So, is gender a factor in the proficiency of generalist or specialist thinking? This amateur page, Hidden Talents, seems to think so, suggesting that women's brains are more balanced than men's brains. The webpage's author (whoever he is) says that this explains, among other things, feminine intuition and conversation. What do you think?

 
I am not useless. The hilarious cartoon comedy of Graham Roumieu.

 
What do we really lose when a language is lost or when a species goes extinct? Humboldt's Parrot is an excerpt from a forthcoming book titled Spoken Here: Journeys Among Threatened Languages and in it writer Mark Abley connects the two kinds of disappearance together. He eloquently touches on how within the next couple of generations, most of the world’s 6000 languages will vanish, due mainly to the unstoppable tide of English. The parallels that he draws with the plight of endangered species are quite remarkable and offer themselves as a very strong backdrop to his main thesis.

On a visit to the Canadian Rockies a couple of years ago, I recall dangling a hand off a walkway beside a natural pool in Banff National Park, eighteen inches above a bed of brown-green algae. A dragonfly skimmed the surface. The algae rippled in the wind. "Pond scum," you might say. Except that this particular scum contained a few diminutive snails: Physella johnsoni, the Banff Springs snail, which appears to survive in just five springs near the townsite of Banff. The snails occur only where foul-smelling, lukewarm water spills out of Sulphur Mountains springs and into ponds. With their tiny black eyes and their coiled, globe-like shells, the snails survive by feeding on algae. Even the largest of them are no bigger than a small fingernail. I could have scooped a few up in the palm of my hand.

If you were to dip your hands into the turquoise water while wearing mosquito repellent or sunscreen lotion, you would threaten a threatened species even further. Over the millennia, the snails have adapted to a delicate environment containing large amounts of dissolved gypsum, little oxygen and no artificial chemicals. Human swimming in the hot ponds  illegal now but tempting  has destroyed some mats of algae, and with them the snails' eggs. "Are snails just as important as grizzly bears?" asks a Parks Canada leaflet. "You bet they are!... Healthy populations of Banff Springs snails indicate the integrity of their unique hot-spring ecosystems. Its all just a matter of scale." The snails used to exist at nine springs in the area; from four, they have disappeared. Many other species of hot-spring snails once flourished in Europe and North America. Most of them are now extinct.

 
Here's a kinda dry economic article from The Economist (go figure) about the growing trend for public companies to "go private". The case for going private has always seemed like a far more sensible route for companies - especially creative companies - to take. Of course, there is a potential bonanza of funds to be had in public markets (the article claims that the private capital market is not that shabby either) but control and long-term vision are sacrificed to greedy brokers and short-sighted "analysts".

...whereas the bursting of the bubble is likely to depress demand for IPOs and mergers for years, it has probably made the case for going private stronger than it has been since the 1980s. In the 1990s, capital was available in effect free in the stockmarkets, and it was a foolish firm that did not get some by going public. Now, that capital has dried up. Many firms now trade at such depressed prices that it may be equally foolish to remain public.

 
The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. That's right, an "orchestra" of those old computer printers have been coordinated by a group of innovative Montrealers - an architect and a composer - to create some pretty impressive sounds. [The User], as these guys call themselves, claim to inhabit "the trailing edge of technology" where the "vantage point affords an excellent view of technology from behind".

 
One of the most destructive forces against ideas has been the coalition of music labels against new technologies, the internet, its listeners/customers, and the artists that actually make the music we all listen to. Wired has a great short article about how we will soon see The Year The Music Dies (and they also have a humanizing piece about the despised Hilary Rosen - spokesperson for the RIAA, the industry's backwards lobby group).

For years, the safest path to success in the music business has been to hunt the teen market. But by ignoring career artists at the expense of the latest trends, the labels have lost touch with wide swaths of society. Ultimately, Timothy suggested to me that night, the industry as we know it could vanish not so much because of technology but because few people over the age of 30 would care if it did. "I can't believe that the business I've spent my life with could be about to disappear," he said. "And I also can't believe it's happening so fast."

If the industry collapsed, as he predicted, would artists and listeners be better or worse off? After a brutally difficult transition musicians and fans might on the whole benefit. The star-making machinery may crumble, but people will still pay for music, whether it's live, licensed, or digitally delivered (at a competitive price). Look at the bluegrass and gospel circuits, which provide long careers and middle-class lives to some of America's greatest performers. Look at the techno bands that are winning an audience by selling their music to advertisers. And look at artists like Phish, Prince, and Wonderlick, who are trying to use the Internet to deal directly with their fans and bypass the middleman.

 
Brian Eno, musician and European, writing in Time about politics and America.

 
Seth Godin is In Praise of the Purple Cow. Ideas and innovations that are not just good but remarkable, because otherwise they don't really matter that much.

So it seems that we face two choices: Either be invisible, uncriticized, anonymous, and safe or take a chance at true greatness, uniqueness, and the Purple Cow. The point is simple, but it bears repeating: Boring always leads to failure. Boring is always the riskiest strategy. Smart businesspeople realize this and work to minimize (but not eliminate) the risk from the process. They know that sometimes it's not going to work, but they accept the fact that that's okay.

 
"Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, a gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all." -- Albert Camus, The Artist and His Time

 
It's a crude title for an article, but it's based off a similar title for a book so I guess that makes it alright. It's True. Asians Can't Think is a scathing Time Asia article inspired by the book Can Asians Think? by Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani. The article examines the East's so-called fundamental drawbacks in thinking when compared to the West. Sin-Ming Shaw posits that most of Asia's current scientific and economic models are based on Western brainpower and that rigid shooling systems and hierarchical career infrastructures limit Asian countries' abilities to think creatively.

The twisted Confucian philosophy passed on by generations has played a damnable role in denting Asian creative thinking. U.S.-trained physicist Woo Chia-wei, president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, believes the Confucian stress on order is a major obstacle to creative thinking that has sometimes affected even his own instincts. All important advances in knowledge involve substantial revision or rejection of an existing framework. Scientists call that a paradigm shift. Order for the sake of order is the opposite of creative thinking.

 
Measuring 0.9 by 0.9 millimetres it is the world's smallest book. "Chekhov's Chameleon" has 30 pages and three colour illustrations and is not much larger than a grain of salt. It is unreadable to the naked eye and, not surprisingly, it cannot be found at Amazon. The head librarian for the College-Conservatory of Music Library at The university of Cincinnati, Mark Palkovic, is the guardian of this miniscule book.

 
Outsourcing is of course a major aspect of creative services (and it is also becoming an increasingly important aspect of ideative services). As long as there are projects to work on and free agents or studios to work on them there will be outsourcing. Here are some of the main trends in this area, as identified by The Outsourcing Institute.

-Many companies are setting corporate policy and strategy to embrace outsourcing and to ensure consistency of the application of outsourcing across business units.

-Companies are placing greater emphasis on incentive compensation packages that focus on delivering cost effective and efficient services. Compensation plans are being revised to include the consideration of outsourcing as a part of the incentive package.

-There is an increase in requests to train and educate business units on the outsourcing process. This provides the empowered business units with the background needed to deliver the desired results to the organization.

-There is a growing desire to accelerate or "fast track" the outsourcing process by streamlining the process using developed tools, templates and guidelines while ensuring consistency of application and managing risk.

-More and more companies are going outside of their organizations to firms that can build the tools, templates and guidelines, and provide the knowledge transfer and retainer based services to help build internal competency.

-Many corporations are creating internal sourcing groups to develop tools, templates, and guidelines to empower business units to look at outsourcing as a viable alternative to delivering cost effective and efficient services. The key words here are "look at," not require or mandate.

-As part of the creation of this new internal business unit, organizations are taking a close look at managing the supply chain of service providers and including roles relative to that function. This becomes an even more important task as the relations with service providers encompass multiple years and services and separate outsourcing contracts could be negotiated with the same service provider in different parts of the globe.

-The new business unit also plays a greater role in governance. The unit participates in governance meetings and takes an active role in not only providing sourcing guidance, but in providing consistency of outsourcing contracts and service supplier management.

-Consistency is a key driver and objective. In this regard, organizations are creating repositories of information such as service levels, terms and conditions, responsibility matrices, contracts, service suppliers and so on, to assist the empowered business units with achieving the goals and objectives of considering outsourcing as an alternative to delivering cost effective and efficient services.

 
His name is Glenn Reynolds, he refers to himself as a "Renaissance dweeb," and his 'blog, InstaPundit, attracts 50,000 people a day, reports Noah Shachtman in The New York Times. That's amazing traffic, especially given that Reynolds posts his comments in his spare time, from home, in and around his job as a law professor at the University of Tennessee. The appeal, apparently, is a certain eclecticism, with entries on topics ranging across "gun control, nanotechnology, barbecue, campus intolerance, fears of terrorism, diet fads, war with Iraq, civil liberties, Hollywood blockbusters, electronic music, cloning cults, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the 2004 presidential race..."

(via Cool News of the Day)

 
Imagine that you and a friend are in a crowded Manhattan nightclub and have managed to secure a seat at the bar. There is a party of people at your back waiting to place their orders with the bartender. A young woman emerges from the group and leans up against you. She is attractive, well dressed, and hands you $10-very friendly. "Could you order me a shot of vodka and a bottle of Brand X?"

"Vodka and Brand X?" you ask, "What's Brand X?"

"Oh!" she replies nonchalantly, "It's an herb-laced energy drink. I mix it with my vodka. It keeps me hydrated so I don't wake up with such a hangover. It's really yummy too."

You pass the drinks and notice her friends-a lively group looking hip, happy and . . . hydrated, all holding bottles of Brand X, which they repeatedly mix with vodka. Throughout the night, you have continued exchanges with the group, and by last call, you are completely unaware of the fact that each member of the party has managed to communicate very subtly to you why he or she prefers Brand X to any other.

The next morning, you wake up with a terrible headache. Over a queasy hangover-helper brunch with friends, Brand X is understandably on your mind, and you mention the woman you met last night and why she drinks it. And your friends mention it to their friends, who mention it to their friends. . . . Mission accomplished. Little do you know that you were the target of an invisible form of marketing, courtesy of Big Fat, Inc.

Are You For Real?

 
The Coolest Small Company in America - it is an interesting headline that acknowledges the crucial importance of, and delicate balance to, growing big by staying small. This Inc. article, which chronicles the re-culturization of Ann Arbor-based food company Zingerman's, shows how establishing local ownership and management fosters the passion and drive necessary for a stagnant company to blossom again.

"The key was having partners who were real owners," says Weinzweig. "We wanted the passion. We wanted people who had visions of their own. Otherwise, whatever we did would be mediocre, and the whole idea was to elevate the quality of each element of the company."

 
Spike Jonze is so good he can even make Nicolas Cage seem like a good actor (twice). Jonze, perhaps our time's best example of a highly talented Renaissance man, once again puts forth something amazingly clever and original with his new film Adaptation. The story, written by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who also teamed up with Jonze on Being John Malkovich), is about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman writing a screenplay about Susan Orlean, the authour of the book (The Orchid Thief) that he is adapting for film - as he was actually to adapt for film. It's a confusing set up of characters but a brilliant mindbender of a plot about writing, books, movies, flowers, life, love and human evolution.

 
Here's book excerpt starring self-described marketing guru Jack Trout as both a CEO and an advice-giving genie emanating from a laptop PC. Jack talks with himself in Chapter 6, Are There Limits to Growth?, of A Genie's Wisdom: A Fable of How a CEO Learned to be a Marketing Genius.

"Most bad marketing is driven by that desire, which is in turn driven by Wall Street, which is in turn driven by greed. CEOs pursue growth to ensure their tenures, to increase their reputations, and to increase their take-home pay."

"Another problem is trying to be all things to all people. That growth strategy fritters away resources on side battles, resources that ought to be concentrated on the main event. Decisions are a lot simpler when you've got one thing on which to focus."

"When your business is more about great accounting than great products or great advertising, you're headed for trouble."

"Set realistic goals, which Frank Typer defined brilliantly as those that are 'Beyond your grasp but witin your reach.'"

"The more things you try to become, the more you lose focus, the more difficult it is to differentiate your product. Mark Twain said it best, 'I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.'" [But Mr. Trout, how can you differentiate if you're conditioned only to think same thoughts?]

 
If you are especially good at something are you a genius? That is the question tackled in a well-researched Atlantic article titled Our Genius Problem.

We live in a time in which all terms and traits are inflated, and even the standard size at Starbucks is a tall. But "genius" appears marked for special inflation, so much so that the term "overrated genius" has begun to seem like a tautology rather than a cautious qualification. What is a genius, anyway? And why does our culture have such an obsession with the word and with the idea?

The words we use shape the way we think. "Genius" has become too easy a word for us to say. The parallel here may in fact be addiction rather than religion: as a culture, we have become increasingly addicted to the idea of genius, so we are dependent on it for a certain kind of emulative high, an intoxication with the superlative. Nowadays it takes more and more genius, or more and more geniuses, to satisfy our craving. It may be time to go cold turkey for a while, to swear off the genius model to represent our highest aspirations for intellectual or artistic innovation. If we remind ourselves that what is really at stake is creativity and invention; if we can learn to separate the power of ideas from that of personality; then perhaps we will be less dazzled by the light of celebrity and less distracted by attempts to lionize the genius as a high-culture hero—as essence rather than force. It's not just another word that we need; it's another way of thinking about thinking.

(via IdeaFlow)

 
SomethingAwful.com has collected a series of (unaltered) photos that have been found on the web and that people have submitted in as "The Greatest Photo Ever". Clearly, that title is a bit of an overstatement, and indeed many of the selected shots are just plain lame, but there are a few of mild amusement. Something light.

(via Metafilter)

 
Humbled by a machine. Go to augustfish and scroll to the bottom, January 1st entry. It's just a small javascript chess match. It's tough. Give it a shot. Makes you realize just how much one plays off of a (human) opponent's mistakes.

 
Lesson #1: Work with others to achieve something great.
Lesson #2: Work with others unlike yourself to achieve something greater.
So writes Andy Lippman in All Together Now...

The amazingly rapid development of the Web, which moved like a tsunami across thousands of businesses and out into the world at large, took many hands—hands that were often unwittingly working in concert. Now we are at risk of being stuck dead in the water. Rather than working together in ways that benefit everyone, companies are delaying innovation because of a narrow, and misguided, sense of self-interest. The solution is, first, to understand what I call the wave theory of how major innovations occur. Then we need to form partnerships that will let us ride those waves together, in ways that help all of us. ...

In this connected world, there is no investment that will fail to help someone else at least as much as it helps you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest. Instead, it means you should look around for partners who are already halfway to where you want to go. If you’re General Motors Corp. and you want cars to be connected to the Internet, work with banks to turn cars into mobile automated teller machines. Work with drive-through restaurants to let people order from their cars while en route. If you want to install wireless Internet connections in airports, work with Starbucks Corp. and airline clubs, which have similar goals. (Mobilstar failed because it tried going it alone.) The only way to return to a climate of innovation and opportunity is to create another wave. And the only way to do that is by looking outside an individual business to potential partners.

 
Are you in the market for a big-time music or comedy act - like, maybe, Wilco or Dennis Miller or James Brown - to perform at your next college or private gig? Or perhaps you're just curious about whether they're available and for how much. Either way, you'll find the answer at Clear Channel's Artist Availability page.

 
How to Write Like a Wanker - lamenting the diminished state of English on the net.