On mental health, it's wise to choose your words carefully | Society. Not long ago, while wandering the over-stuffed aisles of the world wide web, I chanced upon a blog post criticising something I had written. Nothing unusual in that, you might think, and if so you would be right. But this particular writer struck a chord with me for two reasons.
First, his point seemed perfectly valid and, second, I couldn't think what the solution might be. The writer of the blog objected to my use of the term "service users", on the grounds that this excluded people with mental health problems but who didn't have access, for whatever reason, to "mental health services". I'm embarrassed to admit that this objection had never occurred to me. I had chosen to use the term "service users" precisely because it seemed to me the most inclusive, least problematic description I could think of. It is always easy to roll one's eyes when someone objects to one's use of a word. Words communicate assumptions. . • Clare Allan is an author and writer on mental health issues. Invasion of giant snails has Florida on alert - US news - Environment.
Florida is used to strange creatures, but the discovery of a non-native animal — a giant snail from East Africa — has got local officials really worried. A search-and-destroy advisory that went out included this bit of history: the last time the giant snails were found in Florida (back in 1966) they had multiplied from three to 18,000 in seven years and cost $1 million to eradicate.
The new population of giant African land snails was found in Miami-Dade County, and several dozen technicians were quickly dispatched to search them out. About 1,000 were found Thursday within a one-square-mile radius, the Miami Herald reported. Several hundred were found in one backyard in Coral Gables. How they got there was not immediately known.
The snails were sent to freezers to be frozen to death. Why worry? They also breed like crazy. The 1966 incident was tied to a boy who brought three into Miami as pets. It is illegal to import the snails into the United States. . © 2013 msnbc.com Reprints. Human rights: Homophobia feels like a disease. Dear Editor, Why is it that when a man with courage of his convictions like John Cummins speaks his mind, he is really lambasted in the press and on the radio? If a person dares speak up and says that homosexuality is unnatural and an abuse of the natural use of sex, he is subject to all kinds of abuse. Is the truth not allowed any more, or are we all supposed to be politically correct and bow to public pressure? The term homophobic makes us to feel that we are suffering from a disease.
Apparently, people who are pro-gay-lifestyle only want free speech for themselves, not for those who might differ from themselves. I am not proposing that gays be abused, either physically or verbally, but dont try to tell us that its just an alternate lifestyle. Even electricity needs a male and a female plug to connect the circuit. David J. . © Langley Advance. Take Something Literally: 25 Unusual Online Puzzles. Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention - The Chronicle Review. Imagine that driving across town, you've fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You're so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn't there. By contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting.
That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. "Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Experiments like that one have added fuel to the perpetual debate about whether laptops should be allowed in classrooms. Wait a minute. The Tragic Triumph Of The MBAs. “We’ve seen Mubarak fall,” said Salesforce’s Marc Benioff of the corporate need to focus on social networks at the recent Dreamforce conference. “We’ve seen Khadafy fall. When will the first CEO fall for the same reason?” What a fantastic comparison! Because, as we all know, dictators who brutalize, torture, and murder thousands of their own people over a period of decades are just like CEOs who miss quarterly profit targets.
Benioff isn’t a bad guy, it was just a dumb thing to say — but it’s stuck in my mind, because Salesforce, cloud-computing’s poster child, is the future, and his seems to be the voice of the zeitgeist. This feels a little like the end of an era. And it seems that whatever survives the ongoing Mountain View bloodbath will be thoroughly monetized. Is this the right thing for Google to do? Nope. I suspect this is pretty common among CEOs and MBAs — but most techies don’t agree at all. Image credit: Paul G, Flickr. SCHOPENHAUER'S 38 STRATAGEMS, OR 38 WAYS TO WIN AN ARGUMENT. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896.
Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and narrow his or her propositions remain, the easier they are to defend by him or her. Use different meanings of your opponent's words to refute his or her argument.
Ignore your opponent's proposition, which was intended to refer to a particular thing. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer) Groundbreaking Research Methods and Skills for the Human Sciences and Humanities. Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) August 26, 2011 A new book by professors of Transpersonal Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology offers research methods and skills from the field of transpersonal psychology. "Transforming Self and Others Through Research", released this month by SUNY Press, offers transformative approaches to those conducting research across the human sciences and the humanities. As co-author Dr. Rosemarie Anderson explains, “These research approaches can be transformative for researchers, participants, as well as the audience of a project.” Anderson and Braud invite scholars to bring multiple ways of knowing and personal resources to their scholarship.
Rosemarie Anderson is Professor of Transpersonal Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. William Braud is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and the author of Distant Mental Influence: Its Contributions to Science, Healing, and Human Interactions. Handwriting tips. You’ve decided you want to improve your handwriting and you’re probably hoping a fountain pen will do the trick -- maybe a friend told you it would. Maybe you’re just adventurous and you want to try your hand at calligraphy (or you might, once your handwriting improves). Good for you! A fountain pen may make your writing look a bit better, but if your writing looks as if frenzied chickens got loose on the page, chances are this won’t be enough. Most likely, you’ll need to retrain your arm and hand. After coaching handwriting and teaching calligraphy over the years, I’ve learned to see the characteristics of those who’ll be able to pick up the necessary motions quickly from those who’ll have to work a bit harder.
Crampy, uneven letters are often the result of drawing the letters with the fingers rather than using the whole arm to write. People who inevitably have trouble with handwriting and calligraphy write with their fingers. It will take time to re-train muscles and learn new habits. The Danger of Making College Too Career-Focused - Education. This fall's crop of college freshmen and their anxious parents are probably already thinking about what major to choose. After all, college is a serious financial investment, and with fears of a double-dip recession looming, picking a major that promises entree to a lucrative and sustainable career—one that allows repaying student loans—seems like a no-brainer. But is the way we're increasingly connecting higher education with careers actually a good idea? Casey Wiley, an English lecturer at Penn State, writes in an op-ed for Inside Higher Education that he recently met with a student who pointedly asked him, “Can I get a job with an English degree?”
Wiley wanted to "tell her not to worry about the college-to-job equation, that she’s in college to broaden her mind, to question, to grow intellectually—all the learning clichés that hold true. " But that's not why students are heading to school anymore. Screenshot via YouTube user FiendProducciones. Eyewitness Testimony Loses Legal Ground in State Supreme Court. Is justice now less blind to science? Image courtesy of iStockphoto/spxChrome As science has long demonstrated, eyewitness accounts are frequently riddled with errors. Human memory in general is far from perfect—working less like a video camera than an ever-evolving collage, studies have shown. But in courtrooms across the country eyewitness testimony of alleged crimes have frequently been enough to convince juries to send defendants to jail—even without more reliable forms of evidence. Now, the courts seem to be finally catching up with the science. The New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday overhauled the way its state’s eyewitness testimonies would be treated.
The ruling is aimed to “educate jurors about factors that can lead to misidentifications,” Chief Justice Stuart Rabner said, The New York Times reported. A recent survey found that some 63 percent of U.S. adults thought that memory passively records events, per the video camera model. Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide | Guest Blog. Today’s lesson from Sherlock Holmes deals with learning to cull and to cultivate knowledge in such a way that your decision process will be optimized for the question at hand, and not get bogged down in irrelevant minutiae – a lesson that is all too relevant in the age of the internet, when we have a constant stream of information at our beck and call.
A mind is an attic: keep yours well organized In “A Study in Scarlet,” Dr. Watson expresses surprise that Holmes is ignorant of Copernican theory and the composition of the solar system. Holmes explains that he does his best to forget any information that is not relevant to his existence: “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A cluttered mind prevents organized thought Holmes, of course, is exaggerating. Especially when it comes to decision making, Holmes’s analogy is remarkably apt. Has the internet expanded our attics? 10 bad job signs: Health24: Healthy Workplace. The "End of Work" And The Coming Revolution In Education. Are you an ‘educated’ predator? The mad clambering for grades is detrimental to the process of acquiring education. Education – slick, elite, expensive education – for which, I attend classes, take exams and tap a phenomenal fraction of my parent’s hard-earned money.
Education – there is no word so grotesquely misunderstood. No idea so ill-expressed. Little does anyone realise that the mad rat-race to score better grades does not ‘educate.’ Relative grading gives you the grade, but it ingrains in you the idea that your success is tied to another student’s failure. Better grade equals better education? Better grades are universally thought to be reflective of a ‘better educated’ student. Education, however, is not the skill of passing exams or surviving the scars of the corporate world. Upon observing the current state of affairs, one is met with the revelation that the ‘employable’ are often the least-educated.
Scarring paradox, no? Grades vs education on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook Faiza Rahman Email me. Logic Problems - Very Easy. Logic Puzzles <p style="font-style:bold; color:red"> Warning: Solutions are currently displayed. To hide and show the solutions as desired, enable javascript on your browser </span></p> 1. The Camels Four tasmanian camels traveling on a very narrow ledge encounter four tasmanian camels coming the other way.
As everyone knows, tasmanian camels never go backwards, especially when on a precarious ledge. The camels didn't see each other until there was only exactly one camel's width between the two groups. How can all camels pass, allowing both groups to go on their way, without any camel reversing? Show Hint Show Solution Hint: Use match sticks or coins to simulate the puzzle. Solution: First a camel from one side moves forward, then two camels from the other side move forward, then three camels from the first side move forward etc... etc... 2. Three men in a cafe order a meal the total cost of which is $15. Now, each of the men effectively paid $4, the total paid is therefore $12. Show Solution 3. Logic Puzzles - Difficult. Logic Puzzles <p style="font-style:bold; color:red"> Warning: Solutions are currently displayed. To hide and show the solutions as desired, enable javascript on your browser </span></p> 1.
The Most Intelligent Prince A king wants his daughter to marry the smartest of 3 extremely intelligent young princes, and so the king's wise men devised an intelligence test. The princes are gathered into a room and seated, facing one another, and are shown 2 black hats and 3 white hats. The king tells them that the first prince to deduce the color of his hat without removing it or looking at it will marry his daughter. You are one of the princes. Note: You know that your competitors are very intelligent and want nothing more than to marry the princess. Show Hint Show Solution Hint: Based on what you know, why are the other princes unable to solve this puzzle?
Solution: White. The king would not select two white hats and one black hat. 2. 100 Gold Coins Guess: Guess | Show Hint Show Solution Solution: 98 4. Analytical Puzzles and Problems. Five Easy Tricks to Keep Your Brain Young - Alzheimer's.