Time Is Truly A Complicated Matter

DidYouKnow.org 

Remember how as a child you were waiting for your birthday and how it seemed to take forever to arrive? And now as an adult, the time from Monday to Sunday passes all too briefly.

How does time do that? How does time trick us?

Looking from a scientific, psychological and biological perspective, the greatest influence on how we perceive time is made by our internal rhythms, gained experiences, and memories.

Everyone perceives time differently– Five minutes seems to be a definite time limit. However, after five minutes, ask ten people how it passed for them – did it go quick or did it seem long? We can bet that each of them would have a different opinion.

Emotions and time are connected– How do you feel? Happy, depressed, horrified, fascinated, angry, or sad? When you look at the full scale of emotions, you will soon realize that time is perceived differently during each of those sensations. However, one study suggests that pleasant emotions theoretically last longer.

Researchers say that negative emotions can be adopted in different ways; especially then it comes to anxiety or tension. Meanwhile, boredom is usually distinguished by the sense that time slows or stops.

The older we become, the faster time seem to pass– Why does time appear to pass more quickly the older we get?

It is argued that as a younger person gets acquainted with the world, all that new information raises a lot of intrigue and thus, according to Scientific American, a lot of “firsts”. But as we get older, we generally lack new experiences.

Psychologist William James, in his 1890 text Principles of Psychology, wrote that as we age, time seems to speed up because adulthood is accompanied by fewer and fewer memorable events.

One study states that 20-year-olds felt time quite accurately while the persons in their 70s significantly overestimated the time (they said, that the time has passed much faster). The mentioned Scientific American article points out the following:

“How fast did the last 10 years pass for you?” yielded a tendency for the perception of the speed of time (in the last decade, anyway) to increase with age; this pattern peaked at age 50, however, and remained steady until the mid-90s.

Latest technologies changing the concept of time– A few recently done studies state that social networks and smart devices are “stealing” our time more than we think about it. We are always checking the latest news or messages, often wasting time, and we become new technologies’ hostages. In fact, a 2013 Internet Trends report by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers shows that people check their phones up to 150 times a day. According to RawHide, “Every year, teens spend almost 7 full work days taking selfies.”

Stanford University psychologist Dr. Phillip Zimbardo believes that social networking is actually changing the concept of time, and how we take it.

So maybe if you are constantly online but can’t understand where the time passed, log off and enjoy your life without the blue screens.

Joan Rivers said it perfectly: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God’s gift, that’s why we call it the present.”

Past, present, future– However, if you don’t want tomorrow to be a mystery, you should realize that every moment is now, because the past and future concepts become one. The essence lies in the fact that every event in the past and the future is and will be affected by what we do now.

As G.I. Gurdjieff explained: “In order to know the future it is necessary first to know the present in all its details, as well as to know the past. Today is what it is because yesterday was what it was. And if today is like yesterday, tomorrow will be like today. If you want tomorrow to be different you must make today different.”

How Banks And Other Businesses Can  Avoid Becoming Cyber-Crime Victims

Courtesy of Gary S. Miliefsky

In February, Bangladesh’s central bank saw $81 million disappear out a virtual window. Now it’s been revealed that, although the computer hackers used custom-made malware, they probably didn’t need to work up a cyber sweat while pulling off their long-distance theft. The bank had no firewalls to defend against intruders and its computers were linked to global-financial networks through second-hand routers that cost $10.

Apparently, the heist couldn’t have been any simpler if it had been drawn up in the lunch line at an elementary school cafeteria.

“It’s stunning that a major institution would leave itself so defenseless in this day and age when everyone should know that cyber criminals are waiting for you to let your guard down,” says Gary S. Miliefsky, CEO of SnoopWall (www.snoopwall.com), a company that specializes in cyber security.

But he says the episode can serve as a cautionary tale for other banks and any businesses that want to protect themselves against today’s cyber versions of Bonnie and Clyde.

“Most companies have some vulnerability and it doesn’t take a sophisticated attack to cause a security breach,” Miliefsky says. “Often on the hackers’ end of things, it just takes patience.”

For example, he says, a cyber criminal can gain access by sending a company an email with an attachment called a Remote Access Trojan, or RAT, that looks like a normal file. All it takes is for an unsuspecting employee to open that file and, voila, security is compromised.

That’s bad for companies, of course, but it’s also bad for consumers, whose bank account, credit card and other private information is at risk.

Miliefsky says it’s important to go on the offensive. Among his recommendations:

• Employers need to train their staffs.Those employees sitting at their computers each day are a company’s first line of defense. An errant click on the wrong email is like unlocking the front door, so employees should be made aware of the dangers and told what do about suspicious email.
  • Companies should routinely update their defenses.Outdated technology and outdated security software make a company’s computers vulnerable to attack. It’s important that businesses periodically review their IT operations to make sure what worked last year still provides the needed security.
  • Consumers must take their own safety measures. It would be nice to expect banks and retailers to protect consumer information, but the average person can’t count on that. Miliefsky suggests consumers take personal security measures such as frequently changing passwords and deleting any phone apps they don’t use. Many apps contain malware that can spy on you.

“Most people log onto the internet every day without much thought about how susceptible they are to being hacked,” Miliefsky says. “It takes vigilance to protect yourself against cyber criminals who are working hard to figure their way around security measures.”