The decline of driving in the U.S.

Americans began taking their foot off the gas pedal well before the recession.

Energy an urban-planning nerds have been pondering a very interesting question these days – has the U.S. passed peak car?  Ever since the recession, Americans have been driving less, getting fewer licenses, and using less gas. But is that just the work of the recession, or something more permanent?

 

 

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Cubicles are the worst: Study

Workers in cubicles with high partitions were the most miserable.

Is your work station an invading overlord? Do your belongings march across the long desk you share with other workers, spilling out of your space and encroaching on the neutral zones abutting your colleagues’ work areas? Don’t worry, thanks to recent research by Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear at the University of Sydney, that mess probably doesn’t bother your coworkers all that much. In fact, of all the myriad annoyances of office life, workspace cleanliness bothered scarcely 10% of workers — although workers in offices where there are no partitions, coworkers were bothered slightly more.

 

 

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Widening gap between those who use the internet and those who don’t

15% of Americans older than 18 don’t use the Internet.

Jim Crawford, sixty-three years old and retired from a career as a welder, doesn’t have much use for the Internet. Crawford, who lives in Manhattan, Kan. said, “I never had to use it on the job and didn’t have to use it at home for any reason. So I never really learned to do it — and never really got interested.”

 

 

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Exercise during pregnancy may improve baby’s brain development

Exercise during pregnancy alters the fetal brain.

According to new research, moderate exercise during pregnancy may boost your baby’s brain development. The research involving 18 moms-to-be and their babies found that “at 10 days, the children have a more mature brain when their mothers exercised during the pregnancy,” said study researcher Elise Labonte-LeMoyne, a Ph.D. candidate in kinesiology at the University of Montreal.

 

 

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Mobility trend leaves UK workers overworked but unproductive: Study

54% said they felt obliged to work during the weekend because there is too much to do.

Office workers in the UK are so focused on managing email traffic and attending internal meetings, they struggle to find time to produce anything really meaningful, according to research released this week.

 

 

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50 million Americans living in poverty in the U.S.

Food stamps keep about five million people out of poverty.

There are some big problems with the way poverty is measured in this country. A Census report came out this week based on the “supplemental poverty measure” — a newer, unofficial method that figures in the value of many government benefits, the cost of living in different cities, and health-care costs.

 

 

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Couples who text together don’t stay together: Study

Too much texting can disconnect couples.

Two researchers who study the societal effects of text messages, Lori Schade and Jonathan Sandberg of Brigham Young University, just released a new study claiming that too much texting can disconnect couples. Their research, published behind a paywall in the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy, links too much texting to the stripping of nuance from a relationship.

 

 

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Top female business travel trends

A quarter of women business travelers fly more now than they did five years ago.

The independent research reveals that women have their own distinct travel habits that differentiate female travelers from their male colleagues, according to new research by Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT). Twenty-five percent of women business travelers fly more now than they did five years ago and women tend to plan their business travel further in advance than men, with 39 per cent making arrangements less than four weeks in advance compared to 20 per cent of men, who tend to plan just a few days ahead.

 

 

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