You know… It might be terrifying but it happens to be wild enough to be true. We respond to points and rewards. Some people really are working to give us points and rewards for things that are good for us, society, and the planet. Most are just trying to make a few dollars. The thing is, this really matters, because behavior can be shaped by series of inconsequential events into very different modes of not just behavior but thinking.
The video may run a bit longer than your attention span, but it is well worth it.
I have talked about this video from TED more often than I care to remember (and probably some of my friends who have heard about it many times). However, I could never remember who the talk was by. Well I finally found it, and this is a talk by Jill Bolte Taylor about the brain, and more specifically it is a blow by blow account of her own experience having a stroke.
Hearing this talk certainly gave me a new and valuable insight to the brain, strokes, and just how malleable perception is when things go wrong in the brain. I hope everyone who watches this is able to take something positive, informative, and interesting from this talk.
To preface, I am indeed a Zune user and had been lamenting the horrible slowness of the Zune marketplace. So after a brief search, I managed to find a solution which seems a bit odd that it works, but it does… dear lord does it work!
The solutions was found here – and the post on that site includes screenshots if you need them. However, here is the text of the fix which should suffice for the majority of people:
This is a fix for slow Zune marketplace on Win 7, I have tested this on my Win 7 64 bit. Marketplace works fine on my Vista 32 bit and xp 32 bit. You can try this for your Vista 64 bit too. You can find users reporting on this forum http://forums.zune.net/2/8/526815/ShowPost.aspx
The Fix Turn off Automatically detect LAN settings in your IE. Steps
Open IE
Click on Tools–> Internet Options
Click on “Connections” Tab
Click button “Lan Settings”
Un-Check ” Automatically detect settings” (this is/was set by default in my Win 7 installation)
Restart IE and Zune (if you had it open)
I found an article for slow saving of documents in SharePoint from Windows 7 client and this was the fix and thought these were related.
So go forth, and have a blazing fast marketplace, just the way it ought to be!
There are many ways to tell that you play to many video games. My favorite ways are those that manifest in how we perceive reality. And by that I mean, wishing that or thinking of things in real life that would be more awesome if it were in a video game.
Example from work. I work as a customer service rep (seasonal position) for Enstrom’s Candies. We happen to ship exclusively through FedEx, which is an interesting story if you have a love for the world of shipping, so naturally we get a lot of their trucks coming and going. However, the occasional UPS truck shows up, and here is where the game world intervenes…
You see, we had a bit of a falling out with UPS. Thus I sometimes imagine that rather than delivering packages to us one day an armed riot squad will leap out in order to lay siege to us for our impudence at rejecting their services. This is probably a result of too many hours of playing F.E.A.R. where your average jaunt through a parking garage would likely be interrupted 15 times by trucks full of people intent on ruining your day.
Of course, all of this probably related back to the image I posted about how after enough driving games everything in life becomes a bit of a race.
I don’t give a great deal of personal history here, so I will need to fill in some quick gaps.
I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology through Walden University. Right now I am in my first course, which is an introduction to graduate studies in psychology. The course is mostly put in to warm students up to graduate studies. This is probably rather important since the majority of students at Walden have not been students for awhile. However, for someone like me, who has not been out of school very long, it ends up mostly being touchy feely time wasting that has gems of information scattered throughout.
Now as I just said, there are a number of important bits of information scattered in this course. There is a lot of practice in APA style (which I need badly) and a number of development exercises that force us to make a plan for our courses, professional development, and steps to licensure. In between those gems though are thins that are mostly fluff.
Some of the fluff is worthwhile too.
For example, right now we are covering the aspects of scholarly writing. This is includes a couple of video segments that a fifth grader could understand. The best part so far has been the warm up statement which compares/contrasts scholarly writing to things the everyday person has probably written. One thing the speaker in the video brings up is that, “you may have written a note to your child’s teacher…”
Being that I have a mind that thinks in a rather different way from yours, I may be the only person to find a good bit of humor in writing a note to a teacher. I now want to combine the scholarly writing style with all types of usually casual writing. Why simply tell a teacher that your student will be absent on Friday when you can inform them the of the exact reason and a number of important studies that relate to the condition relating to the absence. This is not to poke fun at scholarly writing, but more to make life more enjoyable for people forced to read what I hand them. As such:
Regular Note:
Johnny will be absent Friday.
-Chris
Enhanced Note:
Johnny will be absent Friday. This absence is due to a required visit to the doctor to be inoculated for infectious diseases identified as harmful by the school board (CDC, 2005; SHS, 2009). Any missed work may be forwarded to my home so that negative consequences due to this absence may be mitigated…
Why would anyone use the enhanced note? Because it is fun to use skills you have worked on for years to get quizzical looks from others. Besides, the first sentence is the same, thus within the first two seconds the vital information has been given. Everything after that will give the poor soul on the receiving end a chance to learn and a proper works cited list in order to find your primary source documents.
On a more serious note. Many business documents get far too casual. If you need to write a document for software or policy revisions it will, in reality, benefit your reader to cite source documents and be overly specific. After all, the person reading your recommendations probably does not do your job every day and being very specific will help them understand why the document you have sent to their desk matters rather than just being a vague of a problem you seem to have.
So, for now I am back off to learn to properly cite study notes, video segments, and student forum posts. It may seem inane now, but it will be handy to be in the practice of proper citation once it really matters.
