Crowd-sourced copywriting

Last year I met a student named Asad Khan during a University of Toronto class where I volunteer.  Asad has graduated and started an interesting business that will operate a marketplace to match crowd-sourced copywriters with companies seeking creative ideas. If you think you are can compose the type of catchy phrase that can win an online competition (or you simply want to pretend you are on Mad Men) then you might want to sign-up to be notified when the service goes live. Naturally, Asad is seeking initial funding through a crowd-sourced funding site -- indiegogo.

The Social Animal

TVO's great series Big Ideas has an excellent talk this week by journalist David Brooks entitled How Success Happens. The talk is based upon the research he did for his book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. One of the things he mentions in the talk is Karl Popper's continuum of predictability ranging from clouds to clocks. One of the topics that EWB devote a lot of time is the same notion of being able to distinguish between complex and complicated things. Clouds are very complex and hard to predict; clocks can be very complicated, but ultimately they are extremely predictable.

Hubble movies

Normally we think of images made by the Hubble Space Telescope as being static views of galaxies or stars far away. But 14 years of images stitched together into short video clips provide a very interesting view of how stars form.

The Monkey Business Ilusion

How did you do? I was off by 3 and failed the important parts.

Hawking at Perimeter

Stephen Hawking gave a presentation at Waterloo's Perimeter Institute yesterday, chronicling his life's work in theoretical physics. He has been a leader in joining the physics of the very large (cosmology) and the very small (quantum mechanics). How a black hole leaks off energy is a little beyond my ability to properly articulate, but it fundamentally changed how physicists understand the universe.

Hawking is known for his sense of humor and while his ALS condition make the delivery of jokes somewhat a function of context (and the quality of his text-to-voice computer) the slides shown above are examples: the first showing what he wants on his grave stone and the second a comment about life in the universe while being featured on an episode of the Simpsons.

What Matters- free book

Seth Godin is promoting a new book with a free book It is a series of large font, one page comments from a long list of interesting people such as Kevin Kelly (Wired magazine co-founder), Hugh MacLeod author of Ignore Everybody, Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz who I have mentioned before and lots more.

TED - www.ted.com

Imagine giving a sweater to the Goodwill store and then years later being in Rwanda and seeing a child wearing your sweater. Watch this video and hear Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz tell the story and then describe a few ways to make a difference.

If you haven't been to the TED site I believe you will be astonished by the breadth of brilliant people you might never have heard speak for 18 minutes before. www.ted.com

PS - If you spend a few hours listening to a long list of 18 minute videos, enjoy.