Starbucks Flu Remedy: The Center for Disease Control claims the flu is widespread in 36 states. The Los Angeles Times claims people are flocking to Starbucks to treat their cold and flu symptoms. They are ordering a secret menu item called the Medicine Ball. It contains hot water, half steamed lemonade, one bag of Teavana Jade Citrus Mint tea, one bag of Teavana Peach Tranquility tea, a packet of honey and a pump of peppermint.
Here’s How to Get Back on Track if You’ve Already Given Up on Your New Year’s Resolution
We’re less than two weeks into the New Year, and I know a ton of you have already given up on your New Year’s resolution. Here’s how to get back on track.
1. If you can’t stick to your diet, it might be too ambitious. Instead of aiming to cut out ALL carbohydrates or doing a juice detox, choose something more reasonable . . . like keeping your sugar intake under 5% of your daily calories or making half your plate vegetables each meal.
2. If you’ve been to the gym less than twice this year, either you didnt have a plan going in, or your exercise plan was way too much so you gave up.To get back on track, pick some exercises you LIKE, and then schedule time to do them. So if you HATE running, don’t make yourself run. But going for a walkaround the neighborhood and adding in some jogging intervals could work.
3. If you haven’t paid off any debt, it’s okay . . . you probably haven’t even gotten your first paycheck of the year. But this one is easy to give up on before you even get started because unplanned expenses ALWAYS come up.
So a goal of paying off $5,000 in credit card debt can easily get off track if you procrastinate. Instead, try to put $100 toward your credit card debt every week, which will keep you on schedule and accountable.(Lifehacker / Mental Floss)
Facebook is making a big change to your news feed
Facebook has overhauled how it ranks the posts, videos and photos that appear in its users’ News Feeds, introducing major changes on Thursday designed to put what friends and family have to say first.
In short, you’ll see more posts from friends that have sparked lively debates in the comments. And you’ll see fewer cooking videos from brands and publications. Prioritizing what your friends and family share is part of an effort by Facebook to help people spend time on the site in what it thinks is a more meaningful way.
Facebook is making the changes by tinkering under the hood, reconfiguring its algorithms that guess what you may be most interested in. Here’s what it means for you.
Publishers and brands are the losers.
Facebook is not being coy about this: Those third-party organizations that took over large swaths of your News Feed years ago — sites that post funny pictures and memes, sell you clothing, or deliver articles about the world — will have the visibility of their posts scaled back under the new arrangement.
In a post on the company’s blog Thursday, the head of its News Feed team, Adam Mosseri, wrote that showing more posts from friends and family “means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.”
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For many people, that news will come as a relief. In December, Facebook itself acknowledged that passive consumption of information — surfing shopping websites or reading news articles like this one — is often bad for your mood. (Sorry!)
It gestured toward a 2015 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychologythat showed that passive usage of the website, even for just 10 minutes a day, had a negative effect on students’ sense of well-being.
Those who still want to see posts from their favorite brands and trusted, wonderful publishers, one of whose articles you may be reading at this very moment, will be able to. The options under the News Feed tab on Facebook will allow users to prioritize the pages (and friends) whose posts they are most interested in.
And Mr. Mosseri explained that other posts that your Facebook connections find engaging will also rise to the top. Conversations stemming from live videos, celebrities’ posts, private groups and other highly interactive post types will be among those highlighted on the new News Feed.
