Zoltan Istvan is launching his campaign to become Libertarian governor of the American state of California with two signature policies. First, hell eliminate poverty with a universal basic income that will guarantee US$5,000 per month for every Californian household for ever. (Hell do this without raising taxes, he promises.)

The next item in his in-tray is eliminating death. He intends to divert trillions of dollars into life-extending technologies robotic hearts, artificial exoskeletons, genetic editing, bionic limbs and so on in the hope that each Californian man, woman and AI (artificial intelligence) will eventually be able to upload their consciousness to the Cloud and experience digital eternity.

What we can experience as a human being is going to be dramatically different within two decades, Istvan says, when we meet at his home in Mill Valley, California. We have five senses now. We might have thousands in 30 or 40 years. We might have very different bodies, too.

I have friends who are about a year away from cutting off their arm and replacing it with a prosthetic version. And sure, pretty soon the robotic arm really will be better than a biological one. Lets say you work in construction and your buddy can lift a thousand times what you can. The question is: do you get it?

For most people, the answer to this question is likely to be, Erm, maybe Ill pass for the moment. But to a transhumanist such as Istvan, 44, the answer is, Hell, yes! A former National Geographic reporter and property speculator, Istvan combines the enthusiasm of a child whos read a lot of Marvel comics with a parodically presidential demeanour. Hes a blond-haired, blue-eyed father of two with an athletic build, a firm handshake and the sort of charisma that goes down well in TED talks.

Like most transhumanists (there are a lot of them in California), Istvan believes our species can, and indeed should, strive to transcend our biological limitations. And he has taken it upon himself to push this idea out of the Google Docs of a few Silicon Valley dreamers and into the American political mainstream.

Twenty-five years ago, hardly anybody was recycling, he explains. Now, environmentalism has conditioned an entire generation. Im trying to put transhumanism on a similar trajectory, so that in 10, 15 years, everybody is going to know what it means and think about it in a very positive way.

What were saying is that over the next 30 years, the complexity of human experience is going to become so amazing, you ought to at least see it

Zoltan Istvan

I meet Istvan at the home he shares with his wife, Lisa an obstetrician and gynaecologist with Planned Parenthood and their two daughters, six-year-old Eva, and Isla, who is three. I had been expecting a gadget-laden cyber-home; in fact, he resides in a 100-year-old loggers house built from Californian redwood, with a converted stable on the ground floor and plastic childrens toys in the yard. If it werent for the hyper-inflated prices in the Bay Area (Its sort of Facebook yuppie-ville around here, says Istvan) youd say it was a humble Californian homestead.

Still, there are a few details that give him away, such as the forbidding security warnings on his picket fence. During his unsuccessful bid for the presidency last year he stood as the Transhumanist Party candidate and scored zero per cent a section of the religious right identified him as the Antichrist. This, combined with Lisas work providing abortions, means they get a couple of death threats a week and have had to report to the FBI.

Christians in America have made transhumanism as popular as its become, says Istvan. They really need something that they can point their finger at that fulfils Revelations.

Istvan also has a West Wing box set on his mantelpiece and a small Meccano cyborg by the fireplace. Its named Jethro, after the protagonist of his self-published novel, The Transhumanist Wager (2013). And there is an old Samsung phone attached to the front door, which enables him to unlock the house using the microchip in his finger.

A lot of the Christians consider my chip a mark of the beast, he says. Im like, No! Its so I dont have to carry my keys when I go out jogging.

Istvan hopes to chip his daughters before long for security purposes and recently argued with his wife about whether it was even worth saving for a university fund for them, since by the time they reach university age, advances in artificial intelligence will mean they can just upload all the learning they need. Lisa won that argument. But hes inclined not to freeze his sperm and Lisas eggs, since if they decide to have a third child, 10 or 20 or 30 years hence, theyll be able to combine their DNA.

Even if theres a mischievous, fake-it-till-you-make-it quality to Istvan, theres also a core of seriousness. He is genuinely troubled that we are on the verge of a technological dystopia that the mass inequalities that helped fuel US President Donald Trumps rise will only worsen when the digital revolution really gets under way. And he despairs of the retrogressive bent of the current administration: Trump talks all the time about immigrants taking jobs. Bulls**t. Its technology thats taking jobs. We have about four million truck drivers who are about to lose their jobs to automation. This is why capitalism needs a basic income to survive.

And hes not wrong in identifying that emerging technologies such as AI and bio-enhancement will bring with them policy implications, and its probably a good idea to start talking about them now.

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Certainly, life extension is a hot investment in Silicon Valley, whose elites have a hard time with the idea that their billions will not protect them from an earthly death. Google was an early investor in the secretive biotech start-up Calico, the California Life Company, which aims to devise interventions that slow ageing and counteract age-related diseases. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has invested millions in parabiosis: the process of curing ageing with transfusions of young peoples blood.

Another biotech firm, United Therapeutics, has unveiled plans to grow fresh organs from DNA. Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional, the firms founder, Martine Rothblatt, told a recent gathering of the National Academy of Medicine in Los Angeles.

In attendance were Google co-founder Sergey Brin, vegan pop star Moby and numerous venture capitalists. Istvan fears that unless we develop policies to regulate this transition, the Thiels of this world will soon be hoarding all the young blood for themselves.

Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional

Martine Rothblatt

Istvan was born in Oregon in 1973, the son of Hungarian immigrants who fled Stalins tanks in 1968. He had a comfortable middle-class upbringing his mother was a devout Catholic and sent him to Catholic school and an eye for a story. After graduating from Columbia University, he embarked on a solo round-the-world yachting expedition, during which, he says, he read 500 works of classic literature. He spent his early career reporting for the National Geographic channel from more than 100 countries, many of them conflict zones, claiming to have invented the extreme sport of volcano boarding along the way.

One of the things he shares in common with Americas current president is a fortune accrued from real estate. While he was making films overseas in the noughties, his expenses were minimal, so he was able to invest all of his pay cheques in property.

AlphaGos China showdown: Why its time to embrace artificial intelligence

So many people in America were doing this flipping thing at the time, explains Istvan. I realised very quickly, Wow! I could make enough money to retire. It was just quite easy and lucrative to do that.

At his peak, he had a portfolio of 19 fixer-upper houses, most of which he managed to sell before the crash of 2008. He now retains nine as holiday rentals and uses the proceeds to fund his political campaigns (he is reluctant to name his other backers). Still, he insists hes not part of the 1 per cent; the most extravagant item of furniture is a piano, and his groceries are much the same as you find in many liberal, middle-class Californian households.

Istvan cant think of any particular incident that prompted his interest in eternal life, other than perhaps a rejection of Catholicism.

Fifty per cent of me thinks after we die we get eaten by worms, and our body matter and brain return unconsciously to the cosmos [] The other half subscribes to the idea that we live in a holographic universe where other alien artificial intelligences have reached the singularity, he says, referring to the idea, advanced by Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, that pretty soon we will all merge with AI in one transcendental consciousness.

However, when Istvan first encountered transhumanism, at university via an article on cryonics (the practice of deep-freezing the recently dead in the hope that they can be revived at some point), he was sold. Within 90 seconds, I realised thats what I wanted to do in my life.

After a near-death experience in Vietnam he came close to stepping on a landmine Istvan decided to return to America and make good on this vow. I was nearing 30 and Id done some great work, but after all that time Id spent in conflict zones, seeing dead bodies, stuff like that, I thought it would be a good time to dedicate myself to conquering death.

He spent four years writing his novel, which he proudly claims was rejected by more than 600 agents and publishers. Its a dystopian story that imagines a Christian nation outlawing transhumanism, prompting all the billionaires to retreat to an offshore sea-stead where they can work on their advances undisturbed (Thiel has often threatened to do something similar).

Istvan continued to promote transhumanism by writing free columns for Huffington Post and Vice, chosen because they have strong Alexa rankings (ie, they show up high in Google search results).

I wrote something like 200 articles, putting transhumanism through the Google algorithm again and again, he says. I found it a very effective way to spread the message. I covered every angle that I could think of: disability and transhumanism; LGBT issues and transhumanism; transhumanist parenting.

Hes proud to say hes the only mainstream journalist who is so devoted to the cause. A lot of people write about transhumanism, but I think Im the only one who says, This is the best thing thats ever happened!

Why your biological age may hold the key to reversing the ageing process

Istvans presidential campaign was an attempt to take all of this up a level. It sounds as if he had a lot of fun. He toured Rust Belt car parks and Deep South mega-churches in a coffin-shaped immortality bus inspired by the one driven by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to promote LSD in the 1960s.

His platform Make America Immortal Again earned a fair amount of publicity, but Americans seemed ill-prepared for such concepts as the AI imperative (the idea that the first nation to create a true AI will basically win everything, so America had better be the first) and the singularity. At one point, he and his supporters were held at gunpoint by some Christians in Alabama.

The experience taught him a salutary lesson: unless you are a billionaire, it is simply impossible to make any kind of dent in the system. Hence his defection to the Libertarian Party, which vies with the Greens as the third party in American politics. Every town I go to, theres a Libertarian meet-up. With the Transhumanists, Id have to create the meet-up. So theres more to work with.

The Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, received 3.27 per cent of the votes last year, including half a million votes in California. About seven or eight million are likely to vote in the California governor race, in which context, half a million starts to become a lot of votes, Istvan explains.

His own politics are somewhere between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, he admits, and he has a hard time converting the right wing of his new party to causes such as basic income. (The general spirit of libertarian America is, Hands off!) But he believes transhumanism shares enough in common with libertarianism for the alliance to be viable; the core precepts of being able to do what you like as long as you dont harm anyone else are the same. And the gubernatorial campaign serves as a primary for the 2020 presidential election, when he believes the Libertarian candidate will have a feasible chance of participating in the television debates.

But whats wrong with death? Dont we need old people to die to make space for new people? And by extension, we need old ideas and old regimes to die, too. Imagine if William Randolph Hearst or Genghis Khan were still calling the shots now. And imagine if Mark Zuckerberg and Vladimir Putin were doing so in 200 years. Innovation would cease, the species would atrophy, everyone would get terribly bored. Isnt it the ultimate narcissism to want to live forever?

Istvan does concede that transhumanism is a very selfish philosophy. However, he has an answer for most of the other stuff.

Im a believer in overpopulation Ive been to Delhi and its overcrowded, he says. But if we did a better job of governing, the planet could hold 15 billion people comfortably. Its really a question of better rules and regulations.

And when discussing the desirability of eternal life, he turns into a sort of holiday rep for the future.

What were saying is that over the next 30 years, the complexity of human experience is going to become so amazing, you ought to at least see it, Istvan says. A lot of people find that a lot more compelling than, say, dying of leukaemia.

Still, it comes as little surprise that hes finding live for ever an easier sell than give money to poor people in 21st-century America.

I cant imagine basic income not becoming a platform in the 2020 election, he insists. And if not then, at some point, someone is going to run and win on it. The Republicans should like it because it streamlines government. The Democrats should like it because it helps poor people. Right now, Americans dont like it because it sounds like socialism. But it just needs a little reframing.

Basic-income experiments are already under way in parts of Canada, Finland and the Netherlands, but how would he fund such an idea in the US? He cant raise taxes libertarians hate that. And he doesnt want to alienate Silicon Valley.

If we did a better job of governing, the planet could hold 15 billion people comfortably

Zoltan Istvan

How do you tell the 1 per cent youre going to take all this money from them? It wouldnt work, he says. They control too many things. But Istvan has calculated that 45 per cent of California is government-controlled land that the state could monetise.

A lot of environmentalists are upset at me for that, saying, Woah, Zolt, you want to put a shopping mall in Yosemite? Well, the reality is that the poor people in America will never be able to afford to go to Yosemite. Im trying to be a diplomat here.

And he insists that if Americans miss those national parks when theyve been turned into luxury condos and Taco Bells, theyll be able to replenish them some day if they want.

Theres nanotechnology coming through that would enable us to do that, Istvan argues. We have GMOs [genetically modified organisms] that can regrow plants twice as quick. In 50 or 100 years, were not even going to be worried about natural resources.

Such is his wager that exponential technological growth is around the corner and we may as well hurry it along, because its our best chance of clearing up the mess weve made of things thus far.

The safety of genetically-modified crops is backed by science

Didnt the political developments of 2016 persuade him that progress can be slow and sometimes go backwards? Actually, Istvan argues that what were witnessing are the death throes of conservatism, Christianity, even capitalism.

Everyone says the current pope is the best one weve had for ages, that hes so progressive and whatever. Actually, Catholicism is dying, says Istvan. Nobodys giving it any money any more, so the pope had better moderate its message. As for capitalism, all of this nationalism and populism are just the dying moments.

Its a system that goes against the very core of humanitarian urges. And while its brought us many wonderful material gains, at some point we can say, Thats enough. In the transhumanist age, we will reach utopia. Crime drops to zero. Poverty will end. Violence will drop. At some point, we become a race of individuals who are pretty nice to each other.

But now weve talked for so long that Istvan needs to go and pick up his daughters from childcare. He insists that I join him. What do his family make of all of this?

My wife is a bit sceptical of a lot of my timelines, he says. Lisa comes from practical Wisconsin farming stock, and its a fair bet that her work with Planned Parenthood keeps her pretty grounded. They met on dating website match.com. Does she believe in all this stuff?

I dont want to say shes not a transhumanist, he says, but I dont think shed cryogenically freeze herself tomorrow. I would. Im like, If you see me dying of a heart attack, please put me in a refrigerator. She thinks thats weird.

We arrive at the community centre where Istvans daughters are being looked after. They come running out in summer dresses, sweet and sunny and happy to be alive. Both of them want to be doctors when they grow up, like their mum.

The Times/The Interview People

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Immortality: Silicon Valley's latest obsession ushers in the transhumanist era - South China Morning Post

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Right Wing Bonus Tracks: Get Ready For Satanic Gay Human/Animal Transhumanism - Right Wing Watch

Posted: Monday, August 14, 2017 2:43 pm

Families Can View Solar Eclipse At Glenview Library By DENISE FLEISCHERLifestyles Editor Journal & Topics Media Group

Families will be able to observe the total solar eclipse at the Glenview Public Library, 1930 Glenview Rd., during its Monday, Aug. 21 viewing event.

Sally Baylander, assistant head of youth services, said the drop-in event will feature both televised feeds from NASA on drop-down screens in Community Room West. Children will be able to make a pinhole viewer and step outside onto the South patio to observe the eclipse.

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Families Can View Solar Eclipse At Glenview Library - Journal & Topics Newspapers Online

RIPLEY, Ohio A two-hour program will explore Is Higginsport School Haunted? in Ripley on Aug 19.

The program will be held at the Ripley Library Annex, located next door to the main library.

Justin Brown, founder and lead paranormal researcher for Interface Death, will explain how research into the Higginsport School was done.

According to its website, Interface Death is a paranormal research group based in Hillsboro, Ohio. Its objective is to acquire data and conduct experiments in the field to test hypotheses and develop theories that correlate paranormal phenomena with scientific principles.

Brown will have examples of equipment that is used in the groups investigations. This will be followed by a question and answer session and a short intermission.

Its low budget, Brown said, Entry level equipment. But you make sure the logistics are covered.

After intermission, there will be a viewing of the Higginsport school documentary. The video is a collaboration between Interface Death and Shadowforge Studios. The documentary is about the history and haunting at Higginsport School.

According to Brown, the Higgensport School has had several paranormal reports since around the 1960s. Some instances reported include phantom footsteps, voices, and apparitions.

An urban explorer from Cincinnati went in and got video of child-shaped apparitions in period clothing, Brown said, They were as solid as you or me. That footage will be in my video on the 19th.

The school, built in 1880, was designed to hold 250 students. The population of Higginsport at the time was just 297.

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The school was expanded in 1930 and 1932. In 1952, the school was consolidated into the Ripley Union Lewis Huntington school district. It remained an elementary school until it was closed in 1987.

Brown said getting the history correct is very important to paranormal researchers.

You want to make sure the history is right so you can see if there is a connection to the paranormal, Brown said, A janitor may have died in the boiler room [of Higginsport school] in the 1800s. You want to get the documentation of that so you can see if there is a connection to the paranormal occurrences.

DVDs of the documentary will be available at the program for a cost of $10.

The Ripley Library is located at the corner of U.S. 52 and Main Street in downtown Ripley. For further information about the program call 937-392-4871 or http://www.facebook.com/Ripleyohiolibrary.

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Higginsport haunting program at Ripley library - Ledger Independent

PUNE: Online library platform Knimbus is going from being an e-library platform to enabling colleges and institutes create their own virtual libraries.

"Knimbus 3.0 will be a full stack platform that will allow institutes to build and customise their own online libraries using the material we have. They will have their own homepage and mobile app, which will allow students access content from anywhere," said Rahul Agarwalla, CEO, Knimbus.

Set up in 2011 as a platform to make online content more easily searchable for research students, the new version also marks a shift from catering to PhD students and researchers alone to university and college students as well.

Agarwalla likens it to a variation of the Netflix model, where all the content is curated by Knimbus onto one platform, which is then customised by users as per their preferences. Agarwalla said the SaaS platform was currently being rolled out to existing customers like Niti Aayog and the NIT, New Delhi, and undergoing final testing before opening it up to others. The company hosts content from over 500 publishers along with e-learning material from universities across the world, some of which is available for free, while some is premium content.

"We are currently working with 300 paid customers and have 750 live libraries. The aim is to get to a 1,000 paid customers by the end of 2018," said Agarwalla.

A recent survey conducted among librarians by Knimbus showed that almost 60% of them had some sort of a digital footprint. The biggest constraints according to them were the cost of doing so and the lack of infrastructure.

"All our content is on the cloud and we manage the back-end, which makes it easy for anyone to set up their online library," said Agarwalla.

Read the original here:
Knimbus is making e-libraries a virtual reality for colleges - Economic Times

Not long ago, it seemed to Melissa Larson that solar eclipse glasses were everywhere at the Walmart, the Best Buy and all over the internet. Surely she could take her time before she and her husband left for Southern Illinois to catch a prime view of this rare cosmic phenomenon.

But a few weeks later, her confidence vanished. Store after store was sold out, and websites were demanding a pirate's ransom for the glasses if they had them at all.

So Larson, of Inverness, put a notice on Craigslist on Monday offering to buy two pairs for $20. As of late afternoon, she had no takers.

"The only thing I can find online are 10-packs," she said. "That's ridiculous. Who needs 10 of them?"

Like fidget spinners or flu shots, solar eclipse glasses have become scarce just as demand has reached a frenzy less than a week from the Aug. 21 event. The Chicago Public Library announced it would give away 15,000 pairs, only to be greeted with lines Monday that stretched out the door at some branches.

"If they're not out already, they won't be around much longer," spokesman Patrick Molloy said. "We knew it would be popular, but we didn't know the demand would be that heavy."

In Naperville School District 203, the high schools sagely ordered their supply more than a year ago, but other schools are still scrambling to track down the gear. Spokeswoman Michelle Fregoso said administrators are planning to livestream video images of the celestial event for children who remain unequipped.

"No one's going to miss out on the eclipse," she said. "You may miss out on being outside to view it."

Eclipse glasses block ultraviolet, visible and infrared radiation, and, according to NASA, allow people to gaze at the sun for long durations without harming their vision. Taking a peek with the naked eye is a bad idea, said Dr. Felix Chau, an ophthalmologist with the Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"With the eclipse, the danger is people are fooled, and since the sky will be much darker and part of the sun will be blocked, they'll think maybe it's safe," he said.

It's not. Chau cited a condition called solar retinopathy, in which light energy causes a permanent scar on the retina, leading to vision loss. He recommended using a pinhole camera or other indirect means to view the eclipse, concerned that the specialized glasses might not be safe.

"Who made those glasses and how protective are they really?" he said. "If there's damage to the retina, some people will have to deal with the injury for the rest of their lives."

But Mike Kentrianakis of the American Astronomical Society said glasses that have the approval of the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, have proven to be safe and effective. The problem is that some opportunists are selling counterfeit glasses, ISO logo and all.

He said the best way to be sure that eclipse glasses work properly is to try them on and look at a bright light everything other than the light should be barely visible.

"If you can see faint florescent lights in your home or make out any details indoors, or even outdoors (in sunlight), they're no good," he said.

Researchers have gauged the toll of eye injuries from previous eclipses and reached varying conclusions. One study found that 1 in 7 people who sustained eye injuries during a 1999 eclipse claimed to have used safety glasses or welder's masks.

"No additional information about these devices was provided, so it is likely that some or all of them were homemade, not certified as safe, or otherwise deficient," the society said in a summation of the research. "In any case, all patients in this study recovered their vision after several weeks."

The demand for glasses has factories churning one manufacturer, Tennessee-based American Paper Optics, has said it wants to crank out 100 million pairs and prices spiking.

A five-pack offered last week on Amazon for $19.95 was going for $39.95 Monday. On eBay, one vendor wanted $24.95 for a single pair and within hours had sold more than 100.

One answer to the price gouging has been to buy in bulk. Rachel Hambleton of Evanston found a 25-pack that, with shipping, worked out to $6.50 a pair. She quickly rounded up other parents on Facebook who were eager to share in the haul, finding the response so great that she placed a second order.

"I'm still getting people asking me (for the glasses)," she said. "I say, 'You'll have to check with the other moms. I've already ordered 50.'"

The Adler Planetarium has served as a major distributor of eclipse glasses after ordering 200,000 from American Astronomical Society-endorsed manufacturer Rainbow Symphony. It gave the Chicago Public Library part of the supply, and also is selling them in the gift shop for $2.50 a pair.

Other libraries have secured a cache of glasses through grants by a STEM-related organization. The Oak Lawn Public Library has already given out about 200 pairs, but is holding back about 800 for people who show up on eclipse day.

"Even if they come in droves, we'll have glasses for them," said Emily Kenny, the library's youth services associate. "We feel confident in that."

In the end, supply and demand have a way of working out. By Monday evening, Larson finally got a response to her Craigslist ad: A seller offered her and her husband a five-pack of eclipse glasses for $30.

"Looks like we'll be the ones with extras," she said.

jkeilman@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @JohnKeilman

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As interest in eclipse reaches frenzy, viewing glasses in short supply - Chicago Tribune

CUMBERLAND In a world heading increasingly toward digital media, Prince Memorial Library is keeping pace by scanning several key local texts.

A link on the 266 Main St librarys website, princememorial.lib.me.us/researcher, is a gateway to the online repository of information.

Digital collections of books and maps scanned in by the Cumberland library town meeting records from the 1821 incorporation through 1952, as well as vital records, town census compilations, school yearbooks, planning documents and municipal meeting minutes are among the many offerings that can be accessed from anywhere around the world, at no charge, through the link.

The service is available through the Maine State Librarys Digital Maine network.

The project was conceived when library Director Thomas Bennett attended a workshop hosted by the Maine State Library in 2014.

The Maine State Library is responsible for retaining government documents, he said in an interview July 19. They had an idea that, instead of trying to keep 20 paper copies of every government document that came out they would do a digital initiative, have the different departments publish digitally and it goes up on Digital Maine.

Doing so makes such documents much more accessible to the public, and easier to maintain in libraries growing increasingly cramped for space, Bennett said.

The state library opened the initiative to public libraries and historical societies around the state, and Prince Memorial has been scanning and posting items in the three years since.

Along with historic documents, Cumberlands online offerings include self-published books on various aspects of town history, such as Early Days of the Cumberland Fire Department by Kenneth Chase and History of the Town of Cumberland, Maine by Mary Sweetser.

(For) anybody interested in Cumberland history, its great stuff, Bennett said.

Another resource is the towns online collection of planning documents, which can aid developers in learning the history of a given parcel.

We now have like 500 engineering plans and other documents, Bennett said.

Everything is searchable by keyword through the website, and through Google. Thanks to the library transcribing the texts of its historic documents, the contents as well as the titles and subjects can be found via search engine, saving researchers significant time in perusing page after page for what they need.

And with the state librarys recent partnering with Digital Public Library of America, all the records are showing up there as well, and pointing back to Cumberlands repository.

For us its great, because we have some documents, some books that are fragile, we dont want them going out of the building, Bennett said. We can put them up here (online), and people can find them, make copies.

The librarys outreach efforts have paid off. According to a top 10 downloads listing at digitalmaine.com/topdownloads.html, Vital Records of Cumberland Maine, 1701-1892), compiled by Bennett, was in third place as of Monday with about 3,000 downloads, while minutes of the Town Council meeting of April 12, 1999, ranked 10th.

Its really nice that we can do this, that we can get stuff out there, Bennett said. It takes the stress off of our collection, and gets our information out to a wider public.

And if the original documents are ever destroyed, they would remain preserved digitally for perpetuity.

Cumberland records have been downloaded all over the world, including South Africa and Australia, according to Bennetts data.

Looking to the future, he said he wants to scan and post more self-published works by local authors, to get them back into public consumption, without the cost of going back to a publisher.

Lets get those up on (the web), so that their work can get out there, Bennett said.

Thomas Bennett, director of Prince Memorial Library in Cumberland, shows a searchable catalog of local offerings available online, such as historic documents and books by town authors.

More:
Cumberland library adds to digital collection - The Forecaster

There are many characteristics associated with effective leaders; you can find those lists easily, or you can just make a list yourself. If you have read my writing much, you know that I believe that remarkable leaders are learners that they must be learning to be successful in nearly every part of their role. I believe that an important part of our ability to be a learning leader is to be self-aware.

The Oxford Dictionary defines self-awareness as a conscious knowledge of ones own character, feelings, motives, and desires. Given that definition, I want to give you three reasons why you would want to build the skills and habits of self-awareness if you want to be a better leader and some reflection questions for each of these reasons.

Others are watching. Everything in your behavior is being observed and evaluated by those around, especially your team. They are noticing what you do and say, how you do and say it, and even what you arent doing or saying. The degree to which a leader is unaware of their behavior and how it is being perceived by others limits their ability to be successful today, and become more successful tomorrow. To better understand this, consider questions like:

How are people responding to you? In what ways are those responses surprising? How often do you feel misunderstood, or your actions are misinterpreted? Do you recognize other peoples perceptions as feedback to consider?

You impact everything. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, your presence and behavior will necessarily change the way your team operates, what they value and what they believe.

Who you are and how you behave changes the relationships your team members have, the expectations they carry about their work, how productive they are, and what values they carry in their work. As a leader, you must realize how your presence affects the team. To think about this more carefully ask yourself questions like: Do you notice your team (or individuals) changing when you walk into the room? If so, in what ways? How open does your team seem with you? How would you access the level of trust team members have in you?

Consider cause and effect. As it relates to self-awareness, the most important cause and effect relationship starts with your thoughts. What you are thinking impacts your actions, consciously or not, and therefore directly impacts the two items above. Some questions to ask yourself here include:

What are your beliefs about your team and each member of it? What are the most important parts of your job? What do like most about your role as a leader? What do you wish you were better at?

Self-awareness requires introspection: to look inside yourself at what you were thinking and feeling at any moment, and how it lead you to speak and act. When looking back at a situation, you can see how you responded and why, but more importantly, you can see what type of reaction or outcome resulted. Since we mostly operate on auto-pilot, when we stop and reflect on what we did, why we did it and how it worked, we have a chance to change the auto-pilot settings in the future (if we so choose).

If you want to become a more effective leader, decide to be more self-aware, more introspective, and step back to assess yourself using the kinds of questions above. Time spent doing this will almost assuredly aid you in your journey to becoming a more effective leader.

And before we close, one more important thing . . .

The most effective leaders recognize the power of self-awareness, and are also more open to and actively seek feedback from others as a part of their learning and growth. As important as the self-awareness and self-evaluation is, it is just a starting point and fuel for the desire to grow as a leader and a human being.

Read more:
The Self-Aware Leader - Inside INdiana Business

15 ways to find your inner calm after the Bank Holiday Weekend

Independent.ie

His profound yet simple teachings have already helped countless people throughout the world find calm, contentment and greater fulfilment in their lives. Here, Eckhart Tolle shares his 15 ways to find inner peace.

http://www.independent.ie/life/health-wellbeing/health-features/15-ways-to-find-your-inner-calm-after-the-bank-holiday-weekend-36000560.html

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His profound yet simple teachings have already helped countless people throughout the world find calm, contentment and greater fulfilment in their lives. Here, Eckhart Tolle shares his 15 ways to find inner peace.

"Worry is a destructive and futile thought pattern that many people are trapped in. In the present moment, you may be faced with a challenge but you don't have time to worry about it. You either run away from it or you deal with it. Worry never refers to something that is happening in the present moment. If you look more closely, you will see that the thought pattern we call 'worry' is ultimately a form of illusion because it refers to a future moment that is not reality right now. You cannot deal with the future because it's not here. You can only deal with the present moment."

2 IT'S NOT THE SITUATION, BUT HOW YOU INTERPRET THE SITUATION

"Many things are happening in the world that justifiably seem to make us feel anxious. But if you look back in history, there have been many time periods when life was even more uncertain than it is now. Jesus was already talking about anxiety - several times he emphasised the importance of being aware of your own state of consciousness. We always think the cause for our anxiety is outside of us -but if we look more deeply, we realise that, ultimately, it's not things outside of us that make us anxious but our thoughts about the things outside of us that make us feel anxious."

3 LIFE IS UNCERTAIN BY ITS VERY NATURE

"It would be a delusion to believe that you will reach a stage in life where everything - relationships, jobs, health, finances - is secure. This never happens because the essence of life is that there is always uncertainty and insecurity. One challenge replaces another. People think this shouldn't be happening. They think, 'My life should be in such a way that I can finally relax and be at peace,' but life is not like that. Everything, as the Buddha said, is impermanent. The external world will never give you a sense of security but we can find freedom inside of ourselves so that we enter into a skilful relationship with the eternal world so that our mind does not become our torture chamber."

4 KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 'FOCUSED THINKING' and 'WORRIED THINKING'

"People are under the illusion that worry has some useful purpose, but it doesn't. Unconsciously, they feel, 'If I don't worry about my life, I'm not taking responsibility for my life.' But you cannot because the situation is not here now. I'm not talking about planning. Of course you can plan to take certain steps in the future. Focused thinking is very different from worried thinking - you take out a piece of paper and think about what actions you can take. Worry, on the other hand, is an incessant, repetitive stream of thinking that does not lead to any useful action. So you are trapped in this vicious circle - with one fearful thought producing another fearful thought producing another fearful thought."

5 THERE IS NEVER A GOOD TIME TO START PRACTISING STILLNESS

"People think they can only have inner peace when their external conditions are conducive to inner peace. That happens very rarely, unfortunately. People always want to postpone it - they think, 'Once my problems are sorted out, then I'll be able to do it.' But your problems never get sorted out. You sort out one set of problems and then you encounter a new set. So you have to decide, no matter what your life situation, that inner peace, which is your state of consciousness, is your first priority. Everything else is secondary."

6 HOW ARE YOU RIGHT NOW?

"In The Power of Now, I posed the question: 'What problem do I have right now?' That question can be very helpful. The mind is telling you that you're burdened with these terrible things - but it's all mental; it's not actual. So, what problem do I have right now? Suddenly you realise that you are in this warm bed and you are not being threatened by anything right now, except by your mind."

7 LEARN TO NOTICE WITHOUT NAMING

"Wherever you are, take a moment to use your sense perception to look and listen. For example, I can look out the window and see the sky and a park with beautiful trees, and I can look at that without calling it anything. This is another state of consciousness where you are fully conscious but not thinking, or thinking very little. And that is a portal into inner peace and inner stillness, which is a deeper dimension of consciousness."

8 USE YOUR BREATH AS AN ANCHOR

"A very easy thing to do is simply to become aware that you are breathing. Your attention goes to your breath so you breathe consciously. You don't have to change your breathing. If you bring your attention to the fact that you are breathing, you begin to enjoy the rhythm of your breath and you enjoy observing your breath. And when you do that, you are not thinking anymore. You cannot think and at the same time be aware of your breathing. And when you're no longer thinking, you are no longer worrying."

9 TAKE A FEW MOMENTS TO BE STILL in the MORNING

Don't check your phone first thing in the morning. Instead of cluttering your mind, you need to have a little space of awareness or presence - even for five minutes. This also applies to the last moments before bed. I call it going into sleep consciously. When you turn off the light and close your eyes, become aware of your breathing and notice that your breath moves in and out. This will help you find stillness."

10 BECOME AWARE OF YOUR BODY

"Becoming aware of your breathing can almost automatically take you into this inner body awareness which I have written about in The Power of Now. That means you feel the aliveness inside your body - your hands, your feet, your legs. I always recommend that people begin by feeling the inside of their hands by directing attention into their hands. Some people tell me that they don't know what I'm talking about. The easiest way for me to explain it is to say, 'Hold your left or right hand out, close your eyes and ask yourself, "Is my right hand still there?" How can I know if it is still there? My eyes are closed and I'm not touching anything.' Very often this is a helpful question for people who cannot feel the inner body. This practice can transform your life because it makes you the master of your mind and is the most helpful anchor for being in a state of presence. I sometimes call it a portal into inner peace."

11 YOUR STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AFFECTS YOUR ENVIRONMENT

"There is nothing that will prevent you from practising inner body awareness - even if you're surrounded by highly anxious people. If you can feel your inner body, you're no longer resonating with that state of consciousness that is around you. Sometimes it just takes one person to be present to have a beneficial effect on the entire group. However, there are some workplaces that are so dysfunctional, so dominated by infighting, anger and anxiety, that only you can know if you want to continue being in a particular environment or if you want to remove yourself from it."

12 STILLNESS TRANSCENDS ANY SITUATION

"I often receive correspondence from people who are in prison. They have discovered that they can enter this state of consciousness; they can be in their body and find inner peace that they never had before. They experience a transformation of consciousness in prison because their surroundings are so unpleasant that they have to go deeper inside. People have written to me to say 'I'm still in prison, but I feel free.' It's a wonderful realisation. There is, within very human being, that dimension of consciousness already present."

13 CREATE A TECH-FREE ZONE

"The mind was already dysfunctional, but now it has become amplified through technology, so modern, contemporary humans are probably even more anxious and uncentred than people were in the past because of our exposure to this kind of technology. We have to be very aware of the addictive nature of these things... and we need to create little spaces where we do not interact with these devices. If you do not allow your cellphone or your computer in your bedroom, then you have at least one space where you are not being bombarded with these things."

14 TAKE MOMENTS TO JUST BE

"When I'm waiting somewhere, unless there is really something that I need to communicate, I don't just take out my cellphone to start looking around it. You can just be when you're waiting somewhere - just allow yourself to be in that moment, to look around, to feel the energy inside your body. We need to exercise the power that we have so that we are not slaves to our mind - and slaves to the devices that the mind has created. Otherwise, no matter what you have, there is always a sense of dissatisfaction, underlying anxiety and discontent."

15 LEARN TO TRUST IN LIFE

"Faith is a deep sense of trust that you are being supported by something greater than yourself - a vast power that lies behind life; a vast intelligence lying behind all the manifestations of life. When you find inner stillness, you can sense that there is a presence in that stillness and that presence carries you. People feel they have to control every aspect of their life and basically what that means is a lack of trust. When you have that connection to the inner stillness, then you can have this trust in life, and that neurotic need to control every little thing is no longer there. Then you can do real thinking that is more constructive and you can focus on the power of your thought - that's another story...

* Eckhart Tolle will be speaking in the RDS, Dublin, on September 9 at 7pm. For more information, see seminars.ie

Health & Living

More here:
15 ways to find your inner calm after the Bank Holiday Weekend ... - Independent.ie

Ever suffered from anxiety? I have, and it's no picnic. About 10 years ago, I checked into the ER before a speaking engagement thinking I was having a heart attack. The electrocardiogram showed that my heart was as strong as ever. What had happened? I had had a panic attack, which is a sudden, overwhelming surge of anxiety and fear that mimics a heart attack. Doctors told me it had been induced by stress. That made sense. It was one of the most stressful periods of my life.

Numerous speaking engagements later, I had learned how to control feelings that commonly led to anxiety. I had learned that anxiety is often the result of fears (mostly based on things that haven't happened yet) you may have about uncertain situations, places, and even people in your life.

This is a serious issue. A study by Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor at University of California, San Francisco, found that nearly half of 242 entrepreneurs surveyed reported having one or more lifetime mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults, a whopping 18 percent of the population.

If anxiety is beating up on you, you can reduce it with these helpful hacks.

The most commonly suggested way to manage anxiety is to calm the nervous system by using diaphragmatic breathing (deep breathing). Doing it for a few minutes sends the brain the message that you're not actually in any danger, and in return it will kick your body into relaxation mode instead of fight-or-flight. If any part of your brain is sending signals that you're under threat (and in reality, you're not), kick the fear by gently talking yourself out of it. Convince that part of your brain sending you into fight-or-flight mode that you are just fine.

If you're feeling anxious, move. Literally move -- go outside and get some fresh air. Put on your earbuds and start listening to your favorite relaxing music (give the speed metal or gangsta rap a break) while going for a brisk walk. Try to take your mind away from what's bothering you. Focus as you walk on positive thoughts that will make you feel safe, accepted, loved, and honored. When you're at homeostasis, reflect on how fortunate and blessed you actually are.

Journaling about your fears and worries helps you process how you really feel, which can be healing. Use a notebook, and write these headings at the top of a page: 1) Situation; 2) Thoughts/What am I telling myself?; 3) How anxious do I feel? Jot down a short sentence about the situation and the date so you can monitor your progress. Most important, write down any thoughts you're having either in anticipation of or during a situation that causes anxiety. What are you telling yourself? Is it true, or does it come from irrational fear? In the third column, rank how you feel on a scale of one to 10, or write a few words to describe how you feel. Once you get clarity on the situation, you can look at what actions to take to move yourself forward.

Often, worry is the direct result of trying to control people, things, or certain situations that are actually well beyond your control. Understanding that you can't and shouldn't control everything and releasing your worry will help you manage your emotions better. Focus on the things that are in your control, slow down, and take one thing at a time. Now you can refocus on what's immediately in front of you, and go from there. Releasing your attempt to control will help ease some of the discomfort you're experiencing from your anxiety.

By exposing yourself to whatever it is you fear, it loses its power and control over you. No matter what it is that you fear, if you literally submerge yourself in it for a long-enough period of time, the illusion of fear (because there's no such thing as fear--it's all in our minds) will eventually be gone. That weakness becomes your great strength. When you figure out the thing that you fear, it's usually the most important thing you need to make yourself or your business successful.

A growing body of research in neuroscience suggests that mindfulness is one of the best-kept secrets for helping people deal with anxiety. You can practice it by intentionally focusingon your emotionsand accepting in a nonjudgmental way whatever thoughts and sensations you're experiencing in the moment. Matt Tenney, author of The Mindfulness Edge, summarizes it like this: "We train our awareness so that we become less distracted by our own thinking, which allows us to enjoy our lives more, to be more present with people, and to see our world, both inner and outer, with greater clarity."

Read the original here:

6 Powerful Brain Hacks to Cope With Anxiety Every Day - Inc.com