Integrity in journalism? Public Editor for The New York Times Daniel Okrent puts forward a devastating critique of how his own paper handled the Iraq WMD story. Okrent unleashes a vivid self-criticism of The Times that really highlights the weight and folly that such media superpowers can deliver in shaping world events. A compelling read...

The Times's flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage. I use "journalism" rather than "reporting" because reporters do not put stories into the newspaper. Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through various editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine where they will appear. Editors are also obliged to assign follow-up pieces when the facts remain mired in partisan quicksand.

The apparent flimsiness of "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert," by Judith Miller (April 21, 2003), was no less noticeable than its prominent front-page display; the ensuing sequence of articles on the same subject, when Miller was embedded with a military unit searching for W.M.D., constituted an ongoing minuet of startling assertion followed by understated contradiction. But pinning this on Miller alone is both inaccurate and unfair: in one story on May 4, editors placed the headline "U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq" over a Miller piece even though she wrote, right at the top, that the discovery was very unlikely to be related to weaponry. The failure was not individual, but institutional.

(via MediaScout)

 
There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning. --Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)

 
Linking cell phone technology with urban cityscapes with an old video game with a playful match of tag: Pac Manhattan...

Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980's video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their "little world" of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger "real world" of street corners, and cities.

A player dressed as Pac-man will run around the Washington square park area of Manhattan while attempting to collect all of the virtual "dots" that run the length of the streets. Four players dressed as the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde will attempt to catch Pac-man before all of the dots are collected.

Using cell-phone contact, Wi-Fi internet connections, and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location and their progress will be broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world.

 
"People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas." This from Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who has forwarded an idea about "structural holes" — the notion that people can find opportunities for creative thinking where there is no social structure. Burt claims that creativity is an import-export game, not a creation game. As such, the process and orgnizational environment for an idea matters more than thinking up the idea in the first place.

Often the value of a good idea, he has found, is not in its origin but in its delivery. His observation will undoubtedly resonate with overlooked novelists, garage inventors and forgotten geniuses who pride themselves on their new ideas but aren't successful in getting them noticed. "Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it's largely irrelevant," Mr. Burt said. "The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it." ...

People with cohesive social networks, whether offices, cliques or industries, tend to think and act the same, he explains. In the long run, this homogeneity deadens creativity. As Mr. Burt's research has repeatedly shown, people who reach outside their social network not only are often the first to learn about new and useful information, but they are also able to see how different kinds of groups solve similar problems.

 
Summarizing some the results of their study in which MBA students had to build management groups that best accomplished a simple market share computer simulation game goal, Diane L. Rulke and Joseph Galaskiewicz of The University of London found that the quality of decisions is improved when all members of the group have access to information. Generalists are ideally suited to achieve this, they pointed out, because they have a better grasp of the larger picture. "Specialist groups were less successful in coming up with overall strategy resulting in greater market share when they adopted organizational structures that looked a lot like traditional organizations in which reporting relationships were in layers. Each layer reporting to the next layer and so on, limiting contacts."

Overall, groups composed of students with across the board working knowledge of marketing, finance and etc were the most successful in competing for market share. It seems that when information is shared to begin with, everyone knowing something about what others know, success is easier to obtain. Such groups where successful regardless of the structure adopted by the group. Working and communicating within layers was not a hindrance to student groups consisting of members with generalist knowledge. Since each member of the group has an understanding of the expertise of others in the group it is not necessary for them to communicate directly or learn from each other. Therefore, the formalized structure and resulting limited communication does not slow down such groups. When knowledge is equally distributed among members of a work group less communication is needed.

 
Proving that one can sell anything over the internet... Origami Boulder.

 
From a Mensch & Büro interview with Frenchman and former Ford and Volkswagen top dog Daniel Goeudevert:

What we especially need are generalists. Everyone in professional life will be able to confirm that a first-class education is certainly important, but not crucial in the final analysis. In my time as a manager I had quite a few “straight A” graduates from the very best faculties at my side, and they were all far technically superior to me with regard to academic ability. In terms of qualification they soared in icy heights — and frequently, despite expert knowledge, they were absolutely not up to the task in working practice. Motivating colleagues, convincing employees, providing a solid working atmosphere, assuming responsibility for others, coming to terms with setbacks. Nobody prepared them for that. And such competencies are indeed also not so easy to learn, and not even able to be taught like any other body of knowledge. But you differentiate between a good and a bad manager, a good and a bad politician. That’s why I consider the topic “education” to be a very pivotal theme for the future.

 
Fast Company editor John Byrne writes about how "design thinking" can help all of us reimagine the day-to-day practices of business. Welcome to the Design Revolution.

An essential part of this revolution is the idea of design as a metaphor for the future of work. We don't need to understand designers better, writes Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, in a recent essay. We need to be designers ourselves. We "need to think and work like designers, have attitudes like designers, and learn to evaluate each other as designers do," says Martin. "Most companies' managers will tell you that they have spent the bulk of their time over the past decade on improvement. Now it's no longer enough to get better, you have to 'get different.' "

What does he mean? We can't accept the notion that our dreams are constrained by our budgets. We have to believe, as designers often do, that nothing can't be done, that constraints merely increase the challenge and excitement. We can't be governed by narrow roles that limit our participation in creative work. We must be collaborative and iterative. And we can't derive our status from empire building, or managing a big staff or a big budget. Status is won by meaningful contribution, by personal fulfillment and growth.

 
Every man takes the limits of his field of vision to be the limits of the world. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

(via IdeaFountain, which also posted the following...)
Effective innovation is, at its heart, like 2 funnels placed end-to-end. Ideation is divergent, serving up both the mundane and the fanciful. Analysis and execution is convergent, finding out feasibility, tweaking things so they work, and making stuff happen. If you didn't try to have the random thought, you'd be stuck in a world of incremental innovation. How much fun would that be?

 

The difference between a designer and an art director is fundamentally the same difference between a specialist and a generalist. An art director looks after the bigger picture and leaves the minute details to their designer brethren.

Keep the bird’s eye view: Don’t get too wrapped up in the details. Work like a sculptor. Start with a large mass of ideas and refine from there — but keep looking at the whole through every phase of the project. Let the specialists work out the small details, and guide them subtly when necessary to keep everything on track.

 
For approximately 55,000 Euros and access to a freight helicoptor you could easily create your own penthouse rooftop pad with an amazing view of the city. Designed by studio aisslinger of Germany, the Loftcube project is an inventive architectural solution that takes into account a couple key issues:

What could a temporary, minimalistic domicile look like, to suit people of a nomadic lifestyle, living for short periods of time in large cities and dense urban areas, offering both sanctuary and social structure, and where might such temporary dwellings be built.

The second issue, obviously in reference to the city of Berlin, would posit that such structures would be contructed on the roofs of existing architecture. The endless flat tops of the postwar high-rises in the city and suburbs are an undiscovered treasure of sunlit property.

 
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back. -- Chinese proverb

 
Witness the absolutely unbelievable coordination and dexterity of the Japanese National Yo-Yo Team (13MB .wmv file). Too good!

 
The hunt is on for undiscovered bio-organisms that can be genetically modified for the purpose of manufacturing industrially useful products. Bioprospecting in deserts, arctic tundra and empty swatches of ocean has become a sport for big business, reports The Economist (Sea of Dreams). The nascent industrial biotechnology is banking on a microbiological revolution to build better amino-acid supplements, vitamin supplements, antibiotics, anti-influenza drugs, foundation creams for cosmetics and even the solid rocket-fuel that is used in air-to-air missiles.

Many people... see industrial biotechnology as the wave of the future—a phenomenon that will eventually rock entire economies. Whether this is the case or not, in the shorter term it does seem likely that industrial biotechnology will shake up the chemical industry. And it may provide a route to a future less dependent on fossil fuels, and one that puts less climate-changing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

 
From a Mirror interview with singer/songwriter Lhasa de Sela:

M: Without nomadic personalities like yours, human communities would simply build walls, not bridges. The wanderers are the ones who build those links, but at the same time I don't want to fault those who remain rooted in the same place. They're the ones who define that place, who give its particular character and history.

LdS: It's like flowers and bees, you know? The flowers have to stay put and the bees get to go around, taking sugar from all the different flowers. I get to be a bee! (laughing) I was just thinking, travelling in Europe is an amazing thing because there are no borders anymore, so you're just travelling along the road and all of the sudden, you're in a different country. You get out of the car and people are speaking a different language. You immediately feel that the culture's different, even if it's just between Belgium and Germany, where the people look kind of the same, all white and European and everything. It made me realize how there's history there, how people fought for that territory, for those lines to be drawn and to preserve their identities in those places.