What if it Just Ain't True?

A few years ago one of my friends accidentally discovered that his dad was in fact not his dad at all. Ouch. At twenty seven years of age, he discovered that something he absolutely knew (not thought, hoped, or wished) to be fact, was in reality, not true at all. Let's just say that his reaction wasn't a totally positive one. It never occurred to him that his truth', may in fact, be a big lie. A well-meaning lie (his mum had tried to protect him). A noble lie (is there such a thing?). But a major deception nonetheless.

What if you were to wake up tomorrow and discover that something you've believed (thought to be absolute fact) for years, simply wasn't true? Completely and utterly false. You weren't even close. How would you feel? Mad? Betrayed? Confused? Stupid? Maybe a little of each? Could it be that some of us hold on to certain beliefs in order to avoid the above feelings? After all, imagine having to unlearn something we've believed for decades? That would be quite the mental and emotional challenge, wouldn't it?

We've spoken about beliefs many times here at me-dot-com but today I want to give you a little something to chew on, think about and discuss; if you feel so inspired.

Some questions for you:

1. Is it possible that you've learned' certain things over the years that are, in fact, false? Is it maybe even likely?
2. Is it possible that some of your (self-limiting) beliefs are the very things which stop you from fulfilling (or at least, exploring) your potential, making certain decisions, taking chances and possibly finding happiness?
3. Did you consciously choose and develop your own beliefs, or did you simply adopt hand-me-downs from somebody else? (Many people do this). But Craig, why wouldn't I believe dad? He knows and I trust him, so his beliefs become mine - consciously or not. Intentionally or not. Besides, I wouldn't want to offend him would I?
4. Is it possible that you've believed certain things (seen the world in a particular way) for so long that the very thought of questioning some of your long-held beliefs makes you feel (1) uncomfortable, (2) anxious, (3) disloyal, (4) unfaithful, or perhaps even (5) overwhelmed?
5. Have you ever been coerced, pressured or expected to believe certain things, and because of those imposed beliefs you have been compelled to adhere to certain standards, rules and behaviours? Even though deep down you resented it?
6. Have you ever felt like questioning certain beliefs (to others) but held your tongue in order to keep the peace and avoid potential confrontation? (Why bother it will only create problems?).
7. For the most part, do your beliefs empower you or limit you?

Breaking Free

Sometimes beliefs are like handcuffs or leg irons. They restrict movement, potential, exploration and of course, freedom. Freedom to learn, grow and change. They keep us in the custody of something or someone. You know what I mean.

One of the most liberating, empowering and cathartic things we can do as authors of our own lives is to question our beliefs. Not for the sake of being different, difficult or rebellious, but for the sake of learning who we are, what we are and what we really believe beyond the social conditioning, the weight of expectation, the years of mental and emotional programming and beyond the pressure of group thinking.

After all, our beliefs determine our choices and behaviours (for the most part) and our choices and behaviours determine the kind of results we produce in our world. So why wouldn't we? Is it time for you to do a little unlearning?

Tell me about what you've unlearned lately.

Craig Harper (B.Ex.Sci.) is a qualified exercise scientist, author, columnist, radio presenter, television host, motivational speaker and university lecturer. For the past 25 years he has been a leading presenter, educator, motivator and commentator in the areas of personal and professional development. You can visit Craig's blog at Motivational Speaker.FREE eBook So You've Decided to Get in Shape (Again) Craig's FREE eBook takes 20 30 minutes to read, and addresses the REAL getting-in-shape issues based on his 25 years of experience. To get Craig's FREE eBook click here, weight loss books.

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The trailer for this retro-futurist short about a mechanical squid-shaped submarine has us wrapped in its mechanical tentacles. Brace yourself for the new squidpunk era, with The Anachronism.

Here's the official synopsis for Matthew Gordon Long's new film:

On a sun-dappled summer day a science expedition propels two children towards an enigmatic encounter at the edge of the their known world. Arriving on an isolated beach, they discover the wreck of a robotic squid submarine. The secret it holds within changes their lives forever.

Set in the nineteenth century, the film follows the two children as they pilot the squid sub all over Canada's West Coast, which is slowly turning into a hotbed for science-fictional weirdness. We love the look of the squid, the kid's "explorer" attire and the overall steampunk-lite feel.

Visit the The Anachornism website for more information, and we'll keep riding this mechanical squid for future details.

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

This guest post was written by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, authors of THE POWER OF SMALL .

In today's deadline driven, digital world, taking the time to shoot the breeze' with a coworker, neighbor, or passing stranger can seem like a waste of time. But, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Whether you're a Washington politician or a barista at a local coffee shop, every one of us has the unique ability to inspire change in our lives and in the lives of others around us. And small talk is the key.

When we were writing our book, THE POWER OF SMALL: Why Little Things Make All the Difference , we discovered a truly amazing story that brought our attention to the unexpected ways in which small talk' can change and save lives. In this case, it all started with a cup of coffee and a simple conversation.

The Story of Annamarie and Sandie

Every morning, when Annamarie Ausnes would head to her local Starbucks to pick-up her usual coffee, she looked forward to making a bit of small talk with the barista, Sandie Anderson, but she never imagined that those little conversations would one day save her life.

Over time, what had begun as a casual, How's your morning? or Nice weather, huh? eventually grew into more personal exchanges about their grandkids, weekend plans, and holiday traditions, until one day Sandie noticed something wasn't quite right with her short-drip double-cupped customer. And instead of ignoring it, she decided to trust her instincts and asked one simple question: Are you okay?

At first, Annamarie was reluctant to confide in her barista buddy, but with a little prodding, she opened up.

Actually, I'm not doing so well, she sighed. I was just placed on the national kidney transplant list and I'm getting ready to go on dialysis.

To her shock, Sandie would discover that her friendly customer faced a bleak future. Distraught and determined to help, Sandie announced that she would get tested to see if she could become a donor.

As luck would have it, Sandie turned out to be a match and donated a kidney to Annamarie. Today Annamarie is not only alive and well, the two women are dear friends. And it all started with a cup of coffee and a little small talk.

Of course, not all of us have the ability or courage to make the huge gesture Sandie made by donating her kidney to a virtual stranger, but by simply making small talk, we open ourselves up to new people, new experiences, and new opportunities. As children, we make friends easily. We ask for each other's names, we join in and play with one another. But as we grow older, we tend to close ourselves off, shield ourselves with technology, and forget to acknowledge the people who are right in front of us.

So put away the iPhone for a minute, look up from your laptop, and take the first step by saying hello to the stranger sitting next to you. You never know, they just might be the hero you've been hoping for.

In Their Own Words

Here's a short video clip of Annamarie and Sandie sharing their story in their own words:

Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval are co-authors of the national bestseller THE POWER OF SMALL: Why Little Things Make All the Difference , which debuted on the best seller lists of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Washington Post.

Photo by: polandeze

Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009

How do rockets blast off into space and come back home safely? Scientists and astronauts understand that the same laws of motion and gravity that guide the path of a spaceship also control the motion of golf balls here on Earth. So pilot your ball through this nine-hole outdoor mini golf course and discover the secrets of spaceflight. Visitors ages 6 and older.

Start time: 10:00 am

End time: 5:00 pm

Contact phone: (718) 699-0005

Location: New York Hall of Science (47-01 111th Street)

This morning I received an invitation to Lazyfeed, which debuted at the TechCrunch event last week. Louis Gray has been playing with it and likes what he sees. Here are my initial impressions. Screen grabs follow.

Pros:

• Zemanta plus Google Alerts plus Posterous equals I don't know. (newcommbiz.com)
• LazyFeed: Get the News, Vids, and Pics You Want Without Even Trying (readwriteweb.com)
• The One Huge Issue That Is Going To Kill Tag-based Reading Systems (cloudave.com)

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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If you are going for an interview as a prospective employee then you should do some research. Read the job description and requirements carefully. Browse the web site to see how the organization presents itself. Search for news items and comments about the company on news sites and blogs.

For the interview itself you should dress smartly and appropriately. It is important to have some questions prepared and here are a few that could really help:

1. What exactly would my day-to-day responsibilities be? It is essential that you clearly understand your role and the tasks that you would be expected to undertake. It is easy to make assumptions and get the wrong impression of what the work would be so it is vital for both sides that there is clarity in what is expected of you. If the interviewer cannot give a clear answer then this is a worrying sign, so politely follow up with more questions. Some people even ask to see exactly where they will sit.

2. What are the opportunities for training and career advancement? This question serves two purposes. It helps you to understand where the job might lead and what skills you might acquire. It also signals that you are ambitious and thinking ahead.

3. What is the biggest challenge facing the organization today? This sort of question takes the interview away from the detail and towards strategic issues. It allows to you see and discuss the bigger picture. It proves that you are interested in more than just the 9 to 5 aspects of the job. It can lead to interesting discussions that can show you in a good light - especially if you have done some intelligent preparation. If appropriate you can follow up this question with some questions about the objectives of the department and the manager who is interviewing you.

4. When did you join? After the interviewer has asked a number of questions about you it can make a good change to ask a gentle question about them. People often like talking about themselves and if you can get them talking about their progress in the company you can learn useful and interesting things.

5. What are the criteria that you are looking for in the successful candidate for this position? The job advertisement may have listed what was wanted in a candidate but it is very useful to hear the criteria directly from the interviewer. The more that you can discover about what they want and how they will make the decision the better placed you are to influence that decision.

6. How do you feel that I measure up to your requirements for this position? This follows on naturally from the previous questions. It may seem a little pushy but it is a perfectly fair thing to ask. In sales parlance this is a trial close'. If they say that you are a good fit then you can ask whether there is any reason you might not be offered the job. If they say that you are lacking in some key skill or attribute then you can move into objection handling mode and point out some relevant experience or a countervailing strength.

7. Would you like to hear what I could do to really help your department? If you want the job then this is a great question to ask at the end of the interview. Most interviewers will reply, Yes.' Drawing on what you have learnt in the conversation, you can give a short sales pitch on why you fit the criteria and why your strengths and ideas will siginficantly assist the boss to meet their objectives. Make it short, direct and clear with the emphasis on the benefits for them of having you in the team. At the end ask something like, how does that sound?'

Many candidates take a passive role at the interview. They competently answer the questions that are put to them but they never take the initiative by asking intelligent questions that steer the interview in a helpful direction. If you are a proactive candidate who asks the sorts of questions given above then you will be seen as more dynamic and you will significantly increase your chances of being offered the job.

Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.

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At 14, Caroline Moore became the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. But months later, we're still figuring out how her find, dubbed SN 2008HA, can actually exist, since it defies everything we thought we knew.

Moore is part of the amateur Puckett Observatory Supernova Search Team. According to Deer Pond Observatory:

It all came about at diner with Tim Puckett & Mike Peoples after the Friday's opening of NEAIC 2008. Tim was telling us about the search team and the fact that the team had the youngest person to discover a SN. Her name was Jennifer and she was 16 ( it turns out she was 18 but Caroline did not know that until after her find ) Hearing that a 16 year old had found a supernova, she pronounced " I could beat her". Timmy said it would take a lot of work, but if you think you're up to it I'll sign you up. So at the ripe old age of 13 Caroline started her hunt

That was the beginning of a long eight months. First she had to get a new computer and install all the software then work with Mike Peoples to learn how to get the data and what to do with it.

On November 6,2008 Caroline spotted something odd in one of the data files of distant galaxy UGC 12682, located in the constellation Pegasus. The image of the object was very faint but she noticed some pixels off to one side of the galaxy that made her suspicious, Caroline did all the checks and ran it through all the data basis. "I'm going to send it in. I think it's something," she told her Dad. It took couple nights until the team could get a confirmation image and it looked like her suspicions were confirmed.

Her discovery did indeed turn out to be a supernova, but it goes against all the rules we thought we knew. For example, it's in a galaxy that's in the process of "eating itself," UGC 12682, where supernovas don't usually occur. It's also one of the least luminous supernovas ever detected, and scientists haven't found any evidence of hydrogen, which usually turns up around dimmer supernovas. Now scientists are theorizing that the lack of hydrogen may stem from the fact that this was a massive star that lost mass. Perhaps its core collapsed into a black hole without transferring any energy to the outer layers of the star. Says Stefano Valenti with Queens University Belfast:

The implications are quite important. If this is a massive star explosion, then it is the first one that might fit the theoretical models of massive stars that lose their outer layers through their huge luminosity pressure and then, perhaps, collapse to black holes with a whimper

It's pretty cool that an amateur teenager can discover something that keeps the experts guessing.

New beta online video recommendation engine Invision.TV launches today, and offers a personalized dashboard of related video from sources all over the web, from Hulu to YouTube to CNN to ESPN. Discover new video clips by channels and interests, or sign up to create your own playlists. [via]

Let me start this by saying that many startups have tried to make a funny infomercial, but these guys actually succeeded. The fellow's phony hair and thin mustache, the oldschool computer equipment, and the recognizable 70ies yellowish tone of the video - well, it made me laugh a couple of times. See the video below, and don't forget - it's just that simple!

Overlay.TV enables you to place various text, graphics and animations over a video. The platform enables you to stream videos from popular video sharing sites like YouTube, MySpace TV, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, and College Humor. It's somewhat similar to Ooyala, and it is also partly aimed at advertising, but it also adds some interesting features in the mix. One of them is shopping; for example, you can mark an item on a video and create an online shop out of it; a viewer that clicks on it will be able to buy it directly from the video. Another very interesting feature is a very simple one: if all those stuff on the video starts to annoy you, you can turn all of it off. It all works in both IE and Firefox; Safari isn't mentioned anywhere, though. After the publishers are done with the video, they can share it via email or embed it on a website, blog, or a social networking profile.

Overlay.TV has done its homework and signed deals with over 600 marketing affiliates which at this time accept user click-throughs from Overlay.TV, including Amazon, iTunes and Wal-Mart.

And now, some marketingese for you:

By linking publishers, viewers of online video and marketers, Overlay.TV is transforming user-generated video content from a passive vehicle for entertainment or education, into an interactive vehicle for commerce, said Rob Lane, President and CEO of Overlay.TV. We're empowering a whole new generation of publishers a group we call Generation P' with a user-friendly platform that will help them discover entirely new business models. The advertising industry has significantly shifted from traditional channels to web advertising. With the ubiquity of social networks, consumer-created advertising has more power and influence than anything produced by industry professionals.

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