READING

Please hold the line Nearly all of us known what it’s like to be put on ‘musical hold’ call almost any customer service number, and you can expect to hear at least a few bars of boring elevator music before an operator picks up. The question is: do you hang up or do you keep holding? That may depend on your gender and what type of music is playing, according to research reported by University of Cincinnati Associate Professor of Marketing, James Kellaris. Kellaris, who has studied the effects of music on consumers for more than 12 years, teamed with Sigma Research Management Group to evaluate the effects of ‘hold music’ for a company that operates a customer service line. The research tested four types of ‘on-hold’ music with 71 of the company’s clients, 30 of them women. Light Jazz, classical, rock and the company’s current format of adult alternative (a mix of contemporary) were all tested. The sample included individual consumers, small business and large business segments. Pa...

Optimism and health Mindset is all. How you start the year will set the template for the rest, and two scientifically backed character traits hold the key optimism and resilience (if the prospect leaves you feeling pessimistically spineless, the good news is that you can significantly boost both of these qualities.). Faced with 12 Months of plummeting economics and rising human distress, staunchly maintaining a rosy view might seem deludedly Pollyannaish. But here we encounter the optimism paradox. As Brice Pitt, an emeritus professor of the psychiatry of old age at Imperial College, London, told me: “Optimists are unrealistic. Depressive people see things as they really are, but that is a disadvantage from an evolutionary point of view. Optimism is a piece of evolutionary equipment that carried us through millennia of setbacks.” Optimists have plenty to be happy about. In other words, if you can convince yourself that things will get better, the odds of it happening will improve...

GLASS CAPTURING THE DANCE OF LIGHT A.      Glass, in one form or another, has long been in noble service to hum ans A s one of the m ost widely used of manufacture d materials, and certainly the most versatile, it can be as imposing as a telescope mirror the width of a tennis court or as small and simple as a marble rolling across dirt The uses of this adaptable material have been broadened dramatically by new technologies glass fibre optics — more than eight million miles — carrying telephone and television signals across nations, glass ceramics serving as the nose cones of missiles and as crowns for teeth; tiny glass beads taking radiation doses inside the body to specific organs, even a new type of glass fashioned of nuclear waste in order to dispose of that unwanted material. B.      On the horizon are optical computers These could   store   programs   and   process information by means of light -...

The Risks of Cigarette Smoke Discovered in the early 1800s and named nicotianine, the oily essence now called nicotine is the main active ingredient of tobacco. Nicotine, however, is only a small component of cigarette smoke, which contains more than 4,700 chemical compounds, including 43 cancer-causing substances. In recent times, scientific research has been providing evidence that year of cigarette smoking vastly increases the risk of developing fatal medical conditions.  In addition to being responsible for more than 85 per cent of lung cancers, smoking is associated with cancers of, amongst others, the mouth, stomach and kidneys, and is thought to cause about 14 per cent of leukemia and cervical cancers. In 1990, smoking caused more than 84,000 deaths, mainly resulting from such problems as pneumonia, bronchitis and influenza. Smoking, it is believed, is responsible for 30 per cent of all deaths from cancer and clearly represents the most important preventable cause of ...

A spark, a flint:  How fire leapt to life The control of fire was the first and perhaps greatest of   humanity’s steps towards a life-enhancing technology To early man, fire was a divine gift randomly delivered in the form of lightning, forest fire or burning lava. Unable to make flame for themselves, the earliest peoples probabh stored fire by keeping slow burning logs alight or by carrying charcoal in pots. How and where man learnt how to produce flame at will is unknown. It was probably a secondary invention, accidentally made during tool-making operations with wood or stone. Studies of primitive societies suggest that the earliest method of making fire was through friction. European peasants would insert a wooden drill in a round hole and rotate it briskly between their palms this process could be speeded up by wrapping a cord around the drill and pulling on each end. The Ancient Greeks used lenses or concave mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays and burnin...

READING PASSAGE Forests are one of the main elements of our natural heritage. The decline of Europe’s forests over the last decade and a half has led to an increasing awareness and understanding of the serious imbalances which threaten them. European countries are becoming increasingly concerned by major threats to European forest, threats which know no frontiers other than those of geography or climate: air pollution, soil deterioration, the increasing number of forest fires and sometimes even the mismanagement of our woodland and forest heritage. There has been a growing awareness of the need for countries to get together to co-ordinate their policies. In December 1990, Strasbourg hosted the first Ministerial Conference on the protection of Europe’s forest. The conference brought together 31 countries from both Western and Eastern Europe. The topics discussed include the co-ordinated study of the destruction of forest ecosystem. The preparatory work for the conference had been ...

POPULATION MOVEMENTS AND GENETICS A.     Study of the origins and distribution of human population used to be based on archaeological and fossil evidence. A number of techniques developed since the 1950s, however, have placed the study of these subjects on a sounder and more objective footing. The bet information on early population movements is now being obtained from the ‘archaeology of the living body’, the clues to be found in genetic material. B.      Recent work on the problem of when people first entered the America is an example of the value of these new techniques. North-east Asia and Siberia have long been accepted as the launching ground for the first human colonisers of the New World. But was there one major wave of migration across the Bering Strait into the Americas, or several? And when did this event, or events, take place? In recent years, new clues have come from research into genetics, including the distribution of genetic m...

Ant intelligence When we think of intelligent members of the animals’ kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys’ .But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemicals signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising images and jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, ‘Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids* as livestock, launch armies to war...

EDUCATING PSYCHE Education psyche by Bernie Neville is a book which looks at radical new approaches to learning, describing the effects of emotion, imagination and the unconscious on learning. One theory discussed in the book is that proposed by George Lozanov, which focuses on the power of suggestion. Lozanov’s instructional technique is based on the evidence that the connections made in the brain through unconscious processing (which he calls non-specific mental reactivity) are more durable than those made through conscious processing. Besides the laboratory evidence for this, we know from our experience that we often remember what we have perceived peripherally, long after we have forgotten what we set out to learn. If we think of a book we studied months or years ago, we will find it easier to recall peripheral details – the colour, the binding, the typeface, the table at the library where we soar while studying it – than the content on which we were concentrating. If we th...

Let’s  Go  Bats A.     Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles. You might say that this is a problem of their own making, one that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to be made at  night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the nigh-hunting trade. It is probable that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime economy. Our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors ab...