This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble

The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals. The visualization was created by Maximilian Schich (University of Texas at Dallas) and Mauro Martino (IBM).

Read Nature's news story:http://www.nature.com/news/1.15650
Find the research paper in Science:http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/...

Staging Sustainability 2014: People. Planet. Profit. Performance will be an international conference from February 2-5, 2014 hosted at three exciting downtown Toronto venues — the MaRS Discovery District, 99 Sudbury, The Theatre Centre —and streamed to satellite locations across Canada. 

An international three-day conference on ‘Staging Sustainability: People, Planet, Profit, Performance’ will be the largest gathering of innovative sustainability practitioners in the world to focus on ways in which performance can positively affect our planet. The conference ‘Staging Sustainability 2014’ will introduce the attendees to ground breakers working across Canada, on Broadway, in London, in community gardens — as well as all points in-between — to remake the way we work in the performing arts.

“Performance has always been about how the work affects people. Now we are ready to look at how our performances can affect a sustainable world.”

On 2-5 February 2014 the conference will be hosted at three downtown Toronto venues — MaRS Discovery District, 99 Sudbury, and The Theatre Centre — and will also be streamed to satellite locations across Canada. Live performances illuminating sustainability will be staged throughout the conference and into the weekend.

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Nonprofit Technology Network by Annaliese
Nonprofit organizations are looking beyond traditional data toward information about constituent participation and engagement. Such data might include volunteer activity, e-newsletter activity, Facebook or Twitter mentions, online petitions or pledge activities, event attendance and interaction among constituents, to name only a few.NTEN and Avectra sought input from 10 nonprofits and associations that vary in size and work across many programmatic areas for specific examples of how they are collecting, managing and sharing engagement data -- and how it impacts their work.

We’ve compiled their responses around seven key questions, and are sharing the findings, and their stories, below.

I. What types of engagement data are nonprofits collecting and, more importantly, why?

The organizations that provided input collect a broad range of engagement data, such as but not limited to:

• Website analytics and e-newsletter subscriptions, open rates and click-throughs
• Social media mentions, "likes" and sharing
• Press release responses
• Grantee operations and demographics
• Event registrations, including webinars and other virtual events
• Membership - joins, renewals, membership type/category
• Community activity - discussion forum participation
• Relationships between and among constituent groups
• Customer requests (via phone and email) and customer survey results
• Product sales
• Volunteer participation

Participants agreed that engagement data collection relates directly to their organizational goals and objectives, including the capability to:

• identify trends and leverage them to shape existing programs and create new ones that best meet member needs
• gauge and report effectiveness and outcomes in order to meet funding and revenue goals and
• better focus and allocate resources

One respondent, whose organization's mission is to lower the high school drop-out rate in Canada, has been doing "pretty extensive" tracking since it was founded in 2001. "Additional funding is not possible without metrics."

The League of American Orchestras' (The League) Rebecca Vierhaus told us her organization is "trying to find trends to tie participation to revenue, as well as participation to likelihood of renewing membership or donating….We have always imagined a 'learning journey' for our members -- becoming more and more engaged over time and eventually becoming donors or supporters in other ways. Is this how our members actually engage with us and, if not, what should our strategy be to try and keep them on a 'conveyor belt' towards loyalty and engagement?"

Shoes That Fit's Thomas Pellegrino said his organization uses the data to "communicate our mission and message and develop our communication strategies." Read more

Buffer Blog, Written by Leo Widrich
Our brain on stories: How our brains become more active when we tell stories We all enjoy a good story, whether it’s a novel, a movie or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us that they’ve experienced. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?

It’s in fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens.

When we are being told a story though, things change dramatically found researchers in Spain. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain, that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up, if it’s about motion, our motor cortex gets active:

“Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements.”

A story can put your whole brain to work. And yet, it gets better:

When we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it, can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton:

“When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized.  When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too.  When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners’ brains.” Read more

How can we make the most of culture for economic growth, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion ?  How can we place culture, innovation, and creativity at the heart of public policy ? From 15 to 17 May, UNESCO’s "Hangzhou International Congress" in China will set the stage for a landmark global debate on integrating culture in the conception, measurement, and practice of sustainable development. The Congress seeks to inspire governments, civil society, businesses and communities to harness the power of culture in addressing the world’s most pressing developmental challenges.  Read More

Congratulations to CAPACOA!
April 29, 2013 - Performing arts presenting generates a wide range of benefits for Canadians, the communities they live in and society at large, according to a report prepared by Strategic Moves and released today by the Canadian Arts Presenting Association (CAPACOA).

The Value of Presenting: A Study of Performing Arts Presentation in Canada includes a comprehensive historical and contemporary overview of the performing arts ecosystem. It reveals that performing arts are valued by the vast majority of Canadians – across socio-economic differences – and it provides a new perspective on younger Canadians’ interest in live performing arts. Most importantly, the study identifies a broad range of public benefits associated with performing arts presentation, including better health and well-being, greater energy and vitality in communities, and a more caring and cohesive society.