The stroke of insight of Jill Bolte Taylor
Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist. So you will soon understand the extraordinary insight she got when one morning, she woke up with a terrible pain on the left temporal lobe. As a person, she was both living an intense connective experience and a struggle for survival against a stroke. As a scientist, she had a unique insider experience of what a stroke does, and what it means. As her brain functions (motion, speech, memory, self-awareness, etc.) were shutting down one by one, she started to experience an intense connectedness, the loss of the constant brain chatter, the loss of the sense of self and separatedness.
“How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.”
Jill Bolte Taylor
If the video takes to long to load, you can go and Check TED.
Free Software Foundation
Evernote Forever
I am a great believer in open source. I have been using Linux since Core 1.1.51 (with long gone distribution on 40 diskettes, sigh…), but also Firefox, etc. I like open source because more often than not, these tools are great, even too some extent better than the professional competition. The reason? Feedback. But this is for another post.
This post is about exceptions to the rule. And Evernote would be one of the few exceptions to the rule for me. I have, for a long time, struggled with post-it notes, notebooks, software sticky notes, text files, word documents, pictures organization, etc. And since I am using Evernote the struggle is nearly over. There is a reason to this: this simple note taking tool has grown into a nearly all-encompassing personal information manager. It can handle your notes, your doodles, your pictures. It is possible to clip data from the web or other applications, and find it back 
What is neat about this tool is the tagging and linking “a la Web”. Where most other information managers are still relying on hierarchical structures (i.e. trees), Evernote attaches tag to your notes and enables you to find them through these tags. For instance, if you have a number of projects, you can copy-paste research notes within Evernote, and tag them appropriately, with all the overlaps and links you want want between them.
Even better? With the coming version, your notes will synchronize, which means you can create and access them from anywhere, including your Windows Mobile or java-enabled mobile phone.
If you want to get Evernote, you can go right there!
Future Exploration Network
Future Exploration Network has an interesting website. They pride themselves in “connecting ideas and people at the edge of the future”; ambitious program if you ask me.
They seem to sell their services to large companies like Microsoft, Toyota, American Express, Coca-Cola. So it is unlikely that you would order your own special report, just for you… But still, they have interesting resources on Enterprise 2.0, including a very synthetic web 2.0 framework, and some on the Future of Media. You can get this content in their Thought Leadership section.
Here is the Web 2.0 Framework
And here is the TrendBlend+ 2007
The man who reinvented the corporation
I was recently reading an old article from the March 22, 2004 issue of Business Week. In a series entitled The Great Innovators, they were taking a closer look at the men and women who had left a mark in business, science, technology, government, etc.
This article summarized the life and contribution of Alfred Sloan. Although his name is not as famous as Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin, by far, his influence on the American, and global modern, society might be greater than you think.
Some of Sloan’s contributions include:
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breaking down responsibilities
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He wrote a book, The Organizational Study, referred to by Welch as the first management treatise.