WHAT IF YOU DON'T HAVE A LONG TERM GOAL?

Long-term goals require vision, perseverance, role models, and an ability to focus amongst life's daily distractions. The fact is that long-term goals are extremely difficult for many people to hold in their minds. Take a minute and try to think of your own five- and ten-year plan. Don't have one? Then how can we expect children, especially earlier in their development before their pre-frontal cortexes are fully developed, to be motivated by planning that far ahead.

Moreover, long-term goals, while eminently admirable, feel too challenging when some are just trying to live day to day. 16 million kids lived in food insecure houses in 2012. 20 percent of urban kids feel unsafe in their schools. If you are hungry or don't feel safe, you will not be able to focus on the person in front of you in the classroom, let alone a future that may seem intangible.


Think of how many people never finish their PhD programs, and you begin to understand that even in the best of circumstances, many of us are challenged to think that far ahead.


Dr. Duckworth says that motivation is a crucial underlying aspect for achievement. Solve the motivation issue, and more children, and adults for that matter, will succeed.

But it's critical to remember that motivation is multi-faceted, and comprises of many different elements, with long-term goal setting being just one way to motivate. Here are a few of the mechanisms that help people be motivated:

1. A desire to master the subject

2. Public recognition or other extrinsic rewards

3. A focus on effort and hard work

4. Sugar

Were you startled about the last one? Although those with toddlers may not be surprised that sugar can motivate, there is actually a body of work that a bit of sugar replenishes one's ability to self-regulate.

Given the many different findings, it seems to me a more useful approach would be to focus on the circumstances that might allow one to develop motivation towards a variety of goals, goals that vary from person to person, and might be driven by context, individual differences and opportunity.

This approach would entail the following.

1. Find out what gets a child excited

2. Help them devise a plan to get to this personally relevant goal

3. Make it seem realizable, in other words focus on SHORT-term goals

4. Guide them to the understanding that the power to achieve the goal rests within them, their efforts can make all the difference.

Oh yes, and if all else fails, you can always add a bit of sugar, and grit, to the mix.

Headline, January28, 2014

''' THE BEAUTIFUL SYMMETRIC 

WORLD OF MASTER INNOVATORS '''

Many many  innovative firms appear, consciously or not,  have created and recreated, one way or the other, aspects of the Big Science Model.

Google and 3M encourages workers to spend some office hours tinkering with pet projects.

Infosys, an Indian IT company, gets people from different parts of the company to vet each other's idea. 

Valve, a big American maker of computer games, eschews hierarchy in favour of majority decision -making, including to select new staff.

What then can we all learn from Big Science? As a technical feat, ATLAS takes some beating. It's the world's biggest microscope, used by physicists at CERN, a large laboratory near Geneva, to probe the fundamental building blocks of matter.

It's barrel-shaped body, 45 meters long, 25 meters tall and weighing as much as the Eiffel tower, was assembled in a cavern 100 meters beneath the Swiss countryside from 10m parts, nearly twice as many as in a jumbo jet.

'''It generates more data each day than Twitter does'''.

It is also a remarkable organisational achievement. The components were designed by hundreds of scientists and engineers from dozen of institutions. 

They were subsequently sourced from 400-odd suppliers on four continents, at a cost of $435 million.

At any one time the experiment involves more than 3000 researchers from 175 institutes in 38 countries.

Does a multinational science project like ATLAS have much in common with a multinational business? Some management types assume it does. Occasionally they offer to advise the boffins how to run it better.

Alas, their advice is  'too abstract and difficult to understand'', scoffs one physicists. ATLAS, for one. seems to be doing just fine without it. Last year  -in case you missed the headlines -it nabbed the Higgs boson, known as the  ''God particle''.

It could be that Big Science has more to teach big business and even the rest of the world, than vice versa.

A recent Strategic Management Society Shindig at CERN and IMD business school at Lausanne drew a sell-out crowd of academics, business folk and consultants.

''Big Science'' projects differ from companies in important ways. They are publicly financed and do not seek profits. They are also one-off affairs, with no need to maintain supply chains or manage long term relationships with customers.

Yet, like companies, they must innovate furiously, make the most of limited resources and beat rivals to the breakthroughs.

Although no two bog experiments are exactly alike, all share important traits, says Philipp Turtscher of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. 

There aims are often clear-cut-find the Higgs, sequence the genome or........

Potter around Mars  -but the means of attaining them are anything but. To shorten the odds of success, individual design decisions are put off for as long as possible. 

This says Markus Nordberg, who co-ordinates ATLAS's finances, lets the project ''absorb uncertainty''.

Companies, by contrast, typically try to reduce it by picking one solution that is known to work and sticking with it.

The honour post continues:

With respectful dedication to the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Through The Looking Glass '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Children help parents on how to use Technology

Teresa Correa, University Diego Portales in Chile conducted a deep study, did a lot of surveys, conducted interviews, and found that youth helps parents learning in all technologies like computer, mobile, internet, social networking etc. It occurs up to 40% of the time. Children scores were higher compared to parents which shows that parents dont recognize the influence themselves. Parents also learned how to use technologies by self experimentation.

This phenomenon mainly occurs with mothers and lower socioeconomic families. This is what happens among low income immigrant families where children plays a vital role in connecting between the family and the new environment. Digital media, recent innovations & new technologies attracts everyone in this universe, and this is a new environment for the children from poor families learning new things from school and friends. This spills over and in turn the children teach their parents.

Past studies have connected younger family members influence of older family members with the computers and internet. "The fact that this bottom up technology transmission occurs more frequently among women and lower families has important implications" said Correa. "Women and poor people usually lag behind in the adoption and usage of technology. Many times, they do not have the means to acquire new technologies but, most importantly, they are less likely to have the knowledge, skills, perceived competence, and positive attitudes toward digital media. These results suggest that schools in lower income areas should be especially considered in government or foundation led intervention programs that promote usage of media."

World Cup 2014 Protests

By Ehsan Khaleel
SAM Daily Times

SAO PAULO (AP) — Waving flags, carrying banners and chanting "there will be no Cup" at least 1,000 demonstrators protested in Sao Paulo on Saturday against the World Cup that Brazil will host later this year in a demonstration that devolved into violence late in the night.

On its Facebook page, the Anonymous Rio protest group billed "Operation Stop the World Cup" as this year's first act against the football tournament. Protests were expected in more than 30 cities, but all except that carried out in Sao Paulo fell far flat of organizers' expectations.

Demonstrators gathered in front of the Sao Paulo Art Museum for about one hour before heading out to another part of the city chanting slogans against the tournament.

As they approached the downtown area, some "Black Block" anarchist demonstrators attacked an empty police car and tried to overturn it, while others torched a small car and smashed the windows of banks, as they have in previous protests since last year. Police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, dispersing the crowd. More than 100 demonstrators were detained.

Earlier during the demonstration several protesters chanted "If we have no rights, there will be no Cup."

"By rights we mean the people's right to decent public services," said university student Leonardo Pelegrini dos Santos. "We are against the millions and millions of dollars being spent for the Cup. It is money that should be invested in better health and education services and better transportation and housing."

Fellow student Juliana Turno said "this is a small sample of the protests that will happen when the World Cup begins."

Last year, millions of people took to the streets across Brazil complaining of higher bus fares, poor public services and corruption while the country spends billions on the World Cup, which is scheduled to start in June.

Those demonstrations coincided with the Confederations Cup soccer tournament, a warm-up tournament for the World Cup

In Rio de Janeiro, about 50 protesters gathered in front of the Copacabana Palace hotel, holding signs blasting the World Cup. After about an hour, the crowd moved onto a main street that runs along Copacabana beach, halting traffic as police watched from the side.

Small demonstrations were also held in several other cities.

Lightning strike kills 7 students, wounds 51

By Ehsan Khaleel
Asst Editor, SAM Daily Times

Lightning in Burundi killed seven high school students and wounded 51 others when it struck a classroom where they were sheltering from a ferocious storm, officials said yesterday.

“This was an exceptional disaster that hit not only our town, but also other areas of the country, when we should be in the dry season,” said Prudence Kabura, a local government official in Nyanza-Lac. As many as 500 houses were also destroyed by the heavy rains, he added. Last week lightning killed four people and wounded nine others as they sheltered inside a small church in eastern Burundi.

Newborn mice make an early arrival

By Ehsan Khaleel
Asst Editor, SAM Daily Times

The mild winter has led to some early arrivals at a wildlife centre.


A litter of seven harvest mice was born at the WWT Slimbridge centre in Gloucestershire, England, earlier this month.

At birth, each youngster was only the size of a baked bean but now they are about half the size of an adult harvest mouse.

The mice are part of the Back From The Brink collection at WWT Slimbridge, which highlights wetland mammals that have been threatened with extinction.

Harvest mice are a wetland species but gained their name from adapting to live in cereal crops. However, with the arrival of combine harvesters, they have returned to the safety of the wetland reedbed habitat.

John Crooks, mammal manager at Slimbridge, said: "As the winter has been quite a warm one, they have arrived earlier than expected – normally we wouldn't expect to see them until at least February."

PS VITA SLIM COMING WEST?

By Ehsan Khaleel

According to an invite sent to IGN, Sony fans can look forward to the company’s “slimmest” announcement yet on January 30. Many are speculating this may mean the Western reveal of the PS Vita Slim, a thinner, cheaper version of the PS Vita released in Japan late last year. The Slim is 20 percent thinner and 15 percent lighter than its predecessor, and does away with the current Vita’s OLED display for an LCD one of the same size, a fact that may cause many potential buyers to think twice about choosing the newer version of the handheld.

The PS Vita has seen a rise in popularity since the release of the PS4 due to its remote-play capabilities, so it will be interesting to see what Sony’s next move will be with its struggling handheld. Of course, Sony’s announcement could be about anything, but the announcement of the PS Vita Slim seems to fit the bill.