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Elevate Your Badminton: Master Offense & Defense Positions
Mastering Badminton: It’s All About Where You Stand

Think of badminton like a high‑speed chess match on a racquet court. Your racket is just the tip of the strategy; the real magic happens by spotting the sweet spots on the court and positioning yourself like a seasoned pro.

Why Attack & Defense Zones Matter

Knowing the attack and defense zones means you can:
- Read your opponent’s next move before it happens.
- Respond in a heartbeat.
- Cover more ground without exhausting yourself.
- Set the stage for that unstoppable, well‑timed smash.
How to Use the Zones to Your Advantage

Picture the court as a grid: each square is a playmaker. Follow these quick hacks:
1. Stay central. A good rule is to keep your shoulder just ahead of your shuttle’s last landing spot.
2. Move like a whisk. A nimble shift to the side can catch your opponent off‑guard.
3. Set up a trap. Position yourself to anticipate a lift or a drive, then snap back for a crisp smash.
Timely Shots: The Final Touch

With the court’s zones mapped out in your brain, you’ll fire shots exactly when your opponent’s guard is lax. That’s the difference between a good play and a game‑winning moment.
2025-09-19
Can You Reverse Cataracts Without Surgery? – Health Cages

Cataracts result in vision loss for millions of Australians and result in cloudy vision, which also makes your normal daily activities slower. The closer your lens in your eye gets to being cloudy, the more difficult it is to do simple things like reading, driving, or even looking at the faces of people clearly. Even though cataract surgery remains the gold standard for cataract treatment, people wonder whether or not non-surgical cataract treatment will prevent or reverse cataract development.

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Learning About Cataracts and How They Develop

Cataracts form when proteins in the healthy lens of the eye begin to clump together and produce cloudy spots that affect vision. They will typically do this in a few years, typically as a normal aspect of ageing. More than half of all Australians will have developed cataracts or had cataract surgery by the age of 80.

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The condition manifests differently in every individual. Some acquire the mild symptoms gradually, while others alter vision at a very fast pace. Some of the more prevalent symptoms include blurring of vision, photophobia, night blindness, and colours looking washed out or yellow.

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Non-Surgical Treatment Approach to Cataract

Nutritional Support and Dietary Changes

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There are foods that can delay the formation of cataracts. Some antioxidants, like vitamins C and E, and beta-carotene, defend the lens of the eye from oxidative stress. These can be found in citrus fruits, green leafy vegetables, carrots, and nuts.

Omega-3 fatty acids in fish like salmon and sardines also help with overall eye health. In some studies, people with higher amounts of these nutrients have fewer cataract formations, although evidence is not yet strong enough for reversing the condition.

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Eye Drops and Homemade Remedies

Further, eye drops have been marketed for cataract treatment. It has been stated that N-acetylcarnosine or glutathione will break down protein clumps that cause cataracts. There are few and controversial scientific studies on such products, so it’s important to be aware of this.

No TGA-approved Australian eye drop for cataract reversal is available. There is subjective improvement, but no clear and useful reversal of the cataracts is demonstrated by clinical trials with topical treatment.

Lifestyle Changes

Good-quality sunglasses, that can protect the eyes from ultraviolet sun rays, can slow down the growth of cataracts. Smoking also needs to be avoided as smoking speeds up the growth of cataracts as well as the progression of cataract growth.

Control of an underlying condition such as diabetes would prevent the acute formation of cataract. Hyperglycemia causes more frequent change of the lens protein, and thus stringent diabetic control is required for eye management.

What Are Vision Care Experts’ Suggestions?

Specialists at every eye clinic in Melbourne CBD and beyond generally believe that surgery is the effective and guaranteed method of treating cataracts successfully. Dietary and lifestyle modification are able to delay development but cannot reverse already formed cataracts or restore vision once natural clouding has happened.

All eye physicians recommend eye check-ups from time to time to find out if cataracts are forming. If it is at the initial stage, the change in vision is just remedied with new spectacle prescriptions or with brighter light. When cataracts have already begun to interfere with the quality of life, however, surgery is the ideal option.

Australian cataract surgery now is highly successful, and over 95% of patients go on to have improved vision. It involves the removal of the discoloured natural lens and the placement of an artificial intraocular lens.

Making Your Choice Based on Your Vision Health

While not requiring surgery is a tempting thought, it will have to be science fact and not hype. The non-surgical treatments can be beneficial to overall eye health and slow the formation of cataracts, but any cataract therapy that is available will not reverse them.

2025-09-14
Post Christmas crises: How to help employees beat the January blues
Did you know?
- Early January is divorce lawyers take the most enquiries from warring couples.
- The third Monday in January has been dubbed ‘Blue Monday’ and is said to be the most depressing day of the year.
So when you get back to work, the chances are that at least some of your team will be suffering from the January blues or a post Christmas crisis that will impact on their well being, as well as their productivity in the workplace. What you need to do, as a leader, is to distinguish the people that are just a bit miffed they can longer have a lie in or are disappointed that they’ve already eaten cake for breakfast despite a New Year’s resolution to be healthy, from those who are having a genuinely difficult time.

How can you tell the difference?
Some people may be upfront about their troubles, of course, some of your employees will be intensely private people who do not wish to share. Learning to spot the signs that things are not all well may help you help an employee and decrease the scale of the impact on the individual and the business.

If your employee is suffering from a significant issue, you’ll find one or more of the following signs:
• Changes in normal behaviours such as extroverts becoming introverted or vice versa.
• Poor time keeping
• Increase in absence
• Increase in alcohol or other substances
• Poor concentration
• Conflict happening where there was none before.
• Lower productivity
• Reduction in communication
• Loss of motivation

If your team member is just spending more time chatting, taking more breaks and surfing the internet, then the chances are, it’s just a bit of apathy experienced by most of us after an enjoyable break.

What can you do?
From a practical point of view, you can’t let your business suffer because your team members have issues. Equally, if an individual is suffering from significant stress, it’s vital to offer them the support that they need. From a humane point of view, it’s important to nurture individuals and from a business point of view, you’ll find that tackling the issue as soon as possible will not only resolve it quicker and will lessen the impact on the wider team and its outputs, but it will also ensure much greater loyalty from the individual, in the longer term, to you and the business.

There are some simple and effective interventions you can put in place that will work either for an individual or for a whole company.
• Hold staff awareness training to raise awareness of stress
• Get experts in to brief your staff on nutrition that promotes healthy a healthy balance lifestyle
• Bring in a Acupressure Massage Specialist to provide in house instant 15 minute stress relieving massages
• Arrange drop in days – don’t just say “my door is always open” publicise it, make a big thing of it.
• Arrange one to one chats with all your direct reports to catch up with how they are. Pay attention to their life outside work as well as inside.
• Invite Calm People in (other providers are available) to deliver empowering workshops that help everyone recognise and deal with stress in a healthy way.
• Take professional help from an HR adviser on how you can best support and employee suffering with stress
• Listen with empathy – can you genuinely see the worlds from their point of view with the problems they are facing?

All the above are good for awareness and support. They are also public demonstrations of you caring for your employees and being prepared to take action to support them. This has an important side effect of boosting morale and in my opinion that is better for stress reduction and improved productivity than most other interventions.

Remember, don’t just care, show that you care.

Do be wary of appearing to care and not following through. That can have worse consequences for employee relations. The organisations Calm People work with genuinely care, genuinely take action and as a result have great relationships with their teams.

So, don’t stress over stress. Take action, show you care and see the results.
2025-09-11
Customer Service: Use your own bad experiences to sharpen your game

Outlooks from organisations such as the FSB: “business prospects for the year ahead are looking bleak”, to the CBI: “bumpy times ahead for businesses in Britain”, may well indicate that 2011’s going to be another tough year. Whatever your take on the matter, it makes sense to look at ways you can differentiate your business and improve your chances. Looking after the customers you’ve worked so hard to win over is one crucial area with plenty of potential.

For any of you that might feel a bit discouraged at another exhortation to raise the bar yet again, I have some good news – the standards out there aren’t that high. Instead of doing the usual examination of best practice, let me give you some examples I’ve observed recently of things NOT to do if you want great customer service, to stimulate improvements:

The product or service isn’t fit for purpose. I’d purchased a pair of Salomon walking boots that were definitely not made for walking! The soles completely fell apart after only 3 years’ moderate use. “Normal wear and tear” was how Salomon’s service department described them. Yet I’d bought them as walking boots – not bedroom slippers! Action: Check what your customers really want – this may have changed from when you originally designed your product or service.

The people or processes aren’t up to scratch. I wanted to transfer money from one of my NatWest accounts to a third party and used their telephone banking system, carefully giving the instructions on account number and amount. I then found that they have taken the money from a different account, causing it to go overdrawn, triggering a raft of correspondence about unarranged borrowing and fees etc. Bad enough that someone should make a mistake, but apparently having no check to prevent taking more out from an account than is available seems bizarre to me. Action: Work with your people to think through any point where things could go wrong for customers – and what to do to avoid it happening.

Customers can’t contact you easily. When I trawled the Salomon website looking for a “contact us” type page, I was amazed to find absolutely no way of getting in touch with them. It was only by seeking help from outdoor shops such as Snow+Rock that I managed to track down the one sales rep come service man – who was then only interested in trying to sell me another pair of boots rather than deal with my complaint. Action: Seek out feedback from your customers before they even think of complaining and nip any problems in the bud.

The call centre experience is truly awful. I’m sure you’ve got your own nightmares of seemingly endless and confusing lists of options to navigate through before you even get to the call centre. When trying to resolve my problem with NatWest, I was told I was being passed to the person who had investigated the original problem. After 7 minutes of waiting the call dropped into thin air and I was back to square one. When I called back I was told “You need to speak to the Lending Department”, who were of course unavailable. Action: Test out your own service lines and listen in to calls regularly to understand what’s really going on.

Over promise, under deliver. One my first call to NatWest I was promised everything would be sorted out no problem. On the second time, that my Relationship Manager would be in touch. Neither happened. Action: Make it your policy to always do what you say you’ll do, and to ensue that your business processes can deliver. If you can’t, at least let people know!

We’re experiencing customer service – good and bad – all the time and it’s very easy to criticise poor performance. Rather than get angry or distracted by the problem cases, use them to generate tests for your own business. How does your business avoid that kind of issue? If not, how could you? Small steps of improvement day after day will give you the competitive edge and increase the robustness of your business to weather whatever may happen in 2011.

2025-08-28
Five privacy must dos for CEOs

With busy businesses to run, privacy can fall down the priority list for many CEOs.

Nigel Jones, ex head of legal at Google EMEA and co-founder of the award-winning Privacy Compliance Hub explains how and why CEOs should give privacy the attention it deserves.
Over the past few months, the Information Commissioner’s Office has fined Reed Online £40,000 for sending unsolicited marketing emails. Tuckers Solicitors received a £98,000 fine after a ransomware attack. And Seaview Brokers was fined £15,000 for making more than 4,000 unsolicited marketing phone calls.
Getting privacy wrong can lead to considerable fines, a damaged reputation and loss of customers. A third of all UK organisations lose customers after a data breach and 40% of customers say they’ll never return to a business after a security issue.
But CEOs also have a moral obligation to get privacy right. As Tim Cook, CEO of Apple pointed out on last year’s Data Privacy Day: “If we accept as normal and avoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.”
Faced with a long list of competing priorities, here’s how CEOs can play their part in creating a culture of continuous privacy compliance.

Have a programme

We get it. Privacy can seem complicated and many CEOs don’t take an active role in ensuring their company has an up-to-date, continuously improving privacy programme – or even a privacy programme at all.
But this isn’t a smart way to lead. Privacy is a growing concern for customers, employees, and regulators; improved privacy is already a competitive advantage in many marketplaces. Consumers – and investors – want to see adequate privacy strategies in place. Many will refuse to do business with companies that can’t demonstrate where they stand on using, protecting, and giving individuals rights in relation to personal data.

Have a crisis plan

Those that do not prioritise privacy increase the risk of data breaches. Employees who are less informed about why privacy is important and how it should be protected are more likely to make poor decisions about data usage – putting personal data and their organisation’s future at risk. A sobering 88% of data breaches are down to human error. So even forward-thinking companies that invest heavily on cyber-security can come unstuck due to human error or sophisticated ransomware attacks.
A crisis plan is crucial. Companies have a legal obligation and a financial incentive to report and respond to data breaches in a timely and open manner. If your organisation falls victim to a breach, a simple action plan could save your business millions of pounds in fines and lost revenues due to reputational damage, plus an enormous amount of aggravation.

Appoint a privacy lead

Privacy can fall into the cracks between legal, operations, marketing and even finance departments, resulting in inertia because nobody has been made responsible for developing and maintaining a privacy programme. Does your organisation have someone who ‘owns’ privacy? Organisations have ‘leads’ on sustainability because it’s important to organisational reputation, and it can deliver cost and other benefits. Privacy is no different. CEOs should delegate responsibility to one individual, ensure expectations are clear, and regularly check in on progress.

Then delegate accountability to everyone

But that doesn’t mean the rest of the organisation won’t be involved. The most successful businesses have a shared purpose or vision which unites everyone from the factory or shop floor to the boardroom. While one individual needs to be ultimately responsible for privacy (whether as a formal Data Protection Officer or otherwise), everyone needs to play their part in ensuring an organisation’s privacy programme is a success. Involving every employee has two main benefits; the first is better decision-making on data usage and security, the second is letting employees know that they work for an ethical organisation that strives to do the right thing.

Create a winning privacy culture

One of the mistakes organisations make is preparing a few policy documents on privacy which only the legal department sees, and which soon go out of date due to the changing nature of the business or the regulatory landscape. Treating privacy as a one off project is inadequate. Privacy is fast-moving – consumer attitudes and awareness about how their data are being used are changing, and regulators are showing their teeth.
Privacy needs to stay front of mind, and organisations need to constantly adapt their privacy stance to a changing landscape. That’s where a culture of continuous privacy compliance makes a difference. Having a winning privacy culture, where people understand and care about privacy, where individuals know what they have to do to respect privacy in their day jobs, and where the organisation stays on top of changing regulations helps prevent breaches, and the reputational damage caused by poor privacy practices.
Most CEOs do care deeply about privacy and understand the link between successful privacy practices and successful business. Often the only stumbling block is prioritisation, as business leaders fear long, costly, complicated projects that will remove resources from other tasks. But by making some simple changes, allocating responsibility to a key point person, and stressing the importance of privacy to the whole organisation, CEOs can put privacy at the heart of the organisation’s values and mission. It’s easier than you might think.
Nigel Jones is the co-founder of The Privacy Compliance Hub, a no-nonsense platform created by two ex-Google lawyers that makes compliance easy for everyone to understand and commit to. Take your free 10-minute GDPR health check here.

2024-09-23