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By: Scott Thompson on June 23, 2015 - 9:37pm - Add new comment
After 35 years of public service, longtime Beaufort County community services director Morris Campbell will retire Friday.
Campbell was honored during a recognition ceremony by County Council at its meeting on Monday in Beaufort that included comments from Councilman Bill McBride and former county school board chairman and longtime friend Fred Washington.
A native of Hilton Head Island, Campbell began his service with the county by serving two terms on County Council from 1981-84.
By: Scott Thompson on June 16, 2015 - 3:29pm - Add new comment
After initially endorsing it, Jasper County Council voted Monday to rescind support for an application for state funding for the Bluffton Parkway Phase 5B project.
Jasper County administrator Andrew Fulghum sent a letter Tuesday to S.C. Transportation Infrastructure Bank chairman Don Leonard and S.C. Department of Transportation Commission chairman James Rozier informing them of the panel's decision.
By: Scott Thompson on June 2, 2015 - 4:14pm - Add new comment
A proposal that would require all pit bulls and pit mixes in Beaufort County to be spayed or neutered and microchipped is currently making its way through County Council at the committee level.
County officials presented council's governmental committee Monday with the working draft ordinance that outlines the proposed change and also addresses nuisance pets and livestock nuisances among other issues.
By: Scott Thompson on May 20, 2015 - 2:04pm - Add new comment
As the contentious debate over whether Beaufort County should purchase 84 acres of Robert Graves' land north of U.S. 278 along the banks of the Okatie River continues, there are still concerns that the voting has been tainted by alleged conflicts of interest among two County Council members.
By: Scott Thompson on May 20, 2015 - 1:35pm - Add new comment
In case you missed it, the future of the traffic light at the entrance to Townes at Buckwalter along Buckwalter Parkway is uncertain and contingent on whether or not funding is secured for the realignment of the nothern intersection of Bluffton and Buckwalter Parkways.
By: Scott Thompson on May 19, 2015 - 3:48pm - Add new comment
Beaufort County's deputy administrator will no longer be performing double duty as county attorney.
Charleston lawyer Tom Keaveny started work Monday as the new county attorney, taking over for deputy county administrator Josh Gruber.
Gruber, who had served as county attorney since August 2011, was tapped as deputy county administrator in September after former deputy administrator Bryan Hill took the top post in James City County, Va.
Keaveny has over 30 years of legal experience and is a certified mediator and dispute resolution specialist, Gruber said.
By: Scott Thompson on May 12, 2015 - 12:41pm - Add new comment
It's a full agenda today, as Bluffton Town Council holds its monthly meeting 6 p.m. at Town Hall, 20 Bridge Street.
Council will take on the following items:
* Final reading of an ordinance regulating outdoor patios and cafes at Old Town restaurants.
By: Scott Thompson on May 11, 2015 - 11:40am - Add new comment
The possible purchase of the Pepper Hall tract off U.S. 278 will headline today's Beaufort County Council meeting in Beaufort.
Council will convene at 4 p.m. in its chambers at 100 Ribaut Road in Beaufort.
Council has been debating whether to purchase for $12 million 84 acres of Robert Graves' property in an attempt to control development there.
By: Scott Thompson on May 5, 2015 - 11:27am - Add new comment
Thirteen months after it was approved for relocation by a town committee, Bluffton's historic Graves House remains at its location on the corner of Calhoun and Allen streets, and the developer behind the project has still not announced a new spot for the century-old structure.
Developer Thomas Viljac has until June 15 to rehabilitate the house, which he owns, and obtain a certificate of occupancy from the town. Otherwise, he would have to request an extension or reapply to move it.
By: Scott Thompson on April 30, 2015 - 11:40am - Add new comment
Want to have your say on or learn more about the Beaufort County School District's proposed budget for next fiscal year?
The district is hosting two public forums next week for parents and citizens to learn more about the budget the Board of Education is crafting for the 2015-16 school year.
The first one will be held Wednesday in Bluffton High School's media center, 12 H.E. McCracken Circle, from 6-7 p.m.
The second will be in Battery Creek High School's media center, 1 Blue Dolphin Drive in Beaufort, from 6-7 p.m. on May 7.
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text: Lady Hamilton Hotel Hotel rating Quick Specs Commissions 10.0%Rates $114-$306Year Built 1630Year Renovated 2001 View Large Interactive Map Address Storkyrkobrinken 5 Old TownStockholm, Sweden 111 28 Web http://www.ladyhamiltonhotel.se Phone + 46 8-5064-0100 Fax + 46 8-5064-0110 Toll-free 800-223-5652 Email email@example.com OverviewMeeting SpecsPhotos & videosRatings & Reviews Description Boutique Hotel in building dating from 1550, refurbished to reflect 18th century period of Lady Hamilton, the hotel's namesake.Year Built: 1630Year Renovated: 2001Check in Time: 2:00 PMCheck out Time: 12:00 PMNumber of Floors: 4Total Number of Rooms: 34Rates: $114Commissions: Room Only 10.0% GDS Hotel Reservation CodesAmadeus GDS: WV STOLADGalileo/Apollo GDS: WV 53281Sabre GDS: WV 025834WorldSpan GDS: WV 7056Reps: Euro-Connection, Worldhotels Lady Hamilton Hotel Location & NeighborhoodIn Stockholm. Vasterlanggatan. In the old town of Stockholm, Gamla Stan. Lady Hamilton Hotel Rates & PoliciesLady Hamilton Hotel rates are Daily in USDStandard: $114 Suite: $306 (USD) Credit Cards Are AcceptedReservations must be guaranteed with a credit cardMeals: No Meals IncludedDeposit Policy: Release at 4 pm day before arrival if not guaranteedCancellation Policy: 4 pm day before arrivalHotel Discounts offered: Group discountGovernment/ Military discountTravel Agents 10.0%Airline Personnel Nearby AirportsBromma (4.75 miles northwest)Arlanda (22.75 miles northwest)Hasslo (53 miles northwest)More Airports » Lady Hamilton Hotel Room AmentitiesLady Hamilton Hotel amenities are in All rooms unless noted otherwiseDaily Maid ServiceMini-BarFree NewspaperRooms for Non-smokersTelephoneVoicemailCable/Satellite TelevisionTelevisionInternet Access (High Speed & Wireless) (additional fee) Guest ServicesCar RentalConcierge ServicesCrib/Rollaway BedCurrency ExchangeLaundry/Dry Cleaning ServiceMulti-lingual StaffPaid Onsite ParkingRoom ServiceCommon Area Internet Access (High Speed & Wireless) (additional fee) Security ServicesSmoke Alarm in RoomsValet Parking Service Nearby SightseeingRoyal Palace (20 meters east)Storkyrkan (Largest church) (20 meters east)Skansen (1.86 miles east)Nobel MuseumJunibackenMore sightseeing »DiningBistro Emma (Onsite)Djurgardsbrons SjocafeVerandaEthiostarJai Thai FoodMore dining options » Nearby RecreationBicyclingBoating/SailingCasinoFishingHealth ClubHealth Spa/MassageHot TubJogging TrailsPool (Indoor Pool, Outdoor Pool)Shopping Mall/AreaTennis (Indoor Tennis, Outdoor Tennis) Lady Hamilton Hotel Meeting Rooms & Events3 Meeting Rooms holding 16 people.K1Location: Floor 1Flooring: tileCapacity: , Banquet- 16K2Location: Floor 1Flooring: tileCapacity: , Banquet- 8 Lady Hamilton Hotel Business ServicesA-V EquipmentBusiness CenterCopierPersonal ComputerFaxMeeting FacilitiesAdministrative ServicesMeeting Room Internet Access (High Speed & Wireless) (additional fee) Lady Hamilton Hotel Images, Videos, & Virtual Tours Photos & Videos Lady Hamilton Hotel LobbyLady Hamilton Hotel RoomLady Hamilton Hotel RoomLady Hamilton Hotel RoomLady Hamilton Hotel RoomLady Hamilton Hotel RoomLady Hamilton Hotel RestaurantLady Hamilton Hotel RestaurantLady Hamilton Hotel SpaLady Hamilton Hotel OtherLady Hamilton Hotel OtherLady Hamilton Hotel OtherLady Hamilton Hotel OtherLady Hamilton Hotel Other Images Powered by VFM Leonardo travel42 Review for Lady Hamilton Hotel Want to read the full Lady Hamilton Hotel travel42 Review? For access to this review as well as 10,000 others, visit www.travel-42.com or call 1.866.566.8136 to subscribe. In Old Town opposite the Royal Palace, this charming old-fashioned hotel resides in between its siblings in the ranks; the modest Lord Nelson is a basic budget stop, while the more elegant Victory Hotel will appeal to those thin search of a traditional hotel with authentic patina and more attentive service. If any hotel could be called flirtatious, then this is the one. It is rife with figureheads, coy statues and photo murals; like its namesake, the hotel (named for Lord Nelson's mistress) c... Subscribe to travel42 to read the full review » Copyright (c) 2015 Northstar Travel Media, LLC. travel42. Nearby Stockholm Hotels More Nearby Hotels Scandic Hotel KlaraBest Western Capital HotelClarion Hotel AmarantenElite Hotel ArcadiaElite Palace HotelFirst Hotel Royal StarHotel Birger JarlHotel DiplomatHotel EsplanadeHotel RiddargatanHotel RivalLord Nelson HotelMornington Hotel Stockholm CityPark Inn by Radisson Stockholm-ArlandaRadisson Blu Royal Viking HotelScandic Hotel Jarva KrogScandic Hotel Kungens KurvaScandic Hotel MalmenScandic Hotel ParkScandic Hotel Bromma Hoteliers! Is your listing up to date? With over 130,000 hotels in our database, no other source compares to our depth of information. Click here to review and be sure the travel professional knows your hotel's latest details.

subset: commoncrawl


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Can someone help me? Simply put, on dichroic enlargers, is the cyan dial always at one specific setting (zero or another) or is it changed in conjunction with the yellow and magenta dials? Thanks for your valuable help.
Printable View
Can someone help me? Simply put, on dichroic enlargers, is the cyan dial always at one specific setting (zero or another) or is it changed in conjunction with the yellow and magenta dials? Thanks for your valuable help.
Assuming you are referring to B&W printing it should be at the 0 setting.
For B&W printing, on most enlargers all three C,M,Y are set to zero. What may be confusing is you can adjust the settings for different grades..that said, I am not aware of any dichro head that needs Cyan to ever be set...but have no experience with any head other than Beselar. Check the insert that comes with the paper or check the mfg web site for settings (read as guide line).
Good Luck.
With dichroic color heads cyan is not used because it represents only neutral density to the light path. The only two filtration channels used are magenta and yellow. The yellow channel would be for softer contrast printing and the magenta channel would be for higher contrast. These can be varied in relation to each other or used separately in split contrast printing.
Based upon the responses the assumption is the question pertains to B&W. I'll assume the opposite.
For colour printing you can achieve colour balance with any combination of 2 of the three filters: Y+M, M+C, Y+C. My understanding of why Y+M is the preferred choice is because cyan is a denser filter and will add more exposure, but it is just as usable as Y or M.
At times you may find a neg that requires more red than you have available with Y+M and therefore will need to employ all 3 filters.
Cyan can not be used as a ND filter in colour printing unless a corresponding amount of M and Y are added. Simply adding cyan will cause the print to be redder. I assume that when printing B&W cyan acts as nd.
Some enlargers come with a nd dichroic filter.
Hope that helps
If you are printing colour negative there will be times that you will require to use cyan filter to achieve the colour balance you want.(cross process negatives come to mind) This will be in conjunction with either the yellow filter or magenta filter (but not both) using all three filters will only add neutral density.
For cibachrome printing we generally using the cyan and magenta filters as a starting pack. cfk usually and also the new universal paper.
For Black and white you should only be using the magenta or yellow filter
more magenta will increase contrast.. adding yellow will lower contrast
Bob Carnie
Not quite. Depending on how much color correction is necessary, cyan may be added to increase the effect of yellow and magenta correction. I've done a bit of work where the model was illuminated with the light through a color transparency projected with a Hasselblad PCP 80 projector. The bulb in this puppy is rated at something like 3600 Kelvin, but after the light passes through the transparency, that is really no longer relevant. The film used is Agfa Optima 100 - balanced for daylight - 5500 Kelvin.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Carnie
Printing is done with all three filters: yellow and magenta are not enough by themselves.
sorry , for colour negative printing one uses two filters not three as using all three will just add nuetral density. You are right you can use three filters and we would use three if printing with a thin negative and wanted to get the lens apeture and time back to a workable time and optimum lens apeture. Otherwise balances are acheived easily with two filters.
I believe you are mistaken
Bob Carnie
In theory and practice any colour can be attained with the use of only 2 filters. When the third is used you generally only increase density and or the amount of red (if the cyan is the third and it isn't compensated) in the print. There is one exception (that I know of) when a third filter, cyan in this instance, may be employed or needed. That exception is when the range of the other two needs to be eclipsed.
The thing is though, one or both of the other two filters has to be set to zero so essentially you are only using 2 or 1 filter.
As an obvious example: yellow is at 0, magenta is at 0 and there is a need for 20 points of red. Other examples where cyan is needed whilst the other two are still being 'used' is when more magenta is required and yet it is already set to 0, adding equal amounts of yellow and cyan would create more magenta; or if yellow is at 0 and yet more yellow is required equal amounts of both m and c would be added.
Cross processed chromes, particularly fuji, and daylight film shot in harsh man made light (bars or nightclubs) are the two examples that come to mind.
OK --- I'll try:
First... "Been There - Done That ..."
Most -- if not all modern color negative materials have a built-in color bias... That is why there is a definite "orange cast" (actually, dark yellow) to the negatives when they are held up to the light. This bias eliminates (remember we have to think through the negative - positive frame) the need for a LOT of cyan filtration - in most cases - all of it - in printing.
If the ambient light in exposure deviates enough from that expected... say a 3600K projection lamp used with 5500K "Daylight" film, the - compliment of cyan - yellow bias will NOT be enough (remember: negative) to eliminate the need for all cyan filtration in printing. There will be a need for more than can be handled by the "bias".
I've read this a number of times. Terribly "choppy" but it makes sense to me.
In practice ... I start as usual - using a ColorStar 3000. From the image of a gray card, I'll modify the magenta and yellow filtration - until I run out of room ...I'll be at 00 filtration and still not achieve balance. Next, I'll add 30cc (or so) of cyan, and start all over.
So far, I haven't failed to "balance out" a negative.
BTW - this is just one reason I do my own color printing.


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WEBSITE OF THE DAY - idealhomemagazine.co.uk
Anything planned for the weekend?
If you're of a certain age and inclination, it's safe to say you might be thinking about doing a little home improvement.
Just in time for the weekend, those stylish people at Ideal Home Magazine have launched their new shopping site.
If you have a website that you want to tell us about email us via the feedback form.


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Amy Wielunski
The record flooding this month affected tens of thousands of residents in the Southern Tier, with damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Two special Community Conversation programs addressed the floods of 2011, with updates from Conklin, Binghamton, Vestal, FEMA and more.
Clay Ellis, NYSEG
Bernie Marchuska, Marchuska Brothers Construction


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|Blog Posts
I'm not a big fan of soup served at the beginning of a meal, as an appetizer. The truth is, I don't understand the point of appetizers in general. Are they supposed to whet your appetite? They usually subdue mine instead.
Sure, I've heard the suggestion that you should eat soup in order to fill up and eat less of the main course. This is the kind of diet advice I find annoyingly counterproductive. I don't want to trick myself into eating less. I want to eat exactly as much as I need.
Besides, contrary to popular belief, you really can't fool your body with such gimmicks as drinking a big glass of water before meals, using smaller plates, etc. Maybe you can fool your brain, but sooner or later, your body catches on and you feel hungry, and what do you reach for? Nothing as nutritious as what you would have eaten at dinner.
Soup as a main course, though -- that's another matter entirely!
It takes a bit of chopping and fussing to make a good hearty soup, but in exchange for that small time investment, you now have something delicious and healthy to eat for days afterward. Homemade soup in the fridge or freezer is like money in the bank. Break out soup for a nearly instant dinner, lunch, or even breakfast. Put it in a spill-proof container and bring it to work. I like to take along a Thermos of soup on long car trips -- it's a much better choice than anything I can find to eat on the road.
The crucial element that turns a soup into a main course is some form of protein. A plain vegetable soup, as delicious and healthy as that sounds, won't keep you satisfied over the long haul. Definitely incorporate plenty of vegetables, but also include a protein source such as chicken, sausage, fish, tofu, or beans.
Of course, you can also get your protein from a side dish -- peanut butter and crackers, for instance, or a grilled cheese sandwich -- but we're asking soup to cover all the bases here.
In the curried squash soup below, red lentils contribute protein, squash offers vitamins and antioxidants, while garlic and ginger add their germ-fighting warmth. This recipe is adapted from one that appeared in the dearly missed Gourmet magazine.
Curried Squash and Red Lentil Soup
1 Tb. olive oil
1 Tb. butter
1 medium butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 Tb. grated fresh ginger
1 tsp. salt
1 Tb. curry powder
6 cups water
1 cup red lentils, rinsed
squeeze of fresh lemon juice
Heat oil and butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add squash, onion, carrot, celery, garlic, ginger, and salt, and saute until vegetables are soft, 10-15 minutes.
Stir in the curry powder. Add water and lentils, bring to a boil, and simmer, covered, until lentils are tender to the point of falling apart, about 40 minutes (this thickens the soup).
Stir in lemon juice and season to taste with salt and pepper. Makes 6 servings.
© Make Friends With Food
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Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball
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A material includes a first film layer that carries an electric charge, a second film layer secured to the first film layer to form a pocket and a volatile substance disposed in the pocket.
1. A material, comprising:
a first film layer that carries an electric charge;
a second film layer secured to the first film layer to form a pocket; and
a volatile substance disposed in the pocket;
wherein the first film layer is electrostatically attractable to a surface.
2. The material of
3. The material of
4. The material of
5. The material of
6. The material of
7. The material of
The present invention relates generally to films, and more particularly to a film material.
A web or sheet of material is often used to protect a surface and/or one or more items that may be disposed on the web or sheet. For example, paper has been used for many years to line shelves, drawers and other surfaces of articles.
The paper may be plain (i.e., uncoated), coated and/or adhesive-backed. Paper or other material has also been used as placemats or as a table covering.
Another example of the use of a web or sheet is as a protective covering on other, larger structures, such as a dropcloth on a floor or a liner in a trunk of a car or on a bed of a truck. These products typically must be sufficiently durable to withstand foot traffic and/or other forms of abuse, although less durable materials (e.g., paper) may be used as temporary protective coverings.
Mix U.S. Pat. No. 1,151,895 discloses a sanitary kneading board wherein a quantity of parchment paper is unwound from a roll and placed atop the board to completely cover the surface thereof. Similar arrangements are disclosed in Johnson U.S. Pat. No. 1,952,375 and Hoel U.S. Pat. No. 2,369,898, although the wax paper is used instead of parchment paper in the latter.
Pollock U.S. Pat. No. 5,193,793 discloses a mixing board wherein a plurality of stacked plastic sheets are disposed on a top surface thereof. Each of the plastic sheets has a backing of pressure sensitive adhesive binding the sheets together. A user may mix a compound on a top sheet and may thereafter peel off the top sheet and dispose of same so that a clean surface is provided for subsequent use.
A number of arrangements have been developed wherein an electrostatically charged sheet is used to secure an article to a surface. For example, Henley U.S. Pat. No. 5,970,638 discloses a transparent electrostatic vinyl sheet and a cover film wherein an object, such as a dried and pressed flower, is tightly sealed between the vinyl sheet and the cover film to create a sealed ornament. The sealed ornament may be applied to a non-porous surface and the electrostatic film maintains the ornament in position thereon. Other arrangements utilizing electrostatic sheets to mount objects are disclosed in Arbisi U.S. Pat. No. 5,826,851, Baryla U.S. Pat. No. 4,741,119, Saetre U.S. Pat. No. 5,102,171 and Rubino U.S. Pat. No. 4,992,121.
Peck U.S. Pat. No. 5,899,010 discloses a reusable banner system including a sheet of plastic material and a plurality of flexible static cling vinyl indicia that may be placed on the sheet of plastic material to form a message. The indicia are maintained in position on the sheet of plastic material by the electrostatic charge carried by the indicia. In an alternate embodiment, the sheet of plastic material carries an electrostatic charge and the indicia are made of nonporous plastic.
Stonehouse U.S. Pat. No. 5,010,671 discloses a flip chart comprising at least two sheets disposed in overlying relationship. The sheets are electrically charged and are releasably securable to a surface by static cling. The sheets are adapted for removable marking thereon by a felt pen and are retained on a backing board by staples. Each sheet may be torn from the staples to permit removal of the sheet from the flip chart.
Boyd U.S. Pat. No. 5,207,581 discloses a writing apparatus including flexible electret film that is capable of being erasably written upon by a dry erase marker. The apparatus includes a roll of electret film disposed in a receptacle, brackets for mounting the receptacle to a wall or flip chart stand and a cutter for separating the film into sheets.
Cooledge et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,258,214 discloses a thermoplastic film material having a preprinted image thereon and provided with a static electrical charge for securing the film to a surface. The material may be packaged as sheets or in roll form with perforations to permit separation thereof.
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, a material includes a first film layer that carries an electric charge, a second film layer secured to the first film layer to form a pocket and a volatile substance disposed in the pocket.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, a material includes a first film layer that carries an electric charge, a second film layer secured to the first film layer to form a pocket wherein the second film layer has an opening extending therethrough and a volatile substance disposed in the pocket. Other aspects and advantages of the present invention will become apparent upon consideration of the following detailed description.
Referring now to
The thickness of the film material 10 is in a range encompassing up to approximately 8 mils, with a range of approximately 0.5 to approximately 5 mils being preferred, the range of approximately 1 to approximately 4 mils being more preferred and the range of approximately 1.5 to approximately 3 mils being most preferred. Further, the film material is preferably charged by application of a positive or negative electric field of at least approximately 15,000 volts thereto at an approximate distance of between � inch and 1 inch, with at least approximately 20,000 applied volts being more preferred and at least approximately 30,000 applied volts being most preferred substantially at a distance of � inch. If desired, the material 10 may be exposed to a positive electric field on one side thereof and a negative electric field on the other side thereof wherein the magnitudes of the applied fields are as noted above. In alternate embodiments, the film material 10 is exposed to the same polarity fields on opposite sides thereof (i.e., a first side of the material 10 is exposed to a first positive field and a second side of the material 10 is exposed to a second positive field or first and second sides of the material 10 are exposed to first and second negative fields, respectively.). In addition, the material 10 preferably retains a charge sufficient to develop an electric field at a voltage substantially equal to at least approximately 1500 volts at a specified time after charging of the material, such as three months or more. More preferably, the material retains sufficient charge to develop an electric field at a voltage of at least approximately 2500 volts, and most preferably at least approximately 3500 volts, at least for the period of time between the initial application of charge to the film material 10 and the longest anticipated time to use by the consumer.
The film material 10 of
The support surface is preferably of a suitable material and construction to provide static attraction with the film material 10. Ideally, the support surface provides sufficient support to the film material and the item(s) 14 to permit safe and efficient processing thereof. When processing of the food item(s) 14 is complete, the film may be removed from the support surface 12 and may be recycled or disposed of, preferably after first folding and/or wadding the film material 12 in such a manner so as to capture food particles and juices therein. Also preferably, the charge carried by the film material 10 is of a magnitude such that the film material 10 is restrained against significant movement during processing of the item(s) 14 thereon, yet easy release of the film material 10 from the support surface 12 can be accomplished, when desired. Specifically, the film material preferably exhibits a moderate to high resistance to shear forces but a relatively lower resistance to a peeling force. Also, the resistance to shear forces is preferably not so great as to prevent any lateral adjustment of the position of the material 10 once it is placed on a surface. Thus, the material 10 can be placed on a surface and the position thereof may be adjusted, and thereafter the material 10 is retained in position by the electrical charge carried by the material 10. As a result, the material 10 can be written on or items can be processed and/or moved on the material 10 without substantial lateral movement of the material 10, yet the material can be readily repositioned or peeled from the underlying surface, when desired.
The film material preferably comprises a monolayer or multilayer structure of any suitable polymer material(s) formed into a film, such as an olefin (e.g., polypropylene or polyethylene), nylon, PET, Teflon, or any other family of chemicals capable of being formed into a film and/or may comprise non-oriented, oriented or biaxially oriented materials. The film alternatively may comprise combinations of such materials in different layers that are coextruded or laminated or otherwise joined together.
In the preferred embodiment of the invention, the film material 10 is extruded into a web and wound onto one or more large master rolls. The film material 10 is thereafter unwound from the master roll(s), passed through any commercially available electrostatic charging machine and immediately thereafter formed into individual user rolls. Each roll is supplied to the end user, who preferably cuts or otherwise trims the material to a desired size and/or shape. As seen in
The foregoing manufacturing technique results in less handling by manufacturing personnel, as compared to a technique wherein the extruded film is wound onto a large master roll, and the master roll is thereafter electrostatically charged in bulk and the charged film is unwound from the master roll and wound onto individual rolls or formed into individual sheets. This reduction in handling results in better charge retention and improved film quality. Also, the foregoing technique results in production of amounts of ozone that are within acceptable limits.
If desired, the film material 10 may be charged while in the semi-molten state, thereby forming an electret having internal charges in the film structure. Specifically, this aspect of the present invention comprehends the steps of forming a molten thermoplastic material into a web, electrically charging the web while the web is at a temperature substantially at or above a solidification temperature thereof, cooling the web below the solidification temperature thereof after charging and winding the web into individual rolls immediately following the cooling step. The web may be of single layer or multi-layer construction, wherein the latter may be accomplished by coextrusion techniques. Preferably, the method comprehends the use of a charging machine similar or identical to the charging machine 26 described above which is located downstream of an extrusion die that extrudes the thermoplastic web. After charging, the semi-molten material is allowed to cool, either by exposure to ambient conditions or by active chilling by a chiller roll. One or both outer surfaces of the web may be corona-treated to permit marking by a marking device. Thereafter, the cooled web is preferably immediately rolled onto individual user rolls and packaged.
During charging, the material 10 is exposed to a positive or negative electric field preferably when the film temperature is just greater than the glass transition temperature TG for the material 10. Also preferably, the semi-molten material is exposed to at least approximately 15,000-17,000 volts at an approximate distance of between � inch and 1 inch, with at least approximately 20,000 applied volts being more preferred and at least approximately 30,000 applied volts being most preferred substantially at a distance of � inch. If desired, the material 10 may be exposed to a positive electric field on one side thereof and a negative electric field on the other side thereof wherein the magnitudes of the applied fields are as noted above. In alternate embodiments, the film material 10 is exposed to the same polarity fields on opposite sides thereof, i.e., a first side of the material 10 is exposed to a first positive field and a second side of the material is exposed to a second positive field or first and second sides of the material are exposed to first and second negative fields, respectively.
This technique, as opposed to the electrostatic charging described above that creates surface charges in the material 10, results in a more stable retention of electric charge over time and with exposure to ambient conditions. Also if desired, the film may initially be charged when partially molten and thereafter may be passed through a charging machine after solidification of the material 10 just before winding into individual rolls as noted above to obtain a product with a combination of internal and surface charges.
Regardless of whether the film is charged only when partially molten or charged before and after solidification, the resulting film preferably has at least the electrical charge retention characteristics specified above. That is, the resulting film material 10 preferably retains a charge sufficient to develop an electric field at a voltage substantially equal to at least approximately 1500 volts at a specified time after charging of the material, such as three months or more. More preferably, the material 10 retains sufficient charge to develop an electric field at a voltage of at least approximately 2500 volts, and most preferably at least approximately 3500 volts, at least for the period of time between the initial application of charge to the film material 10 and the longest anticipated time to use by the consumer.
The film material 10 may be colorless or pigmented and may be transparent, translucent or opaque, as desired. Referring to
Still further, the material 10 may be printed on one or more surfaces thereof. Also, the film material 10 may be perforated at one or more locations 39 (
According to a further embodiment, the film material 10 is identical to the embodiment illustrated in
If desired, the material 10 need not be electrically charged.
The present invention is not limited to the concept of providing a material that may be used as noted above. For example, the material 10 may be used to line one or more shelves 50 or drawers 52 (
As further alternatives, the film material 10 may include one or more openings or apertures therethrough and/or the material 10 may include pigmented and non-pigmented areas and/or electrically-charged and non-charged areas, as desired. Thus, for example, a rectangular piece of film material 10 may include an outer portion comprising a frame which is electrostatically charged and which is corona treated to accept removable or permanent marking thereon and a central portion which is clear or which has an opening therethrough. The material of the central portion (if any) may be electrostatically charged or uncharged. The resulting product is particularly suited to hold a photograph, drawing, painting, greeting card, or other object to a windowpane or other substrate (vertical or non-vertical) such that the photograph, drawing, etc. . . . is visible through or at the central portion. In the case of applications where the film material 10 is to hold an object to a vertical surface and where either portions of or the entire sheet (including any central portion) is electrically charged, the film material 10 preferably (although not necessarily) carries an electric charge sufficient to enable the material to hold a weight of a separate object at least equal to the weight of the film material 10. In alternate embodiments, the charge is sufficient to allow the material to hold a weight of a separate object greater than the weight of the film material, for example, a weight at least equal to three times the weight of the film material.
According to still further alternative, a sheet of the film material 10 may include outer margins that retain electric charge, such as an electrostatic charge. The sheet may be folded on itself such that portions of the outer margins are placed into contact with one another, thereby forming a pocket that may enclose an object. If desired, the entire sheet may carry an electric charge or portions of the sheet other than the margins may carry an electric charge. One or more surfaces may optionally be treated as noted above to permit permanent or removable marking of such surface(s) by a marking device, such as a dry erase marker. As in the previous embodiments, the film material prevents the transmission of bacteria and fluids between the surfaces of the material.
Yet another embodiment of the present application comprehends an electrically charged sheet of film material as described above in connection with any of the previous embodiments, wherein the film material 10 is treated and/or modified in some fashion to apply a desired substance having a desired property thereto. For example, a quantity of electrostatically charged film having a surface that may be treated so as to be capable of being marked by a dry erase marker may further have one or more portions coated with a volatile substance, such as an insecticide, a bactericide, an antimicrobial agent and/or a fragrance. The film may be liquid impermeable and may be trimmed to a desired size and placed in contact with a surface (such as a top surface, undersurface or side surface of a shelf, table, drawer, etc. . . . ) such that the film is attracted to and retained on the surface. The substance thereafter volatilizes to release same into the ambient surroundings. Optionally, an item may be processed on the film, provided that the item is not adversely affected by the volatile substance.
If desired, the substance may be a substantially non-volatile liquid, such as an oil, or a solid material or article, such as a printed sheet of paper, fabric, plastic, etc. . . . In this case, the substance may be irremovably secured to the film material 10, or the substance may be removable therefrom. In the latter case, the film material 10 may serve as a transfer carrier that carries the substance until the film material 10 is applied to a surface, whereupon the substance is transferred to the surface and is retained thereon by any suitable mechanism. Such mechanism may include electrostatic attraction resulting from electric charge transferred to the substance by the film material 10. An alternative mechanism may comprise adhesion resulting from making one or more surfaces of the substance sticky. In any event, the film material 10 may be peeled from the surface, leaving at least some quantity of the substance on the surface.
Alternatively, a volatile material or other substance or article may be retained in or by a structure carried by or secured to the film. For example, as seen in
A still further alternative is a design whereby a pouch is formed of a material (whether one of the materials described above or any other material), either by folding the material upon itself or by securing two or more pieces of the same or dissimilar materials together to form one more pockets, and securing the pouch by any suitable means (e.g., heat sealing, adhesive, coextrusion, co-lamination or the like) to a section of a film that carries electric charge as described above. One or more objects may be disposed in the pocket(s), including a pad impregnated with a substance as described above. The material of the pouch may be vapor permeable an/or may include one or more openings extending therethrough. One or more holes covered by removable members may be provided as in the preceding embodiment. The resulting product may be placed and used as described in the preceding embodiment to expose the impregnated substance to ambient surroundings.
In any of the foregoing embodiments, the desired substance may be a repellant and/or toxic to one or more undesirable organisms, creatures, etc . . . Thus, the desired substance may comprise an antimicrobial composition, an insecticide, a bactericide, a herbicide, an animal repellant, or the like. Alternatively, the desired substance may be an attractant (such as a fragrance as noted above) or a substance that encourages growth or multiplication of one or more organisms. Of particular interest in this regard are scents and other air quality control active ingredients and insect control ingredients, including insecticides, repellants and other insect behavioral and/or developmental modification ingredients. Any of these substances can be applied to the film material 10 by any suitable means in addition to those described above, such as a composition which is printed directly on the film material 10, a woven or non-woven fabric or other material impregnated with the substance and laminated or otherwise joined to the material 10, etc . . . . The substance may therefore be dispensed without messy and/or sticky residue. One example of such a substance release arrangement is a 10 inch by 10 inch 2 mil polypropylene film with 100 milligrams of transfluthrin or other insecticide or active applied thereto. Other insecticidal compositions may instead be used in this manner. The resulting material may be supplied in sheet or roll form, and in the latter case, the material may be torn or cut into a desired size by a cutter bar or other implement as described above. The material may alternatively be perforated to allow ready separation into individual sheets, also as noted above. The material may be placed on a substantially horizontal undersurface or any other surface of an object, such as a tray, table countertop, drawer, shelf, a substantially vertical surface, etc . . . , whereupon the volatile substance volatilizes to release an active ingredient into the surrounding environment.
If desired, any of the foregoing embodiments may be adapted to be utilized with a heater that heats the film material 10 either to initiate or accelerate the release of the substance into the surrounding atmosphere. A fan may instead or in addition be used to initiate/accelerate substance release.
Yet another embodiment comprehends a structure including two or more compartments or pockets secured to the electrically charged film material 10. For example, as seen in
Any of the features of one of the embodiments disclosed above can be combined with one or more features of one or more other embodiments disclosed above. Thus, for example, an electrically charged sheet of polymer material as described above having the above-noted charge retention and holding characteristics may be coated or impregnated with a volatile substance, such as an insecticide or fragrance, and, if desired, one or both surfaces of the sheet may be treated to permit permanent or removable marking of such surface(s) by a marking device, such as a dry erase marker. The material may be supplied in sheet or roll form, and in the latter case, the material may be torn or cut into a desired size by a cutter bar or other implement as described above. The material may alternatively be perforated to allow ready separation into individual sheets, also as noted above.
Numerous modifications to the present invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art in view of the foregoing description. Accordingly, this description is to be construed as illustrative only and is presented for the purpose of enabling those skilled in the art to make and use the invention and to teach the best mode of carrying out same. The exclusive rights to all modifications which come within the scope of the appended claims are reserved.
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The Federal Trade Commission challenged the merger
The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in the U.S.
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j2 Global Inc.
), a leading provider of unified messaging capabilities, is
continuing with its buying spree as its subsidiary Ziff Davis
Inc. announced the acquisition of NetShelter from inPowered.
NetShelter is the biggest technology related publisher, dedicated
to consumer electronics, computing and mobile communication
Notably, NetShelter has over 150 consumer and business tech
sites including the very popular AndroidCentral.com that provides
reviews related to
Google Inc.
's (
) Android OS (Operating System) and Macrumors.com that collects
news related to
Apple Inc.
's (
). The sites generally create 40,000 articles per month and
nearly 16 billion ad impressions every year.
j2 Global possesses a global network of publishing partners
and delivers local content in 10 languages across 40 different
countries. According to ComScore, combining Ziff Davis'
technology sites like PCMag.com, Geek.com and Toolbox.com with
Netshelter's sites will make it the largest media publisher in
the technology space.
This is the fourth acquisition by j2 Global in the last four
months after it acquired IGN Entertainment from
News Corporation
) in February, MetroFax Inc. in March and Netherland-based Backup
Connect BV in Apr 2013.
Significantly enough in Nov last year j2 Global acquired
privately-held digital media company, Ziff Davis Inc. for a total
consideration of about $167 million. Delaware-based j2 Global
believes that the combined portfolio of the acquired assets will
create a very powerful content producing company and thereby
allowing its marketers to address a larger group of audience.
j2 Global exited the first quarter of 2013 with a strong cash
position of $310.1 million and revenues of $113.6 million, up
31.0% year over year. Although j2 Global has not divulged
any financial terms of the NetShelter transaction, it believes
that the acquisitions will not have any material impact upon its
We believe that this is a strategic acquisition by j2 Global,
aiming the young tech-friendly customers, which in turn will meet
the advertiser's target of getting a desired viewer base of
substantial size.
Currently, JCOM carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
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A reader of our story on the GSA IG's report criticizing managers for intervening in contract negotiations said the IG was right, writing: The GSA IG has properly addressed a serious problem, which has nothing to do with OFPP's excellent work in clarifying permissible communications in the presolicitation phase [in it's Myth-Busting program]. Interference in the course of negotiations by program or acquisition management not only undermines the warranted Contracting Officer responsible for the award, but will leave the offerors on the other side of the table in doubt regarding the Government's real intentions.
Mark Rockwell responds: I found several people in the procurement community who said they slapped their foreheads in amazement at the level of detail and overall tone of the memo. Most said the IG acted rightly, but kind of harshly. It was the tone, including sharp exchanges between federal contract managers and staff, that took some by surprise. Seeing those kinds of exchanges in print, they said, tends to make everyone take a step back. In a procurement environment where the government is trying to encourage pre-solicitation interaction between private contractors and contracting personnel, it could be counterproductive.
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Three-time Federal 100 winner is leaving government in July.
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Senate bill carves out exemption for supercomputing and other lab IT; an earlier version of the measure would have exempted the entire Department of Energy.
OPM is partnering with CSID to try to manage the fallout from a massive breach of some 4 million federal personnel records.
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In an exclusive interview, Jimaye Sones, who was Defense Information Systems Agency comptroller from 2005 to 2013, says he was reassigned after revealing questionable accounting practices at the agency.
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After two months on the job studying DOD's cybersecurity and IT needs, Secretary Ashton Carter is set to unveil a new Pentagon cyber strategy in Silicon Valley.
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text: An interview with Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced former Penn State coach, will air on the Today Show on Monday. Sandusky is now serving a 30 to 60 year prison sentence, convicted of 45 counts of child sex abuse. His actions, and the coverup that resulted, rocked Penn State to its foundations and tarnished both the school and its legendary head coach, the late Joe Paterno.


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« June 2009 | Main | August 2009 »
July 31, 2009 at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
From Doonesbury:
Bernie: I believe that's the secret of my success, Mike. I never ever thought outside the box!
Mike: Wow! Really?
Bernie: Yup.... Of course, it helps if you own the box.
Mike: I would imagine.
Turns out Douglas Rushkoff was right-- you should get back in the box!
July 30, 2009 at 11:40 PM in Quotes | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Interesting concept: Tweet The Future. It looks like it's relatively simple: from what I can tell, it searches Twitter for tweets with the word "future" in them.
Of course, by focusing on things that explicitly mention the future, it misses tweets that are about the future but don't use the word-- drkiki's forecast that "1000 dollar genome sequencing will be here in under 5 years" can't be caught by the filter, and only one of twenty recent tweets by IFTF actually uses the word "future"-- but it's an interesting start.
Don't know the creator, but perhaps I should. He's in the neighborhood. And he's actually onto something useful. Some friends of mine and I have been talking about creating a system that would aggregate futures-related material from blogs, Twitter, del.icio.us, etc. We've been calling it "social scanning," as it would basically be a Web 2.0 upgrade to the scanning that all futurists already do. (I talk about the concept in greater depth in my recent think-piece on the future of the field.)
July 30, 2009 at 11:10 PM in Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A cautionary tale for meeting facilitators and organizers everywhere:
Thousands of employees were evacuated from an office complex after an employee spotted a suspicious black box with lights, wires and a timer in a conference room, and called for help.
Employees streamed out of the JPMorgan Chase & Co. offices in Columbus, Ohio - only for investigators to figure what the device was: a timing device used to keep presentations short....
Several people were overcome by summer heat in the parking lot during Tuesday's evacuation and were treated by paramedics.
July 30, 2009 at 10:57 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
It's things like this that make me think that I should disconnect my computer and go back to writing letters on nice stationary.
And I was just about to start thinking nice things about Tweet the Future.
I'm going back to thinking about how to apply Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Linked Web to improve the lives of disorganized professionals (not ones who are personally disorganized, but professions that aren't connected together very tightly by gatekeeping institutions, training programs, journals, etc.). And I may not come back.
July 30, 2009 at 10:40 PM in Web / Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Just watch it, if you haven't already.
As Ron Miller comments, "This is a fascinating talk and what jumped out at me was how excited he was about all of this. Rather than being jaded after after 20 years in the field, he's genuinely pumped to take this to the next level."
July 30, 2009 at 02:25 PM in Web / Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Alpinekat (of the Large Hadron Collider rap) is back, this time with a Rare Isotope Rap:
I'll be very disappointed if this doesn't evolve into a CD.
[h/t to Mask of Eris]
July 29, 2009 at 04:38 PM in Music, Science | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
An idea I can really relate to, on parenthood and personhood:
It's true that we ought to make it easier to parent because that would be good for children, and therefore good for society. But there's another claim about parenting that feminists since Friedan have been pretty bad at making, and that is that it's good for parents. Not having liked myself much as a child, I didn't know how to love children until I became a mother. Mothering my children, I mothered myself, and shed a layer of callowness. My children's fiercely animal bodies brought me alive to my own. And when I watched them see all the things I had trained myself not to see—poverty, racism, sexism, filthy public spaces—I felt responsible and ashamed. In short, I flourished, in the Aristotelian sense of the term: I became more politically aware, more physically attuned—more human.
July 28, 2009 at 11:03 PM in Parenting, Quotes | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Paul Graham has a nice post on the different ways managers and "makers" divide up time:
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting.
When I read this, I thought, this explains why I found meetings so disruptive to my days. I'm a pretty social person, but I find myself increasingly aware of the need to create large blocks of time during which I can really get into a subject, and planning my days so all calls and meetings are loaded into a certain period, rather than spread throughout the day.
Graham's essay also echoes the distinction E. P. Thompson made in his classic article "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," between time-oriented work and task-oriented work, in his famous article on time consciousness in the early Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial work, Thompson argued, was task-oriented: whether you worked in the fields or town, the rhythm of your working day wasn't determined by a clock, but by Nature and the work you needed to get done. With the rise of the factory system, and the growing specialization of labor within factories, the rhythms of work were defined not by organic tasks, but by machines and the factory itself: you worked a certain number of hours a day, and then you stopped. Work was no longer task-oriented, but time-oriented.
Of course, there are types of work that have always remained task-oriented, even when we're measuring or regulating or standardizing them using time. Cooking is one. Parenting is another. Babies are as demanding as any factory-owner, but as any new parent will tell you, they run very much on their own clocks. But today, when the two are at odds, task-orientation loses out to time-orientation: managers set meeting times for subordinates, some of whom are likely to be young mothers. As Judith Schulevitz argues,
The politics of time are hugely significant for women because the temporality of motherhood is strictly at odds with the temporality of work... Motherhood follows not just a pre-industrial schedule but a biological one as well. (The two are related.) Women have to have their babies before they become infertile, and once their children are born, they have to meet their needs then, not later. As we learn more about the psychological and physiological benefits to a baby of being soundly attached to a mother or father figure, the importance of love for brain development, not just personality formation, we get an ever clearer sense of the cost to children of depriving their parents of the means to spend time with them, especially when they're young. Under current social arrangements, however, motherhood and fatherhood clocks clash with most career clocks, so parents who spend that time often pay a high price for doing so.
One of the things I think I'm going to have to do more ruthlessly is control my time: not just "manage" it better, but think more clearly about what kinds of time I need. I've done this pretty well for space and other resources, but time is something that I've tended to think of merely as a scarce but relatively undifferentiated resource. High time, as it were, to figure out how I can better balance tasks and time, and the different kinds of discipline required to satisfy each.
July 28, 2009 at 11:01 PM in History of science / STS, Work | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Really interesting piece in the New York Times on studies the military is conducting on why some people have a better sense for danger than others.
The study complements a growing body of work suggesting that the speed with which the brain reads and interprets sensations like the feelings in one's own body and emotions in the body language of others is central to avoiding imminent threats.
"Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it," said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. "Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we're conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us."...
So what are the factors that seem to affect the ability to detect problems early?
Experience matters, of course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.
Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.
Studies of members of the Army Green Berets and Navy Seals, for example, have found that in threatening situations they experience about the same rush of the stress hormone cortisol as any other soldier does. But their levels typically drop off faster than less well-trained troops, much faster in some cases....
The men and women who performed best in the Army's I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a "Where's Waldo" type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations....
Veterans say that those who are most sensitive to the presence of the bombs not only pick up small details but also have the ability to step back and observe the bigger picture: extra tension in the air, unusual rhythms in Iraqi daily life, oddities in behavior.
Of course, this is a different scale of futures thinking where I work, but I always wonder whether there are things we futurists can take away from such studies that would improve our work, or help us heighten its impact.
July 28, 2009 at 02:57 PM in Future, Science | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
One of the more exciting things I worked on when I was at IFTF was a project with Kitchen Budapest, an innovation lab in Hungary that Anthony and I kind of stumbled across. I've been using their fantastic presentation tool Prezi for a while, and it's now getting some well-deserved attention.
They just released a player that lets you embed Prezis in Web pages. This is a presentation I made on the use of Prezi at the Institute:
from prezi.com
I've been waiting a while for this functionality, and am glad it's finally out!
July 28, 2009 at 09:22 AM in Web / Tech, Work | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
William Shatner reads Sarah Palin's resignation speech as poetry (listen for the bongo drums).
Thanks to Balloon Juice for costing me several minutes of productivity this morning. Though the best commentary is from Gawker:
It's like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.
And she wrote this speech! In advance, on paper! What does any of it mean? It is amazing. Twenty years ago she could competently descibe a dog race, three years ago she could articulate a position on the abortion issue, and this weekend she composed a resignation speech by throwing culture war stock phrases into a hat and dumping it upside down on a copy of The Paranoid Style in American Politics [ed: great book! really holds up!].
Okay, now I'm going to work.
July 28, 2009 at 08:47 AM in Culture / Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
July 27, 2009 at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
From The Guardian:
A group of eminent economists has written to the Queen explaining why no one foresaw the timing, extent and severity of the recession.
The three-page missive... was sent after the Queen asked, during a visit to the London School of Economics, why no one had predicted the credit crunch.
What did they come up with? The explain that
the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.
Sounds perfectly plausible. The question is, what would help improve that collective imagination?
July 26, 2009 at 11:20 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
This bit from the TierneyLab:
"Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don't have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists."
So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview with Constance Holden in the journal Science....
The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You're an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of "expert" they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you'll bear the less comfortable label of "maverick," which is only a few stops short of "scapegoat" or "pariah."
A remarkable first-hand description of this phenomenon was provided a few months ago by the economist Robert Shiller, co-inventor of the Case-Shiller house price index. Dr. Shiller was concerned about what he saw as an impending house price bubble when he served as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York up until 2004.
So why didn't he burst his lungs warning about the impending collapse of the housing market? "In my position on the panel, I felt the need to use restraint," he relates. "While I warned about the bubbles I believed were developing in the stock and housing markets, I did so very gently, and felt vulnerable expressing such quirky views. Deviating too far from consensus leaves one feeling potentially ostracized from the group, with the risk that one may be terminated."
July 26, 2009 at 10:05 PM in Postacademic | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
My wife is running a half marathon this weekend in San Francisco. Myself, I'm good for an hour in the weight room or pool, but as a rule I don't tackle any distance greater than about a mile without a bicycle.
I'd meant to link earlier today to her Team in Training page and recommend you support a very good cause, but umm, things got a little busy. Still, it remains a good cause, and I encourage you to pledge!
July 24, 2009 at 11:16 PM in Sports | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Words do not suffice. Not quite as wonderfully over the top as the Singaporean MDA Senior Management Rap, but close. So close.
There's also an MP3 version.
July 23, 2009 at 09:07 PM in Science, Web / Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A few days ago I wondered if shamelessness was the the new virtue. Yesterday I didn't quite find an answer, but I did find another great example of how information transparency doesn't necessarily lead to greater probity and economy, but greater recklessness or shamelessness. This is from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, pp. 16-17:
[I]n 1993, federal securities regulators forced companies, for the first time, to reveal details about the pay and perks of their top executives. The idea was that once pay was in the open, boards would be reluctant to give executives outrageous salaries and benefits....
But guess what happened. Once salaries became public information, the media regularly ran special stories ranking CEOs by pay. Rather than suppressing the executive perks, the publicity had CEOs in America comparing their pay with that of everyone else. The result?... [I]n 1976 the average CEO was paid 36 times as much as the average worker. In 1993, the average CEO was paid 131 times as much.... Now the average CEO makes about 369 times as much as the average worker-- about three times the salary before executive compensation went public.
Really great.
July 22, 2009 at 12:47 AM in Culture / Society, Current Affairs, Quotes | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: business, compensation, economics, predictably irrational, psychology, shame
July 20, 2009 at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 18, 2009 at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 16, 2009 at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
There's a great catflight going on between Matt Taibbi (who has turned into a mad cross between Upton Sinclair, Michael Lewis, and Lenny Bruce) and Claudia Deutsch about Goldman Sachs' plan to pay big bonuses to its people again. Matt rips apart a post titled "Congratulations, Goldman-- And I Wish You Many, Many More."
The defense of Goldman seems to boil down to, yes they have all sorts of connections, and yes they got tons of money from the government, but they're honest about it.
It makes me wonder: At one time, back in the day, we thought that the Internet and other information technologies would create transparency, make it harder to hide corruption, and thus force powerful people to behave better.
But we've essentially run an experiment for a decade testing this hypothesis, and it seems to me that it hasn't worked out that way.
Instead of forcing corruption underground, the Internet has forced shamelessness aboveground-- and indeed, has turned it into a virtue. So the Goldman execs may be dickheads, money-grubbing asses, and willing to sell their grandmothers if the price is right, but they don't pretend to be anything else. So they're welcome to their bonuses.
July 16, 2009 at 02:10 PM in Culture / Society, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Bruce Sterling points out the parallels between the instructions I provide in the "Evil Futurists Guide to World Domination" (henceforth EFG2WD), and religion. Of course he's right. I should have thought of it earlier.
It's a little odd that Pang doesn't seem to realize that he is describing religion here. His "evil futurist" is a morally-certain holy prophet with a scripture. Social figures of this sort carry out practically every tactic that Pang describes, and that scheme's been working grandly for millennia.
But on the upside, this'll be good for another dozen really dense footnotes citing works in the psychology of religion and apocalyptic prophecy literature. Win!
July 16, 2009 at 08:50 AM in Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
For a while now, I've been working on a think-piece on what futures would look like if it started now: if instead of starting during the Cold War, in the middle of enthusiasm for social engineering, computer programming, and rationalistic visions of future societies, futures was able to draw on neuroscience and neuroeconomics, behavioral psychology, simulation, and other fields and tools.
One of thing things I've kept coming back to is that, if you take seriously the criticisms or warnings of people like Nassim Taleb on the impossibility of prediction, Philip Tetlock and J. Scott Anderson on the untrustworthiness of expert opinion, Robert Burton on the emotional bases of certainty, Gary Marcus and Daniel Gilbert on the mind, etc., you could end up with a radically skeptical view of the whole enterprise of futures and forecasting. Or, read another way, you end up with a primer for how to be an incredibly successful futurist, even while you're a shameless fraud, and always wrong.
I've finished a draft of the serious article [PDF], so now it's time for the next project: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong. It would be too depressing to write a book-length study, so I'll just post it here.
(This exercise is, by the way, an illustration of Pang's Law, that the power of an idea can be measured by how outrageously-- yet convincingly-- it can be misused. Think of Darwin's ideas morphing into Social Darwinism or being appropriated by the Nazis, or quantum physics being invoked by New Age mystics. And yes, I know Pang's Law will never be as cool as the Nunberg Error, but I do what I can.)
Full essay in the extended post.
The citations are all real. But no, I don't really mean a single word of it. Yet, I wonder....
Continue reading "The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination" »
July 15, 2009 at 11:32 PM in Future | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)
Technorati Tags: EFG2WD, future, humor, neuroeconomics, parody, psychology, writing
In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes about 10,000 hours to master something-- computer programming, classical violin, tennis, what have you. I've been working as a futurist for almost a decade; I don't know if I've done 10,000 hours of decent work, but I have some feel for how the field works, and what we're good at.
About a year ago-- okay, more like two years ago-- Angela Wilkinson, a friend who runs the scenario planning master classes at the Saïd Business School, invited me to write a think-piece about the field. I took it as an occasion to run a thought experiment: if you were to start with a clean sheet of paper-- if there was no Global Business Network, no IFTF, no organized or professionalized efforts to forecast the future-- what would the field look like? What kinds of problems would it tackle? What kinds of science would it draw on? And how would it try to make its impact felt?
As I got into it, I concluded that a new field would look very different from the one I've worked in for the last decade. This essay (it's a PDF, about 260kb) is a first draft at an effort to explain where I think we could go. Lots of what I talk about will be familiar to my colleagues, and indeed to anyone reasonably well-read; but I think there's utility in synthesis and summary, if only to see connections between literatures and chart one's next steps.
All the usual caveats apply: it's unpublished, it's unfinished, it doesn't reflect the thinking of any of the various institutions I'm associated with, all the errors are mine, there are plenty of things I could have talked about but didn't. But so does the usual invitation to comment on it. I could keep tinkering with it, but at this stage I think it's more useful for me to take a step back, work on some other things, and return to it with fresh eyes.
Angela had in mind something quick, short, and provocative. I definitely missed the first two. Angela, I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.
Update, 22 July 2009: I've posted a slightly updated version of the essay, and also reproduced the introduction below the jump.
July 15, 2009 at 11:29 AM in Future, Work | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
in the course of my reading (or browsing or opportunistic strip-mining) of the literature on behavioral economics, the psychology of the future, studies of certainty, and other things, I keep having the same thought: The whole point of this literature is to explain why people listen to the neocons.
There's no logical reason, after the last eight years, that anyone should ever take anything that William Kristol (to take one example) says seriously. But the neocons don't appeal to logic: they appeal to those parts of our brains that respond to blinding certainty, simple arguments, and self-confidence, not complexity, contingency, and modestly.
Once you realize that it all makes sense. If you want to be constantly rewarded for being consistently wrong, study their careers.
Of course, being well-connected doesn't hurt (amazing anecdote via Balloon Juice, via Denver Post):
I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers.
Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. "I oppose it", Irving replied. "It subverts meritocracy."
July 12, 2009 at 10:28 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed. This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser. In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.
The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident."
July 12, 2009 at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The whole re-subtitled Downfall thing reaches its logical endpoint here:
July 11, 2009 at 10:06 PM in Culture / Society, Web / Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
SciBarCamp is done. Other than a lot of excellent leftover Pakistani food, a surprising amount of beer, and a photo set on Flickr, you'd never know we hosted 60+ people for two days. Time for a bit of reflection.
Wednesday morning, as I was getting the Institute's conference space ready for SciBarCamp-- hauling tables, moving chairs, trying to figure out how to get sixty people into our large conference room, calculating how many and what kinds of signs we needed to put to up to help guests find the wifi, bathrooms, etc.-- I overhead someone say, "What I love about these things is that you don't have to do any preparation. You just show up."
Yeah, right.
Events like these may look like they're spontaneous and free, but that's only because someone has set up the environment in which it takes place. That labor shouldn't really be visible to the participants-- like all infrastructure, its purpose is to be useful, not to call attention to itself-- but it is essential to the success of even the loosest and most improvisational event. To make a brief comparison to music: the most brilliant jazz improvisers, people like Keith Jarrett and Ornette Coleman, aren't brilliant because they just get up onstage and do whatever comes into their heads: they're brilliant because they've played for thousands and thousands of hours, are highly disciplined, have great training... and bring all that to the concert hall. [Update: See Fred Kaplan on creativity in jazz.] Likewise, when I travel, I like to be able to wander around and explore things; but I can do that because I carry a pack that has all kinds of things that I find useful, and come in handy under a variety of circumstances. (Preparation is likewise important for biking and cooking, and other things.)
The Institute's conferences are scripted to the minute, the presentations are rehearsed endlessly, group exercises are agonized over. There's a lot of top-down structure, because we have a lot of content to share, and because it's hard for most people to think about the future in an orderly way. People, we assume, need the structure we provide in order to translate our work into terms that will be useful to them. So the bar camp model is one that I find very interesting.
But the camp isn't just the absence of organization: that wouldn't be a bar camp, it would just be chaos. There is structure here, and I want to understand what it is.
I was talking to Jamie McQuay, one of the organizers of this year's camp and a veteran of the bar camp scene, about the ingredients for a successful bar camp. He said that the two things you really need are free space (which saves the organizers money and time, and cuts down on the number of sponsors you have to look for), and interesting people. Tantek Çelik, a camp veteran, told me that all you really need are physical and virtual spaces-- a conference venue and a wiki.
But my sense is that there's more to it than that.
There's a cultural element to the camps that I think is important. People here are veterans of academic meetings, scientific society conferences, and industry trade shows, and know that world well enough to be intelligently dissatisfied by it. (I had a professor who said you couldn't rebel effectively against Catholicism unless you had been educated by Jesuits. Not Franciscans or Dominicans, mind you-- Jesuits. Truly, give me the child until he's seven, and he's ours forever.) When you have an event that's a mirror-world of the traditional conference, you need to know what the traditional conference is like, so you can do the opposite. I would draw a comparison to Wikipedia. One of the usually unacknowledged reasons Wikipedia works is because people know, or think they know, what encyclopedia articles are supposed to sound like: readers and creators alike share a basic understanding of what they should be doing.
I also suspect a good bar camp also requires some minimum number of people who are veterans of the camp scene, and can catalyze others and acculturate novices. I'm not sure what that number is. Tantek said that return attendees are like culture in yogurt, which I think is a good comparison.
I think there are also some practical things that you can do that I've listed after the jump. None are especially profound, but they'd all make the event work better, and are worth paying attention to. But what else is there? Besides physical and virtual space, interesting people, a familiarity with conventional conferences, and perhaps some elusive bare minimum of people who've been to bar camps before, are there other things that a successful camp needs?
July 10, 2009 at 02:34 PM in Conference, Work | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I'm supposed to be taking some of the summer off, finishing the book and a couple articles, but like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, every time I think I'm out they pull me back in. I was at the first day of SciBarCamp today, playing local host / fixer / keeping an eye on the furniture. Sean Mooney (who in addition to being a former professor at Indiana University, was a World Wrestling Federation announcer) gave a very interesting talk about current challenges in bioinformatics.
A fair amount of Sean's talk dealt with the technical challenges of creating federated databases, the differing demands of bench scientists and funders-- the former want tools for managing and analyzing data in today's problems, while the latter want to attack Big Questions-- and the issues involved in getting people to share their data. The issues aren't so much philosophical or competitive, but practical: people believe in sharing data, and once they're done with it are generally willing to share so long as it doesn't put a burden on them.
But as Sean was talking about how different labs used different procedures for similar experiments, and how those differences manifested themselves in the ways they produced and consumed data (at least, this is what I took away from his talk-- he might have meant something complete different), a thought came to me. Projects intended to let scientists assume that data can be converted into something like the reagents or instruments labs buy from suppliers-- a commodity that you don't have to think about, you just use. But what if data can't be black-boxed this way? Or, more specifically, what if only really uninteresting data-- the kind that everyone understands very well, the kind that's solidly in the realm of normal science-- can be cleaned up, repackaged, commodified and standardized, and put online into generally-usable databases?
On one hand, this idea might seem stupid. After all, science is science: data is data, and facts about nature are true no matter where they're created. That makes them scientific. On the other hand, if you buy the argument of people like Harry Collins, scientific research is as much a craft as a-- well, a science. Databases tend to reflect the specific, local interests of researchers, working on particular problems. This tends to work against the generalizability of data: the more it's a product of craft, and an object tailored to a particular job, the harder it'll be to make it useful to other people.
So depending on how much databases are expressions of craftwork and problem-solving and bricolage, and how much they reflect a timeless, placeless crystallization of nature's order, they're going to be less or more easily poured into big projects to reuse data.
July 09, 2009 at 01:23 AM in Science, Web / Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
In case you can't see, the items are Radiohead's Amnesiac; Alan Furst's novel Dark Star; and the classic children's book Goodnight Moon.
After I stopped being slightly alarmed (can I really be that predictable?), I was pretty impressed.
July 09, 2009 at 12:33 AM in Culture / Society | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country's postwar cultural resurgence."
Nakagin Capsule Tower, from the New York Times
The building, built in 1972, is now in lousy shape (what a surprise for an architecturally distinctive building employing innovative construction technology), but the author argues that
the building's demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.
Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan's transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.
Like lots of twentieth-century architectural movements, the Metabolists were at least as influential for their ideas as their actual buildings. (I remember studying them along with Archigram and Team X in David Brownlee's Art History 481B-- probably the most important class I took in college, given how often I use what I learned in it.) A lot of the more outlandish ideas from this period were never meant to be built-- drawings of walking cities were stimulating reflections on the nature of building in an impermanent world, but totally impractical-- but they made other, more prolific architects think differently about their work and the issues it raises.
Nakagin Capsule Tower, photo by dod: via flickr
In a way, I wonder if there's a useful comparison to be drawn between movements like these, or projects that remain forever on the drawing board but get talked about, and futurists and their work. Most of us don't build things, or write software, or craft strategies; the scenarios we write are intended to be provocations or stimulations (a hedge against them being wrong, which to one degree or another they inevitably are), and at best we have an indirect but positive influence on other people.
Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.
Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath....
Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building's elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.
Nakagin Capsule Tower capsule, photo by pict_u_re via flickr
In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan's technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.
It's amazing how much work and expense goes into making the first example of something modular and standardized.
Of course, the great irony of building and construction standardization is that it hasn't produced a revolution in architecture. If anything, it's made it easier to throw up thousands of neo-Spanish colonial (or American colonial, or frontier, or postmodern-via-Miami Vice) houses in California's Central Valley, outside Phoenix, or in the suburban rings around Atlanta. Kurokawa was right that modularity and flexibility would suit "the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society;" but when married to the reality of real estate development, and the unreality of the mortgage market in the 2000s, the result was kind of architecture very different from what the Metabolists imagined-- a useful reminder for futurists that what we think of as "exogenous" factors often have a bigger impact on the futures we're trying to understand than the factors we do pay attention to.
Update, 22 March 2010: Tom Vanderbilt had a great essay in Dwell about the tower (h/t to Anthony Townsend).
July 07, 2009 at 08:18 AM in Culture / Society, Future | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
July 06, 2009 at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Via Slate, this pretty amazing short film consisting of a drive through the streets of Paris-- at 140 mph.
Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous... from Dat on Vimeo.
As Kevin Conley explains,
The director, who had no permits to film or to stop traffic, hooked a camera to the front bumper of a Mercedes-Benz (in the only bit of film trickery, the sound of the motor was played by a five-speed Ferrari) and filmed the entire movie in a single cinema-verité take: He drove through the streets of Paris at five in the morning, through red lights, around the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, against one-way traffic, over sidewalks, at speeds up to 140 miles per hour. The film ends after nine terrifying minutes when the driver parks the car in Montmartre and a blonde comes up the stairs toward Sacre Coeur. (It was a date.) After the first showing, the director was arrested for endangering public safety.
I suspect if you're familiar with Paris, this is even more terrifying a spectacle.
July 06, 2009 at 06:32 PM in Film | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
July 02, 2009 at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
...on the blog NCBI ROFL. NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and its Web site has a number of scientific journal databases.
Some of these public articles on such cutting-edge subjects as "Disco clothing, female sexual motivation, and relationship status," which concluded that
females are aware of the social signal function of their clothing and that they in some cases alter their clothing style to match their courtship motivation. In particular, sheer clothing -although rare in the study- positively correlated with the motivation for sex.
It may be just me, but the only reason I can imagine this article being written is to help nerdy guys get laid.
The case study on accidental condom inhalation, the article on the dangers of beards in microbiology labs, and the study of canned cat food evaluation techniques are also must-reads.
However, I think the article title "Inappropriate use of a titanium penile ring: An interdisciplinary challenge for urologists, jewelers, and locksmiths" (umm, LOCKSMITHS???) may be the best thing ever written.
Thanks, Anthony!
[Update: Made it onto Boing Boing!]
July 02, 2009 at 11:25 AM in Science, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
From GraphJam:
July 01, 2009 at 10:11 PM in Future | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
[D]ata sets themselves do not really convey any specific meaning. Meaning can be inferred from how the data compare to expectations or previously published data, but numbers in enterprise applications or spreadsheets cannot explain the strategies Intel and its customers are employing or the uncertainties they are facing. Decentralized organizations must find a means of transmitting business context; in other words, instead of transmitting mere data sets, they must transmit information and intelligence from employees who have it to employees who need it to make decisions and plans. (Jay Hopman, "Using Forecasting Markets to Manage Demand Risk," Intel Technology Journal 11:2 (May 2007), emphasis added.)
July 01, 2009 at 09:53 PM in Quotes | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
My son has started tutoring in reading. He's not as strong a reader as we'd like, or as strong as he'd like. So twice a week we take him to a reading expert. She's a former Peninsula teacher, and is actually someone my wife had as a child.
His enthusiasm is striking, because when I was a kid, getting tutored was a Bad Thing. Certainly you didn't look forward to it, or expect it to be fun. I don't know if this is a general change in kids' attitudes, or something specific to this area, or an extension of their general Peninsula-bred love of school. My kids look forward to Monday coming around so they can go back to school, and my daughter and her friends always complain about the end of the school, so those attitudes probably influence their attitudes toward turoring. And my son has known Marion (her tutor) for ages, and that made him more excited to be working with her.
And while I haven't done any surveys, my sense is that a lot more of my kids' friends are doing that in an earlier age might have been seen as remedial, and not talked much about. At least two or three of my son's friends have worked with Marion, which goes a long way to normalizing it. And for kids who already are taking music lessons, are in swimming clubs or little league, or doing lots of other scheduled things, tutoring or speech therapy probably doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary.
So he'd better be reading Tolstoy by September, or I'm going ask for my money back.
July 01, 2009 at 11:19 AM in Parenting, Peninsula School | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
I write about people, technology, and the worlds they make.
I'm a senior consultant at Strategic Business Insights, a Menlo Park, CA consulting and research firm. I'm also a visitor at the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford University. (I also have profiles on Linked In, Google Scholar and Academia.edu.)
I began thinking seriously about contemplative computing in the winter of 2011 while a Visiting Researcher in the Socio-Digital Systems Group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. I wanted to figure out how to design information technologies and user experiences that promote concentration and deep focused thinking, rather than distract you, fracture your attention, and make you feel dumb. You can read about it on my Contemplative Computing Blog.
My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2013.
My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.
The Distraction Addiction
My latest book, and the first book from the contemplative computing project. The Distraction Addiction is published by Little, Brown and Co.. It's been widely reviewed and garnered lots of good press. You can find your own copy at your local bookstore, or order it through Barnes & Noble, Amazon (check B&N first, as it's usually cheaper there), or IndieBound.
The Spanish edition
The Dutch edition
The Chinese edition
The Korean edition
Empire and the Sun
My first book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, was published with Stanford University Press in 2002 (order via Amazon).
Kicking the Distraction Addiction
A Banquet of Consequences: Living in the "Nobody-Could-Have-Predicted" Era.
Using Futures 2.0 to Manage Intractable Futures: The Case of Weight Loss
Thinking Big: Large Media, Creativity, and Collaboration [pdf]
Citizen Satellites (with Bob Twiggs)
Feasting at the Banquet of Consequence
Futures 2.0: Rethinking the Discipline
Paper Spaces: Visualizing the Future
Social Scanning: Improving Futures Through Web 2.0
Global Scenarios: Their Current State and Future
Future Knowledge Ecosystems: The Next 20 Years of Technology-Led Economic Development