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SpellChecker

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I am sitting in Caffè Nero trying to test out a new iPhone app - SpellChecker.

It has its own dictionary that it refers to as you type. However, it can also access a range of other iPhone dictionaries. I have mine linked to the very impressive (but expensive) Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Once you have finished typing in SpellChecker you simply press an icon and the program produces a list of possible words to replace the alternatives that it has previously identified. And, of course, you can tell the program to Skip or Learn your unique spelling or Undo any replacement.

Once you are happy with your text it can be directly exported to your Mail or Messaging or Twitter program, or to Facebook, or to the clipboard for use in any text application. Continue Reading »

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Some time ago I wrote about a couple of applications that were enhancing my Gmail experience, and since then, I have discovered three more that are helping me manage my inbox.  I suppose for many people, email is just email.  However, as a small business user, I get a lot of emails, and many of them represent client enquiries.  Each of these emails therefore, to some extent, is linked to my professional reputation and to my capacity to earn a living.  I need to be able to respond quickly, and to be able to track the correspondence carefully.  The applications discussed below have significantly increased my capacity to do that. Continue Reading »

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How to Think and Intervene Like an REBT Therapist
Windy Dryden
Routledge 2009
ISBN 978-0-415-48795-5 (pbk) £18.99

I liked this book a lot, partly because it is straightforward and ‘does what is says on the tin’. As you would expect from arguably the UK’s most authoritative REBT practitioner and teacher, the book, like an ideal REBT session, is structured, rational, and tries to engage the reader in a persuasive way.

Although the author is Professor of Psychotherapeutic Studies at Goldsmiths College in London, the book was conceived in the Albert Ellis Institute in New York where Dryden was supervising trainee REBT practitioners. As part of the discussions, students were encouraged to think and intervene like REBT therapists (as opposed to thinking like other general therapists, or even other cognitive therapists), and the question inevitably arose: What does it mean to think and intervene like an REBT therapist? This book provides a full and authoritative answer to that question.
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I’ve been a fan of Gmail for some time.  I love its powerful spam filter which seems so much more effective than anything else I have come across, and the seemingly endless capacity to store my mail and make it available for search is really useful for me when running a small business and needing to keep in contact with a large customer base.  Despite my contentment, two recent developments have enhanced my Gmail experience. Continue Reading »

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Well … Vlingo!

I’m not quite sure what to say really.  But it is impressive - at least, I think so.  It has certainly cut down the typing.

I have blogged before about how various iPhone apps were available to enable a user to use voice to interact with software on his or her phone.  For some time I have been speaking to ReQall to make diary appointments and shopping lists, and Evernote to (amongst other things) record miscellaneous notes on the hop.  I also occasionally used the Google voice search software with mixed success.  And then, of course, there’s always ipadio for phlogging.

What Vlingo does it take some of the most common interactions people would want to make with their iPhones (dialing contacts, texting, emailing, web searching, finding locations on maps, and updating social networks) and enable all these functions to be executed either entirely, or almost entirely, by voice.

Voice Dialing Any Contact

I used to have a phone that enabled me to say the names of a restricted number of people (6) that it would recognise and then dial, but I never found it to be very successful and abandoned the practice after several mistaken dials.  What Vlingo does is call anyone in your address book.  You just press the Vlingo button, then say, “Call Peter Smith” and it does.  If Peter Smith has more than one number you can specify, “Call Peter Smith mobile”, “Call Peter Smith work”.  If Vlingo is confident it has the correct number it will dial automatically, inform you what it is doing, and give you time to cancel the call.  If it is unsure of the instruction it will present a list of possible numbers that you can select from.  I have found it to be very accurate indeed, and in a fortnight’s worth of usage, have only had to cancel an automatic dial once.
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There is a lot of loss around.  And I’m not just referring to people mourning the loss of  a loved person.  When someone is bereaved you would expect the mourning.  It is natural and understandable.  But apart from the loss of human beings, there are many other kinds of losses, and many people in mourning - though few of them would understand their feelings and turmoil as ‘grief’.  We somehow want to preserve that label for ‘the big one’. (And some people, of course, would include the death of a pet in that category).

The unacknowledged feelings of grief that people experience surround the many losses that often do not involve the literal death of a body.  There is sometimes shock, and anger, and depression surrounding the loss of a job,  the ending of a significant relationship, or the onset of a debilitating illness.  These are all accompanied by the ending of a particular status and a whole host of expectations and dreams about the future - about what might have been.  I sometimes work with people who arrive at my office in a state of shock having  recently learned that their partner of 20 or 30 years is leaving.  They are almost literally sick with grief - what they thought was the goodness of the past feels destroyed at the time, the present is unbearable, and the future has just evaporated before their eyes.
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Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: Distinctive Features

Frank Wills

Routledge 2009

ISBN 978-0415439527 £9.99

This book sets out to provide a concise account of Beck’s work against a background of his personal and professional history. It is divided into two parts. There are 15 short chapters which examine Beck’s contribution to explaining psychopathology, and then 15 more looking at Beck’s suggestions for the best methods of treatment. Within each chapter the author also attempts to view each topic in the light of current research and of other relevant theoretical or pragmatic positions. He attempts a lot in a mere 166 pages.

I enjoyed this book. The author communicates well, and the combination of the lightness of his style, and the corset imposed by the series editor, mean that the chapters deliver substance without crushing with impenetrable weight. I found the first half of the book to be the most rewarding. Wills gives a clear account of Beck’s contribution to the evolution of CBT theory. Throughout this section there is a definite sense of an empirical pragmatist at work, slowly moving away from psychoanalysis, using patient statements to build hypotheses, then testing these hypotheses and refining theory, starting with depression and then moving into other areas of psychopathology. Amongst other things Wills explains the use of imagery, the development of the different levels and types of cognition, the role played by emotion (the ‘Royal Road to cognition’) and the interaction with behaviour.

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Despite some £4m a year being spent on homeopathy, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said today that using public money on the highly diluted remedies could not be justified.  The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works.

It seems reasonable that people should have the freedom to buy these remedies and pay for these alleged treatments if they wish to.  However, it also seems right that any government should examine the science behind any medical claims, direct limited funding towards remedies that have credible theory and demonstrated effectiveness, and that they should remove any government-backed badge of respectability from those that don’t.

On the World at One on Radio 4 today, Phil Willis MP (Chairman of the Commons Science and Technology Committee) and Dr Michael Dixon (a homeopathic practitioner) were debating the Committee’s findings, which can best be summed up in the words of Phil Willis:

“This was a challenging inquiry which provoked strong reactions. We were seeking to determine whether the Government’s policies on homeopathy are evidence based on current evidence. They are not.

“It sets an unfortunate precedent for the Department of Health to consider that the existence of a community which believes that homeopathy works is ‘evidence’ enough to continue spending public money on it. This also sends out a confused message, and has potentially harmful consequences. We await the Government’s response to our report with interest.”

I was interested in the two points that Dr Dixon made in response to the above devastating conclusions.
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Here’s something. Imagine you live in a community where you are expected to pay into a fund that is used to meet various needs in the community - the upkeep of roads, salaries for nurses and teachers, and community hospitality, for example. Then it transpires that you are about to receive a visit from a dignitary, and custom dictates that you will be expected to meet his considerable costs - the travel and accommodation of his party, and his considerable security expenses, not to mention the disruption and strain on usual community services.

On the face of it, it doesn’t seem too bad.  After all, custom is custom.  However, when you start to realize that the estimated cost of the visit runs into a number of millions - around 20, in fact - you do begin to wonder if that is the best use of community money, especially when the home for senior citizens near you was clearly having to make tough decisions about restricting care.

And then you start to think about it, and various problems start to emerge: Continue Reading »

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In 1968 the sociologist Peter Berger famously predicted that in the 21st century, religious believers would only be likely to be in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.  In 1710 Thomas Woolstan predicted that religion would be gone by 1900.  And many other thinkers (Voltaire, Jefferson, Marx, Engels, Freud) have all anticipated the collapse of religious faith.  To the delight of the faithful, and to the chagrin of the faithless, they have all been wrong.

It is interesting to contemplate why religion hasn’t disappeared.  Why, in roughly 10,000 years of history, have humans created roughly 10,000 different religions and 1000 gods?  It is well known that religion leads people to fly planes into sky scrapers, to shoot staff at abortion clinics, to fracture governments in Northern Ireland, and that it has caused endless wars. Religious societies have higher crime rates than secular ones and pay a huge economic price for their faith.  And religion in its fundamentalist form has held back cognitive evolution for thousands of year - we can only guess how much further science and technology would have advanced worldwide today without it.  (We can only dread what will happen if the current attempts to prevent the teaching of evolution in various parts of the world are successful.  See here, for example.) Why do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system that is so evidently false and self-contradictory?
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