Interesting

Got crap? Want money instead? Amazon has a neat program that essentially lets you dump old books, movies, gadgets, and more in a box, send it to them, and then wait for the money to roll in. Here's how you can start using it and sell your stuff in no time.

How Does FBA Work and Why Should I Use It?

The name of the program is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Although it is designed to let sellers with high inventory have sales, shipping, and customer support handled entirely by Amazon, you can use it too. The primary advantage of using the FBA program is convenience. You basically dump your crap in a box, tell Amazon what's inside of that box, print out a shipping label, and schedule a pickup request. The process generally takes an hour or two, unless you have more stuff than you could ever possibly sell, and if you've already got the box(es) you're going to use you don't even have to leave your home. When Amazon gets the box, they'll post all your items for sale on their product pages and people will be able to buy them. Amazon will ship the items out for you in their own packaging and handle any customer issues that may arise post-sale. For these services you pay a small storage fee, $1 for shipping and handling, and the commission you'd pay for selling on Amazon in general. Although this service is really great, there are a few downsides you should be aware of:

• It's not great for cheap items, such as used books or DVDs nobody wants anymore. Basically, if you can't sell your item for over $4 you probably won't make much money using this service. When you add items to your inventory, however, Amazon will tell you what you'll make when/if the item sells so you'll know before you send it in.
• Not every item is sellable through this service. While you can generally add anything you could sell yourself on Amazon.com, sometimes Amazon will require certain packaging to be present so they can more easily add it to their system. Basically, if you're missing a bar code or ISBN you might have trouble adding it to the system—but this is not always the case.
• Although the process is really easy once you get started and you understand what you're doing, it's a little cumbersome at first. If you get annoyed easily or are just in a bad mood today, you might get a little frustrated. You've been warned!

If that all sounds good, you're ready to get started.

Okay, Sold! Now How Do I Get Started?

Before you can start the selling process, you're going to need to do the following:

1. Assuming you already have an Amazon account, sign up for an Amazon Seller account. Just click "Sell Your Stuff" and skip the professional option—it costs money.
2. Add FBA to your seller account.
3. Go get some boxes. (Or have a few delivered.)
4. Get all your excess crap together and grab your computer.

Once you've done all of that you're ready to get started.

How to List Your Items with FBA

Every time you use FBA, you have to manage your inventory by boxes. If you're only sending Amazon a single box of stuff, this is very easy because you only have to manage one box listing on FBA. If you're sending multiple boxes, you have to simply create a new box every time you fill one up with crap you want Amazon to sell for you. This method is used so the Amazon employees that unpack your boxes and stick them on the shelves for sale will be able to easily and efficiently find the items you have listed. Just follow these steps to create your first "box" and fill it up with inventory:

1. Sign in to Amazon Seller Central (if you haven't already) and hover over the Inventory menu. A few options will drop down. Choose Add a Listing.
2. Enter in the name of the product you want to sell and click Search. (Alternatively you can enter its UPC, EAN, ISBN, or ASIN if you know it.)
3. When your choices appear, select the correct one by clicking the Sell Yours button.
4. The next page looks a little more complicated, but the only things you need to fill out are the item condition, the price, and the quantity. If it isn't already selected, you'll also need to tell Amazon this is an FBA item. You do that by selecting the radio button next to "I want Amazon to ship and provide customer service for my items if they sell." When you're done, Click Save & Finish. (You do not need to click next, as those other options are reserved for people with professional accounts.)
5. If you're a new seller, Amazon will probably present you with a page that's asking you to make sure you're not selling anything hazardous, prohibited by law, alive, is capable of killing someone, and so on. (You know, nothing fun.) Click the Send Inventory button to move on.
6. On the next page, you'll need to let Amazon know where the items are shipping from. Most likely, this will be your default address and it will be filled in for you already. If you need to change it, however, just click the Change Address button to do so. Second, you'll need to tell Amazon you're sending them a bunch of items in one box. Right now you probably have the Individual Items option selected, but you need to switch that to Case-Packed Items. You'll notice this changes the inventory list below and there are a couple of fields to fill in: Units per Case and Number of Cases. If you're selling one book, you'd just fill in the number 1 for both of these. If you were selling one six pack of soda, you'd enter 6 units per case and 1 number of cases. If you were selling two of the same DVD, you'd enter 1 units per case and 2 number of cases. Got it? Click continue.
7. Amazon will now use your address to find the closest facility. I'm in Los Angeles, so I was assigned to PHX3 (Phoenix, AZ). You'll now be asked to name your shipment. FBA will automatically provide you with a generic name, which you can keep if you want or change it to something more interesting (like "Magic Pony Surprise Shipment"). Once you've settled on a name, click Save & Continue.
8. If that was all your were going to ship, you'd be done creating your box—but you're not. To continue adding more of your crap, just follow these steps again. When you get to step 7 (the previous step), however, you'll now be able to choose Add to an Existing Shipment rather than being forced to create a new one. Just choose the shipment you've already created for your previous items to keep them all bundled together.

How to Ship Your Boxes

When you add an item, be sure to add it to the box it's going to be shipped in—or at least keep all the items grouped together—so you don't lose track of which item belongs in which box. Once you've got all your boxes done, there's just a little more work to do to get your items to Amazon:

1. After adding your last item to a box, you can click the Work on Shipment button to start the shipping process. Alternatively, you can always find your FBA shipments by choosing Manage FBA Shipments from the Inventory menu. You'll find the Work on Shipment button next to any unfinished boxes on the resulting page, too.
2. After clicking the button, look over your shipment to see if there are any last-minute changes you want to make. If not, click Save & Continue.
3. You'll now be taken to the item labeling page where you can print out labels for all of your items. Do that, attach the labels to your items, and click Save & Continue.
4. Now you get to pick the size of your shipment and the carrier you want to use. Choose SPD because you're not shipping much. LTL is for shipping pallets that are at least 150 lbs. That better not be you. On the other side of the screen you want to choose Amazon-Partnered Carrier (which is usually UPS). This will let you buy a label from Amazon at a discount and have the carrier come pick up your stuff. You can choose another carrier and ship everything yourself, but we're going to assume that you want the easiest possible method. When you're ready to move on, click the familiar Save & Continue button.
5. It's packing slip time! Choose how many packing slips you want to print. You're going to need to put one in the box, but you might want to keep one for yourself because, you know, who doesn't love a packing slip? Enter the number you want to print, click the Print button, and pack it in your box along with everything else. This time, when you're ready, just click Continue. (There is no need to save!)
6. On the next page, enter the dimensions of your box and its weight. If you can't measure the weight exactly, use this method and round up. Click the Save button (this time you don't have to continue) and then, once your information has saved, click the Get Cost Estimate button.
7. The resulting page will give you a shipping estimate and ask you to agree to be charged for that amount. Agree and then click Accept Charges & Continue.
8. Print your label, stick it on the box as instructed, and schedule a pickup with the carrier (or just drop it off at a shipping store/facility)

Although there are a lot of details necessary to get everything in order with FBA, once you've finished your first box you'll get the hang of it and will be able to breeze through the process. If you want to sell a bunch of your stuff, you can do it much faster and without the headaches that often come with online sales by using this service. Once Amazon receives your shipments and sells your items, you'll be able to transfer all the money you made right into your back account. It's very useful and a great way to get money for crap you don't want without much effort on your part.

(Most of the) illustrations by Leremy.

Adam Dachis

Unfortunately for one man in Las Vegas, a restaurant lived up to its name quite literally. While dining out on a "Triple Bypass Burger," a man suffered a heart attack at The Heart Attack Grill over the weekend.

It's well-known, says FOX5 in Vegas, that the eatery is not of the healthy sort. Diners over 350 lbs eat for free, with items to choose from like Flatliner Fries, Butterfat Milkshakes and the "quadruple bypass burger" which can exceed 8,000 calories. Yes, 8,000. You read that correctly.

Although the waitstaff all wear nurse outfits and the owner calls himself Dr. Jon, no one at the restaurant is actually medically trained, so paramedics were called when the man started showing symptoms of a heart attack in the middle of his meal, and he is reportedly alive and recuperating. Whew.

The restaurant owner said there have been "a variety of incidents" in the past, but that this was the first full-scale coronary on the premises. So, that's good news...?

*Can't forget to thanks Wayne for the tip!

Man suffers heart attack at Heart Attack Grill [FOX5 Las Vegas]

Post written by Leo Babauta.

Kids in today’s school system are not being prepared well for tomorrow’s world.

As someone who went from the corporate world and then the government world to the ever-changing online world, I know how the world of yesterday is rapidly becoming irrelevant. I was trained in the newspaper industry, where we all believed we would be relevant forever — and I now believe will go the way of the horse and buggy.

Unfortunately, I was educated in a school system that believed the world in which it existed would remain essentially the same, with minor changes in fashion. We were trained with a skill set that was based on what jobs were most in demand in the 1980s, not what might happen in the 2000s.

And that kinda makes sense, given that no one could really know what life would be like 20 years from now. Imagine the 1980s, when personal computers were still fairly young, when faxes were the cutting-edge communication technology, when the Internet as we now know it was only the dream of sci-fi writers like William Gibson.

We had no idea what the world had in store for us.

And here’s the thing: we still don’t. We never do. We have never been good at predicting the future, and so raising and educating our kids as if we have any idea what the future will hold is not the smartest notion.

How then to prepare our kids for a world that is unpredictable, unknown? By teaching them to adapt, to deal with change, to be prepared for anything by not preparing them for anything specific.

This requires an entirely different approach to child-rearing and education. It means leaving our old ideas at the door, and reinventing everything.

My drop-dead gorgeous wife Eva (yes, I’m a very lucky man) and I are among those already doing this. We homeschool our kids — more accurately, we unschool them. We are teaching them to learn on their own, without us handing knowledge down to them and testing them on that knowledge.

It is, admittedly, a wild frontier, and most of us who are experimenting with unschooling will admit that we don’t have all the answers, that there is no set of “best practices”. But we also know that we are learning along with our kids, and that not knowing can be a good thing — an opportunity to find out, without relying on established methods that might not be optimal.

I won’t go too far into methods here, as I find them to be less important than ideas. Once you have some interesting ideas to test, you can figure out an unlimited amount of methods, and so my dictating methods would be too restrictive.

Instead, let’s look at a good set of essential skills that I believe children should learn, that will best prepare them for any world of the future. I base these on what I have learned in three different industries, especially the world of online entreprenurship, online publishing, online living … and more importantly, what I have learned about learning and working and living in a world that will never stop changing.

1. Asking questions. What we want most for our kids, as learners, is to be able to learn on their own. To teach themselves anything. Because if they can, then we don’t need to teach them everything — whatever they need to learn in the future, they can do on their own. The first step in learning to teach yourself anything is learning to ask questions. Luckily, kids do this naturally — our hope is to simply encourage it. A great way to do this is by modeling it. When you and your child encounter something new, ask questions, and explore the possible answers with your child. When he does ask questions, reward the child instead of punishing him (you might be surprised how many adults discourage questioning).

2. Solving problems. If a child can solve problems, she can do any job. A new job might be intimidating to any of us, but really it’s just another problem to be solved. A new skill, a new environment, a new need … they’re all simply problems to be solved. Teach your child to solve problems by modeling simple problem solving, then allowing her to do some very easy ones on her own. Don’t immediately solve all your child’s problems — let her fiddle with them and try various possible solutions, and reward such efforts. Eventually, your child will develop confidence in her problem-solving abilities, and then there is nothing she can’t do.

3. Tackling projects. As an online entrepreneur, I know that my work is a series of projects, sometimes related, sometimes small and sometimes large (which are usually a group of smaller projects). I also know that there isn’t a project I can’t tackle, because I’ve done so many of them. This post is a project. Writing a book is a project. Selling the book is another project. Work on projects with your kid, letting him see how it’s done by working with you, then letting him do more and more by himself. As he gains confidence, let him tackle more on his own. Soon, his learning will just be a series of projects that he’s excited about.

4. Finding passion. What drives me is not goals, not discipline, not external motivation, not reward … but passion. When I’m so excited that I can’t stop thinking about something, I will inevitably dive into it fully committed, and most times I’ll complete the project and love doing it. Help your kid find things she’s passionate about — it’s a matter of trying a bunch of things, finding ones that excite her the most, helping her really enjoy them. Don’t discourage any interest — encourage them. Don’t suck the fun out of them either — make them rewarding.

5. Independence. Kids should be taught to increasingly stand on their own. A little at a time, of course. Slowly encourage them to do things on their own. Teach them how to do it, model it, help them do it, help less, then let them make their own mistakes. Give them confidence in themselves by letting them have a bunch of successes, and letting them solve the failures. Once they learn to be independent, they learn that they don’t need a teacher, a parent, or a boss to tell them what to do. They can manage themselves, and be free, and figure out the direction they need to take on their own.

6. Being happy on their own. Too many of us parents coddle our kids, keeping them on a leash, making them rely on our presence for happiness. When the kid grows up, he doesn’t know how to be happy. He must immediately attach to a girlfriend or friends. Failing that, they find happiness in other external things — shopping, food, video games, the Internet. But if a child learns from an early age that he can be happy by himself, playing and reading and imagining, he has one of the most valuable skills there is. Allow your kids to be alone from an early age. Give them privacy, have times (such as the evening) when parents and kids have alone time.

7. Compassion. One of the most essential skills ever. We need this to work well with others, to care for people other than ourselves, to be happy by making others happy. Modeling compassion is the key. Be compassionate to your child at all times, and to others. Show them empathy by asking how they think others might feel, and thinking aloud about how you think others might feel. Demonstrate at every opportunity how to ease the suffering of others when you’re able, how to make others happier with small kindnesses, how that can make you happier in return.

8. Tolerance. Too often we grow up in an insulated area, where people are mostly alike (at least in appearance), and when we come into contact with people who are different, it can be uncomfortable, shocking, fear-inducing. Expose your kids to people of all kinds, from different races to different sexuality to different mental conditions. Show them that not only is it OK to be different, but that differences should be celebrated, and that variety is what makes life so beautiful.

9. Dealing with change. I believe this will be one of the most essential skills as our kids grow up, as the world is always changing and being able to accept the change, to deal with the change, to navigate the flow of change, will be a competitive advantage. This is a skill I’m still learning myself, but I find that it helps me tremendously, especially compared to those who resist and fear change, who set goals and plans and try to rigidly adhere to them as I adapt to the changing landscape. Rigidity is less helpful in a changing environment than flexibility, fluidity, flow. Again, modeling this skill for your child at every opportunity is important, and showing them that changes are OK, that you can adapt, that you can embrace new opportunities that weren’t there before, should be a priority. Life is an adventure, and things will go wrong, turn out differently than you expected, and break whatever plans you made — and that’s part of the excitement of it all.

We can’t give our children a set of data to learn, a career to prepare for, when we don’t know what the future will bring. But we can prepare them to adapt to anything, to learn anything, to solve anything, and in about 20 years, to thank us for it.

“What’s the matter? You’re not eating?!”

I hate when I get hit with that question. It feels almost like a verbal assault, designed to guilt me into gorging. I usually respond with a polite, vague, “Thanks, but I just ate.” Or, “Thanks, but no.”

Truth is, I try to avoid social situations that revolve around eating. Whether it’s a party with endless spreads, birthday cake at work, or happy hour hors d’oeurvre hookups, I’ve always found food-focused socializing to be a recipe for discomfort. If I eat, I eat too much and feel uncomfortable later. And if I don’t eat I feel drenched in disapproval.

Apparently, it isn’t just my problem. According to a recent study conducted at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and other universities, people who scored highly on measures of being very concerned with pleasing others, winning approval, and maintaining harmonious relationships, were more likely to eat in a social context, regardless of hunger, especially if they felt their companion wanted them to eat.

Previous studies have shown that people who restrict their eating behavior in social situations may be perceived as having more self-control, and also as more antisocial and threatening. So the researchers speculated that people with a strong need to fit in and keep their companions happy might be motivated more by that need than the physical need to eat.

Eating to please others may have a high emotional, and weighty, price. When asked how they felt after a situation where they gave in to social pressure to eat, the people-pleasers reported not being happy with that choice afterward.

In a related study, published in February 2012 in the online journal PLoS One, researchers in the Netherlands observed the behavior of 70 pairs of young women eating together and found that the women mimicked the speed at which their companion ate, especially in the beginning. Bite for bite, they unconsciously kept pace with their dining partner. Not a good thing, if you’re trying to slow down to help prevent overeating.

So, armed with this knowledge, I’ll continue to avoid social feeding frenzies when possible, and try to be very aware of guilt-induced gorging pressures when I can’t. And I’ll still give the same type of polite, but vague, response when confronted with that slightly disapproving “What’s the matter? You’re not eating?”

Thanks Mom, but I’m not really hungry.

Sources

People-pleasing through eating: Sociotropy predicts greater eating in
response to perceived social pressure. [Journal of Social and Clinical
Psychology]

Mimicry of Food Intake: The Dynamic Interplay between Eating
Companions [PloS One]

Post written by Leo Babauta.

There is one little habit I’ve learned that has changed everything else in my life.

The pause.

When we fail, it’s because we act on urges without thinking, without realizing it. We have the urge to eat junk, and we do it. We have the urge to check email instead of writing a chapter of our book, and so we open our inbox. We have an urge to smoke, to drink, to do drugs, to chew our nails, to play a Facebook game, to procrastinate, to skip a workout, to eat more fries, to criticize, to act in jealousy or anger, to be rude … and we act on that urge.

What if instead we learned to pause after each urge? What if we stopped, looked at that urge, paid close attention to what it feels like inside our bodies, but didn’t act?

The urge would no longer control us. We would be able to make conscious choices that might be healthier for us, help us be happier.

If we can pause, we create space. Space to breathe, to think, to be without acting.

The pause is the answer to so many of our problems. Such a small thing, and so powerful.

To develop the pause, notice your next urge. Is it an urge to go check something online? Or eat something you know isn’t healthy for you? Pay attention to the urge, learn as much as you can about it. If you act on it after the pause, that’s OK. Just notice it, and pause, and pay attention.

Do it again for the next urge, and the next. You will get good at it with practice, and you’ll have lots of opportunities to practice.

The urges won’t go away, but your ability to pause will get stronger. And when you have the pause, you have everything.

iPhone: Waze, our favorite turn-by-turn navigation app for iPhone (and Android) just added a great new feature: hands-free operation. Now you can control Waze with a wave of your hand and the power of your voice.

The video above will give you an idea of how it works, but here's the gist. You can enable Waze to respond to either a three finger tap or just a wave of your hand over the screen. When you perform one of these actions, Waze will then load its voice control functionality and prompt you for input. You can report traffic conditions, ask for directions, notify others that you're running late, and more. It's pretty awesome and is, as always, another free feature in the already great free app.

The latest version of Waze is rolling out in the iTunes App Store today. Android users can expect this functionality in the coming months. For more info, check out the Waze blog.

Waze (Free) | iTunes App Store

Adam Dachis

The average person consumes about 3,300 milligrams of sodium per day, not including any salt added at the table, which is more than twice the recommended limit for about half of Americans, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most of that sodium comes from common restaurant or grocery store items. The CDC's latest Vital Signs report found that 65 percent of sodium comes from grocery store foods, while 25 percent comes from restaurants meals.

10 foods responsible for more than 40 percent of your sodium intake:

• Bread and rolls
  
• Cold cuts and cured meats
  
• Pizza
  
• Poultry
  
• Soups
  
• Sandwiches
  
• Cheese
  
• Pasta mixed dishes
  
• Meat mixed dishes
  
• Savory snacks.

Excessive sodium consumption raises blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke, the nation's first and fourth leading causes of death. Reducing the sodium content of the 10 leading sodium sources by 25 percent would lower total dietary sodium by more than 10 percent, and could play a role in preventing up to an estimated 28,000 deaths per year, according to the CDC.

We recently reported about how nearly 7,000 consumers joined Consumers Union, the policy and advocacy arm of Consumer Reports, in a petition supporting regulatory efforts to set national, industry-wide targets to reduce sodium in processed and restaurant foods.

"Many American consumers are seeking a sensible solution to the growing levels of sodium in processed and restaurant foods," said Ioana Rusu, regulatory counsel for Consumers Union. "Unfortunately, the answer is not simply to put down the saltshaker, since an overwhelming majority of sodium intake comes from processed, pre-packaged foods."

Vital Signs: Food Categories Contributing the Most to Sodium Consumption — United States, 2007-2008 [CDC]

Over the last few days, there’s been a lot of talk about a flaw in iMessage that allows people to spy on your text messaging. If you want all the details on the not so easy to exploit glitch, check get it here.

Google has successfully wooed Apple’s Simon Prakash come work for it, marking the highest level Apple employee to leave to work for Google yet. Prakash was Apple senior director for project integrity and at this point, it’s not clear exactly what he will be doing for Google.

If you ever wondered what hard-core Android geek would think if he had to switch from Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to the iPhone 4S SlashGear/Android Community’s Chris Burns is doing just that. Check out what he thinks about the move here.

Earlier this week, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation announced a rule change that would cut off funding it had provided to Planned Parenthood to pay for breast exams. After a massive public outcry regarding this decision, the foundation today decided it had maybe made a mistake.

The Komen folks had been defending their actions all week by claiming that it pulled the Planned Parenthood funding because of new foundation rules forbidding it from providing grants to organizations that are under investigation. Planned Parenthood is currently being investigated by Congressman Cliff Stearns of Florida for allegations it illegally used federal funds to pay for abortions.

Even as late as last night, the Komen leadership maintained that it would probably not fund Planned Parenthood in the future -- regardless of an investigation -- because it only provides clinical breast exams and does not actually do mammograms, biopsies or provide cancer treatments.

Planned Parenthood countered that it provides the exact same services that a patient would get from visiting her OB/GYN.

Regardless, after sleeping on it -- and the voices of thousands very angry former donors -- Komen had a change of heart.

Here is the announcement from the foundation's board of directors:
We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives. The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics - anyone's politics.

Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public's understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.

We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

You can never have too much Dropbox space, and now for a special beta period you can grab some additional free space while Dropbox is testing their automatic photo and video uploading feature. In exchange for trying their experimental build, you can get up to 4.5GB of extra space for free.

Experimental Dropbox build 1.3.12 imports photos and videos automatically from cameras, phones, and SD cards and batch uploads and downloads files. The forum post on Dropbox says:

During this beta period, we are also offering additional free space to test automatic uploading of photos and videos. For every 500MB of photos and videos automatically uploaded, you'll receive another 500MB space bonus, up to 4.5GB total.

The downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux are only available from the forum post. Note that you're also strongly advised to make a backup of what's in your Dropbox before upgrading to this build (emphasis on the "experimental" wording). When I installed the client, the software automatically detected my SD card and started uploading the photos, which it put into a new "Camera Uploads" folder and my account had the extra 500MB automatically added. Sweet. Now to find some more photos and videos to add...

If you're looking for even more ways to increase your Dropbox storage capacity, there's always our cheapskate's guide to getting free Dropbox space and the Google AdWords method.

Experimental Forum Build 1.3.12 | Dropbox Forum via gHacks

Melanie Pinola

The FAA Modernization and Safety Improvement Act of 2012, more commonly known as the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Bill, has passed in congress. It changes air travel in a number of positive ways, providing you with additional rights during your flight. Here's what you need to know.

Food and water will always be accessible on the airplane. Previously it was required to make food and water available after two hours, but there are no longer limitations. If you are stranded on the tarmac, the airline will be required to have food and water ready.

Medical treatment will always be available to passengers who need it. Previously airlines were only required to provide medical treatment after two hours.

A Department of Transportation consumer hotline will be established so passengers can call toll-free with problems. This hotline will be published on the internet, prominently displayed by carriers on ticket counter signs, and printed on e-ticket confirmations.

Carriers will be required to post the maximum child safety seat size for every type of aircraft they operate to allow passengers to determine which safety seats will function on their flight.

Musical instruments will be treated the same as regular carry-on luggage so long as they meet the standard carry-on guidelines. Airlines will not be allowed to charge you a fee for bringing a musical instrument on to the plane.

A Department of Transportation Advisory Committee will be created in the interest of protecting the consumer flying experience. It will be made up of members of air carriers, airport operators, non-profit interest groups, and members of state and local governments.

Airlines will be required to refer passengers to a Department of Transportation web page that outlines insecticide use. When flying to some countries, the airplane cabin may need to be sprayed to prevent bug infestation. This list will be made available so passengers can determine if they are allergic to any spray that may be used on the aircraft.

Additionally, congress will be looking at ways to encourage airlines to be more generous with active members of military, the Comptroller General will study baggage fees and how baggage service can improve, and airline/airport contingency plans will be put into place. When all of these changes will go into effect is currently unclear, but they are a great improvement on current flying regulations.

For more information on the new bill, check out Flyer's Rights for a full overview. They were instrumental in getting these new provisions passed so you can fly more safely and comfortably.

Photo by Ilja Mašík (Shutterstock).

FAA Bill Passes! | Flyer's Rights

Adam Dachis

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Having a massage after strenuous exercise not only feels good, it reduces inflammation in muscles at the cellular level, researchers have found.(author unknown)

Dried apples are not only a nutritious snack, they're fantastically delicious too and easy to make at home. All you need is a little lemon juice and water and you can preserve a bunch of apples for the whole winter.

The Going Home to Roost blog notes it takes about five to six hours of baking the lemon-soaked apple slices in the oven. Then you can keep them in jars for a few days or freeze them for two days and then store for up to a whole year. Check out the link for the full directions.

It's a great snack to keep at your desk, stick in your kid's lunchbox, or pretty much anytime. Have another favorite healthy homemade snack idea? Share it with us in the comments.

DIY Dried Apples | Going Home to Roost

Melanie Pinola

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jason Freedman has done his share of public speaking, and despite experiencing the same racing heartbeat and anxiety common to all of us, he knows how to deliver a relaxed, natural presentation. Here's how he does it.

I just gave a presentation on 42Floors to 150 people. It went well. I was really proud of: 1) our team, 2) our product and 3) the way we were able to present it. It was as if we were telling people about it in our living room, but there just happened to be 150 people there. Afterwards, several people told me that it felt like it was a very polished presentation. But the reality is we didn't practice at all. In fact, three minutes before we went on stage, my co-founder turned to me and said, "Jason, we really should've practiced." I said, "Nah, don't worry. We'll be fine." And we winged it, and it came off ever so naturally.

Before I pat myself on the back too much, let me tell you how I felt inside. Thirty seconds before I was supposed to go on, I was standing there on the side and all of a sudden my heartbeat went from normal to racing like I was in the middle of marathon. Uggghhh. I hate it when this happens. It's kind of like how you feel when you blush: you're reminded how little control you have over your own body. For a brief moment, I was upset with my body for reacting this way. I was upset with myself for reacting this way, actually. I should be more confident than this.

For some background, I've done a tremendous amount of public speaking. I did speech and debate in high school, I've spoken to lots of large crowds, I have given this type of presentation many, many times before. This was also a really friendly crowd, and it was super informal. There was no reason for me to be nervous. But, there I was ready to go on, and I was worried that people standing near me would literally be able to see my heart beating this fast.

However, in those thirty seconds, from when my anxiety took hold until I started speaking, I squashed that nervousness almost completely. And that's what this post is about.

The key to public speaking is establishing a routine that solves for the thirty seconds between when your anxiety starts and when you need to go up on stage. After that nothing else really matters. Most normal people do not engage in public speaking regularly enough to be able to actually change any of the fundamentals about how they speak. The very best you can hope to do is to not sound worse than you do when speaking in your own living room. And that itself is actually a really good axiom to start with:

Don't try to become a good public speaker, just try to speak like a normal person while in public.

And the key to speaking normally in public is to squash your anxiety thirty seconds beforehand. Here are a few tricks that I know. Give them a shot.

How to Speak Like a Normal Person While in Public:

• Dribble Twice, Spin Once

  So this trick will take a little bit of time to develop, but it's probably the single most important thing that I'd recommend. When you watch a basketball player go to the free-throw line with the game on the line, he or she does the same routine every single time. It's always some sort of dribble twice, spin once routine. With the spotlight on him, he doesn't want to think about some small aspect of his form. He wants to not think at all. So he focuses on his trivial routine: dribble twice, spin once, shoot. The best he is hoping for is to shoot as well as he normally does in practice.

  I do the same thing with public speaking. I have found a very specific set of physical actions that I do seconds before I start speaking. For me, it's a specific stance that I get into where I stand up very straight, my toes are slightly pointed out, I take my hands and I clap them together. I grasp my hands together really firmly and rub them slowly with my elbows held high.

  I do it this way for one key reason – this is what I usually do anyway. As in, if you see me in my own living room, surrounded by friends, recounting a story of a time when I did something really awesome, you will often find that I am naturally in this stance. This is my natural confidence stance. So, when I'm feeling nervous, I force myself deliberately to take on my confidence pose.

  Jumping back to this public speaking event the other day. At T minus 30 seconds, my heart was beating incredibly fast, but at T minus 25 seconds I had one thing on my mind – hands clasped together, assume the pose, everything else will work out.

  You need to find your confidence pose. Whatever your two dribble, spin once routine is going to be, you need to find it long before your public speaking moment. The single best way to find it is to ask your co-founder or friends to find it for you. Show them this post, tell them you want help finding this pose, and then at some point in the next several weeks, they will see you do it naturally and can point it out for you. And then, you need to figure out exactly what it is about this pose that feels good and practice it over and over again. So the next time when you're up on stage and you're getting really nervous and you have that weird feeling where you just don't know where to put your hands and you just know that in your pockets is like the most awkward thing in the world...at that point – dribble twice, spin once, and shoot.

• Death to Powerpoint

  Powerpoint is this devious device that takes reasonably good speakers and makes them painfully bad. Traditional bullet-point laden Powerpoint decks are only useful for communicating your ideas with visuals and emailing them to people. They are not useful for aiding you in your speaking ability. And that's why most really good speakers stopped using Powerpoint in the traditional way. Throw away all slides that have more than ten words on them (or move them to an appendix).

  It's okay to use slides when they takes almost no focus off of you, the speaker. That's for two reasons. The first is, the focus really should be on you, so having an Apple-like slide with one or two words on it is totally fine because it communicates a point and gets the focus back on you. (Note-the only exception is when you demo your product. Then you do want the attention on the screen.) The second reason is even more important: Powerpoint bullet slides take away your attention from your audience. When you turn around to read a slide, you are forcing yourself out of your own rhythm.

• Speak to Two People

  Remember our goal is to speak like a normal person in public. The best way to speak like a normal person is to actually talk to a real person, and not hundreds of people. So, as I stand there about ready to speak – in my stance, rubbing my hands together – I look to the left side of the room and to the right side for a random person that seems comforting. When I actually start speaking, all I want to do is speak to those two people. I've never met them but I want to lock in on those two people and just tell them a simple story as if they were sitting in my living room. I can pace back and forth and look left and right in the crowd, and yet all I'm really doing is going back and forth between my two people. It's super simple; it totally works.

• Embrace Your Ums

  Um is a verbal tick. It is unconscious and nearly impossible to remove. If your career is going to be an actor, public speaker, politician, whatever . . . go work on your ums and this post was never for you anyway. If you are a normal person, you are not going to get rid of them. And anyone who harps on you because of them is actually doing you a disservice because they are forcing you to speak differently than you speak as a normal person. Paul Graham is one of my favorite public speakers, and he says um all the freaking time. But, he's a powerful speaker, he's lucid and most importantly, he's authentic. Focus on what really matters.

• Don't Memorize

  Memorizing does absolutely nothing for you. The only thing worse than a scripted, memorized speech is a ‘read' speech. So, don't ever read your speeches, either. You are pitching your start-up and trying to inspire people to believe in your vision. It doesn't matter what the actual words are, they're all judging you anyway. And when you memorize your speech, or read your speech, you are communicating that you suck at this. And you don't. You're a normal person – you have the capacity to speak like a normal person.

• Practice with Live Ammunition

  Over-practice can really hurt you, especially if you do it in a fake way. One of the worst things you can do to prepare is to practice over and over again alone. Because that is nothing like the situation that you are going to be in. We speak very, very awkwardly alone. When you are making passionate speeches inside of your car, you look like a crazy person and you feel like a crazy person. Your performance there will be nothing like your performance on stage. Your goal, always remember, is to get back to how you speak in your living room. So do that.

  Ask your co-founders to put you on the spot in front of groups of people. So, if you guys are at some random party, empower your co-founders to play this little trick on you: Without giving you warning, they can yell out for everyone to get quiet because you want to tell them something. You will have zero time to get nervous, you will have to start immediately, and you will do the best job that you can. And if you do that five times before your big public speaking engagement, you will be far better prepared than if you had spoken to the mirror a hundred times.

One final note to that group of 150 people that just saw me speak: Yes, I was absolutely, totally, freakin' nervous. If that's you as well, you already know how to reach me, let's practice together.

Public Speaking for Normal People | humbledMBA

Jason is a serial entrepreneur, based in Silicon Valley. He's currently the founder of 42Floors, building a better way to search for commercial real estate: 42floors.com. You can read more from Jason at his blog humbledmba.com and keep up with him on Twitter @jasonfreedman.

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Jason Freedman

Under a new settlement agreement in California, the maker of Brazilian Blowout products is required to warn consumers and hair stylists that two of its popular hair-straightening products emit formaldehyde gas.

The settlement requires GIB, which does business as Brazilian Blowout, to stop advertisements that describe two of its products as formaldehyde-free and safe. Brazilian Blowout must also make significant changes to its website and pay $600,000 in fees, penalties and costs. The settlement also requires that Brazilian Blowout disclose refund policies to consumers before the products are purchased.

In its announcement of the settlement, the California Department of Justice said it was the first government enforceable action in the U.S. to address exposure to formaldehyde gas associated with Brazilian Blowout products, and also the first law enforcement action under California's Safe Cosmetics Act, which went into effect in 2005.

Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. The Food and Drug Administration received a number of inquiries from consumers and salon professionals concerning the safety of Brazilian Blowout and similar "professional use only” hair smoothing products. In August 2011, the FDA issued a warning letter citing Brazilian Blowout for safety and labeling violations. The action followed a hazard alert the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued in April 2011 to hair salon owners and workers about potential formaldehyde exposure from working with these products.

In 2010, Brazilian Blowout sued the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services after that agency sampled more than 100 “formaldehyde-free” products from 50 salons and found “significant levels” of formaldehyde.

Attorney General Kamala D. Harris Announces Settlement Requiring Honest Advertising over Brazilian Blowout Products [California Department of Justice]
Oregon OSHA reiterates caution to salons using hair-smoothing products [OSHA]
Brazilian Blowout Sues Oregon OSHA over False and Misleading Test Results [Brazilian Blowout]
FDA, OSHA Act on Brazilian Blowout [FDA]

(Reuters) - Efforts to legalize marijuana for recreational use are gaining momentum in Washington state and Colorado, despite fierce opposition from the federal government and a decades-long cultural battle over America's most commonly used il...Alex Dobuzinskis

When you're staring down the barrel of a new diet, your portions are one of the most difficult things to measure and keep track of. Your kitchen scale may be great in the comfort of your home, but it's not practical to carry with you all day. Instead, just get to know the rough estimates with your hand.

If the idea looks familiar, that may be because earlier this month Melanie walked through the basics of this idea, highlighting its usefulness for cooks. This morning, while signing up for Weight Watchers (yeah, that's right, Weight Watchers—I've used it before, and it works really well if game mechanics work on you, and even if you're not looking to lose a lot of weight, it's good at keeping you healthier), I stumbled onto the handy cheatsheet in the image above.

• 1 cup = your first
• 1 ounce = the meaty part of your thumb
• 1 tablespoon = your thumb, minus the meaty part
• 1 teaspoon = the tip of your index finger
• 1 inch = the middle section of your index finger
• 1-2 ounces of a food like nuts or pretzels = your cupped hand
• 3 ounces of meat, fish, or poultry = the palm of your hand

Obviously these are rough estimates, and their accuracy will vary based on the size of your hand, but it's not a bad starting point. If you happen to have a kitchen scale at home, you could use that and some measuring spoons to determine just how well these measurements work with your hand and set your own baselines if any of the measurements are considerably off. As I said, Mel covered these basics a couple weeks back, but I found the Weight Watchers diagram very helpful.

Adam Pash

Measuring blood pressure on both arms rather than only one can reveal an elevated risk of heart disease or even death, according to a study released Monday.(author unknown)

Zapping testicles with ultrasound can reduce sperm counts and might be used in the future as an inexpensive, reliable and reversible male contraceptive, according to US researchers.(author unknown)

If you like to cook with scallions (aka green onions or green shallots) did you know you can keep the white root ends from purchased scallions in a glass of water and they will regrow almost indefinitely?

Household weblog Homemade Serenity shares how scallion ends can regrow in in a glass of water. Just put the root ends in a glass of water and put that glass in a sunny window. After a few days you should be able to begin harvesting the green ends of the scallions. Make sure you change the water every so often and cut what you need with scissors before cooking.

Putting Food By - Beef, Onions, and Vanilla | Homemade Serenity via Punk Domestics

David Galloway