பிரபல கர்நாடக இசைப்பாடகி நித்யஸ்ரீயின் கணவர் மகாதேவன் இன்று(20.12.12) வியாழக்கிழமை அடையார் ஆற்றில் குதித்து தற்கொலை

B B C தமிழ் :20 டிசம்பர், 2012 - 10:50 ஜிஎம்டி

பிரபல கர்நாடக இசைப்பாடகி நித்யஸ்ரீயின் கணவர் மகாதேவன் இன்று(20.12.12) வியாழக்கிழமை அடையார் ஆற்றில் குதித்து தற்கொலை செய்து கொண்டார்.அவருக்கு வயது 40.

நித்யஸ்ரீ பழம்பெரும் இசைக்கலைஞர் டி.கே. பட்டம்மாளின் பேத்தியாவார்.

கர்நாடக இசைப் பாடகியான இவர் பல திரைப்படங்களிலும் பின்னணிப் பாடல்கள் பாடியுள்ளார்.

நித்யஸ்ரீ தம்பதியினருக்கு இரு பெண் குழந்தைகள்.

கணவர் மகாதேவன் இன்று மதியம் சென்னை கோட்டூர்புரம் பாலத்திலிருந்து ஆற்றில் குதித்து, மூழ்கி, இறந்துவிட்டார். தீயனைப்புப் படையினர் உடலை பின்னர் மீட்டனர்.

சென்னை இசைவிழா நடைபெற்று வரும் நேரத்தில் நிகழ்ந்திருக்கும் இச்சம்பவம் கர்நாடக இசை உலகையே அதிர்ச்சியில் ஆழ்த்தியிருக்கிறது.

இன்று கூட நித்யஸ்ரீ அவ்விழாவில் பாடவிருந்தார். ஆனால் அது ரத்து செய்யப்பட்டுவிட்டது.

How Positive Thinking Can Make You a Better Problem Solver

JOE ROBINSON :Entrepreneur :19 Dec 2012

Bouncing back: Punching bags are good at it; humans, less so. A growing body of evidence, though, suggests you can ward off tailspins by building up your reserves of the best antidote to adversity: positive emotions, the hidden engine of resilience.

"We call it the 'undo effect,'" says Barbara Fredrickson, author of Positivity and a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose research has upended our understanding of a group of emotions that were once considered trifling but are now seen as central to persistence, innovation and success.

"Positive emotions help speed recovery from negative emotions," Fredrickson says. "When people are able to self-generate a positive emotion or perspective, that enables them to bounce back. It's not just that you bounce back and then you feel good--feeling good drives the process."

Negative emotions undermine the brain's capacity to think broadly and find creative solutions. The vise grip of fear and stress and the emotions they generate--anger, blame, panic, resentment, shame--limit thought to a narrow field that obscures options. In a work environment, negativity causes teams to lose flexibility and the ability to be curious.

"Losses loom larger than gains," Fredrickson explains. "Our mind is drawn into this mental time travel, and we're obsessing about something negative that happened in the past or we're worrying about what will happen in the future."

She has determined that you can reframe adversity and be more effective every day by countering negative loops with a buried resource--the well of joy, hope, amusement, gratitude, interest, appreciation, awe and other buoyant emotions we can call on as needed. These low-key assets have the power to calm blood pressure and operate as a kind of reset button for stress-addled minds and bodies.

In one of her studies, test subjects whose anxiety was driven sky-high by an impending public speech were able to reverse negative cardiovascular effects in less than a minute by viewing relaxing imagery. They were shown a tranquil film clip of ocean waves, a puppy playing, a sad film or a neutral screen saver depicting an abstract display of lines. Sensors tracking heart rate, blood pressure and artery constriction showed that those watching the seemingly positive imagery recovered the fastest. Another study, this one based on daily reports of positive and negative emotions, found that the more positive emotions people experienced, the more their resilience levels grew, enabling them to let go of negative events faster.

A report Fredrickson co-wrote on bouncing back from business failures ("Beyond hubris: How highly confident entrepreneurs rebound to venture again") suggests that the resources generated by positive emotions can help people overcome setbacks and start new ventures. In fact, the report contends, positive emotions have been shown to help businesspeople negotiate better, improve decision-making, boost creativity and drive high-performance behavior.

"Positive emotions expand awareness and attention," Fredrickson says, which is critical for anyone looking for an opportunity or trying to solve a problem. "When you're able to take in more information, the peripheral vision field is expanded. You're able to connect the dots to the bigger picture. Instead of remembering just the most central event, you remember that and the peripheral aspects, too."

Working with mathematician Marcial Losada, Fredrickson has discovered a tipping point of positive-to-negative emotions that spells the difference between flourishing and floundering. "It seems like we need at least three positive emotions to open and lift us up to counter every single negative emotion that drags us down," she says. "The good news is that the positive emotions don't need to be intense or profound. They can be rather mild. They just need to be frequent."

One of the easiest ways to combat the negative tide is through appreciation or gratitude. Fredrickson advises asking yourself what in your current situation you could be treasuring that you're not. Connecting with someone over a shared interest or amusement is another superb way to shift out of the negative frame. Or step back when you've hit a wall and take a break. Bring some music into your day.

The three-to-one ratio isn't something you need to meet every hour or day, but over time, if you're making deposits to your positivity bank, you get a big dividend. "There's really solid evidence that the positive emotions you feel today predict tomorrow's and next week's and next month's success, health and quality relationships," Fredrickson says, "because they build your resources and resilience."

Joe Robinson is author of Don't Miss Your Life, on the hidden skills of activating life after work, and a work-life balance trainer and executive coach at worktolive.info.

This article was originally published in the January 2013 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Emotional Rescue.

: Four bank employee unions will go on one-day strike tomorrow

F E :New Delhi:AGENCIES: NEW DELHI, DEC 20 2012, 01:20 IST

 Four bank employee unions will go on one-day strike tomorrow to protest the Banking Laws (Amendment) Bill and merger plans of banks.

The unions decided to go ahead with the strike after the conciliatory meeting with Indian Banks' Association before the chief labour commissioner here failed, AIBEA General Secretary C H Venkatachalam said.

Besides All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), Bank Employees Federation of India (BEFI), All India Bank Officers' Association (AIBOA) and National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE) are participating in the nation-wide strike

.

The unions claimed that about 7 lakh employees of various public sector banks would participate in the strike.

The strike follows Lok Sabha clearing Banking Laws (Amendment) Bill after the government dropped controversial provisions relating to allowing banks to trade in futures.

The Bill paves the way for foreign investments in the sector and establishment of new private banks. The Bill will allows RBI to supersede boards of private sector banks and increase the cap on voting rights of private investors in PSBs to 10 per cent from 1 per cent.

Many banks, including Indian Bank and Corporation Bank, have informed customers that normal functioning of branches may be affected if strike materialises.

Corporation Bank said that a section of the bank's employees may participate in the proposed strike on the said date, if the strike materialises. In view of the above, it is likely that the normal functioning of the branches may get affected, it said further.

The unions are contesting that the amendment to the banking laws will dilute the interest of public sector banks.

In August, employees of public sector banks had gone on two-day nationwide strike opposing banking sector reforms and outsourcing of non-core activities.

Management Tip of the Day - Create Rituals to Get More Done

HBR :DECEMBER 19, 2012 Most of us feel pulled in more directions than ever, expected to work longer hours and get more done. To help you battle this overload, create rituals — highly specific behaviors, done at precise times, that become automatic and no longer require conscious will or discipline. For example, go to bed at the same time every night so you consistently get enough sleep, or work out as soon as you wake up to be sure you get exercise even when you don't feel like it. At the end of each work day, write down the most important task to accomplish the following day; when you return in the morning, start on that task before doing anything else. By creating and sticking to these rituals you'll free yourself up to focus on the important things. Today's Management Tip was adapted from the HBR Guide to Getting the Right Work Done.

Bar code's co-inventor N. Joseph Woodland dies

This undated family photo taken in the 1950s shows bar code co-inventor N. Joseph Woodland. 
AP Photo/Courtesy the Woodland Famly

MargALIT FOX;New York Times News Service: The Hindu:Dec 14, 2012

N. Joseph Woodland died on Sunday

It was born on a beach six decades ago, the product of a pressing need, an intellectual spark and the sweep of a young man's fingers through the sand.

The result adorns almost every product of contemporary life, including groceries and wayward luggage. The man on the beach that day was a mechanical engineer-in-training named N. Joseph Woodland. With that transformative stroke of his fingers yielding a set of literal lines in the sand, Woodland, who died Sunday at 91, conceived the modern bar code.

Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City, N.J., on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.

Woodland studied at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor's degree in 1947.

In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data.

The dean demurred, but Bernard Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Woodland. An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.

But Woodland quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents' home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking. To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.

What would happen, Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code were adapted graphically?

''What I'm going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale," Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. "I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason I didn't know I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. "Only seconds later," Woodland continued, "I took my four fingers they were still in the sand and I swept them around into a full circle."

Woodland favoured the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.

On Oct. 7, 1952, Woodland and Silver were awarded U.S. patent 2,612,994 for their invention a variegated bull's-eye of wide and narrow bands on which they had bestowed the unromantic name "Classifying Apparatus and Method."

But that method was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years. The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 all they ever made from their invention.

Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an IBM employee, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Woodland's considerable input.

Thanks to Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who helped popularize the rectangular bar code , it was adopted as the industry standard in 1973. Today, in retail establishments worldwide, bar codes are scanned at the rate of more than 5 billion a day. They keep track of books in libraries, patients in hospitals and nearly anything else. All because a bright young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand

How the Bar Code Took Over the World

Bloomberg Businessweek :Drake Bennett and Jim Aley on December 17, 2012

In 1948 a supermarket executive showed up at the Drexel Institute of Technology, in Philadelphia, with a request: He wanted the engineers there to design a technology that could encode information about his products. 

Two graduate students, Bernard Silver and N. Joseph Woodland, took him up on it. Woodland became obsessed and dropped out of school to concentrate on the problem. That winter he was sitting on Miami Beach, dragging his fingers in the sand, when he had his Eureka moment: a series of lines of different widths could be deciphered like elongated versions of the dots and dashes of Morse Code. In other words, a bar code.

This undated family photo taken in the 1950s shows bar code co-inventor N. Joseph Woodland. AP Photo/Courtesy the Woodland Famly

Woodland died last week, at a time when his technology has become so prevalent that it is almost invisible. Boxes of cereal, cans of soup, books, and magazines all have universal product codes. Anything you buy in a supermarket or department store does, too. The next time someone sends you a gift from Amazon.com (AMZN), take a look at the box that UPS (UPS) delivers. The sticker on it has multiple bar codes, all having to do with tracking the package as it makes its way through the bar-coded distribution system. You no longer just scan at the checkout, either. If you still shop for electronics atBest Buy (BBY) stores, chances are you’re “showrooming”—using one of the many smartphone apps that scan codes and check prices against those at other chains, both online and off.

The bar code was a feat of technology, for sure. But it wasn’t a sure thing: The proposed system started off as one option among many in a stand-off among competing interests. So what enabled the bar code to take over the world? How might today’s emerging technologies (we’re looking at you, mobile payments) achieve similar dominance?

Like other successful standards, the bar code had three essential ingredients, all of which are necessary—but not, on their own, sufficient:

A simplicity that overcomes habit. Until the late 1970s, every clerk in every supermarket in America tapped numbers onto a register keypad. The process was rife with errors; Many of us remember our parents poring over grocery receipts before leaving the store. Errors and all, it was the way retail functioned. Only a simple technology with obvious benefits could overcome that inertia. Bar codes are simple and iconic—people have even had them tattooed onto their bodies.

A governing body to knock heads and work out details. If every supermarket and potato-chip maker had chosen its own product-information technology, chaos would have ensued. Instead, a consortium of retailers and manufacturers got together and chose the UPC, an IBM (IBM) design that Woodland, who worked there, helped develop.

An extravagant, surprising, and often expensive effort to “seed the market.” The classic example here comes from the world of credit cards: The Fresno Drop of 1958. Back than, only the wealthy had credit cards. The middle class paid cash, or perhaps paid over time via an installment plan. As Joe Nocera recounts in his classic “A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class”, a manager at Bank of America (BAC), realizing that the only way people would use credit cards is if everyone they knew did, too, had cards sent to every home in Fresno—60,000 in all. For UPC, the seeding of the market was a bit more mundane: the rise of Wal-Mart (WMT), which used the codes to create its legendarily efficient distribution system.

Half a century after the Fresno Drop and Woodland’s epiphany on the beach, there’s a similar battle brewing over mobile payment technologies. Consumers spend trillions of dollars around the world with credit cards.Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), banks, credit-card companies—everyone is scrambling to come up with ways to get a piece of that action.

One of the more interesting is Square, a startup in San Francisco launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Let’s see the ingredients. 
Simplicity? Check: It’s a small plastic square that plugs into an iPhone or iPad. A splashy move to dominate the market? Last month Square announced a deal to be in 7,000 Starbucks (SBUX) across the U.S. Strong consortium or governing body? A tangle of competing alliances is more like it. Two out of three, so far, for Square.

Bennett is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.Aley is an editor for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Obama named TIME’s Person of the Year

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - December 19th, 2012

 U.S. President Barack Obama was named TIME's Person of the Year for 2012, citing his historic re-election last month as symbolic of the nation's changing demographics amid  the backdrop of high unemployment and other challenges.