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loving what i see, what i feel, what i do. Allah the greatest :)

The Importance of Values

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Values help you get motivated.

Values help you get and stay motivated. Values relate to our purpose in life and are used as guiding principles, rules if you will, to make your life easier. What is important to you? What is important about your business? Do your personal and business values align?

Values provide you with a strong foundation; a method for living your life to it’s fullest. Values will also help you in finding your purpose in life. From the list of values provided, choose your top values and live by them. If you already have values that you use, confirm that these values are in alignment with your business goals, and mission and vision statements.If your business values and personal values are in alignment, great. If they are not, you will be dissatisfied, unhappy, and you will definitely not generate the results you want. Difficult to be a bank robber and think you can save the world. No alignment there.Values help you gain real clarity about what you stand for.

1. Choose ten words from the following list that appeal to you.

2. Select the top four of these words and place one on each line as your Top Four values.

3. Choose to live by these Top Four values for at least the next thirty days.

4. At the end of thirty days, review these Top Four words to see if they still work for you.

 

If not, substitute as needed.You will not be graded; this is not a test. You are looking at what works for you, not someone else. If you want to change your values, do it.Use Your Values Daily: How values can work for you.Say you chose the word “generous” from the list of Values. It could mean that each and every day, you were helpful to others or shared more of who you are with others. With practice, being “generous” becomes a familiar aspect of who you are and you would start attracting other people who were “generous”. You would look for reasons to be “generous” and you would be “generous” to yourself”.Choose 4 Values from this Sample List:Accepting, inspire, accomplished, intelligent, kindAware, knowledgeable, beautiful, leader, brave, lovingCalm, motivated, compassionate, observant, organizedConnected, original, cooperative, passionate, courageous, patientCreative, peaceful, decisive, perceptive, devoted, persistentDisciplined, playful, discriminating, prepared, receptive, energetic resilient, enthusiastic, respectful, excited, responsible, expert, risk-taker, satisfied, flexible, sensible, sensitive, fulfilled, spiritual, generous spontaneous, graceful, strong, grateful, happy, thoughtful, harmonious thorough, humorous, trusting, independent, willing, insightful, wiseReminder.

 

Identify Your Values

       To start this process, you will want to make sure you have time to focus. Sit down with some paper, and ask yourself this question: What is most important to me in life? Write down your values to answer this question. Try to make these one or two word phrases, and don’t worry about the order yet. I was able to get the major ones for me (Faith in God, Family, and Love) but I hit a road block trying to think of everything that’s actually important to me

Prioritize Your Values

       Now try to narrow down this list by combining similar values into a single value (or two if you need to). You want to get this list down to no more than 10-15 values. Using the list of values mentioned above, I ended up with 59 on my list. I had a lot of paring down to do! I eliminated the overlapping values to get it down to the phrases I thought summed up that particular group the best. For example, I eliminated ‘Education’ and ‘Knowledge’ and used ‘Learning’ instead. It took me a while, but I got my list down to 13 values.

       Then you need to prioritize your list of values. You can do this by listing your top value first, then your second highest value, and so on until you’ve prioritized your entire list.

Examine Your Values

       Now that you have your prioritized list of personal values, it’s time to examine these values closely. Are there any that you feel do not fit? Are there any you’d like to change? This can mean dropping a value, adding a value, or tweaking your priorities. Some of your financial goals may require changing your values or priorities, so feel free to reexamine this list at any time.

 

The Broken Glass Window Theory

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What makes the difference?

In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict .

A broken window.

One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

The “Broken Window Theory” has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.

Don’t Live with Broken Windows

Don’t leave “broken windows” (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a “Not Implemented” message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you’re on top of the situation.

We’ve seen clean, functional systems deteriorate pretty quickly once windows start breaking. There are other factors that can contribute to software rot, and we’ll touch on some of them elsewhere, but neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor.

You may be thinking that no one has the time to go around cleaning up all the broken glass of a project. If you continue to think like that, then you’d better plan on getting a dumpster, or moving to another neighborhood. Don’t let entropy win.

Putting Out Fires

By contrast, there’s the story of an obscenely rich acquaintance of Andy’s. His house was immaculate, beautiful, loaded with priceless antiques, objets d’art, and so on. One day, a tapestry that was hanging a little too close to his living room fireplace caught on fire. The fire department rushed in to save the day—and his house. But before they dragged their big, dirty hoses into the house, they stopped—with the fire raging—to roll out a mat between the front door and the source of the fire.

They didn’t want to mess up the carpet.

A pretty extreme case, to be sure, but that’s the way it must be with software. One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of “All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.” It doesn’t matter if the project has been fine up to this point. In the original experiment leading to the “Broken Window Theory,” an abandoned car sat for a week untouched. But once a single window was broken, the car was stripped and turned upside down within hours.

By the same token, if you find yourself on a team and a project where the code is pristinely beautiful—cleanly written, well designed, and elegant—you will likely take extra special care not to mess it up, just like the firefighters. Even if there’s a fire raging (deadline, release date, trade show demo, etc.), you don’t want to be the first one to make a mess.

 

Bipolar Disorder

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Someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression) experiences swings in mood from periods of overactive, excited behaviour known as mania to deep depression. Between these severe highs and lows can be stable times. Some people also see or hear things that others around them don’t (known as having visual or auditory hallucinations) or have uncommon, unshared, beliefs (known as delusions).

If you have bipolar disorder, you will have periods or “episodes” of:

  • depression – where you feel very low and lethargic
  • mania – where you feel very high and overactive (less severe mania is known as hypomania)

Depression

The depression phase of bipolar disorder is often diagnosed first. You may initially be diagnosed with clinical depression before having a manic episode later (sometimes years later), after which you may be diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

During an episode of depression, you may have overwhelming feelings of worthlessness, which can potentially lead to thoughts of suicide.

If you’re feeling suicidal or having severe depressive symptoms, contact your GP, care co-ordinator or the local mental health emergency services as soon as possible.

If you can’t or don’t want to contact these people, call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90. You can call them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Alternatively, visit the Samaritans website or email jo@samaritans.org.

Mania

During a manic phase of bipolar disorder, you may feel very happy and have lots of ambitious plans and ideas. You may spend large amounts of money on things that you cannot afford and would not normally want. Not feeling like eating or sleeping, talking quickly and becoming annoyed easily are also common characteristics of the manic phase of bipolar disorder.

During the manic phase, you may feel very creative and view mania as a positive experience. However, during the manic phase of bipolar disorder, you may also have symptoms of psychosis (where you see or hear things that are not there or become convinced of things that are not true).

The exact causes of bipolar disorder are not known. However, it is thought that several things can trigger an episode. Extreme stress, overwhelming problems and life-changing events are often thought to contribute, as well as genetic and chemical factors.

It is thought that using a combination of treatments is the best way to control bipolar disorder. Treatment can include:

  • medication to prevent episodes of mania, hypomania (less severe mania) and depression – these are known as mood stabilisers and are taken every day, on a long-term basis
  • medication to treat the main symptoms of depression and mania when they occur
  • learning to recognise the triggers and signs of an episode of depression or mania
  • psychological treatment such as talking therapy to help deal with depression and to give you advice about how to improve your relationships
  • lifestyle advice such as doing regular exercise, planning activities that you enjoy and that give you a sense of achievement, and advice on improving your diet and getting more sleep

Help and advice for people with a long-term condition or their carers is also available from charities, support groups and associations. This includes self-help and self-management advice and dealing with the practical aspects of a long-term condition. Find out more about living with bipolar disorder.

Effective Learning

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Image According to the theory of the Association, the learning activities will be effective upon the interactions between educators with learners through stimulus and response . Learning activity is the process of linking a stimulus with a response. Based on this theory, learning more effective if the students more active learning and the higher its ability to link simulus and response.

1. Memory Improvement Basics

the best ways to improve memory. Basic tips such as improving focus, avoiding cram sessions and structuring your study time are a good place to start, but there are even more lessons from psychology that can dramatically improve your learning efficiency.

2. Keep Learning (and Practicing) New Things

Learning and practicing new skills helps your brain retain new information. if you’re learning a new language, it is important to keep practicing the language in order to maintain the gains you have achieved. This “use-it-or-lose-it” phenomenon involves a brain process known as “pruning.” Certain pathways in the brain are maintained, while other are eliminated. If you want the new information you just learned to stay put, keep practicing and rehearsing it.

3. Learn in Multiple Ways

Focus on learning in more than one way. Instead of just listening to a podcast, which involves auditory learning, find a way to rehearse the information both verbally and visually. This might involve describing what you learned to a friend, taking notes or drawing a mind map. By learning in more than one way the knowledge in your mind. According to Judy Willis, more regions of the brain that store data about a subject, the more interconnection there is. This redundancy means students will have more opportunities to pull up all of those related bits of data from their multiple storage areas in response to a single cue. This cross-referencing of data means we have learned, rather than just memorized.

4. Teach What You’ve Learned to Another Person

Teaching can improve your learning. Educators have long noted that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Start by translating the information into your own words. This process alone helps solidify new knowledge in your brain. Next, find some way to share what you learned. Some ideas include writing a blog post, creating a podcast or participating in a group discussion.

5. Utilize Previous Learning to Promote New Learning

Another great way to become a more effective learner is to use relational learning, which involves relating new information to things that you already know. For example, if you are learning about Romeo and Juliet, you might associate what you learn about the play with prior knowledge you have about Shakespeare, the historical period in which the author lived and other relevant information.

6. Gain Practical Experience

For many of us, learning typically involves reading textbooks, attending lectures or doing research in the library or on the Web. While seeing information and then writing it down is important, actually putting new knowledge and skills into practice can be one of the best ways to improve learning. If you are trying to acquire a new skill or ability, focus on gaining practical experience. If it is a sport or athletic skill, perform the activity on a regular basis. If you are learning a new language, practice speaking with another person and surround yourself with immersive experiences.

7. Look Up Answers Rather Than Struggle to Remember

Of course, learning a perfect process. Sometimes, we forget the details of things that we have already learned. If you find yourself struggling to recall some tidbit of information, research suggests that you are better offer simply looking up the correct answer. One study found that the longer you spend trying to remember the answer, the more likely you will be to forget the answer again in the future. Why? Because these attempts to recall previously learned information actually results in learning the “error state” instead of the correct response.

8. Understand How You Learn Best

Another great strategy for improving your learning efficiency is to recognize your learning habits and styles. There are a number of different theories about learning styles, which can all help you gain a better understanding of how you learn best. theory of multiple intelligences describes eight different types of intelligence that can help reveal your individual strengths. Looking at learning style dimensions can also help you better see which learning strategies might work best for you.

Facts Phineas Gage

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If you’ve ever taken an introductory psychology class, then you probably know the story of Phineas Gage, the 25-year-old railroad worker whose personality dramatically changed after a rod pierced his skull.

Gage lost portions of his frontal lobe and went from being a kind and mild-mannered man to rude and unrestrained.

Gage earned his place in the neurological hall of fame in a most unusual – and extremely unfortunate – way. A railroad construction foreman in the US, he was in charge of a crew of men who were working on the construction of the Rutland and Burlington Railroad near Cavendish, Vermont. On 18 September, he and his crew were excavating rocks to make way for the railroad. Gage was preparing for an explosion, using the tamping iron he holds in the photograph to compact explosive charge in a borehole. As he was doing so, the iron produced a spark that ignited the powder, and the resulting blast propelled the tamping iron straight through his head.

At the time of the accident, one of Gage’s duties was to set explosive charges to remove unwanted sections of large rocks. Typically, a long, narrow hole was drilled into the rock which was then filled with gunpowder and ignited. Before lighting the fuse, the hole was topped off with sand, and a three-foot-long, 1.25″ diameter iron tamping rod was used to pack down the gunpowder. However on 13 September 1848, Gage was distracted momentarily while in the process of preparing a blast, and he neglected to add the protective barrier of sand. When he thrust the iron tamper into the hole in the rock, it created a spark, and the gunpowder was ignited.

The resulting explosion propelled the fourteen pound iron rod straight into the air with the force of a cannon, causing it to pass through Gage’s skull in the process. It entered through the bottom of his left cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, then continued to fly in an arc across the sky, landing almost 100 feet behind him.

The unscheduled explosion got the attention of his fellow railroad workers, who rushed over to see if there was a problem. What they found was Phineas Gage slumped on the ground with a hole through his skull. Amazingly, the man was still alive and breathing. Even more amazingly, within moments his eyes were open and he was speaking to his fellow workers. The injured Gage was quickly loaded into a cart, and transported back to his boarding house, some 45 minutes away.

When Dr. John Martyn Harlow arrived, Phineas was conscious and had a regular heartbeat, and both of his pupils reacted to light normally. He was reported to be “in full possession of his reason, and free from pain.” He was under the care of Dr. Harlow for ten weeks, at which point he was sent home to Lebanon, New Hampshire. But while he was recovering, the doctor noted some changes in the man’s demeanor and personality. People who had known him before the accident described him as hard-working, responsible, and popular with his workers, but after the traumatic injury, Phineas Gage was not the same man.

In regards to his patient, Dr. Harlow wrote:

Gage was fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage’.

Several months after the accident Gage felt strong enough to return to work, yet due to his personality changes, his previous employers would not entrust him with the foreman position he had previously held. In the following years, he took various jobs caring for horses, driving stagecoaches, and doing some farm work. He also briefly appeared at a museum in New York which was curated by the infamous P. T. Barnum, alongside the tamping iron which had impaled his brain.

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Not much is known about his years after the injury, but eleven years after the accident, when he was aged thirty-seven years, Gage began to experience epileptic seizures. He died several months later, on 21 May 1860. His brain was not subjected to any medical examination at that time, but seven years later his body was exhumed so that his skull might be studied. It has since been subjected to much scrutiny.

It was determined that damage occurred to Gage’s skull in three places: There is a relatively small area under the cheek bone where the tamping iron first impacted, the orbital bone behind the eye socket, and very large hole where the iron rod emerged. The bone fragments over the exit wound were very skillfully put back in place by Dr. Harlow– so much so that it was hardly visible from outside the skull– but the original hole was about three and a half inches long by two inches wide.

There is still some controversy over the extent of damage to Phineas’ brain. It is certain that it passed through the anterior frontal cortex and white matter, but it has not been determined with certainty whether the lesion involved both frontal lobes or was limited only to the left side. In any case, the damage caused by the accident was roughly equivalent to a frontal lobotomy.

Today, Gage’s skull and the tamping rod which damaged it are on permanent display at Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine. The incident did much to advance the field of neurology, as it was among the first evidence suggesting that damage to the frontal lobes could alter aspects of personality and affect social skills. Before Gage’s brain injury, the frontal lobes were largely thought to have little role in behavior.

Galvanik Skin Response,

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GSR is a method of measuring the electrical conductance of the skin, which varies with its moisture level. This is of interest because the sweat glands are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, so skin conductance is used as an indication of psychological or physiological arousal. There has been a long history of electrodermal activity research, most of it dealing with spontaneous fluctuations or reactions to stimuli.

There is a relationship between sympathetic activity and emotional arousal, although one cannot identify which specific emotion is being elicited. The SCR is highly sensitive to emotions in some people. Fear, anger, startle response, orienting response and sexual feelings are all among the reactions which may produce similar skin conductance responses. These reactions are utilized as part of the polygraph or lie detector.

The devices which measure this response are often referred to as feedback instruments, in part because of how this response is generated or detected. If this response is measured “actively,” then a gentle electric current is passed through the body of the test subject to measure conductivity. A passive test measures the current that is generated by the person’s body itself. The feedback from this is what constitutes the measured galvanic skin response.