Clinically Studied Ingredient

via xkcd.com http://xkcd.com/1096/

Glued [Video]

What is a mother to do when her video game addicted son will not go outside to play? Declare war! Their household will never be the same as she engages in a battle against the game consoles, but is victory assured?

GLUED [via Dorkly]

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via How-To Geek http://www.howtogeek.com/121825/glued-video/

You Can't Be Effective When You're Too Smart For Your Own Good

I have had the good fortune to work for, with, and coach many brilliant people. I have watched many of them struggle with being smarter and faster than everyone around them.

Being the smartest one in the room is not easy. (Really.)

Really smart people, who get to the answer before everyone else, get frustrated because:

• No one gets why they are right, and they tired of explaining things all the time.


• Everyone seems to WANT to go slower, and it is infuriating.


• They resent having to make the effort of “bringing people along”--it’s not fair, and it’s a waste of time.


• They piss people off. Why do people get so upset when they're just stating facts?

If you are one of these people, or you have one of these people working for you, here is the trick: You can either be smart, or you can be effective.

You can be 100% right and 0% effective.

Remember, you can’t do everything alone. At some point you need other people. You need them either to help you or to get out of your way!

So you have to be able to influence people. If you can’t influence them, you will face roadblocks and fail to get others working on your agenda, and you will not be effective. If you want to be effective, you have to suck it up and bring people along with you--even though it seems like a waste of time.

Here are some ideas for doing that.

First, slow down even though it goes against every grain of your being. Then brace yourself, and try some of the following.

Include the annoying people: Don’t just announce the answer. Go through the step of setting context and getting input. Don’t always assume you know where the best ideas are going to come from. Develop the attitude that you can learn something from anyone. Practice being more curious. You will get some good ideas that surprise you. People like to be asked.

Listen even if you don’t want to: In meetings, give others time to talk, and listen instead of arguing, or quickly shutting them down, or telling them why their idea is wrong or won’t work. You may feel like you are wasting time, but you will win favor by listening. Even if you think their ideas are stupid, listening will pay off later when you need to get their support.

Don’t be mean: I know it doesn’t feel like you’re being mean. You are not trying to be mean. You are trying to be straightforward, practical, share the answer, and make progress. In fact, one of the things that is so frustrating about these people is that they accuse you of being mean when you are not.

But they have the right to their perception. What they see may be your dismissing their inputs, ignoring them, or picking fights publicly. Be more gracious. Be more patient. Use more steps in your logic. Get smaller agreements along the way. Say thank you.

Keep your mouth shut: If you are in a room full of stupid people who annoy you, try the strategy of just shutting up. Speak later, with your actions, and make the right things happen. You don’t need to show you are smarter than everyone along the way.

Make an effort to learn what their strengths are: Clearly these people don’t share your strengths if they annoy you this much. Try to discover what their strengths are. You may be pleasantly surprised. Or not. But if you can get someone talking about what they are good at, and show some appreciation of that, you can more easily gain their support for your agenda.

Give them the benefit of the doubt: Keep in mind that these people might be brilliant in ways that you don’t see--in ways that you are not.

What if someone in the room is really gifted at networking and connecting and getting others to get on board? Even if they never understand your project, and sometimes slow you down on the operational part, if you can win over that one person they can save you loads of time by bringing all the others along.

For example, what if the frustrating, ever-questioning numbers guy who is just not getting the big picture, has a relationship with the CFO that will get your idea funded if you can win him over?

Set your sights on effectiveness

OK. Even if you are in a room full of people who just can’t keep up, you have a choice to make. Jump to the answer alone and face roadblocks, or make the effort to bring them along, so you can get the job done.

It’s a choice you have. It may be frustrating in the moment, but the upside is that you will be getting more, and bigger, things done--maybe not as fast as you want to go, but way better than not at all.

Patty Azzarello is the author of Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life. Follow her @pattyazzarello.

[Image: Flickr user Keith Loh ]

via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3000430/you-cant-be-effective-when-youre-too-smart-your-own-good?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Science Off the Sphere: Yo-Yos in Space

Is there anything that isn’t made more interesting when in a space station? Read on to see NASA astronaut Don Pettit wow us with his microgravity yo-yo skills.

[via Geeks Are Sexy]

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via How-To Geek http://www.howtogeek.com/121614/science-off-the-sphere-yo-yos-in-space/

Writing Javascript without using any letters or numbers

Did you know it’s possible to write Javascript code without using any letters or numbers at all? Well, it’s not just Javascript, but that’s the language used in this demonstration. [Patricio Palladino] shows how code can be written using just eight characters, and all of them are punctuation marks.

Typecasting is the name of the game here. By starting out with an empty array formed by a pair of square brackets, [Patricio] can generate the number zero by casting the array with the plus sign. From there he can use an exclamation point (a boolean cast) and addition to generate any number. The image above is an example of the digits 0-9. This would get very tedious for larger numbers but there’s another shortcut. Cast the digits to strings, concatenate them, then cast back to a number and you’re in business.

The technique is fascinating, and basically unreadable. As a proof of concept he wrote a parser that will convert any Javascript into this hieroglyphy. Check out his Github repository to give it a try.

[via Reddit]

Filed under: Software Development

via Hack a Day http://hackaday.com/2012/08/13/writing-javascript-without-using-any-letters-or-numbers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hackaday%2FLgoM+%28Hack+a+Day%29

A Cat with Built-In Image Stabilization

A couple years ago we reported on the amazing fact that chickens have image stabilized heads, and shared some interesting “research” into using chickens as camera stabilizers. It turns out birds aren’t the only creatures with IS systems built into their hardware: cats have it too!



The above video shows a Polish cat owner demonstrating the feature on his household long-haired cat.

It works pretty well, but falls short of the crazy stabilization found in owls:

Human bodies have a similar feature, but our stabilization involves mostly our eyes rather than our entire head. It’s called the vestibulo-ocular reflex. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) is a reflex eye movement that stabilizes images on the retina during head movement by producing an eye movement in the direction opposite to head movement, thus preserving the image on the center of the visual field. For example, when the head moves to the right, the eyes move to the left, and vice versa. Since slight head movement is present all the time, the VOR is very important for stabilizing vision: patients whose VOR is impaired find it difficult to read using print, because they cannot stabilize the eyes during small head tremors. The VOR does not depend on visual input and works even in total darkness or when the eyes are closed.

[...] The vestibulo-ocular reflex needs to be fast: for clear vision, head movement must be compensated almost immediately; otherwise, vision corresponds to a photograph taken with a shaky hand. To achieve clear vision, signals from the semicircular canals are sent as directly as possible to the eye muscles: the connection involves only three neurons, and is correspondingly called the three neuron arc. Using these direct connections, eye movements lag the head movements by less than 10 ms, and thus the vestibulo-ocular reflex is one of the fastest reflexes in the human body.

Here’s a video showing human image stabilization in action:

Someone should definitely do research into how many stops are gained by the IS systems in animals and humans. Agree?

via PetaPixel http://www.petapixel.com/2012/08/07/a-cat-with-built-in-image-stabilization/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PetaPixel+%28PetaPixel%29

The Rise And Fall Of The Company That Was Going To Have Us All Using Biofuels

Amyris’s breakthroughs in bioengineering--and its plans to make biofuels from Brazilian sugarcane--promised to transform how the world’s businesses produce energy, cosmetics, and medicine. Then reality (and Wall Street) got in the way.

via Fast Company http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680328/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-was-going-to-have-us-all-using-biofuels?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

8 Ways To Coax New Ideas To The Surface

We need to face the issue of where great ideas come from. Their foundation is deep insights about customers--that part we know. But how do we get from insights to ideas? This is where we step into the process of invention.

As businesspeople, we tend to be well-versed in the identification and analysis of constraints. We have also developed fairly robust tools, such as scenario planning and options theory, for trying to deal with uncertainty writ large. But what about possibilities? If the ability to envision new possibilities lies at the heart of growth, what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking?

Not much, it seems, because we have tended to see business as a largely analytic endeavor, with relatively little attention paid to its more creative aspects.

Research suggests that breakthrough feats tend to emerge from eight different ways of illuminating new possibilities: challenging, connecting, visualizing, collaborating, harmonizing, improvising, reorienting, and playing. Let's look at how these might be applied to the search for growth.

1. Challenging

Challenging assumptions and defying convention are often the first steps. To produce something original, raise questions about the way things are done and entertains doubts about what is assumed to be necessary, natural, or customary. In the realm of business growth, we see much the same process at work when managers challenge mental models and industry assumptions. New possibilities emerge when they refuse to accept existing paradigms and constraints.

2. Connecting

Making connections between seemingly unrelated ideas is also often at the heart of creative engineering. Novelty can result from going outside of a single field or discipline and bringing together diverse concepts, tools, capabilities, and ways of thinking. Connecting can be equally powerful in the business environment. The use of analogies that reveal similarities between different fields can provide insight into new possibilities for value creation. While adhering to the mental models of one's own industry is limiting, trying on the mental models of someone else's can surface intriguing new opportunities.

3. Visualizing

For engineers, the first step in making something new is often thinking about how it might look--picturing it in the mind's eye. Engaging the senses beyond what words describe sometimes opens new paths to creativity. Designers, we are told, "think with their pencils," allowing the emerging visual images to deepen their understanding of what they are designing as it unfolds.

If managers, on the other hand, think only with their spreadsheets, how much use of imagination can we expect? The act of creating maps and storyboards of customer experiences and interactions often triggers profoundly new insights. Presenting prototypes, no matter how rough, inspires deeper conversation. These are tools well worth adding to the manager's tool kit.

4. Collaborating

Many engineering innovations are the product of cooperative effort and could not be developed any other way. A group of people brings together a range of talents and capabilities, applying them to generate results that are more than the sum of the individuals' skills and creativity.

Collaboration with suppliers and customers represents one way to explore "white space" possibilities. Crossing functional and business unit boundaries can also provide rich sources for enhanced value creation. Here, tools like value chain mapping can identify both vulnerabilities and opportunities in a firm's value chain footprint.

5. Harmonizing

In every area of human effort, creativity is intimately associated with the quest for beauty. This is most obvious in the fine arts, but it is no less true in the practical arts like architecture and engineering. Here, especially, there is an aesthetic quality that often is about harmony, fitting the products of human ingenuity agreeably into their environment.

The origin of the word "aesthetic" is in the Greek word "aisthetikos," which means "of sense perception." Thus, we might conjecture that aesthetically pleasing ideas are those that appeal to the senses, rather than merely to cognition--new possibilities that have an emotional appeal, a "presence" that commands attention and invites engagement.

6. Improvising

Circumstances may require solving problems quickly or place overwhelming constraints on what seems possible. To improvise is to create "on the fly," and the results can be most ingenious.

In the business context, limitations to action are often seen as "stop signs"--as signals to give up the quest for an innovative solution. For designers, the response is the opposite--constraints act as triggers, rather than barriers, to seeing new possibilities. Some of the most successful business strategies were the result not of careful forethought but of improvisation, created out of necessity when familiar options were unavailable.

7. Reframing

New possibilities can emerge from new formulations of problems rather than new solutions. We have already addressed one important reframing of the question regarding customers--a move from focusing on "how do we sell the customer more of product X?" to "What need is the customer trying to satisfy?" We can also start with the specifics of the current offering and reframe from that. For example, you can take an offering that is currently commoditized and try to reframe it as a differentiated value proposition to a specific targeted audience.

8. Playing

The idea of play may appear ill-suited to the business environment. After all, business is a serious endeavor. But the single-minded pursuit of efficiency and optimization can leave little room for the emergence of new possibilities--a situation that, in the long run, may cost organizations far more than some "waste" in the name of play.

It is iterative and improvisational, open to surprise and unexpected opportunities. It is also manifestly experiential. To play is to try, to do something instead of just thinking about it. Play does us the great service of calling attention to the value of the experiment, the willingness to forfeit certainty in the name of learning.

Start Ideating

Ask yourself some questions that draw on these approaches and warm up the possibility-thinking muscles of our strategic brains:

1. Challenging: Take an absolute industry "truth" and turn it on its head. Ask, "What if anything were possible?" and look at the opportunities that appear.


2. Connecting: Look outside the boundaries of your usual world. Ask, "What if we were operating in an industry quite different from ours--what would we be doing instead?"


3. Visualizing: Put the numbers aside and get some images down on paper. Try using a napkin. What emerges?


4. Collaborating: Find a partner and go forth and co-create. Ask, "What can we do together that neither of us can do alone?"


5. Harmonizing: Push yourself beyond the "workable." Try to get to "intriguing." Ask, "What is really worth doing--what can I get excited about?"


6. Improvising: Act as if necessity truly is the mother of invention and make surprises work for you instead of against you. Ask, "How can we turn an unexpected development into an asset?"


7. Reframing: Try on a different definition of the problem. Step away from your product and ask, "What is the problem my customers are really eager to solve?"


8. Playing: Go out and conduct some low-cost experiments instead of forming a committee. Ask, "What can I do today to move a new possibility forward?"

From The Physics of Business Growth by Edward D. Hess and Jeanne Liedtka, (c) 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, reprinted by permission of the publisher, www.sup.org. No further reproduction or distribution is allowed without the prior permission of the publisher.

--Edward D. Hess is Professor of Business Administration and Batten Executive-in-Residence at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Jeanne M. Liedtka is a faculty member at Darden and former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation.

[Image: Flickr user Petras Gagilas ]

via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3000205/8-ways-coax-new-ideas-surface?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29