The Most Effective Therapeutic Approach to Serious Emotional Issues

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We are on a road to significant life disruptions when we cling to what we wish the world was like instead of what it really is like. As M Scott Peck wrote, “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” 

Like it or not, we are all neurotic to some degree. If the wrong set of circumstances comes along, and if they are combined with unhealthy attitudes encouraged by poor parenting and genetic tenancies, any of us can tip over into the abyss. 

Mental clarity is fundamental to emotional health. That's why, despite the biological component of mental illness, our therapeutic approaches should be holistic and address cognitive issues. A cognitive-focused approach has a history of greater effectiveness than drugs (except when dealing with extreme psychotic breaks, schizophrenia, etc.). After an initial physical exam rules out disease and general illness, an eclectic approach that is focused on cognitive therapy is the most effective direction. For most issues, drugs are best regulated to use as a tool allowing a person to find a place of stability in order to deal with fundamental unhealthy cognitive issues.

Stephen Goforth

A Sickness unto Death

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A person begins as an it and must become an I. The fact that they are not necessarily so is the source of their misery. Sin leads to a disrelationship, a separation of people from themselves called despair. Kierkegaard says this disrelationship of the self to the self, this despair, this spiritual sickness unto death reveals not only our separation from ourselves ... but our separation from God. To be rid of the despair, one must choose it. A person will be enabled to overcome it if they recognize the sickness, accept it, and through an act of free will, makes a leap of faith past it. The cure is to choose the good, to choose one's self, Kierkegaard tells us. It is in the act of becoming one's self a person moves from an it to an I.

Stephen Goforth

Avoiding the Transitions

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Individuals will walk out of relationships, rather than letting go of the approach to the relationships that made them unsuccessful and unsatisfying in the past. Individuals will look for new jobs rather than face the attitudes and behaviors toward work and toward authority-figures that made them unsuccessful in all of their past jobs. They don’t ask what it is time for them to let go of. Instead they say they need to start over. Individuals will decide to move to a new house or a new town, rather than letting go inwardly of the old way of living that lacked meaning. They make a change rather than making the more profound transition, which would put them on a genuinely new life-path.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

How instead of Why

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When life is hard, we often find ourselves harping on “why” questions: “Why is this happening to me?” In those moments, Elaine Fox (author of Switch Craft: The Hidden Power of Mental Agility) suggests letting go of the “why” and asking “how” instead: “How can I change this situation?” Or perhaps you’re already asking a “how” question, but the wrong one: Instead of “How do I stop working so much?,” she explains, try an easier question: “How can I find time to go to the gym?”

Kira Newman writing in Greater Good

The Present with a Twist?

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Because time is such a slippery concept, we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today. The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes … we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

29 Data Science & Geospatial Articles from March 2023

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Smaller, simpler neural network models are always more suitable for real-world applications

“Russia has expressed its willingness to target space assets, including commercial communications systems, adding to the U.S. urgency of developing warfighting tactics.”

US vs China—a video about the race to launch the next generation of space telescopes

China is preparing to launch its first satellites for a national low Earth orbit broadband megaconstellation to challenge SpaceX’s Starlink

Pentagon Prepares for Space Warfare as Potential Threats From China, Russia Grow

“The ideal size and intricacy of neural networks remain a matter of debate in the AI community, raising the question: Does neural network complexity matter?”

Remote sensing companies try to capture bigger piece of satellite imaging market

What data scientists need to know about machine learning

A list of free data science courses—from web scraping, statistics/probability, data analytics, SQL to business intelligence

The value of predictive models — cartography when data is very scarce

Quantum computers are a security threat before they even exist thanks to the encryption-breaking threats it posses

Space Force Wants $60 Million for Ultra-Quick Satellite Launches—with just 24 hour notice  

“The era of small satellites in Low-Earth Orbit is upon us”: Satellite manufacturers look to benefit from a multi-orbit future

China launches second classified high resolution remote sensing satellite

China’s secret naval base in Cambodia, through satellite imagery

Four machine learning trends to watch in 2023

Valuable GitHub repositories for data engineering

OpenAI’s price cut is “a warning sign that this may be a business with few producers"

“The launch of ChatGPT & Whisper APIs is expected to have a profound impact on the community of developers”

Documents detail 65-year effort to monitor an increasingly crowded orbital environment: A report on the US space surveillance network

Chinese research institutes are working to construct a quantum communications network using satellites in low and medium-to-high Earth orbits

The paradox that explains why “too much aggregation of data can become useless and start to introduce bias”

31 Generative AI Tools for text, images, & more with descriptions

A Chinese satellite launched in 2018 has been inspecting other nations' spacecraft high above Earth in geostationary orbit

Debating the rules of a conflict in orbit

Data Cleaning with Python Cheat Sheet

Diving into the world of quantum machine learning by exploring an advanced project utilizing a sample dataset

A systematic approach to retraining deep-learning artificial intelligence algorithms to deal with different situations

The difference between the roles of questions versus decisions in data science

The Motivation behind Fake News

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Fake news may be a fight not over truth, but power, according to Mike Ananny, a media scholar at the University of Southern California. Fake news “is evidence of a social phenomenon at play — a struggle between [how] different people envision what kind of world that they want.”

Ideological fake news lands in the social media feeds of audiences who are already primed to believe whatever story confirms their worldview.

Brooke Borel writing for FiveThirtyEight

Choosing the Misery

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Force yourself to make a different choice for a short time, for at least an hour. Do something physically hard that, under different circumstances, you can easily do and that you usually enjoy, perhaps a brisk walk or a short hard run. If you can do it with a good friend who is not overly sympathetic, so much the better. While you are walking or running, especially with a friend, you will notice you are not depressing. For a short time, you are not thinking about your unhappy relationship, and you feel much better. But as soon as you finish, you tend to go back to thinking about the relationship that has gone bad, and the feeling comes back. To depress, you have to keep thinking the unhappy thoughts. To stop these thoughts, change what you want or change your behavior. There is no other way.  

William Glasser, Choice Theory

Earnest was right, but no on listened

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As legend has it, Ernest Duchesne was a student at a French military medical school in the 1890s when he noticed that the hospital’s stable boys who tended the horses did something peculiar: They stored their saddles in a damp, dark room so that mold would grow on their undersurfaces. They did this, they explained, because the mold helped heal the horses’ saddle sores. Duchesne was fascinated and conducted an experiment in which he treated sick guinea pigs with a solution made from mold—a rough form of what we’d now call penicillin. The guinea pigs healed completely. Duchesne wrote up his findings in a thesis, but because he was unknown and young—only 23 at the time—the French Institut Pasteur wouldn’t acknowledge it. His research vanished, and Duchesne died 15 years later of tuberculosis (a disease that would someday be treatable with antibiotics). It would take 31 years for the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming to rediscover penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it. In those three decades, untold millions of people died of diseases that could have been cured. Failed networks kill ideas.

Clive Thompson, Smarter Than you Think