Opinion: Balls as Office Chairs a Bad Idea April 11th, 2005 By Peter Budnick As your mother used to say, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” And when someone tells you that a $19 ball will solve all of your back pain issues, you ought to be suspicious. And when they have the audacity to label that ball "ergonomic," you should know better. The use of ball chairs (or FitBalls, Swiss Balls, Physio Balls, Exercise Balls, and any other name they may go by) are recognizable in your local gym or physical therapy shop, but lately, they are appearing in the workplace as a replacement for an office chair. Below are a variety of opinions that have been shared among members of the Ergoweb community According to Jeanie Croasmun, writing in The Ergonomics Report™: The intent of the ball chair developers was laudable: to take an item that seems to be beneficial in an area of health care (rehabilitation and strengthening/wellness) and apply the same principle to the office. And Jeff Pajot, writing from Canada, in the Ergoweb Forum:
City Generator Announcing: The Coworking Book – with Chapter Excerpt | dangerou For the last few months, I’ve been quietly been working on a new project. Actually, I’ve been working on the contents of the project for over 3 years now, but recently, I’ve been plugging it into a new framework. Back in the fall, I was approached by David Hauser from Grasshopper with interest in helping him set up a new coworking space in Boston. David’s whole “empowering entrepreneurs to change the world” value statement for Grasshopper is clear alignment with coworking, far beyond the business proposition. Furthermore, on a very personal note, he might be the only person I’ve met in business who harps on core values as an operating model more than me. I dig that. David and I quickly made it past the superficial conversations about coworking spaces and got to talking about community, people, empowerment, higher purpose, and the big questions like “why” we do things the way we do them at IndyHall. Fact is, I have written it down. And so, I began writing The Coworking Book. Beyond alpha
10 Ships That Simply Vanished Without A Trace Seafaring is still a dangerous job, with ships lost every year—but most of the time wreckage can be found, bodies recovered, and courses retraced. But some ships just up and disappear, never to be heard from again. Sometimes, a little bit or piece from the ship may be found, but often there’s nothing at all. 10The USS Wasp There have actually been several ships dubbed the USS Wasp, but perhaps the strangest is the Wasp that disappeared in 1814. Ably commanded by Navy veteran Johnston Blakely, the Wasp fought 13 successful engagements and was a valuable asset to the United States Navy. After the Atalanta departed, Blakely and his remaining crew on sailed on, with a Swedish merchantman reportedly spotting the Wasp heading for the warm waters of the Caribbean. 9The SS Marine Sulphur Queen The ship known as the Marine Sulphur Queen was a 160-meter (524 ft) tanker, originally used to carry oil during World War II. 8The USS Porpoise 7The FV Andrea Gail 6The SS Poet 5The USS Conestoga 2The SS Awahou
Web 3.0: Basic Concepts « Evolving Trends Notes You may also wish to see Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?, the original ‘Web 3.0/Semantic Web’ article, and P2P 3.0: The People’s Google, a more extensive version of this article that discusses the implication of P2P Semantic Web Engines to Google. Semantic Web Developers: Feb 5, ‘07: The following reference should provide some context regarding the use of rule-based inference engines and ontologies in implementing the Semantic Web + AI vision (aka Web 3.0) but there are better, simpler ways of doing it.Description Logic Programs: Combining Logic Programs with Description Logic Article Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0): Basic Concepts Basic Web 3.0 Concepts Knowledge domains A knowledge domain is something like Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Politics, the Web, Sociology, Psychology, History, etc. Information vs Knowledge To a machine, knowledge is comprehended information (aka new information that is produced via the application of deductive reasoning to exiting information). Ontologies Addendum
Printable Mazes Printable Mazes Here is a free PDF maze generator that can create mazes of various sizes and complexity, including pretty diabolical mazes that include 3-d crossings... Maze Options This form drives some of the options on the maze generator: Programming in PostScript When I was a student at Cornell I was a postscript fanatic. The Source The result is here: a little cgi/commandline program written in about 150 lines of python which takes advantage of the ReportLab pdf generation library to produce its output. If you improve the program, please let me know. Posted by David at October 10, 2006 11:11 AM Very cool. Roger mentioned over email, "If I make a maze 60x60 I get smoke :(". Basically that's because the maze code puts a 36-point margin around the edge of the paper by default, and throws an exception when a maze ends up being all-margin. So how to make really small mazes? this is totally awesome you should find a way to make a maze with the center as your goal Thanks for your program,too easy!
Watch "Talk about Curation" at Curation Nation Talk about Curation Steve Rosenbaum: So coming out of South by Southwest and the word that kept coming up and didn't... and wasn't coming up on our radar a lot pre-South by Southwest, was curation. Clay Shirky: Yeah. Loading video... Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay Steve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video Curation and Publishing platform. Rosenbaum is a blogger, video maker and documentarian. You can follow him on Twitter @magnify and read more about Curation at CurationNation.org. For website content publishers and content creators, there's a debate raging as to the rights and wrongs of curation. The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. In trying to understand the issue and the new emerging rules, I reached out to some of the experts who are weighing in on how curation could help creators and web users have a better online experience. The Issues at Hand Content aggregation (the automated gathering of links) can be seen on sites like Google News. But all that changes with curation — the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organize and filter content. Who are curators? Where We Stand Now
Study Links ADHD in Kids to Pesticide Exposure – TIME- Fran Suss Posted in Blog on May 19th, 2010 | comments (0) Study Links ADHD in Kids to Pesticide Exposure – TIME. Pesticides are just one factor, as the article notes, in the alarming rise of ADHD. I have worked successfully with children with ADD and ADHD ( as well as kids on the Autistic Spectrum) for almost 2 decades, using nutrition, homeopathy and kinesiology to identify and address issues. Please try a natural approach before you consider medication. With school ending and summer approaching, now is the perfect opportunity to work on these issues so that by the time your child returns to school in the fall, s/he can be functioning significantly better, as well as being healthier and happier.
Has Venter made us gods? | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guar Craig Venter's production of an entirely artificial bacterium marks another triumph of the only major scientific programme driven from the beginning by explicit atheism. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was a militant atheist, who refused to accept a job at a newly founded Cambridge college if it had a chapel, and who invented molecular biology partly to prove there was nothing special or mystical about life: it was just the behaviour of complex chemicals acting in accordance with the normal laws of nature. Now Venter says he has built a living bacterium from nothing but chemicals and code: "Our cell has been totally derived from four bottles of chemicals", he says. In fact, it was grown using yeast as an intermediary, but to the molecular biologist, organisms are just another kind of apparatus. I don't mean that they are both the same because clearly they are not. "We are limited mostly by our imaginations" Venter says.