Radio Lab: Emergence

A great audio exploration of organization from chaos, order from the accidental: ants, cities, fireflies and life itself.

clipped from www.wnyc.org What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, even our very own brains. Featured: author Steven Johnson, fire-flyologists John and Elizabeth Buck, biologist E.O. Wilson, Ant expert Debra Gordon, mathematician Steve Strogatz, economist James Surowiecki, and neurologists Oliver Sacks and Christof Koch.

U-S-A NUMBER ONE! (In guns.)

clipped from www.reuters.com GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said. U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said. "There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said. On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.

Iron Attitude

A good friend just completed, at age 47, his third Iron Man competition (way to go Ed!).

However, the NYC-based Hipster Olympics seems much more arduous and, well, uh, hip.

clipped from www.youtube.com

Godbey Works: Big Idea Part Deux

Mack Miles is a guest blogger for godbeyworks.com. He describes his column and himself:

My column Look and Feel is just that. Stories about how things look and feel — usually with a business twist. I rant, I rave, I give advice and most importantly, I look at things and react to them. After spending thirty years in the field of the visual arts I have assumed this as my calling. It's what I get hired to do. I love it and am very passionate about it.

clipped from www.godbeyworks.com This article is going to be an update to the August 2006 article BIG IDEA. Since preparing that story I have run across several more examples of big ideas, but these have a twist. They are all very heavy on the big idea and light on the budget (although as you will see, some do spend money). They feature the product (or their talent) in a clever way - presenting the use - theatrically, stressing the advantage creatively or coupling the product with something from everyday life in such a way as to make it stand out, endear you to it and promote it. These last few are a different approach and as I found, the web offers up a multitude of examples of very creative ideas on small budgets. Just do a Google search for that! One woman used the top of her refrigerator http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com like a dry erase board to create a website promoting her book. It is very creative, has a surprise, makes you laugh and I wanted to read every page.

Race in a Bottle

Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. By Jonathan Kahn

clipped from sciam.com Two years ago, on June 23, 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first “ethnic” drug. Called BiDil (pronounced “bye-dill”), it was intended to treat congestive heart failure—the progressive weakening of the heart muscle to the point where it can no longer pump blood efficiently—in African-Americans only. The approval was widely declared to be a significant step toward a new era of personalized medicine, an era in which pharmaceuticals would be specifically designed to work with an individual’s particular genetic makeup. Known as pharmacogenomics, this approach to drug development promises to reduce the cost and increase the safety and efficacy of new therapies. BiDil was also hailed as a means to improve the health of African-Americans, a community woefully underserved by the U.S. medical establishment. Organizations such as the Association of Black Cardiologists and the Congressional Black Caucus strongly supported the drug’s approval.

"Benefits & Pitfalls of Metaphors & Syntopical Readings" or "Why We Have a Library"

Books sure are pretty.

And, they make people look smart.

But the books are a vital part of our tool set for helping teams think faster, better and more creativelier [spell check did NOT like that word!].

Here are some resources giving the background of how other organizations use metaphorical reading, research outside their subject areas, and their own libraries as tools and methods for innovation in business.

Syntopical Reading… Intelligent Dialog
Mortimor Adler developed the term and method called Syntopical Reading in How To Read A Book [rbtfBook]. The idea is to read many books at the same time - on a given subject - and aggressively dialoging with the authors. First, you see things this way that otherwise would not be revealed. In addition, it is possible to read a set of books, that together, bring information and insight to a subject that none of them, singularly, cover. by Matt Taylor

The Syntopicon as an Instrument of Liberal Education
The Syntopicon serves the end of liberal education to the extent that it facilitates the reading of the great books and, beyond that, the study and teaching of them. To make the nature of this educational contribution clear, it is necessary to distinguish between the integral and the syntopical reading of great books. by Mortimer Adler. Ph.D.

The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors
Harvard Business Review | It’s tempting to draw business lessons from other disciplines—warfare, biology, music. But most managers do it badly. Instead of being seduced by the similarities between business and another field, you need to look for places where the metaphor breaks down. by Tihamér von Ghyczy

Unearth Growth by Digging in the Dirt
Fast Company | Everything you need to know about innovation is growing (and dying) in a garden near you. So forget balanced scorecards, six sigma and SWOT analysis and read this instead. by Richard Watson

Fast Company: Unearth Growth by Digging in the Dirt

by Richard Watson

Everything you need to know about innovation is growing (and dying) in a garden near you. So forget balanced scorecards, six sigma and SWOT analysis and read this instead.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com There is an element of business, which, as far as I know, has never been written about. Business is like gardening. That’s right; growing a business is like growing a tree. I know this sounds flaky, and I’ve probably lost many of you at this point, but for those of you that remain, consider this: most metaphors about business are about sport or war. This is useful, but the fatal floor in these analogies is that both have an end point in the immediate future. Moreover, the objective of both is to defeat a clearly defined enemy. Aims and outcomes are always fairly clear. The feeling in most organizations like these is that business is a mechanical process. In this context the analogies of war and sport are very apt. It’s all about pre-planned strategies, resources and control within a fairly fixed environment or known set of rules. But real life doesn’t work quite like that does it? We cannot control everything and it is egotistical to think that we can.

GoogleHealth Screen Shots

Move over small-time EMR Guys,.. the Googlemeister is doing a cannonball in the pool.

clipped from blogoscoped.com Google Health, codename “Weaver”, is Google’s planned health information storage program. Google’s Vice President of Engineering Adam Bosworth lobbies for the program for quite a while now. Adam said the current US health care system is challenged when it comes to “supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations.” Adam went on to say that people “need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all ... Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient’s needs.” Adam adds that this – making information accessible – happens to be along Google’s mission. The New York Times today writes that “about 20 percent of the [US] patient population have computerized records

You Are Responsible for Your Child’s Creativity

From GodbeyWorks:

Back to School
by Diana Long, Ed.D.

The summer flies by. Already the Back-to-School ads are dominating television and newspaper advertisements. Memorial Day gives way to the 4th of July in a blink of an eye. Labor Day is the official mindset end of summer and many kids go back into the classroom well before the holiday.

GodbeyWorks is a company that is promoting and yes, screaming for the public to pay attention to development activities that promote entrepreneurship, development of creative jobs, design and value added products and services. The recent “white paper” by Vision Shared, Culture, Creativity and Innovation, West Virginia in the New Economy, recommends actions to government, education and business to encourage such development. Taking the responsibility down to a personal level, I gathered thoughts on this question, “How do parents encourage the creative development of their own children?” more >>

Ballmer Monkeyboy iPod Mashup

Sent by David "Monkey Mind" Owens:

Original source video of Steve "Raging Bull" Ballmer. \

Select mash-ups:

• Young Dr. Frankenstein's Puttin' on the Ritz
• Adolf Ballmer
  

Best comment posted on YouTube: "Why don't you shoot a .44 Magnum into a pillow, vent out some of that anger."