Rejection hurts. Before you groan and sign and say “I know, I know, let me tell you about the time you-know-who did you-know-what to me,” let us clarify. Rejection actually physically hurts. Like dropping something on your toe or getting lemon juice in a papercut hurts. This is true, according to science, and according to the New York Times, which reports on how badly rejection hurts, and how science knows this.
According to a recent study, areas of the brain that indicate physical pain area activated “at moments of intense social loss.” In terms of the actual study, 40 volunteers (who all felt “intensely rejected” due to a recent breakup), were hooked up to MRI scanners to measure their brain activity while they looked at photos of former boyfriends/girlfriends and thought about exactly how they’d been rejected. (Man, science is mean.) Then they were asked to look at a picture of a friend and think of a good experience with that person.
After all that, they “experienced noxious thermal stimulation on their left forearms,” which basically means it feels like they spilled hot coffee on themselves. Then they received “nonnoxious” stimulation, which feels, probably, like a nice warm bath, or at least not as noxious as hot coffee.
The documentary film, Vanishing of the Bees, narrated by Ellen Page, takes a piercing investigative look at the economic, political and ecological implications of the worldwide disappearance of the honeybee. Directors George Langworthy and Maryam Henein present not just a story about the mysterious phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, but a platform of solutions, encouraging audiences to be the change they want to see in the world.
Like other employers, Disney has mastered how to rebrand ordinary jobs as exciting opportunities. “We’re not there to flip burgers or to give people food,” a fast food intern told the Associated Press. “We’re there to create magic.” Yet training and education are afterthoughts: the kids are brought in to work. Having traveled thousands of miles and barely breaking even financially, they find themselves cleaning hotel rooms, performing custodial work, and parking cars in the guise of an academic exercise.
Like many a corporate titan, Disney likes to give the impression it’s in the education business. Disney University, born in 1955 as the company’s training division, predated McDonald’s Hamburger University, Motorola University, and others, prefiguring what Andrew Ross has called “the quasi-convergence of the academy and the knowledge corporation.”
In its scale, the Disney program is unusual, if not unique. Although technically legal, the program has grown up over thirty years to become an eerie model, a microcosm of an internship culture gone haywire. The word “internship” has no set meaning, but at Disney World it signifies cheap, flexible labor for one of the world’s best-known companies—magical, educational burger-flipping in the Happiest Place on Earth.
In tests conducted by PCMAG.com, the theory of you get what you pay for was put to the test. Different brands and different price ranges of HDMI cables were compared in a controlled blind test and the result may surprise you. Sometimes you actually get more than what you pay for.
That said, there are cases where higher quality cables and going to lengths to maintain signal quality are important. They just aren’t cases that apply for most HDTV owner
