Bing Wallpapers (2/28/2015)

Polar bear on a barrier island in the Beaufort Sea, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska

© Patrick Endres/plainpicture

The Redwood National and State Parks of California

© David Fortney/Corbis Motion

American Falls as seen from Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, February 19, 2015
© ZUMA/REX

Holuhraun volcanic eruption, Iceland

© Johnathan Ampersand Esper/Aurora Photos

Bethesda Terrace’s lower passage in Central Park, New York City

© Sean Pavone/Shutterstock

Fort Bourtange, Netherlands

© Amos Chapple/Rex Features

The article originally appeared at Hotchpotch Post. It has been reproduced after taking permissions from Hotchpotch Post.

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How to add a Legacy contact to your Facebook profile

Open your Settings. Choose Security and the Legacy Contact at the bottom of the page.

 

After choosing your legacy contact, you’ll have the option to send a message to that person.

You may give your legacy contact permission to download an archive of the posts, photos and profile info you’ve shared on Facebook.

Facebook has also redesigned memorialized profiles to pay tribute to the deceased by adding “Remembering” above their name and making it possible for their legacy contact to pin a post to the top of their Timeline.

The article originally appeared at Hotchpotch Post. It has been reproduced after taking permissions from Hotchpotch Post.

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Facebook added 'Legacy Contact' feature

Facebook added a new feature to its website called 'Legacy Contact', a feature that lets people choose a legacy contact—a family member or friend who can manage their account when they pass away.
Facebook said "Facebook is a place to share and connect with friends and family. For many of us, it’s also a place to remember and honor those we’ve lost. When a person passes away, their account can become a memorial of their life, friendships and experiences."
"By talking to people who have experienced loss, we realized there is more we can do to support those who are grieving and those who want a say in what happens to their account after death."
If a user wishes, they can choose to appoint a friend or family member to take control of some aspects of the account after their death.
These features were among the most requested by users who gave feedback on its memorial page policies.
When a Facebook user passes away, Facebook will memorialize the account and the legacy contact will be able to:

• Write a post to display at the top of the memorialized Timeline (for example, to announce a memorial service or share a special message)
• Respond to new friend requests from family members and friends who were not yet connected on Facebook
• Update the profile picture and cover photo

People can also choose to give their legacy contact permission to download an archive of the photos, posts and profile information they shared on Facebook.

Other settings will remain the same. The legacy contact will not be able to log in as the person who died or see their private messages.
Facebook added "People can let us know if they’d prefer to have their Facebook account permanently deleted after death.
Until now, when someone passed away, we offered a basic memorialized account which was viewable, but could not be managed by anyone. By talking to people who have experienced loss, we realized there is more we can do to support those who are grieving and those who want a say in what happens to their account after death."
Check our post "How to add legacy contact on facebook" to see how to choose a legacy contact.
Facebook has been looking at ways to help families remember loved ones following a series of high-profile cases in which people wanted to access dead relative's pages.
In one a father wanted to create a video using Facebook's Look Back feature, which brings together popular moments on a person's profile.
But because he could not access his son's profile he was unable to make one.
Facebook said it would create one on behalf of his dead son and promised that they would look again at how to help families in similar circumstances.
In 2009, Facebook introduced a memorialising process which meant that a user who had died would no longer appear alongside advertising, or in contextual messages - and friends would not be reminded of a person's birthday.

The article originally appeared at Hotchpotch Post. It has been reproduced after taking permissions from Hotchpotch Post.

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Playing a musical instrument can improve a child's brain

According to an investigation of the association between playing a musical instrument and brain development, kids who are trained in music have better attention spans, a better grip on their emotions, and are less likely to be anxious.

Psychologist have studied the connection between musical training and brain development to find that the hobby can shape a young person’s brain and help them with functions such as emotion processing and focusing attention.
Run by researchers at the University Of Vermont, College Of Medicine in the US, the study follows on from research conducted previously by professor of psychiatry and Vermont Centre for Children director, James Hudziak. In previous years, Hudziak had been working with the US National Institutes of Health to complete an MRI study of what normal brain development looks like. His team then used this data to observe the brain development of 232 children aged six to 18. Children have particularly adaptable brains, and as they grow up, the outer layer of the brain - the cortex - experiences changes in thickness. In an earlier study, Hudziak and his team first discovered that thinning or thickening of specific areas of the cortex can be linked to instances of anxiety or depression, problems with attention span, aggression and other behavioral problems, even in kids who are otherwise perfectly healthy.  More recently, the team decided to see if a ‘positive activity’ - for example, musical training - could influence cortex thickness and mitigate any negative effects.


Publishing in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the team’s findings support a model proposed by Hudziak called the Vermont Family Based Approach. Rather sensibly, the model suggested that everything in a young person’s environment, including their family, friends, teachers, pets, and hobbies, all contribute to their psychological health. And “music is a critical component in my model,” says Hudziak in a press release.
The team found that because learning a musical instrument calls for control and coordination of very specific movements, the activity alters the motor areas of the brain. But it also controls the changes experienced by areas of the brain that regulate behavior. For example, it reportedly influences thickness in the part of the cortex that relates to "executive functioning, including working memory, attentional control, as well as organization and planning for the future,” the team writes.
They also found that a child's musical background was also correlated to the thickness of the cortex in areas that play a crucial role in emotion processing and inhibitory control.
Referring to the fact that three-quarters of high school students in the US rarely or never take up a hobby in music or the arts, Hudziak says we need to make an effort to make these activities more attractive to young people.
"Such statistics, when taken in the context of our present neuro-imaging results," the team writes, "underscore the vital importance of finding new and innovative ways to make music training more widely available to youths, beginning in childhood."

Adapted from Sciencealert.

The article originally appeared at Hothcpotch Post. It has been reproduced after taking permissions from Hotchpotch Post.

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