Would they?

A handy listing of food (and some non-food) expiration time frames.  Although, come on–you’re supposed to refrigerate opened peanut butter after 3 months?  Refrigerate?  Really?

It’s reassuring, as always, to see that even when the sun outlives its useful existence and fries the earth, honey will still be good to eat.

(via RealSimple, by way of Lifehacker)

“Our findings suggest that consumers who are focused on the future are so preoccupied with finding ways to improve their situation that they become overly sensitive to information that points to such opportunities — and lose sight of the relative advantages of their current choice,” the authors explain.

For example, Meyvis and Cooke asked study participants to choose among three stores on a series of simulated shopping trips. After each trip, they were shown the price charged for a product at their chosen store and the prices charged at each of the other two stores.

After going on a series of shopping trips, participants were then asked to indicate which store was the cheapest and whether they would want to switch to another store for a second set of shopping trips.

Notably, the investigators found that when participants were told in advance that they would make a second set of shopping trips, they were less likely to prefer the store they initially chose and more likely to switch to another store after the first set of trips. In addition, they also thought the store they chose was the most expensive fifty percent more of the time. This phenomenon was replicated in later studies even when the chosen store was less expensive than the other two stores.

In contrast, participants who did not expect to have to make a second choice accurately recalled an equal number of trips on which the chosen store was cheaper or more expensive.

(EurekAlert: “The grass isn’t greener.” [7 Aug 2007])

How we think we understand things we don’t, really.  (Namely, tipping.)  Interesting shufflings in the comments area, as well as some worthwhile links.
(Crooked Timber: “Tipping points,” by Henry [16 May 2007])

StoryCode uses a whole series of user-coded information to match books by similarity. Intriguing, with sometimes useful, sometimes awkward results.

I don’t know exactly how it works, nor do I want to:

MyProgress.com is a set of powerful Personal Progress Management (PPM) tools with built-in intelligence to automatically observe and analyze all essential aspects of your life. With MyProgress, you can watch your progress and discover your productivity at any period, any time, any place. Read More…

Watch your financial progress

Track your personal finance with MyProgress while intelligent technologies calculate your ranks (by occupation, age, and location), grant titles, build forecasts and provide analytics for you.

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While spending time on your passions and pastime, you can hardly realize how good your skills really are and how much experience you obtain. Track your time with MyProgress and get your ranks and titles, watch top, lowest, and average statistics of MyProgress community.

Figure your wealth progress

MyProgress will calculate how wealthy you are using actual currency exchange rates and compare it with the average database figures by global, local, age, and occupational categories.

(Emphasis added.)

100 Great Tips to Improve Your Life.  I like #21, but mostly because it sounds like a teaser for the 11 o’clock news.

Or maybe it wasn’t crazy at all. In fact, does anyone say that anymore? They ought to. Because, if it does, it is. From a press release on the FBI’s web site:

The sales pitch was seductive: the young visionary behind Brown Investment Services in Virginia guaranteed investors he would double their money in 30 business days by tapping into the complex world of foreign currency trading.

Just for future generations, let’s translate:

“guaranteed” = “ha ha ha (etc.)”

“complex world of foreign currency trading” = “fraud”

In case you were wondering.

It is possible something is the matter here. Just as there were deep flaws in the work ecosystems of the caring professions, noticed by researchers in the seventies, it’s possible there’s something wrong with our professional environments—and perhaps, more broadly speaking, our culture of work. Isn’t this worthy of examination? Work, after all, is a form of religion in a secular world. Burning out in it amounts to a crisis of faith.

I came across this article in New York Magazine eight months ago or so, and despite being intrigued by the topic, put off reading it until now. Why? Because it looked fairly long, and I didn’t feel like I had time to read it, then. Of course, the author writes about how we’re always hurried, and waiting. That’s a secondary point, however, and first and foremost the article is interesting for its direct perspectives on burnout, burnout apparently being a relatively recent and little-researched concept.

But today, says Maslach, corporate settings are cautiously, slowly, cracking their doors, letting people like her in, because they recognize that something’s gone awry. “Like in Silicon Valley,” she says. “It used to be the case that people would say, ‘You’re burned out? You don’t like the job? So quit. I don’t run a country club,’ ” says Maslach. “But what was happening was the best and the brightest wanted to opt out. They started saying, ‘I can’t do this; this is not a life.’ They’d go to the Midwest and start a pet-food store.” Maslach adds that when she did interviews at nasa, she noticed similar problems there. “So suddenly, these places were saying, ‘Whoa, what do we need to do to get these people?’ Getting the most out of people didn’t actually mean getting the best. That’s when there was a new wave of interest in burnout.”

Admittedly, I don’t quite understand the “I don’t run a country club” bit, but I like the rest. There are interesting anecdotes, and also facts and figures (which you can take with however much salt you like):

• According to a survey in the Netherlands, 10% of the workforce is burnt out at any given time;
• Younger workers are more likely to burn out than older workers;
• Single are more likely to burn out than married;
• and people in strongly individualistic societies are more likely to burn out than… well, those in less individualistic societies (though I’m not sure how exactly that distinction is made for the purposes of the fact).

If you don’t have enough time to read the article in its entirety, this last bit’s a good one to go out on:

As Schaufeli, the Dutch researcher, notes, one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn’t just work overload but “work-home interference”—a sociologist’s way of saying we’re receiving phone calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth.

Indeed, that’s her colleagues’ most startling finding of all. Most Americans believe they work more today than they did 35 years ago. Yet according to the American Time Use Survey, an ambitious project that for 41 years has been asking thousands of participants to keep detailed time diaries, Americans now have five more hours of leisure per week (38) than they did in 1965. Certainly, there are academics who reject these numbers—in The Overworked American, published in 1992, the economist Juliet Schor calculated we were working nearly an extra month per year, setting off a rather sharp debate about her methodology—but even those who agree our leisure time is increasing will readily concede that Americans experience their leisure quite differently and therefore may feel as if they’re working more. For one thing, it’s non-contiguous leisure time, time meted out in discrete increments. Human beings have always resisted the fracturing of time. Gleick points out that Plautus cursed the sundial. Now, he says, we gain 90- second reprieves with our microwave ovens. But do we do anything meaningful in those 90 seconds? Or do they vanish in the same particle puff?

(NYMag: “Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” by Jennifer Senior)

A study of UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families finds that convenience foods aren’t.  Which is to say, families relying on so-called “convenience” foods spent as much time preparing dinner as those families who leaned on, e.g., hot dogs and frozen peas.

(EurekAlert: “Convenience foods save little time for working families at dinner.” [Aug 7, 2007])