MentalGator

Mentalacrobatics'aggregator

About The layout

Two column layout (can be reduced to one, could be thought of as three if you count the vertical toolbox on the right) that provides simple presentation with extensive customization; not just for the developer, but for the user. The toolbox showcases the power of stylesheet switching. Users can pick their own color, font type, font size, and even dictate what style of layout they view your web page in. Navigation is kept brief and easily accessible at the top of the page, allowing for a wider area in the content region. A min/max width allows you to control your layout, but remain flexible for low resolution users.

Aggregated Blogs

Where does this show up?

Items by Aaron Leaf and Emily Schmall/CPJ Guest Bloggers

Gadgetopia

Black Looks

  • 2012 edition of SCARF magazine: ‘Breathing Space’ edited by Diriye Osman

    Posted: May 16, 2012, 5:34 pm by Sokari
    SCARF Magazine is that rarity: a collectable arts magazine produced  annually that features ingredients that shouldn’t work but always do.  Founded by artist and curator, Kinsi Abdulleh, under the umbrella group ‘Numbi’ (which means ‘healing dance’ in Somali), the magazine is collated by a small group of dedicated editors and artists, including acclaimed short story-writer and [...]

  • Campaign to replace Zanele Muholi’s stolen photography equipment

    Posted: May 15, 2012, 4:57 pm by Sokari
    On the 28th 26th April, Zanele returned home from Seoul, South Korea to discover that all her work between 2008 and 2012 stored on 20 hard drives and including backups had been stolen on the 20th. The thieves also stole her cameras, lens, memory sticks and laptops. There are no words to describe Zanele’s feelings [...]

Colorlabs Project

  • Sneak Peek: E-commerce Child Theme

    Posted: May 15, 2012, 12:01 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    I am excited to announce that we are currently working on the development of a new WordPress theme and it will be a Child Theme for Backbone Theme Framework. So far we had 5 Child Themes: magazine, news, multimedia, portfolio and business/corporate theme. This next creation will be an e-commerce...

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • Sony’s insular culture just didn’t see it coming

    Posted: May 14, 2012, 2:40 pm by Sunny Bindra

    “…Sony, which once defined Japan’s technological prowess,
    wowed the world with the Walkman and the Trinitron TV and shocked
    Hollywood with bold acquisitions like Columbia Pictures, is now in the
    fight of its life.

    In fact, it is in a fight for its life – a development that exemplifies
    the stunning decline of Japan’s industrialized economy. Once upon a time,
    Japan Inc., not to mention Sony itself, seemed invulnerable. Today, Sony
    and many other Japanese manufacturers are pressed on all sides: by rising
    Asian rivals, a punishingly strong Japanese yen and, in Sony’s case, an
    astonishing lack of ideas.”

    HIROKO TABUCHI New York Times (15 April 2012)

    So what happened to Sony? Just the other day it was an iconic Japanese firm, one whose brand stood for innovation and product quality. Now, as Hiroko Tabuchi tells us in a recent issue of the NYT, it is widely thought to be in a fight for its life.

    This, don’t forget, is the company that gave us the Walkman and the Discman, the Trinitron TV, the Playstation and many other hit products. It was the firm that raided corporate America and bought out Columbia Pictures. Just a few years ago, Sony products sold for a premium compared to rivals, and were to be found in many of the world’s better-off households.

    This is the firm that is now declaring a $6-billion-plus annual loss; that has failed to make a profit since 2008; and whose share price hit a quarter-century low last week. Sony’s market value is now one-ninth that of Samsung Electronics, and just one-thirtieth of Apple’s – both companies it dominated in years past.

    How exactly do you go from so good to so bad?

    Ms Tabuchi tells us that this is “the story of a proud company that was unwilling or unable to adapt to realities of the global marketplace. Sony’s gravest mistake was that it failed to ride some of the biggest waves of technological innovation in recent decades: digitalization, a shift toward software and the importance of the Internet.”

    This rings true. The company has not had a leading-edge hit product for longer than I can remember. Its Bravia televisions were the last market-leaders Sony has fielded; but those have faded badly against the onslaught of the ever-improving Samsung and LG sets. Walkmans were eclipsed by Apple’s iPods; video-game players failed to keep up with Microsoft’s Kinect and others.

    Insiders reveal an astonishing tale of rigid product silos within Sony, resolutely refusing to co-operate and create products that spanned divisions. Meanwhile, the rest of the world did just that, designing music players that also showed videos; phones that took pictures and browsed the internet; cameras that connected with online photo galleries.

    In other words, the focus of consumer electronics shifted from the quality of the product to the quality of the user experience, marrying software and hardware to create exciting, multidimensional new products like the Apple iPhone and iPad and the Samsung Galaxy. Sony, too consumed by internal divisions and too proud of its past, simply never saw it coming.

    Sony could still be turned around, and I hope it is. But it will take much pain and re-imagination.

    This could happen to your company. It is a curse to become too successful, a curse that takes years to manifest itself. It takes the form of hubris, insularity and complacency. When the curse does become clear to all, it is often too late to do anything about it.

    The lesson for business leaders is to be very, very careful about premature celebrations. Do not let a sense of superiority creep in; do not allow people to take their eye off the industry and the market; do not imagine you have all the technology worth having; don’t think you’re the best you can be. A little paranoia, even in the face of heady success, is no bad thing for a leader to have.

    Related posts:

    1. Watching Japan’s tumbling giants
    2. If it’s just about you, nothing will outlast you
    3. Here’s a little secret about sustained product success

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on God’s Positioning System (GPS) by Waithera

    Posted: May 14, 2012, 11:18 am by Waithera

    Thanks Pastor M, yesterdays word really changed my outlook. I took time to have a conversation with God in a relaxed manner yesterday evening(i don usually pray) and i felt soo blessed and connected. Can u imagine in the middle of my prayer a verse came to mind and the words of the verse too(note i had not read the verse before). I was afraid to open the bible(doubting thomas) after the prayer to confirm whether its possible that God could speak to me with such accuracy. I gathered courage this morning and to my utter shock, the verse n the words in it were exact!!! Oh my goodness, God spoke to me. am soo humbled i could not help but just shed tears of Joy. I am soo happy and will continue with this journey(connecting with God). God bless you immensely as you continue to shepherd us.

Colorlabs Project

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on God’s Positioning System (GPS) by GOLDEN GIRL

    Posted: May 14, 2012, 7:06 am by GOLDEN GIRL

    WOW !!!! Thats how i felt…..WOWED….if there be such a word….For the longest time…..i prayed only when i needed something or when things were not going right but hey i came to the realization that prayer is conversation with God,,,updating Him on my ‘STATUS”….of course He already knows……He is the author of mu life…. but by connecting with God i am acknowledging my status and seeking insight on what and how i can do whatever i do better….Being an early riser….i connect with my Father on my way to work…..takes me around 20minutes and the conversations are always so refreshing(anyone who sees me probably thinks i own a blue tooth…this lady always talking to herself)…but am not by myself….i am with my Father catching up and placing my day and life before Him to take over…..its such a precious time….I LOVE IT…..I encourage all of you to talk to Him just the same way you would talk to your therapist,friend,lover….without reservation or formality…keeping in mind that HE is the greatest therapist,most loyal friend and divine lover……WHAT A FRIEND I HAVE IN JESUS!!!!!

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • We lost a decade in reforming Kenya’s state corporations

    Posted: May 13, 2012, 10:38 am by Sunny Bindra

    Back in 2003, we thought we had put the era of truly horrible state corporations behind us. The new government of the day, swept into power in a massive rejection of the failures and excesses of the 1990s, promised to reform the public sector and revitalize all of Kenya’s dead or dying parastatals.

    A good start was made: new management teams were installed; performance contracts were introduced; professional managers from the private sector were recruited to inject expertise; “ICT” became the buzzword in the corridors of state corporations.

    So what happened? When we look around us with an objective eye, what do we see? Wherever there is a state corporation, there is often disarray and disorder and service failure. Nine years after the vital project to construct a new world-class airport in Nairobi commenced, the passenger has yet to feel any benefit. Our great port in Mombasa is still bedevilled by unending corruption, service delays and ethnic strife in its leadership.

    The energy sector remains besmirched by unending accusations of procurement scams. The Kenyan power consumer is now subjected to regular and unpredictable blackouts, and still pays a world-topping price for electricity. Our social security fund still grapples with ghosts from its controversial past. Afters years of reversals, we are yet to have a viable and useful rail network.

    I could go on, but what’s the point? The recent controversies surrounding the National Health Insurance Fund, and the subsequent farce played out in front of television cameras, should prove to us once and for all that we have a problem here. Wrangles, scams, political divisions and power plays are the order of the day.

    If we keep looking away and pretending nothing is wrong, we will retard our national progress for another decade. This madness has real consequences, after all: it costs us the education of our children, the health of our citizenry, the competitiveness of our industries.

    I write this with a heavy heart. I meet many excellent managers and board members from state corporations, with good intentions and a professional approach to their work, and have no wish to discourage them. But they are mostly hamstrung by the tentacles of the system in which they work; one in which political patronage, rampant corruption and narrow private interests prevent any real progress.

    What can we learn from the handful of state corporations that have actually excelled and made a difference? First, that leadership matters. You cannot leave the board and senior executive positions of these vital institutions to the whims of politicians – you have to recruit purely on merit, qualifications and integrity. Second, that you have to instil a fresh work ethic and culture in employees used to slovenly standards of service, and that invariably takes time. Third, that you need a layer of protection from the politicians who always circle around state corporations like vultures, seeking campaign funding.

    The new constitution, when properly implemented, will address many of these issues. New policies governing state corporations are also due to be published soon. But the path to reform will be a rocky one, resisted by all those who have benefited from badly run, poorly controlled public institutions.

    Meanwhile, the people of Kenya should stop accepting bad performance from state bodies as somehow natural or expected. It is not. We have lost a decade in which decisive action and systematic reform could have achieved wonders. Instead we are left wondering what might have been.

    A good public corporation should have no lesser standards then a private one. If anything it should have the advantage of meaning, of working for the public good rather than private enrichment. But to attain this, state corporations should be run by the best and brightest and ring-fenced from partisan politics and narrow interests. For a state corporation to have any meaning, it must work solely in the interest of the people.

    Related posts:

    1. The shameless excesses of irresponsible corporations
    2. The lost art of speaking plainly
    3. Without values all will be lost

Gadgetopia

  • Use Canonical URLs, Please

    Posted: May 12, 2012, 11:19 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    If you want to be friendly to the web, do the world a favor and start using the canonical URL LINK tag.  More things than you realize depend on the simple principle of identifying a page by a unique URL, and it's getting harder than you think.

    It turns out that a web without canonical URLs is like a database without primary keys.

    I recently wrote a web crawler (yes, seriously), and I was forcefully introduced to how vague URLs can be.  The idea that a unique page of content has a single URL is laughably naïve.

    Turns out that the absolute hardest part of writing a crawler is “normalizing” URLs – taking two URLs, and trying to figure out if they’re actually addressing the same resource.  Fact is, you can address a page of content in more ways than you think.

    Some examples --

    You need to account for SSL vs. non-SSL.  A lot of sites will accept inbound requests for both [http”] and [https”] to the same URL, and return the same page of content.  This technically results in two separate URLs, and if a crawler is cataloguing URLs, it needs to account for the same that this is really the same page of content, even if the bytes of the URL differ.

    Now, that one isn’t too hard.  There aren’t many pages that differ remarkably if they’re secure or not.  But what about domain?  Your website could respond to multiple domains.  It could be as simple as the same content coming up under “www.gadgetopia.com” and “gadgetopia.com", or as complex as hundreds of different domain names generating the same pages.

    It gets worse – what about querystring arguments?  The fact is that different arguments have different degrees of import.  Some are critical in determining the content of the page (“article_id”) and others really only matter to humans interacting with the page (“return_page”).  There’s a whole bucket of querystring arguments that really have no effect on the core content being returned to the user agent.

    (URL arguments for analytics are especially bad.  Click a link out of a Feedburned blog post, and you end up with "utm_source" and "utm_medium" as querystring arguments, none of which have any bearing on the actual content of the page returned.)

    Differing capitalization could technically result in different pages too (although this would be terribly bad form…)

    I could go on and on about URL vagaries, but just understand that this URL --

    https://domain.com/page.php?article_id=5&return_page=6

    -- and this URL --

    http://www.domain.com/Page.php?article_id=5&return_page=7

    -- may return the exact same page of content, but I have no way of knowing this.

    On a known site (a site I own or am crawling for a client), I can make some rules, like always knowing that I should swap “domain.com” for “www.domain.com,” but if I’m doing a crawl of a site I have no connection with (a “hostile” crawl?), then I just have to assume those two URLs are actually two separate piece of content and index them as different pages even though “article_id=5” probably indicates they return the same thing.

    And none of this takes into account the new world of visitor segmentation and anonymous personalization.  If you live in California, you might get a different page then if you live in New York.  So where is your crawler coming from, and how is it ever going to emulate someone from somewhere else?

    (For a while, I tried to abandon URLs and hash the actual HTML returned, then compare the hashes.  This would tell me, more clearly, if this page is unique.  But that too is problematic for a number of reasons – sometimes querystring arguments, for instance, change the page in tiny, effectively meaningless ways, but ways which result in an entirely different hash.)

    This is where canonical URLs help.  For each page content, have a canonical META tag which indicates the one true URL this should be accessed under anonymously.  Here’s Google’s page about them, and here’s what one of them looks like.

    <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/my/url" />

    It's not just crawlers that depend on this -- any site which needs to tell one URL from another would benefit from this.  If you submit a URL to Reddit, it checks to see if it's been submitted already.  To do this, it depends on the fact that the URL has some consistency.

    If you are writing software that somehow keys of a URL, look for a canonical LINK tag and use it if you find it.  By including it, the site owner is doing you a massive favor.  Don’t ignore it.

    Using a canonical URL is like declaring a primary key on your content.  You are saying, effectively, that “no matter how you actually got to this page of content, this URL is the official URL for this page and should be used when discussing this page.”

    The web will be a better place for it.

  • What does “published” mean anymore?

    Posted: May 12, 2012, 10:40 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    "Self-published" is not in any way analogous to "published": There’s a very interesting discussion going on over at Reddit that’s very similar to something a line of thought I’ve had for quite a while.

    The Internet has made it very easy to “publish” writing, in some form.  Pre-Internet, to get “published” meant to send a book off to a publisher, go through a long vetting process, and see your book on the shelves of a store somewhere.  Not anymore.  With Lulu, you can get a hardcopy from a PDF, and with Amazon, you can have your book distributed as an ebook quite easily (it doesn’t even have to be a book – you can “publish” a glorified blog post as a Kindle Single, even).

    So, does this mean you’re “published”?

    Nononno!  Being published is not just about having a hard copy of one's work - that misses the forest for the trees. Being published is about convincing a third party that your work is worthwhile enough to support and make public. It's about earning the respect of a group completely independent of you and having them fund the dissemination of your ideas.

    Some of the comments are quite good and thought-provoking:

    I was just having a discussion on this yesterday in my library studies class. A lady in the class kept referring to herself as a 'published author' and when I investigated further I found that all she does is chuck her romance novels up on her website as eBooks.

    […] I came here to say something like this, specifically about the wrench that sites like kickstarter throw into the works. As the original post states, "Being published is about convincing a third party that your work is worthwhile enough to support and make public" but traditional publishing houses are no longer the only viable way of doing that.

Colorlabs Project

  • WooCommerce Themes by ColorLabs & Company

    Posted: May 10, 2012, 12:58 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    Thanks to the availability of high quality WordPress e-commerce themes, WordPress has made a mark in the e-commerce industry as a serious online shop platform. More and more e-commerce websites are now powered by WordPress e-commerce. To turn WordPress into an online store you need to install a...

  • Making Google PageSpeed Service Work for Your Website

    Posted: May 8, 2012, 3:34 am by Anita Pravitasari
    Everyone nowadays wants to speed up their site to every millisecond, as it provides best user experience by reducing your site’s load time making it more search engine friendly and helps in search rankings. There are many ways to make your WordPress blog or site load fast, like using W3 Total Cache...

  • Coming this Week: A New Photoblog and Portfolio Theme

    Posted: May 7, 2012, 5:19 am by Anita Pravitasari
    We are going to release another Child Theme for Backbone Framework. The new Child Theme will be released by the end of this week and it will be a photoblog/portfolio WordPress theme. We haven’t really decided on the name yet, so if you have any idea feel free to write it down on the comment....

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • Manage the essence, not the message

    Posted: May 7, 2012, 11:22 am by Sunny Bindra

    The biggest problem with the reputation industry, however, is its central conceit: that the way to deal with potential threats to your reputation is to work harder at managing your reputation. The opposite is more likely: the best strategy may be to think less about managing your reputation and concentrate more on producing the best products and services you can. BP’s expensive “beyond petroleum” branding campaign did nothing to deflect the jeers after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Brit Insurance’s sponsorship of England’s cricket teams has won it brownie points in the short term, but may not really be the best way to build a resilient business. Many successful companies, such as Amazon, Costco, Southwest Airlines and Zappos, have been notable for their intense focus on their core businesses, not for their fancy marketing. If you do your job well, customers will say nice things about you and your products.

    The Economist (21 April 2011)

    Business leaders these days are bombarded with fresh advice regarding what might be their biggest asset: their reputation. They are asked actively to manage their reputations via heavy investments in public-relations contracts, brand building, social media engagement and “mind-share.”

    I have always found such advice to be wrong-headed and self-serving, and it was good to see a comprehensive rebuttal recently in The Economist‘s Schumpeter column.

    There can be no doubt reputation is an extremely valuable thing. As companies and markets mature, importance moves away from tangibles (buildings, equipment, locations) to intangibles (reputation, customer loyalty, employee spirit). After a while, anyone can do the “tangibles thing,” but few can pull off becoming distinctive through things that you can’t even see or touch.

    Reputation is one key intangible. No one denies its importance. Ask giants such as Toyota, BP, News International, Goldman Sachs, RIM and many others who have suffered huge reputation damage in recent years. The best way to manage or improve your reputation, however, is where the problem lies.

    The excerpt shown touches on the essential wisdom: you don’t manage reputation by managing it directly; you manage it by working on the essentials of your business, which in turn influence your reputation. If you want to boost your reputation, in other words, boost your business basics: your efficiency, service levels, product quality, reliability and consistency.

    Few managers want to hear this, as getting the basics right is hard work that takes years to get right. It’s far more seductive to think you can gain a quick and relatively cheap reputation boost by having a savvy PR advisor, advertising guru, or spin doctor. You can’t. No amount of spin can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

    This is a growing trend in Kenya, and an unfortunate one: a flow of positive messages in traditional and social media, about essentially bad companies. The thing is this: people who run good businesses spend their time running good businesses, not talking about them. When products and service are great, that fact is obvious. Reputation takes care of itself. Smart brand management is then an additional layer of excellence, not a shallow substitute for the real thing.

    When the basics are bad, however – when quality is shoddy, service is sour, reliability is non-existent – no amount of massaging can get rid of that problem. You have to fix the basics first. Feel-food advertising, sugary social-media management, corporate social responsibility projects or manipulation of online metrics will not help you.

    If your investors, employees and customers don’t have faith in you, your goose is cooked. No amount of smoke or mirrors can get you out of that one. The best reputation is not a wig or a smart suit; it is a reflection of inner goodness.

    Related posts:

    1. Listen up to the people’s message
    2. India’s election has a big message for the Narc government
    3. At your next strategy retreat, ask yourself: how different are we?

  • The ‘Uta do?’ culture that kills quality standards

    Posted: May 6, 2012, 11:19 am by Sunny Bindra

    Whatever happened to “First-Time Quality?” It seems to have become an irrelevance in Kenya today.

    The idea is simple enough. If you get something right the first time, you don’t have to incur the cost of inspections, revisits, rework or repeat jobs. If you pay acute attention and maintain a high standard when you do something, you will make a lot more money: because you’ll have a satisfied customer who will want to stay loyal to your company; and because you’ll cut out all the costs of redoing the work.

    So what happened in Kenya? Why do so few business leaders impose the mantra of first-time quality on their teams? Why are we constantly fielding complaints and offering to redo things? I just don’t get it. Do we actually enjoy being second-rate, or what?

    What is wrong with building contractors? They seem to routinely put up shoddy constructions, full of defects. They then spend months redoing the wiring, fixing obvious leaks, re-plastering walls that were done badly. Why? Why is it not possible to maintain a high standard every time you do something, so that you build your brand reputation and minimize the costs of reworking?

    Why are utility companies constantly on the road, attending to leaks, blackouts and cut-offs – simply because they didn’t do something right in the first place? Why do power transformers keep breaking down, water pipes keep bursting, and roads have to be re-carpeted after every bit of rainfall? It’s not about the weather; it’s about the missing quality standard.

    Consider the philosophy of “Zero Defects,” coined by management specialist Phil Crosby. Is such a thing even possible, you shout? Out here in Africa? Where so many things can go wrong?

    Consider this: How many times have you mistakenly picked up the wrong child from school? Or erroneously paid out the wrong salary to an employee? Or inadvertently gotten into bed with the wrong spouse? Right here in oh-so-difficult Africa?

    Not often, I bet. Those tasks are usually done just right the first time and every time, with great precision. Why? Because a bad outcome would be unthinkable. The attention is focused because the consequences are grave.

    Our building contractors, utility providers and assorted other businesses are getting away with utterly slipshod quality, first time and every time, simply because the consequences are not grave enough. Bad quality doesn’t lose them business for many reasons: because their customers are docile and uncomplaining; because their competitors are often worse at this quality thing than they are; or because they are corrupt monopolists who routinely shout a rude and crude “Uta do?” to their customers.

    This is a national shame. You don’t stand up to be counted in the world if your quality is slovenly. You don’t build international competitiveness; you don’t create a national export engine; you don’t command premium prices if you are content to play in the fourth division.

    I fear too many of our organizations are all too happy to languish in the lower reaches, and neither their customers nor government regulators are demanding better. Take a look at the quality of buildings, roads, consumer products or hospitality offerings and you will understand why “Made in Kenya” is not a badge of honour; why we have a persistent trade deficit; why we produce such few world-beating enterprises.

    We have to demand better. It is not good enough to spend our hard-earned money and taxes on people who can’t run their organizations properly. It is not good enough to fund the activities of cowboys and rogues. It is not good enough to look away from the corrupt practices that allow the slapdash and the slipshod to prosper unchecked.

    Make it an issue in your life. This is a drum worth beating.

    Related posts:

    1. We have a long way to go in product quality
    2. A focus on quality is essential
    3. Jobs – quality, not just numbers

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on Stay The Course by shiru

    Posted: May 5, 2012, 10:03 am by shiru

    I gotta ask, am not married but I live with my baby’s father. all I remember is crying coz he will not be nice to me. I have done everything to save this relationship for my son’s sake. Forgiven him and welcomed him back to my arms even when he has cheated on me. Now i am at a place i cannot explain. Am tired of expecting the worst but hoping for the best. Am tired that he doesnt show signs of committment, tired that he never has kind words for me. Should I just go on?

Comments for Pastor M's Blog

Colorlabs Project

  • Recent Addition to ColorLabs Showcase Page: April 2012

    Posted: May 4, 2012, 10:49 am by Anita Pravitasari
    We found another batch of user-customized version of our themes out there in the world wide web. We’ve added them to our Showcase Page where we feature the best ones. If you have created a site using one of our themes, please provide us link to that site and if they are as awesome as the...

  • WordPress Backup Services

    Posted: May 3, 2012, 5:31 am by Anita Pravitasari
    I could never stress out enough the importance of regularly backing up a WordPress website, especially true if it makes money. Hopefully, if you are a business owner who is also a WordPress user, you feel the same way as I do. You don’t want to drive a car without a spare tire, do you? [...]

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on But By Grace by Mark

    Posted: May 3, 2012, 3:50 pm by Mark

    letting go of unforgiveness and anger and letting God . Truly inspiring words (But By Grace). If every person can learn to forgive they can find true peace and hapiness that the Lord promises

Comments for Pastor M's Blog

Open Society Institute

  • Bagram Prison Inmates Deserve Clear Answers About Their Fates

    Posted: April 30, 2012, 7:09 pm by Christopher Rogers

    The following originally appeared on the Daily Beast.

    Almost four years ago, near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, United States troops took into custody a 14-year-old Pakistani citizen named Hamidullah, who has been held ever since in a cell at the U.S.-controlled Bagram prison near Kabul. According to Hamidullah, in 2011, U.S. authorities cleared him for release.

    Last month, when the governments of the United States and Afghanistan announced that the prison will be handed over to Afghan control in the next six months, there was an ominous silence about what would become of Hamidullah and 50 or so other detainees at the prison who are not citizens of Afghanistan.

    The transfer of the Bagram prison to Afghan control may finally result in a trial for the Afghan citizens who have been detained there, many of them for years, without knowing if or when they would ever have their day in court. But Bagram prisoners who are nationals of Pakistan and other countries are at risk of sliding deeper into a legal limbo or being transferred into torture.

    Justice Project Pakistan is a Lahore-based legal-action charity that provides legal support to prisoners facing the death penalty, as well as Pakistani citizens detained in the war on terror. The organization is representing nine Pakistani detainees at Bagram. It is working with these prisoners’ families, pressing for information about their status and conditions of confinement, for the establishment of normal communication channels, and for a resolution of their detention, either by trial or release. So far, U.S. authorities have completely denied Justice Project Pakistan lawyers access to their clients, preventing them from making even the simplest inquiries necessary to assist them and their families.

    The U.S. authorities at Bagram have also not provided Hamidullah and the other detainees or their families with clear grounds for their detention. They have never been told what circumstances must arise for them to be able to challenge their detention in a court of law or even when such circumstances might arise. The only legal process afforded them—a military review board—has fallen well short of basic fair-trial standards.

    After examining the cases of some Bagram detainees,, a U.S. review board has recommended their release—Hamidullah says he is among them—either because they should not have been detained in the first place or because they no longer pose a threat. Yet high-level political stalemate, particularly between the United States and Pakistan, has prevented the release of even these individuals to their homes and their families.

    The agreement between the United States and Afghanistan on the transfer of detention authority is an opportunity to finally clean up this legal mess and put an end to a disgraceful, unjust situation. Now is the time to set out a proper legal framework for detention, including guarantees of due process and a fair trial. The United States must also meet its legal obligation not to transfer any detainee in its custody to detention in a country where there will be a real risk of torture. This is a serious concern when it comes to transferring detainees to the custody of Afghan authorities, who have a record of torture. Just last month, a report by the Open Society Foundations and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission detailed widespread torture of persons held in detention by the Afghan authorities.

    The governments of the United States and Afghanistan should agree either to the transfer of non-Afghan detainees, including Hamidullah and others represented by Justice Project Pakistan, to the Afghan authorities for final prosecution or for repatriation to their home countries. If the U.S. government moves forward with repatriation of detainees, it must transfer them in a manner that ensures such individuals are not put at risk of abuse. The United States should also clearly and expeditiously communicate to other states what specific measures it believes they should adopt to secure the repatriation of non-Afghan detainees.

    The Pakistani government also has a responsibility to its citizens held by the U.S. Pakistan’s own courts have said as much, and ordered the government to do more to secure the release of its citizens and ensure that no agreement to transfer Pakistani citizens to Afghan authorities puts them at risk of torture. Should the United States and Pakistan move forward with repatriation, the Pakistani government must also spell out what will happen to these individuals, and if not immediately released, how their cases will be adjudicated and their rights protected.

    After so many years of waiting, Hamidullah and other non-Afghan detainees in Afghanistan deserve to have access to their lawyers, and their cases resolved. If the authorities have no evidence against them, they should be released immediately. If there is evidence of wrongdoing against them, they should be tried. Holding them indefinitely or transferring them to torture are not options.

    Hurricane Juan Strikes Nova Scotia

    AP Online September 29, 2003

    AP Online 09-29-2003 Dateline: HALIFAX, Nova Scotia see here category 1 hurricane

    The NOAA satellite picture taken at 5 A.M. EDT Sunday Sept. 28, 2003 shows a good deal of clouds over the Northeast. Rain is soaking New York and southern New England. Thunderstorms are rumbling off the Middle Atlantic coast. Low clouds cover the Great Lakes and Midwest. High pressure is bringing a clear sky to the West. Hurricane Juan is moving northward toward Halifax, Nova Scotia. (AP Photo/NOAA) Hurricane Juan struck Nova Scotia late Sunday, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of people from low-lying areas, even as the storm was downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane.

    The storm brought 80 mph winds and torrential rains, uprooting trees and knocking out power to significant areas of Halifax, the largest city on Canada's east coast.

    Downed tree limbs cartwheeled through city streets as massive oak trees were knocked over in a downtown park. Several cars were damaged.

    Blackouts were reported throughout the city as rising water levels lapped at the pavement surrounding the Halifax harbor front.

    "We think it's pretty serious," said Peter Bowyer, program manager of the Canadian Hurricane Center in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

    By early Sunday evening, Juan was downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, which has winds ranging from 74 mph to 95 mph.

    The swirling storm system, measuring about 175 miles wide, was moving north at near 32 mph.

    Canadian officials issued hurricane wind warnings for Nova Scotia. go to site category 1 hurricane

    The evacuation, part of a local state of emergency, began around 8 p.m. EDT as winds picked up and rain started to fall.

    The storm was expected to track from Halifax through central Nova Scotia, losing its hurricane strength by the time it reached Prince Edward Island.

    A storm surge warning for waves over three feet was issued for the Halifax area and communities west of the city, including those along the picturesque south shore near Mahone Bay.

    Meteorologists warned of coastal flooding, even in downtown Halifax, as the arrival of Juan was expected to coincide with high tide.

    Margaret Murphy, spokeswoman for Nova Scotia Power, said crews were on standby to deal with any power outages.

    The last hurricane to hit Nova Scotia was Gustav on Sept. 12, 2002. It caused little damage, though it dumped nearly 4 inches of rain and had wind speeds of over 75 mph.

    Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Kate swirled in the Atlantic far from land, a day after forming. Its center was about 1,240 miles southwest of Lajes in the Azores Islands. At 11 p.m., Kate had maximum sustained winds near 60 mph and was moving north northeast near 12 mph.

    Juan arrives a week after Hurricane Isabel hit the U.S. coast, killing 40 people from North Carolina to New Jersey and knocking out electrical service to 6 million customers as far north as New York. About 166,000 customers in the hardest-hit areas of Virginia and North Carolina remained without power Sunday, said Dominion Virginia Power, the area's dominant utility.

    The Atlantic hurricane season began June 1 and runs through Nov. 30.

Gadgetopia

  • The Facebook IPO Effect on Real Estate

    Posted: April 30, 2012, 6:52 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Silicon Valley real estate: The Facebook effect: The pending Facebook IPO is affecting Silicon Valley real estate.  Sellers are keeping their homes off the market until the IPO is done and there’s a new batch of buyers, flush with cash.

    Though the number of actual prospective home buyers with Facebook connections is only a fraction of all buyers in the Valley, their psychological effect on the market is unmistakable. In Palo Alto, in particular -- which Mark Zuckerberg calls home --sellers are either keeping their homes off the market until the IPO or ramping up expectations. For the first quarter of 2012, according to BrokerMetrics, the median price of a single-family P.A. home went up 11%, whereas inventory declined 57%

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • A great leader takes the blame when things go wrong

    Posted: April 30, 2012, 12:45 pm by Sunny Bindra

    “Pep Guardiola has defended Lionel Messi after his penalty miss as good as cost Barcelona a place in the Champions League final.
    Messi has enjoyed an extraordinary run of form in the past four seasons, scoring 63 goals in all competitions this season alone. However, he failed to find the net in either leg of Barcelona’s semi-final against Chelsea – and crashed his second-half penalty off the bar during their 3-2 aggregate defeat.
    …Guardiola said: “We have got this far thanks to this kid. More than ever I want to thank him for what he’s done.
    “My admiration for him knows no limits. He is an example for all of us, his competitiveness inspires us. He’s daring, he’s brave and he plays fantastically well in all kinds of different conditions.
    “I don’t doubt he will have a few bad hours now but sometimes you smile and sometimes you are sad and it’s our turn to be sad.”

    The Guardian (25 April 2011)

    Many years ago, I was a very junior management consultant working on my first ever assignment in London: a very high-profile privatization project. I was part of a team of hundreds, and it was the single biggest assignment in the history of my employer at the time. The privatization was also a highly politicized event, attracting much opposition and media attention.

    So what did I do? I carelessly left a bag containing highly confidential documents entrusted to me lying in a car park.

    After realizing my error in a heart-stopping moment later, I rushed back to the car park. To no avail. The bag was gone.

    I had been in the job just a month or so, and had already messed it up. I went into the office of the senior partner of the consulting division to explain what had happened, and to hand in my resignation.

    After hearing me out patiently, this is what she said: “It doesn’t matter. It was a human error. I’ve done the same in my time. Never mind, I will take responsibility and handle the matter.”

    I looked at her dumbstruck. As we were speaking, the phone rang. A taxi-driver had found the bag and was calling to return it. The situation was saved.

    I have never forgotten that act of leadership. Rosemary Radcliffe, if ever you read this article, I still salute you and talk about you to leaders everywhere.

    I was reminded of Ms Radcliffe when I read Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola’s comments on his star player, Lionel Messi, following their crushing Champions League defeat to Chelsea last week.

    A lesser coach may have directed some blame towards Messi, who missed several chances over the two legs and even wasted a penalty that would probably have decided the outcome. Not Guardiola.

    As shown in the excerpt, the coach was protective of his player and effusive in his praise of the latter’s achievements to date. He would not countenance a blame game.

    Contrast that with leaders you (and I) know, who look for a scapegoat the minute a crisis occurs, and readily offer up a blood sacrifice to appease the baying crowd. These are the leaders who protect their personal image at all costs; who treat employees like expendable resources; who will never have the expansiveness of spirit to do something for others.

    Leadership is, and always has been, about character. It is about getting the best out of others, after all. You don’t do that by protecting yourself first and throwing your team out to the dogs. Nor do you do it by setting the example of self-absorption. Ms Radcliffe and Mr Guardiola know something we should all understand: true character is revealed during a moment of truth, when the leader has something significant to lose.

    Do remember that when you face your next crisis.

    Related posts:

    1. Building a great company takes patience
    2. If you think leadership is all about you, you’re dead wrong
    3. Your chairman should be a great storyteller

Colorlabs Project

  • Papuros – A Magazine WordPress Child Theme

    Posted: April 30, 2012, 7:24 am by Anita Pravitasari
    We have a new Child Theme for Backbone Theme Framework! It’s a magazine-style WordPress theme and it’s called Papuros. Papuros puts a lot of content on the page. The homepage layout shows excerpts of headlines of articles from a variety of different categories or topics on the front...

Gadgetopia

  • The Rise of the Brogrammer

    Posted: April 29, 2012, 4:35 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    "Gangbang Interviews" and "Bikini Shots": Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem: Here’s an article about the apparent growing sexism in the programmer business.

    Remember, a few years ago, we discussed the guy who used Playboy’s CyberGirls in his presentation, and then there was the guy who used a running porn metaphor to describe CouchDB.

    This article starts off with a similar story about a presenter at SXSW:

    He said he'd won over Digg's elusive cofounders by sending them "bikini shots" from a "nudie calendar" he'd put together with photographs of fellow students posing in their swimsuits.

    Van Horn continued with some tips for hiring managers: He cautioned against "gangbang interviews"—screening prospective employees by committee—and made a crack about his fraternity's recruiting strategy, designed to "attract the hottest girls" on campus. He seemed taken aback when nobody laughed. "C'mon, guys, we all know how it was in college," he muttered.

    The article then launches into a long discussion, complete with too many examples to follow, about how women are marginalized in the programming trade, and how this has led to the rise of the “brogrammer” – a geek who revels in the male-centric culture to the point of being blatantly sexist.

    It’s an interesting read.

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • It’s not the superhighway that counts – it’s what you do with it

    Posted: April 29, 2012, 10:48 am by Sunny Bindra

    Kenya has spent more on infrastructure projects in the past decade than at any other time in its history. And there is more to come.

    That is a great and necessary thing. Projects like undersea cables, superhighways and bypasses, link roads, rural power connections, bridges and port expansions will all have significant impact on our national income and growth. As Kenyans, we are proud to be coming of age in infrastructure terms.

    But here’s the thing: it’s not the infrastructure that aids development; it’s what you do with it.

    I read with dismay a police report that there have already been seventy-plus deaths on the new Thika Superhighway since January this year. That figure seemed to pass without comment. Did any leader look at it and shout: “This is unacceptable?” Because it is indeed unacceptable.

    Why have so many deaths occurred? For two reasons: first, that highway has been opened to the public in the most slipshod manner possible. It has had neither signage nor road markings; lanes are opened and closed without warning or indication; and there is hardly ever any traffic-police presence on it to guide motorists.

    Second, we know Kenyans have become some of the world’s most reckless, ill-disciplined, ill-mannered and self-centred drivers. The story is repeated every day on every road; but when that crazy behaviour is taken to a major highway, only mayhem can ensue.

    Without controls or regulation of drivers, the death rate on the superhighway can only climb. Drivers enter and leave the highway at random; they engage in very dangerous cross-lane stunts; they drive against the traffic; they stop suddenly to pick up passengers. Add to that the number of pedestrians who jaywalk on a highway meant only for vehicles, and you have created all the conditions for a deathtrap.

    Why do we do it like this? These deaths are not a necessary cost of development; they are the cost of bad implementation. Why can we not hold contractors to account when it comes to proper signage, drainage and lighting? Why can we not police and regulate that road to impose good behaviour and penalize the worst offenders? Do we have no feeling for all these needless deaths? What will it take for our leaders to be concerned – do they need to be personally affected in order to take any meaningful action?

    There is a wider point to be made here. Just because we are in Africa, we need not settle for second- and third-best every time. We must not be grateful for just getting new roads – we must demand roads that are well-made, well-commissioned, well-maintained and well-run. And that demand must be made across every bit of infrastructure that is introduced.

    We are on the cusp of a great moment in our history. All of these infrastructure developments, combined with changes in governance and in spiralling economic demand, will indeed bestow great dividends. But that does not mean things don’t have to be done properly. Let us not undo all the good work we are doing because we can’t be bothered to do it right.

    Infrastructure is the ‘hardware’ of development. What people do with it is the ‘software.’ So far, our software is shoddy. To work on this software, we must engage some fundamentals. Great delivery doesn’t just happen – it has to be led and managed. People don’t just behave themselves for the common good – they have to be made to. Drivers used to potholed, unregulated chaos don’t just automatically become accustomed to the protocols of a new, complicated highway – they have to be shown the way.

    So let those whose job it is to manage these things wake up and do this infrastructure thing properly. We must demand no less.

    Related posts:

    1. Kenya’s most costly animal: the White Elephant
    2. Why are we busy destroying Nairobi’s trees?
    3. Another famine caused by people, not nature

Gadgetopia

  • The Virtues of eBooks

    Posted: April 28, 2012, 6:56 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Books: Bits vs. Atoms: I’m trying very hard to get over my attachment to physical books.  Jeff Atwood nudges me further in that direction.

    At the risk of stating the obvious, if your goal is to get a written idea in front of as many human beings as efficiently as possible, you shouldn't be publishing dead tree books at all. You should be editing a wiki, writing a blog, or creating a website.

    For some reason, I’m addicted to physical books.  I previously discussed my experience with an original Kindle, which wasn’t great.

    There are two things that ebooks still just don’t do for me.

    1. They don’t provide some physical reminder of their presence.
      I love being surrounded by books.  I seem them, and I think about them.  I stack them up as visual representations of knowledge.  Whenever my eyes drift across the titles of their spines often makes my mind drift in interesting directions.  I need books lying around, it seems.  They’re like…trophies.
    2. They can’t be shared easily.
      I would guess we have almost 1,000 books floating around Blend.  We refer to them by title all the time.  We pass them around.  We drop them on each other’s desk.  They are a communal repository of knowledge, owned by the collective, that can be used by the individual.  I can’t get the same architecture from ebooks.

    Interestingly, Atwood talks about a lot more shortcomings later in his article.  He concentrates a lot DRM, and the layout and presentation differences between ebooks and printed books.

    But, other than those things, ebooks are so much more practical in every way.  I need to get over this hang-up, and transition away from physical books.

  • The Hyper-Addiction of Casual Gaming

    Posted: April 28, 2012, 6:31 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Just One More Game ...: This article is a neat look at casual games, and why they’re so addicting.  How did we get from Call of Duty to Angry Birds, and was Tetris just a gateway drug?  Why are these games so addictive?

    The game was an anesthetic, an escape pod, a snorkel, a Xanax, a dental hygienist with whom to exchange soothingly meaningless banter before going under the pneumatic drill of Life. Soon I found myself struggling in the net of real addiction. Even as I pressed “New Game,” my brain would be thinking, very consciously, I have to stop playing this game. But I didn’t. Instead, I spread the Drop7 virus to other people: my wife, my friends, my mother, my in-laws. I found myself playing in all kinds of extreme situations: at 3 a.m., during a severe gastrointestinal crisis; immediately after an intense discussion with my mother; shortly after learning that my dog — the warm, emoting mammal I lived with for 12 years — was probably dying of cancer.

  • The Limits of Spam Algorithms

    Posted: April 27, 2012, 1:22 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews, Here’s How You Fix It: An interesting story of a false positive spam algorithm doing some damage.

    Yelp flagged poor reviews of a moving company as spam, and hid them.  Turns out, they were legit – the moving company were not nice people – but since this guy never saw the reviews, he hired the company anyway.

    Turns out, the behavior meant to indicate spam overlaid perfectly on the behavior of people trying to complain about this company.

    Your algorithm typically hides entries by people who only post one review and who don’t otherwise engage in Yelp. Your assumption is that if a user only posts one review, posts no comments, has no friends etc. then most likely they are fake and trying to game the system.

    […] In each case the one star review was left by someone who would never normally leave a review… they were simply so outraged that they were motivated to signup to Yelp and try to warn others how bad this company is. None of them ever used Yelp again. Furthermore, they didn’t have the knowledge or inclination to try to make their Yelp profile look acceptable to Yelp’s automated suppression systems.

Open Society Institute

  • UN Recognizes the Vital Role of Legal Aid

    Posted: April 27, 2012, 10:27 pm by Kersty McCourt

    Access to a properly funded legal aid scheme is vital if those with minimal financial means are to access justice. Now, thanks to years of work and diplomatic efforts,  UN member states have agreed that legal aid schemes are not just optional; they should be a basic part of any country's justice system.

    The UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice has just adopted at a meeting in Vienna a ground-breaking resolution on "access to legal aid in criminal justice systems". The resolution adopts a set of "Principles and Guidelines" designed to ensure that access to legal information, advice and assistance is available to all through the provision of legal aid—thus realizing rights for the poor and marginalized and entrenching one of the key building blocks of a fair, humane and efficient criminal justice system.

    This is the first international instrument on legal aid. It brings us a step closer to ensuring universal access to human rights—rights that remain illusory if they are only accessible to those with financial means.

    The genesis of this resolution was the 2004 Lilongwe Declaration on Accessing Legal Aid in the Criminal Justice System in Africa. In 2007 ECOSOC called on the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to develop a global instrument. Since 2009 groups of experts, from all continents, including the Open Society Justice Initiative, have gathered several times in Vienna to draw together best practices and develop a draft that was reviewed by the Member States in 2011. The result is a practical document that traces the criminal justice system from the pretrial to post-trial stage and highlights a number of important components:

    • Prompt access to legal aid at all stages of the criminal justice process.
    • The involvement of a diversity of legal aid providers including lawyers, university legal clinicians and paralegals.
    • The development of a nationwide legal aid system that is sufficiently staffed and resourced.

    It is aimed to help states design and implement innovative, comprehensive and sustainable systems.

    The resolution was sponsored by Cameroon, Canada, Croatia, Chile, Denmark (for the European Union), Georgia, Germany, Israel, Mexico, Namibia, Nigeria, Norway, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Africa (for the African Group) and the United States of America and the negotiations spearheaded by Georgia and South Africa—highlighting their steadfast commitment to legal aid, both through their national systems and through efforts, such as this, to exchange and improve standards at the international level.

    According to Justice Dunstan Mlambo, chairman of Legal Aid South Africa, the way in which a country treats those who come into contact with the criminal justice system is a hallmark of its commitment to human rights. Thus legal aid is not something that is nice to have; it is a must that has to be there. The adoption of the principles and guidelines is a significant and important step forward and a strong catalyst in promoting global commitment to legal aid.

    This is an exciting moment—but of course intensive work now begins. If we take a quick snapshot of the reality on the ground hundreds of millions of people currently go without access to legal assistance, they are detained for months or even years without being informed of their rights and without appearing before a court.

    In many countries there are literally one to two hundred lawyers for populations of over ten million people, and there are blockages both to training additional lawyers and to ensuring support and backup from qualified paralegals. Legal aid is not only important as a human right and as the foundation of a fair trial. Effective legal aid schemes produce significant positive outcomes both for individuals and for the wider society by improving the performance of criminal justice personnel. They lead to more rational and effective decision-making, and increase accountability and respect for the rule of law.

    It is critical now for states to take steps to improve their systems, remove blockages, and adopt practical country-wide strategies. UN agencies and civil society organizations need to provide flexible support, help document best practices and monitor developments. And development funders need to work with governments to support long-term strategies.

     

    Cure for winter blues; Alaskans head to Hawaii and leave cold, dark behind.(Travel)

    Albany Times Union (Albany, NY) January 6, 2008 Byline: JEANNETTE J. LEE - Associated Press HONOLULU - To some, a vacation in the tropics involves sipping mai tais poolside at a five-star resort. To others it's surfing lessons or snorkeling on a colorful, fish-filled reef.

    To Francis Mitchell and Joanne Mehl of McGrath, Alaska, vacation paradise is the modest second home they have built atop a barren, windswept lava field on the Big Island, Hawaii's youngest and most volcanically active island.

    The couple have lived for years in a remote cabin, without running water, in the wilderness of interior Alaska. Each year they, and thousands of other Alaskans, board flights bound direct to the Hawaiian Islands for a break from the cold and, in some places, absolute darkness of a northern winter.

    "Hawaii balances Alaska because it is so soft and gentle compared to how hard Alaska can be," said Mehl, 56, who volunteers with rural firefighting crews in the summer and has worked a variety of jobs in her town of 320 people. "At this point, I couldn't live year-round in McGrath because of the cold and the darkness." McGrath, 221 miles northwest of Anchorage, is known for hosting dozens of dog teams during the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. The community gets less than four hours of sunlight during the shortest winter days. Temperatures there can fall to minus 60. website big island hawaii

    For Alaska's largest air carrier, the annual winter exodus from the 49th state to the 50th is a predictable and attractive market.

    Alaska Airlines began flying the six-hour route from Anchorage to Honolulu for the first time in December, when reasonably priced seats to Hawaii sell out fast. The flights, each carrying just 150 passengers, leave once a day.

    The airline also acquired the assets of rival carrier Hawaiian Vacations Inc., which had based its entire business on the route for about 20 years.

    On a recent flight in December, 150 passengers boarded Alaska Airlines flight 870 at 3 p.m., just as the sun was disappearing behind the jagged white peaks of the Alaska Range. The temperature was 8 degrees.

    Many Alaskans on board said they travel to Hawaii for the same reasons as other residents of the western United States. Besides the obvious charms of the well-marketed Pacific islands, the flight time is just five to six hours and does not involve passports, money-changing, or the other hassles of international travel. go to web site big island hawaii

    "I just love the atmosphere and the people are great," said Palmer resident Ted Perdue. "It's the closest you can come to being in a foreign country, but still be in the U.S." Perdue, who owns a construction business, was making his fourth trip to Hawaii with his wife, Jeanette, and their two children, Jack, 9, and Chantel, 10. The family travels to the Hawaiian islands every two years around the holidays. This year, they are spending eight days on the Big Island and another eight days on the smaller, and generally rainier, island of Kauai.

    Alaskans make up a tiny fraction of the total number of visitors to Hawaii each year, according to Hawaii's Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. But they stay longer on average than visitors from any other U.S. state - 13.04 days, according to figures from 2006.

    And in Alaska, it seems that most people either go to Hawaii in the winter or know at least one person who does.

    Kelly Cassidy, who lives on the island of Kodiak, said several of her closest high school friends happen to be going to the Big Island, where her family is staying. The Big Island is the largest island in the United States and Cassidy's hometown, known for great fishing and giant grizzlies, is runner-up.

    "We're going to have a Kodiak party in Kona," said Cassidy, who is 16. "It'll be like the 'bigger' island of Kodiak. Just warmer." Deanza Hjalseth, of Anchorage, said she is meeting her four siblings in the tourist mecca of Waikiki on the island of Oahu. Hjalseth, 25, grew up in the Inupiat Eskimo village of Shishmaref, about 70 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

    "We might do a submarine tour, visit Pearl Harbor and go to the Polynesian Cultural Center," she said, referring to an attraction on Oahu that features traditional dance performances and several replicas of Polynesian villages.

    As the pilot announced the start of the descent into Honolulu, Kate Kignak of Barrow, Alaska, said she has long been anticipating a 10-day stay on Kauai with her husband and two children.

    "It's always been our dream to go to Hawaii," said Kignak, who works at the elementary school in the mostly Inupiat community.

    The temperature at Honolulu International Airport was 77 degrees when the plane landed. For many Alaskans, the warm temperatures are a treat, but for one reason or another, the far north will always be home.

    "I feel like I need Hawaii, but after a while I long for what McGrath gives me," said Mehl. "There's something so solid and so wilderness about Alaska. As beautiful as Hawaii is, it's still dominated by humans. For us, it's really nice to live someplace that's not." CAPTION(S):

    PHOTO LUCY PEMONI/ASSOCIATED PRESS ALASKANS JEREMY ESMAILKA, his wife, Deanza Hjalseth, and daughter Sienna are among thousands who make an annual winter exodus from the 49th state to the 50th.

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • When you don’t say what you mean – a new poem by Sonya Kassam

    Posted: April 25, 2012, 4:46 pm by Sunny Bindra

    Diplomacy Today

    Today yesterday tomorrow
    Diplomacy is was will be hollow
    Say it like it is
    What’s with the “excuse me please?”
    Do you, in the boxing match
    Hold back the power of your punch?
    Or do you fail
    To fully exhale?
    Coat words with honey?
    No! Claim back your money!
    Is the smell of the dead
    Covered by a flower spread?
    The rupture of seething rage
    Smothered by smiles so strange?
    Let it be known
    They will reap as they have sown
    Pleasantries gestures
    Bowing to false masters
    Do you think we don’t see
    Who the winner will truly be?
    Hiding behind diplomacy
    You sell the pride that belongs to me

    Related posts:

    1. Is your ‘great’ company sowing the seeds of its own future failure?

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on Let Go by bitter no more

    Posted: April 25, 2012, 7:42 am by bitter no more

    My boyfriend and close friend of two years got me pregnant, and sadly he bailed on me and left me with insults. It hurt..so much. But i decided i was going to keep my child. i told my family and sadly my mother rejected me. I was hurt. i felt rejected and alone, but still a small joy inside me coz i was excited about my child. sadly i lost the child and that was the biggest blow. i got extremely bitter and angry.

    I used to tell myself that if i saw that man again, i would push him in front of a bus or train…and the worst thing is i meant it. The bitterness reflected in all my associations, including my job. A close friend one day advised me to forgive him, and i thought to myself why should I?? Why should he get so lucky…free from responsibility..free from guilt then now i forgive him..NEVER!!

    But i prayed about it, and told God to take up my burden. and it was difficult letting it go…because it had become my baby. I wanted to hold on to resentment and bitterness. But He came through for me. It was like a weight lifted…FOR REAL!!! I sat that man down one day and told him my experiences, my lows and the loss of the child. i didnt try and look for guilt or remorse in the man…nope. I told him inspite of all those things, i choose to forgive him.

    I can say i am slowly forgetting the ordeal, but it changed me. I’m not bitter anymore. So No Forgiveness…i can relate with your dilemma in some way, but i urge you my sister, let go, forgive, it will be the best thing. And i am sorry about what you went through, i really am.

Colorlabs Project

  • ColorLabs Storefront Redesign: Official Announcement

    Posted: April 24, 2012, 6:38 am by Anita Pravitasari
    Just over 6 months ago, we took a new identity as ColorLabs & Company and we introduced Lemuel, our cool mascot, for the first time. We also hinted of upcoming style changes on the storefront. Finally, after some successful and unsuccessful ventures in the past 6 months, the redesign is...

Bad Science

  • Is this the worst government statistic ever created?

    Posted: April 23, 2012, 10:13 pm by Ben Goldacre
    I forgot to post this column up last year. It’s a fun one: the Department for Communities and Local Government have produced a truly farcical piece of evidence, and promoted it very hard, claiming it as good stats. I noticed the column was missing today, because Private Eye have published on the same report in [...]

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • Your business is centered on customers? I don’t believe you…

    Posted: April 23, 2012, 1:25 pm by Sunny Bindra

    “I’ve been living in the Thank You Economy since a day sometime around 1995, when a customer came into my dad’s liquor store and said, “I just bought a bottle of Lindemans Chardonnay for $5.99, but I got your $4.99 coupon (later) in the mail. Can you honor it? I’ve got the receipt.” The store manager working on the floor at the time replied, “No.” I looked up from where I was on my knees dusting the shelves and saw the guy’s eyes widen as he said, “Are you serious?” The manager said, “No, no, you have to buy more to get it at $4.99.” As the man left, I went over to the manager and said, “That guy will never come back. I was wrong about that; he did come back. He came back a couple of months later – to tell us he would never shop with us again.”

    GARY VAYNERCHUK ‘The Thank You Economy’ (2011)

    Thus begins Gary Vaynerchuk’s excellent new book. Take a look at the excerpt again. What should that store manager have done? Should he have lost a dollar and accepted the coupon that was late? Most of you, if you have any iota of enlightenment about customers, will say yes. But I don’t believe you.

    I don’t believe you because everywhere I look businesses are still designed to do things that are shrewd rather than wise. Saving the dollar is shrewd; saving the lifetime customer is wise. I believe you know the difference. I don’t believe you act on that knowledge.

    Be a customer. Walk into a shop and try to return something that turned out to be defective. The chances are the shop will try to blame the defect on something YOU did. Or try to say you’ve just changed your mind about what you bought, and look at the expressions. You will be shown a sign on the wall, or small print on your receipt, that will read: “Good once sold cannot be…” (You know the rest.)

    Be a customer. Walk into a bank and try to get a loan for something. Watch the paperwork hoops you will be asked to jump through for the next few weeks. Watch how you will be asked to provide not only cash or a property as collateral, but also insure your own life in the bank’s interest in case you default. Then watch how the bank will make you pay for every single expense related to the loan: insurers, valuers, lawyers et al. Watch how it will also charge you something large for “arranging” the loan (it’s a costly favour they’re doing you, apparently). And watch how the bank will earn a huge spread on the interest payments you will now be bound to make for much of the rest of your working life.

    What are these businesses doing? They’re being shrewd, of course. They’re protecting themselves against nasty customers like you, who will abuse and misuse them if given the slightest opportunity. They’re looking after themselves; you have to look after you. That’s the way business is done.

    Or is it?

    There’s a better way, people. I just don’t think most of you will have the breadth of vision, the acuity of insight, or the bigness of heart to see it. That kind of person, like Gary Vaynerchuk, sees very clearly that the overriding purpose of business is to create and hold happy customers. That making customers happy makes employees happy. That happy customers create happy shareholders. That you make more money, not less, by not sweating the little stuff so much. That archaic rules and regulations kill the relationship and make every transaction coldly economic, instead of warmly emotional.

    I don’t believe your business, whatever industry you’re in, knows this. So go on, prove me wrong.

    Related posts:

    1. Since when is misleading customers a winning strategy?
    2. No company can be all things to all customers
    3. What should we do with our bad customers?

Gadgetopia

  • 2012 Intranet Innovation Awards

    Posted: April 22, 2012, 6:04 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    The 2012 Intranet Innovation Awards are now open for entries!: My friends over at Step Two have opened up the Intranet Innovation Awards for 2012.

    The Intranet Innovation Awards are global awards that celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. The goal is to find these remarkable solutions, and to share them with the wider community.

    I had a long travel stretch late last year, and I actually bought all five of the previous award reports to read on planes and in airports.  It was great reading.  Intranets can be so inscrutable, because you can see anyone else’s, so if you’re wondering what cool things are people are doing, buy this report when it’s released.  Until then, consider entering something – you’ll be in good company.

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • Why waiters (or their guests) can’t predict the weather

    Posted: April 22, 2012, 9:50 am by Sunny Bindra

    I was sitting by my favourite ocean (there is only one) the other day (I was on a break, remember) and I noticed some ominous-looking dark clouds over the ocean. I asked a passing waiter whether he thought it might rain.

    He looked at the sky, and said with gratifying certainty: “No chance. Those clouds are not coming here.” Reassured, I re-immersed myself in my book, ignoring the fact that the sky was darkening and the wind was becoming more insistent. Half an hour later, I was sitting in the hotel lounge soaked to the skin, having just managed to protect my book.

    The book itself truly deserved saving: it is called Fooled by Randomness, and it is written by that very entertaining and erudite iconoclast, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I love iconoclasts of all shapes and sizes; their being entertaining is an additional bonus.

    Taleb tells you that if you place an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters and let them clatter away, it is CERTAIN that one of them will produce an exact version of the Iliad. This is not very interesting, because the probability of any one monkey doing it is ridiculously low.

    But here’s the thing: should one monkey pull it off and present you with the Iliad, would you now be willing to consider the possibility that he could next write the Odyssey? No? What if you knew nothing about this experiment with infinite monkeys, and were simply presented with this hero-monkey who had just (verifiably) written the Iliad: would you not be rather disposed to expecting another great work from this remarkable primate?

    The waiter was confident because his last couple of predictions about the rain had been correct. He was on a run, and thought he had exceptional skill in weather forecasting. The point though, is this: pretty much every waiter I’ve ever met on any beach thinks the same thing. They all think they’ve got the weather figured out; none of them actually do.

    This is because the underlying process by which it rains on a particular beach at a particular time is pretty random. It is influenced by humidity, cloud formation and winds in ways that is very difficult for even a professional weatherman with proper measuring equipment to forecast. So the correct answer to the question, “Is it about to rain on this beach in the next half-hour?” is, “Who knows? Take precautions in case it does.” That is the answer almost no one gives you.

    As you may have worked out, this column isn’t really about waiters or monkeys. It’s about you. Don’t you have the same irrational confidence in your forecasts – about the stock market, business performance, exchange rates? Don’t you feel that a string of successful predictions make you a forecasting guru – when in all likelihood that string was just a run of luck?

    If the underlying process creating the result is stochastic, you have no reason to be confident. And many more results – share price performance, currency rates, business and personal success – have strongly random underlying generators than most of us imagine.

    So abandon your bravado and get real. You may know much less than you think. Think more deeply, and get other opinions. Don’t make big bets on your (or anyone else’s) predictions. Be prepared for forecast failure, and be prepared for the possible consequences. Stay humble, and recognize the huge role of luck in your life. We are quick to extol the virtues of a businessperson who has had a successful run, and quick to forget the many others who failed by doing the exact same things as our “winner.”

    My waiter friend learned from his forecasting error, and refused to attempt a prediction the following day. He’s wiser than many overconfident business leaders I know.

    No related posts.

Colorlabs Project

  • 10 Free Tools for Conversion Rate Optimisation

    Posted: April 21, 2012, 6:07 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    This article is a guest post written by Jim Kinloch. In 2008 I attended a seminar by the Conversion Rate Experts. Here was what I was looking for, a way of looking at all the online/digital disciplines and focusing these techniques into creating the very best performing Websites.  I was hooked and...

  • Preview of Upcoming Magazine WordPress Theme

    Posted: April 21, 2012, 5:09 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    I am happy to announce that ColorLabs will release another Premium WordPress Theme in the next coming week. We are currently working on a magazine style theme and it will be a new Child Theme for Backbone Framework. As usual, before we launched it we wanted to write a quick blog post to show you...

Gadgetopia

  • Social Media is Taking Over Corporate Blogs

    Posted: April 20, 2012, 8:25 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    More companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead: On a lesser scale, this is happening to entire websites as well.  Some companies are just redirecting their home pages to their Facebook pages.

    With the emergence of social media, more companies are replacing blogs with nimbler tools requiring less time and resources, such as Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

    A survey released earlier this year by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth says the percentage of companies that maintain blogs fell to 37% in 2011 from 50% in 2010, based on its survey of 500 fast-growing companies listed by Inc. magazine. Only 23% of Fortune 500 companies maintained a blog in 2011, flat from a year ago after rising for several years.

Black Looks

  • Unpacking the layers of Sweden’s racist-misogynist cake

    Posted: April 20, 2012, 4:29 pm by Sokari
    Shailja Patel writing in Pambazuka News responds to the shockingly brutalisation of African women’s bodies by the Swedish Artists Organisation  – Lets be clear this action and the response by the artists in question does not stand alone.  It should be studied closely in itself AND  along with the growing acceptance of racism and racist [...]

Colorlabs Project

  • Get ColorLabs Bundled Themes Starts from $49

    Posted: April 20, 2012, 12:31 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    This time we’ve set out to create more variations than our previous Bundle. This way the Bundles will be more targeted and you can experience almost all themes that we have on a very low price. This time we divided our themes based on the complexity of their function. So until May 10, 2012...

  • Basic SEO Strategies for Beginners that Really Work

    Posted: April 20, 2012, 9:11 am by Anita Pravitasari
    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may sound like rocket science especially if you are a newbie to being online. Although it sounds like an official and technical term, but the fact is it isn’t too hard for beginners to learn and apply. However, SEO is time consuming and needs to be continually...

Open Society Institute

  • Drug Law Reform: The Genie’s Out of the Bottle in the Americas

    Posted: April 18, 2012, 11:54 pm by Coletta A. Youngers

    The following article originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.

    For the second time since assuming office, President Obama met with the hemisphere’s leaders at the sixth presidential summit in Cartagena, Colombia, on April 14 and 15. At first glance, the summit’s theme, “Connecting the Americas: Partners for Prosperity,” would have been better stated as “Disconnecting the Americas.” The presidents could not come to consensus on a final declaration that had long been in the works in draft form. Brazil’s harsh criticisms of U.S. monetary policy were widely applauded. Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner left the summit early, after the United States refused to go along with a statement endorsing Argentina’s right to the Malvinas Islands, insisting on U.S.  neutrality in the dispute between Argentina and Great Britain (where they are known as the Falkland Islands).

    The biggest tension, however, emerged over Cuba. While the rest of the hemisphere remained remarkably united around the idea that Cuba should participate in the next summit, scheduled for 2015, Canada and the United States remained steadfast in their opposition. (This ticking time bomb may very well derail future hemispheric summits.) To add insult to injury, the United States was deeply embarrassed by serious allegations of U.S. Secret Service agents drinking to excess and cavorting with prostitutes, harking back to the image of Latin America as a U.S. playground (a la Havana 1959).

    Yet what was refreshing about the Cartagena meeting was that these differences were aired in public. Though conflict has taken center stage in previous summits, most were highly scripted events that provided more of a photo op than a meaningful forum for debate. This time, debate—and discord—took center stage.

    The lasting legacy of the Cartagena summit, however, will likely be the beginning of a serious regional debate on international drug control policies. With the apparently adept leadership of Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos, the issue was discussed at a private, closed-door meeting of the presidents—according to press accounts, it was the only issue discussed at that meeting—and Santos later announced that as a result of the presidents’ discussion, the Organization of American States (OAS) was tasked with analyzing the results of present policy and exploring alternative approaches that could prove to be more effective. A topic long considered taboo—the U.S. “war on drugs”—is now being seriously questioned and debate on new strategies—including legal, regulated markets—is officially on the regional agenda.

    The significance of this development cannot be underestimated. For years, Washington has used its economic and political muscle to squash any dissenting opinions from Latin American governments. Academics and other experts who proposed alternative policies were ostracized as “legalizers,” even if that is not what they were proposing. The “L” word could not even be mentioned in official circles. In fact, the present debate is not about outright legalization per se but rather legal, regulated markets. Administration officials, nonetheless, continue to misconstrue the issue. At the summit, President Obama said that drug traffickers could “dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint.”

    Now, Latin American governments have turned the tables, taking on a leadership role in considering alternative policies. Numerous sitting presidents—including Santos, Guatemala’s Otto Pérez Molina, Costa Rica’s Laura Chinchilla and even Mexico’s Felipe Calderon—are lamenting the failure of present policy to stem the flow of illicit drugs or reduce the violence associated with the drug trade. There is also widespread frustration that while Latin American countries are paying a high political, social, and economic cost from both drug trafficking and drug policies themselves, Washington’s approach to the drug issue remains on auto-pilot, with no serious debate evident on Capitol Hill or in the White House.

    Guatemala’s president, retired general Otto Pérez Molina, has emerged as the primary promoter of rethinking the drug war and has insisted that all alternative options must be on the table, including legal, regulated markets. On March 24, he hosted a Central American regional summit, “New Routes Against Drug Trafficking.” Though all of the region’s presidents initially accepted the invitation to participate, the presidents of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras dropped out at the last minute (Honduras sent its vice president)—no doubt due at least in part to U.S. pressure. Indeed, Pérez Molina’s initiative has brought more U.S. officials to the region than at any moment in recent history, including Vice President Joe Biden, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Under Secretary of State, Maria Otero, and the top drug policy official at the  State Department, William Brownfield. Nonetheless, those present at the Guatemala meeting point out that a lively debate took place and it helped ensure that the drug issue was raised at the summit.

    While making clear that no change in U.S. policy is in the offing, Washington has reluctantly agreed to participate in a debate. At a press conference with President Santos on April 15, President Obama said: “I think it wouldn’t make sense for us not to examine what works and what doesn’t, and to constantly try to refine and ask ourselves, is there something we can do to prevent violence, to weaken these drug traffickers, to make sure that they're not peddling this stuff on our kids and they're not perpetrating violence and corrupting institutions in the region,” hastily adding, “I'm not somebody who believes that legalization is a path to solving this problem.” In a presidential election year, the administration is no doubt going to tread very carefully when it comes to the drug issue.

    The United States is no doubt pleased that the OAS was tasked to study the issue. The Secretariat of its Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) is traditionally led by someone appointed by the U.S. government (presently it is former U.S. diplomat, Amb. Paul Simons) and it is widely perceived across the region as a U.S.-driven agency. However, ultimately, CICAD’s agenda and focus is dictated by member states. The burden is now on those member states advocating reform to ensure that the OAS effectively carries out its mandate to explore all alternative policies and to include in the discussion relevant experts and organizations with significant expertise, such as the Pan American Health Organization.

    Present international drug control policies are deeply rooted and change will no doubt come slowly.  However, as a result of the Cartagena summit, for the first time a meaningful debate on developing and implementing drug control policies that are more humane and effective is underway. The genie is out and will be very hard to put back in the bottle, as much as U.S. officials might try.

    Coletta A. Youngers is the Latin America Regional Associate with the International Drug Policy Consortium and a Senior Fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). Both organizations are grantees of the Open Society Foundations.

Colorlabs Project

  • New Affiliate Links

    Posted: April 18, 2012, 12:48 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    Dear affiliates, We recently updated our membership system. The downside of this recent action is all affiliate links got refreshed. So if you have never changed your ColorLabs affiliate links then your current ones wouldn’t be working anymore. But rest assured, old affiliate links are still...

  • Le Journal – An Easy Access to High Volumes of Content

    Posted: April 18, 2012, 7:00 am by Anita Pravitasari
    We just released another child theme for the Backbone Theme Framework and it was designed for any publishing-style WordPress-powered website in the World Wide Web. With the addition of this new theme, now ColorLabs has 4 WordPress themes in the newspaper category and we believe there’s still...

StudioPress

  • How to Design for Apple’s Retina Displays

    Posted: April 16, 2012, 5:09 pm by Josh Byers

    If you’ve watched the HBO series Game of Thrones (or have read through the Song of Ice and Fire series), you’ll know that one of the major themes throughout the story is the subtle art of politicking.

    In order to survive you’d better know what your enemy’s next move will be — and be able to defend or counter it quickly.

    It’s no secret that the majority of web browsing is sliding quickly over to mobile devices.

    Because of this, designers and developers have been forced to confront their new handheld overlords. We’ve been given quite a few responsive weapons that have beaten back these devices including: media queries, fluid layouts, and all sorts of fun javascript hacks.

    But the audience keeps showing up on new mobile devices every day.

    New challenges come with each new mobile device on the scene. The good news is that we don’t need to pay attention to every single mobile device that comes out, or give fealty to their demands. But when the king of mobile devices brings a new heir into the realm? We’d do well to pay attention.

    With the introduction of the new iPad and including both generations of the iPhone 4, Apple now has millions of devices in the hands of its loyal subjects, burning their retinas with beautiful, high-density displays.

    The people of the realm spend hours gazing at the graphics you’ve designed on their new toys. If you haven’t designed those graphics correctly, their blurry appearance might just land your pretty little head on a pike in King’s Landing ;)

    We don’t want to lose our heads over an issue that’s so easy to deal with, so squire alongside me and let I’ll show you what you can do to bring graphical peace to the mobile kingdom … for a week or two, at least.

    When Apple introduced the iPhone 4 and its Retina Display, they stopped measuring the screen in pixels and started measuring in points.

    Each point is actual four pixels. The display blows up each pixel 2 times its size so that the physical dimensional size of the graphic stays the same — whether you are looking at it on an iPhone 4s or an iPhone 3gs.

    This is important because if they hadn’t doubled every pixel, everything would have been too small to see properly. You didn’t want to have people squinting, pinching and dragging to see things they had no problem seeing before.

    But it also created a new problem, because we know what happens when you start duplicating pixels and enlarging graphics — they get blurry. They get blurry fast.

    The graphic above has been exaggerated a bit to illustrate my point.

    When you look at graphics that were not specifically enhanced for the Retina Display on a Retina display, you’re not going to see a huge blurry mess. What you’ll see are edges that are not as clean as they should be, and text will be just a little harder to read.

    Some would say, what’s the big deal? I can handle my edges being a little flat.

    Personally, I want my graphics to look as crisp and clean as a new dollar. Aside from my own preference, ask yourself this: What if, in the next year or two, that pixel density doubles again? What if it triples? We’d have a real problem on our hands.

    So what’s the solution?

    One option is to use a media query to target these high density devices, creating low resolution and high resolution graphics.

    @media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2), screen and (max--moz-device-pixel-ratio: 2) {
    logo {
        background: url(images/scribe-logo@2x.png);
        background-size: 130px 40px;
    }
}

    Take a look at the two graphics below.

    The first is our normal image, the second is our high resolution image.

    Zoom in on either your mobile device or your desktop browser and you’ll be able to see that the first image will get blurry as it’s enlarged, but the second will remain nice and crisp.

    This works well, but it’s a lot of extra work to produce multiple versions of all your graphics.

    Ultimately it would be nice if we had graphics that could scale up and down seamlessly without losing any quality. Raster or pixel based graphics won’t do this so we would have to use vector based graphics.

    One of the newer ways to do this is to use an icon font.

    There are a lot of benefits to using icon fonts for graphics:

    • Infinitely scaleable
    • Resolution independent
    • Supported by all browsers young and old
    • You can design on the fly (easily change colors with css)
    • Small file size

    Here’s how it’s done:

    1. Upload your icon font file to your web server. We’re using a free one called Modern Pictograms from Font Squirrel (I’ll provide a list of great ones at the bottom of the post)
    2. Reference the font file in your css 
      @font-face {
    font-family: 'ModernPictogramsNormal';
    src: url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.eot');
    src: url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.svg#ModernPictogramsNormal') format('svg');
    font-style: normal;
    font-weight: normal;
}
    3. Create your markup 
      <div><span class="icon">i</span>View Basket</div>
<div><span class="icon">a</span>Read More</div>
<div><span class="icon">(</span>Settings</div>
    4. Create the properties for your icons in your css 
      .icon {
     color: #3090cf;
    font-family: 'ModernPictogramsNormal';
    font-size: 18px;
    padding: 0 15px;
}
    @font-face { font-family: 'ModernPictogramsNormal'; src: url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.eot'); src: url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'), url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.woff') format('woff'), url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'), url('http://www.studiopress.com/wp-content/uploads/modernpics-webfont.svg#ModernPictogramsNormal') format('svg'); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; } .icon { font-family: 'ModernPictogramsNormal'; font-size: 18px; padding: 0 15px; color: #3090cf; }

    And here is the results…

    iView Basket aRead More (Settings Here’s are some great icon fonts lists:

Colorlabs Project

  • Should Optimizing My Company Website for Mobile become Mandatory?

    Posted: April 13, 2012, 11:25 am by Anita Pravitasari
    There’s no doubt that the trend of accessing the internet via mobile devices is exploding. From iPhones and Android phones to iPads and Kindle Fires, more and more mobile devices are used to access the Internet. The IDC forcasted that by 2015 “more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet...

  • Past Two Weeks at ColorLabs: April 9, 2012

    Posted: April 8, 2012, 6:10 am by Anita Pravitasari
    Theme Launch: Galerie Our third WordPress theme release of March is a photography WordPress theme named Galerie. It is designed for photographer and photo enthusiast who want a website to showcase an image based portfolio. Galerie is powered with AJAX page and detail loading which not only makes...

Gadgetopia

  • The Hailstorm of Lawsuits in the Mobile Industry

    Posted: April 8, 2012, 6:06 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Apple's War on Android: My normally vitriolic stance towards Apple is softening a bit, but I still need to post this article that details the intellectual property war between Apple and…everyone else, it seems.  Specifically, Apple and Samsung are suing each other, mainly because Apple can’t sue Google directly over Android.

    Here’s the crux of one of the suits – a description of what Apple feels is a “trademarkable” thing:

    a rectangular product with four evenly rounded corners, a flat clear face covering the front of the product, [and] a large display screen under the clear surface.

    I find it absurd that you can try to trademark something that general. Hell, the coffee table in my living room resembles this description perfectly.  The article itself has pictures of a couple of pre-iPhone products that match that description too.

    But, the fault doesn’t just lie with Apple – everyone in the mobile space is suing everyone else, which seems to be the only reason Google purchased Motorola’s mobile unit:

    Google announced it would pay $12.5 billion to acquire the company’s mobile-phone operation and its 17,000 patents. The deal, said Google CEO Page, will “enable us to better protect Android from anticompetitive threats from Microsoft, Apple, and other companies.” In other words: You sue us, we sue you.

    The last paragraph of the article sums up the mess quite elegantly.

    In the short run, the tech giants could save themselves considerable legal fees and distraction if they were to lock their lawyers in a hallway of conference rooms and refuse to release them until they had crafted a series of comprehensive cross-licensing pacts. This process eventually resolved similar litigation in the desktop computer field. Such a solution “is still probably what will happen here,” says Stanford’s Lemley. “But in the meantime, these companies have paid their lawyers more than $400 million” over the last several years. “It’s not clear what they’re getting for that money.”

Black Looks

  • The Week on Sunday (weekly)

    Posted: April 8, 2012, 2:31 pm by Sokari
    Reality Check: Sexy Chocolate – M.I.A. While in retrospect, the films of the Blaxploitation era provided us with many cringe-worthy moments, they did contribute two things that can be viewed as positive. Black actors got work. And it was abundantly clear not only that Black was beautiful, but it was damn sexy to boot!Many a [...]

Gadgetopia

  • Why List Articles Are So Popular

    Posted: April 7, 2012, 1:52 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    The List of N Things: Paul Graham nails the psychology of the list article and why it plays so well on the web – it guides us through the topic, and doesn’t force us to think too hard.

    Structurally, the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay. An essay can go anywhere the writer wants. In a list of n things the writer agrees to constrain himself to a collection of points of roughly equal importance, and he tells the reader explicitly what they are.

    Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure […] As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them.

    I’ve talked about this before: The Psychology of the Bullet Point.

    Bullet points signify a complete, contained, discrete thought.  They encapsulate some nugget of information, separate from everything else.  A bullet point tells us, “this piece of information is absorbable solely from the text in it,” and the text is usually short.

  • Is there a point to pagination anymore?

    Posted: April 7, 2012, 1:41 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    The End of Pagination: Jeff Atwood makes the case that pagination may just be an outdated concept.

    I can understand paginating when you have 10, 50, 100, maybe even a few hundred items. But once you have thousands of items to paginate, who the heck is visiting page 964 of 3810? What's the point of paginating so much information when there's a hard practical limit on how many items a human being can view and process in any reasonable amount of time?

    I’ve talked about this before: The Pointlessness of Category Archives.

Colorlabs Project

  • Recent Additions to ColorLabs Showcase Page: March 2012

    Posted: April 7, 2012, 1:23 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    We found another batch of user-customized version of our themes out there in the world wide web. We’ve added them to our Showcase Page where we feature the best ones. If you have created a site using one of our themes, please provide us link to that site and if they are as awesome as the...

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on Shackled by Troubled girl

    Posted: April 5, 2012, 9:24 am by Troubled girl

    Wow! Just wow! I needed to let myself free first and forgive a lot of close people including myself and my family. I am going to be the best spouse in spite of my other half who keeps putting me down and calling me names, and making crazy accusations because of the past wrong choices I made. Thanks a lot guys, it’s time to build my self-esteem.

Colorlabs Project

  • Up to 35% Off Discount. Grab the Coupon Code Now!

    Posted: April 4, 2012, 6:30 am by Anita Pravitasari
    Have you checked the Deals page? If you haven’t then good news, because we have another great offer you can’t miss! For a limited time we are offering up to 35% OFF on all ColorLabs WordPress themes. This is a great discount for people who are looking to get into their hands on a...

  • Announcement: Technical Support will be closed for Easter Holidays

    Posted: April 4, 2012, 5:36 am by Anita Pravitasari
    To all valued customers, ColorLabs & Company Technical Support department will be closed Friday, April 6, through Sunday, April 8, for the Easter public holidays so that our team may enjoy time with family and friends. The support system will resume normal operations on Monday, April 9. Please...

  • Sneak Peek: Le Journal Magazine WordPress Theme

    Posted: April 4, 2012, 2:51 am by Anita Pravitasari
    We have another great theme in the works, and I am excited to give everyone a sneak preview of our upcoming magazine theme. Though magazine themes might be considered a bit overdone, they are our most popular and the demand is still very high. So we want to make sure that ColorLabs has the best...

Open Society Institute

  • Vote 2012: Think You Have the Right to Vote? Not So Much!

    Posted: April 3, 2012, 9:57 pm by Muzna Ansari

    Last week, Craigslist and craigconnects founder Craig Newmark released "Think you have the right to vote? Not so much!," a witty and comprehensive infographic on voter suppression across the United States. With hard numbers and clear graphics, it lays out how the elimination of Election Day registration, restrictions on independent voter registration activities, reduction of the days allowed for early voting, photo ID requirements, and proof of citizenship requirements negatively impact voters.

    The infographic relies heavily on the Brennan Center's Voting Law Changes in 2012 report detailing how new suppressive laws could affect up to 5 million voters in the 2012 elections. The Brennan Center is a grantee of the Open Society Foundations.

    Take a look, and spread the word.

Really Interesting Group

  • HistoryTag

    Posted: April 3, 2012, 6:02 pm by Phil Gyford

    We’ve just launched a new thing, HistoryTag. It’s not a finished thing, but it might be the start of a thing.

    As Russell put it on the HistoryTag blog:

    “HistoryTag’s a simple way for people who make things, and people who love them, to keep and share the histories of those things.”

    HistoryTag screenshot

    We’ve launched with our friends at Hiut Denim, who have just started making jeans in Cardigan in Wales. Every pair of their jeans comes with a secret HistoryTag code which lets their new owner see photos of their jeans being made, and then continue to tell the story with photos and tweets. Here are Russell’s jeans and here are Ben’s, Tom’s and Phil’s.

    To be honest, there’s not much else to see on the site at the moment, and we’re not sure where it will go from here. But we think there’s something in the ability to easily give physical objects a digital life. Spimes and all that, you know.

    For now, we need to see how HistoryTag feels and work out what would be fun and interesting to do with it. What kind of products deserve to have their life stories recorded? If you make those kind of products, or have any thoughts, do get in touch.

brandkemistry

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on Shackled by Gerh

    Posted: April 2, 2012, 1:33 pm by Gerh

    `m Gerh and i am offended that`s what i told my neighbour at the start of the service.i must admit that i have been hurt severally by real close people./As they say kikulacho ki nguoni mwako,that`s wisdom.Writing the initials of the beings who have hurt me made me realise that i still have the opportunity to forget because forgiving aint that of an issue.I look forward to next sunday as i work on myself.GREAT MESSAGE PASTOR S…..AAAWWWWWHHHHHHO!!!

Black Looks

  • The Week on Sunday (weekly)

    Posted: April 1, 2012, 2:31 pm by Sokari
    Homosexuality is African | Thought Leader We have an enormous body of historical and scientific evidence for the existence of homosexuality in every culture on every continent and stretching back in time as far as the human record goes. Homosexuality may not be normal, but it is natural. The South African government should be lauded [...]

  • Saving Africa, Building Egos

    Posted: March 31, 2012, 3:37 pm by Sokari
    Originally published on Pambazuka News 21-03-2012   I haven’t watched the Kony 2012 video but I note it has just under 84 million hits in two weeks which is to be expected considering the noise around the Invisible Children project.    I have nothing to add to the plethora of existing criticisms of the video [...]

Colorlabs Project

  • Galerie – Professional Portfolio WordPress Theme for Photography

    Posted: March 30, 2012, 2:10 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    View live demo of Galerie theme and purchase it here Hi, everyone. I just want to introduce ColorLabs’ third WordPress theme release of March, a photography WordPress theme named Galerie. Although ColorLabs already have several themes for business, but we didn’t have one that simply act...

  • The Key Metrics to Measure Your Website’s Success

    Posted: March 29, 2012, 4:49 pm by Anita Pravitasari
    When you have an online-based business web analytics should be your best friend. When you’re running a website, you would like to know how well your site is performing. The metrics will show you detailed reports so you can identify which works and which doesn’t, which is important if you want to...

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

Colorlabs Project

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • The enemies of innovation are usually found inside the company

    Posted: March 26, 2012, 10:45 am by Sunny Bindra

    1. The Victims (“Can you believe what they want us to do now? And of course we have no time to do it. I don’t get paid enough for this. The boss is clueless.”
    2. The Non-Believers (“Why should we work so hard on this? Even if we come up with a good idea, the boss will probably kill it. If she doesn’t, the market will. I’ve seen this a hundred times before.”)
    3. The Know-It-Alls (“You people obviously don’t understand the business we are in. The regulations will not allow an idea like this, and our stakeholders won’t embrace it. Don’t even get me started on our IT infrastructure’s inability to support it. And then there is the problem of ….”)

    G. Michael Maddock AND Raphael Louis Vitón, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK (NOVEMBER 8, 2011)

    The excellent article excerpted above caught my eye recently.

    To succeed in today’s world, it’s pretty much a given that you have to be aggressively creative and innovative. “More of the same” just won’t work anymore. There is too much disruptive change looming on every horizon. It’s time to experiment and try stuff out.

    But guess what? Messrs Maddock and Vitón tell us that the greatest enemies of innovation may well be found right inside your organization. They identify three types of people who “block innovation from happening and will suck the energy out of any organization.”

    This rings true. Most organizations are filled with ‘victims’ who whine and moan incessantly; with ‘non-believers’ who don’t believe anything can ever change or improve; and with ‘know-it-alls’ who will find a hundred reasons something CAN’T be done.

    The frightening thing is that these employees aren’t just employed in peripheral roles; they often sit close to the top of the pyramid, blocking and stifling every attempt to do something new.

    Consider this: if Safaricom had had too many of these types of naysayers in influential places, would it ever have launched the epochal M-Pesa product? An initiative like that took genuine guts. It was not for the faint-hearted. If the doubters prevailed, it would never have even got off the design table. But it did, and Kenya, Africa and the world is better off as a result.

    If Equity Bank was populated with cynics and pessimists, would it ever have attempted its game-changing mass banking model? At a time when every bank in Kenya was doing the precise opposite – closing branches and setting minimum-balance requirements? Of course it would not have. A more jittery management team would have played safe and played me-too. It would never have found the spine to make a billion-shilling investment in IT infrastructure to attempt so unprecedented a feat. But it did, and now the world applauds.
    These examples reveal something about management. If you’re a leader who wants to change things, shake up a market, attempt something never seen before – you’d better have the right people around you. Big hearts and open minds are needed to do the unthinkable.

    Most managers, sadly, are rendered timid by too much education, too much experience, and too much interaction with the mandarins of their own industry. These people will shoot down every attempt to bring in the new and ring out the old. They can’t help themselves. Their every interest is to maintain the status quo, not to challenge it. And they will very likely infect everyone around them with the same fear and loathing of new things.

    The authors put it nicely: “(The right employees) must fail fearlessly and quickly and then learn and share their lessons with the team. When they behave this way, they empower others around them to follow suit—and presto, a culture of discovery is born and nurtured.”

    ———-

    For the first time since its inception, this column now takes a short break. Back soon…

    Related posts:

    1. Use rivalry to spur innovation in your company
    2. Learn from a comedian: innovation is about trying things out
    3. Consumers, not corporates, are now driving tech innovation

Colorlabs Project

Black Looks

  • The Week on Sunday (weekly)

    Posted: March 25, 2012, 2:30 pm by Sokari
    Pambazuka - Between 1904 and 1908 imperial Germany waged an atrocious and inhumane war of extermination against the Herero, Nama, Damara and San peoples in its former colony ‘German South West Africa’, now the Republic of Namibia. According to the criteria of the UN genocide convention of 1948, the atrocities and massacres committed by German [...]

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • To rate the leader, study the followers

    Posted: March 25, 2012, 9:42 am by Sunny Bindra

    To rate the leader, study the followers.

    Here’s the first reason why. Good leaders seek out, and attract, good followers. Bad leaders seek out, and attract, bad followers. So if you want to know whether the leader you are about to follow is any good, look around you. Who are your fellow followers?

    Are they decent folk who want to see change and general uplift in the world? Or are they self-centred goons who want nothing but their own gain? If the leader is a me-me-me maniac, he will generally attract people exactly like himself. If the leader is on a genuine mission for good, the good people of the world will emerge to lend her their support.

    Study the leader’s core team, inner circle or kitchen cabinet especially carefully. The people who are the leader’s essential aides, advisors and confidants can tell you everything you need to know. If that core team consists of truculent tribalists and famed fraudsters, you know exactly what kind of leader you are dealing with. The quality of the people that a leader holds closest to the bosom will reveal all.

    This applies to organizational leaders as much as it does to political ones. The core team is something hugely important to every leader. A leader must have people around him who can deliver on his mission. To know what that mission really is, study the key appointments. If the top team is mostly from one tribe; or consists of feeble-minded flunkeys or sweet-talking sycophants; well, then, all is revealed.

    To rate the leader, study the followers.

    Here’s the second reason why. Leadership isn’t really about what happens to the leader; it’s about what happens to the followers. Good leadership’s primary aim is to deliver a collective result, not an individual one. That’s why studying the wellbeing of followers during a leader’s reign is so revealing.

    Who really benefitted from the leadership: the leader or the followers? If you see a leader who is dramatically richer; emphatically more self-absorbed and generally high on his own supply – something has gone very wrong.

    Political leadership is not measured in the size of the leader’s mansion; it is evaluated on the number of followers who have a roof over their heads. It is not measured in the size of the leader’s foreign bank account; it is rated on the number of followers who have escaped from poverty as a result of the leadership.

    This applies equally to corporate leadership. If only the CEO’s ego, office and quota of aides and assistants has grown during his tenure, then this is not a leader of substance. Leadership is best measured in the unseen wealth that it creates: in goodwill, wellbeing and sense of belonging. A great leader works on culture and behaviour, because she knows that her job is to do things through others. When the average employee feels like an integral part of the mission of the collective, and comes to work ready to go the extra mile – then real leadership has occurred.

    So, if you have to select a politico to vote for, or a CEO to work for, take your eyes away from the leader and study the followers instead. Leaders mostly know how to talk the great talk these days. They are often masters of persuasion and charm. To understand what’s beneath the surface, ignore what the leader says and study what the followers are: their nature and quality; and their general wellbeing.

    The followers are the leader’s most important result, and therefore the most important measure of character and success.

    ———-

    For the first time in nine years, this column goes on a short break. Back on this page soon.

    Related posts:

    1. Leaders must walk their talk – or lose their followers
    2. A real leader exists for the good of his people. Period
    3. What the VIP lift says about leadership

Black Looks

  • Statement on President Johnson Sirleaf by LGBTI Liberians & Allies

    Posted: March 24, 2012, 12:34 pm by Sokari
    March 22, 2012-PRESS STATEMENT / Immediate release from THE COALITION OF LGBTI* LIBERIANS AND ALLIES (CLA)  and THE INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, recently expressed in an interview opposition for LGBT rights—especially decriminalization—and was vague about support for increased criminal penalties for [...]

Open Society Institute

  • Vote 2012: Do Super PACs Hurt Democracy?

    Posted: March 23, 2012, 6:22 pm by Muzna Ansari

    An interesting new breed of Super PACs have been born, like the Campaign for Primary Accountability Super PAC, which aims to solve the problem of incumbency instead of supporting individual candidates –but are supporters correct when they argue that such Super PACs are different, that they help, rather than hurt, democracy? The answer is no. Whether they are aiding a specific candidate or trying to change a systemic problem, we must remember that Super PACs are children born only to the elite members of our society. A recent New York Times Sunday Dialogue focused on whether or not Super PACs increase the competitiveness of elections—failing to grasp the basic premise that Super PACs, by definition, undermine competition.

    Following the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United vs. FEC, Super PACs, or “independent-expenditure only committees," can raise unlimited funds from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups. While at first glance it seems that Super PACs foster a greater level of competitiveness by allowing candidates other than the Bloombergs of our world to run for an election, a closer look illustrates that the competition is predetermined. For example, the Campaign for Primary Accountability decided to financially support Brad Wenstrup (a doctor and Iraq war veteran who has never held political office) against incumbent Representative Jean Schmidt in Ohio. What if I, as a citizen of Ohio, wanted to vote for someone with significant political experience? What would I, as a middle class citizen do? I wouldn’t have the luxury of starting a Super PAC in favor of my preferred candidate. Where does my voice factor in the Campaign for Primary Accountability’s decision-making?

    A truly competitive election would not be predefined by the choices of a few, wealthy citizens—it would allow all interested individuals an equal chance of winning and all supporters an equal chance of having their voices heard.  Imagine if two people sought to speak out in favor of a candidate in the town square – the first with a giant megaphone and the other with only his God-given voice. The first can speak so loud that he drowns out all other voices (until someone who can afford a more powerful megaphone comes along). That does not equal more speech, it is just louder speech for some select individuals (while everyone standing in the park covers their ears and runs away.)

    Super PACs limit the American public’s options to candidates chosen for us by the wealthy. How exactly would this lead to greater, healthier competition in our elections? If the Republican primaries have shown us anything, it has been the power of a few wealthy individuals using Super PACs to keep candidates they prefer in the running.

    The Campaign for Primary Accountability explained that they are “interested in shifting power between Congress and the people,” but personally, I would like to know who is interested in shifting the political power dynamic between the wealthy and everyone else?

  • Vote 2012: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly of Voter Restrictions

    Posted: March 22, 2012, 9:36 pm by Muzna Ansari

    The past week has seen some real pushback against the wave of new voting laws that has recently swept across the country. To recap, since the beginning of 2011, 21 new voting laws have passed in 16 states. Some states require voters to show government-issued photo identification, often of a type that as many as 1 in 10 voters do not have. Other states have cut back on early voting, a hugely popular innovation used by millions of Americans. Two states reversed earlier reforms and once again disenfranchised millions who have past criminal convictions but who are now taxpaying members of the community. Still others made it more difficult for citizens to register to vote, a prerequisite for voting.

    The Brennan Center has estimated that it could be significantly more difficult for 5 million Americans to cast ballots in 2012.

    Not all of these restrictions will survive legal scrutiny. This week in Florida, a federal judge is considering whether to block a law that places multiple restrictions on community-based voter registration drives. Already, the Department of Justice, in a separate lawsuit, opposed Florida’s law. And on Monday, the DOJ rejected a voter ID law in Texas (after blocking South Carolina’s law in December), and a judge ruled that Wisconsin’s voter ID law violated the state constitution.

    Many of the legal challenges focus on who is disproportionately harmed by these new restrictions: specifically, the young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. After tremendous progress for equality and civil rights over the last century, it feels like the clock is being turned back. President Bill Clinton is among a number of commentators who have likened the phenomenon to the “Jim Crow” laws of the old South. Ostensibly intended to prevent voter fraud — something the Brennan Center and others have repeatedly shown is not a real problem — the legislation we’re seeing today will make it harder for certain groups of citizens, including elderly, minority and low-income Americans, to participate in the political process.

    Instead of making voting more difficult, we should be working to improve actual flaws in our electoral system, like our outdated voter registration system. That system wastes millions of dollars and keeps a large percentage of Americans out of the political process. Error-ridden voter rolls are a leading cause of disenfranchisement in every election. If we modernized this system, by, for example, automating the registration process at places like departments of motor vehicles and social service agencies, we could ensure that voter records are accurate and up to date. This could expand the franchise to more than 65 million Americans who are not currently registered, while reducing any risk of fraud.

    We should look to take the politics out of election administration, so that it is once again about making voting work, rather than keeping people from the polls.

Gadgetopia

  • Keanu Reeves on the Drawbacks of Digital Film

    Posted: March 21, 2012, 2:23 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Steven Spielberg & Martin Scorsese: the joy of celluloid: The Guardian asked several film people what they thought of the switch from celluloid (“real”) film to digital film meant.

    Keanu Reeves responded with a couple really thoughtful observations about how the physical limitations of film affected how he acted in front of the camera.  By extension, some of this is lost by digital.

    The biggest difference I have found when working photochemically versus digitally on motion pictures is the length of time the takes can last. Broadly, a 1,000ft roll of 35mm film lasts around nine-and-a-half minutes before running out, while a digital tape or recording card or hard drive can last from 40 minutes to over an hour and a half. This translates to a very different rhythm on the floor; the pressure to "cut" to save film is alleviated.

    And the temporal nature of digital – the fact that it can be wiped out and reshot with nothing lost – changes the vibe he gets.

    When the director says: "Action", and the film is rolling, it feels like something is at stake. It feels important and intense. In a way, death is present in the rolling of that film – we live, right now – and the director says: "Cut". And that moment in time is captured on film, really.

  • The Next Evolution in Open CourseWare

    Posted: March 21, 2012, 11:42 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak: The Internet is threatening to destroy higher education.

    First you had Open CourseWare, which was great, but incomplete.  The problem is that there was no test for mastery.  You could say you took a course, but there was proof of this, nor was there anything that certified that you learned something, so it was really nothing more than a “hobby option.”

    Now, however, more cracks are appearing in the form of certifications from online courses given by some of the top universities in the country.  How long before these begin to substitute for credit?

    The news was that the Stanford professors were letting students in their global classroom sit for the midterm, at proctored sites around the world. Those who did well on the A.I. test and a later final exam got a letter saying so, signed by the professors, a pair of well-known roboticists from Silicon Valley.

    A few days later, MIT made a major announcement: The world-famous research university would be creating a new non-profit organization called MITx. It, too, would be offering free online courses, designed from the ground up to serve tens or even hundreds of thousands of students worldwide. And it, too, would administer exams to students who, if they passed, would receive a certificate saying so from MITx.

  • Comedians on the Web

    Posted: March 21, 2012, 5:28 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    A few months ago, Louis C.K. released a straight-to-the-Net, non-DRM performance video, and sold it for $5.  It went nuts.  Now, Aziz Ansari has done the same thing.

    The Times smells a trend:

    While this straight-to-the-Internet strategy is far from ubiquitous in stand-up, it is already having a profound impact on the comedy landscape, enabling online content providers and individual artists to take more turf from television networks and empowering comedians to be as candid (and as explicit) as they want in their material.

  • What Killed Brittanica

    Posted: March 21, 2012, 4:03 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica. Windows Did: An interesting look at what doomed Brittanica.  The authors argue that it wasn’t Wikipedia, but Encarta that did it in.

    In 1990, the company had $650 million in revenue. In 1996, it was being sold off in toto for $135 million. What happened in between was Encarta.

    […] Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia, not-at-all comprehensive encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Britannica.

    When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Britannica was already a weakened giant. It wasn’t a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself.

    I also read a couple of eulogies for Brittanica this morning that are worth looking at.  Both argue that it wasn’t the actual knowledge in Brittanica that provided the value, rather it was the organization of that knowledge – the ambitious drive to amass all off human knowledge into a single volume.

  • Google and the Dancefloor of The Semantic Web

    Posted: March 21, 2012, 3:41 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Google Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever: You know that great, unrealized dream of The Semantic Web?  The thing that everyone acknowledges would likely be great, but that no one actually does anything about?  Yeah, well Google might finally be taking a step in that direction.

    [Google Fellow Amit Singhal] outlined a developing vision for search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.

    […] Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes.

    […] Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal.

    This is fairly huge, because it promises a “URI of record” for real-world objects or concepts.  What you find when starting work with RDF – Resource Description Framework, the de facto language of The Semantic Web – is that it works best when everyone agrees that Thing X is represented by URI X.  That way, you and me and everyone else can use URI X in our RDF, and be talking about the same thing.

    And therein lies the rub – getting the entire web to agree on what URI X was for Thing X was nigh impossible. But now, if Google endorses URI X (and Y, and Z, etc.), that would be akin to kicking a snowball off the hill.

    The biggest problem with The Semantic Web, really, has been a variation of The Empty Dance Floor Problem.  A party isn’t a party until everyone starts dancing, but if no one is willing to take a risk and be the first one on the dance floor, then it stays empty. Google may have just taken that first step out there.

    If you want to learn more about RDF, I highly recommend Programming the Semantic Web by O’Reilly. This is a great book that shows you what’s really possible.  (Also, it was my first introduction to Python, which was a bonus.)

    And if you’re looking for a little history, read the original article about The Semantic Web by Tim-Berner’s Lee from 2001 over at Scientific American.

Black Looks

  • Hopewell Gumbo of the Zimbabwean 6 on their arrest

    Posted: March 21, 2012, 12:44 pm by Sokari
    Hopewell Gumbo talks about his arrest and that of five other activists all who were found guilty by the Zimbabwean government for ‘inciting public disorder’. Originally 44 activists were arrested and charged with treason. Their ‘crime’ watching and discussing a film on the Egyptian uprisings last February 2011. From this we know Zimbabweans are not [...]

Colorlabs Project

Gadgetopia

  • Are Comments on News Articles Pointless?

    Posted: March 19, 2012, 12:50 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    I’ve always maintained the commenting on major websites – especially news sites – is just a complete disaster these days.  Comment threads on sites like CNN and USAToday (especially USAToday, for some reason…) make me not want to live on this planet anymore.

    Nick Denton, of Gawker fame, agrees.  Apparently, he doesn’t even go near the comment threads on his own sites anymore.  He was quoted at SXSW:

    "The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership -- that's a joke."

    […] "I don't like going into the comments. ... For every two comments that are interesting -- even if they're critical, you want to engage with them -- there will be eight that are off-topic or just toxic," he said.

    Over at the Neiman Journalism Lab, they’ve been following the death and resurrection of comments at the New Haven Independent.  In an editorial explaining the removal of comments, the Independent wrote:

    The tone of commenting on the Independent—the remarks readers post at the bottom of stories—seems to have skidded to the nasty edges and run off the rails. We’re responsible for reading, vetting, and posting all comments on the site. We’ve failed in our responsibility to keep the discussion on track.

    We started noticing it during last fall’s mayoral campaign. Both sides became apoplectic every time their opponents were simply quoted in a news story. They resorted to personal attacks and relentless fury. Or they spent the day trying to pick fights with each other through the comments section. The tenor bled onto unrelated stories.

    I’ve noticed that worse than the general inanity of the comments on news sites, they get so, so nasty, so quickly.  And there are regulars that pick on each other.  Based on some of the comments I’ve seen get through, I wonder what’s being filtered.

    And what is to gain?  Never once have I seen a comment on a CNN or USAToday story that has one one single thing to further debate in any constructive way.  They could shut down their comments and lose not one iota of value.  Contrast this to the New York Times, which seems to do much better, for some reason.  Comments there seem to be vastly more cerebral and seek to further the debate in some reasonable direction.

    (It reminds me of this site, which compares random comment threads on MetaFilter to random comment threads on YouTube.  The difference is striking.  Reddit, in particular, does amazingly well with comments. Read the bestof Reddit for some really phenomenal threads.)

    My sadness about this reached it zenith (nadir?) last week when I read this analysis from an Australian news site which tracked down several trolls and asked them what made them troll people.  The answers were just…

    "It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry. It sounds weird but I kind of feed off their anger. The angrier I can get them, the better I feel,"

    […] "I'd feel responsible but I wouldn't care. I've pretty much lost all hope for humanity anyway, I don't believe that anything can save people,"

    […] "I randomly targeted a lady for no reason, humiliated her for no reason - just to be a bitch. Looking back now it was petty. I'm one of those remorseful trolls, I suppose."

  • Solving Your Own Problems By Writing Good Questions

    Posted: March 19, 2012, 5:47 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    I really like Jeff Atwood’s post about the Rubber Duck method of problem solving.  Apparently, the name comes from a manager who would have people ask their questions out loud to a rubber duck.  Usually, in the middle of asking the question, they would stumble on the answer.

    I’m a big fan of asking good questions.  Several times, I’ve linked to Eric Raymond’s treatise on asking good questions, and just a few months ago, I was enraptured by this method of breaking down analysis into different question categories.

    Like Atwood mentions, I will often find the answer to my problem in the middle of asking the question.  I have an account on Stack Overflow, and whenever I post, I ask myself, “If I was interviewing for a job, and the interviewer looked up this account, would this question make me look stupid?”  I hope there’s nothing in there that would.

    I have an account on the EPiServer forums as well, and my motivations for asking good questions there are much the same, except exacerbated by nationalist pride.  When I joined back in 2008, I was one of the few non-Scandinavians on the forums.  Thus, I was paranoid about not wanting to be “the stupid American,” so I went out of my way to support my questions with testing and debugging output.  And, as I mentioned earlier, for every 2-3 questions I asked, one question never got submitted because in the process of writing and documenting it, I figured it out.

    I’m to the point where, if I have a sticky problem, I’ll start taking notes on it offline in Evernote, just to start documenting it and my thought process around it.  When I’m at the end of my rope on one, I’ll ask myself, “If I submitted this problem to a public forum, would I look stupid?”  If the answer is “no,” then I’m ready to ask.

  • Fixing Apple Gadgets is Hard

    Posted: March 19, 2012, 5:25 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Three Ways We Hoped the iPad Would Be Better (But Wasn’t): Here’s an interesting perspective on Apple products – since you can’t open them, you effectively can’t repair them, which means when they break, you more-or-less throw them out.

    We’ve given the new iPad one of the lowest repairability scores we’ve ever given a major product: 2 out of 10. […] We’ve also retroactively downgraded our original iPad 2 score from 4 out of 10 to 2. These devices are very difficult to get into, and they’re selling like hotcakes—slick hotcakes encased in breakable glass.

    […] If Apple is going to be at the head of the pack, we must ask them to lead responsibly. And in electronics, leading responsibly means that your devices must be sustainably made and designed to last. Designed for use. Designed for repair. Designed for a more sustainable future.

    The guys at iFixIt might be a little biased, since their site appears to be all about fixing Apple products.  If you can’t fix them, you have little need for their site.

    The corresponding Reddit thread has some good commentary on both sides of the argument.

  • Generating Automatic Bookmarks in Text

    Posted: March 19, 2012, 3:37 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    Recently, I sent someone a link to a long Gadgetopia post, and I wanted them to read one particular paragraph.  So, I had to tell them, scroll down about halfway to the paragraph that starts…  It was annoying.  What I needed was automatic, stable bookmarks applied to every paragraph in that long block of text.

    The New York Times did something like this with a system they called Emphasis.  They released version 2 of it some time ago, and it works really well once you know how to use it.  For instance, here’s a link that highlights a specific sentence in the first paragraph of an article (but, weirdly, it doesn’t scroll you down below the fold).

    The biggest trick here – and the thing that will derail most attempts to do this – is being able to identify paragraphs consistently, even when editors start rearranging things.  Text elements are not stable like managed content or database records.  In fact, paragraphs of text within a larger page are fairly volatile– people edit, and they can move stuff around – so getting a stable key can be tricky.

    The Times did something fairly impressive here.  They generated their key using the first letters of the first three words of the first and last sentences of the paragraph.  So, each paragraph would end up with a six-letter key.  For this paragraph, it would be: “TTdFtp”

    When someone comes in with that key as a bookmark, they try to match it exactly.  If they can’t (because the article changed), then they try to match half of it, hoping that only one of the sentences was changed.  If they can’t do that either, then they use some form of the Levenshtein distance to find a paragraph with similar-enough text that it might be our missing paragraph.

    (The code for Emphasis is on Github.)

    I was reminded of this while reading a blog post series of someone trying to do something similar with EPiServer.  In this case, they’re trying to allow commenting on intra-text elements, and they’re going a route using GUIDs and changes to TinyMCE to keep those GUIDs stable during editing.

    And, just the other day, I saw the same thing with the Django Docs.  What they do is generate a bookmark with every heading, which lets people deep link into text, however there doesn’t appear to be a matching algorithm – it just uses the text of the heading, lower-cased and dash-delimited.  This will work in more cases than not, but it’s fairly brittle.

    Has anyone else seen other attempts at this?  I’d be interested in other ways to do it.

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • The spectacular resignation that shook this famous employer

    Posted: March 19, 2012, 11:10 am by Sunny Bindra

    “TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
    To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.”

    GREG SMITH, New York Times (March 14, 2012)

    There are resignation letters, and then there are resignation letters.

    Greg Smith got his published as an op-ed in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. Mr Smith, executive director and head of Goldman Sachs’ US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, quit spectacularly. He made very public accusations about the state of his former employer, which, in the social media era, soon traversed the world.

    Now this, folks, was not the sort of letter by a disgruntled employee that we are used to in this part of the world. This came across as a deeply felt, acutely observed, poignant missive. And it hit its mark.

    Goldman Sachs would probably qualify as one of the world’s most mistrusted organizations right now. It has faced accusations of unethical practice repeatedly, from its role in the global financial meltdown of 2008, to its questionable role in mergers and in selling instruments to clients that seemed designed to fail. Many observers feel the company only gets away with it because its influence extends deep into the corridors of power.

    This, however, is the first blow struck from within. Mr Smith did not mince his words. Try this for size: “I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.” Or this: “I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.”

    What could hurt Goldman most is the allegation that firm has stopped caring about its clients, and is interested only in maximizing its take in every transaction. Mr Smith alleges: “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.”

    Now that one will hurt. Customers of the venerable firm are going to take note of those words, and will undoubtedly review their options. At the very least, the “muppets” will examine every deal curated by Goldman henceforth with a beady eye. Watch this space – Mr Smith’s letter is going to have repercussions.

    I have written on this page many times that the time for being merely “shrewd” in business is over. Serious businesses are going to have to choose wisdom over trickery. You have to go beyond mere maximization of profit on every deal, and start to think deeply about long-lived, shared value that nurtures a whole ecosystem, not just a few shareholders. It is astonishing that this point is lost on what was one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

    Mr Smith says he intended his public letter to be a wake-up call to the Goldman board of directors. I suspect they’re wide awake now.

    Related posts:

    1. How one famous family oversees its business
    2. Why do so many good businesses go bad?
    3. Does your company have a distinctive personality?

Colorlabs Project

Comments for Blog.Mavuno

  • Comment on Friends With Benefits? by Brenda Siara

    Posted: March 18, 2012, 1:46 am by Brenda Siara

    I pray that God reveals to you, whom He sees you as: HIS IMAGE AND LIKENESS!!! YES! God created you in His image and I believe that there can never be anything more beautiful to behold. You are fearfuly and wonderfuly made. You are the daughter of not just a king, but the King of kings. So carry yourself like royalty, and give glory to your Father in heaven. )
    Also, you are not alone. Christ said, He will never leave you nor forsake you. He will be with you till the end of the age. If we were to attain righteousness on our own, then Christ died for no cause! And we know it is not so. Let Him become your righteousness today. Through repentance, you are being grafted back into Christ, the Vine that gives life and enables us to accomplish our purpose in life. He will give you the strength you need to rise up and catapult from your past, never to look back. See John 15. Rejoice for Jesus has taken away your shame and your guilt. Your name will change from “lost and greatly wounded”, to “found and miraculously healed”, in Jesus Name.
    Be encouraged.

  • Comment on Grumbling Undermines Great Goals by carl

    Posted: March 18, 2012, 11:02 pm by carl

    hi Pastor,

    I am a professional grumbler. I have been for some time.

    I come from a family where my parents totally ignore anything I say or suggest, including expressing my needs and feelings. This has made me a very bitter and angry person. I have also had similar experiences with employers.

    As a result, I have adopted the unhealthy art of grumbling, because I believe nobody hears me. Its the same with God. I pray and pray and my life only seems to get worse (its really bad right now, but thats a story for another day).

    So I moan and groan to anyone who’ll listen, hoping that this bad feeling will finally leave me alone, but it doesn’t.

    I believe that like Job, all will be restored. But until then can I just continue to grumble, like Job did?

    Some of us grumble simply because life has been sooooo unfair.

  • Comment on Play Your Part by Gerh

    Posted: March 18, 2012, 3:10 pm by Gerh

    Great stuff Pastor Linda.i must admit that you sermon made me come to a point of evocative realism.serving is the breeding ground of greatness and i want to be great.i have already plugged in to Mizizi special edition to enable somebody if not very many people to plug in and find their God given purpose.it’s also when you serve that you get to know that God’s workind on you to be a living testimony.AAAWHOOOO!

Black Looks

  • The Week on Sunday (weekly)

    Posted: March 18, 2012, 2:31 pm by Sokari
    http://ccrjustice.org/LGBTUganda/#timeline Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Lively was filed under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which allows for foreign victims of human rights abuses to seek civil remedies in U.S. courts. tags: uganda+homosexuality SMUG Homophobic Digital Activism | iRevolution The pace of tactical innovation and counter-innovation in Russia’s digital battlefield is stunning and rapidly converging to [...]

Sunwords.com by Sunny Bindra

  • Is it going to be game over for your product soon?

    Posted: March 17, 2012, 6:32 am by Sunny Bindra

    The Encyclopedia Britannica has ended print publication after 244 years.

    I must admit I fell silent after hearing this piece of news earlier in the week. Anyone who admires books and has encountered the venerable encyclopedia in a home or library cannot fail to feel some sadness. The weathered leather covers, the musty pages, the scholarly style – it’s gone now.

    As The Guardian put it: “Its legacy winds back through centuries and across continents, past the birth of America to the waning days of the Enlightenment. It is a record of humanity’s achievements in war and peace, art and science, exploration and discovery. It has been taken to represent the sum of all human knowledge.”

    After some moments of reflection, however, a more rational thought took prominence: what took the printed Britannica so long to go?

    The encyclopedia is not dying, remember: only its print version is. Britannica will survive as a digital-only product, accessed via a DVD version, a website, a subscription service, or an app on your tablet or mobile phone. Britannica’s future is no longer as a reference work, but as a multifaceted digital educational brand.

    If you stop for a moment to think like a customer, you will realize why this development was both necessary and inevitable. The print version of Britannica consisted of 32 hefty volumes. It cost US$ 1,400 (KShs 115,000) to buy. The information in it was static – to update it, you had to buy a whole new set.

    Contrast this with the DVD Britannica which includes two dictionaries and a thesaurus (US$ 30); or the annual online subscription of US$ 70. Here, the information is cheap and portable; easily updated; and contains embedded video and audio links. Which one were you going to buy for your family?

    Another hallowed brand also underwent dramatic change recently. In the case of Kodak, the transition was more painful: it is now technically bankrupt. I wrote about Kodak’s “slow puncture” in the Business Daily recently: “When was the last time you bought photographic film, inserted it into a camera, took snaps, removed the film, took it to a photo lab, and waited for the film to be developed and prints made on special paper? Modern mass-market photography is just not like that, is it? These days we take snaps on our smartphones, upload the photos to “cloud” sites, and print only the exceptional results, if that.”

    For both printed encyclopedias and photo film, thinking like a customer makes the need for change obvious. So which other long-standing products or businesses are about to be disrupted and will have to undergo significant transitions? Here’s a list from me:

    The textbook. The atlas. The map. The camera. The watch. The calendar. The diary. The travel agency. The compass. The bank. The petrol station. The fax machine. The scanner. The business card. The bookshop. The library. The music store. The magazine. The television. The credit card. The personal computer. The post office. The e-mail. This newspaper. And many more.

    Don’t believe me? Think like a consumer or user of the product, and look at the options increasingly available, and you will get the point. Every item on that list will have to change. Some will narrow their focus; some will get unbundled into different sub-products; some will morph into new incarnations; some will be absorbed by other products; some will simply fade away.

    When customers are offered better utility, convenience and value, it’s usually game over for the older version. Those that survive will have to reinvent themselves to provide value in different forms, to customers who still appreciate them. I will always be a customer for the printed book, no matter how much more logical the electronic version is. But the drumbeats of change are getting louder.

    Related posts:

    1. Welcome to the new-look Sunwords.com
    2. We have a long way to go in product quality
    3. Here’s a little secret about sustained product success

StudioPress

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Responsive Design

    Posted: March 16, 2012, 5:02 pm by Josh Byers

    As a lifelong Denver Broncos fan, the possibility of signing Peyton Manning to be our quarterback is mind blowing.

    Growing up I had the privilege to watch John Elway manufacture miraculous drives, miracle wins, and improbable plays — all culminating in 1998 with a Super Bowl victory and MVP.

    While 1998 was perhaps John Elway’s finest season ever, it was Peyton Manning’s worst.

    In his first season as an NFL quarterback Manning won only three games and threw more interceptions than touchdowns. Manning would prove resilient however and he adapted to the pro-style game very quickly. Eleven out of the next twelve years the Colts would win at least ten games and make the playoffs each of those times.

    What was Manning’s secret?

    Most football experts would say it is his ability to “audible” or adapt, no matter what circumstance he finds his team in. When Manning lines up behind his center and sees that his offense will work best spread wide, he’ll adapt the play. If he sees that the defense is giving him a smaller area in the middle of the field he’ll adapt the play.

    Being able to easily and automatically adapt is a key to survival and success.

    It’s true in sports, nature, business, and yes, web development.

    What Is Mobile Responsive Design?

    When a website is responsive, the layout and/or content responds or adapts based on the size of screen they are presented on.

    A responsive website automatically changes to fit the device you’re reading it on.

    Typically there have been four general screen sizes that responsive design has been aimed at: the widescreen desktop monitor, the smaller desktop (or laptop), the tablet and the mobile phone.

    As you can see in the examples below, as the screen gets smaller, the content shifts and changes to the best display for each screen.

    Why Should I Care About Mobile Responsive Design?

    In short, you (publisher, developer, and designer) should care because you want the visitors to your website to have the best experience possible, without forcing them to adapt themselves.

    There are essentially two ways you can give your audience a good experience utilizing responsive design:

    The first is optimizing the layout of the content.

    If a user is browsing from a mobile phone, they generally don’t have a lot of screen real estate to work with. Phones today will typically zoom out automatically, so that the entire website can be seen onscreen. This can be good, as it gives the reader access to the entire sight, but it can also be frustrating when trying to find information that is located in a tiny part of the upper right of the screen. If you could move some things around, make some things bigger and not have as many columns you’ll give your mobile reader a much better experience.

    The second is to adapt the content that is shown.

    If you own a restaurant and a potential customer is browsing your site from a mobile phone, chances are they aren’t that concerned with how pretty your site is — your foody blog with the awesome slideshow of delectable dishes scrolling from side to side isn’t very useful in that situation. They want to know what your hours are, where you’re located, how to make reservations, and want a look at the menu.

    Your potential customer browsing from a desktop computer probably isn’t looking to eat right now, and isn’t in a hurry to see where you’re located and what your phone number is. Most likely he’s looking to see if you offer a good atmosphere and what types food are available.

    These are obviously generalizations but you can see the benefits of having differing content presented to people in different screen viewing circumstances.

    Mobile responsive design takes care of this all “on the fly”, and without multiple versions of your site to maintain.

    How to Easily Create a Mobile Responsive Website

    All of this may be new to a lot of you, and fairly intimidating since it requires not only a change in code and design, but in your overall web strategy and philosophy.

    Thankfully, the team at StudioPress has their capes on and is here to help you out.

    We’ve written several articles that detail how you can get started on your own responsive design, starting with the philosophy behind it and then moving on to actual coding out flexible grids and media queries:

    If all that is not your cup ‘o tea, we’ve created several themes that are responsive out of the box. You can view them (and purchase them) below.

    And stay tuned, we’re now in the process of making every Genesis Theme responsive…

    Agency

    Agency Theme

    Balance

    Balance Theme

    eleven40

    eleven40 Theme

    Focus

    Focus Theme

    Generate

    Generate Theme

    Streamline

    Streamline Theme

    Mobile Responsive Design is The Future of The Web

    Mobile responsive design is all about automatically delivering your audience the content they want, within the context that they’re viewing it.

    It is revolutionary for online publishers, because (for most) responsive design eliminates the need for multiple versions of your site, or exspensive app development and maintenance.

    One website, multiple versions.

    Perfect simplicity for the publisher, great utility for the reader.

Gadgetopia

  • Pinterest Can Be Scary

    Posted: March 15, 2012, 1:30 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

    So, Pinterest is all the rage these days, but it turns out that their terms and conditions are a little scary.   This article sums it up.

    When you pin something, you’re effectively saying that you own the rights and are allowed to pin it.  By pinning it, you give Pinterest the right to sell it.  And then you assume responsibility for all of Pinterest’s legal fees, and assume all risk associated with legal troubles arising from the use of the item, or from you pinning it.

    Here’s the scenario they lay out as being problematic:

    1. You pin a picture of a cat without permission.
    2. Pinterest sells it to ABC Marketing.
    3. ABC Marketing prints it on kitty litter boxes.
    4. Cat picture owner sees kitty litter box in store and calls lawyer.
    5. Lawyer calls Pinterest.
    6. Pinterest calls you.
    7. Bad things happen.