23

"All you have to be by the age of 23 is yourself." Reality Bites

my world has changed!

"it's funny how the world changes sometimes.. how the streets you've walked your entire life suddenly seem darker, colder. how the silence isn't so quiet anymore. how eyes you've barely even noticed, now look at nothing but you. how the walk home every night is no longer a routine, but a victory. and then you begin to wonder that maybe it's not the world that's changed, maybe it's just you." - Roswell

Scientists warn of Twitter dangers

(CNN) -- Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.

Scientists say updates on networking tools such as Twitter are often too quick for the brain to fully digest.

New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's "moral compass" to process and could harm young people's emotional development.

Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern California study.

"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

The report, published next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, studied how volunteers responded to real-life stories chosen to stimulate admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain. iReport.com: Growing pains for Twitter, Facebook?

Brain scans showed humans can process and respond very quickly to signs of physical pain in others, but took longer to show admiration of compassion.

"For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and refection," said Immordio-Yang.

She said the study raises questions about the emotional cost, particularly for young people, of heavy reliance on a torrent of news snippets delivered via TV and online feeds such as Twitter.

She said: "We need to understand how social experience shapes interactions between the body and mind, to produce citizens with a strong moral compass."

USC sociologist Manuel Castells said the study raised more concerns over fast-moving TV than the online environment.

"In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in."

Research leader Antonio Damasio, director of USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, said the findings stressed the need for slower delivery of the news, and highlighted the importance of slow-burn emotions like admiration.

Damasio cited the example of U.S. President Barack Obama, who says he was inspired by his father, to show how admiration can be key to cultural success.

"We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration. It's a deep physiological reaction that's very important to define our humanity."

Twitter, which allows users to swap messages and links of 140-characters or less, says on its Web site that it sees itself as a solution to information overload, rather than a cause of it.

This function, It says, "means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you and it never queues up with increasing demand of your attention."


http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/04/14/twitter.study/index.html

Love actually is all around :)

Nothing cute is about to happen :) Just using Imagination :)

Fate...

"I got to thinking about fate. That crazy concept that we're not really responsible for the course our lives take. That it's all predestined, written in the stars. Maybe that explains why, if you live in a city, where you can't even see the stars, your love life tends to feel a little more random. And even if our every man, every kiss, every heartache, is pre-ordered from some cosmic catalogue, can we still take a wrong step and wander off our own personal milky way? I couldn't help but wonder, can you make a mistake and miss your fate?

Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate. Without them, what would shape our lives? Perhaps if we never veered off course we wouldn't fall in love, or have babies, or be who we are. After all, seasons change. So do cites. People come into your life and people go. But it's comforting to know that the ones you love are always in your heart. And if you're very lucky, a plane ride away."

Sex and the city. I heart NY, season 4

Strangers on a train

In recent weeks I have been very involved in the world of electronic engineering, to be more specific I'm doing the final project to graduate, which is aimed at testing the application of a statistical method to predict losses in a network. Because of this, I have been reading about statistics and I've found it reaaally interesting and has amazing applications in daily life.

uncertainty is one of the most important concepts in the theory of information which is a really important one for communications (communication related to engineering); but just yesterday I was talking with my friends and one of my friends came out with a theory that he learned in his communications' classes (related to interpersonal comm) and I just found it very cool the theory is called as "stranger on a train theory", this theory is in fact related with uncertainty, with reduction of uncertainty, and it says that people have stated the need to reduce uncertainty about others gaining information about them. The information gained can then use to predict the behavior of another. So when you are in a bus, a supermarket or wherever the information you have of people is just provided by the senses, the way someone smells or looks like, so you feel the need to reduce uncertainty, and how cool is to reduce uncertainty :).