Two New Services to Exchange Things and Improve the World

Two similar services have sent me emails letting me know about their new startups and they both share something in common: they want you to make the world better by engaging with strangers. The way they encourage this is through web services that connect your skills with other people and you can barter, sell, or even give away anything you know.

They are worth looking at if you want to learn some cool new things or share some knowledge that you have!

Uniiverse was started in Toronto and focuses on exchanging everything from ideas to experiences and, to a lesser extent, material goods.

From Vancouver there is the new Troc-Exchange:

Vancouver has a large community of environmentally conscious people that take pride in their city. 50% of Troc-Exchange’s profits go to the Surfrider Foundation: an outreach program focused on reducing single use plastics to prevent themfrom entering our oceans. Surfrider Foundation also developed the Blue Water Task Force. This volunteer-run water testing program tests water samples from swimming beaches in the Vancouver area in hopes to create a safer place to play and live for future generations to come.

Etsy Encouraging More Women to Hack

The online craft marketplace Etsy has started funding a school that teaches people how to hack and use technology. That’s fine in itself, but what makes it good news noteworthy is that they are openly encouraging more women to get into the tech space and is having a positive impact.

After having one female student in all of its past three classes, the current batch at Hacker School now has 23 women out of 53 students, said co-founder Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock. That’s still under half of enrollment, but some 661 women applied for the summer program, with an enormous bump following Hedlund’s announcement. “If anything, the admissions standards went up,” Bergson-Shilcock said.

Etsy ended up raising its grant amount to $7,000 for 10 students, to allow for taxes, and signed on Yammer and 37signals to provide four more grants each, for a total of $126,000 offered for female students who asked for financial assistance.

Read more here.

Thanks Jen!

Australia Creates Largest Network of Marine Parks

Australia has taken a step in the right direction when it comes to protecting their natural environment. The country has announced that they’ll be creating the largest network of protected marine areas in the world. Fishing and drilling for non-renewable resources has been been banned inside the network.

The announcement of the network was made a week before more than 130 heads of state and government will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations’ sustainable development conference as part of global efforts to curb climate change, one of the biggest conferences in U.N. history.

New reserves will be established from the Perth Canyon in the southwest to Kangaroo Island off the southern coast, but the “jewel in the crown” will be the protection of the Coral Sea area which surrounds the Great Barrier Reef in the northeast, Environment Minister Tony Burke said on Thursday.

“The Coral Sea marine national park … combined with the Great Barrier Reef area, becomes the largest marine protected area in the world,” Burke said.

Read more here.

Daydreaming is Good for You

I’m a fan of daydreaming so finding out that it helps one process information and be more creative has made my day!

Here’s where things get interesting: those students assigned to the boring task performed far better when asked to come up with additional uses for everyday items to which they had already been exposed. Given new items, all the groups did the same. Given repeated items, the daydreamers came up with forty-one per cent more possibilities than students in the other conditions.

What does this mean? Schooler argues that it’s clear evidence that those twelve minutes of daydreaming allowed the subjects to invent additional possibilities, as their unconscious minds pondered new ways to make use of toothpicks. This is why the effect was limited to those items that the subjects had previously been asked about—the question needed to marinate in the mind, “incubating” in those subterranean parts of the brain we can barely control.

Read more.