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Showing posts with label READING. Show all posts
Showing posts with label READING. Show all posts

RECOMMENDED Website + Blog: THE EMOTIONS LAB

πŸ”ΊIMPORTANT: This is NOT an advert! This is just my free and honest opinion. I've already recommended other interesting websites, tools and videos, and I'll continue doing so in the future as long as I come across things worth recommending.

Why do I recommend this website? Simply because I think it is interesting, useful and fun, and it contributes to our understanding of our own feelings and those of people around us.
πŸ’‘Below is a brief website overview







Active Listening: Hear What People Are Really Saying (From MindTools)

πŸ’‘Infographic  View and Download Full-Size Infographic Here 

How well you listen has a major impact on the quality of your relationships with others. 

[…] Given all the listening that we do, you would think we'd be good at it! In fact, most of us are not, and research suggests that we only remember between 25 percent and 50 percent of what we hear, as described by Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience. That means that when you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers, or spouse for 10 minutes, they pay attention to less than half of the conversation.

Turn it around and it reveals that when you are receiving directions or being presented with information, you aren't hearing the whole message either. You hope the important parts are captured in your 25-50 percent, but what if they're not?

RECOMMENDED: Skills 360 – Business English Pod (More than Business English)

πŸ”ΊIMPORTANT: This is NOT an advert! This is just my honest (and free) opinion. I've already recommended other interesting websites, tools and videos, and I'll keep on doing so in the future as long as I come across things worth recommending.

Why do I recommend this website? Simply because find it useful. Business Skills 360 podcast lessons provide essential tips and language for communicating in English, along with free transcripts, vocabulary quizzes and PDF downloads. (Lessons are listed on the website by the date published, with the more recent lessons at the top. All podcasts are free, and so are most resources though the latest lessons may require a subscription.)

πŸ’‘Below is a brief podcast lesson overview:

How to tell if you’re being ‘breadcrumbed’ at work, by Emily Torres (From BBC Worklife)

πŸ‘‰By Emily Torres
πŸ‘‰READ FULL ARTICLE: Are you being ‘breadcrumbed’ at work?

From: BBC Worklife / Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Stop breadcrumbing me!

🚩Is your boss commitment-phobic?

Our modern dating vocabulary is making its way into our work lexicon, and it’s bringing more life and colour to the way we describe our experiences. Have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer? Or have you ghosted them? Now, thanks to the latest series of the reality TV show Love Island, we have a new word for an old practice: breadcrumbing.

Are you heading for BURNOUT?

Credit: GETTY IMAGES
Here are two excerpts from two reading articles and three videos on burnout: what it is, what its consequences are and how you can avoid it.

πŸ‘‰How to tell if you’re close to burning out, by Zaria Gorvett (From BBC WORKLIFE) 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has redefined burnout as a syndrome linked to chronic work stress. There’s a difference between a busy workload and something more serious, writes Zaria Gorvett.

[…] Late last month [June 2019], the WHO announced that the trendy problem will be recognised in the latest International Classification of Diseases manual, where it is described as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”.

The 101 people, ideas and things changing how we work today (From BBC Worklife)

πŸ‘‰ GO TO BBC WORKLIFE 101
The world of work is in transition. Are you ready?
In Japan, companies are encouraging employees to go for lunchtime sleep, or hirune. It could contribute to a better working environment. (From BBC / Image credit: Piero Zagami and Michela Nicchiotti.)
The world of work is being struck by waves of change. Some are vast and visible – leaps in machine learning and artificial intelligence or the rise of ‘do anything from anywhere’ technologies. Other ideas are just beginning to emerge – like monitoring content to ensure proper gender balance, or rethinking office design to promote air quality. Behind it all are the people whose ideas and attitudes have the potential to shape the next chapter of our lives.

[In this reading article] are the 101 indispensable things that you need to know about our work-life future:

How Good Are Your Listening Skills? (From MindTools)

Understanding Someone's Entire Message

For many of us, listening is the communication skill we use the most. Yet, many people listen poorly, and they rarely think to improve this important skill.

They get distracted by their own thoughts or by what's going on around them, and they formulate their responses before the person who they're talking to has finished speaking. Because of this, they miss crucial information.

Good listeners, on the other hand, enjoy better relationships, because they fully understand what other people are saying. Their team members are also more productive, because they feel that they can discuss problems easily, and talk through solutions.

So, how good do you think your listening skills are? Test them HERE, and then find out how you can improve.

How to escape the ‘hyperactive hivemind’ of modern work, by William Park (From BBC Worklife)

πŸ‘‰ By William Park
Should ‘deep focus’ become a central pillar of workplace culture?

The constant ping of messages that keep us plugged into work chatter might be doing more harm than good. We feel we must respond – it is about work, after all. But always being switched on means we never have the chance to think deeply. And that is a problem for companies that want to get the most out of their employees.
Copyright : Evgenii Naumov
The next great revolution in the office will need to correct this, according to one man who wants to reset the way we work. He believes that the value someone can bring to a company will be judged not by their skill, but by their ability to focus. But how do we find the time to shut off distractions and do our best work?

The emotion centre of the brain: why is mood so important? By Dr Genevieve Rayner (From Your Brain Health)

πŸ‘‰By Dr. Genevieve Rayner, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

“Somebody woke up on the wrong side of bed this morning.” You know that comment; the one that rarely makes you feel any more gracious towards the world (or the person saying it). At other times you might feel particularly gracious and sunny, for no reason at all.

Our mood is a transient frame of mind that influences how we think and view the world. It is influenced by events in our lives, the amount of sleep we get, hormones, even the weather. But what role does the brain play in shaping our mood?

The limbic system

Many regions fundamental to mood are buried deep in the most primordial parts of the brain; that is, they are thought to have been among the first to develop in the human species. This is probably because mood is evolutionarily important.

Being glum can be advantageous and has been shown to sharpen our eye for detail, for instance. But, overall, the brain seems geared towards maintaining a mildly positive frame of mind. Being in a good mood makes us more likely to seek new experiences, be creative, plan ahead, procreate and adapt to changing conditions.

The limbic system is the major primordial brain network underpinning mood. It’s a network of regions that work together to process and make sense of the world. (Continue reading)


From: Your Brain Health Blog
πŸ’‘ You may also be interested in:

Why we should learn to love awful corporate buzzwords, by Meredith Turits (From BBC Capital)

πŸ‘‰ By Meredith Turits
Why we all need to be a little more zen about grating corporate language.
Is vacuous corporate babble diminishing our capacity to think clearly at work? (Credit: Getty Images)
I just wanted to circle back on this. Have we digested the learnings from our fact-finding mission? I need to leverage these insights in the deliverables.

Perhaps you haven’t received this email verbatim, but if you glance back through jargon-littered emails from various jobs you’ll probably find something startlingly similar. Corporation, start-up, sole proprietorship or family company: bad business speak is endemic to many work environments – and, sometimes, infuriating.

In what can seem like universal condemnation, business jargon is considered bad form. There are dozens of overused words that some argue make smart people sound less intelligent. Movements have even sprung up to bin corporate speak.

Yet the backlash might not be worth the effort.

πŸ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: In defense of corporate buzzwords

How well do you know your phobias? (From Oxford Dictionaries Blog)

Spiders. Heights. The dark. Small, enclosed spaces. When we think of phobias, our minds usually jump to the commons ones – including the aforementioned claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) and arachnophobia (fear of spiders). However, there’s a curious group of much rarer phobias out there as well. For example, how about iconophobia (fear of religious works of art)? Or apeirophobia (fear of infinity)?
From Oxford Dictionaries Blog

Etymologically, the names of these phobias are usually formed through two combining forms. The combining form -phobia comes (via Latin) from the Greek word 'phobos', meaning fear or dread. The combining forms that make up the first elements (claustro- or arachno-) come from Greek, Latin, or English origin. Some modern formations retain the elements separately, such as school phobia, and might be considered compound words.

Can you match the less common phobias in the quiz with their corresponding subjects? Take this 10-question quiz and find out!

πŸ’‘You may also be interested in:
πŸ‘‰More QUIZZES:

WEEKLY PICKS - 27

This is a weekly selection of reading articles, free online exercises, YouTube videos, games, quizzes and resources for you to further improve your English language skills and have fun ENJOY!

πŸ“œREADING PICKS – Articles, blog posts, quizzes and more:

From BBC TRAVEL: How France created the metric system, by Madhvi Ramani. It is one of the most important developments in human history, affecting everything from engineering to international trade to political systems. (Continue reading)

From BBC CAPITAL: Can you make money selling your data? By Sam Harrison. Tech giants make billions from our data, but what if there was a way to claw some of that control back – and make some money in the process? (Continue reading)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:
Why is yawning contagious? - Claudia Aguirre (4:28 minutes)
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
Body Language in an Interview - 3 Tips (9:05 minutes)
The Silk Road and Ancient Trade: Crash Course World History #9 (10:30 minutes)
πŸ’¬ VOCABULARY PICKS:
Learners' Questions: Assure, ensure, insure (3:22 minutes)
πŸ’‘ GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:
Learners' Questions: 'When', 'if' and 'in case' (3:06 minutes)
MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

WEEKLY PICKS - 26

This is a weekly selection of reading articles, free online exercises, YouTube videos, games, quizzes and resources for you to further improve your English language skills and have fun ENJOY!

πŸ“œ READING PICKS – Articles, blog posts, quizzes and more:

From BBC TRAVEL: Italy’s ‘practically perfect’ food, by Amanda Ruggeri.
Pound for pound, Parmigiano-Reggiano can compete with almost any food for calcium, amino acids, protein and vitamin A – and is prescribed by doctors to cure ailments. It’s also a dairy product… that can be eaten by the lactose-intolerant. (Continue reading)

From BBC CAPITAL: The cost of free public transport, by Marc Auxenfants. 
From March next year, commuters in Luxembourg will not be charged for trips on its trains, trams and buses. What’s the cost of such a move? (Continue reading)

BBC Reel: The amazing houses that build themselves At the touch of a button, these incredible homes of the future can self-deploy and build themselves in less than 10 minutes. (Go to videos + full article)

🎬 VIDEO PICKS – Short and fun videos:

LESS-THAN-5-MINUTE VIDEOS:
What Is the Sunday Evening Feeling? (4:58 minutes)
5-TO-10-MINUTE VIDEOS:
How parasites change their host's behavior - Jaap de Roode (5:13 minutes)
A LITTLE LONGER BUT WORTH IT!
Inside The Lives Of North Korean School Children (12:31 minutes)
πŸ’¬ VOCABULARY PICKS:
Learners' Questions: Assure, ensure, insure (3:22 minutes)
πŸ’‘ GRAMMAR PICKS – Assorted exercises and games:
Intermediate English grammar - Verb patterns, (verb + ing, verb + to) gerunds and infinitives (8:56 minutes)
MORE PICKS NEXT WEEK!

When taking probiotics could backfire, by Martha Henriques (From BBC FUTURE)

πŸ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: When taking probiotics could backfire
πŸ‘‰ By Martha Henriques

Taking a course of antibiotics could harm the beneficial bacteria living inside us. So should we be taking probiotics after we finish them? The answer may not be so simple.
Taking probiotics when your gut health is weak may not be a good idea (Credit: Getty Images)
Probiotics have been touted as a treatment for a huge range of conditions, from obesity to mental health problems. One of their popular uses is to replenish the gut microbiome after a course of antibiotics. The logic is – antibiotics wipe out your gut bacteria along with the harmful bacteria that might be causing your infection, so a probiotic can help to restore order to your intestines.

But while it might sound like sense, there is scant solid evidence suggesting probiotics actually work if taken this way. Researchers have found that taking probiotics after antibiotics in fact delays gut health recovery.

Part of the problem when trying to figure out whether or not probiotics work is because different people can mean a variety of things with the term ‘probiotic’. To a scientist, it might be seen as a living culture of microorganisms that typically live in the healthy human gut. But the powdery substance blister packs on supermarket shelves can bear little resemblance to that definition.

Even when researchers use viable, living bacterial strains in their research, the cocktail varies from one lab to another making it tricky to compare.

“That’s the problem – there aren’t enough studies of any one particular probiotic to say this one works and this one doesn’t,” says Sydne Newberry of Rand Corporation, who carried out a large meta-analysis on the use of probiotics to treat antibiotic-induced diarrhoea in 2012.

[…] A particular concern is a lack of research on the safety of taking probiotics. While they are generally assumed to be safe in healthy people, there have been worrying case reports of probiotics causing problems – such as fungus spreading into the blood – among more vulnerable patients.

A recent study by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel found that even among healthy people, taking probiotics after antibiotics was not harmless. In fact, they hampered the very recovery processes that they are commonly thought to improve.

The researchers, led by Eran Elinav, gave 21 people a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics for one week. After this, they had a colonoscopy and an upper-gastrointestinal endoscopy to investigate the state of their microbiome throughout the gut.

[…] The volunteers were divided into three groups. The first was a wait-and-see group, with no intervention after the antibiotics. The second group was given a common probiotic for a month. The third was given perhaps the least savoury option: a faecal transplant. This group had a small sample of their own stool – taken before the antibiotic treatment – returned to their colon once the treatment was over.

The surprising finding was that the group who received the probiotic had the poorest response in terms of their microbiome. They were the slowest group to return to a healthy gut. Even at the end of the study – after five months of monitoring – this group had not yet reached their pre-antibiotic gut health.

“We have found a potentially alarming adverse effect of probiotics,” says Elinav.

The good news, incidentally, is that the group who received a faecal transplant did very well indeed. Within days, this group completely reconstituted their original microbiome.

“So many people are taking antibiotics all over the world,” says Elinav. “We can aim to better understand this potentially very important adverse effect that we didn’t realise existed.”

And the evidence is mounting that taking probiotics when gut health is weak is not such a good idea. Another recent study has found that probiotics don’t do any good for young children admitted to hospital for gastroenteritis. In a randomised controlled trial in the US, 886 children with gastroenteritis aged three months to four years were given either a five-day course of probiotics or a placebo.

The rate of continued moderate to severe gastroenteritis within two weeks was slightly higher (26.1%) in the probiotic group than in the placebo group (24.7%). And there was no difference between the two groups in terms of the duration of diarrhoea or vomiting.

Despite evidence such as this, the demand for probiotics is large and growing. In 2017, the market for probiotics was more than $1.8bn, and it is predicted to reach $66bn by 2024.

“Given the very heavy involvement of the industry, clear conclusions as to whether probiotics are truly helpful to humans remain to be proven,” says Elinav. “This is the reason why regulatory authorities such as the US’s Food and Drug Administration and European regulators have yet to approve a probiotic for clinical use.”

But that is not to write off probiotics completely. The problem with them may not be with the probiotics themselves, but the way we are using them. Often probiotics are bought off the shelf – consumers may not know exactly what they are getting, or even whether the culture they are buying is still alive. […]

πŸ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: When taking probiotics could backfire
πŸ’‘ MORE FROM BBC FUTURE:

What the earliest fragments of English reveal, by Cameron Laux (From BBC CULTURE)

πŸ‘‰ GO TO FULL ARTICLE: What the earliest fragments of English reveal
πŸ‘‰ By Cameron Laux
The earliest fragments of English reveal how interconnected Europe has been for centuries. As an exhibition in London brings together treasures from Anglo-Saxon England, Cameron Laux traces a history of the language through 10 objects and manuscripts – including a burial urn, a buckle with bling, and the first letter in English.

The interconnectedness of Europe has a long history, as we’re reminded when we explore the roots of the English language – roots that stretch back to the 5th Century. Anglo-Saxon England “was connected to the world beyond its shores through a lively exchange of books, goods, ideas,” argues the Medieval historian Mary Wellesley, describing a new exhibition at the British Library in London – Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War – that charts the genesis of England.

Something like 80% of all surviving Old English verse survives in four physical books… for the first time in recorded history they are all together [in this exhibition],” she tells BBC Culture. “The period that is represented by Old English is about 600 years, which is like between us and back to Chaucer… imagine if there were only four physical books that survived from that period, what would that say about our literature?”

What we understand as English has its roots in 5th-Century Germany and Denmark, from where the Anglian, Saxon and Jute tribes came. As the Roman legions withdrew around 410 AD, so the Saxon war bands (what Rome called ‘the barbarians’) landed and an era of migration from the Continent and the formation of Anglo-Saxon England began. The word “English” derives from the homeland of the Angles, the Anglian peninsula in Germany. Early English was written in runes, combinations of vertical and diagonal lines that lent themselves to being carved into wood and were used by other closely related Germanic languages, such as Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German.

“The earliest fragments of the English language are likely to be a group of runic inscriptions on three 5th-Century cremation urns from Spong Hill in Norfolk,” Wellesley has written. “The inscriptions simply read alu, which probably means ‘ale’. Perhaps the early speakers of Old English longed for ale in death as well as life.”

The exhibition gathers together an array of documents, books and archaeological evidence to form a dense picture of the Anglo-Saxon period, including a burial urn with runic inscriptions in early English from Loveden Hill, Lincolnshire, England.

Anglo-Saxons cremated their dead and interred their remains in earthenware vessels. About 20 objects with runic inscriptions from before 650 AD are known from England, making this vessel – which seems to feature a woman’s name and the word for tomb – one of the earliest examples of English. (Continue reading)

Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern (4:53 minutes)

How did English evolve? - Kate Gardoqui (5:04 minutes)

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