Just a little dirt

And some recent research has added another missing piece to the puzzle: It’s in the dirt. Or to be a little more specific, a strain of bacterium in soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, has been found to trigger the release of seratonin, which in turn elevates mood and decreases anxiety. And on top of that, this little bacterium has been found to improve cognitive function and even treat some diseases. Which means that contact with soil, through gardening or other means, is beneficial. How did this discovery come about? Mary O’Brien, an oncologist at Royal Marsden Hospital in London, first stumbled upon these findings while inoculating lung cancer patients with a strain of M. vaccae to see if their symptoms improved. She noticed that in addition to fewer cancer symptoms, patients also demonstrated an improvement in emotional health, vitality, and even cognitive function. Dr. Chris Lowry, at Bristol University hypothesized that the body’s immune response to the bacterium causes the brain to produce seratonin. Lack of seratonin is one symptom, or perhaps even cause, of depression. He injected mice with the M. vaccae and he found that cytokine levels rose –cytokines are part of a chain reaction, the end result of which is the release of seratonin. Could M. vaccae be used as a sort of vaccination to treat depression? Possibly, and it is still being explored as a treatment for cancer, Crohn’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. Other research indicates that the bacterium could potentially affect us through normal everyday contact and not just injection. “Gardeners inhale these bacteria while digging in the soil, they also encounter it in their vegetables or when soil enters a cut in their skin,” says Dr. Dorothy Matthews. “From our study we can say that it is definitely good to be outdoors –it’s good to have contact with these organisms. It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks.” Matthews and Jenks shared their results at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego and at the Annual Animal Behavior Society Meeting at William and Mary College. For a more detailed summary of this research, see the Cosmos Magazine article, “How gardening could cure depression.”

Source: TLN Blog: Exploring the connection between nature and health www.healinglandscapes.org Image: Yum, dirt! by Guy Ambrosino.

Watch your posture

Here are two fascinating things that happen once our posture changes: 1. When we sit up straight, we are more likely to remember positive memories or think of something positive in general. 2. If we skip during breaks, we can significantly increase our energy levels. A slow, slumped walk on the other hand, can do the exact opposite and drain us of our energy. Our posture has more to do with our minds we might have thought. And in fact, it seems like our bodies come first –when we alter our posture and body language, it subconsciously influences our thinking and decision-making. You might know about Amy Cuddy’s famous Ted Talk and her incredible insights on how posture changes our hormone levels. Well, some recent studies took this even further. Researchers from Columbia and Harvard Universities showed that body language symbolizing power can actually affect our decision-making, subconsciously. The researchers measured the appetite for risk of participants in either expansive, powerful poses, or contricted poses (occupying minimal space, keeping limbs close to the body). Those in the powerful poses not only felt more powerful and in control, but were 45% more likely to take a risky bet. Plus, the study used saliva samples to prove that expansive postures actually altered the participants’ hormone levels —decreasing cortisol (C) and increasing testosterone (T): This neuroendocrine profile of High T and Low C has been consistently linked to such outcomes as disease resistance and leadership abilities.

Source: The Science Behind Posture and How It Affects Your Brain, by Belle Beth Cooper. lifehacker.com

Science meets Dharma

For years, Emory University, in Atlanta, has been known for its devotion to the field of Tibetan studies. Affiliated since the early 1990s with the nearby Drepung Loseling Monastery, a spiritual and academic center run by Emory graduate Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, the university has fostered exchanges between students and monks in the Tibetan refugee community in Dharamsala, India, to preserve and learn from Tibetan culture and faith. In 2007, Emory even welcomed the Dalai Lama, head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism and exiled soul of the Tibetan society, as a Presidential Distinguished Professor. Over the last decade, the school has partnered with the Tibetan community in Dharamsala to develop a program to revolutionize Tibetan Buddhist religious education –by fusing it with the study of Western science, possibly the first major overhaul of the monastic education system in over half a millennium. Arguably, this curricular change won’t be a huge leap, given Tibetan Buddhism’s historic focus on rigorous, debatebased education, empirical knowledge, and openness to adaptation. In 427 AD, Buddhists founded Nalanda, perhaps the world’s first higher education institution, for the study of both their faith as well as the natural sciences. At present, in some monasteries, monks spend up to 12 hours a day debating philosophy and logic, reciting prayers, and learning traditional sciences; of the 20,000 Buddhist monks in the 120,000 strong Tibetan- Indian exile population, about five percent study between 10 and 20 years to achieve the title of Geshe, similar to a doctorate. This focus on education and inquiry led the Dalai Lama to explore the convergence of Western science and Buddhism in books like The Universe in a Single Atom, and to openly declare that, what science proves false, Buddhism would reject from its scriptures. This has launched scientific-philosophic dialogues through bodies like the Mind & Life Institute, and led to collaborations between monks and neuroscientists to study the biology of mysticism and meditation at Emory, University of California, Davis, Stanford University, and the Universities of Massachusetts and Wisconsin. Yet despite all of the conversation and conceptual overlap, until about a decade ago barely any monks ever received actual Western scientific training. A partnership between philanthropist Bobby Sager and the Dalai Lama, detailed in Sager’s recent Beyond the Robe, emerged in 2001 to bring Western science into the monasteries. Launched as Science Meets Dharma, the program sent European graduate students to monasteries to teach science, with the goal of training monks to eventually teach on their own and incorporate science into their monastic curriculums. Despite some initial resistance by older monks, the program took off, as young disciples yearned for knowledge of the world as others understood it, and a means to harmonize their education with those realities. In 2006, Geshe Lhakdor, Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, came to Emory on a fellowship and began talking about establishing a new program. By 2008, he’d helped create Science for Monks, a crash course for higher-level disciples that would span the course of six summers at Emory. The program has now trained dozens of monks –covering the basics of scientific thought in their first year, then introducing them to major fields, and uniting all the branches of science by the sixth year– and expanded in 2010 to launch the Tenzin Gyatso Science Scholars program, so exceptional students can train as full-time scholars. The major turn came in 2012, though, when the Dalai Lama announced in Boston that he would officially make Western scientific education part of the core curriculum for all Gelug Buddhist monastic students. He then transferred the management of Science Meets Dharma from the program’s European partners to the monks themselves. Officially, the fusion is now complete, but over the past two years, Sager, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, and a host of other institutions have founded additional external programs for young monks and teachers to bone up on their science, to train as teachers, and to prepare for the inevitable challenges of systematically altering a 1,500-year-old corpus of education. To date, the programs have been coining new native words for scientific terms like electromagnetism, and launching a Tibetan-language Tibetan Science Journal, as well as numerous Tibetan and bilingual science textbooks. Yet despite the massive changes that continue to sweep the monastery system, the young monks seem anything but daunted. Their core beliefs intact, they seem to view this not as a strange, foreign imposition, but instead as a chance to keep their identity alive and relevant, and they’re eager to run with it.

Source: This is How Religion Should Deal with Science, by Mark Hay. magazine.good.is

Waste to Energy

Sweden now recycles or reuses an incredible 99 percent of its waste, an improvement on the already impressive 2012 figure of 96 percent. The country uses a waste management hierarchy system that focuses in descending order on prevention, reuse, recycling, recycling alternatives, and as a last resort, disposal in landfill. While only one percent of the average annual 461 kilograms of waste that each Swede produces winds up at the landfill stage, it is the “recycling alternatives” stage that is still causing controversy, as it involves the incineration of around two million tons of trash a year in the country’s Waste-to-energy (WTE) program. While Sweden focuses very heavily on not producing waste in the first place, the country’s 32 WTE stations burn almost as much trash as the country recycles. However, around 800,000 tons of that trash are imported from the UK, Italy, Norway and Ireland because the Swedes are such efficient reducers, reusers and recyclers. The WTE system works on the principal that three tons of burnt trash contains as much energy as one ton of fuel oil. 950,000 Swedish households are heated by the energy produced by the system, and 260,000 households are powered by it. Source: Sweden Now Recycles a Stagge

DIY Porch Pond

Flowerbed water gardens and porch ponds are easily installed and inexpensive, and they make sensational additions to your home’s landscape. These small water features are ideal for someone who is hesitant to create a large pond, perhaps because they lack experience, space, funds or time. Small water features are often considered starter sets and unfortunately are sometimes unfairly denigrated by those who fail to realize their tremendous value. Source: www.fishchannel.com Image: imgfave.com

Petition from Care2

Demand no dumping of nuclear waste on lands belonging to Indigenous Australians Author: Georgina B Target: Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott The Australian Government has been attempting to dump radioactive waste on lands belonging to Indigenous Australians. Proponents are saying it would provide economic benefits for Indigenous people, but many Indigenous groups are opposed to nuclear waste on their traditional lands. In a recent dispute, Indigenous owners of Muckaty Station located north of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory won a seven-year battle to stop domestic nuclear waste being dumped on their land, saying they were not properly consulted. It follows more than 20 years of Indigenous communities in South Australia and the Northern Territory fighting and defeating federal government plans for a national radioactive waste dump on their country. Australia has resisted using nuclear power and storing radioactive waste from overseas. This is in spite of the country holding some of the largest deposits of uranium in the world. Why should Indigenous Australians who have been systematically disadvantaged by white settlement have radioactive waste dumped on their lands? Find hundreds of petitions to sign at www.thepetitionsite. com, or start one yourself. www.care2.com

Share your research

If you want to publish, you need to consider how closely you are keeping your publications to your program. Is it the kind of work in which chunks lend themselves to publication? If ‘yes’, think about the future structure of your thesis as a document so you can try to turn your papers into chapters or subsections of chapters. It is a good idea to identify possible publications at an early stage, rather than wait until you have done some work and then wonder if it could make a paper. The other possibility is to publish papers on side issues. These are not part of your thesis as such but interest you enough for you to want to pursue them. Be careful, of course, that you do not devote all of your energy to these issues to the neglect of the thesis. Journals Once you have decided to publish, you have to consider which are the most appropriate journals in your field. You would already have some idea about what is published where, because of course you are reading these very journals. But now you have to make a deliberate effort to look at their editorial policies, to see if what you are doing fits their profile and to learn about the publishing conventions they require. As soon as you’ve decided to write an article for publication, do this screening of journals because the journal’s requirements, and its likely audience, will determine how you write the article. Writing the article first and then trying to match it to a journal is much more difficult. There are two main reasons why so many papers are not accepted for publication. First, they are submitted to the wrong journal. And second, they are rejected for the same reasons that some theses are found lacking. So, what you need is a clear statement of the point of your research, a logical argument which carries through the whole thing, and a clear indication of the significance of your findings. The main difference between the article and the thesis is that your review of previous relevant research would, of course, be very short and directly to the point. Follow strictly the journal’s formal requirements for publication and ask several colleagues and/or other readers to give you as much feedback on the work as possible before you submit it. It is worth rewriting it several times keeping it clear, short and to the point to increase your chances of acceptance. The question of authorship of publications has to be resolved well ahead. For example, find out the practice in your department and your supervisor’s expectations regarding joint authorship of any articles you write during a PhD candidature. Whether or not your supervisor or others are included, and also the position of names of joint authors, will depend on the extent of the intellectual input of each party.

Important reasons
We cannot think of any reason for not publishing but, when thinking if you should, let’s consider some reasons for wanting to.

1 If you are working on a topic which is hot and you know that many people are also researching it, it is important for you to stake your territory and start to establish a reputation in the field.

2 Also, in fast developing areas such as computer science, it is of course vital to publish your results, since waiting until you have finished the whole thesis may render them obsolete.

3 Publishing will help you to judge whether your work is of a high enough academic standard, or contains an original contribution to knowledge –two concerns often raised by PhD students.

4 Having to publish forces decisions about handling data and helps you organise yourself by providing an interim deadline.

So writing a seminar or conference paper or an article for publication could be a very good idea. It gives you an opportunity to practise your academic writing. It exposes you to critical assessment of your work. And it gives you the psychological boost of knowing that you are achieving something worthwhile. However, the design and structure of your work may mean that isolating a discrete, publishable part is not possible. For example, it may not be until the end of your research that the value of the work can be shown. In this situation you mustn’t feel pressured to publish. But you would be wise to find alternative forums for presenting your work to your peers such as at seminars, conferences and the like. Of course, time constraints will also govern your decision to publish. In addition you have to weigh the risks of rejection against the benefits of publication. These issues and also questions of where to publish and the protocol of possible joint authorship should be discussed with your supervisor. Find different ways to publish your papers at MyAIU Knowledge Source: “Publishing Papers”. www.uq.edu.au

Livescribe Notebooks by Moleskine.

Once it relied on a quill and inkpot, now we use roller pens, spray cans, or smartpens to capture our thoughts. Moleskine is creating tools and services which bridge analog and digital methods for a more seamless experience. The Livescribe notebook is a further step in that direction. The Livescribe Notebooks by Moleskine feature classic design details including familiar round corners, a ribbon bookmark, elastic closure and the “In case of loss, please return to...” label on the flyleaf. The Livescribe versions include an expandable inner pocket containing two bookmarks printed with smartpen buttons and controls. www.dexigner.com www.moleskine.com

7 lessons learned from failure

1. Forgive yourself… Please! Now. And now. And now. Letting go doesn’t just imply changing your mind, but freeing your heart. And that heart cannot be freed unless you drop the weight of your missed-take.

2. Practice inteligent regret. Unhealthy regret sucks your blood and intelligent regret gives you a blood transfusion.

3. You were never supposed not to fail.

You were never supposed to “know better” than you knew at any given moment. It’s mathematically impossible to be more than what you are right now. 4. You are much greater than you think. You’re greater than your mind, your heart, your missed-takes, your dreams, your passion, even greater than your whole life’s story.

5. If you are going to fall anyway, fall from the highest place. Failing greatly is about believing harder each time. Going deeper each time. Loving more each time. 6. Turn your failure into art.

The most effective way to get over what we lost in the fire, is to create something new out of its ashes. So the deeper you burn, the newer and truer your turn. Instead of wasting your energy on pointless self-destruction, spend every effort you can make, on reconstruction.

7. I f...ing lived and it was beautiful. We are supposed to be a goddamn river, not a pond. Flowing and changing is our nature.

–Woody Allen

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative br>
–Woody Allen

Food pairs to-go.

Inspired by the convenience of corningware, Bento makes to-go meals and snacks a cinch! The two-part design consists of a dry storage container and an additional jar, both of which keep hot food warm and cold food cool. In one handy unit, you can keep your favorite paired foods together, like cereal/milk, soup/crackers, yogurt/granola, chips/salsa, the list is endless! So, start creating your own combinations. Designer: Lefie Lindokken. www.yankodesign.com

Bachelor of Electrical Engineering

School of science and engineering Electrical Engineering

The Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (BS, BSEE) program objective is to provide students with a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of electrical engineering that would allow a graduate to function effectively in industry or continue on to graduate school. The Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (BS, BSEE) program is offered online. After evaluating both academic record and life experience, AIU staff working in conjunction with Faculty and Academic Advisors will assist students in setting up a custom-made program, designed on an individual basis. This flexibility to meet student needs is seldom found in other distance learning programs. Our online program does not require all students to take the same subjects/courses, use the same books, or learning materials. Instead, the online Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (BS, BSEE) curriculum is designed individually by the student and academic advisor. It specifically addresses strengths and weaknesses with respect to market opportunities in the student’s major and intended field of work. Understanding that industry and geographic factors should influence the content of the curriculum instead of a standardized onefits- all design is the hallmark of AIU’s unique approach to adult education. This philosophy addresses the dynamic and constantly changing environment of working professionals by helping adult students in reaching their professional and personal goals within the scope of the degree program.

Important:
Below is an example of the topics or areas you may develop and work on during your studies. By no means is it a complete or required list as AIU programs do not follow a standardized curriculum. It is meant solely as a reference point and example. Want to learn more about the curriculum design at AIU? Go ahead and visit our website, especially the Course and Curriculum section: www.aiu.edu/course-curriculum.html