"What's the point of listening to the safety instructions given by flight attendants? If there's a crash, everybody dies, right?" Wrong.
"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."
This Arcade Fire online video makes turns you into the producer. Fun!
Putting all sizes into perspective. A wonderful visualization tool.
An interesting video presentation from Google main OpenSocial evangelist mashing up social computing and the social graph. A must see.
"If children are to become readers for life, they must first love stories." Books for
early years,
middle years &
early teens.
"After it was swept away and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately , it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together." Great pics.
The Library has chosen about 3,000 photos from two of their more popular collections to show on Flickr. Through tagging, the community will help identify and categorize the content. Enjoy these wonderful
color photographs from the 1930's and 40's.
Iris just relaunched her website with new portfolio work in
identity,
print and
web. Congrats!
"Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine." (Thanks James!)
"Although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web."
20 traits, including sincerity, wholeheartedness, honesty and incorruptibility, "let it be known that you stand firm for what you believe in and that your morals, values and actions are not for sale. Don’t let outside forces corrupt the person you are."
"Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos."
A narrated large-format slideshow.
"Getting Seth in this flick is like suddenly growing an extra six inches in the crotch," said
Smith, who wrote the role especially for Rogen. "And as if that wasn't awesome enough, we scored the comedically and aesthetically gifted Elizabeth, too. Castwise, I'm now extremely well-hung."
"One solution was to create the simple cover convention of featuring a “portrait” style photograph of a dairy cow every issue."
Moo &
moo &
moo!
"So far this year, fishermen have pulled in only 12 percent of the 1,533-ton US quota, the worst of several years of steeply declining catches. This is signaling the collapse of a fishery once valued $19 million."
$675,000 for a 16-room mansion in the Bronx.
Full article.
"What's great about Virgin is that the sky's the limit. In fact, it's not even the limit because we have Virgin Galactic now! We don't even have a ceiling at this brand anymore.
Comedy by: Albert Einstein, Fredrick Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Plato, Winston Churchill, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Steven Colbert, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Dennis Miller, Jay Leno, Rodney Dangerfield, Sarah Silverman and Chris Rock.
"What's on family dinner tables in fifteen different homes around the globe? Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book 'Hungry Planet.'"
The world's first and only rotating boat wheel, a modern interpretation of the
Peterborough lift lock.
Photographs taken at low altitude between Hamburg and Cape Town.
"Any picture can speak 1,000 words, but only a select few say something poignant enough to galvanize an entire society."
A riveting read. "The goal of waterboarding is to simulate drowning without the actual drowning or inhalation into the lungs ... It's horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again."
"Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online."
PDF Mash this up with
Guy's predictions for 2008.
Wonderful designs in this "collection of 35mm Kodachrome slides of travel and marketing posters from the 1950's and 1960's."
"In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences."
"Experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects."
(Thanks Dave via Mitch's holiday card!)
"A sense of belonging or affiliation alone is not equivalent to a true sense of community. Achieving a real sense of community requires long-lasting reciprocal relationships and a mutual commitment to the needs of the community as a whole."
The
official National Geographic story is worth the read. Right up there with
Turtle and
The Rickroll other top memes of 2007 (thanks Rocketboom!)
10 tips, including "Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mindset and you look forward to every new day in a constructive way. Stress and anxiety, no matter whether induced by external events or by your own thoughts, actually kills neurons and prevents the creation of new ones."
Exploring the intersection of art, media, and technology with an
interactive SMS wall at
CaseCampToronto6. Thanks guys!
Every movie review they've done, search and stream.
The launch strategy behind
Blog Action Day, the one-day online
environmental movement last October 15.
"Only after researchers cut through its shell and counted its growth rings did they realize how old it had been —between 405 and 410 years old."
"The photos are poignant as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died."
Full article in the NYTimes.
"For every hour of baby-video viewing per day, children ages 8 to 16 months knew six to eight fewer words than those who watched no videos."
“Our attention gets quickly and automatically stuck on attractive members of the opposite sex ... If we’re jealous and worried about our partner cheating, attention gets stuck on attractive people of our own sex because they are our competitors.”
