The more I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.
Attitude, to me, is more important than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do.
It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home…a family…a relationship.
The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we embrace for that day.
We cannot change our past.
We cannot change the fact that people act in a certain way.
We cannot change the inevitable.
The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our ATTITUDES.
Check out the stellar Twitter branding by Lowes, along with snapshots of our websites so you can appreciate the entire branding package.
PicClick — which already offers a visual way to browse eBay— has just introduced an interface that offers a simple, fast and eye-catching way to find your favorite handmade goods.
PicClick’s Etsy shop centers around visualization and displays images — filtered by category, best match, newly listed and oldest listings — based on search queries. You can also set price parameters to limit results, scroll infinitely and use a slider to increase image sizes for a bigger and brighter look at product results.
As it stands, PicClick generates about $1 million in gross product sales per month for eBay and other sellers, so the integration of Etsy could prove to be a powerful sales tool for that site as well.
For decades, educators have been scrambling to find better ways to prepare students for the real world. It began with the mildly apocalyptic government report, A Nation at Risk, which warned that an outdated school system was unwittingly sabotaging America’s economic superiority. Year after year, major educational organizations would echo the report’s call with threats of dire consequences and pleas for sweeping reform, from the U.S. Department of Labor to the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
Audits of the U.S. educational system have revealed that the highest hurdle to adopting skills-based teaching practices is the lack of an easily implementable curriculum.
Enter social video games as a solution — immersive environments that simulate real-world problems. Today, technologically eager schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games, and improving learning outcomes in the process. Here’s how they’re doing it.
We need to pay attention to this trend.
Posted via web from kendrashillington’s posterous
While university departments have cleanly separated academic subjects, solving the real-life problem of, say, building a website, requires individuals to orchestrate the expertise of communication, business, and economics, in addition to computer science. At the ultra high tech Quest2Learn school in New York City, small groups of 6th graders will marshall a range of social technologies, from video games to social networking, to solve hypothetical problems.
For instance, 6th graders learn geography from Google Earth
, collaborate through an internal social networking platform, and present ideas through a podcast. Administrators hope that wrestling with the question of “How can a system function within a larger system?” will bolster critical thinking skills. Many experts contend that so-called “Scaffolded Problem-based learning” is known to improve academic skillsand enhance motivation. With all these new toys, it’s no surprise that one student admits his least favorite part of the day is “dismissal.”
What About More Popular Gaming Models?
It should not come as a shock that Quest2Learn exists because of endowments from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Intel, among other big-name donors. For the less well-to-do educator, the Federation of American Scientists has developed a first-person shooter-inspired cellular biology curriculum. Gamers explore the fully-interactive 3D world of an ill patient and assist the immune system in fighting back a bacterial infection. Dr. Melanie Ann Stegman has been evaluating the educational impacts of the game and is optimistic about her preliminary findings. “The amount of detail about proteins, chemical signals and gene regulation that these 15-year-olds were devouring was amazing. Their questions were insightful. I felt like I was having a discussion with scientist colleagues,” said Stegman.
Perhaps more importantly, the video game excites students about science. Motivating more youngsters to adopt a science-related career track has became a major education initiative of the Obama administration. So desperate to find a solution that motivates students to become scientists, the government has even enlisted Darpa, the Department of Defense’s “mad scientist” research organization, to figure out a solution.
For Stegman, however, the video game solution is intuitive: The actual phenomona of science are fascinating, unlike their 2D textbook drawings. “Explaining how proteins interact takes lots of new words and new vocabulary that can put you to sleep when you’re a 5th year graduate student,” Stegman told Mashable. “But, watching two proteins interact and bump into each other and using them in a video game is fun and exciting.”
You can download the game here.
Gazing into the future with Gartner, what can we expect in the world of tech?
The research firm recently revealed its forecast for 2010 and beyond, envisioning a world where more of us live and breathe online and more often through our smartphones than our PCs.
Although the predictions target Gartner’s corporate clients, most will certainly affect smaller businesses and consumers too.
“As organizations make plans to navigate the economic recovery and prepare for the return to growth, our predictions for 2010 focus on the impact of critical changes in the balance of control and power in IT,” Brian Gammage, a Gartner vice president, said in a statement. “With greater financial and regulatory oversight for all IT investment decisions, few organizations will be unaffected.”
With virtualization and cloud computing gaining more of a grip on the business world, up to 20 percent of companies will own no IT assets of their own by 2012, predicts Gartner. Also driving this future will be the trend of employees using their own personal PCs on the job. As technology ownership shifts toward third parties, Gartner expects that IT budgets will likely dwindle or be refocused onto more critical and strategic projects. Support staff may also need to be cut or retrained to focus on the new business requirements.
Although social networks will continue to develop, Gartner says, Facebook will become the main hub for social networking in 2012, especially as it continues to grow and outpace most other networks. Facebook Connect, which lets third-party Web sites around the world integrate into Facebook, will help drive much of this growth, says Gartner.
By 2013, mobile phones could easily surpass PCs as the way most people hop onto the Web. Gartner’s statistics show that the total number of PCs will reach 1.78 billion in three years, while the number of smartphones and Web-enabled phones will shoot past 1.82 billion units and continue to climb after that. This trend will force more Web sites to revamp their pages to make them easier to surf on a mobile gadget.
More than 3 billion people in the world will bank and shop online by 2014, thanks to advances in technology and growing Internet use among emerging markets, Gartner forecasts. Although cash won’t be going away anytime soon, a base for electronic commerce will be firmly entrenched within the next four years. With 6.5 billion mobile connections expected by 2014, Gartner notes that not everyone with a mobile phone will conduct business online, but that all will have the ability to do so.
By 2014, most IT projects for new PCs and servers will include the costs for curbing carbon emissions, Gartner expects. Many projects already incorporate projected savings in the cost of energy, which can help get them approved. But with increased political and economic pressure to lower the carbon footprint of IT hardware, vendors will soon have to provide details on the carbon lifecycle of their products.
Finally, Gartner predicts, consumers fed up with spam will force Internet marketing to be regulated by 2015. With more than $250 billion forecast to be spent on online marketing by that time, the industry will have to face new regulations to hawk products in cyberspace. And many who rely solely on Internet marketing today may have to redirect their advertising dollars to other avenues.
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