All in the telling

The latest technologies, including cloud, social, anything mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have and will continue to transform business, especially the customer experience, which still revolves around the story. Storytelling is still the centerpiece. Nothing new there. Storytelling has been the centerpiece since before anyone could even write….

The Irony of Beauty

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…

Neil Postman

From Wikipedia: Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who…

Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire

Author Michael Pollan says: The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow…

MIT Media Lab: Personas

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Here’s…

Salt

From Wikipedia: Chloride and sodium ions, the two major components of salt, are necessary for the survival of all known living creatures, including humans. Salt is involved in regulating the water content (fluid balance) of the body. = c

Flow = Attention deconcentration?

It comes up around nearly every turn. It’s one of the wobbles of life that leads us into such ideas repeatedly: Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process…

Remembering the contributions of Phil Dodds

Mark Oehlert, an acquaintance of mine via Twitter, turned me onto his friend Phil Dodds, who turns out was not only in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but contributed a great deal to our culture in his short life, including, but not limited to, SCORM: From Wikipedia: He was the chief architect…

Fahrenheit versus Celsius

In my quest to learn to translate between Fahrenheit and Celsius quickly and accurately, I’ve put this handy calculator here to help me and also to enable me to cheat until I can do it on my own. Type a value in either field below and its equivalent will populate the other: FAHRENHEIT : CELSIUS…

Hero : James Burke

James Burke has the storytelling powers of the immortal. Here we can listen and see him discuss the thinking behind his work. Groovy, indeed. = c

Overlooked : Slackers in Nature

Earlier this morning, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about this research published in the NYT and I am so completely fascinated and thus fixated on it today: Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success….

They sure didn’t walk very far…

Last weekend, I watched In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary put together by Ron Howard about the Apollo missions to the Moon. Like a lot of us, I’ve always been extremely curious about all of these things and in my searching for more and more details, I found the pic below [click on…

Langer wins Millennium Award

MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer has won the Millennium Technology Prize, the world’s largest award for technology innovation. Langer was chosen “for his inventions and development of innovative biomaterials for controlled drug release and tissue regeneration that have saved and improved the lives of millions of people,” according to Technology Academy Finland, which gives the…

Houston, We Have a Coredump

Naturally, the astronauts aboard the ISS kept logs of all their activities while up there. We can read the logs thanks to The Laboratorium, brought to us since 2000 by James Grimmelmann. Thanks, Jim! The kinds of computer problems they experienced in space are interesting to read about if only because they are no different…