The rescue worker squeezed his hand through all the debris just to confirm that she’s dead. He shouted a few times, using his baton to knock a few times on the bricks.. but there was no response inside. When the crowd walked to the next building, the team leader suddenly ran back again, shouting, “come quickly!!!” He came to her dead body, and used all his might to feel under the woman’s body. He seems to have felt something.. then he shouted, “there’s someone, there’s a child, still alive”.

After some struggle, the team and volunteers helped to clear all the debris apart, and took out her child from under her body. He was wrapped in a red blanket with yellow floral patterns. He’s about 3 or 4 months old. Because of his mother’s protection, he was completely unscathed. When they carried him out, he was still sleeping peacefully. His sleeping face warmed everyone’s heart. The accompanying doctor performed some checks on him, and found a hand phone inside the blanket. He read the screen and found that it wrote the following, all entered in the phone. “My dearest child, if you are able to survive, you must remember that I love you”. The doctor who has experienced many births and deaths in life through his career, cried too at this moment. The phone was passed around. Everyone who saw it couldn’t help shedding tears either. (Source: Xinhua Internet Discussion Forum)

Background information:

On Monday, May 12, at 2.28 p.m. Beijing time (6:28 GMT), a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, jolted southwestern China’s Sichuan Province.

The confirmed death toll from the disaster has risen to 32,476 by 2:00pm Sunday, May 17, 2008, and the toll would possibly rise to more than 50,000 as many, still buried in rubbles, are feared dead.
And on Sunday, China Seismological Bureau Sunday revised the magnitude of the earthquake from 7.8 to 8.0 on the Richter scale.

The number of injured in magnitude 8.0 earthquake reached 220,109, it said.

In Sichuan alone, a total of 31,978 people were killed since Monday’s deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake, with 209,905 others injured.

Statistics from the emergency response office show that the death toll in Deyang and Mianyang cities of the province hit 10,341 and 11,874 respectively.

The office also gave a breakdown of the death toll in other areas as 4,156 in Chengdu, 2,586 in Guangyuan, 2,871 in Aba and 23 in Ya’an.

Outside Sichuan, the death toll was 364 in Gansu Province, 113 in Shaanxi Province, 16 in Chongqing Municipality, two in Henan Province, one in Yunnan Province, one in Hubei Province, and one in Hunan Province.

where to get last news?
english.sina.com/z/080512sichuanquake/index.shtml
english.gov.cn/
english.people.com.cn/
news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=china+earthqu…
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036059/
topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/earthquakes/si…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hzdkl/sets/72157605059158003/

US scientists studying how the brain behaves during decision making have discovered that when people are confronted with moral decisions, they think about efficiency in one part of the brain, and equity in another part of the brain that deals with emotions, and the latter tends to win, suggesting that a sense of fairness is fundamental to human nature.

The study is the work of researchers at University of Illinois and the California Institute of Technology, and appears in the 8th May issue of Science.

What is the better decision: to give more food to a few hungry people (the efficient choice), or let some food go to waste so that everyone gets a fair share (the more equitable choice)?

This was the dilemma faced by participants in the study, whose brains were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they considered a series of tough decisions in a scenario involving allocating food to children in a Ugandan orphanage.

In setting up this study the researchers wanted firstly to explore whether equity or efficiency was stronger to our sense of justice, and secondly, they wanted to find out how big a role emotions played in resolving such questions.

These two questions have been at the heart of longstanding debates about “distributive justice”.

Co-principal investigator Ming Hsu, a fellow of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, said that what makes us moral, and how we make trade offs, the fundamentals of moral choices, is a question that interests many scientists.

Hsu said many of the subjects said afterwards that “This is the worst experiment I’ve ever been in. I never want to do anything like this again!”

The participants were given the following scenario.

Each child in the orphanage starts with a monetary equivalent of 24 meals, an actual gift from the researchers to the orphanage.

Then, a number of meals is to be cut from the children’s allotments. The number that is cut depends on choices the participant makes.

Each decision, where the participant has to choose one of two options, comprises a moral dilemma where one option is efficient, and the other option is equitable. For instance, one could choose to take 15 meals from one child (option 1) or 13 meals from one child and 5 meals from another child (option 2). In option 1 fewer meals are lost (more efficient), and in option 2 more meals are lost (less efficient) but the burden is more “fairly” distributed.

Hsu and colleagues said that this type of decision is a good example of a distributive justice dilemma, where each option is compelling, but you can’t have both, so you have to trade one off against the other.

The participants made their decisions by watching a computer animation where they were shown pictures of two choices at a time, each being a photograph of the children affected and a number showing the number of meals that would be lost if they chose that option. They chose their option by selecting a lever that changed the path of a ball that was slowly moving across the screen.

The results showed that participants overwhelmingly chose equity over efficiency.

“They were all quite inequity averse,” said Hsu, who explained that the findings support other research that suggests people are fairly intolerant of inequity.

While the participants watched the screen and made their selections, the researchers observed their brains with fMRI scanners. They were particularly interested in the brain activity at the time they made the decision.

Three regions of the brain, the insula, putamen and caudate, were involved in different ways, at different points in the decision process.

The insula was active when equity changes were being considered, while the putamen was active when efficiency changes were being considered. And the caudate appeared to integrate equity and efficiency when the decision was taken.

Hsu said that the involvement of the insula suggests that emotion is involved when a person is thinking about inequity.

Studies have shown that the insula, which is involved in awareness of bodily states and emotions, becomes active when people feel hungry, crave drugs, or have intense feelings like anger, fear, disgust and happiness. Other studies have also suggested it mediates fairness.

The authors said the putamen and the caudate regions of the brain become activate during reward-related learning.

Hsu described what they saw. At first “you’re seeing the signal in the insula and the putamen,” he said, but “when they hit the lever you see the insula activation. And when the ball gets to the end you see (activation of) the caudate,” he added.

Hsu explained that:

“The putamen is responding only to the chosen efficiency, which is how many meals get taken away from the kids or how many meals they end up with.”

“The insula, however, responded to how equitably the burden of lost meals was distributed,” said Hsu.

The authors wrote that the results showed how the brain “encodes two considerations central to the distributive justice calculus and shed light on the cognitivist/sentimentalist debate regarding the psychological underpinnings of distributive justice”.

They suggested the findings support the notion that “a sense of fairness is fundamental to distributive justice, but, as suggested by moral sentimentalists, is rooted in emotional processing”.

On a more general level they suggested that:

“Emotional responses related to norm violations may underlie individual differences in equity considerations and adherence to ethical rules.”

“The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency.”
Ming Hsu, Cédric Anen, and Steven R. Quartz.
Science.Published Online May 8, 2008.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1153651.

Scientists says it’s more likely to be the latter, or the Power. They attribute this kind of behavior to natural promiscuity combined with opportunity – along with a risk-taking personality common to men like Bill Clinton and John F Kennedy. It’s what makes them seek office and what makes us want to vote for them.

Recently I am reading about “Gateway Drug Hypothesis”. Everything has a beginning, the Gateway. Getting into the gateway doesn’t necessarily warrant to go further on the path. Someone does and others don’t. It depends on the dosage of the “gateway effect” (I might study this dosage effect hypothesis). Power in the sex case may just make it possible to go through the gateway and continue on the path.

Psychologist Christopher Ryan, author of “Sex in Prehistory,” says the desire for sex with more than one person has always been there – for leaders and followers alike. “The desire is not a function of status or power – it’s a question of availability.”What’s relatively new to the human race, he said, is the ability to exercise power and the connection between power and sex.

That’s because, for most of human existence, there was only so far a man could coerce others when food was essentially free and hard to hoard. And until relatively recently, sex with multiple partners was the norm. “It would have been very unusual 100,000 years ago for a person to have one sexual partner for 30 years,” said Ryan in an interview from Barcelona.

We don’t know this for sure, because prehistoric sexual behavior doesn’t fossilize, but there’s much we can infer from studying how people in foraging cultures live today, he said. Such cultures tend to be relatively egalitarian and promiscuous, at least by American standards, he said. But prostitution is rare, as he believes it was for most of our past…….

While Ryan argues that men and women are both naturally promiscuous and power simply gives men the opportunity to follow that nature, psychiatrist Gabriela Cort takes a more open view of the human male. Alpha males – leaders – are often indeed full of pent-up sexual energy, but they don’t always use it to get in trouble, said Cort, author of the upcoming book, “Leading Under Pressure.”

Story becomes different between the sex things and drug use when it is talking about gender. I am going to stop. BTW, in a democratic society, power as a governor is given by the people. So what the people they are.

My use of twitter for now is limited to microblogging, or publishing 140 words at a time, regardless social networking and communication among friends, etc. The way I do it might interest you so I summarize down into this writing. I am talking one simple and the “easiest” way (for now, March 15, 2008) to update your Twitter account. You will see why.

1. Using Flock as your browser (Firefox might work but I love Flock more).
2. Use the Flock add-on for Twitter. This add on puts a tiny icon at the right end of your browser’s address bar. Whatever shown in the address bar will be posted to your Twitter account if this tiny icon is clicked, purposely or accidently.
3. When I am browsing websites and reading interesting things, I can highlight a sentence or so that I like to keep, copy the text by right click the mouse, and paste it to the address bar. (Now, this is inconvenient. Why don’t just highlighting and twittering by inserting the posting function into right click?)
4. Go to the tiny icon and click on it. The text is twittered!

Because whatever in the address bar can be posted to your twitter, this actually also can be used as a way to save “bookmarks” or, better, share bookmarks. In this sense, social bookmark web application should be using twitter more.

The image shows a screenshot of a webpage of mine. Twitter widget is shown on the right sidebar. So it’s like you can post your headline news that has interested you and bookmarks also. Now, the remaining question is Post for what? Why? What purpose? Ok, I am not going to give a full answer. For now, it is springbreak, right?

9 Ways To Jumpstart Your Writing Goal

Building The Writing Habit

1. A set time. Each and every morning I wake up at 6am and begin writing. They say the first waking hour is the Golden Hour, where you concentrate and experience the most creativity. I think this is true for me, and it can be true for you even if you aren’t a morning person. Once you are in the habit of writing at a certain time, that is your Golden Time.

2. A set place. Since I do my writing right when I wake up, it’s pretty much always done in my bedroom, at my writing desk, on my laptop. While I will occasionally write from other locations or on different computers, this is home base (literally). The purpose of this is to continually trigger my mind into a creative flow. You might want to have a completely separate computer just for your writing in order to build an even stronger connection with writing and this apparatus.

3. Writing Utensils. I do 95% of my writing on my Dell Inspiron 6000 machine. It may not be luxurious, but it gets the job done. My program of choice for all initial writing happens to be Dark Room. It is a very basic program that takes up the whole screen and forces concentration on the written word.

4. Idea Lists. An important part of stimulating creativity is the act of bringing plentiful ideas to the writing table. To do this it is important to carry a Moleskin or a Voice Recorder with you throughout the day. You might be in a very random place when you get your million dollar idea and you’ll want to capture every nuance of it instead of letting it get forgotten by trusting your memory.

5. Kill Distractions. I hope no one skimming this list is going to throw a hatchet at the first person to knock on the door while they’re writing. On a serious note, it’s very important to preserve quiet in a distraction free writing space because it takes several minutes to enter a creative flow state after a disturbance. If it takes you 15 minutes to get into maximum flow, and you get distracted every 20 minutes, you aren’t realizing your full writing potential as you throw yourself into the writing world.

6. Quit Quitting. Get used to quitting all those self-limiting beliefs that say you have nothing to write about, no fresh ideas, and cannot properly articulate the language. Forget that. Put the pen to the paper, and write anything that comes to mind, and see where that takes you.

7. Sit In Dark and Silence. Create a time where you can just sit with your eyes closed for 15 minutes and think. You can concentrate on the stillness and block out all ideas or try asking a question of someone that has all the answers in the world. You’ll be surprised to find that your mind will generate the answers for you, then get up and write.

8. Ideas, Not Grammar. I know that my ideas are worth their weight in gold, but my grammar might not always be on top of the class. If that is the case with you, don’t worry about it; write however you write. If it’s a serious piece of work, the editor will take care of it for you. Otherwise your purpose should be to make the ideas as understandable as possible, and nothing more.

9. Revisit. Contrary to number 8 that says ‘Write and don’t worry about it’, a great writing habit is to revisit your work to revise. On a second run, especially after a day break from the work, you get to see it with fresh eyes, and a fresh state, that can word things in a completely different way. This is where you make your ideas even more understandable.