Owner: Notes about the World URL:http://www.world-notes.com/ Join Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:14:40 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: A blog about science and news of interest to people looking to go abroad, whether it is for emigration or a weekend trip. Site statistics:Click here
Battle of the Brainwashed: An Australian report from the Global Voices summit 2008-07-03 08:02:58 Global Voices
is a Harvard-founded media project seeking to highlight voices from places often ignored, through the online community and with online tools. In the last week of june they organized their Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest: here is a summary of the last day. Global Voices also run a series of other [...] Read more:Battle
, Brainwashed
, Australian
, report
, Global
The Blue Mountains: How to survive the mountain towns 2008-06-30 23:41:25 Going to the Blue Mountains is regarded as a nice treat if you are in Sydney, Australia. The nature promises a retreat from the stress of city life: just one-and-a-half-hour train ride from Sydney Central Station, a row of little mountain towns offer themselves as entry points into the pathways and lookout points in the [...] Read more:survive
Technology adaptation rates 2008-06-27 10:14:45 Yet another world map! Anthropologist Dawn Nafus and Intel has created a map of countries’ wilingness to adapt new technologies, and the results are quite surprising! My own home country Norway comes out with a negative ranking, in contrast to neighbouring Sweden, but is in good company with Finland and USA in the negative group. [...] Read more:Technology
, adaptation
The underwater internet 2008-06-27 03:33:39 As far as world maps of information goes, this infographic from the Guardian is beautiful: The internet’s undersea world. The story it came from highlights how sensitive the worlds information infrastructure is: On February 1, 2008, one single ship was able to cut 75% of Asia’s internet capacity with one foolish anchoring in the wrong [...] Read more:underwater
Changing language, changing personality 2008-06-27 02:54:19 Reuters reports (”Switching language
s can also switch personalities“) on a recent study by Luna, Ringberg and Peracchio that touches upon some of the issues of personalities and language in the post about bilingualism and psychosis. However, in this study, a difference was found between real biculturalism and bilingualism in single culture people. By studying US hispanic women, [...]
Distortions in the experience.. of this blog. 2008-06-25 22:57:08 Notes about the World has a new domain! The new adress is www.world-notes.com (after a lot of qualms about what to go with). Please make a note of it - the old one will soon stop pointing here!
And there will be a bit of disturbances today while I freshen things up. It’s all in your [...] Read more:experience
Distortions in the experience of time 2008-06-23 19:33:51 It’s said that all travel is fundamentally travel in time, but actual time travel has always stood for me as the ultimate trip. Although that may seem a bit unrealistic at the moment, at least there is some recent research in how we subjectively experience
the passage of time. As anyone who has waited for [...]
The language of lunacy: bilingualism, affection and psychosis 2008-06-13 22:02:44 There’s been reports for some time that people suffering from mental disorders with psychotic episodes, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, will have different symptoms in their different language
s if they speak more than one. One early report of this is from 1895, of a Welsh sailor who would change between a Welsh-speaking, passive and depressed [...] Read more:lunacy
Best cities in the world: Why are Zürich, Münich and Sydney so good? 2008-06-11 08:14:47 The HR consultants in Mercer releases a yearly report on the best and worst cities in the world, according to quality of life. This year the list is topped, as usual, by Germanic and Australian-Pacific cities, all in peaceful and pleasant countries (Zürich on top for the 7th time). And while all the top 10 [...] Read more:Sydney
Personality maps of the USA 2008-06-07 21:30:04 Based on personality data collected on “hundreds of thousands” of people, Richard Florida and colleagues has developed maps showing the distribution of the personality dimensions of the five factor model of personality. The five factor model is a statistical model of human personality traits that gives five dimensions of personality traits that put people apart: openness [...] Read more:Personality
Things to do in Bremen when you’re there 2008-07-14 10:06:06 Bremen, Germany, doesn’t stand out as a top destination, or even an alternative to consider in where to go for a vacation. The city is, however, a major destination for Ryanair in Europe. And that, in combination with probably not being particularly high on anyone’s list, makes it both a cheap and available place to [...] Read more:Bremen
Update: Surviving the Blue Mountains indeed 2008-07-13 01:42:21 While our visit to the Blue Mountains two weeks ago was eerie enough on its own, it appears to be more dimensions to the creepiness. Although not mentioned in the blog post, my girlfriend mentioned in the comment section that we got food poisoning. And we certainly did, we actually ended up having to go [...] Read more:Update
, Surviving
How much woe when you go: How to calculate your culture shock 2008-07-12 04:39:48 In a piece of research released twelve years ago and seemingly immediately forgotten, Lawrence R. Zeitlin at City University of New York wrote a report on how to estimate the severity of culture
shock. By using measurements of common cultural values taken from a business study of over 160.000 employees in 53 different countries, he extracted [...] Read more:calculate
US soldiers get the reverse culture shock blues 2008-07-11 08:12:07 The US soldier magazine Stars and Stripes reports on the problems some american soldiers have with going home to the States after being posted in Europe. Apparently, after adjusting to European life, some soldiers are so accustomed to the slower European lifestyle that they find the competitive and money-oriented life back home both confusing and [...] Read more:culture
HealthMap: Global news surveillance for infectious diseases 2008-07-10 10:32:58 While western countries usually have effective and comprehensive systems for monitoring infectious diseases, the countries most at risk often also lack the systems for quality reporting. HealthMap is a Google-founded research project that tries to counter this by using publicly available online information from non-official sources, such as news outlets, discussion forums and blogs, to [...] Read more:Global
, surveillance
Frozen, but just fine: An update on Svalbard. 2008-07-09 11:22:44 Longyearbyen, Svalbard: is it really the Chamonix of the Arctic? One thing is for sure, the main Norwegian settlement in the Svalbard archipelago attracts attention and excitement far beyond what should normally be at the command of an 2500 person mining outpost in the middle of nowhere. We went there 4 months ago (mid-february) to [...] Read more:Frozen
Snapshots of seagulls from Manly beach 2008-07-07 10:23:35 While this is low on the science and psychology, hopefully the pictures may bring forth some warm and fuzzy feelings to replace those deep thoughts. The intention of this was to give a presentation of Sydney’s famous Manly
surf beach, but it turned into a meditation over thongs (Aussie language for flip-flops), seagulls in the [...]
The Sydney Aroma Festival 2008-07-06 07:52:00 This sunday The Rocks Aroma Festival
played out in Sydney
’s old historic quarter. For anyone not familiar with Sydney, this is not as niche as it may sound. Rather it is the local code name for the annual Coffee and Chocolate fest, a seven hour hedonistic splurgaton of chocolate fountains, chocolate covered strawberries, rocky roads, [...]
Pictures of a jungle bitch 2008-07-29 18:06:17 At the western end of the Amazon river, where Peru, Brazil and Colombia meet, there is a conglomeration of strange little jungle towns. On the far south-eastern corner of Colombia, the city of Leticia borders directly with the Brazilian city of Tabatinga and together they make up a local hub for trade and tourism - [...] Read more:Pictures
Feeding Komodo dragon on Rinca 2008-07-27 17:32:16 Warning: This post contains pictures of a monster tearing to pieces a dead carcass. This is a long needed departure from nerdy search engines, weekend trips to the coastal towns and the German beer-vacations. This is a picture from a far more adventurous undertaking. Back in 2005 my friend Jon and I went to the little [...] Read more:Feeding
Try the destination research tool 2008-07-27 09:06:03 The destination research tool is a quick little structured metasearch for looking up information on destinations in a really fast way. Just try it by typing in a destination above. It should be pretty self-explainatory, but it’s just a conceptual prototype/mashup now, so I’ll explain the intentions. I could even need some help to make [...]
Picture of the day: Step into the light 2008-07-21 09:20:21 This is from a really short weekend trip down the New South Wales coast of Australia. Seen with local eyes, this isn’t a very large outing, but for me most everything down under has something exotic or at least interesting to it. Actually, it might not be that everyday for the locals either: With every [...] Read more:Picture
, light
The birds of the South Coast 2008-07-20 10:14:47 Kookaburras - they’re about as Australian as the kangaroo. Pelicans may not be equally antipodean, but that doesn’t detract from their appeal - they just set off a lot of images of Hemingway in the Florida Keys for me. They’re the hallmark of deep sea fishing and slightly drunken adventures in the tropics. The following [...] Read more:South
, Coast
Compare your culture with the Hofstede dimensions 2008-07-17 20:43:48 You can check the culture
of your own country against other countries online on Geert Hofstede’s own company website, where the scores on cultural dimensions discussed in this post are published. As mentioned earlier, this may be helpful in estimating expected culture shock when entering a new country - furterhmore, and this is what it [...] Read more:Compare
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