By Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya

Words matter just ask Girl Scout Troop 20923.

The troop, comprised of sixth-graders from Maplewood and South Orange, has spent the past year cultivating a grass-roots advocacy effort, #IWILL.

They are asking that Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) modify the Girl Scout Promise and Law to be more empowering for girls everywhere.

#IWILL was born out of a Womens Leadership conference troop co-leader Jaime Barnes attended where she heard Dr. Cindy Wahler, psychologist and expert in human behavior, speak about female communication style.

Dr. Wahler shared that women, juxtaposed to men, often resist self-promotion and use communication tags, or indirect language, when offering insights or contributions to discussions. By doing this, women inadvertently and often unconsciously diminish the strength of their message and their brand.

She went on to use the Girl Scout Promise and Law vs the Boy Scout Oath and Law as an example of how ingrained this is in our language and our culture.

The Boy Scout Oath states, I will and the Girl Scout Promise says, I will try; The Boy Scout Law states, A Scout is and the Girl Scout Law says, I will do my best to be.

Her talk was eye opening for Ms. Barnes, her co-leader, Catherine DOrazio, and their troop. Before coming to any conclusions, the troop did their own research to understand what Dr. Wahler was referring to.

They began by observing the behaviors of their classmates, both girls and boys. The results were astounding. They noticed that boys were quicker to answer questions and stated their responses with confidence. In contrast, girls in their classrooms tended to hang back, hesitate when called on, and had a hard time expressing their thoughts in a concise manner.

The troop also researched women in leadership positions across business, entertainment and politics and were dismayed to learn that women still hold a minority of these important roles across all sectors of our society.

In the end, Troop 20923 recognized Dr. Wahlers point and unanimously agreed that things had to change! Originally, the troop leaders were only going to modify the promise and law for their troop. But the Troop felt a sense of responsibility to the Girl Scout community and decided to raise awareness for all Girl Scouts.

Troop 20923 observing the behaviors of their classmates, noticing that boys were quicker to answer questions and stated their responses with confidence. In contrast, girls tended to hesitate when called on, and had a hard time expressing their thoughts in a concise manner.

Their request is simple - that GSUSA revise the Girl Scout Law and Promise by eliminating the words try and do my best to be more inspiring and confidence-instilling. Even though the edits are minor, Troop 20923 is confident that the impact on the Girl Scout community will be major.

As the troop leaders explained, 'try is just three letters, but it has serious implications to how girls value themselves and what we, as a society, expect of them. An organization with a mission to develop "girls of courage, confidence, and character should not continue using language that inadvertently and potentially unconsciously, diminishes girls strength and confidence.

When Juliette Gordon Low founded GSUSA in 1912, she envisioned an organization to prepare girls to meet their world with courage, confidence, and character." Girls Scouts is one of the most prominent leadership development organizations for girls today. With over 2 million members, GSUSA has an obligation to shape this next generation of girls and women so that they can have the success and achievement they desire and deserve.

No, more than ever, its important that we send the right messages to girls, so that our future leaders have the confidence to express themselves with authority and assurance.

Speaking for myself, I sincerely hope that Troop 20923 gets the opportunity to be heard. Theyve written letters to GSUSA and submitted a formal request through Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey for inclusion in the G.I.R.L. 2020 Convention. A change like this can only be achieved through a vote at the tri-annual convention. They are now working on getting the word out and building support for #IWILL. The troop is doing their part, so please do yours.

Dr. Cindy Wahler said it best, These girls are our role models for both our current and future generations! They have courage and are bold. Please show them having a voice matters. Empower them to make a difference by signing their petition.

Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya is a stillbirth parent advocate. She lives in Maplewood with her husband and two kids.

The Star-Ledger/NJ.com encourages submissions of opinion. Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow us on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and on Facebook at NJ.com Opinion. Get the latest news updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.

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Why is it that boy scouts will, but girl scouts try? Change the Promise, please. | Opinion - NJ.com

Communication issues are at the top of the list of challenges 21st-Century leaders are facing. Leaders who learn to communicate best win. Lets dig into a simple approach that may help you successfully navigate one communication issue internal conflict.

I sat down with a Millennial leader yesterday to discuss how to deal with conflict in his organization. The issues he face are not unique. Leaders across the country are dealing with conflict either with or between their employees. We ended up discussing a theory that could be very valuable tool for leaders.

In the 1960s, psychiatrist Eric Berne developed the theory ofTransactional Analysisto explain human behavior. The real value I see in this theory is that it is easily understandable for most anyone. A person does not have to be a psychiatrist or some sort of genius to understand the basics. Once a person understands this theory, its easy to see the root issue and the starting point for solving communication issues. Lets dig in!

In order for managers and supervisors to be successful in todays multi-generation workforce, they must take a very individualistic approach to leading employees. The Transactional Analysis theory is a great tool to help leaders do that.

The foundation of the theory is based on what Berne callsego state. Putting this into my own words as I understand it, Id say the ego state is where a personshead is atin the moment when it comes to the situation.

For leaders, understanding that people approach situations with different perspectives and thought processes is key to correctly breaking down the conflict and moving forward in a positive direction. Bernes theory states that there are 3 ego states: Parent, Child and Adult. Everyone can experience each state. Lets dig into what you need to know.

The theory explains the Parent ego state is created with the experiences a person has in the first five years of life. During this time, kids are hearing lots of Do this and Dont do this statements.

In the workplace, employees in the Parent ego state will likely be the ones telling others what to do or how it is most of the time. You might say they have a my way or the highway approach.

The Child ego state is different than the Parent ego state in that the Parents mindset is around control, where as the Child ego state is more focused around feelings. The theory says that this ego state, just like the Parent ego state, is created with the experiences a person has in the first five years of their life. However, instead of processing commands from authority figures as Do this or that, the Child ego state processes things less on what is being said to them and more how it made them feel.

In the workplace, employees acting in the Child ego state may be operating more on feelings than facts.

The theory says that the Adult ego state starts becoming present as early as one year old. In really simple terms, the Adult ego state allows a person to be able to see things as they really are, not just as they have been told or felt. Those operating in the Adult ego state are able to separate feelings from fact.

In the workplace, your goal as a leader should be to get your people to consistently operate from the Adult ego state. Through the Adult ego state, people are able to make sound decisions for themselves and for the business.

It does a leader no good to learn something new and never put it into practice. So, with the Transactional Analysis theory weve just discussed, take action! Start simply solving communication issues among your team today.

Figure out your own current ego state. Next, take the time to figure out the ego state of your people. Then, educate and empower your people with this theory.

My favorite thing about this theory is that most every employee no matter their level of education or sophistication can understand the foundational difference between the words Parent, Adult, and Child. Once briefly explained, its very clear that everyones goal should be to approach everything as an adult.

If you are dealing with conflict, explaining this theory to everyone involved may help them correctly identify their current ego state and potentially shift their approach accordingly. This may help you as a leader open your employees eyes to root communication issues. When everyone has a clear understanding of the problem, you can work moire successfully towards a solution.

Ultimately, we are all adults working together but we dont always act and think like it. Its your responsibility as a leader to get people to where they need to be. My hope is that when you are working to solve communication issues, this theory will be a valuable tool in your pocket to help you do just that!

Excerpt from:
Communication Issues to Solve? Try This - Thrive Global

During the past years, artificial intelligence (AI) the capability of a machine to mimic human behavior has become a key player in high-techs like drug development projects. AI tools help scientists to uncover the secret behind the big biological data using optimized computational algorithms. AI methods such as deep neural network improves decision making in biological and chemical applications i.e., prediction of disease-associated proteins, discovery of novel biomarkers and de novo design of small molecule drug leads. These state-of-the-art approaches help scientists to develop a potential drug more efficiently and economically.

A research team led by Professor Hongzhe Sun from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with Professor Junwen Wang from Mayo Clinic, Arizona in the United States (a former HKU colleague), implemented a robust deep learning approach to predict disease-associated mutations of the metal-binding sites in a protein. This is the first deep learning approach for the prediction of disease-associated metal-relevant site mutations in metalloproteins, providing a new platform to tackle human diseases. The research findings were recently published in a top scientific journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Metal ions play pivotal roles either structurally or functionally in the (patho)physiology of human biological systems. Metals such as zinc, iron and copper are essential for all lives and their concentration in cells must be strictly regulated. A deficiency or an excess of these physiological metal ions can cause severe disease in humans. It was discovered that a mutation in human genome are strongly associated with different diseases. If these mutations happen in the coding region of DNA, it might disrupt metal-binding sites of the proteins and consequently initiate severe diseases in humans. Understanding of disease-associated mutations at the metal-binding sites of proteins will facilitate discovery of new drugs.

The team first integrated omics data from different databases to build a comprehensive training dataset. By looking at the statistics from the collected data, the team found that different metals have different disease associations. A mutation in zinc-binding sites has a major role in breast, liver, kidney, immune system and prostate diseases. By contrast, the mutations in calcium- and magnesium-binding sites are associated with muscular and immune system diseases, respectively. For iron-binding sites, mutations are more associated with metabolic diseases. Furthermore, mutations of manganese- and copper-binding sites are associated with cardiovascular diseases with the latter being associated with nervous system disease as well. They used a novel approach to extract spatial features from the metal binding sites using an energy-based affinity grid map. These spatial features have been merged with physicochemical sequential features to train the model. The final results show using the spatial features enhanced the performance of the prediction with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.90 and an accuracy of 0.82. Given the limited advanced techniques and platforms in the field of metallomics and metalloproteins, the proposed deep learning approach offers a method to integrate the experimental data with bioinformatics analysis. The approach will help scientist to predict DNA mutations which are associated with disease like cancer, cardiovascular diseases and genetic disorders.

Professor Sun said: Machine learning and AI play important roles in the current biological and chemical science. In my group we worked on metals in biology and medicine using integrative omics approach including metallomics and metalloproteomics, and we already produced a large amount of valuable data using in vivo/vitro experiments. We now develop an artificial intelligence approach based on deep learning to turn these raw data to valuable knowledge, leading to uncover secrets behind the diseases and to fight with them. I believe this novel deep learning approach can be used in other projects, which is undergoing in our laboratory.

This project was supported by the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong (Norman and Cecilia Yip Professorship in Bioinorganic Chemistry).

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HKU scientists develop a deep learning approach to predict disease-associated mutations of the metal-binding sites - India Education Diary

To this day Im not sure how I created such chaos and wound up in that headspace, Charlie Sheen said in an interview this past April, reflecting on his infamous 2011 meltdown. Its as though there were some alien or demonic possession going on, he continued, evoking a kind of eldritch, body-invading nemesis in remembrance of his old months-long televised bender.

While surely figurative, Sheens contemporary rhetoric about his past is appropriate given the contrast of his recent form to that of eight years ago. Now he is so much more still and measured. He is not shaking, twitching, hyperbolizing, and arching his eyebrows disturbingly whenever he speaks. He is not, as he once was, proclaiming that he is winning while he clearly suffers.

He is calmer, now, because he is no longer on a ton of drugs and lying about it, and he is no longer the gleeful antihero in an absurd saga, about the lowering of standards for broadcasted human behavior. Sheens spectacular, protracted breakdown was similar to that of Howard Beales in Network, not in message (Im mad as hell, and Im not going to take it anymore) but in how thoroughly it exposed the lack of ethical foundation in media how little of a push the industry needed to turn into an unfettered clown show, a carousel of unwell men being pushed into worse and worse shape so that the public would never look away.

Charlie Sheen doing some good old-fashioned drugs in order to revel in his most manic and egotistical self after his dismissal from Two and a Half Men was not, in either a traditional or a for-the-public-good sense, a newsworthy event. Celebrity implosions had been manically covered for years, but Sheens breakdown came at an inflection point for media, showing how Wow, This Guy Is Actually Nuts would become a defining narrative structure in the years ahead, and how a collapsing protagonist could actively shape the way they were covered. In a few scant years, the rules had changed entirely: Imagine if Britney Spears, who suffered through an indefinitely cruel newscycle following a public breakdown in 2007, had the same media ecosystem, and could have told her story more her own way.

Whether or not it was Sheen who was somewhat randomly chosen by the meeting of technology and time, though, someone would soon be the face of this shift. The internets promise of utopian sprawl was beginning to wear off, as it narrowed into a limited collection of hegemonic data networks masked as community spaces. Much of the omni-directional energy that people brought online was being consolidated into the arenas of just a handful of tech giants, suddenly working on a scale large enough to disrupt traditional media and drastically change the way journalism works.

Sheen, too obviously fucked up to wittingly do much of anything, stepped into the eye of this hurricane, caused by the rising friction between a growing internet and old-school media institutions. This is when he again, not intentionally, because he was entirely too drunk and coked out to be calculating in this way began writing the blueprint for a new kind of fame, a pioneering form of burning out that has since taken regular boundless flight on Twitter. His 2011 bluster has, ever since, been endemic to the platform, embedded in its personality.

In 2011, social media was firmly on its path to cultural dominance but its presence was also still just a fraction of what it is today Twitters total userbase was less than a fifth of its current figure. The larger internets impact on what kind of stories would be reported was already real, however, and very presently becoming much realer. After he insulted showrunner Chuck Lorre in multiple interviews, in March CBS fired Sheen, then their highest-paid sitcom star at nearly $2 million per episode. They would quickly learn that they couldnt just make him go away. Sheen started a Twitter account during his breakdown, literally setting records for follower growth when he did, before even publishing a single tweet. Rivals NBC and ABC would soon air unhinged interview segments with Sheen, but only after demand for wacky-ass Sheen antics not just his posts, but his actual behavior was further created when he first broke his silence by talking to one of the very worst men to ever find success on the internet: Alex Jones.

On Jones InfoWars, an internet-first radio show centered around an angry and conspiratorial worldview that was gaining in FM syndication, Sheen talked of liv[ing] inside of a moment between a moment You either love, or you hate, and you must do so violently, he said. You have to hate everybody thats not in your family, because theyre there to destroy your family, and they will come at you in all forms and shapes. And therefore theres nothing in the middle. I dont live in the middle anymore, because thats where you get slaughtered, thats where you get embarrassed in front of the prom queen, and thats just not an option.

Its hard not to quote the entirety of the interview, a frankly beautiful burst of hubristic gibberish, a remarkable outpouring of the id of a famous person operating outside of their usually tightly controlled context. Youve got to work through your resentments, he said in an intentionally stupid voice, mocking the possibility of going to therapy. Yeah, no, he responded rudely to his own impression. Im going to hang onto them, and theyre going to fuel my attack. Theyre going to fuel the battle cry of my deadly and dangerous, secret and silent soldiers You thought you were just messing with one dude sorry: Winning, he exclaimed, birthing a catchphrase.

With Jones encouragement, Sheen went on to claim that Alcoholics Anonymous was a bootleg cult and that he quickly cured his alcohol and drug addiction with my brain. Then he called Thomas Jefferson a pussy. Next was TMZ, who sent a large man wearing a track jacket and a lot of hair gel to Sheens house for a 42-minute video interview in lawn chairs. During the interview, Sheen claimed he was 100 percent sober, but also took a whiff from a cup he was drinking out of and said you can smell the vodka.

It is, again, difficult not to share every word Sheen says through all of this, because every phrase from his mouth is a unique car crash of demented dude mantra; he was a warlock with tiger blood, he was a rock star from Mars, he was surrounded by goddesses (porn stars who lived with him, and who he suggests he paid to live with him), he was post-death, he had a different head and a different heart than anyone else, capable of enduring monstrous volumes of narcotics; he was a Vatican assassin; he was, himself, a drug that, if ingested, would cause children to weep over your corpse. He frantically leaned to and fro as he said these things about himself, twirling his fingers nervously, repeatedly leaving conversations with journalists to perform entire dialogues all by himself.

Saint Mary's Gaels fans hold up signs before the team's game against the Gonzaga Bulldogs in the championship game of the Zappos.com West Coast Conference Basketball tournament at the Orleans Arena March 7, 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

In the years that have followed, the Sheen-made tragicomedy has been streamlined, if not perfected. Twitter, in particular, has evolved into the quintessential podium on which to shuck all embarrassment and shame to say shiningly stupid things, to fast-growing audiences. It is the number one place where, if you happen to strike all the right chords of cognitive and cultural dissonance, you can make yourself into a soaring, eye-catching comet of bullshit.

Sometimes this tradition is intentional, knowing, ironic: dril, arguably the poet laureate of the medium, curates a feed that can often be described as a series of satirically cocksure micro-poems, delivered in the voice of a man who is falling but insists that hes rising. Other times, and more importantly, the sensation is actual, and can touch every end of the class spectrum. In recent times, weve seen an angry Long Island loser living in his van become a summer celebrity on Twitter, after going on a powerfully misogynistic rant in a bagel store, and NFL star Antonio Brown captivate the platform with some performative, empty chest-puffing against his team, all of which ultimately looked like a distraction from his soon-to-be-discovered abuse of women (something Sheen and Brown have in common). And of course, in the post-Sheen years, we have seen Donald Trump use the platform to rant Sheen-like as he grew a gnarly, racist political power on the platform that helped him become the president. The list gets longer: Kanye West, Roseane Barr, Azealia Banks, Jose Canseco, Heidi Montag, Ted Nugent, Alec Baldwin, Courtney Love, and many, many more have all used the platform to express an anger and lack of mental wellness thats reshaped our understanding of Celebrity.

A few of them, like Roseanne, actually experienced material professional consequences for publicly exploring the range of their inner noise. But mostly not: Like Sheen, these people were rewarded for their terrible, graceless behavior with a larger following. For the most part, famous people going off like this has increased attention for them in a way that can be monetized. The past decade of social media has made a weighty truth more true with each moment: no press is bad press. The fences between audiences and public figures (whether they already are a public figure, or about to become one with the right amount of online ballast) have collapsed mightily.

This, of course, is not precisely a bad thing the positive community gains of the internet, and the potential for more, are unspeakably large and worth plenty of optimism. But increased connective capacity has no intrinsic moral charge, in any direction, and requires cooperative, systemic stewardship. Without better institutional standards for passable online behavior, we will keep seeing wind advance the sails of bad people.

Alex Jones, a highly watchable person, kinetic and passionate and always unfathomable in his loud delusions, is an online character thoroughly in the vein of Sheen, expanding his internet presence immensely by losing his mind in an entertaining way. He also spreads lies to a hateful, radicalized audience, posing real public danger. His 2018 dismissal from all the major social media platforms gives us an example of how the webs overlords might deal differently with his form of internet-climbing a more advanced, pernicious form of the Sheen strain, to be sure over the course of the coming decade.

And we could probably all, as individuals, do less to enable Sheens upon Sheens, collectively leaning in to watch proudly performed pathologies, creating a culture that asks for more and more of them. Charlie Sheen was the seminal carrier of a cultural infection that has clearly spread, and a healthier future for the internet increasingly a synonym for the world depends in part on if we ever properly contain it.

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Charlie Sheen invented never logging off - The Outline