Ideas, Books, Anthropology: Jared Diamond - Collapse

"In Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves."

Source: The New Yorker

(Since first posted the review has been moved by the New Yorker. One can now purchase everything written in the New Yorker before 2005 on cd. The New Yorker overcame copyright concerns by scanning the pages so they can't be searched.)

Ideas: Power and Population in Asia

"Few would contest the general proposition that the population factor bears directly on the course of the friendly — and sometimes unfriendly — competition between states in the world arena today. Problems arise, however, when we try to move from the general to the specific. How, exactly, do human numbers (population size, composition, and trends of change) affect the ability of governments to influence events beyond their borders — or affect the disposition of a country’s interactions with outside actors? And this is no less important for the would-be strategist: How can we use population indicators to anticipate, with some reasonable hope of accuracy, the impact of yet-unfolding demographic forces on the balance of international power? This essay explores these questions for the world’s largest strategic arena: the great Asian/Eurasian expanse."

Source: Power and Population in Asia by Nicholas Eberstadt - Policy Review, No. 123

Ideas: Lakoff

A critical concept:

'Frames', according to Lakoff, are the key to understanding how political ideas are received. Human beings don't absorb information as raw material; we sift input through frames of meaning carried in the language we use.

Ideas: aperspective space

Without or not yet having developed a perspective ... a useful state, me thinks.

"Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Jean Gebser tried in his texts about the development of the history of perspective, which he conceived in 1932 and wrote in the 1940's, to work towards an aperspective perception of space which succeeds the unperspective and perspective world. He was not yet able to realize the connection between this development and the speed of media and the resulting tyranny of real time, but already he predicted a new age of perspective."

Source: Jean Gebser

Management: Corporate Consulting Types - Possibly Relevent Article for your Practises

"The demise of the corporate pecking order is a myth, says Stanford professor Harold J. Leavitt. Middle managers are the ones who bear the brunt when an organization pretends that everyone is equal." Source: HBS Working Knowledge: Leadership: The Plight of Middle Managers

A related thesis was really well presented in Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success by Art Kleiner.

Movies: Kubrick on the power of film

"The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle."

Source: Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide

Management: 3M Meeting Network

"Dozens of articles & tips on how to run effective meetings"

Site: 3M Meeting Network

Technology, Design: XPLANE | The visual thinking company

Design, Art: Milton Glaser Posters

Poetry, Travel: Sacred Poetry

"A chaikhana is a teahouse along the legendary Silk Road pilgrimage and trading route linking China to the Middle East and Europe. It is a place of rest along the journey, a place to shake off the dust of the road, to sip tea, and to gather together to sing songs of the Divine..."

Source: Poetry Chaikhana - Sacred Poetry from Around the World: Sufi, Zen, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, amd Yoga Poetry

Technology, Anthropology: Clay Shirky on the Design of Social Software

"Rating, karma, meta-moderation -- each of these systems is relatively simple in technological terms. The effect of the whole, though, has been to allow Slashdot to support an enormous user base, while rewarding posters who produce broadly valuable material and quarantining offensive or off-topic posts."

Source: Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works

"Nature transformed through industry is a predominate theme in my work."

Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works

Frans Lanting Photography

"A collection of images that highlight the precious web of life that the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet campaign seeks to help save."

Frans Lanting Photography :: Portfolios

Buddhist Pictures

"These exercises and assignments formed the basis for this contemplative approach, which shows us how to synchronize our eye and mind, so that perception is free from pre-conceived ideas, therefore direct and unfabricated."

"Since the beginning of this journey of looking and seeing, there has been a quote by Chogyam Trungpa, the meditation master, scholar and artist that has guided me:

"There is such a thing
as unconditional expression
that does not come from self or other.

It manifests out of nowhere
like mushrooms in a meadow,
like hailstones, like thundershowers"

Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
The Art of Calligraphy

~Source: Miksang.net: About Michael Wood:

Beijing Subway

"Subway construction started in China's capital in 1965."

BEIJING (Peking) Subway

Blog Comments and Moderation

[This whole post may not transcend the I-thought-it-was-funny-at-the-time standard]

This academic guy, Philip Greensan, created a massive photo site called photo.net (it’s a good site) and became rich and now an affiliation with Harvard. He maintains a blog which attracts a collection of comments like:

"P.S. Your blog's comments section continues to amaze. It's like some kind of zoo, but with idiots instead of exotic animals." http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2004/08/27#a5783

This reminds me of the quote "The problem with the global village is the global village idiots."

In one comment, the author of Envisaging Information and some other great books about visual design chimed in: "'My first experience with forum moderation and, indeed, my first contact with Philip, took place when he deleted a contribution of my at his photo.net!' EdwardTufte • 8/29/04; 6:09:40 PM #"

And then there is this stream, where Phil tries to sell a TV on ebay, and plug his cousin's new movie.

"Sounds like your cousins interpersonal skills are as refined as his movie productions. Seena Hyena • 9/3/04; 9:53:52 AM #"

"Seena: My cousin made more than $100 million with his last movie, About Schmidt, which was nominated for at least two Academy Awards. If he had better interpersonal skills maybe he could be a Java programmer sitting in a cubicle quietly taking orders from a University of Massachusetts MBA. Maybe instead of going to Knicks games with Jack Nicholson he should be seeing a therapist to become a kinder, gentler, more caring human being. Philip Greenspun • 9/3/04; 12:00:47 PM #"

But there is more!

Philip's eclectic writings include materialism, about which he says: "Not being a materialist in the U.S. is kind of like not appreciating opera if you live in Milan or art if you live in Paris. We support materialism better than any other culture. Because retailing and distribution are so efficient here, stuff is cheaper than anywhere else in the world. And then we have huge houses in which to archive our stuff."

And ...

"So lemme get this straight. The creator of photo.net doesn't have any photos on his e-bay auctions. Ahh, savor the irony. Wayne Menzie • 9/2/04; 2:29:26 PM"

"Photo nerds: You guys sure were right about eBay. I've gotten a whole bunch of questions from people wanting to see photos of the TV. They aren't satisfied with the "check the Sony Web site" or "it is big and grey" answer. They believe that a photo will enable them to evaluate its "condition" (maybe there are a bunch of folks who let their dogs walk all over their TV, thus marring the grey finish)."

Linguistics Prof. George Lakoff - Part I

"You've said that progressives should never use the phrase 'war on terror'. Why?

There are two reasons for that. Let's start with 'terror.' Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the 'terrorist.' The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The 'war on terror' is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.

Next, 'war.' How many terrorists are there hundreds? Sure. Thousands? Maybe. Tens of thousands? Probably not. The point is, terrorists are actual people, and relatively small numbers of individuals, considering the size of our country and other countries. It's not a nation-state problem. War is a nation-state problem."

Enlivening Presentations ...

Question: Any hints on an application like powerpoint, but that lets you interact more during the presentation, e.g., typing in notes on the screen? Am looking for something for presentations in class, where ppt makes for nice image presentation but sucks all interaction and spontenaiety from class...

The quick answer is to turn off the powerpoint periodically - ie it guides to a certain point and then, pause (or block the projection).

Edward Tufte makes the same point, perhaps with more diatribe and authority than I might. What he is saying is 'form follows function' and we often use powerpoint when we really want to present a detailed argument better served by text ... I'd figure out what I was trying to do - show images, present an outline, make a coherent argument etc

So ... Not sure what you want to do ... Presumably brainstorm ideas with students about a particular point ...

Writing down the points, using the students own words on a flipchart, is very good (much better than just letting them hang in the air) - you could do this in ppt or another application, assuming you can type fast enough. (I find different parts of the brain are involved and so its hard to reflectively question the students and quickly write down their ideas.)

But maybe you have something else in mind for them? I keep in mind the adult learning cycle - experience (which could, at least some of the time, be a lecture), reflect (thinking about, ideally in conjunction with others - aka the small group discussion), generalization (connection to previous work, life experiences, etc.), application (opportunity to use - a formula in math class applied to a problem) - application to other, new situations which now fit the expanded or moulded paradigm. Etc. Ideally this cycle is created for each learning point.

You could browse both Course 1 and 2 at SCI Training quite a bit of material available therein.

Science experiments ...

Wedding day ...

Links ...

Camille Paglia: http://www.desires.com/1.2/sex/docs/paglia2.html

Steven King on Writing: http://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/King_Everything.html

Social Bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/

The number of Americans living in poverty rose by 1.3 million last year, to 35.9 million, while those without health insurance climbed by 1.4 million, to 45 million, the Census Bureau reported today. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/national/26cnd-cens.html?hp

Charles Bukowski on writing poetry:

CB: I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies. I revise but not much. The next day I retype the poem and automatically make a change or two, drop out a line, or make two lines into one or one line into two, that sort of thing—to make the poem have more balls, more balance. Yes, the poems come "off the top of my head," I seldom know what I’m going to write when I sit down. There isn’t much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.

CB: There’s too much bad poetry being written today. People just don’t know how to write down a simple easy line. It’s difficult for them; it’s like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning—not many can do it. Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem. And it comes out the way they think a poem should be. Take a cat. He doesn’t think, well, now I’m cat and I’m going to kill this bird. He just does it.

I have written with children running about the room having at me with squirt guns. That often helps rather than hinders the writing: some of the laughter enters.

CB: A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I’m not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn’t much good. But sometimes I do get aware that it isn’t going too well. Then I go to the racetrack and bet more money than usual and scream at and abuse my woman. And it’s best that I lose at the track without trying to. I can almost always write a damn near immortal poem if I have lost somewhere between 150 and 200 dollars.

~From: artdamage

deSoto, Titling, WorldBank policy ...

id21: "Land titles have been promoted by liberal economists such as Hernando de Soto on the assumption that they account for the affluence of the West and that if the poor had clear titles and rights enforceable in law over the land and property they live in they would be able to obtain credit and lever themselves out of poverty and into capitalist affluence. The evidence, even in Peru where de Soto's ideas have been most widely applied through government led titling programmes, is that increased access to credit for those granted titles is minimal. To date, the link between the provision of titles and poverty reduction remains unproven. "

Steven King: Everything You Need to Know....

Primer on Public Key Encryption

"The article below is an outline of the principles of the most common variant of public-key cryptography, which is known as RSA, after the initials of its three inventors - a mathematically detailed explanation of RSA by the programmer Brian Raiter, understandable to anyone willing to spend a little time with paper and pencil. Primer on Public Key Encryption

Adventures in Poetry

"Then came a time when I started to think about quality, and about what makes good things good. It would lengthen this essay too much to cover those ideas here. The basic summation is that something is good if you find it to be good. That is, does it please you?

"This turned out to be revolutionary in terms of my writing, because it undoes the need for a standard entirely. Instead of writing verses that longed for something outside myself, I begin to pen whatever it made me happy to write. This in turn made the experience of writing enjoyable, and I learned my first genuine lesson about poetry, that it satisfies the soul in its own way.

"Here is the first poem I ever wrote ... Adventures in Poetry" (via Martin)

Queen Charlottes

Good Work

"It is of course not possible to summarize the results from so wide ranging a study and one, moreover, that is still very much in progress. We can say that professionals in most domains do have a clear vision of what constitutes good work and how it might be achieved, even as they recognize the challenges to carrying out such good work in the current milieu. Good Work is most readily carried out when the various interest groups are well-aligned - that is, when the long term professional mission, the individual practitioner, the current institutions and gatekeepers, the shareholders - in the case of for-profit enterprises- and the society's stakeholders all want the same thing from current work.

"In contrast, when there are wide disparities within and across these interest groups, good work is elusive. Nonetheless, even under less favorable conditions, some individuals and institutions succeed in carrying out good work and these exemplars serve to inspire others. Moreover, some individuals are actually stimulated by misalignment and proceed to 'right' the institutions in which they work or to devise new ones that realize their ideals.

"On a less positive note, many young workers feel that they cannot afford at present to be ethical as well as excellent. They believe that others around them are cutting corners all the time, and if they are to be successful, they must also sacrifice the means to achieve the desired ends. One day, they are confident, when they are in a position of power, they will be able to achieve and exemplify good work. This discouraging finding underscores the need for educational experiences that foreground goodwork as well as for periodic booster shots, should the image of good work become blurred. "

~From: About the GoodWork Project

David Allen - the Blog

iPlan - Community engagement techniques and tools

"... clusters of techniques that best suit each phase of plan making and development assessment processes."

iPlan - Community engagement techniques and tools

Collaboration Tiers

Many-to-Many: Collaboration Cases and Spaces
"The broadest tier is a guest space, available to all.
The second tier is a knowledgebase, accessible to all employees and contractors.
The third tier is product development, for employees and contractors bound by a confidentiality agreement.
The fourth tier is for the core management team to share confidential financial and HR information."

Happiness in Everyday Life

Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling
"The strongest predictor of trait happiness was how Excited (vs. Bored) a person felt, followed by the variables Feeling Good about Self, Proud (vs. Ashamed), Sociable (vs. Lonely), feeling Active and Strong (vs. Weak). The correlation coefficients of these variables with Happiness (and controlling for age), were .58, .59, .47, and .53, respectively (with N= 799, all p?s<.0001)."

More Flow ...

Eudaomonia, The Good Life
"Central to Seligman's positive psychology is 'eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.'
'The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more - recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.'"

Thinking about Africa

Virtual Communities: Africa Rising
"About a decade ago, I migrated directly from a frontier Wyoming cattle ranch to the frontier of cyberspace. I began to focus on concepts rather than cows. It was a surprisingly easy transformation.

But there is a surface tension on this new world that some folks find difficult to penetrate. It appears to me that common perceptions of the potential of virtual commerce, digital society, and intangible work are limited by the habits of mind one develops in an industrial society.
I believe that my background of working in agriculture, avoiding television, and living in a small town rather than a 'burb spared me some crippling assumptions about this emerging world. And it therefore seemed likely that others in the so-called developing world - Africans, for instance - might have been spared these illusions as well. "

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Biography

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Biography: "KEITH HART is an anthropologist who lives in Paris and commutes to London, where he teaches part-time at Goldsmith?s College. He started out studying classical languages and literature and went on to explore Atlantic society from the point of view of Africans in North America, West Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, France and South Africa. He has taught in ten universities on both sides of the Atlantic, for the longest time in Cambridge, where he was Director of the African Studies Centre. He has worked as a consultant, journalist, publisher and gambler. He contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies, and has published widely on economic anthropology, especially about money. The abiding theme of his work is the relationship between movement and identity in the transition from national to world society. His life is now defined by the poles of solitary writing and world travel. He is sustained by his family and the virtual intellectual network in his laptop. He is currently writing a novel and several other works of non-fiction. His greatest ambition is to be a movie critic. "

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Welcome!

Keith Hart?s Memory Bank - Welcome!: "Money and language are the main means of communication available to us and both serve as a store of individual and collective memory. The idea of a ?Memory Bank? refers to the convergence of the two as information ? especially now that the exchange of objects through money and the exchange of meanings through language are coming together in a single network of communication, the Internet.The various sections of this portal give access to my published and unpublished work on people, machines and money? as well as to other forms of creative writing and information about me. The site grew out of the publication of my book, The Memory Bank (Profile Books, London, 2000), which was later published in the U.S.A. as Money in an Unequal World (Texere, New York, 2001). "

The New York Review of Books: Twilight at Easter

The New York Review of Books: Twilight at Easter: "Why were Easter Islanders so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them? This is a key question that nags everyone who wonders about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, 'What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?' Like modern loggers, did he shout 'Jobs, not trees!'? Or: 'Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood'? Or: 'We need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature'?
Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment, including ours today. It turns out that there is a series of reasons why people in any society? whether Easter Islanders, Maya, or ourselves?may make fatal mistakes that will look foolish to their successors. They may not anticipate a problem, because of the problem being unprecedented in their experience: e.g., today's overharvesting of the ocean's seemingly inexhaustible fisheries, for the first time in human history. They may fail to perceive the problem when it does arrive: e.g., global warming today, initially difficult to distinguish from just the usual year-to-year fluctuations in temperature. Conflicts of interest may prevent them from addressing a perceived problem: e.g., dumping toxic wastes into rivers is bad for people living downstream but saves money for the company doing the dumping. Some problems just prove too difficult to solve with current abilities: e.g., no one has figured out how to eliminate the Dutch elm disease that reached North America. Probably all of those kinds of explanations apply to deforestation on Easter Island, but the most important reason there may be conflicts of interest. A chief's status depended on his ststatus depended on his statues: any chief who failed to cut trees to transport and erect statues would have found himself out of a job.

The Easter Islanders' isolation probably also explains why their collapse, more, perhaps, than the collapse of any other pre-industrial society, haunts readers and visitors today. The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter's eleven clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, or to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future."

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: "The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 10,000 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. "

Geospatial Solutions - From Parchment to Ether: Fusing Historical Maps with Web GIS

Geospatial Solutions - From Parchment to Ether: Fusing Historical Maps with Web GIS: "For the past 20 years, I have built my map collection with the help of dealers, bookstores, auction houses, and other collectors. Today, with more than 150,000 maps, the collection is recognized as one of the largest in the United States focusing on 18th and 19th century North and South American cartographic materials (see 'What's in a Collection?' sidebar). The collection also features maps covering the entire world and includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. "

Blog de Jour: Journal

Journal: "Ledger 1.7
Version 1.7 of Ledger, the command-line accounting tool, is now available and ready for download. This tool is written in C++, and depends on the GNU multi-precision library (gmp) and the Perl regular expression library (pcre).
Version 1.7 adds support for historical pricing information, making it possible to generate cost basis reports, market value reports, and net gain/loss reports. See the new section in the README, under 'Currencies and Commodities'.

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 A house divided
Why is following certain standards so hard? Why can we not 'whip ourselves into shape'? Why do some behaviors feel impossibly hard to stop, with self-deception always making think we've succeeded, only to prove later than we still fail?"

Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog

Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog: "Weblog Without Honor or Humanity
by Krzysztof Kowalczyk"

waferbaby

Not quite Everything but waferbaby is pretty interesting: "the details: originally developed in 1995 as a site for the author's shareware, waferbaby has since grown into a crazy web community, with most of the content created by the users. the name was originally intended for a comic label that has yet to see the light of day."

Software Project Management

Software Project Management: "Principles of Software Project Management (Q7503)"

tonypierce.com + busblog

tonypierce.com + busblog: "teenage fanclub is on my ipod talking about what they do when theyre fucked up.

ive got groceries in the trunk, the cubs on the telly, and a bbq at welches house that i am fixin to attend.

just after i write and tell you that this ipod deal is pretty sweet, i must admit."

Beijing Art Scene

Beijing Art Scene: "A decade ago avant-garde photographer Rong Rong lived in a ramshackle farmhouse and took odd jobs to support himself. "No one was interested in buying my work," he recalls. On the contrary: once when he was photographing performance artist Zhang Huan, who had stripped naked, covered himself with honey and then sat for an hour in a Beijing public toilet while flies landed on him, a villager stumbled upon the shoot and called the authorities."

The Shape of Your Life

The Shape of Your Life - Outside Magazine July 2002

Elsa Dorfman, Portrait Photographer

Elsa Dorfman, Portrait Photographer: "My web site is my obsession. Here is a map that Andrew Grumet and I came up with, inspired by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Browse on the different subway lines."

Before Sunrise @Everything2.com

Excerpt from the quirky, borderline encyclopedic Everything2.com: Before Sunrise @Everything2.com: "If you could take a whole bunch of questions and theories that relate to birth, life, relationships, and death and have two mutually attractive and intelligent people meet up to discuss them and maybe even fall in love at the same time, then Before Sunrise would pretty much be the result of filming them for a night.
What is interesting is the way in which the extremely sharp dialogue moves in cycles through these topics like the chronology of life itself, woven together with the dynamics of boy meets girl, of European meets American and the idea that even circumstances of complete alienation can bring about the strongest of connections. "

Xiahe Monks

Queen Charlottes

Gansu Grasslands

Edward Burtynsky: Photographic Works

Brilliant photos - Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works

"Exploring the Residual Landscape: Nature transformed through industry is a predominate theme in my work. ... These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear."

Kangding ... Children's Day Festival

Representations of Global Capital

Toether with Chomsky's blog, a radical, intelligent critique: Representations of Global Capital: "Like the other ads in this campaign, this ad is structured by using the technique of splicing together the speech of many actors conducted in many separate interviews to create the impression that they are altogether uttering a common, shared idea. "

SmartMeetingDesign - Main.WebLog

SmartMeetingDesign - Main.WebLog: "Blog
Articles "

Experimenting

Radified Guide to Ripping CD audio & MP3 encoding [EAC + LAME]

Radified Guide to Ripping CD audio & MP3 encoding [EAC + LAME]: "This guide presents what the gurus of the encoding scene consider the *best* way to rip & encode CD audio. By 'gurus' I mean the people who have taken the time to participate in blind listening tests, and compare a variety of music, encoded with a variety of encoders, at a variety of settings (also called arguments, or switches). I'm talking about people who are serious about music.

The word 'best' used here refers to audio fidelity, not ripping or encoding speed. In other words, this guide focuses on maximizing the quality of your encoded files, rather than minimizing the time it takes to produce them.

You'll be glad to know that all the requisite programs referenced here are freeware. That's because the best software in the ripping & encoding world is free. So put away your credit card and break out your CD collection.

Before we get started, you should know that this guide is available for download in a single zipped PDF file posted here (78-KB, updated 05jan2004), which allows you to store the entire guide locally, on your system, for quick & easy reference, and off-line viewing."

Camilla Paglia on declining interest in books

Camille Paglia Magic of Images: "The Magic of Images:
Word and Picture in a Media Age
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Education has failed to adjust to the massive transformation in Western culture since the rise of electronic media. "

Heraclitus [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Heraclitus [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]: "Heraclitus sees the great majority of human beings as lacking understanding"

F-Stops and Creative Focus Techniques (Free CyberCollege Interactive TV Course)

F-Stops and Focus Techniques: "F-Stops and Creative
Focus Techniques"

david a. kolb on experiential learning

david a. kolb on experiential learning: "david a. kolb on experiential learning
David A. Kolb's model of experiential learning can be found in many discussions of the theory and practice of adult education, informal education and lifelong learning. We set out the model, and examine its possibilities and problems."

chris argyris, double-loop learning and organizational learning @ the encyclopedia of informal education

chris argyris, double-loop learning and organizational learning @ the encyclopedia of informal education: "Single-loop and double-loop learning"

Rob Galbraith DPI: Sports Illustrated's digital workflow

Rob Galbraith DPI: Sports Illustrated's digital workflow: "Sports Illustrated's digital workflow
Tuesday, March 16, 2004 | by Eamon Hickey"

Canoeing in Canada

Canoeing in Canada

798 Photo Gallery

798 Photo Gallery

Educational Psychology Interactive: Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Nice Maslow Summary: Educational Psychology Interactive: Maslow's hierarchy of needs: "Abraham Maslow (1954) attempted to synthesize a large body of research related to human motivation. "

I think you spin out from this in all directions ...

How come it ain't so simple? Intricate blog ... Daring Fireball: "Eric S. Raymond — the renowned Linux/Open Source evangelist/essayist — couldn’t figure out how to connect to a shared printer. So he wrote an essay describing the problem (the UI for printer configuration on his Linux system is horrible) and proposing a solution (open source developers should do a better job with UI design). "

waferbaby: what's the best job you've ever had?

waferbaby: what's the best job you've ever had?: "james
added 25/02/04 @ 04:59:47 pm.
mine's pretty cool - i'm a freelance writer doing rpgs. of course, the thinking is greeeeat but throwing down the wordcount is a bitch. all good though."

Lawrence Lessig's Blog

Good example of posts on his blog: Lawrence Lessig: "Oh Canada
Will the sanity ever stop?"

Perhaps I'll get accused of being a libertarian?

People/Details/Time: Overview of Windows Outliners

Overview of Windows Outliners: "Overview of Windows Outlining Programs
This page documents my usage of outlining program, and a few other information-organizing program (such as free text databases, and the occasional hybrid organizer/idea-generator). "

Lost, or Just Lost in Translation?

CD Times - Soundtrack: "Sofia Coppola turned to a story of a relationship that blooms between Americans who feel lost, not only in Japan, where the film is set, but also in their own marriages. Lost In Translation, in using its soundtrack as effectively as Coppola's earlier film, mixes Japanese pop, chilly electronica, swirling eighties indie and drunken karaoke to reveal how foreign it's possible to feel when in Japan."

Effective Schools

Resource | Main Page: "This site is a knowledge base about ways of creating the conditions for effective teaching and learning in schools which has been designed to assist task managers, practitioners, program designers and decision makers in their efforts to promote the best practice in education quality improvement programs around the world."

A Unified Field Theory of Design

A Unified Field Theory of Design: "Organizing Things
The first step in transforming data into information is to explore its organization."

Frye, Northrop

Frye, Northrop: "'I am often described as someone who is now in the past and whose reputation has collapsed. But I don't think I'm any further down skid row than the deconstructionists'"

cool one of the grit over eastern china

Visible Earth - Haze over Eastern China

Northrop Frye - Culture: It is of the essence of imaginative

Northrop Frye - Culture: It is of the essence of imaginative: "Northrop Frye


Culture

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable."

enchant

enchant: "
We didn't see the seven mountains ahead of us. We didn't see how they are always ahead, always calling us, always reminding us that there are more things to be done, dreams to be realised, joys to be rediscovered, promises made before birth to be fulfilled, beauty to be incarnated, and love embodied.


'Songs of Enchantment'
by Okri


We didn't notice how they hinted that nothing is ever finished, that struggles are never truly concluded, that sometimes we have to re-dream our lives, and that life can always create new light.


This is the song of a circling spirit. This is a story for all of us who never see the seven mountains of our secret destiny, who never see that beyond the chaos there can always be a new sunlight. "

Anti Patterns

Anti Patterns: "An AntiPattern is a pattern that tells how to go from a problem to a bad solution. A good AntiPattern also tells you why the bad solution looks attractive (e.g. it actually works in some narrow context), why it turns out to be bad, and what positive patterns are applicable in its stead. "

Reviewing Satre in The Nation

Accidental Friends: "Aronson is surely right to remind us that both Sartre and Camus fastened on part of the truth--the need, on the one hand, for real, if unpretty choices and, on the other, for moral verities. "

Noam starts Blogging

Turning the Tide: "Welcome to Turning The Tide
This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet Sustainer Forum System where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets -- always from Noam Chomsky."

The Brain?

The Brain? It’s a Jungle in There: "These theories are part of what Dr. Edelman hopes will become 'sciences of recognition,' studying how biological processes recognize other biological processes. It is an enterprise, he argues, that spurs amazement, because if it succeeds, it will show that out of accident and diversity, something as miraculous as human consciousness can be born. But this vision can also spur discomfort, because it implies that there is no supervising soul or self — nobody is standing behind the curtain. This, for Dr. Edelman, is Darwin's final burden. "

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia: "China's western ambitions do not end with the purchase of huge amounts of energy, the main products that Central Asia has to offer, international political analysts, Chinese and regional officials agree. Beijing's bid to secure vital fuel supplies is part of a bold but little noticed push to increase its influence vastly in a part of the world long dominated by its historic rival in the region, Russia."

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia: "'It is not Kipling's `Great Game' yet,' Dr. Blank said, 'but it is a hell of a contest in its own right: military and economic and everything else.'"

Quentin's Eurides Days

A Passion for the Classics and, Well, Passion: "Ms. Carson, 53, described the play in her typically elliptical way, 'Euripides had his Quentin Tarantino days.'"

JAlbum - free web photo album software

Great software, with a tad complex set of tweaking optionsJAlbum

Age/wisdom

I recall a Canada World Youth group leader saying that as a result of their experiences overseas the participants started reading the New Internationalist and the group leaders started reading the Economist. I think the naiveté of youth is fine - I'm still in favour of cheap cheap university tuition and generous funding and strong government regulation of the environment, etc - its just you also acquire these contrary experiences like seeing universities as institutions seeking corporate funding and the individual profs focusing on their pensions. And somehow you have to make sense of it. I don't think I allowed for enough self-interest or systemic absurdity in my youthful thinking.

Extreme Programming - Extension?

I wonder if principles in Extreme Programming apply elsewhere in life? For example:

DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork encourages us not to over (or under)-engineer;
AskTheCode because it knows;
ListenToTheCode;
ModelFirst plus SpartanUserInterface helps us concentrate on real customer value
ExtremePlanning suggests quickly building a map of the whole imagined system and incrementally refining it
The PlanningGame formalizes the rituals and roles of planning
CountDownToRelease discusses how to use the ExtremePlanning practices when you're getting close to release
ExtremeReuse - adopting third party software and making it XP-compatible by building tests
TossIt - making projects trim and keeping projects trim
SystemMetaphor - how we communicate the system to ourselves and others
XpSimplicityRules
OnceAndOnlyOnce
ExtremeDocuments - we do documentation, sometimes differently
SupportCrisis - what to do until the doctor comes
IncrementalDelivery
LazyOptimization and EarlyProfiling
OpenWorkspace

Results in...
IterativeDevelopment - tends to be a natural result of ContinuousIntegration and ContinuousIntegrationRelentlessTesting and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork at each iteration
DynamicDesign - from RefactorMercilessly and short Code-Compile-Debug cycle
FewerWorkHours [important]

Blog vs Wiki

Interesting post on combination of Blog and Wiki. Seems like a variant on presenting a structured arguement/discussion i.e. that somehow I want to collect, order, organize and present information in an only vaguely linear fashion. In the first instance I'd like to be able to do this for my reference only, ideally with a local copy on my pc and a synchronized web accessible. Some might want to 'publish' some/all of their information. Some software tackles this, such as The Brain... but it seems imperfect. Are there other solutions? HTML, text/word files, Visio, Inspiration, Endnote ... all have their specific uses ...

: Irate Scotsman - Blog Wiki Blog: "However, wikis are not blogs, and I don't think they're particularly well-suited to be hacked into being blogs (which is the main gist of the links from Andrew's WikiBlogIntegration page). Sure, they can be used as (or made into) blogs, but the question is whether or not it's a valid approach. The problem lies with the basic concept of a blog. A (modern) blog is:
Ordered (by the chronology of posts)
Temporaly aggregated (a page displays the 10 or so most recent posts at any time)
Dynamic (the pages change constantly, due to the temporal aggregation)
Categorised (most modern blogs strongly rely on the use of various categories for posts)
Contemporary (a blog's primary external value lies in its current posts, or current topics)
A blog is a time-stream of information, which inherently understands the concepts of past, present, updating, recency and progress.

By contrast, Wikis seem to be more about the timeless accretion of static data. To my mind, a wiki is:
Principally unordered (wikis only care in a very secondary way about the most recent edits; recency is not core to the concept of what a wiki is)
Logically aggregated (content is within a mass of related material)
Primarily static (each individual page mostly contains its own relevant content and nothing else)
Not intrinsically categorised (categorisation in wikis seems to be human-enforced; internally, all pages exist at the root level, with no subdivisions or priorities)
Timeless (wiki content is long-term; rarely is it associated with a single point in time)
So, if you're looking to combine static with dynamic content, do you start out with a blog or a wiki? It's a matter of what you specifically need to do. For examp"

Creative Commons

Creative Commons: "Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share."

Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte: New ET Writings, Artworks & News

Project Management Templates

tools: Project Management checklists and templates: "Project Management checklists and templates"

Enigmas: Why don't people do what they say they will?

Why don't people do what they say they will?: "Why don't people do
what they say they will?" "In summary, the main issues are: competition for time, unhelpful personal motivations, lack of autocracy, lack of urgency, lack of prompts, and multi-tasking."

Writers on Iraq War

Guardian Unlimited | True colours: Collection of writers' views on Iraq War. Here is Le Carre - "I opposed the war before it began, wrote against it in the Times and marched against it in London. I believed then, and believe now, that this illegal and unprovoked invasion will lead to greater instability and suffering in the region than existed before it was launched."

Heartneing

Is 'network literacy' different?

jill/txt: talk at brown: "'Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network'"

UI elements

Widgetopia, Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities: "Widgetopia
Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities "

On Searching

ongoing On Search, the Series: "This series of essays on the construction, deployment and use of search technology"

Countries Visited

create your own visited country map

The Great Game II + China's Wild West

China's Wild West - 99.09: "In the terrible desert and desolate massif of Xinjiang, the Beijing government faces a volatile mixture of ethnic groups, some of whom are hostile to all that is Chinese.

"In the Hexi Corridor, between the mountain ranges of China's arid, north-central Gansu Province, the Great Wall crumbles to an end. "

The New 'Great Game': "The Caspian region may be the next big gas station, but, as in the Middle East, there are already a lot of men running around throwing matches."

ShangHai Eye - Hu for oil: "while Premier Wen Jiabao rushes around the poultry farms of China, personally wringing the necks of thousands of flu-ridden birds, President Hu Jintao is presumably enjoying himself in the swankiest hotel in Libreville. But it's not all fun and games. Hu is in Africa, doing his bit to solve one of China's biggest problems. "

Peking Blogs

Living in China: "Living in China is a member of the Living on the Planet, a network of regional blogzines around the world. "

danwei: "Danwei.org is a frequently updated website about media and advertising in the People's Republic of China. It is maintained and edited by Jeremy Goldkorn."

The Peking Duck: "A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing and finally to Singapore for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him... "

Oil, Tibet and other bits explained ... Not Shanghai Eye

ShangHai Eye - Not Shanghai Eye: "Stuff for which Shanghai Eye is not responsible, which you may nevertheless enjoy looking at."

Review of the Cambridge Illustrated History of China

ShangHai Eye - China is too big even for a big book: "“THERE IS nothing inevitable about the results of China's confrontation with the West,” Professor Buckley Ebrey writes, “a whole concatenation of contingent events contributed to the outcome.” A sensible statement in a very sensibly written - and handsomely illustrated - history. "

Walt Whitman - Inspiration for Writing

Walt Whitman, Proud Music of the Sea Storm

Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences—the tempest on the sea,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances, of religious fervor,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love, and grief and death,
I said to my silent, curious Soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh'd amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish'd henceforth by our celestial dream.

And I said, moreover,
Haply, what thou hast heard, O Soul, was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of stormy waves, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh scream,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic—nor vast concourse of voices—nor layers of harmonies;
Nor strophes of husbands and wives—nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the different bugle-calls of camps;
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which, let us go forth in the bold day, and write.

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia: "Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting. Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem The Second Coming as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot, but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats' apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the 1890s. "

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home: Poet Brodsky, whom I don't know yet, but who got a nobel prize:

… cities one won't see again. The sun
throws its gold at their frozen windows. But all the same
there is no entry, no proper sum.
There are always six bridges spanning the sluggish river.
There are places where lips touched lips for the first time ever,
or pen pressed paper with real fervor.
There are arcades, colonnades, iron idols that blur your lens.
There the streetcar's multitudes, jostling, dense,
speak in the tongue of a man who's departed thence."

Nobel e-Museum

Nobel e-Museum: "The Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation

Derek Walcott Profile

The New Yorker: Derek Walcott: "Walcott and I walked to a little grove off the side of the main house. We sat at a table in the shade. The sea crashed against the rocks below us. Walcott began to speak of his marginal existence. "

Also, a useful and reasonable exhaustive (at least more than I can digest quickly) list of related sites.

Mountains of Public Health

Tracy Kidder interviewed on Paul Farmer: "You titled your book after the Haitian proverb 'D?y? m?n gen m?n,' meaning 'beyond mountains there are mountains.' Is this description of the Haitian landscape also symbolic of the obstacles that Paul Farmer and the Haitian people have faced, and continue to face?

Exactly. The proverb as I understand it means 'beyond mountains, more mountains.' But I looked at it harder and saw a verb in there: 'gen.' I think it's the verb 'there are,' or it could be 'one gains'?beyond mountains, one gains mountains. Haitians use the phrase in two different ways: to say that there's no end to obstacles, and also to say that there's no end to opportunities. "

Organizing Design

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Louis Rosenfeld: "Information architects need to know something about each of these three areas to ensure their designs are balanced, regardless of whether they're designing content management processes, search interfaces, taxonomies, or anything else. Most of us already know a lot about one of these areas - for example, if you studied organizational behavior in college, you might be considered an expert in context. If that's the case, it might not be a bad idea to 'minor' in the other areas to achieve a more balanced perspective. So you might shore up your knowledge of content by reading up on topics relevant to content creation, like technical communication, journalism, or markup languages. Ditto users: read a book on human factors or ethnographic methods. "

Secure Thoughts

Schneier.com: "IDs and the illusion of security (San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 2004
'Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that's just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.' "

Esoteric links

all things cowboy Courtest of Bowers

Organizational Development and Project Management

: "The differences in project management success rates may be a result of the fact that some organizations do a better job of training their project managers. So they may be more skilled and knowledgeable in the project management discipline. But the way your organization deals with training is just one aspect of your overall organizational culture. A number of big-picture factors influence your ability to deliver projects successfully. Let's look at two of them: culture and structure."

Thinking Too Much

A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload

Hierarchies, trees, paradigms, and facets

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web: "Kwasnick (1999) identifies four classificatory structures: hierarchies, trees, paradigms, and facets. When one of the first three works, use it. If some other organizing principle, such as a timeline or ordering by size, works, use it. The design of the classification must follow its purpose, and different things can be classified in different ways for different purposes, requiring different structures. If the others are insufficient, look to facets."