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Source: http://www.facebook.com/GeekyGadgets/posts/10151090746945967
Sunday, September 30, 2012
The One Thing Every Writer Has Experienced Before
Writer's block.
Oh. My. Gawd.
You open the word editor, place your fingers on the keyboard, and suddenly the despair sinks in. You can't visualize the story. You can't formulate the right words. There's this thick wad of ephemeral nothingness just sitting there, preventing the flow of words that you know so well and love so much from reaching the page. You wait for a while, hoping for something to come--anything--a piece of dialogue--anything--but the wad of nothingness just seems to grow thicker, forcing you out of your own mind. Gah! You throw up your hands in the air. Writer's block strikes again!
The wad of nothingness stays there for hours on end. Sometimes it lets up and you can crank out a sentence or two, but the words seem foreign, strange, lost in translation. You try to come up with something better, but everything sucks. All those years of practice and the best you could come up with was "he smiled happily at her happy smile"!?
You walk around the house, thinking over the story, fueling your muse. Finally you can see it: the dragon, swooping down from the tower, mouth wide, tongue ensnared with wicked embers. But you can't see the sentences. You can visualize it, but the vocabulary to accompany the actions is missing. You decide to try your hand at writing it anyway.
"Teh dragon flew to the ground, opened it mouth, breathed fire and burned all the soldiers. They dropped dramatically to the ground and died. the dragon spread its wings victoriously, the end."
You feel like you wrote something. You're staring at the period; you know you just wrote something. But why are you so afraid to look at it? What the heck did you just write!? Look at it!
GAH! IT BURNS!
You delete, you retype, you delete, you retype--but dangit, there is no hope; you've digressed down the evolutionary ladder and wound up somewhere on the lower rungs.
You bang your Neanderthalian skull against the metaphorical wall, trying fruitlessly to break the block. You do this for days. You do this for weeks. You do this for months, or even years. All you end up with is a brain tumor.
You browse the web, searching for help. You find sites for helping you write better prose, articles with some ideas for writer's block, forums, books, scrolls, grimoires, tomes--but none of them help.
This wad of nothingness is impenetrable. When it appears, all hope is lost. Fighting it is fruitless.
You cannot. Beat. Writer's block. This is the one realization I've come to...realize, and it's helped me tremendously. Don't fight writer's block, because you can't beat it. The only thing you can do is get through it.
Source: http://www.streetarticles.com/creative-writing/the-one-thing-every-writer-has-experienced-before
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Saturday, September 29, 2012
Hearing brains are 'deaf' to disappearance of sounds, study reveals
Friday, September 28, 2012
Our brains are better at hearing new and approaching sounds than detecting when a sound disappears, according to a study published today funded by the Wellcome Trust. The findings could explain why parents often fail to notice the sudden quiet from the playroom that usually accompanies the onset of mischief.
Hearing plays an important role as an early warning system to rapidly direct our attention to new events. Indeed we often rely on sounds to alert us to things that are happening around us before we see them, for example somebody walking into the room while our back is turned to the door. Yet little is known about how our brains make sense of the sounds happening around us and what makes us hear certain events while completely missing others.
Researchers at the UCL Ear Institute wanted to try and understand what makes certain sounds easily detectable while others go unnoticed. They created artificial 'soundscapes' comprised of different on-going sounds and asked listeners to detect the onset or disappearance of different sound-objects within the melee.
Overall, the team found that listeners are remarkably tuned to detecting new sounds around them but are much less able to detect when a sound disappears. In busy sound environments, the participants missed more than half of the changes occurring around them and the changes that were detected involved much longer reaction times. The effects were observed even in relatively simple soundscapes and didn't seem to be affected by volume.
Dr Maria Chait, who led the research at the UCL Ear Institute, said: "On the one hand, we might expect to be more sensitive to the appearance of new events. In terms of survival, it is clearly much more important to detect the arrival of a predator than one that has just disappeared. But this reasoning doesn't apply to other situations. Imagine walking in a forest with your friend behind you and suddenly having the sound of their footsteps disappear. Our results demonstrate that there are a large number of potentially urgent events to which we are fundamentally not sensitive. We refer to this phenomenon as 'disappearance blindness'"
The study also explored how resilient listeners are to scene interruptions. In busy scenes, such as those we often face in the world around us, important scene changes frequently coincide in time with other events. The study showed that even brief interruptions, such as a short 'beep' occurring at the same time as the change, are sufficient to make listeners fail to notice larger scene changes. It is thought that this occurs because the interruption briefly captures our attention and prevents the information about the change from reaching our consciousness.
"Understanding what makes certain events pop out and grab attention while others pass by un-noticed is important not only for understanding how we perceive the world but also has important practical applications. For example, to aid the design of devices intended to help professionals such as air traffic controllers and pilots who operate in environments where the detection of change is critical," added Dr Chait.
###
Wellcome Trust: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk
Thanks to Wellcome Trust for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/123966/Hearing_brains_are__deaf__to_disappearance_of_sounds__study_reveals_
A Ray of Hope
Every day until the election, Slate will offer up one reason to be optimistic for your candidate.
Today?s Good News for Obama: This week has given Obama supporters a lot of reasons to smile. On Wednesday, the Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS Poll showed Obama leading in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. He?s also pulled ahead in Colorado, Iowa, and Wisconsin. As a result, FiveThirtyEight now puts Obama?s chances of winning the Electoral College in November at 81.9 percent. And if the election were held now, Obama would have a 97.8 percent chance of winning. Democrats have more than a ray of hope today.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=0382e7c061a730ce592c0ab6b602e6e4
Improving Small Business Customer Service Through Social Media ...
Friday, September 28th, 2012
NEW YORK, Sept. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ ? Social media has become a commonplace outlet for consumers to voice their queries, complaints or praise about a product or service, or seek resolution to a problem, bypassing automated phone systems and the routing process of a customer call center. For small businesses, this provides an alternative customer service channel ? one that is not only cost-effective, but also creates an opportunity for brand visibility.
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The fourth PR Newswire article in a six-part series from PR Newswire focused on social media for small businesses , ?Which social media sites should I use for my strategy? Part Two: Customer Service? suggests practical social media sites that could help small businesses become more efficient and responsive when tending to their customers? needs. Furthermore, the article outlines best practices for managing requests on Twitter and the value of Skype to create a more personalized customer exchange when needed.
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Source: http://www.thmg.com/social-media/improving-small-business-customer-service-through-social-media/
Friday, September 28, 2012
'Sons of Anarchy' actor Johnny Lewis found dead
A young actor best known for a role on the hit motorcycle club series "Sons of Anarchy" has been found dead outside a Los Angeles home along with an elderly woman.
The L.A. coroner's office has identified the male found by police outside a home in the Los Feliz neighborhood on Wednesday as Jonathan Kendrick Lewis, 28, also known as Johnny Lewis. Officers responding to a report of a screaming woman came upon Lewis' body outside of the home on the driveway, while the body of the woman who was in her 70s was found inside the residence.
"He appeared to have died from some type of fall, either from the stairway, or from the balcony, or from one of the roofs," LAPD Commander Andrew Smith told ABC News affiliate KABC.
"The best we're piecing together now is that it appears that some type of altercation occurred inside of the house resulting in the death of the woman. Then this individual ran outside, had an altercation with a couple of neighbors, ran back into the house and by the time we got here, he had fallen or had somehow died on the driveway," said Smith.
Lewis is considered a suspect in the homicide investigation, KABC reported. A neighbor and a handyman were badly beaten in a confrontation they had with the suspect.
The cause of death of the woman, who was in her 70s, has not yet been released, but Smith said that she had suffered major trauma. Smith said that though it is possible that Lewis was renting one of the rooms in the residence, police are still unsure, calling it "very preliminary."
Greg Sarian, a neighbor of the residence owned by the woman, said that she rented out rooms to boarders. He said that he became alarmed when he heard screams Wednesday morning.
"'Help, help,' from both sides, man and woman," Sarian said. "I was praying to God. 'God,' I said, 'Clean up this mess here, because this is evil place.' Evil place. All kind of people, by the way, coming, different people, coming, going couple of days, disappearing, coming, other people."
Lewis, who began acting in his teenage years, worked steadily in television in roles on "Boston Public," "American Dreams" and "The O.C." His career picked up steam when he landed the role of Kip 'Half Sack' Epps on two seasons of "Sons of Anarchy" and appeared alongside Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart in "The Runaways" in 2010.
Also ReadSource: http://gma.yahoo.com/sons-anarchy-actor-johnny-lewis-found-dead-111527717--abc-news-celebrities.html
Ancient burial shroud offers up surprise
Ancient scraps of fabric found in a grave in Denmark are not made of cultivated flax as once believed, but instead are woven from imported wild nettles, suggesting the grave's inhabitant may have traveled far for burial. ?
This discovery, announced Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, casts a new light on the textile trade in Bronze Age Europe, said study researcher Ulla Mannering, an archaeologist at the University of Copenhagen.
"Since the Stone Age, they had very well-developed agriculture and technology for producing linen textiles," Mannering told LiveScience. "So it's really unusual that a society which has established agriculture would also take in material from things that are not of the normal standardized agricultural production" ? in other words, wild plants.
A luxurious shroud
The soft and shiny fabric dates back to between 940 B.C. and 750 B.C., making it about 2,800 years old. It was discovered in Voldtofte, Denmark, at a rich Bronze Age burial ground called Lusehoj. The Bronze Age ran from about 3200 B.C. to 600 B.C. in Europe.
The fabric was wrapped around a bundle of cremated remains in a bronze urn. It was a luxurious piece of material, Mannering said. [ 10 Weird Ways We Deal With the Dead ]
"The fibers we get from the European nettle are very, very fine and soft and shiny, and we often say this is a sort of prehistoric silk textile," Mannering said. (Silk, made from insect cocoons, is known for its shimmery texture.)
Previous analysis pegged the Danish fabric as woven from flax, a plant widely cultivated in the region. But along with nanophysicist Bodil Holst of the University of Bergen in Norway, Mannering and her colleagues used advanced methods to reanalyze the scraps of cloth. By studying the fiber orientation as well as the presence of certain crystals found in plants, the researchers were able to learn that the fabric is not flax at all, but nettle, a group of plants known for the needlelike stingers that line their stems and leaves.
Nor is the nettle local, Mannering said. Different soil regions contain different variations of elements. The variation of one of these elements, strontium, found in the fabric, was not local to Denmark, suggesting the plants the textile was made from grew elsewhere.
There are a few regions that match the strontium profile, the researchers found, but the most likely candidate is southwest Austria. The bronze burial urn holding the remains is from Austria, Mannering said, and it makes sense that the fabric might be too.
A well-traveled man?
Despite these imported grave goods, the remains appear to be those of a Danish man, Mannering said. The personal objects in the grave, such as two razors, suggest he was a Scandinavian, albeit perhaps a well-traveled one, she said.
"Maybe he died in Austria and was wrapped in this Austrian urn and Austrian textile and was brought back to Denmark in this condition and then put in a big burial mound," Mannering said. "The personal objects that were placed inside the urn together with this textile and the bones indicate that he is a male of Scandinavian origin, but it doesn't mean that he couldn't have died abroad."
Bronze Age Europeans lived an agricultural life and traded many goods with one another, especially the bronze that gave the era its name, Mannering said. The nettle fabric may have been an ancient luxury good for Bronze Age elite, she said.
"It shows that they also knew how to get fibers from wild plants, and they wanted these fibers probably because of their very different and unique appearance," she said.
Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook and Google+.
? 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49212239/ns/technology_and_science-science/
At a recent trip to a fast-food place I observed a couple, probably in their 50?s. They were chowing down for about 25 minutes. She was on her cell phone for the first 4 or 5 minutes. On my way to get a drink refill I noticed that he was playing Angry Birds on his smart phone. She did most of the talking, mostly asking yes and no questions. Her voice was loud. If you don?t want anyone to hear your conversation don?t use your phone in restaurants. Chances are those near you don?t want to hear your conversation either. I only heard him utter 4 words during their dinner: ?Huh?,? ?Yeah,? ?Yep,? and ?Okay.? Several times he just shook his yes instead of speaking. How sad. Do your best to never let your relationship slip into a ?no communication? mode.
Divided attention and distraction are only two of the issues. The lack of visual cues including gestures, facial expressions and posture creates challenges. Miscommunication is another common problem. Not having a phone nearby seems to help foster closeness, connectedness, interpersonal trust, and perceptions of empathy ? the building-blocks of relationships. 
Face to face is always best. When communicating face to face, nonverbal behaviors provide context clues for the words we use. Sarcasm and jokes without nonverbal context cues can cause frustration. So, it?s best to use your phone for short, quick check-ins instead of long conversations. Long phone conversations seem to inhibit feelings of intimacy you?d otherwise get when you?re sitting face-to-face with someone. 
Pillow talk plays a vital role in happy relationships.
Copyright ? 2012 ? Larry James. This idea is adapted from Larry?s books, ?How to Really Love the One You?re With: Affirmative Guidelines for a Healthy Love Relationship,? ?LoveNotes for Lovers: Words That Make Music for Two Hearts Dancing? and ?Red Hot LoveNotes for Lovers.? Larry James is a professional speaker, author, relationship coach and an award winning nondenominational Wedding Officiant. He performs the most ?Romantic? wedding ceremony you will find anywhere. Something 
