The Daily Show recently parodied the recent widespread concern that our zoadiac signs may have shifted.

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Nevermind the question about why this old news is news now.  The real question should be: why haven't people figured out yet that there are not twelve or thirteen signs, there's one.  Signs may be mystical but truth is in the metadata, which you can see clearly thanks to this awesome visualization and analysis in the link below:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2011/horoscoped/

Michael Porter is probably the most cited and esteemed philosopher of business and economics.  My BU MBA classmates thought of him like a rockstar, and his accolade is known to anyone who has ever read books on business theory.  Recently, Porter has been speaking out on the need to rethink the wedge between business and society that people perceive:

“Increasingly companies are being perceived as creating profits at the expense of the community… We need to think differently: what’s good for society is actually good for business.”

In the recently-published paper, Rethinking Capitalism, Professor Porter recommended “creating shared value” for both businesses and society.

This Youtube video offers specific examples of shared value, such as fair trade, corporate social responsibility, and expansion of value.  He also addresses the rejection of corporate social responsibility in a way that links personal responsibility to the responsibility of shareholders.

“By actually creating products that are not just dealing with contrived needs or trying to force products onto the customer… If we create products that are actually ‘good’ for the customer – nutritionally good, environmentally good, help them save, help them raise their family in a better way – actually that’s the right way to make economic profit.”

Image via Wikipedia

Beat Procrastination With a Stopwatch: "I have been experimenting with a new strategy for combatting procrastination and it seems to be working! It’s nothing so genius; it’s actually a very simple idea — which might explain why it has proved effective.
I started using a stopwatch."
Try it, it might just change your life.  I've been using the stopwatch on my iPhone and as a result my workdays are off to a more productive start.

Making the reservation is the easy part, holding it is the hardest. Here's a great article from 43 Folders:

Resolved: Stop Blaming the Pancake | 43 Folders: "My bet is that most people who are seeing the kind of change and growth and improvement that sticks tend to avoid these sorts of dramatic, geometric attempts to leap blindly toward the mountain of perfection.
I’ll go further and say that the repeated compulsion to resolve and resolve and resolve is actually a terrific marker that you’re not really ready to change anything in a grownup and sustainable way. You probably just want another magic wand.
Otherwise you’d already be doing the things you’ve resolved to do. You’d already be living those changes. And, you’d already be seeing actual improvements rather than repeatedly making lists of all the ways you hope your annual hajj to the self-improvement genie will fix you.
Then, of course, we make things way worse by blaming everything on our pancakes."


"At this point, you have logistical options for both execution and troubleshooting:

• Make a modest plan that you can envision actually doing without upending your real life;
• Build more sturdy scaffolding for sticking with whatever plan you’ve chosen;
• Make a practice of learning to not mind the duds–including those messed-up first pancakes;
• Or–seriously?–just accept that you never really cared that much about making breakfast in the first place.Care is not optional.

Otherwise, really, you’d never need to resolve to do anything. You’d already just be cooking a lot. Instead of being all mad and depressed about not cooking.
But, please. All I really ask of you. Don’t blame the pancake."

Read the whole post here.

Image via Wikipedia

We're connected all the time.  The internet is usually within our reach, or in some cases our pocket, at all hours of the day.  When cellphones first became ubiquitous, it meant that everyone was reachable at any time.  But was that really the case, or was that our expectation?  When my cell became my only telephony device after I gave up my landline, I would purposefully silence my phone when I needed to "unplug."  It's just like when you are in a play or a movie theater -- sometimes it's healthier to be in a "do not disturb" mode than connected all the time.  Now that mobile web technology is practically ubiquitous, the various modes of communication conflate our expectations of always being connected: through chat, instant messenger, Facebook and other non-telephony comms.

Does anyone reminisce on the days when we had to leave messages on answering machines?  Recorded on cassette tapes??!!  There was something nice that happened in between the time it took go to get a message: you could sort your inbox and prioritize the messenger most important to you.  Most modern forms of electronic communication carry the expectation of immediate response -- keeping us more connected, but not necessarily helping us communicate better.  It's easy to forget that when we text or msg, the expression is so easily lost.

In the final weeks of every year, I eagerly await the onslaught of "best-of" lists. Pitchfork's top 50 albums inspired me to do my own, so it's time to start the virtual crate digging in the music blogs.  Looking back, twenty-ten was a tremendous year for music.

Top 10-Singles:
Ou Est Le Swimming Pool - Dance the Way I Feel
Major Lazer and La Roux -

Excuses - The Morning Benders

Duck Sauce - Barbara Streisand

Lady Gaga Feat. Beyonce - Telephone (guilty pleasure)

Sleigh Bells - Infinity Guitars
Cold War Kids, "Coffee Spoon"

Matt & Kim - Cameras

Two Door Cinema Club - Something Good Can Work Out

Breakbot - Baby I'm Yours

Other favorites I first heard in '10 although they came out earlier:
Bassnectar's Remix of The Pixies - Where is My Mind (Dec '09)
Bombay Bicycle Club - Always Like This (Jul '09)

Top 5-Albums:

The Morning Benders - Big Echo
Crystal Castles
Jamaica - No Problem
Broken Bells
Two Door Cinema Club - History
THE BLACK KEYS “Brothers’’

Top 5-Videos:

M.I.A. - "Born Free"

Hot Chip - "I Feel Better"

Holy Fuck - "Red Lights"

Duck Sauce - "Barbara Streisand"

Daft Punk - Drezzed

Broken Bells "The Ghost Inside"

Blaqstarr ft. MIA - "Lemme Hump You"

Notable "Best-Of" 2010 Lists:

Rolling Stones Top 30 Albums of 2010

Pitchfork's Top 50

Time's Top Ten of Everything

Pretty Much Amazing's Best Songs of 2010

Image by Getty Images 

2010 Marks the end of the use of Kodachrome. I was lucky enough to shoot on Kodachrome while studying film at the University of Michigan.  When I look at the images crafted from the chemical film process and compare them to the most advanced digital cameras today, I still prefer the old analog way.  It's not about a difference in quality (though one could argue so), rather that film has a majestic, almost magical process which was heightened by the delay of instant gratification -- it requires a process to see what's "in the can."  My first New Year's resolution is to shoot more analog film...if I can find any rolls left!  Click the text below to lament this beautiful (now) extinct analog photography.

Today is the day that Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last lab on the planet to process Kodachrome, stops developing the iconic film forever. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, they gave me the last roll. When I finished shooting the final frames, I hand-delivered it to Parsons. Here are a few of those last 36 frames.

via Waxy

Reeling in the Years with this superb live rendition by Steely Dan.




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