I am fueled by my ignorance

Submitted by Susan Miller on Tue, 04/22/2008 - 08:09.

This woman, whom I have written about before, Liz Lerman, gives a little talk about innovation that is instructive. Be sure to listen all the way through til you hear these words from a Nobel Laureate whom she quotes, "I am fueled by my ignorance." Then she says, "So am I. I make things so I can understand things."

On May 2, 2008 Liz will be in Cleveland to address a gathering of the global thought leaders on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of genomics (ELSI) at the first ever ELSI conference – Translating ELSI. Only 120 people will be able to hear her speak at the conference. These lucky folks will be those who have traveled here from around the world to discuss genomics. We hope to be able to videotape and post the talk.

In the meantime, it is instructive to listen a little further to the video posted at the link above (the talk she gave in Rhode Island at the Business Innovation Factory).

She says "All of this innovative work here is going to displace people. Then how are they going to handle their imaginations? How are they going to wonder, it's beautiful that this person who can't move now has a way to move, but now we have to reclassify what the body is. Pluto is nothing compared to what we're going to be reclassifying. ... and I think the arts are the partner."

( categories: )

wishing for RSS

Susan, I really wish that this Drupal would handle RSS feeds so that I could keep up with your stuff better. With RSS, things are sent to me, in my email. With RealNEO, I have to come over here to see what's going on.

 

Your content lately has been timely and really helps me keep my perspective where it ought to be. Can we ask old Jeff, Norm, or young Jeff if RSS is something RealNEO could implement, on Drupal?

RSS feeds for REALNEO blogs

Tim,

Yes -- RSS feeds are available for all blogs on REALNEO.

Scroll to the very bottom (below all entries) of any user's blog to find an XML button ~ that's the feed link.

Susan's is
http://realneo.us/blog/susan-miller/feed
and there's
http://realneo.us/blog/jeff-buster/feed
http://realneo.us/blog/norm-roulet/feed
http://realneo.us/blog/lmcshane/feed
...

Be wary of adding feeds to your reader by continuing this pattern, though. Some feed URLs use user ID # instead of username:
Roldo's is
http://realneo.us/blog/5312/feed

And, as lmcshane mentioned, the Syndicate box -- at the bottom of the left-side menu -- links to the combined feed aggregating all REALNEO blogs.

IE7

IE7 comes up with an error message, something about feeds with DTDs not being supported

IE7 error on REALNEO RSS feeds (updated)

Sorry about that Tim.

Unfortunately, (but par for the course for its creator,) IE7 doesn't interpret RSS to spec.

I found a patch for Drupal: DOCTYPE in RSS is causing some parsers to fail. (It's for a newer version than we're currently using, though, so I made the change manually.)

Do you use IE itself to manage your newsfeeds? Have you tried any other feedreaders like Google Reader or FeedDemon? I'm in love with Google Reader...

IE7 and Outlook 2007

Jeff, I'm trying to manage the feeds with IE7 and Outlook 2007, neither of which is perfect--I have dysfunctionality all over the place, and sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't.

 

I'll try the RealNEO feeds again, now that you have applied the patch.

able to subscribe to feeds

Jeff, I successfully subscribed to the feeds--now, we'll see how they feed in. This is progress, and thanks.

timely content

So Tim, I am wondering about your response to the post. There are two pretty big issues there.

  1. Cleveland is hosting  about 400 GLOBAL THOUGHT LEADERS on the issues surrounding the Ethical, Legal, Social Implcations of Genomics this weekend. Whoda thunk?!?
  2. A MacArthur Genius Choreographer Innovator will address them on the subject. Again, whoda thunk?

So while we wile away the hours saying "no conferences or conventions come to Cleveland" maybe we might focus on the content rather than the size. While at the Renaissance this weekend, we'll be sure to tip well. I know, I know - it is not open to the public, but if you don't think genomics is a big topic for the public, think again. This topic is local - it's local to our bodies - our cells on a global scale.

still focused on size

most people, and not just in Cleveland, are still focused on size and on volume, not on quality or particularity

 

for a seminar or a convention we count the number of attendees to gauge the success

 

for a blog we count the number of unique visitors

 

we are finding that what is really important is that the proper people, the right person, become aware, and that's hard to measure or quantify

 

we have a lot of businesses predicated on headcounts, which will ultimately prove to be bullshit--appropriateness, or particularity, trumps volume, but you can't sell this concept, so we're relegated to measuring mediocrity, and counting the unranked masses

 

 

RSS Feed-good question

  Granted, it's not easy to find, but the RSS feed is listed as syndicate XML on the lower part of the left sidebar.

http://www.realneo.org/node/feed

Just to add to Jeff's comment...if you like someone's posts, click on their name and you should see their account and view recent blog entries.  If you look at their posts by blog, their RSS feed is listed at the bottom of the page as XML syndicate, just click and add.

ie.

http://www.realneo.org/blog/bill-macdermott

Lerman on job swap - wall street execs for artists

This thread went off in other directions, but here she is again - "fueled by her ignorance" and her creativity, MacArthur Genius, Liz Lerman weighs in on the economic crisis -

A Proposed Job Swap To Save American Capitalism

"a modest proposal to solve some of our economic problems: Let’s do a job swap. We’ll put the corporate executives to work as artists while the artists run Wall Street"

I'm not sure I agree about saving capitalism, but Liz makes a good point about the way in which artists work. Unfortunately brokers don't see life the same way. Need economic development? As Richard Florida and others have pointed out... toss in some artists to get a real bang for the buck. From what I can tell, Timothy Geithner could use a few artists in his office; he's working like an artist these days - round the clock.