Scientists say this simple strategy can help you learn anything
In his book Fluent Forever, opera singer Gabriel Wyner suggests that one of the best ways to learn a new language is to practice remembering it. In other words, instead of reading and re-reading a list of vocabulary words, you should read it once and then test yourself repeatedly.
The same strategy works for pretty much anything you're hoping to commit to memory, and there's a growing body of research behind it. Psychologists call this phenomenon the 'testing effect'.
Learn Spanish? Finally quit smoking? Become a better cook? Whatever you've decided to achieve next year, you know all too well that you're probably going to fail, and that list of beautiful, aspirational goals is staying unfulfilled. Sorry.
For this very reason some people forgo making any resolutions altogether, so we're here to help - this year you might actually have a chance, with help from a few tricks of the mind.
British psychologist Richard Wiseman has done several surveys on willpower - in 2007 he tracked the success of 3,000 people's New Year's resolutions, only to find that a mere 12 percent of them managed to achieve what they had set out to do. He looked into what the successful people were doing differently, and, based on their experience, devised a list of tips for others who want to stop failing miserably.
Before we get into the list, it turns out the number one thing to stop relying on is your own willpower - that's basically the worst approach to keeping a resolution, and is the reason why so many of us never start exercising more, continue eating all that fried chicken, and still can't speak a word of French.
What should you be doing instead? As Wiseman explained on his blog back in 2013, your goals should be small and manageable, you should document your success, tell others about your intentions, and, importantly, not beat yourself up for failing.
Here’s the complete list of Wiseman’s advice:
1) If possible, make only one resolution - changing a lot of things at once is more difficult.
2) Think about your resolutions in advance, and spend some time to reflect on them.
3) Don’t re-visit past failures, but focus on new resolutions instead.
4) Focus on what you really want - don’t just go with what’s trendy.
5) Break your goal into manageable, concrete steps with specific deadlines.
6) Go public - tell your friends, family, social networks about your goals, which will increase your fear of failure and also garner support.
7) Create a checklist focusing on how much better your life will be once you’ve achieved your goals.
8) Whenever you make progress on the steps towards your goal, give yourself a small reward.
9) Document your journey - charts, spreadsheets, journals and other means of tracking your progress will keep it concrete.
10) Don’t beat yourself up and quit if you sometimes revert to old habits - treat it as a temporary setback.
Learn the five most important tips below, and good luck in 2016!
A computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets has been developed by an Indian-origin scientist and his team.
The computer is nearly a decade in the making, incubated from an idea that struck Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, when he was a graduate student.
Manu Prakash, who amazed the world last year by building a paper microscope, has now come up with a computer that works by moving water droplets. Prakash is an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and he has developed the water computer with the help of two of his students. He was born in Meerut, India.
When Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash traveled to a mosquito-infested rainforest in Thailand a couple of years ago, he visited a clinic with a sophisticated, $100,000 microscope that sat unused in a locked room. It was then Prakash realized that what global health workers really need is an ultra-low cost, simple-to-use, portable microscope that could be deployed in the field to diagnose disease—and he took it upon himself to develop one!
The result is the Foldscope, a ‘use and throwaway’ microscope that Prakash demonstrated last week at the first-ever Maker Faire at the White House.
Clockwise from upper left, Foldscope projecting a magnified image onto a table; a diagram of an assembled Foldscope; magnified images of disease-causing microbes as seen through a Foldscope.
Here’s what you need to know about the Foldscope. It’s made out of thick, waterproof paper and a glass-and-polymer lens that’s the size of a large grain of sand. While it can be used by simply holding the device up to the sun or a light bulb, there’s also a version illuminated by tiny LEDs powered by an inexpensive watch battery.
The framework of the Foldscope is printed onto a sheet of paper that’s perforated in a way that each shape can be easily snapped out and folded in a manner resembling the traditional Japanese art of origami. A diagram showing how to assemble the Foldscope is even included on the sheet, and can be understood by anyone, regardless of their native language.
Different designs, folding patterns, and types and numbers of lenses create different types of microscopes: bright field, dark field, fluorescence, and lens-array. A low-magnification microscope costs as little as 50 cents, while a high-mag version is just shy of a dollar.
So, how do you use the Foldscope? It turns out that this bookmark-size device uses the same glass slides that one uses in a regular microscope. So, the preparation of blood or tissue samples remain the same. In the simplest version of the scope, the slide is inserted between the microscope’s paper layers and the user, with a thumb and forefinger grasping either end of the microscope strip, holds the lens close to one eye and flexes the strip to find the target object and bring it into focus. I had the chance to try this at the White House event, and found that learning how to use it is very easy. In more advanced versions, the device can project the image onto a wall or any other flat surface—a great, low-cost tool for educating healthcare workers and others in low-income nations about various infectious diseases.
Prakash is currently fine-tuning Foldscopes so they can be field tested in Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, and Peru for diagnosis of malaria, microfilariasis, leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, and sleeping sickness. His team at Stanford is also busy designing Foldscopes to help diagnose 30 other diseases, and drawing up plans for a next generation of Foldscopes that will utilize microfluidic components rather than glass slides—a step that should make sample collection and analysis even easier.
Not only will Foldscope give healthcare workers around the globe better ways to detect, and thereby treat, disease, it will also place magnifying power within the reach of all the world’s students, enabling them to ask and answer a great many scientific questions. To this end, Prakash has launched the Ten Thousand Microscopes Project to entice inquiring minds to beta test these devices and design experiments that can then be compiled into a crowd-sourced microscopy text. Imagine a world in which every kid carries around a 50-cent portable microscope, and brings science out of the lab and into real-world biology.
Already 10,000 citizen scientists from 130 countries have answered the call. Among the ideas: a proposal from a Mongolian farmer who wants to use Foldscope to detect potential pathogens in camel milk. Think about it – what would you do if you had one of these in your pocket?
Manu Prakash
Manu Prakash received a B.Tech from IIT, Kanpur and a PhD. in Physics of Computation and Physical Biology from MIT. He was nominated a Junior Fellow in Physics at Harvard Society of Fellows. Manu is a Pew Scholar, a two-time Gates Foundation Explorations Award Winner, Terman Fellow, MIT Tech review TR35, Popular science “Brilliant 10″ and a TED Senior Fellow. Manu is a member of Stanford Biophysics Program, Woods Institute of the Environment and a core faculty in Department of Bioengineering at Stanford.
He has been involved in technological interventions in resource-poor settings, tackling public health problems. The lab has recently invented a new tool tackling a major diagnostics bottleneck in global health: Foldscope, a microscope built via folding paper. It currently costs 50 cents to manufacture at scale with a goal to provide a “microscope for every child” in the world.
Blindness may be the biggest curse. In folklore, it is said: "If you lose your teeth, you will lose taste; if you lose your eyes, you will lose the whole world!"
What about people who are born blind? Destiny definitely seems to be cruel in their case. However, there are a few who don't sit idly, complaining how they got served injustice - they simply pick themselves up and make a point of becoming an inspiration to others too.
Asif Patel, a mechanic from Pakistan, is one such example. Suffering from a rare disease, he was born without eyes. But even as a child, he had a great sense of touch. Now, as they say, his touch is his magic. He repairs automobiles with his sense of touch only. His customers are a happy lot.
He is renowned in the area of Karachi, owing a small workshop that also employs seven people.
Used in more than 10 billion devices throughout the world, the USB turned 20 years old last week. However, the man who discovered the technology has not made a single penny off it and he is fine with it.
Ajay Bhatt, Intel’s Chief Systems Technologist, who’s largely responsible for inventing the USB technology, told Business Insider, “I don’t do these things for money. I did this to bring about change, and it’s not very often that somebody gets a chance to bring about this big a change.”
Definition of money a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and banknotes collectively. the assets, property, and resources owned by someone or something; wealth. Before answering the important question, let's see other important factors and question important for you to understand.
Do we need money ? Why can't we survive on barter system ?
Ever wondered why blueprints were blue and not black or red or any colour other than blue, well, it's because the technique in making blueprints caused the paper to turn blue. Mental Floss delved into the history of blueprints and discovered that the blueprint process was developed in the 1800's when scientists found an easy way to reproduce documents by using ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferrocyanide as some sort of old school photocopy.
It would almost certainly kill
you. If you got medical help REALLY quickly, they might be able to save you.
At least in rats, the median
lethal dose is 3g per kg of body mass. Me, I weigh 100 kg. So 300g of salt
would give me a 50-50 chance of kicking the bucket, assuming my body works
roughly like a rat's. 1kg is more than 3x that.
This is a very famous Chinese torture/suicide technique, where a person was made to eat a lot of salt.
A photographic portrait by Steve McCurry. She was in the Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan in December 1984. This photo became very famous and it has been linked to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
Chris Bray and his wife Jess recently visited India — but this was no
ordinary December visit. They were here with one very specific
mission in mind: to locate a girl and her family. Dick Smith
showed Chris a photo he had taken from a train.
The photo was of a homeless family living under a bridge, and included
a little girl who wasn't wearing anything but a pink bracelet.
Dick wanted Chris and Jess to go to Vadodara (where the photo
was taken) and find the family, who he wanted to help with accommodation,
education for the girl, and a bank account into which he could
regularly transfer money for the family. Talk about the spirit of Christmas
giving! This is the story of Jess and Chris’s whirlwind India visit:
Meet Mr D. Prakash, a hero who is a little man by our standards but is indeed a great man by all accounts..going by his good and selfless deeds. Rao, 58, a tea stall owner in Cuttack, runs a school for 70 underprivileged children for free. He has donated blood 205 times till now. There's more to story of this remarkable man!
Venil Ali, Teach For India City Director of Mumbai talks about her journey and her passion for working with kids and how the power of the collective is what it will take to bridge the gap of education inequity in our country.
Venil Ali would have never imagined that she was destined to work towards improving the state of education in her country.
Throughout school she was (like most of her peers) focused on herself – family, academics, goals and dreams. So when, as a part of her B.Sc. Honors program at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, she was required to do 60 hours of social work – her initial reaction was to just get it over with.
“After college hours, I’d have to go to an organization called V-Care near my house and teach kids who had come from different parts of India for cancer treatment for two hours every day. The idea was to bring them up to speed with their academics since they were obviously missing out on school. That’s when I realized how much I enjoyed working with kids and ended up volunteering 400 hours instead of the assigned 60 hours by the end of my graduation!” she remembers with a smile.
Born in 1865 in an extremely orthodox Brahmin family in Maharashtra, a 9 year old girl got married to a widower who was almost thrice her age. Sounds like a normal “old Indian saga”? Not really! The girl later on became the first Indian woman to qualify as a doctor. Even though she died at a very young age of 21, she opened the gates for many young women in India who wanted to do much more than devoting their entire life to household chores. Yes, we are talking about Anandi Gopal Joshi, India’s first lady to qualify as a doctor from the USA in 1886. You go to a hospital and a lady doctor is there to attend to you. Doesn’t look like an unusual scenario, right? But back then in the nineteenth century, it was nothing less than a miracle. Even today, India is struggling with a major dearth of doctors, especially female doctors. At present, nearly 66 percent of the health workers are men. Only 17% of all allopathic doctors and 6% of allopathic doctors in rural areas are women. According to the paper “Human resources for health in India”, published in the British Medical Journal ‘Lancet’, 1 in 5 dentists are women while the number stands at 1 in 10 pharmacists.
Pranav Mistry is an Indian computer scientist and Inventor. At present, he is the head of Think Tank Team and Vice President of Research at Samsung. He is best known for his work on SixthSense and Samsung Galaxy Gear.
Some of his other work, Pranav has invented :
Mouseless – an invisible computer mouse
SPARSH – a novel way to copy-paste data between digital devices
Quickies – intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located and can send reminders and messages
Shrikanth Bolla- first visually impaired student at MIT
It was probably a good thing
when the Indian Institute of Technology closed its door to Srikanth Bolla, on
account of his visual disability, because it propelled him to apply to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). And he got through.
"I thought that if I could not get a seat
at a renowned Indian institution, I must at least get into a world renowned
institution. And I did," said Bolla.
Chennai, one of the busiest and populated metropolis city with 9 million residents in India. On December 2015, the city faced heaviest rainfall, considered to be the most highest in the past century. This rain was no ordinary, not the kind it rains for few hours and then stops. It rained and rained for days together with constant dark clouds above the city.
Within hours rain water started to flood in few places, as the intensity of the rain got higher and higher... the Chennai city was sinking!
The water level rose to 10 feet in some areas while the dams and rivers flooded like ever before.
Nearly 400 people have died and over 1.8 million people have been displaced.
No media covered much and no politicians came.....
Below are FB posts by locals of Chennai in context ofChennai floods that say: # We were not willing to give our homes for rent to Muslims in our localities . Today Muslims are opening up theirmosques and providing us shelter. I wish no more babri masjids are demolished, it would help us for another calamity. FB post by Sankara Rama Bharathi -
"Rains of Humanity" A mom just called her son from a mosque where she has been sheltered and fed . She said 'I am feeling safe and also watching how Muslims pray their Lord from the behind .. Am also praying to God during that time ....
You are not defined by anything but by deeds you perform.
December 16, 2014, Peshawar witnessed the deadliest terrorist attack ever to occur in Pakistan, surpassing the 2007 Karachi bombing. Army Public School was attacked by 7 militants killing 141 people, including 132 schoolchildren, ranging between eight and eighteen years of age.
But hatred cannot conquer you if you have love in your heart.
