We head to deep inside the natural habitat of frenemies: reality TV. Rich Juzwiak is a full-time blogger for VH1 and his own pop-culture blog which means he's spent a lot of time watching and dissecting reality TV shows. And last year, he noticed that one sentence seems to repeat an awful lot in the frenemy friendships that happen on reality TV.
I would print out and place this very picture in my wallet right now, if only I hadn't just burnt my father's new printer due to my forgetting that the printer is 110V, and the wall plugs here are 220V. WHOOPS.
(From Boing Boing, picture from here.)
'Sit! Stay! Snuggle!' is a story from the Wall Street Journal about a new sort of service dog--one for the psychologically afflicted. It's very interesting."NEW YORK -- Like any other golden retriever seeking a treat, Tuesday nudged his owner's hand with his snout one recent morning and waited expectantly.
Luis Carlos Montalvan got up from a chair in his small Brooklyn apartment and walked to the kitchen. Tuesday followed close behind, eyes fixed on a white cabinet. The retriever sat alertly as Mr. Montalvan, an Iraq war veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, reached for a vial of pills, lined a half-dozen on the table and took them one by one.
The dog had gotten what he wanted: When the last pill was swallowed, he got up and followed his master out of the kitchen, tail wagging.
Tuesday is a so-called psychiatric-service dog, a new generation of animals trained to help people whose suffering is not physical, but emotional. They are, effectively, Seeing Eye dogs for the mind....
Tuesday, now 3 years old, listens to the daily alarm on Mr. Montalvan's wristwatch, his cue to make sure he takes his pills. Wearing the red harness of a work dog, he accompanies Mr. Montalvan to Dunkin' Donuts and the movie theater, to Veterans Administration group counseling sessions in Manhattan, and to Columbia University, where Mr. Montalvan is studying journalism and communication.
At Mr. Montalvan's apartment -- decorated with his Purple Heart and Bronze Star certificates, and pictures and paintings of Tuesday -- they sleep in the same wooden sleigh bed.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Montalvan and Tuesday walked to a nearby subway station. The platform was crowded. Mr. Montalvan began to look agitated. Tuesday, who had been lying at his feet, jumped up and stood between his master and the nearest cluster of people, creating a buffer. Mr. Montalvan's breathing noticeably stabilized.
The train approached. Mr. Montalvan bent down to tie his Army combat boots, scratched Tuesday behind the ears, and they made their way aboard."
Dan was badly burned and spent a lot of time in burn wards. Much like band-aids, except wrapped all over your body, body bandages can be ripped slowly or quickly, starting from various parts of the body. There is no consensus on how to do it best.
Dan's nurses thought faster was better. Dan felt otherwise, but could not convince them from their gut feelings, and had no research to back it up. Once he got well, he embarked on some semi-sadistic scientific study about pain. He found that since the mind doesn't really take duration into account, ripping slower is actually better. Taking breaks to recuperate is best. Also, starting from high-nerve density areas such as the face, and moving on to less innervated parts such as the back, lead to a sense of improvement.
He went back to tell his former nurses and they related how hard it is to go back on their gut feelings. But now you know, there is research. So feel free to tell all your health-field friends to rip it slow. (That's what she said, pada-chk!)
Oh yeah, then Dan moves on to tell us that we are predictably irrational, and we all tend to cheat by a little bit, or something like that. Enjoy!
Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes is a TED talk by Philip Zimbardo, American psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He's a much better speaker than I'd imagined, and I had no idea he grew up poor in New York.
Zimbardo is of course, famous for his Stanford prison experiment, where he took 24 normal college students, assigned them randomly to be prisoners or guards--which elicited sadistic behavior to such an extent that the experiment had to end early. The key is that there is neither pure good or evil, only personality traits that can be elicited depending on circumstance.
In this talk, Zimbardo talks about how he was shocked but not surprised at the prisoner abuse that went on in Abu Ghraib, and shows [GRAPHIC, NOT SAFE FOR WORK] images that were not as widely circulated in the media. Zimbardo states that the administration pushed the blame down on the soldiers (citing a few rotten apples), and that the soldiers stated they were just following orders. But the blame is not to be individualized, it is systemic.
Zimbardo states that if you give people power without oversight, it's a prescription for abuse. The Bush administration, via documents he presented, knew that, and let that happen. He says the abuses were going on for 3 months. Who was watching the store? Nobody. And he thinks nobody on purpose. The guards were given permission to do those things, and they knew nobody was going to come down into that dungeon. These pictures were examples of situational and systemic vectors of disease.
He finishes on a positive note, proposing heroism as the antidote to evil. He proposes activating the heroic imagination in all of us and celebrating ordinary heroes. This especially for children. He proposes thinking of ourselves as heroes waiting: each one of us may only have one chance in a lifetime to act heroically, so we must prepare ourselves for when the time comes.
