"This deck of 91 full-colour cards names what skilled facilitators and other participants do to make things work.  The content is more specific than values and less specific than tips and techniques, cutting across existing methodologies with a designer's eye to capture the patterns that repeat.  The deck can be used to plan sesssions, reflect on and debrief them, provide guidance, and share responsibility for making the process go well.  It has the potential to provide a common reference point for practitioners, and serve as a framework and learning tool for those studying the field. "

Hey, anybody out there want to learn a thing or two about online collaboration, or teamwork, or communication, or, like... anything? Look at this fucking spec doc. Fangirls seriously know their shit.

If you work or play downtown there’s a way to keep warm while travelling through the different landmarks of Detroit.

Mark Nickita, architect and president of Archive Design Studio as well as co-owner of Pure Detroit, Stella International Cafes, and The Rowland Café, routinely takes people on this little tour of Detroit that is very helpful if you want to keep warm and dry.

Nickita devised a route that will keep you inside while getting where you need to go. From the RenCen to the Compuware Building and everywhere in between, you only need to be outside to cross the street. Go from lobby to lobby, check out the shops and architecture, and stay warm. 

A dot on the map midway between Waukegan and Kenosha, the lakeside Illinois town of Zion doesn't make the news much these days, but throughout the first third of the 20th century it was nationally famous--"notorious" may be a better word. Zion's celebrity peaked between 1923 and 1928, when the town was home to WCBD, one of the most popular radio stations in the pioneering age of American broadcasting.

The men — and in the evening, the women — who made up this work team, the inmate library detail, tended to be the more educated among the inmate population. They are exactly the kind of people who might go back into their neighborhoods and, like Kat, serve as positive role models, and even leaders. I came to realize that if we used the prison library to systematically develop these values and skills, we would be creating small, but potentially influential, cadres of post-prison citizens. If each prison library were to send even one Fat Kat back into each community, it would already have a significant effect.

"There was a tremendous money-generating aspect to Richard's work," Frantz says. "We did it in a grand way. We traveled in style. We stayed in boutique hotels in most of the places we were working." But it is wrong, he says, to see any conflict in Florida's dire pronouncements on the places that bankrolled this success, because he hadn't promised prosperity in the first place. "He wasn't really making prescriptions," Frantz says. "This wasn't Jesus Christ throwing the money men out of the temple; this was an academic. He was a fucking college professor, and you're hoping to resurrect Canton, Ohio? Yeah, good luck with that."

God help me if I like this stuff, I thought while building my two mince pies. But now I just say God help me, because, man, those mince pies were pretty awesome if I do say so myself. The family resemblance of old-fashioned mince to modern mincemeat is unmistakable, but the real deal is stronger and yet more subtle, miles deeper, and yields an infinitely more complex concert of flavors. The crazy taste is accompanied by a hot, fatty mouth feel that's almost obscenely pleasing. It takes some getting used to, I will allow, but by my third slice I was pretty much hooked. That was the one I tried with ice cream on top, per the fashion pioneered in New York in 1904. (I ran out of pie before I could try it under a layer of hot melted cheese, another Gothamite innovation of the same era.) Yes, it was hard to digest, and yes, I had very weird, intense dreams every night I ate it. Don't ask.

In exactly the same way – note for note – the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered. Assange must know this – a teenage hacker would understand the lesson of Napster. Assange knows that someone had to get out in front and fail, before others could come along and succeed. We’re learning now, and to learn means to try and fail and try again.

ho ho ho

This last is what really worries me. Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “The Night of the Gun”). Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/01/stop-the-world.html#ixzz0ebfzb5Gu

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Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and favor boring and faded technologies where possible. A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I'm excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production.