stereotypes

Although this show has had incomparable success, the show has received threatening comments saying that it is racist against Caucasian performers and their casting choices are unacceptable. This altercation was a hot topic to discuss after one certain night.

almost of the

Normal people

unwritten rules of this profession

“People underestimate the happiness effect” of being outdoors, Nisbet says. “We don’t think of it as a way to increase happiness. We think other things will, like shopping or TV. We evolved in nature. It’s strange we’d be so disconnected.” But some people are starting to do something about it.

One recent Nature Conservancy poll found that only about 10 percent of American teens spend time outside every day. According to research by the Harvard School of Public Health, American adults spend less time outdoors than they do inside vehicles—less than 5 percent of their day.

In a “forest kindergarten” in Langnau am Albis, a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland, children spend most of the school day in the woods, regardless of the weather. They learn whittling, fire starting, and denbuilding; they’re able to explore. Supporters say such schools foster self-confidence and an independent spirit.

A 15-minute walk in the woods causes measurable changes in physiology. Japanese researchers led by Yoshifumi Miyazaki at Chiba University sent 84 subjects to stroll in seven different forests, while the same number of volunteers walked around city centers. The forest walkers hit a relaxation jackpot: Overall they showed a 16 percent decrease in the stress hormone cortisol, a 2 percent drop in blood pressure, and a 4 percent drop in heart rate. Miyazaki believes our bodies relax in pleasant, natural surroundings because they evolved there. Our senses are adapted to interpret in- formation about plants and streams, he says, not traffic and high-rises.

A real-life experiment is under way at the Snake River Correctional Institution in eastern Oregon. Officers there report calmer behavior in solitary confinement prisoners who exercise for 40 minutes several days a week in a “blue room” where nature videos are playing, compared with those who exercise in a gym without videos. “I thought it was crazy at first,” says corrections officer Michael Lea. But he has experienced the difference. “There’s a lot of yelling really loud— it echoes horribly,” in the plain gym, he says. “In the blue room they tend not to yell. They say, ‘Hold on, I got to watch my video.’

Measurements of stress hormones, respiration, heart rate, and sweating suggest that short doses of nature—or even pictures of the natural world—can calm people down and sharpen their performance.

What he and other researchers suspect is that nature works primarily by lowering stress. Compared with people who have lousy window views, those who can see trees and grass have been shown to recover faster in hospitals, perform better in school, and even display less violent behavior in neighborhoods where it’s common.

But then he did a large study that found less death and disease in people who lived near parks or other green space—even if they didn’t use them. “Our own studies plus others show these restorative effects whether you’ve gone for walks or not,” Mitchell says. Moreover, the lowest income people seemed to gain the most: In the city, Mitchell found, being close to nature is a social leveler.

In England researchers from the University of Exeter Medical School recently analyzed mental health data from 10,000 city dwellers and used high-resolution mapping to track where the subjects had lived over 18 years. They found that people living near more green space reported less mental distress, even after adjusting for income, education, and employment (all of which are also correlated with health). In 2009 a team of Dutch researchers found a lower incidence of 15 diseases—including depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and migraines—in people who lived within about a half mile of green space. And in 2015 an international team overlaid health questionnaire responses from more than 31,000 Toronto residents onto a map of the city, block by block. Those living on blocks with more trees showed a boost in heart and metabolic health equivalent to what one would experience from a $20,000 gain in income. Lower mortality and fewer stress hormones circulating in the blood have also been connected to living close to green space.

These measurements—of everything from stress hormones to heart rate to brain waves to protein markers—indicate that when we spend time in green space, “there is something profound going on,” as Strayer puts it.

There wasn’t much hard evidence then—but there is now. Motivated by large-scale public health problems such as obesity, depression, and pervasive nearsightedness, all clearly associated with time spent indoors,

var el = document.getElementById("jyjoopa3"); el.setAttribute('class','standalone-linked'); el.addEventListener('click', function(){ //pass to Prez gallery: Json for photos, current index, the Title for the Prez gallery, social link data, and social link analytics site Pestle.emit("OpenPresentationGallery", '87af759b-6aa3-40f4-9267-9affa769fccc'); }); View Images In Singapore, which aims to be a “city in a garden,” greenery cascading off a luxury hotel soothes a guest in a balcony pool—and people on the street below. “A concrete jungle destroys the human spirit,” former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once said.

American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir inherited that outlook. Along with Olmsted, they built the spiritual and emotional case for creating the world’s first national parks by claiming that nature had healing powers.

NATURE'S CALL TO WILD Science is proving what we've always known intuitively: nature does good things to the human brain—it makes us healthier, happier, and smarter.

Strayer’s hypothesis is that being in nature allows the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center, to dial down and rest, like an overused muscle. If he’s right, the EEG will show less energy coming from “midline frontal theta waves”—a measure of conceptual thinking and sustained attention.

“If you can have the experience of being in the moment for two or three days, it seems to produce a difference in qualitative thinking.”

The three-day effect, he says, is a kind of cleaning of the mental windshield that occurs when we’ve been immersed in nature long enough. On this trip he’s hoping to catch it in action, by hooking his students—and me—to a portable EEG, a device that records brain waves.

Our brains, he says, aren’t tireless three-pound machines; they’re easily fatigued. When we slow down, stop the busywork, and take in beautiful natural surroundings, not only do we feel restored, but our mental performance improves too.

In their view, “those educators who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the greatest proportion of their students” are seen as successful (p. 82). From this perspective, openness is seen as an effective vehicle for achieving various scholarly goals like affordability, efficiency, accuracy, accessibility, sustainability, dissemination, and effective pedagogy.

Disciplines have other aspects as well, such as theories and assumptions. But content, methods, and epistemologies are the central building blocks of disciplines, and it is helpful to understand these as you get started in Interdisciplinary Studies.

Sometimes we break problems down into smaller parts so that we can solve it piece by piece.

Unity of Knowledge: Being able to learn more so that you have the ability to connect with more knowledge. Most majors and fields look at parts of the world, but there is something beautiful and exciting about trying to step back and see how things connect.

Creative Breakthroughs: Taking a new perspective from a different angle can yield unexpected pathways that were not visible before.

Interdisciplinary studies is “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession,” and it “draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective”

. But there remains this notion, deeply embedded in Domain of One’s Own, that it is important to have one’s own space in order to develop one’s ideas and one’s craft. It’s important that learners have control over their work – their content and their data

And then – contrary to what happens at most schools, where a student’s work exists only inside a learning management system and cannot be accessed once the semester is over – the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.

But almost all arguments about student privacy, whether those calling for more restrictions or fewer, fail to give students themselves a voice, let alone some assistance in deciding what to share online.