deNormalized log

ADHD Drugs Cause Hallucinations in Children; Psychiatry Pushes Hallucinogenic Drugs for Profit

2009-01-27T09:30:00.001-08:00

(NaturalNews) New research published in the journal Pediatrics reveals that the ADHD drugs prescribed to millions of children are causing them to experience frightening hallucinations. Children on these drugs hallucinated that snakes and bugs were crawling all over them, says Reuters, and some kids taking the drugs experience other bizarre psychotic side effects such as thinking they ran into a wall and falling to the ground even when no wall was present.
ADHD drugs, of course, are powerful psychotropic mind-altering chemicals that are often molecularly identical to street drugs. The industry of psychiatry is virtually owned by Big Pharma, which hopes to drug every child, teenager and adult with at least one mind-altering medication.
The drugs reviewed in this study include: Ritalin and Focalin XR (Novartis), Adderall XR and Daytrana patch (Shire), Concerta (Johnson & Johnson), Strattera (Eli Lilly), Metadate CD (Celltech Pharmaceuticals) and Provigil (Cephalon).
Researchers noticed that only children taking these drugs suffered from hallucinations. Those taking placebo had no hallucinations, and the children who stopped taking ADHD drugs saw their hallucinations cease.
Reuters reports that "…FDA researchers urged doctors to discuss the potential side effects with parents and children to help ease their anxiety if such symptoms should occur." So instead of getting their kids off these drugs, the FDA thinks parents and kids just need to "talk about the hallucinations" to ease their anxiety.
And if that's not enough, I suppose, there are anti-anxiety drugs they can both take in order to avoid getting too uptight about the fact that their children are on hallucinogenic drugs.

Stop the insanity!

I'm just going to come right out and say the obvious: These children are tripping out on hallucinogenic, mind-altering street drugs. This isn't "treatment" for some genuine health problem; it's a legalized mass-drugging campaign that's permanently harming the brains of children while earning sick profits for Big Pharma.
The psychiatric pill pushers have managed to turn a generation of children into druggies who are now demonstrating the same symptoms as a street junkie burnout. And rather than trying to get kids OFF these drugs, the FDA, Big Pharma and modern psychiatrists are doing everything in their power to put MORE kids on these dangerous, hallucinogenic drugs!
That this continues in America today is outrageous. In a nation that spends billions of dollars on the so-called "War on Drugs" -- see the Drug War Clock at http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm -- to ignore the mass drugging of its own children with hallucinogenic street drugs relabeled as "medication" is unconscionable.
If there's really a War on Drugs, why doesn't that war target the biggest drug pushers of all? Big Pharma has put more kids on drugs than any street corner crack dealer could ever hope to achieve. In fact, the entire industry of psychiatric medicine is little more than a legalized drug dealing network that hides behind the jargon of "medicine" and "therapy."

Mind-numbed parents lead to drugged children

It's not just the industry that's to blame on all this, either: Parents who allow their children to be drugged with these hallucinogenic ADHD drugs are just as much a part of the problem. In the same households where parents are adamantly restricting their child's use of pot or alcohol, they will literally feed that same kid dose after dose of hallucinogenic street drugs on the advice of a psychiatric medicine quack who's on the take from Big Pharma.
What are they thinking? Say no to drugs, but say yes to hallucinogenic psychotropic drugs if a corrupt psychiatrist tells you your kid needs them?
Somehow, when speed is labeled under Big Pharma's brand names, it eludes all rational thinking by parents, doctors, pharmacists and drug war zealots. It is one of the largest sectors of the hallucinogenic drug trade in America, and yet it goes completely unnoticed by virtually everyone.
My latest hip-hop song takes a shot at mind-altering medications with some disturbing, uncensored lyrics. Listen to "SSRIs - S.S.R.Lies" here: http://www.naturalnews.com/SSRIs_S_...

The ugly truth about the War on Drugs

The War on Drugs, of course, was never really about ending drug use in the first place. It was about eliminating the competition for Big Pharma, making sure kids get off generic black market drugs and get onto brand-name Big Pharma drugs. To legitimize this mass drugging of children, the industry of modern psychiatry was created, with all its imaginary (hallucinated?) disorders and dysfunctions used to befuddle the public with seemingly intelligent-sounding technical jargon.
It's all just drug-pushing psychobabble, of course. Disorders like ADHD are purely fictional, having no basis in reality whatsoever, and the brain shrinkage pointed to by psychiatrists who claim ADHD causes stunted growth is actually the result of the amphetamine drugs they put the kids on. It is well documented that drugs like Ritalin cause stunted grown and reduced brain size (http://www.naturalnews.com/021944.html).
The degree of quackery present in the psychiatric industry today is simply staggering. And to think that mainstream doctors defend this quackery is yet more evidence that modern medicine has nothing whatsoever to do with actual science; it's all based on a Cult of Pharmacology where all drugs are considered good and necessary, regardless of the mountain of evidence showing them to be dangerous and medically useless.
This is where I have to challenge all the so-called "skeptics" out there who attack natural medicine. These skeptics and self-proclaimed quack observers are, in fact, among the greatest quacks of all. Why? Because they aren't skeptical in the least about psychiatric medicine!

The skeptics are quacks

Where is the skepticism about this home-grown brand of legalized drug pushing? Where are all the intelligent questions demanding proof that ADHD is a genuine disease and not just something made up to sell more drugs? The skeptics are silent when it comes to psychiatric medicine, and in their silence they reveal themselves to be quacks.
Logic, reason and scientific evidence are all thrown out the window on the subject of psychiatric disorders. The most rational-sounding skeptics are instantly transformed into psychobabble-spouting quacks who defend the indefensible -- the mass drugging of children with powerful hallucinogenic street drugs as "treatment" for some imaginary disease.
Sure, the skeptics will attack meditation, crystals, prayer, intention, chiropractic care and even herbal medicine (all of which can be healing, by the way), but when it comes to the loopy loose logic of psychiatric medicine inventing diseases and drugging up the children with hallucinogenic amphetamines, they swallow the whole thing without blinking an eye!
So much for the credibility of the so-called skeptics and quack busters. It turns out they're quacks themselves. They've simply subscribed to their own form of quackery: Drugs and surgery for all!
The quacks are on crack, and they're supporting an industry that hands out speed to the children. Meanwhile, the War on Drugs fills the prisons with people who smoked a little weed while completely ignoring the psychiatric pill pushers. Crazy, huh? I'm beginning to thinking everybody's on drugs!
Just remember, folks: If you want to sell drugs to kids, just get FDA approval first. It keeps the DEA off your back and fools parents into thinking your hallucinogenic drugs are "medicine."

via http://www.naturalnews.com/025433.html

Defining Success: If you don't know what you want, you won't know when you've gotten it

2009-01-27T09:27:00.001-08:00

When it comes to your life, what do you want? How does your money fit into that?

If you can't answer these two questions, you won't ever know when you've been successful. In fact, it might be worse than that: you might achive what you thought you wanted, or what all of your friends want, and suddenly realize that it doesn't satisfy. In order to make sure you're going the right direction for you, it's important to figure out what you want from your life (to find your definition of "success").

Why it Works

We're all going after something. That's part of being alive. As long as we're living and acting, we are headed towards something. Even if we don't want to live, we're going towards our goal (yes, death is a goal!). Our lives are going somewhere. We're caught up in the stream of living and we'll end up somewhere.

Luckily for us, we have some say about where we can end up. Sure, we all die in the end, but we have the abilitiy to decide what is important and make choices towards that end. If you're saying, "Sure, Sarah, we all know that. Make this entry worth reading, already!" then tell me what you're living for. Go ahead, tell me what your life's goal is. Tell me why you're on this earth and how all the different parts of your life fit into that.

If you can do that, you're ahead of most of us. Deciding what we want, what we're about, takes a lifetime of deliberate, focused introspection. But we can figure out different parts of this whole at different times in our lives, and we can live deliberately towards them.

How it Works

If you're not sure how to get started in this process, here is a process that helps.

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper. In 10 minutes, list as many things as possible that you have not done, that you would regret not doing if you died tonight. To the best of your ability, don't stop writing and don't censor or even think too hard about anything. Just write. You might find some crazy things coming out the end of your pen, and that's ok. Let them be.

2. Read your list. Notice any internal reactions you have to different items on the list. Note these in the margins next to your list so you can remember them later.

3. Step away from the project for 3-7 days, except to read your list once a day. This lets the list percolate in your mind. Often, writing down our desires brings to the forefront things that we haven't thought about in a while, or voices things we avoid voicing any other time. It can take us a few days to become accustomed to these thngs being a reality in our lives. We learn to accept, "Yes, I am the person whose life won't feel complete if I never help the refugees in Darfur," or, "Yup, I'm the busy entrepreneur who really wants a desk job so I can spend more time with my kids before they leave home."

4. Come back to the project and read the list again. Note any internal reactions that have changed as you let the ideas percolate.

5. Start pulling the different items on your list together and write a statement that encompasses what you're about. In the beginning, this can be a list of more general cateogories that cover all of the items on your list. For instance, my list would containg such items as "helping people grow" and "working with groups to help them better understand and support each other." My larger category might be, "working with people, as individuals and in groups, to help them better understand and support the growing process in themselves and others. Eventually, this statement will be less like a list and more like a sentence or two, but the list is fine to start.

6. Write down and commit to one step you can take this week! today! right now! to help move your life more in line with your statement. Make sure that this is small enough to be achievable and is something you can maintain.

7. Repeat stps 3-6 until you have a statement that feels right. Most people know when they've hit on the one that's right for them. It moves many to tears, but some also feel joy or peace when they find it. Continue with the small goals until your life looks like what you want it to be.

8. Live the life you've designed. Achieve your definition of success.

via http://www.wisebread.com/defining-success-if-you-dont-know-what-you-want-you-wont-know-when-youve-gotten-it

5 Credit Card Company Tricks — and How to Thwart Them

2009-01-27T02:44:00.001-08:00

True or False? Credit card companies lure you in with big promises, but bury the nasty stuff in fine print.

It would be hard to find many people that disagree. Unfortunately, when the consensus is that card companies are out to get you, you might be tempted to throw up your hands and give in, saying “What can I do?” If that’s your attitude, you can be sure they’ll take full advantage.

Because you read Get Rich Slowly, though, I’m guessing you’re a little more savvy, a little more proactive about your finances, a little more likely to look before you leap. So, let me give you five specific things to watch out for, both when getting a credit card and when using the card you have, and how to avoid each trap.

Promise #1: “As low as 9.99% APR!”
The Trap: Your interest rate could be as low as 9.99%… but it could also be as high as 20.99%, or whatever the card company has put in the fine print.

Your Plan: Read the “Schumer box” (where the interest rate is shown in larger type, usually on the reverse side of an application) to see if the card company has allowed themselves the luxury of giving you any interest rate they please. If yes, either consider your credit history and go in with your eyes wide open to the possibility of a higher rate, or choose a credit card that offers a single take-it-or-leave-it rate. In that way, you’re either approved or rejected, but you don’t come away feeling fleeced.

Promise #2: “Up to 5% cash back!”
The Trap: Several. The card may offer you much less than the 5% rebate until you spend a certain amount per year. On the flip side, it may give you a 5% rebate for the first $300 in purchases each month, then drop the rebate down to 1% or less.

Your Plan: Stay away from cards that market a rebate “up to” a certain percentage, and go for those that promise a “full” percentage. And check the fine print for caps on monthly or yearly rebates.

Promise #3: “0% APR on balance transfers for 12 months!”
The Trap: Two-fold. First off, it’s almost impossible these days to transfer a credit card balance without paying 3% of the balance upfront. Transfer $5000 and you’ll pay $150 before we even start talking about paying down the balance.

Second, almost all card companies take your payments and apply them first to balances with the lowest interest rate. Say you transfer $1000 to a card at 0%. The card’s interest rate on new purchases is 13.99%. This month you buy $500 worth of stuff with the card, then pay $500 when the bill comes. Do you still have a $1000 balance at 0%? No, you have a $500 balance at 0% and a $500 balance at $13.99%! Why? Because your $500 payment went toward the balance sitting at 0%, not toward the balance sitting at the 13.99%.

Your Plan: A couple of options. The easy thing to do would be to swear off credit for a bit — transfer the balance then don’t use the card until it is paid off. (You’d stilll get hit with the 3% fee, but it might be worth it if you had a high interest rate on your old card.)

If you have decent credit and a little more self control, you could get a new credit card that offers a 0% rate on purchases for 12 months, then use it while you pay off your old card’s balance. By doing so, you focus on paying off your high-interest debt while floating new purchases at 0%. If you follow my logic, this is very similar to transferring your balance at 0% but without the fee. Either way, recognize that the 0% rate doesn’t last forever and the bill eventually comes due.

Promise #4: Your card has a credit limit of $3000.
The Trap: While logic would tell you that your card company won’t approve purchases beyond the limit, the reality is that they will let you charge beyond your limit, then slap you with a $39 fee to penalize you.

Your Plan: Don’t think of your card company as a caring parent who cuts you off when you overspend. It’s up to you to keep track of when you get close to your limit. (By the way, you really should not be getting that close to your card’s limit. It’s hell on your credit score.)

Promise #5: “Any time for any reason”
The Trap: Unlike the other promises, this one’s too nasty for the issuers to put a positive spin on, so it stays tucked away. In short, in almost every card agreement, the card issuers give themselves the right to change your interest rate at any time for any reason, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. And they only have to give you 15 days notice, so you could find yourself scrambling if it happens to you.

Your Plan: Have a second credit card before this happens instead of waiting until you’re in trouble. You don’t ever have to use the second card, but the last thing you want is to have your interest rate jacked up to 25% with no recourse if your credit card issuer decides to play hardball.

Credit cards ain’t for fools. If you’re going to carry one, then take responsibility for understanding what you’re getting into, and fight fire with fire when your card company decides to play rough.

via http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/01/26/5-credit-card-company-tricks-and-how-to-thwart-them/

Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Mental Decline

2009-01-27T02:30:00.001-08:00

A new study published in the Journal of Geriatric Psychology and Neurology reveals that vitamin D deficiency leads to significant mental decline as people age.
The study followed 2,000 people aged 65 and above, comparing their vitamin D levels to their degree of cognitive impairment. Those with the highest vitamin D levels had the least cognitive impairment while those with the lowest vitamin D levels had the greatest cognitive impairment.

If allowed to progress, cognitive impairment is usually diagnosed as dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Modern medicine has no real answers for treating either one: Their pharmaceuticals don't work and they still refuse to teach patients about the importance of vitamin D.
Notably, vitamin D is also the most impressive anti-cancer vitamin of all: It has been shown to halt nearly 4 out of 5 cancers all by itself. (http://www.naturalnews.com/021892.html)
The population of advanced nations is universally vitamin D deficient due to spending most of their time indoors, resulting in a sunlight deficiency. This study correlating vitamin D with cognitive impairment may explain why the people of these nations have become so mentally impaired over the last few generations.
One or two generations ago, when their parents or grandparents used to work outside on their own farms, sunlight exposure was much higher. Cancer rates were low and mental function was much higher. But as societies "advanced," their workers moved indoors, into offices with fluorescent lights. Vitamin D deficiency skyrocketed while IQs plummeted.
That's why today we have the most cognitively impaired population any advanced nation has ever seen (a fact that should be obvious by observing the way people vote). The remedy, of course, is supplementary vitamin D through various fish oil products or straight vitamin D3 supplements. But medical experts are still trying to keep vitamin D a secret, hoping that the population won't catch on and start taking vitamin D supplements (which would largely put the cancer industry out of business).

via http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000691_vitamin_D_cognitive_impairment_Alzheimers.html

New Research Confirms Vitamin D Blocks Formation of Breast Cancer

2009-01-27T02:25:00.001-08:00

(NaturalNews) Women with a higher vitamin D intake may be a quarter less likely to die from breast cancer than women with lower levels, scientists have found.
In a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto analyzed the vitamin D intake of 759 breast cancer patients and 1,135 women without breast cancer, accounting for both dietary intake and vitamin D production from exposure to sunlight. They found that women with a higher vitamin D intake had a 24 percent lower risk of acquiring hormone receptor-positive breast cancer than women with a lower vitamin intake.
"Few epidemiologic studies have considered the association between vitamin D and hormone-receptor-defined breast cancer," the researchers wrote.
Hormone receptor-positive breast tumors have their growth stimulated by the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone, and are the most common form of breast cancer diagnosed in the United States.
The researchers also found that women with higher vitamin D intake had a 26 percent lower risk of developing hormone receptor-negative tumors, however, and a 21 percent lower chance of developing mixed-receptor tumors, which are receptive to only one hormone type. Unlike the correlation with receptor-positive tumors, these correlations were not statistically significant.
"This study suggests that vitamin D is associated with a reduced risk of breast cancer regardless of [hormone receptor] status of the tumor," the researchers wrote.
Breast cancer is the second most common and the fifth most lethal cancer in the world, with more than one million new diagnoses and 500,000 deaths each year. In the United States, 180,000 women are diagnosed with the disease and 40,000 are killed every year.
The current study is not the first to suggest that vitamin D intake may affect breast cancer risk and prognosis. In fact, the idea has been around since the 1940s, when researchers noted that cancer deaths increased with distance from the equator.
Technically a hormone, vitamin D is produced naturally by the body when the skin is exposed to sunlight. It has long been known to be critical for proper calcium absorption and bone health, and deficiency can lead to rickets in children and osteoporosis in adults.
Just 15 minutes of sun on the face and hands is considered to provide enough vitamin D for an average light-skinned individual, with 20 to 30 minutes needed for darker skinned people. Because the sun is weaker farther from the equator, however, many people are not able to synthesize all the vitamin D they need themselves, especially during winter months when the days are shorter. For people in those circumstances, dietary vitamin D is also available from certain fatty fish, in fortified grain and dairy products, and in the form of supplements.
Research has linked vitamin D deficiency to an increased risk of a wide variety of cancers, including cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, pancreas and prostate. Another study conducted by University of Toronto and Mount Sinai Hospital researchers found that women who were vitamin D deficient at the time of breast cancer diagnosis had a 75 percent higher risk of death than women with adequate levels, and a 100 percent higher risk of having their cancer metastasize.
Recommended daily vitamin D intake remains controversial, with the governments of Canada and the United States recommending only 200 IU per day for children and 400 IU per day for adults, the amounts long accepted as necessary to stave off bone and dental problems. Recent research suggests that much higher levels are needed to protect against cancers, diabetes, heart disease and autoimmune disorders, however, leading the Canadian Cancer Society and other groups to recommend 1,000 IU per day for adults.

via http://www.naturalnews.com/025397.html

Fix the top 6 causes of clutter

2009-01-27T02:24:00.001-08:00

If you're ready to make a clean sweep of your house, help is here. Experts share the six main reasons why people can't seem to let go of their stuff and their smartest tricks for outwitting that primal hoarding instinct. Prepare to clear out -- for good!

The obstacle: 'If I get rid of this wedding vase, I'll feel guilty'

The solution: People feel a responsibility to be good stewards of things, says Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and a coauthor of "Buried in Treasures" (Oxford University Press). Especially items they've been given by or inherited from a loved one. Getting rid of a present feels like disrespecting the giver. But remember the true meaning of gifts.

"When you receive a present," says Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, an interior designer in New York City and the founder of ApartmentTherapy.com, "your duty is to receive it and thank the giver -- not to keep the gift forever."

That goes for items you inherit. "Ask yourself, 'How many things do I really need to honor this person's memory?'" says Frost. Select a few objects with strong associations to your late grandmother, say, and keep them in places where you'll see them. Let the rest go to people who want them more than you do.

Likewise, don't be shy about admitting a mistake you made and moving on. The $120 pair of heels you bought last spring that pinch? Cut yourself some slack and give them away. Real Simple: How to Donate Old Clothes

A look at your love-hate relationship with the possessions that surround you, and how to overcome them

The obstacle: 'But I might need seven sleeping bags one day'

The solution: Everyone fears tossing something out only to realize -- six months, a year, or five years down the road -- that she shouldn't have. Keeping things around "just in case" makes people feel safe.

If your main problem is an overflowing closet, try the "packing for a trip" trick. It goes like this: You're packing for a month's vacation -- you'll need both dressy and casual clothes, for warm and cool weather, and you can fill two big suitcases.

Then take all the other things and place them on a rack in your basement or attic. If you want to wear any of those exiled clothes in the coming days, grab them. But as the months go by, you'll be shocked at how few of those clothes you need or even think about. From there, it's a baby step to a Goodwill bag.

Still have separation anxiety? Box up the stuff you're not quite able to part with and write on the outside, open six months later. Then tuck it away in your basement, attic, or storage facility. If a year from now you find that you didn't miss the items, it will be much easier to part with them.

The obstacle: 'I think this brooch/chair/ugly knickknack might be valuable again'

The solution: When you hear the appraisers on "Antiques Roadshow" say that someone's grandmother's old Bakelite bracelets would now fetch $500, it's easy to wonder whether your vintage piece might be worth a bundle. Stop guessing and find out what the item in question is truly worth.

Take a 10-minute spin on eBay, searching for an item similar to yours. (Click on "Advanced Search," then "Completed Listings Only.") If the sale prices look promising -- or if you can't find equivalent items -- consider having the item appraised by an expert. Many local auction houses will do this for free in the hopes that you will sell the item through them later. (Google "auctions" and your city to find an auction house near you.)

For the greatest certainty, hire an independent appraiser through the American Society of Appraisers or the Appraisers Association of America. Be sure to ask for an estimate first. Real Simple: How to sell old clothes online

Remember -- for something to be considered valuable, it must be in tip-top shape. "People think their old baseball cards or "National Geographics" are worth money," says professional organizer Caitlin Shear. "But that's true only if they're packaged in a Mylar sleeve and in pristine condition."

The obstacle: 'If I put the bills away, I'll never pay them on time'

The solution: Many clutterers have gotten into the habit of organizing their world visually and spatially, says professor Randy Frost. They're afraid that if they put stuff away, they won't remember it, because they won't see it. "But it's a perception of order," he says, "not real order."

You may initially recall that the electric bill is next to the potted plant on the kitchen counter, but it will soon be buried by other items you need to have in plain sight, too, like invitations and permission slips.

Even hard-core clutterers can train themselves to complete tasks without obvious visual cues, says Frost. For starters, if you're used to leaving things in piles, designate a logical home for every object. Set up automatic e-mail reminders to help you remember to pay bills. In addition, if you feel as if out of sight is out of mind, make transparency your friend. Take items destined for closets, the garage, or the basement and store them in clear plastic bins so you can always see what's there. Real Simple: Where to keep important documents

The obstacle: 'I want this chartreuse muumuu to go to a good home'

The solution: People often want to find just the right place for their belongings. The problem is, trying to find just the right place can be paralyzing, says interior designer Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan. And while you wait, say, for your niece to move into a starter apartment, your old love seat and dinette set gather dust.

To satisfy your desire for perfect placement, look for a charity with which you feel a strong connection -- perhaps a shelter for women. To identify a worthy one near you, visit charitynavigator.org, a nonprofit research group that evaluates charities based on how effectively they use donations. Go to the Advanced Search page, select "Human Services" charities, and type in your ZIP code. Contact the three- or four-star charities that interest you and ask if they accept donations.

If that sounds like too much trouble, call your nearest house of worship and inquire whether it has a clothing drive coming up. Ask if the donation is tax-deductible, and get a receipt.

The obstacle: 'I want to declutter, but I can't get motivated'

The solution: This may be due to a phenomenon known as delayed discounting, says Daniel Hommer, M.D., chief of brain imaging at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, in Bethesda, Maryland, and an expert on motivation. It works like this: If it takes a long time to reach a goal, you value that goal less than if you could reach it quickly -- making it harder to get started. Make projects small and rewards immediate, says Hommer.

After you organize a distinct area, dress it up -- add decorative paper to the bottom of a now spartan toiletry drawer, for instance. Keep at it and your home will become not only more orderly but also more beautiful.

via http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/homestyle/01/20/rs.top.causes.of.clutter/index.html

What To Ask Your Doctor During Your Visit

2009-01-27T02:12:00.001-08:00

Your relationship with your doctor greatly influences your ability to make wise health decisions. It can also affect the outcome of your care. Partner with your doctor in making decisions about your health care. Common goals, shared effort, and good communication are the basis of successful doctor-patient partnerships.
Questions to ask your doctor
Even if you don't have a plan for treating your condition, your doctor does! These important questions will help you and your doctor create a treatment plan that is right for you.
How should I treat my condition?
What problems could occur from my condition?
What will happen if I don't treat my condition?
What lifestyle changes can help me deal with my condition?
How will this condition affect my life in the long-term?
When should I set my next appointment?
Questions if you receive a prescription
Some conditions can be managed with diet, exercise or other lifestyle changes; but it may be necessary to take a prescription medication as well. If you receive a prescription from your health professional, here are some specific questions you should be asking:
What is the benefit of this medication over another?
How does my medication work?
How do I take my medication?
Is my medication available in generic?
What are the possible side effects of my medication and what should I do if I
experience any?
What should I do if I miss a dose?
What are the risks of not taking my medication as prescribed?
How long will I have to take my medication?

via http://healthierhealth.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-to-ask-your-doctor-during-your.html

Success Is In Your Limitations

2009-01-27T02:04:00.001-08:00

Limits are something that we all deal with. Because of restrictions placed upon us, we are all limited in the choices that we have. As we grow and expand, our options tend to increase proportionally. One easy way to change your life is to overcome the limitations which are presently holding you back.
Freedom is something that I hold as one of my highest values. I believe that for one to fully be in control of his or her life, this has to be something that one strives for. Freedom has many different levels to it and it starts with the inherent right to pursue those objectives which will make you happy. This can include career, family, relationships, and hobbies. Unlike many parts of the world, we have the freedom to choose most aspects of our life. Sadly, few actually exercise this choice.
The greatest limitation that exists is the ones that we put upon ourselves. People's favorite saying appears to be "I can't". They hold grand ideas yet are stopped by the "I can'ts" in their minds. It reminds me of the old prayer "God, please release me from the bondage of self". This is a tall order for everyone.
Success starts in our minds. It is our mindset that begins the path to achievement. Without a top-notch outlook, we are apt to believe the lies we tell ourselves. The bondage of self can take over at any moment.
We live in a reality that includes time and space. There are physical constraints that are impossible to overcome. For example, it is physically impossible for me to be in two different cities are one time. Nevertheless, that limitation is overcome through the use of technology. Thus, I can have my image transmitted to as many different locations as I want. My success is determined by how well I overcome this limitation.
There is always something that we can do to expand the choices we have. Another example is the physical health of an individual. Suppose we take a person who is 150 pounds overweight. What are some of the ailments of that individual? Perhaps shortness of breath, fatigue, lack of stamina, etc... Now, consider how that affects his/her relationship with children. Obviously, the interaction is limited by the physical shortcomings.
Taking this a bit further, how do you think the situation would change if that person lost the 150 pounds? Naturally, the interaction (relationship) with his/her children would be different. Without the fatigue and shortness of breath, that person could play a game of tag or go for walks with them. The increase in energy would allow for more interaction.
As you can see, the overcoming of this physical limitation opened other avenues for this person. The same is true for your life. Whenever we overcome something that limits us, we experience the freedom of being able to do more.
So, what is presently limiting you? In other words, what is keeping you from your success? Get the answers to these questions and you will have a list of things that need your attention. It is that basic. There is nothing that cannot be gained by overcoming the limiting factor which is holding you back.

via http://dennisharting.blogspot.com/2009/01/success-is-in-your-limitations.html

Honeybees are found to interact with Quantum fields

2009-01-26T07:04:00.001-08:00

How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.
Honeybees don't have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee's dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, by they do have a secret.
This secret has vexed Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, ever since she was a child. "I grew up thinking about bees," she says. "My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture as a bee researcher. My brothers and I would stop at his office, and sometimes he would how show us the bees. I remember my father telling me about the honeybee's dance when I was about nine years old. And in high school I wrote a paper on the medicinal benefits of honey." Her father kept his books on honeybees on a shelf in her room. "I'm not sure why," she says. "It may have just been a convenient space. I remember looking at a lot of these books, especially the one by Karl von Frisch."
Von Frisch's Dance Language and Orientation of Bees was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, there was scarcely an entomologist in the world who hadn't been both intrigued and frustrated by his findings. Intrigued because the phenomenon Von Frisch described was so startlingly complex; frustrated because no one had a clue as to how bees managed the trick. Von Frisch had watched bees dancing on the vertical face of the honeycomb, analyzed the choreographic syntax, and articulated a vocabulary. When a bee finds a source of food, he realized, it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees, called recruits. On the honeycomb which Von Frisch referred to as the dance floor, the bee performs a "waggle dance," which in outline looks something like a coffee bean--two rounded arcs bisected by a central line. The bee starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting point.
It is easy to see why this beautiful and mysterious phenomenon captured Shipman's young and mathematically inclined imagination. The bee's finely tuned choreography is a virtuoso performance of biologic information processing. The central "waggling" part of the dance is the most important. To convey the direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the waggling run makes with an imaginary line running straight up and down. One of Von Frisch's most amazing discoveries involves this angle. If you draw a line connecting the beehive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive and the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed by the two lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run to the imaginary vertical line. The bees, it appears, are able to triangulate as well as a civil engineer.
Direction alone is not enough, of course--the bees must also tell their hive mates how far to go to get to the food. "The shape or geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food source changes," Shipman explains. Move a pollen source closer to the hive and the coffee-bean shape of the waggle dance splits down the middle. "The dancer will perform two alternating waggling runs symmetric about, but diverging from, the center line. The closer the food source is to the hive, the greater the divergence between the two waggling runs."
If that sounds almost straightforward, what happens next certainly doesn't. Move the food source closer than some critical distance and the dance changes dramatically: the bee stops doing the waggle dance and switches into the "round dance." It runs in a small circle, reversing and going in the opposite direction after one or two turns or sometimes after only half a turn. There are a number of variations between species.
Von Frisch's work on the bee dance is impressive, but it is largely descriptive. He never explained why the bees use this peculiar vocabulary and not some other. Nor did he (or could he) explain how small-brained bees manage to encode so much information. "The dance of the honeybee is special among animal communication systems," says Shipman. "It conveys concise, quantitative information in an abstract, symbolic way. You have to wonder what makes the dance happen. Bees don't have enough intelligence to know what they are doing. How do they know the dance in the first place? Calling it instinct or some other word just substitutes one mystery for another."
Shipman entered college as a biochemistry major and even spent some time working in a biology lab studying the hemolymph--the "blood"--of honeybee larvae, but she quickly moved her interest in bees to the side. "During my freshman year," she says, aI became more attracted to the beauty and rigor of mathematics." She switched her major and eventually went on to graduate school and to a professorship at the University of Rochester. For several years it seemed as though she had wandered a long way from her childhood fascination.
Then, taking an unlikely route, she found herself once again confronting the mysteries of bees head-on. While working on her doctoral thesis, on an obscure type of mathematics known only to a small coterie of researchers well-versed in the minutiae of geometry, she stumbled across what just might be the key to the secrets of the bee's dance.
Shipman's work concerned a set of geometric problems associated with an esoteric mathematical concept known as a flag manifold. In the jargon of mathematics, manifold means "space." But don't let that deceptively simple definition lull you into a false sense of security. Mathematicians have as many kinds of manifolds as a French baker has bread. Some manifolds are flat, some are curved, some are twisted, some wrap back on themselves, some go on forever. "The surface of a sphere is a manifold," says Shipman. "So is the surface of a bagel--it's called a torus." The shape of a manifold determines what kinds of objects (curves, figures, surfaces) can "live" within its confines. Two different types of loops, for example, live in the surface of a torus--one wraps around the outside, the other goes through the middle, and there is no way to transform the first into the second without breaking the loop. In contrast, there is only one type of loop that lives on a sphere.
Mathematicians like to examine different manifolds the way antiques dealers browse through curio shops--always exploring, always looking for unusual characteristics that expand their understanding of numbers or geometry. The difficult part about exploring a manifold, however, is that mathematicians don't always confine them to the three dimensions of ordinary experience. A manifold can have two dimensions like the surface of a screen, three dimensions like the inside of an empty box, four dimensions like the space-time of our Einsteinian universe, or even ten or a hundred dimensions. The flag manifold (which got its name because some imaginative mathematician thought it had a "shape" like a flag on a pole) happens to have six dimensions, which means mathematicians can't visualize all the two-dimensional objects that can live there. That does not mean, though, that they cannot see the objects' shadows.
One of the more effective tricks for visualizing objects with more than three dimensions is to "project" or "map" them onto a space that has fewer dimensions (usually two or three). A topographic map, in which three-dimensional mountains get squashed onto a two-dimensional page, is a type of projection. Likewise, the shadow of your hand on the wall is a two-dimensional projection of your three-dimensional hand.
One day Shipman was busy projecting the six-dimensional residents of the flag manifold onto two dimensions. The particular technique she was using involved first making a two-dimensional outline of the six dimensions of the flag manifold. This is not as strange as it may sound. When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional outline of a three-dimensional sphere. As it turns out, if you make a two-dimensional outline of the six-dimensional flag manifold, you wind up with a hexagon. The bee's honeycomb, of course, is also made up of hexagons, but that is purely coincidental. However, Shipman soon discovered a more explicit connection. She found a group of objects in the flag manifold that, when projected onto a two-dimensional hexagon, formed curves that reminded her of the bee's recruitment dance. The more she explored the flag manifold, the more curves she found that precisely matched the ones in the recruitment dance. "I wasn't looking for a connection between bees and the flag manifold," she says. "I was just doing my research. The curves were nothing special in themselves, except that the dance patterns kept emerging." Delving more deeply into the flag manifold, Shipman dredged up a variable, which she called alpha, that allowed her to reproduce the entire bee dance in all its parts and variations. Alpha determines the shape of the curves in the 6-D flag manifold, which means it also controls how those curves look when they are projected onto the 2-D hexagon. Infinitely large values of alpha produce a single line that cuts the hexagon in half. Large' values of alpha produce two lines very close together. Decrease alpha and the lines splay out, joined at one end like a V. Continue to decrease alpha further and the lines form a wider and wider V until, at a certain value, they each hit a vertex of the hexagon. Then the curves change suddenly and dramatically. "When alpha reaches a critical value," explains Shipman, "the projected curves become straight line segments lying along opposing faces of the hexagon."
The smooth divergence of the splayed lines and their abrupt transition to discontinuous segments are critical--they link Shipman's curves to those parts of the recruitment dance that bees emphasize with their waggling and buzzing. "Biologists know that only certain parts of the dance convey information," she says. "In the waggle dance, it's the diverging waggling runs and not the return loops. In the circle dance it's short straight segments on the sides of the loops." Shipman's mathematics captures both of these characteristics, and the parameter alpha is the key. "If different species have different sensitivities to alpha, then they will change from the waggle dances to round dances when the food source is at different distances."
If Shipman is correct, her mathematical description of the recruitment dance would push bee studies to a new level. The discovery of mathematical structure is often the first and critical step in turning what is merely a cacophony of observations into a coherent physical explanation. In the sixteenth century Johannes Kepler joined astronomy's pantheon of greats by demonstrating that planetary orbits follow the simple geometric figure of the ellipse. By articulating the correct geometry traced by the heavenly bodies, Kepler ended two millennia of astronomical speculation as to the configuration of the heavens. Decades after Kepler died, Isaac Newton explained why planets follow elliptical orbits by filling in the all-important physics--gravity. With her flag manifold, Shipman is like a modern-day Kepler, offering, in her words, "everything in a single framework. I have found a mathematics that takes all the different forms of the dance and embraces them in a single coherent geometric structure."
Shipman is not, however, content to play Kepler. "You can look at this idea and say, `That's a nice geometric description of the dance, very pretty,' and leave it like that," she says. "But there is more to it. When you have a physical phenomenon like the honeybee dance, and it follows a mathematical structure, you have to ask what are the physical laws that are causing it to happen."
At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold's presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what's going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell.
Say a bee flies around, finds a source of food, and heads straight back to the hive to tell its colleagues. How does it perceive where that food is? What notation can it use to remember? What teens can it use to translate that memory into directions for its fellow bees? One way, the way we big-brained humans would be most comfortable with, would be to use landmarks--fly ten yards toward the big rock, turn left, duck under the boughs of the pine tree, and see the flowers growing near the trunk. Another way, one that seems to be more in line with what bees actually do, would be to use physical characteristics that adequately identify the site, such as variations in Earth's magnetic field or in the polarization of the sun's light.
Researchers have in fact already established that the dance is sensitive to such properties. Experiments have documented, for example, that local variations in Earth's magnetic field alter the angle of the waggling runs. In the past, scientists have attributed this to the presence of magnetite, a magnetically active mineral, in the abdomen of bees. Shipman, however, along with many other researchers, believes there is more to it than little magnets in the bees' cells. But she tends not to have much professional company when she reveals what she thinks is responsible for the bees' response. "Ultimately magnetism is described by quantum fields," she says. "I think the physics of the bees' bodies, their physiology, must be constructed such that they're sensitive to quantum fields--that is, the bee perceives these fields through quantum mechanical interactions between the fields and the atoms in the membranes of certain cells."
What exactly does it mean to say that the bees interact with quantum fields? A quantum field is a sort of framework within which particles play out their existences. And, rather than assigning an electron to one position in space at one particular time, you instead talk about all the different places the electron could possibly be. You can loosely refer to this collection of all possible locations as a "field" smeared out across space and time. If you decide to check the electron's position by observing it, the interaction between your measuring device and the field makes the electron appear to be a single coherent object. In this sense, the observer is said to disturb the quantum mechanical nature of the electron.
There is some research to support the view that bees are sensitive to effects that occur only on a quantum-mechanical scale. One study exposed bees to short bursts of a high-intensity magnetic field and concluded that the bees' response could be better explained as a sensitivity to an effect known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, an acronym commonly associated with a medical imaging technique. NMR occurs when an electromagnetic wave impinges on the nuclei of atoms and flips their orientation. NMR is considered a quantum mechanical effect because it takes place only if each atom absorbs a particular size packet, or quantum, of electro-magnetic energy.
This research, however, doesn't address the issue of how bees turn these quantum-mechanical perceptions into an organized dance ritual. Shipman's mathematics does. To process quantum mechanical information and communicate it to others, the bee would not only have to possess equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world; to come up with the appropriate recruitment dance, it would have to perform some kind of calculation similar to what Shipman did with her flag manifold. Assuming that the typical honey-bee is not quite intelligent enough to make the calculations, how does the bee come up with the flag manifold as an organizing principle for its dance? Shipman doesn't claim to have the answer, but she is quick to point out that the flag manifold is common both to the bee dance and to the geometry of quarks. Perhaps, she speculates, bees possess some ability to perceive not only light and magnetism but quarks as well.
The notion that bees can perceive quarks is hard enough for many physicists to swallow, but that's not even the half of it. Physicists have theorized that quarks are constantly popping up in the vacuum of empty space. This is possible because the vacuum is pervaded by something called the zero-point energy field--a quantum field in which on average no particles exist, but which can have local fluctuations that cause quarks to blink in and out of existence. Shipman believes that bees might sense these fleeting quarks, and use them--somehow--to create the complex and peculiar structure of their dance.
Now here's the rub. The flag manifold geometry is an abstraction. It is useful in describing quarks not as the single coherent objects that physicists can measure in the real world but as unobserved quantum fields. Once a physicist tries to detect a quark--by bombarding it with another particle in a high-energy accelerator--the flag manifold geometry is lost. If bees are using quarks as a script for their dance, they must be able to observe the quarks not as single coherent objects but as quantum fields. If Shipman's hunch is correct and bees are able to "touch" the quantum world of quarks without breaking it, not only would it shake up the field of biology, but physicists would be forced to reinterpret quantum mechanics as well.
Shipman is the first to admit that she is a long way from proving her hypothesis. "The mathematics implies that bees are doing something with quarks," she says. "I'm not saying they definitely are. I'm just throwing it out as a possibility." And when she publishes her research, probably sometime next year, no doubt many scientists will be turned off by her dragging quarks and quantum mechanics into the picture.
"The joining of mathematics and biology is a fascinating endeavor and is just getting under way," says William Faris, a mathematician at the University of Arizona. "Connecting quantum mechanics directly to biology is much more speculative. I frankly am skeptical that the bee dance is related to quantum mechanics. The mathematics she uses may be related to a completely different explanation of the bee dance. This is the universality of mathematics. To venture into quantum mechanics may be a distraction."
Shipman isn't the first scientist to go out on a limb trying to link biology to quantum mechanics. Physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford University has postulated that nerve cells have incredibly tiny tubes that serve as quantum mechanical detectors, and other physicists have expressed similar ideas, but they are by no means widely accepted.
It is risky for a young scientist to take on a radical theory. Championing an unproved or unpopular idea is a good way to put your academic career on permanent hold. "My thesis adviser was worried, too," says Shipman. "He was happy to know that I am beginning collaborations with biologists."
However, Shipman is too excited about the ideas to care about the risk. "To make discoveries that cross disciplines, someone has to start. I know there is always resistance to new ideas, especially if you are approaching the problem from a different perspective. Sometimes theory comes before discovery and points the way toward the right questions to ask. I hope this research stimulates other researchers' imaginations."

Procrastinating Again? How to Kick the Habit

2009-01-25T18:04:00.001-08:00

Key Concepts

Almost everyone occasionally procrastinates, but a worrisome 15 to 20 percent of adults routinely put off activities that would be better accomplished right away.
A penchant for postponement carries a financial penalty, endangers health, harms relationships and ends careers. And yet perpetual foot-draggers sometimes benefit emotionally from their tactics, which support the human inclination to avoid the disagreeable.
Research into the reasons people put off projects has led to strategies for helping all of us get and stay on task.

Raymond, a high-powered attorney, habitually put off returning important business calls and penning legal briefs, behaviors that seriously threatened his career. Raymond (not his real name) sought help from clinical psychologist William Knaus, who practices in Longmeadow, Mass. As a first step, Knaus gave Raymond a two-page synopsis of procrastination and asked him to read it “and see if the description applied.” Raymond agreed to do so on a flight to Europe. Instead he watched a movie. He next vowed to read it the first night at his hotel, but he fell asleep early. After that, each day brought something more compelling to do. In the end, Knaus calculated that the lawyer had spent 40 hours delaying a task that would have taken about two minutes to complete.

Almost everyone occasionally procrastinates, which University of Calgary economist Piers Steel defines as voluntarily delaying an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay. But like Raymond, a worrisome 15 to 20 percent of adults, the “mañana procrastinators,” routinely put off activities that would be better accomplished ASAP. And according to a 2007 meta-analysis by Steel, procrastination plagues a whopping 80 to 95 percent of college students, whose packed academic schedules and frat-party-style distractions put them at particular risk.

Procrastination does not mean deliberately scheduling less critical tasks for later time slots. The term is more apt when a person fails to adhere to that logic and ends up putting off the tasks of greater importance or urgency. That is, if just thinking about tomorrow’s job pricks the hair on the back of your neck or compels you to do something more trivial, you are probably procrastinating.

A penchant for postponement takes its toll. Procrastination carries a financial penalty, endangers health, harms relationships and ends careers. “Procrastination undermines well-being on a wide scale,” notes psychologist Timothy A. Pychyl, director of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa. Nevertheless, recent work hints at potential upsides to this otherwise bad habit: perpetual foot-draggers seem to benefit emotionally from their trademark tactics, which support the human inclination to avoid the disagreeable.

Procrastination is learned, but certain hardwired personality traits increase the likelihood that a person will pick up the habit. “Procrastination is a dance between the brain and the situation,” Pychyl says. That nature-and-nurture view is part of a new line of research into the process and prevention of procrastination. Understanding why people put off projects has led to strategies for helping all of us get and stay on task.

Built-in Bias
Procrastination is as old as humans are. For people living in agrarian societies, a late-planted crop could mean starvation. Thus, our ancestors, including Greek poet Hesiod in 800 b.c., equated procrastination with sin or sloth. The industrial revolution may have facilitated the practice of putting off important jobs. Technical advance brings some protection from the forces of storms and famine as well as an increase in leisure time, in consumer goods and in the number of possible choices of activities. Contemporary society offers a surfeit of distractions, including computer games, television and electronic messaging—not to mention cars and planes to take us to more stuff to see and do—all enticing us to move off task.

Succumbing to such enticements can be costly. Experts estimate that 40 percent of people have experienced a financial loss because of procrastination, in some cases severe. In 2002 Americans overpaid $473 million in taxes as a result of rushing and consequent errors. And Americans’ dearth of retirement savings can be attributed, in part, to people putting off putting away cash.

Procrastination can also endanger health: after screening more than 19,800 people for high cholesterol, epidemiologist Cynthia Morris and her colleagues at the Oregon Health and Science University reported in 1990 that 35 percent of those who learned they had elevated cholesterol put off consulting a physician for at least five months. In 2006 psychologist Fuschia Sirois of the University of Windsor in Ontario reported in a study of 254 adults that procrastinators had higher stress levels and more acute health problems than did individuals who completed jobs in a timely manner. The procrastinators also received less frequent medical and dental checkups and had more household accidents, a result of putting off dull jobs such as changing smoke detector batteries.

Task aversiveness is one of the main external triggers for procrastination. Who puts off doing what she loves? According to Steel’s meta-analysis, half of the college students surveyed cited the nature of the task itself as the reason they put it off. Undoubtedly, few leap at the chance to write a dissertation about nematode reproduction or clean out the garage. “Procrastination is about not having projects in your life that really reflect your goals,” Pychyl says.

The amount of time before a project’s due date also influences the tendency to procrastinate. In particular, people are more likely to dawdle when the deadline is far away. The reason for this lies in a phenomenon known as temporal delay, which means the closer a person gets to a reward (or a feeling of accomplishment), the more valuable the reward seems and hence the less likely he is to put off performing the work needed to earn it. In other words, immediate gratification is more motivating than are prizes or accolades to be accrued in the distant future.

Such a preference may have a strong evolutionary basis. The future, for those in the Stone Age, was unpredictable at best. “Thus, there was truth to the saying ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,’ ” Pychyl says. “For survival, humans have brains with a procrastination bias built in.”

In 2004 neuroscientist Barry Richmond and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health reported finding a biological basis for this bias. Richmond’s team first trained monkeys to release a lever whenever a spot on a computer screen turned from red to green. As the monkeys continued to correctly let go of the lever, a gray bar increased in brightness, letting the animals know they were getting closer to a reward, a juice treat. Like human procrastinators, the animals slacked off during early trials, making lots of errors. But when the juice reward came closer, the animals stayed on task and made fewer mistakes.

Richmond’s team hypothesized that the neurotransmitter dopamine, which transmits feelings of reward, might underlie this behavior. Working with Richmond, molecular geneticist Edward Ginns used a molecular decoy called DNA antisense to partially shut down production of a receptor for dopamine in a region of the monkeys’ brains called the rhinal cortex that associates visual cues with reward. The treatment diminished dopamine’s effects to the point that the monkeys could no longer predict when any given trial would earn them a juice treat. Thus, they hedged their bets, working hard all the time as if “they are always one trial away from the penultimate,” Richmond says.

But not all the monkeys with diminished dopamine responses behaved with the same intensity. Some remained mellow after the dopamine-depressing treatment, failing to put in much effort even as the time to reward narrowed. That observation speaks to individuality in procrastination: some of us are more prone to it than others.

Getting Personal
At the end of the 20th century, psychologists began studying the so-called big five personality traits that blend to describe any human being: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extroversion. According to Steel, the extent to which a person displays each of these traits helps to determine that individual’s proclivity to procrastinate.

The characteristic most strongly linked to procrastination is conscientiousness—or lack thereof. A highly conscientious person is dutiful, organized and industrious. Therefore, someone who is not conscientious has a high probability of procrastinating. A person who is impulsive also is a procrastinator at risk. “People who are impulsive can’t shield one intention from another,” Pychyl says. So they are easily diverted by temptations—say, the offer of a beer—that crop up in the middle of a project such as writing a term paper.

Procrastination can also stem from anxiety, an offshoot of neuroticism. Procrastinators postpone getting started because of a fear of failure (I am so worried that I will bungle this assignment), the fear of ultimately making a mistake (I need to make sure the outcome will be perfect), and the fear of success (If I do well, people will expect more of me all the time. Therefore, I’ll put the assignment off until the last minute, do it poorly, and people won’t expect so much of me).

These personality traits, as well as less influential ones, play out in particular situations in conjunction with the environment. Researchers are now trying to capture that nature-nurture interaction to unify existing procrastination theories and to predict who is likely to procrastinate under what circumstances. Steel has derived a mathematical formula that defines “utility,” that is, how desirable a task is for an individual. To determine a task’s utility and therefore how likely a person is to do it right away, Steel puts together four basic factors, expectancy (E), value (V), the delay until reward or punishment (D), and personal sensitivity to delay (P), in the following equation:

U = (E x V) / (P* x D)

When a person expects to succeed at or values a particular task, she is more likely to do it. Hence, a higher number for expectancy or value will increase utility. On the other hand, if a reward or punishment lies far in the future or a person is particularly “sensitive,” meaning distractible, impulsive or lacking in self-control, he is less likely to do the task, at least on time. Thus, sensitivity to delay and delay itself decrease the utility of a task and lead to procrastination.

Several scientists take issue with the idea that complex human behavior can be defined by a mathematical formula. “It leads you to believe that if I put numbers in there,” Pychyl says, “I could tell you what you will be doing next Friday.” Nevertheless, Steel’s equation is an initial attempt to unify various motivational and psychological theories of procrastination and to provide a framework for future research.

The Psychology of Delay
Instead of measuring personality traits and solving formulas, some researchers prefer to tease out the psychology behind the behavior. Two key elements in the urge to let projects slide are an uneasy feeling about an activity and a desire to avoid that discomfort. “A procrastinator says, ‘I feel lousy about a task,’” Pychyl explains, “and thus walks away to feel better.” Psychologist Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University has coined “avoidance procrastinator” to describe a person for whom avoidance is the prime motivator.

Another psychological driver is indecision. An “indecisive procrastinator” cannot make up her mind about executing a task. Say a woman intends to visit her mother in the hospital. Rather than simply grabbing the keys and heading out, the indecisive procrastinator starts debating whether to drive or to take the train. The train is a hassle, but parking is expensive and I’ll have to drive back at rush hour. But then again, the train will be packed, too. The internal debate continues until enough time passes that visiting hours are over.

A third oft-cited explanation for unreasonable delay is arousal. The “arousal procrastinator” swears that he works best under pressure, loving—perhaps needing—the rush of a last-minute deadline to get started. Such a person believes procrastinating affords a “peak” or “flow” experience, defined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi of the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. Time disappears. The ego dissolves.

But procrastination does not facilitate flow, according to social scientist Eunju Lee of Halla University in South Korea. In 2005 Lee reported surveying 262 students and finding that procrastinators tended to have fewer, not more, flow experiences. After all, a person must be able to let go of herself to “get lost” in an experience, and procrastinators are generally self-conscious individuals who have trouble doing that.

Nor is the thrill of a looming deadline an actual reason people put off uninviting jobs. Pychyl and his graduate student Kyle Simpson measured traits associated with arousal, including thrill seeking and extraversion, in students who often procrastinated. In Simpson’s unpublished doctoral thesis, Pychyl and Simpson show that neither of these qualities accounted for the dawdling the students reported. Thus, procrastinators are probably not really in need of arousal, Pychyl says, but use the belief I need the pressure of a last-minute deadline to justify dragging their feet, which they do for other reasons, such as circumventing unpleasantness.

Other procrastinators strategically delay projects to excuse poor performance, should it occur. They tell themselves or others, “I could have done better if I had started earlier.” Such a strategy might, in some cases, serve as a shield for a fragile ego.

Tricks of the Trade
Procrastination is not always so maladaptive. In a 2007 survey of 67 self-described procrastinators among college students, psychologist Gregory Schraw of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his colleagues learned that these students found creative ways of making their bad habit work for them. For example, many students only took classes in which the professor offered a detailed syllabus rather than just a rough sketch of the assignments. Such specificity allowed for “planned” procrastination: the students could schedule how to delay their course work and thereby afford maximum time for more enticing activities.

To cope with the guilt and anxiety brought on by waiting until the last minute, some students acquired all the books for an assignment as soon as it was given and placed them on a shelf. The students said that by shelving the books they “shelved” their discomforting thoughts about the task. They also fended off guilt by telling themselves, “Hey, at least I got the books.” Then, 48 hours before the project was due, the procrastinator dusted off the books and bad feelings and worked in a frenzy to get the assignment done. As a result, the students did the maximum amount of work in a minimum amount of time—with a minimal amount of pain.

So although these students were still putting off the work longer than they should, they were nonetheless managing to finish their assignment while maintaining their sanity. Schraw emphasizes that his work is not meant to advocate procrastination but to point out that the practice can engender some useful survival skills such as tactical planning to complete a task in limited time and with a minimum amount of stress. “The moral of the story is that people procrastinate so they can lead a better mental life,” Schraw says.

Preventing Procrastination
Not all experts agree with Schraw. Indeed, Steel’s meta-analysis suggests that 95 percent of procrastinators would like to break the habit but cannot, because it has become automatic and ingrained. “Habits become nonconscious brain processes,” Pychyl says. “When procrastination becomes chronic, a person is, essentially, running on autopilot.”

Some experts suggest replacing the reflex to postpone with time-stamped prescriptions for action. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer of New York University and the University of Konstanz in Germany advises creating “implementation intentions,” which specify where and when you will perform a specific behavior. So rather than setting a vague goal such as “I will get healthy,” set one with its implementation, including timing, built in—say, “I will go to the health club at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow.”

Setting such specific prescriptions does appear to inhibit the tendency to procrastinate. In 2008 psychologist Shane Owens and his colleagues at Hofstra University demonstrated that procrastinators who formed implementation intentions were nearly eight times as likely to follow through on a commitment than were those who did not create them. “You have to make a specific commitment to a time and place at which to act beforehand,” Owens says. “That will make you more likely to follow through.”

Smart scheduling can also thwart procrastination. In an experiment published in 2002 Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and marketing professor Klaus Wertenbroch of INSEAD, a business school with campuses in France and Singapore, asked students in an executive-education class to set their own deadlines for the three papers due that semester. Ariely and Wertenbroch set penalties for papers turned in after the self-imposed deadlines. Despite the penalties, 70 percent of the students chose deadlines spaced out over the semester, rather than clustering them all at the end. What is more, those who set the early deadlines scored better, on average, than did students in a comparable class in which Ariely set one due date for all three papers at the end of the semester. Such planning can buck any inclination to put off the work. “The deadlines made them better performers,” Ariely says.

More simply, Pychyl advises procrastinators to “just get started.” The anticipation of the task often is far worse than the task turns out to be. To demonstrate this fact, his group, in work that appeared in 2000, gave 45 students pagers and checked in with the volunteers 40 times over five days to query them about their moods and how often they were putting off a task that had a deadline. “We found that when students actually do the task they are avoiding, their perceptions of the task change significantly. Many times, they actually enjoyed it.”

In Raymond’s case, getting to the task was, indeed, the hard part. Knaus helped him to do that by first determining the reason for his instinct to delay: Raymond feared being tested on the synopsis and looking foolish. So Knaus asked him to pick the lesser of two evils, doing his work—and risking imperfection—or avoiding difficult tasks and losing his job. When Knaus put it that way, the lawyer was able to “just grind it out.” Instead of being fired, Raymond became a “superstar” at his firm.

via http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=procrastinating-again

People procrastinate when asked to think in the abstract

2009-01-25T05:36:00.001-08:00

TO SOME there is nothing so urgent that it cannot be postponed in favour of a cup of tea. Such procrastination is a mystery to psychologists, who wonder why people would sabotage themselves in this way. A team of researchers led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz, in Germany, reckon they have found a piece of the puzzle. People act in a timely way when given concrete tasks but dawdle when they view them in abstract terms.

Dr McCrea and his colleagues conducted three separate studies. First they recruited 34 students who were offered €2.50 ($3.30) for completing a questionnaire within the subsequent three weeks. Half of the students were then sent an email asking them to write a couple of sentences on how they might go about various activities, such as opening a bank account or keeping a diary. The others were asked to write about why someone might want to open a bank account or keep a diary.

For their second study, Dr McCrea and his colleagues recruited 50 students, who were offered the same sums and timespans as the first lot. Half of these students were asked to provide examples of members of a group, for example, naming any type of bird. The task was inverted for the other students, who were asked to name a category to which birds belong.

Finally the researchers asked 51 students, who were again offered cash and given a deadline, to examine a copy of “La Parade” by Georges Seurat, a 19th-century French artist. Half were given information about pointillism, the technique Seurat used to create the impression of solid colours from small dots of paint. The others were told that the painting was an example of neo-impressionism in which the artist had used colour to evoke harmony and emotion. Both groups were then asked to rate the importance of colour in 13 other works of art.

As the team report in Psychological Science, in all three studies, those who were presented with concrete tasks and information responded more promptly than did those who were asked to think in an abstract way. Moreover, almost all the students who had been prompted to think in concrete terms completed their tasks by the deadline while up to 56% of students asked to think in abstract terms failed to respond at all.

Theories abound for why people procrastinate. Some psychologists think that those who delay completing tasks do so because they have low confidence that they will succeed in that task. Perhaps procrastinators are perfectionists or they may just be depressed. Others believe they are impulsive and lack self-control. Earlier research has shown that people defer tasks that are unappealing, difficult or expensive, which is no great surprise. Dr McCrea and his colleagues, however, are the first to show that the way in which a task is presented also influences when it gets done.

Those seeking to cajole a colleague, friend or spouse into action might ponder the finding, though perhaps not for too long. It might be better to offer a procrastinator a concrete choice—Lapsang Souchong or Darjeeling?—rather than asking him just what sort of a person it is who would drink tea when time is of the essence.

via http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12971028

Why do the majority of people never get cancer?

2009-01-25T02:54:00.001-08:00

PhysOrg.com) -- Every year, millions of people are diagnosed with cancer - a remarkably high number. But what about the flipside of those statistics? That is, two out of three people never get cancer, and more than half of heavy smokers don’t get cancer, either. A recent study points out this overlooked fact, and suggests that researchers might discover something by asking why so many people are resistant to the often deadly disease.

George Klein, Professor Emeritus at the Microbiology and Tumor Biology Center at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has been teaching and researching since the mid-1940s. In a recent study called “Toward a genetics of cancer resistance” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Klein highlights evidence of several biological cancer resistance mechanisms that some individuals have that seem to prevent them from developing cancer. Perhaps, Klein says, there are cancer-resistant genotypes that “nip cancer in the bud” and keep most of us healthy.

As Klein explains, the suffering of cancer patients and their families has inspired most cancer researchers to focus on the genetics of cancer susceptibility. On the other hand, the genetics of cancer resistance has been largely unexplored, possibly because it is assumed to be merely the other side of the susceptibility coin. For example, if cancer is caused by mutations in genes that control cell division, then it logically seems that cancer resistance is simply a low occurrence of these mutations.

But, Klein says, maybe there is another alternative to the concept of cancer resistance. Perhaps most people have various protective mechanisms that counteract the development of cancer cells and stop the disease from progressing beyond the earliest stages.

“Cancer resistance must be investigated on its own merits,” Klein told PhysOrg.com. “It is possible and even likely that evolution has provided our species with highly efficient cancer resistance mechanisms. These may be the mechanisms that prevent most circulating, disseminated cancer cells that are found in the blood of all cancer patients to grow into metastasis, and can also nip cancerous foci (islands of cells in, for example, the prostate or the breast) in the bud, so that they do not progress.”

In a previous discussion, Klein and his coauthors identified five kinds of anticancer mechanisms. The first type is immunological, which applies to virus-associated cancers. For instance, researchers have compared the antibody responses of the squirrel monkey and the marmoset when infected with Herpesvirus saimri, a virus that is endogenous to squirrel monkeys but that the marmoset never encounters. When exposed to the virus, the marmosets, but not the squirrel monkeys, develop rapidly growing lymphomas. The researchers found a striking difference in the timing of each animal’s antibody response. In the tumor-resistant squirrel monkeys, the antibodies rose to a high level just three days after the infection, but, for the marmosets, the response took three weeks. By that time, the marmosets already had a rapidly growing virus-driven lymphoma. Research has shown that such immunological responses are influenced by genetic variation.

A Developers Guide to Servers. What you need to know but were afraid to ask.

2009-01-25T02:34:00.001-08:00

Servers are the backbone of enterprise computing today, most websites for example run on either Apache or IIS and will be running on a server of some description.

Perhaps because of servers ubiquity it is easy to become complacent about them especially as they are rarely seen but understanding what a server can offer you and it's limitations will definitely help with software development.

Servers on the whole are built more of the practicality side than for the esthetics, there is no need to make them look pretty if they are going to spend most of there time in a Data-Centre rarely seen. The server will only have a visit if something goes physically wrong, everything else should be looked after remotely. Ultimately the success of a server is measured in the the amount of time spent looking after it and it performing the task(s) you have set it.

The Differences Between Servers and Desktops

The main difference between Servers and Desktops are Servers are designed to run 24/7 desktop aren't. The components in a server can usually handle higher stress and handle redundancy by having two or more of critical components so if one fails there still is another keeping the server up and the service it is running available.

The Different Types of Server

There are different types of server then mains ones are,

Pedestal/Tower

A Pedestal Server (which is often know as a Tower) isn't rack mounted as the main intention of it's design is to work primarily in an office environment not in a Data-Centre. These machines are usually found as file or print servers.

Rack Mounted

As the name suggests a rack mounted service lives in a rack. Placing servers on top of each other in a rack to support their weight and to provide them with services such as power and networking means that you can have lots of servers taking up less room and room in data-centre's are at a premium. A typical rack is 19 or 21 U (I will explain later what a U is)

Enterprise Class

Enterprise Class servers are free-standing like pedestals but you won't find them in an office! Because of their size, value and special requirements such as multi-phased power supply, larger than domestic voltages or specialist cooling they can only really live in a data-centre. As you can imagine this type of server doesn't come cheap. Enterprise Class machines would have been called 'Mainframes' in year gone by but as they run can happily run operating systems such as Linux, Unix and Windows (The IBM P Series pictured does not run Windows). Their main function today is as a consolidated platform as one of these servers can run the equivalent of several hundred Linux servers saving space and power.

Blade

In a typical rack you can get about 10 rack mounted servers. Blade servers on the other hand are designed for high density, i.e. more servers in the same amount of space. Take for example the HP C Class Blades, a U10 C7000 Blade Enclosure can have upto 16 468c G5 Blade Servers. So a normal rack can have 32 servers in it rather than 10. Blades servers make ideal candidates for hosting Virtualised servers such as Vmware, Hyper-V or XenSource.

The Worlds Most Popular Server

It is estimated by HP that the world most popular server is the ProLiant DL380 G5. As I haven't seen this claim undisputed I will use the DL380 as an example of a typical server as it is the one you are most likely to meet. This next section will give you a detailed overview of the machine.

HP's Official ProLiant DL 380 Overview

Front View:

1. Eight sockets for PC2-5300 Fully Buffered DIMMs (DDR2-667) - up to 64GB RAM is possible

2. Hot-plug fans, full redundancy - air is sucked through the machine from front to back.

3. Systems Insight Display

4. Quick release lever for rapid server access - lifting these levers will allow you to quickly pull the machine out of a rack.

5. Support for eight Small Form Factor hot plug hard drives bays - Typically SAS drive (discussed in the article on Storage) are installed here.

6. Front LEDs (show server status) and Unit Identification button/LED (for easy in rack server identification)

7. Two front USB ports (2 rear USB ports, 1 internal USB port)

8. Intel Xeon Processor (Performance models include two processors)

9. Hot plug power supply, redundancy option (High performance models include redundant power supply) - Yes two power supplies. One can be replaced whilst the server is still working for maximum up-time.

10. Three full-size PCI-E expansion slots in standard expansion cage (or optional mixed PCI-X/E expansion cage). Two additional low-profile PCI-E slots embedded on the system board. Four slots available for use; one consumed by Smart Array controller (Base and Performance models)

11. Quick removal access panel

Rear View:

1. Torx service tool - HP exclusively use a standard screw-driver head in their machines called the Torx T15 to help avoid screw-driver cam-out.

2. Optional pass through cable door

3. Two Embedded NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapters with TCP/IP Offload Engine

4. Hot plug power supply bays, redundancy option (High performance models include redundant power supply)

5. Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2) Remote management port. ILO is a remote management console that can turn a server on and off and take over the screen amongst other features. ILO usually has it's own dedicated VLAN. I will talk more about what that is in A Developers Guide to Networking. What you need to know but were afraid to ask.

6. Video Port

7. Two USB 2.0 Ports

8. Serial Port

9. Keyboard Port

10. Mouse PS/2 Port

11. Two low-profile PCI Express x8 slots. Slot 1 is consumed by the P400 Smart Array controller. (Base and Performance models)

12. Three full-size PCI Express slots in standard cage (or optional mixed PCI-X/E expansion cage)

Specifications

Processors:
- Quad-Core and Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processors - systems support up to 2 processors
- Intel® 5000P chipset
Memory:
- Up to 64 GB PC2-5300 Fully Buffered DIMMs (DDR2-667)
Storage Controller:
- Performance Models: 512MB (RAID 0/1/1+0/5/6)
- High Efficiency and Base Models: 256MB Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0/5)
- Entry Models: 64MB Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0)
Internal Drive Support:
- (8) small form factor (SFF) hot-plug drive bays to support Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) drives
- Slimline media bay supporting Optical or Floppy drive
Network Controller:
- Two embedded Gigabit Network Adapters
Expansion Slots:
- Four PCI-Express slots
USB Ports:
- USB 2.0 support
- 5 total ports: (2) ports up front; (2) ports in back; (1) port internal
Integrated Hypervisors (Optional):
- VMware & Citrix XenServer virtualization technology ... sadly not Microsoft yet!
Redundancy:
- Fully redundant hot plug fans (N+1)
- Hot plug power supply with optional redundancy (Included in Performance models)
Form Factor:
- Rack (2U), (3.5-inch); Depth 26 inches (66 cm)

What is a U ?

A 'U' or Rack Unit is an Electronic Industry Alliance standard height (EIA 310) measure for a rack mounted server. The reason there is a server is so machines from multiple vendors can all use the same racking.

A U or 1U equates to 1.75 inches or 44.45 millimetres. A typical rack is either 19 or 23 U's high. Our example machine the HP DL 350 G5 is 2U (see Form Factor in previous section)

Good Questions to Ask

One of the most frequent question there is, is why is the system running slowly?

Often the answer to this question is one of the four resources on a server is getting maxed out. CPU, Memory are obvious but the problems usually lie with I/O in the form of networking and disk. So understand what networks the servers is connected to and what storage and how it is configured. Recently I found a SQL Server database was running like a dog because the mdb file was sitting on the same hard disk as many others so the disk was working flat out! However to solve the problem developers were off writing better SQL and .Net code which won't have helped at all.

Is the Live server the same as the Dev? If so, what else is the Live server running?

'It runs ok in development' is frequently heard and we all know that if development and testing environments could accurately simulate a Live environment then more problems could be found before go-live. A far easier thing to do is measure how much resource your new development consumes and profile it over a working cycle such as a day or through a month-end process, then examine the servers it's going to go live on, and watch the server through the same profile you will get a better idea whether your new development will fit, this will be easier than trying to reproduce a Live simulation in test or dev but if you can do that, that's great!

In Summary

I do like hardware! So I am bias but I do believe that getting to know hardware can help bridge divides and help solve problems because if programs don't work well infront of business users the whole of IT looks like smucks and the 'his fault not mine' looks extra lame.

via http://geekswithblogs.net/SabotsShell/archive/2009/01/24/a-developers-guide-to-servers.-what-you-need-to-know.aspx

HTTP vs. HTTPS :: It's all about keeping you secure

2009-01-25T01:39:00.001-08:00

HTTP stands for HyperText Transport Protocol, Which is just a fancy way of saying it's a protocol (a language, in a manner of speaking) for information to be passed back and forth between web servers and clients. The important thing is the letter S which makes the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.

The S (big surprise) stands for "Secure". If you visit a website or webpage, and look at the address in the web browser, it will likely begin with the following: http://.

This means that the website is talking to your browser using the regular 'unsecure' language. In other words, it is possible for someone to "eavesdrop" on your computer's conversation with the website. If you fill out a form on the website, someone might see the information you send to that site.

This is why you never ever enter your credit card number in an http website! But if the web address begins with https://, that basically means your computer is talking to the website in a secure code that no one can eavesdrop on.

You understand why this is so important, right?

If a website ever asks you to enter your credit card information, you should automatically look to see if the web address begins with https://. If it doesn't, there's no way you're going to enter sensitive information like a credit card number.

PASS IT ON (You may save someone a lot of grief).

Going Through the Process

With HTTP, you sit at your browser and interact with data. HTTP’s job is to present that data to you, and browsers are the means of doing so. Mozilla’s Firefox browser, for example, understands HTTP instructions and arranges the data as the site’s designer intended. The browser knows what to do when you click. It uses HTTP to do this. But HTTP cannot do much beyond that. How the data travels from Point A to Point B, or even if it travels at all, is none of HTTP’s concern. This is a great compromise if you want speed and elegance and couldn’t care less about security. One does not require security to view BizTech’s latest online articles, for instance.

With HTTPS, the story is quite the same. But when security is a must, HTTPS differentiates one sender and receiver from another. SSL takes the data, going or coming, and encrypts it. This means that SSL uses a mathematical algorithm to hide the true meaning of the data. The hope is that this algorithm is so complex it is either impossible or prohibitively difficult to crack.

The encryption begins when the owner of the Web site purchases a time-sensitive certificate from a trusted certificate authority such as VeriSign. You can get a certificate anywhere, or even make your own, but is it trusted? Your browser will let you know. This certificate is a security code created specifically for that one user, or even for that one Web site. The code is so complex that no one else on Earth should have a duplicate.

Getting a certificate can be an involved task. All types of information must be recorded so the issuer of the certificate can be a reliable authority on the certificate’s owner. Information that must be provided includes the name of the site and even the name of the server that hosts the site. Complexity makes counterfeiting incredibly difficult.

This makes the issuer a trusted third party. When your browser sees the secure Web site, it uses the information in the certificate to verify that the site is what it claims to be. Browsers commonly indicate security by presenting a picture of a shiny closed lock at the bottom of the screen. This process is not always perfect because of human error. Maybe 53.com is a valid banking site, but 53RD.com is not. We call that phishing. Unscrupulous people phish for careless people. So be cautious. After the identity of the Web site is accepted, the encryption is negotiated between the browser and the Web server, and the data is all but locked up tight.

via http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/2332033-http-vs-https-its-all-about-keeping-you-secure

ScrumMaster and ZenMaster: The joke of certification

2009-01-24T20:34:00.001-08:00

Many people object to ScrumMaster certifications:

It’s a money making machine
Scrum Masters do not learn anything during classes
The certification is nothing worth - because nothing is certified

I have been a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and a Scrum practioner for some years. People who object to the certification do see it from the wrong angle. You need to understand Zen to understand the goodness in CSMs.

photo credit: darkpatator

Certification is a Zen joke, because the role of a ScrumMaster cannot be certified. It’s not about knowing some technical questions. What should a trainer certify in such a class? That you can lead an agile Scrum team as a ScrumMaster? No one can certify the fact that you’re a leader, catalyst and enabler. You either are or you aren’t. Zen masters (ha, another master without a master!) would laugh at the fun in the ScrumMaster certification. They laugh about the idea of certifying enlightenment.

Scrum without ScrumMasters

As another parallel, both in Scrum and in Zen, masters are only enablers. They are not needed after the act of enabling Zen/Scrum. My Scrum trainer told me, the goal of a ScrumMaster is to make himself obsolete. There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
— Linji

If you see a ScrumMaster, kill him. Zen tells you:

If you are thinking about Buddha, this is thinking and delusion, not awakening. One must destroy preconceptions of the Buddha. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind during an introduction to Zazen, “Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else. Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature.”

If you think the ScrumMaster is Scrum, you’re delusioning yourself. In Scrum the product owner and the scrum team can, and should from my view, act by themselves, without the need of a ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster helps them achieve their Scrum. Helps them overcoming initial obstacles in their productivity.

Kick your ScrumMaster
If the ScrumMaster is not good enough for them, certification and coaching inside the company hasn’t helped, the Scrum team has always the right to kick their SM if he isn’t good enough for them. And they should do so. If in Zen a master isn’t good, pupils will just leave him. This might lead to problems within the organization, especially if the ScrumMaster is their boss, but that should be the problem of the organization, not a team problem.

Practitioner certification

There are many more certifications from the Scrum alliance. If you dig deeper, the real fun part is that CSM doesn’t mean anything, practitioner means much more:

The practitioner level of certification (CSP) is only offered to those CSMs who have hands-on experience using Scrum. Applicants must complete an extensive questionnaire with probing questions that focus on applicants’ real-world experience using Scrum on software development projects. Their application is reviewed for answers demonstrating competence and comprehension of principles that can only result from hands-on work. The applicant may be questioned to determine eligibility. To maintain CSP status, you must submit a new application every two years.

Is the certification any use?

Yes. The Certified Scrum Master training has several merits:

Calling the Scrum training “Certified” guaranties the quality of the trainer
It motivates the Scrum master to think in Scrum
If managers take part, it helps the organisation adopt a “we can do it” view about Scrum
Certification (CSM) seems to be one of the main reasons for Scrum success in the enterprise. The certification makes Scrum compatible for managment.

The view about acceptance is shared by Peter Stevens:

It is also about branding, and has been quite successful. The acceptance of the CSM program is high (especially from corporate customers, and this is where the money is). I believe the CSM program is an important reason why Scrum is better accepted than say, XP, in corporate management circles.

Scrum is successful. I’ve seen it help development departments gain productivity. If you do not scrum yet, go for it.

Vitamin D 'is mental health aid'

2009-01-24T20:11:00.001-08:00

Vitamin D, found in fish and produced by sun exposure, can help stave off the mental decline that can affect people in old age, a study has suggested.

UK and US researchers looked at 2,000 people aged 65 and over.

They found that compared to those with the highest vitamin D levels, those with the lowest were more than twice as likely to have impaired understanding.

Alzheimer's charities said the research was interesting, but more work was needed to understand vitamin D's role.

It would be interesting if a low level of vitamin D was found to be a risk factor for cognitive problems as it is cheap and easy to remedy

Dr Susanne Sorensen
Alzheimer's Society

Vitamin D is important in maintaining bone health, in the absorption of calcium and phosphorus, and in helping the immune system.

The body makes vitamin D when it is exposed to the sun, or it can be obtained from foods such as oily fish, and those fortified with vitamin D, such as milk, cereals, and soya drinks.

But older people's skin is less able to absorb vitamin D from sunlight so they are more reliant on obtaining it from other sources.

Supplements

Animal and lab studies have previously suggested that the vitamin can have a beneficial effect on cognitive function.

The team from the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, the University of Cambridge and the University of Michigan, assessed people's cognition, or comprehension skills.

People who have impaired cognitive function are more likely to develop dementia.

The researchers looked at people who had taken part in the Health Survey for England in 2000.

Just over 200 had significant cognitive impairment, assessed by looking at people's attention, orientation in time and space and memory.

The study found that as levels of vitamin D went down, levels of cognitive impairment went up.

The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geriatric Psychology and Neurology.

Dr Iain Lang from the Peninsula Medical School, who worked on the study, said: "For those of us who live in countries where there are dark winters without much sunlight, like the UK, getting enough vitamin D can be a real problem - particularly for older people, who absorb less vitamin D from sunlight.

"One way to address this might be to provide older adults with vitamin D supplements.

"This has been proposed in the past as a way of improving bone health in older people, but our results suggest it might also have other benefits.

"We need to investigate whether vitamin D supplementation is a cost-effective and low-risk way of reducing older people's risks of developing cognitive impairment and dementia."

Risk factor?

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said: "Many foods that contain vitamin D, such as oily fish, eggs and breakfast cereals, are also good sources of vitamin B12, which, as previous studies have shown, can help protect the brain.

"Diet is known to influence dementia risk. The best way of reducing your risk of developing dementia is to maintain a balanced diet with regular exercise and frequent social interactions."

She added: "These findings may be significant, but much more research is needed."

Dr Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, added: "One in three people over 65 will die with dementia so research into how we can reduce risk is to be encouraged.

"There was some previous evidence to suggest that people with dementia may have a lower level of vitamin D in their blood but it was not clear if this happened after the onset of disease.

"It would be interesting if a low level of vitamin D was found to be a risk factor for cognitive problems as it is cheap and easy to remedy.

"We look forward to seeing the published results of this new research to help us better understand the potential role of vitamin D in reducing risk."

via http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7845703.stm

Future-Proofing A Design

2009-01-24T09:16:00.001-08:00

Last time on FAIC a user asked for guidance on the potential pitfalls of refactoring an automatic property into a regular explicit property. This is just an example of a far more general problem: how can we design programs so that they are easy to get right when things inevitably change in the future?

This is an incredibly difficult question to answer, one which whole books could be written on. Today, I'll just give three general points to think about.

First: Premature generality is expensive.

Designing code to be future-proof without a clear understanding of what the future holds often leads to excess generality; generality has very real costs, and they might be higher than the benefit accrued.

If you do a good job of solving the problem at hand with the tools at hand, if the code is clean and organized and has few moving parts, then it will be easier to generalize it in the future if you need to in order to solve a problem then.

Design your code to solve the well-understood problem. If you design it to solve an unknown future problem, odds are good that you're going to solve it poorly, making even more work for the future.

Second: Represent in your model only those things which are always in the problem domain and whose class relationships are unchanging.

The relationships between the classes TrafficLight, TrafficSign, Vehicle, Car, Truck, Pedestrian, Roadway, Intersection, SignalTiming and RightOfWayLaw are likely to be eternal and unchanging.

Things change. The semantics of a particular RightOfWayLaw might change subtly or grossly as the city council does its job. There might be new subclasses of Vehicle created in the future. A specific traffic light might have a faulty implementation that the rest of the system needs to handle gracefully. But each of these situations is about changing the implementation details of a class, never changing its relationships with other classes.

If the class relationships are future-proofed then it is a lot easier to edit the implementations of those classes without having to worry that the whole system will thereby get messed up.

The easiest way to keep the relationships straight is to base them as much as possible on concepts directly from the problem domain.

Third: Keep your policies away from your mechanisms.

The mechanism of a traffic light works the same way no matter what policies like light timings at rush hour are. If mechanisms (TrafficLight) are separated from policies (SignalTiming) then you can change the mechanism to a more efficient one without worrying that you’re going to inadvertently change policy, and can change policy without worrying that you’re going to break mechanism.

My earlier example of a bank balance was deliberately an example of what goes wrong when mechanism and policy become conflated. The “Balance” getter was originally a mechanism, but after the edit, it became a security policy enforcement tool.

You must then ask yourself, “where in this code do I care about enforcing the policy, and where do I care about executing the mechanism?” and make the appropriate edits. After the edit, everywhere that needs policy enforcement needs to use “Balance”, everywhere that needs to effect the action of the mechanism needs to use “balance”.

What are the odds that there is going to be a bug introduced, given that we now have a difference which is important and almost invisible? Pretty high! This difference should probably be made more visible by renaming the backing store to something that calls it out as semantically different from the property accessor.

Let's bring this back to the question at hand. What guidance do we propose for future-proofing turning automatic properties into regular properties? The guidance that I am proposing here is:

First, think about whether making the design general now to solve an unknown problem that you might not even have in the future is worthwhile.
Second, make sure that the design in general makes the relationships between classes unchanging, even if the specifics of each class change.
Third, consider whether that hypothetical future change to the property will be splitting apart its role as a mechanism from its role as an enforcer of policy; if this is going to be an important distinction, then consider getting that distinction into the class implementation early so that you don’t have to retrofit it in a tedious and error-prone manner later.

via http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2009/01/16/future-proofing-a-design.aspx

Green tea: 7 more reasons to love the tiny leaf

2009-01-24T09:13:00.001-08:00

Click the play button on the video window to the see the story
By now, we know that drinking green tea is undoubtedly good for our bodies. The antioxidant and free-radical scavenging properties of green tea have made it a must-have for the health conscious and numerous studies highlight the potential benefits of green tea including cancer prevention and weight loss.
But green tea isn’t just a delicious and healthful drink; it can also be used as an at-home health and beauty remedy. Read on to find out 7 surprising things you didn’t know about green tea
1. It can reduce puffy peepers: Stayed out too late last night? Soaking a cotton pad in green tea and placing it over eyes for 10 minutes can reduce the puffiness of tired eyes, making you look revitalized and refreshed.
2. It can soothe skin: Spent a little too much time in the sun? Use the naturally calming properties of green tea to soothe sunburned skin. Place green tea in a spray bottle and mist on sunburned areas for all-natural relief. Because it has anti-bacterial qualities, green tea can also be used as an antiseptic to spray on skin blemishes or irritations.
3. It’s great for teeth: Green tea has fluoride in it, making it a superstar for keeping gums and teeth healthy. Green tea can even be used as a mouthwash to maintain breath.
4. It can soothe sore throats: The anti-viral effects of green tea make it an excellent remedy to help prevent the effects of a cold or flu. In fact, you can gargle with green tea to soothe a sore throat.
5. It’s good for the bones: Naturally high in minerals, green tea aids in strong bone density, which is important for maintaining good posture.
6. It’s a room deodorizer: Green tea leaves have traditionally been used to naturally absorb odors in a room. Place tea leaves in a bowl to help absorb unpleasant odors or leave some in the fridge in place of baking soda.
7. It’s good for the feet: Soaking tired feet in green tea can prevent unpleasant fungal infections.

via http://www.abc15.com/content/style/beauty/story/Green-tea-7-more-reasons-to-love-the-tiny-leaf/tWUqZbd9NU-YD-PkgoFYEg.cspx

Weight loss easier when you get paid for it: Study

2009-01-24T09:12:00.001-08:00

CHICAGO -- Losing weight is easier when there is money on the line, U.S. researchers say.

They said weight-loss programs that reward people with money -- and remind them of the cash they stand to lose if they fail -- provided a powerful incentive to lose weight compared with more conventional approaches.

Dr. Kevin Volpp of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine was looking for an effective way to treat obesity, a growing problem that carries serious health risks.

He said many weight-loss programs fail because people are being asked to make sacrifices now for rewards in the future.

“We wanted to create a reward system which gave them rewards in the present,'' said Volpp, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Volpp and colleagues studied two kinds of incentive programs for weight loss. One was a lottery-based design in which participants played a lottery and were allowed to collect their winnings if they met their weight-loss target.

The lotteries were running daily, and people were told what their winnings would have been if they had met their weight-loss target.

“There is a very strong sense of loss aversion,'' the theory that people are highly motivated to avoid losses, Volpp said in a telephone interview.

“The idea was to create a mechanism where loss aversion would help drive people's motivation,'' he said.

The other was a deposit contract, in which participants invested a small amount of their own money -- between 1 cent and $3 per day -- which they would lose at the end of the month if they failed to reach their goals. People in this group also got a bonus if they met their goal.

“You only received your reward at the end of the month if your weight was below the stated goal for the month,'' Volpp said.

The researchers assigned 57 obese but otherwise healthy people to one of these two groups or a control group, in which people were simply weighed at the end of each month. All were aiming to lose 16 pounds by the end of four months.

People in the incentive groups lost far more weight than those who got no pay for their efforts, with about half of the participants in each group meeting their weight loss goals.

People in the lottery program earned a total of $378.49 and lost about 13 pounds, while people in the deposit group got $272.80 and lost 14 pounds.

Those in the control group, who were merely rewarded by better-fitting jeans, lost about 4 pounds after four months.

Volpp said the studies were highly effective at producing short-term weight loss, but when the money stopped flowing, the weight began to creep back on.

“We need to establish whether they can be effective in sustaining weight loss as well,'' he said.

via http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/story.html?id=1053538

Want to Live to 100? Move to a Blue Zone!

2009-01-24T09:10:00.001-08:00

Have you heard? There’s a spiritual movement afoot in America, and it is lead by the chosen one, the goddess divine, the picker of presidents – Madame Oprah Winfrey. But before you groan and turn away, I urge you to consider the latest project infused with Oprah’s superpower support. It is called The Blue Zones, and it makes good sense. The Blue Zones is the study of areas around the world that have the highest number of centenarians. The people in these areas all share certain lifestyle elements. Mostly importantly, they eat locally. And they eat green.

In 2005, Dr. Luis Rosero-Bixby presented a paper at an international conference claiming that some Costa Ricans have the longest life expectancy of anyone in the world. This was scandalous to some. How could “The Third World” (cue dramatic music: dun dun DUN!) have such a high number of healthy elderly? Scientist Dan Buettner, funded by National Geographic, decided to investigate. Buettner has since revealed why many of his subjects have avoided the diseases of old age that pick the rest of us off like flies. And it is not just Costa Ricans. Locations like Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, also have a high rate of healthy 100 year olds.

So what do these areas have in common? First of all, the people who live in them all promote sustainable living. They load up on local vegetables and plant proteins. The preparation of Blue Zoners’ food also adds to their longevity. The reasoning is this: if you are involved in the planting, harvesting, and preparation of your meals, you are more likely to get a good amount of exercise at an older age. Apparently, sustained, mindless motion such as hoeing is good for the body. My own grandmother constantly crocheted – and she lived to be 91.

Great, so there are places in the world where you can live to be 100. What happens if you don’t live there? Well, you can live life as if you do. Dan Buettner has broken down the rest of the Blue Zones’ shared traits into nine different behaviors. Among others, the behaviors include knowing your purpose in life, making your family a priority, creating a healthy social network, and calming down.

And finally, you can go to www.bluezones.com, answer some questions, and see how you can diffuse the ticking time bomb that is your life. You enter your gender, age, height, weight, and information about your diet and lifestyle. You know, you answer the kind of questions where you start off smug. Then you realize there actually are people out there who eat 4-6 daily servings of whole grains and vegetables AND fruits. Suddenly, your 1-2 servings of vegetables looks pathetic.

Once your information is entered, you get your results. My report had my “biological” age at five years younger than my “chronological” age. (Score whole grains!) I will also live to be 94 years old (rock on!), but will only be disease-free until age 79.9. (Bummer.)

But the good news is that I could add on 3.5 years to my life if I get Blue Zoney. For instance, I could be more spiritual. And in the end, that might not be the worst thing. After all, if it works for Oprah, it can work for her minion. Which may be me. Or it may not be me. I’ll never tell!

Male brain vs. female brain II: What is an “extreme male brain”? What is an “extreme female brain”?

2009-01-24T02:55:00.001-08:00

Both the systemizing/mechanistic skills characteristic of the male brain and the empathizing/mentalistic skills characteristic of the female brain are distributed normally in the population. It means that most men and most women have their sex-typical brains in the moderate range, but some people have extremely strong or extremely weak versions (just like most people are of average height, but some people are extremely tall or extremely short). What are the “extreme male brain”? What are the “extreme female brain”?

Simon Baron-Cohen revolutionized the study of autism and autism-spectrum disorders (such as Asperger’s syndrome) by suggesting that autism is a manifestation of an “extreme male brain.” The male brain tends toward systemizing and mechanistic thinking, treating other people as if they were logical systems or machines. If you take this tendency to an extreme, you would treat everyone as if they were machines without minds or feelings. That, according to Baron-Cohen, is the essence of autism, which he calls “mindblindness.” Mindblind people (autistics) are blind to other people’s minds or emotions. In fact, they don’t even know that other people have minds separate from their own; autistics tend to assume that other people know and think exactly what they do. Baron-Cohen’s notion of autism as the extreme male brain explains why an overwhelming majority of autistics (four out of five) are men and there are relatively few female autistics (although, once again, there are exceptions to the general pattern; there is an occasional “girl with a boy’s brain.”)

Even after Baron-Cohen figured out the essence of autism as an extreme male brain, the nature of the other extreme, an extreme female brain, remained a puzzle, until Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock figured out what an extreme female brain might entail.

The female brain tends toward empathizing and mentalizing thinking, treating machines and objects as if they were other people. They attribute minds, thoughts, and feelings to inanimate objects. That, according to Crespi and Badcock, is the essence of paranoid schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenics hear voices where there are no people, and they attribute minds and thinking where none exist, such as when they believe other people are talking about or conspiring against them when they aren’t. Paranoid schizophrenics are hypermentalistic, and overinfer minds and emotions in other people, just as autistics are hypomentalistic, and underinfer minds and emotions in other people.

In their forthcoming article in the premier journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Crespi and Badcock present a very convincing case for paranoid schizophrenia as an extreme female brain. Now the whole picture appears to be complete. When your brain is “too male,” too systemizing, too mechanistic, you become autistic. When your brain is “too female,” too empathizing, too mentalistic, you become paranoid schizophrenic. If the extreme male brain of an autistic is “mindblind,” then you might suggest that the extreme female brain of a paranoid schizophrenia is “logicblind.”

[Postscript: As it turns out, there are subtle differences between Baron-Cohen's theory and Crespi and Badcock's theory which I failed to explain fully in my original post. While Baron-Cohen suggests that autism results from extreme male brains, Crespi and Badcock propose that autism results from paternal brains (under the control of the father's genes) and paranoid schizophrenia results from maternal brains (under the control of the mother's genes). I'd refer interested readers to their forthcoming article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences for further details.]

via http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200803/male-brain-vs-female-brain-ii-what-is-extreme-male-brain-w

Exploring the Folds of the Brain--And Their Links to Autism

2009-01-24T02:33:00.001-08:00

Key Concepts

The cerebral cortex is the structure that gives the organ its convoluted surface. It is involved with high-level processing of our perceptions, thoughts, emotions and actions.
Intricate folding permits the expansive cortex to fit inside a skull with limited surface area.
Recent discoveries have shown that mechanical tension between neurons creates the hills and valleys of the cortex.
The cortical landscape differs between healthy people and individuals with brain disorders that originate during development, such as autism. These shape differences suggest that connections between brain regions of affected individuals also depart from the norm.

One of the first things people notice about the human brain is its intricate landscape of hills and valleys. These convolutions derive from the cerebral cortex, a two- to four-millimeter-thick mantle of gelatinous tissue packed with neurons sometimes called gray matter that mediates our perceptions, thoughts, emotions and actions. Other large-brained mammals such as whales, dogs and our great ape cousins have a corrugated cortex, too each with its own characteristic pattern of convolutions. But small-brained mammals and other vertebrates have relatively smooth brains. The cortex of large-brained mammals expanded considerably over the course of evolution much more so than the skull. Indeed, the surface area of a flattened human cortex equivalent to that of an extra-large pizza is three times larger than the inner surface of the braincase. Thus, the only way the cortex of humans and other brainy species can fit into the skull is by folding.

This folding is not random, as in a crumpled piece of paper. Rather it exhibits a pattern that is consistent from person to person. How does this folding occur in the first place? And what, if anything, can the resulting topography reveal about brain function? New research indicates that a network of nerve fibers physically pulls the pliable cortex into shape during development and holds it in place throughout life. Disturbances to this network during development or later, as a result of a stroke or injury, can have far-reaching consequences for brain shape and neural communication. These discoveries could therefore lead to new strategies for diagnosing and treating patients with certain mental disorders.

Scientists have pondered the brain's intricate form for centuries. In the early 1800s German physician Franz Joseph Gall proposed that the shape of a person's brain and skull spoke volumes about that individual's intelligence and personality a theory known as phrenology. This influential, albeit scientifically unsupported, idea led to the collection and study of "criminal," "degenerate" and "genius" brains. Then, in the latter part of the 19th century, Swiss anatomist Wilhelm His posited that the brain develops as a sequence of events guided by physical forces. British polymath D'Arcy Thompson built on that foundation, showing that the shapes of many structures, biological and inanimate, result from physical self-organization.

Provocative though they were, these early suppositions eventually faded from view. Phrenology became known as a pseudoscience, and modern genetic theories eclipsed the biomechanical approach to understanding brain structure. Recently, however, evidence from novel brain-imaging techniques, aided by sophisticated computational analyses, has lent fresh support to some of those 19th-century notions.

Hints that His and Thompson were on the right track with their ideas about physical forces shaping biological structures surfaced in 1997. Neurobiologist David Van Essen of Washington University in St. Louis published a hypothesis in Nature in which he suggested that the nerve fibers that link different regions of the cortex, thereby enabling them to communicate with one another, produce small tension forces that pull at this gelatinous tissue. In a human fetus, the cortex starts out smooth and mostly remains that way for the first six months of development. During that time, the newborn neurons send out their spindly fibers, or axons, to hook up with the receptive components, or dendrites, of target neurons in other regions of the cortex. The axons then become tethered to the dendrites. As the cortex expands, the axons grow ever more taught, stretching like rubber bands. Late in the second trimester, while neurons are still emerging, migrating and connecting, the cortex begins to fold. By the time of birth the cortex has more or less completed development and attained its characteristically wrinkled form.

Van Essen argued that two regions that are strongly linked that is, connected via numerous axons are drawn closer together during development by way of the mechanical tension along the tethered axons, producing an outward bulge, or gyrus, between them. A pair of weakly connected regions, in contrast, drifts apart, becoming separated by a valley, or sulcus.

Modern techniques for tracing neural pathways have made it possible to test the hypothesis that the communication system of the cortex is also responsible for shaping the brain. According to a simple mechanical model, if each axon pulls with a small amount of force, the combined force of axons linking strongly connected areas should straighten the axon paths. Using a tool known as retrograde tracing, in which a dye injected in a small area of the cortex is taken up by the endings of axons and transported backward to the parent cell body, it is possible to show which regions send axons to the injection site. Furthermore, the method can reveal both how dense the connections of an area are and what shapes their axon paths take. Our retrograde tracing studies of a large number of neural connections in the rhesus macaque have demonstrated that, as predicted, most connections follow straight or slightly curved paths. Moreover, the denser the connections are, the straighter they tend to run.

The sculpting power of neural connections is particularly evident in the shape differences between language regions in the left and right hemispheres of the human brain [see "Specializations of the Human Brain," by Norman Geschwind; Scientific American, September 1979]. Take, for instance, the form of the Sylvian fissure a prominent sulcus that separates the frontal and posterior language regions. The fissure on the left side of the brain is quite a bit shallower than the one on the right. The asymmetry seems to be related to the anatomy of a large fiber bundle called the arcuate fascicle, which travels around the fissure to connect the frontal and posterior language regions. Based on this observation and the fact that the left hemisphere is predominantly responsible for language in most people, we postulated in a paper published in 2006 that the arcuate fascicle on the left is denser than the one on the right. A number of imaging studies of the human brain have confirmed this asymmetrical fiber density. In theory, then, the larger fiber bundle should have a greater pulling strength and therefore be straighter than the bundle on the right side. This hypothesis has yet to be tested, however.

Mechanical forces shape more than just the large-scale features of the cerebral cortex. They also have an effect on its layered structure. The cortex is made of horizontal tiers of cells, stacked up as in a multilayered cake. Most areas have six layers, and individual layers in those areas vary in thickness and composition. For example, the regions of the cortex that govern the primary senses have a thick layer 4, and the region that controls voluntary motor functions has a thick layer 5. Meanwhile the association areas of the cortex which underlie thinking and memory, among other things have a thick layer 3.

Such variations in laminar structure have been used to divide the cortex into specialized areas for more than 100 years, most famously by German anatomist Korbinian Brodmann, who created a map of the cortex that is still in use today. Folding changes the relative thickness of the layers, as would happen if one were to bend a stack of sponges. In the gyri, the top layers of the cortex are stretched and thinner, whereas in the sulci, the top layers are compressed and thicker. The relations are reversed in the deep layers of the cortex.

Based on these observations, some scientists had suggested that whereas the shapes of layers and neurons change as they are stretched or compressed, the total area of the cortex and the number of neurons it comprises are the same. If so, thick regions (such as the deep layers of gyri) should contain fewer neurons than thin regions of the cortex. This isometric model, as it is known, assumes that during development neurons first migrate to the cortex and then the cortex folds. For an analogy, imagine folding a bag of rice. The shape of the bag changes, but its capacity and the number of grains are the same before and after folding.

Our investigations into the density of neurons in areas of the prefrontal cortex in rhesus macaques reveal that the isometric model is wrong, though. Using estimates based on representative samples of frontal cortex, we determined that the deep layers of gyri are just as densely populated with neurons as the deep layers of sulci. And because the deep layers of gyri are thicker, there are actually more neurons under a unit area in gyri than in sulci.

Our discovery hinted that the physical forces that mold the gyri and sulci also influence neuronal migration. Developmental studies in humans have bolstered this suggestion. Rather than occurring sequentially, the migration of neurons to the cortex and the folding of the cortex partially overlap in time. Consequently, as the cortex folds, the resulting stretching and compressing of layers may well affect the passage of newly born neurons that migrate into the cortex late in development, which in turn would affect the composition of the cortex.

Moreover, the shapes of individual neurons differ depending on where in the cortex they reside. Neurons situated in the deep layers of gyri, for example, are squeezed from the sides and appear elongated. In contrast, neurons located in the deep layers of sulci are stretched and look flattened. The shapes of these cells are consistent with having been modified by mechanical forces as the cortex folded. It will be an intriguing challenge to figure out whether such systematic differences in the shapes of neurons in gyri and sulci also affect their function.

Our computer simulations suggest that they do: for example, because the cortical sheet is much thicker in the gyri than in the sulci, signals impinging on the dendrites of neurons at the bottom of a gyrus must travel a longer distance to the cell body than do signals impinging on the dendrites of neurons at the bottom of a sulci. Researchers can test the effect of these physical differences on the function of neurons by recording the activity of individual neurons across the undulating cortical landscape work that, to our knowledge, has yet to be undertaken.

To fully understand the relation between form and function, scientists will need to look at an abundance of brains. The good news is that now that we can observe the living human brain using noninvasive imaging techniques, such as structural magnetic resonance imaging, and reconstruct it in three dimensions on computers, we are able to collect images of a great many brains far more than are featured in any of the classical collections of brains obtained after death. Re searchers are systematically studying these extensive databases using sophisticated computer programs to analyze brain shape. One of the key findings from this research is that clear differences exist between the cortical folds of healthy people and those of patients with mental diseases that start in development, when neurons, connections and convolutions form. The mechanical relation between fiber connections and convolutions may explain these deviations from the norm.

Research into this potential link is still in its early phases. But over the past couple of years, several research teams have reported that the brains of schizophrenic patients exhibit reduced cortical folding overall relative to the brains of normal people. The findings are controversial, because the location and type of the folding aberrations vary considerably from person to person. We can say with certainty, however, that brain shape generally differs between schizophrenics and healthy people. Experts have often attributed schizophrenia to a perturbed neurochemical balance. The new work suggests that there is additionally a flaw in the circuitry of the brain's communication system, although the nature of the flaw remains unknown.

People diagnosed with autism also exhibit abnormal cortical convolutions. Specifically, some of their sulci appear to be deeper and slightly out of place as compared with those of healthy subjects. In light of this finding, researchers have begun to conceive of autism as a condition that arises from the miswiring of the brain. Studies of brain function support that notion, showing that in autistic people, communication between nearby cortical areas increases, whereas communication between distant areas decreases. As a result, these patients have difficulties ignoring irrelevant things and shifting their attention when it is appropriate to do so.

Mental disorders and learning disabilities can also be associated with aberrations in the composition of the cortical layers. For instance, in the late 1970s neurologist Albert Galaburda of Harvard Medical School found that in dyslexia the pyramidal neurons that form the chief communication system of the cerebral cortex are shifted from their normal position in the layers of the language and auditory areas of the frontal cortex. Schizophrenia, too, may leave imprints on the cortical architecture: some frontal areas of the cortex in affected individuals are aberrant in their neural density. Abnormal distribution of neurons in cortical layers disrupts their pattern of connections, which ultimately impairs the fundamental function of the nervous system in communication. Researchers are just beginning to probe structural abnormalities of the cortex in people with autism, which may further elucidate this puzzling condition.

More studies are needed to ascertain whether other neurological diseases that originate during development also bring about changes in the number and positions of neurons in the cortical layers. Thinking of schizophrenia and autism as disorders that affect neural networks, as opposed to localized parts of the brain, might lead to novel strategies for diagnosis and treatment. For instance, patients who have these conditions might profit from performing tasks that engage different parts of the brain, just as dyslexics benefit from using visual and multimodal aids in learning.

Modern neuroimaging methods have also enabled scientists to test the phrenological notion that cortical convolutions or the amount of gray matter in different brain regions can reveal a person's talents. Here, too, linking form and function is fraught with difficulty. The connection is clearest in people who routinely engage in well-defined coordinated mental and physical exercise.

Professional musicians offer one such example. These individuals, who need to practice extensively, systematically differ from nonmusicians in motor regions of the cortex that are involved in the control of their particular instruments. Still, clear folding patterns that distinguish broader mental talents remain elusive.

We still have much to unravel. For one, we do not yet understand how individual gyri attain their specific size and shape, any more than we understand the developmental underpinnings of variation in ear or nose shape among individuals. Variation is a very complex problem. Computational models that simulate the diversity of physical interactions between neurons during cortical development may throw light on this question in the future. So far, however, the models are very preliminary because of the complexity of the physical interactions and the limited amount of developmental data available.

Scholars are also keen to know more about how the cortex develops. Topping our wish list is a detailed timetable of the formation of the many different connections that make up its extensive communication system. By marking neurons in animals, we will be able to determine when different parts of the cortex develop in the womb, which, in turn, will enable scientists to experimentally modify the development of distinct layers or neurons. Information about the sequence of development will help reveal events that result in abnormal brain morphology and function. The range of neurological diseases with vastly different symptoms such as those seen in schizophrenia, autism, Williams syndrome, childhood epilepsy, and other disorders may be the result of pathology arising at different times in development and variously affecting regions, layers and sets of neurons that happen to be emerging, migrating or connecting when the process goes awry.

To be sure, mechanical forces are not alone in modeling the brain. Comparisons of brain shape have demonstrated that brains of closely related people are more similar to one another than are brains of unrelated people, indicating that genetic programs are at work, too. Perhaps genetic processes control the timing of development of the cortex, and simple physical forces shape the brain as nerve cells are born, migrate and interconnect in a self-organizing fashion. Such a combination may help explain the remarkable regularity of the major convolutions among individuals, as well as the diversity of small convolutions, which differ even in identical twins.

Many of the current concepts about the shape of the brain have come full circle from ideas first proposed more than a century ago, including the notion of a link between brain shape and brain function. Systematic comparisons of brain shape across populations of normal subjects and patients with brain disorders affirm that the landscape of the brain does correlate with mental function and dysfunction.

But even with the advanced imaging methods for measuring brains, experts still cannot recognize the cortex of a genius or a criminal when they see one. New models of cortex folding that combine genetics and physical principles will help us integrate what we know about morphology, development and connectivity so that we may eventually unlock these and other secrets of the brain.

via http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sculpting-the-brain

The genius behind the Google 20% time; It isn’t the time

2009-01-24T02:07:00.001-08:00

Paul Buchheit has a really nice post on the power of code over talk and has one item that resonated with me:

This is where Google’s “20% time” comes in — if you want innovation, it’s critical that people are able to work on ideas that are unapproved and generally thought to be stupid. The real value of “20%” is not the time, but rather the “license” it gives to work on things that “aren’t important”. (perhaps I should do a post on “20% time” at some point…)

That is exactly how I felt about 20% time. It wasn’t about the time. In fact, I didn’t actually know that many people who took the time! The key was the following effect:

In order for 20% time to work, anyone must be able to see what is out there
In fact, if you want to get some people working “for free” you need to both advertise your project, and write it in such a way that it is easy to get ramped up and productive (end result: better code)

The end result is the culture HAS to be kept very open. The ability to see the projects that are worked on, check out the code, see presentations and design docs, is a key reason why Google does so well at engineering in my opinion.

Compare this to companies such as Apple where you don’t know what the chap sitting on the other side of the cube is doing. Therefore, even if you have some amazing wisdom that could be game changing for his project, it will never happen.

20% time means that sparks of genius can happen. If you copy anything about it, ignore the “time” part, and go with the open culture part.

Whenever I saw projects that were secret within Google it irked me. It stopped this from happening. It was as though that project was going walkabout instead of joining the party.

via http://almaer.com/blog/the-genius-behind-the-google-20-time-it-isnt-the-time

Traits of a Bad Boss

2009-01-23T20:40:00.001-08:00

The trials and tribulations that accompany working for a bad boss are manifold, from daily ups and downs to a growing fear of losing one's job. What qualities define a poor manager?

We're all familiar with the management courses human resource departments make available to aspiring managers, but what's the reality when it comes to managerial preparedness in the workforce?

A recent survey, conducted by Right Management suggests that unqualified managers are anything but rare. "Only 23 percent of new leaders or employees who have advanced from being individual contributors to supervising or managing others receive the coaching they need to reach their full development potential," according to the findings.

As if that isn't telling enough in terms of the future of organizational leadership, take a look at the breakdown when it comes to managerial training and support across North America: Only 29 percent of developing leaders, such as vice presidents, directors and managers, have access to senior-level coaching. This leaves 71 percent of developing leaders without enough job-appropriate training, hardly a comforting figure.

Still, the most unsupported and unprepared are the new leaders — those who will eventually, over time, fill the highest positions.

If you or your boss falls under the "new leader" category, there's a pretty high chance that you or your boss falls among the 77 percent of managers who don't receive training commensurate with the current position.

This doesn't necessarily mean that all untrained managers are unqualified. Many new leaders advance as a result of demonstrated qualities and abilities, but these traits may not translate into effectively managing people or working well with others, crucial points when it comes to upper-level management.

So what qualities define poor managers? Margaret Heffernan at Fast Company and David Silverman of Harvard Business' The Start-Up Diaries identify several common habits associated with bad management. Among them:

1) Poor Prioritizing: Bad managers not only fail to prioritize their own work, they also fail to prioritize yours. Also, managers who consistently work late or arrive early may be demonstrating an inability to manage their time or pace themselves; if so, letting them manage other people's time hardly seems like the logical next step.

2) Bias Against Action: A poor manager not only flip-flops when delegating important tasks, but changes his or her mind about everything. Ineffective managers delay making decisions (and thus action) as long as possible. This may mean fewer mistakes are made, but nothing risked means nothing gained.

3) Lousy Communication: In a recent survey of 150 senior executives, one-third of respondents said lack of open and honest communication with staff members tops the list of management missteps. Managers withholding information from staff can erode morale and destroy trust, while at the same time, not explaining the meaning of "make it better" is just poor direction.

4) Love for Procedure, Focus on Small Tasks: A manager's fondness for rules and ritual may be indicative of an inability to see the larger picture, to face unique issues with case-specific diplomacy. An unnatural attention to detail and the perfection of small tasks is often meant to distract from the fact that this person is unable to perform their actual job.

5) Over-Sensitivity: An inability to address a problem out of fear of upsetting someone is not a reason to shirk responsibility. In today's economy and resulting work environment, now is the time for strong leadership. An effective manager doesn't delay addressing an issue, but is able to do so with tact and empathy.

6) Preference for Weak Candidates: Hiring someone who is less qualified but also less intimidating than another candidate is a bad move. Good managers have the confidence to hire smart, confident candidates without feeling threatened.

So it isn't that the new leaders need more coaching in technical skills as much as they need guidance in how to approach the job and treat others.

The result of hiring unprepared managers or promoting employees to managerial positions without providing proper guidance: "Effective leadership development can ultimately make or break a company's performance," Steve Doerflein, Right Management's vice president for organizational consulting, said in a statement. "Without the right model delineating the specific capabilities of competencies required for effective performance, it's unlikely companies will be able to identify the best people and develop the crucial skills needed to achieve their goals."

Not only is company performance greatly compromised, so is company morale.

Despite feelings of malcontent as a result of poor management, the economic recession has led many disgruntled employees to stay at their jobs rather than actively seek new work. According to a recent survey by Lake Research Partners for Working America, "more than one-third of workers feel some pressure to stay with a bad boss because of the economy." Of these workers, full-time employees are almost twice more likely to stick it out with a bad boss than their part-time counterparts.

If companies care about developing their managers and employees, they must provide adequate resources. Unless new leaders have access to appropriate training and support, it looks like the grim 23 percent of supervisors and high-potential employees who do receive training will be a lonely group.

via http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/archives/2009/01/qualities-of-a-bad-manager-indecisiveness-poor-prioritization.html?t=recent

Steve Ballmer’s Entire Memo to the Microsoft Troops About Layoffs and Weak Results

2009-01-23T20:37:00.001-08:00

Here is the full memo to employees from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured here) about the 5,000 layoffs and other cost cuts just announced, due to economic slowdown, which also resulted in weak financial results for the second quarter.

It is not a happy missive, obviously.

But tough times have also hit Microsoft (MSFT).

“…We believe these job eliminations are crucial to our ability to adjust the company’s cost structure so that we have the resources to drive future profitable growth,” wrote Ballmer, in part.

But read it for yourself below in its entirety:

From: Steve Ballmer
To: All Microsoft FTE
Subject: Realigning Resources and Reducing Costs

In response to the realities of a deteriorating economy, we’re taking important steps to realign Microsoft’s business. I want to tell you about what we’re doing and why.

Today we announced second quarter revenue of $16.6 billion. This number is an increase of just 2 percent compared with the second quarter of last year and it is approximately $900 million below our earlier expectations.

The fact that we are growing at all during the worst recession in two generations reflects our strong business fundamentals and is a testament to your hard work. Our products provide great value to our customers. Our financial position is solid. We have made long-term investments that continue to pay off.

But it is also clear that we are not immune to the effects of the economy. Consumers and businesses have reined in spending, which is affecting PC shipments and IT expenditures.

Our response to this environment must combine a commitment to long-term investments in innovation with prompt action to reduce our costs.

During the second quarter we started down the right path. As the economy deteriorated, we acted quickly. As a result, we reduced operating expenses during the quarter by $600 million. I appreciate the agility you have shown in enabling us to achieve this result.

Now we need to do more. We must make adjustments to ensure that our investments are tightly aligned with current and future revenue opportunities. The current environment requires that we continue to increase our efficiency.

As part of the process of adjustments, we will eliminate up to 5,000 positions in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, LCA, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, of which 1,400 will occur today. We’ll also open new positions to support key investment areas during this same period of time. Our net headcount in these functions will decline by 2,000 to 3,000 over the next 18 months. In addition, our workforce in support, consulting, operations, billing, manufacturing, and data center operations will continue to change in direct response to customer needs.

Our leaders all have specific goals to manage costs prudently and thoughtfully. They have the flexibility to adjust the size of their teams so they are appropriately matched to revenue potential, to add headcount where they need to increase investments in order to ensure future success, and to drive efficiency.

To increase efficiency, we’re taking a series of aggressive steps. We’ll cut travel expenditures 20 percent and make significant reductions in spending on vendors and contingent staff. We’ve scaled back Puget Sound campus expansion and reduced marketing budgets. We’ll also reduce costs by eliminating merit increases for FY10 that would have taken effect in September of this calendar year.

Each of these steps will be difficult. Our priority remains doing right by our customers and our employees. For employees who are directly affected, I know this will be a difficult time for you and I want to assure you that we will provide help and support during this transition. We have established an outplacement center in the Puget Sound region and we’ll provide outplacement services in many other locations to help you find new jobs. Some of you may find jobs internally. For those who don’t, we will also offer severance pay and other benefits.

The decision to eliminate jobs is a very difficult one. Our people are the foundation of everything we have achieved and we place the highest value on the commitment and hard work that you have dedicated to building this company. But we believe these job eliminations are crucial to our ability to adjust the company’s cost structure so that we have the resources to drive future profitable growth.

I encourage you to attend tomorrow’s Town Hall at 9am PST in Café 34 or watch the webcast.

While this is the most challenging economic climate we have ever faced, I want to reiterate my confidence in the strength of our competitive position and soundness of our approach.

With these changes in place, I feel confident that we will have the resources we need to continue to invest in long-term computing trends that offer the greatest opportunity to deliver value to our customers and shareholders, benefit to society, and growth for Microsoft.

With our approach to investing for the long term and managing our expenses, I know Microsoft will emerge an even stronger industry leader than it is today.

Thank you for your continued commitment and hard work.

Steve

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