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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Business Networking With Dr. Ivan Misner ? Business Networking ...

In?this second?installment of the Networking Faux Pas Series, I talk about Premature Solicitation (a term you certainly don?t want to attempt to say three times fast as it very well may get you into a little bit of trouble . . .)?a classic example of how NOT to network. I share a personal story of an occurr...

People often mistakenly perceive what goes on at networking meetings and events as making small talk with a bunch of strangers.? Real business networking , however, isn?t about making small talk at all; rather it is about building meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships with other business professionals and ...

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was in Sweden on business and my wife Beth and I had the truly unique and memorable experience of staying at the Ice Hotel?.? The owner of hotel happens to be a member of BNI?, the global networking organization I started back in 1985, and during my time there I had the opportunity to not...

Since business referrals are the principal tools and the valued currency of networking, you should make sure that yours are both timely and appropriate.? Here are five important points to consider in giving a good referral: 1. Listen for needs from the people you meet.? When you meet someone who expresses a need, tell ...

In this video, I talk about the two factors that I firmly believe are what make people successful in any situation?hard work and good choices.? The truth is, you can?t achieve success without both of these things. People talk all the time about the necessity of hard work when it comes to success and though t...

The truth is, if you choose a networking group that focuses entirely on your target market, chances are you?ll be in a group of people who are a lot like you.? Sounds like a good thing, you say?? Well, it?s not.? A group that consists of a whole lot of people like you tends to hang out together in other se...

This is the first post of a series of video blogs I?ll be doing on networking faux pas.? The faux pas I talk about in this video is what I call ?abusing the relationship.?? I tell the story of a woman who used her relationship with another networker in a way that was very wrong and even somewhat decep...

I learned an important lesson about the fundamentals of success while playing football many years ago.? We had a fairly good team my junior year of high school and most of the players on the team were juniors.? The following year the team had mostly seniors, and we had some pretty high expectations for the season.? A ...

There are little ways and big ways of making a difference in someone?s life.? More likely than not, there?s someone you can immediately call to mind who has impacted you and really made a difference in your life, whether it happened recently or even back during your formative years. There are definitely cert...

If you interact with your clients, customers, referral sources, and contacts with a referral mind-set, show them that you are a giver, help others, and continually and strategically give referrals, you?re modeling the behavior you want others to exhibit toward you.? By itself, however, that?s not enough to t...

When it comes to business, having fun is something that?s almost never talked about?it?s almost like people think fun and business are two completely unrelated, and mutually exclusive things.? However, I don?t share that opinion at all.? I definitely think it?s important to have fun in bus...

I?m excited to announce that during April 1st-5th, I am going to be participating in an online event called ?Everything Your Business Needs? and I?ll be one of over twenty business experts presenting on an array of topics and areas of business that are important for every business owner to educate...

Are you using coin-operated networking? In this short video, I discuss coin-operated networking vs. Givers Gain networking and I explain why the transactional process (I will give you this, now you have to give me that) doesn?t work because there is always a scorecard. The value of the referrals may also be the dif...

Many people have surface-level referral relationships.? They know just enough about a referral source?s business to get by.? They don?t actually know a lot about the person themselves.? They tend to say vague things like: ?They are really nice,? ?You?ll like them, they are a good pe...

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Source: http://businessnetworking.com/

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Rotoworld: Live, up to the minute NFL Draft news

CollegeBasketballTalk

College hoops news and rumors
? CBT on NBCSports.com

Off the Bench

An irreverent, offbeat look at sports
? OTB on NBCSports.com

Source: http://www.rotoworld.com/playernews/nfl/football-player-news

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Friday, April 26, 2013

Chiefs pick Central Michigan's Eric Fisher at No 1

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) ? The Kansas City Chiefs have a new anchor for their offensive line.

The Chiefs selected Central Michigan offensive tackle Eric Fisher first overall in the NFL draft Thursday night, grabbing a potential replacement for Branden Albert and someone to protect the blindside of new quarterback Alex Smith. The Chiefs picked Fisher over Texas A&M tackle Luke Joeckel to lead off a draft heavy on offensive and defensive linemen.

"I can't even process what's happening right now," Fisher said. "This is a dream come true, the fact that I was the No. 1 pick. I can't even understand what's going on right now, but what an honor. What an honor. A great opportunity."

Fisher is the third offensive lineman picked No. 1 since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.

The Chiefs had the top pick in the modern NFL draft for the first time in franchise history. But rather than announce their intentions early, like the Indianapolis Colts did in picking Andrew Luck last season, new general manager John Dorsey and coach Andy Reid decided to wait until they were on the clock before making their choice public.

Kansas City was still considering a handful of players early this week, including Joeckel, who many believed was the best available player. Dorsey also indicated that he would listen to offers from teams trying to trade up until the last possible minute.

When nothing materialized, Dorsey phoned in his selection to Radio City Music Hall, and Fisher became the first player from Central Michigan to be picked first overall.

He's only the third player in the past 20 years to be drafted first from a non-BCS school, and the first non-quarterback. The only other player out of Central Michigan to go in the first round was Joe Staley, the San Francisco 49ers' Pro Bowl left tackle.

With surprising athleticism in a 6-foot-7, 306-pound frame, Fisher rocketed up draft boards during the annual scouting combine. His ability to make blocks in the open field ? not to mention a bit of a mean streak ? made him a natural fit for Reid's offense.

The Chiefs were in a need of a quarterback after going 2-14 a year ago, but without a top-end talent available, they acquired Smith in a trade with San Francisco. That allowed them to spend the most coveted pick in the draft on who they believed to be the best player.

While Fisher doesn't play a marquee position such as quarterback or wide receiver, and may not push the needle for many Chiefs fans, he does fill a significant need.

Albert, who the Chiefs picked in the first round in 2008, was given the franchise tag in March when the two sides failed to reach agreement on a long-term deal. He ultimately signed the tender, which guarantees him about $9.3 million next season, but has repeatedly expressed his unhappiness with the lack of long-term stability. The Chiefs granted permission to the Dolphins to speak with Albert's agent, and it's possible a trade could happen during the draft. Kansas City was seeking a second-round pick.

That would allow Fisher to slide into the starting lineup at left tackle. Even if Albert plays for the Chiefs next season, one of them could shift to the right side.

Fisher's only scholarship offers out of high school came from Central Michigan and Eastern Michigan, and he said at the combine in February that he heard from Michigan State and Purdue but that "neither of them really wanted anything to do with me."

The Chiefs certainly have made him feel wanted.

While Fisher is a solid pass blocker, his real strength comes in the running game, where he helped the Chippewas' Zurlon Tipton run for 1,492 yards and 19 touchdowns last season.

Now, he'll be blocking for Pro Bowl running back Jamaal Charles.

Fisher is the 13th offensive lineman that the Chiefs have drafted in the first round, the most of any position. He also continues a trend: Dorsey helped to pick offensive linemen two of the past four years when he was working for the Packers, and Reid selected offensive guard Danny Watkins with the Eagles' first-round pick in 2011.

The only other offensive linemen picked first overall had been Orlando Pace, who the Rams selected in 1997, and Jake Long, the choice of the Dolphins in 2008.

Pace started 165 games over 13 seasons, and was voted an All-Pro three times while making seven Pro Bowls. Long started 68 of the 80 games he's played over the past five seasons, going to the Pro Bowl every year from 2008-11, but appeared to decline this past year.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chiefs-pick-central-michigans-eric-fisher-no-1-002757222--nfl.html

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Did an Earthquake Destroy Ancient Greece?

The grand Mycenaens, the first Greeks, inspired the legends of the Trojan Wars, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." Their culture abruptly declined around 1200 B.C., marking the start of a Dark Ages in Greece.

The disappearance of the Mycenaens is a Mediterranean mystery. Leading explanations include warfare with invaders or uprising by lower classes. Some scientists also think one of the country's frequent earthquakes could have contributed to the culture's collapse. At the ruins of Tiryns, a fortified palace, geologists hope to find evidence to confirm whether an earthquake was a likely culprit.

Tiryns was one of the great Mycenaean cities. Atop a limestone hill, the city-state's king built a palace with walls so thick they were called Cyclopean, because only the one-eyed monster could have carried the massive limestone blocks. The walls were about 30 feet (10 meters) high and 26 feet (8 m) wide, with blocks weighing 13 tons, said Klaus-G. Hinzen, a seismologist at the University of Cologne in Germany and project leader. He presented his team's preliminary results April 19 at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting in Salt Lake City. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]

Hinzen and his colleagues have created a 3D model of Tiryns based on laser scans of the remaining structures. Their goal is to determine if the walls' collapse could only have been caused by an earthquake. Geophysical scanning of the sediment and rock layers beneath the surface will provide information for engineering studies on how the ground would shake in a temblor.

The work is complex, because many blocks were moved by amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1884 and later 20th-century restorations, Hinzen said. By combing through historic photos, the team found unaltered wall sections to test. They also hope to use a technique called optical luminescence dating on soil under the blocks, which could reveal whether the walls toppled all at the same time, as during an earthquake.

"This is really a challenge because of the alterations. We want to take a careful look at the original conditions," Hinzen told OurAmazingPlanet.

Another hurdle: finding the killer quake. There are no written records from the Mycenaean decline that describe a major earthquake, nor oral folklore. Hinzen also said compared with other areas of Greece, the region has relatively few active faults nearby. "There is no evidence for an earthquake at this time, but there was strong activity at the subduction zone nearby," he said.

The Mycenaean preference to place their fortresses atop limestone hills surrounded by sediment would concentrate shaking, even from distant earthquakes, Hinzen said. "The [seismic] waves get trapped in the outcrop and this can do a lot of damage. They are on very vulnerable sites," he said.

The researchers also plan to study the ancient Mycenaean city of Midea. The group has done similar work investigating ancient earthquakes in Turkey, Germany and Rome.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us?@OAPlanet, Facebook?& Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/did-earthquake-destroy-ancient-greece-173454478.html

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Movie review: 'Pain & Gain' is Bay's nauseating stab at comedy | The ...

This undated publicity photo released by courtesy of Paramount Pictures shows, from left, Dwayne Johnson as Paul Doyle, Mark Wahlberg as Daniel Lugo and Anthony Mackie as Adrian Doorbal in the film, "Pain and Gain," directed by Michael Bay from Paramount Pictures. The film releases in theaters April 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Paramount Pictures)

Movie review: ?Pain & Gain? is Bay?s nauseating stab at comedy

By Sean P. Means

| The Salt Lake Tribune

First Published Apr 25 2013 01:14 pm ? Updated 8 hours ago

"Pain & Gain" is like "Fargo," except that: 1) It?s set in sunny Miami rather than snowy Minnesota. 2) It?s based on a real murder case, so the humorous take on violence is harder to swallow. 3) It?s directed by Michael Bay ("Bad Boys," "Transformers"). It?s comedy as nuanced as a barbell to the head.

The story centers on Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a success-driven bodybuilder who hatches a plan to kidnap a deli franchise mogul (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign his vast wealth over to him and his iron-pumping cronies, Christian convert Paul (Dwayne Johnson) and steroid-injecting Adrian (Anthony Mackie). And since these three have biceps for brains, the plot doesn?t quite go according to plan.

zero stars

?Pain & Gain?

Opens Friday, April 26, at theaters everywhere; rated R for bloody violence, crude sexual content, nudity, language throughout and drug use; 130 minutes.

Bay trots out his inner Tarantino, treating the nauseating violence as if it?s just nutty hilarity, and drives home every "joke" with his trademark sledgehammer subtlety. (Oh, and boobies.)

Sometimes you only know it?s a comedy because familiar comic actors ? Shalhoub, Rob Corddry, Ken Jeong and Rebel Wilson ? pop up amid the mayhem.

movies@sltrib.com; www.sltrib.com/entertainment

Source: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/entertainment2/56209344-223/bay-comedy-gain-pain.html.csp

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The reality of shopping for health insurance ? e-Patient Dave

I keep hearing disparaging things about what lousy consumers patients are ? unable to understand how things work, unable to understand the options. Well, as I often say in my speeches, in any other industry you go out of business if consumers don?t understand you ? because customers ditch you. But in medicine we consumers can?t easily do that. Heck, we can hardly get our hands on information in the first place.

Case in point: when I shopped for health insurance in 2011, I found out just how slanted the table is when companies offer insurance and consumers buy it.

Here?s the true story of the information I was given.

1. Cancer? You can?t play in our market ? go away.

First, Blue Cross of New Hampshire asked if I?d ever had various things. When I said cancer, they went from cordial & friendly to cold and ?go away.? It was rude, frankly.

But at least I could get at the high risk pool. Some states won?t let people like me get ANY insurance without a six month waiting period. (Up yours, states. And up yours, regulators in those states.)

2. Here are your options. Figure it out yourself.

Of course they didn?t phrase it that way, but I was given five separate PDFs for the available plans, A-D and H. H wasn?t available to me ? it?s family-only.

I couldn?t make sense out of them separately so I typed them into a grid. (I could have written it on paper of course.)

Raw options as presented to me

3. So, which is best?

Heck if I know! ?The whole point of spending known dollars on insurance is to control the risk of maybe having?disastrously high spending. But??different premiums, different deductibles, different co-pay, different ? aaaahggg! How do I choose? What if I get cancer again ? which policy is best? What if I never have a single thing this year that requires a doctor visit? Which is best?

4. Scenarios!

Being a business person, accustomed to doing forecasts, I knew that what you do is run some scenarios ? some different examples. Calculate the numbers and see how it pans out:

Doing those calculations on paper is possible but I know Excel, which can do it faster and better and produce many many scenarios.

It got geeky:

Full table

For each plan option, at each level of spending, I added up the insurance premiums, deductible, co-pay, on and on. ?To do this, I had to use Excel features like ?named ranges? and formulas like this:

=IF(Actual<Deductible,Actual,Deductible) =IF(maxoop<I9+I10,maxoop,I9+I10)

and so on.?(It?s not shown here but I ran the columns out to $25,000 of actual spending.)

Now, notice two things:

Insurance companies have people who do this all the time. Ordinary families don?t. This is not a level playing field.
It?s still not clear what?s the best option. You still can?t tell which plan gets better or worse as spending grows.

5. To the graphs!

Well, again from business, I knew what you do when the numbers are overwhelming: you graph them, so you can see the trends.
Graph of the numbers

So now I could see what the actuaries in the insurance companies know:

Once you hit $5000 of actual spending, options A, B & C are pretty much identical.
Below that level, Option D (high deductible) is cheapest.
Above that level, that option becomes most expensive.

Which one would you choose? Your answer may be different from mine: do you anticipate lots of bills or little? That?s always the choice with insurance ? and you can?t answer it if you don?t understand how each option plays out.

Said differently: You can?t be an informed consumer if you don?t have information you understand.

I chose to place my bet on ?I don?t think I?ll have a lot of spending,? so I chose Option D. ?It?s $10,000 deductible, so as you can see, up to $10k it?s a straight line: every dollar of medical bills comes out of my pocket.

I was happy to take that deal, but it was hard. ?So I am sick to death of hearing that patients make lousy consumers.

Give us clear information about our options, their quality, and our prices,
and give us ability to choose, and to change our minds.
Then we?ll see who?s a competent consumer.

Without those conditions, such accusations are abusive.

Source: http://epatientdave.com/2013/04/25/the-reality-of-shopping-for-health-insurance/

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Longer days bring 'winter blues' -- for rats, not humans

Apr. 25, 2013 ? Most of us are familiar with the "winter blues," the depression-like symptoms known as "seasonal affective disorder," or SAD, that occurs when the shorter days of winter limit our exposure to natural light and make us more lethargic, irritable and anxious. But for rats it's just the opposite.

Biologists at UC San Diego have found that rats experience more anxiety and depression when the days grow longer. More importantly, they discovered that the rat's brain cells adopt a new chemical code when subjected to large changes in the day and night cycle, flipping a switch to allow an entirely different neurotransmitter to stimulate the same part of the brain.

Their surprising discovery, detailed in the April 26 issue of Science, demonstrates that the adult mammalian brain is much more malleable than was once thought by neurobiologists. Because rat brains are very similar to human brains, their finding also provides a greater insight into the behavioral changes in our brain linked to light reception. And it opens the door for new ways to treat brain disorders such as Parkinson's, caused by the death of dopamine-generating cells in the brain.

The neuroscientists discovered that rats exposed for one week to 19 hours of darkness and five hours of light every day had more nerve cells making dopamine, which made them less stressed and anxious when measured using standardized behavioral tests. Meanwhile, rats exposed for a week with the reverse -- 19 hours of light and five hours of darkness -- had more neurons synthesizing the neurotransmitter somatostatin, making them more stressed and anxious.

"We're diurnal and rats are nocturnal," said Nicholas Spitzer, a professor of biology at UC San Diego and director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. "So for a rat, it's the longer days that produce stress, while for us it's the longer nights that create stress."

Because rats explore and search for food at night, while humans evolved as creatures who hunt and forage during the daylight hours, such differences in brain chemistry and behavior make sense. Evolutionary changes presumably favored humans who were more active gatherers of food during the longer days of summer and saved their energy during the shorter days of winter.

"Light is what wakes us up and if we feel depressed we go for a walk outside," said Davide Dulcis, a research scientist in Spitzer's laboratory and the first author of the study. "When it's spring, I feel more motivation to do the things I like to do because the days are longer. But for the rat, it's just the opposite. Because rats are nocturnal, they're less stressed at night, which is good because that's when they can spend more time foraging or eating."

But how did our brains change when humans evolved millions of years ago from small nocturnal rodents to diurnal creatures to accommodate those behavioral changes?

"We think that somewhere in the brain there's been a change," said Spitzer. "Sometime in the evolution from rat to human there's been an evolutionary adjustment of circuitry to allow switching of neurotransmitters in the opposite direction in response to the same exposure to a balance of light and dark."

A study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found some correlation to the light-dark cycle in rats and stress in humans, at least when it comes to people searching on the internet for information in the winter versus the summer about mental illness. Using Google's search data from 2006 to 2010, a team of researchers led by John Ayers of San Diego State University found that mental health searches on Google were, in general, 14 percent higher in the winter in the United States and 11 percent higher in the Australian winter.

"Now that we know that day length can switch transmitters and change behavior, there may be a connection," said Spitzer.

In their rat experiments, the UC San Diego neuroscientists found that the switch in transmitter synthesis in the rat's brain cells from dopamine to somatostatin or back again was not due to the growth of new neurons, but to the ability of the same neurons there to produce different neurotransmitters.

Rats exposed to 19 hours of darkness every 24 hours during the week showed higher numbers of dopamine neurons within their brains and were more likely, the researchers found, to explore the open end of an elevated maze, a behavioral test showing they were less anxious. These rats were also more willing to swim, another laboratory test that showed they were less stressed.

"Because rats are nocturnal animals, they like to explore during the night and dopamine is a key part of our and their reward system," said Spitzer. "It's part of what allows them to be confident and reduce anxiety."

The researchers said they don't know precisely how this neurotransmitter switch works. Nor do they know what proportion of light and darkness or stress triggers this switch in brain chemistry. "Is it 50-50? Or 80 percent light versus dark and 20 percent stress? We don't know," added Spitzer. "If we just stressed the animal and didn't change their photoperiod, would that lead to changes in transmitter identity? We don't know, but those are all doable experiments."

But as they learn more about this trigger mechanism, they said one promising avenue for human application might be to use this neurotransmitter switch to deliver dopamine effectively to parts of the brain that no longer receive dopamine in Parkinson's patients.

"We could switch to a parallel pathway to put dopamine where it's needed with fewer side effects than pharmacological agents," said Dulcis.

The other researchers involved in the study, which was funded by grants from the Ellison Medical Foundation, were Pouya Jamshidi and Stefan Leutgeb of UC San Diego.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

D. Dulcis, P. Jamshidi, S. Leutgeb, N. C. Spitzer. Neurotransmitter Switching in the Adult Brain Regulates Behavior. Science, 2013; 340 (6131): 449 DOI: 10.1126/science.1234152

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/jWxZHMiyj5c/130425142430.htm

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