Heavy Mental

Abysses electroniques

André Grunthert de Histoire Visuelle (qui cite Dinosaur Jr sans le savoir, grâce lui soit rendue) m’ayant fait la gentillesse de commenter le premier epidode de cette série et de me donner une liste considérable de bloggers français, j’ai pu me plonger dans les abysses monochromes de la blogosphere de mon pays et constater l’inéfficacité de l’anti-NS League.

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It’s that time again : when, running out of ideas and/or time, Heavy Mental multi-twitters.

On the (pretty geeky) menu : high scalability, graduating Vs startuping, Web 2.0 Noise, OS/360 Tar Pit and a rock solid business model there for the taking : God Bless HTTP !

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(UPDATE : La retranscription exacte de l’article de France culture journal du 17/09/2007 à 08:00)

Exercice

Une histoire entendue à la radio ce matin (journal de la matinale de France Inter, 08:00) d’un responsable d’entreprise (Thibaut Lanxade, président de Positive Entreprise) racontant sa surprise en lisant cet exercice dans un manuel scolaire de science Economique et Sociale:

“Un employé d’une usine se met en grève pour obtenir une augmentation. Ne l’ayant obtenu par la négociation, il bloque l’usine et obtient cette augmentation. Question : décrivez pourquoi cet ouvrier a eu raison d’entreprendre cette démarche et en quoi c’est un succès”.

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Great post by Roger Von Oech on Creative Think today : Embrace failure.

Errors serve a useful purpose: they tell us when to change direction. When things go smoothly, we generally don’t think about them. To a great extent, this is because we function according to the principle of negative feedback.

Scott Berkun made a very interesting essay on a pretty tangential issue : admitting mistakes. Read the rest of this entry »

Le Livre

Bon je vous l’avoue tout de suite : je suis incapable de la moindre objectivité à l’endroit de Yasmina Reza. Depuis son passage chez Denisot en 95 pour la sortie d’Art je suis éperdu : belle, intelligente, mystérieuse, elle incarne à la perfection le métissage capiteux de la sagesse feminine orientale et de l’intellectualisme européen.

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On se croit d’amour, on se croit féroce, enraciné

Avec la coupe du monde de rugby ressurgit cette vague notion de patriotisme. On enfile mécaniquement un maillot bleu pendant 2,3 semaines en braillant “on est les champions” et on sort les accolades avant de sombrer à nouveau dans tous nos travers ultra-individualistes.

(En même temps, les accolades et le champagne sur les Champs, ça semble plutôt mal barré après le match de Vendredi et surtout les incroyables 20 premieres minutes des All Blacks mais là n’est pas le sujet).

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A quick post on enjoyable ideas to browse through. It may be pretty recent content, maybe quite old but it is this week’s and highly hypertextual in any case.

On the menu : Egonomics, Situational Relevance of social networks, preparing keynotes with Steve Jobs and Portfolio Management explained. Read the rest of this entry »

Within the scope of MyFaveBloggers serie, and after Kathy Sierra and Hugh McLeod, I’ve written a blog post on Scott Berkun work for techITeasy, so that you know.

I shall do one at some point on the immense work of my secretly (okay it’s kinda public now) beloved danah boyd, for whom i’ve just fixed the link in my blogroll, making sure I spell her name in lower case.

Technorati: Scott-Berkun Tech-it-easy

I’ll do a more comprehensive review of that book when I am finished with it. I’ve just started it thanks to danah boyd advices.

The objective of this book is in the subtitle : propose some explanations as to why today’s young americans are more confident, assertive, entitled and more miserable than ever before.

I always am extremely excited whenever I bumped into a book sheding some new light on society, offering a new perspective on urban sociology. Especially when this theory is supported by tons of data and when it remains readable even if you’re not a PHD in philosophy. Jean Twenge’s book is one of those :

The boomers practically invented youth rebellion in the 1960s. By the 1970s the rebellion was mainstream and the defiance of authority an accepted social value.

Obviously, it’s fair to say that the scope of this book can be extended to young people in the western world even if the massive data gathered by Twenge only applies to USA.

Individualism : the child of the boomers

I always hear people in France whinging (we’re profesionnal whinger, sadly) about individualism in our societies, pointing the finger on hysterical consumerism. As a principle, I just dont buy blindly into simplistic and politically oriented types of explanations.

This book, for instance, comes with this other assumption whereby individualism is a direct consequence of being raised by baby boomers, the people that mainstreamed rebellion who incidentally grew their children with these values of being truth to themselves, their belief and what they want to be. Interesting.

Watch this space : I’ll get back to it later !

Technorati: Jean-Twenge Generation-Me