sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” —Kahil Gibran Parents today are overwhelmed with demands on how to raise their kids. We want the very best for our kids. We want them to be smart, athletic, healthy, kind, happy, polite, disciplined, creative and more. We want to give them everything! And before everything, we focus on getting them into good schools so that they can have the best possible education. Kids on the other hand, are growing up bombarded by technology, needing to compete in every way, comparing themselves with others, trying to be perfect and please their parents, wanting to fit in. As a result, they are often anxious, stressed at a very... posted on Oct 15 2018 (40,227 reads)

overseas at the University of Manchester in the U.K.  I ended up getting that scholarship. I had twenty-seven thousand dollars to study anywhere in the world.  But I couldn't start until twelve months from then. So in the meantime, I planned to go work in a school in Bismarck.  Then at the last minute one of the most generous people I know, said, “Greg come and learn from me. Take a year; think of it as a leadership retreat.” There was a gentleman involved in technology who had done very, very well and was trying to redefine our downtown. So I started to work with him. I lived in the urban environment and I fell in love with Fargo. It was in 2011-20... posted on Jan 2 2019 (3,222 reads)

buy iPhones to be universally connected and have a ton of cool functions and features at their fingertips.  But as the wise monk Rev. Heng Sure once said, everything we create in silicon already exists in carbon.  I’d add that the silicon technology is a poor facsimile at best.   So how exactly do you tap into the wonderful carbon technology you carry around with you all the time? Meditation is a phenomenal tool to do just that. Here are five areas where meditation beats an iPhone.   1. Connectivity   The truth is that you can’t really connect to anyone else unless you’re in touch with yourself.  The iPhone allows and enc... posted on Nov 22 2011 (46,588 reads)

control [...] rather than [information] controlling you". She closes with a quote from Aldous Huxley which could have been from The Analects of Confucius: "There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."  Despite these occasional mentions, public discourse about virtue is muted. To abuse a recent parlour game, below is a graph of the rate of occurrence of the words "virtue" and "technology" in Google's Ngram Viewer, which plots frequency of words occurring in books over time. We see a rapid rise of technology in the last forty years against a two-century slide in virtue.... posted on Dec 21 2011 (15,912 reads)

information networks for doing things like raising money for hospitals or getting companies to backtrack on outrageous decisions. None of this would be possible without our networked, highly connected word. Is this just a kind of illusion in some sense -- that this highly connected world is having as much impact as we think it is? Iyer: You're absolutely right. For example, I couldn't live in rural Japan on a tourist visa while my family and my bosses are in New York without technology. It's only e-mails and fax machines before that that allow me to live 6,000 miles from the office. And it's only planes that allow me to live a continent or an ocean away from my mo... posted on Jun 19 2012 (19,845 reads)

school in the late 1970s and the early 80s. This was the future, and it looked great. I consumed Isaac Asimov novels at a rate of knots. I was looking forward to it. I think it is precisely this fear of the future, this sense of a looming apocalypse, this feeling that we have unleashed a monster that is now beyond our control, that has given rise to the latest outburst about the colonization of other worlds. Today, the world is a different place. The popular faith in science and technology has drained away, to be replaced by a widespread, if often unspoken, fear. From biotechnology to geoengineering, from unmanned drones to internet surveillance, the democratic promise of tec... posted on Jul 27 2014 (14,159 reads)

impacts us. So they come in with this narrative that children are born with a digital gene now. There’s no option. There’s no getting away from it. Right? It’s inescapable. Of course, in a way, it is inescapable; we have to recognize that we’re in a mediated environment. But someone in their home with their child still has a certain amount of control available. RW:  The idea that we’re born with a digital gene is disturbing. There’s a way that technology creates its own thoughts, so to speak, and pretty soon people’s thoughts are being defined by the technology. Mary:  Exactly. This is exactly what Neil Postman called “T... posted on Jul 11 2016 (20,894 reads)

technology accelerates our lives, many of us feel an urgent need to slow down. One seductive solution: A secular sabbath. Pico Iyer makes the case, in this meditative excerpt from his new TED Book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. “All the unhappiness of men,” the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, “arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.” After Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarct... posted on Apr 30 2017 (17,063 reads)

word to describe the relationship between Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere societies? In effect, the word powaqqatsi means predation. It means eating the life of another person.   RW:  And without the victim knowing it, right? GR:  Right. And once you know it, it’s too late. Taking that word and giving it an application to the modern world we live in, it’s the neo-liberal dictums of progress and development, the World Bank, science and technology. This idea of progress and development becomes the powaqa. It makes promises—“you’re going to get a higher standard of living.” That’s all predicated on number... posted on Oct 25 2017 (11,183 reads)

at this. This is the site of the government of India. It invites tourists to see the shame of our country. I'm so sorry to say that. Is this a beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture? It depends upon how you look at the life of the people. If this woman has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles, you cannot be celebrating that. We should be doing something about it. And let me tell you, with all the science and technology at our command, millions of women still carry water on their heads. And we do not ask this question.  You must have taken tea in the morning. Think for a minute. ... posted on Sep 3 2021 (3,773 reads)

that you can't do, that aren't yours to do. I think there's constantly all of these practices that ask you, "Is this for me? How can I apply it?" Maybe it's not the one. Maybe you can't do all 37, that's quite a challenge. But to pick out one or two and really work with it, I think is important.Charles: I love that journey from empathy to compassion. That was beautifully framed. Thank you. Another dimension of our time and it is part of what makes ServiceSpace possible is the rapidly evolving technology. There are so many gifts that (technology) gives the world, and yet it also has people often spend much more time relating to screens than they might be, we might be, I might be - to the li... posted on May 5 2024 (2,557 reads)

call that whole process—observe, observe; access your sources of stillness and knowing; and act in an instant -- theU process, because it can be depicted and understood as a U-shaped journey. A New Social Technology: Seven Leadership Capacities But why is the U the road less traveled in institutions? Because it requires an inner journey and hard work. The ability to move through the U as a team or an organization or a system requires a new social technology. As illustrated in Figure 3, this social technology is based on seven essential leadership capacities that a core group must cultivate: • Holding the space • Ob... posted on Jul 9 2013 (87,483 reads)

critical thinking. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary zoologist, University of Oxford. Effective theory "'Effective theory is one of the more important notions within science — and outside it. The idea is to determine what you can actually measure and decide, given the precision and accuracy of your measuring tools, and to find a theory appropriate to those measurable quantities." Lisa Randall, physicist, Harvard University. Expanding in-group As technology makes us more interconnected, there are more cross-overs between groups and populations. For example, there are more intermarriages. "These effects are potentially beneficial f... posted on Aug 5 2013 (590,930 reads)

or this sort of — it goes back and forth because it is the present mind conversing with a past mind. So it's a different kind of hypertext, I guess. MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. That's so interesting. You are often referred to, as one of the many descriptors of what you do, as a blogger. But you don't really reside online in the way I think that word might suggest. I mean, you do many things. You do many kinds of writing. But it seems to me, that one of the things you do is you use technology, you use the Internet to circulate thinking about old-fashioned reading and writing. MS. POPOVA: Hmm. I guess so. It was not always the case. I mean, my site is really a record of my bec... posted on Jul 15 2015 (11,513 reads)

for the pharmacy industry, we train medical technicians for the medical industry, and we train chemical technicians for companies like Bayer and Calgon Carbon and Fisher Scientific and Exxon. And I will guarantee you that if you come to my center in Pittsburgh -- and you're all invited -- you'll see welfare mothers doing analytical chemistry with logarithmic calculators 10 months from enrolling in the program. There is absolutely no reason why poor people can't learn world class technology. What we've discovered is you have to give them flowers and sunlight and food and expectations and Herbie's music, and you can cure a spiritual cancer every time. 12:51 &nbs... posted on Aug 1 2015 (10,863 reads)

it with what we were familiar with from the Old World, which was cows. We wanted those cows; we didn't want the bison. That's what the Indians ate. RW: It’s one example of what some people could call our hubris—that we can make it work the way we want it to. What you've just described suggests how sadly mistaken we can be. Peter: I call that the myth of progress. We pride ourselves on not being superstitious anymore, right? Because we've got science and technology; we've come out of the Dark Ages and we're mastering nature; we're making a better life for ourselves. It's what we tell ourselves. But we’ve replaced what we thought ... posted on Oct 11 2020 (17,759 reads)

is fundamental, but when it comes to trusting people, something profound is happening. Please raise your hand if you have ever been a host or a guest on Airbnb. Wow. That's a lot of you. Who owns Bitcoin? Still a lot of you. OK. And please raise your hand if you've ever used Tinder to help you find a mate. (Laughter) This one's really hard to count because you're kind of going like this. (Laughter) These are all examples of how technology is creating new mechanisms that are enabling us to trust unknown people, companies and ideas. And yet at the same time, trust in institutions -- banks, governments ... posted on Jan 22 2017 (17,499 reads)

In a couple hours they had to shut it down. This is the Tay bot. In just a matter of couple hours this AI machine was spewing out stuff like this: “Bush did 9/11. Hitler would have done an even better job.” I don’t even want to read this next tweet. Racist, xenophobic. They shut it down in a matter of hours. It didn’t work. If we look at that failure, we can innovate in two directions. One approach is -- big data to bigger data. If we had more information, our technology would be smarter. And how far can bigger data go? Judging by today's corporations, pretty far. Facebook tracks the items you hover over when you're just surfing. Delete... posted on Aug 17 2017 (21,499 reads)

mean - you are saying that these things which you have just described are... JK: ...superficial. DB: Yes. Well now the things that are basic are what? JK: Fear, sorrow, pain, anxiety, loneliness, and all the human travails. DB: Well, many people might feel that the basic things are the highest achievements of mankind. JK: What has he achieved? DB: For one thing people may feel proud of the achievement of man in science, art, culture and technology. JK: We have achieved in all those directions, certainly we have. Vast technology, communication, travel, medicines, surgery have advanced tremendously. DB: Yes, I mean it is really r... posted on Dec 29 2017 (15,096 reads)

the researchers write. Of course, giving support to others may help them feel better and cope better. And being kind makes us happy. But this study goes a step further, suggesting that comforting others is actually emotional training—all the more reason to open ourselves up to both giving and receiving support. “Phubbing” could hurt your relationships During the past year, we saw black-and-white debates about the emotional and social impact of technology evolve into a more nuanced and useful discussion: Which ways of using technology are beneficial or detrimental, and to whom? For example, “phubbing” is the act of snubbing so... posted on Jun 21 2018 (18,714 reads)