Problems Sleeping? The Internet May Be The Culprit

In the early 1990s, scientists began to discover a disturbing trend: people began feeling compulsions to use their computers in the same way that drug addicts feel a compulsion to get a hit of their favorite drug. “ Internet addiction ” is now actually a widely-accepted problem that most psychologists encounter. In essence, if you are addicted to the internet, you forego normal daily tasks in order to spend more time online. Ironically, this “addiction” was originally proposed as a hoax in 1995. However, it is currently in debate as to whether or not it will be included in the 2013 edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnotistic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the definitive word on acceptable diagnosis by most professional psychologists.

Whether or not it will become a “real” mental disorder, all of us still have days where the internet and our computers just seem to suck us in. Especially those who work on computers regularly. Graphic artists, computer programers, writers, and even students taking online courses, are required to be on their computers for long periods of time each day. At the end of a long day, they go home and then use their computers again for recreational use. There are several dangers to this, the most obvious ones being involved with your health. Social issues and other mental and emotional disorders may also crop up if internet and computer use goes too far.

As far as poor health goes, there are several drawbacks to spending too much time on the computer. First, it can be a serious strain on your eyesight. Medical professionals recommend taking frequent eye breaks and turning from your computer for a few minutes every hour to focus on a distant object. Other health problems include wrist and hand pain from a cramped typing position, back problems from improper posture or badly-made chairs, and even general health problems from not getting enough exercise throughout the day.

Yet, despite these drawbacks, there is one that is of even greater detriment to the computer user. Usually the first thing that gets sacrificed in order to dedicate more computer time is sleep. As you probably already know, getting insufficient sleep can affect every part of your life. Being tired will inhibit your performance at work or school. It will also affect your mood and could potentially lead to dangerous behavior, such as being drowsy while driving. You may even turn to other substances to give you energy, such as caffeine filled energy drinks or alcohol. All of which can turn into problems and are considered by psychologists and doctors as serious medical conditions. Yet they can all stem from a lack of sleep. And the lack of sleep comes from playing games, chatting, reading blogs, or doing whatever else on the internet that you care to do.

Moderation in all things is key, especially with internet use. With nearly any piece of information at your fingertips, it’s hard to resist the itch to Google. However, our brains can only hold so much information, and even less of that if we allow internet use to trump other important daily activities like showering, socializing with real human beings, and sleep.

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Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's 155th Birthday

WEDNESDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2012

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's 155th Birthday

Google Doodle today (February 22, 2012) in New Zealand, Indonesia, Australia, Nederland, Germany, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Qatar, Kuwait, ect come with a theme Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's 155th Birthday. Looks like a graphic image that moves up and down and do not form the word "google" as shown in the picture above. And the picture above illustrates the radio waves, which are the findings Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.

Who is Heinrich Rudolf Hertz?
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (February 22, 1857 – January 1, 1894) was a German physicist who clarified and expanded the electromagnetic theory of light that had been put forth by Maxwell. He was the first to satisfactorily demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves by building an apparatus to produce and detect radio waves. The unit for frequency is named after him.

Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany, into a prosperous and cultured Hanseatic family.
His father, Gustav Ferdinand Hertz, was a writer and later a senator.
His mother was the former Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkorn.
His paternal grandfather David Wolff Hertz (1757-1822), fourth son of Benjamin Wolff Hertz, moved to Hamburg in 1793 where he made his living as a jeweller.

He and his wife Schöne Hertz (1760-1834) were buried in the former Jewish cemetery in Ottensen. Their first son Wolff Hertz (1790-1859), was chairman of the Jewish community. His brother Hertz Hertz (1797-1862) was a respected businessman.
He was married to Betty Oppenheim, the daughter of the banker Salomon Oppenheim, from Cologne. Hertz converted from Judaism to Christianity and took the name Heinrich David Hertz.

Biography of Heinrich David Hertz

Born                      February 22, 1857(1857-02-22)
                              Hamburg, Germany
Died                       January 1, 1894(1894-01-01) (aged 36)
                              Bonn, Germany
Residence               Germany
Nationality              German
Fields                      Physics
                               Electronic Engineering
Institutions               University of Kiel
                               University of Karlsruhe
                               University of Bonn
Alma mater              University of Munich
                                University of Berlin
Doctoral advisor       Hermann von Helmholtz
Known for                Electromagnetic radiation
                                Photoelectric effect

(source wikipedia, google)

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28 Top Tips For Exams and Tests

Practical Exam Tips

1) Pens and Pencils

Some exams require the use of PENS, while others have to be completed in PENCIL. Make sure you know what you should be using in every paper before you go in.

2) Websites

All the major examination boards have websites these days, usually with sample papers and examiners' reports that you can download. These sites are well worth a visit as they may offer a lot of sound advice. The examiners' report, for instance, can give you an idea of exactly what it is that they are looking for.

3) Take Spares

Take spare pens and pencils just in case the one you are using stops working.

4) On time not In time

Allow for problems, hold-ups and traffic jams on the way and make sure you arrive with time to spare so that you can go in calmy rather than in a frantic rush.

5) It may sound stupid, but ...

Don't forget to read the instructions and make sure you know what you are being asked to do. You should go into the exam well aware of what is expected of you, but you should always check. Don't, however, waste a lot of time on this.

6) Honesty- 1

A language exam is not a test of honesty and you will not be penalised if you tell the examiners that you are CANCER rather than SAGITTARIUS in a written question simply because you are sure of how to spell it. Language Tests are quite simply that; they are designed to test your language and not your honesty- don't worry about lying or being economical with the truth in order to show off your accurate language use.

7) Zzzzz

Try to get a good night's sleep the night before any exam.

8) Hangovers

Try to avoid alcohol the night before an exam, especially in quantity, as a bad hangover is among the very worst things to be suffering from in an exam room.

Writing Tips

9) Writing- 1

Don't carried away and overload your writing with too many obvious connectives and contrastives; if every sentence has two or three such words or expressions, then the writing can seem strained and artificial. Remember- you can try too hard as well as not hard enough.

10) Writing- 2

Write on alternate lines (leaving every second line blank) so that you have space to make changes when checking through your work.

11) Writing- 3

Always credit your sources in academic writing, even when you are referring to ideas rather than actually quoting.

Multiple Choice Tips

12) Psychological Warfare

Examiners can choose the same letter successively for the correct answer. After three consecutive answers with the same letter, many students may well start to feel confused and worried. Eventually, many candidates will start changing their answers simple because they don't believe that examiners would have half a dozen of more questions with the same letter one after the other. They can and sometimes do; this is a real test of your comprehension and reduces the possibility of scoring by guessing.

13) Right word, wrong answer

With multiple choice comprehension questions based on a text, a simple trick is to take obvious and prominent words from the text and put them in an incorrect option. Seeing a word or phrase from the text is not enough; these questions are designed to test comprehension not recognition of a word from the passage.

Speaking Tips

14) Speaking- 1

Don't bother learning speeches and trying to say them verbatim (word-for-word) in interviews; examiners will usually spot this without too much difficulty and mark you down for it. It is very hard to do this and sound natural.

15) Speaking- 2

Do think over your answers to common questions about yourself. This an opportunity for examiners to get a general picture of your language level, especially your ability to talk about past, present and future experiences, so run these thing over in your mind and try to include corresponding verb forms accordingly.

16) Speaking- 3

If you are asked to talk about or describe a photograph, don't get too hung up on describing every visible detail. Instead, be prepared to speak in general terms about it and how the theme it illustrates affects you.

Listening Tips

17) Listening- 1

You are often given false information first that sounds as if it could be the answer to the question. An instance of this is where the information given matches one of the answers, but does not fit the criterion given in the question- the person could be talking about last week, say, when the question asks about next week. The correct information usually, but not always, comes afterwards.

18) Listening- 2

Nearly right is not the same thing as right; examiners often give information that sounds more or less correct, but is in some way unsatifactory. Adverbs and modals are often used to send you the wrong way; the listening text might use 'She may well be late' and the question 'She will be late'- this is not an exact match and consequently could easily be the wrong answer. It has to be 100% accurate to be right.

19) Listening- 3

In longer listening passages, they often try to lull you into losing concentration by having quite long sections where no information relevant to the exercise is given, then out of the blue they hit you with a couple of answers in quick succession.

20) Listening- 4

Although most longer listening passages begin with an introduction that lets you get into the flow before they start testing you, you cannot depend on this; the first word could in theory be the answer to the first question.

21) Listening- 5

Examiners will often place a word directly from the passage in a wrong answer and use a synonym *[syn.] in the correct answer; check the meaning and do not rely on word recognition to get the right answer.

Examiners & Exam Myths

22) Examiners- 1

Examiners are, by and large, sadistic so-and-sos. Their sole aim in life is to trap you and catch you out.

23) Examiners- 2

In multiple choice exercises, examiners have been known to use the same letter for the correct answer several times in succession (a, a, a, a, a, etc). This is unsettling and can make students worry that their answers must be wrong; it does not. I once gave a Cambridge Proficiency group an entire Reading Comprehension exercise (25 questions) with the same answer for all. The students started changing their answers and choosing wrong ones because they couldn't believe that this was possible. While I have never seen it, there is nothing to stop them doing it. They are there to test your understanding and will play psychological games to make you doubt yourself, and this is one little trick they use. It also has the advantage of reducing the possibly of inaccurate scores achieved by guessing, as few would guess in a regular pattern, but would try to vary their answers across the range of possibilities. From their perspective, grouping a few consecutive answers with the same letter makes sense.

24) Examiners- 3

Many students and teachers try to analyse exams and work out patterns. In one Cambridge First Certificate exercise, there were usually between four and six correct sentences. Then one year there were only two. Patterns may help, but beware of relying on them; examiners will change them without warning.

25) Exam Myth 1

Apparently, a philosophy student got a first class grade for a paper which had "Is this a question?" as an essay title. Instead of going into the nature of questions, etc, he or she simply wrote "Yes, if this is an answer." Perhaps you should read Exam Myth 2 before feeling encouraged to do likewise.

26) Exam Myth 2

When asked "What is courage?", another philosphy student wrote "This." He or she failed; even though it was, indeed, courageous to stake their degree on such an answer, it was not held to have answered the question. The answer was an example and not an explanation.

27) Exam Myth 3

An Oxford undergraduate, or so the story goes, discovered an ancient regulation that allowed a gentleman to send the invigilator to buy a quart (Two pints or 1.14 litres) of ale (beer) during the exam for the student's refreshment. He duly ordered it and produced his evidence and was bought the beer. The following day, the invigilator approached him with a hat, gown and sword, which another old regulation stipulated had to be worn at all times. So, the student had to to sit through the exam in a stuffy hall on a hot day in a heavy hat, etc.

28) Exam Myth 4

A student used amphetamines (a chemical stimulant) to stay awake to study all night in the days leading up to an exam, hoping to make up for lost time. Feeling shattered on the morning of the exam, they took a huge dose to make sure they were bright and alert and didn't fall asleep halfway through. Throughout the exam, they scribbled away frantically; writing page after page. Unfortunately, they'd taken so much of the stimulant that they failed to notice that they had written everything on the same side of paper, which meant that instead of handing in a dozen sheets of paper, they had one so covered in writing that it had turned black.

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HTML color codes

HTML color codes

For the purposes of blogging, sometimes we need the HTML color codes.
There are many software options that we can use to find out this html color codes.

1. You can use the following software, easy way of working life. Just click the color that we want, then pick a color code listed.
See the picture below.

You can download free here. 317 KB only.


2. Or if you have pictures and want to know the color code, you can use this software. The trick, put the mouse on the color you want, copy the color code.
Example, looking at pictures of butterflies below.

You can download HTML color code here. Less than 200 KB.

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