Interesting kitchen hack noticed last week in France. A stopper duct-taped to a pan lid to prevent people from burning themselves. Note the interesting use of grey duct-tape to make it more coherent color-wise. Quite elegant.

It’s not possible to insert this in the power plug/socket, if you try there’s something that block the insertion. The trick consists in inserting something (like a key… which is super bad if you remember what you’re parents/teachers told you not to do) in the ground/earth connection:

Going through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan another time, I stumbled across this inspiring quote at the beginning of the book:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.“

Why do I blog this? mostly two reasons for this on a sunday evening:

1. Because it highlights to what extent books and resources like the one shown on the picture above (some of my books, including weird comics) can be seen as TOOLS. Mostly for researching insights, ideas, methods over the course of projects. Even comic books and awkward booklets have a role in research projects I conduct.
2. As a reminder to avoid the fear of having stack of un-read books here and there. It’s sometimes menacing but reassuring at the same time (still some material to peruse). The importance of the “un-read” is in direct correlation with possible discoveries and new vectors. I often randomly take one of the books and look at it (be it read or unread) and adopt two strategies: quick scan OR focus on one page and deeply explore what is said.

Seen at the office today.

When the digital (in the form of a DVD that contains drivers and software) needs to be put close to the physical (this scanner) through the magical use of duct tape. DVD like this often gets lost although they’re generally needed, a quick trick to avoid losing it is to keep it close to the physical items it is related to.

For compulsive note-takers like me, this tool is of tremendous value:

The Economist about “life hacking” (tricks or hacks to get things done, as described by Danny O’Brien and Merlin Mann). I already mentioned that here, here are the tricks The Economist mentions:

• Slow down your e-mail: Set your e-mail program to fetch new messages every 15 minutes or every hour, rather than every minute, so you are interrupted less often.
• Create form responses: Any time you find yourself typing substantially similar e-mails, create a form version and save it for future use.
• Go full-screen: Switch your computer to full-screen mode, filling the whole screen with your current application, minimising the visual distraction of
other programs.
• Park on a downhill slope: When wrapping up work on a task, make a note of what needs to be done next. This makes it easier to get started when you resume work on the task.
• Use a “dash” to beat procrastination: Putting something off? Devote five minutes, measured with a kitchen timer, to working on it. It will make the task seem more approachable.
• Declare a “vertical day”: Switch off e-mail, mobile phones, everything, and devote yourself to a single, important project for an entire day.

In the last issue of Communication of the ACM, there is a paper about the value of color in email by Moshe Zviran , Dov Te’eni and Yuval Gross. The authors conducted an interesting field experiment about it.

DOES COLOR IN EMAIL MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
Yes, if used correctly, it can excite and please, prompting recipients to respond as the sender intended— clicking a designated link or even buying something.

Color has two main functions—attract attention and set the right mood—for responding positively to a message or request. And because of our increasinglyshort attention spans and the relatively quick interaction speed we expect in today’s electronic world, it must do both at the same time.
Color can be a prime attention grabber when and where people’s attention is scarce

Why do I blog this? this kind of topic is absolutely not related to what I do but I am sometimes amazed by color usage in email exchange.

3 years ago, while becoming a PhD student, I had this wonderful “wireless notepad”:

After 3 years, it’s now an RFID notepad:

Of course, technologically speaking, both are fakes (the former is wireless in the sense that there is absolutely no wires and the latters just had the RFID tag of a cd I bough last saturday).

The very insighitful Stowe Boyd gives a follow up to Robert Scoble’s advice about how to raise more attention (and consequently send more important ’snowball’ as in Stowe’s terminology). I.E. it’s w how to for improving one’s blog and one’s sphere of influence. Some excerpts:

1. True Voice — authentic and empassioned writing, clearly expressing a consistent and value-based perspective
2. Throw Yourself Into Dialog — Most great posts are a response to the writing of others.
3. Draw The Line, Over And Over Again — At any given time, successful, engaged bloggers are pursuing a set of themes or topics. (…) State your position and defend it.
4. The Big Idea — Every once in a while, work on one of those big posts, that outlines an idea that may have big implications.
5. Sharpen Your Pencil, And Then Write. (…) You should write — at a minimum — every day.
6. Courage — (…) Accept the occasional (or even consistent) vitriol from detractors and nay-sayers. If you stand up and say something is great, or pointless, or the most likely trend for the future, you can be sure that there are others that will disagree, and they will be happy to say so. Fine. But you can’t hedge, and middle-of-the-road platitudes or cautious optimism
7. Technology — (…) Learn how search engines work, and do the obvious things. Expressive titles, especially with people’s and products’ names help greatly. Tagging with detailed terms helps search engines and people alike. By all means, make your blog visually pleasing, accessible, and easy to read. Use graphics when appropriate, such as screen shots or diagrams. Link to all the people and stories you reference, and include people discussed as tags. [My favorite but hard to follow on a regular basis -nicolas]
8. Timing Matters — I am not suggesting blowing hot and cold on themes, but rather try to build on stories when they are still new and in people’s thoughts.
9. Human Sized Pieces — People are busy, and so your posts should generally not be 20 page dissertations.
10. Respond to comments — (…) Engage them when they come. But never feed the trolls.

Why do I blog this? actually I don’t aim at following all of these, especially my blog is first a repository for what I keep track of (yes that’s why it’s a HUGE MESS here) but I found some ideas interesting. I like what Stowe Boyd writes, relevant insights about to improve new media communication.

At the same time, News Scientist has a paper about the opposite: How to keep your site anonymous!

(Via) Once in a while I check what’s happening in the field of educational technologies because it’s a very good field of application for IT and I stumbled across this very good resource: 50+ RSS Ideas for Educators, a work in progress paper by Quentin D’Souza.

Apart from the obvious “conduct web searches when you sleep”, there are some very relevant ideas like using RSS for reminders/calendars/tracking (students’ collaboration/updates) / portfolio / todo lists / …

The document is also illustrated with some scenarios.

While reading “Richard Hamming: You and Your Research” (a tremendously interesting talk at Bellcore in 1986, found on Paul Graham’s website), I ran across this excerpts I fully concur with:

I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

This is really something I was struck by in the various organizations where I’ve worked.

Jacobs N, Mcfarlane A. (2005) Conferences as learning communities: some early lessons in using `back-channel’ technologies at an academic conference - distributed intelligence or divided attention? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 21, No. 5., pp. 317-329

researchers attend conferences as a part of their practice, and yet it is an under-researched activity. Little attention has been paid either to developing a theoretically informed understanding of conference practice as knowledge building, or to assessing the extent to which conferences are successful. This paper addresses these issues in the context of a small empirical study of the introduction of mobile, interactive (‘back-channel’) technologies into a conference setting. Science studies and learning theories literatures are used to develop an eight-point statement describing the aims of an idealised conference. This is then used as a framework through which to make sense of what happened when ‘back-channel’ technologies such as internet relay chat (IRC) and blogging were introduced into the 2004 Colston Symposium ‘The Evolution of Learning and Web Technologies: Survival of the Fittest?’. Focusing on sequential issues and the conference as a forum for knowledge building, the analysis shows that conference order is disrupted by the introduction of the back-channel technologies. Nevertheless, other pressures on academic and professional practice (the governance agenda, calls for greater collaboration and a more consensual approach, and so on) suggest that the potential of the new technologies to help open up the black box of scientific and professional practice will be seen as increasingly important. If these tools are to be used effectively in the future, conferences will need to be supported by new skills and practices.

Why do I blog this? my interest in this is twofold. First because we’re organizing a conference (LIFT) and we’re wondering about setting a backchannel system. Second because I think it’s an interesting CSCW topic.

Ok, it’s in french but everyboday can get it: how to re-use nespresso caps, the authors was imaginative enough to come up with an idea about to hack nespresso system, I did not try…

Yesterday I attended a presentation about dangers and opportunities fostered by weblogs (of course ‘danger’ is where the emphasis where). One of the most interesting presenter was certainly David Sadigh from IC Agency (internet marketing firm in Geneva) in the sense that his presentation achieved to show how weblog and their corollary tools (e.g. search engine a la technorati/blogpulse) could be used for marketing/data collection/competitive intelligence issues. His pragmatic view of how using such tool was very refreshing among those talks who more focused on conservative topics.

This made me think about my own practices about intelligence gathering; which are certainly close to what to do, except that the focus is less business-oriented but rather purposely aimed at being part of a research community, finding new information about specific topics and in the end discussing about innovation. But the approach is the same.

Then I made a quick list of the tools I used on a daily basis for various purposes connected to my research activities (be it for my phd funded by public fundings or for my R&D projects for private copmanies):

Scientific database/search engines: web of science, scopus, citeseer (+ less professional but useful: google scholar)
• Web search engine: google, ask keeves, jux, A9, alexa
• Blog tracker/search engine (to see who talk about what + who talk about certain things I blogged): technorati, icerocket, blogpulse, pubsub, google blog search, daypop, g-metrics
• Social Bookmark Managers (to share my bookmarks, I also use them as search engine): del.icio.us, blogmarks, citeUlike
• News aggregator: my offline aggregator is NetNewsWire and my online is rss4you, My opml is there for people who wants to see what I read.
• txt file still rocks: I then have a list of all the books I’ve read + movies I’ve watched here
• Bibliographical references are managed through a bibtex file with bibdesk; there is also a RSS version but it’s down

I should make the same list for statistical sources.

An insightful article in the NYT about life hacking. The article begins by summarizing the work of Gloria Mark who studied office work and came up with an atrocious description of how people work (or can’t work):

When Mark crunched the data (…) Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.
(…)
Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark’s study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work.
(…)
If high-tech work distractions are inevitable, then maybe we can re-engineer them so we receive all of their benefits but few of their downsides. Is there such a thing as a perfect interruption?

And all of this leads to Danny O’Brien and Merlin Mann who are doing a terrific job blogging about life hacking (see 43folders, it’s the best resource about life hacking)

In essence, the geeks were approaching their frazzled high-tech lives as engineering problems - and they were not waiting for solutions to emerge from on high, from Microsoft or computer firms. Instead they ginned up a multitude of small-bore fixes to reduce the complexities of life, one at a time, in a rather Martha Stewart-esque fashion.

Why do I blog this? this article is a great piece about office work troubles and potential solutions (aka life hacking + common stuff like ‘calm technology’ and so forth), there is a good summary of past research (academic) and geeky solutions that are tremendously useful.