Update on the 101 Happiness activities book, progress so far

In December, Tom and I asked for contributions to the book we are writing: 101 Activities for Happiness Workshops; this is an update to let you know how we are progressing.

The call was circulated by several national and international happiness studies and positive psychology organisations. We are very grateful for the kind effort of those who forwarded our call for contributions.

We received many contributions as a result of this call in many different forms, from one-line ideas and suggestions to fully structured activities.  We are now working on writing these up in a format suitable for the book. We have made good progress, and have about fifty gathered so far.

We feel it is likely that there will be enough to justify the title of the book, but whatever happens, we will share the resulting collection with all those who contributed and will let contributors know how we are progressing as we work through the ideas.

We are still happy to receive further suggestions, if you have more to offer!

 
asher and Tom

When is a gun not an assault weapon, asks Ana Marie Cox, in sobering article on guns and suicide

Why Obama’s gun control orders miss the target | Ana Marie Cox

A very cogent and statistically explanation of why having a gun in the home, makes it much more likely that someone will die.

Ana Marie Cox also highlights the decrease in spending on mental health, but manages to disagragate suicide from broader issues of mental health. Here is where she is good with the stats, driving home the argument, that all types of people are at risk of death by suicide, if there is a gun in there house.
http://gu.com/p/3d6cc

More detail on the proposed: 101 Activities for Happiness Workshops

Title: 101 Activities for Happiness Workshop (provisional)

Rationale: We want to live in a society with more happiness and less unhappiness. We believe that workshops can make a significant contribution to that goal. To that end, we would like to encourage the development of more happiness workshops. A book containing 101 activities for happiness workshops would be a valuable resource to stimulate the development of such workshops.

Over the last 2 decades, evidence-based knowledge of the sources of our happiness has been accumulating. And over the last decade, many books have been written to popularise the results of happiness research. Books can only go so far, however, as increasing happiness needs more than intellectual assent; it requires action to apply that knowledge, new behaviours and new habits. Workshops can be an effective way of initiating changes in behaviour than reading alone. This is why workshops are so frequently used in fields of professional development and personal development which depend for their success on behavioural change. Workshops are a proven way of disseminating knowledge and turning it into changes in behaviour that support personal development and growth

In summary, the main rationale for this book is to facilitate the development of happiness workshops that can contribute to more happiness in the world around us.

Coverage and features: The book will contain an introductory chapter about the accumulation of knowledge of happiness, ways of disseminating it and the role of workshops in communicating and applying such knowledge. This will be followed by 101 activities as a resource for those who run workshops on happiness and how to share it, or would like to develop such workshops. The book will also contain advice on how to use the activities to run an effective workshop i.e. a happiness workshop that really works.

Who are we:

Tom is emeritus professor of personal and professional development at the University of Brighton in the UK. Asher is senior lecturer in e-commerce, digital marketing and information systems at Brighton University. Both have a long-standing interest in workshops. In the early 1990s Tom published (jointly with Phil Race and Viv Martin) the book Workshops that Work, (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill), 1993.

Call for short written contributions to a new book: 101 Activities for Happiness Workshops

We are collecting activities for a book titled 101 Activities for Happiness Workshops and we invite you to contribute to this publication. The book is intended to be a resource to facilitate the development of happiness workshops and for courses in positive psychology.

Any royalties earned by this book will be assigned to the Action for Happiness Foundation which is a charity aimed at increasing human happiness in the world around us. Information about the Action for Happiness Foundation can be found at: http://www.actionforhappiness.org/about-us.

Please send the details of any activity which you believe could be appropriate for inclusion in a happiness workshop to A.Rospigliosi@brighton.ac.uk

If your activity is included in the book you will receive a full acknowledgement in the book together, if you wish, with your email address and the address of any website you would like to promote.

We’ll give further details about the book in a future post. For any additional information please contact asher.

Thank you for your support.

Tom Bourner and Asher Rospigliosi.

3 Iron 2004, a strange slice of Korea

I Watched a film last night and really enjoyed the unspoken romance in 3 Iron. The care the silent couple lavished on dead dad they found, in one of the houses they squatted was sweet. But, for a short romance, the levles of random violence are scary. A tired mum, pissed off after a fraught family holiday, tells her son to shoot her in the face, not knowing the silent, caring squatter has repaired it! When he is in a police cell, the beatings are brutal, though their result is strangely inspiring. He gradually perfects invisibility, a state to which seems to have aspired all along. By the finale, he is able to live with his silent girl, eating from the side of her brutal husbands plate, to her giggles. She was very beautiful and mute suited her, judging by her ill judged use of her 3 minutes of fame: to raise money for comfort women, thru sales of soft porn of that theme (according to wikipedia)

A thoughtful response to the changes to Facebook Edgerank

A thoughtful consideration of the much debated changes to how Facebook shares items from users news feed from  John Battelle’s Search Blog

 

 

 

Stimulating thoughts on the imminent eschaton and the mobile Internet

Just read some stimulating thoughts on the imminent eschaton and the mobile Internet by one of my colleagues from ZDNet UK, Munir Kotadia. Lots of interesting ideas pulled together from a panel discussion at the Origins of Consciousness Tour in Sydney. The conneciton between us all facilitated by mobile technology and how that fosters a shared consciousness fascinates me.  Of those on the panel, I saw Pesce talk about VRML and wrote a piece on him, in the days of ZDNet news! My wife saw Terrence speak in Sydney in mid nineties. Only yesterday (admittedly the day after my zombie wedding party) I was talking with friends about Robert Anton Wilson’s part in the Illuminatus Trilogy, which drew hevily on McKenna’s ideas.
As an academic, I feel it helpful to offer a counter argument to the iPill appeal, the idea that we will want to take a pill that would give us wired connections to an internet consciousness, so will share this  YouTube ‘sight‘ of how an implanted F***book virtual reality might feel
Mun’s account of the discussion are here The iPhone 15 is (almost) unimaginable | Delimiter.