Month: May 2008

How to Unleash Your Creativity

Reading Time: < 1 minute In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creat­ive self. John Houtz is a psychologist and professor at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Educational Psychology of Creativity (Hamptom Press, 2002).…
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As We May Think: Creating Your Own Personal Memex

Reading Time: 3 minutes The memex ( “memory extender”) is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. The memex has influenced the development of subsequential hypertext and intellect augmenting computer systems. Bush’s vision for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism…
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JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT)

Reading Time: < 1 minute I’ve been personally waiting for something like this for a while…. What is JIT? The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques. The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based…
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Document Management Systems: SCAN (Smart Content Aggregation and Navigation)

Reading Time: 3 minutes Back in March, I began evaluating some open source Document Management Systems (DMS) to help compliment my wiki-based Personal Knowledge Manager (PKM). That’s a little bit of acronym-overload. But, in simple terms I really am looking for a way to easily store, categorize, and retrieve a number of my documents related to research and learning…
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Web-based Mind Map Smackdown!

Reading Time: < 1 minute Chuck Frey has just published an extensive comparison chart of the major web-based mind mapping applications – MindMeister, Mindomo, Mind42, Comapping and Mead Map – covering over 60 features and capabilities of these apps. This detailed chart covers criteria such as: * Overview (versions, pricing) * Map formats supported * Map level features * Topic-level…
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Semantic Wikis and Faceted Browsing: The Ultimate Knowledge Database

Reading Time: 2 minutes Every 6 months or so I mix things up and alternate my primary area of focus between studying philosophy and pursuing my creative technical interests (e.g. my multitude of pet/geek projects). I decided to switch gears a couple weeks ago and have been back into academic mode. My primary focus has been studying the history…
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100 Simple Ways to Change Your Life for the Better

Reading Time: < 1 minute No matter how perfect you may think you are, the fact this there’s always some small way you can improve upon yourself. Whether it’s broadening your knowledge or reducing your impact on the earth, there are seemingly endless little things you can do to make a change for the better. Here, we’ll discuss 100 of…
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