KACHARAGADLA

There’s no shortage of advice out there claiming to make you better, but mindfulness meditation is the rare, research-proven technique that boosts your performance by physically altering your brain. Researchers from the University of British Columbia recently pooled data from more than 20 studies to understand how practicing mindfulness affects the brain. While the researchers found significant changes in eight brain regions, there are two regions that are of particular importance to you. In these brain regions, the simple act of practicing mindfulness increased both brain activity and the density of brain tissue: 1. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC ), which is responsible for self-control. It enables you to resist distractions, to focus and to avoid impulsivity in order to work efficiently and make great decisions. The ACC is also responsible for flexibility, and people who have problems in this brain area are known to stick to ineffective problem-solving strategies

Your LinkedIn profile is your online billboard. Before LinkedIn arrived on the scene in 2003, a lot of people built and maintained personal websites that showcased their professional accomplishments. We don’t need personal websites anymore because you can use LinkedIn for the same purpose. Who would ever find your personal website? Everyone can find you on LinkedIn! The more connections you have, the more visible your profile will be. The more followers you have on LinkedIn, ditto. Here are 10 brand-damaging mistakes that will kill your LinkedIn profile’s effectiveness whether you are job-hunting, looking to build your business or just looking to grow your network and your credibility. Your LinkedIn Profile Photo You don’t need to pay a photographer to take a photo of you that you’ll use for your LinkedIn profile, but you have to have that photo! When the space where your photo should be is left blank, the rest of us instantly see you in our mind’s eye looking like the Jason

Most career-minded professionals have a LinkedIn profile (there are over 400 million members), but having a profile is not enough. It needs to be a stellar profile, and you need to have a strategy for using LinkedIn to advance you career and deliver greater value to your employer. In this post, I share the three-step process for getting the most from LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is so vast with copious opportunities for personal branding, I only focus on the features I think will have the greatest impact on your success. But before you get all excited about having the perfect LinkedIn profile and strategy, you need to get clear about your personal brand. Your LinkedIn profile is the electronic version of you. So you need to know who you are, what separates you from your peers and what makes you relevant and compelling to stakeholders. This will ensure you build an accurate impression of you in the virtual world that’s congruent with the real-world you. Once you have clarity a

After seeing the environmental hazards that burning rice waste was causing at her family farm in North India, then-15 year old Bisman Deu saw an opportunity to create something useful, and developed an environmentally sustainable building material out of the farm’s biggest waste product. She’s 18 now, and finishing school in Chandigarh, but Deu is on a journey with her product, Green Wood, as it becomes more relevant now than ever before. Bisman Deu speaks at a UNICEF State of The World’s Children Conference 2015 in New York. Photo courtesy of UNICEF. To understand Deu’s product, one needs to understand the levels of  dire pollution  that the entire North India region suffers as a result of two major burning seasons for farmers. The first round is in May, during the heat of summer when wheat chaff is burnt and rice crops are sown, and the second in November when rice paddy is burnt and wheat crops are sown. Deu’s family farm in the North Indian city of Amritsar grow

Last month was a quiet watershed in debt capital market history, reversing the decades-old, untrammeled legal privilege of rating agencies to express their credit views. Superficially, the cases were very different—one in Hong Kong involving emerging market corporate research, another in the state of California involving a highly structured money market type investment—but both featured substandard credit information and spillover volatility into related, non-credit markets. The essence of the California case was whether ratings are automatically protected by the American Constitution, even if negligently produced. In a nutshell, the California courts said “no.” The essence of the Hong Kong case was whether its securities regulator, the SFC, had jurisdiction over credit research published by the agencies it licenses. In a nutshell, the Hong Kong Tribunal said “yes.” On March 9, 2016, Moody’s Investors Service agreed to pay $130 MM to settle a 2009 $1 billion lawsuit by the Califo