NETUCATION Blog

Category: Blog

Blog posts and news articles we published on a weekly basis

  • When a Facebook Post Is a Cry for Help

    By LIZ HERON

    In today’s connected world, it is not uncommon for high school and college students to use Facebook as a place to pour out their feelings, sometimes in intensely personal updates. Some are predictable melodrama and fairly harmless cries for validation — but not all. Facebook posts can serve as early warning signs for adolescent depression or even suicide attempts, particularly when parents or friends notice a sudden departure from the writer’s usual tone.

    Jan Hoffman, reporting for The Times, found that psychologists, social scientists and adolescent medicine specialists are watching Facebook postings by teenagers for indications of depression — and to help learn how, when and if to intervene. Facebook started working with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in 2007, and in December, Facebook also began sending the distressed person a link to an online counselor. Research suggests that although between 30 percent and 40 percent of college students suffer a debilitating depressive episode each year, barely 10 percent seek counseling. Could college counselors, as Facebook friends, watch for those episodes, and offer help?

    While she was reporting on this subject, Ms. Hoffman and I posed a series of questions on Facebook to New York Times readers. We asked students whether they posted to Facebook when they were sad, and how their friends and family reacted. We also asked parents, educators and guidance counselors whether, and how, they responded to such dark postings. (Read some of the responses here, and below this post.)

    Do you, as an adult or student, post to Facebook when what you are feeling is closer to depression than connection? Have you responded to bleak posts from one of your children and been rebuffed? Should professors or even therapists ever “friend” a student or patient on Facebook — and if they do, should they use what they read there to reach out if they suspect they’re needed?

    Click here to read the full article

    source: Motherlode /  By LIZ HERON

  • Restaurant turns to Twitter to publicly shame customers who fail to keep reservations


    You might want to think again before failing to keep a restaurant reservation after one eatery decided enough was enough and began publicly shaming no-shows on Twitter.

    Noah Ellis, the managing partner at the Vietnamese restaurant Red Medicine, said those people who booked a table but then never honoured their reservation ‘ruin restaurants’.

    ‘The a******* who decide to no-show, or cancel 20 minutes before their reservation ruin restaurants for the people who make a reservation and do their best to honour it,’ he told Eater.com.

    ‘Either restaurants are forced to overbook and make the guests wait, or they do what we do, turn away guests for some prime-time slots because they’re booked, and then have empty tables.’

    To try and stop customers cancelling at the last minute or simply ignoring their reservation, Red Medicine’s Twitter account has begun posting the names of those who never show up.

    An initial post on March 24 declared: ‘All the nice guests who wonder why restaurants overbook and they sometimes have to wait for their res should thank people like those below,’ before publishing a list of names and bookings.

    Brian Rosman, a spokesperson for the Beverly Hills restaurant, told TODAY.com it had become a trend in Hollywood for assistants to book tables for their bosses at three or four different places and then either cancel all but one at the last minute or never shop up.

    ‘For a small restaurant like Red Medicine, even a couple of tables really affects them,’ he said.

    ‘People don’t realise that this causes real problems for a restaurant.’

    source: METRO

  • On Kurzweil: The Sleight of Hand That Makes It Seem We Understand the Mind

    Is the way we talk about the human mind messing with our ability to think about it clearly?

    C06086-650.jpg
    U.S. National Library of Medicine

    The philosopher Colin McGinn is a tough book reviewer. He looks like a cop in an old movie about cops and robbers, and writes like one. And when he decided to take down Ray Kurzweil’s new book,How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he pulled no punches. First, he runs through Kurzweil’s “pattern recognition theory of the mind”:

    One cannot help noting immediately that the theory echoes Kurzweil’s professional achievements as an inventor of word recognition machines: the “secret of human thought” is pattern recognition, as it is implemented in the hardware of the brain. To create a mind therefore we need to create a machine that recognizes patterns, such as letters and words. …

    The process of recognition, which involves the firing of neurons in response to stimuli from the world, will typically include weightings of various features, as well as a lowering of response thresholds for probable constituents of the pattern. Thus some features will be more important than others to the recognizer, while the probability of recognizing a presented shape as an “E” will be higher if it occurs after “APPL.”

    These recognizers will therefore be “intelligent,” able to anticipate and correct for poverty and distortion in the stimulus. This process mirrors our human ability to recognize a face, say, when in shadow or partially occluded or drawn in caricature.

    Then the assault begins. First, McGinn states that Kurzweil’s whole theory is wrong, just on its face: “that claim seems obviously false.”

    But the fascinating part of the critique is why Kurzweil’s theory can seem plausible. And that comes down to the language Kurzweil (and other people) employ in writing about neuroscience. McGinn calls it “homunculism,” the erroneous attribution of human-like qualities to pieces of a human. And it generates the illusion that we understand how synapses firing leads to an appreciation for rock ‘n roll.

    [H]omunculus talk can give rise to the illusion that one is nearer to accounting for the mind, properly so-called, than one really is. If neural clumps can be characterized in psychological terms, then it looks as if we are in the right conceptual ballpark when trying to explain genuine mental phenomena–such as the recognition of words and faces by perceiving conscious subjects. But if we strip our theoretical language of psychological content, restricting ourselves to the physics and chemistry of cells, we are far from accounting for the mental phenomena we wish to explain. An army of homunculi all recognizing patterns, talking to each other, and having expectations might provide a foundation for whole-person pattern recognition; but electrochemical interactions across cell membranes are a far cry from actually consciously seeing something as the letter “A.” How do we get from pure chemistry to full-blown psychology?

    Click here to read the full article

    source: The Atlantic / ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL

  • Motor Vehicles Accidents

    Motor vehicle accident law refers to an area of law that is a hybrid of traffic law and personal injury law. Vehicle vehicles (including trucks) and motorcycles are subject to traffic laws while users of electric personal assistance vehicles are subject to traffic law.
    Vehicle accident law, which does not change much, consists of a number of sections.
    In certain cases, in addition to motor vehicle accidents, the owner of an parked personal assistance vehicle will be liable for the damages due to this if the owner does not insure the vehicle or did not register it with the DMV within the time required.
    Personal assistance vehicle law is simple but can be tricky if you have a problem. If you do not care for the issue and are not trying to manipulate someone, you do not have a case. If you have a real issue, you are not going to get any sympathy here. You are basically asking for an attorney, in addition to being prosecuted. There is no case for this type of situation and the only way I can see is if the car is stolen or if you have a ticket for a traffic violation and no insurance or no registration, in which case you are not going to get anything from an attorney for this.
    In some states, personal assistance vehicle laws will get you the same punishment as a traffic ticket. Some states have a maximum fines range for DUI for them.
    If you have a mechanical problem with an electric personal assistance vehicle, and it is not a battery or electric system problem, this is probably the most forgiving thing you could possibly be charged for. If you have an electric vehicle problem and a mechanical problem with the vehicle, you may be facing a possible 15 days in jail. These are penalties that could apply in most situations but getting a lawyer can also help you with this from sites such as https://valientemott.com/practice-areas/car-accident-attorney-las-vegas/ online.
    For those of us with vehicles that are not classified as electric personal assistance vehicles, there are still some issues to be aware of. Some states have special registration requirements for electric personal assistive vehicles.
    Some states have laws requiring liability insurance for drivers of these vehicles that do not have minimum coverage. For states that are subject to these types of laws, you may have to look elsewhere for insurance.
    Electric personal assistance vehicles are not included in auto insurance, unless you have the vehicle registered with the DMV. In these states, auto insurance rates are usually higher than a reasonable percentage of the vehicle’s actual value. Do not put your own life and property at risk with an electric vehicle. The typical real estate agent might charge a lot more than that.
    It is important to check your state’s laws if you are thinking about buying an electric vehicle. If you are having any type of problem with it, do not buy it. If you believe you have been overcharged, this is a thing that you need to be prepared to pay for. If you do not want to buy one, don’t buy one. It is something you could have resolved with the dealer if you knew what you were doing.
    What type of insurance will I need? In addition to requiring auto insurance for all owners of electric personal assistance vehicles, some states have additional laws that govern these vehicles and their owners. For example, some states require the drivers of these vehicles to obtain specific coverage for injuries of the passengers and/or passengers of the owner and/or a designated passenger of the vehicle. This requires an extra policy to cover these people.

  • Why to use SEO

    SEO can help you build better relationships with your audience and improve the customer experience. In the next steps, I’ll discuss how to create a blog post that takes advantage of the blog-loop to get more traffic for your content. As mentioned earlier, this process is an iterative one, where you make some minor adjustments based on what you’ve learned. The specific adjustments that you make to your content and your blog post will depend on your own niche. If you’re not satisfied with your SEO results after you’re done, don’t feel bad, there’s plenty of time to improve things later. The Key Word If you’re reading this post, chances are good you are following a content marketing strategy. Whether it’s a search engine optimization process, blogging approach, or SEO strategy, a content strategy helps you get the highest quality traffic for your content. That said, it is important that you understand the goals of your content strategy before you begin. In this post, we will consider five keywords you could use to test your blog content strategy. Blogger Even though these keywords are simply “blogger”, you don’t need to worry about them too much. A Google-powered blog won’t cost you much. Most major search engines will return pages with at least one of these words. As you might guess, for SEO purposes, you need to consider these keywords. This is because the keyword will start indexing and ranking well as soon as you add them to your website, if you want to learn more about this, find out here what you should do in SEO. What is SEO, SEO and more SEO? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of using the best ranking signals to make sure your website ranks in the top spots for relevant keywords. What is great about SEO is that it will increase your traffic and your sales. But, SEO isn’t just about increasing your traffic and sales, it’s also about improving your website’s health. Without a solid knowledge of SEO, you will not reap the full benefits of having a great website. In this guide, we will give you everything you need to know about what SEO is, how to think about and implement a great SEO strategy, and a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish SEO in your blog. So what are we going to cover? SEO Competitor Research Before you get started on your SEO strategy, you need to have a very good idea of what you are up against. Fortunately, SEO is a multi-dimensional process. Just like in any other industry, you need to be making it possible for users of your site to find what they need. If your site has a small audience, you won’t be able to do a lot of SEO on your own. The most effective approach would be to partner with a reputable blog and host your content there. However, if your audience is very large or if you just have a ton of content, you may need to do some extra legwork on your own. You will need to learn how to find a keyword in your niche that has similar ranking signals to your blog posts.