MindMap WebApp: Bubbl.us

From LifeHack's 11 Top New Web Apps of 2007:

bubbl.us: Flash-based mindmap creator bubbl.us allows you to quickly and easily make effective, attractive mindmaps that can be exported as images or as HTML outlines, or shared with others who can add new items or draw new connections between existing ones. Sometimes clunky if your connection is slow or if the mindmaps get too large. But a fantastic Flash-enabled tool!

Cherry Blossoms: Mapping the City of Bombs

Discovered via the post "You Don't Understand Our Audience" by Dateline reporter John Hockenberry on http://www.technologyreview.com/

clipped from web.media.mit.edu Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death. Alyssa Wright began working on Cherry Blossoms last semester, wondering how to think about — and feel about — the civilian war deaths in Baghdad. Alyssa’s genius was in sacrificing herself. After all, it’s not an easy piece to perform. You don’t know when it’s going to blow. It’s shocking and loud, and one has no sense of how others will react. Of course, she won’t get hurt by the compressed air, but she might well be confused for a suicide bomber (or, more appropriately, a mooninite) and arrested.

Alphachimp at Manpower's employment summit

Photo: Julie Fanselow

The international staffing service and employment company, Manpower, moved its headquarters from suburban Milwaukee to the Harambee-Brewers Hill neighborhood in September 2007, and it recently launched an initiative called Accelerate Employment Circles to help people in the immediate area talk about finding “A Place for Everyone in the World of Work.”

Addressing the December 17 gathering, Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres explained how – while the company is helping solve thorny staffing issues in China, India, France, and Mexico – unemployment remains high right in its own back yard. “We want to take the good things happening in this neighborhood, see if we can accelerate them, and take time and thoughtfulness to do so,” he said.

About 100 people attended the mid-December summit, and about 60 people – including a dozen or so members of the city-sanctioned Workforce Investment Board – spent three hours talking about what it would mean if everyone in the neighborhood had meaningful work. Using a guide developed by Manpower with the help of the Study Circles Resource Center (soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy), participants were asked to imagine a backpack containing the most important things people would need “to help them choose, prepare for, and obtain the right job for their talents and interests.” Items mentioned included opportunity, education, knowledge, self-awareness, trust, support, financial skills, and time-management skills. In one dialogue, participants noted the lack of a safety net of help with childcare, transportation, or simply the ability to take time off for an emergency.

As the circles worked, facilitators made written lists of ideas and observations, and graphic facilitator Jim Nuttle from Alphachimp Studio Inc. rendered the conversations into words and pictures. People spoke of barriers including racism, inadequate public transit, inflexible employers, the need for a living wage (working at or near the minimum wage is hardly worth it, some said), and the lack of gathering places where diverse people can meet and network. But they also spoke of assets including schools, the Milwaukee Area Technical College (whose president took part in a dialogue), non-profit organizations, and forward-thinking businesses.

After the dialogues ended, participants gathered to prioritize the action items proposed using keypad technology provided by Padgett Communications.

Rating the best social networks

Which social networking sites have the best balance of ease-of-use vs. available features? The British consumer magazine Computing Which? has ranked Bebo as the best social networks, ahead of rivals Facebook and MySpace. The Guardian writes:

Bebo and Facebook achieved the highest scores of 79% and 74% respectively, and were rated easier to use than MySpace and best for socialising. Bebo, which is used predominantly by the 13- to 24-year-old age group, is praised for working hard to encourage responsible networking. "Users can restrict who sees their information, and block users, and there's plenty of advice on security risks and how to avoid these," says the magazine.

Details that matter to new users include: ease of sign-up, length of process, ease of use, features, navigation, and speed of page loads. Of course, one of the major drivers is the number of friends the new user already has on the service!

Visit Bebonation >>

New Year's Contemplation

Thanks to David Christie, cheers to all.

Surprise form the Street: Art!

Few artists can walk past an empty lot, deserted building or blank wall without dreaming of the possibilities afforded by all that open space. Here is a flavor of some "artoneers" who are claiming urban blight as free range gallery space.

Article by Bill McGraw | December 18, 2007

clipped from www.freep.com CREATION OF COLOR: With an artistic storefront, the artist known as Dabl attracts customers to his store, Dabl's African Bead Gallery, at Vinewood and Grand River. He sells thousands of African beads, some more than 300 years old, he says. (ERIC SEALS/DFP) Aaron Timlin, CAID's executive director, added: "There's a pioneering attitude. There are so many things artists can do in Detroit because it is so spread out. Throw up a sculpture on a vacant lot. Performance art. Detroit is a big empty canvas." The spiritual godfather of the grassroots art scene is Tyree Guyton, whose internationally known installation around Heidelberg Street on the near East Side attracts visitors every day. Guyton's artwork deals with how abandonment affects a neighborhood -- and decay is central to the work of a number of artists. In Detroit, there are people who draw attention to abandonment by painting gutted homes orange or attaching orange traffic cones to them. There is Larry Zelenski, who produces greeting cards with lovingly enhanced photos of abandoned houses. And there is Kevin Joy, who paints cartoons, Mayan-style hieroglyphics and other wacky images on abandoned houses and in the windows of vacant downtown buildings.

Embrace the Edge -- or Perish

The periphery of today's global business environment is where innovation potential is the highest. Ignore it at your peril.

Article by John Hagel and John Seely Brown

Edges are increasingly significant as the global business environment speeds up. In a world of accelerating change, what's born on the edge transforms the core with breathtaking speed. A few short years ago, both India and China were marginal players in the global economy. Now they are central players. Not long ago, the Internet was a specialized communication platform for scientists. Now it's a center for commerce and advertising.

clipped from www.businessweek.com Engage. Too often, executives get intrigued with the edge and arrange field visits to explore this strange terrain. Insight rarely comes from such casual visits. Instead, executives need to identify and focus on challenging business issues to engage edge participants productively and drive real insight. Sustain relationships on the edge. A lot of the current effort in open innovation focuses on short-term transactions to gain access to existing resources. To get the full value of the learning that's occurring on the edge, executives need to find ways to build long-term, trust-based relationships with edge participants. Bring the edge to the core. In too many cases, companies set up remote outposts on the edge that become isolated and alienated from the core of the business. Senior executives need to identify challenges confronted by the core where insights from the edge can be helpful and sponsor initiatives to bring participants from both domains together around these issues.

Crowley's High Speed Art

Watch graphic facilitator Steph Crowley create a 35-foot mural over 5 days in high speed--inspirational music included!

This American Life: Unconditional Love

Dr. Harlow spent a lot of time with monkeys and their mommas. Evil, robot mommas, to be exact.

Dr. Harry Harlow and his Artificial Mother

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-deprivation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in the early stages of primate development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked for a time with humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow.

Some of Harlow's experiments involved rearing infant macaques in isolation chambers that prevented them from having any contact with other monkeys or human beings. The monkeys were left alone for up to 24 months, and emerged severely disturbed.

This podcast from This American Life examines Stories of unconditional love between parents and children, and how hard love can be sometimes in daily practice.

clipped from thisamericanlife.org Hard as it is to believe, during the early Twentieth Century, a whole school of mental health professionals decided that unconditional love was a terrible thing to give a child. The government printed pamphlets warning mothers against the dangers of holding their kids. The head of the American Psychological Association and even a mothers' organization endorsed the position that mothers were dangerous—until psychologist Harry Harlow set out to prove them wrong, through a series of experiments with monkeys. Host Ira Glass talks with Deborah Blum, author of Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection.

Full spectrum attention management

The comment at the bottom of this article sums it up: "This is THE best blog post about a GTD implementation I have read so far."

Katherine Doubek is an engineer, artist, and writer living in the American south and studies artificial intelligence at the University of Texas at Arlington. This post is a fantastic summary on personal project management and electronic organization for the Mac OS.

clipped from www.fragmentedzen.com David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (book) allows busy people to manage their attention, energy, priorities, and tasks in a simple, straight-forward manner. It’s discussed and reviewed in a number of places online, but example setups aren’t presented frequently. This article outlines my personal GTD setup, and how you can adapt it to help track your time and attention investments. I keep all information with me at all times which I may need to be able to reference on short notice, such as my portfolios, codebase, and medical history. This stays in a folder on my Mac’s desktop: If you’re interested, I’ve compiled a PDF of the full taxonomy of my archive folder for you to download and reference.