Here’s a question: is it best to let your relationship with your dog develop on an ad-hoc basis, kind of warm and fuzzy and organic, or should you adopt a structured approach that lays down the ground rules right from the start? You probably know the answer. How many owners of nutty, uncontrollable dogs do you know who are now regretting not having trained them properly?
Those involved in decision-making in business and law might have heard of the OODA loop. Standing for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, it is a methodology for treading carefully, avoiding unnecessary conflict, and winning in challenging situations by performing actions based on rational decisions. To make those decisions, one must first fully understand the situation by observation, and get to know one’s opponents’ intentions and likely actions by orientation. The four steps in the loop are:
Mindfulness is all about mental clarity, and alcohol is well known for having the opposite effect. So why has a course near Niagara Falls in Canada combined the two? Do they cancel each other out, or can they actually enhance each other?
Before looking at the Niagara Falls course on ‘winefulness’, let’s look at another phenomenon that is gaining popularity in Asia: beer yoga. Just follow the link. We’ll wait.
The world is full of books, DVDs and motivational speakers on the subject of how to become successful. Some are mere lists of platitudes to keep repeating to yourself. Others, like Napoleon Hill’s Classic Think and Grow Rich, focus on the character formation required for success. Others still are based on case studies with a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach.
Rihanna has been pushing for responses from world leaders on Twitter as part of her push to raise awareness for charity the Global Partnership for Education. And she has been getting them.
The pop star from Barbados received, among others, the following replies:
"Hola @Rihanna! Education is in the central core of our political aims. Only education can change the world." – Argentina President Mauricio Macri
There is a growing body of evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness in areas such as health, medicine, schools, prisons, law, and even government. In numerous clinical studies including over 100 randomised controlled trials, its practice has been shown to correlate strongly with greater wellbeing and perceived health as well as physical health. It has also been shown to foster better decision-making and clarity of thought.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
Ever since the robot dog K-9 appeared in Doctor Who in the 1970s, geeks of a certain age have fantasized about having a metallic sidekick that does most things a real dog would do but doesn’t need to poop and can beat them at chess.
