Thursday, September 15, 2011

Spongebob Squarepants are bad for the brains









Pic: What?! No TV for me?!!


As has long a suspect, the television is indeed an idiot box. Research has shown in a new study in the Journal of Pediatrics says that cartoons like SpongeBob SquarePants have a detrimental effect on 4-year-old kids. Researchers divided kids into three groups: one group of children watched Caillou, a slower-themed show on public television, the second group was given crayons and paper to draw with, while the third watched SpongeBob. Afterward, the group who watched the yellow square guy wasn’t able to follow rules as well or to delay gratification as easily. (Interestingly, the group of kids who watched Caillou and the group who drew pictures performed at pretty much the same level.)

Does this shock any us who were were once young kids? No surprise that four year olds are affected by the amped-up pacing and crazy antics of the characters.

The reason for this? The researchers concluded that fast-paced programs over-stimulate young kids’ brains. Watching these cartoons makes it harder to employ executive function in the brain, the process used to complete tasks. In addition, children “may mimic” characters afterward. (I love the use of the word “may” here. Um, yes, they may do that…and they may do it for hours on end until you want to scream.)

This doesn't mean that SpongeBob is bad or that kids should never be allowed to watch it, by any means. But it all comes down to knowing your child and seeing how shows on TV affect him or her. Many parents didn’t allow our son to watch SpongeBob when he was younger — not because we were opposed to it, but because he acted like the characters from the show after watching it. A worried parent, Bob, says, "His 4 year old son's behavior was so crazy it made us crazy, and we knew that it wasn’t doing him any favors, either, so we set some firm limits around that cartoon and others like it. (We also didn’t let him drink coffee, eat cotton candy for breakfast, or stay up until 1 a.m. — all things he begged to be able to do — pretty much for the same reasons.)

Bob says now that he’s 8, it luckily doesn’t have quite the same effect, but I still think cartoons are best watched in small doses.

Verdict
Now its scientifically proven that TV addiction is bad for mental development and for that matter your pursuit of ACCA. So throw that idiot box away and focus on REAL mental development, your pursuit of your study course. Elevate your prowess and mental agility.




Sources:
http://technorati.com/lifestyle/family/article/is-spongebob-bad-for-kids/#ixzz1XzEQGeZl
TheStar, 2011, Spongebob is bad for kids, 13 Sept

Friday, September 9, 2011

USA 's Worsening Economy in Cartoon

- relevant to Working Students

Things are getting worse. American economy has gone from anaemic growth to comatose state. Depressing with cartoons that says it all. Asia cannot decouple itself from relying on USA Economy for its exports. Once China finish spending allocated US$300 billions, there is not much world demand left.

Expect unemployment and inflation to come - its called stagflation.

Enjoy the pictures, though.

Marcus
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Record Unemployment
Employment in the U.S. unexpectedly stagnated in August, increasing pressure on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and President Barack Obama to spur an economy that’s barely growing two years into the recovery.
Payrolls were unchanged, the weakest reading since September 2010, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey called for a gain of 68,000. The figures included a 48,000 drop in the information industry, mostly reflecting a strike at Verizon Communications Inc. The jobless rate held at 9.1 percent.

“This is further evidence that the economy is very close to stalling if not having stalled,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS in Lexington, Massachusetts, who forecast a gain of 15,000. Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., called the report “grim and scary” in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop” with Betty Liu.
Stocks slumped and Treasuries rallied on bets the data raise the odds of another recession. Earnings and hours worked both declined, today’s report showed, reducing the purchasing power of consumers whose spending accounts for 70 percent of the world’s largest economy.
“We’re calling for a mild recession at this point,” said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York. “We’ll see QE3 definitely,” she said, referring to a third round of large-scale asset purchases by the Fed. “It helps put a floor under the economy and stabilize things.”

Stocks Slump - hurts middle class
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 2.5 percent to 1,173.97 at the 4 p.m. close in New York. The yield on the benchmark 10-year note dropped to 1.99 percent from 2.13 percent late yesterday.
The report raises the political stakes for Obama as he prepares to address a joint session of Congress next week. An unemployment rate stuck near 9 percent has helped push Obama’s disapproval rating to an all-time high, according to a Quinnipiac University Aug. 16-27 poll of 2,730 registered voters. Some 52 percent disapprove of Obama’s job performance, up from 46 percent in July.
Gene Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council, said Obama will propose tax and spending initiatives that will have a “significant” impact.
“There’s no question we need stronger jobs growth, stronger growth overall,” Sperling said today in a Bloomberg Television interview.

Obama Proposal - stale solution

Among the steps Obama has been considering are more infrastructure spending, tax incentives to spur hiring, a reduction in the employer portion of the payroll tax and changes to unemployment insurance to subsidize worker retraining, according to people familiar with discussions.
Obama’s options will be limited by opposition to increased spending from Republicans in Congress.

“I’m not sure what the administration can do at this point,” said Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “I think any full-bore stimulus is dead in the water.”
The Office of Management and Budget said in an update of its economic forecasts through August that the jobless rate will average 9.1 percent in 2011 (more than 9.1 million Americans are jobless) and show little change next year with an average of 9 percent. It won’t fall below 6 percent until 2016, the OMB said.
Political squabbling over the budget and mounting fear of a default in Europe caused the S&P 500 to plummet 17 percent from July 22 to Aug. 8, prompting companies and consumers to cut back. The lack of hiring is one reason Bernanke last week said the central bank still has tools available to stimulate growth.

Bond Purchases - Government borrows to spend
The Fed ended a $600 billion bond-buying program in June and last month said it would keep its benchmark interest rate near zero at least through the middle of 2013, adding a specific time-frame to its low-rate pledge for the first time.
Further options for the Fed include extending the maturity of Treasury securities in its $1.65 trillion portfolio to push down long-term interest rates, purchasing more Treasuries, or expanding the range of securities it buys, El-Erian said.
Estimates of the 86 economists surveyed by Bloomberg for payrolls ranged from a decline of 20,000 to a 160,000 increase. The unemployment rate was projected to hold at 9.1 percent, according to the survey median. The July gain in payrolls was revised down to 85,000 from 117,000.
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Monday, September 5, 2011

Crisis: Women are marrying later or never

- relevant to all ACCA-Male candidates

Introduction : Men in Crisis with The flight from marriage

Asians are marrying later, and less, than in the past. This has profound implications for women, traditional family life and Asian politics
Conservatives in the West are fond of saying that the traditional family is the bedrock of society. That view is held even more widely in Asia. The family is the focus of Confucian ethics, which holds that a basic moral principle, xiushen (self-improvement), can be pursued only within the confines of the family. In an interview in 1994 Lee Kuan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore, argued that after thousands of years of dynastic upheaval, the family is the only institution left to sustain Chinese culture. It embodies a set of virtues—“learning and scholarship and hard work and thrift and deferment of present enjoyment for future gain”—which, he said, underpins Asia’s economic success. He feared that the collapse of the family, if it ever happened, would be the main threat to Singapore’s success.

A. Women marrying later
The first change is that people are getting married later, often much later. In the richest parts—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—the mean age of wedlock is now 29-30 for women, 31-33 for men. That is past the point at which women were traditionally required to marry in many Asian societies. It is also older than in the West. In America, women marry at about 26, men at 28. If you take account of the cohabitation that routinely precedes Western marriage (but not Asian), the gap between East and West is even larger. The mean age of marriage has risen by five years in some East Asian countries in three decades, which is a lot.

B. Women choice of not marrying at all
The second change is that, among certain groups, people are not merely marrying later. They are not getting married at all. In 2010 a third of Japanese women entering their 30s were single. Perhaps half or more of those will never marry. In 2010 37% of all women in Taiwan aged 30-34 were single, as were 21% of 35-39-year-olds. This, too, is more than in Britain and America, where only 13-15% of those in their late 30s are single. If women are unmarried entering their 40s, they will almost certainly neither marry nor have a child.

C. Women makes an educated choice








Pic 01: Asian Women making own choices on choosing Husbands











Pic 02 : Asian Women postponing marriages




The main function of marriage in most traditional societies is to bring up children (romantic love rarely has much to do with it). Not surprisingly, changes in child-bearing have gone along with changes in marriage. The number of children the average East Asian woman can expect to have during her lifetime—the fertility rate—has fallen from 5.3 in the late 1960s to below 1.6 now, an enormous drop. But old-fashioned attitudes persist, and these require couples to start having children soon after marriage. In these circumstances, women choose to reduce child-bearing by delaying it—and that means delaying marriage, too.

D. Women empowered by Education
Two forces are giving women more autonomy: education and jobs. Women’s education in East Asia has improved dramatically over the past 30 years, and has almost erased the literacy gap with men. Girls stay at school for as many years as boys, and illiteracy rates for 15-24-year-olds are the same for the two sexes (this is not true of South Asia). In South Korea now, women earn half of all master’s degrees.

Education changes women’s expectations. Among Thai women who left school at 18, one-eighth were still single in their 40s; but among university graduates, the share was a fifth. A survey in Beijing in 2003 found that half of women with a monthly income of 5,000-15,000 yuan (roughly $600-1,800, an indicator of university education) were not married. Half said they did not need to be, because they were financially independent. South Koreans call such people “golden misses”. “Why should I have to settle down to a life of preparing tofu soup, like my mother?” asks one.

Rates of non-marriage rise at every stage of education. Women with less than secondary education are the most likely to marry, followed by those with secondary education, with university graduates least likely. This pattern is the opposite of the one in America and Europe, where marriage is more common among college graduates than among those with just a secondary education.

There are two reasons why education’s spread reduces women’s propensity to marry. First, non-marriage has always been more prevalent among women with more education. Now that there are more women in these higher-education groups, there are fewer marriages. Marriage rates are also lower in cities. Since education is likely to go on improving, and urbanisation to go on rising, more women will join the ranks of graduates or city folk who are least likely to marry.

E. Men: Insecurity by marrying down
Second, more education leaves the best-educated women with fewer potential partners. In most Asian countries, women have always been permitted—even encouraged—to “marry up”, ie, marry a man of higher income or education. Marrying up was necessary in the past when women could not get an education and female literacy was low. But now that many women are doing as well or better than men at school, those at the top—like the “golden misses”—find the marriage market unwelcoming. Either there are fewer men of higher education for them to marry, or lower-income men feel intimidated by their earning power (as well as their brain power). As Singapore’s Mr Lee once said: “The Asian man…preferred to have a wife with less education than himself.” In Singapore, non-marriage rates among female university graduates are stratospheric: a third of 30-34-year-old university graduates are single.

F. Men: 60 million will never find local brides
More important, the marriage systems of both giants risk being torn apart in future by their practice of sex-selective abortion. Tens of millions of female fetuses have been aborted over the past generation, as parents use pre-natal screening to identify the sex of the fetus and then rid themselves of daughters. In China in 2010 more than 118 boys were born for every 100 girls. In India the ratio was 109 to 100. By 2030, according to Avraham Ebenstein of Harvard University and Ethan Sharygin of the University of Pennsylvania, about 8% of Chinese men aged 25 and older will be unable to marry because of the country’s distorted sex ratio. By 2050 the unmarried share will be 10-15%. In 2030, in the two giants, there will be 660m men between the ages of 20 and 50, but only 597m women. Over 60m men therefore face the prospect of not finding a bride. That is almost as many men of 20-50 as will be living in America in that year. This alone will wreck Asia’s tradition of universal marriage.

Conclusion :
Women has never had it so good economically, socially and legislatively. Governments continue to rely on skilled and educated workforce regardless of sexes, races and nationalities. More and more ACCA graduates are dominated by women, which will eventually result in greater male lonely hearts unable to match to the intellectual level of women.











Pic 03:
Man : "Will you marry me?"
Woman: "Are you an ACCA-graduate? No? Can you cook? Do Laundry? Do dishes? Do foot massage?"

















Pic 04 : Modern, Liberated Woman. Who needs man, anyway?



Solutions for ACCA-Male candidates:
1. Attract superficially by going for facial or skin treatment to be modern metrosexual.
2. Attract by demonstrating you have real domestic skills – washing, cooking, parenting, laundrying, grocerying.
3. Study and pass ACCA to match women’s expectations
4. Do all of the above.

Source: Economist.com

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