If you like the portability of the Phillips LED Candle light, but want something a bit “sweeter,” check out Nick Foley’s Pear Light. Custom made from hand-forged steel, this tree of light comes bearing fruit with rechargeable LEDs that allows you to take the lights with you down dark hallways. Once “picked” from the tree, each pear stays illuminated for about an hour. To bring it back to life, just place it back on the tree, where it will recharge for your night-viewing pleasure.

Nick Foley’s Portable LED Pears

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran appears to rely heavily on notes from a discussion between Iranian military officials involved in that country's nuclear weapons development program. What if, instead of such easily manipulated documentary evidence, the CIA's National Clandestine Service had been able to recruit a spy at the highest reaches of the Iranian government, someone who could just tell us what the country's nuclear capabilities and plans were?

It wouldn't have made any difference.

With Spies Like These . . .

Andy Oram:

A common lament is that the early Internet was invented without a view toward security, much less reputation. Considering that the first intended use of the Internet was a kind of 1970’s-style grid computing (time-sharing on supercomputers), the inventors should have had both security and reputation in mind. Nowadays we need reputation even more.

Reputation: where the personal and the participatory meet up

We need white space to think blue thoughts.

Mr. Judkins spends his day moving around the agency’s offices, which are in a converted elementary school. The former gym, now filled with couches and tables, is a good place for creative thought, he said. The “rocket sculpture,” an abstract piece in a central hallway that has a bench inside it, is a favored spot when he doesn’t mind colleagues stopping to chat. There are hidden corners and crannies where no one can interrupt (best for writing).

What Mr. Judkins is doing is looking for “white space,” a term creeping into the language of work to describe a place where the actual work gets done. Desks suffice for answering phones and filing forms, but when it comes to the creative or introspective aspects of a job, desks can be uninspiring at best, or formidable obstacles at worst.

So we leave those desks. Because we can. We take our laptops and seek shelter (and WiFi) either elsewhere in the building, as Mr. Judkins does, or farther away in libraries and bookstores.

The term “white space” implies a place set apart, physically and mentally. It is not only used by graphic artists to describe the empty space in a layout, but also by time managers to explain the minutes frittered away between appointments on office calendars.

Andy Hines, who studies the future of work at the Washington office of Social Technologies, a global consulting firm, said white space is “what we are looking for when we have thinking to do.”

You Won’t Find Me in My Office, I’m Working

Researchers are teasing out the ways we perceive flavor, from our tongue to our nose to the genes that dictate how we taste food. In the process, they're uncovering exactly which flavors will transform a dish into an offer you can't refuse

The Science of Yummy

The end of ethnic nationalism, building societies around sets of common values, seems like a good idea. But something is going wrong. In the 2007 Massey Lectures, writer Alberto Manguel takes a fresh look at some of the problems we face, and suggests we should look at what stories have to teach us about society. “How do stories help us perceive ourselves and others?” he asks. “How can stories lend a whole society an identity...?” From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Don Quixote to The Fast Runner, Alberto Manguel explores how books and stories hold the secret keys to what binds us together.

These lectures are still available as podcasts, but only for a very limited time.

The City of Words, by Alberto Manguel | CBC Radio | Ideas | Massey Lectures

CommandShift3 is like Hot or Not.
Except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites.

CommandShift3 - It's like Hot or Not for web design

At last. Realtime outlining for the web.

Collaborate in realtime using a structured and flexible outline format.

Create ideas, make notes, build plans, share files, agree tasks and organise everything in a single shared workspace, using just your web browser.

ThinkFold: Realtime outlining for groups

Luminotes is a WYSIWYG personal wiki notebook for organizing your notes and ideas. It's designed for creating highly interconnected documents with many links between concepts. Streamlined visual editing allows you to create your wiki without having to use any special markup codes or switch to a separate edit mode.

Most wikis are designed for creating one large document per page. But for your own notes, this approach can grow rather unwieldy. With Luminotes, you deal with several notes all at once on the same web page, so you get a big-picture view of what you're working on and can easily make links from one concept to another.

Luminotes is open source / free software and licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Luminotes: personal wiki notebook

There are a variety of articles and papers that I continue to draw insight from and find myself recommending to others on a regular basis. I decided it would be a useful exercise to assemble them into one set of pointers, add a little bit of commentary, and make it available.

I limited myself to materials that were easily available on the web, which eliminated some more obscure, academic, materials that you probably wouldn’t want to read anyway. I ended up with a dozen items that fall into two categories. The first group represents useful thinking about individual knowledge workers; the second about design principles relevant at the organizational and strategic level.

We talked about Richard Hamming's You and Your Research back in 2002. (It's now available here.) We've talked about As We May Think on numerous occasions. We've also talked about Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, as well. We've talked about the Rise of the Stupid Network.

The ones I hadn't seen:

“Structured procrastination” - John Perry. A somewhat different, but nonetheless useful take on how to best leverage a multi-tasking, multi-demand world.

"Places to intervene in a system" - Meadows. The changes we need to make to take full advantage of the opportunities that technology presents us depend on thinking and operating at a systems level. This is the best short overview of the leverage points that can be found and used to make this level of change happen.

"Wicked problems and social complexity" - Conklin. As a counterbalance to Meadows, Conklin enriches the discussion of systems change by laying out the notion of “wicked problems.” These are the kinds problems whose solutions arise from the interaction between competing interest groups and change the definition of the problem as they are implemented.<?bq>

Papers you should read in the world of Enterprise 2.0