bamboo
Monday, September 17, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Mindful Pracice and The WWW.
Is the Web Driving Us Crazy? A Mindful Response
It’s undeniable. The bond between human and digital device gets stronger every year. The average person sends or receives four times the amount of text messages since 2007. People are starting to feel their phone vibrate in their pockets when in fact there was never a vibration. This has been called “phantom-vibration syndrome.”There’s a historical shift happening that we’ll only begin to understand years from now. With the wonderful things that the internet has brought us, it also hard to deny the ADHD and OCD-like qualities many of us are picking up as we continue to merge with our digital devices.
As you practice and repeat something, it becomes a habit, and whether the kick starter was a need to use the internet for business or social reason, the devices we have today are pretty good and getting us to use them over and over again. What do you need to be aware of?
The fact is, every day our brain is being trained dozens, if not hundreds, of times to check for messages; be it texting, messaging, Facebook, Twitter, emails, voicemails or any other form of notification. Threfore, it’s going to train the brain to constantly be anticipating the next message. Consider how many times you’ve been on a walk to your car, to the bathroom, in a line or wherever and grabbed for the phone in your pocket. At times, this may have happened even if you forgot your phone. It’s already a habit.
Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, already thinks we’re there. As she points out, “we are all cyborgs now.” Our brains have already merged with technology. This technology is only in its infancy and offers so many incredible gifts. We can find friends all around the world; we can get aids to help us count our calories easily to manage weight; it’s easier than ever to donate to a needed organization; with the push of an icon we can find a map and navigate wherever we want or find the top rated places to eat. This is all good stuff.
However, we’re not really going to harness the power of this technology if we’re sleepwalking through this new relationship, unaware of the tightening hold it has on our attention. As Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford University says, “end[ing] up glassy-eyed zombies.”
Larry Rosen wrote a book called “iDisorder
,” and “his team surveyed 750 people, a spread of teens and adults who represented the Southern California census, detailing their tech habits, their feelings about those habits, and their scores on a series of standard tests of psychiatric disorders. He found that most respondents, with the exception of those over the age of 50, check text messages, email or their social network “all the time” or “every 15 minutes.” More worryingly, he also found that those who spent more time online had more “compulsive personality traits.” (Newsweek article)However, we can take the fear of addiction to the internet a little too far. The Newsweek article uses the following as examples of a way to make the misleading point of how dire this is:
“One young couple neglected its infant to death while nourishing a virtual baby online. A young man fatally bludgeoned his mother for suggesting he log off (and then used her credit card to rack up more hours). At least 10 ultra-Web users, serviced by one-click noodle delivery, have died of blood clots from sitting too long.”My guess is it’s probably safe to say there were mental issues co-occurring with this, but technology usage could have exacerbated those issues.
However, we can also take it too lightly, as a Forbes article explains in We’re all Internet Addicts and We’re All Screwed, says Newsweek. While the Forbes article has some entertaining bits that poke fun at Newsweek‘s focus on internet addiction, this article also mocks it for bringing up an important comment by Sherry Turkle, PhD, suggesting that texting while breast feeding can create stress in the mother that can get passed along to the child. Or that parents are on their devices at the expense of attending to their kids.
In other words, while these aren’t examples of heavy neglect, they are the little things that add up, and the Forbes author’s assertion that these aren’t things worth looking out for may be naive.
In this new era, it’s okay to love and feel the rewards of your Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Pinterest, Apps, or whatever, but it’s all about how far we take it. Each of us is in a pretty serious relationship with our technology, and so the question is, how can we begin to become more aware of how we’re relating to it? How is it affecting our relationships or our stress? Do we feel compelled to grab for it, it is splitting our attention and taxing our brains? When does it turn from a source of leisure and relaxation, like reading a magazine or book, to a source of stress and feelings of being overwhelmed?
Here’s today’s practice:
Start by just being mindful of how your body reacts to your digital devices. Do you notice a pull at times? What does that feel like? What happens when you just let it be, how long does it last? How long until it goes away?
After all, if we’re going to be married to technology, we might as well get to know it a bit better.
As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.
Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com
Blogger: The Mindful Gorilla - All posts
Red Pandas, Face Extinction
Red Pandas, Cursed by Their Adorable Looks, Face Extinction
Aug 22, 2012 5:23pm
By DAN HARRIS and JAKE WHITMAN
The red panda, an animal that once roamed vast regions of the Earth, is now on the brink of extinction, and its adorable face and gentle curiosity is only adding to its plight.
These creatures can be found in the wild at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, in countries such as Nepal, Bhutan and in the jungle areas surrounding Darjeeling, India, a crowded, chaotic city known for growing some of the world’s best teas.
But even there, the red panda’s natural habitat, the best chance to see one face-to-face is at a zoo. Conservationists believe there are less than 10,000 left in the wild.
Once sought after to keep as pets, red pandas are now hunted for their pelts. In Nepal and northern India, poachers can command a heavy price for their body parts. In some parts of China, their bushy tails are considered good luck charms in wedding ceremonies.
Red pandas also face the threat of deforestation. It takes as much as four pounds of bamboo a day to keep these little guys going.
Darjeeling is home to one of the most successful red panda breeding
centers in the world: The Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park. But
while zoo officials hope their match-making will produce offspring that
potentially could be returned to the wild, they also worry about what
they called the “red panda curse” – their cute faces and loving natures
make these animals a target.
Red pandas seem so lovable that they have been featured in movies – Dustin Hoffman voiced the character Master Shifu in the “Kung Fu Panda” movies – as well as video games, postage stamps and beer bottles. Even “Firefox,” the popular Web browser, is named after them.
When red pandas were first discovered in the early 1800s, a full 50 years before the giant panda, they were a must-have accessory of the Victorian age. Furry, friendly and about the size of a house cat, European women clamored to have a red panda by their side.
As far as biologists know, red pandas only exist today in the region around the Himalayas. However, a red panda tooth, estimated to be around 4 to 7 million years old, was recently found in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee.
Steve Wallace, the curator for the East Tennessee Natural History Museum located in Gray, Tenn., said he and his team have unearthed evidence of giant turtles, saber-toothed cats and pot-bellied rhinos at the Gray Fossil site, but were not expecting to dig up an ancient red panda tooth.
Since it was discovered, red panda bones have become common at the site. Wallace said the ancient Tennessee “firefox” was probably much larger, about the size of a mountain lion, and thrived in the thick forests once found in that part of the world.
One theory about what caused the red pandas to disappear from the
Blue Ridge Mountains is that raccoons moved in and began competing for
the same food. While scientists do not yet fully understand why evidence
of this animal surfaced in the southern United States, they are hoping
their discoveries can help bring the red panda back from the brink.
“Understanding why fossil red pandas were so much more successful, so much more widespread, than pandas today, could be a very beneficial to actually protecting them and ensuring that they’ll be here for future generations,” Wallace said.
The red panda, an animal that once roamed vast regions of the Earth, is now on the brink of extinction, and its adorable face and gentle curiosity is only adding to its plight.
These creatures can be found in the wild at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, in countries such as Nepal, Bhutan and in the jungle areas surrounding Darjeeling, India, a crowded, chaotic city known for growing some of the world’s best teas.
But even there, the red panda’s natural habitat, the best chance to see one face-to-face is at a zoo. Conservationists believe there are less than 10,000 left in the wild.
Once sought after to keep as pets, red pandas are now hunted for their pelts. In Nepal and northern India, poachers can command a heavy price for their body parts. In some parts of China, their bushy tails are considered good luck charms in wedding ceremonies.
Red pandas also face the threat of deforestation. It takes as much as four pounds of bamboo a day to keep these little guys going.
Credit: Jake Whitman/ABC News
Red pandas seem so lovable that they have been featured in movies – Dustin Hoffman voiced the character Master Shifu in the “Kung Fu Panda” movies – as well as video games, postage stamps and beer bottles. Even “Firefox,” the popular Web browser, is named after them.
When red pandas were first discovered in the early 1800s, a full 50 years before the giant panda, they were a must-have accessory of the Victorian age. Furry, friendly and about the size of a house cat, European women clamored to have a red panda by their side.
As far as biologists know, red pandas only exist today in the region around the Himalayas. However, a red panda tooth, estimated to be around 4 to 7 million years old, was recently found in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee.
Steve Wallace, the curator for the East Tennessee Natural History Museum located in Gray, Tenn., said he and his team have unearthed evidence of giant turtles, saber-toothed cats and pot-bellied rhinos at the Gray Fossil site, but were not expecting to dig up an ancient red panda tooth.
Since it was discovered, red panda bones have become common at the site. Wallace said the ancient Tennessee “firefox” was probably much larger, about the size of a mountain lion, and thrived in the thick forests once found in that part of the world.
Ancient red panda skull found in Tennessee. Credit: Jake Whitman/ABC News
“Understanding why fossil red pandas were so much more successful, so much more widespread, than pandas today, could be a very beneficial to actually protecting them and ensuring that they’ll be here for future generations,” Wallace said.
Credit: Jake Whitman/ABC News
Monday, September 3, 2012
Red Pandas Standing
Uploaded by a1candidate
on Jan 23, 2011
Red Pandas (also known as the Firefox) are definitely the cutest and most amazing animal EVER
Dont you wish you could hug one in your arms?
Dont you wish you could hug one in your arms?
License: Standard YouTube License
Red Panda's Plight.....Cute and ENDANGERED
Published on Aug 22, 2012 by ABCNews
The race is on to save these adorable creatures before they are hunted into extinction.
License: Standard YouTube License
License: Standard YouTube License
Giant Panda News
Giant Panda News
Female Giant Panda's Hormones on the Rise
August 20, 2012
National Zoo scientists have detected a secondary rise in urinary progesterone in its female giant panda, Mei Xiang. Giant panda breeding season began this year in April at the Smithsonian's
National Zoo when female giant panda, Mei Xiang (may-SHONG), went into
estrus.
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