Tough economic times threaten all sorts of institutions: investment banks, newspapers and, yes, marriages.
While there's no evidence to show that cheating increases during recessions, experts point out that money and employment woes strain relationships, leaving them vulnerable to infidelity.
Avoiding temptation, particularly when a lost job or depleted bank account has shaken your sense of self, can be difficult. But it's not impossible. The most obvious strategy, productive communication, bears repeating since couples often assign blame instead of engaging in fruitful conversations. Managing your expectations of the relationship, and what might be gained from an affair, is another successful technique.
Dr. Joshua Coleman, an author and senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families, says these strategies help a couple understand the weaknesses of the relationship.
"Most marriages end not because of one or two big crises," he says. "Typically it's a death by a thousand cuts."
Lines of Communication The whirlwind of working long hours, raising children and tending to the many bureaucracies of everyday life leaves little time for personal reflection. Under these conditions, couples can go weeks and months without expressing resentment or gratitude.
Tell-tale signs of strained communication, says Coleman, include chronic impatience and a tendency to blame. This dynamic can weaken the relationship and prompt one or both partners to seek validation from someone else. That may be fine when the outsider is a confidante with whom there is no risk of romantic entanglement. But otherwise, seeking emotional support from someone else may invite trouble.
Instead, Coleman suggests repairing breakdowns when they occur and then taking stock occasionally to be sure both individuals have moved on. Of course, this requires that both individuals take responsibility for mistakes, apologize when necessary and adjust future behavior. Though such communication may be difficult for some men, says Coleman, "It's actually a sign of psychological health and strength."
Realistic Expectations Even when communication is frequent, it might not be enough to counter the draw of a "quick fix," says Dr. Mark Smaller, a spokesman for the American Psychoanalytic Association.
An affair may seem like a shortcut to happiness when times are bleak, says Smaller, but infidelity often masks larger problems tied to feelings of self-worth or disappointment.
Smaller also encourages his patients to think of cheating as a life-changing choice instead of an impulsive act. Such decisions should be made with the maximum information possible. This means understanding why you're considering an affair, as well as anticipating the outcome.
Cultivating realistic expectations applies equally to your relationship. "In American marriages, we expect our partners to be everything to us," says Coleman. Instead, couples should look to outside interests and friendships to provide fulfilling and validating experiences.
Finally, Dr. Smaller advises his patients to arm themselves with a sense of humor. The ability to laugh at your own limitations, he says, indicates a healthy perspective on the relationship's weaknesses. The ability to distance yourself from the everyday challenges of being in a relationship, and even poke fun at them, can bring long-term stability.
Even if you think a partnership is doomed, Smaller is ready with an important caveat: "These things are never solved by way of another relationship."
Ten Ways To Stay Faithful
Freida faces naked facts
It’s not just the global deals. Freida Pinto is constantly hitting headlines for another reason — her uncensored snaps. Now, Freida’s “naked” photo from Elite’s 2007 calendar and “washroom stills” from the sets of Miral are in the news.
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Paparazzi followed Freida even to the washroom on the sets of MiralOn the sets of Julian Schnabel’s Miral in Jerusalem, the Slumdog Millionaire star was shot when she stepped out of a portable toilet. Freida was clueless about the photographs till they started flooding websites and blogs.Experts, however, slam the pictures as ‘distasteful’. “It’s in bad taste,” says Ryan Martis, who shot Freida in her first shoot.“How can you click a person during his/ her private moments? I don’t believe in such photography.” Surprisingly, Freida’s latest photos are inviting critical reactions too. A post on wingfantasy. com states: “ The lissome lass, who has been posing all prim and proper with her powder and rouge done to perfection, was recently caught off guard sans any make-up.” Also, Freida’s past experiments are hotting up the internet world. A sizzling picture from the Elite Modelling Agency’s calendar adds up more drama with several reports calling it a ‘naked’ photo shoot.But interestingly, Elite’s India director, Sushma Puri, refuses to call it a “nude snap”. She adds: “We used Freida twice — in 2006 and 2007. But I don’t find her snap to be naked. Wendell Rodericks did the styling for us.” Sources close to Freida say the model-turned- actress is upset with her paparazzi pictures. And if the buzz is to be believed, Miral producers have doubled Freida’s security to guard her privacy on the sets.Co-incidentally, Freida’s latest picture trouble comes at a time when L’Oreal has signed an endorsement deal with her.Along with Freida, other global beauties — Evangeline Lily and Elizabeth Banks are also joining the L’Oreal Paris family.
A still from a calendar that Freida shot in 2007. Many reports are calling it a 'naked' photo shoot.“I am very moved to be joining the great L’Oréal Paris family and illustrious personalities: A family I am now proud to be a part of,” said Freida in a statement. Earlier, she was rumoured to have signed up with Estee Lauder.Coming back to Freida’s snappy issue, she must be feeling the heat of achieving international fame. Ever since stepping into the international limelight, her every move has been closely scrutinised.In between, Freida’s old pictures have become a hot property with publications and netizens. So, be it her romantic images with Dev Patel or the sultry photos before Slumdog, she is surely topping popularity charts.“If Freida’s old pictures are not being used in a justifiable manner, it’s not right to use them. They only make sense if a publication or website needs them for their write- ups and not for sheer publicity,” says Puri.Meanwhile, Freida is gearing up for Woody Allen’s yet- untitled film after wrapping up Miral.The shooting starts in July though Hollywood star Nicole Kidman has opted out of the multi-starrer project, reports Variety magazine.
Indians happiest with their sex lives
Indians sure are having a "rocking" time in the bedroom. A new survey has found that 70 per cent of people living in the sub-continent are sexually satisfied.
According to the - Asia-Pacific Sexual Health and Overall Wellness survey, by a pharmaceutical company, India topped the list with respondents saying they were satisfied with their sex lives while Japan reported the lowest sexual satisfaction rate at 10 per cent.
Malaysia ranked sixth among 13 countries with two out of three Malaysian men and three out of four women saying they are not happy with their sex lives. "The Malaysian figure is higher than the overall Asia Pacific results where 57 per cent of men and 64 per cent of women reported being not very satisfied with sex," The Star Online quoted Dr Rosie King, who led the study in the Asia Pacific region, as saying. "The survey links the level of erection to sexual satisfaction for men," said Dr King during discussion.
"We found that greater sexual satisfaction is strongly associated with greater satisfaction with life overall. Generally, men and women who are highly satisfied with their sex life have a more positive outlook on their relationships and life," King added.
Washington, May 11: In a new revelation, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has said that the CIA of the United States and his country's ISI together created the Taliban. "I think it was part of your past and our past, and the ISI and CIA created them together," Zardari told the NBC news channel in an interview. In the interview, which was given to the NBC on May 7, Zardari also accused the US of supporting the military rule of Pervez Musharraf who was alleged to be taking sides of the Taliban. He disagreed with the popular belief in the US that the Pakistan military and intelligent services still have sympathies for the Taliban. "I think General Musharraf may have had a mindset to run head and hand with the hound but certainly not on our watch. We don't have a tough process at all," Zardari said. Asked about the influential role of the Pakistan Army, Zardari said he is in control of everything in the country, including the military. "The Parliament has final say. It's the Parliament form of government, and I am a product of the Parliament," he said. Earlier, Zardari in an another interview had said that India
was not a "threat" to his country and that Pakistan had moved some of its forces from its Indian border to western frontier to eliminate Taliban in its tribal belt.
Pak govt to take over all madrassas
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has said that all madrassas in the country would be taken over by the government to separate the students from extremism and impart modern as well as religious education to them. Speaking at a community dinner, Zardari said his government has resolved to bring reforms in the madrassa system and bring it under the government system. Commenting on the ongoing military operation in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) against the Taliban and other terrorist groups Zardari said the government would initiate every necessary step to pull the country out of the crisis and hand over a better Pakistan to the next generation. “We are striving for reconciliation with all forces in Pakistan, rejuvenation of national institutions, reorganisation of Pakistan’s strength. We have a lot of strength but we have never allowed our full potential to be utilised for the good of the country,” The News quoted Zardari, as saying. Zardari also claimed that Islamabad has shifted an ‘unspecified number’ of troops from its eastern border with India to fight against the Taliban.
50 YEARS OF SEEKING E.T.
Or maybe we just haven't been looking long enough.
All of those possibilities are considered in "Confessions of an Alien Hunter," a new book from Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute's senior astronomer.
Shostak's "confessions" are actually Shostak's arguments for why the SETI search makes sense - leavened with dramatic accounts of the effort's best-known false alarms and folksy metaphors that would put Dan Rather to shame (including this one: "Life is as durable as Christmas fruitcake").
The California institute where Shostak works is the primary standard-bearer in the search for alien signals. That search dates back to 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake (now the SETI Institute's president) aimed an 85-foot radio telescope in West Virginia skyward in hopes of tuning in the extraterrestrials.
After his initial foray, Drake and his fellow seekers moved on to bigger and better telescopes, including the old 140-foot Green Bank Telescope and the 1,000-foot Arecibo Observatory. But the strategy was pretty much the same: Check one star for an unnaturally steady radio signal, then move on to the next star.
Now that's changing. The Allen Telescope Array, a joint venture involving the SETI Institute and the University of California at Berkeley, will allow bunches of stars to be studied at once. Like microchips, the efficiency of SETI has been improving at a geometric pace in agreement with Moore's Law. If that pace continues for the next two dozen years, more than a million stars will be checked for signs of on-air life, Shostak notes.
Shostak and Drake say that sampling should be big enough to result in contact - assuming first that the aliens exist, and then that they think like we do. The first assumption is big, but the second one is even bigger. If the search for signs of microbial life on Mars and more distant worlds requires a correct understanding of astrobiology, the search for intelligence beyond our own solar system requires something more: astropsychology, perhaps?
Over the decades, the strategy for SETI has by necessity been dictated by a cosmic Golden Rule: We look for communication in the channels that we use to communicate. A generation ago, that might have been the analog television signals that carried "I Love Lucy" out to the cosmos. Today, Drake speculates that the aliens might be transmitting digitally, with lasers instead of monster radio antennas.
During a weekend talk in Seattle, Drake pointed out that the just-completed National Ignition Facility can focus the light of 192 lasers to create a pulse that lasts just a few nanoseconds but far outshines the sun. "Those lasers can make pulses of light which are visible to very small telescopes all across the galaxy," he noted.
Shostak theorizes that E.T. might have two types of transmitters going: one that flashes such pulses of light toward a long list of target planets that might be habitable - including us - and another "low-power, omnidirectional broadcast that tells you how to join their book club, or whatever." For that reason, SETI searchers have started conducting surveys for those tiny flashes of light as well as for sustained radio traffic.
So where should we look? Historically, the SETI Institute's target list has favored Earthlike planets where life as we know it might have taken root. But in "Confessions of an Alien Hunter," Shostak suggests that on the basis of what we're learning about artificial intelligence, the most likely aliens to send signals would actually be artificially intelligent machines.
If E.T. is a big shiny robot, the strategy of targeting Earthlike worlds orbiting sunlike stars may turn out to be "a very antiquated idea," Shostak acknowledged during a weekend interview. "A world on which the whole thing can rust might not be the best place for it," he said. A better place, from the machine's point of view, would be in orbit around a star hot enough to provide the prodigious power required for the big broadcast.
But Drake said the other end of the stellar scale shouldn't be overlooked, either. It turns out that about three-quarters of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, which are dimmer than the sun but still could provide a home for E.T. Those stars have been overlooked in past SETI searches.
The bottom line, Drake said, is that "our simple picture was really way too simple" when it came to visualizing the kinds of places in the universe where life might lurk.
That's one of the reasons why Drake isn't discouraged that the SETI quest has come up empty, even after 50 years. He pointed out that only a thousand stars or so have been studied, over bandwidth that accounts for just a few percentage points of the potential spectrum. "We've looked at something like 10-5 of the possible combinations," he said.
Shostak said he felt confident that solid evidence of life beyond Earth will be found within two dozen years - either by continuing with SETI, or by analyzing exoplanet atmospheres, or by digging into the dirt on Mars or the ice on Europa or Enceladus. Drake, meanwhile, had a longer timetable in mind. "I don't think 2025 is going to happen unless we're very lucky," he told me. "Maybe it'll take twice as long - maybe 2050."
Other experts have suggested time frames of 100 to 200 years.
Of course, such timetables assume that SETI efforts around the world will continue to attract followers and funding. SETI efforts in the United States are funded privately rather than publicly, and Drake said it's getting tougher to raise money. "As long as the recession keeps going on, we have to move that [timetable] back," he said.
Could there ever come a point when the experts decide there's no E.T. out there to phone home? What would Shostak do if he hasn't heard from the aliens after a century of searching (other than celebrating the fact that he's still alive in the year 2060, that is)?
"I don't think I would be ready to say that they're just not there," he said, "but I might be inclined to say that we're barking up the wrong arboreal fixture ... that there's something fundamentally wrong with what we're doing."
BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) has announced a strategic tie-up with Hewlett Packard (HP) to provide "a portfolio of solution"' to businesses on its smartphones.
Under the tie-up, Hewlett Packard will unveil HP CloudPrint to enable BlackBerry users to print emails, photos, web pages and other documents from their smartphones to the nearest printer - at home, in the office or on the road.
The California-based PC maker will also unveil HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server during the Wireless Enterprise Symposium at Orlando in Florida this year.
This manager (software) will "centrally monitor and manage the extended BlackBerry solution ecosystem.'' The ecosystem comprises the BlackBerry Enterprise Server software, mail servers, databases, Microsoft Active Directory and server operating systems such as Windows Server.
In a statement Monday, the Waterloo-based Canadian wireless giant said the solutions, including support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, will raise service levels, cut operations costs and improve productivity for customers.
The statement said RIM and HP will "design and launch offerings to increase the productivity levels of the growing number of mobile employees, enabling businesses to extend the return on their investments in mobility.''
RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said, "RIM and HP are working together to deliver solutions to customers that weave mobility into their daily operations - from innovative new services in the cloud to managed mobile services for the enterprise.
"Through our collaboration with HP, businesses will have access to an expanded set of applications and services for their BlackBerry smartphone deployments.''
HP executive vice president said, "As businesses look for new ways to increase service levels, reduce operational costs and improve productivity, they can meet these challenges by transforming how they manage the infrastructure that powers their mobile workforces.
"Emerging models of communications and collaboration have created an opportunity for RIM and HP to provide service-based mobile solutions that deliver value to customers."
BlackBerry shares jumped up $1.68 to $87.48 on the Toronto Stock Exchange after the announcement of the tie-up.
Vote or pay fine!
STUNG BY the low turnout in urban India, BJP's prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani (81) on Thursday floated the idea of making voting compulsory for Indians. Though there are many countries that have made voting compulsory, a Supreme Court bench headed by of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan said India records up to 60 per cent average polling and that was satisfactory. The idea of making voting compulsory was immediately rejected by Advaniâs opponents as well.
It is binding on the citizens of countries like Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, Greece, Singapore, Switrzerland and Uruguay to cast the ballot, however, the degree of enforcement varies.
A spokesperson of the Australian high commission said, Australia made voting compulsory in 1924. It is well regarded by the Australians who see it as a part of their civic duty. Those who donâte vote have to pay a nominal fine. There is no sense of infringement of peoples rights.
The turnout in Australia has never fallen below 90 per cent. Meanwhile, Uruguayan ambassador Cesar Ferrer told, With a population of 3.5 million Uruguay has a system of compulsory voting since 1971. In case of no show on poll day, Uruguayans have to justify on a case by case basis their absence or they face a fine.
The Swiss have to pay a fine of three francs, the Argentinians 10 to 20 pesos and Cypriots face a Cyprus £200 fine, while in some other countries non-voters can also face imprisonment, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. In Belgium those who don't vote find it difficult to find employment in the public sector and in Greece they have trouble procuring passport and driving licence, the institute added.
A lawsuit seeking compulsory voting had come up before the Supreme Court earlier this month. The court dismissed the lawsuit on the point that greater voter turnout could be brought about by creating awareness rather than enacting laws.