Posts tagged feed
Jaeckle, K9s for Warriors help veterans with PTSD
Sep 16th
Now Flagler College assistant professor Tina Jaeckle and a group called K9s for Warriors are trying a different approach in the form of man’s best friend.
“When you come home, your dog knows when you’ve had a bad day,” said Jaeckle, who serves on the board of the Ponte Vedra Beach-based organization. “They want to get up in your lap. They want to cuddle. Dogs do that naturally. They’re much more sensitive to these things than humans.”
According to Jaeckle, who teaches sociology at Flagler, it’s that sensitivity to feelings such as fear and anxiety that make them perfect compliments to combat veterans suffering from PTSD.
According to a study by the Rand Corporation, one in five returning veterans suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One in six will attempt or commit suicide. Symptoms can include hostility, aggression, depression, suicide, paranoia, acrophobia, nightmares, panic attacks, poor coping skills, memory loss and lack of trust.
“My background as a clinical social worker has always been in crisis and trauma. It’s something I educate law enforcement on and first responders,” said Jaeckle. “Right now, (PTSD) is an epidemic and if we don’t figure out better ways to deal with this, we’ll have no idea what to do when all these folks come back home.”
In the K9s for Warriors program, service dogs, which are rescues from local shelters, are trained together with their matched veteran to establish a deep bond that will enable the dog to be able to sense when its owner is in danger.
Three to five veterans at any given time are put up at the facility for a three-week training program where the “warrior” learns the skills needed to train their own canines. The group provides a service canine, training, certification, equipment, seminars, vet care, most meals and housing free of charge.
Service dogs at the facility are trained to respond to these dangers by performing tasks to lessen the distress. Examples of these tasks include pawing or bringing a toy to break a disturbing episode, blocking an unwanted person from advancing too close, reminding the warrior to take medicine or nudging the warrior while thrashing due to a nightmare. Each warrior has differing symptoms, so his or her service dog is trained for his or her specific disabilities.
Sandi Capra serves as director of development for the K9s program, but her connection runs much deeper than that. Her husband graduated from the program in November of 2011.
“This program allows (veterans) to live a more normal life. They can go to shops, restaurants, movies, everyday things you and I take for granted they are no longer able to do due to the overwhelming symptoms of PTSD,” said Capra. “They start to interact with the public and relearn to trust and can become productive members of society once again.”
And since the group’s services are provided free of charge, financial help and volunteers are always needed.
“The cost to feed the warriors while they are in residence and the cost of dog supplies are a large expense for K9s,” said Capra. “Financial help is always appreciated.”
And the local facility and need for volunteers is a fact that Jaeckle says has played well with her students, who have had visits from several veterans who have graduated the program.
“I think there are numerous opportunities for students in sociology and psychology to study PTSD as well as a huge opportunity to help veterans,” said Jaeckle. “We’re talking about current and future trends in psychology and sociology that students can take with them to graduate school.”
For more information on K9s for warriors or to find out how you can help, visit k9sforwarriors.org
Source: Flagler College
Quick Guide to Social Media using WordPress
Jul 9th
Top three reason to use your wordpress site as your Social Media Distribution system rather than the competitions.
1. If you have a WordPress site or some other CMS like it then you should take this as a rock, not a grain of salt.
2. If you’re using social media for your company like twitter, Facebook etc… You should listen, it wont take long.
3. If you’re tired of using multiple Social media accounts or paying someone to do so in order to promote a product or event. You can still do this but now all in one place.
Let’s start.
Using WordPress and a few simple but powerful tools can get this all done in a flash.
First and foremost I suggest that you start all of your content from your home (your website) and then tree out to the social media sites. Why give them the all your hits and probably never see them kick back any in return.
Some tools I use for our wordpress sites are. RSS Graffiti, WP to Twitter and Twitter Feed. Are simple to setup and you’ll never need to touch anything except for wordpress for a while. Especially if all your doing is saying things like. How was your weekend, come see this, come on in and check this out etc… And last but not least is Shareaholic an easy to install plugin for WordPress.
All wordpress RSS is handled in a simple way. To find your feed you may need to look at the wordpress feeds page : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds and figure out what format you may be using depending on if you use permalinks or not it could be as simple as just adding /feed/ to the end of a WordPress category URL…. That’s how we roll.
First off find your feed. Example: http://c1n.tv/feed/
Chrome reads feeds fairly standard so if you’re interested in the appearance I suggest FF IE, Safari. On a sidenote: Wow Google have you not even checked or I guess they make you use a reader?
RSS Graffiti: http://www.rssgraffiti.com/ / https://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/
A little slow but works beautifully, Simple to register and feed your post category to Facebook. Enough said. Search for RSS Graffiti on Facebook and they walk you through the steps to get a feed setup for a Facebook page you made or at least have admin access too.
WP to Twitter: http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/
Probably the most time consuming to setup but by far the best one I’ve found for twitter. This one lets you not only send your new posts to twitter but also resend a post to twitter without having to republish one and duplicate content just by clicking update (Just beware if you don’t want things going to twitter if you update a lot.). As well it provides you with a way to push content to a Hash-tag ! Sweet! Login to twitter and select API down there at the bottom and/or visit https://dev.twitter.com/ to get started. The plugin designer also wrote a nice walk-through on how to do this as well. But you’ll need to creat a new Application, call it what you will, put your URL in (Not yoru feed) and make sure you have it set to read and write access level. That should get you all the keys and tokens you need to copy into the WP to twitter settings. Once setup it works great. Believe me.
Twitter Feed: http://twitterfeed.com/
Simple to register and feed to twitter. Can also be used for more than one account and not just for twitter, however I only use it for secondary accounts, for example. You have a category that you want to feed to a separate twitter account, this is made possible by twitter feed. It’s not instant like WP to twitter but like RSS graffiti it sends a category feed to an account you define. Great if you have multiple twitter accounts and directly relate to categories you have made in wordpress, like News, Movies, Music etc… Not as pretty, but then again are tweets pretty? lol. I don’t think they allow that yet.
Shareaholic: http://www.shareaholic.com/
Simple to install plugin for sharing posts, pages etc… I usually use this after I have sent things out to Facebook and twitter. This pretty much encapsulates the rest of places you can socialize your post with in one simple click. The key to sharing using shareaholic I think would be that whatever you are sharing is share with whoever you’re logged in as. To make sure your sharing as the right person just make sure you’re logged in as them or else it will share from your personal account.
Hope these applications give you a little insight into what you should be using for social media rather than spending your time on 3 or 4, why not just press a button and feed the family all in one, on top of that you’ll be sending people to your website rather than keeping them outside and so easily moved to something else in 5 seconds or less. Let’s hope that’s not the case. Feel free to comment, if it’s related I’ll approve it.
Thanks!
Aaron Smith
webmaster@boulderchannel1.com
“Dinner for Schmucks” Dinner with Redemption
Aug 4th
“Dinner with Redemption”
DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS is a comedy that takes a long time getting to the laughs, and once it does, they are mean-spirited laughs and all at the expense of others.
Steve Carell plays Barry, a meek little man whose hobby is constructing elaborate dioramas that use dead mice dressed up as people in them.
Paul Rudd plays Tim, an analyst on the sixth floor of an investment firm who wants the office of a colleague who just got fired.
In other words, Tim wants a promotion to the top floor, and he gets an opportunity when he comes up with an idea to land a new client for their company who has $100 million to invest.
So, Tim’s boss invites Tim to a dinner party he hosts once a month called “Dinner for Winners,” and the next one is this Saturday. Each person brings a guest who has a skill or talent of some kind, everyone makes fun of them, the winner gets a trophy, and they all are released into the world no more the wiser.
Tim has doubts about this cruelty, and his girlfriend, Julie, doesn’t want him to attend, but then Tim meets Barry, who is a tornado of destruction and makes Tim’s personal life much worse.
Barry has an odd way of thinking, and as he tells Tim, “In the words of John Lennon, ‘You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not.'”
Tim can’t convince Barry that he is leaving off three words at the end, but no matter. Barry doesn’t listen well to others.
You can see the gags coming ahead of time, but you will still laugh, mostly in spite of yourself, and there are two subplots that add to the gags at the dinner party, one involving a woman who has been stalking Tim for three years and the other involving Julie’s relationship with a self-absorbed artist.
The movie wants us to feed sad and sorry for Barry, but we can’t. Also, you might be getting tired of Carell playing an idiot, but he does it so well, doesn’t he?
And as much as you might want to hate this movie for its premise, remember that it is based on a French film, the 1998 THE DINNER GAME.
DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS to its credit, however, redeems itself at the end.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”