by Christine Cavalier
on 5 July 2008
Flickr has been grabbing more of my time lately. The community there is pretty fun and welcoming. I need to grok it a bit better, to get more involved there. Any tips are welcome.
Why do I want to spend yet more time away from writing? I love photography. I started with a totally manual SLR Nikon with a 50 mm lens when I was 12. I continued with it and buying a new Canon to shoot for my High School yearbook. I moved on to doing portfolio shots for artists and my friend’s wedding. All my photography experience was gathered using traditional SLR’s. I have quite the collection of lenses and filters, all heavy as hell and totally obsolete now.
My next big purchase will be a ‘prosumer’ camera, a digital SLR with professional capabilities but with an ‘affordable’ price. This purchase is a long way off, of course. So I am pushing my little Canon SD 550 to its limits in the meantime. Go check out my photography stream on Flickr to see yesterday’s interesting results of a mix of rain, smoke and fireworks. Please add me as a contact there so I can see your pix too. Again, if you are a photography community user and have any tips for me on how to get more involved, please let me know. Thanks!
by Christine Cavalier
on 5 July 2008
My real life and super-smart friend Bob (who lives two streets away) runs a very popular art blog. Bob’s achieved blogging success most of us don’t even know is possible. Besides all the normal stuff like lots of hits, etc., Bob is sought after by art book publishers to review their latest releases. Now one of those publishers is working with Bob to sponsor a contest to give away one of its most pricey art books. See the blurb below and click over to Bob’s site to check it out. If you aren’t an art connoisseur, click over anyway to look at the amazing paintings! From Bob:
“’I am the most arrogant man in France,’ Gustave Courbet once bragged, doing his best to live up to that reputation through the boldness of his art and personality. Thanks to the generosity of the awesome people at Abbeville Press, Art Blog By Bob hosts the first Art Contest By Bob in which a copy of Ségolène Le Men’s Courbet will be given to one lucky reader. (See my review of Courbet HERE.) Are you arrogant enough to think you deserve a free copy of this lushly illustrated, beautifully written, coffee-table book retailing at $135 USD?”
Find all all the details here.
by Christine Cavalier
on 2 July 2008
A friend who subscribes to the WSJ online sent me this article. I’ll be able to read it for only 7 days, so I copied and pasted it here so we could discuss. I’ll talk more later about choices and decision-making, which is really the heart of the matter between these two opposing theories.
_____________________________________
Study Refutes
Niche Theory
Spawned by Web
July 2, 2008; Page B5
Had PowerPoint been around 150 years ago, Thoreau might have warned us to beware not only of enterprises that require new clothes, but also of those that require new paradigms.
A book from 2006, “The Long Tail,” was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we rethink everything we presume to know about how society works. In this case, the Web and its nearly unlimited choices were said to be remaking the economy and culture. Now, a new Harvard Business Review article pushes back, and says any change occurring may be of an entirely different sort.
[continue reading…]
by Christine Cavalier
on 2 July 2008
***I posted about Multiple Intelligences back in November of 2007. This is an expansion of that short post.***
Twitter is a site where a person can post a message to a bunch of friends at once. Sometimes Twitter works like a bulletin board (where you pin up your notice and get no replies) and sometimes it works like an on-line chatroom with a ton of conversations going on at once.
Last night I replied to a post from my friend Laura. She questioned how it would be possible for someone named Angelina to have a high IQ score (around 136 I think). Assuming Laura was referring to Angelina Jolie, I responded that a 136 score, albeit high, isn’t uncommon and Ms. Jolie seems capable of such a score.
A firestorm erupted, and this time it wasn’t about Angelina Jolie’s shenanigans. All sorts of Tweets (i.e. posts) popped up containing anger over the concept of intelligence testing and the permanent public (and more important personal) branding that can ensue afterwards. My contacts on Twitter interpreted my Tweets as support for and true belief in the IQ test. At 12:30 a.m., after much varied discussion and much qualification from me, the storm died down enough for me to go to bed. Embers were still smoldering this morning, as I had a quite few messages waiting for me in my inbox.
[continue reading…]
by Christine Cavalier
on 26 June 2008
The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Demographic Storm (Hardcover)
by Kenneth W. Gronbach
The Age Curve is a book about numbers. Don’t worry. The author does the math.
The author Kenneth Gronbach, a proud member of the Baby Boomer generation, outlines the numbers of live births in the US starting from the beginning of the 1900’s and ending with projected estimates in 2010. This sounds boring, but this book is a fun read filled with anecdotes, quirky observations and the occasional easy-to-understand chart. [continue reading…]
