'A great read is the perfect gift'―

Microsoft co-founder Encourages the Gift of Reading;
Sharing the 5 best books he has read in 2018.

December 3, 2018
Article: Annabel Gutterman via TIME
Bill Gates announced his annual list of favorite books of 2018, perfectly timed for the holiday season. The Microsoft co-founder encourages the gift of reading with these five titles, which range from a memoir about the power of education to a guide to facing modern-day fears.

A great read is the perfect gift:
In a post detailing his picks on Gates Notes, the philanthropist acknowledges that he normally does not consider the “giftable” nature of a book, but his selections for 2018 can truly satisfy any reader. “If you’re looking for a fool-proof gift for your friends and family, you can’t go wrong with one of these,” he writes. Here, the five books Gates loved in 2018.

5 books I loved in 2018

Bill Gates shares the five books he loved in 2018.

'We Take Notice'
― Poboycorp!

“A breath of immortality for everyone.”―

MOM: A breath of immortality for everyone.

Small tokens, scattered around the world, will guide future generations to the underground archive of forgotten knowledge (Credit: Memory of Mankind)

If you were to build your own time capsule, what would you want people—or alien beings—a million years from now to know about us? That we were loving, or warmongering, or dopes strung out on memes and viral videos? That we flew to the moon and made great art, ate Cinnabons (that we measured at 880 astonishing calories), and committed atrocities? How could you begin to represent these times, as lived by nearly 8 billion people? And what would give you, of all people, the right to tell the story?

After these questions would come to another wave of more logistical ones.
Assuming the capsule was found, how would it be translated into the language of the future, whatever that language might be? And what materials could be employed that might last that long? And how could you lead a future race of beings to the capsule itself, assuming our planet might be buried under ice or oceans of red sand by then? It's this very vision of an earth one million years from now that changed Martin Kunze's life forever.
Article: 'The Time Capsule That’s as Big as Human History'
By Michael Paterniti via GQ

Related Links
The world’s knowledge is being buried in a salt mine. By Richard Gray via BBC Future

Fearful of digital decay, a ceramicist wants to return data storage to a more lasting medium: clay. Article by Richard Kemeny via The Atlantic

If you do not take part, will never have existed!
The plaques are resistant to everything: pressure, burning heat, radiation and chemicals cannot harm the branded information.

Reporters traveled to Austria and found a project deep inside a salt mine trying to capture the human experience.

HALLSTATT, Austria — Deep in the Austrian Alps sits the beginnings of an international treasure.  Story by Rebekah Dare Guin via @anteksiler

The Memory of Mankind:
Which episodes of your life do you want to tell your grandchildren?
You can go now to the MOM website and type your deepest thoughts, which will be translated to a tablet for future finders to read. Some stories simply need to be externalized.

Home - Memory of Mankind

Float-Menu id=1]

This physical and analogue backup of our age
stored here in the salt mine of Hallstatt
will persist throughout all of time.

In MOM we will leave behind art
and culture, scientific insights
and medical knowledge.

But each and every individual
can write on this story and history.
Tell about your life,
your passions, your family,
your favorite recipes
or special experiences.

Our descendants in a distant future
will find this “treasure” one day.
“A breath of immortality for everyone.”― MOM

'Optimists see opportunities that are invisible to pessimists.'―

Deep Patel:
We are all searching for that elusive elixir that will help increase our wealth, gain success and live a life of contentment and peace. Who doesn’t want to find a way to have it all?

Part of the reason these things are difficult for us to achieve is that we never really define what our purpose is in life. We don’t really know ourselves, so we don’t really understand what makes us happy. And we don’t really want to do the hard work to get there.

There’s no magic formula to making all these things happen, but if you’re willing to open your mind and put in the time and effort, you can achieve nearly anything. Here are 16 life changing ways you can attain success, wealth and happiness and live your best life.

Deep Patel: 16 Mental Shifts

 

 

Image credit: Hero Images | Getty Images
16 Mental Shifts for Living a Happier, Wealthier, More Successful Life.
Citation: Deep Patel via Entrepreneur

Deep Patel: “Top 25 marketing influencer” 
An Entrepreneur's VIP Contributor.
“One of the top 11 youth marketers to follow”

Unlocking the Power of the World's Educators—

Teachers Pay Teachers: 'To make the expertise and wisdom of all the teachers in the world available to anyone, anywhere, at any time.' — TPT

Teachers Pay Teachers, an online platform that allows teachers to sell classroom resources they’ve created, such as worksheets and bulletin board decor. TpTs is the World's Most Popular Online Marketplace for Original Educational Resources

TpT is the go-to place for educators to find the resources, knowledge, and inspiration they need to teach at their best. Offering more than 3 million free and paid resources, created by educators who understand what works in the classroom. Teachers Pay Teachers marketplace is growing every day to meet the evolving needs of the PreK-12 classroom. When educators get the resources and support they need, they're best equipped to inspire the next generation of learners.

Julia Reinstein
BuzzFeed News Reporter Article: Teachers Are Moonlight To Make Ends Meet
If you saw Amy Groesbeck during school hours, you’d think she’s just your typical third-grade teacher.— Not!

A Platform for Sharing Educator Expertise
TpT believes that the best ideas and approaches to learning comes directly from educators who have experience teaching and connecting with students. Each resource on TpT is created by a Teacher-Author and is tailored to a unique need or niche.

When one teacher deeply understands how to bring rich, relevant, active learning to a classroom and shares that with other teachers around the globe, the benefits reach everyone, most of all the students. Today, the demands on teachers are as high as they’ve ever been. Many teach multiple subjects to a wide array of learners. Meanwhile, the standards — and even the educational environment — are changing rapidly. 
Through TpT: Teacher-Authors are able to respond to the changing landscape immediately.
Teachers provide feedback and support along the way, therefore; TpT's content continues to evolve and improve with every use.

'We believe that when teachers work together, great things happen.'
— Teachers Pay Teachers:

Teaching Resources & Lesson Plans | Teachers Pay Teachers

World's most popular online marketplace for original educational resources with more than three million resources available for use today.

Reduce your exposures to common drinking water pollutants:

State of American Drinking Water

When most Americans drink a glass of tap water,
they're also getting a dose of industrial or agricultural contaminants linked to cancer, brain and nervous system damage, developmental defects, fertility problems or hormone disruption. That's the disturbing truth documented by EWG's Tap Water Database – the most complete source available on the quality of U.S. drinking water, aggregating and analyzing data from almost 50,000 public water utilities nationwide.

The vast majority of the nation's drinking water supplies
get a passing grade from federal and state regulatory agencies. However, many of the 250-plus contaminants detected through water sampling and testing are at levels that are perfectly legal under the Safe Drinking Water Act or state regulations, but well above levels authoritative scientific studies have found to pose health risks.

Unanswered questions
Utilities must treat their water to meet state and federal standards before piping it into homes, schools and businesses, but water treatment chemicals can themselves produce other potentially harmful contaminants. Utilities must also provide annual water quality reports to their customers, but those reports leave many unanswered questions.

Related Article via NPR
Which Water Is Best For Health? Hint: Don't Discount The Tap

EWG'S GUIDE: SAFE DRINKING WATER
Reduce your exposures to common drinking water pollutants with EWG's handy tipsheet.
Includes the latest news, tips, action alerts, promotions and more - from EWG.

EWG's Tap Water Database: What's in Your Drinking Water?

Look up your local water system to find out which pollutants might be of concern, and find suggestions on the best kinds of home filters to remove those chemicals.

Sleeping At The Office: High-Tech Pods on the Rise

'Sleeping on the job is no longer frowned upon'
Office napping may finally be climbing out from under the desk.
A small but growing number of businesses are encouraging sleep-deprived employees to grab 40 winks during the workday, providing rooms — or, in some cases, high-tech napping pods — to get the job done right. Benefits include a more productive workforce and, hopefully, the end to stealth sales meeting snoozes.—
Citation: Article by Robert Channick via Chicago Tribune

High-Tech Pods: Biz-Office Napping

 Photo Courtesy: (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

In response to growing demand for offices to dump the cubicle desk and foster a more welcoming environment for talent, two European manufacturers were among those unveiling new nap pods to the North American market at the annual NeoCon commercial interiors show in Chicago: Silence Business Solutions, and Framery.

On Monday Mornings: How do you feel? 
Framery Innovations;
tools for a happy workplace.
How do you feel on Monday mornings?
Studies show that most of us work for over 30 years of our lives.
That’s more than the time you spend with your partner, eating, travelling, exercising or watching movies – combined. However, research shows that most of us won’t go to work happily. Find out how Framery increases happiness at work and the tools used to achieve that.

A radical transparency
'One of the key things for a happy company is transparency.
Framery wanted to go further and developed a culture of radical transparency.
The idea was simple: Framery organization is truly flat – no strong hierarchy, no unnecessary middle management nor hidden secret processes. All the information can be found in Framery’s internal wiki page.'—Framery.

NeoCon: A Retrospective
NeoCon has provided a platform for ideas that have transformed the ways we live and work for the past 50 years. Through its first five decades, NeoCon has showcased commercial design’s response to technological advances, cultural change, and growing ecological consciousness. Retrospect: 50 Years of NeoCon, 1960 ― Present.

- NeoCon

NeoCon marks its 51st edition as the world's leading platform and most important event of the year for the commercial design industry.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come:

The 'Just City' Concept
The “just city” concept infuses social justice concerns throughout planning and design process. It’s a style Toni Griffin has been honing over nearly two decades while practicing as an architect, designer, and urban planner, leading major civic projects such as the Washington Nationals Ballpark District in D.C. and the Detroit Future City master plan.

(Harvard University Graduate School of Design)

Griffin has formed a pedagogy from this as well, drawing on her field experience to become the founding director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York in 2011.

Toni Griffin, one of the leading black women in architecture and design,
is leading her students at Harvard in envisioning and designing the "just city."
And it looks different in Boston than it does in Rotterdam.
Citation: In Search of the ‘Just City’ by Brentin Mock via CityLab

Imagine that the issues of race, income, education and unemployment inequality, and the resulting segregation, isolation and fear, could be addressed by designing for greater access, agency, ownership, beauty or empowerment.

Now imagine the Just City — the cities, neighborhoods and public spaces where all people, but especially the ‘least not' are included, have equitable and inclusive access to opportunities and tools that allow them to be productive, thrive and advance through the ranks of social and economic mobility. The Just City Lab investigates the concept:

Design and the Just City - Harvard Graduate School of Design

The Just City Lab investigates the concept of the Just City, and how design and planning contribute to the conditions of justice and injustice in cities, neighborhoods and the public realm. This exhibition presents our interrogation of whether design can have an impact on correcting urban injustice, inequality and disparity.