On the other hand, the US had homicide rates between 5.0 and 5.8 per 100,000 population during that same stretch.
After visits with professors, government officials, lawyers, journalists and citizens, the pie-chart breakdown became clear – though admittedly, it is impossible to determine how much each factor contributes.
First – and arguably foremost – there is virtually no difference among upper, middle and lower classes in Iceland. And with that, tension between economic classes is non-existent, a rare occurrence for any country.
The tycoon’s children go to school with everyone else”
Björgvin SigurðssonSocial Democratic Alliance
A study of the Icelandic class system done by a University of Missouri master’s student found only 1.1% of participants identified themselves as upper class, while 1.5% saw themselves as lower class.
The remaining 97% identified themselves as upper-middle class, lower-middle class, or working class.
On one of three visits to Althing, the Icelandic parliament, I met Bjorgvin Sigurdsson, former chairman of the parliamentary group of the Social Democratic Alliance. In his eyes – as well as those of many Icelanders I spoke with – equality was the biggest reason for the nation’s relative lack of crime.
“Here you can have the tycoon’s children go to school with everyone else,” Sigurdsson says, adding that the country’s social welfare and education systems promoted an egalitarian culture.
Babies are sometimes left unattended in Iceland
Crimes in Iceland – when they occur – usually do not involve firearms, though Icelanders own plenty of guns.
GunPolicy.org estimates there are approximately 90,000 guns in the country – in a country with just over 300,000 people.
The country ranks 15th in the world in terms of legal per capita gun ownership. However, acquiring a gun is not an easy process -steps to gun ownership include a medical examination and a written test.
Police are unarmed, too. The only officers permitted to carry firearms are on a special force called the Viking Squad, and they are seldom called out.
In addition, there are, comparatively speaking, few hard drugs in Iceland.
According to a 2012 UNODC report, use among 15-64-year-olds in Iceland of cocaine was 0.9%, of ecstasy 0.5%, and of amphetamines 0.7%.
There is also a tradition in Iceland of pre-empting crime issues before they arise, or stopping issues at the nascent stages before they can get worse.
Right now, police are cracking down on organised crime while members of the Icelandic parliament, Althingi, are considering laws that will aid in dismantling these networks.
When drugs seemed to be a burgeoning issue in the country, the parliament established a separate drug police and drug court. That was in 1973.
Many people from Iceland, such as these marksmen, use firearms – yet gun crime is rare
In the first 10 years of the court, roughly 90% of all cases were settled with a fine.(BBC Magazine)
According to reports in Iceland Review, international crime has started coming to Iceland. Not only are criminals being sent to Iceland in order to break the law, but large scale organisations are setting up branches in the Nordic nation.
Sigridur Bjork Gudjonsdottir, assistant national commissioner of the Icelandic police told Icelandic newspaper Frettabladid that international crime has become a reality in Iceland. “Reports from the investigative department of the Icelandic police confirm that organised crime has taken root in Iceland,” she said.
Reports indicate that criminals are being sent from organisations in East and Central Europe in order to commit crimes in Iceland.(icenews)
They have not changed,we have rather our Perspectives.
Happiness ,Sadness do not lie in things or people.
Bhagavad Gita Quote.
They lie within us.
Though we want to change this, we can not.
Why?
It is because these thoughts are a part us that we can not get rid of.
Yet there are certain things we are happy through out,like being Alone.
Alone means being within oneself.
Every one knows what it is.
Again there are certain things that give us pleasure at all times, like watching Ocean,Sky,Infants, Seeing a smile on others,or helping some one who is in dire need and seeing his tears of gratitude.
And of course the instinctive feeling we are more than this flesh and bones.
Why?
Patanjali explains.
The Modifications of Chiththa are the cause.
They are of Two kinds,
Klishta,that which make us delve deep into them and be lost in them, like the objects of the senses.
Aklishta, that those which help us retrieve ourselves from them.
Desire to enjoy is like poring Ghee to Fire, the more one enjoys , more he needs them, there is no end.
But to come out of them there are two practices, as Lord Krishna explains to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.
They are Abhyaasa,Practice and Vairaagya, clear deter determination.
Once we develop these two we can be rid of these tendencies to be happy or Unhappy.
I will deal with them when we discuss them later at a more appropriate place.
I would say ‘Happy,Family oriented,Has values,Informed and reasonably responsible for their age”
How about my readers view?
In general,I have seen parents judging their children harshly forgetting what or how they were of their children’s age!
Parents’ View of Children
If you ask American moms, we are raising a nation of baby Einsteins. Here’s what one parent had to say about the intelligence of her 3-year-old, which was apparent to her from the very first moments of her life:
“I have this vivid memory when she was born of them taking her to clean her off … And she was looking all around … She was alert from the very first second … I took her out when she was six weeks old to a shopping mall to have her picture taken — people would stop me and say, “What an alert baby.” One guy stopped me and said, “Lady, you have an intelligent baby there.” … And it was just something about her. She was very engaging and very with the program, very observant. She’s still fabulously observant.”
The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children’s intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as “happy” or “easy” children to parent.
“The U.S.’s almost obsession with cognitive development in the early years overlooks so much else,” Harkness told Slate.
For part of their research, the authors focused just on parents in the United States and the Netherlands. The differences are stark: American parents emphasized setting aside “special time” with each of their children, while Dutch parents spent a few hours each day together with their kids as an entire family.
American parents said they struggled to manage the sleep schedules of their babies and young children, explaining that they try to entertain or distract them when they wake up in the middle of the night. As one American dad says:
“We both have different strategies. She’ll put him in the walker down here and I generally put him in the playpen and try to keep him somewhat entertained, either by the TV or he loves the stereo.”
Compare this to Dutch parents, who emphasized plenty of rest and regular schedules for their kids (and, by extension, themselves), and somehow end up inducing their offspring to sleep more:
“Many parents stressed the importance of a regular schedule, including a set time for both meals and bed. As one mother of an 18-month-old explained: ‘To bed on time, because they really need rest to grow, and regularity is very important when they are so little. If she gets too little rest, she is very fussy.’ A mother of a 6-month-old commented, ‘We are very strict about going to bed – at 6:30, upstairs.’”
Apparently, it works. The authors noted that the children of Dutch parents were consistently more calm, existing more frequently in a state of “quiet alert,” while American babies were more often “actively alert.”
“The higher state of arousal of the American babies corresponded to differences in their mothers’ behavior: the American mothers touched and talked to their babies more than the Dutch mothers did,” the authors note.
But beyond sleep schedules, Americans also seem preoccupied with their children’s smarts from an extremely young age.
The researchers compiled a list of the attributes that 60 families in six different countries used to describe their children, which you can see at the top of the page.
American parents were the only ones to consistently mention their children’s advanced intellect, while other countries focused on qualities like “happiness,” being “easy” to manage, or the even more zen-like “well-balanced,” in Italy. (Italians also used the word simpatico, a group of characteristics suggesting social and emotional competence).
True, those who climb mountains climb despite hazards and payments start all over again for the sheer pleasure of it.
Edmund Hillary put it better, when he asked why he kept on climbing Mountains,
‘Because it is there”
Appears to be true.
But they too need Money to climb mountains and they go in for some other jobs or for sponsors for expenses.
So Money is needed.
The point is we do get pleasure in doing what we want to and we perform better,yet if the basic needs are not met you can not do do or work what gives you pleasure.
The crux is the result of the Work.
If the work is appreciated by others and if the work is creative and not destroyed we work better.
So work or performance Pleasure and efficiency is determined by the results it produces.
Yet the results of work is not determined by our efforts or work alone.
It has other factors to influence the results, like the other factors , environment and people.
Even a simple task like brushing one’s teeth assumes and needs other factors like Gravity,paste being available at a given time and most imp importantly one should be alive.
These factors, agents are not in one’s control and as such the outcome of any work depends heavily on these external factors.
The best one can do is to efficiently manage the one factor in one’s control, that is Himself.
If one were to worry about the other factors like others’ opinion and other factors,the very thought will impair on’e efficiency, thus lowering the chances of the work being completed successfully and as a result the pleasure one can derive.
Therefore to improve efficiency and derive pleasure out of work is to change the mind-set into one of detached attachment.
An action that is performed is non action when there is no involvement or motivation.
An action that is performed with the results in mind are Actions, which may cause disappointments when one is not appreciated or the work is destroyed.
Non action is an action is one where one performs an action or work because it has to be done without bothering about the consequences .
Here there is action and yet there is no anticipation of results and consequently no disappointment; if it is appreciated or remains for some time you are Happy, it is a Bonus.
This is the way one has to approach to work to be Happy and be more efficient.
One should be careful in understanding this thought as this does not mean non involvement or irresponsibility.
When we think about how people work,the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give people money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty to walk and difficulty of breathing — cold, challenging circumstances.And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.” (Laughter) “Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier. And he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank. This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed.Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor.And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said,”Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one. And when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycleof them building and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happenedwas that people built many more Bionicles — they built 11 versus seven — in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
Any activity performed or any Stimuli received is reflected in the Brain.
Be it feelings or thoughts.
Love , we know, has a soothing effect and one who is brought up in an Environment of Love,Care and protection grows into a Normal adult, there are exceptions though.
A recent study revealed that the left part of the Brain of the child ,which has been exposed and brought up in an environment of Love and affection grows larger than the one which is deprived of Love.
Age old wisdom never fails.
According to neurologists the sizeable difference between these two brains has one primary cause – the way were treated by their mothers These images are brain scans of a two three-year-old children Brain on the left is considerably larger, has fewer spots and less dark areas, compared to the one on the right
Scroll down for video.
Story:
The chilling images reveal that the left brain, which belongs to a normal 3-year-old, is significantly larger and contains fewer spots and dark “fuzzy” areas than the right brain, which belongs to that of a 3-year-old who has suffered extreme neglect.
Neurologists say that the latest images provide more evidence that the way children are treated in their early years is important not only for the child’s emotional development, but also in determining the size of their brains.
Experts say that the sizeable difference in the two brains is primarily caused by the difference in the way each child was treated by their mothers.
While at first glance, the images might indicate that the child with the right brain might have suffered a serious accident or illness, neurologists said that the truth is that the child with the shrunken brain was neglected and abused by its mother, and the child with the larger and more fully developed brain was raised in a loving, supportive home and was looked after by its mother, according to The Sunday Telegraph.
Researchers told the UK newspaper that the image of the brain scan on the right shows that the child lacks some of the most fundamental areas that are present in the image of the brain scan on the left.
They say that the child on the left with the larger brain will be more intelligent and will be more likely to develop the social ability to empathize with others compared to the child on the right.
Two brain scans: the left one of a normal child, the right one of a neglected child of the same age. The speaker is Dick Swaab, professor of neurobiology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA)
(Broadcast in 2009 on Dutch television)
Babies are sometimes left unattended in Iceland
Many people from Iceland, such as these marksmen, use firearms – yet gun crime is rare
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