Good news from the largest estuary in the United States:
The Chesapeake Bay’s beleaguered oyster population spawned a bumper crop of babies last year, Maryland officials announced Monday, and there are signs that the diseases that have ravaged the bay’s bivalves for more than two decades might have loosened their stranglehold.
A year ago, an earthquake in southern Chile devastated towns, flattening fire stations and equipment that could have been used in the rescue efforts.
An Illinois pastor, who was in the locality working at the time, wanted to help the fire departments rebuild and to ensure they were better prepared to help in the event of another catastrophe.
He mobilized 10 Chicago-area firefighters who next week will pack their bags and travel to the South American country to train about 100 firefighters, bringing along discarded but usable firefighting gear.
(READ the story in the Chicago Tribune)
Sensing a mid-life crisis, a successful 35-year-old Japanese businessman quit his job believing it was time to do something positive with his life, instead of just making money. He turned to what he loved most, storytelling — and especially manga (or anime), the graphic comic book novels popularized by animators in his country. Today, he uses manga, normally the medium for superheroes, to tell tales of real life heroes, such as the Dalai Lama and Ghandi, in a modern quest create positive change within young people and society.
Now 40, Eiji Han Shimizu remembers how anime shaped his values growing up in Japan, instilling determination, compassion, a craving for social justice and an ability for dreaming big. Believing in the power and potential of manga for good, he set out to show how actual heroes like Mother Theresa and Che Guevarra lived their lives, and how these leaders think.
With the backing of Penguin Books, the biographical mangas created by Shimizu’s company, Emotional Content, have been released in 20 countries and translated into Chinese, Spanish, Tibetan, Russian, and Hindi.
Most exciting for him in 2010, the Dalai Lama book was distributed as a textbook among the Tibetan refugee children in India and Nepal for the teaching of history and language. On a visit to Dhramsala, the home for His Holiness and the Tibetan government in exile, the ministry of Education told Shimizu that all Tibetan schools (more than 60 schools) adopted its use for their curriculum.
Penguin Books published two manga biographies in English last year that featured the Dalai Lama and Che Guevarra. The huge publishing house is planning two more English adaptations — one about Mahatma Gandhi and another about Mother Teresa. Also in the works are manga based on the lives of Aung San Suu Kyi, Abraham Lincoln, and Anne Frank.
Shimizu earned his MBA at the University of Miami and joined Sun Microsystems, Inc., before returning to Japan to specialize in business development.
When he decided to make the leap to media, he wasn’t sure what kind of inspiring manga to create, whether to interpret the classics such as Shakespeare, Dickens or Dostoyevsky, or focus on great athletes. The answer came during a pilgrimage to Mother Teresa’s home for the dying and destitute in Calcutta.
“(There), I vividly felt Mother Teresa’s presence, where hundreds of volunteers from around the world serve with the poorest of the poor. It became clear that, first and foremost, I wanted to make manga about the spiritual and political leaders who changed the world for the better,” says Shimizu in a featured interview with CNN.
Filmmaking is also a keen interest for him. He is working now with animation artists — and trying to secure funding — to create an animation series called, North, exploring the hardship and atrocities experienced in North Korea from the point of view of a young man repatriated with his Japanese-Korean family.
He spent five years producing the documentary, “Happy” (see Good News Network story), collecting interviews from experts and citizens around the world about what makes humans happy.
Surely, Eiji knows the answer for himself is doing what you love.
(READ more of the feature story from CNN International)
Sensing a mid-life crisis, a successful 35-year-old Japanese businessman quit his job believing it was time to do something positive with his life, instead of just making money. He turned to what he loved most, storytelling — and especially manga (or anime), the graphic comic book novels popularized by animators in his country. Today, he uses manga, normally the medium for superheroes, to tell tales of real life heroes, such as the Dalai Lama and Ghandi, in a modern quest create positive change within young people and society.
Now 40, Eiji Han Shimizu remembers how anime shaped his values growing up in Japan, instilling determination, compassion, a craving for social justice and an ability for dreaming big. Believing in the power and potential of manga for good, he set out to show how actual heroes like Mother Theresa and Che Guevarra lived their lives, and how these leaders think.
Facebook’s privacy settings are extremely detailed, giving you the ability to fine-tune the privacy aspects of almost every little part of your Facebook account. Unfortunately, for most users, this level of micromanagement makes Facebook’s privacy settings a convoluted mess.
Here are 10 essential settings you should know about…
(READ the article at Mashable.com)
A lot of people want exchange their old AT&T iPhones for the new Verizon models.
Now, major retailers, such as Target and RadioShack, are buying back products from customers in-store and offering credit toward purchase of new products. The retailers are working with a handful of websites that hunt for used gadgets, including NextWorth, Gazelle and CExchange.
A Volkswagen commercial won high marks in last night’s Super Bowl parade of advertising. The ad features a young boy donning a Star Wars Darth Vader costume.
Determined to harness ‘the force’ to make objects move around the house, the faux villian gets a surprise after his father arrives home from work.
A Volkswagen commercial won high marks in last night’s Super Bowl parade of advertising. The ad features a young boy donning a Star Wars Darth Vader costume.
Determined to harness ‘the force’ to make objects move around the house, the faux villian gets a surprise after his father arrives home from work.
GNN fan Paul Wesselmann sent this story today about the pint-sized Darth Vader who appeared in a Volkswagen commercial during the Super Bowl and is now a big star.
Just when you thought the little guy couldn’t endear himself any more, he takes his mask off and reveals he is overcoming a congenital heart condition.
(May the Force be with him!)
(WATCH the video from CNN below)
Since his three tours in Iraq, a decorated Marine Corps infantry sergeant turned organic farmer has developed a six-week course in avocado agriculture for returning veterans who may want to build new careers in the farming movement.
He sees a similarity between the struggles of soldiers and farmers.
(READ the story in the Herald Tribune)
A charity ride led by cycling great Lance Armstrong has raised more than $125,000 for Queensland flood victims.
Armstrong and Australian riders Robbie McEwen and Alan Davis flew in to Brisbane two weeks ago to ride through the city’s streets, joined by more than 2,500 cyclists. (READ more from ABC News)
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Meanwhile, TV chef Jamie Oliver, who was planning to open a food center in March, sped up construction so he he could open early and offer free meals to 250 people a day who have been affected by the floods in Australia. (READ more in Queensland Times)
Change is hard. New Year’s resolutions almost always fail. But at The Energy Project, we have developed a way of making changes that has proved remarkably powerful and enduring, both in my own life and for the corporate clients to whom we teach it.
Our method is grounded in the recognition that human being are creatures of habit. Fully 95 percent of our behaviors are habitual, or occur in response to a strong external stimulus. Only 5 percent of our choices are consciously self-selected.
In 1911, the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead intuited what researchers would confirm nearly a century later. “It is a profoundly erroneous truism,” he wrote, “that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
Most of us wildly overvalue our will and discipline. Ingenious research by Roy Baumeister and others has demonstrated that our self-control is a severely limited resource that gets progressively depleted by every act of conscious self-regulation.
CHECK Out: 4 Quick Tips to Find—and Keep—Happiness
In order to make change that lasts, we must rely less on our prefrontal cortex, and more on co-opting the primitive parts of our brain in which habits are formed.
Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically
What follows are our six key steps to making change that lasts:
1. Be Highly Precise and Specific. Imagine a typical New Year’s resolution to “exercise regularly.” It’s a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you’re going to do on each of them.
Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular work out Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 30 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9 a.m.
Researchers call those “implementation intentions” and they dramatically increase your odds of success.
2. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I’ve established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes and then taking a break to spending 90 minutes talking with my wife about the previous week on Saturday mornings.
In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Even then, in some cases, it’s taken several tries before I was able to stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.
Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially.
3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than it turns out we can chew. Imagine that after doing no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances are high that you’ll find exercising that much so painful you’ll quit after a few sessions.
It’s also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at it. The problem is that you don’t feel any better for it after several weeks, and your motivation fades.
The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.
4. What we resist persists. Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they’re typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self control.
The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming emails while you’re working on an important project that deserves your full attention.
The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email, the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times, and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it’s to keep food you don’t want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do, the more successful you’re likely to be.
5. Competing Commitments. We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we’ve always done, even if it isn’t ultimately serving us well. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this “immunity to change.” Even the most passionate commitment to change, they’ve shown, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen “competing” commitment not to change.
Here’s a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you’re currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you.
For any change effort you launch, it’s key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself “How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?”
6. Keep the faith. Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will succeed, and probably without multiple failures.
Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working
Change is hard. New Year’s resolutions almost always fail. But at The Energy Project, we have developed a way of making changes that has proved remarkably powerful and enduring, both in my own life and for the corporate clients to whom we teach it.
Our method is grounded in the recognition that human being are creatures of habit. Fully 95 percent of our behaviors are habitual, or occur in response to a strong external stimulus. Only 5 percent of our choices are consciously self-selected.
After his brother was murdered by Hamas, Yuval Roth turned his loss into a way to promote peace. He and his organization, On the Road to Recovery, transport sick Palestinians into Israel so they can receive quality medical care.
Roth recruited 200 volunteers who have driven an estimated 90,000 kilometers (about 55,000 miles) in 2010 alone, helping hundreds of Palestinians get access to health care they would otherwise be unable to receive.
WATCH the video below, or read the story at CNN…
After his brother was murdered by Hamas, Yuval Roth turned his loss into a way to promote peace. He and his organization, On the Road to Recovery, transport sick Palestinians into Israel so they can receive quality medical care.
Roth recruited 200 volunteers who have driven an estimated 90,000 kilometers (about 55,000 miles) in 2010 alone, helping hundreds of Palestinians get access to health care they would otherwise be unable to receive.
Four foundations have provided Teach for America with $100 million in endowments to coincide with the group’s 20-year anniversary celebration this week. The fund will be used to create a reliable, long-term stream of revenue to fund Teach For America’s ongoing efforts to recruit, train, and develop transformational teachers for pre-K-12 education.
The unemployment rate is suddenly sinking at the fastest pace in a half-century, falling to 9 percent from 9.8 percent in just two months.
The steepest two-month decline in unemployment since the Eisenhower administration saw more than half a million people back to work in January.
In just 8-weeks, a program of mindfulness meditation was able to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, empathy and stress. A team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers documented that the structural changes in the brain were actually produced by the regular periods of focused attention during meditation, according to a study in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study’s senior author. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.
Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life.” says Britta Hölzel, PhD, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. “Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change.”
Amishi Jha, PhD, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, “These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an 8-week mindfulness training program but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amydala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR’s potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.” Jha was not one of the study investigators.
James Carmody, PhD, of the Center for Mindfulness at University of Massachusetts Medical School, is one of co-authors of the study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the British Broadcasting Company, and the Mind and Life Institute.
In just 8-weeks, a program of mindfulness meditation was able to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, empathy and stress. A team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers documented that the structural changes in the brain were actually produced by the regular periods of focused attention during meditation, according to a study in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study’s senior author. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
Seven teenage boys bullied him, beat him and recorded a video of the entire attack in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania in January.
The 13-year-old, Nadin Khoury, appeared on ABC’s The View Thursday to talk about the incident which led to the arrest of the seven older boys.
Near the end of his appearance, he was surprised by three special guests from the pro football team, the Philadelphia Eagles. The boy was moved to tears when the three Eagles arrived, DeSean Jackson, Todd Herremans and Jamaal Jackson.
