Blog Archives
How Successful People Stay Productive and In Control
Source: talentsmart.com
By: Dr. Travis Bradberry
TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that the upper echelons of top performance are filled with people who are high in emotional intelligence (90% of top performers, to be exact). The hallmark of emotional intelligence is self-control—a skill that unleashes massive productivity by keeping you focused and on track.
Unfortunately, self-control is a difficult skill to rely on. Self-control is so fleeting for most people that when Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed two million people and asked them to rank order their strengths in 24 different skills, self-control ended up in the very bottom slot.
And when your self-control leaves something to be desired, so does your productivity.
Never losing the hope…
Source: blog.islamiconlineuniversity.com
By: Fareed Ahmad
The arabic word for sadness or grief is “Gham” – derived from the word “Ghaamama (the cloud) “. Although there’s no apparent relationship between sadness and cloud, there is a hidden one. Just like how a cloud blocks away sunshine from lighting up the earth,sadness/grief also acts as a stumbling block, hindering man’s positive energy and performance.
Just like a cloud blocks all the sun-shine coming down to the earth, sadness or grief, one way or another, also acts as a stumbling block for a man’s positive energy and performance. 2
It is very natural that when a person is happy and everything is going according to his whims and desires and his own wishful thinking, his performance is at it’s peak, but when he is tested or acalamity strikes him, he becomes pessimistic and isn’t able to give a good performance.
Yasiin Bey aka Mos Def – Umi Says (Video)
An epic night to say the least. Mos Def back stage with a glint in his eye, seeing so many people from diverse backgrounds coming together on Chicago’s South Side in celebration of humanity and civic action. The event, hosted by the Inner City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), Taking it to the Streets, was held is Marquette Park, a place where Dr. King would talk to the people and was met with racism in the past, now the park is becoming a place where people of all races can come in celebration of diversity and our shared humanity! Amazing! We’ve come a long way but have a long way yet to go.
Mos Def was the highlight of the night and his music brought the crowd together and inspired us all. Thank you, good sir, for respecting the deen and for being a gentleman, an artist, and an activist always!
And thank you IMAN for being a pillar of Chicago’s South Side activist community dedicated to social change in all the right directions. You are all inspirational and I am proud to call you family.
A Good Muslim equates to a good Human Being
By: Khalid Baig
Source: muslimvillage.com
Ihsan is a special Islamic term, defined by the famous hadith known as the Hadith of Jibreel.
Once Angel Jibreel (peace be upon him) visited the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) in the guise of a man and in the presence of the Companions. This happened toward the end of the Prophetic mission and its purpose was to summarize some fundamental teachings of Islam for the education of all of us.
Amir Sulaiman – Dead Man Walking (Video)
Amir Sulaiman performs ‘Dead Man Walking’. An excerpt from the Radical Middle Way’s Dangerous Ideas Tour 2008.
Want better exam results? Take notes on paper NOT a laptop!
By: Elliot Davies
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/
Students who write notes by hand during lectures perform better on exams than those who use laptops, according to a new study – even when the computers are disconnected from the Internet to avoid distractions.
In fact not only do handwritten notes appear to help students better understand lectures right away, but they may also lead to superior revision in the future.
Students are increasingly using laptops for note-taking because of the speed and legibility they confer. But research into how note-taking affects students’ academic performance has found that laptop users are less able to remember and apply the concepts they have been taught, despite making more notes than students who write by hand.
The study was carried out by Daniel Oppenheimer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, and Pam Mueller, a psychology graduate student at Princeton University. They performed a series of experiments that aimed to find out whether using a laptop increased the tendency to make notes “mindlessly” by transcribing word for word.
In the first test, students were given either a laptop (disconnected from the Internet) or pen and paper. They all listened to the same lectures and were told to use their usual note-taking strategy. 30 minutes after the end of the talk, they were examined on their ability to recall facts and on how well they understood concepts.
The researchers found that laptop users took nearly twice as many notes as those who wrote by hand, which can be useful. However, the typists performed considerably worse at remembering and applying the concepts they had been taught. Both groups scored similarly when it came to memorizing facts.
The researchers’ report said: “While more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop, the benefit disappears.
“Verbatim note-taking, as opposed to more selective strategies, signals less encoding of content.”
In another experiment aimed at testing long-term recall, students took notes as before but were tested a week after the lecture, with a chance to revise beforehand. This time, the students who wrote notes by hand performed significantly better at both parts of the exam – even though some of the faster typists had managed to transcribe most of the lecture verbatim.
Taken together these two studies suggest that handwritten notes are not only better for immediate learning and understanding, but that they also help embed information for future reference.
In a final test, the researchers specifically told some of the laptop users not to take verbatim notes. The students were told that “people who take class notes on laptops when they expect to be tested on the material later tend to transcribe what they’re hearing without thinking about it much”.
But despite being explicitly aware of the potential pitfalls, members of this group still got lower scores in both parts of the exam, suggesting that taking notes by hand really is a superior technique.
The findings will be published in a paper called “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note-Taking” in the Psychological Science journal.
Lesley Hazleton: A “tourist” reads the Koran (VIDEO)
http://www.ted.com Lesley Hazleton sat down one day to read the Koran. And what she found — as a non-Muslim, a self-identified “tourist” in the Islamic holy book — wasn’t what she expected. With serious scholarship and warm humor, Hazleton shares the grace, flexibility and mystery she found, in this myth-debunking talk from TEDxRainier.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the “Sixth Sense” wearable tech, and “Lost” producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, athttp://www.ted.com/translate
More lectures…
PASS THE KNOWLEDGE (LIGHT & LIFE) 