Off Topic - Urban Beekeeping

The coolest thing I saw on the internet this week was this short film from the Made By Hand project called 'The Beekeeper', a profile of Megan Paska, a Brooklyn, NY based local farmer and beekeeper. The short (less than 6 minutes) piece is a testament to not only the increasing focus on sustainable and accessible farming practices, but also a bit of an inspiring reminder of how great it is to find and be able to do the kind of work that you love.

Give it a look and let me know what you think! (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

You can learn more about the Made By Hand series at their website and also follow them on Twitter.

Have a Great Weekend!

Off Topic - Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before

If you are a user of the Google Chrome browser, then you are certainly famiiar with the way Chrome displays your Top 8 'most visited' websites when you click to open a new browser tab. For me, these Top 8 most visited sites, (see image on the right), never seem to change all that much if at all. And I am not sure if that is a good thing quite honestly. Whether it is a list of most frequently visited sites, a familiar and kind of static collection of blogs in a RSS reader, or the tendency many of us have in social media to follow and connect with thousands of people but actually converse with about 20, it is really easy to fall into an information rut, seeing the same kinds of content from the same sources, or as the author Eli Pariser has described it, a filter bubble.

A filter bubble can occur when we either proactively choose to limit the number and diversity of our information sources, or, as is a key feature of the social network Facebook, a system and algorithm determines what content and information it thinks we should see, based on our past preferences and behaviors. But by explicit choice, or more passive acceptance of smart filters, the end result can be, paradoxically, in a networked, connected world of almost unlimited information, that our consumption and exposure to content becomes pretty narrow. We read things we already know, from sources we access every day, and that are shared with us by the same small group of people we know well, (and who, mostly, think like we do).

So here are the questions for today - what do you do to try and ensure you are seeing a wide enough range of viewpoints and sources of information? Do you try and seek out new and different, (perhaps divergent), writers and thinkers to supplement the same five blogs you read every day? How do you seek out people that might disagree with you?

And finally, who is out there doing amazing work that you think the rest of your community might not know about?

Have a Great Weekend!

Off Topic - In the 1990s, an amazing future awaits

Back in the late 1960s, an amazingly accurate, (and unintentionally hilarious) video titled 'Telecommunications Services for the 1990s' was produced in the UK by its Post Office Research Station at a place called Dollis Hill. The eight-minute video, (go ahead and watch, you can spare the time), offers a vision of a future world where every house is connected to a central data service, video calling is simple, easy, and inexpensive, businesses and consumers will access things like bank statements from their own computers.

And the nature of work, with all these advances in technology, will change dramatically, In fact, 'Given all these facilities, the businessman will scarcely need to go to his office at all. He can do all his work in the comfort of his own home.'

Check out the video below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), then come back to see the list of everything the post office folks got right:

So what did they correctly predict would be coming?

High-speed internet connections to every home and business

Worldwide video calling, (essentially Skype)

Pagers

Fax machines

A crude form of Web Conferencing/Screen Sharing

Online banking

Online mortgage calculators

Widespread remote working enabled by technology.

Pretty amazing, wouldn't you say?

Hope you had a laugh with this one, and have a great weekend!

Off Topic - Shut it. Shut your trap I said.

Did you have to endure a meeting this week where someone just would not let go of a topic and kept blathering on and on endlessly?

Did you find yourself stuck on a commuter train or bus or maybe waiting on a plane when Mr. or Ms. Big Shot Important Person could not get off their mobile phones for one second, subjecting you and everyone else around them to the intimate details of their (boring) lives?

Or maybe, just maybe, that significant other in your life has been on your case about something you sort-of-but-not-really promised you'd do and have not managed to get around to it yet?

Well I just might have a solution for you - get yourself one of these cool Speech-Jamming guns, direct it towards the person you'd like to silence, and suddenly.... Shut it!

The details of this awesome new invention come courtesy of the MIT Technology Review's Physics Blog with this piece - How to Build a Speech-Jamming Gun. 

From the MIT piece:

The drone of speakers who won't stop is an inevitable experience at conferences, meetings, cinemas, and public libraries. 

Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, both in Japan, present a radical solution: a speech-jamming device that forces recalcitrant speakers into submission. 

The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of a fraction of a second. 

Kurihara and Tsukada have simply built a handheld device consisting of a microphone and a  speaker that does just that: it records a person's voice and replays it to them with a delay of about 0.2 seconds. The microphone and speaker are directional so the device can be aimed at a speaker from a distance, like a gun. 

In tests, Kurihara and Tsukada say their speech jamming gun works well: "The system can disturb remote people's speech without any physical discomfort."

Money. Shut up that person who needs, (at least in your mind), shutting up with the added bit of awesomeness in using their own words fired back at them. I'd love to try one of these out sometime.

What do you think - did you find yourself looking around for a Speech-Jamming gun this week?

Have a Great Weekend!