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POPSMentally Unstable Soldiers Redeployed to Iraq "People who have psychiatric symptoms, actively symptomatic with PTSD or depression, are being sent back to the very situation that caused their PTSD and depression," Ragan said. The Army's chief psychiatrist, Dr. Elspeth Ritchie, agrees with the Rand Corp.'s estimate that 300,000 service members have demonstrated post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Some are returning to the battlefront, although the Army is not keeping track of how many.
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POPSWikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
These policies have become the social contract for Wikipedia's army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them, incorrect information generally disappears quite quickly. So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based? Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wiki
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POPSGossip more powerful than truth The researchers then took the game a step further and showed the students the actual decisions people had made. But they also supplied false gossip that contradicted that evidence. In these cases, the students based their decisions to award money on the gossip, rather than the hard evidence, showing such information is a powerful tool, Sommerfeld said. "Rationally if you know what the people did, you should care, but they still listened to what others said," he said. "They even reacted on it if they knew better." Researchers have long used similar games to study how people cooperate and the impact of gossip in groups. Scientists define gossip as social information spread about a person who is not present, Sommerfeld said. In evolutionary terms, gossip can be an important tool for people to acquire information about others' reputations or navigate through social networks at work and in their everyday lives, the study said. One example could be using gossip to learn tha
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POPS10 legs, 4800 books and 1 passion On a trip this month into the rutted hills, where about 300 people regularly borrow books from him, he reminisced about a visit to the National Library in the capital, Bogotá, where he was stunned by the building’s immense collection and its Art Deco design. “I felt so ordinary in Bogotá,” Mr. Soriano said. “My place is here.” Very nice story....
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POPSAttention and Emotional Self Regulation 1) Alerting: helps us maintain an Alert State. 2) Orienting: focuses our senses on the information we want. For example, you are now listening to my voice. 3) Executive Attention: regulates a variety of networks, such as emotional responses and sensory information. This is critical for most other skills, and clearly correlated with academic performance. It is distributed in frontal lobes and the cingulate gyrus. The development of executive attention can be easily observed both by questionnaire and cognitive tasks after about age 3–4, when parents can identify the ability of their children to regulate their emotions and control their behavior in accord with social demands. Very interesting read.
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POPSAmerican Muslims grateful to Colin Powell Powell said he felt especially strongly about the because of a photo he saw in The New Yorker magazine of the mother of a Muslim soldier in Arlington Cemetery embracing her son's grave, which was marked with a Muslim crescent and star. The soldier, Kareem R. Khan of New Jersey, was 20 when he was killed in Iraq.
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POPSUS ranks 36th on press freedom list "fight against terrorism" cause for steep decline in press freedoms worldwide. We tied with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ghana, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, Surinam, Jamaica all rank higher in press freedom than the USA.
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POPSHidden Casualties of US Meltdown <<<Right now, there are no real counts of the many extreme acts born of the financial crisis, but assuredly other murders, suicides, self-inflicted injuries, acts of arson and of armed self-defense have simply gone unnoticed outside of economically hard-hit neighborhoods in cities and small towns across America. With no end in sight for either the foreclosures or the economic turmoil, Americans may have to brace themselves for many more casualties on the home front. Unless extreme economic steps, like mortgage- and debt- forgiveness, are implemented, the number of extreme acts and the ultimate body count may be far more extreme than anyone yet wants to contemplate.>>>
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