9 Jun
Nothing is more powerful for your future than being a gatherer of good ideas and information. That’s called doing your homework.
Jim Rohn
P.S. Since the tags and categories are not always up-to-date, use “search” to look for possibly useful information.
30 Jul
EUGENE, Ore., Jul 25, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) — Emotional suppression may cost college freshmen friendships, a co-author of a University of Oregon at Eugene study said Saturday.
"Hiding your emotions is something that is very common but it's something that often is not the right thing to do," Sanjay Srivastava said. "We're not saying never ever do this, but doing it may have negative effects in certain contexts, such as in transitioning into college."
Srivastava, a professor of psychology, said in a press release from the university that suppressing emotions in a new or difficult situation is understandable and may be appropriate, but carrying it too far may result in difficulty trusting and being trusted by others.
The study looked at 278 college freshmen who filled out weekly diaries with data on support received from parents and friends, their closeness with others and social and academic satisfaction. When the term ended, the participants addressed the same topics and the researchers spoke to their friends to determine how they were faring during their first term.
30 Jul
30 Jul
*********************************************** Damn Interesting is a great site with one flaw that finding damn interesting information is harder than imagined thus infrequent posts. The whole idea of a valley under the ocean being 7 miles deep is fantastic. Is it really a lifeless area? If I was an alien from another planet with need of a base on this planet, I would say Challenger Deep rank as one of my top locations. Then, aliens do not exist and we know that for sure. What about the 60 people who jumped overboard rather than serve the queen?
26 Jul
This edition probably will not show the underlying changes I am making but they are taking place. I am still doing book reviews and critical writing based on worthy articles but also increasing the number. My choice articles are becoming clearer as a group and over the next few editions should appear as a permanent line of thinking. I find it hard to rewrite because the volume of the articles is increasing and the ideas are somewhere in the mess.
The book reviews are few.
I read more books obviously and some always appear in my video and my photo blogs. I have also made a new blog to collect copies of all my posts. World of Cush may be the best place to find all of my book reviews in one spot. My reviews blog also makes an attempt to keep a copy of each. Starting Your Consulting Business is a very introduction to this vocation. The Transormation of Cities was a good book but more of a theory text than what I had expected and not as useful as accurate. How Your Brain Deceives is a great book to read for some of us. I found it difficult to read mostly because of the style of writing and that I sometimes have a difficult time fast reading works by female authors. The male writing style usually is straightforward and gets to the point. The female writing complicates ideas while describing them. I cannot read slow or re-read because the text is not in my field or that interesting of a read.
The articles are a good bunch for this edition. Wine and psychology dominate and the articles are better than average.
I am neither a left nor right brain person and the test given failed me by casting me as left brain. The descriptions given for dedicated left brain person hardly make any sense if you know me. Racism can be eliminated according to some and I agree but what is most interesting is the broad definition the article provides for racism. I really like that viewpoint. Mine has been weak and not productive. Social security numbers cannot be protected online which I think is a much bigger problem than most people realize. I have practiced negative thinking as a practical mean and agree with the article that it can work in some situations. Beautiful people are now scientifically smarter based on how good looking. and finally Francis Ford Coppola tells us all.
I wrote a definition piece of what a sommelier is and no debate exists over the definition but I am confident the profession is misunderstood at least in the US. The wine business has a chance to learn from the wine drinkers and will not listen as usual. World's largest appellation comes into existence and amazes us. I thought the whole point of an appellation was to attempt some control. The word appellation should show preference for small to achieve more control. Large appellation should be an oxymoron. And the $1 million wine book has arrived. That should give a good idea of the different levels of people involved in the wine business. It is not just about wine as a drink. Wine critics are born and made but the article reminds me of a good friend who cannot taste and proves a great theoretical point.
22 Jul
22 Jul
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22 Jul
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From self-help books to popular television shows, you've probably at least heard of right brain vs. left brain dominance. According to this theory, each side of the brain controls different types of thinking. Additionally, people are said to prefer one type of thinking over the other. A person who is "left-brained" is said to be more logical, analytical and objective, while a person who is "right-brained" is said to be more intuitive, thoughtful and subjective.
The right brain-left brain theory grew out of the work of Roger W. Sperry, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981. Later research has shown that the brain is not nearly as dichotomous as once thought. For example, recent research has shown that abilities in subjects such as math are actually strongest when both halves of the brain work together.
While often overgeneralized and overstated by popular psychology and self-help texts, understanding your typical behavior can help you develop better ways to learn and study. For example, students who have a difficult time following verbal instructions (often cited as a right-brain characteristic) can benefit from writing down directions and developing better organizational skills.
About.com's Guide to Homework Help, Grace Fleming, has created a fun quiz to help you determine your "brain type" and improve your study habits and academic skills. Take the right brain-left brain quiz to learn more.
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The Results Are In!You can use these results to help you identify the best ways for you to study effectively. Be sure to find more ways to evaluate your own personality and study skills. It will pay off!
You probably like some order in your life and in the classroom. You are comfortable listening to lectures and taking most test types, but you might be uncomfortable with open-ended essay assignments that require you to imagine scenarios. You want class directions to be clear. A disorganized teacher or unclear assignments will drive you crazy! You are good at analyzing problems to find the right answer. You may have considered pursuing a degree in science or math. You don't like mushy love movies. You might be a Jeopardy champ one day, not because you're smarter than right brain students, but because you are able to answer questions quickly.
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I am more like the following
Do you get bored when teachers lecture too much? Do you feel like you can size up people easily by watching them? If so, you may be right-brain dominant.
Characteristics of Right-Brain Students
22 Jul
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No doubt, racism is one of the most important evils in our pluralistic, open societies need to confront. And various programs are meant to do so. But what are the odds that these programs will work? Psychology can help us answer this question.
There are roughly two distinct ways to fight against racism. One can attempt to weaken people’s disposition to classify themselves and others into races. The thought goes as follows. Suppose people treat race as they treat eye color—viz. as an irrelevant, superficial, psychologically and morally meaningless physical character. Then, people would not despise, hate, envy, be afraid of, etc., others because of their race. After all, we do not despise, hate, envy, etc., others on the basis of the color of their eyes.
Alternatively, one can leave people’s disposition to classify themselves and others into races as it is, and attempt to eliminate people’s negative attitudes (such as their negative emotions) toward members of other races. If this approach were to work, people would still view themselves as Black, White, and so on, but they would have no negative attitude toward other individuals qua members of specific races.
Now, will the attempts of fighting racism that are inspired by these two approaches work? What can psychology tell us about their chances of success? It is fair to say that lawmakers and social activists have ignored the potential contributions of psychology to answering these questions. In this post, I want to make a case for the relevance of psychology with respect to the design of anti-racistprograms. I will first focus on the first way to fight racism, leaving the second one for another occasion.
So, what does psychology tell us about the attempts to fight against racism by eliminating or weakening our disposition to classify into races? To answer this question, we need to turn toward the research on the nature and evolution of the cognitive mechanisms underlying racial categorization. This is what I will do in the remainder of this post. In my next post (in a week or so), I will explain why it matters to anti-racist programs.
The literature on racial classification is too vast to be reviewed here (see, e.g., Machery and Faucher, 2005b for an overview of what evolutionary have to say on the topic). I will merely present what I take to be the best hypothesis (Machery and Faucher, 2005a).
Following anthropologist Francisco Gil-White, I have proposed that we evolved a capacity to determine to which cultural group people belong to. We pay attention to cues or markers that indicate people’s affiliation to specific groups. These markers include accents, clothes, behaviors, and maybe subtle physical features; many cultures physically shape the body of their members: think, e.g., about the Padaung Giraffe women, about the split and cut penises in Papua New Guinea, about our own tattoos.
Why did this system evolve? Well, the idea is that it is important to know whether people belongs to one’s own or to another culture when one undertakes some cooperative ventures with them. In the latter case, they might comply with different norms, have different expectations, etc., which might prevent success.
Now where does racial classification come in? The idea is that our disposition to identify cultural markers and to infer cultural membership misfires. We take various racial properties (skin color, etc.) to be cultural markers and as a result, we draw distinctions between races. Racial classification is thus some kind of accident. We have not evolved to classify into races, but, rather, into cultural groups. And we mistake races for cultural groups.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/experiments-in-philosophy/200806/how-eliminate-racism-part-i
22 Jul
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Less than half of UK wine drinkers think region is important when they buy wine, a new report says.
In the Wine and Spirit Trade Association's latest Consumer Intelligence survey, 48% of respondents said that region or origin is important, while 59% said country is important when making the buying decision.
This will come as no surprise to major producers such as Lindeman's, Blossom Hill and Echo Falls. All are now producing wine in a number of countries under the same brand.
Clare Griffiths, VP European Consumer Marketing for Constellation Europe said country of origin and regionality were low on the list for Echo Falls consumers.
'What is important to these consumers is the right taste profile, a recognisable grape variety and an easy drinking wine at the right price,' she added
The survey also shows promotions are more important than ever. 77% of respondents said discounts like three for £10, or money off deals were very important to their buying decision. This is compared to 61% three years ago.
The report also showed Pinot Grigio has overtaken Sauvignon Blanc as the UK's second most popular white grape variety.
Pinot Grigio is experiencing a surge in popularity with 54% of the UK's regular wine drinkers consuming it in the past six months. While Chardonnay maintains its leadership of the UK white wine market, it has lost fans in the past three years.
Sergio de Luca, director of buying for Italian specialist Enotria, told decanter.com, 'The strength of Pinot Grigio sales, despite euro exchange rate problems and duty increases, demonstrates the flexibility of the grape variety.
'It shows that the neutrality of this wine makes it easier for consumers to choose it'.
Wine Intelligence, for the WSTA, surveyed 3,059 regular UK wine drinkers between March and April 2009.
22 Jul
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The USA will soon have the world's largest wine appellation – the 4m hectare Upper Mississippi River Valley AVA.
Covering 48,142km sq (4.8m ha or 29,914 square miles) over four states, the AVA averages 193km (120 miles) from east to west, 362km (225 miles) from north to south.
It encompasses some or all of ten counties in Minnesota, nine in Illinois, 18 in Iowa, and 23 in Wisconsin. The northern boundary begins near St Paul, Minnesota in the north to Moline, Illinois in the south.
The AVA is more than double the size of Wales (20,779km sq), and fifty times greater than Bordeaux (100,000ha or 1000km sq).
Representatives of the four states involved filed the petition in 2006. It will take effect 22 July 2009.
Lake Wisconsin, established in 1994, is the only AVA which currently lies within the new UMRV AVA.
It contains producers of some repute. The Wollersheim Winery of Prairie du Sac, for example, works with a range of grapes including Sangiovese and Bonarda, and has earned some 267 medals over the past 20 years.
The application for the UMRV AVA was based upon evidence of a glacial retreat 15,000 years ago.
The resultant water flows combined with the St Croix River and what became Lake Superior to form this bedrock.
As federal tobacco subsidies have diminished, and wine consumption has risen in the US, many tobacco farmers, especially in Wisconsin, have switched over to growing grapes.
Due to the abundance of cold and humidity, French and other hybrids dominate the region.
22 Jul
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News Tuesday that Social Security numbers may not be as random nor secure as believed is just one more security problem the ubiquitous identification number faces.
Last fall, the Government Accountability Office found that Social Security numbers are under attack and your personal records are more exposed than you’d like to think. At least that seems to be the observation in a frightening study that says among other things that 85% of large counties and 41% of small counties in the U.S. make records that may contain SSNs generally available in bulk or online.
On top of that, many record-keepers do not or cannot restrict the types of entities that can obtain public records and may not know how records are being used. Finish that observation off with the notion that some businesses are sending records with SSNs offshore, primarily to India and the Philippines, even though not much is known about how such data are protected overseas.
The dour Web-based GAO study looked at 247 counties across the U.S. responsible for recording documents — including the 97 largest counties by population and a random sample of 150 of the remaining counties. Records could include birth, death, and marriage records; criminal and civil court case files; and records that reflect property ownership, such as property liens. Some records contain personally identifiable information, such as SSNs, dates of birth, and credit card or bank account numbers.
Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Vermont were not included in the study because the GAO said individual counties don’t collect personal data in those states.
So, if you have ever wondered how identity theft can be the number one consumer fraud problem seven years running, costing consumers more than $1.2 billion in 2007 alone, and showing no signs of letting up, perhaps we need only look to the results of studies such as this.
Read the rest http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/070709-social-security-numbers.html?fsrc=netflash-rss
22 Jul
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A US$1m wine book weighing 30kg is set to be released next year.
The Wine Opus will list the world's top 100 wineries.
As well as its US$1m (£600,000) price tag, at 30kg (66lbs) it will weigh as much as the average labrador dog (pictured), or a nine-year-old child.
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Published by Kraken Opus, which has previously launched extravagant works on fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, Indian cricket ace Sachin Tendulkar and Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, it will be released in spring next year.
Every purchaser of the book will also receive a six-bottle case of wine from every one of the 100 wineries listed, as well an invitation to visit some of them.
Only 100 copies of the book will be made – 25 have already been pre-ordered, with a number of copies set aside for auction.
A spokeswoman for Kraken Opus told decanter.com that a 'panel of experts' will draw up a shortlist of about 300 producers, and then a second panel, comprising 40 sommeliers, will make the final selection, based on a 'number of criteria' at a 'wine UN meeting' in London in 2010.
A third vote will then be taken to decide the top 10.
The list of sommeliers and wine experts has not been revealed, but the spokeswoman said that 'every wine-producing country' will be represented, and that chef Marco Pierre White will be involved in the launch.
22 Jul
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But was Norman Vincent Peale right? Is there power in positive thinking? A study just published in the journalPsychological Science says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are.(See pictures of people mourning the death of Michael Jackson.)
The study's authors, Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, begin with a common-sense proposition: when people hear something they don't believe, they are not only often skeptical but adhere even more strongly to their original position. A great deal of psychological research has shown this, but you need look no further than any late-night bar debate you've had with friends: when someone asserts that Sarah Palin is brilliant, or that the Yankees are the best team in baseball, or that Michael Jackson was not a freak, others not only argue the opposing position, but do so with more conviction than they actually hold. We are an argumentative species.
And so we constantly argue with ourselves. Many of us are reluctant to revise our self-judgment, especially for the better. In 1994, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper showing that when people get feedback that they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better. If you try to tell your dim friend that he has the potential of an Einstein, he won't think he's any smarter; he will probably just disbelieve your contradictory theory, hew more closely to his own self-assessment and, in the end, feel even dumber. In one fascinating 1990s experiment demonstrating this effect — called cognitive dissonance in official terms — a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write hard-hearted essays opposing funding for the disabled. When these participants were later told they were compassionate, they felt even worse about what they had written.(See how to prevent illness at any age.)
For the new paper, Wood, Lee and Perunovic measured 68 students on their self-esteem. The students were then asked to write down their thoughts and feelings for four minutes. Every 15 seconds during those four minutes, one randomly assigned group of the students heard a bell. When they heard it, they were supposed to tell themselves, "I am a lovable person."
Those with low self-esteem — precisely the kind of people who do not respond well to positive feedback but tend to read self-help books or attend therapy sessions encouraging positive thinking — didn't feel better after those 16 bursts of self-affirmation. In fact, their self-evaluations and moods were significantly more negative than those of the people not asked to remind themselves of their lovability.(See pictures of couples in love.)
This effect can also occur when experiments are more open-ended. The authors cite a 1991 study in which participants were asked to recall either six or 12 examples of instances when they behaved assertively. "Paradoxically," the authors write, "those in the 12-example condition rated themselves as lessassertive than did those in the six-example condition. Participants apparently inferred from their difficulty retrieving 12 examples that they must not be very assertive after all."
Wood, Lee and Perunovic conclude that unfavorable thoughts about ourselves intrude very easily, especially among those of us with low self-esteem — so easily and so persistently that even when a positive alternative is presented, it just underlines how awful we believe we are.
The paper provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than try to reject and fight them. In the fighting, we not only often fail but can also make things worse. Mindfulness and meditation techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic perspective. Call it the power of negative thinking.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909019,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
22 Jul
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I was excited to read Tranformation of Cities. I was however not as satisfied after reading because of the theory part. I didn't expect the book to be about architecture or city layout but expect practical and useful information with good analysis. Transformation of Cities stays in the theory realm and what practical it offers explores too broadly for my reading sake. It is a good book overall.
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