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New bicycle share stands across New York are drawing mixed reactions, with some formerly supportive residents changing their minds once they saw the kiosks.

Scientists are zeroing in on some of the genes that were crucial to the rewiring of canine brains in the transition from wolves to domesticated dogs.

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For the full original unedited article, visit Celestine’s blog, Personal Excellence.

Are you a productive person? Have you ever wondered what makes one more productive than another?

Unlike what most might think, being productive is not about one’s intellect or capability. Being productive is about practicing certain habits over others, such that you can get the most out of your days. As someone very passionate about personal productivity, I have found eight habits to be superior in boosting one’s productivity. Practice them and prepare to skyrocket your productivity!

Habit 1: Ruthlessly cut away the unimportant (and Focus on the important)

The first habit of productive people is to slice and dice everything that’s unimportant.

For everything you’re doing now, ask yourself how important this is. Does this bring you dramatically closer to your dreams? Does this create any real impact in your life in the long term? Is it the absolute best way to spend your time or can you be doing more high value tasks?

If the answer is ‘yes’ to all the questions, keep this task. If not, perhaps it’s time to ditch it. No point doing something unimportant! Say you’re handling a project that makes no difference to your business after it’s completed. It wouldn’t matter whether you take an hour, three hours, or one week to do it—it’d still make no difference at the end of the day!

Many people tend to wrongly classify regular tasks as high value tasks. A good tool to set them apart is the Time Management Matrix that classifies our daily activities into 4 different quadrants. Your most important tasks fall under Quadrant 2, which should be your quadrant of focus.

Habit 2: Allocate breaks strategically

The second habit is to allocate breaks strategically.

I don’t think being productive requires you to work non-stop like a robot. On the contrary, it’s by doing that that you become less productive. While the number of hours spent on work increases and the amount of work accomplished seems marginally higher, the work done per unit time is lower than your average. Not only that, your work done per extra unit time actually decreases. In Economics, this is known as the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Rest is important. No matter how much you want to work, there are areas of your life that work can’t fulfill, such as love, family, health. That’s why our life wheel is made up of different segments, vs. just 1 big segment. Each segment is distinct and irreplaceable by others. By “rest”, I’m referring to taking time for any segment of your life that is outside of Business/Career/Studies. Taking time off charges your batteries so you can sprint forward when you return to work.

Watch this video tutorial on the life wheel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDUK6c9gwk

If you’re self-employed or on a flexible work schedule, you can put this into practice easily. Even if you’re in a 9-5 job, you can still do it all the time. Whenever you feel unproductive, throw in a quick break. Walk away from the desk, get a drink from the pantry, go for a toilet break, talk to a colleague about work. You’ll be more perked up when you return.

Habit 3: Remove productivity pitstops (i.e. distractions)

The third habit is to remove productivity pitstops.

Productivity pitstops are things that limit your productivity. They can be the music you listen to when you work, your slow computer, unwanted phone calls, alerts from your inbox on incoming mail, the internet, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These things trap you and prevent you from getting things done.

Go about your daily routine and observe when your output slows down. What’s distracting you? How can you remove it? Experiment and try working in different places. Adjust your environment. Make tweaks here and there. The more productivity pitstops you find and remove, the more productive you’ll be.

Habit 4: Tap into your inspiration

The fourth habit is to tap into inspiration.

How do you do that? Simple – think about what inspires you in life. Is it helping others grow? Connecting with people? Being recognized for your work? Working with the poverty? Helping the unfortunate? Being #1 in your field? How can you achieve them? Find out your motivators, then use them to drive you.

My biggest inspiration is to see others achieving their highest potential and living their best lives. I love seeing everyone living to their highest being, and if there are ever anything blocking them I’ll feel all ready to rip it away, so I use this to drive me in everything I create. When I’m writing a blog entry, I’ll start by thinking what is an area people are facing blockages in, then I channel into that energy.

Habit 5: Create barriers to entry

The fifth habit of is to create barriers to entry.

A great thing about our world today is that it’s easier than ever to reach out to someone. Everyone is just a text message/phone call/email/Facebook message away. At the same time it has become a highly distracting place to live in. Every few minutes, there’s a distraction coming in, whether by way of a phone call, a text message, an e-mail, or a Facebook mass event invite.

To get real work done, I recommend you put up barriers, so it’s hard(er) to reach you. Unplug your phone, switch off your phone, close off your inbox, set a personal rule where you only reply to emails after X days. I’m not saying disappear from the face of the earth, but do that during your work hours at least, especially when you’re working on an intense project. After a while, people will get used to it and adhere to the rule in order to reach you.

Habit 6: Optimize time pockets

The sixth habit is to optimize time pockets.

Time pockets refer to pockets of time you have in between events. You usually get time pockets when waiting for people, commuting, walking from one place to another, etc.

Look at your schedule. What are the time pockets that can be better utilized? How can you maximize them? Have some ready activities to do during these pockets, such as listening to podcasts, reading books, planning, etc. You will be amazed at how much can be done in just a short amount of time!

Habit 7: Set timelines

The seventh habit is to set timelines.

This is a fundamental productivity habit. By Parkinson’s Law, work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. This means if you don’t set a timeline, you can take forever to complete what you’re doing. If you set a timeline of two weeks, you’ll take two weeks. If you set one week, you’ll take one  week. And interestingly enough, if you set one hour, you actually can complete it by one hour too, if you truly want to.

So, set timelines. When you set timelines, you set the intention to complete the work by this time, hence paving the way for the reality to manifest.

Habit 8: Automate everything possible

The eighth and last habit is to automate everything possible.

Technology today has made automation possible for a lot of things we do. Even when it’s impossible to fully automate the task, we can still use the systems to get a lot of the work done for us.

Keep a record of the things you do today, and see how you can automate them. Some of the not-so-productive tasks that we do on a regular basis are:

1. Delete, archive, sort our mail
2. Delete spam mail
3. Paying our bills
4. Appointment scheduling
5. Planning our days/weeks/months (unproductive because it’s still planning vs. acting)

Here is a partial list of things I automate:

• Mail: I have set up e-mail filters where all site requests and reader mail automatically go into my ‘Reply later’ folder.  I also have filters where newsletters and subscriptions go into different folders depending on what they are about. That way, my only job is to read e-mails and respond where needed, not to sort.
• Scheduling: My schedules are somewhat automated. I set recurring items for things I’ve to do daily, weekly or monthly like paying the bills, exercising (daily), training workshops, etc so I don’t have to worry about them later. It’s not exactly automatic in that I have to first create the entry, but once it’s set I don’t need to do anything about it anymore.
• Tweeting/Facebook: I automate the tweeting and posting of my new posts. Every time a new post goes live, my twitter will have an announcement, which automatically feeds into my Facebook as well
• Payments: My product payments are automatic. Whenever someone makes a purchase for one of my books, e-junkie (my payment vendor) will automatically generate an invoice, a download link and a confirmation email and send them to the buyer. The payment is automatically sent to Paypal.

I’m continuously looking for ways to automate my process, so I can spend more time on creating value for others rather than being stuck in busy work. By automating your to-do list as much as possible, you reserve your time for the absolute important things. If you get a deja vu feeling when doing something on your task list, that’s a cue to automate that item.

This article is also available in manifesto, web lecture and audio podcast formats.

People walking in subway: 10 Great Notebooks Productive People Love

The post The 8 Habits of Highly Productive People appeared first on Lifehack.

The Hong Kong-based photographer Michael Wolf first began to photograph the city's residential high-rises, like the one pictured above, in their entirety – or, at least, with some sense of sky and horizon and scale in the frame. Then he printed them out and began to rearrange them.

"At some point, I just began folding the prints, folding way the sky, folding away the sides, until I basically had an image that looked like a supermarket bar code," Wolf says. "I somehow had the feeling this was the right way of doing it, this was the gut decision."

This was the best way to capture life amid extreme density, in a compact city of 7 million people jammed full of 80-story apartments and infinitely replicated facades. Wolf's own 300 square-foot studio looks out on such patterns of stacked homes, with maybe 10,000 other units in view. Collectively, they form a kind of geometric art that appears in Wolf's tightly cropped photos as simultaneously stunning and claustrophobic. The images have recently been reprinted in the book Architecture of Density. Each photo produces the disorienting sense that these buildings could stretch into the sky forever.

"I realized it was a very effective way of communicating density exactly for those reasons: You had no idea how big these buildings actually could be because there were no real references," Wolf says. Most of the images are cropped near the tops of buildings, although they look like they could continue for another 30 floors. "It’s an illusion which I’m creating," Wolf says. "It gives you an idea of an unlimited scale."

The images invite a kind of ambivalent reaction: They make dense city living look almost inhumane – as if people were living amid computer chips – despite the implied mass of humanity behind all these windows. At the same time, these photos capture endearing glimpses of private lives seen through all that geometry.

"The primary statement is about life in cities, it’s about the living conditions in mega cities," Wolf says. "But on the other hand, if you look at these photographs at a distance, at 10 or 15 feet, they look very beautiful, they have a beautiful aesthetic. They could almost be like op art, with very geometric patterns. But when you go closer, you realize each one is an apartment, each one is inhabited by a human being – you see that from the curtains, and from the objects which people hang out to dry."

That very geometric beauty has made these images popular among collectors at the blown-up scale of a living room wall ("The irony," Wolf says, "is most of these collectors have 5,000 or 10,000 square-foot apartments").

In a parallel project, Wolf has also photographed the interiors of people living within 100 square-foot apartments. And some 80 percent of those residents told Wolf they were happy with their homes. The reason? The sense of community, density's greatest benefit.

"The important lesson to be learned is that it’s not space which is important for humans," Wolf says. "It's your neighbors."

All images courtsey of Michael Wolf.

It's not unusual to see the odd beach-house balanced on posts, hoisted above the rising tide. 

But a 7-million-pound building, dating from 1898, in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains? That's what is floating 40 feet in the air in Provo, Utah, at the behest of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints.

When the Provo Tabernacle caught fire in 2010, much of the inside was ruined, but large parts of the facade remained standing. To reconstruct the building as a Mormon temple, engineers had to suspend the facade on stilts while digging out the ground around it to create room for a basement and a solid structural foundation.

Top image via MormonNewsroom.

HT: Colossal.

It sounds like a pretty safe assumption that the people who live in flood plains, or own businesses there, face the highest chances of flooding. This was certainly true during Superstorm Sandy in low-lying coastal areas at the mercy of storm surges. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency calculates flood risk this way all over the country, plotting properties against the geography of flood plains.

And yet here is a map of the Chicago metropolitan area, its flood plains shown by squiggly blue lines:

The Prevalence and Cost of Urban Flooding: A Case Study of Cook County, Ill."

The zip codes shaded the darkest brown received the largest number of flood insurance claims between 2007 and 2011, from private insurance companies, the National Flood Insurance Program, or disaster relief assistance. Some of the zip codes with the most claims are in more densely populated parts of town. But they also sit nowhere near flood plains.

That map comes from a new report [PDF] by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology that amassed an impressive database of 177,000 local flood insurance claims, worth a total of $660 million over the five-year span, covering 96 percent of the zip codes in Cook County (this represents a flood claim for one in every six properties in the county). The analysis found no correlation between damage payouts and floodplains, as this graph shows:

"It’s completely counter-intuitive," says Harriet Festing, CNT's water program director. "If you were to ask the average person, even the average expert in flooding, they would say the bulk of flooding happens in the flood plains."

So what's going on here? Consider this second map, which shows the percentage of "impervious" surface area across the county, by zip code. The dark brown patches are the places with the highest share of roads, roofs, parking lots and general asphalt cover through which rain fall or flood water cannot penetrate:

Chicago – and plenty of other cities just like it – has artificially created flood-prone places simply by paving over the region's natural ability to manage excess water. And, as Festing points out, most people are entirely unaware that the city has done this. In urban areas anywhere, when we focus instead on the risks posed by flood plains, we may be ignoring the even greater threat created by how we've designed cities to crowd out their essential green space.

This also means we need to think about flooding at the scale of whole cities instead of at the level of individually problematic properties.

"Some solutions for the individual make it worse for everybody else," Festing says. "Every time one individual finds a solution for their property which means shoving the water somewhere else, that makes the problem harder collectively for everyone else."

She is talking, for instance, about sump pumps.

"A lot of the problem at the moment," she says, "is that people aren’t realizing that this is a collective problem."

Top image of 2004 flooding in the Chicago suburb of Gurnee: John Gress/Reuters

Known as one of the worst cities in the world in which to drive, Mexico City's rush hours aren't much better underground. The 10th biggest metro area in the world, its subway system generates around 4 million riders a day, or 1.5 billion a year, the second highest in North America (New York City is first).

Spanish photographer Héctor Mediavilla experienced the daily crush first hand, using the subway while living in Mexico's capital. For a photography project he's titled Megapolis, themed around rapid urbanization across the globe, Mediavilla saw the city's underground commute as a clear representation of an overcrowding world.

His photographs shed light on what he sees as a barely manageable aspect of urban life: the rush hour. "I wanted to show a part of the Megalopolis that struck me, that showed very clearly that something is not working well for us as human beings in relation with our environment," says Mediavilla.

Now back in Spain, Mediavilla and his photography collective, Pandora, are capturing similar images for Megapolis in São Paulo, Tokyo, Karachi, and Shanghai. Looking back at his time underground in Mexico City, Mediavilla sees an overcrowded city with few options beyond packed subway stations and trains to get to and from work. "They have no other choice but to be part of that amorphous mass," he says. "They have to go along with it." 

Below, a glimpse of rush hour on Mexico City's subway as seen through Mediavilla's lens:

The Amazon Basin is the epicenter of the world’s hydropower plants--the same gushing rains that give the region its lush foliage make it a prime destination for developers seeking to capitalize on this allegedly renewable energy source. But the long-term sustainability of these projects, which use the natural flow of water to generate electricity, is now under scrutiny.

Seth, Paul:

Hanna, Paul,

Hanna, Seth,

DAKAR, Senegal – Just two seasons exist here: the rainy and the dry. At the best of times, the temperamental rains come for three or four months and turn dusty plains into green pastures, forests and fields.

Seth, Paul: