Norman Doidge : Neuroplasticity
Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and best-selling author, Dr. Norman Doidge, at a University of Toronto interdisciplinary symposium on "Altered States of Mind". He discusses his latest book, The Brain that Changes Itself, an examination of the most important breakthrough in neuroscience: the discovery of neuroplasticity. He describes how our thoughts can change the structure and function of our brains.
Posted: May 15th, 2011
at 9:52am by mnp
Categories: life,science,development,philosophy
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The Great Astros Escape

Posted: May 14th, 2011
at 3:43pm by mnp
Categories: myninjaplease,games,9th dan,ninjas are everyehere
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Never Be Comfortable
To a lot of people, comfort is the main goal of life. They work hard enough so they can live a "comfortable" life style. They want enough money to not have to worry about things. They spend time around friends that think the way they do so they don’t have to have anyone question the way they view the world (and make them uncomfortable).
If you’re not careful, you work our whole life to get comfortable only to realize that all the growth happens during those times when you were incredibly uncomfortable.
The parts of life where you were extremely uncomfortable were the parts where you grew the most.
Comfort is the kiss of death. As soon as you get comfortable, you start to let down your guard. It gets easy to coast and you lose opportunities to get a lot better. Sure, things could be good enough where you’re at, but if you get comfortable with "good enough", you’ll never be great.
Adaptation Fail
In 1982, the management consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, a colossally popular business title. The book aimed to learn lessons from the world’s best companies, and Peters and Waterman produced a list of 43. But just a couple of years after In Search of Excellence had been published, BusinessWeek ran a cover story with the simple title: "Oops! Who’s Excellent Now?" Almost a third of the companies singled out for praise by Peters and Waterman were in financial trouble.
My aim isn’t to mock Peters and Waterman, but to point out that the rise and fall of business models is an unavoidable part of economic growth. In a complex world, things fail - a lot. According to the economist Paul Ormerod, 10 percent of U.S. firms go bankrupt every year. Ormerod - an iconoclastic figure who enjoys beating fellow economists at their own game, mathematics - has studied the statistical patterns that emerge from these bankruptcies. He thinks they suggest that failure and success in business are far more random than our culture of CEO-worship would have us believe.
Posted: May 13th, 2011
at 9:24pm by mnp
Categories: business,weaponry,development,entrepreneurship,fail,innovation
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Steve Wozniak : Advice to Graduates

Posted: May 13th, 2011
at 5:14pm by mnp
Categories: mnp is for the children,education
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The Tech Community’s Diversity Problem
Take gender diversity, for one thing. By most counts, the average open source project has 49 male participants for every female participant. Women at conferences - rare enough already! - are assumed to be significant others, designers or visitors from planet marketing, with disastrous consequences for all involved.
This is a problem, for lots of reasons. The worst is that it’s self-perpetuating - women will (wisely!) avoid hostile environments, and through some broken-window-like mechanism, environments without women will quickly become environments that are hostile to women. (The same holds for other visible minorities.)
In discussions about "how to fix this", community leaders often appear to be at a loss, unsure how to progress. Their early efforts are often met by criticism on both sides - techies have a strong libertarian streak that tilts at all sorts of windmills, and the women who do "blaze trails" aren’t always much better than the men. (In fields like physics, chemistry and finance - fields dominated by men for ages - which are, these days, however, beating our numbers by a wide margin - the first generation of women to brave the hostilities and pierce the glass ceiling are often later generations’ harshest critics. "What? You want to have a career and a family? I didn’t have that option. Why should you? You’ll need to learn to drink scotch and smoke cigars like I did, or you’re through.")
Posted: May 13th, 2011
at 5:14pm by mnp
Categories: hood status,computers,life,business,mnp is for the children,weaponry,"ninja",development,blogs,internets,philosophy,ethics,entrepreneurship,open source,jobs,innovation
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