Giving up speed for quality

Giving up speed for quality | Eric Weaver: We’ve joined every niche social site and accepted nearly every friend request. Strangers know which conferences we’re attending, acquaintances know what we’re reading or buying, and coworkers can see every place we check in, before, during and after work hours. Where are the boundaries? What was the point? Was it worth it?

For the last six years, partially out of interest, partially out of a desire for keeping up to date on the tools, I’ve joined pretty much any social site that I could find. Squidoo, Vox, Posterous, Marzar, XING, Plaxo Pulse, Upcoming, Spock, ProfileFly, Xigi, Hi5, Tagworld, Skobee, Blip.fm, Last.fm, iLike, Virb, Panoramio, Picli, 8Tracks, BrightKite – plus at least 100 more. Many are long gone, rolled up or shut down. But I joined them all; to learn and to connect. To keep my view of the social world as wide as possible.

Through each network, hundreds of friend requests rolled in. Former coworkers. People I’d met at a conference. Unknown friends of known friends. Friends of my wife, friends of my kids. I added all but the total unknowns, to see what the value of each site was in terms of network volume. To see what happened.

The answer: I spent a ton of time and got very little back.

Don’t get me wrong: I love connecting with people and I get a tremendous amount of value from doing so. And I had to join each community to learn. But my Return on Time Investment has been rather low.

Sure, it brings back memories to see where my former coworkers at DDB check into an old haunt. It’s fun to find that several Social Media Club friends and acquaintances are attending #barcampseattle. I really dig getting exposed to music I really like through former colleagues on Blip.fm. But the rest? I have never connected with former European coworkers through XING. I have gotten nothing but porn spam from Windows Live Spaces and Hi5. I used Picli for two seconds and stopped. Which makes me question:

1. Should I continue to accept every new friend request from someone I don’t know but with whom I have shared friends?
2. Should I allow acquaintances and former coworkers to connect on Foursquare? And if my checkins are for fun, not for work, should I allow current colleagues to see my every destination?
3. Should I invest the time to maintain profiles on the outlier sites like Squidoo or Epinions – in the hopes that one day, I will connect in a meaningful way? Do they really increase my search rankings?
4. At which point does the happy Social Media Kool-Aid wear off (example: Quora)?
5. When do I get my offline life back?

Now that we’ve joined everything, added everyone, and sampled every site: what comes next?

Time for pare-down. Fewer sites, fewer friend connections, fewer hours spent in front of a monitor.

Time to get my life back

After six years of this, I want my offline life back. Drinks with my friends where we have to actually TALK to learn what we’ve been up to. Kayaking. Hiking. Camping. Photowalks. Karate classes. All the things I used to do before I got hooked on this delicious addiction to social knowledge.

When we’re time-starved, we speed up and shorten our social interactions, so that, just like an addict, we can have MORE. Speed becomes a game, and the faster we can go, the more we can learn, and the larger volume of news/updates/photos/videos we can ingest.

But information and speed addiction reinforces a focus on the online life instead of the off. Kids can keep your brain present, but it just ratchets up the intense desire for time maximization. We start squeezing every ounce out of every second. That tyranny of the clock penalizes us in ways we don’t even begin to understand.

No offense, but…

As of today, I am disconnecting from most of the vast number of communities I’ve joined. I am disconnecting tangential acquaintances from most of my social networks. Don’t take it personally. I just want my life back. You know: close friends, hanging out, impromptu trips to the Cascades, working on my car, mowing my lawn. I am forcing a mental move from a volume/speed-based mentality to a quality mentality. Quality of interactions, quality of connections, quality of life. No more waking up and checking my phone to see who messaged me while I was sleeping.

Quality of life does not come from speed of life. It doesn’t come from information addiction or intensive time optimization. It comes from focus and being present. And also from taking your foot off the personal gas pedal. Fear of loss (friends, work opportunities, income) may make you think that’s a bad idea. But I don’t want to live with fear of loss.

Quality of life will create the abundance we all seek. Not speed.

This post is probably a bit rambling. But only because I want to stop writing, get offline and enjoy the sunshine.

So if we get disconnected, if you hear less from me, if you can’t see where I check in and can’t follow what I am reading, don’t take it personally.

Who Gives a Tweet - Carnegie Mellon University

Who Gives a Tweet - Carnegie Mellon University: Who Gives a Tweet

Who Gives a Tweet

Twitter users say only a little more than a third of the tweets they receive are worthwhile. Other tweets are either so-so or, in one out of four cases, not worth reading at all.

This is according to a recent new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Georgia Tech.

"If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users," said Paul André, a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and lead author of the study.

Twitter users choose the microblogs they follow, but that doesn't mean they always like what they get.

Twitter says more than 200 million tweets are sent each day, yet most users get little feedback about the messages they send besides occasional retweets, or when followers opt to stop following them.

André and his colleagues — Michael Bernstein and Kurt Luther, doctoral students at MIT and Georgia Tech, respectively — created the website "Who Gives a Tweet?" to collect reader evaluations of tweets. They will present their findings Feb. 13 at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Seattle, Wash.

People who visited "Who Gives a Tweet?" were promised feedback on their tweets if they agreed to anonymously rate tweets by Twitter users they already follow. Over a period of 19 days in late 2010 and early 2011, 1,443 visitors to the site rated 43,738 tweets from the accounts of 21,014 Twitter users they followed.

Overall, the readers liked just 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent. Another 39 percent elicited no strong opinion.

"A well-received tweet is not all that common," Bernstein said. "A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons."

Despite the social nature of Twitter, tweets that were part of someone else's conversation, or updates around current mood or activity were the most strongly disliked.

On the other hand, tweets that included questions to followers, information sharing, and self-promotion (such as links to content the writer had created) were more often liked.

"Our research is just a first step at understanding value on Twitter," Luther said. "Other groups within Twitter may value different types of tweets for entirely different reasons."

Nevertheless, the analysis confirms some conventional wisdom and suggests nine lessons for improving tweet content:

• Old news is no news: Twitter emphasizes real-time information. Followers quickly get bored of even relatively fresh links seen multiple times.
• Contribute to the story: Add an opinion, a pertinent fact or add to the conversation before hitting "send" on a link or a retweet.
• Keep it short: Followers appreciate conciseness. Using as few characters as possible also leaves room for longer, more satisfying comments on retweets.
• Limit Twitter-specific syntax: Overuse of #hashtags, @mentions and abbreviations makes tweets hard to read. But some syntax is helpful; if posing a question, adding a hashtag helps everyone follow along.
• Keep it to yourself: The cliched "sandwich" tweets about pedestrian, personal details were largely disliked. Reviewers reserved a special hatred for Foursquare location check-ins.
• Provide context: Tweets that are too short leave readers unable to understand their meaning. Simply linking to a blog or photo, without giving a reason to click on it, was "lame."
• Don't whine: Negative sentiments and complaints were disliked.
• Be a tease: News or professional organizations that want readers to click on their links need to hook them, not give away all of the news in the tweet itself.
• For public figures: People often follow you to read professional insights and can be put off by personal gossip or everyday details.

André said it may be possible to develop applications that can learn a user's preferences and filter out unwanted content.

Or apps might display some information differently; location check-ins are unpopular tweets, but might be valued if plotted on maps.

But it's also possible that users are willing to tolerate unwanted content, he added. Some people may follow others out of social obligation. Others may dislike certain types of tweets, but value them in the aggregate as helping them keep track of people or issues.

"Social media technologies such as Twitter pose questions regarding privacy, etiquette and tensions between sharing and self-presentation, as well as content," André said.

"Continued exploration of these areas is needed for us to improve the online experience."

Fluoride Health Effects Database

Fluoride Health Effects Database: Fluoride & the Thyroid

Summation - Fluoride & the Thyroid:

According to the US National Research Council, "several lines of information indicate an effect of fluoride exposure on thyroid function."

Fluoride's potential to impair thyroid function is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that -- up until the 1970s -- European doctors used fluoride as a thyroid-suppressing medication for patients with HYPER-thyroidism (over-active thyroid). Fluoride was utilized because it was found to be effective at reducing the activity of the thyroid gland - even at doses as low as 2 mg/day.

Today, many people living in fluoridated communities are ingesting doses of fluoride (1.6-6.6 mg/day) that fall within the range of doses (2 to 10 mg/day) once used by doctors to reduce thyroid activity in hyperthyroid patients.

While it may be that the thyroid in a patient with hyperthyroidism is particularly susceptible to the anti-thyroid actions of fluoride, there is concern that current fluoride exposures may be playing a role in the widespread incidence of HYPO-thyroidism (under-active thyroid) in the U.S.

Hypothyrodisim, most commonly diagnosed in women over 40, is a serious condition with a diverse range of symptoms including: fatigue, depression, weight gain, hair loss, muscle pains, increased levels of "bad" cholesterol (LDL), and heart disease.. The drug (Synthroid) used to treat hypothyroidism is now one of the top five prescribed drugs in the U.S.

As recommended by the US National Research Council: “The effects of fluoride on various aspects of endocrine function should be examined further, particularly with respect to a possible role in the development of several diseases or mental states in the United States.”

Fluoride & the Thyroid - Overviews:

Letter from Dr. Richard Shames - Letter to Palm Beach Board of County Commissioners, May 1, 2006

Health Warning: The Thyroid and Fluoride - Paul Connett, PhD, September 2003

Fluoride & the Endocrine System: Presentation to 2nd Citizens' Conference on Fluoride - Kathleen Thiessen, PhD, July 2006

History of the fluoride/iodine antagonism - Parents of Fluoride Poisoned Children, 2000-2006

Fluoride & the Thyroid - US National Research Council (2006):

“In summary, evidence of several types indicates that fluoride affects normal endocrine function or response; the effects of the fluoride-induced changes vary in degree and kind in different individuals. Fluoride is therefore an endocrine disruptor in the broad sense of altering normal endocrine function or response, although probably not in the sense of mimicking a normal hormone. The mechanisms of action remain to be worked out and appear to include both direct and indirect mechanisms, for example, direct stimulation or inhibition of hormone secretion by interference with second messenger function, indirect stimulation or inhibition of hormone secretion by effects on things such as calcium balance, and inhibition of peripheral enzymes that are necessary for activation of the normal hormone.”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 223.

“The effects of fluoride on various aspects of endocrine function should be examined further, particularly with respect to a possible role in the development of several diseases or mental states in the United States.”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 224.

“several lines of information indicate an effect of fluoride exposure on thyroid function.”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 197.

“it is difficult to predict exactly what effects on thyroid function are likely at what concentration of fluoride exposure and under what circumstances.”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 197.

“Fluoride exposure in humans is associated with elevated TSH concentrations, increased goiter prevalence, and altered T4 and T3 concentrations; similar effects on T4 and T3 are reported in experimental animals..”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 218.

“In humans, effects on thyroid function were associated with fluoride exposures of 0.05-0.13 mg/kg/day when iodine intake was adequate and 0.01-0.03 mg/kg/day when iodine intake was inadequate.”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 218.

“The recent decline in iodine intake in the United States could contribute to increased toxicity of fluoride for some individuals.”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 218.

“Intake of nutrients such as calcium and iodine often is not reported in studies of fluoride effects. The effects of fluoride on thyroid function, for instance, might depend on whether iodine intake is low, adequate, or high, or whether dietary selenium is adequate.”
SOURCE: National Research Council. (2006). Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. p 222.

Fluoride & the Thyroid - Studies Available Online:

FULL TEXT - pdf:Bachinskii PP, et al. (1985) Action of the body fluorine of healthy persons and thyroidopathy patients on the function of hypophyseal-thyroid the system. Probl Endokrinol (Mosk) 31(6):25-9.

FULL TEXT - html: Day TK, Powell-Jackson PR. (1972). Fluoride, Water Hardness, and Endemic Goitre. Lancet 1:1135-1138.

FULL TEXT - html: Steyn DG, et al. (1955). Endemic Goitre in the Union of South Africa and Some Neighbouring Territories. Union of South Africa. Department of Nutrition.

FULL TEXT - html: Wilson D. (1941). Fluorine in the aetiology of endemic goitre. Lancet Feb 15: 212-213.

See also:

FULL-TEXT (html): Lin Fa-Fu; et al (1991). The relationship of a low-iodine and high-fluoride environment to subclinical cretinism in Xinjiang. Iodine Deficiency Disorder Newsletter Vol. 7. No. 3. (August).

Local alternative dentist

BarefootGardener : Message: tooth care advice from our local alternative dentist: I was browsing through John's blog just now and read his rant about fluoride and
his search for alternative tooth care. I think I have a bit of information to
contribute to that which might be helpful to someone.

We are lucky to have right in our area an alternative dentist who not only
doesn't believe in fluoride, he also doesn't believe in conventional fillings.
Some years ago my husband and I had ours replaced by him with ones that are not
only less toxic, they are also white...makes it almost look like you've never
had a cavity. It has helped me with some of my chronic fatigue issues. I am
very glad I have had his procedure done.

His name is Dr. Behm and he is located in downtown Clearwater.
His website is:
http://www.saveyourteeth.com/

Read especially the page called "The Secret" for his take on how to care for
your teeth.

He also recommends removing the conventional fillings from your mouth because
they are a source of mercury poisoning. Dentists routinely experience the Mad
Hatter syndrome AND the hatter was mad because in his day mercury was routinely
used in the manufacture of hats. I will warn you that that is a very expensive
proposition, though.


- Sent using Google Toolbar

WAKE UP

AMERICAN - FREEDOM: Our institutions will not get
better, until more of the general population participates and takes responsibility for their piece in the revamping process.

- Sent using Google Toolbar

SO MANY PEOPLE are expecting Superman to show up and get everything done for them. Like electing the next clown to office. What a joke. Whether it's Ronald McDonald or Bozo will never change anything. What ever clown puppet they put in place will never change anything. The system is broken, our votes are meaningless when the media only props up clowns for us to choose from.

The 2-Minute Move That Will Elevate Your Personal Brand | Fast Company

The 2-Minute Move That Will Elevate Your Personal Brand | Fast Company: When it comes to building your own personal brand, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn get all our digital love. However, for the majority of business professionals, the hundreds of people you're emailing day in and day out make up the most important social network you have.

Tools like Smartr help personalize the inbox experience, assigning photos, titles, and email history to names. Tout offers you the tools and templates you need to track and schedule your messages. What's missing for most people in this day-to-day email equation is a helpful and memorable email signature.

This precious real estate at the bottom of every message is often filled with either too much or too little information (or, worse, dead space). Sifting through my own inbox, there are few signature stand-outs among thousands of contacts.

- Sent using Google Toolbar

got this from their linkedin page:
http://www.linkedin.com/today/fastcompany.com

media military industrial complex

Robert Greenwald and Reporter Michael Hastings Take on the Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War Machine | | AlterNet: the “media military industrial complex,” is significant. And I do not think it's a question of just sort of attacking some bad journalists, although that can be done, but I'd like you to talk about the institutional way that Pentagon approaches this.

MH: Well, one point on Stephen Colbert's speech: it's now considered sort of this amazing speech because it was, but at the time a lot of journalists panned it. Oh, they hated it because it hit too close.

I mean, look, there are a lot of excellent journalists doing great, great work. But the reason I called it the “media military industrial complex,” and one of the sort of insights that I have had is that they call it the Pentagon Press Corps, right? And you sort of think, oh, well it means the people who kind of watch over the Pentagon and perform the media's watchdog function, but no, it's an extension of the Pentagon. For the most part.

I mean, when was the last time anyone at the Pentagon broke a story that wasn't pre-approved? It's very, very rare. And the reason why it's so difficult -- and this gets to the information operations and the public affairs -- it's a very difficult story to tell because you're lifting up the curtain on what have become very common practices for journalists to do.

And I noticed this first in Iraq when things were going horribly -- this is in 2005, 2006, 2007 when I was there. And the spokespeople in the military public relations apparatus would just lie to your face. Every day they would lie. It was general Caldwell who was one of the spokes people there who I would sit next to at these briefings and he would say everything's fine, you know? And there might have been four car bombs that morning.

And what's been scary is that these sort of information operations tactics ... most journalists consider them no big deal. And when you try to point out, 'hey, this isn't right.' you get your head chopped off.

I did a story about this information operations team trained in psychological operations that was being asked to spin and influence visiting senators. Did the media respond by saying, 'let's launch an investigation, let's make sure we don't do this?' No, they responded by attacking the whistle blower and then at the same time saying, 'oh, it's no big deal, this is fine. Of course generals use their information operations psy-ops guys to put together material, it's not a big deal, it's just normal public relations.'

But wait a second here. This is not just normal public relations -- there are entire operations in the Pentagon whose goal is not just to influence the enemy's population but in fact the more important goal is to influence the U.S. population. And the line that used to be, or was supposed to have been the red line between public relations and information operations, meaning one you use on Americans and one you use on the enemy, they are tearing that firewall down. So you have generals with public media handlers and they have these contracting companies that are collecting data on who's tweeting what and they have different Twitter “sock-puppets” that they've put up to try to manipulate all these different social media.

And at some point they're essentially waging this global information war against their own citizens. So that, to me, is the most disturbing trend of it all. And General Petraeus at one point said the most important thing about Iraq was information operations, information operations, information operations. And in the context he was saying it, he meant in terms of convincing the Iraqi people that things were going well. But the real people he was convincing were back in Washington. That's who the target of all the spin really is.

- Sent using Google Toolbar