Saturday, December 12, 2015

Research suggests this is the best music to listen to for optimal productivity

Rachel Gillett

Dec. 11, 2015, 11:13 AM
69,534

VFS Digital Design/FlickrMusic doesn't have to add to your list of distractions.

Oftentimes we have innumerable distractions at work competing for our attention.

Luckily, music can help put us back on a more productive track.

Studies out of the University of Birmingham, England, show that music is effective in raising efficiency in repetitive work — so if you're mindlessly checking email or filling out a spreadsheet, adding some tunes will make your task go by that much faster.

But when it comes to tasks that require more brainpower, finding that perfect playlist is not so easy.

Luckily, we have science at our disposal to help.

Based on some of what we know about how music affects productivity, you should try funneling this kind of music through your headphones the next time you're feeling unproductive:

View As: One Page Slides

Music that include sounds of nature.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently discovered that adding a natural element could boost moods and focus.

Sounds of nature can mask intelligible speech just as well as white noise while also enhancing cognitive functioning, optimizing the ability to concentrate, and increasing overall worker satisfaction, the researchers found. The mountain-stream sound researchers used in their study also possessed enough randomness that it didn't distract test subjects.

You could try simply listening to recordings of nature sounds, or check out this tranquil background music that incorporates sounds of water:

Music you enjoy.

Listening to music you like can make you feel better.

Teresa Lesiuk, an assistant professor in the music-therapy program at the University of Miami, found that personal choice in music is important, especially in those who are moderately skilled at their jobs. Generally participants in her studies who listened to music they enjoyed completed their tasks more quickly and came up with better ideas than those who didn't because the music improved their mood.

"When you're stressed, you might make a decision more hastily; you have a very narrow focus of attention," she told The New York Times. "When you're in a positive mood, you're able to take in more options."

But don't enjoy too much.

Flickr/Garry Knight

Different research suggests, however, that music you're ambivalent about could be best.

Researchers from Fu Jen Catholic University in Xinzhuang City, Taiwan, studied how listener's fondness for music affected their concentration. They found when workers strongly liked or disliked the music they heard in the background they became more distracted by it.

Music without lyrics.

Words are distracting.

According to research from Cambridge Sound Management, noise in general isn't to blame when it comes to lost productivity — it's how intelligible the words are that forces us to shift focus from our work to figuring out what someone is saying. Speech distracts about 48% of office workers, according to Cambridge's 2008 study.

When masking your neighbor's conversation with music, it follows then that you not do so with music that has lyrics — your focus would simply shift from the conversation to the words in a song.

This playlist of lyric-less music may provide the productivity boost you need:

Music that matches your tempo.

Music tempo can have varying affects on your arousal.

One study by Canadian researchers found subjects performed better on IQ tests while listening to up-tempo music. If your work requires you to be more upbeat, you could try listening to music that matches this tempo. Baroque music, for example, is a popular choice for many who need to get work done.

In fact in a small study by researchers at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, Harbor Hospital in Baltimore, and the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia, the radiologists they studied reported an improvement in their work and mood when they listened to baroque music. This playlist offers a nice sampling:

Another study by researchers from BMS College of Engineering in Bangalore, Malaysia, saw subjects report a dramatic reduction in feelings of stress and an increased sense of physical relaxation when they listened to music that played around 60 beats per minute. In classical music terms, you would refer this as "larghetto," which translates to not very fast or somewhat slowly.

If you prefer to feel more relaxed while you work, you could try one of Focus @ Will's playlists dedicated to concentration:

Music played at medium volume.

Noise level matters.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, and the University of Virginia found that moderate noise levels are just right for creative thinking.

While both high and moderate noise levels have been found to open people's minds to more abstract thinking, high noise levels decrease the brain's ability to process information.

As a point of reference, if you can drown out the sound of a nearby snow blower, your music is too loud, and if you can't drown out a nearby conversation, it's too quiet.

DON'T MISS: The 27 jobs that are most damaging to your health

esla doesn't care about making money on its cars, and its shareholders need to live with that

Tesla doesn't care about making money on its cars, and its shareholders need to live with that

Matthew DeBord

6h
8,492
10

AP Photo/Ng Han GuanTesla pays attention to the details — not the money.

Tesla shares have been on an impressive run since the company's IPO, up over 1,000% and topping out in September of last year near $300. The biggest Tesla bulls on Wall Street think that the automaker could go to $450.

But the bears see the stock tanking. Some analysts have put the bottom in the mid-two digits, while others figure a plunge to the $150 ballpark is possible.

You might think that Tesla is concerned about this wide divergence of opinion.

But it isn't.

In fact, Tesla sees its stock price as at best a nice piece of leverage for raising capital, as it did earlier this year, and at worst as a huge distraction from its actual mission. That mission — toaccelerate humanity's departure from the fossil-fuels era — is the signal. The stock price is noise. And even the very sexy cars are really just a means to an end.

Is that a great expense to shareholders? Yes. But if shareholders don't realize that they've signed onto Musk's larger-than-life vision, then they should probably sell now.

This reality was evident in a recent SumZero exchange between a Tesla bull and a Tesla bear. Michael Frazis of Torchlight GP is long Tesla and sees tremendous upside for investors. John Pangere of Windy City Advisors, on the other hand, is short Tesla and thinks it's a bad bet.

Pangere's thoughts on what Tesla is effectively costing shareholders are instructive:

Tesla may be setting sales records, but the company is also setting records of a dubious nature as well. When taking a deeper look at the numbers, the company lost an astonishing $19,810 per car sold last quarter, up from a loss of $15,975 in the previous quarter and a loss of $9,956 per car sold in Q3 of 2014. Tesla may in fact reach its production goals, but it will be at great expense to shareholders.

Pangere correctly observes that Tesla is losing money at a furious clip because it's trying to scale from being a 50,000-per-year carmaker to being one that builds 500,000 by 2020.

Cooler heads might tell CEO Elon Musk to put the brakes on and aim for at least a medium-term profit of some sort, which is conceivable given that Tesla is currently selling cars for $100,000 and up.

But Musk doesn't want to do that. Rather, he and Tesla want to spend a "staggering" amount of cash to ramp up the business. The whole point of building pricey luxury electric cars is to lose a lot of money of them — because the cash flow is being relentlessly invested in growth.

Screenshot via Yahoo FinanceIt's been a very up-and-down six months for Tesla shares.

Tesla's balance sheet is one of those things that can be picked to pieces. It's a smorgasbord of pitfalls and problems, and if you want to bolster a short case, then it's as good a place as any to start.

However, you don't actually need to do that much work to argue that Tesla will fail. Musk has already done the job for you. He never thought Tesla would succeed — or more accurately, he's said he thought that it was likely to fail.

REUTERS/Rebecca CookJust make sure you know what you're getting into.

But against the odds, it didn't. And at the moment, the automaker is no longer facing the existential risks it confronted in late 2008, when but for a (literally) final-hour outside investment, it would have gone out of business. It's also a long way from the period when it was burning all the cash it had on hand over the course of a few days.

Musk knows that you don't get a second chance to do something truly transformational, so he's put Tesla on an absurdly ambitious path. This is baffling to skeptics, who think that Tesla should at least pretend to care about making money. But Tesla is focused on being a bigger and better car company — and on alleviating global warming.

If it succeeds, that will be worth much more to shareholders than making a few thousand bucks per car in the next year or two.

NOW WATCH: Here's why 'hard conversations' are built into Facebook's culture

More: Tesla Elon Musk Electric Cars Wall Street

Getting tired of too many apps? Or just indifferent?

Jacquelyn Cheokjaccheok@sph.com.sg @JacCheokBT

DEC 12, 20155:50 AM

Singapore

EVERY day, there seems to be a new mobile app (or two) that we hear about, from helping drivers find parking in the city to helping travellers exchange their foreign currencies with peers at no charge. While consumers love the convenience (and app creators the e-commerce revenues some of these apps bring), investors urge caution on what is beginning to look like app fatigue in the market.

Christopher Quek, who manages Tri5 Ventures' S$5 million fund for seed-stage startups and offers free mentorship to startups under Angels Gate Advisory (AGA), told BT: "Around 95 per cent of over 500 startups we have seen for advisory since 2012 are me-toos or show apps with very similar business models - in particular, the e-commerce, property and Uber or peer-to-peer sharing types."

Trezo (by Singapore Press Holdings) and Shopee (by Garena), for instance, are two mobile marketplace apps launched this year that resemble Carousell, which was founded in 2012 to let users buy and sell items in under 30 seconds. November-launched PAIR Taxi, which allows commuters in Singapore's central business district to share taxi rides during peak hours, was clearly inspired by GrabTaxi, Uber and the like.

"For a person to download an app and retain it, it has to be unique and applicable for a big part of everyday life use," said Mr Quek. There are now over 1.6 million apps available on Google Play (1.5 million on the Apple App Store) since apps emerged in 2008, according to statista; most are in education, lifestyle and entertainment. On average, smartphone users access 27 apps per month, going by a US Nielsen report.

"There's only so much room on our phones and in our lives, and so many apps don't address 'must-have' needs," said Hugh Mason, investor and chief executive of startup accelerator JFDI.

"Rather, they address either peripheral, 'nice-to-have' needs that we only experience once in awhile or problems we never knew we had."

He was surprised at how frequently people assume their idea is unique. "They just don't go on Google to see what's been done before! I'd suggest that almost anything you can imagine has been tried by someone somewhere before. Unfortunately, most people fall in love with their solution - not with the problem they're trying to solve - so they end up creating me-toos."

It is app indifference - not fatigue - that the market is now experiencing, Mr Mason noted.

For Page Advisor (a Singapore-based app that allows users to book over 100 lifestyle services - from cleaning to computer repair to photography - on demand), being mobile-first was a strategic decision.

Chief executive Fabian Lim said: "Through our new bundled services product Packages, customers who venture into malls can use the app to view attractive packages launched by our retail merchants."

This would not have been possible if Page Advisor had started out as a Web-based platform, he said. "Customers will be less motivated to use their mobile devices to search for services once they venture outdoors into the retail malls."

Since its May launch, Page Advisor has been seeking to close pre-Series A funding.

In any case, app fatigue or indifference is a natural part of the app economy's evolution, said Jay Shapiro, founder of Singapore-based app creator AppMakr. "If you look at the word processor space in 1985, there were 15 mainstream apps competing in the Mac and PC space. That quickly whittled down to just Microsoft Word dominating everything and becoming overweight. Now, there's a resurgence of innovative competitors entering the market: Google, Zoho, etc."

The same thing is happening with apps - only much faster, he said. "As a new idea emerges, there will be dozens of apps competing in the space before a winner starts to dominate. What's important is that the number of these ideas, and overall app usage, is steadily increasing."

Over Thanksgiving and Black Friday alone, sales via mobile devices were up 50 per cent this year, accounting for over US$1.5 billion in purchases, according to Adobe.

"This shows that consumers are using apps for their primary shopping more than ever. Moreover, shopping is just one piece of the app economy," said Mr Shapiro. He added: "We are still in the very early days of the app economy. There is a lot of growing, weeding out, and maturing to be done."

While ideas can be similar, what stands out are the founding team's capabilities, app user interface and experience, and clarity of the thought process, said AGA's Mr Quek.

JFDI's Mr Mason agreed: "Just because others have tried and failed doesn't necessarily mean something is a bad idea. We would say . . . if someone had tried to solve the problem, where did they fail and why is the new team better placed to solve it?"

For all that, it has also become much easier to create apps, said Mr Shapiro. "There are now tools at every level of technical competence. Whether it is a drag-and-drop, zero-coding tool like AppMakr (which is good for small businesses that may not have any technical skills) or tools like Appcelerator or Google's Android Studio (both of which help existing Web developers to transition into a mobile environment), all are free to use."

US official: ISIS and the Assad regime are 'engaged in millions and millions of dollars of trade'

Guy Faulconbridge and Jonathan Saul, Reuters

Dec. 10, 2015, 3:18 PM
5,293
8

Twitter/Eric Gaillard/Reuters/Amanda Macias/Business InsiderAn ISIS militant, left, and Syria's President Bashar al-Assad.

Islamic State militants are engaged in oil trading worth as much as $40 million a month with significant volumes sold to the government of President Bashar al-Assad and some finding its way across the border into Turkey, senior U.S. Treasury official Adam Szubin said on Thursday.

"ISIL is selling a great deal of oil to the Assad regime," Szubin, acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence with the U.S. Treasury, said at Chatham House in London.

"The two are trying to slaughter each other and they are still engaged in millions and millions of dollars of trade."

"The volumes we are talking about and the amounts of money we are talking about are very sizeable," said Szubin.

Szubin said the "far greater amount" of Islamic State oil ends up under Assad's control while some is consumed internally in Islamic State areas but some ends up in Kurdish regions and Turkey.

"Some is coming across the border into Turkey," Szubin said.

Islamic State militants have made more than $500 million from black market oil sales and looted up to $1 billion from bank vaults in Syria and Iraq, he said in prepared remarks.

"Our sense is that ISIL is taking its profits basically at the wellhead and so while you do have ISIL oil ending up in a variety of different places that's not really the pressure we want when it comes to stemming the flow of funding — it really comes down to taking down their infrastructure," he said.

NOW WATCH: ISIS is selling oil to the Syrian regime

More: Reuters Isis Assad Syria

PRESENTING: 'The Central Bank Hall of Shame' - Sam Ro Dec. 10, 2015,

PRESENTING: 'The Central Bank Hall of Shame'

Sam Ro

Dec. 10, 2015, 11:28 AM
1,754
1

More Charts

At this point, it seems like the data is favorable enough to justify the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates for the first time since June 2006.

A rate hike would put an end to the so-called zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP), which the Fed put into place in December 2008 in its effort to stimulate growth and stoke inflation during the darkest hours of the global financial crisis.

Of course, the concern is that the Fed may actually be hiking rates too soon. Indeed, many of its central bank peers around the world have hiked rates in this post-financial-crisis era, only to be forced to cut again within months because their local economies couldn't handle it.

During a presentation on Thursday, Deutsche Bank's Chief International Economist Torsten Slok shared this chart, which he informally called, "the central bank hall of shame."

It picks on eight countries, whose central banks hike rates, only to cut rates once again soon after.

"It's a very important reminder that the rest of the world has not been very successful with this experiment," he said.

The Fed surely doesn't want to get inducted into this unfortunate list. The group's Federal Open Market Committee convenes on December 15 and 16 to decide whether or not they'll pull the trigger.

Deutsche Bank

NOW WATCH: Fed's Bullard explains the problem with keeping rates at zero forever

Follow Markets Chart Of The Day and never miss an update!

More: Chart Of The Day Torsten Slok Central Banks Monetary Policy

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Research suggests this is the best music to listen to for optimal productivity