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.
Are you human or a bot?Credit: Phil Whitehouse on Flickr
Mobile phones are ubiquitous. One of the allures of mobile phones is that they are personal. A smartphone can store zillion details about its owner in ways never imagined before. Furthermore, mobile phones have extended their use to virtually every aspect of our lives - from making calls to financial transactions. It is then imperative that we take the security of mobile devices as much as important as desktops and laptops. Protecting mobile devices against malware or malicious software implies preserving our privacy.
A research team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have devised a malware detection technique that is simple and akin to captcha verification on computers. The technique involves the detection of hand gestures common with three primary smartphone services like calling, tapping and snapping using motion, position and ambient sensors to give the phone protection against attacks by malware.
Captcha was invented to prevent bots from adding urls to search engines. It is a test used in computing to determine whether the user is a human or not. Malware cannot perform common user gestures which is a familiarity on mobile devices or smartphones, such as tapping, dragging the screen etc; this distinction was used as a security advantage for identifying malware from human gestures whenever a phone attempts making calls, or is performing tasks that involve human gestures.
By the way, the user gesture is one of the weak security points of smartphones. They put themselves at risk by downloading apps that are insecure, or they just click “yes” to an ad without extensive verification. The research team is using this weakness to advantage.
In the future we could see secured gesture techniques extended to commercial grade smartphones and also to other areas of smartphone use, such as sending SMS or email.
When a prepared teacher walks into a classroom his aim is to make the students active participants in the learning process. That is what engagement is about. Engagement of students in active learning brings about predictable outcomes – increased achievement in standardized test scores and assessment, reduced dropout rates and enrollment in challenging courses. Student engagement should cut across the three dimensions of learning, hence, affective, behavioral and cognitive, whether at the classroom or school level.
Active student participation is a learning good.Credit: Woodleywonderworks on flickr
How does a school, administrator or teacher measure the frequency of his/her students’ engagement?
According to research from student motivation and psychology, when students participate in class, they could be driven by many factors. One of them is the desire to cooperate in the process and learning, so that the teacher, the oppressor, should not bother them. This is what a teacher wants to avoid. Another is to put the maximal effort without any external compulsive force to show exemplary academic behavior. This latter is a good in a class.
Another reason why an engagement measuring tool is important is that children learn across different developmental stages. The learning predisposition of kindergartens, elementary school, middle high and senior high school students are different. It is known that elementary and kindergarten school pupils are more attuned to affective or emotional learning styles more than high school students.
To fill this knowledge gap in measuring engagement, Ze Wang, associate professor of educational, school and counseling psychology in the College of Education at Missouri University, MU, along with other colleagues produced a classroom engagement inventory (CEI) tool.
The classroom engagement inventory or CEI tool measures student engagement in both the classroom and school level. School level engagement is a prompt for teachers and educators to test why students chose or exempt themselves from out-of-school learning; it measures their interest in schooling at a holistic level. Classroom level engagement would answer questions such as: what can teachers do to make their students participate more in class activities, how can a teacher’s teaching effectiveness be evaluated, how can teachers know and understand how their students perceive them, and understand the relationship between engagement and learning.
The CEI tool has been shown by studies to be consistent and validated. It has been consistent whether the students or pupils have variable characteristics such as ethnicity, income of the family, age, subject and gender. According to Ze Wang, the goal of a tool like CEI is to lead the teacher and students to greater learning.
You can download a copy of the research.
Procrastination, to put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness. Some people allow panic, complicated tasks, fear and nervousness to get over them, and delay doing that important job. Procrastination is not a problem when it happens once, but it becomes so when you repeat it again and again that it becomes a habit. As the cartoon below shows.
Created on Bitstrip.com. See the full image.
This is the time to take control of your life. Step back and ask yourself: "Am I allowing situation and complications to get over me?" "Do I put off doing important things and rush over them just seconds to the deadline?" Many people have lost opportunities of making a significant progress in life because of the weakness of procrastination.
If you see yourself under the spell of procrastination, try to imagine yourself under the spell of taking action, of approval by others who trust in you and are inspired by you. Which image do you desire?
Comments in the comment box below, please!
Credit: Flickr.comCan you draw the Apple logo? When some UCLA undergraduates were asked to test their memory of the ubiquitous Apple Logo, they failed the memory test.
I want you to pass. Take the test.
Hold your breath! Now Click to enter!
If you cannot draw the logo, take a look at it on that mac!
“There is nothing as sweet as success” might be a trite statement but the realization that success will always thrive when disaster strikes is not stale. Archaeology, linguistics, psychology and now genetics attest to it. Successful people have a greater chance of giving birth to children, of getting married and on average, of surviving disease outbreaks like Ebola.
When diseases like Ebola strikes, success will always thrive.Credit: DFID on flickr.
A recent research conducted globally on genetic diversity during a period where genetic diversity was declining globally found that those who were wealthy and successful had a better chance of having their genes inherited than those who were not. The consequence of this is related to chances of surviving against diseases and inheritance of genetic traits.
In another related archaeological study it was found that men who were wealthy, measured by the tools recognized with the rich at that period, the Neolithic, or stone age, had access to better land than those buried without tools. Class existed in the stone age!
These two studies conducted at about the same period, the stone age, are not treatises on materialism. They emphasize what is known by man for ages: the successful will always dine with Kings.
But the question those researches did not breach is: what is the definition of success? I really wanted to read the article, the first that related wealth and success to genetic diversity, because it made a relation to “survival of the fittest.”
Fittest is a quarrelsome word in biology. Take a Bill Gates. Is he the fittest on earth? Yes, if you were living in a democratic country where the rule of law is adhered to, but no if you were living in a country ravaged by years of warfare like Afghanistan or Iraq. Well defined property rights do not exist in such countries!
During the Neolithic the main occupation was sedentary farming. Farming requires physical prowess and knowledge of the supernatural forces that controlled agriculture. That was sufficient to be successful. Success does not always translate to material wealth, but success is enough for genetic advantage. Success in the information age is related with the ability to code, to use multiple intelligences, to understand data and how data relates to the world around us and to make money, physical cash.
The two researches above are not treatises on materialism but an exhortation to be successful. Success is what nature wants. Success is what everyone smiles upon. Excellence is a good that must be pursued by the modern man.
Geese migrating in V formation.Credit:Karthijaygee on Wordpress
It is not a new phenomenon in nature: creatures migrate in a patterned leader-follower fashion. For example, geese fly in a V formation with the leader ahead of them. When tired, the lead goose drops back and hands over leadership to another goose. Researchers working in the field of bioengineering have discovered that cells migrating to the site of a wound exhibit this same pattern.
A delicate biomechanical and biochemical interaction is at play during the cell migration of wound healing cells. At the site of a wound the cells sense that the force between cells, what holds them together, is missing and a protein called DII4 is released. This protein then transmits a signal that activates the migration of wound healing cells to that site. During the migration, the cells are divided into two groups: leader and follower cell groups. The leader cells are distinguished by the possession of a token. That token is a protein called mRNA or messenger RNA which is used for sending biochemical signals to follower cells during migration. Eventually, when the cells arrive at the wound site, the wound healing process is begun.
Astonishingly, just as for migrating geese, it was found that if a leader cell gets missing, in a randomly chosen process, another leader cell is chosen from the ranks of follower cells.
This discovery has much application in medicine.
In tissue and organ transplants.
Bio-engineers can speed up the process of tissue and organ transplants in humans if they can successfully coordinate this process of wound healing.
In tissue regeneration.
Since wound healing is similar to tissue regeneration, understanding and controlling this process could help in regeneration and elongation of life.
Treatment of diabetes.
A non-healing diabetic wound which is the number one cause of lower limb amputations in the United States could be cured when this process is under medical control.
In cancer treatment.
Cancer cells that invade healthy tissue could be prevented from succeeding when this cell migration activity is coordinated and regulated.
This discovery can open doors to innovations in medicine and engineering.
Why do men and women cheat? That is one of the oldest questions humanity has asked. I asked it when I was in my late teens. The answers I receive are numerous.
Cheating presupposes a relationship. Cheating supposes that someone has gone outside the agreement of that relationship. It could be a marital, financial or emotional relationship.
The picture below illustrates one.
Most of the times, we think emotional and marital relationship when we associate the word cheating in our minds. Lack of reciprocal sex, lack of love, lack of trust and willpower to be faithful are some of the reasons given for cheating.
Greed is one of the principal reasons why people cheat in financial relationships.
Could we add more? Please do. I’ll be privileged to have your comments
