Coca Cola Has Been Very Successful  at Transmitting The Same Message Over And Over Again To Create A

6 acts of literary kindness

In order to celebrate World Kindness Day, set up in 1998 by the World Kindness Movement, we have put together a list of six acts of kindness by prominent literary figures.

One of the more widely known acts of literary charity, J.M. Barrie gave all of the rights to “Peter Pan,” his original play, to the Great Ormond Street Hospital (a children’s hospital) in London. Royalties from all productions, books, movies, and other iterations of the story still go to the hospital. The cast of the original play also started a tradition, in which they came to the hospital and played the nursery scene for the children there.

J.K. Rowling co-founded the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG) with Baroness Emma Nicholson in 2005, and auctioned off a special edition of her book The Tales of Beedle the Bard for the charity in 2007, raising nearly £2 million. She also supports a number of charities and causes through her charitable trust, Volant. Volant offers assistance to projects that are related to alleviating social deprivation, with an emphasis on women’s and children’s issues.

Charles Dickens was one of Great Ormond Street’s earliest benefactors, (it seems great authors think alike). In April, he published an article entitled ‘Drooping Buds’ in his magazine Household Words. He described how one third of babies born in London each year died before their first birthday, and emphasized that the Hospital was the only institution dedicated to saving this appalling waste of life. He called to his readers for support, and their enthusiastic response helped to keep the Hospital open and expand the base of its supporters. In 1858, Dickens was called on to help rescue the project again. He responded by giving a whole evening’s performance of his most famous passages on children, and raised enough money to enable the hospital to buy the house next door, and effectively double in size. He continued featuring the hospital in his creative works, and left a legacy behind that continues to benefit the hospital today.

Like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, Victor Hugo helped the poor by going into his own pocket. He started at home, providing for his estranged wife and his sons who didn’t earn much money on their own. He instructed his cook to feed beggars who showed up at his front door. Every other Sunday for about 14 years, he served “Poor Children’s Dinners” to about 50 hungry youngsters in his neighborhood. According to biographer André Maurois, personal charity accounted for about a third of Hugo’s household expenses during his peak earning years.

Maya Angelou passed away in 2014, and her trust now continues her legacy with contributions to many different charities. Before her death, however, she was an honorary board member for the Legacy of Hope Foundation. It was created to provide medical care and facilities for underserved children and communities around the world.

Judy Blume, beloved young adult and children’s author, has spent most of her career fighting against censorship with the National Coalition Against Censorship.  She also is the founder and trustee of The Kids Fund, a charitable and educational foundation which purports to facilitate communication between children and parents, and is financed by the proceeds of her publication Judy Blume Diary: The Place to Put Your Own Feeling.

Image: J.K. Rowling at the White House, via the Executive Office of the President. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Can we talk? Language, society, and consciousness

The story of human evolution does not end with the appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa 200,000 years ago, or with the subsequent migrations to Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. Our curiosity about our origins demands that we try to explain why it is this particular species that goes on to dominate the planet.

The answer, of course, is our particularly human form of consciousness, the development and use of language and the growth of complex social structures. The evidence suggests that these developments were intimately linked, driven by feedback loops. The FOXP2 gene may be responsible for literally wiring the brain for the capability of language, among other things. It encourages the growth of interconnections between neurons which, when combined with a larger frontal lobe and the anatomical changes necessary for vocalizing speech, make the human instinct for language inevitable.

British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar argues that language allowed us to socialize, to build relationships with each other through gossip, and one-to-many bonding through the telling of stories and jokes. As social interactions became more complex, neural capacities expanded in response.

The result is the Great Leap Forward, the transition to behavioural modernity and the emergence of modern humans, which is thought to have occurred about 50,000 years ago.

Image: Etologic horse study, Chauvet cave, by Thomas T. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

Millennial girls and women have grown up with the sentiment that independence is one of the most important qualities for a modern woman to possess and that we should never, ever let our happiness depend on a boy. While those are certainly important tenets to try to live in accordance to, it can be hard to reconcile that with our needs as humans who have the basic desire to be liked and cared for. What results is the tug-of-war between finding healthy companionship and maintaining your own self-sufficiency that comes to define late-youth. Katie Crutchfield, the woman behind Waxahatchee, is now 26 years old—a good age to begin the inevitable power cleanse of the toxic relationships in your life. Her third album Ivy Tripp documents this transitional period with even more of the self-awareness and wisdom that characterised her previous work.

There is subtle sunniness to the album suggesting that whatever was burdening Crutchfield during the making of her last two albums has dissipated, most likely through her own will. While, as a whole, Ivy Tripp stays on brand for Waxahatchee, there are a few pop tracks sprinkled throughout that prove Crutchfield is growing sonically as well. Crutchfield’s fingerprints are all over the album and the delicate lo-fi quality harkens back to her debut album of bedroom recordings, 2012′s American Weekend, making the maturation of her lyrics even more apparent.

Even with some of the quieter songs, Ivy Tripp is never boring. However, the standout is, without a doubt, its first single “Under A Rock”. The pop-rock track is Crutchfield’s rallying cry against dudes in whom she’s become maybe too emotionally invested, flippantly singing “Now you’re someone else’s mess tonight”. Later on in the album, in the hazy “<”, she croons “You’re less than me; I am nothing”, articulating the simultaneous self-deprecation and self-assuredness of a 20-something fumbling around with their newfound adulthood.

Ivy Tripp is the light at the end of early adulthood. While it is melancholic, there is a sense of contentment overshadowing that, or at least making it a little more palatable. Listening to it in one sitting feels like going to the beach on a rainy day at the beginning of spring; everything is damp and the air still feels vaguely bitter, but at least you’re finally outside.

| 5am | nick |

Amazing, the World of Artist Management

The world of artist management is amazing. It is like being in backstage in a beautiful theatre in New York watching the play of Macbeth. What is right behind the curtain is the most wonderful sight that a student might be able to watch and enjoy. This is exactly what happened with this class in Product and Artist Management. It is that opportunity to see closely how things are done in all the aspects involved in the promotion and making of an artist.

  In the light of that, we learn in the course how to plan, because “the difference between success and failure in the promotion of an artist is planning”. Consequently the plan cannot go forward if there is no “organization” to assemble all the necessary resources to achieve that particular plan designed for the artist.

Also, we need to lead and direct people towards the goal and use all those resources at hand to achieve their success.

  As the artist's manager, our responsibility is to get the artist to the top of his or her career. In order to do that, we need to follow the plan by controlling the whole process, such as time, people, resources and finances. It is important to do a reality check and see if everything is going according to the plan. If it is not, we need to make some decisions. Do we fire some employees and look for new people that can do the job or change the plan? Would it be worth it? Would it be better to find a new person? How that is going to help us to achieve success?

  All these lessons are learned from Paul Allen in his book “Artist Management for the Music Business” that covers all of the aspects in the promotion of an artist.

  Personally, I have already applied some of these lessons in real world. We started a project with a couple of friends, and most of those lessons have been applied into this project. We are going step by step, little by little trying to give some shape to this adventure to see it through and successful. For this reason, this project in particular plus the lessons from that book, open our eyes and provide us with the knowledge to deal with these cases at hand at the present time, and indeed will be of great help in the future.

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mary would have turned 257 years old this week. (via oupacademic)

Shake up the happiness. A well written theme from Coca Cola to promote its brand... What is a brand? A person's gut feeling about a product, service or organization, according to Marty Neumeier in his book The Brand Gap.

Continuando con las bellas acústicas de un programa

Capitulo 4: La gente empezó a enamorarse de los cuerpos, cuando las mentes dejaron de valer la pena.

Ms Beautiful lo sabia, y lo sabia bien. 

Ella sabia que la belleza es temporal, y sabia que la belleza pasa con los años, por eso no hacia de su belleza su orgullo, y cómo la amaba y admiraba Walter por ello. Podia hacer juegos con su belleza, como cualquier otra mujer, pero no dejaba que se le subiera a la cabeza, porque lo más maravilloso de ella estaba en su mente. 

Su belleza era solo un instrumento de su personalidad que la naturaleza le habia otorgado, era solo un complemento apreciado en su persona, que cuando se conectaba con su mente, trabajando belleza y el racicionio, hacían bomba, explosión, juegos pirotécnicos en una fiesta con glamour, porque su mente era maravillosa.

Miss Beautiful, amaba a la gente, y tenia un tremendo amor por el ser humano, tan inmenso como el amor por si misma, pero no la coloquen en el lado opuesto, donde alguien viene a destruir su amor y sus amores, porque arderá Troya, tormentas y rayos electrizantes que dejarán quemados a los que se envuelvan en ello.

La mente de Ms Beautiful, el compromiso de Ms Beautiful, era el proposito, una mente con un propósito, pegando una tercera cualidad a una hermosa mujer que podia como los pavoreales, extender todos sus hermosos plumajes ante el hombre de su agrado.

Por eso Walter no amaba su cuerpo, amaba su mente. 

Ella tenia una mente maravillosa.