• Archive for April, 2009

    McDonald’s or Chinese? A useful way of talking about voluntary cooperation

    by  • April 18, 2009 • The Global Picture • 0 Comments

    There are two different global food brands which epitomize the difference between top-down brand-driven franchising, and the bottom-up “open source” ideas we all know and love. In almost any city anywhere in the world you can find both of these options. There will be McDonald’s which is part of the corporate entity headquartered in America, [...]

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    How’s about a nice cup of tea?

    by  • April 16, 2009 • Personal • 0 Comments

    There is little doubt that the occupational self-image of the police is that of “crime-fighters” and that this is not just a distortion of what they do, it is virtually a collective delusion. A mountain of research has indicated that police have little impact on crime rates, are responsible for discovering few crimes and detecting [...]

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    Japan also has (nanoscale) population fan-out.

    by  • April 15, 2009 • The Global Picture • 0 Comments

    As the global financial crisis sinks Japan into its worst recession since World War II and hundreds of thousands of jobs are slashed in factories and offices, farming has emerged as a promising new career track. “Agriculture Will Save Japan,” blared a headline for a business weekly magazine. Farmer’s Kitchen, a popular new Tokyo restaurant, [...]

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    Breaking Conceptual Logjams

    by  • April 15, 2009 • Personal • 0 Comments

    Two or three times this year I’ve stepped into situations where a team had hit an absolute brick wall at a policy, strategy or business level, and half a day or a day later the problem has been cured and the path forwards has been made clear. This is not a service that I’ve made [...]

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    Thresholds of awareness on Twitter.

    by  • April 13, 2009 • The Global Picture • 0 Comments

    Jim pointed me at this NYT article on Twitter. “Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.” I think I know why this is happening. I could follow maybe 30 blogs. Every day or two, [...]

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    The Tribike

    by  • April 13, 2009 • Hexayurt • 3 Comments

    (SketchUp & other files) The Tribike is an attempt to create a “hexayurt for transport” – something minimally functional that can be made with common parts. The core idea is to use a tetrahedron as the basic form – the most minimal shape for enclosing space, and one of the strongest. Steel tube would be [...]

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    The (giant) Solar Funnel solar cooker

    by  • April 13, 2009 • Hexayurt • 3 Comments

    (thanks for the pic, Jonathan) At the Maker Faire Newcastle, we made a new kind of Solar Funnel solar cooker. The design is very simple but very effective: take a 4×8 sheet of thin corrugated plastic (2mm is probably ideal, we used a light grade of 4mm) and cover one side with ordinary tinfoil using [...]

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