on hiatus

Listphile is on an extended holiday, having succumbed to all the packing and trip lists she has encountered over the years.

Ten RSS Hacks

Steve Rubel offers one of the best lists I've seen for how you can use RSS feeds to manage the information that flows across your monitor. A comment to this post explains well the value of understanding this technology: "One of the first things we do with a new client is help them set up and [sic] RSS reader and fill it with relevant reads. What a great moment it is when the lightbulb appears overhead and they realize they can make their favorite Web pages come to them."

Technorati Tags : rss, subscription

Tricks to remembering names

7 tips to remembering the names of people you meet. The best tip is number #1, Be interested. Plain and simple. Why picturing their name on their forehead helps doesn't make sense to me at all.

via digg

Technorati Tags : memory

The Reading Cure

Social policy and community expert Arthur I. Blaustein laments the sharp decline in civic participation and public discourse in the United States (and elsewhere), and offers fiction as the means to expore national politics and character.

Here is his pragmatic 4-step list to revive civic culture, and he includes a thoughtful list of moral fiction in this month's Mother Jones:

1 – Pull the plug on television news and stick with serious print media.
2 – Get active in the organizations and political campaigns that support the same issues and causes you do.
3 – Read good socially conscious and political novels.
4 – Organize a political reading group with a social conscience.

Technorati Tags : reading lists

The Seattle Public Library: Reading Lists

The Seattle Public library staff have created these readings lists for children, teens, adults, and for ADA/Special Services. Their subheadings show particular attention to their audience. For example, for teens, these include lists about vampires and you are not the only one. For adults, it's author readalikes. I wish they had also made RSS feeds available for those of us who like their recommendations.

Thanks Librarians' Internet Index!

Technorati Tags : reading lists

About Recording for LibriVox

LibriVox is a volunteer-driven project that makes books available in audio format on the internet. The site includes these lists that give speaking (modulate, modulate) and technical (external microphone, pre-amp) advice for recording mp3s.

Thanks LifeHacker!

Technorati Tags : audioliteracy

Cracking Your Next Company's Culture

Danielle Sacks list looks at how you can delve past the shiny veener of your next employer's culture to see if the fit is still looks good. My favourite item recommends using storytelling as a way to guage culture. "Ask the interviewer to walk you through a recent initiative. How was the idea sold across the organization? How long did it take to get approved? Those stories will help you determine whether the company is filled with careful, analytical types or shoot-from-the-hip risk takers."

Technorati Tags : job search, corporate culture, storytelling

How to Prepare for One Really Quick Getaway - New York Times

This list courtesy of the New York Times will help you or anyone in your family locate things you need for the insurance adjuster or relief worker. The author recommends creating a secure disk of financial and medical records, and provides a Word template to do so. It is a thankfully concise approach for protecting your records and yourself if your house floods, or catches fire, or is destroyed by an earthquake (i.e., you may actually do this).

Thanks LifeHacker!

Technorati Tags : emergency, security

What Does It Mean To Be an Educated Person?

It is a worthwhile question. The acts of teaching and learning benefit greatly from such a pruposeful vision. Unfortunately, this vision feels like a product of the 19th rather than 21st century. My list would not have all students be poets, atheletes and leaders. It would include seeking diversity, being innovative, and taking time for reflection. Still, creating such a list is a valuable exercise for anyone who contemplates seriously about learning and teaching.

Thanks OLDaily!

Technorati Tags : learning, teaching

The real top ten tips for blogging anonymously

There are many good reasons to blog anonymously. Whistleblowers need a way to report news that their organizations would rather keep quiet. Human rights workers need support in their struggle with repressive regimes. Victims of domestice violence need to start new lives away from their abusers. Tim Yang's list, written in response to what he calls the irrelevant list by Ethan Zuckerman, is surprising because most of the solutions are not technology-based. Onion-outer schmonion-router, he says. " Setting up an onion router compounds the problems of having to ask for help to set it up and putting too much trust in technology to hide yourself. If the authorities are going high-tech to find you, then go low-tech for protection. Tell no one and use popular public computers."

Thanks TipMonkies!

Technorati Tags : security, anonymity

20 Things They Don't Want You to Know

Lists are always more intriguing if they are also secrets. Never pay full price. Your cell phones been crippled. You can get a human on the phone (!). Technology tips from PC World.

Technorati Tags : consumer

10 Secrets of a Master Networker

Keith Ferrazzi's networking tips list includes a passion for lists: "I'm constantly ripping out lists in magazines. I was one of Crain's '40 under 40' when I was 30. Interestingly enough, I had been ripping out 40-under-40 lists for years and continue to do so. Those are individuals who somebody has spent enough time to identify as an up-and-comer, a mover, an intellectual, and these are the kinds of people I want to surround myself with. I rip out lists of top CEOs, most admired CEOs, regional lists. A recent book by Richard Saul Wurman lists the 1,000 most creative people in the United States. It's fantastic."

Technorati Tags : networking

A Not-to-Do List

Today is the start of your project. Do not do this list instead. There is no need to check them off, because you are not going to do these. Well, I did some of them anyway.
Technorati Tags : productivity

Building a Smarter To-Do List

Part 1 and part 2 of a best practices of to-do lists, packed with good ideas, but I found these characteristics of to-do tasks the most insightful:

• it's a physical action


• it can be accomplished at a sitting


• it supports valuable progress toward a recognized goal


• it's something for which you are the most appropriate person for the job

Technorati Tags : productivity, GTD, facts

Free Cornell Note Taking Method

You see lots of posts on the Cornell system of talking notes at this time of year. It is not really so much a way to take notes, as it is a system for organizing them to promote active learning and critical thinking. The format uses the 5Rs: Record, reduce, recite, reflect and review. Find a Cornell Note-taking lined paper pdf generator here.

Technorati Tags : study skills, procedure

Animated knots for climbing

Need a loop in the middle of your rope? Or a good stopper knot to tie off the loose end of a bowline or figure eight The UNE Mountaineering Club offer a small repertoire of useful knots, complete with animated graphics as to how to use them.

Technorati Tags : procedure, knots

10 Steps to a hugely successful web 2.0 company

Charlie's (no last name) list feels like an itemized The Cluetrain Manifesto. It all seems a little too easy, and makes no mention of how to sustain such an enterprise (all points brought up in the comments), but nevertheless succinctly illustrates that this is a new era for designing applications, one that revolves not around creating a great product, but rather around creating great relationships with customers.

Technorati Tags : web2.0, customers, cluetrain

33 Days to Your Dream Job

Job expert Kevin Donlin has a list of 33 exercises (1 per day) designed that helps you choose, network, interview and get hired for the job of your dreams. I like this list because of its scope - it isn't just about interviews or networking - although I suspect that dream jobs take longer than 33 days to find yourself the perfect job.

Technorati Tags : jobsearch

11 Tips to surviving a day job with your creativity intact

Jori Lynn Keyser's list is for artists and budding artists who have a day job while all their passion is directed in another direction entirely. She explain the essence of her list in tip #7 (Set a theme for the day):

The point is to see the day (and the day job) as a work of art rather than a series of drudgeries keeping you from your true vocation. Your art is everywhere in your life — it is your life and your life is your art. Practice holding this truth in your awareness and you will never be bored.

I hope she writes a similar list for managers who should be nurturing and engaging all their employees creative abilities.

Technorati Tags : creativity

The difference between feedback and measurement

This final post of a series of posts that look at Margaret Wheatley's rich collection of lists on organizations and leadership, focuses on feedback. All life thrives on feedback for sustenance and growth. But prevailing organizational proactices rely on measurement rather than feedback as a way to monitor qualities such as accountability, innovation and teamwork. Margaret Wheatley makes these distinctions between feedback and measurement:

Feedback	Measurement
Context-dependent	One size fits all.
Self-determined; the system chooses what to notice.	Imposed. Criteria are established externally
Information is accepted from anywhere.	Information is put in fiexed categories.
System creates its own meaning.	Meaning is predetermined.
Newness, surprise are essential.	Prediction, routine are valued.
The focus is on adaptability and growth.	The focus is on stability and control.
Meaning evolves.	Meaning remains static.
The system coadapts with its environment.	The system adapts to the measure.

Technorati Tags : change, feedback

Seeing the system

How can we act intelligently when things remain fuzzy? Where do we intervene to change something when we can't determine a straightforward cause and effect relationship? Margaret Wheatley suggests the following actions for being able to see a system and its webs of connections:

• Start something, and see who notices it. "It's only after we initiate something in a system that we see the threads that connect."


• Whatever you initiate, expect unintended consequences. "When we're willing to look at unintended consequences, they teach a great deal about how a system operates."


• Reflect, often.


• Seek out different interpretations. Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. "The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole."


• Look for insights to emerge out of messiness."...confusion can create the condition for intuitions and insights to appear, often when we least expect them."
  

Technorati Tags : change, complexity

Some principles that facilitate knowledge management

In the midst of profound changes created by the age of information, Margaret Wheatley observes that managing knowledge is a survival skill that is both natural and satisfying. Yet organizations struggle with managing knowledge. She offers these principles in support of knowledge management:

• Knowledge is created by human beings, not hardware.Organizational conditions that support people, foster relationships, and give time for thinking and reflection would reveal that "it is not knowedge that is the asset or capital. People are."


• It is natural for people to create and share knowledge. "Study after study confirms that people are motivated by work that provides growth, recognition, meaning, and good relationships."


• Everybody is a knowledge worker. "...you never know who has already invented the solution you need."


• People choose to share their knowledge. People "willingly share if they feel committed to the organization, believe their leaders are worth supporting, feel encouraged to participate and learn, and if they value their colleagues.


• Knowledge management is not about technology. "Our relationships connect us, and once we know the person or team, then we eagerly use the technology to stay connected."


• Knowledge is born in chaotic processes that take time. "We have to face the difficult fact that until we claim time for reflection, until we make space for thinking, we won't be able to generate knowledge, or to know what knowledge we already possess. We can't argue with the clear demands of knowledge creation-it requires time to develop. It matures inside human relationships. Relationships and creativity are always messy and inherently uncontrollable."

Technorati Tags : KM

How life self-organizes and changes

We live in an interdependent, interconnected world that is better described by networks than the neat boxes and hierarchies of organizational charts. With her view of the organizations through the lens of living systems, rather than the traditional one as machines, Margaret Wheatley sees identifies these principles of self-organization and change:

• A living system forms from shared interests. "From that realization, individuals reach out, and seemingly divergent self-interests develop into a system of interdependency."


• All change results from a change in meaning. "People, like all life, only change when they allow an event or information to disturb them into voluntarily letting go of their present beliefs and developing a new interpretation. Nothing living changes until it interprets things differently."


• Every living system is free to choose whether it will change or not. "It is impossible to coerce a living system to change in any direction but the one it chooses for itself. We never succeed in directing or telling people how they must change. We can't succeed by handing them a plan, or pestering them with our interpretations, or relentlessly pressing forward with our agenda, believing that volume and intensity will convince them to see it our way."


• Living systems contain their own solutions. "Somewhere in the system there are people who have already figured out how to resolve this problem. They are already practicing what others think is impossible. Or they possess information which, if known more widely, would help many others. Or as a particular group that has been negatively labeled or stereotyped, they are far more capable than anyone knows."

Technorati Tags : self organization, change

Four core principles of change

Organizational change efforts most typically produce unmet promises. This is not surprising to Margaret Wheatley, who points out that, "Every person, overtly or covertly, struggles to preserve this freedom to self-create." Her four principles of change recognize the value of involving people in the creation of change, rather than being caught up in the struggle to deliver it:

• Participation is not a choice. "We ignore people's need to participate at our own peril."


• Life always reacts to directives; it never obeys them. "It never matters how clear or visionary or important the message is. It can only elicit reaction, not straightforward compliance."


• We do not see "reality." We each create our own interpretation of what's real. In the descriptions of this principle, Margaret Wheatley emphasizes a world of shared significance, and that "arguing about who's right and who's wrong is a waste of time."


• To create better health in a living system, connect it to more of itself. "When a system is failing, or performing poorly, the solution will be discovered within the system if more and better connections are create." This, she says, is the best precsirption of thinking about organizational change efforts.

Technorati Tags : self organization, change

Five stages to solving complex problems

Problems often seem unsolvable. Worse, As Meg Wheatley explains in this thoughtful essay, we often take an aggressive approach to problem-solving evident in practices such as scapegoating that in the long-term aggravate with unintended consequences. She offers an alternative approach characterized by some infrequently-used skills: humility, curiousity, and a willingness to listen. These 5 activities are designed to encourage a rich understanding of a complex problem in order to determine appropriate actions to resolve it.
Technorati Tags : problem solving

How to Make Your Speaking Easier and More Effective

The University of California at Berkeley's Office of Educational Development offers this tipsheet to easier and more effective public speaking. Fortunately, picturing your audience as naked isn't one of their tips. Instead, the author offers an extensive list of tips. Particularly interesting are the collection of tips tha enhance credibility and commitment, which recognize that the "audience finds concepts, knowledge, skills, and ideas most accessible and credible from someone they consider...well, not dull."
Thanks again, Lifehacker!

Cole Hardware's Quick Tips: Tool Box

I have 3 tool boxes - one for each floor of the house. Inexplicably, all three screwdrivers eventually end up in the same box, and that box is always on a different floor than where required. Of course, this list of tools for the basic tool box won't help me solve this problem, but the tip to measure the distance between my finger joints might save a trip to find the toolbox with the ruler.
Thanks again Lifehacker.

How to make your own terrarium

One of the best uses of the ordered list: to string together a series of steps to create a procedure, in this case, to build a terrarium. The comments, as they so often do, add such value to those barebone steps that are confusing or found wanting.
Thanks Lifehacker!

This to That (Glue Advice)

Ceramic to plastic. Metal to plastic. This to That helps you choose the right glue to meet your bonding requirements. Occasional philosophical digressions ("The primary principle of glue is much like any relationship in that the adhesive must fit the adherend.") holds everything together quite nicely.

5 Tips: How to manage your manager

Many lists that advise managers how to manage their staff are available to web surfers. Here, finally, is one that advises staff how to manage their manager.

The Diet Channel's Top 10 Strategies for Permanent Weight Loss

For many people, weight loss is a chronic under-taking in which periods of pounds lost alternate with pounds reaquainted. The Diet Channel offers 10 strategies that characterize successful long-term weight loss.

13 Rules for Dealing With Sociopaths in Everyday Life

A book that guaranteed to give you a wide berth on a crowded commuter train, Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door warns that one in 25 Americans is a true sociopath, lacking in conscience and real feeling toward others. These rules, while interesting, make it sound like Stout's book is of the self-help variety (i.e., how to stay out of the clutches of your sociopathic neighbour), but really it is more about the role of conscience (and lack thereof) in human nature.

Writer's Block, Geek-Block, and Procrastination

Some hair of the dog that bit you? Blogger secretGeek tackles to-do list procrastination with an anxiety list:

In the action column you can write big goals or tiny little tasks. Your aim is to end up with at least one task small enough that you can get on with it.
In the anxiety column you can write big over-riding fears, or small concerns, problems, worries. Your aim is to get down to at least one problem that is small enough to be solved.

How does this help?

You'll find that writing one action will lead to related anxieties. And writing down an anxiety will lead to actions that overcome this.

Wisely, the author adds:

Unfortunately, The real difficulty lies in recognizing that you are procrastinating/stopped in the first place.

via LifeHacker

Inconstant Constants

Lists can be reassuring. In a complex world, they offer a certain level control and reliability. Well, now even that may be cast in doubt because apparently nothing is constant. In this month's Scientific American, Barrow and Webb question even the most constant of constants that define how nature works - the velocity of light, c, Newton's constant of gravitation, G, and the mass of the electron, me, for example - have likely themselves changed over billions of years, with profound effects on the universe, and the lists made thereof.

10 Keys To Designing A Personal Lifelong Learning Process

This 10-item list gets kudos for scope if not for specifics (e.g., #5 Tap into the power of your mind is a little vague). It's accumulative message stresses the value of being attentive to learning daily in all life's activities, not just the ones in a classroom.

Commit to Change One Thing in Your Life in 2005

It's the time of year when even non-listphiles make long lists of lofty goals. However, Stephen Covey (author os The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) suggests a list of one, not many for those of us hoping to achieve lasting change.
link

Acronyms for Decision making - summary

Neel Dhar summarizes some of the responses he received when he asked the TRDEV group to share acronyms that describe decision-making.
link

Do It Now

Steve Palina's ruthless productivity list, paraphrased here:
* Be absolutely clear about the goal
* Be flexible about the path to the goal
* Embrace failure, which is part - not the opposite - of success
* Decide now and spend most of your effort in action
* Get rid of everything that wastes your time
* Get out now if the pursuit no longer inspires you
* Find ways to recover wasted time
* Ruthlessly apply the Pareto Principle - 20% of task gives 80% of value
* Block 90 minutes of uninterrupted time for intense tasks
* Do nothing but the task during this block of time
* During all other times, multitask
* Experiment for ways to maximize your strengths, compensate for your weaknesses
* Reinforce your enthusiasm with motivational tapes
* Balance work with personal life

Plagiarism Resources - Swarthmore College

Swathmore College's partial list of the types of plagiarism typically encountered. Cryptoplagiarism and melodic plagiarism, which I assume describe the pilfering of particularly difficult and elegant turns of phrase, respectively, are especially noteworthy.

How to change a habit

Insights Newsletter, Florida International University Office of Employee Assistance (OEA), 2001

Two lists - one of helpful suggestions to set up a habit change, the other to sustain motivation for the 21 days it takes to change a habit.

100 Things Every Guy Must Know

From Maxim Magazine, May 1999, comes this "ultimate road map to help you fit in," such as this nugget (also obtainable if you spend any time sewing):

An easy way to tie on a fishhook: Tie a three- to four-inch loop in the end of your line and poke the loop (not the knot) through the eye of the hook and over the hook itself. Pull. The fishhook can be removed without untying the knot simply by reversing the process.

Conflict Map

The conflict map displays about 200 wars of the 20th century. (A war is defined as an armed conflict with at least 1,000 military battle deaths, involving at least one government of a state.) Tiny flames show you where and when the war were fought with shocking effectiveness. The trade off for such clarity is simplification. As the site admits: "...it does not explain the deeper causes of war or how they end." Requires Shockwave Player plug-in.

Volcano Types Diagram on Flickr

Alan Levine shows how the notes feature in Flickr, the online photo-sharing service, can be used to create "hotspot learning objects." He offers this example of volcano types, plotted by their degree of explosiveness and height of eruption column, and clarified with additional popup notes. What I like is that anyone with a free Flickr account can label images this way.
Thanks CogDogBlog

Sister Benadette's Barking Dog

By Kitty Burns Florey, no date

"Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning sociks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss." Dating from at least the last half of the 19th century, it was a tool designed to promote the rules of syntax. Considering a diagram of "The dog barked," Kitty Burns Florey writes: "The diagram was the bridge between a dog and the description of a dog. It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was much more than words uttered, or words written on a piece of paper: it was a picture of language."

Orwellian Considerations: Tea

By Kitty Burns Florey, no date

I am so glad Kitty Burns Florey brings to our attention George Orwell's essay "A Nice Cup of Tea," in which he lists "no fewer than eleven outstanding points" in its preparation. The list is satisfying even for a coffee-drinker like myself because it is precise, delicate, respectful (of the tea leaf) and reflective. This is in contrast to desparation and addicitive tone (as in, "I can't function without my morning coffee!") that would likely characterize a list about preparing coffee.

The greatest equations ever

By Robert P. Crease, Physics World, October 2004

Readers who were asked to send in the greatest equations of all time chose Maxwell's electromagnetism equations and Euler's equation. But even more interesting than the top 20 are the criteria they used for greatness: simplicity, profoundity, practicality and relevance to the history of physicis. The author also ponders why greatness in equations matters. Afterall, singling out a single equation refutes their dependence on a network of other equations, tools and ideas. He suggests that over time we tend to take for granted the wonder we feel at the insight into the empirical laws of nature. "In reawakening that sense of wonder, debating what makes equations great therefore re-educates us about the fundamental nature of science, and knowledge, itself." This is what lists are all about.

Managing Incoming E-mail: What Every User Needs to Know

By Mark Hurst, Good Experience, May 2003
Every September, synchronized with the back-to-school season, I try to reorganize myself so that I can be more productive. Mark has several lists in this report on reducing E-mail overload. Quite insightful is a list of inappropriate but common uses for the email inbox, included here because the report is a pdf file. By the way, the "appropriate use" for an inbox is "to store email temporarily before they are read, possibly filed, and (always) deleted."

• To-do list. Probably the most common misuse. Action items belong on a to-do list if they take more than two minutes to complete
• Filing system. Meeting notes, project status messages, attachments containing proposals and other important documents stay in the inbox, instead of going to a proper project folder.
• Calendar. Dates and times for meetings, conference calls, or other events should go into a calendar.
• Bookmarks list. Pointers to websites and other
applications, including usernames and passwords, belong in bookmarks.
• Address book. Messages with phone numbers and postal addresses of contacts should be transfered to an address book.

How the Internet has changed our lives

By Peter Birnie, The Vancouver Sun, September 16 2004
Indeed, the Internet is 35 years young this month, and this list counts the ways in which the Net has revolutionized most of everday life's activities. In #35 - "The Internet has changed the way we look at the future" - Peter warns that we prefer cybervisions of virtual reality over physical reality. "The future will be very real, and unless we have a clear sense of what reality means, it also has the potential to be very scary." This is a list I'd like to look at again on the occassion of the Net's 70th birthday.

Goin' Mobile: 12 mlearning tips

By Clark Quinn, Learning Circuits Blog, July 28 2004
Lists are typically authoritative - these are the 10 best places beaches in Hawaii, or when you've tried those 7 trouble-shooting tips, call the help desk. What I like about this list is that its goal is not to be definitive. Its point is to be as long as possible - each item is the prelude to the next item. This is the list as a creativity tool.

Powell's Books - Excerpt from "The Metterling Lists"

Woody Allen's classic deadpan critical review of a deceased writer's laundry lists ...