April 26, 2008
Still don’t believe anger kills, and stress ages you? In a
recent study re: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) the psychological
assessment included these questions: “I am not a worrier,” “I
often feel tense and jittery,” and “I often get angry at the way
people treat me.”
The study included 797 individuals with an average age of 75.
Research has proven that chronic stress is associated with
changes in the hippocampus (an area of the brain), as does
chronic depression, and problems with learning and memory.
Researchers therefore suspected that people who frequently
experience psychological distress might be at increased risk for
AD. Their suspicions were confirmed.
Participants were also tested on episodic memory, as impaired
episodic memory is a symptom of the disease.
According to the study, reported in PsychiatryMatters.MD, “over
an average 4.9 year follow-up, 140 individuals were diagnosed
with AD. In addition, those classified as being highly prone to
stress (90th percentile) were shown to have twice the risk of
developing the disorder as those in the lower stress catefory
(10th percentile).”
Further, there was a greater than 10-fold increase in episodic
memory decline. Episodic memory is the recall and recognition of
events, where as non-episodic memory is factual memory and
implicit memory (things you “just know”).
“The results suggest that chronic psychological distress is a
risk factor for AD and that this association probably reflects
neurobiologic mechanisms other than the pathologic hallmarks of
AD,” said lead researcher, R.S. Wilson, in the journal Neurology.
More evidence for the need for emotional intelligence, stress
management and resilience. Source Neurology 2003; 61: 1479-1485
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/61/11/1479
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Wedding Arrangements one of
the most difficult & creative work in world. You put all your
efforts to make your wedding, the best day of your life. You
have to arrange everything from wedding planner, wedding rings, florists &
flowers, dresses, catering, photographers
a>, wedding venue, wedding invitations,
limousine to honeymoon almost everything.
Everything needs very carefull investigation, price
comparision, best quality etc. and all these things need loots
of time. Here are few tips to lower the burden of all these
work: 1) Make a list of all your friends & relatives, who can
help you for your wedding
arrangements. Make a list of work or arrangements you need &
assign work to the person best suitable for that task.
2) Before choosing any vendor consult your friends or relatives
who get married recently. They can provide you best guidance
about good & bad things, do & donts, tips etc.
3) Start planning several months ago, create a list of all
tasks & assign completion date for each task.
4) Try to make yourself always free, engage yourself for
monitoring & selection purpose only.
5) If you need more time for your own then you may consult the
wedding planners. They will do all the arrangements for you, so
that you can spend more time with your friends & relatives.
These are few tips. I will keep posting some more good articles
soon.
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D.zigns dzignerwebs
The Basics
Before starting on how to design a website effectively, how about clearing some basic web design concepts? Designing Effectively
Now that you know what web design and related terms mean, lets get down to the real thing: Designing Effectively How to balance artistic design with practicality and functionality.
Use of graphics and content
Unless your website is all about graphics, how to make them, edit them or just a bunch of links to graphics websites, I suggest you use graphics sparingly, especially the flashing, twirling kind. They not only detract readers from the content, but they also take ages to load. You do not want your readers to leave your website because your graphically attractive page does not seem to load fast enough. Then again, too much text is boring. So mix and match the graphics and text on your page, having enough white space so that the page is not plain annoying.
Layout and design
While designing, keep in mind that poor layout and design will make your pages unreadable and difficult to keep your visitors on your website for long. Some of the things that make a poor design and layout:
Text that is too small to read
Color combinations of text and background that make the text hard to read
Large graphic files that take forever to load
Multiple things that blink
Unclear navigation; over complex navigation
Paragraphs of type in all caps, bold, and italic all at once
Graphics that don’t fit on the screen (assuming a screen of 640×460 pixels)
Animations that never stop
Complicated frames, too many frames, unnecessary scroll bars in frames
Cluttered, not enough alignment of elements
Some of the things that make a webpage stand out from the crowd:
- Stay away from bad design features listed above.
- Background does not interrupt the text
- Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use
- Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, pull quotes) to break up large areas of text
- A large site has an index or site map
- Link colors coordinate with page color
- Every graphic link has a matching text link
- Animated graphics turn off by themselves
- Pages download quickly
- All pages have the immediate visual impact within 640 x 460 pixels
Planning
Most of the time, all it takes to design your website effectively is a little planning. When designing a website, it needs to be clean, uncluttered, attractive and easy for users to read and find what they need. Begin with a webdesign plan:
- what colors do you want to use?
- Are these colors complimentary?
- What items - text, images, data - do you want to put in your pages?
- What layout do you want? Look at other websites and then decide.
Follow the above steps to get a website that speaks for itself and your business. You can always contact me for suggestions and webdesign projects.
Tasneem Rangoonwala is a freelancer Web Development Co-ordinator at D.zigns Enterprise Solutions, offering webdesign, development and other related services.
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