Quite a simplistic title for an extremely complex subject matter. Dr. Terry Wahls talks about how she tackled MS with her diet in ways medicine couldn’t. This is truly fascinating. I urge you to watch it.
My wife is studying Nutritional Therapy so I’m learning a lot more about this kind of thing, albeit in passive fragments from her. It’s startling how little we know or think about how our diet can address illnesses.
Fascinating Wired article about using open source data to predict the future. I won’t try to paraphrase what is fairly complex, but I will share an anecdote from the article that humanises one of the principals:
“In the 40s the allies routinely bombed rail bridges to disrupt supply lines into Nazi-occupied France. After a raid, though, the Royal Air Force couldn’t fly reconnaissance missions over the targets as they were considered too risky, so it didn’t know if a bridge had been destroyed.”
The article goes on to explain how some very public – and unlikely – data was subsequently used to solve the problem:
“By monitoring the daily prices of oranges on sale at various fruit stalls [they] were able to tell which supply chains had been affected. (Germans embedded in London were doing the same thing; unfortunately for the Nazis, they were under the control of SOE and were fed false information.) This is the difference between information and intelligence: information is the price of oranges, intelligence is knowing which supply chain has been affected.”
Below is a brilliantly constructed presentation from John Howard. It echoes lots of things I’m a passionate advocate of: seduction, gentle action-based persuasion and motivating people without asking for the world. And it’s put together into an effortless narrative. Which is appropriate, really.
Ben once told me that kids’ toys are a good place to look to get a sense of what emerging technologies are about to get commercially interesting. If it appears in kids’ toys, it’s getting cheap enough to mass produce. And toys are about (often silly) fun, so an idea is likely to be approved faster here than in an arena with more serious intentions. Sifteo is a good example.
Reading Bill Bryson’s At Home yesterday (at home) I discovered that this isn’t such a new thought after all:
“In Central America, the Maya also independently invented the wheel but couldn’t think of any practical applications for it and so reserved it exclusively for children’s toys.”
Who knows how accurate that is, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Boiled Frog Syndrome is based on…
“the premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.”
I read about it in this book (which is excellent) but lazily took the description from Wikipedia. It’s a concept/metaphor I’ve come across a few times recently, although mostly never named. Watch this truly phenomenal ten-minute talk by Dan Gilbert in which he applies the boiling frog syndrome to global warming as well as explaining other reasons we’re rubbish at tackling the most threatening forces.
I’m reading Alone Together. Mainly because I saw Russell was reading it. And anything that feeds his mighty brain must be worth a squizz. (Is that creepy?)
Anyway, I’m half way through, and squizz-worthy it is. My favourite bit so far is the below. The two quotes are describing teenagers’ usage of social networks. But it perfectly describes how brands are dealing with the social space too. Have a read and think about your brand or company. In fact, I’ll even bastardise the words to help:
“These young people [companies] are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. [...] They nurture friendships on social-networking sites and then wonder if they are among friends. They are connected all day but are not sure if they have communicated.”
It gets better:
“Their digitized friendships—so often predicated on rapid response rather than reflection—may prepare them, at times through nothing more than their superficiality, for relationships that could bring superficiality to a higher power.”
Boom. ‘Bring superficiality to a higher power’. Let that be a warning. A superficial approach to engagement does not become less superficial just because it lives in a potentially more intimate environment. ‘Connection’ does not equate to meaningful affiliation. Which also means more data does not (necessarily) equate to more meaningful measurement.
Wow, I blogged. Maybe it’s not dead just yet ;)
This is exactly the sort of idea I want to say I came up with. But, alas I didn’t. From my light research, I believe Jung Von Matt, in Germany created it with/for WWF.
Instead of ‘talking about’ saving trees (yawn), they’ve created a new file format: *.WWF
A WWF file is basically a PDF that can’t be printed. So by creating and sharing WWF files, people can express their support of WWF, propagate their message and actually impact on the amount of paper being used. The word genius is over-used these days, but I feel it’s deserved here.
The tough/interesting part will be trying to get people to use this file format long-term, which requires a wide-spread behaviour change. It will be most powerful if it genuinely becomes a part of culture. Otherwise it will only be effective as far as its novelty and ingenuity will propel it. I truly hope this gets used.
The Royal British Legion are doing an interesting thing to spread awareness and affinity about this year’s Poppy Appeal. They’re creating a celebrity video of two minutes’ silence, which they’re cleverly trying to get to number one in the charts as a music video.
I think this is a great example of how tweaking the cultural context of something can dramatically alter its impact. The video on its own is not that interesting or engaging (or original). The process [facebook group here] and potential event of slotting it in the charts ahead of Lady Gaga et al is very smart and could be incredibly powerful. Here’s a quick sneak peek:
You don’t always need new things. Sometimes you just need new ways to look at existing things.
Check out my pretentious title ;)
Actually it’s a quote from a smarter man than me, Steven Johnson, which make it OK. The article from which I nabbed the quote is well worth reading. It supports many of my beliefs about creativity – specifically that creativity is the disruption of established pattens of thought.
It was Edward De Bono – via the medium of paperback – that first introduced me to this notion. Many people seem to resent his mechanical description of creativity – as though dissecting it this way somehow erodes its romanticism. I don’t feel that way and it seems Steven Johnson doesn’t either.
De Bono describes the brain as a pattern-defining instrument; we make connections that quickly establish an on-going understanding and way of behaving. We then navigate the world based on our experience of it and can therefore restrict ourselves from discovering new ideas. ‘Lateral thinking’, a term coined by De Bono, is the forced departure from these established patterns.
Johnson also refuses to subscribe to the myth of the ‘eureka’ moment or the idea that creativity is something purely magical. He talks about ‘the adjacent possible’. “Coined by the biologist Stuart Kauffman, it refers to the fact that at any given time – in science and technology, but perhaps also in culture and politics – only certain kinds of next steps are feasible.” And he knows that the more ideas you are aware of and can cross-reference, the greater number of ‘next possible’ moves you have. His advice is simple:
“expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible.”
And I would just like to add: Fuck yeah.
If you like numbers and statistics and clever bastards then you’ll probably enjoy this story about the British intelligence during the second world war.
“The statisticians believed that the Germans, being Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they were produced. And this deduction turned out to be right. It was enough to enable them to make an estimate of the total number of tanks that had been produced up to any given moment.”
Read the full article and see how they did it.
