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Litterati: Cleaning Up Litter With Instagram

7/23/2013

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PictureImage: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0
Literati.org is on a mission to eradicate litter by crowdsourcing trash pickup, archiving the results in its Digital Landfill, and extracting data to prevent the original littering. As described in the profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, the site is already having a big impact: "The Digital Landfill, now home to more than 12,500 pieces of trash, is crowdsourced cleanup, and because the images are geo-tagged, Kirschner has been able to build a map that shows where each piece of trash was found. This kind of data could not only help raise litter awareness in urban areas but also alert the companies whose products often end up on the ground."

"I feel we have become so desensitized to our surroundings," Kirschner said. "People walk over broken glass or a coffee cup or a potato chip bag and just keep going. I've reached a point where I'm no longer OK with that."
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On average, 100 photos are posted every day. "If 1 million people - which is a failure by social media standards - picked up one piece of trash per day, we could have a huge impact," he said.
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To Kathleen Russell, leader of Keep Dimond Clean, an Oakland neighborhood group that picks up 12,000 pounds of litter every year, Litterati is a step in the right direction: "The key that we were missing was the young people, and Litterati does that with social media."
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Because the Digital Landfill creates a record of how much litter a user has disposed of, Kirschner imagines that Litterati could be a tangible way for participants to track the impact they've had. It has already changed his family's purchasing habits. The Kirschners buy in bulk, avoid single-use packaging and are planning to bring reusable containers to restaurants for take-out.
...
"If I were to turn (Litterati) off, 12,000 pieces of litter aren't on the ground, and I know two little kids who will never litter as long as they live," Kirschner said. "If that's the legacy of Litterati, then I'm OK with it. But I think there's an opportunity for it to be much more than that."

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Five Ways to Find God In All Things

7/2/2013

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PictureImage: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0
The Ignatian Spirituality blog dotMagis offers five tips for finding God in all things: micro-awareness, journal, do something the "old-fashioned way," listen, and say "God is here."

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On Being a Hashtag Christian

6/3/2013

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PictureImage: Pixabay, Creative Commons CC0
Stephen Mattson confesses on Sojourners to being a "Hashtag Christian," one who projects an image of being an engaged Christian through social network sites, but doesn't follow through in real life:

Religious Views: Christian — but not in practice.

I’m a #Christian, and my online faith is radically different than the one I live in real life.

Hashtag Christianity isn’t necessarily bad, but it can cause self-righteousness and provide a false sense of spirituality. It has the danger of making us believe we’re living out our faith without really doing anything. 

It forces us to move at the speed of light as we constantly keep up with trending developments, unintentionally creating a spirituality that is superficial and easily distracted.

The online version of our faith is often unrealistically clear and concise and clean. If negative comments or links challenge our faith, we can delete them. If people disagree or attack our faith, we can block them. We curate and maintain a false version of ourselves, keeping up with an ideal that is fake and impossible to fulfill.
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Barber Give Haircuts To Homeless for Hugs

5/19/2013

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A retired 82-year-old barber has been offering free haircuts to the homeless at a Connecticut park for the past 25 years.  All he asks for is a hug in return.  He was originally motivated to start by a church sermon.

The Huffington Post reports:

His clients line up on park benches, some of them also turning out for free meals provided on Wednesdays by a local church. One by one they take a seat in a folding lawn chair above a car battery Cymerys uses to power his clippers.

As he finished a trim on one customer recently, a loud squeal came from the battery. He gathered the mobile shop, connected the clippers to his car and picked up where he left off.

"It really is love. I love these guys," Cymerys said. He paused and turned to his client in the chair, "You know I love you, right?"

"That's what it's all about," Cymerys said.
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Secret Agent L: Anonymous Acts of Kindness

5/17/2013

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Laura Miller writes about how God led her to create a movement of 2,000 agents performing anonymous acts of kindness across nine countries.  She reports on "missions" at the Secret Agent L blog.

And did I see any of this coming? Not at all. But it has become so very clear to me that this is my calling.

When I was in my teens, struggling with, well, those teen things, I did manage somehow to remember to pray. And my prayer was this: God, please use me for goodness. I’d grown up in a home with a family member who lives with a severe mental illness, and so I’d seen, experienced, and known quite deeply my fair sure of pain, of deep suffering, of suffering individuals. And it took a toll on my heart. But God, doing the slow, steady work He’d been doing for years, heard that daily—sometimes hourly—prayer. I simply wanted to be a force of good, to be a facilitator of peace and love and non-suffering.

And with the Secret Agent L Project, I am just that. God absolutely, 100% answered my prayer. And what’s equally amazing is that I see God in the Secret Agent L Project so clearly. When I receive emails from individuals who want to become Affiliated Agents, I see God working in their hearts, calling them to extend kindness to people they don’t know and will probably never even meet. When I am the featured speaker at events around the city, I see God in the attentive faces of the members of the audience who want to listen and experience kindness. When people approach me after speaking engagements and tell me how inspired they are by the Project, I see God moving through them and turning their hearts toward continued goodness and love and service to others.
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Top Five Regrets of the Dying

5/12/2013

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The prospect of death has a way of clarifying our values and priorities.  The Guardian reports on the book The Top Five Regrets of Dying, written by Australian nurse Bronnie Ware who gathered reflections from patients in their last twelve years of life.
Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."
The number one regret: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."
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National Day of Unplugging

3/2/2013

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Today culminates another National Day of Unplugging, sponsored by the Sabbath Manifesto.  It encourages people to take a 24 hour break (sunset to sunset) from technology.  They also are posting photos of people holding up signs reading their completion of "I unplug to..."

The San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate challenges folks to go a step father, however, and make a more long-term change.

From the National Day of Unplugging site:

Do you have multiple cell phones? Take your ipad to the beach on vacation? Ever find it hard to get through a conversation without posting an update to Facebook? Is your computer always on?

We increasingly miss out on the important moments of our lives as we pass the hours with our noses buried in our iPhones and BlackBerry’s, chronicling our every move through Facebook and Twitter and shielding ourselves from the outside world with the bubble of “silence” that our earphones create.

If you recognize that in yourself – or your friends, families or colleagues— join us for the National Day of Unplugging, sign the Unplug pledge and start living a different life: connect with the people in your street, neighborhood and city, have an uninterrupted meal or read a book to your child.
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Pay It Forward

1/25/2013

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What Makes You Come Alive

1/18/2013

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- Howard Thurman
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Is the Internet Making Us Crazy?

7/23/2012

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Newsweek reports on new research about how technology and our online activity contributes to loneliness, depression, and compulsive behavior.

"The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways."

"People tell her that their phones and laptops are the 'place for hope' in their lives, the 'place where sweetness comes from.' Children describe mothers and fathers unavailable in profound ways, present and yet not there at all. 'Mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text,' she told the American Psychological Association last summer. 'A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.' She added, 'Technology can make us forget important things we know about life.'"


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