Exploring Life: Web Clips

So why is there not more progress towards working at home? I think that the answer is culture. We have confused attendance and physical control with being productive.

via Robert Paterson’s Weblog: Telecommuting – One of the Best Responses to this economy – Undress for Success THE best Guide for this.

We generally use the word “stress” when we feel that everything seems to have become too much – we are overloaded and wonder whether we really can cope with the pressures placed on us. Anything that poses a challenge or a threat to our well-being is a stress. Some stresses get you going and they are good for you – without any stress at all many say our lives would be boring and would probably feel pointless. However, when the stresses undermine both our mental and physical health they are bad. In this text we shall be focusing on stress that is bad for you.

via What Is Stress? What Causes Stress?.

The W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics (the Centre) is an interdisciplinary research unit within the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, at the University of British Columbia. The Centre was created in 1993 with endowments by W. Maurice Young (LLD) and the Bentall Foundation. The Centre’s affairs are managed by a Coordinating Committee representing faculty, students and research associates, chaired by the Director of the Centre.

The Centre’s approach to other UBC academic and research units follows from our position as an interdisciplinary academic centre, and from our mission to advance the research agenda of applied ethics. A number of departments — including Animal Welfare, Resource Management and Environmental Studies, Nursing and Philosophy — have contributed outstanding students to the Centre, while our research and teaching/supervision now ties us to Medical Genetics, Law, Political Science, Journalism, Forestry, Botany and Computing Sciences. These relationships and the products of our collaborations place the Centre at the forefront of the movement to create “transdisciplinary” research.

via The W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics | Home page.

The Creative Nonfiction Foundation pursues educational and publishing initiatives in the genre of literary nonfiction. Its objectives are to provide a venue, the journal Creative Nonfiction, for high quality nonfiction prose (memoir, literary journalism, personal essay); to serve as the singular strongest voice of the genre, defining the ethics and parameters of the field; and to broaden the genre's impact in the literary arena by providing an array of educational services and publishing activities.

via Creative Nonfiction.

Lee Gutkind is the founding editor of Creative Nonfiction and prize-winning author or editor of more than a dozen books, the most recent of which, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As founder of the creative nonfiction movement, according to Harper's Magazine, and the “godfather behind creative nonfiction” (Vanity Fair), Gutkind travels widely throughout the world giving workshops and readings, explaining the craft and the mission of the genre.

via Lee Gutkind – What’s New.

When self publishing a book or e-book there are many steps to consider. The Internet contains a wealth of information to help the author. Here are some helpful sites.

via Ten Websites Important to Self-Publishing Author: Valuable Publishing Information on the Internet for Writer & Author.

Therefore, an annotated bibliography includes a summary and/or evaluation of each of the sources. Depending on your project or the assignment, your annotations may do one or more of the following:

* Summarize: Some annotations merely summarize the source. What are the main arguments? What is the point of this book or article? What topics are covered? If someone asked what this article/book is about, what would you say? The length of your annotations will determine how detailed your summary is.

For more help, see our handout on paraphrasing sources.

* Assess: After summarizing a source, it may be helpful to evaluate it. Is it a useful source? How does it compare with other sources in your bibliography? Is the information reliable? Is this source biased or objective? What is the goal of this source?

For more help, see our handouts on evaluating resources.

* Reflect: Once you've summarized and assessed a source, you need to ask how it fits into your research. Was this source helpful to you? How does it help you shape your argument? How can you use this source in your research project? Has it changed how you think about your topic?

via Annotated Bibliographies – The OWL at Purdue.

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings…

via Everything is Waiting for You — David Whyte.

At the very core of creativity there seems to be an admonition that says, “Your own way is essential.” This is true even in a traditional master-student relationship. The word “expert” seems to be like a fog in which we lose ourselves. We feel our lack before we have done the essential work of touching our own inner longing, in other words, we put the cart before the horse. Creativity has much more to do with giving ourselves over to our deepest longings than it does with giving ourselves over to any kind of strategy.

via MenWeb – Men’s Issues: Poetry and Personal Passion by David Whyte.

The Center For Naturalism provides extensive resources for those interested in scientific naturalism, its implications and applications.

via The Center for Naturalism.

Maybe you don't want to spend all that time taking classes in obscure subjects while hoping to find your calling and piling up student loan debt. Maybe you don't really care so much about college. You just want to work and make money.

You can do it, but there aren't many fields where it happens very often. In our list of 14 potentially six-figure jobs that don't require a four-year diploma, only two have a median wage of above US$100,000. For the rest, you'll have to be in the top 10 per cent of earners, and even then you may find yourself working 50 to 60 hours a week.

“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed,” wrote William Burroughs, in his 1992 Painting & Guns. (Painting & Guns … oh, what a brilliant title for a book!) He continues: “An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation’. Creative viewing.”

via American Ethnography | This, upon reading The Americans.

What, then, does this say about societies (and occupations / professions) that concentrate on the material and external, on “training” rather than “education”?

Nathaniel finishes his post with a plea for “creativity” as a core quality of military genius; “creativity” in the sense of not being controlled by past actions, but being able to improvise as the current situation demands. I have to agree with him and, further, extend this out to leadership in general.

Over the years, I have worked with a number of people who claimed to be leaders – most of them were leaders only in the sense of seeing which way the mob was running, pushing to the front and yelling “Follow me!” True leaders are much rarer in my experience, but of the ones I have encountered, they all had a core quality of “creativity” guided, but not throttled, by their training.

The other common quality I have noticed about them is that they all use the term “discipline” in its 19th century sense – a technology or collection of techniques that allows you to focus on a problem set. Furthermore, they all consider that mastery of a discipline is crucial to get you to the point where you can “improvise” well.

via » Leadership, “genius” and creativity In Harmonium: Being in the main the musings of a Symbolic Anthropologist.

Boosting Creativity and Innovation in Europe: Official launch of the European Year 2009 in Prague

The Czech Presidency of the EU and European Commission launched on Wednesday the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 with the slogan “Imagine. Create. Innovate”. The Year was inaugurated in a ceremony in Prague by the Commission President José Manuel Barroso and the Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek. The aim of the Year is to promote creative and innovative approaches in different sectors of human activity and help equip the European Union for the challenges ahead in a globalised…

via About the Year EN - European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 – EUROPA.

* Publishes free downloadable interviews with leading health authors, doctors and researchers.

* Publishes more than 7,000 free articles containing health strategies and warnings about dangerous foods and drugs.

* Created the Honest Food Guide (HonestFoodGuide.org) and made it available absolutely free as a downloadable PDF file.

* Is one of the few true honest voices in health, nutrition and medicine. It’s where you’ll learn the truth about health, not the politically influenced version promoted by the government or the press.

via Books on natural health, nutrition, appetite suppression and disease prevention.

A Call for Slow Writing

By Lindsay Waters

What will it take to make essays the standard of achievement once again in the scholarly world? This is not where we are: Books are the gold standard for tenure in most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, so much so that journal articles almost don’t even count. As august a figure as Helen Vendler assured me recently that essays could never replace books as a basis for tenuring junior colleagues. So, in departments of English as on Wall Street, counting is all that counts. “It’s the bottom line, stupid.” Countability is the thing whereby you’ll catch the conscience of the dean, as a friend of Hamlet might advise the young Danish assistant professor or the young Shakespeare scholar. Articles don’t make a thumping sound when you drop them on a table the way a body might in Six Feet Under.

via A Call for Slow Writing :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education’s Source for News, Views and Jobs.

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.”

via Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

FIGHTING POVERTY TO BUILD PEACE

1. Once again, as the new year begins, I want to extend good wishes for peace to people everywhere. With this Message I would like to propose a reflection on the theme: Fighting Poverty to Build Peace. Back in 1993, my venerable Predecessor Pope John Paul II, in his Message for the World Day of Peace that year, drew attention to the negative repercussions for peace when entire populations live in poverty. Poverty is often a contributory factor or a compounding element in conflicts, including armed ones. In turn, these conflicts fuel further tragic situations of poverty. “Our world”, he wrote, “shows increasing evidence of another grave threat to peace: many individuals and indeed whole peoples are living today in conditions of extreme poverty. The gap between rich and poor has become more marked, even in the most economically developed nations. This is a problem which the conscience of humanity cannot ignore, since the conditions in which a great number of people are living are an insult to their innate dignity and as a result are a threat to the authentic and harmonious progress of the world community” [1].

2. In this context, fighting poverty requires attentive consideration of the complex phenomenon of globalization. This is important from a methodological standpoint, because it suggests drawing upon the fruits of economic and sociological research into the many different aspects of poverty. Yet the reference to globalization should also alert us to the spiritual and moral implications of the question, urging us, in our dealings with the poor, to set out from the clear recognition that we all share in a single divine plan: we are called to form one family in which all – individuals, peoples and nations – model their behaviour according to the principles of fraternity and responsibility.

via Message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace 2009.

Religion may have evolved because of its ability to help people exercise self-control (12/31/2008)

Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups. This, in turn, might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.

Economic Pain Not Spread Equally | Martin Prosperity Institute

Economic Pain Not Spread Equally
December 10, 2008

If a recession hits Ontario, as many think is already the case, will its turbulence affect all of us in the same way? Not if past history is a guide.

Martin Prosperity Institute researchers using the definition initially introduced in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class have examined century-long trends in employment in four major economic classes of workers:

* Creative class – High autonomy occupations where workers are paid to think (e.g., artists, doctors, nurses, senior managers, architects).
* Service class – Low autonomy occupations in the service sector (e.g., food service workers, janitors, grounds keepers, secretaries, clerks).
* Working class – Occupations that depend highly on physical skills and repetitive tasks. (e.g., construction trades, mechanics, crane operators, assembly line workers).
* Farming/forestry/fishing class – Occupations specific to the farming/forestry/fishing industries.

These distinctions are different from the usual industry classifications. Somebody may be working in the automotive industry but is not necessarily working on the assembly line in a working class occupation. In fact, about a third of employees in Ontario’s manufacturing industries are in the creative or service class.

Creative Class » Blog Archive » Talent, Creativity, and the Crisis – Creative Class

Richard Florida, author of “Who’s Your City?” and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, sees the gravitational pull away from Wall Street and toward more creative industries as part of a necessary economic recalibration. “The economy couldn’t survive on speculation and what really amounted to advanced financial alchemy,” he said. “We are now realizing it is our human creativity that is our real capital. “The economic downturn is going to free up top talent to do other things that are going to change the metabolism of cities like New York in a very good way.”

Mr. Gatter said that many of his colleagues at the bank commended his choice to leave, telling him that they also nursed ambitions to be chefs, photographers, writers and artists. “Everyone seems to have something else they would rather be doing than their 9-to-5,” he said. “I think that people who are losing their jobs are being forced to pursue their dreams and, in a way, are being liberated from the golden handcuffs of Wall Street and venturing into something that might fulfill them.”

Pension Funds Collapse: The End of Retirement?

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Unless things change fast, human history will show that the phenomenon of “retirement” was limited to one generation. After World War II, when European and Japanese economies stood in tatters, American capitalism could fulfill “the American dream,” since there was little foreign competition to speak of. For the first time ever, workers were promised that — after working thirty or so years — they would be able to securely retire. That was largely the case … for one generation.

The second generation is having a devastating reality check. 2008 was supposed to be a watershed year for retirement: it was the first year that the baby-boomers turned 62, and the retirement frenzy was to begin (since people could begin to draw on their social security benefits). Early in the year, however, a study was conducted that found one-fourth of these boomers were delaying retirement (only the baby-boomers who were actually able to plan for retirement were studied). The economy has since nosedived, and many more retirements are being delayed. The unfortunate reality is that many who planned on retiring will work until the grave, joining the millions of other baby-boomers who never had such dreams.

The experts are calling this the “perfect storm” for retirement. Everything that could go wrong is in fact going wrong. This storm, however, was not created by supernatural forces, but the coordinated effort of big-business and their puppet politicians.

Joseph Campbell Foundation

This site is a hub of sorts – people of all walks and nationalities and a world of different interests arrive here seeking to learn more about the words and ideas of Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey, and mythology in general.

Our Associates – people like you who have a desire to learn and grow – represent the world of humanity: they are students, teachers, authors, filmmakers, artists, computer programmers, tour guides, grandmothers, retirees… seekers of every make and model.

Make yourself at home and get to know the thousands of other folks who make this a regular stop on their virtual journeys. We’d like to know your comments on the design of our new site. It is growing constantly as we add more resources, more events, more of everything.

http://www.jcf.org/new/images/logos/logo_header_left.png

RandyPauschInformation

Randy Pausch’s Update page

In Sept. of 2006, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Thanks to everyone who has done so much to help me and my family.

PsyBlog: Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted

In reality, people frequently don’t know what they want and psychology has proved it. That’s why career planning, or at the very least just deciding what you’re going to do next, is so unpleasant. It’s no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. There seem to be so many different options, each with myriad branching possibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but all equally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it is no wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know and follows in parental footsteps. But we don’t all want to trust the tried and tested, whether for good reasons or bad. We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.