Launch of Alphachimp Coaching!

Coaching is a relationship that focuses on you. Who are you? Where are you in your life? Where do you want to be? What are the barriers? What actions do you need to take to get there? You are the heart of this relationship. During this co-active coaching process with Diane Durand, you will discover more about yourself which will lead to more fulfillment and balance in your relationships, career, health and family. LEARN MORE

Map of Creativity

This month's Map of Creativity newsletter features an interesting and inspiring interview with one of the co-directors of the European project WebLabs. Find out how six European countries got kids talking about high level maths and science.

Illustrated Manuals for Development Projects In many rural development programmes field-level training is the most appropriate means of communicating new ideas and practice. Unfortunately, staff responsible for conducting the training often have few resources to help them with this task and work in villages scattered over large areas.

Virtual Hikers are computer-created virtual hiking routes that can be followed by hikers in the real world. While currently experimental research in the area of “locative media in the wild,” the long-term value of virtual hikers is apparent.

Food Force leverages the popularity of video games to educate youngsters about hunger and the work of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

The Black Swans of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From IT Conversations:

The hardest part of predicting the future is that it's, well, the future. That may sound flippant, but it's essentially true; the greatest problem in forecasting isn't understanding the current situation or the problem itself, it's accounting for unforeseen factors the cannot be predicted. In a session from Pop!Tech 2005, essayist and former financial trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses these "black swans" and their effect on the task of forecasting.

The complexity of the world increases each day, and our inability to forecast events increases as well. "Black swans", unforeseen and unforeseeable events, are impossible to predict but can drastically change results.

These essentially random factors cannot be accounted for, so how can we successfully forecast; how can we account for the unaccountable? Should we just stop forecasting altogether? Not according to Nassim Taleb; he details the pitfalls we encounter while trying to predict the future and a partial solution to the problem.

Peter Durand created this large scale illustration during, Taleb's talk at the What Do We Know session at Pop!Tech. The other speaker in this session was Robert Trivers. The question and answer period can be heard at the end of Robert Trivers' talk.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an essayist principally concerned with the problems of uncertainty and knowledge. Nassim's interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, finance, literature and cognitive science, but he has stayed extremely close to the ground, thanks to an uninterrupted two-decade career as a mathematical trader. He held senior trading positions in New York and London, before founding Empirica LLC, a trading firm and risk research laboratory.

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He is the author of Dynamic Hedging and Fooled by Randomness, which has been published in 14 languages. Nassim's ideas on skeptical empiricism have been covered by hundreds of articles around the world.

Nassim holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris and is Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Zero Boy News

Check out the "oh so timely" and "as strange as reality" news podcasts from Zero Boy News.

Zero Boy is part of an online festival called The Huffington Post Contagious Festival. Enjoy a few minutes to check out his piece What Bush is Really Saying.

We met Zero Boy at Pop!Tech 2004, where, in the words of Renee Blodgett:

He's a combination performance artist, stand-up comic & "vocal acrobat." Zero Boy performed for us between sessions; quite a creative and funky twist in the midst of Emerging World Views and Global Creativity. He recounts his zany adventures in Zeroland through a unique blend of sound and mime, the results being something akin to a performed comic book. He combines movement with live, vocally-produced sound effects, and enacts a parade of hilarious, fantastical characters.

Performance artist, stand-up comic & "vocal acrobat" Zero Boy recounts his zany adventures in Zeroland through a unique blend of sound and mime, the results being something akin to a performed comic book.

Combining movement with live, vocally-produced sound effects, Zero Boy enacts a parade of hilarious, fantastical characters that find themselves in the most unlikely situations.
"Reminds one of the best days of Saturday Night Live" - Time Out Amsterdam

From his New York base Zero Boy has written, directed & performed numerous productions on both coasts and Europe, working in traditional theater, stand up comedy, television, street performance festivals, radio, film, comic books, a national magazine, and on the cutting edge of digital media/art.

Woolgathering

Elizabeth Perry is an artist, writer and media specialists working with teachers and students to integrate art, language, science and storytelling through electronic media.

She recently led a workshop at the Mattress Factory, a premier contemporary installation sculpture museum and performance space. (Check out what kids are doing there in the Matress 14 Project!)

Perry's own book-to-blog works of watercolor sketches are wonderful meditations on the simple beauty of the everyday.

From Elizabeth's blog:

I work on a variety of projects, on and off the web.

writing

One of my degrees is in writing. I have published nonfiction and short stories. A children's book, Think Cool Thoughts, was published in 2005 by Clarion Books.

web + video + digital

memory - a movable collage constructed in Flash
Uluburun shipwreck - an interactive archaeological site
Pittsburgh Signs Project - a collaborative online museum
5 x 4 - an experiment in multi-dimensional poetry and Flash
textile - a Flash toy hinting at some ideas I'm always working with
stop motion animation made by kids
more stop motion from a summer camp
my house as a snow globe - animation
Homewood Cemetery and The Ellis School - 360-degree panoramas in QuicktimeVR

knitting

I make up my own patterns, but I rarely get around to typing them up. One of these days...

grass roots community development and activism

My inner-city neighborhood in Pittsburgh has several community organizations. I've served on the board of one of them.

Baghdad Journal

Somehow, watercolorist Steve Mumford, convinced his wife to let him go, the editor of an on-line arts magazine, artnet.com, to issue him a press pass, and his hands to produce beautiful images. All this during the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Mumford's book Baghdad Journal (Drawn and Quarterly, 2005) is a large-scale, saturated visual narrative that deftly captures soldiers and citizens, stay dogs and looters, elegant mosques and burnt out wrecks, beat up sedans and Bradley fighting vehicles–all the texture, color and human drama of the post-Saddam era.

Steve details his first-person narrative as an artist struggling to understand the value his presence can bring to the situation. The results provide illumination on how a peaceful man with no ties to power or influence (and a limited budget) can navigate and survive in a looted landscape; how citizens of an occupied country can extend a helpful hand to a stranger; and, how art can be created in the context of war.

From Baghdad Journal:

Drawing here takes a little getting used to. The Iraqis are intensely interested in most things western, so the presence of an American sitting on a stoop or at a cafe making a drawing always elicits an avid audience. Every brushstroke is watched, and people have many questions. The Iraqi sense of personal space is very different from a westerner's; here people crowd in so close they're touching me, and men feel free to stab at the paper to point out someone I've drawn whom they know. If an onlooker blocks the view, however, he'll be shouted at to get out of the way. Sometimes a passage is greeted with a round of "tsk, tsk, tsk," which in Iraq doesn't necessarily connote disapproval as much as interest (I think).I spend a few hours working on Karada Avenue, the mecca for appliances and satellite dishes. It's a major boulevard, the sidewalks cluttered with big stacks of boxes, satellite dishes arranged like blossoming flowers as far as the eye can see in both directions. Sometimes you have to go through a maze of these boxes to continue down the sidewalk. The usual chorus of "Hey, Mister!" follows me as I go. When I locate a good vantage point to draw, the salesmen come out to look, then offer to pose. One pretends to flag down a cab, and then has to explain to several irritated cab drivers that he doesn't in fact want a ride, much to the amusement of the others.

I spend a few hours working on Karada Avenue, the mecca for appliances and satellite dishes. It's a major boulevard, the sidewalks cluttered with big stacks of boxes, satellite dishes arranged like blossoming flowers as far as the eye can see in both directions. Sometimes you have to go through a maze of these boxes to continue down the sidewalk. The usual chorus of "Hey, Mister!" follows me as I go. When I locate a good vantage point to draw, the salesmen come out to look, then offer to pose. One pretends to flag down a cab, and then has to explain to several irritated cab drivers that he doesn't in fact want a ride, much to the amusement of the others.

Review from Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. With countless war accounts already in from Iraq, it's refreshing to get this dispatch told, from the perspective not of a journalist or a photographer, but of an artist. Mumford, a New York City painter, first arrived in Baghdad in April of 2003 and spent about a year there, and in other cities, accompanying U.S. troops on patrols, raids and combat missions. But the most arresting images in this illustrated journal come from his more mundane interactions: with people in cafés, at a meeting with a local imam, at a galley favored by local Baghdad artists. Mumford writes that, for him, "the act of drawing slowed down the war, recording the spaces in between the bombs," and it is through these spaces, the day-to-day of life in a country where life runs minute-to-minute, that Iraq and its war become illuminated in a way that we rarely see. At first glance Mumford's watercolors carry something of the hasty urgency of courtroom art, but this impression is soon belied by the images' depth of feeling and nuance. Accompanying the watercolors are passages from his journal, written in a lucid and reflective style that perfectly matches these quiet spaces pushing out at the surrounding chaos. His is a remarkable document.

>> Read Steve's journal on-line
>> About Steve Mumford
>> NBC's Person of the Week

Sundance Shorts

Don't miss out on the Sundance Film Festival... especially the fun and freaky (and free!) on-line shorts.

Definitely one of the standouts is Beyond Iraq directed by Tom Eldridge, which shows wounded vets conquering their injuries through conquering the slopes.

Studio 360's Kurt Anderson has a quality interview podcast with founder Robert Redford on his evolution from leading man to leading the vanguard for innovative and independent cinema.

From the interview:

"There is a darker strain in my heritage, or a perversity, whatever - I always believed my whole life if things got too good, maybe it's time to stop. Because you want to be careful you don't fall in love with either success or yourself. I felt with that kind of success at the end of a very productive decade of work, it was maybe time to stop, take a pause and go back to zero a little bit and think about what I was going to do next; but beyond that, maybe give something back.

"And I came up with the idea for the Institute, as a workplace for young artists, for having a place to work, because that's what I would have liked. And then, focus on independent film because it was a category that was pretty much dead at the time. It was pretty much in the academic realm of NEH and NEA grants, which is great. But it's small sphere."

>> Read full transcript
>> Go to the Sundance Film Festival

Needled

I missed the tatoo craze, but am amazed at the Byzantine intricacies of skin art.

[via Cool Hunting]

As Needled was a Yahoo pick this week, it held off on further posts about scantily-clad tattooed burlesque queens. At least for a week. Instead, it stayed focused on tattoos in the news with some potent photos and links to Guatemala gangs and their prison ink, creative ways tattoo artists have adapted to harsh zoning laws, and a public service announcement on why one should beware of traveling tattoo salesmen. In shopping, Needled picked Diabolic DVD as their source for films with a body art edge and looked at the Dooney & Bourke tattoo heart banana bag. For a bit of history, Needled posted links to vintage photos of tattooed ladies in traveling circuses as well as to modern day freaks.

What makes IDEO so... IDEO?

Most people take vacations to the ski slopes, or tourist destinations. This winter, Dominic Muren, product designer and writer for IDFuel, decided that visiting IDEO would be more fun. He wanted to see what makes a firm like IDEO so successful at continually turning out concepts that not only answer design questions, but answer them in ways that are often so far off the beaten path that they create entirely new product definitions.

Check out what he uncovered.

IDEO helps companies innovate. We design products, services, environments, and digital experiences.

Dominic Muren is an Industrial Designer/Mechanical Engineer working as a toy designer in Chicago. He loves mechanical design, materials, and flan. His idols are the Eames's, and James Dyson.

The Monkey King of China

An ancient Chinese legend comes to life at Chicago Children's Museum! This traditional tale describes the curious Monkey King’s adventures through foreign lands as he causes mischief in the emperor’s palace and finds himself trapped under a mountain for 500 years. This interactive exhibit lures you in when the courageous Monkey King is given a chance to redeem himself by escorting a monk to India. You can learn lessons the Monkey King reveals as you help him overcome the perils he encounters in his journey.

Become a mischievous monkey and try to steal the emperor’s peaches before he catches you. Play pranks at the dinner table in the Heavenly Palace. Fly over China, climb through Buddha’s fingers, and extinguish the flames of a burning mountain with the goddess’s fan. Discover China’s mystique in this imaginative, one-of-a-kind exhibit!

Asian American Social Network: Special Partner of Chicago Children's Museum.

[Photo from Adventures in Chinese Culture: The Monkey King's Guide, the East Asia Program at Cornell.]