Monday Mailing
Year 20 • Issue 05 07 October 2013 1. Art of The Rural 2. 8 Mistakes Our Brains Make Every Day And How To Prevent Them 3. A Scientific Guide to Maximizing Your Impact on Twitter, Facebook, and Other Digital Media. 4. Tax Reform Becomes Next big Project for Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (2013 Special Session) 5. Deadly Lake Natron Turns Animals into Ghostly 'Statues' 6. Instructables-Shape What You Make 7. State-Level 'Monsanto Protection Act' Passes in Oregon 8. How to Conquer Public Speaking Fear 9. Welcome to Commonomics: How to Build Local Economies Strong Enough for Everyone 10. What the Rise of Technology Has to Do With the Decline of Driving 11. How Google Taught Itself Good Design 1. Art of The Rural As a digital platform, Art of the Rural elevates the rural arts field by facilitating rural-urban dialogue and cross-sector exchange. On the ground, we cultivate an organic manifestation of the digital mapping process by engaging the field in conversation, encouraging partnerships, while also activating participation in rural cultural policy and programming. Quote of the Week: “Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.” ~John Ray Oregon Fast Fact #8: The world's oldest shoes, 9,000-year-old sandals made of sagebrush and bark, were found at Fort Rock Cave in central Oregon in 1938.
For more information, click here. 2. 8 Mistakes Our Brains Make Every Day And How To Prevent Them Get ready to have your mind blown. I was seriously shocked at some of these mistakes in thinking that I subconsciously make all the time. Obviously, none of them are huge, life-threatening mistakes, but they are really surprising and avoiding them could help us to make more rational, sensible decisions. Being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thinking can make a big difference in avoiding them. Unfortunately, most of these occur subconsciously, so it will also take time and effort to avoid them—if you even want to. Regardless, I think it’s fascinating to learn more about how we think and make decisions every day, so let’s take a look at some of these thinking habits we didn’t know we had. To access the full story, click here. 3. A Scientific Guide to Maximizing Your Impact on Twitter, Facebook, and Other Digital Media. The tricky thing I’ve come across is that since the Web is still so new, a lot of the research available to us is conflicting. We really need more
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time and more studies to get definitive answers about what works best, and the fact that our audience members are constantly changing their own activity patterns makes it even harder to work out for sure. Looking at the latest social media stats seems to only confirm that. So my suggestion would be to use this guide as just that--a guide to help you work out what to test for in your own audience, so that you can see what actually works best in your specific case. To access the full story, click here. 4. Tax Reform Becomes Next big Project for Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (2013 Special Session) After getting his way -- again -- during this week’s three-day special session on public pension cuts, what does Gov. John Kitzhaber have in mind for an encore? Tax reform. Starting now. At least that’s what the governor said less than an hour after the session ended Wednesday. “We clearly have to take on the issue of comprehensive reform of our system of public finance,” Kitzhaber said, “which I intend to apply myself to rather vigorously, starting tomorrow.” True to his word, the governor held meetings Thursday in Salem to rekindle a tax discussion he started 18 months ago, said his spokesman, Tim Raphael. He wouldn’t say with who To access the full story, click here. 5. Deadly Lake Natron Turns Animals into Ghostly 'Statues' Approaching the shoreline of Lake Natron in Tanzania, photographer Nick Brandt faced an eerie sight: There, lying on the earth as still and stiff as statues, were calcified corpses of a variety of birds and bats that had met their untimely demise after crashing into the deadly waters. "No one knows for certain exactly how [these animals] die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, causing them to crash into the lake," Brandt writes in his new photo book Across the Ravaged Land. "The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry." To access the full story, click here. 6. Instructables-Shape What You Make The seeds of Instructables germinated at the MIT Media Lab as the future founders of Squid Labs built places to share their projects, connect with others, and make an impact on the world. One of these early places was a blog Zeroprestige, which was an open source hardware experiment for kitesurfing. Here they documented their hand-sewn kites, plywood boards, and other general mayhem that happens when PhDs and high winds collide. To access this website, click here.
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7. State-Level 'Monsanto Protection Act' Passes in Oregon Oregon food activists rejoiced upon the demise of a bill this July, because it would have blocked localities from making their own policies about genetically engineered seeds and other agricultural policies. But the bill, with the backing of agri-business giants like Monsanto and Sungenta, has resurfaced. The measure was passed Wednesday after being re-introduced as part of a bipartisan-backed package of bills, SB 863, which was intended to address state spending, taxes and education on it's face. But it would also give the state the sole authority to regulate seeds and was debated in a special session last week. To access the full story, click here. 8. How To Conquer Public Speaking Fear: By Morton C. Orman, M.D. Public speaking is a common source of stress for everyone. Many of us would like to avoid this problem entirely, but this is hard to do. Whether we work alone or with large numbers of people, eventually we will need to speak in public to get certain tasks accomplished. And if we want to be leaders or achieve anything meaningful in our lives, we will often need to speak to groups, large and small, to be successful. The truth about public speaking, however, is IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE STRESSFUL! If you correctly understand the hidden causes of public speaking stress, and if you keep just a few key principles in mind, speaking in public will soon become an invigorating and satisfying experience To access the full report, click here. 9.
Welcome to Commonomics: How to Build Local Economies Strong Enough for Everyone Chokwe Lumumba was an unlikely candidate for high office in Mississippi. But last June, the former Black Nationalist and one-time attorney to Tupac Shakur was elected Mayor of Jackson. He’s now in hot pursuit, not of big box stores or the next silver bullet solution to what ails the state’s capital city. He wants to create worker-owned cooperatives and small-scale green businesses and to invest in training and infrastructure. It’s the program of change he ran on in the election: local self-reliance. Jackson’s population is 80 percent black, 18 percent white, and the rest largely immigrant, with heavy concentrations of Indians, Nigerians, and Brazilians. “Without question, the ideas of economic democracy that we want to propose come from the Southern context,” says Kali Akuno, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and a coordinator of special projects for the Lumumba administration. To access the full story, click here.
10. What the Rise of Technology Has to Do With the Decline of Driving In dozens of small ways, emerging technology has been subtly nudging our behavior – at work, at home, while socializing or traveling – in ways that directly impact how people use transportation. Teleconferencing has made telework more common. E-commerce has reduced the need to drive to the mall. Real-time arrival apps have made public transit more predictable. Solar-powered stations have helped bike-share expand. WiFi and smart phones have made it possible to get work done on a Page 3 of 4
moving bus, raising the mental cost of driving alone. And social media, for some people, has reduced the need to travel across town to see a friend you might more easily connect with on Facebook. To access the full story, click here. 11. How Google Taught Itself Good Design "I had just assumed that Google was hostile to designers," says Matias Duarte one afternoon this summer. We're in a drab Google conference room at the Plex, and Duarte sports a red-and-yellow floral-print shirt, skinny khaki pants, and a pair of white sunglasses. With his short, matted hair, he looks more like a Madrid clubgoer than your typical schlubby Google engineer. That's the point. Duarte is one of the most storied designers in the mobile software industry. In the early 2000s, he led the design team at Danger, where he helped create the Sidekick, a phone that became a hit with celebrities for its amenability to texting. Later, he led the team that built the critically acclaimed user interface for Palm's mobile operating system. Throughout his career, Duarte has won 37 mobile device patent Three years ago, Google came calling. The search company was looking to improve Android's look and feel. But Duarte was skeptical; he didn't think he'd fit in. "Google had a reputation for being broken when it came to design," Duarte says. "That was just the conventional wisdom." Then Duarte had a surprising conversation with cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The surprise was that they wanted to alter how the company approached design. "They talked about the impact that design had on the user, and it became clear to me--in a way that had never been clear before-that they actually cared," Duarte says. "Google just didn't know how to make design a priority." To access the full story, click here.
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