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The rise of a truly literate class

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I once heard that eighty percent of what we think of today, we thought of yesterday. I enjoy optimizing my world, so increasing the percentage of new thought seems a worthy goal. Wikipedia lists the United States having a 99.9% literacy rate, citing the CIA Wo... More »

Real social networks are powered by people

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In recent years, the topic of social networking has gained a considerable amount of buzz. I wish a week could go by without someone showing me yet another graph visualization of an individual’s contacts and concepts they share with others. I approach this ki... More »

The changing world of writing

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The Big Moo is a book that I found refreshing, both in format and in content. It had many authors, each with their own story and that was part of what made it compelling. After the read I started looking up the authors of interest and landed on Amit Gupta’s ... More »

Learning from PIXAR’s 20 Years of Animation

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My first exposure to the world of 3D animation was the Luxo Jr. Movie shown in an Introduction to Computer Science Course lead by Lori Scarlatos now at Brooklyn College, CUNY. This past Monday (Jan. 2) I got the opportunity to check out the Pixar exhibit at th... More »

Challenging Apple with Zen Vision

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I just came across an article by John Biggs on the new Creative Zen Vision:M in the Circuits section of the New York Times. Creative’s new personal media player is positioned to compete with the Apple iPod, and it will undoubtedly fail. Very often, businesses ... More »

Emotional Design

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I started reading Donald Norman‘s Emotional Design today. I have not read anything from him since college, so I thought this 2004 publication might give me a good refresher. Norman is well known from his book, The Design of Everyday Things. I remember being in... More »

Neopets – intimate advertising

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I was reading a post from Amit Gupta on Neopets, an online virtual pet site, and thought, brilliant! I remember a few news cycles growing up that positioned cartoons as a vehicle to sell products in toy stores. They engage viewers in thirty to sixty minutes of... More »

Perspectives on limitation

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Creativity is a big deal to me. It is central to how my mind works. For me creativity is playful – there is no question that the kid in me is alive and well, it just so happens that the playgrounds change and I have discovered more of them. I was musing on one... More »

Something remarkable

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Remarkable is my new favorite word, inspired by a new book I picked up, The Big Moo. I never read The Purple Cow, but I have to believe it has to do with being remarkable. A purple cow does not seem to cut it anymore, and so, we have the big moo. The cover cap... More »

Empowering everyone to read it all

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My first real introduction to email was a local BBS run be a local users group in Connecticut ~1990. In 1994, I went off to college and was, excitedly, one of less than a dozen PC users on a Mac dominated campus – email was a given and I remember being able to... More »