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clipped from www.fastcompany.com

Innovation and inspiration. Management and creativity. This is our fourth annual report on the intersection of business and design. Online we feature a video interview with Yves Behar and a video tour of R/GA's best interactive work.

Yves Behar
Not long ago, Yves Béhar was a self-described "slumlord" to cover his rent. Now he's a superstar.

Bob Greenberg
The phrase "interactive advertising" is everywhere. Bob Greenberg actually makes it.

Sam Lucente
Sam Lucente's business is corporate design. Persuasion is his game.

clipped from www.kk.org

My recommendation for the best personal color book printer is Blurb. Blurb produces color books very similar to the iPhoto books you can order from Apple. Using iPhoto Books is slightly easier than using Blurb's software, particularly if all your photos happen to already be in iPhoto, but it works well enough. The idea is that you can drag images (photos or illustrations) into template book pages, add text or captions where you want to, then hit a button and have the finished book mailed to you. (all these systems work with PCs and Macs)

The results from both Apple and Blurb are marvelous. In fact, these books are astounding. That's because they both use the same back-room engine, the HP Indigo 5000 (as do the other color book makers like Snapfish and MyPublisher). The Indigio is essentially a high-speed, high-quality liquid-toner printer that will print your photo book several pages across.

Blurb Photobook
$19 base price
Available from Blurb

Blurb's How to Make a Book

clipped from www.vanderbilt.edu

In a long standing enigma of economics and psychology, humans tend to immediately value an item they’ve just received more than the maximum amount they would have paid to get it to begin with. This tendency, known as the endowment effect, is something some economists consider a fluke, but new research finds that humans aren’t the only ones exhibiting an endowment effect.

A new study co-authored by Vanderbilt professor Owen Jones, who is one of the nation’s few professors of both law and biology, uncovered the first evidence that chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect similar to people. Specifically, the study showed that chimpanzees favor items they just received more than items they normally prefer that they could get through exchange.

“Our results support the conclusion that the frequent failure to exchange a less-favored food for a more-preferred food was an active choice and is similar to the endowment effect behavior seen in humans,” said Jones.

clipped from www.fourhourworkweek.com

Here are a few of the changes I noticed then and am noticing again now:

1) My lazier thinking evolved from counterproductive commiserating to reflexive systems thinking. Each description of a problem forced me to ask and answer: What policy can I create to avoid this in the future?

2) I was able to turn off negative events—because the tentative solution had be offered—instead of giving them indefinite mental shelf-life (and “open loop” in GTD parlance), resulting in better sleep and more pleasant conversations with both friends and business partners.

3) People want to be around action-oriented problem solvers. Training yourself to offer solutions on-the-spot attracts people and resources.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com

On March 26, 1997--chosen because that day was the anniversary of Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan--Begum became the first participant in GrameenPhone's Village Phone Program. Now widely known, the plan offers small loans, or microcredit, that enable people in one of the world's most impoverished countries to buy cell phones and rent them, call by call, to neighbors who can't afford telephones of their own.

A decade later, instead of begging on the streets and sleeping with cattle as she once had done, Begum shares a two-room brick house with her husband, two sons, a daughter, a television set, and a refrigerator. Next door, she has built a barn, shops, and temporary housing that she rents to five poor families. Today, her banker estimates her net worth at $145,000, which may be more than everyone else in her village combined.

In Bangladesh today, the only one making real money on GrameenPhone's wireless service is … GrameenPhone.

clipped from www.fastcompany.com

Environmental Activist Adam Werbach Used To Call Wal-Mart Toxic, But Now He Works For Them Once the youngest president of the Sierra Club, Adam Werbach used to call Wal-Mart toxic. Now the company is his biggest client. Does the path to a greener future run through Bentonville? By Danielle Sacks

How Green is Wal-Mart? In October 2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott outlined audacious environmental and sustainability goals for the company. Here's the status of some of the company's major initiatives. By Charles Fishman

Wal-Mart's Personal Sustainability Project The Personal Sustainability Project, or PSP, that Werbach and his firm, Act Now, are running for Wal-Mart is intended to help the company's 1.3 million employees see how sustainability--defined very broadly as "having enough for now, while not harming the future"--relates to their own lives. Here's the strategy. By Fast Company Staff

clipped from www.kk.org

Leave it to the Japanese to create a brush pen. This pocketable pen has a super fine brush tip of actual bristles, perfect for tiny Kanji characters, or of course, doodling in your journal, or sketching in your Moleskine. While it's hugely popular with comic book folks and cartoonists, artists of all stripes have picked one up for their paper work. The feel is incredibly tactile and lovely. It works like a fountain pen, with replaceable rich ink cartridges. Once capped it doesn't leak as far as I can tell. (There's a moment of panic when you first assemble it since the instructions are 100% in Japanese, but just insert the ball-bearing end of the ink capsule into the tip.) You can purchase other color inks as well.

Pentel Pocket Brush Pen
$18
Available from Wet Paint Artists' Materials

clipped from www.kk.org

Comic books, comics, graphic novels, or whatever you call them are not a genre, they're a medium. Wolk emphasizes this from the outset of this vivid examination of the form and many of the geniuses and misfits of the American mainstream and avante-garde. Always frank, always insightful, Wolk, a former comic book store clerk, covers a lot of ground: pregnant moments, metacomics, parallel Earths, disposable Sunday strips, and, of course, how the world of comics can be "annoyingly male." The first half of the book tackles history along with an overall assessment of what comics mean and how to read them. There are great bits about what makes a "superreader" and how the form blossomed despite the economics of limited shelf space. The second half is a series of precise essays on specific artists, including Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Charles Burns and Steve Ditko.

clipped from www.kk.org

Magnificent! A work of genius. The best how-to manual ever published. I could keep piling on the superlatives because this book is simply a masterpiece. At one level, it is a comic book about how to make comics, and for that it is supreme; the best. It will walk you through every step of making a comic, including how to make them on the web, digitally, or in pen and ink. I've been working on a near-completed graphic novel, and every page has told me something important and spot on. With brilliant graphics, Scott McCloud combines the most profound insights from his two previous books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. But in this book he raises your understanding of graphic communication further by making every lesson utterly practical and useful for both novice and expert. I can't imagine anyone ever doing a comic manual better.

clipped from www.reuters.com

CHICAGO (Reuters) - When it comes to a man's body odor, the fragrance -- or stench -- is in the nose of the beholder, according to U.S. researchers who suggest a single gene may determine how people perceive body odor.

The study, published online on Sunday in the journal Nature, helps explain why the same sweaty man can smell like vanilla to some, like urine to others and for about a third of adults, have no smell at all.

Matsunami and colleagues at Duke and Rockefeller University in New York focused on the chemical androstenone, which is created when the body breaks down the male sex hormone testosterone.

clipped from www.ted.com

If you're going to hold a conference about ideas, from time to time you need to step back and look at the mysterious engine that creates them: the human mind. What goes on in there anyway? How can our strange, gray, gooey brains create inspired inventions, the feeling of hunger, the experience of beauty, the sense of self? And how reliable are they? Might there be strange quirks in the ways our minds work, given that they were optimized for the needs of a savannah-roaming hunter-gatherer?

Our speakers offer numerous insights. Dan Dennett argues that brains are the ecosystem in which a new form of life, the meme or idea, can flourish. Meanwhile Peter Donnelly, Al Seckel and Dan Gilbert, in three very different ways, highlight bizarre quirks in the way we think, perceive and experience. Yes, it turns out our mental programs are a little buggy. These talks will help you take countermeasures!

clipped from www.publicradio.org

You may not have heard of Capgemini, but the technology consulting firm has some big-name clients, like drug maker Eli Lilly and the accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers — big corporations that spend big money on office software and technology. So it's no small deal that Capgemini is endorsing Google's suite of office software. Capgemini will continue to support business software made by other vendors, including Microsoft and IBM, but this is the first time one of the world's top technology consulting services will recommend Google Apps to its corporate customers.

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com

TOKYO - It looks like a washing machine on wheels, but the bulky contraption vacuuming the hallways of a Tokyo high-rise is a robot.

Japanese researchers hope that robots like this one will be the answer to a pressing question hanging over the country -- how to cope with an aging population and a declining labor force.

The vacuuming machine developed by Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd is already cleaning floors in about 10 buildings around the country, including a 54-floor skyscraper in central Tokyo.

clipped from www.cnn.com

Asleep on the job

Speaking of nodding off, turns out American's aren't so good at keeping their eyes open in the workplace. A whopping 50 percent of those surveyed say they've caught someone sleeping at work, not to mention the 28 percent who admit they've fallen asleep at work themselves.

Little-known-fact: Auto mechanics (65 percent) have the highest rate of self-admitted snoozing on the job, followed by 51 percent of government workers.

Having trouble staying awake? Follow these pointers from "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Work," by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, on how to cover if you're caught sleeping at your desk.

Blame work. Say, "I'm so exhausted; I was here until midnight last night!" Do not attempt this if your boss works late and you do not.

clipped from www.sciam.com

In recent years, however, a new picture of leadership has emerged, one that better accounts for leadership performance. In this alternative view, effective leaders must work to understand the values and opinions of their followers—rather than assuming absolute authority—to enable a productive dialogue with followers about what the group embodies and stands for and thus how it should act. By leadership, we mean the ability to shape what followers actually want to do, not the act of enforcing compliance using rewards and punishments.

clipped from news.yahoo.com

For the first time in human history, more people are laboring in service trades than in food production, according to data gathered by the International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency affiliated with the United Nations.

As recently as 1996, agriculture accounted for 42 percent of world employment, with another 21 percent of workers in goods-producing industries and 37 percent in services. By last year, the ILO says in a report released over the weekend, 42 percent were in services, 37 percent in agriculture, and 22 percent in industry.