Month: August 2012

Japanese Women Fall to No. 2 in Life Expectancy | LiveScience.com

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credit: takayuki, shutterstock

photo credit: takayuki, Shutterstock

For the first time in more than 25 years, Japanese women are not considered to have the longest life expectancy across the globe, losing out to Hong Kong, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

Japanese women’s life expectancy at birth dropped from 86.30 in 2010 to 85.90 in 2011, while men dipped from 79.55 in 2010 to 79.44 in 2011, according to the ministry of health. For Hong Kong, life expectancy at birth in 2011 for females was 86.7 years, while for males it was 80.5 years.

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Get More than Prescription Drugs | The Simple Dollar

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Whenever people go to the doctor for an ailment, they often expect to walk out the door with a prescription in hand. Ideally, that prescription will help treat the problem.

Unfortunately, prescriptions aren’t always the magic answer you need.

Prescriptions often address symptoms, not the underlying cause. If you’re sick, they’ll get rid of some of the symptoms of the sickness, but they sometimes won’t treat what it is that actually is making you sick.

Prescriptions are often expensive. Some prescription drugs are reasonable. Others can cost you an arm and a leg.

Prescription drugs often come with side effects, some of them nasty. A few years ago, I was prescribed Bactrim for a severe sinus infection. Two days later, all of my skin turned bright red and I didn’t have enough energy to climb out of bed. The period when I was recovering from Bactrim left me bedridden, and since it was the start of winter, it ended up triggering the worst case of seasonal affective disorder I’ve ever had. The side effects of medications can really hit you hard.

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Chill.com Redesigns to Streamline Music Video Discovery | Rolling Stone.com

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Six months after launching, Los Angeles-based startup Chill has redesigned to make it easier for its 19 million registered users to find online videos.

The social video discovery site taps directly into a user’s social graph through Facebook Connect. Then the user, known as a “curator,” can browse through their friends’ collections or discover new videos based on common themes and interests.

The new Chill homepage spotlights new themed verticals for videos like popular, funny, shocking or sexy. User voting, also newly implemented, will determine which videos get featured in each vertical. Chill hopes this facelift will also help artists like Enrique Iglesias reach their fans, as music videos will be filed under the jukebox vertical.

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Chivalry on Sinking Ships Only a Myth, Researchers Find | Bloomberg

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Crew members had the highest survival rates in shipwrecks, followed by captains and male passengers, according to the report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research found that women’s survival rate on 16 maritime disasters from 1852 to 2011 was half that of men’s, and children had the worst chance of getting off the boat alive.

Chivalry on Sinking Ships Only a Myth, Researchers Find – Bloomberg.

Follow These Steps to Improve the Customer Experience | AllBusiness.com

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Improving the customer experience doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be broken down into a three steps that allow you to examine how different parts of your business contribute to the overall encounter. Improved customer experiences usually result in increased customer retention and more referrals.

All you need to do is look at your business and its processes from the customer’s perspective, to see your company as the customer sees it. There are three steps: before, during, and after the customer interaction.

Before the Sale

“Before” includes how customers become aware of your business and the influences that drive them to walk up to your door. Marketing and word-of-mouth advertising is a big part of this step. In today’s world, advertising includes everything from traditional mainstream media to social media platforms such as Facebook, blogs, and Twitter. For retailers, store signage and point-of-sale advertising is still important.

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Caffeine — how much is too much? | MayoClinic.com

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If you rely on caffeine to wake you up and keep you going, you aren’t alone. Caffeine stimulates the central nervous system, alleviating fatigue, increasing wakefulness, and improving concentration and focus.

When to consider cutting back

For most healthy adults, moderate doses of caffeine — 200 to 300 milligrams (mg), or about two to four cups of brewed coffee a day — aren’t harmful. But some circumstances may warrant limiting or even ending your caffeine routine. Read on to see if any of these apply to you

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Ancient Life-Size Lion Statues Baffle Scientists | LiveScience.com

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credit:American Journal of Archaeology

Two sculptures of life-size lions, each weighing about 5 tons in antiquity, have been discovered in what is now Turkey, with archaeologists perplexed over what the granite cats were used for.

One idea is that the statues, created between 1400 and 1200 B.C., were meant to be part of a monument for a sacred water spring, the researchers said.

The lifelike lions were created by the Hittites who controlled a vast empire in the region at a time when the Asiatic lion roamed the foothills of Turkey.

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