Ny Safidinao

As a motivational speaker and executive coach, Caroline Adams Miller knows a few things about using mental exercises to achieve goals. But last year, one exercise she was asked to try took her by surprise. ADVERTISEMENT Every night, she was to think of three good things that happened that day and analyze why they occurred. That was supposed to increase her overall happiness. "I thought it was too simple to be effective," said Miller, 44, of Bethesda. Md. "I went to Harvard. I'm used to things being complicated." Miller was assigned the task as homework in a master's degree program. But as a chronic worrier, she knew she could use the kind of boost the exercise was supposed to deliver. She got it. "The quality of my dreams has changed, I never have trouble falling asleep and I do feel happier," she said. Results may vary, as they say in the weight-loss ads. But that exercise is one of several that have shown preliminary promise in recent research i...

Microsoft is probably the greenest company in all of high technology. Not green in the environmental sense—green with envy. It is so jealous of the iPod’s success that last week it unveiled a new music system—pocket player, jukebox software and online music store—that’s an unabashed copy of Apple’s. It’s called Zune. The amazing part is that it’s Microsoft’s second attempt to kill the iPod. The first was PlaysForSure—a gigantic multiyear operation involving dozens of manufacturers and online music stores. Microsoft went with its trusted Windows strategy: If you code it, the hardware makers will come (and pay licensing fees). And sure enough, companies like Dell, Samsung and Creative made the players; companies like Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and MTV built the music stores. But PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex —something of a drawback when the system is called Pla...

A Florida voter may have unwittingly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by using an extremely rare stamp to mail an absentee ballot in Tuesday's congressional election, a government official said on Friday. The 1918 Inverted Jenny stamp, which takes its name from an image of a biplane accidentally printed upside-down, turned up on Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale, where election officials were inspecting ballots from parts of south Florida, Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom told Reuters. Only 100 of the stamps have ever been found, making them one of the top prizes of all philately. Rodstrom, a member of the county's Canvassing Board, said he spotted the red and blue Inverted Jenny on a large envelope with two stamps from the 1930s and another dating to World War Two. The nominal value of the four vintage U.S. Post Office stamps was 87 cents, he said. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I know that stamp, I've seen that stamp before,"' said Rodstrom, 54, wh...