Tag: ideas

The Economist (and yours truly) on why you want to update your LinkedIn profile

If you think LinkedIn is a waste of time and something no one uses, think again. For starters, check out this chart:

More and more companies and people are using LinkedIn.

You might counter: I have never heard of anyone getting a job on LinkedIn. To that I say that people are losing jobs to LinkedIn, in that HR and others are using LinkedIn as a screening process. Good use of LinkedIn might not get you a job, but poor use of LinkedIn might lose you a job.

I’d add that lots of recruiters use LinkedIn, more than you think. The better your profile, the better chance you have to get linked in with someone with a new and better job for you.

Lastly, LinkedIn is becoming a longer and better version of a resume. Just like you should have an up to date version of that, you should have an up to date version of your career highlights on LinkedIn.

For more on this topic, and to see where I got the chart, go to The Economist’s excellent tumblr

Some of the best things in Paris are free


And the Guardian has a list of them.  If you are going to Paris, take a quick peek and take notes. Yes, many you may have heard of, as I had. One I hadn’t is pictured above and is relatively new:

Opened in 1993, six years before New York’s similar High Line project, La Promenade Plantee is a tree-lined walkway on an old elevated railway line in east Paris. The 4.5km trail is a wonderful way to explore the city, taking you up and down staircases, across viaducts, above the streets and offering the occasional chance to wave back at the lucky Parisians whose apartments overlook it. The walkway also runs over the Viaduc des Arts, a bridge in which the arches are now occupied by galleries.

• 12th arrondissemen, promenade-plantee.org

For more from the list, see 10 best free things to do in Paris | Travel | theguardian.com.

Bonus: here’s a piece from the Globe and Mail how to eat like a Parisian. Since you’ll be enjoying all these free things in Paris, you’ll have more money for food.

Some thoughts on mining twitter for art

There was a lot of talk when Cory Archangel published the book above.  Essentially it is a collection of tweets from others tweeting about…well, working on their novel! It’s clever, but it made me think that it is just the beginning of works of arts that could be mined from the colossal amount of tweets each day.  There’s gold in there amongst all the twitter rage and minutiae about people’s day. It deserves better.

Meanwhile, more about that book, here: A Novel Compiled From Crowd Sourced Tweets About Writing A Novel | MAKE.

Add colour to your room: no paint required

While there are lots of great rooms that consist only of neutrals, I think every room benefits from bright colours. If you can’t paint your walls — and many people who rent cannot do that — there are ways to get around that, as this article shows: Put Down the Paintbrush: 10 Ways to Add Color Without Painting — Renters Solutions | Apartment Therapy. Some require more require more work than others. Others, like in the photo above, just require some a book shelf, coloured paper and adhesive. (If you are stuck for coloured paper, go to a place that sells sheets of wrapping paper.)

The typical American room, and incidentally, the importance of home decor

This is not a typical American room:

No, not because of the actors in it. It’s not typical because it is interesting. It is packed with things to capture the eye. It is a “typical” room to an art director of a TV show.

To see and think about the typical American (and Canadian) room, I highly recommend this piece, The American Room — The Message — Medium. The author takes a number of YouTube videos to explore the typical American room and what it means. It sounds potentially boring, but I found it thought provoking.

I think home decor is important. The furniture you choose, the pictures you hang, and the color of the walls you choose are important. It stimulates the mind and gets you to think about yourself, your world, and your  life. I read once that the great artist Ferdinand Leger painted his floor red because he wanted it to stimulate him to produce better art. You need to live in rooms that make you better.  The typical room discussed in the article has none of that.

Here’s me hoping you strive to furnish your home in a way to gives you a better life.

What if life follows Moore’s Law

A fascinating idea: what if life on earth follows Moore’s Law? If it does, as discussed
here, then it could explain why there are no beings in the universe advanced much beyond ours. It could also mean that life on Earth came from somewhere else.

The article in MIT’s Technology Review is well worth a read. It also makes me think that Moore’s Law could be a fundamental way of understanding much more than integrated circuits.

Why not buy flowers…

On the weekend I was in Dufflet on Yonge in Toronto having a delicious brownie. This particular Dufflet also has a flower shop in it with gorgeous flowers for sale. While I was enjoying my brownie, a woman walked by with a gorgeous bouquet. As she exited, she exclaimed “I am buying them to cheer me up”.

It may seem extravagant to some to buy flowers. You can’t do much with them. But we pay for movies and attend musicals and watch TV shows on cable TV. If anything, flowers last longer and cost less than these diversions. Even my brownie is not something I have to eat. I enjoy it for much more than the calories it provides (and it does provide alot of those!) It’s a small extravagance.

No, flowers are no more extravagant than any of those. If you want to make yourself better, you could do worse than buy flowers. Even one small one, in a tiny vase. Go ahead!

How systemic changes improve societies


I believe that better way to improve societies is through systemic changes. Providing everyone access to clean drinking water reduces disease. Improving lighting through a city reduces crime. Providing free education and libraries increases literacy.

I said the better way because there will still be disease, crime and illiteracy, but you greatly reduce this ills if you do this simple (but not necessarily easy) things.

I thought of this when I watched Bill Clinton speaking at this TED conference (See here). He talks about the approach they took to driving down the cost of drugs for HIV/AIDS. What I like about it is that it is a systematic approach they took: improve the supply chain, change the business model, be economical in the best sense of the term. The result is more medicine for more people which results in people living longer and better lives.

It is a common wish that everyone should live longer and better lives. But in going from the wish to the fulfillment, people can get tangled up in ideology, philosophy, and all sorts of things that don’t promote the very thing they want.

Applying systematic changes will often get us 80% of the way from wish to fulfillment. 100% might be best, but 80% is much better than 0%. And that’s why I believe that better way to improve societies is through systemic changes.

I can’t recommend the TED site highly enough.