You've got to check out the interior and alternate view photos - simply amazing!

This has to be the most beautiful photo of an insect I've ever seen.

I want this. In my house. If I had a house. Well, whatever.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I saw a post on how most Twitter users do not use the service, and thought I’d expand some thoughts. The majority of my friends do not Tweet. Nor does my family. They do not care about it. They see “follow us on Twitter” during TV broadcasts and don’t know why they should. Further, they are not getting more interested despite an increasing barrage of the service.  If anything, they are even less intrigued to the mystique that is Twitter than ever before.  Note that some of my screenshots contain vulgar language – nothing compared to Xbox Live banter, but you’ve been warned.

Here’s the “first impression” a user gets by coming to twitter:

 

Independent of all other things, this doesn’t really give any insight as to why people are going crazy about Twitter. If I’ve heard that Oprah and Ashton are tweeting, and my favorite football player, and it’s the latest hottest thing, and all I see is a static page with a bunch of random-seeming terms, I’m not yet compelled.  Further, the major tagline “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” isn’t exactly right.  If you make a search like “how are things in haiti” you get a very bizarre set of responses that do not inherently answer the question.  Knowing how to search in Twitter is important, yet isn’t taught.  Showing hashtags also overly geeks up the screen, and in a bad way.  To continue this “new user experience”, I clicked on “pregnancy pact” (was curious) and saw the following:

 

This didn’t really explain anything to me, just showed me, well, the exact type of garbage the average person does not want to be reading.  It’s not even gossip/fun, it’s just *weird*.  Sure there’ll be the occasional clever gem, but for the most part, especially with popular topics, it’s becoming a haven for spam or utter drivel.  Also, as an aside, Twitter should not display foul language to users who aren’t logged in – some people still prefer to keep vulgarity elsewhere. It actually gets even worse if you look at trending topics:

Huh?  No thanks.

Now how about the new user experience from the perspective of following someone they were “told” to follow.  The @CNN account shows recent CNN headlines, as it should.  However, this does not exactly “add value” to someone’s life, as finding CNN headlines is relatively easy to do.  How about mega-celebrity @Oprah?

 

Not exactly new and interesting, and definitely not “real-time”. All we’ve learned is she seems to like Avatar, uses capital letters inappropriately, and then includes a bunch of things that look like gobbledygook.  Why? Because once you do get “into” Twitter, you start using acronyms, links, and vocabulary that make texting look downright poetic.  What’s a ow.ly? Who’s RT? It looks foreign and daunting.  It’s as if there’s a huge “insider’s” club, and if you don’t get it, you feel awkward and alienated.

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The last American wild jaguar: captured and euthanised

Ewen Callaway, reporter

The last American wild jaguar - a male by the name of Macho B - was captured illegally by Arizona state officials, concludes a new US government report on the incident.

"In February, the 118-pound jaguar, which then appeared to be in fine health, was captured in a leg-hold snare in the mountains near Nogales, Ariz. His canine tooth was broken as a result. He was tranquilized, equipped with a radio collar and released. Days later it was found that Macho B was not moving, and he was recaptured and brought to the Phoenix zoo. Veterinarians there said he was suffering from irreversible kidney failure and euthanised him," reports the New York Times.

Officials at the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AZGFD) have maintained that they inadvertently snared the animal.

"We found that the AZGFD was aware of Macho B's presence in the vicinity of its mountain lion and black bear study in late December 2008 and January 2009," the report says, adding that the agency did not consult with the US government before laying traps as required by the Endangered Species Act.

"Federal investigators are weighing whether the evidence gathered in the case of jaguar Macho B merits prosecution of anyone involved in its capture last year, an official said Friday. The criminal investigation is now under 'prosecutorial review' by the US Attorney's Office in Tucson, said Nicholas Chavez, the US Fish and Wildlife Service's law enforcement chief for the Southwest," according to AP (via Arizona Daily Star).

Categories: Environment

• Posted on January 25, 2010 4:46 PM
Posted by Rowan Hooper at January 25, 2010 4:46 PM
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When Kathleen Hall stepped off the elevator at her office on the 104th floor one Monday, she had it all: beauty, smarts, a successful career as a stockbroker on Wall Street, a supportive husband, and two healthy children. But despite her efforts to act composed, she was terrified. Nauseated and short of breath, her chest tight, she stopped to lean against a wall. She didn't move from that spot until a security guard took notice and asked if she was okay. She wasn't. Her life, until then so calculated, had come to a screeching halt.

Born to a violent, alcoholic father and a victimized mother, Hall, 55, had learned early what it took to survive. She worked hard as a teenager, baby-sitting, cutting hair in her garage, even detailing cars to scrape cash together. When married and pregnant with her first child, she began to put herself through college. Later she strove to achieve corporate success and make money -- something she knew brought power. But the years of late hours and high-stakes pressure (not to mention the weekly commute from her home base in Georgia) seemed to coalesce into a single realization: Winning the race wouldn't bring happiness. In fact, it could cost her life itself. She turned around, got back in the elevator, and booked a flight home.

Twenty years later, Hall is one of the nation's noted experts on stress management, sought after by clients, colleagues, and media in times of crisis. "I've seen stress cause people to totally shut down -- physically and emotionally. They lose focus and become disoriented, confused, and depressed," says Hall, whose work has included consoling Katrina survivors, counseling victims of domestic violence, and advising families in hospitals coping with cancer and AIDS. Stress comes in countless incarnations, from poor, homeless single mothers to wealthy, depressed CEOs. "It's our nation's greatest democratizer," she says, "and it's not going anywhere."

In her case, that moment of panic by the elevator turned out to be a catalyst for self-inquiry. She quit her job, retreated for six months to a remote cabin at her Clarksville, Georgia, home, and then spent the next seven years on an entirely different course, pursuing a master's in divinity at Emory University and then a doctorate in spirituality at Columbia University. She studied with an eclectic group of visionaries -- Thich Nhat Hanh and Bishop Desmond Tutu, Trappist monks and Sufi leaders -- and noticed that, despite their diverse backgrounds, they all seemed to advocate the same ground-up approach to life. "So many of us strive to move onward and upward, but I began to see that the path to joy starts with an entirely different approach: inward and downward. Seeds first move inward and downward to root -- and then toward the light, upward and forward." Reducing susceptibility to stress, she realized, was essentially a matter of nourishing the roots.

She adopted a powerful but surprisingly simple mantra -- SELF, an acronym for serenity, exercise, love, and food -- and started teaching it to others to great effect. These "four roots of real happiness" may seem almost too easy, but she insists they have a centering effect in even the worst of circumstances. "It's these basic, ordinary actions that ground you," she explains. "By attending to your roots each day, you learn to stay focused and intentional -- and stay true to your design." Making time for serenity, for instance, creates space in our lives for meditation and stress reduction; exercise benefits the spirit and mind as well as the body; love and friendship bring physiological and emotional rewards; and nourishing food, consciously consumed, feeds the senses in a deeply satisfying way. It's these simple things, she says -- a moment to connect with your breath, a walk in the park, a hug from a friend, a thoughtfully prepared meal -- that keep us balanced.

From Body+Soul, March 2007

Next Page: 10 Secrets to a Stress-Free Life

Page 1 | 2

The SELF acronym seems both clever and wise.

Incredible design using "...concepts familiar to many artists and photographers, specifically the diving proportion, the golden rectangle and golden spiral. To the layman, this means that hard geometry played a primary role in developing a house that is as beautiful and natural as it is mathematic."

Very clever! (via @designmilk)

The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

"Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all."

Enlarge

An artist's concept of the Local Interstellar Cloud, also known as the "Local Fluff." Credit: Linda Huff (American Scientist) and Priscilla Frisch (University of Chicago)

The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will eventually bump into other, similar clouds in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers call the cloud we're running into now the Local Interstellar Cloud or "Local Fluff" for short. It's about 30 light years wide and contains a wispy mixture of hydrogen and helium atoms at a temperature of 6000 C. The existential mystery of the Fluff has to do with its surroundings. About 10 million years ago, a cluster of supernovas exploded nearby, creating a giant bubble of million-degree gas. The Fluff is completely surrounded by this high-pressure supernova exhaust and should be crushed or dispersed by it.

"The observed temperature and density of the local cloud do not provide enough pressure to resist the 'crushing action' of the hot gas around it," says Opher.

So how does the Fluff survive? The Voyagers have found an answer.

"Voyager data show that the Fluff is much more strongly magnetized than anyone had previously suspected—between 4 and 5 microgauss*," says Opher. "This magnetic field can provide the extra pressure required to resist destruction."

NASA's two Voyager probes have been racing out of the solar system for more than 30 years. They are now beyond the orbit of Pluto and on the verge of entering interstellar space—but they are not there yet.

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"The Voyagers are not actually inside the Local Fluff," says Opher. "But they are getting close and can sense what the cloud is like as they approach it."

Enlarge

The anatomy of the heliosphere. Since this illustration was made, Voyager 2 has joined Voyager 1 inside the heliosheath, a thick outer layer where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas. Credit: NASA/Walt Feimer.

The Fluff is held at bay just beyond the edge of the solar system by the sun's magnetic field, which is inflated by solar wind into a magnetic bubble more than 10 billion km wide. Called the "heliosphere," this bubble acts as a shield that helps protect the inner solar system from galactic cosmic rays and interstellar clouds. The two Voyagers are located in the outermost layer of the heliosphere, or "heliosheath," where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas.

Voyager 1 entered the heliosheath in Dec. 2004; Voyager 2 followed almost 3 years later in Aug. 2007. These crossings were key to Opher et al's discovery.

The size of the heliosphere is determined by a balance of forces: Solar wind inflates the bubble from the inside while the Local Fluff compresses it from the outside. Voyager's crossings into the heliosheath revealed the approximate size of the heliosphere and, thus, how much pressure the Local Fluff exerts. A portion of that pressure is magnetic and corresponds to the ~5 micVoyager Makes an Interstellar Discoveryrogauss Opher's team has reported in Nature.

The fact that the Fluff is strongly magnetized means that other clouds in the galactic neighborhood could be, too. Eventually, the solar system will run into some of them, and their strong magnetic fields could compress the heliosphere even more than it is compressed now. Additional compression could allow more cosmic rays to reach the inner solar system, possibly affecting terrestrial climate and the ability of astronauts to travel safely through space. On the other hand, astronauts wouldn't have to travel so far because interstellar space would be closer than ever. These events would play out on time scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, which is how long it takes for the solar system to move from one cloud to the next.

"There could be interesting times ahead!" says Opher.

To read the original research, look in the Dec. 24, 2009, issue of Nature for Opher et al's article, "A strong, highly-tilted interstellar magnetic field near the Solar System.

December 26, 2009

Trend setters may only be visible in rear view mirror:

I've just found this excellent Fast Company article from last year challenging the idea that there is a 'tipping point' in fashions or trends driven by small numbers of highly connected people who have a disproportionate influence over which new products or ideas become popular.

The piece is based on work by Duncan Watts, a physicist and sociologist, who created numerous computer simulations of how trends move through society in a similar way to how medical scientists model how diseases spread.

One study has suggested that the role of key highly influential people in starting fashions or trends is likely to have been vastly overstated. This conclusion has rattled the cages of many in the marketing world who have been focussed on identifying and targeting 'trend setters' for many years.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion...

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn't think it's possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex--too weird and unpredictable--to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can't most companies do it reliably?

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn't their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

However, Watts' work is largely based on computer simulations. These have the advantage of having to be based on very explicit well-defined descriptions of the phenomenon, which many of the more popular accounts are not, but have the disadvantage or having to include various assumptions and simplifications about what actually happens when people pass on ideas.

The Fast Company article is interesting as it looks at how some core marketing ideas are being tested by Watts, and how the public relations world is reacting to having some of their assumptions questioned.

Link to Fast Company article 'Is the Tipping Point Toast?'

—Vaughan.

Gorgeous remodel gallery of Napa farmhouse....

Gallery of this beautiful and interesting design as well as other tree-in-houses on dornob.com...

This guest post was written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com - a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month -- 70% of whom are outside the US -- and it accounts for 25% of the Web's traffic, according to Pew nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter or some other service to check status messages, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad -- it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.

So what will social Web bring next? What will "being connected" mean? What will the next experience be for the 2 two billion people who are connected to the Internet? Here are 10 ways what we've called social media will evolve in 2010.

Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies

By this time next year, social media will no longer be "social media" -- it will be an integrated, unquestionable component of your online and offline experience. Last year we spoke of cross-platform integration across media sites. Open APIs and OpenID made that possible, and even LinkedIn announced last month that it too will finally open its APIs. 2010 will be about integration and a single, cohesive experience across platforms as well as across products and devices -- Web, mobile, TV, and video -- will become near-inseparable experiences.

Users will access content from any device or platform, co-create and mashup their photos, videos and text with traditional content while interacting with each other. Publishers will create new kinds of content for the connected world, and the last years' lull in good entertainment will finally be lifted. This trend will cut across all of our activities -- from playing games to shopping to emailing and texting -- nothing will be lost; everything we do will be gathered and streamed together, allowing people to view their world of activities as if it were projected in front of them, open to change, review and input at any point in time from any device or online tool.

Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology

With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such as closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets -- content and capabilities -- in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web's capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people's attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.

Mobile Will Take Center Stage

Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information. Our phones will be used as a central hub and beacon -- enabling a slew of new capabilities and experiences.

Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content

2009 marked the year of open Web, and divergence of content, making content available anywhere, anytime, by anyone and to everyone; it was the year content exploded across the web, platforms and devices. The issue Google solved so magically -- content find-ability -- will become all but moot in the coming years. Instead, content relevance and quality will become the key focus. In 2010 we will start to see convergence as companies take measures to own their own content, its location and its cost. Last month, Rupert Murdoch announced he may opt News Corp out of Google, instructing it to de-index its publications from the search engine and giving exclusive rights to Bing for a fee. This means that content publishers will be able to determine where they make their content available and at what cost.

With the growth of user generated content and the dwindling relevance of search results, people will gradually shift their trust from large aggregators like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and move to searching and finding content at specific locations and, eventually, creating and integrating their own content hub into the rest of their personal digital experience. "People don't realize that everything they do -- on Facebook, Ning, Google and with their credit cards -- is being collected, tracked, analyzed, owned and monetized by these companies who provide (so-called) free services. It's not a healthy model." Says John Faber, COO of af83, a Drupal development house and co-founder of the upcoming DrupalCon.

Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We've Called "Social Media"

It was easy to forget that enterprises and large institutions are the originators of some of social media's pillars: listservs, forums, intranets and collaboration tools. As social media became a public domain, enterprises have been cautious participants, predominantly in the product space, with few visionary leaders like Zappos, IBM and Dell. But cautionary they are no more. With a reported average of 25% increase in funds allocation toward social media activities, in 2010 we will see a surge in adoption of social media across product, services and solutions companies.

Having the need and the funds, enterprises will determine the next generation of social experiences. They will push enhancements that meet their needs, specifically around monitoring, automation, alignment with the sales cycle and integration with existing systems, expanding social "media" to encompass the ecosystem of social computing across solutions, and making them actionable for the company. Jive, blueKiwi, Remindo and Sharepoint support companies internally. Most recently, Salesforce.com released Chatter, designed to turn the corporation, and CRM, social. With its APIs opening later this year, "Chatter can become a new layer over its Force platform, already being used by 68,000 customers, enabling companies and developers to leverage the Salesforce infrastructure in a secure environment," said Bruce Francis, VP corporate strategy Salesforce.com.

Next page: ROI Will Be Measured -- and It Will Matter

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