Category: Misc

Another big week of multimedia training and speakers/panels coming up at the J-School, starting this Sunday. Once again, we’ll be webcasting all speakers — tune in here (or, if you see this post in the future, visit that page for archived versions).

Featured speakers are Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs” author; Travis Fox, Washington Post; Robert Hood, msnbc.com; Al Bonner, Lawrence.com; Seth Gittner, Roanoke Times; Seth Familian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business; Joe Howry, Bruce McLean, Colleen Casem and Tom Kiska, Ventura County Star.

Should be some fascinating conversations.

c|net has a small slideshow demonstrating coming technology to pull large cargo ships along with giant kites, reducing fuel consumption. Not quite a return to the days of great sailing ships, but a nod. Since it’s not quite sailing, it will only work when traveling roughly in the direction of the wind, but it still makes me happy to see big industry harnessing nature and taking enviro steps with zero-impact methods.

Russel Davies has created a mini-primer called How To Be Interesting — a list based on two assumptions: 1) The way to be interesting is to be interested, and 2) Interesting people are good at sharing. The title is tongue-in-cheek of course, but some of the suggestions are good — carry a camera with you at all times and post one photo per day, try things you’ve never tried before (often), pay attention to art, interview one person per month, make things (“Making’s the new thinking.”)

4. Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before. Interesting people are interested in all sorts of things. That means they explore all kinds of worlds, they go places they wouldn’t expect to like and work out what’s good and interesting there. An easy way to do this is with magazines. Specialist magazines let you explore the solar system of human activities from your armchair. Try it, it’s fantastic.

I think the sharing recommendations are great – sharing is the open source of human endeavor. And the more you take in, the more interesting what you have to share will be. I personally feel this tension — like I’ve become less interesting over the past few years as my available time to consume information about things not directly related to my work has slipped toward a vanishing point.

Groaned when asked to take part in a “group exercise” at a meeting for our co-op preschool tonight. Broke into teams of eight, each team given a 6-foot-long bar. We were asked to suspend the bar from below using three fingers of each hand, and lower it to the ground as quickly as we could. What could possibly be easier? Just one unbreakable rule: At no point must anyone’s fingers lose contact with the bottom of the bar.

Out of five teams, one never completed the task, while another finished it four times in the allotted period. It took my team seven minutes to lower the damn bar.

Being a person who gets frustrated quickly by people standing in the left lane on the escalator, taking too long to pick out a muffin at the coffee counter, entering a train before everyone’s gotten off, or riding their bikes too slowly on the bike path, I found the experiment extremely aggravating. I like things to flow smoothly, wordlessly, and I like simple things to be simple. “Who is holding up the bar, and why???”

But no one is “holding it up” on purpose. Everyone is just trying to maintain contact with the bar. The mutual goal is in direct contradiction to the mutual rule.

One of two things has to happen for the process to work smoothly: Either an individual has to emerge as a clear leader and somehow direct the flow, or the group has to have a near-psychic interpersonal connection. We had neither. We just struggled and got frustrated.

The exercise was supposed to be a community builder. Instead, for me, it became an object lesson on why preschool meetings drag on endlessly.

Miles was a brave knight in shining armor. Of course I ended up carrying the shield and sword most of the way, but he made quite a haul. At a couple of doors, for no apparent reason, when prodded to say “Thank you,” he instead broke into song: “Knights are brave and strong, and queens are never wrong.” At one point, heading up towards a dark-ish porch, turns to me and says “No daddy, you stay back there” – wanted to approach the door by himself. Of course that was the house where he was greeted by a big hairy gorilla and a robotic Frankenstein singing a mash-up of a Men-At-Work song. Scared the brave right out of my little knight (who wouldn’t be?)

Just after returning home, heard a thud and a clattering sound coming from the back of the house. Went out to find the lower leg and foot of a mechanical skeleton, electrical cord dangling, just landed in our back yard. 13-year-olds screaming off into the darkness of the next block.

Comes a point, heading home from work at 9:30, when you realize you just can’t do it tomorrow.

via says-it

Back in the 1930s, an avenue near our house was graced by a gorgeous art deco movie house. It closed its doors in the 1960s and became a furniture warehouse. The marquee was nuked, and the entrance stripped down. We never thought much of it. In 2001, the building went back on the market, and locals found, to their amazement, that all of the original deco murals and mirrors inside had survived.

Around the time we bought our house, citizens organized a group to manage restoration of the theater, and we’ve been eagerly awaiting its re-opening. We don’t have any theater in El Cerrito, and the new owners also run a groovy theater in Oakland with couches in place of chairs, beer and pizza (ushers bring food right to your couch). Plans for this theater are similar.

We’ve been watching the slow construction of the marquee mount, architected from old photos. and this week the crowning jewel arrived from the manufacturer – the new marquee, exactly like the original.

Now we just need time to go to movies — and a cheap babysitter — and we’ll be all set.

One of our students did a multimedia piece on the restoration a few years ago — great resource for additional history and interviews with people who remember the the heyday.

This makes me happy. Bicycle air hose snaking out the mail slot of The Missing Link bicycle cooperative on Shattuck in Berkeley, free for the taking (shot with phone cam). Unfortunately, if you have Presta valves, you still have to go in the store to use the adapter, but they’re always cool about it. They even have a bike mount in the shop for public use so you can get your ride up in the air to work on. No need to ask, just go for it. Unfortunately, if you do need repair work done, you’re going to have to wait for the love – asked about a drop-in tune-up today and walked out with an appointment card for October 4.

Well, there’s one way to deal with cell phones in classrooms. Love how the professor barely skips a beat.

Whether a brain belongs to a person with an IQ of 75 or 150, the physical organ looks virtually identical to surgeons. Nor can most existing brain scan techniques tell us much about the “intelligence” of the brain being examined. Intelligence happens on a level that’s difficult to observe, but new techniques are starting to give scientists a glimpse of brain traits that characterize it. Scientists dissect mystery of genius:

The MEG scanner works like a rapid-exposure camera, snapping a thousand pictures each second of electrical activity pulsing through the brain and across its surface. You can actually see a thought unfold in real time.

Advanced brain imaging techniques are turning up some cool observations:

Intelligence research is full of surprises. For example, the brains of smarter people, as measured by IQ, tend to be less active but more efficient, Haier says.

What’s that about how the good programmer is a lazy programmer?

via weblogsky