Google’s biggest mistake with Android
By Tim | June 16, 2011
This is why I haven’t moved from an iPhone yet – Google’s biggest mistake with Android has been to sub out OS updating to handset makers. Meanwhile my iPhone 4 is on v4.3.3 – I’ve lost count of the number of updates this represents but it is a massive amount more than any Android user has ever received. Handset makers are only ever going to be interested in selling you the next handset, whereas Apple are content to keep you ‘happy’ so you keep coming back for more (in roughly two year cycles in my experience).
Thanks to GenerallyFine for the pointer to the article.
Topics: Android, Communication, iPhone | 3 Comments »
Another side to the story–the dance is on!
By Tim | June 16, 2011
If you were only to look at the news being reported out of Greece at the moment you would quickly gain the idea of a country facing internal collapse with serious rioting happening at the current demonstrations in Syntagma Square, and a government in the process of collapse. At least that is how things are being reported.
I would be no different to you except for one thread. The thread called Maria. Now Maria is someone I came to know about a year and a half ago through being on an Art of Hosting training event, and subsequently have held discussions with her about a possible conversation event and followed her rich contributions to the AoH Ning forum and email conversations. Maria has been in Syntagma Square throughout the demonstrations, and has a markedly different story to tell of what has been developing.
This ‘demonstration’ has been far more than that – a joining together of all ages to stand against the negatives in their nation, and to stand for a new way of living together. To quote in her own words…
There was no violence between those of us that gathered. The violence came from our own riot police, who tear gassed us repeatedly for 3 hours hoping to disperse the collective energy – and who also created physical violence by planting people who caused physical damage to buildings (police were caught on camera handing out batons to their plants to do this). Tear gas was used completely openly and with no provocation – including being sent right into crowds on Syntagma Square who were dancing and singing to beautiful live music that some of our musicians were offering. A symbol of a dying system that is not willing to open up to the new.
The spirit amongst us was incredible – we moved as one as we were tear gassed – helping each other – of all ages. When we could not see or breath for the chemicals, we sprayed each other with malox – when we needed to offer water we gave to each other. When the despair, anger or fear became too much and provocation of the riot police became to vocal and overwhelming, we calmed each other down. We sang and told jokes. We moved the riot police back – not by force – but with a strong fierce movement – a breath of saying no and yes at the same time.
We did not leave – they did not disperse us – actually by 6:00 p.m. we were collectively picking up the garbage and washing the streets of the chemicals – preparing to receive the others who were going to join us. By nightfall – we were hundred of thousands – if not millions. There was chanting, singing, dancing, people’s assembly happening in the middle of Syntagma square (this happens every night – like in ancient Greece – since 25 March) – life was seriously and lightly happening everywhere.
We are hosting ourselves – back to ourselves – what will happen next – who knows – but the dance is on….
Topics: Change, Communication | 1 Comment »
After the flood and shaking
By Tim | June 16, 2011
A moving set of images of Japan post earthquake from ‘The Big Picture’. Somehow seeing scenes where the bulk of the devastation has been removed seem even more haunting, with just hints of the fullness of life stripped away. Images are from Kyodo News via Associated Press.
Topics: Images | No Comments »
ProAction Cafe
By Tim | June 9, 2011
For any who might be interested here is a really useful introduction to the ProAction Cafe concept from Art of Hosting. This can be a very powerful tool to help develop ideas through sharing of wisdom, questioning and inspiration.
Topics: Art of Hosting | No Comments »
Working with, not for
By Tim | May 25, 2011
I read a recent post by Global Guerrillas with growing interest, particularly the reference to ‘working with’ and not ‘for’ someone. This simple change of phrase captures much of the project John Robb and participators are working on at present, but also sums up how I increasingly both enjoy working and seek to see implemented wherever I am.
Many years ago someone told a simple story that has stuck with me since. There is a big difference between a ‘king’ model of leadership, where the king passes on his vision and instructions to his followers and they go off and do whatever that means, and a fathership model, where a father seeks to impart his heart to his children but empowers their dreams and visions, resulting in a multiplicity of things happening but with similar characteristics.
‘Working for’ is the king model, ‘working with’ is the fathership model. Although working ‘for’ seems to bring order and accountability through clear management structure it immediately limits how those doing the working ‘for’ can develop. Everything will tend to go via the one in control. ‘Working with’ can create the space needed to allow for personal change and up skilling whilst maintaining a strong sense of team and commitment.
At work we have a situation of a highly skilled team all able in one sense to take on a traditional command structure environment (which is the organisation’s preferred way btw). However the only way to develop in this ‘working for’ environment is really to leave, as the team is so small that apart from generating nice sounding titles there simply aren’t any expansion options available. Whereas if the team had been built around a ‘working with’ ethos then personal development can be achieved along with shared responsibility for the services delivered.
Topics: Organisation, work | No Comments »
The future as seen from the past
By Tim | May 12, 2011
Just started reading Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity and a couple of quotes leapt out, probably because of my childhood envisioning through reading the Eagle and its cutaway drawings of future world transformations (neatly captured in Donald Fagen’s brilliant IGY track)
It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.
Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss 1954
and the scary slogan of the 1933 World’s Fair:
Science Invents; Industry Applies; Man Conforms.
Wow, has that latter one worked itself out!
Topics: Vision | No Comments »
The Three Great Stimulants
By Tim | May 4, 2011
Trawling through Evernote today (such a superb tool!) and reassigning content to different notebooks I came across the lyrics from an old Joni Mitchell song ‘The Three Great Stimulants’ – still (sadly) so appropriate today too.
I picked the morning paper off the floor
It was full of other people’s little wars
Wouldn’t they like their peace
Don’t we get bored
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocenceNo tanks have ever rumbled through these streets
and the drone of planes at night has never frightened me
I keep the hours and the company that I please
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocenceOh and deep in the night
Our appetites find us
Release us and bind us
Deep in the night
While madmen sit up building bombs
And making laws and bars
They’d like to slam free choice behind usI saw a little lawyer on the tube
He said, "It’s so easy now, anyone can sue."
"Let me show you how your petty aggravations can profit you!"
Call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocenceOh and deep in the night
Appetites find us
Release us and blind us
Deep in the night
While madmen sit up building bombs
And making laws and bars
They’re gonna slam free choice behind usLast night I dreamed I saw the planet flicker
Great forests fell like buffalo
Everything got sicker
And to the bitter end
Big business bickered
And they call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocenceOh these times, these times
Oh these changing times
Change in the heart of all mankind
Topics: Signs of the times | No Comments »
50 Tools for Sustainable Communities
By Tim | May 3, 2011
A really interesting initiative underway in Missouri to create open source industrial machines that will allow users to create a ‘sustainable manufacturing and farming community of about 200 people almost anywhere across the globe’. The aim is to design 50 types of machines using as many interchangeable parts as possible so that devices can be reconfigured to different uses. Still a long way to go but what a superb idea and one which could benefit developing communities all over the world.
Topics: Change, Development | No Comments »
Spectacular
By Tim | May 2, 2011
This is worth viewing even if hang gliding isn’t your thing – a remarkable panorama from mid flight. You can interrupt the sequence and pan around using the controls at the bottom centre if you want.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
The archbishop and the question
By Tim | May 1, 2011
A great story about the six year old girl who asked the question ‘To God: how did you get invented? to four major Christian denominations. Only Rowan Williams, archbishop of the Church of England responded in a child friendly way (two denominations didn’t respond at all), and he obviously took the time to think out a response that was on the child’s wavelength and would stimulate her thinking.
Topics: Communication | No Comments »
Just one more go
By Tim | April 30, 2011
I’ve spent the last two weekends starting demolition of my ailing front garden wall, along with a 5 metre length of concrete path prior to rebuilding it all. With all the great and high profile events of the current times one simple thing stuck in my mind as I was swinging my sledgehammer in the sun.
When you whack a section of concrete or brick wall, generally nothing happens. Nor usually on the second or third goes. But if you keep your eyes peeled eventually the blows begin to produce a hairline crack here and there, and within two or three more strikes a chunk will sever.
Sometimes changing something seems so impossible (it was a very strong concrete path for example, no cracks or fault lines there). You try to hit that something with all you’ve got and nothing seems to split or move. Keep striking!
Every blow is slowly but surely creating stress fractures that will enlarge if the pressure is maintained. Change can come!
Topics: Change | No Comments »
Music craft
By Tim | April 4, 2011
Another amazing Rube Goldberg machine, this time wood in a wood, and advertising a mobile phone. No, it is not April 1st….
Topics: Humour | No Comments »
The Real Cost
By Tim | March 31, 2011
A very humbling set of pictures on the recent Japanese disaster from The Frame, a photo column on the US Sacramento Bee newspaper.
Incidentally it is well worth following @sacbee_theframe on Twitter as the quality of images and the stories portrayed are well worth keeping up with.
Topics: Environment | No Comments »
And it gets worse
By Tim | March 30, 2011
Anyone who still holds on to the belief that banking in general has only suffered a slight ‘whoopsy’ through the goings on of the past few years needs to read this article by Robert Peston on the state of the Irish banks. The levels of greed and flawed faith beggar belief, and not just amongst bankers lest anyone think this is just about that side of the coin.
Everyone is at fault (e.g. you and me) for perpetuating a way of living that is simply not sustainable, and one can only be thankful that the crisis here was as slight (!) as it was.
Topics: Economics | No Comments »
Metabolising Money
By Tim | March 16, 2011
Great quote from Dougald Hine about how limited are our imaginations when it comes to getting things done without cash or force.
I think we’ve become used to metabolising money to a dangerous extent. We’ve lost the knack of getting things done without using either money or coercion – not entirely, not everywhere or in all corners of our lives, but compared to how people have tended to live in most times and places, we’ve become very rusty.
Topics: Imagination, Mindsets | No Comments »
The cycle of giving
By Tim | February 28, 2011
I’m really enjoying reading Charles Eisenstein and the Ascent of Humanity at the moment, (lots of interesting ideas on money in the current chapter I’m on, including demurrage) and came across this great quote he takes from Lewis Hyde:
The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum.
Topics: Giving | No Comments »
The unpleasantness of uncertainty
By Tim | February 27, 2011
It is strange how you change over time, and the things you become interested in that in earlier years you would have never given even a first glance to. This post by Robert Burton on placebos, artificial neural networks and how we think has proved very stimulating and is worth pushing past any initial doubts you might have. He particularly draws out the need for us to accept the limitations of our ‘certainties’ of belief, accepting that part of us does actually want/need to believe.
The quote from F Scott Fitzgerald was for me very apposite, as I find I am so often having to hold seemingly contradictory or strangely juxtaposed concepts without any immediate sense or guarantee of conclusion.
"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
Topics: Thinking | No Comments »
Creating islands of meaning in the sea of information
By Tim | February 24, 2011
As someone who frequently feels swamped by the deluge of information that pours in from the multiple worlds I work and inhabit I took to the tweet that mentioned this book review of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick.
Drawing to start with from an opening illustration from the book of African tribal drum language the story of the book is briefly unpacked, highlighting the pivotal work of Morse and Shannon, both of whom in their own ways influenced the future of information flows.
I’d not really considered before a key point of Shannon’s approach to data, which was to separate information from meaning.
His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning.
But I do wonder that even if we had the means to turn even a slight percentage of information into meaning whether we might then complain of a deluge of meaning, in that something of meaning tends to require a deeper response from us as respondents beyond merely processing. Meaning can often bring new insight, redefinitions, hope but also conviction, challenge and awareness of lack.
Apparently the word information…
first appears in 1386 a parliamentary report with the meaning “denunciation.” The history ends with the modern usage, “information fatigue,” defined as “apathy, indifference or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information.”
The review goes on to cover Shannon’s law of reliable communication.
Shannon’s law says that accurate transmission of information is possible in a communication system with a high level of noise. Even in the noisiest system, errors can be reliably corrected and accurate information transmitted, provided that the transmission is sufficiently redundant.
One can’t help but think of the Internet, email, Twitter etc. in this light, providing immense redundancy of communication (this blog post being exactly that) to enable any given pieces of information to be transmitted far and wide. But transmitting is not the same as bringing meaning to what is being transmitted, which brings me to one final quote from the review itself:
As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.
Topics: Communication, Information | No Comments »
Community action anyone?
By Tim | February 23, 2011
What an amazing story this is of people working together to change their world – over 50,000 people coming together in Estonia on the same day to clear illegal rubbish dumps across the country. Admittedly the high tech start of mapping was fairly crucial to enabling what followed, but this is a brilliant example of defining a clear target that people can own for themselves and collaborate in taking action to produce a beneficial result for all.
Topics: Change, Community, Empowerment | No Comments »
The welcome I receive with every start
By Tim | February 22, 2011
I always enjoy these lyrics each time I listen to the track, that just perfectly sum up God’s grace.
It seems as if all my bridges have been burned,
You say that’s exactly how this grace thing works
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart,
But the welcome I receive with every start.Roll Away Your Stone: Sigh No More – Mumford And Sons
Topics: Grace | No Comments »