I'm not sure if I would really fancy one of these for myself. It's pretty, but i'm turning into ashes and dust anyway, so I probably won't get to live in such a pretty piece of artwork :( Well, I may consider if they make urns. Haha. But come to think of it, I wouldn't want my loved ones to spend such money on me after I'm gone.
Hmmm.
Oh well. It's still quite a thoughtful business for these entrepreneurs to think up of! I guess it does help the loved ones in their greiving, coz helplessness is often a salient feeling and this would probably let them feel they can do one last thing for the departed? Hmmm.
If you're wondering about my hectic work life I blogged about when I just started now, it's in control now :) I'm knocking off mostly by 4pm for now. Haha.
Anyway, I may not know if this is what I want in the long run, but it's what I want to do for now. After more than a month of work life, I feel more humbled than before. I used to think about getting a promotion as fast as possible, but now I realise there's just so much more for me to learn.
A friend once told me that somebody commented to him/her that fresh grads keep eyeing opportunities for advancements when they're searching for a job, but they don't put enough consideration into what they can value-add to the company. It's very true in Singapore, and admitedly, I guess I used to be one of those fresh grads. For now, I would still like advancement of course, but I now know my limits and won't expect one before I'm deemed fit for it :)
It's a big world out there, with so much more to see and experience for yourself! There's so much more to feel and be touched. I would like to stay put at where I am to experience and learn what I'm going through now and learn from my fellow experienced colleagues, and be humbled with all these first.
I have no sky-high salary, but I know that every one of the clients I am serving is thankful and appreciative for what we provide for them. I have not many days off from work, but the tiny smiles and endless peals of laughter keeps me going for now. I have no eye-boggling bonus and welfare packages, but my heart is warmed everyday. I know what I am doing now has a life-altering effect in the clients I serve, and this makes me both proud and humbled at the same time.
Job satisfaction can alter this much your attitude toward the benefits you are receiving compared to your peers. Don't let yourself be shaken by comparing with your peers what you're receiving. Ask yourself what you wanted at the beginning, and whether you have/am on the path to achieving your goal.
Grass is greener on the other side? There's just a thin line between being unambitious, and being rationale, giving oneself and one's job the due respect and time before starting to compare :)
If you think you're having a much harder time or working much harder than others, why fret? You're young and you've just taken off. It's the best time to strive harder! If you can take the extreme hardship now, there's nothing that can overwhelm you in your many more years to come!
That is of course, given you're not working under super disastrous and horrible circumstances. Haha.
Alright, shall stop my out-of-nowhere prep talk. I'm off for a jog! :)
Singapore, 9 June 2010 -- The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore today released results of a ten-month study on PopCap’s Bejeweled 2, showing its subjects’ improved response time and attention to details after playing the video game for ten hours in one week. The participants were randomly selected and monitored by a group of four psychology major students from NTU’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
According to Dr. Michael Donald Patterson, Assistant Professor from NTU’s Division of Psychology, playing some computer games may actually lead to positive benefits. “Since people in Singapore of all ages spend significant hours playing these games, it is important to understand their effects, specifically on cognition,” he said. “We chose Bejeweled 2 because the game makes high demands on visual perception, attention, and planning. We examined whether increased skills acquired through playing the game are transferrable to non-gaming, real-life situations. The results of this initial study indicate that improved performance in everyday life is possible,” he added.
Bejeweled 2 is a sequel to Bejeweled – recently awarded by Guinness World Records 2010 Gamer’s Edition as the Most Popular Puzzle Game Series of the Century – developed and published by PopCap Games. Bejeweled 2 was chosen for the study as it is a free web-based game, which is popular amongst Singaporeans regardless of gender and age. In addition, the game is easily accessible due to its availability on multiple gaming platforms – including Play Station, Xbox, and Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. The game features a range of secret game-play modes that can be accessed upon completion of any of four modes – the Classic, Puzzle, Endless and Action modes. The Action mode was chosen because it restricts players to a limited time to complete each game level – requiring players to react quickly to create as many cascades as possible in order to advance to the next level of the game. The progressive increase in difficulty is one factor which may inspire game players to improve their play continuously.
Over the course of ten months, students were randomly recruited to participate – declaring that they had never played Bejeweled and did not play action video games on a regular basis. This study was to examine whether playing 10 hours of Bejeweled 2 in a week would result in superior cognitive abilities, including selective attention, executive planning, and visual spatial resolution – compared to playing Pet Society, which is a neutral social networking game hosted by Facebook. Participants were asked to take the same set of cognitive tests before and after the 10-hour game playing session. Results showed that those who played Bejeweled 2 improved in their cognitive tests performance compared to the control group. These Bejeweled players were able to ignore irrelevant distracters that clutter their visual environment better than their Pet Society player counterparts – translating into improved visual attention and spatial acuity.
The objective of the Bejeweled game series is to swap one gem with an adjacent one to form a chain of three or more, requiring the player to identify the correct gem to move from the rest (visual selective attention), especially when all the gems are closely packed (crowding effect). The study incorporated the Flanker Test and the Crowding Test as the most relevant as they highlight the general phenomenon of identifying a target object in a complex setting when distracting objects are present in the immediate vicinity.
“Selective visual attention is one of the most commonly used skills applied to daily tasks, like driving and shopping. Furthermore, being able to focus and avoid distractions is also advantageous in day-to-day life. Therefore, we believe it is important to study whether the benefits derived from playing video games may, in fact, apply to real-life situations. The result from the students’ final year project is an intriguing start to research into this cognitive behaviour,” Dr. Patterson concluded.
A similar outcome from a study on Bejeweled and Peggle – other PopCap Games’ franchises – was recently announced by East Carolina University in the United States; establishing a clear link between regular exposure to video games and the resulting positive effects on cognition.
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Alternatively, you may see it in the chinese news and look at P's funny hair! :p
Ok, this is freaking awesome. Look at the picture above-do you see a girl spinning on one leg?
Do you see her as spinning in the clockwise direction or anti-clockwise direction?
Well, it's actually up to your control whichever way she spins! :D
It's no computer effect or whatsoever trick at all! It's a freaking hard optical illusion! I saw it turning in the clockwise direction first, then had to stare for about 5min before I saw it turning in the anti-clockwise direction, then had to stare for even longer (less than 10min la) to see it turn back in the clockwise direction again. So after a few times, I can see it turning whichever way I want in less than 5 seconds! :p
SO freaking amazing!! Hahaha. This is supposed to be how it works: The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.
By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction. -Taken from http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=27.
