Adam Philbin, in a widely echoed tweet offering speculation about this device’s target market, put it like this: “Apple TV … it’s like a shit, single-purpose Mac Mini for people who don’t know what BitTorrent is.”
Ouch.
(CNN) -- The two sets of 15-year-old twins on opposite sides of the country share a lot of similarities.
Ask all four of them their favorite food, they will say sushi. Ask them about an annoying habit, they will say they bite their nails. They describe themselves as athletic, outgoing and open-minded. They have brown hair, full lips and broad hands.
They are also the biological offspring of sperm donor No. 1096.
Fifteen years ago, sperm donation enabled two mothers to give birth to the children they always wanted. Now the internet age has allowed their twins -- Jonah and Hilit Jacobson in Georgia and Jesse and Jayme Clapoff in California -- to find each other.
Their connection happened partly from persistence and partly from luck in 2007. The two families had joined the Donor Sibling Registry online, where they found their half siblings by searching for families with a matching donor identification number.
Hilit and Jonah Jacobson, 15-year-old twins, were conceived with the help of sperm donation.These aren't the most conventional sibling relationships, but the teens are gradually forming friendships and growing closer, the siblings say. Today, 12 offspring from sperm donor No. 1096 have connected through the site.
"We miss you!" says Hilit, the female twin in Georgia, outfitted in a in a tie-dyed tank with her fingers adorned in shiny rings with peace signs. "How are you?"
Her brown eyes peer into her silver Mac with her twin brother, Jonah, sitting next to her. They are video-chatting with their half siblings in California. On the screen, Jesse, their donor half brother with cropped short hair, tells them about his recent Costa Rica surfing trip.
They chat like this, by video, once a month and text and Facebook message every few days. They also vacation together about once a year.
The two sets of twins are probably the closest of the 12 donor siblings, even though they live thousands of miles apart, they said. Their friendship formed immediately after they met at the Jacobsons' home in Atlanta, Georgia.
"It's like your best friend but a different kind of bond," said Jonah, who is tall and neatly dressed in a Polo shirt. "You have that feel."
Sperm donor children come out
The anonymity in the world of sperm donations is fading as donor children collide on the web.
Becoming a sperm donor
Where are the donor siblings?
Many of the donor sibling connections -- about 7,300 of them including the Jacobsons and Clapoffs -- have been made through the Donor Sibling Registry, a voluntary website that matches donor siblings based on identification numbers. Occasionally, the site brings the children and the donor together.
Wendy Kramer, 51, who had her son Ryan in 1990 with donated sperm, created the site in 2000. At the time, her 10-year-old son was curious if he had donor siblings.
"We realized there was no way to make mutual consent contact. There was no way for anyone to get in touch," said Kramer, who eventually found her son's half sisters through the site. The sperm donor siblings recently spent the Fourth of July together.
Studies estimate 30,000 to 60,000 children are born each year with the help of donated sperm. The estimate is rough, because sperm banks and clinics aren't required to report their birth figures. Overall, the billion-dollar sperm banking industry remains unregulated, reproductive technology experts said.
California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, said that 60 percent of the sperm donor births are reported from the sperm they distribute. The number of related offspring from a single donor usually doesn't exceed a dozen, Kramer said, but she has seen as many as 50 donor offspring discover they have the same donor on her site.
"It's an important therapeutic option for some people for family building," said Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
Over the last decade, sperm donor conception has come out of the closet, several families said, perhaps because of the growing diversity of American families shaped by adoption, divorces, single mothers and same-sex couples.
The Jacobson family in Georgia joined the Donor Sibling Registry to find their donor half siblings.Recent Hollywood movies have explored the lives of donor children. The film "The Kids Are All Right," starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, tells the story of teenage children conceived through sperm donations who seek and get to know their donor father. Jennifer Aniston's latest movie, "The Switch," to be released next week, chronicles a single woman who uses a sperm donor to get pregnant.
"When you see things appear in pop culture, I think it really suggests a shift in acceptance," said Scott Brown, a spokesman for California Cryobank.
The fact they were conceived from donated sperm was never hidden from the Jacobson twins. Terri and Eric Jacobson told their children they were conceived with a donor when the twins began talking. The twins say their friends, neighbors and teachers have all been accepting of their untraditional family structure.
"If you're going to have this great relationship between you and the kids, there has to be honesty," said Terri Jacobson, 47, who chose to use a donor when she learned her husband, Eric, was sterile in the early 1990s.
'A family is what you make it'
On the day Eric Jacobson, 48, learned he couldn't produce children, he felt like he lost a child he never had, he said.
The Jacobsons considered adoption, but the process was too expensive. Terri Jacobson had also wanted to be pregnant. She happened upon information about sperm banks in a library book.
"It was the best alternative," the Jacobsons said.
It's like your best friend but a different kind of bond.
--Jonah Jacobson, 15, sperm donor siblingThe sperm donation industry has become increasingly specialized. With California Cyrobank's Donor Look-a-Likes program, a parent can try to engineer their child to have traits from someone who resembles Zac Efron or Brody Jenner. The dating site called BeautifulPeople.com launched a sperm and egg bank this summer for "an exclusively beautiful community."
Physical looks weren't the priority for Terri and Eric Jacobson. They were more concerned that the donor was Jewish like them. But they did pick some traits that resembled Eric, such as being tall and having curly brown hair. Using a donor also allowed them to attempt to fill in traits the couple lacked, such as sharp mathematical skills, musical abilities and athleticism.
The traits the couple selected are apparent in their twins. Hilit pole vaults and runs track. Jonah plays baseball and the drums. They like math, too.
A June study from the Institute for American Values examined the struggles donor children face. The study re-explored a decades-long debate about anonymous donors: Should donor children have a right to know where they come from? Does the donor have a right to protect his privacy?
Elizabeth Marquardt, lead author of the study, said many donor children want to know more about their origins. She discovered through interviewing 485 donor children that many felt confused and isolated about their conception. About 65 percent surveyed believed the sperm donor is "half of who I am."
"It really speaks to how your biological kin matters to you," Marquardt said. "Whoever is raising you could be a loving family, but we are made of bodies. We want to know who these people are -- not just have a file on them. It's a key human longing."
The Jacobson twins said they don't want to know or meet their sperm donor.
"I already have a dad," Hilit said.
Jonah chimed in, "I have no desire to meet him. Maybe I'd like to see a picture of him, but that's it."
A family isn't just about biological connections in the Jacobson household.
They said, "A family is what you make it."
From the perspective of a donor
Todd Whitehurst donated his sperm while he was in graduate school at Stanford University in 1991.
He needed the extra cash and wanted to help people who couldn't have children. He applied to become a donor at California Cryobank.
Like many young men, the money from the donations went to pay for bills during school. He said he didn't think much about what happened to his donated sperm after he graduated.
Then three years ago, he received an unexpected e-mail from a child conceived from his sperm. The 14-year-old girl revealed to him the donor identification number from her file.
She had done some detective work on her own to find his e-mail. She was excited to learn that her donor identification number matched his.
Whitehurst was already the father of two children when he received the e-mail. Still, he chose to have a relationship with the 14-year-old girl. Over the years, Whitehurst has been contacted by two more of his donor offspring through the web.
The three donor siblings and Whitehurst have formed a bond. He takes the donor offspring and his own children on vacation together. He said the children all get along.
"They don't expect anything undue from me," said Whitehurst, now a 44-year-old physician, adding that, "They don't expect me to show up and become a full-time dad. I like to get together with them, and the great thing is my two kids like them, too."
But some reproductive technology experts said a generation of sperm donor children easily connected by the web comes with challenges. Not all sperm donor offspring want to get to know their half siblings or the sperm donor, said Susan Crockin, an attorney and reproductive technology expert in Massachusetts.
"What if someone and their family don't want to be a part of an unexpected family?" Crockin said.
At least one of the families the Jacobsons' encountered through Donor Sibling Registry decided not to pursue a relationship with their twins.
"Some really want to meet us," said donor twin Jayme Clapoff. "Some don't want to meet us. When I found out a sibling didn't want to meet us, I wonder why, because we are brother and sister, but I can understand it can be overwhelming. They are living their lives and suddenly these new people are in it."
What if someone and their family don't want to be a part of an unexpected family?
--Sue Crockin, reproductive technology expertMost half siblings have been receptive to the Jacobson and Clapoff families. Since they first connected in 2007, they discovered more siblings through the site.
They found another set of twins in Boston, Massachusetts and a half sister in Reno, Nevada.
There are five more siblings scattered across the country.
They have stayed in touch with the new siblings through trips, like their vacation to Hawaii, where they snorkeled and ate fresh fish on the beach. Two summers ago, the half siblings stayed at a cabin in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They spent the days grilling and the nights watching reality television and movies together. Eight of the donor siblings gathered at the Jacobson twins' B'nai mitzvahs a few years ago.
"You always have someone you can fall back on," said Jonah of his half siblings. "And not many people have that."
It's time to abandon Earth, warned the world's most famous theoretical physicist.
In an interview with website Big Think, Stephen Hawking warned that the long-term future of the planet is in outer space.
"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet," he said.
"I see great dangers for the human race," Hawking said. "There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future."
"But I'm an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space," he said.
That said, getting to another planet will prove a challenge, not to mention colonizing it for humanity. University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese told Big Think that "the nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away. That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there" -- or about 50,000 years using current rocket
science.Still, we need to act and act fast, Hawking stated. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space."
Hawking has become quite outspoken in recent months. In April, he warned of the dangers of communicating with aliens, telling the Discovery Channel
that extra-terrestrials are almost certain to exist -- and humanity should avoid contact with them at all cost.“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”
The answer, he suggests, is that most of alien life will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals
-- the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history -- and they could pose a serious threat to us.In May Hawking said he believed humans could travel millions of years into the future and repopulate their devastated planet. If spaceships are built that can fly faster than the speed of light, a day on board would be equivalent to a year on Earth. That's because -- according to Einstein -- as objects accelerate through space, time slows down around them.
“Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank," he said in Stephen Hawking's Universe.
"These days I’m not so cautious.
Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He is writing a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.
(CNN) -- Google this week abandoned "Wave," its much-hyped social collaboration tool. Wave was perhaps the prototypical Google product: Technically advanced, incredibly ambitious and near-impossible to use.
Its demise is the canary in the coal mine for Google's social networking plans: Facebook is destined to build the Web's next wave, as Google continues to tread water.
Wave was a testament to Google's technical prowess: A real-time communication platform that combined elements of instant messaging, e-mail and collaboration software. The only problem: With its many dials and switches, mastering Wave was the web equivalent of programming your VCR.
Few users took the time to understand the product, and mainstream adoption proved unattainable.
It's the same fate that awaited Google's other recent foray into the social realm: Google Buzz. This Twitter-like service seemed smart in theory, but Google's inability to build simple and compelling social tools meant the service was perceived as a nuisance rather than a breakthrough.
All of which must have Mark Zuckerberg rubbing his hands together in glee. While Google is one of the few companies large enough to build a significant social network, Google Wave's demise is further proof that these efforts (rumored to be called "Google Me") are destined to fail.
Like Wave, Google Me will likely be a work of technical wizardry too advanced for us mere mortals to understand.
Google's failure to develop engaging social services is more disastrous than it might seem at first. Social networking is no longer just a time-waster for young people -- it now reaches all demographics and encompasses personalized search, highly targeted advertising and the red-hot social gaming trend.
As Facebook builds a user base of more than 500 million people, it also stockpiles the personal information required to provide more comprehensive ad targeting -- and a more personalized search engine -- than Google could ever hope to engineer through algorithms alone.
Google isn't unaware of this predicament: The company is throwing its resources behind a plan to escape its social networking slump. But short of a miracle -- an acquisition of Facebook nemesis Twitter, perhaps -- Google won't become a socialite anytime soon.
Let's be honest: Sleeping eight blissful hours every night is nothing but a dream for most people, especially during the hectic workweek. Weekends and vacations provide the few opportunities our chronically sleep deprived population has to catch up on some missed hours of shut-eye. Thankfully a new study just published in the journal Sleep has found that those periods of "recovery sleep" are good for us and can actually undo some of the damage caused by sleep deprivation.
The study authors recruited more than 150 healthy sleepers, aged 22 to 45, who regularly slept 6.5 to 8.5 hours a night. None of the participants worked irregular shifts or had traveled internationally in the months leading up to the study.
To begin the study, each person slept 10 hours a night for two nights so the researchers could reduce any pre-existing sleep deficits. Afterwards each participant was only allowed to sleep for four hours a night, for five straight nights. The researchers constantly sampled their level of alertness and neurobehaviors throughout the day.
On the sixth night, each participant was granted a period of "recovery sleep" that ranged upwards of 10 hours. The study authors found that any period of recovery sleep restored the participants' neurobehaviors, including level of alertness and their ability to concentrate.
"You don't realize now just how far off normal you are or how much more alert you could be if you've gotten more sleep," says Dr. David F. Dinges, one of the study authors and Chief of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Dinges says people who chronically undersleep need regular recovery periods of sleep because most people cannot handle sleeping only a few hours a night.
But burning the midnight oil during the week and then crashing on the weekends is not ideal, despite the health benefits of recovery sleep.
"Getting recovery sleep is important and that may take more than a day, " saysDinges. "Don't get chronically sleep deprived in the first place."
Dinges says that despite society's frenetic pace, sleep should be a priority for everyone.
"It's a profound mistake of people to take for granted you can abuse the system endlessly at no consequence to yourself," says Dinges.
"Prioritize sleep!"
The following is a guest post by Brian Halligan who is my co-founder and CEO at HubSpot (which means he gets to do most of the really hard work).
I recently did a lecture at a Babson MBA summer class on Entrepreneurial Leadership. I got a lot of questions from students about how and why HubSpot won the Boston Business Journal’s #1 place to work award….hmmm….good question.
At the highest level, we are trying to create a “post-modern culture” (I just came up with that term…too high falutin?). Believe it or not, this post-modern culture was inspired by the TV show Mad Men. The show is set in an advertising company 50 years ago and it pokes fun at corporate culture in that era. For example, almost all of the women in the office are secretaries, many of the married men are sleeping with these secretaries, everyone boozes heavily during work hours, etc. While watching Mad Men, I couldn’t help but wonder what a show might look like 50 years from today that poked fun at current working conditions and company culture. That led us to think a bit about what just didn’t make sense anymore given the realities of the Gen Y worker, broadband in the home, constant connectivity via mobile devices, the modern market for hiring exceptional people, etc.
(Health.com) -- Trent Northcutt, 42, a corporate executive in New York City, had been suffering from lower back pain and leg pain for about three years, to the point that he was "cautious about picking up the simplest thing," he remembers.
When he finally sought help, his doctor recommended acupuncture right off the bat. Northcutt ended up having six treatments over about eight months. Now, he says, "I don't have any back pain at all. I'm 100 percent good."
More than 26 million Americans ages 20 to 64 suffer from ongoing back pain, according to the American Pain Foundation, and it's one of the top reasons people visit a doctor. But many of those millions also discover the painful secret about back pain: This common condition can be surprisingly difficult to treat.
The lower back is a complex spot, with many potential sources of pain. Although surgery would seem to be a quick fix, in reality about 85 percent of people don't need -- and won't benefit from -- back surgery, says Dr. Anders Cohen, M.D., chief of neurosurgery at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, in New York City.
That leaves plenty of room for alternative and complementary therapies, such as vitamins, acupuncture, and chiropractic therapy, that may help soothe the pain. "If I don't see something unstable, something wrong with a disk or a bone, I use alternative therapies on a regular basis. It's a central crux of my practice," adds Cohen.
"There are some types of back pain that seem to be in the covering of the muscles or in the tissue connecting the muscle that are really difficult to treat," adds Dr. James Bray, M.D., a sports medicine physician with Scott & White Healthcare, in Georgetown, Texas. "That's where a lot of alternative therapies [such as acupuncture and chiropractic therapy] really excel."
Acupuncture
One of the first and most effective recourses for people with chronic back pain is acupuncture. "We've had great success with acupuncture. It's great for someone who gets pain that's situated in the back or neck and is not radiating down the arms and legs so much," says Cohen, who is a retired tennis pro. "I've had it myself, gotten up, and felt 75 percent better."
Practitioners of Eastern medicine say that acupuncture works by realigning the energy meridians and rebalancing the body. Western doctors don't really know why there's a benefit. Still, they find that it can help in many cases. "We don't have a correlate for that in Western medicine, but it seems to work," Cohen says. "We just don't have a Western explanation."
Massage
Massage could benefit people who want to maintain their back health and who get occasional soreness. Its effects have been studied and explained.
"Massage is not only stretching the muscles and getting out the knots but also manipulating lactic acid and lymphatic draining in [the] body," Cohen says. "When people are sore, that means a buildup of lactic acid or waste products in the muscles. Massage moves lactic acid faster from the muscles. It's like fast-forwarding the waste products out of your body to help it heal faster."
The key, says Bray, is to find a masseuse whom you connect with and trust. "If you have a good masseuse, it's great," he says. "If you don't, they can totally mess it up."
Chiropractic therapy
Although most people tend to think of a chiropractor as a practitioner who cracks your back while you lie on a table, they also "have a lot of soft tissue treatments," Cohen says.
Chiropractors can help with back pain and, in a few cases, even pain that radiates into the buttock or leg.
Some borrow techniques from physical therapy, using ultrasound and heat to break the cycles of muscle spasms and trigger points that cause chronic irritation, he says.
And it turns out that the cracking sound that goes along with a visit to the chiropractor is a good thing. Doctors think that it comes from nitrogen bubbles being released in the joints. "That helps rebalance the spine," Cohen explains.
Pilates and Yoga
One hailing from Germany and the other with roots in Hinduism, Pilates and yoga can help maintain your back and stave off soreness, says Cohen.
"These are techniques that work on body symmetry, muscle strengthening, breathing, coordinating strength, flexibility, coordination in the body, and body symmetry, so you get your body in right alignment, which makes you feel better and more resistant to injury and fatigue," he explains. "It does make sense."
Health.com: Quick ways to stop back pain
"Men and women tend to carry weight on the hips and abdomen because that's the center of gravity," Cohen continues. "The concept of Pilates is to strengthen the abdominal muscles and hips -- which are like the Grand Central Station of your body -- by keeping [them] functioning and flexible. It's an insurance policy against injury and wear and tear."
But they are not activities for people with degenerated or herniated disks. "Types of yoga that really focus on flexibility and really stretching the spine may actually be counterproductive to somebody who has degenerative spine changes or has a stress fracture," says Kostantinos Vasalos, a physical therapist and coordinator of the spine rehabilitation program at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Strengthening exercises
Activities like sit-ups or crunches are designed to maximize muscle contraction. But strengthening exercises can also be counterproductive and need to be used judiciously.
"You get stronger, but you also get a lot of spinal compression. So if you do these with spine issues, you may compress the spine and increase symptoms," warns Vasalos.
Aerobic exercise
Like Pilates and yoga, aerobic exercise is more for people who need to keep in shape and maintain a healthy back, not for those with acute injuries.
"Aerobic exercise makes the muscles more efficient over time," says Cohen.
And walking is a good way to exercise the muscles of the back, Vasalos says. However, to be effective, walking has to be at a brisk pace and has to be continuous and done regularly.
"Walking is a more natural position for the back than sitting," Cohen explains. "If you sit in a low chair or low car and the hips and knees come up, it takes the curvature out of the back and aggravates the strain."
Health.com: 6 mistakes pain patients make
For people who are 60 or older and have, for instance, a disk that is compressing a nerve, walking in a pool or interval bicycling are likely to be more comfortable, Vasalos says.
"That will help build some of the muscles around the spine," he adds.
And fast-paced exercises should not be used for a pain flare-up, Cohen warns.
Glucosamine
A large Norwegian trial published in the July 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association has cast serious doubts on the value of glucosamine for chronic lower back pain associated with osteoarthritis. Participants in the study took 1,500 milligrams of glucosamine a day for six months, but didn't see a benefit of the supplement.
Researchers aren't ruling out that glucosamine may have preventive effects or may have effects over several years, though. And glucosamine seems to be safe. So if you think you're benefiting in some real or imagined way, there's no harm in continuing.
Vitamin B12
Some people swear by vitamin B12. However, there's really no indication that it has any direct effect on low back pain, experts say. Instead, any benefit may come from the energy boost it bestows.
Health.com: Food rules for pain patients
"It's really more of a pick-me-up," Cohen says. "Patients feel it has a way of jump-starting the system. It does give you energy but, in terms of healing capacity, I wouldn't say it's much more beyond that."
Vitamin D
One long-term strategy to maintain bone and back health is vitamin D.
Some spine surgeons are "really, really pushing that as far as maintaining good bone health, especially as we age," says Vasalos, who recommends that every patient take 2,000 international units (IUs) of vitamin D and 1,000 mg of calcium citrate daily.
The National Osteoporosis Foundation recommends 400 to 800 IUs of vitamin D daily for adults under 50 and 800 to 1,000 IUs for those 50 and older.
This is especially important because, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, as many as 1 billion people worldwide are deficient in vitamin D, which is crucial for bone health.
Health.com: 12 ways to stop work-related back pain
Vitamin D is present in some foods, such as cod liver oil, some fish, and fortified milk, but it is largely synthesized in the body after exposure to sunlight. Still, that's not an excuse to roast in the sun just 10 to 15 minutes of sun exposure sans sunscreen is enough to generate an adequate amount of vitamin D. Even better, many multivitamins will give you 1,000 IU of vitamin D.
Therapy
"Some people feel that back pain, especially in chronic patients, almost becomes as much of a psychological condition [as a physical one], especially if doctors can't find anything physically wrong," Cohen says.
Biofeedback, hypnosis, and cognitive behavioral therapy have been shown to be of benefit.
Health.com: 7 questions to ask before back surgery
"These try to reset a patient's mind, retrain the mind to help lower pain," Cohen says. "I think that's a little more out on the fringe...but every once in a while, you can't find out what's wrong. And the idea is not to give up on the patient but to find a different angle of attack so they can feel better."
A new study debunks the theory that an hour of exercise a day is all you need to live a long life. Turns out, people who spend more time sitting during their leisure time have an increased risk of death, regardless of daily exercise.
American Cancer Society researchers tracked the activity levels and death rates in more than 123,000 healthy men and women for 13 years. They found women who spend over six hours a day sitting during leisure time (watching TV, playing games, surfing the web, reading) were 40 percent more likely to die sooner than women who spend less than three hours sitting. Men who spend more time sitting have a 20 percent increased risk of death. Essentially, those who sit less, live a longer life than those who don't.
Several factors come into play when figuring out “why” sitting may take years off your life.
The first may seem like common sense. The more time you spend sitting, the more likely you are to passively eat snacks or consume high calories drinks resulting in unhealthy weight gain. But this isn’t always the case. Sedentary obese and normal weight Americans had similar increased risk of death in the study.
Prolonged time sitting suppresses your immune system, which may increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. And your blood isn’t circulating as it should when you’re sedentary for long periods of time. When blood doesn’t flow thru your veins up to your heart, it could lead to dangerous blood clot. It also has metabolic consequences – increasing your resting blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Researchers say the metabolic effect may explain why the association was strongest for cardiovascular disease mortality in the study.
The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemology suggests, “public health guidelines should be refined to include reducing time spent sitting in addition to promoting physical activity.”
So as you keep your brain stimulated with your smart phones, video games and gadgets, wireless apps and paperless books – walk around or stand up while playing your favorite game. You may add years to your life.
While we can rely on a spell checker to catch glaring errors, a computer can’t pick up on all careless mistakes, especially if the word could be correct in a different context. Often word misuse is our mistake. The English language is full of homonyms, or words that have different meanings but sound and look similar, which makes it easy to confuse proper usage. For instance, verbally, you might not even notice the difference between “your” and “you’re.” But in print, the error can lead the reader to perceive you as less intelligent than you are. For this reason, it's important to spell check and proofread your documents, especially for the following common misuses, which are so easy to make, you might even have to check your document a couple times to catch them.
Its versus It’s (and all other apostrophes):
According to a copy editing instructor for California-based copy editing service provider Edicetera, confusing “its” and “it’s” is the most common error in the English language. That one minuscule apostrophe (or lack thereof) drastically changes the meaning of the entire sentence. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is,” whereas “its” refers to possession. Also, watch out for “your” versus “you’re.”
Sales versus Sails
Can you imagine writing on your resume that you “increased sails by 20 percent”?! Unless you’re applying to a job for a sail boat manufacturer, this careless mistake will probably get your resume sailing right into the recycling bin.How to dress for interview success!
Affect versus Effect
There is a lot of confusion around this one but here’s the rule: “Affect” is a verb and “effect” is a noun. It’s as simple as that.
Would Have NOT Would of
The subtlety in pronunciation leads to the rampant misuse of this phrase; however “would of” is never correct and may make you appear as if you are not well-read.
Relieve work stress with fun desk-top gadgets.Through versus Threw
“He threw the ball through the window.” “Threw” is a verb and “through” is a preposition. And speaking of “through,” be careful to make sure you don’t actually mean “thorough” or vice versa. The slight variation in spelling will not be picked up by a computer, but writing “I am through” when you mean “I am thorough” is quite ironic, don’t you think?The best way to master the subtleties of language? Reading of course! Check out six classics worth revisiting and other great summer reads!
Then versus Than
Six is more than five; after five then comes six. “Than” refers to a comparison, while “then” refers to a subsequent event.
Supposed To NOT Suppose To
“Suppose” is a verb, meaning to think or to ponder. The correct way to express a duty is to write, “I was supposed to…”Stylish and affordable office fashions!
Wonder versus Wander
You can wander around while you wonder why “wander” and “wonder” have such different meanings, yet sound oh so similar.
Their versus There versus They’re
OK, once and for all: “Their” is possessive; “there” refers to distance; and “they’re” is a contraction of “they are.”The best blouses for the office!
Farther versus Further
While both words refer to distance, grammarians distinguish “farther” as physical distance and “further” as metaphorical distance. You can dive further into a project, for instance, or you can dive farther into the ocean.
Facial recognition software allows ads in Tokyo to see faces of viewers and tailor the ads displayed. Kyung Lah reports.
