November isn’t the only time when people come together to raise money for good causes. Here are three other major charity events from around the world.

What started off as a race of 680 women in a London park in 1994 to raise money for a cancer charity has now turned into a massive nationwide event, with thousands of women up and down the UK taking part every year.

Known for dressing head to toe in pink, participants raise money for breast cancer research by being sponsored to take part in marathons, which are organized all year round. Since it began, more than 8 million women have taken part, raising over ￡547 million for Cancer Research UK.

Normally taking place in mid-August, this program encourages young Australians to give something up for 40 hours in order to raise awareness of less fortunate youths around the world.

Participants raise money which is donated to good causes worldwide, by giving something up for the weekend, including the use of technology(TVs, computers, smartphones and so on), or even food. Since it began in 1975, World Vision Australia, the event’s organizer, has raised over ＄200 million.

Each year, thousands of people ride the 545-mile route from San Francisco to Los Angeles in order to raise money and awareness for HIV (AIDS-related causes). Cyclists make the trip over seven days, stopping each night at designated camps to shower, eat and relax. The mainly male riders are known for their colorful riding sportswear, with some dressing as nuns(修女), cowboys or even in bikinis. The event has raised around ＄100 million since it began in 2001.

83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the trend. As Brazilian landowners cut down rain forests to make room for profitable plantations(种植园) and cattle grounds , he struggled to bring the jungles of his childhood back to life.

“When I was a child, the peasants cut down the trees to make grasslands and charcoal, and the water dried up and did not come back,” he told the reporters. “I thought:‘Water is valuable, no one makes water and the population will not stop growing. What is going to happen? We are going to run out of water.’”

With only some donkeys and a small team of hired workers, Antonio Vicente set about bringing back the forest to his land. What started out as a weekend hobby soon became a permanent way of life , and Antonio recalls often spending whole days and nights in his young jungle, surrounded by rats and foxes, and eating banana sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Over the last 40 years, he has planted an estimated 50,000 trees on his 31-hectare land, which now make up a small but unique area of rain forest, and a haven for wildlife.

As the forest grew, the water returned, and Antonio says that there are now over 20 water sources on his land that were no longer there when he bought it. Then the animals started making a home there. Today, the forest is alive with the sounds of birds and insects living there, and more species are settling in every year.

“There are toucans(巨嘴鸟)，all kinds of birds, squirrels, lizards, and even the boars are returning,” 83-year-old Vicente says. “If you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed.”

It’s surprising how much simple movement of the body can affect the way we think. Using expansive gestures with open arms makes us feel more powerful, crossing your arms makes you more determined and lying down can bring more insights.

So if moving the body can have these effects, what about the clothes we wear? We’re all well aware of how dressing up in different ways can make us feel more attractive, sporty or professional, depending on the clothes we wear, but can the clothes actually change cognitive(认知的) performance or is it just a feeling?

Adam and Galinsky tested the effect of simply wearing a white lab coat on people’s powers of attention. The idea is that white coats are associated with scientists, who are in turn thought to have close attention to detail.

What they found was that people wearing white coats performed better than those who weren’t. Indeed, they made only half as many errors as those wearing their own clothes on the Stroop Test (one way of measuring attention). The researchers call the effect “enclothed cognition,” suggesting that all manner of different clothes probably affect our cognition in many different ways.

This opens the way for all sorts of clothes-based experiments. Is the writer who wears a fedora more creative? Is the psychologist wearing little round glasses and smoking a cigar more insightful? Does a chef’s hat make the restaurant food taste better?

From now on I will only be editing articles for PsyBlog while wearing a white coat to help keep the typing error count low. Hopefully you will be doing your part by reading PsyBlog in a cap and gown(学位服).

When you install an app on your smartphone, you’re often asked whether you’d like to share your list of contacts with that app. That might be a convenient way to connect with friends and family, but it also means you’re giving away their personal information to the app developers.

And that personal information could end up being used to create so-called “shadow profiles” of your contacts —even if they don’t use that app or social media service.

Shadow profiles appeared as a potential problem in 2011 when an Ireland-based advocacy (辩护) group accused Facebook of gathering information on non-users, including names, email addresses and phone numbers.

The following year researchers showed that social network companies such as Facebook could use machine learning to pretty accurately predict whether two non-members known by the same member also know one another. And a recent study in the journal Science Advances raises the stakes.

In that work, David Garcia, chairman of systems design at the sci-tech university ETH , used a social network member’s personal information to infer relationship status and sexual orientation (倾向) of the members’ contacts who did not have their own user accounts on that social networking site.

He was able to do that using data from the Friendster social networking site. He says he chose those two attributes—relationship status and sexual orientation—because they can carry important privacy consequences and were both available in the Friendster data set.

Garcia is careful to point out that he didn’t prove that shadow profiles exist, just that they can be created. His work also reminds us how much we wind up giving away online-- about ourselves and about the people in our lives.