Autism and Designer Babies

All of us have dreams of growing up, having a family and receiving children. But sometimes, life has its way of short-circuiting our dreams by throwing us unexpected challenges. What if one day a child of ours is diagnoised with autism? The autism most of us are acquainted with is probably the milder strain. In this short story, the author speaks of her experiences.

For years I had been telling my son's story, insisting that autism is beautiful, mysterious, perhaps even evolutionarily necessary. Denying that it can also be a wild, ravaging madness, a disease of the mind and soul.

I spent Tuesday at a friend's house, as planned, in front of the TV, watching the Obamas walk and wave. Once, when someone asked why I was so quiet, I mentioned that one of my children was in the hospital, quite ill. She touched me and said something kind. I knew she was thinking of something like leukemia and I wanted to tell her I would hack off my right arm in return for something as simple as cancer. The flickering beauty of a sad, pure, too-early death sounds lovely. Instead I nodded, silent and dumb.

Sigh, what a sad tale.

And the most chilling thing? It can happen to any one of us.

This leads me to another strand of thought: Will designer babies become part of the accepted norm in the near future? As society progresses towards becoming more meritocratic and elitist in nature, will our morals, ethics and values shift to become more accepting of designer babies? Enmesh these considerations with the observation that people across the world are slowly becoming conditioned to avoiding suffering and you may get what I mean.

I do think it is a very probable scenario in the near future. What is morally correct today may not be so tomorrow. Are morals always evergreen? It seems wrong to purposefully specify traits for children, but, at the same time, isn't it morally wrong to not utilize such technology if it could save lives or improve standards of living?

What do you think? Will you ever consider designing your baby, not for cosmetic purposes, but to screen it for potential life-afflicting diseases?

Love is not all you need

Just read this interesting article.

This approach is romantic, but it's also a little daft. Sure, being passionately attracted to someone is a great elixir, but making a commitment based on hormone-addled logic is a recipe for disappointment, if not disaster. We shouldn't be misled by fleeting moments of bliss. Love is not all you need, and you will not know—across a crowded room or even on a first date—that this person absolutely is the One. While some hunches work out (and, of course, those are the Cinderella stories), most do not. There is a real danger when you think that fate has delivered the One: You may stop looking for disconfirming evidence, even if there are big problems (like his tendency to drink too much or her occasional disappearances).

Theories about love that are based on fate are not only untrue, they aren't even in the best interest of love. Of course, Cupid forbid, if the One does not work out, you might think you've lost your true love and forego giving other people a chance. Choosing the right partner is arguably the most important decision you will make. Since 1993, a multitude of studies have shown how bad relationships can negatively affect job performance, physical and mental health, financial security and even life span. Certainly, such an important decision requires more than the adrenaline rush of infatuation.

More can be found here.

haha 1 MORE DAY! It feels so surreal thinking about it now. Tomorrow marks the unofficial end of As. After that, we're left with the final paper PHYSICS 1 which is like MCQ. mmm but will be hardcoring that with fellow friends, hopefully over a sleepover in school or possibly Vinod's house if his parents allow. Get 36/40 for Physics and it's probably an A! :D

Anyway, econs has ended just when I started to find it more interesting. Somehow, studying econs has broaden my scope of thinking, what with the multitude of considerations one has to make. In fact, it makes the 5W1H model more significant than what one may realize when we learnt it in primary school.

HISTORYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. sian. To think I lost my Theme 2 notes 1 day before the As. Oh well, maybe Lady Luck is telling me that the afflicted section don't have to study so hard, spend the time on other sections ya?

Assortative Mating

“We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two,” Lee said.

“We will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic.”

He did not specifically refer to genes or inherited intelligence which he had frequently done before when he was prime minister.

“Mr Lee is wrong to think that we should choose a life partner based on some selection logic, and then force yourself to love that person.”

Source: The Star Online

I always thought that what MM Lee meant was the beneficial effects of having graduate parents who may perpetuate good learning habits and/or provide more conducive studying environments for their child, but looks like MM Lee really subscribes to theory of inherited genes.

Anyway, I believe that love is a collective process between two parties who are willing to share their lives with one another. It is an attitude or mindset that can be cultivated. Anyone can love. So I guess the difference between finding one's 'true love' and not might just lie in the intensity of love.

The Grandmaster Experiment

Just read this lengthy article called The Grandmaster Experiment, and it's really quite fascinating as it details the rise of the best female chess grandmasters the world has seen. The significance? The experiment was a trial to see if genius can be nurtured as opposed to common belief that genius is in-born, and it also supports gender equality in a game that has been largely male-dominated.

Forty years ago, Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian psychologist, conducted an epistolary courtship with a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara. His letters to her weren't filled with reflections on her cherubic beauty or vows of eternal love. Instead, they detailed a pedagogical experiment he was bent on carrying out with his future progeny. After studying the biographies of hundreds of great intellectuals, he had identified a common theme—early and intensive specialization in a particular subject. Laszlo thought the public school system could be relied upon to produce mediocre minds. In contrast, he believed he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy. He had already published a book on the subject, Bring Up Genius!, and he needed a wife willing to jump on board.

haha I laughed when I read that. What a romantic pursuit of love. But it (their eventual happiness found in marriage) does go to show that love is nurtured as opposed to a natural compatibility and chemistry between two parties. Alright, I'm distracted, back to the article.

Anyway, it dawned on me that the geniuses of contemporary society (I have encountered quite a few of them in school) may have undermined their potential in particular fields as students nowadays study a curriculum that is extremely diverse, thus spreading their mental resources across a spectrum of disciplines.

A few centuries ago, education was not universal and only the social elites had access ago, thus making their fields of education much more specialized than ours today, granting them the opportunity to focus all their attention onto a singular field.

Certainly, it could also be said without such a varied curriculum, students may never discover what they are best at, and that a balanced and healthy development of a person potentially hinges upon a broad-based curriculum that encourages growth in multiple intelligences as opposed to a rigid attachment to one. haha this reminds me that geniuses of the past like Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci often harbour weird and unconventional fetishes or habits, so I guess an asymmetrical development of a person can possibly result in the rise of dialectical forces that wreck havoc on the person, so it's not very good either.

Some other tidbits to chew on from the reading:

Anders Ericsson is only vaguely familiar with the Polgars, but he has spent over 20 years building evidence in support of Laszlo's theory of genius. Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argues that "extended deliberate practice" is the true, if banal, key to success. "Nothing shows that innate factors are a necessary prerequisite for expert-level mastery in most fields," he says. (The only exception he's found is the correlation between height and athletic achievement in sports, most clearly for basketball and volleyball.) His interviews with 78 German pianists and violinists revealed that by age 20, the best had spent an estimated 10,000 hours practicing, on average 5,000 hours more than a less accomplished group. Unless you're dealing with a cosmic anomaly like Mozart, he argues, an enormous amount of hard work is what makes a prodigy's performance look so effortless.

"I had an inner drive," recalls Susan. "I think that is the difference between the very good and the best." Ellen Winner, a psychologist at Boston College, calls this drive the "rage to master." She thinks it's what propels prodigies through grueling years of training. "The rage to master is a prodigy's primary motivation," she says. "Mastering a certain activity is more important to them than socializing, than anything else." Winner believes that infusing a child with the rage to master is impossible: "You can force your kids to work harder, but you can't get them to have that level of passion. The sisters could have just as easily rebelled against Laszlo. In fact, they couldn't be stopped. Laszlo once found Sophia in the bathroom in the middle of the night, a chessboard balanced across her knees. "Sophia, leave the pieces alone!" he said, shaking his head. "Daddy, they won't leave me alone!" she replied.

And today has been rather unproductive. Sigh, and I have set myself a goal of finishing my Physics TYS in 1 week! 5 more days left.

And I still have to contend with finding out more about colleges and courses. zZz

infinite possibilities

Can Men and Women Be Friends?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20010901-000031.html

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MRS TUI!
It was fun celebrating her birthday with housed yesterday at Crystal Jade. haha after that we went to Macs and talked about our future plans, of maids-of-honour, of weddings, of marriage, of babies, of work, of universities, of life after school. Somehow, it seems like we're becoming more 'adult-ish' as reality bites and issues of growing importance confront us.

10 years down the road, who will we be? A millionaire on his way to earn his next million? A wife or husband? A mother or father? A friend?

There seems to be infinite possibilities. Will we still be the same? Will we still keep in contact? Will we still be studying? Will we be a citizen of a different nation? Will we have found our one true love?

So many questions that we will never have all the answers to.

The road of love is narrow;
There is only room for one.

choking on choices

To friends who are struck by indecision, worry and anxiety over the choice of a university as well as how to go about going there, here is an interesting article (:

In America, people are faced with more and more decisions every day, whether it's picking one of 31 ice cream flavors or deciding whether and when to get married. That sounds like a great thing. But as research from a Swarthmore College psychology professor has shown, too many choices can make us confused, unhappy—even paralyzed with indecision.

That's particularly true when it comes to the workplace, says Barry Schwartz, an author of six books about human behavior. Students are graduating with a multitude of skills and interests, but often find themselves overwhelmed when it comes to choosing an ultimate career goal.

In a study, Schwartz observed decision-making among college students during their senior year. Based on answers to questions regarding their job-hunting strategies and career decisions, he divided the students into two groups: "maximizers" who consider every possible option, and "satisficers" who look until they find an option that is good enough.

You might expect that the students who'd undertaken the most exhaustive search would be the most satisfied with their final decision. But it turns out that's not true. Schwartz found that while maximizers ended up with better paying jobs than satisficers on average, they weren't as happy with their decision.

Why do these people feel less satisfied? Maybe because a world of possibilities is also a world of missed opportunities. When you look at every possible option you tend to fixate more on what was given up than what was gained. After surveying every option, a person is more acutely aware of the "opportunity cost" of their decision, or all the opportunities they had to turn down to pursue just one career.

So is it better to be a happy satisficer or a successful maximizer?

Some people may not be just one or the other; they may change their decision-making style to fit different situations. Columbia University business professor Sheena Iyengar, the study's co-author, thinks maximizing is only a problem if it's a full-time strategy. "People have to pick and choose what domains they're going to maximize on," she says. "There may be people out there who try to maximize on everything and, in the process, end up making decisions that don't satisfy what they're looking for." These people will, literally, never be satisfied.

In Schwartz's view, it's better to settle for "good enough" most of the time. Lower expectations and fewer regrets will make people who settle happier. He believes considering every option is almost never necessary, and should be reserved for the most important life decisions. Ultimately, it's more important to maximize happiness than options.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20060420-000001.html

GAMING!

haha, today's been a great day! It's fun playing DOTA on a non-lag computer and even more fun winning the competitive matches! w00t!

Anyway, this article on gaming, entitled 'Rage against the machines', provides a few interesting viewpoints about gaming, an activity which has been slammed with far too many negative connotations and far too little credit.

"The best sign that someone's qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status." Is there anything to this? "Absolutely," he says, "but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview."

"In Warcraft I've developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I've enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people's intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task."

On the other side, the Labour MP Keith Vaz responded to news of a reported stabbing in a queue to purchase the game in Croydon by telling the Times that GTA IV "is a violent and nasty game and it doesn't surprise me that some of those who play it behave in this way." Given that the GTA series has to date sold over 70m units worldwide, the fact that "some" players may be violent is hardly a revelation.

Specifically, Greenfield goes on to suggest, the fast-paced, second-hand experiences created by video games and the internet may inculcate a worldview that is less empathetic, more risk-taking and less contemplative than what we tend to think of as healthy. We may see people's mental lives transposed to "the fast-paced, immediate world of screen experience: a world arguably trapped in early childhood, where the infant doesn't yet think metaphorically."

He singles out video games as entertainments that captivate because they are so satisfying to the human brain's desire to learn. It's almost a mirror image of Greenfield's vision. Where she sees an identity-dismantling intoxication, Johnson finds "a cocktail of reward and exploration" born of a desire to play that is active, highly personal, sociable and creative.

These trends embody a familiar but important truth: games are human products, and lie within our control. This doesn't mean we yet control or understand them fully, but it should remind us that there is nothing inevitable or incomprehensible about them. No matter how deeply it may be felt, atavistic fear is an inappropriate response to technology of any kind.

"15 years from now, the prime minister of the day will have grown up playing computer games, just as 15 years ago we had the first prime minister to have grown up watching television, and 30 years ago to have grown up listening to the radio. Times change: accept it; embrace it."

But the doomsayers are right in one important respect. If we do not learn to balance the new worlds we are building with our living culture, we may lose something of ourselves.

haha sounds quite interesting eh?

haha and we've started our housed blog! We're gonna post all our random photos taken together and hopefully it can be a group diary of sorts =)

boredom

Increasingly, these empty moments are being saturated with productivity, communication, and the digital distractions offered by an ever-expanding array of slick mobile devices. A few years ago, cellphone maker Motorola even began using the word "microboredom" to describe the ever-smaller slices of free time from which new mobile technology offers an escape.

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries -- one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one.

There is a strong argument that boredom -- so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness -- is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love.

Paradoxically, as cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy, flitting from one activity to the next. Ralley has noticed a kind of placid look among his students over the past few years, a "laptop culture" that he finds perplexing. They have more channels to be social; there are always things to do. And yet people seem oddly numb. They are not quite bored, but not really interested either.

The Joy of Boredom

there are too many distractions at home. i think i shall go school and mug tomorrow. the advent of technology has introduced a plethora of slick gadgets that saturates our lives, filling our empty moments with infinite distractions and creating endless possibilities for our minds to be engaged in.

we have become so conditioned to being busy that we have lost ourselves in the whirlwind of activities. we have deserted the time we used to spend in our inner sanctuaries to reflect and explore for external opportunities to expend our energy. but without these little pockets of time to immerse ourselves in thoughts and ideas, we subconsciously become more restless. we gradually lose our personal identity to the various subcultures of our society, subconsciously conforming to the popular trends.

and so, step back from the flurry of activities and start delving into boredom! haha just don't start now. finish your mugathorn before you start learning how to be bored and permeate every second of your 'microboredom' with facts, figures and techniques! haha i better start practising what i preach. ><

lit.

i wonder...

what i'm doing still awake at 2. sigh, i'm tired. but i like to rationalize with myself and keep telling myself that i need some time to allow my thoughts to settle, to seek sanctuary in the peaceful night to organize my mind.

and so i continue to burden my body with less sleep and more work. haha nvm! i shall sleep early today since i won't have anything after school! it's most probably the first and last time i'd get to leave school so early.

i read an article entitled 'the miracle of melancholia'. many of us yearn to be happy, and we live with the constant pressure that being happy is being normal. we believe that these highly idealistic happiness will absolve us of all our problems, that happiness will make us better people. definitely, joy is among the most important emotions to all human beings, and i can't imagine life without happiness - i can only see it to be a bleak landscape that is devoid of all colours. however, we should not allow the need to be happy to consume us, because grief is as important as joy, if not more important.

What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing -- of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world's beauty.

grief and sadness allow us to "reconcile ourselves to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world". it brings out an awareness in us that will sometimes provide new perspective to old issues - new wine in old bottles. a person who is happy all the time will not have his mind developed completely for his thoughts remain in a perpetual status quo.

Joni Mitchell confessed in an interview that she has frequently endured long periods of gloom. But she has not shied away from the darkness. Instead, she sees her sorrow as the "sand that makes the pearl" -- as the terrible friction that produces the lustrous sphere. Given her fruitful struggles with sadness, Mitchell has understandably feared its absence. "Chase away the demons," she has said, "and they will take the angels with them."

just as we need pain and hardwork to progress, sorrow is required to complete joy. we need to experience sadness to cherish happiness. yup it's definitely an insightful take to the human emotion that many deemed as a weakness we must avoid. haha do read it if you have the time!

I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.

ok school in a few hours' time =) haha and dim sum dollies is very entertaining and nice.

HAPPY BDAE FUNX!

give and live

The Bible insists it's more blessed to give than to receive. And if you define living a long and healthy life as blessed, then indeed the Bible is on the mark… or is it Paul? Science has added its own grace note, furnishing some supporting evidence that giving increases the giver's longevity. And that receiving support, while helpful in some ways, isn't always an unmitigated blessing.

The kinds of giving we're talking about are things like driving a friend to the doctor's, helping a sick or elderly neighbor with shopping, volunteering to deliver meals to the housebound or caring for a chronically ill family member. These are known in the psych biz as instrumental support. Then there's out and out emotional support, the kinds husbands and wives give each other, which includes things like making the other person feel loved, cared for and listened to when they need to talk.

Intuitively we believe that helping makes the other person feel better. But receiving support can also generate feelings of dependence. And depending on other people for help and support can cause guilt or anxiety. It can make people feel like a burden to others, and even heighten tendencies to suicide among receivers.

For some time now, researchers have known that social contact can have a measurable impact on protecting people's health. It seems to boost the immune system, lower the frequency of colds and other infections. It speeds wound healing. But now it turns out that not all social contact is created equal. And the benefits of social contact may belong only to those who are on the giving end of the contact.

Giving, finds a team of researchers at the University of Michigan, reduces mortality and promotes longevity. It doesn't matter whether the support is in the form of the kind of emotional support that spouses exchange or the instrumental help one might provide to a neighbor. Either way, it has a significant impact on the giver.

And receiving has no impact whatsoever on mortality.

Helping others reduces distress in givers, improves both mental and physical health. It gives people a sense of belonging and of mattering. It increases happiness, decreases depression. In short, it increases positive emotions. And positive emotions are good for the body, promoting cardiovascular health and boosting the immune system.

So now there's scientific proof: Helping others is a way of helping yourself.

http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030729-000002.html