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Rapid economic expansion, with GDP growth of nearly 6 percent in 2011 — its highest in four years — has led to an increase in house buying especially among the growing middle-class. Plus a decade-long military offensive against illegal armed groups has made it safer to do business in the country, attracting a flood of foreign investment, which has in turn boosted property prices. Foreign direct investment jumped more than 30 percent in the first quarter of 2012 to $4.2 billion compared to the period last year.

Property prices went up 3.2 percent year on year in 2011, while new home sales were up 19 percent in the first half of last year compared to the period a year earlier, according to government figures.

 

4. Singapore
5-year price growth: 50.5 percent
Singapore is the most expensive real estate market in Southeast Asia. The average price of a prime property in the city-state was $25,600 per square meter or $2,600 per square foot in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to Knight Frank.

The country also ranked as the third most expensive city to rent high-end property in Asia last year after Hong Kong and Tokyo, according to research firm ECA International. Low interest rates and a wave of immigration in recent years have boosted demand for homes.

A regional financial hub, Singapore has a large foreign population that’s helping to drive home prices. Foreigners make up more than one-third of Singapore’s 5.2 million people and accounted for 18 percent of new homes sold in the third quarter of 2011, according to Citigroup. Among foreign buyers, mainland Chinese are the largest group , accounting for 30.6 percent of foreign sales in the third quarter of 2011, according to real estate firm DTZ.

Public discontent over soaring property prices has led the government to implement measures to cool the market. In December, the government hit foreign property buyers with an additional stamp duty equal to 10 percent of the property value. This has contributed to property prices marking their first quarterly fall in nearly three years of 0.1 percent in January to March this year.

 

3. Israel
5-year price growth: 54.5 percent
Israel is holding on to its spot as the third-hottest housing market in the world since 2009, when house prices jumped more than 21 percent, followed by 16 percent growth in 2010, according to Knight Frank.

High home prices in Israel led to a series of protests in 2011 with demonstrators asking the government to intervene to cool the market. Thousands of protesters made headlines with tent cities last July to voice concerns over a housing shortage and high rentals. The demonstrations seem to have had an effect on property prices, which fell 1.2 percent in 2011, according to Knight Frank.

However, after an interest rate cut from 3.25 percent to 2.5 percent in February, there appears to be resurgence in property demand, with new mortgages issued by banks jumping more than 14 percent in March compared to the two pervious months.

 

2. Hong Kong
5-year price growth: 93.7 percent
Property in Hong Kong is among the world’s most expensive. As a major global financial center, the city overtook London last year as the world’s most expensive office rental market, according to Knight Frank.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the average price of a home in prime areas was about $47,500 per square meter or $4,400 per square feet — the fourth-highest in the world.

The growing wealth of mainland Chinese, coupled with China’s property restrictions, has led to an influx of mainland buyers into Hong Kong’s residential market in recent years. According to industry estimates, three in 10 deals in Hong Kong’s luxury property markets are done by mainland Chinese buyers.

Protests from locals over high prices and foreign buying led the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to introduce a measure last year that requires buyers whose principal incomes are not in Hong Kong to pay an extra 10 percent in down payment when buying a house.

All this has led to a slowdown in recent months. Housing prices grew only 11.3 percent in 2011, compared with 20.1 percent in 2010, according to Knight Frank. And year-to-date prices have grown by a more moderate 6.7 percent , according to market estimates. Sales of luxury homes valued over $1.29 million also decreased 23.6 percent in February following a 17.4 percent fall in January, according to Knight Frank.

 

1. China
5-year price growth: 110.9 percent
China is the world’s hottest property market. Housing prices in major cities Beijing and Shanghai have surged by over 110 percent in the past five years as the world’s second biggest economy experiences rapid growth.

A home in Shanghai’s prime areas cost $19,400 per square meter or $1,800 per square foot in the fourth quarter of 2011. In Beijing, the same home cost an average $17,400 per square meter or $1,600 per square foot, according to Knight Frank.

Fears of a developing asset bubble have led the government to spend much of the last two years reining in red-hot house prices by limiting multiple home purchases, raising interest rates and hiking bank reserve requirements. The years of tightening measures started showing results in the second half of last year with home prices marking a fifth straight month-on-month drop to 0.1 percent in February.

Despite the recent cooling, the country’s home prices are still far from a reasonable level, according to Premier Wen Jiabao, who has maintained that the government will not relax tightening restrictions this year. China’s average home prices are expected to fall between 10 percent and 20 percent in 2012, according to a Reuters survey.

The country’s property developers, meanwhile, have enjoyed rising sales this year. Vanke, China’s biggest developer by sales, reported March sales rising 24 percent year on year — the second-straight month of gains. While the country’s largest developer by market value, China Land Overseas, saw February sales hit $1.7 billion, up 209 percent from the same month a year ago.

By: Charles Choi

Talking to yourself might not mean you are crazy — it can actually benefit thinking and perception, researchers say.

People often talk to themselves — most do so at least every few days, and many report doing so on an hourly basis, scientists have said. Although such muttering might seem irrational, past research has shown that self-directed speech can help guide children’s behavior, with kids often taking themselves step-by-step through tasks such as tying their shoelaces, as if reminding themselves to focus on the job at hand.

To see if talking to oneself could also help adults, psychologists conducted experiments with volunteers who had to search for specific items. This work was inspired in part by the researcher’s own self-talk. “I’ll often mutter to myself when searching for something in the refrigerator or supermarket shelves,” said researcher Gary Lupyan, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In one experiment, volunteers were shown 20 pictures of various objects and asked to look for a specific one, such as a banana. In half of the trials, participants were asked to repeatedly say what they were looking for out loud to themselves; in the others, they were asked to remain silent. The researchers found self-directed speech helped people find objects more quickly by about 50 to 100 milliseconds. (The average time it took participants to find an item was 1.2 to 2 seconds.)

People often talk to themselves — most do so at least every few days, and many report doing so on an hourly basis, scientists have said. Although such muttering might seem irrational, past research has shown that self-directed speech can help guide children’s behavior, with kids often taking themselves step-by-step through tasks such as tying their shoelaces, as if reminding themselves to focus on the job at hand.

To see if talking to oneself could also help adults, psychologists conducted experiments with volunteers who had to search for specific items. This work was inspired in part by the researcher’s own self-talk. “I’ll often mutter to myself when searching for something in the refrigerator or supermarket shelves,” said researcher Gary Lupyan, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In one experiment, volunteers were shown 20 pictures of various objects and asked to look for a specific one, such as a banana. In half of the trials, participants were asked to repeatedly say what they were looking for out loud to themselves; in the others, they were asked to remain silent. The researchers found self-directed speech helped people find objects more quickly by about 50 to 100 milliseconds. (The average time it took participants to find an item was 1.2 to 2 seconds.)

“The general take-home point is that language is not just a system of communication, but I’m arguing it can augment perception, augment thinking,” Lupyan told LiveScience. [10 Fun Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp]

In another experiment, volunteers carried out a virtual shopping task in which they saw photos of items commonly found on supermarket shelves and were asked to find all instances of a particular item, such as Jell-O, as quickly as possible. The results were more complex — there was an advantage to speaking the name of an item only when volunteers looked for familiar objects. For instance, saying “Coke” helped when looking for Coke, but saying the less familiar item “Speed Stick” when looking for Speed Stick deodorant actually slowed people down. (Speed stick isn’t such a “universally” common item.)

“Speaking to yourself isn’t always helpful — if you don’t really know what an object looks like, saying its name can have no effect or actually slow you down,” Lupyan said. “If, on the other hand, you know that bananas are yellow and have a particular shape, by saying banana, you’re activating these visual properties in the brain to help you find them.”

Future work can scan the brain at the same time as these experiments are conducted, to see what brain circuits are involved, Lupyan suggested.

Lupyan and his colleague Daniel Swingley detailed their findings online April 10 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

 

Livescience

 

Happiness may stem from a balanced perspective involving looking fondly on the past, enjoying the present and having goals to strive for in the future.

A new study by San Francisco State University researcher Ryan Howell and his colleagues demonstrates that having this sort of “balanced time perspective” can make people feel more vital, more grateful, and more satisfied with their lives. Their findings are reported online in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

“If you are too extreme or rely too much on any one of these perspectives, it becomes detrimental, and you can get into very destructive types of behaviors,” Howell said. “It is best to be balanced in your time perspectives.”

While it may seem obvious that people who have a positive attitude about their past, enjoy the present, and focus on goals for the future would be the happiest, Howell said that a sense of well-being depends on the balance between these elements.

“If you’re really dominant in one type of perspective, you’re very limited in certain situations,” he added. “To deal well when you walk into any situation, you need to have cognitive flexibility. That is probably why people with a balanced time perspective are happiest.”

It can be fine to have fond memories of childhood, for instance, but spending too much time remembering the past can keep you from enjoying the present. It might be great to treat yourself to a nice dinner, but “living in the moment” like that every night could keep you from achieving future goals.

There is some evidence that people can “rebalance” their time perspectives, Howell said, while noting that “there hasn’t been a lot of work that’s tried to change time perspectives explicitly.” But in general, “if you’re too future-oriented, it might be good to give yourself a moment to sit back and enjoy the present,” Howell suggested. “If you’re too hedonistic and living for the moment, maybe it’s time to start planning some future goals.”

Howell directs The Personality and Well-Being Lab. He and his graduate students at SF State are collecting data on time perspectives through their Beyond the Purchase website at http://www.beyondthepurchase.org. They hope their results will help individuals to extend the benefits of a balanced time perspective into the area of consumer choice. The site contains a variety of short quizzes and surveys on purchasing habits and values and how they relate to happiness.

“The site is open to anyone who wants to learn more about their spending habits,” Howell said, “and put themselves in a place where they can make better consumer choices.”

“We would expect that people with certain time perspectives would be much more likely to make consumer choices that fall either in the more experiential or more materialistic side of things,” said Howell, who is preparing a new study on the topic.

 

By: Wesley Donehue

 

 

(CNN) — I make a living encouraging politicians and candidates to use social media.

And now I’m going to tell them why it’s a bad idea.

Not always, mind you — social media will, and should, continue to play an important role in our political discourse. But the trend has grown so quickly; I don’t know that anyone has really stopped to consider the implications of moment-by-moment, real-time transparency.

I would argue that what we’ve gotten is a trade-off, and the jury is still out on whether what we’ve lost is worth more than what we’ve gained in the process.

So before I go about the process of destroying my company’s business model, let’s talk about what we’ve gained with social media.

The Web and social media have created a level of transparency that never before existed in our country.

People sitting at home can research complicated issues with a few clicks of a mouse. Online campaign disclosure databases make pay-for-play politics far more difficult to obfuscate. Instantaneous tweeting of shady government practices — and the resulting uproar — means that public bodies are more responsive than ever.

But there’s an unintended consequence, too, of over-democratization.

Wait, you ask, how can we have too much democracy?

Well for starters, we don’t live in a democracy. We never have, nor should we. We live in a republic, where we elect people to take the tough votes and make the tough decisions for us. And quite honestly, politicians should have some level of flexibility to cast votes that — gasp — we might not like, without their every action becoming a referendum via Twitter and Facebook.

A quote sometimes attributed incorrectly to Alexis de Toqueville goes, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Today the same sentiment could be said about the danger of shutting naysayers up on Twitter and Facebook.

Too many politicians aren’t voting their conscience, they’re voting to placate blog commenters, and that’s no way to run government.

Secondly, it’s one thing to see the sausage get made. It’s another thing entirely to watch the pig get slaughtered.

There’s a domino effect when it comes to transparency. In policy making, lots of ideas are thrown out in order to set the good apart from the bad, and in order to stake out a position for compromise.

Cynics would refer to it as “backroom deal-making in a smoke-filled room.” But here’s the harsh reality — that’s how bills get passed. And it’s how every important collaborative effort since the dawn of the written word has been achieved.

After all, do you think the Constitution would have ever been written if Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had Twitter accounts?

Third, government by social media leads to an environment where in every setting a politician has to be “on.”

When politicians are hashing out ideas, those ideas can range somewhere between politically untenable and electorally suicidal.

Once they’re tweeted — be it by a journalist or a rival politician — they become TV ad, direct mail, and attack e-mail fodder.

During the discussion, an idea is thrown out about “What would be the implication of zeroing out funding for popular program X?”

Suddenly, that politician is facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in negative ads back home, telling his constituents that he “considered” or “proposed” eliminating X.

Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney made a passing reference to eliminating HUD. It won’t be long before President Obama’s team is cutting ads about Romney “proposing” that we leave millions of Americans homeless.

Factually accurate? Sure, but misleading as hell.

The result is a political discourse that is becoming devoid of real ideas, and instead pared down to the safest of talking points.

And because most politicians draw their own districts to shield against a viable challenge from the opposite party, they are far more susceptible to electoral defeat in the summer than they are in the fall.

Their audience in everything they do is the primary voter, not the swing voter. So the rhetoric throughout the year from both parties is increasingly divisive, increasingly partisan, and increasingly destructive to any kind of progress.

Is any of this a product of social media? No, absolutely not. American politics have been trending this way for decades. But technology has expedited our descent toward a political system devoid of real ideas and bold, controversial thought.

As the use of social media accelerates, it’s incumbent upon everyone involved in the political process to make sure its power is used to harness everything good about the American political system, rather than to hasten political trends that are hurting our republic.

                        

     A NATIVE OF JACKSONVILLE, ARKANSAS, Mr. Arthur L. Woods joined the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management (ADEM) as Division Director of the Division of Federal Surplus Property (ADEM/ DFSP) in July 2009. Mr. Woods is also the Program Manager for the General Services Agency (GSA) Federal Surplus Property (FSP) Donation Program which acquires surplus federal property and distributes the property to eligible programs and agencies for the State of Arkansas. Mr. Woods also serves at the national level for the National Association of State Agencies for Surplus Property (NASASP) as a national officer for the organization holding the office of Secretary as well as representing the State of Arkansas with NASASP on the following national committees: Legislative Committee Delegate (AR) and Chairman, Property Disposal and Oversight Committee.
Before joining state government, Mr. Woods dedicated over 20 years of his life in service to his country as a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) in the United States Air Force (USAF) retiring in May 2007. His USAF career included assignments at Little Rock Air Force Base, AR, Kadena Air Base, Japan and Pope, Air Force Base, NC. In addition, he is a veteran of both the Gulf War and the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and has saw tours of duty in the Middle East in support of operations ENDURING FREEDOM, SOUTHERN WATCH, as well as a tour of duty to the Korean peninsula in support of operation FOAL EAGLE.
Mr. Woods has a very rich and diverse background involving business, insurance and financial services. He has been a small business owner as well as a licensed property and casualty (P&C) and life & health (L&H) insurance agent. Mr. Woods majored in Journalism while attending Arkansas State University – Beebe, the University of Maryland – College Park and the US Air Force Community College of the Air Force and the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH. He also has had previous employment with a major insurance conglomerate (Nationwide Insurance and Financial Services) as an Associate Agent for H.L. Townes Agency Nationwide Insurance and Financial Services in Fayetteville, NC. Mr. Woods is the proud father of three children Carl age 24, Anastasia age 19, Symone age 18, and resides in Little Rock, Arkansas.