As I cobble together this sporadic collection of visual and vaguely primate-related newsletter tidbits, I don't know which is more nerve-racking:

1. The up-for-grabs political tornado spinning about the news channels, or...
2. The tornados that just touched down in our new home town of Nashville, Tennessee.

Whatever happens, keep your head down and do what my wife does on nights like these:

Monkey Management for Project Teams Pry off those primates!
In this podcast, professional project manager Mike Graupner describes the techniques he uses to address the Monkeys in his life--random requests, urgent tasks, unplanned events, other people's problems, etc. Graupner advocates that these metaphorical monkeys should either be shot or left alone. We, on the other hand, advocate non-violence towards fellow primates :)

Ready to Ware From FastCompany: Clothes That Look Hip and Track Your Vital Signs, Too.
Industrial inventor, De Rossi, who has worked on robotic skin and motion-capture tech for Darpa and the US National Institutes of Health, began exploring the idea of fabric as a data-collection medium 12 years ago. Most of his designs employ thin, pliable strands of conductive steel spun with cotton or polyester fibers into yarn. The Wealthy suit has nine electrodes and conductive leads woven in, yet the fabric looks and feels completely normal.

Good Education Scary statistics delivered succinctly

Part of the transparency section of Good Magazine, this clever video commissioned by ED in '08 highlights details behind America's ranking in public education.

Many Eyes Visualization Options Available in Many Eyes
Finding the right way view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental. IBM researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are the creators of Many Eyes, a new kind of social website dedicated to data visualization and analysis. Members upload batches of data - about politics, weather, or anything else - then chart, interpret, discuss, and even re-visualize one another's data.

This podcast from IT Conversations traces the history of this data visualization project.

Geni Animated Geneology Web Apps

This web 2.0 app drastically improves the (usually) tedious process of tracing family history, by combining the elegance of Flickr and the tools of social networking. You can kick off the family tree and invite your relatives to fill in the blanks!

Quick Primer on Graphs and Networks The power and flexibility of a network

Whether a simple group of casual neighbors or a complex next generation communication network, the quality and strength of a network depends not just on the number of connections, but on the quality of the nodes, and more important, the type of nodes. is a fantastic intro to the concept of graphs and networks. It helps in understanding the a social graph, the basis of Facebook, and how it differs from a social network.

MindMap WebApp From LifeHack's 11 Top New Web Apps of 2007

Flash-based mindmap creator bubbl.us allows you to quickly and easily make effective, attractive mindmaps that can be exported as images or as HTML outlines, or shared with others who can add new items or draw new connections between existing ones. Sometimes clunky if your connection is slow or if the mindmaps get too large. But a fantastic Flash-enabled tool!

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