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
Continue readingTag: Mind Space
Things Are Good: Vogue Wants Woman Who Look Real, not Girls
Vogue, a fashion magazine, has decided to only show women older than 16 and women who don’t appear to have an eating disorder. This may sound odd that they would have used young girls with eating disorders in the past, but at least they are paving the way forward for
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Better Approach Than Zero Tolerance in Schools
A school in Walla Walla was essentially a dumping ground for all the students deemed to have behavioural problems and their explosion rate was through the roof. This all changed when a principal ditched the atrocious zero tolerance policy that the school was using (many schools in North America punish
Continue readingThings Are Good: MIT and Harvard to Launch Full Free Courses Online
This is a really cool way to bring post-secondary education to more people via the internet. Harvard and MIT are launching a new initiative built upon MIT’s expertise in online course delivery to launch a new project called edX that’ll give unbridled access to the knowledge in the two acclaimed
Continue readingThings Are Good: Eat Fruit to Judge Intelligence
Meat eaters are really good at denying the intelligence of other living beings according to a new study. When people were told to eat fruit their assessment of an animal’s intelligence was higher, with meat eating people they denied that the animal could be intelligent. In a study that excluded
Continue readingThings Are Good: Play Tetris to Reduce Traumatic Flashbacks
Playing games is tons of fun and enterprising people are finding ways to better humanity through gameplay. I just found out that Tetris can be used to help people deal with traumatic experiences – cool! Research tells us that there is a period of up to six hours after the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kids Should Fail
A prevailing attitude in North American schools is that students shouldn’t be able to fail, but really what better place than a school to learn from mistakes? Thankfully people are noticing that letting kids not excel at something is actually a good thing. Interestingly, it’s in the world of games
Continue readingThings Are Good: Economy Down, Happiness Up
It seems like the world has its own life-work balance and thanks to the fact that we’re (on average) working less we are happier! The second conclusion challenges the received notions of mankind’s moods. A tenet of political science is that happiness levels rise with wealth and then plateau, usually
Continue readingThings Are Good: More Happiness by Having Fewer Things
Here’s a quick, short, and inspiring TED Talk from the founder of TreeHugger about getting rid of material things can bring happiness to your life.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Time + Money ≠ Happiness
Trying to make a decision about your life and how to spend the time you have? Well don’t thinking about spending time, in fact don’t let the idea of money- as-time factor into your decision at all. Professor DeVoe and PhD student Julian House based their conclusions on three experiments.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Why You Should Talk to Yourself
Talking to yourself is a good way to reason through problems, so there’s no reason to feel awkward about your big debates you have with yourself while walking down the street. At least according to some new research from a few universities. This new research in questions stems from Talking
Continue readingThings Are Good: How to be Happier at Work (and beyond)
Here’s a fun TED Talk on happiness and how we can better achieve at as individuals and as a society.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Function Better in Your Old Age by Playing Music
Admit it: you’ve always wanted to play guitar, or perhaps, you’ve been meaning to pick it up again. Either way, you should! New research has found that people with musical training on any instrument were able to certain task better in their old age when compared to non-musicians. So pick
Continue readingThings Are Good: Female Politicians Inspire Young Women
A new study from MIT has concluded that female politicians boosts aspirations, educational achievement of young women. There have been a few international initiatives that look to improve the world by empowering women and now we know that getting more women into politics actually does make the world better! Based
Continue readingThings Are Good: Why We Went Down Yesterday
Yesterday you probably noticed that most of your favourite websites were down yesterday or had a notice up warning you about two bills in front of the American government. Those bills are SOPA and PIPA and essentially if these bills pass the internet would be all but dead to American
Continue readingThings Are Good: How do We Define Life?
Most of the news that gets covered here is related to new discoveries and good events happening around the world, but sometimes we need to take a step back from those discoveries and think deeper about what it all means. Recently NASA launched its most ambitious mission to Mars and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Want Good Grades? Go Run Around!
There is strong evidence that physical activity and good grades at school are directly connected. It’s a good idea to let kids go outside and just run around! “The findings of one high-quality intervention study and one high-quality observational study suggest that being more physically active is positively related to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Canadians Like the Occupy Movement
Even the right-leaning Canadian press can’t disagree that the Occupy Movement is a positive thing in and of itself. A new poll reveals that almost 60% of Canadians view the movement in a positive light, while some others tend to have problems because it is “leaderless”.
It’s great to see Canadians (who have not suffered […]
Things Are Good: UforChange: Culture for a Better World
UforChange is all about using art and culture to make the world a better place! They focus on St. Jamestown in Toronto and have had great success engaging their community through participating in art projects that make the neighbourhood more welcoming and a great place to be.
UFORCHANGE: Creative Culture,Better World from Mad Ruk Entertainment on […]
Continue readingThings Are Good: Guest Post: Review of an Artobiography
After reading Tina Collen’s book Storm of the I: An Artobiography
(Art Review Press, 2009), I am left with a delightful and very real sense of the value of simplicity.
Collen’s creative memoir takes us from her childhood and youth in New York and her relationship with her family, to her life in Aspen with her […]