How to deal with Internet trolls.

Everyone has them. Trolls (on a blog) are those commenters who consistently post comments with the sole purpose of being annoying and inciting a reaction. I have two regular trolls on my blog. Every comment they post is in some way insulting, irritating, rude, obnoxious or otherwise unwelcome. At first, I puzzled as to why they read my blog since they are always attacking me for what I write. After a while, I realized, however, that they get some kind of personal pleasure out of being hostile. They seem to have fulfilment in attempting to provoke an offended reaction.

At first, I read their comments, sometimes posted them (the less offensive ones) and replied. After awhile, however, I simply stopped posting their comments since they added nothing to the blog, but detracted from its overall friendly tone.

Recently, however, I have come up with a new plan of approach to those posters I know to be trolls. I simply DON’T READ THEM. When I see their name on the headline to a comment post in my email, I just don’t open it.

I think this is funny and most appropriate. Now, when these trolls post their bile, I am sure they imagine that somewhere, far away, I am annoyed by what they have written. However, in truth, I have not even read what they have written. They have now selected themselves out of my consciousness, because of their habitual offensiveness.

So, if you are suffering from an attack of the trolls – do what I do – and refuse to read what they write. Furthermore, don’t post it. In time, they will probably give up posting.

Does anyone else have a solution to the problem of Internet trolls?

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.) 

The laziest student in the world.

Today, perhaps, the laziest student in the world, visited my blog. It is not uncommon for people, from University web addresses, or other educational institutions, such as Secondary schools or high schools, to arrive on my blog, with what is clearly an essay question in their search terms. Sometimes, I get dozens of people from the same country, searching with the same essay question, arriving on the same page, of my blog. I can only imagine the consternation of their teacher, when a dozen or more of their students hand in the same copy/pasted essay (mine), as their own!

Plagiarism is very common amongst today’s students. I see other evidence of it too, sometimes. Occasionally, someone searches with an extended quote from one of my essays, and arrives on my blog. I assume this to be a teacher checking whether an essay is plagiarized or not...for how else did they get a hold of an extensive quote from my writing?

Today’s example was a classic. A person searched from Mongolia, in Asia, with the search terms “Mongolian laziness essay”! Just think about the most likely interpretation for what is happening here. This searcher is probably a student, from Mongolian, who had been tasked to write an essay about Mongolian laziness. I assume this to mean that their teacher had identified them as lazy and required them to write an essay on laziness, as it applied to Mongolians, as some kind of punishment. So, it is a stroke of genius order laziness for that student to then search the Internet for an essay on Mongolian laziness, to steal! I mean, how lazy can you get, than getting someone else to write about laziness, when that is your own task?

What is, perhaps, funniest of all, is the page they arrived on. It was an essay on Mongolian laziness. In fact, it was an account of my experience of teaching one of the laziest students I have ever encountered – and the ways he dealt with the tasks I set him. Given these two experiences, I am left to wonder if Mongolia has a problem with laziness, as a cultural issue. If anyone knows more about this, please comment below.

On a more serious note, it is a worry that so many students, these days, are using the Internet to answer their school essays for them. This speaks of a generation too lazy to learn to use their own minds. Any child who grows up doing this, instead of actually writing the set tasks, will never learn to write or express themselves in written form, in any way at all. They will become incapable adults. Not only that, but not having learnt to exercise their minds in disciplined thought – which they will have avoided – they will probably be quite dim, as well. It doesn’t bode well for the future world they shall be tasked with creating – along with the rest of their often ill-equipped generation. It seems likely that people who are now middle aged, will see a real decline in the level of discourse in the world, by the time they reach old age. Quite simply, many people will not be capable of complex discourse in any verbal form, at all. Another thought occurs to me. If the common man, is poor at dealing with words, one might have thought that the few who were truly literate would be prized – but I think it likely that the opposite will be true. When the average man is too verbally dumb to appreciate the output of the verbally bright, the writings of the best writers will be even less appreciated than they are today. It takes an educated and well informed audience, to receive well the thoughts of the best writers. The reader needs to be a sufficiently erudite companion to the writer, for the relationship to work well. Sadly, the younger generation today, in so many parts of the world, are not cultivating high verbal skills. So, they will become people unable to appreciate or enjoy them in those who do so equip themselves. Basically, the future promises to be a philistine one. I wonder whether Mankind will be able to pull itself up from that now seemingly inevitable precipice? The search terms of my innumerable plagiaristic searchers, is not an encouraging sign as to our probable shared future. I suppose this is what the beginning of the ends of Empires and civilizations looks like: a decline in the quality of the people being a first and troubling sign. It won’t be that far in the future, when such people are unable to manage the culture they have inherited. After that, the process of forgetting will begin. Soon, all will be gone.

It all begins with students too lazy to think their own thoughts and write their own essays. The Internet is full of them. In fact, that is what many students think the Internet is for: doing their homework for them. Some advice: if you see signs in your child that they are pilfering off the net, cut them off. Force them to write their work on their own. It will be the best stimulus to their mental growth you could ever invent.

I am left with one final dilemma: do I publish the offending student’s IP address to reveal what he or she has done...or do I not? What do you think?

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Air: Ainan's first word.

Now, I realize that the word is confusing, but Ainan’s first word was “Air”. This is not the stuff you breathe, but is, in fact, the Malay for water. Now, to an English speaking ear, or at least my ear, it seems to be pronounced “Eye – Ay”, or “Ayer”. I have referred to it variously as either of those terms, in my writings, because, if I referred to it as “Air” EVERYONE who was English, would misunderstand which word was being referred to and would get the pronunciation wrong.

Ainan began saying Air (water) whenever he was thirsty, from just two weeks old. Now, I have been attacked a lot, on the Internet, by often quite dumb people, for revealing this. They don’t believe it. Well, that is their problem since Ainan’s early speech was witnessed by a lot of people – since we have a large family and plenty of friends. Why, on Earth, would a large group of people decide to make something up like that? There is no reason to do so. Ainan spoke from a couple of weeks old, words in context and with meaning. It was clear that the words had the intended meaning because when we met the interpreted need, for instance, by giving him a drink, whenever he said “Air”, he would STOP SAYING THE WORD. This is rather clear proof that the word had the intended meaning.

His second word, at a few weeks old, was “poo”, which he would say whenever his nappy needed changing. He would say it repeatedly, in a long, slow drawn out way, “Poooooooooo!”, many times, until we checked his nappies and found it to be the case that he needed changing. Only then would he stop saying it.

Ainan is the way he is and was the way he was. There is no doubt about his early speech, his early crawling, walking, running, reading, or anything else. It just was. If anyone doubts us, then the problem is in their own mind and doesn’t exist in the real world. In the real world, Ainan is at University, doing sciences, at 11. He started tertiary education at 8. So, how would the conspiracy nuts explain that one? Did that not happen either? Perhaps they should start reading the newspapers more regularly. For me, the doubters seem utterly bonkers, because all the evidence, from a very large number of witnesses, is against them. Yet, they, who have never met Ainan, and know nothing about him, firsthand, think they know better. Such people are the definition of insane, of course.

“MrTrueGenius” pointed my way to a conversation on Youtube, with one of these nutters. This particular nutter “visioninScience”, thinks that Ainan’s first word was not a word because the spelling of “Air” differs from “Ayer”. He or she is too dumb to realize that I was trying to render the pronunciation, somewhat phonetically, in the spelled word, so that an English person would understand how it was said. What is most odd is that this person concedes that “Air” is pronounced “Ayer” in English, but doesn’t even realize that that is what I was trying to convey. Dumb.

I would like to thank MrTrueGenius (YouTube account name) for notifying me of the exchange on Youtube, regarding one of the videos that references Ainan. Personally, I find the ignorant attempts to diminish Ainan, from people who know nothing about him, very tiring. I wonder at their motivation and their reasoning: since they know nothing, how can they presume to pretend to know what they cannot? It is all quite bizarre – but does show that some people prefer their own private doubt-filled fantasies, to multiply verified reality. I am moved to ask, inevitably: what is the nature of a person who prefers private fantasies, to observable reality? Mad. That is right...to be a doubter, now, after so many publicly disclosed achievements by Ainan, is to be nothing more or less than a madman.

Just to make the point clear to all those confused out there. Ainan’s first word was “Air”. To communicate it, at various times, I have used different spellings to convey the sound.

Air = “Ayer” = “Eye-Ay” = Water.

I hope that is understood.

Thanks.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Of beauty and ugliness.

There is a beauty in the apt expression of words. There is a beauty too, in an honest description of childhood - for in a child's mind, much is still beautiful that, by adulthood, seems no longer. I have tried to write of the beauty of the child's world, through my daily glimpses of it, in my own sons. I have tried also to choose words which, though simple, are beautiful in themselves, for how they capture that world.

So, I have been striving to embody some of this beauty, that I see, daily, in my life, on these electronic pages. To some extent, I am sure that I have succeeded - for some of my posts have captured some of the daily wonders that I encounter. It is true, however, that, at other times, I have failed to fully reflect the beauty that I see: my words do not come close to embodying those moments that are most precious - yet, at least, I have tried. Something of those times will, thus, remain for future contemplation.

Now, on the one hand we have my own striving to capture beauty - but on the other hand, I have seen much ugliness on the internet. There are truly a vast horde of stupid, jealous, spiteful people out there in the world. In particular, quite a few of them seem to come from Singapore. I say this because, on the odd forum, here and there, I have seen the most unpleasant of comments, coming from people who almost always have Chinese names, and use terms such as Ang Moh...they also have Singlish phrasing, so I can conclude that they are Singaporean. More than a few of their remarks are highly insulting about me, or members of my family - and, this is what gets me most, THEIR INFORMATION IS ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG. Yet, they spew their spite, and justify their erroneous views with what amounts to lies, on the internet. Oddly, I have seen this kind of behaviour from two nationalities only: Singaporeans, and Americans. The Americans seem to be doing so out of an extreme sense of competitiveness (ie. your son can't possibly be brighter than my son and I am going to do my damndest to prove it...). The Singaporeans are often doing it out of sinocentric racism. It is quite sad to watch what they do, online, to one of their own citizens. Yet, they don't see Ainan as a Singaporean - they see him as a MALAY...and so they feel apart from him. They think him "OTHER" and therefore unworthy of the fellow feeling that citizens of most countries, show to their fellow citizens. Singapore is a country in which anyone who is non-Chinese is never fully integrated, never fully accepted, by the majority (who are, I might point out, Chinese themselves). Indeed, the way the Chinese forum commenters treated our family is one of the big reasons we decided to leave Singapore. There was just no way that I was going to bring my family up in a country which had so much hate of its own people. Why should I subject them to daily racism, when I can easily find another country that will treat them as one of their own? So, we did...

Anyway, for me, the internet is a place of contrasts, therefore. I am making my own personal efforts to create something of lasting beauty - my thoughts on my children's childhood as they grow up - amidst a world of public arenas that are anything but beautiful. It is a strange contrast. You see the medium that allows me to attempt to express the beauty that I see, daily, is also the medium that allows these antagonists to spew their hate, their envy, their misunderstandings and their, lets be blunt, racism.

It is my hope that the beauty that I succeed in capturing, on these virtual pages, will outshine the ugliness that is found, all over the internet. Personally, I would rather a world that did not have such people in it, as I have seen writing rubbish on the net. Their minds are too crude, too uninformed, too dim and too nasty, to be allowed access to the public arena. Yet, there they are. Would it not be a better world were they not to exist? I can't help but feel that they would vanish, if they were readily identifiable on the net. My thoughts, therefore, again turn to the idea of anonymity on the net. I don't feel there should be any. Were everybody to be immediately identifiable, people such as I have seen, would not dare to write the things they do, lest they face libel charges, or other consequences. A net without anonymity would be a much better one, I think.

In the meantime, I hope my words have more power than theirs; that my thoughts have more readers than theirs - that my readers are able to distinguish truth from lies; beauty from ugliness.

Thank you for reading.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 6 and Tiarnan, 4, this month, please go to:
http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at: http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/
Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm/3305973/
Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/


Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is at http://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)