Untangle the World Wide Web with RSS (Reuters)

Untangle the World Wide Web with RSS (Reuters)

Reuters – “RSS” is one of the coolest things you’ve never heard of when it comes to the Internet.

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Anti-smoking: Award

Anti-smoking: Award

Location: Mumbai, India
Creative Directors: Anup Chitnis, Rensil D’Silva
Art director: Bosky Doshi
Copywriter: Delara Sidhva

Top ten tips for preventing innovation

Top ten tips for preventing innovation

At a recent presentation in Austin by Seilevel about the goals and
methods of requirements gathering, a member of the audience asked “What
can we do with our requirements to assure

innovation?” That’s a tough question with an easy answer – nothing.

What if the question had been “What can we do to prevent innovation?” That’s a better question with a lot of answers.

Struggling with too much innovation?

Yes, people have been innovating since fire and the wheel it’s a
curse we’ve inherited. In modern times, much of that innovation has
happened inside companies. 3M had the post-it note, Lockheed had the
skunkworks that created the SR71. Google allows their employees to
dedicate 20% of their time to whatever interests them – and Google’s
employees innovative a lot.

Most companies do a good job of providing incremental improvements
to existing products and processes. What are those few who struggle
with innovation doing wrong?

Companies with track records of innovation have flawed processes.

• They fail to screen out likely innovaters in their hiring process.
• They mismanage their employees, who end up innovating when they should be towing the line.
• They inadvertantly reward innovation instead of mediocrity with recognition and compensation.
• They create opportunities to innovate and their employees drive Mack trucks through these loopholes.

Here is some guidance about how to fix those problems:

Top ten tips for preventing innovation

1. Hire employees looking for safety in their roles.
   Innovation happens when people stretch outside their comfort zones –
   don’t let them stretch! Find people who primarily want security and a
   nine-to-five role, stay away from those troublemakers who want to
   “change the world.”
2. Hire incompetent employees. What better way to
   prevent innovation than to have people who have to focus just to do the
   bare minimum? For extra safety, try and find someone who can take
   credit for other people’s work and hide their own incompetence – these
   people are easier to promote, which will become important later. If we
   are forced to hire someone who is competent, it’s critical that we make
   sure that they only have one area of expertise. People with more than
   one area of expertise, switch-hitters, just cause trouble by talking to people on other teams.
3. Keep salaries below the 75th percentile.
   Innovators know their value – and when they aren’t applying for jobs
   with intrinsic utility to them, they are commanding higher salaries. If
   we keep our salaries low, there’s much less risk of one of these
   innovators sneaking into our organization. As a bonus, we’ll save a
   fortune!
4. Read The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley of IDEO.
   He focuses on the types of people and organizational behavior that
   encourage innovation. The writing style is very clever – Mr. Kelley
   writes as if he were trying to encourage innovation – what a
   riot! He identifies ten personas that contribute to innovation. Put
   those ten faces on the wall in HR like an FBI most-wanted poster and
   coach HR to screen those people out.
5. Treat employees like garbage. Yell at them. Whenever possible, call them at midnight to yell at them some more. They work for us.
   If they get uppity, make them work on the weekends. Make them dig holes
   and fill them back up again. Threaten them – especially when they need the job. If you can’t yell, at least be condescending in public forums. Remember we are smarter than they are. Punks.
6. Reward conservative and marginal successes. The
   old rule of thumb for office politics was “It takes ten good projects
   to recover from one bad project.” Stick to it! If we punish people for
   mistakes when they ’swing for the fences’, and reward them for marginal
   and safe projects, they will quickly get the idea. This is the most
   subtle of all the tips – but don’t worry – people will figure out the
   reward system and shy away from those risky projects. This technique
   has the added benefit of propogating itself up and down the management
   hierarchy. Many organizations get lucky, and do this one accidentally.
   Wish we were all so lucky!
7. Micromanage. We’ve been promoted because we
   understand their jobs so well that we could do them in our sleep.
   Whatever those pesky little people think, it’s wrong. We know what we
   want, we know how we want it (not like that, you fool!). Every day we
   should make sure they do things exactly like we want. Even things like
   using the right font in their emails can be important. If anything
   slips thru unmanaged, then we aren’t doing our jobs. Of course, if we
   have a good boss, he’ll tell us exactly how to manage them.
8. Only create customer-requested features. Let our
   customers tell us what to do. Lucky for us – customers don’t have big
   ideas, they keep us focused on what we’re doing. Don’t let them whine
   about their other problems – that’s not why we’re talking to
   them. We just want to know if they like the idea of animated buttons on
   all the dialogs. Stay away from the unhappy customers – if we aren’t
   getting the job done now, well, we don’t really care what they say
   (they are existing customers, we need new customers). We’re here to solve our
   problems. Oh – and don’t second guess the customer. If they say they
   want the menu items in alphabetical order, well, that’s what they want.
   The customer is always right. If Henry Ford had listened, think of how
   fast horses would be today. Even better, appoint a user-representative, then we don’t have to talk to the customers at all.
9. Make performance reviews easy. Create some
   easy-to-measure metrics (like # of sick-days taken, # of powerpoint
   slides created, # of meetings attended), and use those for performance
   reviews. People always gravitate toward the metric.
   We can run the reviews with a minimum of effort, giving us more time to
   tell them how to do their jobs. Just an hour a year. Some managers can
   give feedback in 15 minutes.
10. Build a kingdom. When we have information, that
    means we have power. With that power, we can grow our organization. The
    more people we have, the more important we are. We need to make sure
    that those other teams don’t get our information. They might apply it
    in ways that we didn’t intend. While we’re at it – make sure our people
    don’t find out what we know. Not only will it protect us from them, but
    it will keep them from accidentally discovering a more important
    problem, or an alternate way to apply what they already know to a new
    problem domain.

Google now searches patents, too

Google now searches patents, too

Got an idea for a better mousetrap? Head to Google’s new Patent Search to make sure someone didn’t beat you to it.

The new site not only culls through seven million patents, it also presents you with five random patents you can peruse for your edification and enjoyment. (Who knew that gum-massaging toothbrushes were conceived as far back as 1938?)

Finally, a new Google service that actually deals with searches! Of course, it’s puzzling that you can’t sort the results by date. Hopefully the search king will fix that glaring oversight when Google Patent Search comes out of beta. — Rick Broida

Google Patent Search [via dumb little man]

How to cure traffic jams

How to cure traffic jams

Think traffic jams are an unbeatable force?

Bill Beaty, an electrical engineer and “traffic physics” enthusiast, doesn’t think so.

After conducting his own experiments, Bill’s discovered a simple trick anyone can do to relieve two common types of traffic jams: the “merging-traffic jam” and the “traffic wave”

The strategy is to simply maintain a large space in front of you instead of instinctively speeding up to close any gaps. It’s counter-intuitive, but according to his own experiments, it works. Here’s what he says:

Traffic jams on highways are often triggered where two lanes must merge into one. Lanes of cars cannot merge if there are no large gaps between cars. Therefore, drivers who create large gaps between cars will ease this type of traffic jam.

Bill backs this up with thorough explanations and animated diagrams of his experiments. He also responds to a lenghthy list of frequently asked questions.

I find the idea of one driver being able to beat Goliath-like traffic jams fascinating. But I must confess. I don’t know how to drive and can’t test this out personally. So if any LifeClever reader would like to test this out, please share your results!

Links:
A cure for waves & jams
Merging-Lane Traffic Jams, A Simple Cure

Thanks to Hugh Dubberly for sending this my way.

Map of the Internet

Map of the Internet

How do we remember this (and not that, or the other thing)?

How do we remember this (and not that, or the other thing)?

The Neurocritic has a fascinating report on recent research exploring memory interference. One of the primary problems with memory is deciding what to remember and what to forget. As an example of the scale of the problem, if we recorded every image we ever saw in its raw format, we’d soon exhaust our memory reserves. And what if we remembered every word we’d ever read, instead of recalling the larger sense of what we learn? Again, eventually we’d run out of space.

When we encounter new images or words, we must decide which memories should be discarded, and which we should keep. Memory interference is one mechanism we use, and one type of memory interference is one that privileges older memories over new ones. It can make sense: if we’ve retained an item in memory, there’s probably a good reason. It’s more likely that the new information is just noise.

The new research has identified the region of the brain that’s responsible for this type of interference:

Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

Lebanese opposition puts on show of Muslim unity

Lebanese opposition puts on show of Muslim unity

BEIRUT (Reuters) – A Lebanese Sunni preacher led thousands of anti-government Shi’ite protesters in prayers on Friday, in a show of Muslim unity designed to dispel fears of sectarian strife.

The Hezbollah-led opposition has besieged government headquartersfor the past week to try to topple the Western-backed cabinet of PrimeMinister Fouad Siniora.

Shi’ite Hezbollah is the most powerful force in the opposition while Siniora and his main backer,parliamentary majority leader Saad al-Hariri, are both Sunnis.

The city center protest has heightened tensions between the two communities, but Preacher Fathi Yakan, who leads a small pro-opposition Sunni group, urged unity.

“This mass protest is not for Shi’ites or for Sunnis or any other sect. It is for all of Lebanon,” he said, accusing the government of being an agent of the United States.

“Fellow Lebanese, Sunnis and Shi’ites, Druze and Christians, beware and then beware of sliding toward the hell of strife,” he said, his words echoing around downtown Beirut which still bears the scars of the1975-90 civil war.

Shi’ite parties withdrew their ministers from the cabinet last month and have called for the creation of a government of national unity following this summer’s 34-day war with Israel.

“Your sit-in, God willing, will foil the American project in Lebanon,” Yakan said.

Beach volleyball bikinis shake up Asian Games in Qatar

For Qatar, men tolerate beach volleyball bikinis

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — When Salim Al-Nabit and his friends went to see beach volleyball for the first time, they left their wives home.

Al-Nabitsaid he would watch the bikini-clad women, but he certainly wouldn’t want his wife to do so. He was there, he added, because it was a matter of national honor.

“We don’t see this a lot in Qatar,” Al-Nabit said. “I think most people think it is outrageous. But we accept it because it is important for our country. We want others to see us as a generous and hospitable people, willing to accept their ways, even if we don’t agree.”

Beach volleyball’s penchant for bikinis has touched off a bit of a cultural clash in this conservative Muslim city, which by hosting the Asian Games, a regional sports extravaganza, is trying to bolster its bid to bring the 2016 Summer Olympics to the Middle East.

The city has transformed itself in an effort to woo the Olympics. It has spent billions on infrastructure and sparkling new sports facilities, including the 50,000-seat “Aspire” stadium.

Doha organizers brought in 80 truckloads of sand from dunes in the desert outside the city to create the proper beach setting for the volleyball competition. They then even had the sand tested by a Canadian contractor to make sure it was just right.

But some things are just too much to ask.

Though 16 Muslim nations are represented at the Asian Games, only one, Iraq, is competing in women’s beach volleyball. And its team, sisters Lisa and Lida Agasi, are Christians.

Do they feel uncomfortable?

“No, not at all,” Lida said after her first game on Saturday. But their coach noted they seemed a bit overwhelmed because “all eyes were upon them.”

Even so, the Iraqis wore considerably more conservative outfits than their opponents, the Japanese. While the Agasis were clad in yellow, two-piece tights that went down to mid thigh and coveredmost of their shoulders, the Japanese pair’s uniforms were so small that the country name had to be abbreviated on their bikini bottoms.

The Qatari women are sitting out the event, though Qatar has teams for everything from archery to skeet shooting.

“It’s not good,” said Parvana Khoory, who watched from the almost-empty stands around the 1,500-seat center court dressed in black from head to toe. “We want a woman to cover all of her body. I think this discourages Muslim women from playing this sport.”

Some of the players agree that the outfits don’t need to be as brief.

“I felt kind of funny about it at first,” said Japan’s Satoko Urata. “But what can you do? It doesn’t bother me now. They have uniforms like this in swimming and track, too.”

That has been a sticking point with Muslim athletes as well. Few Muslim teams at the Asian Games include female swimmers. Of those that do, some, like Pakistan, prefer its women wear full-body swimsuits.

Beach volleyball has strict rules dictating what constitutes proper attire. Women can wear one- or two-piece uniforms, and that usually means they play in bikinis and sunglasses.

Competition manager Ramon Suzara, an official with the Asian Beach Volleyball Association, said that allowances have been made for Muslims.

“They can wear what they want, so long as it is appropriate,” he said.

Suzara added, however, that he hopes Muslims will come to accept the same kind of outfits that the athletes of other nations wear.

“This is sport in the 21st century,” he said. “I think this will be an eye-opener for Doha.”

It was for Al-Nabit, who confessed that, in the end, he enjoyed watching the competition.

“But I felt very shy about it,” he said.

via [CNN]