LimbicNutrition Weblog » Personal Effectiveness

Q-Drum

Jonathan — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:30:32 +0000

The Q-Drum, a low cost rollable water container for developing countries.

The burden of fetching water, invariably over long distances by cumbersome and far too often, unhygienic means, is all too evident in rural Africa.

The idea of the Q-Drum originated in response to the needs of rural people for clean and potable water, as well as easing the burden of conveying it.

The solution had to be simple, water in adequate quantities is by far too heavy to carry, by rolling the water in a cylindrical container and not carrying it seemed to be the only solution. The container had to be durable, and breakable handles & other attachments would simply not do – in many parts of Africa even a hammer & a nail are scarce commodities.

The Q-Drum addresses these needs by providing a simplistic, cost effective and durable solution: The uniqueness of the Q-Drum lies in the idea and design of the longitudinal shaft or doughnut hole, and is acknowledged by the fact that Worldwide patents have been granted for the concept, thus confirming the novelty & inventiveness of the design. [From Q-Drum - About]

Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape

Jonathan — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:25:47 +0000

Superb post from Positivity Blog on the Wisdom Of Bruce Lee. Sake sure you see the full post for links to resources and discussion. Here is a summary:

1. What are you really thinking about today? – “As you think, so shall you become.”

2. Simplify. – “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” and “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

3. Learn about yourself in interactions. – “To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.”

4. Do not divide. – “Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”

5. Avoid a dependency on validation from others. – “I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.” and “Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”

6. Be proactive. – “To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”

7. Be you. – “Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”

Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape

Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower

Jonathan — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:07:35 +0000

From Wired.com :

“Face it: Your IQ is basically hardwired. Still, there are lots of ways to get smarter — to max out your so-called functional intelligence. Think of it as a software upgrade. Our guide to better brainpower shows you how to boost your memory, sharpen your concentration skills, and even pop the right combination of drugs and supplements.”

[From Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower]

Gin, Television, and "Cognitive Surplus"

Jonathan — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:34:05 +0000

This is an absolutely brilliant presentation given by Clay Shirky (author of the new smash hit on organizing Without organizations called “Here Comes Everybody“) on the topic of “Where do they find the time”. You hear this phrase, usually in response to some report of silly activity or massively time consuming hobby. We Clay knows and soon you will too. It turns out that even a fraction of the time we devote to passive entertainment (e.g. Television) can, when applied to productive activity, equate to massive collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia).

I will let Clay explain. Do not miss this.

The transcript is here.

Incidentally, he mentions a Brazilian professor who has set up WikiCrimes, a wiki google maps mash-up that allows users to plot crimes on a Google map with descriptions and other information. I wanted to do exactly the same thing back in 1998, when I lived in Clapham in London. I even went so far as to register a domain and researched how one requested crime data from police. In those days it was simply too hard to do it alone. I would have needed serious developers. There were no web mash-ups and the Semantic Web was mostly theory.

Other ideas I had at the time, like a civil volunteers to take care of neighbourhood old people were also impractical because of technology limitations and legal threats. I think I may just have to crack open that old Someday maybe list and see what might be more doable now in the Web 2.0 era.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody

Reality Mining

Jonathan — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:36:36 +0000

Ever since I read Timothy D. Wilson’s magnificent “Strangers to Ourselves“, I have been fascinated with the fact that we often know less about ourselves than our closest friends and family (thanks probably to our many cognitive biases) .

Enter MIT’s Reality Mining Project:

[O]ur ultimate goal is to create a predictive classifier that can learn aspects of a user’s life better than a human observer (including the actual user)…

Kevin Kelly explains:

Can our devices know us better than we know ourselves? It seems obvious that this must be true. Human self knowledge is plagued by all kinds of limits: bias, sampling error, memory failure, and lack of sufficient processing power to recognize complex patterns. Machines do not suffer from the first three of limits, and the last is under steady assault from Moore’s law. But for computers to help us know ourselves better, they need two things: better data, and new analytical tools for transforming this data into predictions. These are problems that the Reality Mining researchers (among others) are trying to tackle.
…Proving that people can be effectively tracked using low-power Bluetooth transmissions has a certain technical interest, but of course the true power of this work lies in beginning to understand what kinds of things can be learned from such tracking. Eagle and his colleagues, for instance, found it easy to predict when two people were likely to encounter each other, as long as the users had fairly regular habits.

…Their claim is that their system can predict social behavior among people who are easily predictable. Such a result might seem the very definition of trivial, but it’s not as pointless as it sounds. Such a result functions as a kind of system tuning, a check on whether the basic parameters of Bluetooth tracking and social predictions are plausible. Once you know that it works on the easy cases, you can start trying to generate the more interesting analytical tools necessary to get more surprising results.

If Sociology in the 21st Century, User Behaviour Modelling , Relationship Inference, Social Serendipity, Organizational Dynamics, Epidemiology, Information
Dissemination and Eigenbehaviors are your thing, then get over there and find out what your overlords have install for you next.

Via The Quantified Self

Physiognomy and success

Jonathan — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:34:21 +0000

Thin Slicing at work in the corporate world as the Economist declares “What the boss looks like determines how he performs”.

This may sound like voodoo. Psychologists spent much of the 20th century denigrating the work of 19th-century physiognomists and phrenologists who thought the shapes of faces and skulls carry information about personality. However, recent work has shown that such traits can, indeed, be assessed from photographs of faces with a reasonable accuracy.
…These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance.
Sadly, the characteristics of likeability and trustworthiness appear to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when it comes to business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though these traits are not harmful). But this result also suggests yet another thing that stockmarket analysts might care to take into account when preparing their reports: the physog of the chief executive.

Physiognomy and success | Face value | Economist.com

5 Steps To Being More Photogenic

Jonathan — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:14:12 +0000

From Digital Camera University come a primer on how to look better in photos.

In summary:

Step 1 – If you are standing, turn slightly and rest your weight on one foot. It may FEEL goofy, but you WILL look better. If you are sitting, angle to one side or the other.
Step 2 – Lean slightly toward the camera
Step 3 – Learn how to change your state (mood). Develop a ‘trigger’. Squeeze your butt cheeks together to get a nice smile. It works!
Step 4 – Learn to ¬æ smile. People just don’t like pictures of themselves with huge smiles. Smiling too big exposes gums and causes your eyes to turn into slits.
Step 5 – Never look directly at the lens – ALWAYS, look slightly ABOVE the lens.

Amelia from date hook-ups also kindly pointed out a primer they have in their site which lists several great resources for this.

Use your mobile as a dictaphone

Jonathan — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 15:30:15 +0000

I have always loved the idea of having dictaphone to capture those thoughts, tasks and plans that occur to one whilst out and about.

The problem I discovered soon after I bought one was that in public I felt like a dingbat talking into my little device.

I now use my mobile phone as a dictaphone and it serves this role superbly well.

It is almost always with me
I look normal dictating into a phone
Thanks to shortcuts it is very quick and easy to record and save a message

I simply set the right shortcut button on my Samsung D500 bring up the voice note feature.
One that is open, simply press the OK button to start recording. Closing the slide (as one does to end a call) automatically saves the voice note.

I process the voice notes from the phone when I have a chance to add them to my todo lists. I can also Bluetooth them to my computer for processing during my daily or weekly reviews.

A superb and dignity saving hack.

The Forearm Forklift

Jonathan — Tue, 09 May 2006 07:45:47 +0000

The Forearm Forklift is a pair of lifting straps designed to make moving furniture, appliances, mattresses, dry wall, windows, HVAC units, glass, marble, copy machines and filing cabinets easily.

Calculate the Golden Mean with Phiculator

Jonathan — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 23:58:41 +0000

Phiculator, the Golden Ratio calculator

Phi, the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, the golden section, the golden mean, the divine proportion. It‚Äôs known as many things, but the ratio they all refer to is the same, 1 : 1.61803399…

Found in art, architecture, design, and most intriguingly, in nature, this ratio has been used throughout history and today for its aesthetic beauty.

Phiculator (pronounced “fyeÔøΩcuÔøΩlaÔøΩtor”) is a simple tool which, given any number, will calculate the corresponding number according to the golden ratio. Useful to anyone wishing to create anything with divine proportions!

Windows, OSX and Flash.