Author: Adam Clare

Start the Action Habit

I’ve been told that some habits are hard to break when referring to bad habits. Let’s reverse that and make a good habit hard to break. Fortunately the people over at Pick the Brain have a great article on the seven ways to grow the action habit.

They encourage people to take action to conquer many aspects of their lives. It’s an inspiring read, and after reading it I’m sure you’ll want to never break the action habit.

4. Use action to cure fear – Have you ever noticed that the most difficult part of public speaking is waiting for your turn to speak? Even professional speakers and actors experience pre-performance anxiety. Once they get started the fear disappears. Action is the best cure for fear. The most difficult time to take action is the very first time. After the ball is rolling, you’ll build confidence and things will keep getting easier. Kill fear by taking action and build on that confidence.

Facebook for Justice

Wal-Mart, the king of conspicuous consumption, has tried to open a group on Facebook only to find that people are well aware of the bad things Wal-Mart does. The good part of this story is that Wal-Mart is getting told by people what they actually think, and Wal-Mart’s being encouraged to take the battering.

I like seeing people use a social networking tool to argue against a corporation with a poor track record on nearly everything.

Cable to Research the Depths

While I’m in Vancouver, British Columbia, I want to find more good news coming from the west side of North America (I live in Toronto). To get the ball rolling, here’s a news report on how they are wiring the oceans to learn more about the depths of the seas. Some scientists are going to drop a huge cable to monitor ocean life via the internet.

“They are so important to our understanding of our planet and the understanding of the consequences of changes in our planet for our everyday lives.”

Taylor Neptune stands for North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments. Eventually the B.C. cable loop, which can support up to 700 sensors, will be joined by, and to, another loop in U.S waters, for a total of 3,000 kilometres of cabling covering most of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, the smallest of the major plates that make up the surface of the planet.

This Magazine

This Magazine is an excellent Canadian publication that simply states that “everything is political” which is something that I entirely agree with. They recently added Things Are Good to their blogroll, so I thought it was perfect opportunity to draw attention to this great Canadian magazine (sorry all you non-canucks, you can skip this post).

The This Magazine Blog is a must read if you’re at all interested in Canada. They cover almost everything from “media navel-gazing” to human rights.

Keep up the good work all those working at This Magazine!

Games as Outbreak Simulations

Two years ago a disease ravaged the country sides of the World of Warcraft, an online virtual world in which players have to interact with one another to solve problems. The virtual disease effectively ‘killed’ the players and now researchers are thinking that they can examine these virtual outbreaks and compare them to real-world scenarios because in both cases the outbreak is treated as real by the humans involved.

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.

“The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”

She acknowledged that a virtual setting might encourage riskier behaviour, but said this could be estimated and allowed for when drawing conclusions.