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Forget the carrot and stick. Motivation and innovation come from a desire to help
For decades, bosses have assumed that the best way to motivate workers is by promising financial gain and threatening financial loss. With one hand they dangle a carrot of more pay while brandishing in the other, the stick of "get to work or you're fired."
However, according to a recent article in the New York Times, research in organizational psychology strongly suggests that people are more innovative and more successful when motivated by a desire to help other people.
This is a vast departure from the management theories of the past which have assumed that success in business is "the survival of the fittest." Under this way of thinking, helping others is a waste of time and effort... except insofar as it's self-serving.

What Do You Like Best About Your Job?

Over the past 20 years, I've interviewed hundreds of successful people, mostly top executives and top salespeople. I start nearly every conversation with a simple question: "What do you like best about your job?"
In every case, these highly-successful individuals have responded to that question with some variation of: "I like helping people." When I probe, I usually discover that they're not just talking about customers. They want to help coworkers, too.
When I look at the different types of writing I've done in my life, there's no question that I've been happier, more productive, and more innovative in exact proportion to the likelihood that what I'm writing will help others be more successful.
I'll bet if you honestly review the jobs you've done in the past, and the job you're doing right now, you've accomplished more when you were certain that you were helping others than when you weren't quite sure.
The lesson here is simple: when you focus on helping others rather than helping yourself, you draw upon your deepest sources of motivation. It frees your creativity and energy while developing simultaneously developing both empathy and patience.
It's not a dog-eat-dog world out there. It's a "let's make this happen together" world.
Sorce:  inc

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — It's the world's highest glass ceiling. Of the 3,755 climbers who have scaled Mount Everest, more than half are Nepalese but only 21 of those locals are women.
Aiming to change the all-male image of mountaineering in their country, a group of Nepalese women have embarked on a mission to shatter that barrier by climbing the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents.
The women, aged between 21 and 32, have already climbed Everest in Asia, Kosciuszko in Australia and Elbrus in Europe. They are preparing to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa to mark International Women's Day this week.
"The main goal of our mission is to encourage women in education, empowerment and environment," Shailee Basnet, the 29-year-old team leader, said before leaving for Africa.
Women in this Himalayan nation rarely got the chance to climb because they were confined to their homes while their husbands led expeditions or carried equipment for Western climbers, Basnet said.
It was only in 1993 that a Nepalese woman — Pasang Lhamu — first reached the 8,850-meter (29,035-foot) summit of Everest. She died on the descent.
According to Ang Tshering of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, Nepalese women had traditionally expressed little attraction to mountaineering.
"It is only recently that women have shown interest," Tshering said.
Since they climbed Everest in 2008, the women have spoken in more than 100 schools across Nepal to tell students about their mission.
"We are hoping to attract more women to mountaineering, both as a profession and as a hobby," said Pema Dikki, 25, another member of the team.
Basnet said the response to the Everest climb encouraged them to push ahead.
"After Everest, we felt that we needed to go beyond the borders, so we decided to travel to all seven continents to climb the highest mountains there," Basnet said.
Basnet said the team members have spent their savings, taken out loans and sought sponsorships to finance their expensive gear, climbing permits and plane tickets.
The team plans to speak to students while in Africa to spread their theme, "You can climb your own Everest," to encourage girls to stay in school.
The team will be joined by two women from Tanzania and one from South Africa during the Kilimanjaro climb.
Nepal has eight of the 14 mountains that are more than 8,000 meters (26,240 feet) in height.
It’s one of the most common dermatological conditions, with 7.8% of the Australian population suffering in the last 12 months1. The infection may begin as a white or yellow spot under the tip of your nail. As it spreads, the nail may discolour, thicken and develop crumbling edges. If left untreated, nail infections are highly contagious, and generally don’t resolve themselves without treatment.

What Is Nail Fungus?

Onychomycosis better known as nail fungus, is a fungal infection of the nail plate.
In 80% of cases, nail fungus occurs in the toenails.2 This is due to the environment inside your shoes – a
dark, warm moist environment where fungi can thrive. Nail infections can often occur due to increased use
of communal change rooms in gyms and pools.

Fingernail and toenail fungal infections occur when the nail bed is invaded by various types of fungi. Fungal
infections of the nails, also referred to as onychomycosis, account for almost half of the common nail
disorders. Lack of treatment can worsen the condition and make it difficult to treat. Fungal nail infections can
also be highly contagious. Listed below are some causes, symptoms and treatment for fungal toenail and
fingernail infections.

Causes for Fungal Nail Infections:

Fungal fingernail and toenail infections are caused due to fungi that don’t require sunlight to survive. A group
of fungi referred to as dermatophytes causes nail fungal infections. These fungal infections can be caused
due to some yeasts and molds.

Although Trichophyton rubrum is the most common dermatophyte which causes fungal nail infections,
Trichophyton violaceum, Trichophyton interdigitale, Microsporum gypseum, Epidermophyton floccosum,
Trichophyton soudanense and Trichophyton tonsurans may also cause infections. Common molds that
cause infections include Aspergillus, Neoscytalidium and Scopulariopsis.

Pathogens which cause nail infections enter the skin through small cuts between the nail and the nail bed.
They grow when the nail provides a warm and moist environment.

Symptoms of Fungal Nail Infections:

Discoloration: Discoloration of the nails is the most common symptom of fungal nail infections. The nail turns
yellow, brown or purple in color. The fungus lodges itself on the tip of the nail and then works its way to the
root.

Flaky Nails: Brittle, flaky and chipped nails are also a sign of fungal infections of the nails.
Patches on the Nail: Back or white patches start to appear on the infected nails. Sometimes it becomes
difficult to identify whether the white color on the nail is a fungal infection or an indication of the nail not
being attached to the skin.

Thickened Nails: If a nail becomes thick and causes discomfort while cutting, it is a symptom of fungal nail
infections. Thick nails become tender and cause pain. They become thicker due to the layers of fungi which
grow under the nail.

Itchiness: Fungal infections of the nails cause an itching sensation under the nails. The itching sensation
causes a lot of discomfort because it is difficult to reach under the nail.

Distorted Nails: Due to fungus under the nails, the nails lose their shape. The distortion of the nails could
also be caused because the nails are detached from the nail bed.

Bumps under the Nails: In cases of fungal nail infections, you may notice small bumps under the nails, which might be filled with pus. Pus is also an indication of fungal infections.
 NEW DELHI: Thirteen years after the mutilated body of Captain Saurabh Kalia of the 4 Jat Regiment was handed over to Indian authorities, his father Dr NK Kalia has approached the United Nation Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for justice as the family wants the ghastly act to be declared a war crime.

The petition has been filed by Dr NK Kalia, Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Flags of Honour Foundation.

The petitioners urged the UNHRC to ensure a full and independent investigation is opened immediately, justice is achieved and also to conduct enquires into this matter and takes appropriate steps to urge the Government of Pakistan to conduct an enquiry into the matter and ascertain those responsible for the torture and death of Captain Kalia.

Saurabh Kalia and his five men of the 4 Jat regiment were taken captive by Pakistani troops in the icy hills of Kargil and barbarically tortured for over 22 days.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, an active voice in urging the government to take up the issue with the UN Human Rights Council, said: "I am supporting this petition to UNHRC filed by Flags of Honour Foundation and Dr. N.K. Kalia to seek justice for the family of Capt Saurabh Kalia who was tortured and shot dead performing his duty - a clear case of war crime and violations of Geneva conventions.

This is about principles of natural justice and laws being violated against Indians anywhere in the world and about men and women in uniform who serve the nation and expect the nation to back them and take care of their families."

Saurabh's parents NK Kalia and Vijaya have been raising their voice against human rights violations and pleading with the government to take up the issue of war crimes at the international level.

Dr Kalia who has been running from pillar to post to fight for justice for his son, said: "This matter is about dignity and honour of Capt Saurabh Kalia and five soldiers and a national issue where country's prestige was slighted due to such heinous crimes which go unchallenged."

Saurabh Kalia of 4 Jat Regiment, who was the first army officer to report incursion by the Pakistani army on Indian soil, had along with five soldiers - Sepoys Arjun Ram, Bhanwar Lal Bagaria, Bhika Ram, Moola Ram and Naresh Singh - went for a routine patrol of the Bajrang Post in the Kaksar sector when they were taken captive by the Pakistani troops on May 15, 1999.
This week Foreign Policy published a “Sex Issue.” They explained their decision to feature a special issue with these words
Foreign Policy's first-ever Sex Issue…is dedicated…to the consideration of how and why sex—in all the various meanings of the word—matters in shaping the world's politics. Why? In Foreign Policy, the magazine and the subject, sex is too often the missing part of the equation—the part that the policymakers and journalists talk about with each other, but not with their audiences.…Women's bodies are the world's battleground, the contested terrain on which politics is played out. We can keep ignoring it. For this one issue, we decided not to.
It is commendable that Foreign Policy highlights the all too common silence about sex and gender politics in its own pages. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a serious and continued engagement, rather than a one off matter. Despite the editors’ good intentions, however, Foreign Policy disturbingly reproduces much of the dominant and sensationalist discourse about sex in the Middle East. The “Sex Issue” leaves much to be desired. 

To begin with, it is purportedly about how sex shapes the world’s politics. But with the exception of one article that urges US foreign policy makers to understand women as a foreign policy issue and a target of their “smart-power arsenal,” its focus is almost exclusively on Iran, the Arab world, and China. Thus “the world” is reduced for the most part to Arabs, Iranians, and Chinese—not a coincidental conglomeration of the “enemy.” The current war on women in the United States is erased. 

The primary focus is Islam and its production and repression of sex and gender politics in the Middle East. In discussing the role of fatwas in the regulation of sexual practices, Karim Sadjadpour parades a tone of incredulity. Leaving aside his dismissal of the centuries old tradition of practicing Muslims asking and receiving advice on sexual and gender practices, the article assumes an unspoken consensus with its readers: the idea of a mullah writing about sex is amusing if a little perverted.

Then there is the visual. A naked and beautiful woman’s flawless body unfolds a niqab of black paint. She stares at us afraid and alluring. We are invited to sexualize and rescue her at once. The images reproduce what Gayatri Spivak critiqued as the masculine and imperial urge to save sexualized (and racialized) others. The photo spread is reminiscent of Theo van Gogh's film Submission, based on Ayyan Hirsli Ali’s writings, in which a woman with verses of the Quran painted on her naked body and wearing a transparent chador writhes around a dimly lit room. Foreign Policy’s “Sex Issue” montage is inspired by the same logic that fuels Submission: we selectively highlight the plight of women in Islam using the naked female body as currency. The female body is to be consumed, not covered! 

For those of us now long familiar with the depictions of the Arab/Muslim woman as repressed but uncontrollable sex object, these images only reify the fascination with the hidden underside of that liberated, secularized self. This week, they also echoed two other media events, which paraded European repulsion from and fascination with the Muslim other. One was the Breivik trial, in which the ultra-right wing crusader against multiculturalism cited al-Qaeda almost daily as a source of tactical inspiration in his war against Islam. As Roqaya Chamseddine argues, the other image Foreign Policy called to our imaginations was that other spectacle of desire and repulsion at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. There, artist Makode Linde howled in black face and feigned pain as the Swedish minister of culture sliced through his cake-body designed like a “native” African woman. Then she fed it to him.

The painted on niqab introduces, adorns, and interrupts Mona El Tahawy’s feature article: “Why Do They Hate Us: The Real War on Women is in the Middle East.” The title is an adaption of the Fareed Zakaria article that exposed the “real” reasons behind September 11. In a moment when many of us have been relieved to move past binaries, El Tahawy has chosen to revive them. 

That choice has inspired a deluge of tweets, blogs, articles, letters, and comments that have applauded her courage or attacked what many have called a reductive and simplistic analysis that flattens women’s lives, histories, and choices. The image of “Tahrir woman” who wore a blue bra that fateful day when Egyptian forces dragged, stripped, and beat her is the backdrop for El Tahawy’s argument: men in the Arab world, and especially Islamists, who she repeatedly locates in the seventh century, hate women.

We would suggest, as many have, that oppression is about men and women. The fate of women in the Arab world cannot be extracted from the fate of men in the Arab world, and vice versa. El Tahawy's article conjures an elaborate battle of the sexes where men and women are on opposing teams, rather than understanding that together men and women must fight patriarchal systems in addition to exploitative practices of capitalism, authoritarianism, colonialism, liberalism, religion, and/or secularism. 

Indeed, Mubarak’s authoritarian regime did not use the woman’s body alone as a site of its policies of repression and torture. El Tahawy cites Bouazizi several times as the spark of revolution in the Arab world. But she forgets Khalid Said, whose face—tortured and mangled beyond recognition—became an icon of the revolution. El Tahawy overlooks this shared experience of the body as a site of humiliation and pain. She does not see what Ahdaf Soueif powerfully explained: “As the tortured face of Khaled Said broke any credibility the ministry of the interior might have had, so the young woman in the blue jeans has destroyed the military’s reputation.” Indeed, the hatred of the people, women and men, has been a, if not the, unifying characteristic of colonial, neo-colonial, and authoritarian rulers in the Middle East and beyond.

In her sloppy indictment of Arabs, Muslims, authoritarian rulers, and Islamists, El Tahawy has papered over some messy issues that complicate her underlying message: liberalism is the solution. Why is female genital mutilation practiced widely in Egypt? Because men hate women. Why can't women drive in Saudi Arabia? Because men hate women. Why are men and women against raising the age of consent in Yemen? Because men hate women. Hatred is a one size fits all answer. The use of hatred in this way is important. Hatred is irrational. It is a state or emotion. As Wendy Brown reminds us, such emotional or affective states are understood to be outside of, or unwelcome in, liberalism. 

Of course, female genital mutilation and ages of consent are topics that require our careful attention. In the case of former, the reality is that women are often those that insist on the practice because of ways that gender and political economy regimes together make it a necessary rite of womanhood. In fact, critical thinkers have long argued that this practice has more to do with the lack of economic opportunity for women, the imperative to marry, and the hardening and modernization of tradition in response to colonial and neocolonial interventions (including rights frameworks) than some irrational and razor crazed “hatred.” The same insight could be extended to the question of ages of consent. A reductive framework of hatred makes these topics even more difficult to critically think about and work on. 

Many writers and activists have called El Tahawy to account for erasing women’s histories. For Arabs, like all peoples, have histories that one must engage, as Lila Abu-Lughod reminds us, in order to understand the “forms of lives we find around the world.” Critics have pointed to the long history of the Egyptian women’s movement and that formative moment in 1923 when Huda Sha‘rawi took off her face veil at the Ramses train station. This is a useful point to revisit, if only to reflect on why the liberalism that Sha‘rawi and her cohorts fought for—men and women—drastically and resoundingly failed. One reason, and there are many, was that liberalism resonated with only a small elite. As Hanan Kholoussy points out, women under domestic confinement who like Sha‘rawi were expected to don the face veil made up only two percent of Egypt’s five million females at the end of the nineteenth century. 

One would have to also critically and historically engage how women’s movements have been implicated in the policies and longevity of authoritarianism. After all, the two countries where women enjoyed the broadest scope of personal status law were Tunisia and Egypt, before the recent revolutions. Indeed, of all the countries of the Arab world, it was only in Tunisia and Egypt that a woman could pass her citizenship on to her children if she was married to a foreigner. (In Egypt there was a small qualification for women married to that other other, the Palestinian; post-revolutionary Egypt has, at least in law if not in practice, done away with this exception). 

How can we account for these legal achievements under authoritarian regimes? We could turn to the source of El Tahawy’s inspiration: Fareed Zakaria’s “Why They Hate Us: The Politics of Rage.” There, Zakaria’s muddled logic counsels: “we have to help moderate Arab states, but on the condition that they embrace moderation.” As Mahmood Mamdani and Lila Abu-Lughod often write, moderate Islam has often been produced on the wings of women's and minority rights. 

We can also look to the experiences of feminists and women’s activists. Rema Hammami and Eileen Kuttab have shown that in the Palestinian context, the women’s movement lacked a coherent strategy linking gender equality to democracy. The women’s movement thus appeared to be sponsored by the Palestinian Authority; its fate became dependent on that of the political system. In 1999, Hammami and Kuttab warned:
Examples are myriad—eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union saw massive attacks on women’s rights issues after the fall of communist regimes because they came to be associated with other undemocratic and unpopular regime policies. Turkey, Algeria, Egypt are situations where you have small women’s movements whose popular legitimacy is lost because over time they have been seen as linked to or sponsored by authoritarian secular regimes.
Is it liberalism then that will fight off the misogyny of authoritarianism? Is the much-feared Islamist summer the real enemy here? And if so, how do we explain that it is women just as much as men, as Shadi Hamid has noted, who have gone to the ballot box and voted Islamists into power? 

El Tahawy’s presumes that she is starting a conversation. We respectfully invite El Tahawy to join the conversation among women and men in Tahrir and outside of it. After all, the shameful and state-sanctioned sexual violence of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ “virginity tests” did not take place in silence. They happened a day after International Women’s Day when women claimed Tahrir as a space of gender equality and liberation. The “virginity tests” did not meet silence either, as El Tahawy herself points out. Samira Ibrahim continues her fight; her following and her courage are formidable. 

The battle against misogyny does not follow a “men hate women” formula. It cannot be reduced to a generic battle of the sexes spiced with a dose of Islam and culture. It cannot be extracted from the political and economic threads that, together with patriarchy, produce the uneven terrain that men and women together navigate. It is these lessons that one would have to engage before meting out an indictment about the politics of sex, much less envisioning a future of these politics. There is no one answer because there is no single culprit, no single “culture” or “hatred” that we can root out and replace with “tolerance” or “love.” Similarly, the absence of a sustained and critical attention to sex and gender cannot be solved, syllabus style, by a separate glossy special “Sex Issue,” the content and form of which reproduce what it purports to critique.

John Storms of Austin, Texas has been putting on phenomenal Christmas LED outdoor light displays for years, but 2012's decorative "Gangnam Style" exhibition has really drawn some viral attention! The stunning 25,000+ synchronized LED light display set to K-pop sensation Psy's hit summer dance tune flashes and sparkles in all the right ways. Read on to check out an awesome YouTube video of the mesmerizing "Gangnam Style" Christmas display (which was just posted earlier this week and already has over 22,000 views and counting).

The glowing snowflakes and flashing bulbs match up perfectly to Psy's catchy four-minute long tune (with a bright green cactus even making a synchronized stop-and-go appearance in-between chorus lines). The entire display goes pitch-black during breaks in the song, and then quickly fires back up in a dazzling array of bright blinking lights. Check it out:

Storms, who just moved into the residential neighborhood with his family about two months ago, spent the last two weeks meticulously adorning the house with thousands of twinkling lights (with hired help for safety reasons). According to Storms, who has his own website listentoourlights.com, it took 2-3 hours to program the display with Psy's "Gangnam Style." Thankfully the light display has received mostly positively reviews - the music can't be heard blaring from the roadside because Storms made it so that onlookers can listen in from a local radio station while watching the amazing show from their own cars.



To many people, the idea of a love addiction seems far-fetched or made up to explain irrational behaviors.

However, love addiction is not a new concept, nor is it fabricated. Early literature and history are full of references to people — often very powerful and famous people — who allowed their dependence on others to destroy them.

People become so dependent on others because of emotional needs that are not met through positive relationships; they are met through negative and destructive relationships. But love addiction is more than just an emotional need unmet — there is also a potential for serious injury because of this behavior.

When a person continues in a relationship that is abusive, either physically or mentally, there is a very real danger. Women and men are abused in relationships, and unfortunately, death by an intimate partner is a very real concern in today’s society. Here are questions you can ask yourself to see if you are addicted to love:

    Have I been hurt, physically or emotionally, by my partner?
    Do I make excuses or rationalize the abuse?
    Do I tend to choose partners that are emotionally distant or do I have a history of being in abusive relationships?
    Is there a give and take in this relationship or do I give and give but seem to get nothing or very little in response?
    Can I leave this relationship and move on in my life?
Answering these questions honestly is the first step in determining if you may have an addiction to love that is potentially dangerous.

Most people need help with this very serious issue and greatly benefit from talking with a therapist or counselor that specializes in addictions and addiction recovery.

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