...might explain where the panic is coming from.
Here at work, we started looking at the videos of people who "Just took Hand of God" or "Were dosing Gates of Hades". O.o; WTF is all that? The question is: is it mass placebo? We're thinking you watch people doing this, then you psych yourself into doing it. Or...what?
So, we all decided to try it out. Even our manager tried it out. We all decided the reactions are from the sudden euphoria of the most annoying sound on earth ceasing after 10 minutes. You could achieve the same effect with an MP3 of 40 minutes of nails on a chalk board.
Personally, the whole department calls Emperor's New Clothes on all the YouTube videos of "high" I-Dosers.
In the most recent issue of Time Magazine, the cover story is all about Twitter and what it is. I really enjoy this quote from the article:
For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and "Who Shot J.R." cliff hangers—the folkloric American living room, all of us signing off in unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation booths. But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors. Some of that conversation is juvenile, of course, just as it was in our living room when we heckled Richard Nixon's Checkers speech. But some of it is moving, witty, observant, subversive.
Steven Johnson.. How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. TIME. June 15, 2009. Pg 35
I remember doing exactly this while watching the recent inauguration while tracking #obama and a few other hashtags in my TweetDeck. I had one of those moments, that I hope all people involved in the development and leverage of technology, where I was just in awe of what I saw.
Twitter is not a new idea, and it will probably not last very long. I saw it likened to IRC elsewhere on this thread. It is, in a way. However, instead of IRC with several channels, we just send all the messages together and allow the user to filter them however they see fit. Furthermore, this filtering gives a whole new way to find someone talking about a topic right now.
Another moment I like to talk about is when I posted to Twitter how I was going over to a close friend's house. He had asked me to bring over a bottle of Vodka. Not two minutes later, I got an @ reply from Pinnacle Vodka, saying that they hoped it was good news and to try out their brand of vodka. I picked up a few shots of it on my way out the door at the liquor store. I appreciate that sort of relevant advertising. Obviously, I was looking for a bottle of vodka right then and I received a suggestion for a particular brand. I like it far better than Facebook reminding me that my profile says I'm single by flashing single's dating sites all over it's pages for me.
To be fair, there are horror stories. My friend posted that she was going to go on a diet. Afterward, she suddenly had 40 new followers. All of them were accounts with 2 to 3 tweets with links to various diet plans. Twitter has since removed all 40 accounts, as she diligently reported all of them for spamming. Twitter still has some work to do to differentiate itself as a viable, highly targeted, and powerful advertising medium.
Twitter has changed the game both for the users and the advertisers, and I think it's for the better. Twitter may be gone in 4 years, but the rules they've changed will probably persist in this form for some time beyond that.
Social fad? Possibly. Game changer? Definitely. That's the point of Twitter.
Stranger danger is vastly overrated. Bad things happen, yes. However, raising and indoctrinating our children with an attitude of fear and "playing it safe" spills over from walking home from school to applying to a highly competitive university.
The things you teach now will be applied to every facet of her life. Rather than to teach her to be afraid, you should teach her to balance risk with reward, to keep a cool head in unexpected situations, and to feel confident in herself because you trust her to do the right thing.
Actions like this perpetuate a sense that she is always incompetent until proven otherwise. You should teach her that she should know her own boundaries and trust her to be capable until she displays otherwise.
My own parents took this approach. Though, I will say that it did backfire a little. I was independent and living on my own at 17 as an emancipated minor. They were really against it at the time, but they trusted me to make that decision. I fell on my face a lot, but here I am, 25, done with my first bachelor's, excellent prospects for going directly into my Ph.D., and financially independent. I'm one of the most stubborn, self-motivated person I know. Most of the other people I know from my circle are in the 21-25 range, live with their parents, and can't even cobble together two jobs and move out. Not to mention I can easily bully them into doing about whatever I want them to do.
In summary: Raising a successful, independent child who thinks for herself is nerve racking and likely to result in a child that will do what they want how they want to do it. On the other hand, they'll never lie down and let someone else walk all over them, and you'll be able to brag to everyone that your kid's an astronaut/professor at MIT/etc.:-)
Well, so, again, why isn't it a better research goal to force the virus to speed up viron production (thus defeating the cleverness you highlight), rather than helping it to slow down viron production (which enhances the cleverness you highlight)?
The reason this is bad:
First, quick background:
HIV is a retro virus. It reverse engineers its RNA into DNA and the DNA incorporates into the nucleic region. The viral DNA normally will lie dormant through a few mitosis cycles. At some point, an unknown chemical factor activated the viral DNA and the cell takes on infected behavior, whether it's self destructive viron production or the attack behavior described in the article.
Now, the reason:
There is a very large body of evidence gathered that statistically implies that this chemical factor that activates viral DNA is most prevalent during an auto-immune response. In other words, when your T-cells roll out to fight the bad guys, the viral DNA wakes up and takes over. In well entrenched cases of HIV, there have been instances where the viral DNA was so wide spread the viral loads and T-cell counts leaped in a matter of months for undetectable and healthy to full blown waiting for pneumonia or PML AIDS. Most of the time, this can be traced back to some sort of infection.
Encouraging viron production to prevent this sneaky behavior may very well call the immune system to arms. However, doing so may cause latent viral DNA in a large percentage of T-cells to activate, effectively causing a cascade of viron production.
Sure, the evidence is statistical and indirect, but I don't think I'd risk it without direct evidence to the contrary.
Qualifications as a semi-expert: In the second month of dating, my boyfriend was diagnosed HIV+. I spent a long time researching everything there was to know before I decided to stick with him. We had one hell of a run together, always used protection, and I'm still negative.
Who modded the parent insightful? It's totally incorrect and sexist.
Women spend more time having sex with my friend with the Ninja than the guy with the SUV. Of course, I'm more about picking up the boys, so my Ninja works well there too.:-)
While I disagree with your support for McCain, I agree that this is a non-federal issue. This is best handled at the state level.
Also, you address a very obvious issue with parents. Our society places less and less value on education. This is a social problem that will not be solved easily with a piece of legislation.
We need to either get the parents involved, or reconstruct the system in such a way that they are no longer required.
What are you going to test an accountant on? Can you add 2+2? Seriously, accounting has a lot of rules, but it's quite honestly easy, boring as fuck, but easy.
I did an IT internship for an accounting firm. Accounting is no joke. An accountant knows more secrets about his or her clients than a lawyer ever could. Furthermore, you should see the sheer beauty of turning the United State's tax law against itself to completely nullify a billionaire's tax liability.
A friend of mine got a call a few days ago from an old job of his doing some Access application development (*pukes*).
Apparently they didn't appreciate the fact that the code was littered with references to the Spanish Inquisition, Spam, Grail Shaped Beacons, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
...might explain where the panic is coming from. Here at work, we started looking at the videos of people who "Just took Hand of God" or "Were dosing Gates of Hades". O.o; WTF is all that? The question is: is it mass placebo? We're thinking you watch people doing this, then you psych yourself into doing it. Or...what? So, we all decided to try it out. Even our manager tried it out. We all decided the reactions are from the sudden euphoria of the most annoying sound on earth ceasing after 10 minutes. You could achieve the same effect with an MP3 of 40 minutes of nails on a chalk board. Personally, the whole department calls Emperor's New Clothes on all the YouTube videos of "high" I-Dosers.
OMG...I can't tell you how many hours I lost to Number Muncher.
Seriously. I wish I made £499 a day. Who let the CIO on /.?
In the most recent issue of Time Magazine, the cover story is all about Twitter and what it is. I really enjoy this quote from the article:
For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and "Who Shot J.R." cliff hangers—the folkloric American living room, all of us signing off in unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation booths. But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors. Some of that conversation is juvenile, of course, just as it was in our living room when we heckled Richard Nixon's Checkers speech. But some of it is moving, witty, observant, subversive.
Steven Johnson.. How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. TIME. June 15, 2009. Pg 35
I remember doing exactly this while watching the recent inauguration while tracking #obama and a few other hashtags in my TweetDeck. I had one of those moments, that I hope all people involved in the development and leverage of technology, where I was just in awe of what I saw.
Twitter is not a new idea, and it will probably not last very long. I saw it likened to IRC elsewhere on this thread. It is, in a way. However, instead of IRC with several channels, we just send all the messages together and allow the user to filter them however they see fit. Furthermore, this filtering gives a whole new way to find someone talking about a topic right now.
Another moment I like to talk about is when I posted to Twitter how I was going over to a close friend's house. He had asked me to bring over a bottle of Vodka. Not two minutes later, I got an @ reply from Pinnacle Vodka, saying that they hoped it was good news and to try out their brand of vodka. I picked up a few shots of it on my way out the door at the liquor store. I appreciate that sort of relevant advertising. Obviously, I was looking for a bottle of vodka right then and I received a suggestion for a particular brand. I like it far better than Facebook reminding me that my profile says I'm single by flashing single's dating sites all over it's pages for me.
To be fair, there are horror stories. My friend posted that she was going to go on a diet. Afterward, she suddenly had 40 new followers. All of them were accounts with 2 to 3 tweets with links to various diet plans. Twitter has since removed all 40 accounts, as she diligently reported all of them for spamming. Twitter still has some work to do to differentiate itself as a viable, highly targeted, and powerful advertising medium.
Twitter has changed the game both for the users and the advertisers, and I think it's for the better. Twitter may be gone in 4 years, but the rules they've changed will probably persist in this form for some time beyond that.
Social fad? Possibly. Game changer? Definitely. That's the point of Twitter.
Stranger danger is vastly overrated. Bad things happen, yes. However, raising and indoctrinating our children with an attitude of fear and "playing it safe" spills over from walking home from school to applying to a highly competitive university.
The things you teach now will be applied to every facet of her life. Rather than to teach her to be afraid, you should teach her to balance risk with reward, to keep a cool head in unexpected situations, and to feel confident in herself because you trust her to do the right thing.
Actions like this perpetuate a sense that she is always incompetent until proven otherwise. You should teach her that she should know her own boundaries and trust her to be capable until she displays otherwise.
My own parents took this approach. Though, I will say that it did backfire a little. I was independent and living on my own at 17 as an emancipated minor. They were really against it at the time, but they trusted me to make that decision. I fell on my face a lot, but here I am, 25, done with my first bachelor's, excellent prospects for going directly into my Ph.D., and financially independent. I'm one of the most stubborn, self-motivated person I know. Most of the other people I know from my circle are in the 21-25 range, live with their parents, and can't even cobble together two jobs and move out. Not to mention I can easily bully them into doing about whatever I want them to do.
In summary: Raising a successful, independent child who thinks for herself is nerve racking and likely to result in a child that will do what they want how they want to do it. On the other hand, they'll never lie down and let someone else walk all over them, and you'll be able to brag to everyone that your kid's an astronaut/professor at MIT/etc. :-)
Well, so, again, why isn't it a better research goal to force the virus to speed up viron production (thus defeating the cleverness you highlight), rather than helping it to slow down viron production (which enhances the cleverness you highlight)?
The reason this is bad:
First, quick background:
HIV is a retro virus. It reverse engineers its RNA into DNA and the DNA incorporates into the nucleic region. The viral DNA normally will lie dormant through a few mitosis cycles. At some point, an unknown chemical factor activated the viral DNA and the cell takes on infected behavior, whether it's self destructive viron production or the attack behavior described in the article.
Now, the reason:
There is a very large body of evidence gathered that statistically implies that this chemical factor that activates viral DNA is most prevalent during an auto-immune response. In other words, when your T-cells roll out to fight the bad guys, the viral DNA wakes up and takes over. In well entrenched cases of HIV, there have been instances where the viral DNA was so wide spread the viral loads and T-cell counts leaped in a matter of months for undetectable and healthy to full blown waiting for pneumonia or PML AIDS. Most of the time, this can be traced back to some sort of infection.
Encouraging viron production to prevent this sneaky behavior may very well call the immune system to arms. However, doing so may cause latent viral DNA in a large percentage of T-cells to activate, effectively causing a cascade of viron production.
Sure, the evidence is statistical and indirect, but I don't think I'd risk it without direct evidence to the contrary.
Qualifications as a semi-expert: In the second month of dating, my boyfriend was diagnosed HIV+. I spent a long time researching everything there was to know before I decided to stick with him. We had one hell of a run together, always used protection, and I'm still negative.
Who modded the parent insightful? It's totally incorrect and sexist.
Women spend more time having sex with my friend with the Ninja than the guy with the SUV. Of course, I'm more about picking up the boys, so my Ninja works well there too. :-)
While I disagree with your support for McCain, I agree that this is a non-federal issue. This is best handled at the state level.
Also, you address a very obvious issue with parents. Our society places less and less value on education. This is a social problem that will not be solved easily with a piece of legislation.
We need to either get the parents involved, or reconstruct the system in such a way that they are no longer required.
What are you going to test an accountant on? Can you add 2+2? Seriously, accounting has a lot of rules, but it's quite honestly easy, boring as fuck, but easy.
I did an IT internship for an accounting firm. Accounting is no joke. An accountant knows more secrets about his or her clients than a lawyer ever could. Furthermore, you should see the sheer beauty of turning the United State's tax law against itself to completely nullify a billionaire's tax liability.
A friend of mine got a call a few days ago from an old job of his doing some Access application development (*pukes*). Apparently they didn't appreciate the fact that the code was littered with references to the Spanish Inquisition, Spam, Grail Shaped Beacons, and so on.