John Abraham claims action is safer outside India

Actor John Abraham, who has performed daredevil stunts in movies like Force, Shootout at Wadalaand upcoming Madras Cafe, feels that doing action is much safer outside India.

"For Madras Cafe, we have shot the action sequences in Thailand and Malaysia.

"We heroes need to be more

 safer while doing action. I've broken all my bones. As an actor we are suppose to be fit and fine. We need to be more protective and I am ensure safety measures are taken," he told reporters at an event reacting to Hrithik's head injury while doing stunts for his film Bang Bang.

"I am happy that he is doing fine. Thank God, he is recovering. I feel doing stunts is safer outside than in India," John said.

Hrithik was suffering from Subdural Hematoma caused in the brain as a result of the head injury. He successfully underwent a brain surgery to remove a two-month-old clot on Sunday.

smartphone Makes You Fat and Lazy

Were you planning 

If you answered yes to either question, you may be turning into a "hyper-connected" couch potato.

According to a study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, frequent cell phone users were far more likely to forego or disrupt physical exercise and scored lower on fitness assessments than peers who used cell phones less frequently.

Though the compact size and mobility of smartphones would seem to facilitate physical activity, the ever-present lure of e-mail, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, games, Pinterest, Instagram, surfing the web, sharing photographs or talking with friends and family is having the opposite effect for some.

"While cell phones provide many of the same temptations as television and Internet connected computers, the difference is that cell phones fit in our pockets and purses and are with us wherever we go," wrote the Kent State University researchers. "Thus, they provide an ever-present invitation to 'sit and play.'"

The study began with a random survey of 305 college students, who were each asked about their cell phone usage, according to lead author Andrew Lepp, an associate professor of recreation, parks and tourism management, and his colleagues.

Students who logged just over 90 minutes a day were considered low-frequency users; those who averaged about 5 hours a day were considered moderate users. Students who spent up to 14 hours on their phone were considered heavy users.

In the second phase of the study, 49 of the surveyed students were randomly selected for physical examination. The students ran on a treadmill until they were exhausted, to determine their cardio-respiratory fitness, and they had their body fat content measured.

Authors found that heavy smartphone users were more inclined toward sedentary behavior than light users. The heavy users also had lower levels of cardiorespiratory fitness than those with lower use.

Study subjects reported that heavy usage had negative effects on their activity level.

"Now that I have switched to the iPhone, I would say it definitely decreases my physical activity, because before I just had a Blackberry," one heavy user told researchers. "Now, if I'm bored, I can just download whatever I want and just sit there and play."

Another heavy user agreed.

"One of my friends called me during my workout, and like, I haven't talked to her in a while and I had to tell her a lot of stuff. So it kind of distracted me from my workout," the study subject told authors.

Interestingly, students who fell into the low phone-usage category said the devices made them more active, because they were able to coordinate recreational pursuits with friends.

However, once they were engaged in a physical activity, the low-use subjects were more like to shut off their phone or put it aside.

Microsoft Overhauls, the Apple Way

SEATTLE — A couple of years ago, a satirical set of diagrams depicting the organization of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and other technology companies made the rounds on the Internet. The chart for Microsoft showed several isolated pyramids representing its divisions, each with a cartoon pistol aimed at the other.

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has talked increasingly about transforming it into a “devices and services” company.

Its divisions will war no more, Microsoft said on Thursday.

The company said it would dissolve its eight product divisions in favor of four new ones arranged around broader functional themes, a change meant to encourage a tighter marriage among technologies as competitors like Apple and Google outflank it in the mobile and Internet markets.

“To execute, we’ve got to move from multiple Microsofts to one Microsoft,” Steven A. Ballmer, the longtime chief executive, said in an interview.

The notion of organizing the company around the trinity of modern technology products — software, hardware and services — is most famously used by Apple. It is yet another sign of how deeply Apple’s way of doing things has seeped into every pore of the technology industry.

And in the process, some of the biggest technology companies are starting to look much more alike organizationally. The goal is to get thousands of employees to collaborate more closely, to avoid some duplication and, as a result, to build their products to work more harmoniously together.

“The current model is obviously Apple, given how phenomenally successful they have been,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor of business at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “What Apple has been great at is creating these experiences.”

The changes at Microsoft, a giant in the tech industry for decades that has stalled in the last few years, echo similar moves at its biggest rivals, including some tweaking at Apple. Craig Federighi, who led the development of Apple’s operating system for computers, was also given oversight of much of the operating system for iPhones and iPads. Jonathan Ive, the industrial designer behind the slick look of Apple hardware, took charge of the interface of Apple software. At Google, the development of operating systems for mobile devices and computers was put into the hands of a single executive, Sundar Pichai, rather than two.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it, too, would consolidate its major operating systems, including Windows, Windows Phone and the software that powers the Xbox, under Terry Myerson, who handled engineering only for Windows Phone before. The underlying goal is to create software with tighter linkages to power an array of devices, making it easier for people to use their smartphones, tablets and game consoles as adjuncts to one another.

But Microsoft’s charges are far more sweeping and involve many more people. “This is, in my mind, the biggest thing we’ve ever done,” said Lisa Brummel, a 24-year Microsoft veteran who leads its human resources department, noting that the company has nearly 100,000 employees.

It remains to be seen whether more cohesive teamwork, if that is what results from all the movement, will offer the spark that has been missing recently from so many of Microsoft’s products. The company remains one of the most lucrative enterprises on the planet, with nearly $17 billion in profit during its last fiscal year on $73.7 billion in revenue. But it has been widely faulted for being late with compelling products in two lucrative categories, smartphones and tablets. Its Bing search engine is a distant second to Google and loses billions of dollars a year for Microsoft.

Rivalries among the Microsoft divisions have built up over time, sometimes resulting in needless duplication of efforts. Microsoft managers often grumble privately that one of the most dreaded circumstances at the company is having to “take a dependency” on another group for a piece of software, placing them at the mercy of someone else’s development schedule.

Product development groups will sometimes go to great lengths to avoid this, creating software like e-mail programs that duplicate the functions of other products at Microsoft. While its old divisions all had their own finance and marketing organizations, Microsoft is now centralizing those functions.

Bill Whyman, an analyst at the ISI Group, said Microsoft’s promise to make all of its technologies work better together would be challenging given the sheer breadth of its product portfolio, which covers corporate and consumer products.

“That sounds right but it’s really, really hard to do,” Mr. Whyman said. “Maybe Apple does it with the iPhone ecosystem. Microsoft is proposing to do it over a much broader set of customer applications and uses.”

Amazon has already been trying. It has become a major player in devices, with its Kindle family of e-readers and tablets. Google tiptoed into hardware production with products like the Chromebook Pixel laptop and Google Glass, as well as the failed Nexus Q for streaming media. And Google’s boldest and riskiest move in hardware was spending $12.5 billion to buy Motorola Mobility.

The focus on the full suite of offerings has led several companies to rethink how they are organized. When Larry Page, Google co-founder, took over as chief executive in 2011, he shook things up at the search company, whose structure had become bloated and labyrinthine. To help the company move faster, Mr. Page centralized decision-making power with him, eliminating Google’s former triumvirate of equal decision makers at the top.

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said revamping an organization’s structure tended to provide only temporary remedies.

“I never take these reorganizations too seriously,” said Mr. Cusumano. “Almost any reorganization is designed to solve current problems people see. Over time, other problems come up.”