This could be a new way to manage your email, set realistic expectations for others and …. most importantly, help to be present in the present.

Coping with Email Overload – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review.

Pomodoro timer (Image via Wikipedia)

I sometimes find myself overwhelmed by tasks and projects, and find it useful to chunk up my work into focused sprints during a fixed time frame—a concept used both in software development and in various time management practices.

I’ve been finding myself using the Pomodoro technique, a fancy name for doing 25-minute sprints punctuated by 5-minute intervals.

There are a wide variety of simple Pomodoro timers available:

• At home, I use Pomodoro for Mac
• At work, I use Focus Booster (for Mac and Windows)
• Some people like the Tomato Timer web app

What techniques do you use to maintain focus while juggling projects?

"Birthday cake" by Will Clayton, Flickr

How important are birthdays? Computer scientist Latanya Sweeney‘s work quantifies the importance of knowing someone’s date of birth when trying to re-identify partially de-identified data. She’s written a series of papers showing how multiple non-name attributes can work together to serve as functional identifiers when matched against publicly available databases like voter lists or public hospital visit data. Per her research, she estimates that:

• 87% of Americans can be uniquely identified by the combination of date of birth, gender, and ZIP code
• 53% of Americans can be uniquely identified by the combination of date of birth, gender, and city
• 18% of Americans can be uniquely identified by the combination of date of birth, gender, and county

However, substituting year of birth for the full day-month-year:

• 0.04% of Americans can be uniquely identified by the combination of birth year, gender, and ZIP code
• 0.04% of Americans can be uniquely identified by the combination of birth year, gender, and city
• 0.00004% of Americans can be uniquely identified by the combination of birth year, gender, and county

Read more:

• Latanya Sweeney’s research on identifiability

The CDC’s Public Health Matters blog posted a wonderful guide on how to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, starting off with a reference to zombie neurophysiology.

Conveniently, many zombie preparedness safety tips also carry over to other real-world dangers:

“In movies, shows, and literature, zombies are often depicted as being created by an infectious virus, which is passed on via bites and contact with bodily fluids. Harvard psychiatrist Steven Schoolman wrote a (fictional) medical paper on the zombies presented in Night of the Living Dead and refers to the condition as Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome caused by an infectious agent.

…

So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen? First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored). Below are a few items you should include in your kit, for a full list visit the CDC Emergency page.

• Water (1 gallon per person per day)
• Food (stock up on non-perishable items that you eat regularly)
• Medications (this includes prescription and non-prescription meds)
• Tools and Supplies (utility knife, duct tape, battery powered radio, etc.)
• Sanitation and Hygiene (household bleach, soap, towels, etc.)
• Clothing and Bedding (a change of clothes for each family member and blankets)
• Important documents (copies of your driver’s license, passport, and birth certificate to name a few)
• First Aid supplies (although you’re a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane)”

Read the whole thing, before the undead hordes come for you.

Image credit