It irritates me when I send someone a written message containing all of the information he needs for his purposes, then replies asking for the information I just sent him.

Here, for instance, is an email exchange between myself and a former classmate (name and details altered to protect the other party’s identity):

Lisa: I think you’re the John Smith who was in Drama Club at Acme High School.  I realized that I hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from Drama Club when I went through the yearbook last week!  Lisa Lisa, 92/93.

John: When were you at Acme, and how do you know me?

Upon reading this, I realized that I could have stated my position better had I taken more time to construct the message.  Although I didn’t state directly that I was in Drama Club with John, it can be reasonably inferred that I would have no other reason to contact him if I wasn’t in the same class as him.  The year in which we shared Drama Club was directly stated.

Lisa: Drama Club. 1992-93 school year.

John: You were two years ahead of me, and you remember me?

The subject was Drama Club, and the school year in which we were both in Drama Club was 1992-93.  Was that not clearly and simply stated?  If I was in Drama Club two years ahead of him, we wouldn’t have been in that class together!  It was difficult for me not to tell him that he was too dumb to have a conversation with, and that I was sorry for contacting him.  John was apparently referring to graduation class, which was neither mentioned nor relevant.

Lisa: No.  Drama Club was in 92/93.  I graduated in 1995.

John: So, why did you decide to contact me?

Lisa: Because I have fond memories of Drama Club, and you were there!

Why do people usually make contact with former classmates?  To relive some old memories, and share a moment of nostalgia.  I have found that different friends have different memories, and sharing them is like putting a puzzle together…  That is why I contact former classmates.

After almost six months that I have delivered my thesis, I’m finally posting it here. It turned up to be a very extensive document (about 150 pages), but mainly because we first wanted to assess the capabilities of SIM cards, identities and finally trust frameworks. And as I was working together with the SIM Research Team at Telenor and I do have some experience with SIM from when I worked in Gemalto, we spent several pages on reviewing the SIM capabilities and trying to figure it out the future SIM.  We also touched an aspect that may start to become more present in the SIM cards which is the ability to sense context.

Other pages were spent in getting into the identity management world and this was one part of the thesis which in fact I wished I had more time to go through. I got very interested in going deeper in the field after finally understanding the identity frameworks such as Higgins, Cardspace and specially on the concepts in which they are based. At last we studied a bit about trust models and this was one of the most difficult parts of the thesis as none of us had much an idea of trust modeling and it is a topic that can get very complex if studied deeply.

After this long background, we finally chosen a new application that could be hosted in the state-of-art (or future) SIM cards, take advantage of the fact that the SIM represent one or more identities and that can be used to build trust. That application was what I have proposed in my paper mentioned in the previous post.

The idea is to use the future sim cards to sense each other (either through NFC,  location information and server interaction, wlan, etc), to sense the environment and based on that, attribute a situational trust value for that meeting between the 2 sim holders.  Then with a bunch of those situational trust value, you can infer the user relation. The more context information, the more you can infer.

Based on that idea, we made a small prototype using SunSpots representing those advanced SIM cards and with a simple trust inference model and a test scenario.  It  may sound a simple test and in fact it was, as the thesis focused a bit on bringing a new idea (which is extensively described) and the state-of-art research, having the prototype as a small proof-of-concept.

When I was reviweing the thesis for the paper presentation, I read in Bruce Schneier’s blog about a paper from some researchers from the Santa Fe institute that used location information and phone calls information to infer the friendship closeness between the people involved in the experiment. The result was that they could predict the level of friendship with 95% accuracy! This pretty much confirm my thesis result =)

I can’t believe this. Evangelicals are using scripture completely out of context and now advocating a political
agenda to find ways to make sure Obama leaves office or even worse. Check out Brian Mclaren’s thoughts.

http://www.brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/religious-right-insanity-evangel.html

Christmas in Colombia has typically been more of a spiritual than consumer holiday. This appears to be changing. Two weeks I ago I began to hear Christmas music in the malls and supermarkets. There is a lot of advertizing for Christmas gifts, much of it aimed at kids and parents.
On the brighter side, Medellin puts on a spectacular light display every year. The river is decorated to the nines and there are Christmas lights and displays all over the city. A cabbie told me that the city sells its displays every year to other cities both in Colombia and in other countries. This does not surprise me as the work is very good and deserves to be used again.

A nice link can be seen here.

Ben Turpin in A Clever Dummy. Hartman. Kerr. 1917.

Een opzettelijk gecreëerde absurditeit roept op tot speculatie, interpretatie en discussie. 
Ook over The Beatles’ Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey gaan heel wat mensen in discussie op fora op het internet. Ik zie John Lennon gniffelen in zijn graf.

Lennon received a letter from a pupil at Quarry Bank Grammar School, which he had attended. The writer mentioned that the English master was making his class analyse Beatles’ lyrics. (Lennon wrote an answer, dated 1 September 1967, which was auctioned by Christie’s of London in 1992.) Lennon, amused that a teacher was putting so much effort into understanding The Beatles’ lyrics, wrote the most confusing lyrics he could. Lennon’s friend and former fellow member of The Quarrymen, Peter Shotton, was visiting, and Lennon asked Shotton about a playground nursery rhyme they sang as children.

“Yellow matter custard, green slop pie,

All mixed together with a dead dog’s eye,

Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick,

Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick“.

Lennon borrowed a couple of words, added the three unfinished ideas and the result was “I Am the Walrus”. The Beatles’ official biographer Hunter Davies was present while the song was being written and wrote an account in his 1968 biography of The Beatles. Lennon remarked to Shotton, “Let the fuckers work that one out.” Shotton was also responsible for suggesting to Lennon to change the lyric “waiting for the man to come” to “waiting for the van to come”.

Zie Wikipedia voor de volledige tekst.

Most people believe that good will triumph over evil.

This optimism is a core tenet of humanity.

Indeed, it’s so ingrained that we often assume that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ will be easy to tell apart – like night and day.

Sometimes this is the case; some crimes can never be justified, while some acts are universally welcomed.

However, much of our world view dictates ‘good’ from ‘evil’ on a purely subjective basis.

For example, religion will likely always remain a matter of individual opinion.

The same is true of culture.

There’s little doubt that globalisation has led to a degree of homogenisation of attitudes and behaviour, and we’ve lost much cultural variety along the way.

But this is nothing new; the Greeks and the Romans are perfect evidence that even the strongest and most influential ‘civilisations’ rise and fall.

This is because culture and ideas are subject to the same principles of evolution as biological species: only the fittest survive.

And as with biology, the key to continued survival is genetic diversity.

This means we must draw from as many influences as possible, but at the same time, ensure that we do not distill everything into a single, homogeneous result.

I was reminded of this while watching a fantastic TED talk from Dan Dennett (below).

He approaches the topic of cultural propagation from a philosophical angle, but there’s a clear relevance to advertising and planning in there too.

For me, the abiding lesson is that our individual cutural and moral perspectives are never ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

They’re simply subjective perspectives.

I recently created a post on a BA’s role on agile projects. The essential message was, simply, that there is no BA role. There’s also no PM role either. However, both disciplines have an immense number of skills that are incredibly valuable in agile projects.

Sprint Zero

• Identifying users: Understanding who to talk to and who the prioritised feature sets and requirements represents if the first skill needed on an agile project. A BAs skills in stakeholder segmentation is the perfect starting point as is documenting them as personas.
• Collecting user needs described on story cards: BAs have a great number of skills in eliciting requirements. In Sprint Zero all that is required is documentation as a story card:”As a [role] I need to [activity] in order to [outcome]“This gives you great traceability throughout the project because everything as to tie into enabling the user to undertake the activity and give them the outcome they seek.

Articulating the skinny solution

• Prioritisation of requirements: What requirements are more important than others?  BAs have skills in negotiation, liaison, workshop organisation and execution. Pair a BA with an Information Architect (IA) or user-experience designer (UXD) and you get a good idea of the prioritisation of their needs and how they need to be articulated during the iteration phases as complete feature sets. Remember it’s not about having mandatory, desirable, etc. Instead, agile requirements are listed in priority order with a minimum set — the things we can’t do without — forming the skinny solution.This is where the BAs skills are essentially lacking because it’s more in the province of cognitive and behavioural psychology. The skinny system reflects users’ hygiene factors.Pair a BA with an IA, however, and the way to elicit the hygiene factors will become clear.

Planning an iteration

• Work estimation and benchmarking: What is the team going to produce? What skills are required? What activities will be done in this iteration? How long will elicitation and validation tasks take? These are all questions that BAs because of their ongoing involvement in projects are readily able to answer.I like to ensure that I’ve got a wiki handy to note the aspects of the estimation so that I can change the estimation into a benchmark once the work has been completed. Over time, this becomes a valuable knowledge tool because I can simply say “when we last did it, it took [this long]“
• Risk analysis: While doing work it’s the job of all team members to understand issues and risks as they arise and communicate them to the team’s leader, Sensei or Product Owner. The ability, therefore, to analyse on the fly is vital to the team and a skill that BAs have in spades.I find that differentiating between a fear and a risk is the hardest thing for peope to grasp. People often fear that something will eventuate, but when you start to boil things down into hard facts abouta) the impact the issue will have, and

  b) the actual likelihood of occurence (based on research) then fears can rapidly vanish when also paired with constant communication from standup meetings.

  In this way, the BAs skills are best applied in the Roshi, Scrum Master or Project Lead roles.

Understanding the context

• Elicitation and observation: Analysing how people work, why, and the outcomes achieved is an important part of a BAs skill set.  Whether done through interviews, focus groups or a contextual inquiry (my own favourite), understanding the context of use and communicating it is a BAs core strength in agile environments
• Communication: How do you relate to the rest of your multidisciplinary team that you know the context of use — both from a user and systems perspective? BAs have a variety of tools they use regularly coupled with a talent for customisation of communication mediums and messages so that information is passed on to others with maximum efficiency.So what are some of these tools?
  • Storyboards (which I love to draw!)
  • Plans on a page (epic stories)
  • User pathways
  • Behavioural and process flow diagrams
  • Context diagram
  • Logical data model

  Notice that these are all light-weight, can be done in a short period of time, are easily changed, and are, essentially, placholders for a conversation.

Understanding the human, strategic and system requirements

• Custodianship of requirements: Understanding context is one thing, but then drawing the relationships between context and the needs of different people, and then taking into consideration the constraints, is a BA’s bread and butter. Where other disciplines, particularly UXD, tend to have greater strength in understanding and documenting context, the BAs strength has always been in elicitation, translation and communication of requirements, and then the management of these requiremens through to solution design, validation and implementation.For people like me, who tend to like to work at the ‘big picture’, having a BA who is detail oriented is a must.

Solution design

• Translation, communication and business representation: This is my favourite part of the iteration. While other team members might be responsible for the organisation of information of a system, its interaction design, and its systems architectural design, the BAs skills best served during the design phase is in representation of business and end-users. This is largely because their role as custodian of requirements makes them the most familiar with what is required and what the outcomes need to be when putting everything together.

Validation of the solution

• Diplomacy, negotiation, and whole-of-project representation: While programmers use automated testing in agile environments one aspect that can’t be automatically tested is whether or not the system behaves in the way that matches the way users need and want to use the product. Here the BAs diplomacy is his most valuable asset to bring to the agile project. He has to balance the needs of everyone, as well as their expectations, to help negotiate an agreement that the solution works, or whether additional things need to be incorporated in order for the solution to be acceptable to those who will use it.Of course, the outcome also needs to be communicated to The Powers That Be. With their strong skills in diplomacy and negotiation, a BA is able to represent the team and project as its Roshi, Scrum Master, or Project Lead.Then there’s letting the team know they’ve not suceeded in producing a valid solution. Lots of people get very attached to what they think is the right way to proceed and having users tell you that it’s not what they want can be incredibly frustrating. It means that the BAs skills of diplomacy are not only valued as an outward facing ability but also as an inward facing one as well

Implementation

• Diplomacy and sign-off: Having completed the ISO13407 cycle final implementation the feature set needs to be signed-off. Someone has to remind users and the business of how the iteration has been conducted and the points of agreement throughout. This can be a delicate matter particularly given many users and sponsors want a big thick document to read at their leisure and then sign.I usually print and package all of the smaller deliverables and put them into a folder. The first page lists the milestones and activities, agreement dates and who was present/represented, and when agreement was reached. The bottom of the page has the dotted line on which to sign.
• Setting expectations: I’ve found other sponsors don’t care so much about being this formal, particularly given the BA has been in constant communication with them and set expectations along the entire feature set iteration.

Ultimately, while there is no actual BA role, a BAs skill sets are of incredible importance throughout an agile project. This is a breath of fresh air for those of us who are only invited by the PM to elicit requirements during the first stage of the a waterfall project only then to be brought back onto the scene to help with users acceptance testing. This, ultimately, is why as BAs, we should all be championing agile. And if you’re not, then you should be!

So where are your strengths? What skills do you use most often as a BA in agile environments?

M

Chicago journalist Roger Ebert with Carole Myer. 1980.

Content is one of the most valuable things you can focus on during development of your website. Consider each page of your website a chance to capture or lose your audience. If a web page has paragraph after paragraph of text, many visitors won’t bother to begin reading. There are various other things to be leery of when writing for the web. This article covers eight tips to help you succeed when writing content for your website.

Entice with Communicative Headings

Visitors decide whether to invest their precious time reading your content, typically after scanning a heading or two. Consider which headline will receive more attention:

• PHP solutions for the Web

• Three eCommerce PHP Solutions for the Web

While both could be headings for the same content, the second heading will attract more attention because it clearly denotes what will follow. Additionally, it adds a level of expertise. It is also important to keep your headings concise. When headings wrap to multiple lines, they start becoming paragraph-like and readers cannot scan them. Sub-headings are another way to make your content easier for visitors to scan. Once readers have decided your heading is worth investing more time in, they often scan the sub-headings to jump to the section that is most applicable to them.

Conclude Before You Expand

Every page of your website should cater to the most impatient reader and clearly state what the page is about in the first few lines. Most readers won’t want to read an entire page to get to the point. Write an introductory paragraph that summarizes the most important parts.

Many successful writers outline the points they want to get across, fill in those points and only then do they write their first paragraph. It is not necessary to write from top to bottom and this method can help you write a stronger introduction.

Create Effective Lists

It is quicker to scroll down a web page than it is to read from left to right and keep your eyes wrapping from line to line. For this reason, readers appreciate lists. However, it is important not to use overwhelmingly long lists. Studies have shown people can remember 7 things at a time. A list of seven bulleted items is digestible, while a list of 50 is intimidating. If it is crucial for you to list 50 points, break up your lists with sub-headings so readers are able to jump from section to section efficiently.

Write Clearly and Succinctly

Whether your visitors are coming to gain information, make buying decisions or simply be entertained, respect that they don’t have all day to read your content. If you are wordy, you can expect your visitors to drift to competitors’ websites. However, don’t sacrifice clarity for brevity.

Similar to print writing, each paragraph should contain only one idea. The attention span of a web reader is shorter than that of a print reader though, which makes it important to trim your paragraphs to a few sentences each.

Eliminate unnecessary words. For example, there is no need to say, “at this point in time” when you can say “currently.” It is useless to say “an awful tragedy” when tragedies are awful by nature. Avoid describing an object as “round in shape” when you can just say round.

Avoid the passive voice. For example, replace, “My life has been made easier by templates” with “Templates simplified my life.”

The above paragraph helps illustrate that examples are useful; however, I should specify that repeating yourself is not. Do not say the same thing in three different ways.

Use consistent language. Consider your audience when writing in first, second or third person and be careful transitioning from one to the next. Jumping from a formal paragraph to a first person story sounds like two authors wrote the content.

Finally, read your content aloud and trust your first reaction. If you have to re-read to put the emphasis in the correct part of the sentence or to understand your point, you can bet that others will too.

More importantly, have someone else read your content – preferably, your target audience, not your business partner. You are too close to the ideas you want to communicate and others may find ambiguities that you will certainly want to clarify.

Create Content Relative to Your Audience

Know your audience and speak to them, not at them. Whether your objective is to sell toilet seats or convey a change in the stock market, play to people’s emotions. Don’t use technical terms for a less than savvy audience.

Don’t assume your readers have been to certain pages of your website before others. With a growing dependence on search engines, visitors often arrive at a website two tiers down from the home page. Consider the visitor’s point of view: If I knew nothing about this company or website, would I understand this page?

Be cautious of tangents, information and links that will distract a reader from the web page’s primary purpose.

Specify Links with Style and Language

Links are another way visitors can scan your web pages as they stand out from normal text – or at least they should. Make sure your links differ in color or style from other text on your website. Using “click here to learn more” is a waste of space. Instead, use “learn more.” Your links should tell readers where they are going, but they shouldn’t be reminded they need their mouse to get there.

Be specific with where the link is leading to. There are many websites that break up articles into two or more pages. Readers are more apt to click on a link that says, “Part 2: SEO Tips” than they are to click on a link that says “next.”

Proofread – Forward and Backward

There are some people who are a captivating force to typos and grammatical blunders. While some will gloss over these errors, the people who do notice are typically repelled. Websites with typos look unprofessional – or worse – like the author didn’t care enough about the reader to take the time to proofread.

Tips for proofreading:

• Use spell check and grammar check.
• Read backward. When we read forward, our eyes skip over small words and miss mistakes.
• Have someone else proofread your content.
• If in doubt, look it up!

Trusting copy/paste is a common mistake; be sure to proofread your content after it is on the web page.

Conclude with Action

Although many of your readers won’t make it to the end of your content, it’s important to summarize for those who do. Include your overall point, as well as where you would like to lead your reader to next. If you are fortunate enough to have your readers want more, don’t miss a chance to provide it!

For example, I would like to conclude by articulating that web writing has similarities to print writing (entice and be concise!) but differs in that readers are more impatient and can easily “surf” elsewhere. The more you understand how people read on the web in general and what your audience wants to know, the more you will keep visitors coming back for more.

Resource: WebAssist

I’d like to get one thing straight with the world. I’m here in France to learn the language, if I knew it all already I wouldn’t need to be here, non?  At the moment I’m getting a bit pissed off with people correcting me all the time, and okay, if it was a huge mistake and we’re alone then correct away. However, to make a deal out of something as simple as a wrong gender is far from helpful – especially when done in public. 9 times out of 10 I’ll have realised the mistake myself but carried on and just concentrated on getting the message across.

My strengths in language learning lie in reading and writing. Speaking and listening are not my forté because they are the skills that require the most confidence, I’m working on it but I’m not there yet. Being corrected by a pompous know-it-all does nothing for my confidence and learning and knocks me right back to square one. I’d love to be able to say that it was just the French people trying to conserve their language but I’ve been corrected by English people, here for the same reason as me, so many times – surely they know how little this makes a learner feel.

I hate it when people try to correct you in something you are almost 100% certain is right. When someone comes along, with no idea of context, and says “Ooh that’s not quite right” (even worse when they say “I think you have did an error” – if you don’t like your language being butchered then don’t butcher mine) in front of a room full of people or even worse spread across Facebook for the world to see it makes me not want to speak the language at all.

Example? Thought so. I posted a status “2 jours libre pour faire n’importe quoi! Je vais dormir, je vais aller au shopping, je vais boire du vin! Grippe A c’est pas du toute mal” – cue status comment from French friend “I think you have did an error with c’est pas d toute mal”. Now. I can understand, yes it should have been “c’est pas mal du toute” but with the rest of my status being correct what was the need to highlight, on facebook, that I put a word in the wrong place. Everyone else that ‘liked’ or ‘commented’ my status understood exactly what it meant so why bother?

I’m not sure if these people get a heightened sense of well-being and intelligence or whether they just get off on making people feel like they know nothing in their field of study. So just a small message to anyone reading this who occasionally finds themselves wanting to correct someone; think about it first. Survey the situation. Is it really necessary? Will your correction make the person feel stupid or will they appreciate it? I’m betting the first in most situations, so be careful you don’t crush someone’s linguistic confidence unnecessarily.

In ‘Is Sales Enablement just Lipstick on a Knowledge Management Pig?’ Gerhard Gschwandtner (@gerhard20) asked:

“What’s the real cost of running a Sales Enablement solution? Is there a need for editorial staff to help create and edit content, to set up template standards and apply them?”

The following job posting gives a bit of a hint what kind of tasks around a Sales Enablement Web Portal need to be performed manually:

Job Title: Sales Enablement Intern
Job Date: 2009-09-24

Company: Initiate Systems

Job Location(s): Chicago, IL, US

Description:
Sales Enablement: Sales Enablement Web Portal– Maintain the sales portal by:
o Naming, dating, tagging and approving submitted assets on a daily basis
o Building or creating custom pages when needed
o Special projects

Sales Enablement: Sales Methodology (RADAR) Opportunity Sessions
o Scheduling monthly RADAR sessions for AEs
o Researching submitted RADAR opportunities to find additional materials

• Hoovers
• LinkedIn
• Google
• Spoke

Sales Enablement: Weekly Reports
o Sales Portal weekly reports
o RADAR monthly reports

As time permits:
Lead Generation: Lead Processing
o Research incoming leads verify in Salesforce.com and add if necessary

Lead Generation: Telesales Tagging
o Add campaigns in Salesforce.com
o Add tasks for AEs in Healthcare and Enterprise

Lead Generation: Assist with Tradeshows
o Assemble collateral

Lead Generation: Mailings
o Tag campaigns
o Mail merge letters

Having been working with the cutting edge Sales Enablement solution BizSphere at a large b2b company since 2007, I can comment on the extend to which the tasks above can be automated:

o The submission process (for assets or pieces of information like contact details) can be shortened.

• Empower both – providers of official content (Product Marketing, MarComm, CI/MI, Training Department, Event Planning Team, etc.) and users who want to contribute (Sales, Customer Service, rest of work force, Channel Partners, etc.) – with an easy way to submit from within the context of the specific combination of geography, product/service/solution and type of information they are looking at. That takes care of the tagging. If they want to tag things further they should be allowed to.
• Implement a Content Governance model that automates notifications regarding content that needs to be approved, that reached the end of its Life Cycle, or that is meant for a limited audience only.

• For most companies cutting down the number of ways to submit content and even unifying the process so that one form allows to upload a single instance (Single Sourcing) and to publish it to multiple locations (facing the public, channel partners or only sales people) would be the wildest dream.
  BizSphere goes further than Single Sourcing of assets. It does Single Sourcing for the fragments (nuggets) your assets consist of. When you only have one instance of a photo, a logo, the number of employees you have or lets say a value proposition, then it will be updated in all your assets the moment you update this instance. Your assets are being auto-generated! The moment you click the ‘Generate’ button, hundreds of nuggets come together to form an asset that is customized for the context you chose. You want to pitch an offering to a customer in Spain? Then the auto-generation means that only the customer references from Spain are being pulled and put together in a polished way according to the chosen template. (See Do we really want people who earn $150 an hour creating PowerPoint presentations from scratch? and Do you want your sales people to spend their time customizing slide decks?)

o The task of building pages can be reduced to typing the name of a new offering (product/service/solution) and clicking ‘Publish’.

• When you have established a context, your assets or their nuggets live in, then your sales portal’s pages can be dynamic and just list everything that is applicable for the given combination of geography, offering and type of information. A manually built page would be a silo that would be pretty much outdated the moment the intern from the job posting above has finished it. In BizSphere adding the name of a new offering automatically extends the number of possible combinations of geography, offering and type of information. For each of these combinations BizSphere lists what has a good standing with regards to its life cycle, therefore everything you see is fresh.

o Reports should be in real-time and not weekly.

• Having a dash board overview of both your inventory of assets and their usage lets you track whether a certain region or offering has no assets available or whether they are not being looked at. You will see which type of assets your sales people love (Ratings might not tell you a lot but usage data will). This ability is crucial in becoming better and better in focusing your marketing efforts on what will actually help sales to close deals. “IDC research shows that over 40% of all marketing assets handed over to sales are not in use today.” (IDC’s Best Practices in Sales Enablement – Content and Marketing, July 2009) Why pay someone to create reports every week when you and everybody else, who is interested, could have the kind of dash board BizSphere calls ‘Content Landscape’ as well as even more detailed usage metrics of the Sales Enablement solution; all of it in real-time and sliced and diced as you wish. For presentations to executives just create a deep link to how you sliced and diced the data and they will get to see the current – as opposed to last week’s – data.

BizSphere is the Sales Enablement solution Jeanne Hellman looks at in her case study of “implementing Sales Enablement in a complex, global company”. The link lets you download the full case study for free.

To give my work some (more) context I will now look at works of artist who have done or attempted similar things to myself.

Robert Gober: when making my fountain mask I was told about the artist Robert Gober who works with objects that look like readymades but are actually handmade. He even alludes to Duchamp in his work three urinals. Maybe he’s referencing the holy trinity in a triptych like manner. I hope not, cos thats kinda the idea I’m leading into. I think the main reason I was told about the artist was due to whether I need to finish my mask off to the extremes of precision. Couldn’t find a picture of the three urinals but I did find one of this installation.

Fiona Jardine: Need to look up this artist more, but what I’ve seen is rather good. Rather.

I think its about representation, but it may also be about wall drawings, can’t remember what was the point of me looking at her right now, but I’m sure I will.

Picking at a loose thread at the bottom on my trousers at work I marvelled at my ability to unravel something previously so seamlessly joined. Great, yet another thing to add to the list. Hey, and still only 8.30am not bad going.   

But then it begs the question of whether the workmanship was really so perfect in the first place, so steadfast if it could not withstand a little gentle pulling, that at the first sign of tension it began to unravel. Opening up the bottom drawer of my desk reaching for the sewing kit (not a girl guide for nothing!) it kind of clicked. A little bit like the long withstanding approach to life… when it soon became apparent that I would not be the kind who would be sauntering nochantly down the street, gliding through each day… no my approach would be a little more reactive, side stepping past debris, ducking out of the way, plucking at the latest, catching many hems  at many different times and sometimes feeling helpless as I watched them unravel – “a time to tear and a time to mend” seemed a cycle I was well acquainted with.

And at the moment when there was little time for oh you know the usual banalities for enjoying life, save from the ‘eating, sleeping’ variety. It was all a little wearing…  such introspection, correction, such constant editing.

Stressing about the ‘what nexts’ and the ‘but then what’s’ are often second nature, not just those that are mine, but all those those that are surrounding me and those that are absorped in the daily context of work. The overwhelmingness of having to steer a way through drama’s and dilemma’s, brokeness, bitterness, weariness and worry.

Or perhaps it was actually a complete 360… I just hadn’t seen it that way before. The designer ‘one off ‘, moulded so closely, that by its very nature it needed to be re-hemmed, refitted and re-pinned until it formed the perfect layer to do full justice to how it was intended be. While the beauty lay in the pattern, the craftmanship lay in the changes and attention to detail. A small step back forces me to another vantage point, and makes me appreciate again what I already know.

The feeling of being ‘hemmed in’ in a biblical context is much less about restriction or correction than it is about being safe, the knowledge that we will be guided, at the times when we feel without guidance, and we are ‘held fast’ the ultimate stronghold.

“You hem me in—behind and before; You have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”

Psalm 139 v 5

Colombia is developing the groundwork to become the leading supplier of electrical energy to the region. It currently supplies power to Venezuela and Ecuador. In September, sales to Venezuela reached 59.3 giga watts and 153 giga watts to Ecuador.  This in comparision to 14.9 and 78.4 giga watts respectively during the same month last year. Power production in both countries has been adversely affected by the dry weather associated with El Nino.

Plans are underway to include Panama among its customers. Eventually Colombia intends to provide power to other parts of Central America. Companies here also are beginning to license transmission lines in Peru, Brazil and Ecuador. Plans are being developed to install a submarine cable to supply the Dominican Republic with electricity.

 Although Hugo Chavez has restricted the importation of goods from Colombia and revenues have fallen by about 50%, Colombia continues to be a reliable energy supplier for the Venezuelan people. Even talk of preparing Venezuela for war with Colombia has not resulted in a change in policy. Similarly Colombia has been a faithful suppler for the Ecuadorean people while Evo Morales has repeatedly made relationships difficult after the Colombian incursion which took out a key FARC base in that country.  This kind of fidelity to its customers and the political maturity of the government will support Colombia’s bid to be the major player this component of regional development.

Factual information in this post is based on an article in El Colombiano published 22 November 2009: http://www.elcolombiano.com/BancoConocimiento/C/colombia_alumbra_en_tension_internacional_mas_inversiones_en_energia/colombia_alumbra_en_tension_internacional_mas_inversiones_en_energia.asp?CodSeccion=19

awesome!

Inspiration and overview for the final push: a great slogan from the SHoP Architects site, an advertisement for Dupont, for a software company, and images from the Stanford Art Department’s front page.

When is not directly specialized in art-science project either the hosts as many of the visitors are art-sci related practicioners.

Cultivamos Cultura is a platform for experimentation and development of shared knowledge in the theory and practice of science, technology and contemporary art. In other words, Cultivamos Cultura provides conditions to foster your creativity.

Cultivamos Cultura organizes activities in the areas of production, dissemination, research, education and exhibition.

http://cultivamoscultura.blogspot.com/

LABORATORIA is the first nonprofit research centre in Russia focused on constructing the platforms of interdisciplinary interaction between contemporary art and science as well as between contemporary art and social psychology.

LABORATORIA is aimed at establishing a new type of relationship between art, science and society in which new forms and currents of creative energy are redirected and reset. LABORATORIA is the space for commun creation, intersection and movement of scientists and artists. LABORATORIA is the starting point for developing the international autonomous Art&Science space.

http://newlaboratoria.ru