Posts

Showing posts from January 30, 2012

Davos 2012 hails a year of worries

Image
Davos 2012 hails a year of worries By Tim Weber Business editor, BBC News website, Davos   Some of the world's richest and most powerful people attend the World Economic Forum When more than 2,600 of the world's richest, cleverest, most powerful, influential or entrepreneurial people are cooped up in a Swiss mountain valley, surely something must come out of it? Call it the curse of high expectations. With a track record like the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) - peace deals struck, political breakthroughs achieved, massive aid projects launched, wars averted, or at least the global agenda set - expectations are high. Against these benchmarks, Davos 2012 felt somewhat flat. Now don't get me wrong. By definition the World Economic Forum can't be boring. There are just too many interesting people here to make it a dull event. Walk 20 yards, chat to four or five people, and you

Why do some people never get depressed?

Image
Why do some people never get depressed? By Geoff Watts BBC World Service Confronted with some of life's upsetting experiences - marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind - many people become depressed. But others don't. Why is this? A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as "resilience". According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a slidling scale. "At one end you have people who are very vulnerable. In the face of quite low stress, or none at all, they'll develop a mental health problem," she says. "At the other end, you have people who life has dealt a quite appalling hand with all sorts of stressful experiences, and yet they remain positive and optimistic." Most of us, she thinks, are somewhere in the middle.

Trendfear: Do you ever feel you're being left behind?

Image
Trendfear: Do you ever feel you're being left behind? By Tom de Castella BBC News Magazine   January is a cornucopia of technological tipping and frantic futurology, but do you ever get a nagging fear that trends are passing you by? What is Pinterest ? And is it important what it is? And will Summly have a big year in 2012? And does that matter? There are plenty of people who would answer these questions with a stock "I don't care". These people might refuse to even look at social media, and choose to eschew the smartphone and the tablet. But there are plenty of jobs where you might have to take notice. There are areas of advertising, marketing, public relations, journalism, academia, design, and finance where workers might find themselves looking a bit silly if they reveal they have no idea of the technological lie of the land. And the narrowly defined technology sector itself is ever-more important.

Defining Current Government in 3 Minutes - Very Funny Must Watch

Defining Current Government in 3 Minutes - Very Funny Must Watch