The TeledyN Addendum

The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough? - 60 Minutes - CBS News

2010-03-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough? - 60 Minutes - CBS News: "Bloom boxes will power not just our richest companies, but remote villages in Africa and all our houses.

'In five to ten years, we would like to be in every home,' he told Stahl.

He said a unit should cost an average person less than $3,000.

'You are an idealist,' Stahl remarked.

'You know, it's about seeing the world as what it can be and not what it is,' Sridhar replied."

Billboard - Google Books

2009-10-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

Billboard - Google Books: "In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends."

Costa Rica Creates Department of Peace

2009-09-24T21:09:00.000-07:00

IMAGINE PEACE: "Costa Rica’s justice ministry was created to oversee the country’s penitentiary systems and supervise research on criminal behavior, but had no responsibility for crime prevention. A 1998 executive decree addressed this lapse by creating the National Directorate for the Prevention of Crime. The recent legislation takes crime prevention in a new direction, replacing the old directorate with the newly formed Directorate for the Promotion of Peace and the Peaceful Coexistence of Citizens.

“While we talk about prevention of violence, we are experiencing its effects every day. Changing the language and speaking about ‘promotion of peace’ lead[s] us to the roots of the problem,”

The ministry will take on new responsibilities, including peace promotion, violence prevention (for example, by targeting a recent increase of juvenile offenders), and an emphasis on conflict resolution.

“With this change in name, the focus on prevention of violence has been shifted to promotion of peace,” says Kelly Isola of the Rasur Foundation, the Costa Rican nongovernmental organization that proposed the law in 2005. Having a department of peace, she said, will enable Costa Rica “to benefit from international experiences, which demonstrate that a culture of peace has positive effects in the reduction of violence and crime.”"

How Organized Consumer Purchasing Can Change Business

2009-07-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

How Organized Consumer Purchasing Can Change Business from carrotmob on Vimeo.
The predictable reflex behaviour called "business sense" will fall for a ploy, every time. There's no trick there, its simple behaviour-mod, 2-4-6-8 Ring the Bell and Salivate ... a carrot on a stick. That part is easy, but the REAL trick is getting the shoppers to coordinate THEIR purchase reflex to hold the carrot's stick.

And I would give up all hope of THAT, had I not seen http://vimeo.com/2913530

Why do some governments work?

2009-06-03T08:35:00.000-07:00

What makes democracy work? (National Civic Review; Spring 1993, v82) Robert Putnam writes: "What explains why some governments work and others do not?"

"We considered many possible answers: wealth, education, party politics, urbanization, social stability, and so on. None of these answers fits the facts; none was directly correlated with government performance. The right answer surprised us, though it likely would not have surprised Alexis de Tocqueville, that astute 19th-century French observer of democracy in America: What best predicted good government in the Italian regions was choral societies, soccer dubs and cooperatives. In other words, some regions were characterized by a dense network of civic associations and an active culture of civic engagement, whereas others were characterized by vertical patron-client relations of exploitation and dependence, not horizontal collaboration among equals."

"Vertical patron-client relations of exploitation and dependence" -- oddly I'm reminded of my wondering about the thoughts of those final-days kings of Easter Island as they gave the order to cut down the last of their life-giving trees in a bid to win a one-upmanship contest -- there is a lesson on Putnam's essay, it is a lesson in intention: before we can move towards a better government, we, our citizens, businesses and policy makers, must intend to get there. Yes, for the astute readers out there who loath fuzzy 'new agey' stuff, that is correct, this is The Secret, but put a better way: habits follow intentions, results follow habits. Putnam's Choral Societies are more than just a passing Grade 10 glee-club experience, it is a recipe for a cultural infrastructure that needs to begin as young as possible, and must offer supporting infrastructure all through all the years that follow.

It is the everyday normalcy of the habit of the choral cooperation and trust that becomes the fabric of community credit:

The Renaissance was a direct consequence of the economic boom, which was a direct consequence of credit, which was in turn a direct consequence of the trust expressed in tower societies and choral societies. Civic engagement paid handsome dividends ... I originally thought that these fortunate communities had more choral societies because they were wealthy. After all, I thought, poor peasants don't have time or energy to spend singing. But if we look closely at the historical record, it becomes dear that I had it exactly backwards. Communities don't have choral societies because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they have choral societies -- or more precisely, the traditions of engagement, trust and reciprocity that choral societies symbolize ... None of this would appear in standard economics textbooks, of course, but our evidence suggests that wealth is the consequence, not the cause, of a healthy civics.

Robert David Putnam (born 1941 in Port Clinton, Ohio) is a political scientist and professor of public policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also visiting professor and director of the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (wikipedia)

Busking Owen Sound? Absolutely!

2009-05-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've been corresponding with Doug Cleverley over at the Owen Sound Special events office on the topic of their plans for a late summer busking festival, and in my bid to have this folded in to make Summerfolk Weekend a really-folk festive occasion for the whole of the town (which apparently would not please the GB'f'S, so they won't) I made the comment that I thought we should have buskers all the time in Owen Sound. And guess what ...

"there is absolutely no reason - including municipal bylaws - why buskers could not play downtown during Summerfolk, even if it's just a spontaneous, saloon-clearing kind of activity. In fact, few people realize that Owen Sound has a virtually open door policy on busking. It's allowed in any public area, as long as the busker isn't interfering with any business or impeding traffic, doesn't use offensive language, and isn't aggressively trying to get money (i.e. panhandling).

You might enjoy talking with Irwin Seidman, the DIA's new general manager - he's hoping the Busker Festival will help launch a new program that actively encourages busking downtown, if he can get support for it."

if you want to get involved and/or show some support, you can contact Doug at dcleverley (at) city.owen-sound.on.ca

The Strangest Species

2009-04-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

Humans: "Humans are arguably the most bizarre creatures in the animal kingdom. The proof is in the many gross, unnecessary, contradictory and simply inexplicable things we do. And of course we're different in our capacity to ponder all these oddities and sometimes figure a few out."

Oddles and oodles of links on everything you ever wanted to know (and some that you didn't) on what our best research has found about being a you.

Greenback Dollar

2009-04-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

How Lincoln Averted Financial Crisis: "legal-tender U.S. Notes or 'Greenbacks' represented receipts for labor and goods delivered to the United States. They were paid to soldiers and suppliers and were trade-able for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Lincoln's government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen"

When I was a little baby, my momma said,
"Hey, son. Travel where you will and grow to be a man
And sing what must be sung, poor boy.
Sing what must be sung.

And I don't give a damn about a greenback dollar,
spend it as fast as I can.
For a wailin' song and a good guitar,
the only things that I understand, poor boy,
the only things that I understand.

Goats in overcoats

2009-04-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

Mind Hacks points out this mindblowing item in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience: "A Roman chariot, the rider dressed in gold, flashed across the curtain several times. On the ward, tropical vines grew from the foot of her bed. A man stood with thick brown tree trunks for legs and thick green branches for arms. Nurses’ heads would shrink and then expand before melting into the floor. Brightly coloured fairies carrying wands invited her for walks around the hospital grounds."

Charles Bonnet Syndrome sufferers can experience complex colour patterns, images of 'little' people animals, plants or trees and inanimate objects that blend into the person's surroundings.

Given the astounding 17% prevalence of these illusions, I wonder if there may be corresponding phenomenon in other modalities, brushings by of ghosts on the arm, or vivid personal perceptions of phantom time, meter and pitch. While the cause is not yet known and there is no treatment beyond reassurance, the good news is the effect generally fades away after a few years.

the basic official theory explaining the visions associated with visual impairment like macular degeneration is that the brain, on receiving incomplete visual data through the eyes, 'fills in' the missing elements as best it can -- a kind of 'best fit' process. In fact, there is evidence that it is only the input of a constant visual stream through our eyes that prevents the brain making up its own imagery in any case.
[ Eye Spirits: Fortean Times UK ]

How to Speak Hip

2009-04-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome. Be hip. - Breathe. Prepare. Enjoy.

A Coming Paradigm Shift in (Online) Music

2009-03-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

FAßCINATED: "For starters, it seems to me that over the course of history very little of what we now think of as great music was produced specifically because the people making it were concerned about making the music a commercial success"

I know many of you have heard me say nearly this verbatim, and I know many who have rolled their eyes at it, but here it is, proof of the existence of at least two others out there who share my "naturally unpopular but important" point of view.

I'll go one farther too, and point out that all of the musics now considered marketably popular, be that hip-hop or baroque, bebop or troubadour, without exception all genres were pioneered by people who weren't in it for the money, and only later appropriated and exploited by the unimaginatives who were. Yes, I know, that's a pretty strong generalization, but I am open to any spectacular counter-examples.

Musicians' brains keep time--with one another

2009-03-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Scientific American Blog: "The synchrony was most prominent in the frontal and central parts of the brain that regulate motor function. 'Whenever synchrony of behavior was high, synchrony of brain waves were also high,' Ulman Lindenberger, a director the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, tells ScientificAmerican.com. But, 'we can't assign a causal role to that synchronizing.'

While brain synchrony during a duet seems like a given, it's a mystery how it happens, says Lindenberger, a psychologist. 'One could speculate that this may be related to mirror neurons, the capacity of primates and humans to imagine the action of the other person while performing actions yourself,' he says. 'The mirror neuron system could be active during synchronized guitar playing.'

Lindenberger says that inter-brain synchrony may also help explain humans' ability to engage in a host of other activities and behaviors that involve couples or teams, such as dancing, boxing, tennis and mother-child bonding. 'People have an extraordinary capacity to synchronize their actions,' he says. 'When two people concentrate on the same thing, gestures and head movements are highly coordinated and supported by brain synchronicity. We think what we are getting through music has wider implications and social bonding behaviors are part of those wider implications.'"

A further implication: the sum energy of adding waves increases as the square of the number of sources when the sources are in phase, which is to say when they are synchronized, yes, but also when those sources are proximally co-located, say, for example, on a small live stage. This seems a very strong case against any equivalence of sound and the subjective qualia of music, a myth that lead us to multitrack recording and replacing live musicians with pre-recorded sound as if they were the same; the broadcast psychic energy-wave of the canned and asynchronous performances simply could not gain anywhere near the same intensity as the living sound.

Canadian government eyes open source

2009-03-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

Canadian government eyes open source, asks for feedback - Ars Technica: "The government of Canada has issued an official Request For Information (RFI) on open source software and is looking for feedback and public guidance to help shape procurement policies. This move could be a prelude to broader adoption of free and open source software in the Canadian government's IT infrastructure."

The language used in the RFI makes it pretty clear that cost reduction is priority number one. It uses the broad term "NO CHARGE LICENSED SOFTWARE", which it defines as software that is open source or available at no cost. According to the RFI, Canada is exploring no-cost software options on the desktop as well as the server, in categories that include operating systems, office suites, and automation systems.

The RFI closed February 19, 2009, which means, like Copyright Reform, it likely safely escaped all detection (apparently CLUE missed it!). Which is probably just as well as the official Request Document really doesn't read like the Feds were eager to be good neighbour eager community participants in software, only just what we in the free-software world affectionately call leeches looking to save a buck. Nonetheless there was also the bit about new custom software being opensource (to taxpayers?) which mirrors what I had done with Bell Canada and the CBC back in the middle 90's, and given what's happening in France is it only a matter of time before the needs of their pocketbooks take sway over the wants of their pride.

Libertango

2009-03-12T15:02:00.001-07:00

So why would you want to put what you do on YouTube and give it away for free? You might want to ask Argentinia's Josefina Scaglione and how she got from Buenos Aries to be currently cast by Arthur Laurents as Maria in his latest production of West Side Story:

From the Wall Street Journal's article on January 9, 2009:

"She has this incredible, ineffable something," the director says. "She's trained as an opera singer, she's trained as a ballet dancer and she's trained as an actress. It's unbelievable in somebody that young."

This is the video that led to her discovery.

Making ads more interesting

2009-03-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

Official Google Blog: Making ads more interesting: "ads are a valuable source of information — one that can connect people to the advertisers offering products, services and ideas that interest them. By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers."

what this also means is now your experience of any given website's advertising will now become different from my experience on the same site; the adverts we'll see will still be driven by that site's content, but now become influenced by our respective surfing behaviours as tracked by the adsense we've seen elsewhere.

on the privacy side, no, Google isn't keeping track of where your cookie has been, but if you've gone on a binge of watching websites on how to separate U232 by whirling a bucket of Uranium slop, be aware that shadows of that interest might be detectable in the Visit Afghanistan! adverts your local MI5 agents will find when they check out your laptop.

to peek at and maybe pro-actively tweak what Google thinks you're like, you can visit your Adsense Manager and edit your cookie.

The Brain Beautiful

2009-03-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

TeledyN: "The objective is fine of itself, to work to be better tomorrow than one was today, to work to keep mentally acute and fit, to stay mentally agile and so save others the need to dote and care over your advancing years, or even so as to ensure the peak condition and progressive cognitive development for growing minds, from 8 to 80 as the boardgames used to say:

Participants play fitness games for about an hour per day on a computer, training their brains to react to certain stimuli faster, thereby speeding up the process of when nerve cells talk to each other.
[ Reality Sandwich | Brain Workout ]

But dig, before you shell-out the subscriber fee for your ticket to übermench-hood, I want you to know something: there is something very very wrong here, fundamentally wrong, epidemically wrong, culturally wrong, and needlessly wrong, and I'll tell you what it is ..."

And so begins the case for trading the suduko pads and Wii stations on a brand spankin' new clarinet, and why we should care. A re-tweet of a year-old post prompted by MooCow and VinylGirl who regrettably said they liked it; they should know by now, you shouldn't encourage me.

The Obama Song Project

2009-03-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

Weebly Site: "Her principal had given her two periods free from teaching to complete the project. She brought her iMac to work and set up a makeshift studio in her English office. By makeshift, she means she put her computer on her desk and plugged it in. There were no external microphones, mixing boards or audio interfaces. There weren't even earphones with a long enough cord to stand away from the computer (a student would lend her earphones later in the day -- the black ones seen in the video).

An announcement was made in the morning for singers to stop by the office throughout the day. Slowly but surely, students popped their heads in and started to sing. Weston is a school with 1300 students, so the odds of not knowing a student are higher than the odds of knowing. Some, Ms.Price knew by name; others, she was meeting for the first time.

Somehow, between the ringing of bells, making of announcements and daily interruptions, the song became whole."

Every year at Weston [Collegiate Institute in Toronto] , the African Canadian Leadership Committee, or ACLC (led by Chris Reid) organizes an assembly to celebrate Black History Month.

Every year Ms.Price-Farago, an English teacher at Weston, creates a video to open this assembly. This year's video broke the mold with the help of seventeen talented students who loaned their voices to heighten Obama's words.

East isn't East and West isn't West

2009-03-08T19:46:00.000-07:00

The cognitive fallacy of East is East and West is West: MindHacks review of Ed Yong's article in New Scientist which suggests that Kipling's twains of East vs West never existed in the first place

"Even more surprisingly, the article describes how these same cognitive tendencies are malleable - they can be changed in individuals by simply priming them with individualistic or collectivist concepts.

The article is a thought-provoking challenge to the East - West psychological stereotypes common in both the popular press and the scientific literature"

mirror mirror

2009-03-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

The Japanese Spider-Man

2009-03-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

You Really Haven't Lived Until You Have Seen The Japanese Spider-Man TV Show: "In this series, Spider-Man isn't some geeky, science loving, newspaper photographer, named Peter Parker. Oh no, he is a bad ass motorcycle racer named Takuya Yamashiro.

In true Japanese fashion, this Spider-Man doesn't waste his time taking on light-weights like 'The Vulture' or 'Doctor Octopus.' Japanese Spidey fights giant monsters with the aide of his 'Voltron-like' robot from space."

This explains a great deal about all those strange techie-vehicle Spiderman toys we see in the Wal-Marts.

Terry McBride on DRM

2009-03-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

Rollo & Grady - Los Angeles Music Blog: Interviewing Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group - "I didn’t see any purpose in locking down files; it made no sense to me. People have always been sharing music. Why would I want to stop them? Why would I want to tell them what to do? The way to win was to get them to support my artists, not to force them to do it a certain way. I know I wouldn’t like anyone telling me that."

“The future of music isn’t selling records. It’s selling music in every form imaginable.” As a result, he shifted the company’s focus to the Internet and digital distribution in order to market his clients’ music. Those changes have paid off.

The Tone Scientists

2009-03-01T07:55:00.000-08:00

"In the half-between world,
Dwell they: The Tone Scientists
In notes and tone
They speak of many things...
The tone scientists:
Architects of planes of discipline
Mathematically precise are they:
The tone-scientists"

Working long hours?

2009-02-28T08:06:00.000-08:00

Working long hours 'puts us at higher risk of dementia': "Middle-age workers doing more than 55 hours a week have poorer mental skills, including short-term memory and ability to recall words, than those clocking up fewer than 41 hours, a study has found.

The stress and exhaustion of long hours could be as bad for the brain as smoking"

Those doing the most overtime recorded lower scores in two of the five key brain function tests - reasoning and vocabulary. -- or dare I suggest that sub-standard reasoning and poor debate skills might themselves lead to the subject being hoodwinked (by themselves or others) into working those hours? As a monk once told me, "No one diagnosed of a terminal disease ever wished they'd spent more time at the office."

In what is maybe a related story on how animals may be smarter than we think, Daily Grail points out how it is your cat that spends the day lounging on your bed while its you that goes off to work.

The Devil & Michael Cleveland

2009-02-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

Wrath of the Grapevine: "Our Red-Horned Bogieman presented young Michael with the ancient Fiddle of Souls, strung with the strings of pity, of hope, of love, of joy, of death.

Not only was young Michael of Cleveland the only person in history to ever own this fiddle who did not have to give up his soul in exchange for it, but our unnasuming lad was also the only person humble enough to wield such a mighty instrument safely."

asimo

2009-02-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

Japanorama visits with two new additions to the Asimo line