My old friend and college classmate Sharon Roth sends this tangle of a sign, which she snapped on the mean streets of Park Ridge, Illinois.
The “Stop Means Stop” addendum at the bottom could be effective, she says. But there’s so much clutter and noise surrounding it that many drivers tune out rather than slow down. (In other words, writers aren’t the only people who need editors? — Ed.)
Jason Soll – a sprinter, a TEDster, and a central Ohio homeboy — sends this sign from his dorm at Claremont McKenna College. It’s clever. And by getting us to look twice, the sign might prod us into following its instructions.
I’ve been on the road a lot lately — which means that my posts have been infrequent and that they have a travel theme. Today’s the same. Sitting on the tarmac in O’Hare for two hours tonight, I came across this stunner in today’s Wall Street Journal:
“There are an estimated 10 trillion unused frequent-flier miles in circulation now, worth some $165 billion.”
That dollar figure is more than the GDP of Egypt. And if you were to distribute all those miles evenly among Americans, it would amount to one free trip for every man, woman, and child in the United States.
Message: Cash in those miles soon. Or they’ll end up worth as much as that pile of Beanie Babies in your attic.
That’s the question that power-mad (in the electrical sense) travelers ask when they arrive at an airport with their phones and laptops screaming “battery low.”
The search can quickly lead an upstanding citizen down the low road. I’ll cop to: scouring every baseboard in a terminal in a mouse-like quest for a power hole; pinching the outlets behind the United check-in desks when nobody is looking; sitting on the floor, Buddha-style, in the middle of a crowded gate so I can draw a few minutes of juice from one inconveniently located power source; and unplugging the electronic garbage receptacles in the Atlanta airport so I can, er, borrow the outlet for a few minutes.
But on a recent visit to Iowa, I discovered that officials at the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids have fashioned a slightly more civilized solution. Upholstered onto several of the chairs in the gate areas is a small symbol that indicates that an electrical outlet is within reach. If you need power, sit in one of those chairs. If you don’t, sit somewhere else. It’s akin to special seating for people with physical disabilities. Only this time, the seats are for those disabled by their anal-retentiveness. This might catch on.
On a visit to Bogota last week, I saw all kinds of cool things — including some negative space. From Alqueria, a Colombian dairy company run by the innovative Carlos Enrique Cavalier, comes this logo, which simultaneously depicts Alqueria’s main product and the source of that product.
If you’re interested in education, motivation, or doing right by our kids, you owe it to yourself to watch this Edutopia interview with James Paul Gee.
In eleven minutes, he offers an array of compelling insights, including:
How games, unlike schools, avoid the mistake of separating learning and assessment,
Why we should use textbooks the same way we use game manuals,
Why you can often learn more with a peer than from an expert.
“For the first time in history, adults aged 100 or older are a fast-growing population group. Most industrialized countries now average one centenarian per 10,000 residents, but the figure is moving toward one in 5,000.
“University of Georgia gerontologist Leonard Poon looked at common threads among the centenarians he interviewed: They exercised regularly, ate breakfast daily, consumed carotenoids and Vitamin A in large amounts, and didn’t smoke.“
(Source: Outlook 2010, The Futurist, November-December 2009)
The traditional approach is to offer economic incentives, which can be effective in some circumstances but often fall short.So here’s a small but intriguing alternative from Sweden: Motivation through engagement.
Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:
“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”
