Fibbing easier through e-mail — “A U.S. study shows e-mail is much more conducive to telling falsehoods than using old-fashioned pen and paper. Moreover, people feel more justified in doing it.” Past research has also found that e-mails are more likely to engender lower levels of trust, negative attitudes and sending rude messages. One more reason to slow down and take your time before replying to those pesky electronic messages.

Writing about values improves relationships — “According to a study published in this month’s issue of Psychological Science, writing about values you hold dear can conjure feelings of love and connection that may help strengthen your social bonds and decrease defensiveness.”

Court rules lesbians are not just from Lesbos — “A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the Aegean island of Lesbos to ban the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday.” Continued

Another miscellany of the odd and interesting

Superstar CEOs aren’t

BusinessWeek recently reported a study showing that ‘ordinary CEOs’ who didn’t hit the headlines or get awards from various media out performed those who did — even though the superstar CEOs were given greater rewards by their organizations (”Superstar CEOs Don’t Equal Superstar Performance“). As the Wall Street Journal remarked, this may even been a useful indicator to investors that it’s time to seel the company’s stock, just like those other indicators of forthcoming corporate troubles: a huge HQ building with flagpoles and a landscaped entrance, and the purchase of private jets for executives.

Help for the obsessed

It was a good week for snippets from Canada’s Globe and Mail. The first of these offers Holiday help for the CrackBerry crowd: the addicts who can’t even get away from their ‘fix’ of electronic contact with their office during vacations. Amongst the suggestions: A theme park in England as a PDA-free zone to encourage parents to pay more attention to their children and less attention to their hand-held devices, complete with “PDA police” pointing parents to drop-off areas, where they could safely leave electronics for the day; and an ‘Isolation Vacation’ in Anguilla that bans visitors from all technology — no televisions or phones in the rooms, and confiscation of laptops and personal digital assistants upon arrival. Continued

A sampling of odd and wacky news items from around the world

Man tries to sell advertising space on his leg

It seems that a silly gimmick is something that few people can resist, whether they’re producing it or reporting it. According to Britain’s The Guardian, New Zealander James Stewart is selling tattoos as advertising space on his leg in a bid to raise NZ$1m. Sponsors can choose any artwork from the art community website ArtKlick.co.nz. he’s even committed to wearing shorts as often as possible to make sure the tattoos stay visible (“Man in £380k bid to sell ad space on leg”).

Getting your point across without concealment

Reuters reports that a disgraced Colombian former lawmaker, Yidis Medina, convicted of taking favors from government officials to allow a dubious re-election process, posed naked on the cover of monthly men’s magazine SoHo. She claims to have given up politics. Medina spoke out about her experience of taking part in corruption, she says, after the government failed to produce the favors they promised her. What her new career is to be isn’t stated. Continued

Another round-up of odd and wacky news items from around the world

It seems that you can make money out of anything

According to Reuters (“Beirut restaurant makes meal out of war”), at ‘Buns and Guns’, a fast food restaurant in Beirut’s southern suburbs, you can order a ‘Kalashnikov’ sandwich from a bullet-shaped menu, prepared by chefs in military fatigues with the roar of explosions as background music.

And it’s never too young to begin that financial career

The Wall Street Journal reported on a new kind of summer camp. At Finance Camp, children learn about stocks, bonds and risk, while paying bills with ‘Cow Moola’. They will also, “take excursions to a local bank or delve into budgeting and investing simulations. Rather than singing around the campfire, they will chant personal-finance mantras like these sung at Camp Millionaire in Santa Barbara, Calif.: ‘Financial freedom is your choice’ and ‘Assets feed you, liabilities eat you.’” (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, My Portfolio Is in the Gutter”)

It also pays to diversify

An American career diplomat, currently the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, has become that country’s newest singing sensation. He learned the obscure Paraguayan Guaraní language, recorded a music album of indigenous folk songs and sold 1,000 tickets to a concert in a downtown theater. The Miami Herald adds: “Though he does not leave his post until the fall, he is already planning his life in Miami, where he hopes to sell his album and perform with visiting Paraguayan musicians, possibly inviting local Cuban bands to jam.” (“U.S. diplomat now a music star in Paraguay”)

Get each day off to a good start

Canada’s Globe and Mail explains that, according to researchers, a big breakfast packed with protein, carbohydrates — and even something sweet — can actually lead to weight loss (“Start your day with a square of chocolate”). Researchers tested two low-calorie diets to see which one did a better job at helping people drop pounds and keep them off. The “big breakfast” diet had more carbohydrates and provided 610 calories for breakfast, about half the day’s calorie allotment, by including milk, lean meat, cheese, whole-grain bread, added fat and even a little chocolate.

At four months, women on the low-carbohydrate diet lost, on average, 28 pounds and the big-breakfast dieters shed 23 pounds.

After eight months the situation had reversed. The low-carb dieters regained about 18 pounds, while the big-breakfast eaters continued to shed weight, losing a further 16.5 pounds. The end result: Women in the big-breakfast group lost 21 per cent of their body weight versus 4.5 per cent for the low-carbohydrate group.

Always look on the bright side too

According to Britain’s New Scientist magazine, thinking happy thoughts could help dampen cravings. Volunteers in a study, placed under an fMRI scanner, were told to to associate blue cards with a real $4 payoff, and yellow cards with nothing.

Before either a yellow or blue card flashed onto a computer screen, the volunteers received an instruction to either concentrate on their prize or instead on some calming, natural object — a blue ocean, for instance [. . .] thoughts of clouds and oceans slightly lowered activity in the brain’s reward centre — the striatum — compared to thoughts of money, but only when the card promised a payoff.

The researchers hope that making addicts think about something truly dear to them could make them more resistant to desires to satisfy their addiction (“Happy thoughts may dampen cravings”).

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• Eating a big breakfast may a good way to lose weight

More of the odd and fascinating from a week’s perusal of the blogosphere

According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Adolf Hitler took time out from running Nazi Germany to make jokes at the expense of his henchmen. That’s the claim of a new book by the last surviving member of his bunker anyhow (“Adolf Hitler told bad jokes about Nazi friends”). His favorite victim was the Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering; a notoriously vain and pompous bully even by Nazi standards. On this showing, Hitler made about as good a job of being a comic as he did of winning the war.

Anti-corruption investigators in China city have taken to questioning the mistresses of suspected corrupt officials to get compromising information, according to a report by Reuters (“Corrupt officials betrayed by pillow talk”). The report doesn’t explain what questioning techniques are used — or why these ladies are so willing to betray their lovers. Perhaps it’s another case of “Hell has no fury . . .” Continued

It seems the canny cephalopods are brighter than you think

Slate Magazine has a fascinating article summarizing research on the brain power of the octopus (“How Smart Is the Octopus?”). Why, I’m not sure, but it makes for more fun reading than all the articles at the moment prophesying doom and collapse for the economies fo the Western world. Besides, on this showing, an octopus seems smarter than a good many people I’ve met.

Not only can octopuses learn, they can process complex information in their heads, and behave in equally complex ways. On available evidence, a good many people seem incapable of learning quite simple things, like not taking on debt they can never pay off or investing their life savings in some get-rich-quick scheme pushed by a slick salesperson. If you look at the media, it’s quite evident that they assume their mass audiences aren’t able to absorb or process complex information of any kind, and are willing to exist on an endless diet of simple lies and titillating trivia. As for complex behavior, the banks — who claim to employ the best and brightest — seem to have learned their business strategies from watching sheep and lemmings. Continued

This week’s miscellany of the odd, intriguing and amusing items I came across on the Web.

First from The Guardian (“Gentlewomen prefer Bonds”). It seems it has now been “scientifically proven that being a bit of a bastard is simply a natural evolutionary strategy.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that while gentleman prefer blondes, women prefer bastards. But just in case anyone was fretting that the old adage was just a hoofed-together cliché, the brains at New Mexico State University have surveyed 200 college students and clinically proven that men with serious personality flaws always get the girl.

Continued

Here are some interesting and oddball stories from this week’s news around the world

Financial Infidelity, it seems, is the new extra-marital activity. “There’s no such thing as an innocent financial fib,” says Bonnie Eaker Weil, PhD, a New York–based psychotherapist, whose book Financial Infidelity: Seven Steps to Conquering the #1 Relationship Wrecker is [now out]. Whether you hide shopping bags, abominate price tags, or lie about how much you paid (or owe), you’re being financially unfaithful, she says. (“Financial Infidelity: A type of cheating so subtle; you may be straying without knowing it.”) Continued