Good Morning Everyone by muha

Belief Net has many resources for those of us on a spiritual journey. One of my favorite sections is about prayer.  The topics for prayer include:

(1) Prayers By Faith–Christian l Catholic | Eastern Orthodox | Protestant ) Judaism | Buddhism | Hinduism | Islam | Pagan | Native American | Other Faiths | New Age | Multifaith

(2)  Prayers For Milestones and Moments: Daily | Morning | Meals | Bedtime | Adoption | Aging | Baptism | Born Again | Celebrations | Children’s Milestones | Children’s Prayers | Coming Out | Conversion | Death | Divorce | Illness | Marriage | Moving | Parenting | Pregnancy & Birth |

(3)  Prayers by Need: Comfort | Compassion | Depression | Fear | Forgiveness | Gratitude | Guidance | Healing | Hope | Loneliness | Loss | Peace | Praise | Protection | Strength & Courage | Stress

(4)  Other Prayers:  Abortion | Abuse | Addiction | Fertility Challenges | Holidays | Military | Money | Nations & Leaders

Belief Net also has prayer galleries of: The World at Prayer—Ten Quick Ways to Pray—Seven Saints for Healing and Comfort—Ten Creative Ways to Energize Your Prayer Life—Muslim Pregnancy Prayers—as well as others.

1. Brett Zamore for Architecture for Humanity, $135,000. With $33,000,00 fro Oprah’s Angel Network, this organization set up shop in Biloxi, Mississippi, and attracted 250 volunteers who helped residents rebuild or replace their homes. Plans for a 1,415 sq. ft. shotgun//dogtrot home by Zamore (the one pictured is called the ParkerHouse} are among seven blueprints free at openarchitecurenetwork.org/biloxi.

2. Graft for Make It Right, $150,000. The 1,028 home is a collaboration between Graft, the Berlin-based architecture firm and Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation which aims to erect 150 homes by 14 architects in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. All 14 firms will share their blueprints for free which you can see at makeitrightnola.org. To request Graft’s plans, call 323-441-9610.

3. Marianne Cusato for Lowe’s, $120,000. After Cusato designed the award-winning Lowe’s Katrina Cottage in 2006, she and four of her colleagues added 18 more homes to the line, ranging from 308 to 1,807 square feet. Buy the plans for this 697-square-foot, two-bedroom charmer for $700. at lowes.com/loweskatrinacottage, or purchase both plans and materials (about $40,00 for the model pictured) at any Lowe’s store.

4. Looney Ricks Kiss for Mississippi Alternative Housing, $50,000. Over 2,000 families in Mississippi ditched their FEMA trailers for the featured 400 sq. ft. cottage thanks to Viking Range CEO Fred Carl, who convened a dozen architects to create a better option. To buy one fully installed, call 574-293-6507 in the Northeast, 817-478-5551 in the West, and 877-747-9800 in the South.

In the back of the issue, O At Home also recommends these three ways to help rebuild the homes and lives of those uprooted by Hurricane Katrina. (1) Make It Right Foundation–your money can buy everything from non-toxic paint ($25) to an energy-efficient, three-bedroom home ($150,000) at makeitright.org. (2) Architecture for Humanity–a $100 gift will feed and house volunteers–like the ones who’ve been helping out in East Biloxi, Mississippi at architectureforhumanity.org. (3) Finish the Job–6,600 families in Mississippi still need help and projects continue for 8,900 more. Just $1 from every American would do it at finishthejobfund.org.

Finance and Investing

A variety of web-based investment analysis tools and financial statistics can only be found in the deep web.

1. Bankrate.com — A directory of interest rates for different types of loans, mortgages, and savings accounts.
2. InvestIQ — A database of market data from different world regions.
3. BigCharts — A searchable database of quotes and performance charts for different stocks and mutual funds.
4. SmartMoney.com Tools — A portal of different stock analysis tools.
5. EDGAR Online — A database of EDGAR SEC filings searchable by ticker or company name.

General Research

These are good places to start researching for background knowledge on any topic. The subscription-based databases will help intensify any research by scouring numerous scholarly journals.

1. GPO’s Catalog of US Government Publications — A searchable database of federal publications, with links to those available online.
2. Smithsonian Institution Libraries — A collection of 20 libraries from the world’s largest museum complex.
3. The National Archives — A list of all of the National Archives’ research tools and databases.
4. Encyclopædia Britannica — The authoritative encyclopedia searchable with full text online.
5. Topix.net — A news search engine.
6. Internet Public Library — The Internet’s public library. Fully searchable.
7. San Francisco Public Library – A list of all of the databases offered to SFPL library card holders. Not a California resident? This is just one example of many such local public libraries that offer similar services.
8. Xrefer $ — A searchable database of 236 titles and over 2.8 million entries.
9. LexisNexis $ — The world’s largest collection of public records, unpublished opinions, forms, legal, news, and business information. Over 35,000 individual sources are searchable with full-text available online.
10. Forrester Research $ — An independent technology and market research company, publishing in-depth research reports on a variety of subjects.
11. Factiva $ — A searchable collection of over 10,000 individual sources.

Government Data

The United States government publishes data on a variety of subjects, some of which is derived from census data or CIA findings.

1. Copyright Records (LOCIS) — A database of copyright records, searchable by documents, serials, and multimedia (including books, music, films, sound recordings, maps, software, photos, and art).
2. American FactFinder — A repository of aggregate census bureau data searchable by city, county, or ZIP code.
3. FedStats — A gateway to statistics from over 100 US federal agencies.
4. United States Patent and Trademark Office — A database of patent full-text and full-page images.
5. Geospatial One Stop — A searchable database of geographic data, displayable on maps.
6. United States Government Printing Office (GPO) — A search engine for mutliple government databases, including US budgets, campaign reform hearings, code of federal regulations, congressional bills, unified agendas, and more
7. POW/MIA Databases and Documents — A database of POWs and MIAs information.
8. ZIP+4 Lookup — A database of US ZIP codes and ZIP+4 codes, searchable by city or address.

Resources for choosing online learning, choosing degrees, choosing schools, college basics,military assistance degrees, financial aid information, online class assignments, as well as several featured online colleges. One of the great resources on this amazing resources is an article entitled: “Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better.”

This article has these 77 tips:

Health: Shake a leg–Food for thought-at breakfast–Eat a light lunch–Cognitive enhancers (ginkgo biboba)–Reduce stress and depression.

Balance: Sleep on it–Take a break–Take a hike–Change your focus.

Perspective and Focus: Change your focus, part 2–Do walking meditation–Focus and immerse yourself–Turn out the lights–Take a bath or shower.

Recall Techniques: Listen to music–Speedread–Use acronyms and other mnemonic devices.

Visual Aids: Every picture tells a story–Brainmap it–Learn symbolism and semiotics–Use information design–Use visual learning techniques–Map your task flow.

Verbal and Auditory Techniques: Stimulate ideas–Brainstorm–Learn by osmosis–Cognitive enhancers (binaural beats)–Laugh.

Kinesthetic Techniques: Write, don’t type–Carry a quality notebook at all times–Keep a journal–Organize–Use post-it notes.

Self-motivation Techniques: Give yourself credit–Motivate yourself–Set a goal–Think positive–Organize, part 2–Every skill is learned–Prepare yourself for learning–Prepare yourself, part 2–Constrain yourself.

Supplemental Techniques: Read as much as you can–Cross-pollinate your interests–Learn another language–Learn how to learn—Learn what you know and what you don’t–Multitask through background processes–Think holistically–Use the right type of repetition–Apply the Quantum Learning (QL) model–Get necessary tools–Get necessary tools, part 2–Learn critical thinking–Learn complex problem solving.

For Teachers, Tutors, and Parents: Be engaging–Use information pyramids–Use video games–Role play–Apply the 80/20 rules–Tell stories–Go beyond the public school curriculum–Use applied learning.

For Students and Self-Studiers: Be engaged–Teach yourself–Collaborate–Do unto others: teach something–Write about it–Learn by experience–Quiz yourself–Learn the right things first–Plan your learning.

Parting Advice: Persist–Defy the experts–Challenge yourself–Party before an exam–Don’t worry:learn happy.

For this page, I am going to summarize his main categories for an easy reference about each. Be sure to check his website for a more total explanation of each.

Conscious and the Unconscious: Sigmund Freud

(1) Biological: mating, assertive, social, and nurturing complexes.

(2) Social unconscious: our language, social taboos, cultural habits, etc.

(3) Personal unconscious: defense mechanisms, personal habits, etc.

(4) Most important to remember about consciousness is that is personal for each of us and therefore unique.

Stages: Three transitional stages: infancy, adolescence and senescence.

(1) Fetal and infancy stages—develop our temperaments

(found in hormones and neurotransmitters)

(2) Child stage—develop our personality (founded in habits)

(3) Adolescence—develop character (based on conscious

Decision-making)

Temperament: Jung—Eysenck—Big Five

(1) Established genetically: emotional stability and extraversion/introversion

(2) Conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness

(3) Psychoticism (Eysenck), activity (Buss and Plomin),

impulsivity (Buss and Plomin).

Learning:

(1) Environmental—many theorists

(2) Social—vicarious learning and imitation (probably the most significant for personality development

(3) Verbal—from words

Emotions:

(1) Pain and pleasure—distress and delight

(2) Anxiety—anticipation of fear

(3) Fear—imminent harm

(4) Guilt—related to shame. Guilt may be when we contravene our own self-definition which may also be regret.

(5) Sadness—world isn’t as it should be. Grief is the extreme sadness and depression is the unrealistic sadness that lingers

(6) Anger—same situation but we have energized ourselves to change the situation. Aggression is when we use our anger and hostility is unrealistic anger.

Motivation:

(1) Biological motivations—mostly instinctual and instinct

(2) Social motivations—needs for acceptance, approval,

and attention

(3) Personal motivation–habits, defense mechanisms,

and our styles

(4) Higher motivations competence and altruistic

(5) All motivations can be summed by as actualization

As defined by Rogers, Jung, and Horney

Neurosis: If we experience childhood traumas without necessary parental buffers of positive regard, we have an on-going apprehension about life and no longer trust life. So we develop defense mechanisms. We defend our sensitive egos by denial, repression, distortion, and rationalization.

These defense mechanisms help us when we are young, but if maintained during adulthood, they cause us to avoid becoming who we really are.

Coping strategies:

(1) Dependent style—inferiority and weakness in the inferiority complex

(2) Aggressive style—the superiority complex

(3) Perfectionist style—anal retentive or hoarding

(4) Schizoid style—avoiding or withdrawing

(5) Infantile style—avoid responsibility

Therapy:

(1) Emphasis on sell-awareness

(2) Encourage conscious, higher motivations

(3) Use caring dialog and provide support with the

goal of eventual autonomy

(4) Use of drugs that help

Because Dr. Boeree is visual (NLP), he has designed a graph of all this ultimate theory that I won’t attempt to repeat or explain. You can see it at his website here.

The Open Directory Project is an amazing resource. According to Wikipedia: “The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

Under society, the link for Religion and Spirituality contains 36 religion categories including atheism.

• Advaita Vedanta (220)
• African (166)
• Agnosticism (45)
• Atheism (223)
• Baha’ism (274)
• Buddhism (3,276)
• Cao Dai (13)
• Christianity (78,358)
• Confucianism@ (48)
• Deism (60)
• Esoteric and Occult (2,636)
• Ethical Culture (26)
• Falun Dafa (27)
• Fourth Way (123)
• Gnosticism (136)
• Hinduism (1,403)
• Humanism (112)
• Islam (1,852)
• Jainism (37)
• Judaism (2,473)
• Modern Movements (77)
• Native American (55)
• New Age (1,704)
• New Thought (116)
• Pagan (2,259)
• Pantheism (48)
• Scientology (634)
• Shamanism (126)
• Shintoism (17)
• Sikhism (186)
• Spiritualism (330)
• Taoism (418)
• Unitarianism and Universalism (1,168)
• Universal Life Church (21)
• Zoroastrianism (45)

From OEDB:

Got a research paper or thesis to write? Want to research using the Internet? Good luck. There’s a lot of junk out there — outdated pages, broken links, and inaccurate information. Using Google or the Wikipedia may lead you to some results, but you can rarely be sure of pinpoint accuracy. And what’s more, you’ll only be searching a fraction of all of the resources available to you.

Google, the largest search database on the planet, currently has around eight billion web pages indexed. That’s a lot of information. But it’s nothing compared to what else is out there. Google can only index the visible web, or searchable web. But the invisible web, or deep web, is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the searchable web. The invisible web comprises databases and results of specialty search engines that the popular search engines simply are not able to index.

Do you think your local or university librarian uses Google? Sure, but certainly not exclusively. In order to start researching like a librarian, you’ll need to explore more authoritative resources, many of which are invisible. Note: Although some of the following resources are visible and indexed, they have all been included here because of their authoritative nature.

$ = Available only by subscription.

Topics Covered in this Article

Deep Web Search Engines | Art | Books Online | Business | Consumer | Economic and Job Data | Finance and Investing | General Research | Government Data | International | Law and Politics | Library of Congress | Medical and Health | Science | Transportation

Deep Web Search Engines

To get started, try using a search engine that specializes in scouring the invisible web for results. None of these can search the entire invisible web, but they make some inroads that Google has not as of yet.

1. Clusty — A metasearch engine that combines the results of several top search engines.
2. Intute — A searchable database of trusted sites, reviewed and monitored by subject specialists.
3. Librarians’ Internet Index — A search engine listing sites deemed trustworthy by actual human librarians, not just a Googlebot.
4. Internet Archive — A database of tens of thousands of movies, live music, audio, texts, and home of the Wayback Machine that allows you to find old versions of web pages, over 55 billion.

Art

Hundreds of other museums all over the world have their own databases. This is just a list of the databases for a few of the most popular. Within these databases are descriptions of the work, its location, and an image of the work.

1. Musée du Louvre — One of the oldest and most famous art galleries in the world. Contains Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Alexandros de Antioch’s Venus de Milo.
2. Guggenheim Museum — A collection of over 160 classical and new artists, searchable by artist name, title, date, movement, medium, concept, and museum.
3. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery — A searchable database of more than 80,000 portrait records.
4. The National Gallery of Art — A searchable catalog of all of the museum’s 110,000 objects, with images of more than 6,000 available online.

Books Online

There are tens of thousands of classic books with full text available online for free. Some authors whose books are available in full text online include Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

1. The Online Books Page — A searchable database of more than 25,000 English works with full text available for free online.
2. Bibliomania — A searchable database of free online literature from more than 2,000 classic texts.
3. The National Academies Press — A searchable directory of 3,000 free books online and 900 for-sale PDFs.
4. ebrary — A searchable database of more than 20,000 full-text books.

Business

The most accurate quantitative business knowledge often comes from specialty search engines and business directories/databases.

1. Explorit Now! — A portal allowing searchable access to numerous business journals and databases.
2. Agency ComPile — A searchable database of advertising and other marketing agencies.
3. GPO Access Economic Indicators — A portal to economic indicators from January 1998 to present.
4. Hoover’s — A searchable database of businesses.
5. ThomasNet — An industrial product search directory.
6. SBA Loan Data — A database of loan program approval activity from the Small Business Administration.

Consumer

For consumers, authoritative product reviews and pricing information often times are hidden in the deep web or among subscription-based reports.

1. Melissa Data — A directory of complete demographic data, sortable by ZIP code.
2. Kelley Blue Book — A guide to pricing new and used vehicles.
3. Edmunds — Another guide to pricing new and used vehicles.
4. Consumer Reports $ — A guide to consumer product reviews, including cars, appliances, electronics, computers, personal finance, travel, and more.

Economic and Job Data

A wealth of information regarding microeconomic and macroeconomic data is available from government sources and other organizations

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics — A directory of job-based and consumer economic data from the US Department of Labor.
2. Salary Wizard Calculator — A tool that shows national average salaries adjusted by location for different jobs.
3. Economagic — A free economic data directory containing over 200,000 data files.
4. Penn World Tables — A database of purchasing power parity and national income data for 179 countries for the years 1950-2000.
5. America’s Job Bank — A searchable database of jobs and resumes.
6. USAJOBS — A searchable database of federal government jobs.
7. Regional Economic Conditions (RECON) — A database of economic data available by state, county, and MSA.