Here are some excerpts from a great article printed in Fortune Magazine a few years ago. Credit goes to Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful.

Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?

Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends." Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.

Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company's strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That's the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from. As University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why."

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up.

Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.
Extra Awesome Version of - People Are Awesome

Human behavior is 93 percent predictable, a group of leading Northeastern University network scientists recently found. Distinguished Professor of Physics Albert-László Barabási and his team studied the mobility patterns of anonymous cell-phone users and concluded that, despite the common perception that our actions are random and unpredictable, human mobility follows surprisingly regular patterns. The team’s research is published in the current issue of Science magazine.

“Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population. Despite the significant differences in travel patterns, we found that most people are equally predictable,” said Barabási, who is also director of Northeastern’s world-leading Center for Complex Network Research. “The predictability represents the probability we can foresee an individual's future whereabouts in the next hour based on his or her previous trajectory.”

Barabási and his team also discovered that regardless of the different distances people travel, the 93 percent predictability remains true both for those who travel far distances on a regular basis and for those who typically stay close to home.

“We tend to assume that it’s much easier to predict the movement of those who travel very little over those who regularly cover thousands of miles,” said Chaoming Song, PhD of the Center for Complex Network Research and lead author of the paper “Yet, we have found that despite our heterogeneity, we are all almost equally predictable.”

The researchers were also surprised to find that the regularity and predictability of individual movement did not differ significantly across demographic categories, including age, gender, language groups, population density, and urban versus rural locations.

In earlier research on human mobility patterns, published in a 2008 issue ofNature magazine, Barabási and his team studied the real-time trajectory of 100,000 anonymous cell-phone users (randomly selected from more than 6 million users) and found that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns.

“While most individuals travel only short distances and a few regularly move over hundreds of miles, they all follow a simple pattern regardless of time and distance, and they have a strong tendency to return to locations they visited before,” explained Barabási.
Study Makes It Official: People Are So Predictable
The Crowd: People Are Predictable

Google Trends Reveals People’s Predictability
Cellphone traces reveal you're so predictable

Cellular memory is a theory that states the brain is not the only organ that stores memories or personality traits, that memory as a process can form in other systems in the body and can be stored in organs such as the heart. This theory is not new. Imaginative fiction writers probably were writing about the concept as early as the 1800's, long before transplants of anything were even considered plausible. Perhaps it was Maurice Renard's Les Mains d'Orlac that popularized the idea for the first time. In the story a pianist looses his hands and a killer's hands are transplanted in their place. Of course the story has been spoofed and remade so many times in our own culture there's scarcely anyone that doesn't know how the story ends, with the killer's hands possessing the main character to kill. This is an extreme and over simplified version of what cellular memory could be. 

It's a potentially sucky situation. The vampire craze in teen literature – exemplified by the "Twilight" book series – could be affecting the dynamic workings of the teenage brain in ways scientists don't yet understand. "We don't know exactly how literature affects the brain, but we know that it does," said Maria Nikolajeva, a Cambridge University professor of literature. "Some new findings have identified spots in the brain that respond to literature and art."

Scientists, authors and educators met in Cambridge, England, Sept. 3-5 for a conference organized by Nikolajeva to discuss how young-adult books and movies affect teenagers' minds. "For young people, everything is so strange, and you cannot really say why you react to things – it's a difficult period to be a human being," Nikolajeva told LiveScience. The conference, she said, brought together "people from different disciplines to share what we know about this turbulent period we call adolescence."

Teenagers' minds are more susceptible than adult minds to influence – from peers and experiences as well as from books, movies and music, researchers say.

"What we have learned over the past decade is that the teenage brain processes information differently than a more mature brain," said conference presenter Karen Coats, a professor of English at Illinois State University who integrates neuroscience into her research. "Brain imaging shows that teens are more likely to respond to situations emotionally, and they are less likely to consider consequences through rational forethought."

That's because the teenage prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and risk assessment, goes through a growth spurt before puberty, followed by a period of organizing and pruning of the neural pathways, Coats said.

Linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University, a keynote speaker at the conference, is studying how reading longer novels habituates the brain toward a greater capacity for sustained attention to visual material.

"What neuroscience opens for us is what happens within the brain during specific activities that take place within identifiable emotional or motivational states," Heath said by e-mail. "For example, we know now that in reading about particular activities (especially those known to the readers), motor-neuronal activity is detected."
Are Teens Biting One Another Because of On-Screen Vampires?The Impact of Vampire Books & Movies on Pop Culture
History of Psychology in the development of films and movies
Scary movies can have lasting effects on children and teens
Super Bowl Half Time Show Symbolism Explained
Vlad the Impaler: How is Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth related to him?

The Prince of Wales's 10-year battle to protect Dracula's home and his yearning for Transylvania
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2053357/Prince-Charles-battle-protect-Draculas-home-yearning-Transylvania.html#ixzz1mMM4nk6r Chateau des Amerois - Mother of Darkness Castle

Let's start with some background information. A bulletin board (pinboard, pin board or notice board in British English) is a surface intended for the posting of public messages, for example, to advertise things to buy or sell, announce events, or provide information. Bulletin boards are often made of a material such as cork to facilitate addition and removal of messages or it can be placed on the computer so people can leave and erase messages for other people to read and see.

Bulletin boards are particularly prevalent at universities. They are used by many sports groups and also advertisements by extracurricular groups and anything from local shops to official notices. Dormitory corridors, well-trafficked hallways, lobbies, and freestanding kiosks often have cork boards attached to facilitate the posting of notices. At some universities, lampposts, bollards, trees, and walls often become impromptu posting sites in areas where official boards are sparse in number.

Internet forums are becoming a global replacement for traditional bulletins.Online bulletin boards are sometimes referred to as message boards. The terms bulletin board, message boards and even Internet forums are interchangeable, although often one bulletin board or message board can contain a number of Internet forums or discussion groups. An online board can serve the same purpose as a physical bulletin board. Magnet boards, or magnetic bulletin boards, are a popular substitute for cork boards because they lack the problem of board deterioration with the placement of pins over time.

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H.G. Wells published in 1897. Wells' novel was originally serialised in Pearson's Weeklyin 1897, and published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it absorbs and reflects no light and thus becomes invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse the procedure. Instead, his plight becomes known. When he attempts to enlist the aid of former acquaintance, he is betrayed. Griffin's attempt to begin a "Reign of Terror" by murdering his betrayer ends in his own death.

While its predecessors, The Time Machineand The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using first-person narrators, in The Invisible Man Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view.

The narrative opens in the English village of Iping, West Sussex, with the arrival during a snowstorm of a mysterious stranger at the local inn, The Coach and Horses. The stranger wears a long-sleeved, thick coat, and gloves, his face hidden entirely by bandages, large blue goggles and a wide-brimmed hat. He is excessively reclusive, irascible, and unfriendly. He demands to be left alone and spends most of his time in his rooms working with a set of chemicals and laboratory apparatus, only venturing out at night. He becomes the talk of the village (one of the novel's most charming aspects is its portrait of small-town life in southern England, which the author knew from first-hand experience).

Meanwhile, a mysterious burglary occurs in the village. The Invisible Man has run out of money and is trying to find a way to pay for his board and lodging. When his landlady confronts the stranger to demand that he pay his bill and quit the premises, he reveals part of his invisibility to her in a fit of pique. An attempt to apprehend the stranger are frustrated when he undresses to take advantage of his invisibility, fights off his would-be captors, and flees to the downs.



1. Scientists Use ‘Time Hole’ to Make Events Disappear:

Palmistry or chiromancy (also spelled cheiromancy, Greek kheir(χεῖρ, ός), “hand”; manteia (μαντεία, ας), “divination”), is the art of characterization and foretelling the future through the study of the palm, also known as palm reading, or chirology. The practice is found all over the world, with numerous cultural variations. Those who practice chiromancy are generally called palmists, palm readers, hand readers, hand analysts, or chirologists.

The information outlined below is briefly representative of modern palmistry; there are many ― often conflicting ― interpretations of various lines and palmar features across various schools of palmistry.

A Palmistry or hast rekha can trace its roots back to Greece from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) discovered a treatise on the subject of palmistry on an alter of Hermes, which he then presented to Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.E.), who took great interest in examining the character of his officers by analyzing the lines on their hands. Aristotle stated that "Lines are not written into the human hand without reason. They emanate from heavenly influences and man's own individuality". Accordingly, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Alexander the Great popularized the laws and practice of palmistry. Hippocrates sought to use palmistry to aid his clinical procedures. However, it is believed that Palmistry reached the shores of Greece from the Far East. The knowledge of palmistry has been used in the cultures of India, Tibet, China, Persia, Egypt and to some countries in Europe. Studies show that most ancient communities like the Sumerians, Tibetans, Hebrews, Babylonians, Egyptians and Persians were greatly interested in the study and practice of palmistry.

It is believed that Palmistry originated in India with its roots in (Hindu) Astrology (known in Sanskrit as Jyotish), ChineseYijing (I Ching), and Roma (Gypsy) fortune tellers. The Hindu sage Valmiki is thought [4] to have written a book several thousand years ago, whose title translates in English as "The Teachings of Valmiki Maharshi on Male Palmistry", comprising 567 stanzas. Renowned palmist Cheiro learnt palmistry in India where he is believed to have read ancient scriptures on palmistry. From India, the art of palmistry spread to China, Tibet, Egypt, Persia and to other countries in Europe From China, palmistry progressed to Greece where Anaxagoras practiced it. However, modern palmists often combine traditional predictive techniques with psychology, holistic healing, as well as alternative methods of divination.

This TV channel provides a few extra resources for teachers who are always on the run and have very little free time to spare. Recent news topics along with pictures, maps and videos are combined to create interesting discussion topics for teenagers. It might even be worth letting students explore this site for themselves, with a little external monitoring.

Talk and Educational radio is a radio format containing discussion about topical issues. Most shows are regularly hosted by a single individual, and often feature interviews with a number of different guests. Talk radio typically includes an element of listener participation, usually by broadcasting live conversations between the host and listeners who "call in" (usually via telephone) to the show. Listener contributions are usually screened by a show's producer(s) in order to maximize audience interest and, in the case of commercial talk radio, attract advertisers. 

This magazine and website with online resources is committed to advancing the Education Revolution by printing news and essays from around the world related to issues of alternative education at the intersection of culture, power, and learning.