It has long been known that happiness depends on many different life circumstances.

Now scientists have developed a mathematical equation that can predict momentary delight.

They found that participants were happiest when they performed better than expected during a risk-reward task.

Brain scans also revealed that happiness scores correlated with areas known to be important for well-being.

The team says the equation, published in PNAS Journal, could be used to look at mood disorders and happiness on a mass scale. It could also help the UK government analyse statistics on well-being, which they have collected since 2010.

Arab artists tell stories to make sense of their conflicted world

Jul 19th 2014 | NEW YORK

ASK most American museum-goers, even avid ones, to name a prominent artist from the Arab world, and they will probably draw a blank. Now an ambitious show at the New Museum in the Bowery district of Manhattan aims to put that right. “Here and Elsewhere”, which opened on July 16th, does not propose to define Arabic art as a unified whole or even try to pin down a regional aesthetic. Instead, it presents more than 45 artists working in a wide range of media, who chronicle or bear witness to political and social change in the Middle East in all its heated confusion and messiness.

The exhibit borrows its title from a French film of the same name, “Ici et Ailleurs”, made by Jean-Luc Godard and his partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, about the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The project ran into trouble during filming in 1970, when King Hussein ordered the raiding of PLO camps in Jordan. Many of those who had been filmed were killed. Uncertain at first about how to proceed, Mr Godard and Ms Miéville decided to recast the unfinished work, mixing what they had shot with file footage, voice-over narration and written commentary. The New Museum takes that multi-pronged approach as its cue.

Creating a show covering such a vast region is hard. In 2006 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) across town was criticised for the limited scope of an exhibition on the Middle East, “Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking”. Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist living in exile whose work was exhibited in the show, was vocal about the curators’ failure to show how religion and politics inform an artist’s viewpoint.

Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s director of exhibitions (and curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale) has focused on reportage. His curators cast a wide net and contacted more than 800 artists as possible candidates. Many had never had their work shown in America.

Will Climate Change Lead to Conflict or Cooperation?

• by Joel Jaeger (United Nations)
• Monday, August 04, 2014
• Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 04 (IPS) - The headline of every article about the relationship between climate change and conflict should be "It's complicated," according to Clionadh Raleigh.

Abandoned villages

Director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Raleigh thinks that researchers and the media have put too simplistic a spin on the link between climate change and violence.3

clip: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131107-could-video-games-replace-exams

1. Do you believe that video games are good tools for educational purpose?

    Compared to conventional educational method, is there any new way to teach?   

2. What is your opinion on 12-year compulsory education? 

Just how much do you love your cat?

by JAMES CHAPMAN, Daily Mail

It could be the ultimate gesture of devotion for a treasured pet.

For £8,000, owners of cats with kidney disease are to be given the chance to extend their lives by giving them an organ transplant.

http://www.ted.com/talks/aj_jacobs_how_healthy_living_nearly_killed_me#

Q1 : If you have a chance to make a one-year project like this speaker, what will it be and how will you practice it?

Q2 : Have you ever successfully sticked to any plan, such as going on a diet, ahciving new year resolutions, saving money....?  Please share your experiences or useful tips with us.

source: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/why-is-internet-outrage-so-popular-91357483899.html

On the off chance you’re having trouble coming up with something to be outraged about, how about outrage itself?

That’s more or less what the always-entertaining writer Teddy Wayne did the other day in The New York Times, casting a critical eye on online outrage — the, loud, all-caps, hypercritical discourse that has come to be a routine feature of the World Wide Web. “Bile” is not new to Internet life, he conceded. But “the last few years have seen it crawl from under the shadowy bridges patrolled by anonymous trolls,” he argued, “and emerge into the sunshine of social media, where people proudly trumpet their ethical outrage.”

1. People. Planet. Purpose

2. Making the Future.

3. Marieke Hart. Co-founder of shareyourmeal.net The power of sharing

4. I believe in the power of sharing.

Shocking study: People would rather jolt

themselves than be alone with their thoughts

source:http://www.today.com/health/people-would-rather-shock-themselves-be-alone-their-thoughts-1D79883179

Maybe you can’t go to bed, or even the bathroom, without your phone. Or maybe you come home from work and immediately check email, turn on the TV or hit “play” on the stereo.

At 20 Amazon is bulking up. It is not—yet—slowing down

Jun 21st 2014 | PHOENIX AND SEATTLE | 

Source: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21604559-20-amazon-bulking-up-it-notyetslowing-down-relentlesscom

HIGH-TECH creation myths are expected to start with a garage. Amazon, impatient with ordinary from the outset, began with a road trip. In the summer of 1994 Jeff Bezos quit his job on Wall Street, flew to Fort Worth, Texas, with his wife MacKenzie and hired a car. While MacKenzie drove them towards the Pacific Northwest, Jeff sketched out a plan to set up a catalogue retailing business that would exploit the infant internet. The garage came later, in a suburb of Seattle, where he set up an office furnished with desks made from wooden doors. About a year later, Amazon sold its first book.

The world saw a website selling books and assumed that Amazon was, and always would be, an online bookshop. Mr Bezos, though, had bigger plans. Books were a good way into online retailing: once people learned to buy books online they would buy more and more other stuff, too. The website would be able to capture much more data about what they looked at and thus might want than any normal shop; if they reviewed things, that would enrich the experience for other shoppers. He saw a virtuous circle whereby low prices pulled in customers and merchants, which boosted volumes, which led to ever lower prices—a “flywheel” that would generate growth for as long as the company put the interests of the customers first. Early on, Mr Bezos registered “relentless.com” as a possible name; if it was a little lacking in touchy-feeliness, it captured the ambition nicely.