The surprising truth about what motivates us

Roo showed me this really great 10ish minute speech accompanied by whiteboard illustrations to keep you focused on what he’s saying. The speech is by Dan Pink, an author of many books about “changing the world of work”. He was presenting for RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts), a society that “seeks to develop and promote new ways of thinking about human fulfilment and social progress.” They have a video that better explains who they are. But watch the speech, it’s worth the 10 minutes of your time.

This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.
www.theRSA.org

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48HR Magazine – a pocket documentary

Ricky Montalvo has created a mini documentry of the people behind 48HR Magazine
(who might have to change their name) during the whole process.

48HR is the magazine that took submissions by crowdsourcing the internet to create a magazine in 48 hours.
Issue Zero: 48HR Hustle is already out and for sale.

48 Hour Magazine – a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits. Can you write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days? This pocket documentary follows the experiment and the people behind it.

48HR Magazine – a pocket documentary from ricky montalvo on Vimeo.

(credit: Laughing Squid)

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PadRacer: First iPad + iPhone arcade game

PadRacer is a racing game that uses the iPad and the iPhone (up to 4) to play
The iPad is used as the gameboard and each car is controlled by an iPhone (or iPodTouch with WiFi or Bluetooth), holding it upright like a steering wheel. The iPhone controller (Pad Racer) app is free
& downloaded here. Download the iPad part here.

This video explains this better:

The game was made by Hong Kong company, SMHK.
What a smart way to integrate the iPad + iPhone, I can’t wait until more companies use this. This really shows how the iPad could be competition for game consoles.

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Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill photos

Greenpeace has released this overhead photo of the oil spill.
The news reports are now saying this spill might be worse than the Alaskan oil spill by Exxon. Reuters has a Factbox of the possible environmental impact of this spill.

(click to see full size)

Photo Credit: © Sean Gardner / Greenpeace

Here’s a gallery with more horrifying photos, including this one from NASA.

Handout photo from NASA made available 27 April 2010 showing the oil spill from the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drill rig disaster located in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, USA on 25 April 2010. This NASA/ALI image taken from the EO-1 satellite shows some of the oil slicks and sheen (bright areas). The spill source is a leaking well on the seafloor located near bottom center of this image. An estimated 42,000 gallons (160,000 liters) of oil per day are leaking from the damaged oil well. EPA/NASA HANDOUT (via)

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The Domestic Transformer

Hong Kong architect, Gary Chang has taken his 344 sq. ft. apartment and built it to contain
24 different living spaces. He calls it “The Domestic Transformer”.

This is the first time I’ve seen it, but The NY Times did a feature on his living space a little over a year ago with some amazing photos & floor plans. Gary Chang used this apartment as an experiment to test reconfigurable spaces. His company EDGE Design Institute, which he founded in 1994, was apart of a project called The Suitcase House Hotel. It’s situated near Beijing and The Great Wall of China can be seen from all spaces within when seated. Check out the image gallery.

Suitcase House Hotel is originated from the experimental development The Commune By the Great Wall in Beijing. The developers of the project invited altogether 12 younger generation of Asian architects, from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Mainland China and Hong Kong, to design independently 11 houses and a club in the valley at the foot of the Great Wall. The development compiles of 2 phases. The first phase of the Commune is a Guesthouse-Hotel community while the second phase will be the weekend Villa-Homes.



Casting a question mark on the proverbial image of the house, Suitcase House Hotel attempts to rethink the nature of intimacy, privacy, spontaneity and flexibility. It is a simple demonstration of the desire for ultimate adaptability, in pursuit of a proscenium for infinite scenarios, a plane of sensual (p)leisure. (via)

This is a video of The Domestic Transformer in action.

(credit: @Martin_Isaac)

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West Wing Week

The White House has started a series called “West Wing Week” which quickly highlights
“all things 1600 Pennsylvania Ave”

It’s light-hearted, well-edited, quick and goes through each day of the previous week with short clips of all the events, meetings and some behind-the-scenes of everything that happened in The White House. Pretty neat. The most recent one is below, but also check out the week of 4/16, 4/9 & 4/2
(I guess these started this month of April?).

West Wing Week: 4/23/10 “Competing the Old-Fashioned Way” from The White House on Vimeo.

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Aviary : Free easy-to-use web based editing tools

Aviary is a free image editor that you can use through a browser.
It doesn’t just have “photoshop” capabilities. There are 7 different programs within this site: Image editor (Phoenix), color editor (Toucan), effects editor (Peacock), vector editor (Raven), image markup (Falcon), screen capture (firefox extension) and audio editor (Myna). For beginners, they have a long list of video tutorials to help get you started, which sorts by application and difficulty. All of this is for FREE. Check out the G4 review below.

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J.D. Salinger’s fan mail

Joanna Smith Rakoff just started as an assistant at Harold Ober Associates in 1996 (who was J.D. Salinger’s literary representative) and one of the tasks she has to do was take care of Salinger’s fan mail.
The rules were to NEVER give out Salinger’s phone number or address and give them the standard form letter as a reply.

Some of these letter writers wanted something specific from Salinger—his permission to make a film version of one story or another, often—but most simply wanted a letter back from him. For the most part, they knew that Salinger didn’t read his fan mail—in fact, he’d insisted that nothing, not one letter, be passed on to him—but each was convinced that his letter was going to be the one that was so moving, so brilliant, so funny, so perfectly aligned with Salinger’s interests and sensibilities, that we, at Ober, would pass it on to him. And that Salinger would then, of course, recognize the writer—the teenage girl from Japan, the World War II veteran in Kansas—as a kindred spirit and write back. Though the authors of these letters varied in age and nationality, there was a theme common to nearly all the letters: Salinger was the only person who understood them.

Read the rest of the Slate article here.

(credit: Scott Lamb)

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Vapur : The Anti-Bottle

Vapur is a portable refillable collapsible attachable bottle.

The Vapur Anti-bottle ($9) is a reusable BPA-free, foldable bottle that you can roll up when empty and stash back in your bag. There’s an integrated carabiner to help it hang around, you can freeze it full of water and it will even go into the dishwasher on the top shelf. It has a small label allowing the bottle to be personalized with the user’s name. Perfect for outdoor using. Priced at $8.95 each, or $29.95 for a four-pack. (via LikeCool)




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Urban Skiing

Skiing on the street.
I’ve actually done something like this with my friends but sledding, in a rubbermaid bucket, pulled around the back of a 4-wheel-drive Subaru by a rope, on an iced over street. It was awesome.

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