Mumpliments

No matter what you do, or how badly you do it, there’s always one person in the world who’ll be completely oblivious to any form of rational appraisal — our mums!

“Mumpliments” are the compliments we receive from our mums. You need them, and you want them, but you know as soon as you scratch the surface, the brief feeling of smug satisfaction is about as long lived as the half-life of Darmstadtium, and yet, how sad life would be without them!

When a Huntsman Drops onto Your Lap

Spiders, Australia and the danger of too little too soon

The Huntsman is a large, generally good natured, fleet-footed (90 cm per second) arachnid that loves hiding between very flat surfaces. In fact, we even had a charming female of the species living under a yellow raincoat that my dad affectionately called “Gertrude”. But despite the fact that it is neither particularly venomous nor aggressive, the Huntsman has been cited among Australia’s most deadly creatures, for one simple reason – it has caused the deaths of as many human beings as any Australian spider, without so much as raising a fang….but how?

The Huntsman’s penchant for enclosed spaces, and the fact that many an Australian has been known to leave the odd car window open during the blazing Australian Summer, has lead to a number of unfortunate tragedies among motorists.

Imagine you’re driving along, a beautiful summers’ sun shining brightly in your face. You reach up to lower the sun visor, when suddenly a ten-centimeter blur of abdomen and legs falls on to you lap. Understandably, the last thing most people would be concentrating on in that moment is the road, even more so if they are arachnophobic. You can count yourself lucky if you snap back early enough to veer back onto your side of the road.

To extend this to human relations, “Dropping the huntsman” can be interpreted as sharing information with people that is incomplete, out of context or premature, and which distracts or frightens them without offering either enlightenment or relief. Dropping the Huntsman can cause a knee-jerk shift of focus, with potentially detrimental consequences. Like telling someone they have cancer based on the results of a single test. We often find this happening in cafés and corridors – especially in a time of uncertainty such as the current economic crisis.

The long-term danger of partial, premature disclosure of information, even if the aim is to offer people as much transparency as possible, is the development of phobias of not only spiders, but cars, driving and even the road itself.

Sometimes, a little information can be a lot worse than none at all. After all, you can only see so much through a keyhole.

Shellous? Second Wormimation

Part two of our little claymation weekends. This time with sound effects!

Before the Chicken

This is a very short stop-motion animation I created with my kids tonight. It rephrases an age old question. Enjoy!

LEGO: Serious Play

Team Building often has very little to do with building, and much more to do with establishing pecking orders based on the ability of individual team members to assert themselves, and not on their ability to offer valuable contributions. Beyond all the usual lip-service of management seminars, LEGO Serious Play claims seminar attendees will find themselves “…building landscape models with LEGO bricks, giving them meaning through storymaking, and playing-out various possible scenarios, which deepens understanding, sharpens insight, and socially “bonds” together the group who “plays” together.” Using LEGO for team building really appeals to me, and I would love to attend one of these seminars. If anyone has attended please leave a comment! The site can be found under http://www.seriousplay.com/.

Syndication 2.0: Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes makes it possible to apply a host of filtering and sorting functions to a variety of information souces. If for example, you want to receive news about Science from multiple RSS feeds, you can create a simple “pipe” to aggregate your news items into one individual feed. If you only want news tagged with “Europe” or “media” or a combination of both, you can determine this as part of the feed as well. In fact, the pipes can become almost as compley and specific as you like, ensuring you only get content you really want. Aggregating feeds into pipes is an awesome next step in the world of syndicated, dynamic content. Check out the Website under http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/.

Crowdsourcing: Predictify.com

Whilst attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was quite astounded to see how effective a service like Twitter could be for getting answers to random questions fast. Of course, a certain critical mass of followers is required for it to work, but it actually works quite well. Taking this basic idea of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, Predictify.com is a site dedicated to “crowdsourcing”, or asking the many to predict answers to particular questions. You can even earn a little money by participating, and you can include witty comments on why you predicted a certain result, all displayed in a nice scatter-graph at the end. I personally think this is a “wicked cool” idea as they say, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of this approach in future in our private lives and in the enterprise.

newsmap: Brilliant visualization of Google News entries

If a picture paints a thousands words, how much information can you get in a glance? Well, a lot more than you get in your standard, somnial slideware exposes to be certain! The creator of newsmap probably asked himself the same thing when he put the site together and came up with a wonderful way of displaying the relationships between articles and related articles entered into Google News, offering deeper contextual insights into the data presented. Take a look at newsmap under http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/.

Edufire: Online Language Tuition

Today I gave my first Edufire session. Incredible service and set up for tutors and students of languages alike.  The Website itself is very intuitive and sports pretty much every major community tool you may want to use. Within minutes my profile was up and running, and a day or two later (today actually!) I’d completed my first session. The online video conferencing tool is a lot easier to use than most tools I’ve encountered in the enterprise, and the Web 2.0 functionality is reminiscent of similar communities like Facebook. Check it out under: http://edufire.com/.

LibriVox: Talking Books for Everyone

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. If you would you like to record chapters of books in the public domain, Librivox offers the opportunity to volunteer. All you need is a computer, some free recording software, and your own voice.