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Theme : qualityof
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Life-work balance
Update: thanks to everyone who has emailed in on this (keep them coming!) - i'll post some links at the bottom of the entry in case anyone is interested.Lots of the discussion about work-life balance understandably focuses on keeping work out people?s home lives. Not too many hours in the office. Making sure new technology frees people up, rather than allowing their work to follow them home. That sort of thing. But I?ve been wondering whether there are approaches to finding a balance or...
from : duncanoleary
23rd March 2006
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Nice one...
The BBC is currently broadcasting a mini-series on the 'Golden Years', exploring how different countries deal with older people and the challenges of an ageing society - responses range from interactive dolls for lonely Japanese widows to provide companionship to Italy's 'adopt a granny' scheme. Although I am not convinced by every single one of the different initiatives, I think this approach to talking about the ageing society represents an improvement to our usual debates about the 'pension...
from : jackstilgoe
13th April 2005
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Seeing Green
Making visible the invisible is a tough problem for environmentalists who'd like us to use less power, and for the traffic engineers who'd like us to leave our cars at home or take another route. Economists preach about market failure, but information failure -- the inability to access critical data at the moment of decision -- helps to keep us blind to the public costs of our private actions.Rendering this relationship is one of the great, juicy design problems of our time. With hybrid cars...
from : petermacleod
4th March 2005
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See you tomorrow
Right, i'm off home.[via Tom Watson]
from : duncanoleary
21st February 2005
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The 'death' of small print
Publishers in the US have decided to respond to declining sales figures by making books bigger to allow for a larger font-size. According to an article in today's Guardian the new range of books is targetted specifically at the ageing consumers who experience difficulties reading normal print from the age of 40 onwards.
from : juliahuber
17th February 2005
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You aren't feeling very sleepy
Did anybody else see that programme on BBC 1 about sleep last night? It was a sort of self-help version of our slightly more policy-oriented pamphlet Dream On from last year. Apparently the average UK night's sleep is 7 hrs 2 mins.
from : paulmiller
3rd February 2005
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Trust is Worthy
Demos has long taken an interest in the role of trust in building social connectivity and resilience. Now a new study by Kennedy School academic, Iris Bohnet, adds an international perspective to understanding how status and trust interact.She discovers that Scandinavians are most likely to trust. People in developing countries typically are least likely to trust. Americans are in-between. WOMPs ? white, older, male, Protestants ??behave significantly differently than their counterparts ?...
from : petermacleod
2nd February 2005
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The Peru-it of Happiness!
I spent the month of December travelling around Peru and have fallen in love with the country. The people are warm, kind, genuine and I am in awe of all the sincere smiles I received along the way. So I have been asking myself since I have come back why is it that the people of a supposed developing country are so kind and genuinely happy. The word "depressed" does not seem to exist. The genorosity and kindness of these people have amazed me and I am wondering why generally the western world...
from : alistairdavidson
7th January 2005
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You are feeling very sleepy
If our sleep pamphlet got you interested in your circadian rhythms and all that, here's an interesting site about the science of sleep in relation to learning.
from : paulmiller
29th November 2004
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Bonjour Paresse
1. You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. You work for your pay-cheque at the end of the month, full stop.2. It's pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger.3. What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you're untouchable when the next...
from : jameswilsdon
15th August 2004