A Marshmallow Challenge might seem to be an unlikely topic for this blog, but it is a topic on today’s Ted Blog that is amusing and stimulating.  It is a talk by Tom Wujec and it is all about collaboration, innovation and creativity.  He is a Fellow at Autodesk and is the creator of the marshmallow challenge.

He describes it as one of the fastest and most powerful techniques for teams to improve their capacity to generate fresh ideas, build rapport, and master the skill of prototyping – all of which lie at the heart of team innovation.

The challenge is disarmingly simple.  The teams get 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string and one marshmallow.  The rules are straightforward:

1. Build the Tallest Freestanding Structure: The winning team is the one that has the tallest structure measured from the table top surface to the top of the marshmallow. That means the structure cannot be suspended from a higher structure, like a chair, ceiling or chandelier.
2. The Marshmallow Must be on Top: The entire marshmallow needs to be on the top of the structure. Cutting or eating part of the marshmallow disqualifies the team. 
3. Use as Much or as Little of the Kit: The team can use as many or as few of the 20 spaghetti sticks, as much or as little of the string or tape. The team cannot use the paper bag as part of their structure.
4. Break up the Spaghetti, String or Tape: Teams are free to break the spaghetti, cut up the tape and string to create new structures.
5. The Challenge Lasts 18 minutes: Teams must not be holding on to the structure when the time runs out. Teams holding the structure will be disqualified.

If you explore the website, you will see some of the creative solutions that teams have used around the world.

This post is also a challenge in another way.  Like the other SMM blogs, this blog is currently structured according to the LMNHP (Look Mom No Home Page) approach.  It is early days and the key measure of how useful this approach is will come from rankings of posts in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). 

The Marshmallow Challenge has produced no less than 390,000 items and the TED blog post today will encourage many more.  It will be interesting to see, given that competition, how high this blog post can rise for a Google search for ‘Marshmallow Challenge’.  We will keep you posted.

Post from: BPWrap

The Marshmallow Challenge

Technorati Tags: challenge, creativity, lmnhp, marshmallow, team

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Hold me tight is a straightforward and direct message so what does that have to do with websites?  The link may escape you but read on and all will become clear.  The progression of ideas runs as follows

• Hold Me Tight
• Three Brains Synergy
• Blink For Fast Reactions
• Engaging Websites

Hold Me Tight

Hold me tight is also the title of a book by Sue Johnson.  It sets out the key principles involved in the EFT approach that she has developed over thirty years.  Sue Johnson is a professor at the University of Ottawa.  She is also the Director of both the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy (ICEEFT) and the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute Inc..

The book covers a most important topic and here we pick up on only one small sliver of the knowledge she covers.  A key reason why two people in a relationship may get at cross purposes is that the couple are hardwired to react instinctively if they feel that their relationship is threatened.  To fully understand, you should read her book, but the essence is that this threat of losing that key relationship triggers an extremely rapid primal fear instinctive reaction.  This occurs in the amygdala, which is part of the limbic area of the brain.

This is the area in which the fight or flight reaction is triggered when threats occur.  You might almost say that this is unthinking reaction, since it occurs unbidden and instantaneously.  Any primate or indeed any mammal has this possibility of being affected by such a primal fear of losing a connection with a significant other.  It starts at birth with a link between a mother and child and is always a feature of our human nature although linkages may change over time.

Her thesis is that subsequent actions and reactions are all affected by what happens in those first microseconds of primal reaction.  Although our reaction to a given website will rarely involved anything as gripping as a primal fear, it is not too much of a stretch to believe that reactions to a web page are not just affected by what is logically perceived.  Perhaps they can be affected by how our emotions affect that perception.

Three Brain Synergy

The words of Sue Johnson to an extent are in sync with the approach suggested by Fritz Glaus and Stephen Goldberg, cofounders of Three Brain Synergy.

They suggest that each human being in a sense has three brains, which have been labeled ”head brain”, ”heart brain”, and ”gut brain” by the neuroscientists.  The head brain is concerned with logical reasoning, the heart brain deals with emotions and the gut brain deals with those instinctive reflex actions generated by the limbic area of the brain.

Humans will react in any given situation based on how these interacting parts of their brain function are interacting.  Sue Johnson’s work is building on the same foundation.  In both cases the gut brain, or the limbic area, may have already triggered a certain sense which then affects and perhaps limits the actions that the other parts of the brain can consider and act on.

Blink For Fast Reactions

Malcolm Gladwell has written persuasively on the notion that people can react to websites in milliseconds in deciding whether to stay and interact with the website or flee elsewhere.  The specific trigger may not be as primal as the fight or flight reaction but undoubtedly it can be very rapid.  Given that it happens, we should not discount the notion that our reaction to a given web page is not just a logical, intellectual response to seeing what the web page displays.  Our emotions and even our gut reaction may modify or distort what our thinking brain is perceiving.

Engaging Websites

The most reasonable description of our reaction to a web page must be that the perception is made up of our logical, emotional and even gut reactions to what is on display.  This will also be affected by our expectations of what we might see in opening that web page.

If we wish to have engaging websites where visitors interact with the web pages by pursuing the calls to action, then we cannot just rely on a logical analysis of what appears on the web page.  As so often, we must approach this in a visitor-centric manner.  What is the visitor expecting to see and what will their three brains working in concert perceive when the web page opens in their browser.

Identifying exactly how a given visitor is perceiving the web page may be challenging.  Not everything will be necessarily perceived consciously.  Some aspects may be instinctive and unspoken.  All one can do is stay open-minded to the possibilities.  What may appear to be an illogical reaction may be explained by some emotional factor.  This three brain synergy explanation raises some interesting challenges for the search engines and what they are attempting to do.  Google might hope to deliver the most relevant web page to a keyword search query.  If that relevance should really be based on a tri-brain perception, how can a spider using only logic deliver the most relevant page.  The answer will be suggested in a follow-up post.

Conclusion

In the end, one can only hope that the visitor’s total reaction is in line with the objective we had for that particular web page.  Hold Me Tight is in many cases a worthwhile goal to shoot for.

Post from: BPWrap

Hold Me Tight And Engaging Websites

Technorati Tags: Blink, EFT, Emotion, Perception, Sue Johnson

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The dollar hit its lowest level in more than four months against a basket of major currencies on Wednesday, continuing its slide as investors stuck to the view that the worst of the global financial crisis had passed. That reduced safe-haven demand for the dollar and bolstered assets perceived to have higher risk, such as emerging market currencies, including commodity-based units such as the Australian and New Zealand dollars.

This view that the Fundamentals Are Returning to Currency Trading was a widely held view:

Not only did the currencies rally versus the dollar yesterday, but gold and silver took part in the proceedings too! It’s been a long time since we’ve seen this happen. For the most part, whenever the currencies (minus yen) rallied, gold would back off, and vice versa… Not yesterday! For the first time in a long time, the negativity toward the dollar was front and center.

A return to more normal currency markets does not reduce the risk involved in currency trading. Trading foreign currencies on margin carries a high level of risk, and may not be suitable for all investors. Before investing in forex currency trading you should carefully consider your investment objectives, your level of experience, and your appetite for risk. You should not invest money that you cannot afford to lose. You should seek advice from an independent financial advisor if you are in two minds about this.

If you do want to get involved in currency trading, then you may well wish to use forex trading software, which can provide all the background knowledge you wish to have and analysis of your trading actions.

With the right forex charts, you can better analyse trading patterns and spot trends and deviations. This ongoing analysis of what is happening in the foreign exchange currency markets is essential if you are to manage the risk that is involved in currency trading.

Post from: BPWrap

Forex Currency Trading Returns To Fundamentals

Technorati Tags: currency, foreign, forex, trading

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Sleep is, or should be, making a workplace comeback according to the Vancouver Sun.

Cisco Systems and Google are just two companies that have recently purchased Energypods, egg-shaped recliners that block noise and light, which employees use to grab quick naps during working hours. Google has even enlisted the services of a napping expert.

As the New York Times explains,

“There is a cultural bias against sleep that sees it as akin to shutting down, or even to death,” according to Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Most people, Dr. Ellenbogen says, think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” — it does nothing productive. Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate aha! moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

Dr. Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.” In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but they don’t know it.

So where do you get your Power Napping Pod For The Office

Perhaps you can talk the boss into buying a couple of MetroNaps EnergyPods. These comfortable looking chairs conform to your body, while a “sphere of silence” keeps the clickity-clack of keyboards and ringing phones from disturbing your brief beauty rest. Power naps aren’t supposed to be long, and the Energypod keeps you from drifting off to Slumberland by using a combination of vibrations and alarms to wake you after 20 minutes. The EnergyPod looks like something straight out of Sleeper and will set you back $8,000.

Related: 10 Benefits of Power Napping, and How to Do It

Post from: BPWrap

Power Napping For Ideas

Technorati Tags: creativity, EnergyPod, ideas, MetroNaps, napping

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John Brandon asks this morning whether interest in Google Chrome is already waning. He feels that:

People use IE because it comes pre-installed and does mostly what they need it to. Walk into an office and glance around — you will see a lot of IE. Those who know better use Firefox because it is more stable, more secure, and faster. Where does that leave Chrome? I think as a third option for early adopters. But those who just need to get work done, who use Gmail and are too busy to mess around with bugs have probably all switched back to Firefox.

Just after the launch there was an initial flurry of interest. Mark Evans commented that a number of people had checked it out with some like Walter Mossberg liking it and others like Alec Saunders suggesting it was all a shell game. Mark Evans even questioned, What Took Google So Long?

Some experts such as John Andrews even warned that ‘under the hood’ there was a Google Chrome Bait ‘n Switch. That was because of some unfortunate language in the Agreement that all users had to agree to. Google beat a hasty retreat on that one but it still left a negative impression for some.

By now, everything in the garden should be lovely. However like John Brandon, I am still left with the question as to whether this browser really has any natural customers. Clearly the power users find it lacking, yet the novices may well find its apparent simplicity somewhat baffling. I am still trying to get the Omnisearch field to accept searches with other search engines. I should be able to type ‘Yahoo cheeses‘ and get a search on Yahoo for cheeses. Perhaps the problem as PCWorld explains is that I am using Windows XP.

Type ‘google fish sticks’ to search for fish sticks on Google. The same syntax works for Yahoo, Amazon, Live Search, and other sites that are already recognized by Google or that you add. This feature, though nifty and promising, proved inconsistent in the early going: It worked for me most of the time on a Windows Vista PC, but two of my colleagues who were testing Chrome on Windows XP machines had trouble getting the feature to work.

It is all very well to have an ultra-simple browser like this, however a user manual is always obligatory. The only one I could find is the Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome. That title is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

Post from: BPWrap

Google Chrome Manual

Technorati Tags: browser, Chrome, Google, John Andrews, Mark Evans, Search

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At the recent SES San Jose, Dan Heath, co-author of Made To Stick and keynote speaker, offered 6 Tips for Small Business Marketing Success. He suggested that ideas that catch on are:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

He feels that presenting users with too many choices reduces their response rate. So, avoiding “decision paralysis” is one key aspect of keeping an idea simple.

That’s what Sheena Iyengar calls ‘choice overload‘. It really is true that ‘the fewer, the better‘.

Post from: BPWrap

Choice Overload Reduces Sales

Technorati Tags: choice overload, Dan Heath, KISS, Made To Stick, Sheena Iyengar

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Firefox 3.0 Looks Much Better Full Screen. That was written by Geoff Fox of PC Magazine and I think he has got it exactly right.

If you are a Firefox user and have upgraded to Firefox 3.0, then just hit that F11 key to see what he means. If you are working with a 1024 x 768 screen, then the effect is particularly good. The whole screen is taken up with the window content of the webpage you were visiting. If the page is particularly long, then you may have a scrollbar down the right-hand side. The rest is exactly what that website owner was hoping you would see. There are no toolbars along the top or a status bar along the bottom. It is all just visual content.

If you do wish to see which tabs are open, then just move your mouse to the top of the screen and the tab bar will appear. If you were working with the Navigation toolbar visible, then this toolbar will also appear at the top above the tab bar. All the other toolbars you may have had visible still remain hidden in this Full Screen view.

If you are hooked on having these bars permanently visible along the top, then Percy Cabello has some advice for you on how to Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode. That will make the tabs and navigation toolbar a permanent visible item in your Firefox 3 Full Screen mode.

I very much prefer keeping that clean simple look. Indeed by an approach that I am about to describe, I will suggest to you how you can stay in Full Screen mode probably 95 percent of the time. I work fairly extensively on the Internet. However if I analyze my behavior on any given day, I am probably working within a very restricted list of web pages or URLs. The problem is that from a Full Screen mode webpage, I cannot access my Bookmarks Toolbar.

I raised this problem with my colleagues on the Cre8Asite Forums, in a topic which was titled Maximizing The View Window. There was a suggestion that the Bookmarks or Favorites could be put on a web page. This in turn raised the possibility that such a HTML file could be held on my local computer, which gives the most rapid and reliable access. The following image shows some of the final product. It’s a Demo version of my new computer-resident Home Page.

With what is there, I can work most of the time in the Full Screen version and rarely need to put all those toolbars back. You can download it, if you wish to check the code or modify it to create your own, from this link: Home Page Links Demo.

Some of the features you will note are the clock at the top right, a Google search field and a Quote Of The Day. Below that arranged in a table are some of the links I use for much of the day. When working for a specific client, I often add a few links that are specific to that client.

For those who are novices with HTML, it is a very simple matter to modify the code to remove or add a link. You just open the homepagelinksdemo.htm file in Notepad or something equivalent that can handle text files. The HTML code for a table entry looks like the following:
<td><a href="http://www.mysite.com/">My Site</a></td>
To change the link, put the new URL between the ” ” and add the appropriate name between the > and <.

When using such a Home Page, it really becomes very handy if you arrange that opening a new tab shows that Home Page. This can be achieved by using the New Tab Homepage 0.4 Firefox Add-on.

If you wish to select a link on this Home Page, <control>T opens up a new tab with the Home Page showing. Clicking on a link on that Home Page opens the URL in the same tab. Throughout you are working Full Screen. If you no longer want that web page, <control>W will close that tab.

I’m finding this increases my effectiveness and viewing pleasure significantly. Try your own local Home Page and perhaps you will be equally impressed. Unfortunately a similar set-up does not work so smoothly for Internet Explorer. The security features blocking ActiveX controls prevents single click opening of new web pages. Often two clicks are required to remove the blocking feature. The only sensible suggestion for Internet Explorer users is to switch to Firefox.

Post from: BPWrap

Ultimate Simplicity For Firefox 3 Full Screen

Technorati Tags: 1024x768, display, Firefox, full screen, Home Page

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Since Google Answers is no longer active, I suggest you may wish to try out BrainBoost. At the least, it’s a very catchy name.

Post from: BPWrap

Not BrinBoost – I Should Have Said BrainBoost

Technorati Tags: BrainBoost, BrinBoost

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Now Google announces that it is offering a new service, Google Patent Search, in beta of course. Their Advanced Patent Search gives you some flexibility in selecting which patents should appear in your search.

Patent experts such as William Slawski, writing in a post on this in Search Engine Land, comment that the Beta label is well justified in this case since there are some bugs that need to be corrected. He points out that the results are only an undefined fraction of what is fully available, which is true. However if you are going to eat an elephant and know that it should be done ‘slice by slice’, then it’s handy to be able to say just how you want your slices carved up.

If this topic is of interest to you, then check out the Cre8asite Forums discussion on this. There are some useful suggestions there.

Other Useful Patent Search Programs

• The FreePatentsOnline search engine is one of the most powerful, fastest and easiest patent search engines on the web.
• SumoBrain features full-text cross-collection searching of US & EP patents and applications, PCT documents, and Japanese abstracts.

Tags: Patent Search, Google

Post from: BPWrap

US Patent Search – How To Eat An Elephant

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Google in its ever-ongoing journey to catalogue all knowledge in the world is well along with the printed word. You can use Google Book Search to find out where in a book you can find a particular quote. If you’re that way inclined, you can also do some detective work on some newly written book to see whether it contains other folks’ work. Of course that’s OK if it’s small sections and the author attributed it to the original author. Otherwise the author may well be liable to be pursued for copyright infringement.

It’s another example of the new transparency that we all must observe in this Internet era. Those spiders are everywhere.

Tags: Google, Book Search

Post from: BPWrap

Copyright, Copy Write, Copy Wrong

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