Adam Clare

An Extra 32 Minutes a Day for People in Greater Toronto

Your32 is an effort by CivicAction to promote a financially sustainable and more efficient transit solution for people living in the greater Toronto area (GTA). This project is a great way to engage the people in the GTA as the region is regressive when it comes to transportation, even going so far to remove bike lanes – the opposite of every other city of comparable size.

Your32 is promoting a region-wide plan that will improve transportation for everyone and echoes what other major cities are doing around the world.

Thereâ€™s a plan in place to dramatically improve transportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area â€“ one that could actually save you an average of 32 minutes on your daily commute. But it will take all of our support to help make it happen. Together, weâ€™ll make transportation in the region more efficient and connect people in ways never dreamed of before. With your help we can create a Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area thatâ€™s, well, greater than ever.

Find out more and contribute at Your32.com.

Bhutan to go 100% Organic

Bhutan is an amazing little country that has banned cigarettes and measures its success not through the backwards-looking GDP but by Gross National Happiness. In another step to be the one of the friendliest to the environment, the Asian nation has now pledged to produce and consume only organic food!

“We have developed a strategy that is step-by-step. We cannot go organic overnight,” Gyamtsho said, describing a policy and roadmap which were formally adopted by the government last year.

“We have identified crops for which we can go organic immediately and certain crops for which we will have to phase out the use of chemicals, for rice in certain valleys for example.”

Bhutan’s only competitor for the first “100 percent organic” title is the tiny self-governing island of Niue in the South Pacific, which has a population of only 1,300. It aims to reach its objective by 2015-2020.

Nadia Scialabba, a global specialist on organic farming at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, says the organic food market and its premium prices are attractive for small countries and territories.

“This is happening in very small countries who are not competitive on quantity, but they would like to be competitive in quality,” she told AFP.

The global organics market was estimated to be worth 44.5 billion euros (57 billion dollars) in 2010, according to figures from the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements.

We’re Helping the NotFound Project

Sadly, even in these modern times, children go missing and finding them can be difficult. The NotFound Project hopes to help find missing children by making use of 404 pages online. 404 pages refer to pages on a website that cannot be found, so it makes thematic sense to use that classification of page to find people.

You can see an example of this by clicking here.

If you have a website then you can help the project too!

The NotFound Project.

Change Your Stance to Change Your Attitude

In this TED talk Amy Cuddy explains that if you change how you stand, sit, or generally hold yourself you can change how you feel. As an added bonus, by posing yourself in certain ways you can make other people think of you differently.

A Phone Call to Diagnose Parkinson’s

About a week from now I’ll be running to fundraise for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s’ research. As a result of my participation, I’ve been researching Parkinson’s and found out that some enterprising researchers have discovered a simple way to diagnose the neurological disorder through a simple phone call.

“He came up to me and said, ‘Max, we’ve got vast amounts of data recorded from Parkinson’s disease patients and we really don’t know what to do with it. So perhaps your algorithms might be useful for analyzing this,'” Little remembers.

The recordings were voices of people both with and without Parkinson’s and Little’s algorithm sorted them. It was 86 percent accurate.

“And that’s when we thought ‘Ahh, okay, we got something here,'” Little says.