IdeaFestival

Vertical farming

As the husband of an asparagus and cattle farm manager, and as someone who loves chestnut orcharding, this article caught my eye. Vertical farming?

That must involve some serious plumbing.

I don't know what kind of reception this idea gets from the university agricultural community, but if it's bad, maybe Dr. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University is on to something. See the second link above for more information from his web site.

I wonder if Wendell Berry would approve.

Wayne

Technorati tags: Vertical farming, land use, ecology, food, livestock, urbanization 

The music and color of words

What happens in a work of fiction when the narrator gives up control over the characters? It's a provocative question answered in People of Paper, a work by Salvador Plascencia.

As mentioned previously, I've got a thing for magical realism, having read a great deal of John Cheever in college.

Thank you, Jon Hassler! 

I haven't read this book, so see this Boldtype mini-review. Salvador Plascencia apparently goes deep with People of Paper, folding themes within themes within themes.

I'm attracted to magical realism because sentences so often seem to work beautifully outside their role as builders of (magical) meaning. In some cases, they do not transcribe ideas so much as they sing or paint them, as in the opening line to One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the best known works in the genre:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Even though this is translated from Spanish, I sometimes think I would take pleasure -- apart from the meaning of the words -- solely from reading them together, much as I derive meaning from music or a painted work of abstraction, because the music and color of the words approach one unexpectedly from outside the form.

Wayne

Technorati tags: Jon Hassler, Salvador Plascencia, magical realism

Culturegraph

Google graphs the culture in 2005. Click the tabbed information at the top.

Psychotherapy on the couch

Psychotherapy is asking itself some difficult questions, according to this New York Times article (free registration required).

While the two other general branches of psychology -- test and measurement and experimental  psychology -- have flourished and grown by applying scientific method (and in the case of experimental psychology, finding a home nearer the physical sciences like biology and neurology) psychotherapy wants to know to what interpretive framework it really belongs.

In my own decidedly inexpert opinion, psychotherapy as a discipline is much more closely allied with the humanities, not science, because as subject matter, we are not logical. We belong, rather, in narrative.

Wayne

Technorati tags: psychology, cognition, science, humanities, hermeneutics 

Design questions and one nitpick

CPH127 asks for help with questions first raised by Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek on the application of design to business/organizational problems. Good questions, all:

1) How can companies measure the effectiveness of creativity and design strategies?
2) How can a design strategy be a tool for organizational change?
3) As innovation cycles shorten, what strategies will companies adopt in order to compete?

Reading Bruce's post at BusinessWeek I found this Davos session title: "Prepping for the Post-Knowledge Economy." It certainly follows the right-brain, design-thinking, we're-all-marching-toward-an-innovation-future theme that prevails.

You know I believe. And I hope the session is an enormous success. But still: "post knowledge?!" Here's hoping that idea goes nowhere. 

Now, how DO companies measure the effectiveness of creativity and design strategies?

Wayne

Technorati tags: innovation, creativity, design thinking, Bruce Nussbaum, CPH127

Milky Way landscapes

Landscapes from terrenes on the fourth planet from the sun, Orion-Cygnus arm, Milky Way galaxy.

The image on the right is in real color, the land as it would appear to human eyes on the surface. Many more pictures in true color are available here.

Wayne

Diet and leadership

Via BusinessPundit, this link to Talking Story's list of best leadership and management posts from 2005. I particularly liked the passionate vision statement and paying the leadership price. In this time of diet resolutions and personal vows -- better husband, father, a giver of time -- they're useful reminders that there are no gimmicks. And with appropriate focus, there is much lose. This quote from There's Leadership and Then There's Leadership sums up the issue for me.

To lead is to be more than an average exemplar human, you have to care because you care, not because you or someone else thinks you should. The burn is internal.

Leadership will only cost me what I didn't want anyway: more of me.

Wayne

Technorati tags: leadership, servant leadership, BusinessPundit, resolutions,

New categories added

I've added "participatory narrative," "Ray Betts" and "Kris Kimel" to the categories at the lower left side of the page (page down if necessary). Participatory narrative seems to fit a broad theme of mine - we more and more own and are free to tell our stories. Ray and Kris also have categories to collect their contributions to the ideaFestival web log. New contributors will likewise have categories for their work.

Wayne

Clear narration of the story

In these scattered times the news may declame, but story is always in process.

Such is the case for the nation's paper of record, the New York Times. Jay Rosen, a journalist critical of journalistic piety, excels at reporting about reporting at PressThink. Here, he takes the Times to task for misplacing the transparency the newspaper had pledged to apply to its stories.

In the participatory narrative it's the ongoing account of authority, who has it and why. Our stories are just that.    

Wayne

Technorati tags: Jay Rosen, PressThink, citizen journalism, media, New York Times

Haunting love and imagined things

Death staggers the imagination. Of all of life's mysteries, our minds pause longest at the prospect of death, haunted by the invisible. What is there?

Is it vanity?

A void?

Glory?

I think in some cases the prospect of death teaches us the substance of love. It's contrary. The harder the circumstance, the more piercing, determined and luminous it, love, can be.

There is a saying that I can't locate now that says love breaks the heart again and again until, finally -- finally -- it remains open. Surely without it, our imaginations are impoverished. But even knowing that, there are some things that I can hardly think on. May this story haunt your imagination.

Wayne