POSITIVE NEWS plus a dash of the freshest visual arts and literature...
Your Editor "My mission is to hand-pick the best good-news stories."
ODE Magazine has launched a new RSS news feed that only pulls in the positive news, from 60 of the world’s mainstream news sources. The system is semi-automated and still ‘in beta’, so it throws up a few false positives — but is generally fairly accurate. The system attempts a basic semantic analysis of a [...]
Action for Happiness launches. This is a new global campaign that aims to… “to inspire a mass movement for fundamental cultural change” based on evidence-based approaches to what works in terms of generating a happy citizenry, without damaging the economy by simply “spending for happiness”.
Skype is already free — and now the phone-over-the-web firm has a new free service called Skype in the Classroom. This provides a suite of services just for educators, and the new offering already has over 7,000 users signed up to it. Kids around the world are communicating with and learning from each other, even [...]
A simple new service lets you search across 18 crowd-funding websites, to find worthy projects that might otherwise get buried.
clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk A new scheme to recognise the dedication of British soldiers has “snowballed” across the UK after it was set up from a fish-and-chip shop in Scarborough. Heroes Welcome is now all set to become a nationally recognised symbol — as shops, hotels restaurants and taxi drivers eagerly adopt the idea. The scheme [...]
Do advanced cities work by certain provable rules? Geoffrey West thinks they may, at least in part, and is working to make them into a usable basis for a system… “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.” Above: Creative Commons photo [...]
Local British people will have a right to buy their local vital amenity — such as a local shop, pub, or library. The measures are included in the British government’s forthcoming Decentralisation and Localism bill in Parliament. If an asset appears for sale, local people will be offered a ‘countdown’ period to raise the required [...]
Tobacco. The evil weed? Perhaps future generations won’t see it that way, if the vast plantations of it can be used instead to produce a potent organic weed-killer. The Economist reports that Canadian scientists have discovered that ground, sieved and pressurised tobacco leaves produce a treacly oil — that proves to be an extremely potent [...]
The UK Government has announced plans to measure the national happiness. New questions will be formulated for insertion into the forthcoming national census. Studies have shown that levels of happiness have remained much the same in the Western world since 1945, despite a huge leap in living standards, education, and health. Creative Commons photo by [...]
A consortium of scientists is seeking new value in old data. CODATA is scouring old ships’ logs, old magnetic media from 1950-1980, old agricultural records, and old glass plates from astronomical photography, among others — in a bid to preserve these data sources as workable archives for future analysis.
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