Joseph Rountree Foundation published the first three of eleven ‘viewpoints’ examining the issues raised by their Social Evils work in the UK.
The three papers can be downloaded on the links below:
Has there been a decline in values in British society?
Unkind, risk-averse and untrusting - if this is today’s society, can we change it?
Social evils and social good
They are extremely well written, and do offer different viewpoints.
I felt that Anthony Graylings discussion around individualism was particularly well argued:
Hundreds of stuffed Tiggers occupy the seats on the Carnegie Mellon University campus in preparation for a memorial for professor Randy Pausch last week. During his last lecture, Pausch said, “You just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore”
Via:Telegraph
Horsesmouth is a really impressive online mentoring website which seems to be growing so quickly, and with good reason. As I write there are 5028 mentors registered with the site, with 1986 thank you’s sent. Without all the hassle of arranging to see someone about an issue this type of mentoring looks to be really effective and I look forward to watching Horsesmouth’s continued success!
Alex Johnson recently wrote an article for Rapport - The Magazine of the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation, about social networks and mentoring projects. Alex asked me what I thought about social media in this context…. isn’t that nice of him? You can read what Alex wrote by downloading the magazine here, and seeing the article on page 20/21.
A recent article in the NY Times describes a study of athlete’s gestures of pride and shame. You know what I mean - the upraised arms of triumph, the drooping shoulders of shame. However, the amazing thing is that these athletes were blind from birth, and so, it is not likely that they are merely reflecting cultural norms.
There is great debate amongst emotions researchers regarding the very nature of emotions and the importance of context in assigning labels to emotions. It’s good research, very compelling stuff. But this study is absolutely fascinating and suggests that emotions do have some sort of cross-cultural application and also do communicate important information, and have meaning.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/health/02prid.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=matsumoto&st=cse&oref=slogin (If this does not work for you, search the NY Times website for the Sep 2 08 Science Times article titled ‘Proud Is Proud, Sighted or Not, Researchers Find’.)
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, and Designmatters is commemorating with a public education exhibition at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris as part of the annual UN Department of Public Information/Non-Governmental Organization Conference.The posters were designed by a hand-picked team of students at the Art Center College of Design (where Designmatters is a “college-wide initiative enabling students to develop “real-world” solutions to critical contemporary issues.”)View all 25 of these beautiful posters on the Design 21 site.
Very, very sadly Randy Pausch succumbed to pancreatic cancer on Friday at home in Virginia. Randy’s bravery during his illness captured the admiration of thousands of people. The personal wisdom that he conveyed in his Last Lecture, which has been watched by 4.5 million people, is inspiring. The book of the same name is available on Amazon.
A couple of the winners of the RSA Design Direction caught my eye, although all the winners and entrant’s work seems amazing.Alex Ostrowski approached The Frenchay Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Bristol to see how he might use design to help in some way. It emerged that all patients suffer from post-traumatic amnesia and experience confusion in their sense of time, place and person. The term for this lost understanding is disorientation, something the unit is responsible for regaining with patients. Alex worked closely with staff to establish an appropriate colour system to bring holistic navigation to the unit, which we could apply to patients’ timetables, orientation boards, and the building itself and the project resulted in a book entitled ‘I am here’.
Jim Rokos designed ‘Mind-plan’, a tool that captured the user-centred nature of the brief, to help patients recovering from mental illness and who find it hard to plan a balanced life and fulfil their daily needs. A healthy balanced life allows recovery to continue and reduces the possibility of a relapse. Mind-plan is based on Maslow’s psychological theory, Hierarchy of Needs, which many people perceive as the definitive set of five human needs.
One of the most difficult things these days is to establish some truths about the state of the world. What really is happening? I read so many research papers, books and news stories simply in an effort to keep up and try to get a proper, realistic view…. an in-depth, informed perspective.Research is so complex, but it can lead to simple and powerful insights. This morning I was really thrilled to read a new research paper on happiness and wellbeing. The World Values Survey is publishing the results of a longitudinal research analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science (July, 2008) Development, Freedom, and Happiness: A Global PerspectiveData from representative national surveys carried out from 1981 to 2007 show that happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries. The country rankings showed that USA was 16, Britain was 21, Zimbabwe 97.Democratization and rising social tolerance contributed even more than economic development to a growing sense of free choice, and thus to rising levels of happiness.
“The strong version of the hedonic treadmill model was supported by three arguments: (a) individuals have a long-term happiness set point to which they readapt, despite changing circumstances; (b) this set-point is largely genetically determined; (c) societies’ happiness levels remain fixed over time. Recent research argues that the first two points should be re-interpreted as strong tendencies and not iron laws. The findings presented here support this reassessment, and demonstrate that the third point also needs to be modified: the happiness levels of nations can and do change.” “Taken together, these findings suggest that the hedonic treadmill model should be revised but not abandoned. The twin studies provide convincing evidence that genetic factors have an important impact on subjective well-being. And there is abundant and equally convincing evidence that people adapt to Development, Freedom, Happiness changes, so that subjective well-being levels tend to fluctuate around stable set-points. But these factors are not as dominant as earlier interpretations suggested. The hedonic treadmill model is a tendency that prevails only when other factors are constant.”
This paper questions some of the methods of previous happiness measurement data, but also within their conclusions they write:
“We would not expect subjective well-being to continue rising forever. Even apart from ceiling effects, recent years have seen a conjunction of favorable factors. Many low-income and middle-income countries experienced exceptionally high rates of economic growth, in the range of 4 to 11 percent annually. Rich countries had relatively little economic growth (in the range of 1 to 3%), but they experienced remarkable rates of social liberation, with hard-core opposition to gender equality and homosexuality falling by roughly half since 1981(Inglehart and Welzel, 2005).”
“These findings suggest that subjective well-being has important social consequences: Falling levels of subjective well-being were a leading indicator of the collapse of former communist systems. These findings also have important implications for social scientists and policymakers, for they imply that human happiness is not fixed, but can be influenced by belief systems and social policies.”
