• Climate change: Don't wait until you can feel it - Carnegie Institution -http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140425093601.htm

• Are Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours of Practice Really All You Need?- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140310-gladwell-expertise-practice-debate-intelligence/

• Misunderstanding Innovation - http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innovation/

• Going to the library gives people the same kick as getting a raise does - a £1,359 ($ 2,282) raise, to be exact - according to a study commissioned by the U.K.'s Department for Culture, Media & Sport. The study, which looks at the ways "cultural engagement" affects overall wellbeing, concluded that a significant association was found between frequent library use and reported wellbeing.  - NPR: http://n.pr/1pOucNZ 

• Face Recognition Algorithm Finally Beats Humans - http://news.sciencemag.org/signal-noise/2014/04/face-recognition-algorithm-finally-beats-humans

• "Stop Stealing Dreams" - Seth Godin's manifesto on the issues with our current educational system.   

  "The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake: We spend a fortune teaching trigonometry to kids who don't understand it, won't use it, and will spend no more of their lives studying math. We invest thousands of hours exposing millions of students to fiction and literature, but end up training most of them to never again read for fun (one study found that 58 percent of all Americans never read for pleasure after they graduate from school). As soon as we associate reading a book with taking a test, we've missed the point.  

  Even though the workplace and civil society demand variety, the industrialized school system works to stamp it out.  

  The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass produc- tion and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing.

  We continually raise the bar on what it means to be a college professor, but churn out Ph.D.s who don't actually teach and aren't particularly productive at research, either. We teach facts, but the amount of knowledge truly absorbed is miniscule." - Seth Godin  - from his manifesto on our current educational system - "Stop Stealing Dreams" http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/StopStealingDreamsSCREEN.pdf 

• Daring Greatly to Unlock Your Creativity with Brené Brown - http://youtu.be/kAk4cwjvJ0A

• Our Loss of Wisdom - TED talk by Professor of Psychology, Barry Schwartz, Swarthmore College -  https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom

• MindfulDirect pop-up studio interview with Bill Duane, Senior Manager at Google; in charge of Well Being and Sustainable High Performance Development Programs. In this poignant interview excerpt Bill tells the story of how a neuroscientist visiting Google convinced him to overcome his resistance to the stereotypes and try meditation practice: http://vimeo.com/mindfuldirect/billduane1

• Dollison and Marsh - Vertical Voices: The Music of Maria Schneider - a tribute record to jazz's current shining composer - Maria Schneider.

• William Parker / Raining On The Moon - Friday Afternoon - the William Parker jazz sextet in fine form live in Montreal (one Friday afternoon...).

• Adam Hurst - Obscura - cellist Adam Hurst fuses world-beat rhythms, instruments, and textures on this great disc.

• Will Ackerman - Meditations - Will Ackerman is the founder of new age pioneering record label Wyndham Hill and a world-class guitarist in his own right. 

• Kenny Garrett - Pushing the World Away - Though Joe Lovano may be the Michael Jordan of Jazz Tenor Sax, Kenny Garrett would certainly qualify as the Jazz world's Scotty Pippen.  

• Tunde Jegede - Testimony  - Tunde Jegede is a multi-talented musician, composer, and multimedia visual artist.  He is of African and European descent and he fuses both cultures into his art.  This album of solo cello work is very good.  Skip down into the album (past the Bach cello suites) to  his own compositions first.  They are wonderful. He is also the founder of the Xiom music record label. They've done a great job - you can feel the room he is playing in and the powerful acoustics.  

• "Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position." - Gandhi

• "True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost." - Arthur Ashe

• "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

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