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The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun Book Review! Maurice Sendak's Little-Known and Lovely Posters Celebrating Books and the Joy of Reading. By Maria Popova A heartening transaction of literary pleasure. Given my well-documented soft spot for all things Maurice Sendak and for rare vintage out-of-print gems, imagine my extreme delight over this recent discovery: As if to have any surviving copy of the 1986 gem Posters By Maurice Sendak (public library) weren’t already joyous enough, to have no ordinary copy but a first edition signed by Sendak himself is absolute exaltation. Collected in this magnificent large-format tome are Sendak’s little-known and lovely posters for plays, book fairs, art events, operas, Broadway shows, and other cultural happenings. But, given Sendak’s love of classical literature and the literary greats who became his lifelong influences, most enchanting of all are his posters celebrating the love of books and the joy of reading, many featuring his iconic Wild Things, which I’ve digitized below for our shared enjoyment.

Sendak writes in the introduction: And give they do: Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Animals of Southern Africa. Phdcomics : What PHD fans had to say about... Laughing Our Way to a Better World:Sindre Olav Edland-Gryt at TEDxBarcelonaChange. How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days. Here's a crazy game idea: Drag trash-talkin' gobs of goo to build a giant tower higher and higher. They squirm and giggle and climb upward over the backs of their brothers, but be careful! A constant battle against gravity, if you build a tower that's too unstable, it will all fall down. "Tower of Goo" was downloaded over 100,000 times within months of hitting the net, it was dubbed “Internet Game of the Month” in one magazine, it was demoed on G4 and at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC, and it was one of over fifty games we made as a part of the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center.

And like the rest of them, it was made in under a week, by one person. The project started in Spring 2005 with the goal of discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, we locked ourselves in a room for a semester with three rules: 1. We lay it all out here. 1. Mr. You only need a few days. Ed Norton's Crowdrise Brings Fundraising (And Fun) To The Masses. In October, and before an audience of 800 Chicago Ideas Week attendees, Norton announced, “My name is Edward, and I’m a philanthropy addict.”

He’s not kidding: The two-time Academy Award nominated actor also serves on the Boards of President Obama’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities; Enterprise Community Partners; Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust; the Signature Theater Company; the Friends of the High Line; and the Conservation Lands Foundation. And he’s not an in-name-only kind of board member; he really gets in there and works. When he’s not indulging his philanthropy issues, he writes, produces, directs and runs marathons but most recently he’s launched a crazy popular grassroots, peer-to-peer crowdfunding platform, called Crowdrise.

It’s a platform to allow anyone to fundraise for a cause, and it does it with a laid-back and funny attitude that undermines the self-seriousness of a lot of philanthropy. Crowdrise is based on an idea of "sponsored volunteerism. " Absolutely. The difficult challenge of media alignment. Viewers are not the customer of the TV networks—advertisers are. For a long time, those two groups had similar goals, though. Advertisers wanted lots of viewers and viewers wanted shows that lots of them wanted to watch. So the TV networks used ratings as a proxy for advertiser happiness and there wasn't much of a problem.

The same thing was true for newspapers. More local readers meant local advertisers were happy. Both newspapers and TV networks suffer when mass starts to disappear. HBO turns this upside down. Search engine advertising works because the search engine knows the searcher is going to leave the site no matter what. Which leads to the conundrum faced by Twitter as they try to monetize sufficiently to justify the expectations of their investors. If they relentlessly sell the attention of their users, they will have a misalignment as they maximize profit. My suggestion: Twitter has the opportunity to become extraordinarily aligned with their best users. Practical Guide to EU funding opportunities for Research and Innovation : Checklist. Checklist for EU innovation and research funding under and : The European Research Council (ERC) manages the FP7 strand for funding “bottom-up”, or investigator-driven, “frontier research” projects in any scientific field including social sciences and humanities.

The Marie Curie Actions are ‘bottom-up’ and applications are invited from all fields of research for any research project from basic research to advanced development. Basic research may also arise in projects funded under . The JRC purchases support for its own basic research, undertaken as part of its work programme. under , provided the research is in a field covered by FP7: health, food, agriculture and biotechnology, information and communication technologies; nano-sciences, nanotechnologies, materials and new production technologies, energy, environment (including climate change), transport (including aeronautics), socio-economic sciences and the humanities, security and space. . . . . . . , but only in a limited cases. . . 9-year-old's DIY cardboard arcade gets flashmobbed. Nirvan says: "I just finished this short film about a 9-year-old boy's elaborate DIY cardboard arcade. Caine made his arcade using boxes from his dad's used auto parts store.

He hadn't had many customers, so we set up a fun flashmob to make his day, and filmed his response. I hope it brings a smile to your day. P.S. Caine's Arcade is in East LA. Caine Monroy is a 9-year old boy who spent his summer vacation building an elaborate DIY cardboard arcade in his dad’s used auto parts store. Zero UI will "change design" Zero UI is the new term for “invisible interfaces”—what happens in the future when all the clicking and tapping and typing is history: “If you look at the history of computing, starting with the jacquard loom in 1801, humans have always had to interact with machines in a really abstract, complex way.” Get essential tools and recipes for the at-home bartender with this set from MakersKit. Foundups.TV: FOUNDUPS® Pitch - Enjoy. Visit us on Foundups.org. Peer-to-Peer Finance: A Flight to Simplicity. Home > Ideas > Innovations 25 Comments By Chris Cook February 25, 2009 Internet activist John Gilmore famously said, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

" A key event of the Internet age was the invention of Napster, the direct online music-sharing program that helped erode the business model of the global music industry. This capability of the Internet to route around middlemen is becoming more apparent. A reader of the Financial Times in December won £10,000 for identifying peer-to-peer lending through the Internet as the "next big investment idea. " How such a directly connected financial system could work is a question that has interested me for almost a decade. At a recent conference in Tehran on the current financial crisis, one of my fellow speakers observed that "it is not possible to solve 21st century problems with 20th century solutions. " Credit and investment may be achieved without the intermediation of banks.

Direct Credit Direct Investment Outcomes. The Coming Capital Convergence. True Believers As attendees entered last week’s SoCap conference in an old Army warehouse on the San Francisco waterfront, they filed past a large graphic projected on a screen depicting the full spectrum of socially motivated financial capital, from socially responsible investment to charitable giving. At the center was impact investing — the financing of for-profit ventures and initiatives that explicitly address major social challenges — that is the focus of SoCap, now in its 4th year. The prominence of a still-tiny category — total impact investments represent an estimated $50 billion, an afterthought in Wall Street terms — testified to the faith of many SoCap participants that powerful forces are driving the growth of impact investing and pushing it from the margins of the investment world to the core. The creator of the infographic, Brian Walsh, director of Liquidnet for Good, had dubbed the presentation “The Coming Capital Convergence,” adding to the messianic feel.

RO(Impact)I. CROWDFUNDING THE COMMONS. What A Detroit Supper Club Teaches Us About Co-Creativity. A social movement is underway in downtown Detroit. Each month, 100 or so individuals pay $5 for admission to a loft, where they eat a dinner of organic soup (and other foods) prepared by volunteers. Diners share ideas and connections, hear presentations from artists who are working on projects aimed at improving the city, and then vote on which project will receive proceeds from the evening's dinner. Detroit SOUP organizers call the gathering "a democratic experiment in micro-funding," but it’s much more than that: It’s an example of the power of co-creativity, and it represents the way forward for organizations that want to remain relevant and reach consumers in an authentic way.

In recent years, crowdsourcing has become a trendy tactic for soliciting input and engaging consumers, but in reality this approach is nothing more than an open call for submissions. Yesterday, businesses succeeded through industrial or technological expertise, with little need to converse with consumers. CrowdfundingTaxonomy.