Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools

Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools: "Here are my recommendations for cool tools. I include books, gadgets, software, videos, maps, hardware, materials, websites or gear that are extraordinary, little-known, or reliably handy for an individual or small group. I depend on friends and readers to suggest things they actually use. Particularly welcomed are old items that you still dote on after years of use. "

Chatwin's Notebooks - Net obscuria

Moleskine notebooks - The History: "Moleskine is the legendary notebook that the European artists and intellectuals who made twentieth-century culture used: from Henri Matisse to the turn-of-the-century Parisian avant-garde, from Louis Férdinand Céline to Ernest Hemingway. Writer-traveler Bruce Chatwin picked up this tradition and made it famous."

3 Critical Competencies

E-Buzz 11/23-03 — In the Classroom: "When pressed to come up with a handful of competencies that might be important across industries and positions, McGrath cites three competencies in particular that she sees as frequent needs: managing paradox, building broad influence, and building perspective."

Clinton on Winning the Next US Election

TAP: Vol 14, Iss. 10. The Clinton Formula. Michael Tomasky.: "So that means that we're in every race. You start with 45 percent, you're in a race. I don't care what anybody says. So sometime between 1992 and 2000, for the first time -- probably in the last four years, for the first time since 1964 -- we were no longer at a cultural disadvantage in our base. So both parties go into this next election with a natural base of about 45 percent. So in 2004, this race will be about -- it goes back to your question about the Democrats' dilemma and our division. We have to improve our turnout to their level, as we did in '98 and 2000 but not in 2002. And then we have to win the votes among the other 10 percent. That's eminently doable.
But we've got to fight. And we gotta look like we're havin' a good time doing it. "

ICT, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction

ICT, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction: "Can ICTs fuel economic growth? Can ICTs help directly and significantly reduce poverty? Is there a conclusive evidence? Which specific projects or studies can provide a definitive answer? There are different opinions on this issue. "

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi - The origin of 6 degrees

"Frigyes Karinthy, the Hungarian writer, who in a 1929 short story conjectured that any two people on Earth could be connected by five handshakes.

(Albert-Laszlo Barabasi is in turn referencing a link here)

Needs of Core Foremost?

Art Kleiner's blog

Kleiner has just published Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success

Excerpt from The Electronic Recruiting News - Daily News For Recruiting Professionals
"You've probably encountered Art Kleiner's work and just didn't know it. Often billed as the world's greatest living Ghost Writer, Art had a deep hand in Peter Senge's The Fifth
Discipline, Peter Schwartz's The Art of The Long View and a large number of others. He co-authored The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change and Schools That Learn with Senge. Kleiner's own The Age of Heretics is a comprehensive view of the role of the counterculture in corporate history.

"These days, Art is making waves with a new organizational theory that is bound to be a conference room topic next year. The Core Group posits the intelligent argument that there is a simpler reason for the existence of organizations. They don't exist for profit or productivity, they exist to satisfy the needs of the ruling Core Group. Period. Either you're in, and being served or you're out and you're serving. Either you want to be or you don't."

Studying Networks

Wired Excerpt: Part chaos theory, part biology, part connect-the-dots, the science of emerging networks seems to account for almost everything from why flies swarm to how yoga got so trendy. The world’s inchoate phenomena, the theory goes, can be explained by finding underlying patterns. In recent months, the idea has jelled into a network all its own — finding its way into a pack of new books that uncover complex patterns lurking everywhere.

Interesting Ideas: The Great Library of Amazonia

"We have the tools to make all books available to everybody"

Insights: Use of Computer/Social Networking

Social networking systems promise ease and deliver irritability, by Jerry Michalski

From Ryze and LinkedIn to Tribe.net and Friendster, social-networking Web sites are all the rage. I count at least 18 active social-networking services today, plus several that have vanished or morphed (SixDegrees, for example, one of the earliest such services, is now being relaunched as an upscale-dating site.) They are sprouting so quickly they practically constitute a new Internet boomlet of non-revenue-generating startups.
To these offers you might add similar relationship-building and -mining software, such as dating services (Match.com, SocialNet); webs of trust (Advogato); reputation systems (Slashdot Karma, eBay Ratings); nifty experiments (Friend of a Friend project); and ways to mine all the above through analytic social-network, or 'X ray,' technology (Valdis Krebs's Inflow). "

Biomimicry

Biomimicry
A new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems.

Kitchen wisdom

"Kitchen Confidential" Chef's Taste for Chaos
"A restaurant kitchen usually operates in crisis mode, says chef Anthony Bourdain, author of a top-selling tell-all, Kitchen Confidential. In this interview from Harvard Business Review, Bourdain explains why—and what managers can take away from the kitchen."

Overview of Knowledge: Metadata

"In the pages that follow, I'll be giving you a bird’s eye view of a few independent technologies, each aspiring to get useful metadata back into the Web. ..

We'll start with an explanation of that metadata word (so we can finally quit italicizing it).

Next comes a tour of the platitudes and latitudes of GeoURL, a fun, on-your-site-in-just-ten-minutes META tag that pinpoints your webpage’s real-world location with GPS-style accuracy.

Then we'll check out SMBmeta, a newly launched metadata framework designed to give small businesses their fair share of the Web limelight.

We'll finish up with a macro look at some of the 'Semantic Web' standards favored by the W3C: Dublin Core and RDF — and we’ll show them off a bit with FOAF (Friend of a Friend), an application which leverages both those high-minded efforts. "

Nikon Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review: Smooth Skin Technique

If you use Photoshop this is what you would do...

Open the image and after you've done what corrections you think necessary

1-duplicate the layer
2-apply guassian blur to that top layer, oh... around 4 should do.
3-click on the 'create a layer mask' icon (bottom of layers palette)
4- hit d on your keyboard to set colors on the toolbar to black and white.
5- choose the fill tool (bucket) and make sure black is your foreground color and click in the image. Note the layer mask changed to black.
6-make sure your foreground color is white, pick a soft paintbrush and set it's opacity low, maybe around 15 to 20.
7-paint over skin, staying away from the eyes and teeth , hair, eyebrows etc. With the brush set at a low opacity the effect builds up slowly just as it should, so enlarge the image and keep brushing.
8-if you go to far, simply make black your foreground color and go back over the area to correct
9-if when your done you think it's a little too much, reduce the opacity of the blurred layer on the layers palette to your liking."

WINMAIL.DAT attachment to messages

I forwarded a message from outlook to a mac user; they got an error message.

winmail.dat attachment to messages: "Issue: Messages come in with an attached file 'WINMAIL.DAT' or 'AT00001.DAT' and neither Eudora nor any other program can open it."

This leads to (from Microsoft's Knowledge Base) ... Outlook and the Microsoft Exchange Client sometimes use a special method to package information for sending messages across the Internet. This method is technically referred to as Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF).

Net net? Use plain text formating!

Dooney's Cafe

Dooney's Cafe - An alternate news service is a state of mind rooted in several things: a community centred around a café on Toronto’s Bloor Street, a dissatisfaction with conventional news gathering, analysis and dissemination.

Great Artcile: The Illusory Diffusion of Innovation

The Illusory Diffusion of Innovation: An Examination of Assimilation Gaps
"The question of why some innovations might be widely acquired but sparsely deployed is in need of theoretical attention."

Wild and Perhaps Errant Ideas: Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink
"It is my personal commitment to combine cyber pragmatism and media activism with pleasurable forms of European nihilism. Not the apocalyptic, conservative culture of complaint which post modernism has left behind, but short heroic epics on the everyday life of the media, reporting from within the belly of the Beast, fully aware of its own futile existence, compared to the millennial powers to be."

Wild and Perhaps Errant Ideas: through blind cyborg eyes i will speak deafly by zina kaye

through blind cyborg eyes i will speak deafly by zina kaye november 1995
"It was a Thursday. I went to bed thinking I want to make clear this mess, to understand all these spaces, these images, these texts: not their content but where they fit. What I have been missing this past six months is, in psychoanalytic terms, my biggest blind spot, that which I most care about."

Elf's Sony SJ33 Clié Journal

"This page is a journal of my experiences using the Sony SJ33 Clié beginning with the day I purchased it."

Matrix Quotes

Agent Smith: "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not.

You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure."

Morpheus: "What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your
entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know
what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."

Morpheus: I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the
door. You're the one that has to walk through it.

Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before.

Morpheus: There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the
path.

Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?
What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the
difference between the dream world and the real world?

Morpheus: The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to
blind you from the truth.

Tank: So what do you need? Besides a miracle.
Neo: Guns. Lots of guns.

Trinity: Neo... nobody has ever done this before.
Neo: I know. That's why it's going to work.

Digital Photography Article

Digital Photography for the Web
by Michael Calore, WebMonkey, 23 Apr 2003