Impatient Futurist Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

Impatient Futurist Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

After doing some much-needed research, cognitive scienctists are suggesting a new way to boost students’ lagging scores: Get rid of the hallowed (and stultifying) classroom lecture.

Teaching well is hard. I can cite my direct observations of the hundreds of victims of my occasional efforts over the years as a teacher of physics and writing. As I have stood lecturing brilliantly to a few dozen purportedly eager collegians, it has not escaped my attention that at any one time only three or four seem awake enough to keep up with their text messaging.
Clearly the problem is not the content or presentation style of my lecturing, which, as I may have neglected to mention, is brilliant, or so I was once assured by a student who stayed after class to ask for a sixth extension on an assignment. Then again, from what I recall of my college days, I wasn’t exactly on the edge of my seat at my professors’ lectures, either. And most of my fellow lecturers don’t report much different. Could the problem be with the nature of lecturing itself?
To find some answers, I posed this question directly to Carl Wieman, associate director for science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Wieman, to be blunt, knows zero. In fact, he won a Nobel Prize for his extraordinarily low achievement. During the mid-1990s in a University of Colorado physics lab, Wieman enlisted lasers to bring matter as close to absolute zero as anyone is likely to get—a temperature so low that atoms freeze together into quantum-mechanical clouds predicted by Einstein but never before observed. “That was challenging,” Wieman says. “But changing how people teach, that’s really hard.”

Wieman should know. Aside from having captained his share of undergraduate physics-for-poets courses, Wieman is now, in a sense, America’s First Science Teacher, in that President Obama took him on last year with the assignment of improving science education in America.
It’s no secret we’ve got some work to do along those lines. A widely accepted standardized test administered in 2009 to large samplings of high school students in industrialized countries found that U.S. students scored 23rd in science, with students from China scoring highest. The United States has long closed the knowledge gap in graduate school, where our programs still lead the world in the production of new scientific insights, as measured by publications in science journals. But a study by the Royal Society in the U.K. earlier this year reported that even in this regard China is on track to pull ahead of the United States as early as 2013.
Noting that his physics Ph.D. students were arriving from college woefully unprepared but went on to thrive in the lab-oriented atmosphere of grad school, Wieman suspected the problem might have its roots in that core teaching tool of the college experience, the undergraduate lecture. He unearthed some research to back up that hunch.
A University of Maryland study of undergraduates found that after a physics lecture by a well-regarded professor, almost no students could provide a specific answer to the question, “What was the lecture you just heard about?” A Kansas State University study found that after watching a video of a highly rated physics lecture, most students still incorrectly answered questions on the material. Wieman himself found that when he quizzed students about a fact he had presented 15 minutes earlier in a lecture, only 10 percent showed any sign of remembering it.
Investigating further, Wieman learned what cognitive scientists have proven repeatedly in recent years: Humans don’t learn concepts very well by having someone blab on about them. In other words, the college lecture is to a large extent a waste of time.
Graham Gibbs, former director of the Oxford Learning Center, which helps instructors improve their teaching skills, has been making that argument for three decades. In a landmark paper, “Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing,” he points to “overwhelming” evidence that lectures are an ineffective way for universities to achieve the educational objectives they set. Academia continues to rely heavily on lectures, Gibbs argues, because professors are “overworked,” “ignorant,” and “don’t know how to design courses.”
The simple insight that lectures don’t work well raises two questions. First, where do I apply to get those 3,000 hours of my life back? And second, what does work? To demonstrate, Wieman and colleague Katherine Perkins put together a science-learning initiative at the University of Colorado. The next year he and his wife, Sarah Gilbert, then a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, created a second one at the University of British Columbia after the institution pledged $12 million over six years to the program.
In these test settings, various science curricula were revamped to get them to jibe with the latest cognitive science research on effective learning, which points to more interactive approaches that include immediately and repeatedly putting new information to use. Students in science courses were continually peppered with questions that they all had to answer via wireless handheld clickers. The students were frequently broken into small work groups to try their hands at solving problems using the material they had just learned, and they took at least two midterms each class.
The results have been eye opening. In a study published in the journal Science, one section of a University of British Columbia physics course about electromagnetic waves was taught by the cognitive approach, while another section was taught by the standard course lecture. The first group scored an average of 74 percent when tested on the material, while the second group scored only 41 percent. “We’ve been able to clearly demonstrate how much better we can do in teaching students,” Gilbert says.
But scientists who teach have proven reluctant to toss out the lecture, never mind the evidence that it doesn’t work. “They say this is the way it’s always been done, and it was good enough for them, so it’s good enough for their students,” Wieman says. Were this attitude to hold in medicine we would still be bloodletting, in physics we would be trying to reach the moon with very large rubber bands, and in economics we would still be suffering major worldwide financial crashes. (Well, physics and medicine are advancing, anyway.) Wieman is using his White House position to push universities to reward professors for the quality of their teaching, not just their research results.
At the University of Cambridge, cognitive researcher Michelle Ellefson is making her own bid to improve teaching by applying lessons from cognitive science. “Decades ago, we thought children’s brains functioned much like those of brain-damaged adults,” she says. In particular, younger brains seemed short on prefrontal cortex, the seat of so-called executive functions that, among other things, enable us to switch our attention from what we are learning now to something we learned earlier. That’s a problem in the classroom, where teachers tend to focus on one subject for several classes and then move on to another one, often causing students to lose touch with whatever knowledge they had just acquired.
But more recent research suggests that children who are struggling can readily improve their executive functions with appropriate stimulation. In other words, recalling old lessons is just a matter of training. Ellefson ran a study in which a group of students were briefly pushed every day to revisit earlier material, while another group just plowed ahead with the new material. “After eight weeks, the group that did daily reviews became just as good at switching back and forth between new and old material as adults are,” she says, adding that test scores jumped accordingly. “It’s a simple classroom change that can make a big difference.”
Such results come as no surprise to Kurt Fischer, who directs the Mind, Brain, and Education Program at Harvard University. The reason scientists are likely to turn up all sorts of simple new ways of dramatically improving classroom learning, he claims, is that until recently they haven’t bothered to look for them. “We have massive research programs in agriculture, meteorology—even the cosmetics industry is constantly researching,” he says. “But there hasn’t been much research in education. Now we’re starting to discover what techniques actually work.”
Which leaves me with a few new tricks to try out in my college class this semester. Hey, maybe the next time a light goes on in the eye of one of my students it won’t be merely the reflected glare of a text message.

 

Impatient Futurist High-Tech Soaps Just Might Clean Up the Planet

Impatient Futurist High-Tech Soaps Just Might Clean Up the Planet

The worst industrial spills call for something stronger than the old-fashioned bar sitting in your soap dish.

New-age soaps can respond to light, acidity, temperature,
pressure, or magnetism—so they clean
up just the right nasty atoms.

David Plunkert

Between freak Arctic melting, Japanese nuclear melting, and antibiotic resistance popping up everywhere, I can’t help but see the world as tiptoeing into pre-apocalypse. If there is some sort of crapstorm coming and I’m lucky enough to survive it, there’s one thing I know for sure: I’m going to need a really good hand-cleaner for the aftermath. When I come in from a hard day of zombie hunting, it won’t be just dirt that I’ll need to get out from under my fingernails.
Actually, I could use that doomsday soap now—or rather, we all could. That’s because most of the human race has no intention of patiently waiting for an unspecified apocalypse and has already gotten a head start on mass despoiling. So far the tides of toxic waste and exploded-oil-rig crude haven’t made it as far as my sleepy burb. But right now somebody somewhere is facing a mess that Softsoap won’t make a dent in.
Hold that last thought—soap is, in fact, exactly what some of the world’s smartest cleanup experts are now touting for the next big spill. You might suppose that scrubbing bubbles would be a poor choice of weapon against giant blobs of crude, especially compared with giant oil-corralling booms and high-tech oil-skimming robots. But soap has some important advantages: It really cleans things up (that’s what it is made to do, after all), and at the end, all that oily soap can be neatly and completely gathered up with a magnet.

 

You didn’t know soap was magnetic? You’re obviously using one of those old-fashioned iron-free soaps. The new stuff can be found in the laboratory of research chemist Julian Eastoe at the University of Bristol in the U.K. Sure, any numbskull can pour a bag of iron filings into a jug of Tide (trust me, my wife is still screaming). The trick is to get the iron to chemically bond to the soap—or as chemists like to say, the “surfactant”—and in sufficient quantity to enable the ironic solution to be pulled by a magnet.
A Magnetic Mop for Oil

Eastoe played around with a number of surfactants and iron compounds before hitting on solutions of iron salts, related to the surfactants in mouthwash and fabric softeners but with some magnet-friendly metal thrown in. In theory, this soapy slop could be heaved by the tankful onto oily shorelines to mix with the spilled crude, and then sucked up by magnet-equipped vehicles or volunteers, leaving behind none of the toxic solvents or messy detergents commonly employed in cleaning oil. “It would be especially useful for cleaning contaminated seabirds,” notes Eastoe, who has obviously never had to wield a magnet against an infuriated, oil-and-soap-covered seagull.
Pennsylvania State University materials science professor T. C. Chung has come up with a different take on an oil-spill cleaner. Chung was working for Exxon in 1989 when that company’s notorious Valdez tanker spilled 11 million barrels of crude into Alaskan waters. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster blackened much of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Professor Chung was determined to become Professor Clean. “I saw that in all that time, we still hadn’t come up with a better way to clean up oil than a paper towel,” he says. “I knew there had to be a solution.” That solution, he decided, was Petrogel.
Chung worked with a cheap, plasticlike compound called a polyolefin, a long-chain molecule. Though the stuff isn’t technically a surfactant, he chemically tacked on branches to the molecular chain and got it to form a molecular web that surrounds particles of oil. The result: One pound of Petrogel will combine with more than 40 pounds of oil, preventing it from dispersing into the ocean or from sticking to sand or dolphins. “You could spray it on a spill as powder, trap all the oil as gel, and then recover it with skimmers,” he says. And since a polyolefin is made up of hydrocarbons, like oil, the easy-to-handle gel could be refined as if it were plain old oil. It wouldn’t have to be dumped somewhere, and some of the costs of recovery could be, well, recovered.
The fact that chemically hot-rodded Jell-O and fabric softener turn out to be mighty weapons in the fight against catastrophic soilage might tempt you to rummage through your household items for other potential tools. You need go no further than your pocket or purse, due to the work of a Michigan Technological University chemical engineer who has figured out how to turn chewing gum into another super-spill tamer. Gerard Caneba zeroed in on polyvinyl acetate, a major ingredient of gum. He discovered that this natural, biodegradable stuff needs only a bit of strategic molecular tweaking to become a surfactant that readily foams up in contact with water. “Everyone knows chewing gum is good for making bubbles,” he says. “It’s already pretty close to being a detergent.” Oh Bazooka Joe, is there anything you can’t do?
The trick to making this gummy soap into an oil-fighter, Caneba found, was to manipulate the compound so that one part of the molecule latches onto water while another part cozies up to crude. The result is a liquid that, when squirted at the edges of a spill, forms a foamy barrier around it that will push the spill in the direction in which the liquid is applied. “If you try squirting water or other liquids at oil, they’ll just move around or through it,” Caneba says. “This foam will stay up against the oil and herd it.” It can even be sprayed upwards via an underwater pipe at the bottom of an underwater plume of spilled oil in order to bring it to the surface. The herding action can keep the oil from dispersing in the water and from reaching shorelines.
If you’re still not impressed with the mega-filth-fighting capabilities of this soapy gum, consider that it also works wonders against “red mud,” a highly caustic sludge left over from aluminum manufacturing; a recent red-mud spill in Hungary forced hundreds of villagers to evacuate. When Caneba’s stuff is sprayed on it, a series of chemical reactions converts the mud into a nontoxic, foamy goo that can be compressed into a durable building material. “It would be great for patio tiles and ceiling insulation,” Caneba suggests. I, for one, am completely behind the idea of cleaning the planet while redecorating.
Detox Gels and Foaming Meds

If oily Jell-O cannot mop up your toxic spill, maybe congealed soybean oil can. Building on research conducted at the Savannah River National Laboratory, a company called EOS Remediation in Raleigh, North Carolina, has found a secret ingredient that turns soybean oil into a gel. But here’s the interesting part: If you stir it up a bit, it temporarily becomes a liquid that can be pumped into soil that’s been contaminated with toxins. Once the liquid is in the soil, it reverts to gel form and stays that way for a long time—years, even. Taking advantage of that long lifetime, EOS laces its gel with toxin-eating bacteria, including one that can break down the chlorinated solvents commonly used to degrease machine parts. The idea is that the bacteria will remain in position for however long it takes to leave the soil squeaky clean—not counting the gel, which is basically edible at the end. It worked for cleaning up a wastewater site at Savannah River, though nobody actually showed up to dine on the end product.
Frankly, I’m doing a huge disservice to soap science by implying that all it can do is save the planet from toxic catastrophes. Eastoe, for example, envisions all kinds of surfactant-based miracles. “The chemical imagination runs wild with the possibilities,” he says. True, coming from a soap scientist, you might wonder if “wild” needs to be taken with a grain of sodium chloride. But Eastoe and other chemists are creating genuine supersoaps by finding ways to get surfactant molecules to lose their foamy properties [pdf] under particular conditions so that the foam can, in effect, be turned off and on at will.
Eastoe has created foams that can be switched on and off with light [pdf], so that if mixed with insecticides or herbicides and sprayed on plants, they could foam up only at night or only during the day, whenever they were most effective. He is considering drug-laced foam that could be swallowed by a patient and then de-foamed with an electric field so that it would drop its drug payload only when it’s at the right place in the body. And he points out that foam doesn’t just clean oil up; it can also produce it cleanly by helping to drag raw crude out of deep deposits.
So inspiring to me is this work that I’ve started experimenting with other household items to see if I can invent my own supersoap. I’ve already substantially contributed to the field by brilliantly ruling out organic ketchup and lite chocolate syrup as candidates. Though I have to admit, it’s hard to focus with all that screaming in the background.

The Velociraptor-Like Robot That Could Save Your Life

The Velociraptor-Like Robot That Could Save Your LifeA balancing trick used by geckos, and possibly dinosaurs, is helping to make more agile and helpful rescue robots.

On your mark, get set, go! Tailbot may not have the speed of an agama
lizard (left) or an extinct velociraptor (right), but it is just as adept at
maneuvering its tail in midair to set up a perfect landing.

Dr Torsten Wittmann/Science Photo Library

Biologist Robert Full’s lab is brimming with critters in motion: scuttling crabs, crawling centipedes, prowling geckos. These animals serve as inspiration as he and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, build robots that are fast, steady, and agile. In January, Full used his analysis of leaping lizards to design a rugged bot that can navigate through the rubble following an earthquake or other disaster.
Full’s breakthrough came from observing African agama lizards, which have a remarkable ability to stick a perfect landing after vaulting through the air. The lizards keep their balance during flight, Full found, by moving their tails up and down to counteract the motion of their bodies and keep themselves stable. He thought about how he could apply that technique to search-and-rescue robots, which must remain upright as they clamber across precarious terrain.
Within a few months, Full and his team had built a four-wheeled, foot-long vehicle with a stiff tail section, which they dubbed Tailbot. When it was driven off a ramp without any postlaunch adjustments, Tailbot nosedived into the ground. But when the robot lifted its tail after it left the ramp—just enough to make up for the vehicle’s forward pitch—it landed even more gracefully than the lizards. Full and his team are now working on a robot that can stabilize itself if it starts to bank left or right in the air.
Full’s lizard analysis also led him into unfamiliar territory: paleontology. He found 40-year-old scientific papers suggesting that the velociraptor—a swift predatory dinosaur—used a similar body-stabilizing trick. Full made a mathematical model of how the creature moved, based on its bone structure, and discovered that the raptors were probably as good as or better than present-day lizards at staying upright by using their tails. Although Full can never confirm his theory, he is able to assess the motion of the computer-generated raptors in the film Jurassic Park. “If you watch that scene where the velociraptor is jumping from the balcony,” he says, “it moves its tail perfectly.”

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How to Make Anything Disappear

Sophisticated cloaking devices 
may soon hide objects from light, 
sound, water, even earthquakes.
Back in 2006 Harry Potter was all the rage in the engineering world. That year a team at Duke University built the first rudimentary device for hiding objects, akin to the boy wizard’s invisibility cloak. But in technology as in the movies, Harry Potter is now old news. Over the past six years, scientists have moved beyond mere invisibility: If they could build cloaks for light waves, then why not design materials to conceal sound and even ocean waves?
A whole suite of invisibility cloaks are now under development, all building on the same basic principle as the first prototype. When we perceive an object, we are actually detecting the disturbances it creates as energy waves bounce off it. The Duke cloak, constructed from a synthetic structure called a metamaterial, prevented those disturbances by bending light waves around the object, allowing them to continue flowing like water in a stream around a rock (concept shown at right). Sure enough, that technology is not limited to light. In the latest designs it is being applied to mask all kinds of other waves, with the potential for zeroing out sound pollution and protecting cities from earthquakes. Meanwhile, scientists continue to pursue the original invisibility concept—work that is sparking a lot of interest in military surveillance circles.

1  VISIBLE-LIGHT CLOAK
The Tech: A group of physicists led by Tolga Ergin and Joachim Fischer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany built a light-bending fabric last year that—for the first time—rendered a cloaked object invisible to the human eye from any viewing angle.
What It's Made of: A rigid synthetic polymer composed of tiny rods spaced about 350 nanometers (billionths of a meter) apart, a gap small enough to manipulate waves of visible light.
How it Works: As a test, researchers laid the cloak over a flat surface with a small bump in the middle. The cloak bent incoming light rays around the bump and bounced them back as if they had struck a flat surface. Observers would never know the bump existed.
Applications: For now, this cloak can hide only small imperfections on flat surfaces. But eventually, scientists hope to scale it up to conceal much larger objects anywhere in space. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) started investing in metamaterials way back in 2001, and while it doesn’t like to reveal specific intentions, the agency would certainly be interested in cloaks that conceal soldiers and military equipment.

2  SOUND CLOAK
The Tech: Last year a Duke University team led by engineer Steven Cummer built a cloak that rendered an object “invisible” to sound waves.
What It's Made of: Stacked sheets of one-millimeter-thick perforated plastic (the actual engineering of these cloaks is difficult but unglamorous). The sheets’ holes and arrangement allow the cloak to manipulate sound waves.
How It Works: It hides an object much like Ergin’s light cloak does. Cummer placed the perforated sheets over a 10-centimeter-long block of wood. The cloak bent sound waves heading toward the block so that they avoided the cloaked area and rebounded as if it were not there. If the block had ears, it would not have heard any sound from outside the cloak.
Applications: Sonic cloaks could steer sound waves around beams and columns in a concert hall to give every seat perfect acoustics, or block the noise pollution from that chatty coworker in a neighboring cubicle. Such cloaks could also conceal submarines from the pulses of enemy sonar, although Cummer considers that a major challenge—he cannot just slap thick layers of plastic onto a military sub 3  EARTHQUAKE CLOAK
The Tech: Last February Sang-Hoon Kim at the Mokpo National Maritime University in South Korea and Mukunda Das at Australian National University presented a blueprint for seismic cloaks that could protect buildings from earthquakes.
What It's Made of: An array of giant concrete cylinders, 60 to 200 feet in diameter, each drilled with small holes to manipulate seismic waves. The cylinders would be installed underground, arranged to encircle a building’s foundation.
How It Works: Seismic waves propagate through the Earth much as sound waves move through air, so the concept is similar to the sound cloak. The difference is that engineers do not want merely to steer seismic waves around buildings, because doing so would end up inflicting damage on other structures. That’s where the thick concrete comes in: As the cylinders deflect the seismic waves, they would also absorb some of the waves’ energy and convert it into heat and sound. The cloaked building would vibrate barely at all, while the structures around it would experience a weakened temblor.
Applications: The goal is protecting nuclear reactors, dams, airports, government offices, and other sensitive and essential structures from earthquake damage. Kim expects to consult with engineers building small-scale test models soon.

4  WATER CLOAK
The Tech: Last year, Duke engineers Yaroslav Urzhumov and David Smith proposed a means of cloaking ships as they move through the water.
What It's Made of: A network of small water-deflecting blades and pumps encasing the bottom of the ship.
How It Works: As a ship chugs ahead, it drags water along with it and leaves a wake behind. Urzhumov’s contraption would scoop up water in front of the bow, steer it around the ship, and release it behind the stern. Water behind the ship would move at the same speed and in the same direction as at the front of the ship. The result: The ship would glide through the water without disturbing it.
Applications: Urzhumov says ships will not be getting fitted for cloaks for at least a decade, but the benefits are worth the wait. Cloaked ships could move faster, since they would encounter little friction from the surrounding water. They would also be harder to spot without a trail behind them. If that sounds like something that would make naval officers salivate, it is: The Navy helped fund the Duke study.

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An Article That Made Me Sad, and a Little Response to Readers

Bill Galston is one of the great intellects around, and this week he wrote an especially bracing short piece at TNR after he read a quote from Mitch Daniels that obviously put a bee in Bill's bonnet.

The quote from Daniels was this: “He [Obama] does not understand where wealth and jobs come from. It comes from a successful private sector or not at all … Government does not create wealth or income. It just shuffles it around and charges a price, a cost for that service or disservice.”

Galston unloads and is worth quoting at some length:

Daniels is obviously right that a vigorous private sector is and must be the principal locus of wealth and employment. But he is dead wrong to suggest that government is simply redistributive or worse, a dead-weight drag on the economy. Throughout American history, government has made investments that have fueled economic growth. Is it really necessary to remind the governor of facts that young people used to learn in high school? Is he not familiar with the historic role of the public sector in catalyzing the construction of canals, railroads, bridges, and roads—indeed, every aspect of the infrastructure that ensures the mobility of raw materials and finished goods? What about human capital—public schools, land-grant colleges, student grants, and loans? Surely the governor understands that individuals’ ability to earn a decent living, and America’s ability to compete in the global economy, depends more and more on the education and training of our workforce. And what about basic research, which helps replenish the well of ideas from which so many commercially viable products and processes are drawn?

The concept of “public goods” is hardly the creation of liberal ideologues. Standard economics tells us that market mechanisms tend to undersupply investments that benefit those other than the investors. Although we would all be better off with a better-trained workforce, each business has reason to believe that others could end up enjoying the fruits of its own training expenditures. The aggregate of individual decisions, each of which is rational, yields an inadequately trained workforce. When government acts to fill the gap, it is neither redistributing income nor charging for a service. It is playing its appropriate role in helping to create income, wealth, and jobs.

I like that second graf especially, because it is an entirely market-based, unsentimental case for government. Markets send benefits to investors. Since many citizens are not investors, a mechanism is needed to send benefits their way.

This is an argument that applies very specifically, by the way, to health care. We don't have much in the way of preventive medicine in the US, at least compared to Europe and Canada. And the reason we don't is expressed in Galston's second paragraph. It's because health care is largely provided by employers. To paraphrase Galston somewhat, while it is in society's interest to have more preventive medicine, it isn't in any single employer's interest to provide it, because that business has good reason to think that a different employer will someday enjoy the fruits of its having done so (i.e., a worker encouraged to quit smoking at 26 will cost less to insure when she's 46, but by that time will probably be working at a different company).

And Galston's first graf is just depressing and made me sad. Really. It's high-school-level knowledge of the world, and Republicans deny it. Daniels is not that dumb. But there's only one other thing he can be, which is a liar, so he's that. When even these allegedly "reasonable" Republicans spout such fantasy propaganda, what on earth are we to do?

Now, a quick response to the comment threads. It's hilarious to me when conservatives think they've "uncovered" the scandal that...I'm for Obama! Yes. I am. My whole world view is a lot more complicated than that, and in fact I believe right now that what this country needs more than anything is more moderate Republicans, about which I've written and will continue to write. But yes, I am for Obama. This is a real stop-the-presses revelation, folks.

But if you have any interest in being fair-minded, you will note that I calls 'em as I sees 'em. Last week, I wrote three pieces in a row, three in a row, laying into Obama. Go off and have a look and tell me how many conservative columnists ever write three in a row attacking Romney. And wingers, as a general principle, just get ahold of yourselves, would you?

Sad moment as royal couple tours gardens

Updated: 20:45, Tuesday September 11, 2012

In a poignant moment, royals William and Kate visited Singapore's Botanic Gardens and viewed an orchid named for Princess Diana after her death.
Princess Diana never got to see the magnificent free-flowing hybrid as she died only a few weeks before a scheduled trip to Singapore's Botanic Gardens in 1997.
The sky was heavy with monsoon rain as the royal couple arrived at the grounds shortly after touching down at Changi Airport.
About 200 locals braved the scorching Singapore sun, erupting into thunderous applause for the rock star royals.
The Duchess of Cambridge - popularly known as Kate - defied the sticky tropical heat in a kimono-style soft pink, long-sleeved, knee-length dress, patterned with white orchids, by British designer Jenny Packham.
She matched it with tan shoes, a half-up hair do and tiny drop pearl earrings.
The future king was overheard joking with his bride about how her dress matched the orchid with white petals and purple red spots that was on Tuesday named 'Vanda William Catherine' in their joint honour.
He also asked staff at the gardens whether his mother had a chance to see the delicate flower named after her, and sadly remarked 'that's a shame' when told she hadn't.
Princess Diana's white orchid, Dendrobium Memoria, was named in September 1997.
Among the 180 orchids named after VIPs are blooms paying tribute to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, South Africa's Nelson Mandela, singer Ricky Martin and the Queen.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are touring South-East Asia and the South Pacific as part of celebrations marking the 60th year of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.
It will be a vastly different tour to when they visited North America last year although Kate - now a fashion icon - is expected to once again pay homage to the locals by wearing some home-grown designers.
Despite her near perfect evolution into the royal role, all eyes will be on the new Duchess to see how she handles herself when pitted against the unforgiving humidity, insects, language barriers, and vastly different cultures and religions.
Kate is expected to wow the crowds later in the evening by wearing a lavish ball gown at a state dinner hosted by Singapore's President Tony Tan at his official residence.
The dinner will wrap up the first of their three days in Singapore.
The Queen has personally selected much of their nine-day itinerary, which also takes in Malaysia, the Solomon Islands and the tiny island of Tuvalu - but not Australia.
Renowned for their common touch, the couple will join children in sports, scrub down after some art therapy, travel by garlanded war canoes, visit a jungle, and wear traditional dress at outdoor feasts.

25 Most Beautiful Quotes

25 Most Beautiful Quotes:

25) The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched ... but are felt in the heart.
-- Helen Keller

24) He who cannot forgive others destroys a bridge over which he himself must pass.
-- George Herbert

23) It is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
— Henry Ward Beecher

22) When someone tells me something is impossible, all I hear is that he or she in particular cannot do it. If it can be thought, it can be done.-- Brian Vaszily

21) If you want the rainbow, you must put up with the rain.
-- Dolly Parton
 20) You, as much as anyone in the Universe, deserve your love and respect.
-- Buddha

19) Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
–- Anne Frank

18) In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.
-- Janos Arany

17) The dreamers are the saviors of the world.
-- James Allen

16) I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am in.
-- The Bible, Phillipians 4:11 (NASB)

15) Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
-- Howard Thurman

14) It is never too late to be what you might have been.
-- George Eliot

13) Are you being the best you can be, or the worst that has happened to you?
- Brian Vaszily

12) Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
– Confucius

11) If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
-- Mother Teresa

10) How does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.
-– Trina Paulus

9) Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

8) The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. it is the source of all true art and science.
-- Einstein

7) If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.
-- Alfred Tennyson

6) Believe those who are seeking truth. Doubt those who find it.
--Andre Gide

5) Whatever you are, be a good one.
--Abraham Lincoln

4) The true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.
-- Ann Landers

3) Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional. We cannot avoid pain, but we can avoid joy.
-- Tim Hansel

2) Falling down is how we grow. Staying down is how we die.-- Brian Vaszily

1) I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
-- Mother Teresa
And one extra beautiful quote for good luck:
Be silent, or say something better than the silence.
-- Pythagoras

First Class Flyers Who
Complain About Pretzels,
Heart Attack Survivors Who
Complain About TV

A Cautionary Tale, A Personal Confession,
An Illuminating Conclusion

I know a woman who, after being out of work for over a year, after sending out hundreds of resumes, and after having to frequent a food donation center to keep her family fed, wept tears of joy upon receiving and accepting a very good job offer.
Just two months into the job, she was complaining about it every time I talked to her.
I know a father whose teenaged son is healthy, getting pretty good grades, and staying out of serious trouble, but who often berates his son for not hanging out more with the “smart kids,” and for not getting even better grades.
Just around the corner from this father lives another father whose son is severely disabled, and who beamed with joy for days after his teenaged son finally fed himself with a fork for the first time.And recently at a conference, a man who had been born in the United States approached me and ranted on for ten minutes – till I excused myself – about how our country and everything about it had completely gone to hell.
Not five minutes after that, another man approached me who had been born in a foreign country run by a dictator, where violence is rampant and people are imprisoned for speaking their minds, and rhapsodized for ten minutes about how our country is heaven on earth.


What are You Really Looking For?

You may have only one set of eyes, but you have a choice in how you see through them.
If you seek the dark, if you let your ego and emotions push you to seek the dark, you are guaranteed to find plenty of dark in every person, place, and situation you look. And it will darken you.
If you seek the light, if you contain your ego and manage your emotions so that your spirit can do what it is naturally drawn to do and seek the light, you are guaranteed to find plenty of light everywhere you look. And it will illuminate you.
Once while traveling, I was fortunate to be switched to a first class seat at no extra cost because there wasn’t enough room in coach. I sat next to a woman who complained – seriously, and to three different attendants over the course of the flight – that her pretzels didn’t have enough salt.
I knew a man who, after struggling hard for years, taking many risks, and experiencing countless failures but pushing forward anyway, made his first $100,000 at something he was passionate about.
Around the time he was rejoicing in this, I lost touch with him, but when I was reunited with him again about a decade later, he was miserable – and physically sick because of it -- because he had never quite reached making a million.
I’ve known many people who met someone, recognized so many of the wonderful qualities in that someone, fell in love, and married. But two, seven, or twenty-seven years hence, all they now choose to see are all the faults in that someone, and how that someone is “ruining my life.”
And I know people who have survived heart attacks, and years (sometimes months) later, are always complaining that there is nothing good on TV.
Of course, this is all not a call to stop making improvements where improvements can be made. Jobs, grades, countries, income, marriages, TV, and even pretzels can always be improved.
It is a call, however, to stay vigilant – for the sake of your health, happiness, energy, and very life – in not mistaking the opportunities for improvement (which are, after all, what gives us purpose) for bad situations to whine, nag, insult, fight, and otherwise waste your energy over and bring the world around you down in the process.
It is a call to remain aware of the light, to rejoice in the gift, in all things.
In this spirit, by the way, you will be far more effective at helping to make improvements where they do need to be made, because you will have far more of the energy, clarity, creativity, peace and kindness required to really get things done.


I Admit It Is Me, Too, My Friends

I receive kind words every day from people who have been inspired by the free IntenseExperiences.com newsletter, or my inspirational videos, or whose entire lives have been changed by my Bust Through the Negative Emotions audio training program. And I am grateful.
On the other hand, I still also find myself berating myself – and God, and the Universe, and my cats, and our information-cluttered world where the rare things of worth get lost among the hordes of drivel -- because my material at Intense Experiences is only reaching thousands or tens of thousands of people, and not hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions.
The pretzels are never salty enough, or they’re too salty, as long as we’re focused on what is wrong with them.
We are all human, and that means we do have egos, and we will keep experiencing the full range of human emotions including the “negative emotions” like fear, guilt, anxiety, anger, and all the rest.
It’s how aware we keep ourselves, and how we then manage ourselves, that makes all the difference.
You may be inspired here and now, in reading this, to seek the light where you may be seeing dark. But how do you maintain that perspective during the course of a day, a week, a life?
You surround yourself with reminders to train you into a healthier perspective.


What are Your Constant Reminders to Seek the Light?

When I encounter frustration or feelings of failure that people who are inspired by one of my articles aren’t forwarding it to everyone they know – while YouTube videos of school fights get forwarded in the millions – I turn to the Intense Experiences forums, for example, where readers have posted such kind words about the difference the IntenseExperiences.com newsletter has made in their lives.
This reminds me that, while I may not be reaching nearly everyone who would benefit from being reached, I have made a positive impact on some people … and that is light, that illuminates me, and that enables me to go forward positively and keep creating.
That’s (likely) why you subscribe to the free IntenseExperiences.com newsletter … it is one of those reminders for you.
Printing out this article, if you find it worthwhile, or any article, poem, motivational quote, or the like, and posting it where you will routinely see it – on your refrigerator, by your computer, etc. – can be a strong reminder.
You can also take photos, draw pictures, find items in nature, or buy things like pictures and jewelry that you decide will remind you to stay focused on the light every time you see it – and place them in places where you will see them often.
What did you once rejoice in that you may be taking for granted now?
What is worth rejoicing in that you may not be recognizing enough?
You are alive, and so the answers to these questions are endless, when you really consider it.
And that is the most beautiful light of all.

An Intense Experience to Ensure Your New Year is Happy

The past is good for two things: the happy memories, and the lessons it provides.
That is why as each year ends I partake in an intense experience that focuses on these values, creates an important sense of closure and helps greatly to ensure a happy New Year.
To embrace what is worthwhile from the previous year and leave the rest behind you – instead of holding onto grudges and regrets, as so many unfortunately do much to the detriment of their emotional and physical health – and to ensure your New Year is happy, I encourage you to try this experience. And to share it with those you love.
Take some time to ponder and create two lists:
One, your Top Five Most Important Lessons Learned in the Year.
And two, your Top Five Favorite Memories of the Year.
Now before you race off to do this, read the rest of this short article. It provides important perspective on doing this.
First and foremost, remember that the key aspect of this intense experience is to “take some time to ponder” it.
In today’s go-go faster-faster world, you may be tempted to rush through this experience, to treat it like another task to get off your to-do list.
But you just invested 8760 or so hours of your life in the previous year. To pull what is worth pulling from it, to give it proper perspective and proper closure, it surely deserves some of your focused conscious energy.



Remember the Wisdom of a Child
Maybe you lost half your investments this year. Or your job. Or your house. Or you faced health challenges. Or worse.
Well, you have two options:
One, dwell on the negative, self-defeating questions like “How could I be so stupid?” or “How could God let this happen to me?”
Those are not really questions but unchecked emotional responses that will only drive your spirit, health, relationships and more into the ground.
Your other option is to ponder what positive lessons you were graced with from whatever you experienced in the year. And to be thankful for them, as you have the gift of life and consciousness and therefore the ability to do something with those lessons.
For example, I personally went through some very painful relationship experiences and business experiences this past year. I could choose to beat myself up over them, or point the finger at others and say, “How could you?” I could choose to drown in the pain.
But a child doesn’t touch fire, get burned, and then spend the rest of his days – or even hours – lamenting how this could have happened to him. He learns not to touch the fire and twenty minutes later he is happily playing again.
In this past year two of the things I learned, or learned even more, are that:
- No matter how much you have invested, sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is let go.
- Deep love is hard work. And worth every ounce of it.
So, whether from challenging experiences or wonderful experiences, what top five lessons did you learn from the previous year?


Don’t Bang on the Beehive
To focus on your top five (or ten, or twenty) favorite memories of the year likely seems like good advice, but not profound advice.
But as with so many sensible actions, what seems so obvious when anyone thinks about it is unfortunately not what many people tend to do.
Instead, for example, when discussing the past year I have already heard so many people stating how bad it was. I hear them recalling all the bad memories.
This follows so many people’s tendency to dwell on what is wrong, what they don’t have, what they lack.
And this is as dangerous and unhealthy as it gets. It is like banging on a beehive.
Because here is a universal law: whatever you seek, you will find plenty of.
If you are focused on bad memories, problems, and things to complain about, you will most certainly find them. They will swarm your mind, your heart, and sting your life.
Likewise, if you are focused on good memories, the beauty in the world, and things to feel grateful for, you will most certainly find them too. They will nourish your mind, your heart, and allow your life to blossom.
I am grateful my son is attending college as a freshman and, all things considered, doing well. I am grateful for all the wonderful holiday gatherings with my family. I am grateful for being able to put the new Life Story Book out there for the world. I am grateful for the beautiful woman in my life. And I am grateful for so many kind words I receive from readers of the Intense Experiences newsletter.
So what are your top five favorite memories of the past year?
What are the most important lessons you learned from the year?
Put them out there, and put your gratitude for them out there, for the world, for the universe, for God to hear.
Share them with your family, and pass this article on to those you care about and ask them to share theirs with you.
What you put out, after all, is what you get back. And that will make for a very Happy New Year for you.

How to Discover Your Real Worst Trait (So You Can Be Happier and Better Accomplish Goals!)

How to Discover Your Real Worst Trait
(So You Can Be Happier and Better Accomplish Goals!)


She told me that I tended to be impatient. I couldn’t wait to hear exactly what she meant by that. But this time, because it was one of the essential rules of the exercise whose ultimate aim was to help me improve myself toward being happier and better able to accomplish goals, I kept my mouth shut.
Yes, the moment my wife told me my worst trait was impatience, I felt a powerful need to defend myself. I wanted to point out that what she saw as impatience was really my go-getter nature, my accept-nothing-but-the-best (and now) attitude, and therefore it couldn’t possibly be my worst trait.
She saw me literally biting down on my tongue and she laughed. “See, you’re fighting your impatience right now. You want to respond before I even have a chance to explain what I mean when I say impatience is your worst trait.” And in that way that only a spouse can, she took a much-longer-than-necessary pause -- she may as well have filed her nails, chewed gum and stared at the ceiling for further effect – before continuing on. But even then I stayed silent, per the rules.
She then explained that “intense drive” was indeed one of my best qualities, but that its flipside was the often intense impatience she was referring to … an impatience that sometimes made her and others I cared most about feel inadequate, or at least mighty irritated, and an impatience that was likely also my own worst enemy.
She provided various details and examples, I shut up and listened, and sure enough – POP!– that oversized light bulb you used to see in cartoons came to life above my head.
She was absolutely right.
Now of course I am married to her, so I didn’t put that news to her in those terms. But when she was (finally) done voicing why she believed my worst trait was impatience, I simply thanked her. That was also per the rules, but I really meant it.
The simple exercise had worked wonders at opening my eyes.
I then – per the rules – launched into what I believed her worse trait to be, and why. (Actually I started by saying, “I think your worse trait is your inability to recognize my worst traits,” but she just shook her head and rolled her eyes so I got serious.)
A few months later, when I went through this same “What Do You Think My Worst Trait Is?” exercise with my mother, sister and brother-in-law at a holiday meal, my impatience was again the answer I received (at least from my mother and sister; my brother-in-law said my worst trait was my inability to beat him at poker.)
Hearing that from other trusted sources of course only made that light bulb above my head burn brighter.
By shutting up and simply listening to this constructive criticism from those who cared about me – a beautiful thing, but a rare and difficult thing to do as I am certain you reading this can personally attest too – I was prompted to face something about myself that I had glimpsed before … but never directly confronted.
Because of this, today I am happy to report that I am the most patient person in the world.
Okay. NOT.
But I am aware of my tendency toward “intense impatience,” and have been working in various ways to reduce it. It’s a long road, and I will probably never reach the destination of most patient person in the world, but the point is I am now on the road.


“What Do You Think My Worst Trait Is?” – THE RULES
By now you likely get the gist of “What Do You Think My Worst Trait Is?” Below are some specific and important rules.
You will find that going through this exercise with your spouse, other loved ones and friends can be one of the most intense growth experiences of all for you, helping you to improve yourself and be happier and better able to accomplish goals because of it.
To hear what those who know you best think you need to work on most, without the opportunity of interference, an explanation or reply, will provide you some possibly challenging but truly powerful and transformative insights.
Simply:

1. Ask your loved one(s) to please tell you what your worst trait is (or your two or three worst traits), noting your commitment to silence as they do so. You’ll love the look you get when you ask this.
2. In turn, explain that you can do the same for them when they are done with you … but only if they choose to have you do so. This reciprocation should not be required, however. They may not be ready to hear the truth from you; you are ready to hear it from them, though.
3. Agree to these rules with your loved one(s.) And agree to abide by them within yourself.
4. Be silent as your loved one provides you the answer to “What Do You Think My Worst Trait Is?” Don’t ask for clarification. Don’t try to pull them back if they meander into other areas that don’t seem relevant to their reply. They are going where they go for a reason, so it is relevant … and likely quite worthwhile to you. PROMISE to stay silent and let them answer, let them explain, let them talk until they are done. (You can, of course, agree to answer any questions they may ask of you in the course of your answer, or to ask to go to the bathroom.)
5. When they are done with their answer, just thank them. Fight any urge to explain or defend yourself even at this point. Perhaps you believe they got some detail or example wrong; that is NOT the point. The big picture is the point. They told you what they told you, and gave you what they gave you, because that is the way they see it. And because they care about you. Though this or that detail may be off, there is remarkable value in that!
   (When they are done, you can of course ask questions for the sake of clarification and your deeper understanding; but commit to remain silent in terms of “defending” yourself against the insights. They’re not attacking – they’re loving – so try to remember there is nothing to defend.)
6. If you did agree to reciprocate, make sure you are not feeling any urge to “get back at them” if anything that poured forth from them rattled you. If you are feeling that, take a breather. Step away if need be and remind yourself that there is no fight here, this is all being done out of love and for the sake of growth. (And hey, you started it anyway!)
7. If they violate the rules as you explain your answer, just kindly remind them that they are doing so. Tell them if they don’t want you to go on you won’t – you are not attacking but loving, providing your honest answer as requested, and they can later choose to do with it what they will, unless they genuinely choose that you stop … in which case you should, because your answer to them is for them, NOT a “get it off your chest” opportunity for you.
8. You can also opt to agree to conclude by telling one another your best traits; it’s an additional positive way to close the conversation, and what you learn may surprise you as well.
9. When you are both done, in addition to a thank you, hug one another. If you are not used to hugging one another, hug one another. If you are a guy and the loved one you do this with is also guy, and you are both too tough to hug, hug one another. It is the perfect finish to a powerful exercise whose benefits –including a greater focus on where you need work and the resulting greater happiness and ability to accomplish goals – are only starting (but only if you ponder and act on the answer you were given about your worst trait, of course.)
   Oh, and if it is your loved one or significant other, also throw in a kiss of gratitude. I did with my wife, and I made sure it was deep, heartfelt and most of all -- unrushed.

Brief Thoughts on Big Things:
On Conviction of Character

To remember how to be who you really are, learn from the tree. It does not spend its day running from task to task, trying to get everything done and trying to please everyone. It does not care what I say about it, nor what you think. No matter what, it is and remains the tree. It serves its purpose, it lives long, and it stands proud and beautiful being exactly what it is.

How to Discover the Truth -- Including the Hardest Truths -- Inside You Every Time

by Brian Vaszily, Founder of IntenseExperiences.com You’ve certainly heard the expression in many different contexts before, but if you ever have raised or are raising children – particularly teenagers -- it’s probably fresh on your lips: “Look me in the eyes and tell the truth.”
If you are trying to discover the truth, the eyes really don’t lie. Of course, the key is to be able to fairly and purely read another’s eyes, without bringing in your own preconceived notions.
If I have cleared a path past my desires and fears straight to my intuition, in other words, I am always able to read my teenaged son’s eyes and discover the truth … even the hardest truths.
But if my own concerns or hopes for him are racing around inside me -- if I let my fear that he is recklessly speeding when he drives cloud my ability to hear his answer to me in this regard, for example – I may only see that emotion inside me instead of discovering the truth his words and eyes hold.
Truth is always a two-way street. Truth can only be given when it is also ready to be received.
But the eyes themselves definitely help. More than any other means we have available to us, a pair of eyes gently set upon another pair of eyes can clear straight through both parties’ “rust and crust” – the self-sabotaging emotions and assumptions that build up over time – to both discover the truth and to allow that truth to be discovered.
This is so when the other pair of eyes belong to another, and it is so when the other pair of eyes you are gently staring into are your own. If you are seeking to find honest answers to some difficult questions inside of you, therefore, the following simple experience is a remarkably effective and powerful a means to discover the truth – including the hardest truths that your “rust and crust” might otherwise be preventing you from facing.
Like all the most powerful experiences, it is simple. It will seem somewhat familiar, as we all have done it subconsciously to some extent. And it may even seem obvious … but of course it is the obvious we most often lose hold of, abandoning what really matters in the process.
So get your hardest questions ready – about the relationships in your life, about your career, about whatever difficult choices you are faced with making – and delve into this experience to discover the truth you are seeking:
The 6 Step Process to Finding the Truth Inside You 1) Stand alone before a mirror, ideally where you can talk to yourself aloud and you don’t have to worry about anyone hearing you. It helps to be naked and not even wearing any make-up; this can subtly help you feel even freer of any false fronts and modified appearances to discover the truth all the more effectively.
2) Look yourself in the eyes. Be kind and gentle about it. Smile at yourself. Make funny faces for a bit to clear the air if you need to. Keep gazing at yourself and try not to let the kind and gentle stare into your own eyes go. At the same time, don’t worry about blinking if you need to blink – this is not a staring contest. Keep your eyes comfortable, blink as much as you need to, as they stare kindly into your eyes.
3) If you have any notion that this is strange or that it “won’t work,” try to let go of it. No one else ever has to know you are doing it if you so choose. And this experience will likely work in a big way – tell yourself as much aloud as you stare into your eyes, “This is going to work, I am finally going to discover the truth, even if it is a hard truth, inside of me.” The beauty of experiences is that they always guide you to something worthwhile inside you, even if it is a small thing, but this experience will work in a big way … tell yourself as much as you look kindly into your eyes. And even if you don’t fully believe it, don’t worry. Continue anyway.
4) Take three deep and intentional breaths, maintaining your gentle gaze at your own eyes in the mirror. When you exhale, feel the doubts and negativity leaving your body, and when you inhale feel the purity and joy flowing in.
5) After the third exhale, while staring gently into your eyes, ask yourself the difficult question (or the first of multiple difficult questions) that you have. For example:
“Are he and I truly meant to be together?”
or
“Why do I really feel so depressed?”
Keep gently staring into your eyes, that is the key, as you hear the responses to your question in your head. Try not to let your stare go, and if you do happen to look away always bring your eyes kindly back to your eyes.
6) Repeat the same question again while still, of course, staring into your eyes. Are you hearing the same answers when you ask again? Or different answers? Does it feel like the truth? Be patient and accepting. Your brain may get straight to the truth, or it may rattle around a while trying to skirt the issue. But your conversation with yourself while maintaining the gaze at your own eyes will draw the truth out. Feel free to discuss the issue, aloud and in more detail, with yourself. Ask other related questions and make related comments to keep the truth coming.
Keep holding your gentle stare as you discuss it. Don’t allow your eyes to divert, don’t allow them to take you into hiding. And if they momentarily succeed in looking away from you, quickly and gently bring them back and continue with your self-questioning.
Asking the questions, having the conversation, and staring gently into your eyes as you do so, you will know when the answers in your head are attempts to bypass the truth. And you will know when you finally discover the truth.
It may be a truth that fills you with joy or excitement, or with fear or sadness, but as long as you are holding your gaze even the hardest truths will come to you.
Try it. Commit to it. You will see it truly is that simple.
On the other hand, if the truths you discovered mean difficult actions must follow if you are to remain true to yourself, you may find that when you look away -- moments to minutes to hours to days after you stop staring into your eyes -- all sorts of self-delusions will try pushing their way back in instead. That part is not always so simple.
So when that occurs go back to the mirror. Go back to the six steps above. Go back to your eyes. Keep doing so until your actions have had no choice but to follow through to the truth you have discovered.
Even as the rest of you resists, your eyes will never lie to you if you are open to them. Let them guide you.

How an “X” Written on Your Hand Can Equal An Act of Kindness... and Improve Lives

By Brian Vaszily, Author of the #1 bestseller, The 9 Intense Experiences -- named one of the best motivational books ever -- and Founder of IntenseExperiences.com

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind. – Henry James

If someone you know reasonably well has written an “X” on the back of their hand, you’re naturally curious what it means. Especially if it is an adult who penned that “X,” as writing on the skin is a far more common pastime of kids and teens. I am routinely one of those Xing adults.
Perhaps once or twice a month, and despite the fact that my cell phone, computer, watch and probably other gadgets all have audio reminder capability, I’ll find myself scribbling an “X” in the canvas between the back of my thumb and forefinger to remind myself of something particularly important.
Inevitably anyone who knows me and who sees this has to ask, “What’s that for?” And usually my reason is mundane; the other day I did it to make sure to get my ex-wife a birthday card, for example. “Oh” is all people usually have to say when you give them such boring truths.
But the time before that, about a month ago, the “X” I had scribbled in black on my hand had a more interesting purpose behind it.


Nice Teeth, Brian
That morning, I awoke in one of those super blah moods where I knew that, if I allowed it to, the world and everyone in it was going to grate on my nerves. I realized why I was in this bad mood – not enough sleep several nights in a row, consuming fast food for the first time in a very long time the day before – and I also realized I had better go through certain motions to release those negative emotions before I faced the day.
I went through those motions, but this time – perhaps because I chose to supersize the %$^#& fast food the day before – enough of the blahs still lingered that I had to do something more.
So I decided to try something different.
With a black pen, I created an X on the back of my left hand that was double the size of my normal X. Then I outlined it with a red pen. Now, discounting the voice of an old schoolteacher who warned her students that the ink would surely leach into the skin and poison us, and accepting that my left hand wasn’t the world’s most professional-looking left hand but that was a small price to pay, I felt prepared to face the world.
That’s because that black X in red outline stood for a commitment I made to myself so as not to let my chemical mood get the best of me and ruin my and other people’s day (or worse), and in fact to possibly transform it: no matter who I encountered, the X said, I would pay them a big, honest compliment. Two or three if necessary.
Kindness at all costs, even if I encountered the very devil or the very ex-girlfriend from long ago who stole my entire cassette tape collection.
Since I was the first person I met that day, I looked at my X and then stared into the mirror. “Wow Brian,” I complimented me, “kudos to you for so vigilantly trying not to let your toxic emotions control you.” I also added, “Nice teeth,” because after brushing they looked particularly bright and shiny.
The next person I encountered was my wife. Now, anyone who is married knows that, when you’re in the throes of the blahs, the one other person most likely to pay for it is your spouse. Especially if she’s running late for something and doesn’t like her hair that day. So I looked long and hard at that X on my hand – I would’ve even licked it if necessary – and then paid her a series of important compliments.
And she left the house beaming.
I did the same with my kids and, although both seemed to have awakened on the same side of their beds as me that morning, after my compliments their stomping turned to happier, buoyant steps out the door.
I won’t give you a chronological history of everyone I encountered that day in person, on the phone, and via email or the compliments and kindnesses my X made sure I handed them. But I will share with you two important points:


Three Ghosts Not Required for this Scrooge
First, one of the people I encountered earlier in that day was someone who, in a different, younger life, I would have called a complete and total jackass (in a moment of contemporary weakness I still might use this designation). This person, being full of anger and therefore vindictive, and also being in a position of power, had stabbed me and many others in the back over the years.
I only still dealt with him periodically because business demanded it of me.
The call he was placing to me was not to chat about old times or make amends… on the contrary. Momentarily I wondered if I would fail my X, if I should’ve carved it deep into my flesh versus merely using ink, but I pressed forward. As he launched into the nature of his call, negative tone intact, I dual processed, considering the biggest compliment I could hand him.
When he paused, I inhaled deeply and began: “Before we go on, I just always meant to tell you something despite our history together.” And I proceeded to tell him how much I admired his tenacity in the face of adversity (leaving out his part in the adversity) and several other compliments. (Everyone – and I mean everyone – has some good qualities, something you can learn from or appreciate in them.)
When I finished, and though admittedly I expected him to proclaim my compliments nonsense, an amazing thing happened. His entire tone changed, as did the intent of his call. I could feel him backtracking – still preserving his ego of course – on his intent as he spoke. By the call’s end, he had basically talked himself out of the negativity he had meant to pursue.
I realize kindness is not always this immediately “magic,” and that my compliments to him likely didn’t change the man permanently.
But I also strongly suspect that if I and others more vigilantly responded to his anger with kindness, that act alone really would “magically” help heal his heart and transform his character. His anger had typically been met with more anger and fear – and negative emotions only breed more negative emotions – but what if it had been met with unrelenting kindness? What if it could be?
Though it is perhaps the hardest medicine of all for people to administer, kindness cures where nothing else can.


In Which the X is Transferred to My Heart
The second important point I want to share is that, even before the near-miraculous transformation of Scrooge earlier in the day as noted above, and certainly thereafter, several amazing things happened as I presented compliments and kindness to everyone I encountered:
1) My day brightened… intensely. It is a beautiful thing, and it should be an obvious thing though all too often it is obvious only in retrospect, how shining light upon someone returns light. Simple kind words – to business associates, friends, the man behind the counter at the gas station and other strangers – can transform a day (or more), transforming yours right back.
2) After a certain point, I no longer needed to look and listen to the X on my hand at all. Around midday was the last time I recall needing to look at it, in fact. After that point, the compliments and kindness to friends, associates and strangers just came naturally and easily. It was now penned on my heart (which would make my old schoolteacher really nervous about the ink leaching through if she knew.)
Now, I would love to conclude this piece by noting that since that day I have been committed to constantly practicing kindness, including kindness in the face of adversity.
But that wouldn’t be true.
I don’t always pay sincere compliments to those I encounter, though I have seen the power of it and know doing so would be best. Due to negative emotions or lack of sleep or a headache or any number of other excuses I can muster, I am not always kind … though I have seen how being so can transform people, including me, like nothing else in this world.
I have not been 100% kind and complimentary since then, and I also know I will never be 100% so. But I thoroughly intend to try to be so -- and to kindly forgive myself when I fail and keep trying again – because everything that needs to be said and done can be said and done far more effectively in a kind way.
There is nothing more that we or the world around us needs more than that knowledge, and that commitment.
As J.M. Barrie, author of perhaps the greatest children’s story ever told, Peter Pan, noted, ”Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.”
That is worth remembering, even when it takes a black X outlined in red on the back of your hand to do so.

The Perfect Gift for Enemies, Strangers, Friends and All Deserving People

The Perfect Gift for Enemies, Strangers, Friends and
All Deserving People
(A Revelation in a Shopping Mall)

by Brian Vaszily, founder of IntenseExperiences.com

“The Perfect Gift for Him!” “The Perfect Gift for Grandma!” “The Perfect Gift for That Person Who Thinks They’re Perfect!”Whether it’s on TV, the radio, the newspaper, in stores, or in your email inbox, by now you’ve likely witnessed – and perhaps tried to ignore -- dozens or hundreds of ads along these lines.
What follows is not another diatribe against the materialistic excesses of the holidays; most people already are aware that the holidays are too materialistic, and in the U.S. at least, 3 in 4 wish it weren’t so according to a recent study*. Nonetheless, most people still tend to go overboard on holiday gifts, and at least there is something to be said for the fun of exchanging those gifts.
Instead what follows is my own guide to what I believe you will agree are truly perfect gifts to try your best to give ... during the holiday season and all year long.
I wish I could claim to have been inspired to create this while taking a solitary walk in the snowy woods beneath the moonlight or something similarly romantic. But the truth is I was inspired to create this when I got frustrated while shopping at a mega-mall where I couldn’t find a decent gift, much less the perfect one, for several people in my life.
I took a step back from my frustration, inhaled a few deep breaths, and then ended up really taking in all the people and activity going on around me. The throng of zigzagging strangers of all races and many different cultures on their shopping missions. The Salvation Army bell ringer with uncombed hair and dirty fingernails ringing his bell. The Santa with a yellow beard and smoker’s rasp ho-ho-hoing in the center of the mall, a long line of children wiggling and squealing in fear and delight before him.
Long story short, removing myself from the bustle and instead observing it, I was reminded that while worrying about the perfect material gift was just silly, doing my best to give the following perfect gifts now and all year long is as worthwhile as it gets.


The Perfect Gift for Children
My children, and the world’s children, are watching me. They will not learn from what I tell them to do; instead they will learn from what I actually do. If I practice intolerance for those with different viewpoints or physical features, I accept the world our children will run will be an even more intolerant place. If I practice tolerance, forgiveness and love, I expect the world they will run will be a more tolerant, forgiving and loving place. That is the perfect gift for my own children and the world’s children: my example.

The Perfect Gift for “Enemies”
Whether they trespassed against me intentionally or not, and even if they are aware of their trespasses against me but still cannot or will not alter their course, I will not allow hatred to take hold in my heart for anyone. Hatred only destroys, including destroying my dreams, peace and happiness and therefore destroying those around me who love me and depend on me. Even if I must take action to pursue what is right with those who have violated me in some way, I will take noble action with a loving heart, and even as I must act I will do so with forgiveness in my heart. That is the perfect gift for my “enemies” and all the lives they touch, which means my life and all lives: forgiveness.


The Perfect Gift for Friends
A true friend is someone who feels the same about me as I do about them: I don’t seek to take from them but instead thrive by giving of myself to them. The time, energy, and most of all the understanding I can provide them make me better, and I am at peace that they feel the same toward me. That is the perfect gift for my friends: my commitment to their heart.


The Perfect Gift for Strangers
Strangers are not threats to my way of life, they are potential for an even greater life. Though my ego may fear strangers and want to barricade me from the different perspectives they may offer, I will not let my ego confine me away from the greater happiness that can be mine. Every person of positive significance in my life was once a stranger to me too, and therefore strangers are gifts. Therefore, the perfect gift I can give to strangers is my embrace of them.


The Perfect Gift for Those in Need
I do not need to agree with any of the choices that may have led them there, nor do I even need to know or understand those choices, to give to those in need. I am not a flawless being equipped to make others in my image and therefore judge them when they are not, but I am a loving being equipped to make the world a better place by putting that love into action.
If I practice indifference to anyone in need, or they must pass my judgment before I extend my hand, I accept that I will be treated the same if I am ever in need, and that others I care about will be treated the same if they ever are. If I practice unconditional love, I accept that the world will become more of an unconditionally loving place. Attentive conversations with lonely elderly people, serving meals to the homeless, generous donations to the destitute, visiting the sick and forgotten in hospitals, long and genuine hugs for those down on their luck who hold a different political or religious view from my own… the perfect gift for those in need, and for anyone, is my love in the form of action.
It is the gift that keeps on giving.
It is the spirit of the holidays.
This love in action, I remembered while watching all those shoppers rush by with their treasures, is the only gift that has ever kept our world merry and bright.
It turned out to be the most worthwhile experience I ever had at a shopping mall.


Happy Holidays, and may your healthy perspective and loving heart bring you the gift of a wonderful New Year.

Introducing Android 4.0

Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is the latest version of the Android platform for phones, tablets, and more. It builds on the things people love most about Android — easy multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing.

Simple, Beautiful, Useful

Refined, evolved UI

Focused on bringing the power of Android to the surface, Android 4.0 makes common actions more visible and lets you navigate with simple, intuitive gestures. Refined animations and feedback throughout the system make interactions engaging and interesting. An entirely new typeface optimized for high-resolution screens improves readability and brings a polished, modern feel to the user interface.
Virtual buttons in the System Bar let you navigate instantly to Back, Home, and Recent Apps. The System Bar and virtual buttons are present across all apps, but can be dimmed by applications for full-screen viewing. You can access each application's contextual options in the Action Bar, displayed at the top (and sometimes also at the bottom) of the screen.
Multitasking is a key strength of Android and it's made even easier and more visual on Android 4.0. The Recent Apps button lets you jump instantly from one task to another using the list in the System Bar. The list pops up to show thumbnail images of apps used recently — tapping a thumbnail switches to the app.

The Recent Apps list makes multitasking simple.

Jump to the camera or see notifications without unlocking.

For incoming calls, you can respond instantly by text.

Rich and interactive notifications let you keep in constant touch with incoming messages, play music tracks, see real-time updates from apps, and much more. On smaller-screen devices, notifications appear at the top of the screen, while on larger-screen devices they appear in the System Bar.

Home screen folders and favorites tray

New home screen folders offer a new way for you to group your apps and shortcuts logically, just by dragging one onto another. Also, in All Apps launcher, you can now simply drag an app to get information about it or immediately uninstall it, or disable a pre-installed app.

The All Apps launcher (left) and resizable widgets (right) give you apps and rich content from the home screen.

On smaller-screen devices, the home screen now includes a customizable favorites tray visible from all home screens. You can drag apps, shortcuts, folders, and other priority items in or out of the favorites tray for instant access from any home screen.

Resizable widgets

Home screens in Android 4.0 are designed to be content-rich and customizable. You can do much more than add shortcuts — you can embed live application content directly through interactive widgets. Widgets let you check email, flip through a calendar, play music, check social streams, and more — right from the home screen, without having to launch apps. Widgets are resizable, so you can expand them to show more content or shrink them to save space.

New lock screen actions

The lock screens now let you do more without unlocking. From the slide lock screen, you can jump directly to the camera for a picture or pull down the notifications window to check for messages. When listening to music, you can even manage music tracks and see album art.

Quick responses for incoming calls

When an incoming call arrives, you can now quickly respond by text message, without needing to pick up the call or unlock the device. On the incoming call screen, you simply slide a control to see a list of text responses and then tap to send and end the call. You can add your own responses and manage the list from the Settings app.

Swipe to dismiss notifications, tasks, and browser tabs

Android 4.0 makes managing notifications, recent apps, and browser tabs even easier. You can now dismiss individual notifications, apps from the Recent Apps list, and browser tabs with a simple swipe of a finger.

A spell-checker lets you find errors and fix them faster.

A powerful voice input engine lets you dictate continuously.

Improved text input and spell-checking

The soft keyboard in Android 4.0 makes text input even faster and more accurate. Error correction and word suggestion are improved through a new set of default dictionaries and more accurate heuristics for handling cases such as double-typed characters, skipped letters, and omitted spaces. Word suggestion is also improved and the suggestion strip is simplified to show only three words at a time.
To fix misspelled words more easily, Android 4.0 adds a spell-checker that locates and underlines errors and suggests replacement words. With one tap, you can choose from multiple spelling suggestions, delete a word, or add it to the dictionary. You can even tap to see replacement suggestions for words that are spelled correctly. For specialized features or additional languages, you can now download and install third-party dictionaries, spell-checkers, and other text services.

Powerful voice input engine

Android 4.0 introduces a powerful new voice input engine that offers a continuous "open microphone" experience and streaming voice recognition. The new voice input engine lets you dictate the text you want, for as long as you want, using the language you want. You can speak continously for a prolonged time, even pausing for intervals if needed, and dictate punctuation to create correct sentences. As the voice input engine enters text, it underlines possible dictation errors in gray. After dictating, you can tap the underlined words to quickly replace them from a list of suggestions.

Data usage controls let you monitor total usage by network type and application and then set limits if needed.

Control over network data

Mobile devices can make extensive use of network data for streaming content, synchronizing data, downloading apps, and more. To meet the needs of you with tiered or metered data plans, Android 4.0 adds new controls for managing network data usage.
In the Settings app, colorful charts show the total data usage on each network type (mobile or Wi-Fi), as well as amount of data used by each running application. Based on your data plan, you can optionally set warning levels or hard limits on data usage or disable mobile data altogether. You can also manage the background data used by individual applications as needed.

Designed for accessibility

A variety of new features greatly enhance the accessibility of Android 4.0 for blind or visually impaired users. Most important is a new explore-by-touch mode that lets you navigate without having to see the screen. Touching the screen once triggers audible feedback that identifies the UI component below; a second touch in the same component activates it with a full touch event. The new mode is especially important to support users on new devices that use virtual buttons in the System Bar, rather than dedicated hardware buttons or trackballs. Also, standard apps are updated to offer an improved accessibility experience. The Browser supports a script-based screen reader for reading favorite web content and navigating sites. For improved readability, you can also increase the default font size used across the system.
The accessibility experience begins at first setup — a simple touch gesture during setup (clockwise square from upper left) activates all accessibility features and loads a setup tutorial. Once accessibility features are active, everything visible on the screen can be spoken aloud by the standard screen reader.

Contacts and profiles are integrated across apps and social networks, for a consistent, personal experience everywhere — from incoming calls to emails.

Communication and sharing

People and profiles

Throughout the system, your social groups, profiles, and contacts are linked together and integrated for easy accessibility. At the center is a new People app that offers richer profile information, including a large profile picture, phone numbers, addresses and accounts, status updates, events, and a new button for connecting on integrated social networks.
Your contact information is stored in a new "Me" profile, allowing easier sharing with apps and people. All of your integrated contacts are displayed in an easy to manage list, including controls over which contacts are shown from any integrated account or social network. Wherever you navigate across the system, tapping a profile photo displays Quick Contacts, with large profile pictures, shortcuts to phone numbers, text messaging, and more.

Unified calendar, visual voicemail

To help organize appointments and events, an updated Calendar app brings together personal, work, school, and social agendas. With user permission, other applications can contribute events to the calendar and manage reminders, for an integrated view across multiple calendar providers. The app is redesigned to let you manage events more easily. Calendars are color-coded and you can swipe left or right to change dates and pinch to zoom in or out agendas.
In the phone app, a new visual voicemail features integrates incoming messages, voice transcriptions, and audio files from one or more providers. Third-party applications can integrate with the Phone app to add your own voice messages, transcriptions, and more to the visual voicemail inbox.

Capture the picture you want, edit, and share instantly.

Rich and versatile camera capabilities

The Camera app includes many new features that let you capture special moments with great photos and videos. After capturing images, you can edit and share them easily with friends.
When taking pictures, continuous focus, zero shutter lag exposure, and decreased shot-to-shot speed help capture clear, precise images. Stabilized image zoom lets you compose photos and video in the way you want, including while video is recording. For new flexibility and convenience while shooting video, you can now take snapshots at full video resolution just by tapping the screen as video continues to record.
To make it easier to take great pictures of people, built-in face detection locates faces in the frame and automatically sets focus. For more control, you can tap to focus anywhere in the preview image.
For capturing larger scenes, the Camera introduces a single-motion panorama mode. In this mode, you start an exposure and then slowly turn the Camera to encompass as wide a perspective as needed. The Camera assembles the full range of continuous imagery into a single panoramic photo.
After taking a picture or video, you can quickly share it by email, text message, bluetooth, social networks, and more, just by tapping the thumbnail in the camera controls.

A Photo Gallery widget on the home screen.

Redesigned Gallery app with photo editor

The Gallery app now makes it easier to manage, show, and share photos and videos. For managing collections, a redesigned album layout shows many more albums and offers larger thumbnails. There are many ways to sort albums, including by time, location, people, and tags. To help pictures look their best, the Gallery now includes a powerful photo editor. You can crop and rotate pictures, set levels, remove red eyes, add effects, and much more. After retouching, you can select one or multiple pictures or videos to share instantly over email, text messaging, bluetooth, social networks, or other apps.
An improved Picture Gallery widget lets you look at pictures directly on the home screen. The widget can display pictures from a selected album, shuffle pictures from all albums, or show a single image. After adding the widget to the home screen, you can flick through the photo stacks to locate the image you want, then tap to load it in Gallery.

Live Effects let you change backgrounds and use Silly Faces during video.

Live Effects for transforming video

Live Effects is a collection of graphical transformations that add interest and fun to videos captured in the Camera app. For example, you can change the background behind them to any stock or custom image, for just the right setting when shooting video. Also available for video is Silly Faces, a set of morphing effects that use state-of-the-art face recognition and GPU filters to transform facial features. For example, you can use effects such as small eyes, big mouth, big nose, face squeeze, and more. Outside of the Camera app, Live Effects is available during video chat in the Google Talk app.

Snapping a screenshot.

Sharing with screenshots

You can now share what's on your screens more easily by taking screenshots. Hardware buttons let them snap a screenshot and store it locally. Afterward, you can view, edit, and share the screen shot in Gallery or a similar app.

Cloud-connected experience

Android has always been cloud-connected, letting you browse the web and sync photos, apps, games, email, and contacts — wherever you are and across all of your devices. Android 4.0 adds new browsing and email capabilities to let you take even more with them and keep communication organized.

The Browser tabs menu (left) lets you quickly switch browser tabs. The options menu (right) gives you new ways to manage your browsing experience.

Benchmark comparisons of Android Browser.

Powerful web browsing

The Android Browser offers an experience that’s as rich and convenient as a desktop browser. It lets you instantly sync and manage Google Chrome bookmarks from all of your accounts, jump to your favorite content faster, and even save it for reading later in case there's no network available.
To get the most out of web content, you can now request full desktop versions of web sites, rather than their mobile versions. You can set your preference for web sites separately for each browser tab. For longer content, you can save a copy for offline reading. To find and open saved pages, you can browse a visual list that’s included with browser bookmarks and history. For better readability and accessibility, you can increase the browser’s zoom levels and override the system default text sizes.
Across all types of content, the Android Browser offers dramatically improved page rendering performance through updated versions of the WebKit core and the V8 Crankshaft compilation engine for JavaScript. In benchmarks run on a Nexus S device, the Android 4.0 browser showed an improvement of nearly 220% over the Android 2.3 browser in the V8 Benchmark Suite and more than 35% in the SunSpider 9.1 JavaScript Benchmark. When run on a Galaxy Nexus device, the Android 4.0 browser showed improvement of nearly 550% in the V8 benchmark and nearly 70% in the SunSpider benchmark.

Improved email

In Android 4.0, email is easier to send, read, and manage. For composing email, improved auto-completion of recipients helps with finding and adding frequent contacts more quickly. For easier input of frequent text, you can now create quick responses and store them in the app, then enter them from a convenient menu when composing. When replying to a message, you can now toggle the message to Reply All and Forward without changing screens.
For easier browsing across accounts and labels, the app adds an integrated menu of accounts and recent labels. To help you locate and organize IMAP and Exchange email, the Email app now supports nested mail subfolders, each with synchronization rules. You can also search across folders on the server, for faster results.
For enterprises, the Email app supports EAS v14. It supports EAS certificate authentication, provides ABQ strings for device type and mode, and allows automatic sync to be disabled while roaming. Administrators can also limit attachment size or disable attachments.
For keeping track of incoming email more easily, a resizable Email widget lets you flick through recent email right from the home screen, then jump into the Email app to compose or reply.

Android Beam lets you share what you are using with a single tap.

Innovation

Android is continuously driving innovation forward, pushing the boundaries of communication and sharing with new capabilities and interactions.

Android Beam for NFC-based sharing

Android Beam is an innovative, convenient feature for sharing across two NFC-enabled devices, It lets people instantly exchange favorite apps, contacts, music, videos — almost anything. It’s incredibly simple and convenient to use — there’s no menu to open, application to launch, or pairing needed. Just touch one Android-powered phone to another, then tap to send.
For sharing apps, Android Beam pushes a link to the app's details page on Google Play. On the other device, the Google Play app launches and loads the details page, for easy downloading of the app. Individual apps can build on Android Beam to add other types of interactions, such as passing game scores, initiating a multiplayer game or chat, and more.

Face recognition lets you unlock your phone with your face.

Face Unlock

Android 4.0 introduces a completely new approach to securing a device, making each person's device even more personal — Face Unlock is a new screen-lock option that lets you unlock your device with your face. It takes advantage of the device front-facing camera and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology to register a face during setup and then to recognize it again when unlocking the device. Just hold your device in front of your face to unlock, or use a backup PIN or pattern.

Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth HDP

Support for Wi-Fi Direct lets you connect directly to nearby peer devices over Wi-Fi, for more reliable, higher-speed communication. No internet connection or tethering is needed. Through third-party apps, you can connect to compatible devices to take advantage of new features such as instant sharing of files, photos, or other media; streaming video or audio from another device; or connecting to compatible printers or other devices.
Android 4.0 also introduces built-in support for connecting to Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) devices. With support from third-party apps, you can connect to wireless medical devices and sensors in hospitals, fitness centers, homes, and elsewhere.