Circumin, considered the most bioactive and soothing portion of the herb tumeric, shows protective effects on the liver. It also inhibits the cox-II enzyme and is a powerful antioxidant. When taken alone, curcumin has very poor absorption. Bioperine greatly enhances the bioavailability of curcumin.

GABA Calm combines three of the main inhibitory neurotransmitters, plus N-acytyl L-tyrosine, a precursor of norepinephrine The sublingual form is absorbed directly into the bloodstream, via the blood vessels under the tongue and cheeks, allowing for quick entry into the system.

Vitamins B are essential components of numerous key enzyme systems, without which the body cannot function. Each Vitamin B fills a different, complementary need, which is why they should most often be taken together. Vitamins B act as coenzymes to catalyze numerous biochemical reactions, and to aid in energy production, blood cell formation, and fat and protein/amino acid metabolism, and are important for the normal functioning of the nervous system.

MobileCowboys.nl has noticed this HTC handset, the PB65100, passing through the FCC, and based on the size and shape have concluded the device is the Windows Mobile 6.5 HTC Tera.

The HTC Tera is a low-end successor to the HTC Touch Pro 2 and has only a low resolution 3 inch WQVGA screen, so is unlikely to excite our readers.

See the full specs in this post here.

Via Allaboutphones.nl.

Aristides Demetrios Wind Harp

A large instrument played by the wind

Perched on a hilltop in a South San Fransisco industrial park, this striking 92-foot-tall sculpture by Aristides Demetrios is one of the world’s largest aeolian harps. Named for Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind, and invented by the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher, an aeolian harp is a passive instrument played by the movement of the wind.
Be sure to visit on a breezy day to hear the eerie sounds of the arched and rusted steel I-beams singing at their loudest. Situated 243 feet above sea level, the site also offers a beautiful panoramic view of South San Francisco and the Bay.

Read more about Aristides Demetrios Wind Harp on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Inspired Inventions, Musical Wonders
Location: South San Francisco, California, US
Edited by: Josh, Lignamorren, Dylan

Once again it is time for a goals/progress update. I am pleased to report that annualized dividend income rose in March, extending the streak to 13 months after February 2009’s decline. Since I began publicly tracking annualized dividend income in November 2007, it has increased in 27 of the last 28 months.

My goals were defined in this December 1, 2007 Investing Goals post and updated in my 2010 Investing Goals post. Below is an updated version of the table found in the original post.

Description	Dividend Income Annualized	Yield on Cost
2027 Goal	110,000	20.00%
2017 Goal	30,000	10.00%
2010 Goal	9,500	5.00%
December/2009	7,274	4.84%
Purchases YTD	875	-0.10%
Div. Changes YTD	64	0.08%
Sales YTD	–	-%
March/2010	8,213	4.82%
Purchases	312	-0.01%
Div. Changes	41	0.07%
Sales	–	-%
February/2009	7,860	4.76%

The above information covers the current month and year-to-date through the current month.

Click here for a Detailed Historical Progress Table.

For the month, annualized dividend income increased $353, and Yield on Cost (YOC) increased 0.06%. This month’s changes were a net of new purchases and dividend changes (no sales). Let’s examine each of the these categories:

Purchases: The $312 increase in annual dividend income and a (0.01%) decrease in YOC related to the following purchases (yield at the time of purchase):

• $104 Leggett & Platt, Incorporated (LEG) 5.13% [Analysis]
• $74 Abbott Laboratories (ABT) 3.20%  [Analysis]
• $134 Vanguard Long-Term Bond ETF (BLV) 5.09%

LEG and BLV raised my YOC, while ABT lowered it. As noted in earlier updates, I generally expect YOC to drop each month since most new investments will yield less than my current YOC, and dividend increases will not be sufficient to offset it. This month was an exception.

Dividend Changes: The $41 increase in annual dividend income and the 0.07% increase YOC related to the following dividend changes (a=dividend stated in annual terms, q=quarterly, m=monthly):

• $14 CenturyTel, Inc (CTL) $0.70q>$0.73q
• $5 Consolidated Edison Inc. (ED) $0.59q>$0.595q
• $22 United Technologies Corporation (UTX) $0.385q>$0.425q
• $4 Intel Corporation (INTC) $0.14q>$0.1575q
• ($4) Vanguard Long-Term Bond ETF (BLV) $4.00a>$3.96a
• ($3) iShares Invest Grade Corp Bond (LQD) $5.69a>$5.65a
• $3 3M Co. (MMM) $0.51q>$0.525q

Sales: There were no sales in this month.

I am still on target to achieve my goal of an annualized dividend income of $9,500 by December 31, 2010.

That’s it for this time. The next monthly progress update will be early May.

(Photo: sanja gjenero)

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Google’s search ranking algorithms are one of the Universe’s great mysteries. Like all great mysteries, they’ve become almost mystical in nature for some and Google’s usual lack of transparency when it comes to search ranking only serves to accentuate this. Now, Google has added another ingredient to the mix, page loading speed now factors in the sea… (read more)

The Volkswagen Golf 7 is continuing its development towards its presentation in 2012, and here is a rendering showing the Golf 7 in Scirocco style. The next generation Golf is expected to go on sale sometime in 2013, replacing the current intermediate Golf 6 model. Design is being directed by Walter de Silva who has recently declared that the new Golf will be based on the style of the first and fourth generation Golf models, with a sloping windshield and angular lines. The Golf 7 will be longer and wider than the current model, but slightly lower in height.

The Golf 7 should have a totally revamped interior with new multimedia components. A transverse engine and new platform forms the major change for the new car, which will herald a new platform for all of the VAG compact models. To keep price and CO2 emissions down, the Golf 7 will also be available with a smaller, entry-level engine: the 1.2-litre TSI with 86 hp. The Golf R with its 2.o TFSI and 300 hp sits at the top of the range.

The whole TDI engine range will comply with new Euro 6 norms in Europe, while we should also see hybrid and electric versions, with the latter called the E-Golf. Volkswagen is planning to sell approximately one million units a new, of which it believes the hybrid model will make up about 20 percent. This would make it less of a niche model than the electric Golf, and hopefully contribute to taking hybrid technology more mainstream.

Source | Autointernationaal.nl

We all know instinctively that Gran Turismo 4 will be the game that can change the face of the numbers game, to much benefit of the PS3. Still, it’s always nice to have an actual number to back

Article Tags: Dan Pangburn

The following article is a follow up from Dan Pangburn to Climate Change Mistake

Conclusions of the Natural Climate Change Verification

This work shows the influence that sunspots have had on 20th century and more recent average global temperatures. Without the influence of sunspots, the trends of anomalies would have been close to the shape of the graph for ESST only.

The precise points to make calculations of the effective influence of the sunspot timeintegral are somewhat uncertain. Temperatures predicted at the end points of the ESST trends result in the following: Sunspots had little effect prior to about 1941. The anomaly predicted for 1941 was 0.1017 and in 1973 was -0.0908 for a decline of 0.1925. Without the sunspot time-integral the decline would have been that of the ESST or 0.45.

Thus the temperature decline from 1941 to 1973 would have been about 0.257 C deeper if not forthe high sunspot-number-time-integral during that period. This is equivalent to saying
that the decline from 1941 to 1973 was (0.45 – 0.1925)/0.45 or 57% less than it would have been without the time-integral of sunspot-number during that period.

Click PDF file to download Corroboration of Natural Climate Change by Dan Pangburn

Read in full with comments »

File attachment: corroborationofnaturalclimatechange.pdf
  

Found under: Android, Shop, Google, Scan, Barcodes, Covers, CD, DVD, Games, Voice Search,

Shopper is application for Android phone by Google which purpose is to save your time and nerves while shopping. It recognizes books CDs DVDs and video games by their cover art and also offers barcode scanning and voice search. After you make a search you are headed to prices reviews and specs. You can star your favorites and share your items. Shopper Features Detailed product information – Find prices reviews specs and more. Shopper is powered by Google Product Search.

Read More

Read more in mobile format

This Aston Martin Guantlet concept has been designed by Ugur Sahin who has also developed his own works on Ferrari and Corvette. The Guantlet concept car is based on the Aston Martin One-77 with a few touches that refer to past models from the company. The Dutch designer has also tried to include his own stamp on the project, with a few nerve lines running along the length of the car. Sahin has completed the Guantlet purely as a design concept, although if it were ever to go into production, it could prove a successor to the Aston Martin Vanquish. And we just love the name!

Ron Paul appeared on Larry King Live last night along with former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, talk show host Stephanie Miller and Republican strategist Andrea Tantaros.

The show was hosted by Jesse Ventura and topics of discussion included the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Stevens, Sarah Palin’s future in the Republican party (with Ron Paul commenting on the possibility of a Paul/Palin ticket in 2012), the potential for an anti-war coalition of principled progressives, libertarians and constitutionalist conservatives, the degree of Barack Obama’s radicalism, Tiger Woods, and why the mainstream media didn’t review Jesse Ventura’s latest book “American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us“.

Show: Larry King Live
Host: Jesse Ventura
Channel: CNN
Date: 4/9/2010

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Casey Stengel, manager of the hapless 1962 New York Mets, once famously asked, after an especially dismal outing, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

This week I ask, after months of worse than no progress, “Can’t anybody here even spell financial reform, let alone get it done?” We are in danger of experiencing another credit crisis, but one that could be even worse, as the tools to fight it may be lacking when we need them.

With attacks on the independence of the Fed, no regulation of derivatives, and allowing banks to be too big to fail, we risk a repeat of the credit crisis. The bank lobbyists are winning and it’s time for those of us in the cheap seats to get outraged. (And while this letter focuses on the US and financial reform, the principles are the same in Europe and elsewhere, as I will note at the end. We are risking way too much in the name of allowing large private profits.) And with no “but first,” let’s jump right in.

Last Monday I had lunch with Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Mr. Fisher is a remarkably nice guy and is very clear about where he stands on the issues. My pressing question was whether the Fed would actually accommodate the federal government if it continued to run massive deficits and turn on the printing press. Fisher was clear that such a move would be a mistake, and he thought there would be little sentiment among the various branch presidents to become the enabler of a dysfunctional Congress.

But that brought up a topic that he was quite passionate about, and that is what he sees as an attack on the independence of the Fed. There are bills in Congress that would take away or threaten the current independence of the Fed.

I recognize that the Fed is not completely independent. Even Greenspan said so this past week: “There’s a presumption that the Federal Reserve’s an independent agency, and it is up to a point, but we are a creature of the Congress and if … we had said we’re running into a bubble and we need to retrench, the Congress would say ‘We haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’”

Long-time readers know I do not have much time for Senator Chris Dodd. He has threatened the viability of the Fed by holding up appointments, actually risking the ability of the Fed to get an emergency quorum if the need arose. His current proposal to give the President the ability to appoint the president of the New York Fed is likewise a wrong-headed political power grab. He has openly proposed to have the presidents of the local districts appointed by the board of governors. These presidents are the only real check on the board.

Let’s do a brief recap. There are seven Federal Reserve governors, including a chairman and vice-chairman. There are twelve bank districts with independent boards that choose their districy president. The Federal Open Market Committee oversees monetary policy and is composed of the seven governors and five of the district presidents. The president of the New York district is always one of the five, and the other four are rotated among the remaining eleven.

The chart below gives you a visual graphic of how the system is organized.

Note that the seven governors are appointed by the President and must be approved by the Senate. Further, the board of governors appoints three members to each of the nine-member boards of directors of the local districts.

Dodd wants to give the President the right to appoint the president of the New York District. My response is “Not no, but hell no!” The President (from whichever party) gets to appoint a majority as it is. I prefer a small token of independence. And while the selection of a district president is of course political, it is at least now local and not national politics.

Further, when a local board narrows its choices for district president to a few candidates, it submits those choices to the national board of governors for comments, which are of course taken seriously. (There has been at least one occasion when a board submitted only one name and the governors asked for alternatives, and the local board reasserted that this was their only choice. The governors backed down.)

A Fed governor is supposed to serve for 14 years, and the terms are staggered. That way, no President gets to appoint more than a few governors and cannot stack the board in favor of certain policies. That has changed with Obama. Dodd held up two nominations by Bush for several years, and with the resignation of Vice-Chairman Kohn, President Obama now gets to appoint four governors, and he has almost three years left in his term.

About the best thing I can say about Chris Dodd is that he will not be in the Senate next year, since he is not running for re-election, which he could not win anyway.

There are other bills that would subject the presidents of the local districts to Presidential or, even worse, Congressional appointment.

Let me be clear. There are a lot of things not to like about the Federal Reserve System. I think it was Milton Friedman who said we would be better off with a computer determining monetary policy. A quote from an interview with him is instructive. When asked “Do you still think it would be a good idea to have a computer run monetary policy?” he answered:

“Yes. Of course it depends very much on how the computer is programmed. I am not saying that any computer program would do. In speaking of that, I have had in mind the idea that a computer would produce, for example, a constant rate of growth in the quantity of money as defined, let us say, by M2, something like 3% to 5% per year. There are certainly occasions in which discretionary changes in policy guided by a wise and talented manager of monetary policy would do better than the fixed rate, but they would be rare.

“In any event, the computer program would certainly prevent any major disasters either way, any major inflation or any major depressions. One of the great defects of our kind of monetary system is that its performance depends so much on the quality of the people who are put in charge. We have seen that in the history of our own Federal Reserve System. Surely a computer would have produced far better results during the 1930s and during both world wars.

“That raises a question about the desirability of our present monetary system. It is one in which a group of unelected people have enormous power, power which can lead to a great depression or which can lead to a great inflation. Is it wise to have that power in those hands?

“An alternative would be to eliminate the Federal Reserve System; to reduce the monetary activities of the federal government to the provision of high-powered money, that is, currency and bank reserves, and to constitutionalize, as it were, what is to be done with high-powered money. My preference is simply to hold it constant and let financial developments produce the growth in the quantity of money in the form of bank deposits, a process that has been going on for many decades. But that is, of course, politically impossible.”

( http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009561)

As much as I acknowledge how intriguing an idea the above is, in the end Friedman is right; it is politically impossible. We are stuck with this system. But what would be far, far worse is a system that was directly controlled by Congress or the President, whether Republican or Democrat. Politicians think in very short election cycles.

I do not want the same people who gave us Freddie and Fannie and now $400 billion in taxpayer losses, who pass entitlement bills that we cannot pay for, to have the power of the printing press. “Roll the dice,” said Barney Frank, on Freddie and Fannie and low-income loans. How did that work out? Monetary policy is not something you roll the dice on.

Giving politicians the ability to print money has always eventually been a disaster for any nation that did so. The temptation is just too great. Down that road lies inflation (maybe hyperinflation) and currency destruction. Just as Congress had good intentions to make home ownership more attainable, the good intentions of printing money to help pay for programs that help the poor or education or whatever is just too much for politicians to resist.

If I could change the Fed system in any way, I would add four more district presidents to the FOMC, to put the majority on the Federal Open Market Committee out of the hands of political appointees. That won’t happen, of course, but we all have dreams. The key here is that any attempt to politicize the Fed any more than it already is must be resisted. (That does not mean, however, that they should not be more transparent, along the lines of my friend Ron Paul’s bill. Sunshine is a good thing.)

(Mark Thomas wrote a very good piece awhile back, for those who want to dig deeper on this issue. http://moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/blog/maximum-utility/the-dodd-proposal-to-restructure-the-federal-reserve-system-concentrates-power-and-politicizes-district-bank-governance/230/.)

Credit Default Swaps Threaten the System

We will get into banks being too big to fail in a minute, but the first problem to be dealt with is credit default swaps. What happened in the last credit crisis was that interlocking credit default swaps among so many banks made the ENTIRE system too big to fail. AIG basically sold naked options in the form of credit default swaps to all and sundry (in a unit basically created after Eliot Spitzer forced Hank Greenberg out, which allowed the unit to get out of control, yet another reason to not like Spitzer).

And nothing has changed. We again have credit default swaps (CDS) growing, and no one knows who could be overextended. Once again, everyone could be dependent on everybody else, and we have no idea if there is a Bear, Lehman, or AIG in these woods.

As I have been pounding the table about for years, we need to put CDS on an exchange. ASAP. I am not against CDS, per se. CDS are good things, just like futures. But they must go to a transparent exchange. There need to be position limits, just as there in futures and commodities. There needs to be very transparent pricing and commissions. And someone needs to monitor who owns them and what risks they are taking.

Why hasn’t this been done? In a word, money. Banks make huge commissions selling CDS, as much as 2-3%, I am told. If they were on an exchange the commissions would be $10 a round turn. An enormous profit center would get blown up. So, the banks hire lobbyists to persuade Congress not to regulate CDS. Dodd’s bill basically says we will deal with them later.

The good news is that there is some effort to regulate these derivatives in Congress. It should have been done a year ago, but the sooner the better. This shouldn’t be all that partisan. It is common sense.

Too Big To Fail Must Go

We have large banks that take massive risks, which allow them to pay huge bonuses to management and traders; and then if they have problems the taxpayer has to take the losses. I can see why the banks like it. I don’t get this business model from a taxpayer’s point of view.

First, let me say that I thought, along with most of the world, that repealing Glass-Steagall was a good thing. OK, we tried that experiment and it didn’t work out so well. Where is the movement to separate commercial banks from investment banks? And I must admit, Glass-Steagall is not really the problem. It is just a part of the problem. The problem is that parts of these large banks are essentially hedge funds, working with cheap commercial deposit money and putting the entire bank at risk.

I make a lot of my income helping investors find hedge funds and alternative investments. I like trading and traders, and we have a lot of client money with them. There is good money to be made there, if you are riding the right horse. But we don’t put money with big investment banks, just private funds, and there is the difference. If our funds go bad, taxpayers don’t bail us out.

When I put on my taxpayer hat, I don’t want to be taking the risk so some big bank can have a trading desk and make large profits that only benefit their shareholders and management, and I have to pick up the pieces with my tax dollars when they fail. Separate traditional banking and investment banks. I want my commercial banks to be boring. You know, traditional lending to customers, services, that type of thing.

And This Thing About Leverage

The problem of too big to fail is ultimately one of leverage. If a small bank fails, no one really notices. If a giant bank fails and puts the system at risk, it costs us a lot. I have a simple proposal to mitigate the problem.

Why not reduce the allowable leverage the larger a bank gets? This would clearly reduce their risk and encourage them to only make prudent bets (otherwise known as loans), as their risk capital would be limited. If they wanted to make more loans, then they could raise more capital or retain more earnings. Would that hurt earnings and shareholders and limit share prices? Yes. And I don’t care. If I’m not getting the dividends, then I don’t want to be made to pick up the tab if there is a crisis. The world of privatizing the gains and socializing the risks must become a thing of the past.

What Happens If We Do Nothing?

What happens when we have the next credit crisis, when a major sovereign government defaults, as I think will happen? It will be a body blow to many banks, especially in Europe. Once again, we could have banks worried about lending to each other or taking letters of credit, which would be a disaster for world trade and the recovery we are now in.

That we (and Europe and Britain) have taken so long to enact real reform has the potential to really put the world at risk. In the next crisis, we will not have the tools available to stem the tide that we did the last time. Rates are already low. Do you think we could pass another TARP? The Fed’s balance sheet is already bloated. It could get much worse unless we get financial reforms that have some bite.

All this debating about a consumer protection agency and where it should be and all the other trivia is wasting time. Fix the big things. Credit default swaps. Too big to fail. Leverage. Then worry about the details. And leave the Fed alone.

New York, Media and La Jolla

I wish I had time to write some more, or at least do some edits, but time is pressing. I write this letter at the Torrey Pines Lodge in La Jolla, where the weather is perfect. I am at Rob Arnott’s annual Research Affiliates Conference, where for a weekend he brings in some of the best and brightest to talk about the state of the financial world. It is one conference I really look forward to every year. This year features a debate between Princeton professor Burton Malkiel and James Montier on the Efficient Market Hypothesis. They are friends, and it will be good fun to watch them spar. Paul McCulley, Prieur du Plessis, and others are here, and it will be a lot of fun!

And tonight I open a very special bottle of wine. Rob Arnott gave me a 1949 Petrus for my birthday, and I thought it right to bring it here to open with a few friends. I hope it has aged well, as I need some good portents for aging.

I will be in New York next week for a speech on Tuesday morning, then I will be on Bloomberg TV at 2 pm, and spend a whole hour with Liz Claman from 3-4 pm, which will give us time for a real discussion. I will be on Yahoo Tech Ticker Wednesday morning (and maybe Business Insider) and then will tape an interview with Steve Forbes, which will go on Forbes.com. I’ll wind up with dinner with Art Cashin that night and be back home on Thursday. Oh, and I’ll work in a few meetings with friends like Barry Ritholtz. Catch me if you can!

And now I need to hit the send button. The wine starts pouring in a few minutes and I feel the need for some good vino. Rob always serves the best. Have a great week. I know I have, and will.

Your passionate about the need for real reform analyst,

John Mauldin
[email protected]

Copyright 2010 John Mauldin. All Rights Reserved

John Mauldin, Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore

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See Also:

• Senator Dodd’s Reform Will Screw Angel Investors And Small Businesses
• Here’s The Problem With Dodd’s Financial Reform: It Leaves Too Much Room For Idiot Regulators To Screw Up
• Why Dodd’s Financial "Reform" Is Nothing But A Placebo For A Very Sick Economy

Now may be a bit of an odd time to buy one, given the arrival of Windows Phone 7 in around 6 months, but if you prefer a pretty nice media player that is regularly updated with new features, and have a massive library and music, this 64 GB ZuneHD is now available for purchase.

Selling for $349.99 at the Zunestore, the 64 GB device comes preloaded with the latest 4.5 version of its software, which brings better features on TV-out and expanded video codecs. The smaller capacity 16 GB and 32 GB models have seen corresponding reductions in price to $200 and $270 respectively.

Are any of our readers interested? Let us know below.

Via Engadget.com

Those still relying on a desktop email client have probably moved to Thunderbird 3 by now, but, if you haven’t, Mozilla developers are not leaving you behind entirely. The venerable Thunderbird 2 has been updated with the latest release, Thunderbird 2.0.0.24, patching a few security holes and fixing several stability bugs. In total, five security vulnerabil… (read more)

MMMOOO has some really interesting themes, and I’m going to highlight a few of them I haven’t shown before. Unique, interesting, and definitely intriguing, come see what MMMOOO has to offer. We’ll start with Aquarium, then Azure, and finally the Jing Realm, let’s check them out…

Aquarium is one of my fave screensavers. It’s really neat as the fish and jelly fish swim around to keep your phone entertaining when you’re not using it. I was so excited when I found out a theme named The Aquarium Theme that was out to match it. First off, I love the way it looks, with the soothing I like the vivid colors, the highlight in light blue, the teal windows, and the way the bars run, showing a B for Battery and S for Signal. The time and date are displayed as well as the GPS and the type of coverage. There’s a hidden bottom bar which you can hide by scrolling over the last icon moving the trackball to the left. Return the bar scrolling the opposite way. When you bring up all the icons, the picture blurs in the background. I’ve included a few screenshots so you can get the idea of the soothing tranquility and colors this theme has to offer. The Aquarium Theme and the Aquarium Screensaver pair perfect together. If you like it, Aquarium is available in the BlackBerry Sync App Store for $6.99

Azure-Premium Theme is a nice theme with a fresh background, and icons that look cartoon-like and is easy on the eyes. Icons are easy to recognize and the theme itself is a break out of the ordinary. It is simple and concise. Azure-Premium Theme is available in the BlackBerry Sync Store for $3.99.

The last theme I’m going to highlight is by one of my favorite designers from MMMOOO. It’s called Jing Realm-Art Hidden Menu Theme. I love how the GPS and the clock are hidden in the art, and how it looks like the art has a shadow behind it. The description is as follows:

Unique & Best in Art Character Style Themes. Traditional Chinese brush drawing as homescreen, those two characters means our strength is in quietness and trust. Reminding us seeking for peace and wisdom even in busy time.

SVG Art Hidden Menu gives you an ultra view to enjoy the nice homescreen, still with quick accessing shortcut icons.

The art is classic, black and white with grey as well. It’s very simple, yet elegant. The icons are very familiar. The side bar is hidden easily and brought back just with scrolling. Jing Realm is available in the BlackBerry Sync App Store for only $5.99.

You’re reading a story which originated at BlackBerrySync.com, Where you find BlackBerry News You Can Sync With…

This story is sponsored by the new BlackBerry Sync Mobile App Store. Grab your free copy today at www.GetAppStore.com from your BlackBerry.

The Aquarium, Azure-Premium, And Jing Realm Themes From MMMOOO

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About a year ago, we posted about a study at the University of Manchester who were evaluating the impact of podcast about psychosis on attitudes towards unusual mental states. Mind Hacks readers formed a large bulk of the participants and the paper has just been published in the journal Psychosis.

So, in possibly one of the most recursive posts you’re likely to read for a while, I’m going to write about a study you were part of because you read about it on Mind Hacks.

The research was motivated by the fact that although anomalous psychosis-like experiences are common (for example, about a third of people report naturally occurring hallucinations) those who end up in front of mental health professionals are more likely to have assumed that these psychological distortions are uncontrollable, unacceptable or dangerous.

Imagine if you started occasionally hearing voices. The majority of people who hear voices don’t become mentally ill, they’re absolutely fine. But if you didn’t know this you might automatically think you were ‘going mad’ or ‘losing your mind’ and become, understandably, very distressed.

Of course, voices can be a symptom of mental illness but headaches can be a symptom of a brain cancer and imagine how you’d feel if you assumed that every headache meant you had a tumour.

Importantly, there is evidence that distress from worry about unusual experiences can actually worsen the mental state, making it more likely that the person becomes mentally ill.

Ideally, we’d want everyone to know that unusual experiences, like headaches, can be normal but to go to the doctor if they are causing any sort of interference or difficulty.

Unfortunately, most people don’t know this and getting the word out is hard, so the team at Manchester decided to run a pilot study to see if a short podcast that gave good advice would help, so they set about evaluating it.

They asked people to complete some psychological questionnaires online that measured attitudes to hearing voices and attitudes to feeling paranoid, asked people to listen to the podcast, and then return to complete the questionnaires again afterwards.

I have to say, the podcast was not the most gripping and the sound quality could have been improved but despite this, after listening, participants were more likely to accurately rate how common unusual experiences are reported less negative and distressing attitudes towards voices and paranoid thoughts.

As the researchers note, to understand whether this was genuinely an effect of the psychosis podcast, rather than just spending 30 minutes relaxing with an mp3 player, they’d need to run a control group who listened to something else, but this is a promising start and they hope to take the project further to develop a useful mental health education tool.

This is also the first time Mind Hacks appears in the medical literature. The paper mentions Mind Hacks, quotes our entire post, and links to us:

The authors of a popular high-quality psychology blog (http://www.mindhacks.com) also kindly agreed to mention the study to their readers in a short internet post.

So forget your hit counts and blog rankings, the claim that Mind Hacks is a “popular high-quality psychology blog” is now SCIENTIFIC FACT! Although, largely of course, because of you. Researcher Paul Hutton also asked us to pass on his thanks to you all, and we can only do the same.

Link to DOI entry and summary for psychosis podcast study.

Filed under: Fitness, Ask a Fitness Expert

Dear Sarah,

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Continue reading When Am I Really Burning Fat?

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If you were hoping for Phase one of the Final Fantasy XIV beta to head to the PlayStation 3, you’ll have to prepare yourself for disappointment because it won’t. There’s always a second chance, though, and Square Enix