What are the limits of love, in order words, what are those things that could happen, you or your loved one could do, that would kill love or dampen it?
I cracked my brain and the first answer that came up was infidelity. I think that's the major killer of love. Infidelity includes adultery, unfaithfulness, and betrayal.
Another, as the cartoon below portrays is attaching too much meaning to physical appearance. When that mortal flesh starts to show signs of aging, most persons start looking, which is wrong, somewhere else.
Can you add to the list? The comment box is below, or you can join the facebook group or join my group on whatsapp by writing your phone number on the comment box below.
Last week ended April 18, amongst the top three youtube trending videos, the first position belongs to – a political video. Guess who? Hillary Clinton.
David Hasselhoff’s "True Survivor" comes second and is absolutely stunning. Third place was prominent filmmaker’s vlog, Casey Neistat, whose story is not only inspiring but motivationg.
The videos start from the third. I hope you do enjoy them.
No 3: Intensity by Casey Neistat
At 26 after a devastating accident, he was told by his doctors that he wouldn’t be able to "run" again. According to Casey: "This is what matters…[the brain] and the body is there to keep it running." Two years later, 28, he ran a marathon and 21 other marathons after that with several hundred triathlons.
In this vlog, he ran 21 miles for more than 2½ hours. Astonishing, the intensity!
This is the 19th vlog from filmmaker, Casey Neistat. He recently announced that he’ll be starting a daily vlog that will allow his viewers a window into his life.
Viewers: 447,959
Likes: 12,514
Dislikes: 233
Every day we interact with different persons, learn different things and encounter different situations. Hours, days, and weeks from that encounter, can you properly recall what happened?
These are some useful suggestions about memory and recalling events.
Our memory glosses over general details of a matter or subject.
When I was working for a bank, I used to take the company bus. At end of the first day, it struck me that the company buses were of the same model and same color. So, how did I make out the bus for my route? The drivers realized one truth: people are interested in taking the gist of a matter and would rather gloss over the details. The buses were parked on the same spot at the same time every day.
If they had not done that, I’d take the pain and an inconvenient one, of recalling license plates, driver faces, bumps on the body etcetera.
Could you make out these faces one hour hence?Credit: Wikipedia.org
When faced with daily items, our memory is poor. But given specific details, one can easily recall those items.
Our memory is much poorer than we can imagine.
Close your eyes for one second. Can you recall all the items that were in front of you? Zillions, not so, but can you recall just fifty of them? Most persons don’t. Hours after an email was answered, one forgets what the email subject was especially if it was not replied. I was reading my email this week when a company wrote me that my annual subscription was renewed and extended for free. I sent a “thank you” message. If I had stopped receiving the company newsletter, I would surely have recalled that and re-subscribed.
So, never trust your memory. Make it a habit of jotting down important details.
Increased exposure does not affect memory recall.
Increased exposure to a matter or subject increases familiarity but does not determine future recall. When I was a bachelor living alone, I used to meet a friend to write me recipes for a favorite African dish. I never stored that recipe in my memory. I can’t even recall that recipe if you asked me!
Distinguishing attractive details is better than learning everything.
For effective learning, students and teachers need to have an idea of how every part of the subject matter are connected. For easier recall, students should concentrate on the easy parts of the subjects, the areas that attracts them most, before moving on to the difficult zones. It is the same with recalling information. Start with your zone of confidence about a subject if you want to be able to remember details about it later. An argument that you had with someone, what really piqued you about it? Make sure you make a note of that. It could be the only thing you might be able to recall weeks or months after.
Luis Suarez, loyal for club and country.Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Luis Suarez, 28, will be man to watch in the quarter-final game between Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona on Wednesday, April 15.
The Uruguayan has impressed me on and off the pitch. Oh, forget the match biting incident. We know he did it twice and deserved to be punished. He has, hasn’t he? I agree with the views of this news story that he brought it upon himself.
Now, he’s back and to prove it just after the round of 16 victory over Manchester City (he scored in the first leg), he sealed Barca’s dominance over Real Madrid by scoring the 56th minute goal that made it 2-1, bringing his goals tally for this season to 14.
After scoring a goal at the World Cup in South Africa, 2010.Credit: Lightscripture on Flickr
Suarez started his career with Nacional, Uruguay, at age 11, and played his first game there in 2005. He later moved to the Netherlands to play for FC Groningen and then Ajax FC. He got his first taste of continental football with Groningen in a match that was lost 2-4 to Partizan at the first round. He led Ajax to win the 2009/10 Dutch Cup and was voted Netherlands' Footballer of the Year for 2010. He joined Barcelona last summer, in August 2014.
I like his spirit of determination and of team work.
This is what he said when asked about playing alongside superstars like Neymar and Messi:
"It's about adapting to the way they play and the moves they make, trying to make things easier for them and help them.
…
"They are incredible players, you don't have to work hard to do the dirty job but to really support the team as a whole, regardless of who is playing that day and who isn't.”
Luis Suarez is my pick for Wednesday’s match.
See you at Parc des Princes stadium - Paris, France, on Wednesday. Kickoff time: 19:45 hrs.
Rumors are stories or reports which truth or accuracy is doubtful or uncertain. Sometimes also, those stories are not even verified before people start labeling them as facts.
Rumors are enjoyed by people because they are information that are usually entertaining, juicy or stimulating to the ears. But because their truth value is debatable, rumors are usually thought of as stories used for casting reputations, institutions and truths in bad light.
Some people enjoy rumors; some detest it. Some spread it like wildfire; some don’t want to hear about it. Rumors though are a fact of our lives.
So, how do you react to a rumor about you?
As the cartoon below shows, the rumor in question was replied quickly. But, which, the reply or the first story, is the truth, is what makes it more intriguing
There are people who can make money or friendships from spreading rumors. Do you enjoy listening to rumors?
Between Sunday, April 5, to Saturday, April 11, 2015, 2300 hrs GMT+1, West African Time, millions of videos on Youtube were watched, liked, disliked and shared on the Internet. Some were funny, some musicals and others soccer shows, dramas, and news.
Three of them all had the most viewership. The data was collected on Saturday, April 11.
Watch the videos below, starting from the third. I hope you do enjoy them.
Number 3: Big Girls Cry by Sia(Official Video)
"Big girls cry," by Sia. In the video, a young muse is sitting, displaying several emotions like pain, despair, joy and amazement. I think I liked the video after pausing and viewing it again.
I'm not the only one because there were 5 million views of the video in less than 24 hours after it was released. You should listen to the music. It really is mesmerizing.
Viewers: 16,787,699
Likes: 233539
Dislikes: 19677;
If you take a child from his/her biological parents and place him/her in an adoptive care, a most permanent kind of environmental change, if the adopting parents are more educated and have better socioeconomic circumstances than the biological parents, that child will be more intelligent than his/her siblings.
Siblings and IQ have environmental associationCredit: Wikimedia Commons
This is the result of a study by some researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Virginia and Lund University in Sweden. It places high authority to the claim that environmental circumstances such as educational level of the parents as well as their socioeconomic status has a high impact on the cognitive abilities of children even down to their early adulthood.
This also rends credence to the claim that DNA or one’s genes has influence on intelligence.
So, factors influencing IQ resides both within and outside the person.
Take a look at these two words: HAPPINESS and SADNESS. They are supposed to be opposites. Some people have the latter and desire the former, or vice versa. What you’ve not yet been told is that your brain does not form visual images of those words, or any word, by taking them alphabet by alphabet, or by alphabet groups. Your brain forms images of any word, interesting or nonsense, meaningful or casual, based on its interpretation of the word as a complete whole.
Words are learned by visual imagery.Credit: Steve Jurvetson on Flickr
Jerome Bruner, a well-known educational theorist, posited the theory that people learn based on three leaning modes: doing or enactive, image association or iconic, and by abstraction or symbolic mode of learning. Adults are associated more with abstract learning.
Well, in a ground breaking work published in the Journal of Neuroscience by Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, along with other authors, from the Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, it can be established that abstract or symbolic learning of new words, whether nonsense or meaningful , occurs in the left side of the brain, what is called the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) while at the right brain, a Fusiform Face Area (FFA) is associated with learning of new faces.
The Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is selective in picking out words, especially new words. It can distinguish between sensible words like turf in contraposition to turt which is meaningless in English dictionaries. This selectivity demonstrates the plasticity of the brain. Before this, Stan Dehaene, has demonstrated that neurons at the VWFA distinguishes over case while other researchers have shown a division over font.
This study is instructive because it can be used to great use. Teachers who used to think that word recognition by children and adults could be enhanced by improving spelling would have to make a rethink, and also using partial word groupings would not help matters, especially for children with learning difficulties. New word learning and retention can best be enhanced by visual learning techniques.
The advertising industry is also wont to play with fonts, case, color and words of brands in order for consumers to retain the brand image. Better understanding of this information could help them in brand image marketing.
We live in an uncertain world. Acts of God, even when foreseen, like a cyclone striking where we live, cannot be stopped. Last month, it happened in Vanuatu. I felt for that poor Island country and decided to post some pictures on this blog. Climate change has exacerbated storms, floods, natural catastrophes that it could happen anywhere anytime.
Although there is nothing you can do about stopping their onslaught, you can do much for yourself by responding positively.
But, what if you are strong and someone is weaker? You can help yourself by giving them support. Support, helping others to get up when they are fallen, to see the good and the best in them, is good for the community as much as for the person.
That is the theme of this week’s cartoon: support.
Think of ways you can give support to someone close to you who is weak: your work colleague, your brother or sister, your neighbor, a stranger you met on the road…
You could end up giving yourself a needed boot indirectly.
On the 14th and 15th of March last month, a category 5 storm, named Tropical cyclone Pam hit the Island nation of Vanuatu. The speed of the storm was measured at 155 mph. Days later, about 11 persons were reported killed, 70% of the population displaced.
Before the storm, Vanuatu was a tourist destination. Its people were subsistence farmers. It exported copra to New Zealand and Australia. Port Vila, the capital, was one of the poorest places in the South Pacific. Weeks after, the people are beginning to settle down to usual life. But, they need help. Tourism has to be revived by people spreading the word that Vanuatu is going to return to its usual beauty.
This is my contribution to helping Vanuatuans. This series of pictures, Vanuatu – Before and After, were creative commons photographs compiled from image repositories on the web, especially Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.
Dry coconut is used to make copra, a Vanuatuan export.
When Pasteur advocated rigorous washing in hospitals by doctors and nurses as a way to fight off infections, particularly during surgical operations, he was scorned. In the nineteenth century, many health professionals believed diseases were spontaneously generated, possibly influenced by the theory of evolution. Later, when it was proved that germs enter living organisms from the environment, hygiene and attention to washing and cleanliness took its position in medical practice.
That was a case where practice and concept (or theory) were mismatched. In such cases, education and public awareness campaigns are powerful tools for bridging the gap.
When the fact and idea doesn't match.Credit: Charlotte on Flickr
In a similar vein, bill shock prevention could be falling into that class. If you read this Syniverse bill shock prevention document, bill shock prevention has the mobile subscriber in mind. It enables subscribers to set spending and/or usage thresholds based on pre-established policies.
Unfortunately, a recent study has called its economic value into question. The study conducted by Mathew Osborne, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Michael Grubb, an assistant professor of economics of Boston College, argues that the practice might be going contrary to the claims.
Bill shock prevention might be costing subscribers.
By sending timely SMS or email alerts to customers when plan threshold is about to be breached, mobile network operators hope to save their customers' money, make them happier and increase company revenue while protecting themselves against customer churn. It seems that is but a concept.
In reality, such SMS or email alerts induces a secondary behavior on the subscribers. It makes them to decrease their network usage, stop using the plan or switch to a wrong plan. All these makes the cost of usage more expensive for the subscriber.
It is estimated that the average subscriber cost increment when network operators implement bill shock prevention strategies is about $33. Calculate this by the subscriber base of each mobile operator and you’ll understand why this is possibly an externality the society might have to address.
To bridge the gap, subscribers have to be more educated on their plan usage details. They should have access to summaries of past usage, to weekly and monthly usage histories. "Perhaps a better avenue is policy that helps consumers do a better job of forecasting their usage," they posit.
Whatever the case, this externality is not common to network operators only. Utility companies, banking overdrafts and health insurance do fall into this category of mismatches which might have to be addressed.
Can you add to the list? The comment box is below, or you can join the facebook group or join my group on whatsapp by writing your phone number on the comment box below.
