I’m recently read Daniel Goleman’s “Social Intelligence” where he mentioned the Micro Expression Training Tool, short METT, from Paul Ekmann.

Micro Expressions are signs of real emotions that flash involuntary over one’s face.

They last only split seconds before our consciousness takes over and shows the emotion it finds adequate. For example an employee who hates his would show his hate and disgust in a micro expression just for a short time before he puts on a false smile.

Wired ran in 2003 a great article about this topic.

Now what the METT does it shows you a face with an micro expression for a split second and then you must specify what emotion it was. People who train with METT report some improvement in recognizing this micro expressions.

The short version of the training costs $49, the long $69.

Alia Crum and Professor Ellen Langer of Harvard University made an interesting experiment that measured what the effects of better appreciation of one exercise might have:

“…amazingly, despite no change in actual exercise levels, in the intervention group, simply being told about the value of what they were already doing caused a significant change for the better on every single one of the objective health measures recorded: weight, body fat, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure.”

More over at the PsyBlog.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Bank of America Corp., AT&T, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Microsoft Corp. — would each receive over $1 billion a year.

Think Progress

McCain’s Tax Plan or Obama’s? Both don’t look very good in my opinion. Kinda great not beeing an American citizen.

Found at Political Irony. Shows how the states voted in the last hundred years:

Greg Mankiw posted an picture displaying the effective marignal tax rates of Obama’s plan compared to how they’re currently from an analysis by Alex Brill and Alan Viard:

While both candidates will reduce their tax plans to clever sound bites, voters should consider how those plans would affect incentives to earn income. Unfortunately, Senator Obama’s proposed “tax cuts for the middle class” are actually marginal rate hikes in disguise.

One should read the article as Alan Viard pointed out that the analysis

does not find an increase in average tax rates, or in tax payments, at the income ranges shown in the chart.

The following chart is from an comment by Michael J. Boskin the Wall Street Journal:

Brian Provost wrote his view on the “Obama Tax Hike” in a post titled “Obama Vows To Crush The Top Internet Entrepreneurs?” and Aaron Wall asked “Populism to Kill the US Economy?“.

Apple’s Browser Safari displays a blue border about active elements like forms, buttons and links.

The Greasemonkey script Bright Focus does kinda the same. I installed it over a month ago and grow accustomed to it.

It seems like the Firefox developers considered changing the focus indicator in 2006 but didn’t go through with this. They should’ve.

I really love little hacks and apps that improve work flow and make you more efficient. AutoPager is one of them I recently found.

AutoPager is a firefox/mozilla extensions to autoloading next page. It’s configuration is base on XPath. You can find there is a built in function to create a XPath by click some links on the pages.

Works well with blogs, forums, newspapers and all sites that divide their content into multiple sites. Like Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker.com, NYTimes.com, USAToday, …

Scribefire is a Firefox addon that lets you write posts directly from Firefox. I’m currently testing it.

While I was adding this blog to the interface there was however a little error. Scribefire couldn’t login.

The solution was to activate the XML-RPC protocol at the “Writing Options” page in Wordpress. Just click on the box before ” Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.”

Works now really fineas this post was written using ScribeFire

You can force a secure connection to Google Gmail with a Greasemonkey script. Now Google offers an option to always connect using a https. (It’s under Settings -> General Settings, at the bottom)

Thats especially nice if you’re using Gmail from a different computer and not your own for example at an internet cafe.

Found over at Ghacks.net and Sizlopedia.com

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Let’s take a look at some numbers:

and:

Both from “National Survey on Drug Use and Health”.

Found over at Vistabay.com: “Teen & Adult Drug Use Statistics that will blow your mind“.

Why Statistics Often Promote Even More Drug Use

Do you know these ads stating x thousand people start smoking every day? Or x millions are addicted to drug y?

While many politicans use statistics like the above to show how serious the problem is they  often have a counterproductive effect.

The mind thinks kinda like that: If millions of people smoke Marijuana, if millions of people try/use cocaine or crack - it can’t be that bad. If they’re doing it it’s socialy ok for me to do so, too.