The role of a therapist in life is very important. They help with body and mind problems. They help patients dealing with different issues, such as mental issues, physical issues, and body issues. Therapists meet with patients regularly to help them cope with different issues they are struggling with. They advise the patient’s family members, relatives, and friends on what they can do to help the patients cope with their problems. For example, a patient might be struggling with a particular phobia or habit they need to get rid of as quickly as possible. Therapists can help with that. But how do they do it? Well, there many different strategies therapists can do to fix a patient’s problem. Assessments are one of them. Now, by an assessment, I don’t mean a math assessment or something like that, by assessment I mean a protocol assessment. These types of assessments are way different than school-based assessments. These assessments are used to see what level the patients are at right now. A therapist might show pictures and ask the patients to tell them what they see. This can also help the therapists understand what the patients are coping with and how they can help them. Although a therapist’s job seems pretty simple there are some required skills therapists must-have. Having the skill of communicating well is a mandatory skill. Talking to patients in a way they can understand you is very important.

Being a communicative person can help patients with what they are coping with. Another skill that is extremely important is time-management. You and your patient have to agree on which day and time will work for you and them. So prioritizing tasks and managing time plays a strong role in therapy. Listening and connecting with patients is another important skill to have. Patients need to vent out and they need a person they can trust to tell them how they are feeling and what they want to do so their problem can be fixed. And although it might seem pretty simple, it’s not. A patient needs to get someone’s trust so they can feel healthy and happy instead of troubled and miserable. A therapist needs to be positive and optimistic so their patients can feel the same way and maybe even better. And although a therapist might go through some obstacles they know their changing lives. 

by Megha Krishnan

Importance of Education

When I say education in this case, I mean school. School is often characterized as a large source of stress and misery for kids. Every school day, they have to wake up early in the morning, ride on a bus, spend several hours doing working, or take tests on that work, with a half-hour lunch break in between. Then they have to ride the bus home and spend some more time doing homework for school. This makes kids dislike school quite a lot. This causes them to ask questions like, “Why do I need to write essays?”, or “Why do I need to know what y=mx+b means?”. But school is important. It is vital for both individuals and society as a whole that people are educated. 

First of all, education is extremely important for the individual.  Most of the stuff that we learn in school tend to be prerequisites for certain degrees in college. High school level math is often a prerequisite for college-level math, which is required for most STEM degrees. Getting a good STEM degree can allow people to have lucrative jobs. But any degree builds on the education that we received in school, one way or another. We also need education in order to understand most things about the government. The chart below shows the vocabulary and grammatical level of the speeches of several candidates for US president. 

With the exception of Donald Trump’s speech, all of these speeches are at a high school reading level. If someone didn’t go to school and they only know how to read and write at a basic level, they’re going to have a really hard time understanding what these candidates are saying. If they do “understand” it, they’re most likely going to misinterpret it and vote against their own interests. According to an article from the National Center of Biology Information, people who are less educated are more likely to believe conspiracy theories. This can have really adverse consequences for the individual. Look at the people who attacked the US Capitol because they believed that Trump’s election was a fraud. People, who otherwise might have been reasonable, literally turned to terrorism because they believed in a conspiracy theory Education also makes people much less likely to be poor. The chart below from the Federal Bureau of Labour perfectly explains this.Workers without high school diplomas only earned 62% as much money as workers with high school diplomas. Workers with a Bachelors’s degree over 50% more than workers with just a high school diploma. There are more details in the chart. But the idea is that income correlates heavily with the level of education that one receives. People who are poorer are much more likely to be incarcerated. Adults in poverty are three times as likely to be put in jail as everybody else. In conclusion for this portion, more education leads to more income which leads to less poverty and lower willingness to commit crimes.

Educating our citizens also really helps society as a whole. This ties heavily with the first portion. Societies with less crime and less poverty tend to be better for everyone. Societies with lower education rates tend to deteriorate pretty quickly. The Ottoman Empire, for example, failed to educate its citizens. The literacy rate of the empire never went above 15%. This caused them to have a shortage of skilled workers. When the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe, the Ottomans simply didn’t have enough skilled workers to be able to build factories and machines, causing them to be unable to compete with the other European empires, ultimately leading to their demise.  Note that lack of education was not the only factor in their collapse, and maybe was eclipsed by them losing WW1. But it played a big part. Conversely, when education became the norm in western countries, we saw a lot of advancements in technology such as steam engines, the telegraph, the automobile, and more. Overall, education allows society to be stable and advance, but lack of education can cause instability and for society to crumble.

As you can see, education is very important. It not only can uplift individuals and keep them out of poverty, but it also allows society to function properly. Without education, society, as we have it today, would be impossible.

I am sure that every single person who is reading this has heard of Albert Einstein in one way or another. You probably have seen his last name being used as a synonym of genius, smart, or other words to describe someone intelligent. Maybe, you’ve even heard of E=mc² as one of his biggest and most important achievements. But what do all of these things mean? There are way too many people who know about Einstein as a genius, but they don’t know why he’s so famous. There are at least a thousand people alive right now who have a higher IQ than Einstein. Einstein himself considered Niccola Tesla to be smarter than him. The reason Einstien is so famous is because of his contributions to humanity, which I’ll explain in this blog. More specifically, I’ll be explaining his two most important contributions to humanity that affect us every day.

The first, arguably the most important contribution is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Please note that this is an umbrella term that contains many sub-theories. With that being said, I think the biggest use of this theory is in GPS systems. Einstein discovered that gravity ever-so-slightly slow time down. (think microseconds). One of the components of GPS systems is that satellites need to have an extremely precise idea of time to get the location accurately. The time change by the lack of gravity that satellites experience becomes a big problem now. Luckily that difference is accounted for so we’ll be fine. But if Einstein hadn’t discovered that law, GPS wouldn’t be impossible. Next time you or your parents use GPS, remember that it’s Einstien and his imagination that helped make this possible. And yes, I meant it when I said his imagination. He sat for a while and thought up these theories. 

Another big contribution from Einstien was the discovery of the equation E=mc².  I won’t go into the details of the principles behind this equation or even what each of the variables means. I’ll instead go into the effect of this law. The effect of this law is that seemingly small objects contain an enormous amount of energy at an atomic level. Because of this law, a walnut has enough energy to power the entirety of New York City for around 52 days, though tapping that energy is only possible in certain elements as of right now.  The discovery of this is what allowed nuclear power to be invented. The most well-known effect of this is the invention of the nuclear bomb. The world might have been in some kind of war right now if countries weren’t scared about each other’s nukes. But there are other uses to this equation as well, such as nuclear power. France, for example, gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear power plants. Next time you hear about anything nuclear, remember that it’s Einstein who made it possible.

There are definitely more things that Einstein helped to discover. But these two things are by far the two most tangible. Einstein was no doubt a genius. But it’s disrespectful to him to only remember that him as some crazy smart guy. Because he’s one of the most important figures of the 20th century, perhaps even in history. There’s no telling of how this world would be(if it would even exist) without him. Thanks for reading my blog!

I’m quite sure that everybody here knows about COVID and all the bad things that come with it. You have to stay home, you can’t shake hands, you have to wear a mask if you want to go outside, you have to frequently wash your hands, people are losing their jobs because of the lockdown, and more! The majority of your time thinking about COVID would be about the bad things from this virus. But there are many good things about it as well! These good things are going to help us in the long-term. In this blog, I’ll focus on the two best things that have come from this pandemic. 

One of the best long-term benefits of this virus is the reduction in pollution. This was probably the most obvious. Traffic from cars, flights, trains, and other forms of transportation has largely reduced. This is in turn has greatly reduced the amount of pollution. In China, for example, it’s estimated that at least 78,000 would’ve died due to pollution. But instead, 4600 people died due to COVID. This is happening in many other places too. Within the first week of lockdown, India’s air pollution has dropped to the lowest it has been in the last 20 years. When my mother went to India in January, the airport runway was barely visible when her plane landed in Dehli. But now, Delhi has clear skies. People in Dehli can now breathe fresh air and have a much lower chance of a variety of diseases that are much more dangerous than COVID.

Another long-term effect of COVID is going to be the digitization of everything. People are starting to see that it is largely possible to do the majority of IT jobs from home. Google, for example, is going to let their workers stay home until July 2021. They might one day conclude that there is no need to go to the office the majority of the time. This going to reduce the amount of pollution(people will be commuting less) and it’s going to save a lot of money. This will in turn allow for Google and other IT companies to allocate less money to office costs and more money for innovation. 

Overall, COVID has done a lot of bad things for everybody around the world. But benefits like this are a nice silver lining to an otherwise terrible situation. 

Net neutrality is something about which you may not know. But it is of utmost importance in the age of the internet. In this blog post, I will explain to you what net neutrality is, why it is so important, and ways that it is being jeopardized.  

First of all, what is net neutrality? Net neutrality is a law that prohibits internet service providers such as Verizon and Jio from discriminating on internet traffic. This essentially means that they have to treat all internet traffic equally. They can’t deliberately slow down some traffic or speed up other traffic. For example, if Amazon bribed Verizon into slowing down the traffic from all of the other online shops, this would be illegal and they would be punished. Conversely, if Verizon slowed down the traffic from Amazon and tried to blackmail them into paying money, Amazon could take Verizon to court and win easily. 

Why is this important to the average consumer like you and me? This is important because the user experience of some sites could deteriorate quite a lot if the service providers try anything like that. For example, back in December of 2013 people who used Comcast experienced a sharp drop in quality of the streaming from Netflix. The video quality was about half as good as before, and the videos were buffering much more than before. Users of Netflix and Comcast suffered from this for two months before Netflix and Comcast struck a deal. This is luckily not that common, but imagine what would happen if they tried to do something like this to something much more popular like YouTube or Google. Things like this only will make the internet worse for everyone as it undermines the fact that the internet was made for people to communicate and view content as they wish, consumers shouldn’t have to suffer like this just because their internet service provider(which they already pay for) wants even more money. Not to mention the fact that this by principle ruins the purpose of the internet(to freely communicate). 

How is net neutrality be being jeopardized? This is mainly in the US, but the US has a large influence over the rest of the world and is the third-largest consumer of the internet behind India and China. In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission(FCC). This is the Commission that enforces and passes laws that regulates everything internet-related in the US. He is firmly anti-net-neutrality and rolled back a lot of the regulations that were created to ensure net-neutrality.   As of right now, the FCC no longer enforces this law and it is up to the individual states to do so. To make this even worse, many countries follow the US a lot in these situations, so this could really affect many, many people.

I hope you have a good understanding of this issue now.