• Should You Bring Your Unborn Baby to Work?
  It’s not so much a question of should you work with an unborn baby, but how much work is too much. The scientific data however, seems inconclusive.

  One possible explanation for the differing outcomes is this: contrasting social realities may affect how citizens of different countries respond to stressors. Denmark and other Nordic countries have legendary social safety nets, including laws that require employers to accommodate pregnant women by changing their duties or, if they can’t, allowing the women to go on leave. The absence of a relationship between maternal stress and preterm birth in Denmark, Danish scientists note, may really show that preventive measures are working, not that job strain never causes problems.

• The Credit Card Obsessives Who Game the System—and Share Their Secrets Online
  A light story about the world of credit card bloggers and the lifestyles that they seem to live due to their livelihood.

  “My friends and I say, ‘Chase the fare, not the destination,’” admits Michael Rubiano, a tech consultant who’s been collecting credit card miles for 25 years and calls himself a points “junkie.” Ben Schlappig, the 24-year-old blogger behind One Mile at a Time, kickstarted his points obsession at the tender age of 14 by doing mileage runs, taking trips for the sole purpose of earning miles. He adds that “a large part of the community doesn’t actually like to travel, but they love gaming the system.”

• The Hidden Effects of Cheap Oil
  We celebrate cheap gas prices, but there are going to be ripples around the world that we don’t really think about.

  The collapsing price of oil played a role in the recent rapprochement between Cuba and the United States. Venezuela’s economic crisis heightened the risk that Havana would no longer be able to count on the enormous subsidy it has enjoyed for more than a decade from Caracas. The Cuban regime was thus eager to find another source of economic support. It found one in America.

• Inside the Mad, Mad World of TripAdvisor
  I think TripAdvisor is useful, but has the same issues as other review sites like Yelp and Amazon which this article calls out: It’s not always easy to put yourself in the shoes of a biased review, so you probably won’t have the same experience.

  Those reviews carry demonstrable weight. A study by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research found that for every percentage point a hotel improves its online reputation, its “RevPAR” (revenue per available room) goes up by 1.4 percent; for every point its reputation improves on a five-point scale, a hotel can raise prices by 11 percent without seeing bookings fall off. This has been a boon for smaller, midpriced, independently owned hotels. “Twenty years ago, the brands owned the sense of quality,” says Bjorn Hanson, a professor at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. “If I stayed at a big-name hotel, I knew what I was getting.” That sense of confidence in quality, argues Hanson, has been supplanted by TripAdvisor.

• About Face
  The plastic surgery industry in South Korea is pretty well known, but this is still an interesting article into how it is done and the rationale of why people do it.

  “When you’re nineteen, all the girls get plastic surgery, so if you don’t do it, after a few years, your friends will all look better, but you will look like your unimproved you,” a college student who’d had a double-eyelid procedure told me. “We want to have surgeries while we are young so we can have our new faces for a long time,” another young woman said.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: pocket