Sunday, March 28, 2010 Cancelling School Due to Good Weather  The principal of Bellingham Christian School canceled classes at the private school today because it's too nice out. "Good morning students, parents and staff. Yes, It's a Sun Day! Wahooo," Sampson wrote on a page on the school's Web site. The page also features a picture of him giving a thumbs-up from the seat of his year-old Suzuki 450 motorcycle. "That's right, school is CANCELLED today due to good weather! Enjoy!" Read More >>
back to top  Saturday, March 27, 2010 Africa's Gift to Silicon Valley  After Kenya's disputed election in 2007, violence erupted. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, Ory Okolloh, who was based in South Africa but had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election, received threats about her work and returned to South Africa. She posted online the idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people anonymously to report violence and other misdeeds. Technology whizzes saw her post and built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend. The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on a map, using the locations given by informants. It collected more testimony -- which is what ushahidi means in Swahili -- with greater rapidity than any reporter or election monitor. Read More >>
back to top Friday, March 26, 2010 An Artist Who Photographs Weeds  For Doug Burgess, weeds are constant companions. As a kid, Doug was given the task of removing weeds from the front lawn, but his task extended through his teen-age years and beyond. "As a middling bureaucrat," he writes, "I often pulled weeds as a form of therapy." He adds that after more than a half-century of weeding, he still did not have a single weed-free patch to show for his efforts. Finally, Doug -- as he put it -- "went over to the dark side" by moving to a neighborhood where no one worries about weeds. Now he names the weeds he finds in his yard and follows their life-cycle. And he photographs them. Meet an artist named Doug Burgess. Read More >>
back to top Thursday, March 25, 2010 Happiness At Work  He teaches them to be grateful and he wants them to meditate. But Prof. Srikumar Rao's isn't a spiritual teacher: he teaches at some of the world's top business schools! In his gentle voice, he asks his students to stop living in a "me centered" world and start living in an "other centered" one. At a conference in Copenhagen, he spoke of breaking free of the "I'd be happy if ..." mental model, and embrace our hard-wired happiness. Read More >>
back to top Wednesday, March 24, 2010 From Mansion to Mud Hut  Most of us would dig deep in our pockets to donate to a good cause, but how many of us would sacrifice everything? Wealthy businessman Jon Pedley is about to do just that. The 41 year-old is selling his comfortable home, successful consulting business, and top-of-the-line car to kick-off a service-immersion program in rural Uganda. The hope is to improve the community's health, water, and education facilities while giving troubled teens and young adults the opportunity to serve. Read on to learn about the transformation and dreams of a recovering alcoholic who previously described his life as "totally and utterly self-centered". Read More >>
back to top Tuesday, March 23, 2010 Free Farm Stand  "I'm a simple person," says a man who goes by the name Tree. "We're going to grow food here, and then we're going to give it away to people who need it." On a 1/3 acre lot in San Francisco, known unofficially as the Free Farm, volunteers cultivate the land and its given freely to anyone who wants it. Since 2008, Tree has donated more than 6,000 pounds of food on Sunday mornings. Read More >>
back to top Monday, March 22, 2010 Good News Travels Faster Than Bad?  Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news, but they've had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. More recently, though, researchers at Penn dived deep into the archives of NY Times articles and found a surprising result -- good news travels faster than bad. "If I've just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means," Dr. Jonah Berger said. Read More >>
back to top | 
0 comments:
Post a Comment