Month: January 2007

The other guys in digital TV

The other guys in digital TV | Tech News on ZDNet
Over the past year or so, a group of small companies–Vizio, Syntax-Brillian, Westinghouse Digital and Polaroid–have gained a greater share of the TV market in the U.S. than the name-brand computer companies.

Costs are kept low due to the company’s structure. Vizio employs only about 55 people in the U.S. and most of them work the customer support desk, according to Wang. There are a few additional employees overseas. “We like to keep it really lean,” Wang said. Second, Vizio sold TVs through Costco and Sam’s Club, although it now sells some models in Circuit City. These retailers, which are selling an increasing number of TVs, typically are looking for gross margins on their products only in the 10 percent range, said Young. Electronics retailers are looking for 25 percent or more.

Don’t Sit Up Straight

“Don’t Sit Up Straight,” Some Experts Are Advising
Almost from childhood, people are told to sit up straight. New research suggests it could be bad advice.

Researchers at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland, found that sitting upright with a straight back and thighs parallel to the floor increases the strain on lumbar discs in the lower back, a prescription for pain. Waseem Amir Bashir, M.B.Ch.B., F.R.C.R, author and clinical fellow in the Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada, delivered the researchers’ findings at the November meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago.

The RSNA press release said the newly-designed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine the researchers used provides a full view of the back in sitting position. It’s a positional scanner, which means patients can be scanned seated or standing. Traditional scanners require patients to lie flat, a position that places different strains on the back and can mask causes of pain associated with varied movements or postures.

“A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal,” Dr. Bashir reported. The study indicates that less strain is placed on the spinal disks and associated muscles and tendons in a more relaxed sitting position. See Times of London Graphic.

In search of happiness

In search of happiness: UMNnews: U of M.
In 1996, University professor of psychology David Lykken and associate professor Auke Tellegen released the findings of their now-famous study on the heritability of happiness. After years spent studying sets of identical twins who had been reared apart, the two concluded that despite all the talk about nature versus nurture, happiness is genetic. Everyone is born with a happiness “set point,” Lykken and Tellegen reasoned, a genetic baseline from cheerful to cranky to which, following events both good and bad, each person will invariably return. Trying to be happier than one’s set point, Lykken and Tellegen might argue, would be akin to hoping to increase your IQ by sleeping with your head on a stack of books.

This pessimistic conclusion made headlines, and Lykken soon found himself thinking that he and his colleague were wrong to characterize their findings that way. After all, he thought, the twins study had estimated that only half of a person’s set point was determined by genes. Didn’t that leave some room for people to change their happiness level? Continue reading “In search of happiness”