Neil Gaiman’s morbid 1989 Christmas card gets transformed into a pop-up book

IN 1989, Neil Gaiman and Sandman artist David McKean collaborated on a 100-word Christmas card story titled "Nicholas Was." Since then, this story has been transformed into a short animated feature and this hyper-detailed pop-up book by Vimeo crafter Nomsa.

Nicholas Was... from nomsa on Vimeo.

http://io9.com/5871017/neil-gaimans-morbid-1989-christmas-card-gets-transformed-into-a-pop+up-book

Apple Loses Bid for Order in Effort to Block Samsung Galaxy

Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. lost a request for a court order in its bid to block sales of Samsung Electronics Co.'s 4G smartphone and Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer, according to a ruling that was posted on a court docket and then removed.

The iPad maker, in its lawsuit filed in federal court in San Jose, California, sought an order blocking Samsung from selling its Galaxy line of mobile devices products in the U.S. based on claims they violate Apple patents. The lawsuit is part of a legal battle between the companies being fought in 10 countries.

Samsung said in an e-mailed statement that the ruling confirms its long-held view that Apple's arguments lack merit.

“In particular, the court has recognized that Samsung has raised substantial questions about the validity of certain of Apple's design patents,” according to the statement. “We are confident that we can demonstrate the distinctiveness of Samsung's mobile devices when the case goes to trial next year.”

The two companies have filed at least 30 lawsuits against each other, according to Samsung. The conflict began in April, when Apple filed the San Jose lawsuit claiming the Suwon, South Korean company's Galaxy devices copied the iPhone and iPad.

More at:
http://news.businessweek.com/article.asp?documentKey=1376-LVMBE50YHQ0X01-6V6D73DTOQDBSF9LI8K52CBLH2

Introduction to TRIZ

A comparison between concept maps, mind maps, conceptual diagrams, and visual metaphors as complementary tools for knowledge construction and sharing

In this article, Novak's concept mapping technique is compared to three other types of visualization formats, namely mind maps, conceptual diagrams, and visual metaphors. The application parameters and the respective advantages and disadvantages of each format for learning and knowledge sharing are reviewed and discussed. It is argued that the combination of these four visualization types can play to the strength of each one. The article then provides real-life examples from such a use in undergraduate and graduate university teaching. The results provide first indications that the different visualization formats can be used in complementary ways to enhance motivation, attention, understanding and recall. The implications for a complementary use of these visualization formats in class room and meeting contexts are discussed and a future research agenda in this domain is articulated.

http://liquidbriefing.com/twiki/pub/Dev/RefEppler2006/comparison_between_concept_maps_and_other_visualizations.pdf

Is the crowd’s wisdom biased?

We present a study of user voting on three websites: Imdb, Amazon and BookCrossings. Here we report on an expert evaluation of the voting mechanisms of each website and a quantitative data analysis of users’ aggregate voting behavior. Our results suggest that the websites with higher barrier to vote introduce a relatively high number of one-off voters, and they appear to attract mostly experts. We also find that one-off voters tend to vote on popular items, while experts mostly vote for obscure, low-rated items. We conclude with design suggestions to address the “wisdom of the crowd” bias.

http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~vassilis/files/socialcomm09.pdf

Richard Feynman - The Relation of Mathematics & Physics. Part 1

The Six Thinking Hats

Maximise the Power of Your Brain - Tony Buzan

Do you need to come up with brilliant ideas? Or find inspired solutions to any problem? Tony Buzan is the world leading author and the top lecturer of brain and learning.  He has changed the lives of over 250 million people with his revolutionary system of MindMap.

So, What is a Mind Map? A MindMap is a thinking tool that reflects externally what goes inside your head. The MindMap was like a Swiss army knife to the brain: Anything I wanted to do in terms of thinking, contemplation, cognition, remembering and creating. The MindMap was the ideal tool for that. MindMap is straight forward and fun.We start in the center of a blank page, we connect branches to the central image and connect second and third level branches to the first and second, and so on.

The brain is radiant, it thinks centrally and explodes out in all directions.Branches are curved and taped rather than straight lined.  They are organic and free flowing as opposed to structured and uniformed. The branches of a MindMap are the reflection of the way brain thinks, so when you think of anything, if you think of a chair, you have your picture and then you have your associations of that.  The brain thinks by imagination and association.

The reason why traditional note taking in lists and lines doesn’t work actually is counterproductive; is because it doesn’t have these associations. If you don’t have associations, you don’t have connection, if you don’t have connection, you don’t have memory and you don’t have thinking.In a MindMap the branches are always curved, curvilinear.  The reason why: Nature is curvilinear. And if all the branches are straight, it is literally rigid, similar and therefore…  BORING. The brain will very quickly get unhappy with a whole bunch of rigid straight lines.  It gets absorbed and intrigued by the beauty of curvilinear.We add one word to each branch.

One of the important points in structuring a MindMap is to have one word per branch, why?   Because if you have one word, that one word, with all its associations is free.  If you put them together, you’re making it more rigid, and very simply, for example, if you’re mind mapping, and you wanted to put Tony Buzan.  If you put Tony Buzan, you stuck them together with glue.  But, if you put Buzan and then Tony, you’ve got the freedom to radiate out my father, my mother, my brother, the history of the name, etc. So, the single word per line gives you much more freedom, much more creativity, much more clarity.

Ideally, the length of the word should be the length of the branch, for the very simple reason that if this word here is then placed next to this word here, and the branch and the word of the same line in the meeting point, is very close, so the two words are, in space, close. They’re connected. If you get one word, little word here on a long branch and then a little word over here in a long branch, the words are disconnected.

We don’t use colors in notes traditionally because we’re told not to in school.  All the research says exactly the opposite should be sold.  We love color!   And studies in London University show that people who use color and image in their imagination, when they’re learning and trying to remember inevitably, do better than those who don’t.We use images throughout.  Throughout the MindMap there should be key words and key images, and if an image is easy for you to do, you know, instead of, instead of people, you can quickly just draw three little stick figures. The image is a picture; the picture is worth a thousand words. Another important point about the use of images, the use of associations is that all the great geniuses did that.

So, if you start to use associations, you start to use images externally; you’ll join the Pantheon of the great geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci, Leonardo did it! Darwin did it! Beethoven did it!  Every genius used image and associations and the MindMap is the process by which you can do that. It’s a genius tool!

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

RSAnimate www.theRSA.org Dan Pink, Drive

Our motivations are unbelievably interesting, I mean... I've been working on this for a few years and I just find the topic still so amazingly engaging and interesting so I want to tell you about that. The science is really surprising. The science is a little bit freaky. OK?

We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think. There's a whole set of unbelievably interesting studies. I want to give you two that call into question this idea that if you reward something you get more of the behavior you want. If you punish something, you get less of it.

So let's go from London to the main streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts the northeastern part of the United States and let's talk about a study done at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here's what they did: They took a whole group of students and they gave them a set of challenges. Things like memorizing strings of digits solving word puzzles, other kinds of spacial puzzles even physical tasks like throwing a ball through a hoop. OK, they gave them these challenges and they said to incentivize their performance they gave them 3 levels of rewards. OK? So if you did pretty well, you got a small monetary reward. If you did medium well, you got a medium monetary reward. And if you did really well, if you were one of the top performers you got a large cash prize.

Ok, we've seen this movie before. This is essentially a typical motivation scheme within organizations right? We reward the very top performers we ignore the low performers and other folks in the middle. Ok, you get a little bit. So what happens? They do the test. They have these incentives. Here's what they found out. 1. As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected the higher the pay, the better their performance. Ok, that makes sense, but here's what happens. But once the task calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward led to poorer performance.

Now this is strange, right? A larger reward led to poorer performance. How can that possibly be? Now what's interesting about this is that these folks here who did this are all economists: 2 at MIT, 1 at the University of Chicago, 1 at Carnegie Melanie the top tier of the economics profession. And they're reaching this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics which is that the higher the reward, the better the performance. And they're saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill it's the other way around which seems like the idea that these rewards don't work that way seems vaguely Left-Wing and Socialist, doesn't it? It's this kind of weird Socialist conspiracy. For those of you who have these conspiracy theories I want to point out the notoriously left-wing socialist group that financed the research: The Federal Reserve Bank. So this the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that's quite surprising seems to defy the laws of behavioral physics. So this is strange, a strange funny. So what do they do? They say... This is freaky. Let's go test it somewhere else. Maybe that 50 dollars or 60 dollars prize isn't sufficiently motivating for an MIT student, right? So let's go to a place where 50 dollars is actually more significant relatively.

So we take the experiment, we're going to Madurai, India. Rural India, where 50 dollars, 60 dollars whatever the number was, is actually a significant sum of money. So they replicated the experiment in India roughly as follows: Small rewards, the equivalent of 2 week's salary. I'm sorry, I mean low performance [received] 2 week's salary. Medium performance [received] about a month's salary. High performance [received] about 2 month's salary. Ok, so these are real good incentives so you're going to get a different result here. What happened though, was that the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the small reward but this time around, the people offered the top reward they did worst of all. Higher incentives led to worse performance.

What's interesting about this is that it actually isn't all that anomalous. This has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologists by sociologists and by economists, over and over and over again. For simple, straight-forward tasks, those kinds of incentives if you do this then you get that, they're great! With tasks that are an algorithmic set of rules where you have to just follow along and get a right answer "If-then" rewards, carrots and sticks, outstanding! But when the task gets more complicated when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking those kind of motivators demonstrably don't work.

Fact: Money is a motivator, at work. But in a slightly strange way if you don't pay people enough they won't be motivated. What's curious about, there's another paradox here which is the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough, so they are not thinking about money and they're thinking about the work.

Now once you do that, it turns out there are 3 factors that the science shows, lead to better performance not to mention, personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed: to direct our own lives. Now in many ways, traditional methods of management run afoul of that. Management is great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement which is what we want in the workforce today as people are doing more complicated, sophisticated things self-direction is better. Let me give you some examples of this of the most radical forms of self-direction in the workplace, that lead to good results. Let's start with this company right here, Atlassian an Australian company. It's a software company and they do something really cool. Once a quarter on Thursday afternoon, they say to their developers "For the next 24 hours, you can work on anything you want. You can work at it the way you want. You can work at it with whomever you want. All we ask is that you show the results to the company at the end of those 24 hours." and this fun kind of meeting, not a star chamber session but this fun meeting with beer and cake and fun and other things like that. It turns out that one day of pure undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software a whole array of ideas for new products that otherwise have never emerged. One day. Now this is not an "if-then" incentive.

This is not the sort of thing that I would have done 3 years ago before I knew this research. I would have said "You want people to be creative and innovative?" Give them a fricken innovation bonus. If you could do something cool, I'll give you 2,500 dollars. They're not doing this at all. They're essentially saying you probably want to do something interesting. Let me just get out of your way. One day of autonomy produces things that never emerge.

Now let's talk about mastery. Mastery is our urge to get better at stuff. We like to get better at stuff. This is why people play musical instruments on the weekend. You have all these people who're acting in ways that seem irrational economically. They play musical instruments on weekends, why? It's not going get them a mate. It's not going to make them any money. Why are they doing it? Because it's fun. Because you get better at it, and that's satisfying. Go back in time a little bit. I imagine this: If I went to my first economic's professor a woman named Mary Alice Shulman. And I went to her in 1983, and said "Professor Shulman, can I talk to you after class for a moment?" "Yeah." "I've got this inkling. I've got this idea for a business model. I just want to run it past to you. Here's how it would work: You get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20, sometimes 30 hours a week." Ok, she's looking at you somewhat skeptically there. "Oh, but I'm not done. And then, what they create, they give it away, rather than sell it. It's going to be huge." And she truly would have thought I was insane. All right, you seem to fly in the face of so many things but what do you have? You have Linux, powering 1 out of 4 corporate servers and Fortune 500 companies. Apache, powering more than the majority of web servers. Wikipedia...What's going on? Why are people doing this? Why are these people, many of whom are technically sophisticated highly skilled people who have jobs, ok? They have jobs! They're working at jobs for pay doing challenging, sophisticated, technological work. And yet, during their limited discretionary time they do equally, if not more, technically sophisticated work not for their employer, but for someone else for free!

That's a strange economic behavior. Economists who look into it "Why are they doing this?" It's overwhelmingly clear: Challenge and mastery along with making a contribution, that's it. What you see more and more is a rise of what you might call the purpose motive. It's that more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose partly because it makes coming to work better partly because that's the way to get better talent. And what we're seeing now is, in some ways when the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive bad things happen. Bad things ethically sometimes but also bad things just like, not good stuff: like crappy products like lame services, like uninspiring places to work. That when the profit motive is paramount or when it becomes completely unhitched from the purpose motive people don't do great things.

More and more organizations are realizing this and sort of disturbing the categories between what's profit and what's purpose. And I think that actually heralds something interesting. And I think that the companies, organizations that are flourishing whether they're profit, for-profit or somewhere in-between are animated by this purpose. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Here's the founder of Skype. He says our goal is to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place. Pretty good purpose. Here's Steve Jobs. "I want to put a Ding in the universe."

All right? That's the kind of thing that might get you up in the morning, racing to go to work. So I think that we are purpose maximizers, not only profit-maximizers. I think that the science shows that we care about mastery very, very deeply. And the science shows that we want to be self-directed.

And I think that the big take-away here is that if we start treating people like people and not assuming that they're simply horses you know, slower, smaller, better-smelling horses if we get past this kind of ideology of "carrots and sticks" and look at the science I think we can actually build organizations and work lives that make us better off but I also think they have the promise to make our world just a little bit better.

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci

Highly Successful People by Edward De Bono