Arizona plans to spread awareness of highway dust storms in a unique way

The state of Arizona has planned to combat it's old enemy in a new way. Summer dust storms,harboobs are quite troublesome for the drivers. These storms reduce the visibility level and also increases the risk of highway accidents leading to loss of property and life.

                                                   (image courtesy:  newdeal.feri.org )

However,Arizona has planned to combat this problem in an interesting way! The state is trying to promote awareness about this problem by conducting a haiku challenge. 

Haiku are micro-poems that contain 17 syllables arranged in the format of 5~7~5 syllables. These poems have originated from Japan but have considerably been popular in other countries too! These micro-poems are short but convey great poetic excellence and meaning. It has been popular among the twitter family too,with increased number of people tweeting these micro-poems under the hashtag #haiku.

Basically the challenge invites the twitter users to tweet haiku about the dust storm under the hashtag #harboobhaiku. This unique idea came out during a brainstorming session conducted on how the social media could be used efficiently to reach out to the drivers! Social media is connecting in a stronger way with the common public and these connections can be efficiently used to bring awareness to the daily life.

Source:

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/15/us-arizona-haiku-idINBRE85E0EO20120615

Power of Social Media: A nine-year-old girl's blog goes viral!

There are probably millions of people who are into blogging,Martha Payne is one such girl. However what's unusual about her is that she's just nine-years-old and she has turned up to a unique and interesting way of raising charity! Her blog neverseconds has gone viral in the past few weeks and has got over 6 million hits!

(image courtesy: blog.hellomagazine.com )


She actively blogs and photographs about her school lunch. She has a unique way of describing the food by giving a detailed information about it ranging from food rating to mouthfuls to the price to the number pieces of hair found. 

Her blog has served as a nice forum of debate and discussion,attracting a large number of comments to her posts and eventually drawing up quite a fantastic amount of money for her charity mission. She has raised  stg £80,000 for the charity Mary's Meals Kitchen in Malawi. 

The controversy

The Argyll and Bute Council stopped her from taking photographs of the meals following a newspaper report criticizing the meal arrangement. This was followed by her writing the following post

This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office. I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today. 

I only write my blog not newspapers and I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos. I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners and I’ll miss seeing the dinners you send me too. I don’t think I will be able to finish raising enough money for a kitchen for Mary’s Meals either.

Goodbye,
VEG

The post eventually received over 2800 comments,drawing criticism from people and fans all over! 


A large amount of support was seen on twitter too with #neverseconds trending for over 5 hours. Finally the ban was lifted by the council leader Cllr Rody Mcuish. 


Finally she is back to blogging and rating meals in the unique style. This incident clearly exhibits the power and unity of social media and also on it's direct influence over the traditional media. 


Sources:

• http://www.siliconrepublic.com/new-media/item/27810-9-year-old-blogger-sparks-a/
• http://www.business2community.com/blogging/the-power-of-blogging-how-a-9-year-old-girl-became-a-social-media-star-0198932
• http://neverseconds.blogspot.in/2012/06/goodbye.html
• http://neverseconds.blogspot.in/

Are we losing out joy? Twitter shows negative signs.

Are we becoming sadder day by day? A recent research conducted by a team of scientists at the University of Vermont indicates a decrease in the level of happiness among human beings, at least among the twitter users.

Are we as joyful as we used to be?

 The Research
Since April 2009,The team of scientists studied 46 billion tweets from the 63 million online users. Each tweet was analysed and a grade was assigned to the analysed tweets.
The tweets were ranked with the help of Amazon's mechanical truck on the basis of their emotional temperature,on a scale of 1 to 9 on the increasing level of happiness.
The ranked tweets were then analysed by seeking patters based on date,place and time. (Read more about the research here and here).

Indications
Apart from indicating a reduction in happiness level,the researchers also found that people are most happy during the weekends and least happy during the initial week days. Also people were more happy during the day as compared to night.

But,But.....
These research indications may not depict the big picture since a lot of people across the world aren't a part of the micro-blogging service. Another reason is that the tweets posted may often be exaggerated.

Is your office desk clean?

For every human being,office desk is a place where they they spend more than one-third of their time they spend working. It is a second home to some. And for the workaholic beings,this gets even more serious,they try to spend most of the time trying to be close to their desk and rigorously performing their work.

you can't see me

In that case,it would be like waking-up-to-a-nightmare to find out that our toilet seat is much cleaner than an office desk. According to a research conducted by the University of Arizona,an average desk can have 400 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Also objects such as keyboard,phones etc. which come in contact with several people,by the means of touch are favorable places for these microorganisms to reside.






Don't Panic
The research also found out that wiping regularly can keep a control on their levels. Hence objects which appear to be clean with naked eyes can actually contain a lot of bacteria. More about the reseach,click here or here

So nest time you enter your office,Do ask yourself "Is your office desk clean?".