10 things to learn on July 22nd

10 things to learn from the almighty WWW today:

Why is yawning contagious? – Healthy Living on Shine

No one knows for sure, but a study published in a recent issue of the journal Cognitive Brain Research theorizes that yawning in response to someone else’s yawn may be an empathetic response, similar to laughter. “A yawn can be triggered not only by seeing a person yawn but also by hearing, reading about, or even just thinking about yawns,” says Steven Platek, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, who directed the research. Platek and his colleagues believe that contagious yawning may be a primitive way of modeling our feelings after other people’s.

Crackdowns fail to slow social media in China

With an internet penetration of 63%, Malaysia has 9.4 million users that managed social network profiles and they also lead the way to join a social network site with 47% penetration for all 16 to 54-year-olds.

10 Ways To Give Yourself A Procrastination Inoculation

A recently study by Dr. Piers Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary concluded that procrastination is on the rise. According to Steel’s research, in 1978 about 15 percent of the population were considered moderate procrastinators. Today that number is up to 60 percent, a four-fold increase. While procrastination is to some degree a natural phenomenon and can’t be completely eradicated, you can use the following ten strategies to to get in the habit of getting things done.

How to Get Twitter Followers: The Definitive Guide « The Metric System

This article provides an in-depth look at the major tricks and techniques for gaining Twitter followers. These include organic (i.e. legitimate) growth, paid services, and shortcut “tricks” used by the most-followed nobodies on Twitter.

We provide detailed, data-driven conclusions about the effectiveness of each technique and its real cost to the end user. The impact of follower acquisition campaigns are heavily interconnected (as shown in the chart below), but we make an effort isolate the effects of each in a fair way.

Slashdot Science Story | How They Built the Software of Apollo 11

LinuxScribe tips a piece up at Linux.com with inside details on the design and construction of the Apollo 11 code. There are some analogies to open source development but they are slim. MIT drafted the code — to run on the Apollo Guidance Computer, a device with less grunt than an IBM XT — it had 2K of memory and a 1-MHz clock speed. It was an amazing machine for its time. NASA engineers tested, polished, simulated, and refined the code.

Twitter for Beginners: 5 Steps for Better Tweeting

Twitter is immensely useful as a utility for joining in the global conversation and sharing thoughts, opinions, information, and media. But for new users, there’s also a fairly steep learning curve. For many people new to Twitter (Twitter), the site doesn’t immediately “make sense” and it can be a bit daunting. But there are things those users can do to make the service more useful from the get go.

Below are five steps for new users to take in order to make the Twitter experience more enjoyable from the beginning. New users have both third party services and built-in tools at their disposal to make Twitter work for them, and this post highlights some of the best.

The Most Engaged Brands On The Web

What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below or on ENGAGEMENTdb, which was presumably created with Wetpaint’s site-creation software.

Signs Of Doomsday According To Major Religions

All the world’s great religions contain Messianic prophecies, which promise that God will one day send a Promised One whose teachings will unite all humanity.

The Promised One is called by different names by different religions. Jews look forward to a Prophet like Moses. Hindus look for the return of Krishna. Christians await the return of Christ. Muslims look for the appearance of Imam Mahdi as well as Christ. Buddhists await Buddha.

The fascinating aspect of all these prophecies is that they all seem to be pointing towards the same event.

All the major religions of the world have their own signs of Doomsday.

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day – Peter Bregman – HarvardBusiness.org

Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people's problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I'd been ambushed. And I know better.

July/August 2009- From Ghetto to Glamour

In Europe, only a few professions were open to Jews. Largely barred from owning land, they were forced to earn their living as tailors or traders, honing skills that would serve them well in the New World. They arrived in 19th-century America just as a new technology—the sewing machine—was revolutionizing the apparel business. As Americans moved from the farm to the city and began buying from the Sears & Roebuck catalogue or the general store, a new industry of ready-made clothes began to take shape. Jewish immigrants streamed into the cities, providing cheap labor for garment factories in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and elsewhere. “Based in urban centers and pushed by history toward entrepreneurship, Jews found fashion one of the fields open to them,” says Valerie Steele, a historian at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

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