The goal was to examine a real or fictional person from two competing personality perspectives of the eight that we covered in our coursework and reading.  I chose to look at Bateman in three ways.  The first is to describe his personality more fully from an abnormal point of view using schizotypal and borderline personality disorders. I then did a more detailed theoretical analysis using general psychoanalytic theory and then using a novel application of self-actualization from humanistic psychology.

I just reformatted the paper to appear in a more journal like format, and is hopefully a bit easier to read using two columns and with single spacing.

Read it here: BatemanReformatted.pdf

This paper is my first major work for my PhD program in Clinical Psychology through Walden University.  I have written plenty of other papers, but this is the first that really let me dive into theory and produce work that was an original synthesis of other research.  Overall, because it was a paper for a class with some specific requirements, it straddles the line between giving extra description of theories to demonstrate understanding and also in using jargon from both the psychology and literary fields.  So it might seem to drag in some areas and then plow through others.  But, hopefully it will be a decent read overall.

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A 15 year project has now created truly synthetic life. That being a 1 million base pair chromosome that can self replicate and which the scientists understand the purpose of each set of DNA information, what it produces, etc.

Not only that but the genetic code includes a watermark which includes direction on how to decode the watermark into English from the base pair sequences, 46 names of people responsible for the genetic code and project, a website address for the organism, and quotations.

This changes the game.

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You are not here to receive this letter.  Some days that makes me very angry.  Other days very sad.  Still two years after you left this life I fight a struggle with emotions, healing, and understanding.  I have had the great fortune to have excellent friends help me at every stage of this process.

Your last wishes to me were that we hold no memorial for your passing.  You wished to fade away from memory.  We soundly ignored that.  You are worth being remembered by each of us who are left behind.  At that memorial I read an abbreviated version of this observation about life from Bill Hicks:

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while.

Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we…kill those people.

"Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real."

It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok… But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want.

It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money.

 Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.

The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off.

The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.

Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

That passage means as much to me today as it did two years ago.  Life is a ride, and we can change the ride for the better.

We had our won roller coaster of ups and downs as a family.  Few times were easy.  It was real, it was fun, and sometimes not real fun.  And I am thankful for every moment of it we had.

Thank you for everything you gave me, I love you, I miss you.

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I want to emphasize: The amount of physical data we receive often exceeds our cognitive abilities to track and organize it.

I have mountains of paper, receipts, rental statements, insurance invoices and payments for both car and home, taxes, property taxes, financial aid documents for my graduate program, software serial numbers, and the list goes on.  It is quite impossible for me to memorize any of this information in a way that is useful, and even file folder organization does not provide a way to organize the information to make finding any one document a simple matter.  A conversion to digital records provides a layer of abstraction that creates a useful way of managing the data.

Digital conversion abstracts my documents into searchable text that can be indexed, searched, and retrieved in an almost limitless number of ways.  A database has no need to have a memory, it can simply query vast numbers of records at a speed which to human perception is instantaneous.  However, this data is fragile.  My vital records are reduced to magnetically stored 1’s and 0’s.  These are not any less fragile than the physical documents, but there is the implication that redundant co-location of this data is necessary so that the information is not lost.  Such a loss would be near devastating if physical records are destroyed.  Previously, if paperwork had become lost, there was some chance of finding it had been misplaced.  Disruption of digital data can mean real total loss of that documentation.

Now examine other parts of life and the many layers of abstraction.  I have a bank account.  There is money in that account, but if I were to ask to see the physical currency backing the amounts in my accounts I would simply be greeted by a number on a screen that was generated from a database.  The majority of that money has come from checks from my property management company, I have records of these checks but the currency they represent is also existent entirely as points in a database.  One misplaced decimal and I can grow by orders of magnitude or have my financial ability crushed.  We are assured that there are rigorous safeguards and audits of data to insure that mistakes do not occur.  In the majority of cases these safeguards and trails of digital records work brilliantly, but errors do occur.  Even one error in a million is a high rate when you consider the billions of transactions that occur daily.

We must begin to ask what the reality of our work, income, accounts, and information is based upon.  We are physical being who increasingly interact with each other through abstractions in data.  To what degree do we know that our digital interactions are with other people?  To what extent are we cruel to data in ways that we would never impose on flesh and blood? 

This is not an exit.

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If you have ever been a business to business service provider, this should all seem far too familiar.

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You know… It might be terrifying but it happens to be wild enough to be true.  We respond to points and rewards.  Some people really are working to give us points and rewards for things that are good for us, society, and the planet.  Most are just trying to make a few dollars.  The thing is, this really matters, because behavior can be shaped by series of inconsequential events into very different modes of not just behavior but thinking.

The video may run a bit longer than your attention span, but it is well worth it.

Found at Fox @ Fury via StumbleUpon

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Hearing this talk certainly gave me a new and valuable insight to the brain, strokes, and just how malleable perception is when things go wrong in the brain.  I hope everyone who watches this is able to take something positive, informative, and interesting from this talk.

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The solutions was found here – and the post on that site includes screenshots if you need them.  However, here is the text of the fix which should suffice for the majority of people:

This is a fix for slow Zune marketplace on Win 7, I have tested this on my Win 7 64 bit. Marketplace works fine on my Vista 32 bit and xp 32 bit. You can try this for your Vista 64 bit too. You can find users reporting on this forum http://forums.zune.net/2/8/526815/ShowPost.aspx

The Fix
Turn off Automatically detect LAN settings in your IE.
Steps

1. Open IE
2. Click on Tools–> Internet Options
3. Click on “Connections” Tab
4. Click button “Lan Settings”
5. Un-Check ” Automatically detect settings” (this is/was set by default in my Win 7 installation)
6. Restart IE and Zune (if you had it open)

I found an article for slow saving of documents in SharePoint from Windows 7 client and this was the fix and thought these were related.

 

So go forth, and have a blazing fast marketplace, just the way it ought to be!

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Example from work.  I work as a customer service rep (seasonal position) for Enstrom’s Candies.  We happen to ship exclusively through FedEx, which is an interesting story if you have a love for the world of shipping, so naturally we get a lot of their trucks coming and going.  However, the occasional UPS truck shows up, and here is where the game world intervenes…

You see, we had a bit of a falling out with UPS.  Thus I sometimes imagine that rather than delivering packages to us one day an armed riot squad will leap out in order to lay siege to us for our impudence at rejecting their services.  This is probably a result of too many hours of playing F.E.A.R. where your average jaunt through a parking garage would likely be interrupted 15 times by trucks full of people intent on ruining your day.

Of course, all of this probably related back to the image I posted about how after enough driving games everything in life becomes a bit of a race.

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I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology through Walden University. Right now I am in my first course, which is an introduction to graduate studies in psychology. The course is mostly put in to warm students up to graduate studies. This is probably rather important since the majority of students at Walden have not been students for awhile. However, for someone like me, who has not been out of school very long, it ends up mostly being touchy feely time wasting that has gems of information scattered throughout.

Now as I just said, there are a number of important bits of information scattered in this course. There is a lot of practice in APA style (which I need badly) and a number of development exercises that force us to make a plan for our courses, professional development, and steps to licensure. In between those gems though are thins that are mostly fluff.

Some of the fluff is worthwhile too.

For example, right now we are covering the aspects of scholarly writing. This is includes a couple of video segments that a fifth grader could understand. The best part so far has been the warm up statement which compares/contrasts scholarly writing to things the everyday person has probably written. One thing the speaker in the video brings up is that, “you may have written a note to your child’s teacher…”

Being that I have a mind that thinks in a rather different way from yours, I may be the only person to find a good bit of humor in writing a note to a teacher. I now want to combine the scholarly writing style with all types of usually casual writing. Why simply tell a teacher that your student will be absent on Friday when you can inform them the of the exact reason and a number of important studies that relate to the condition relating to the absence. This is not to poke fun at scholarly writing, but more to make life more enjoyable for people forced to read what I hand them. As such:

Regular Note:

Johnny will be absent Friday.

-Chris

Enhanced Note:

Johnny will be absent Friday. This absence is due to a required visit to the doctor to be inoculated for infectious diseases identified as harmful by the school board (CDC, 2005; SHS, 2009). Any missed work may be forwarded to my home so that negative consequences due to this absence may be mitigated…

Why would anyone use the enhanced note? Because it is fun to use skills you have worked on for years to get quizzical looks from others. Besides, the first sentence is the same, thus within the first two seconds the vital information has been given. Everything after that will give the poor soul on the receiving end a chance to learn and a proper works cited list in order to find your primary source documents.

On a more serious note. Many business documents get far too casual. If you need to write a document for software or policy revisions it will, in reality, benefit your reader to cite source documents and be overly specific. After all, the person reading your recommendations probably does not do your job every day and being very specific will help them understand why the document you have sent to their desk matters rather than just being a vague of a problem you seem to have.

So, for now I am back off to learn to properly cite study notes, video segments, and student forum posts. It may seem inane now, but it will be handy to be in the practice of proper citation once it really matters.

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