Church 2.0 Notes

I'm in Lexington, MA today for the Church 2.0 conference. I'll be taking notes here and liveblogging throughout the event.

Update: http://church2pointo.unifyer.com/ web site for Church 2.0

Notes from Greg Atkinson

Innovation is not a dirty word

Design: Do you matter?

Listening through technology.

Virtual relationships: can you have a real relationship online? Some that see Greg everyday don't know who he is or what he is doing. Others who have never met him face to face know all about him and what he is doing on day to day basis.

Open Sourceness

Innovation:
Apple, BMW, Ikea, Starbucks; all of these are known for design in a comprehensive way.

Many Apple users keep the box that the product came in.

Update:
youversion.com and lifechurch.tv

Churches must consider design comprehensively. Some are hiring mystery worshippers to help them.

Some decide whether to come back to a church before they ever hear the pastor from the pulpit. Some will never enter the door of your church because of what they see online.

Update:

From Greg: I shouldn't have to search around for last weeks sermon. When I click on "Meet the Staff" I should see smiling faces.

http://citylifeboston.org/ is not too bad.

Update:

Top Web 2.0 from Colin and Greg:

1. http://www.flickr.com/
   
2. itunes.com

Some companies like Apple tightly control some aspects of their company and build loose collaborative communities in other spaces (ITunes).

Comcast and Dell know listen for people talking about them online so they can respond and shape the conversation.

Greg: we are missionaries to a new world. Listening through technology is important for missionaries. People post their heart and life online.

Update:

How does ministry change when it goes online?

Sticky Church

Fusion

Fellowship One

Break for lunch.

Update:

Twitter for small groups. Twitter can fill in the gaps between the times you are together and enhance the relationships for those in small groups: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Facebook is a place where your life can collide with others who you may interact with.

Web 2.0 rewards integrity. If you have integrity in your walk with Jesus, everyone who knows you can and will see that. If you are a hypocrite, that will be revealed as well.

Email is dying. Facebook is a preferred mode of communication. Kids don't answer their email, they respond to Facebook.

Broadcasting your service increases the audience: RSS, Mogulus, qik, blip TV, vimeo, truthcasting, Godtube.

Also using Skype and Mogulus to broadcast small groups.

Facebook ads used to connect students with www.everystudent.com

Outreach ideas: posting on Craigslist or meetup.

Update:

roov.com

http://www.dreamcenter.org/

Why web 2.0 innovation is becomes more difficult the older you get....

I've been thinking lately that the hardest thing about innovation with web 2.0 tools these days is not related to age specifically. It is a function of the last finite resource in a world of ambient findability: attention.

College students are often early adopters of innovative technology because they have an excess of time and attention. The older a person gets the more their time is "value added" with job and family commitments. Time does not equal money. Time = value. To the extent that a person values their job, their family, their hobbies, their health, they will spend time on it. Once those habits of time investment are established, investing in a technology that was invented a few days or months ago seems foolish. Often it is foolish. But the power of Web 2.0 technology exceeds the printing press. This is why investing the time to explore and discover new technologies is ultimately worthwhile.

Web 2.0 is really just a new kind of city. It is millions of people who are opening themselves up for real human connection. Investing time in connecting with these people is very important, even if the means of that connection changes so often that it requires a seemingly excessive amount of time to do it.

This will mean a divestment of time in other things for those who have good and healthy habits of investment in other things. I have divested time spent watching TV. I watch very little TV anymore. It is boring, static and feels like a waste of time when compared with finding my friends and new ideas and technologies in a Web 2.0 world. I believe most people have a slice of time that could be reinvested in Web 2.0 that would improve their life far more than what they used to spend that time on.

What is Church 2.0?

The McReynolds Story: What is Church 2.0? : djchuang.com: "I'll be attending this gathering in Boston."

How to explain how we got into this mess...

A tragic loss...

The McReynolds Story: The death of a namesake

I need to "go to" this conference...

Pixelated - Your New Business Conference Starts Now Online | Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications Blog and Podcast - By Mitch Joel at Twist Image: "Pixelated is a free full-day online conference with some of the world's leading speakers on the topic of how business is changing including: Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, Avinash Kaushik, Chris Brogan and many more.

It is 100% free and it starts right now."

Global Warming Update: Baby, it's cold outside

Public Information - NOAA's National Weather Service: "THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE SO FAR THIS MONTH OF 27.1 DEGREES IS 8.2 DEGREES BELOW THE 30-YEAR AVERAGE. IT HAS BEEN THE COLDEST FIRST 5 DAYS OF THE MONTH OF OCTOBER SINCE 1992."

An Operations Saint

Local Woman Devotes Life To Doing God's Busy Work | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: "'At a very young age, I felt the call to do God's busy work,' said Salas, spiritually fulfilled from a long afternoon spent photocopying hymn lyrics for Sunday's mass and changing the bulletin board's decorative seasonal border. 'I am just a vessel through which He cleans the church Tupperware.'"

Forget Red or Blue State: Are You Wireless or Wireline?

Edgelings.com » Forget Red or Blue State: Are You Wireless or Wireline?: "More than 32 million American adults have now ditched landlines for cell phones, up from 10 million in 2004, according to a recent federal study. Problem is: the opinions of these people are not captured by current political polling. That’s right, the pollsters don’t call cell phones. As a result of this structural flaw, a giant swath of American opinion is missed and as a result we have no idea where this race for the White House stands today.

This oversight is another example of how the political process has failed to keep up with our changing culture-a culture being rapidly reshaped by technology. Just as political operatives everywhere were overwhelmed by Senator Obama’s ability to raise a quarter of a billion dollars in $100 increments via the Internet, the polling professionals failed to appreciate that a big and growing block of Americans don’t see the logic in having both mobile and landlines."

Letting Our Fingers Do the Talking - NYTimes.com

Drilling Down - Letting Our Fingers Do the Talking - NYTimes.com: "In the fourth quarter of 2007, American cellphone subscribers for the first time sent text messages more than they phoned, according to Nielsen Mobile. Since then, the average subscriber’s volume of text messages has shot upward by 64 percent, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly."

A Man's Man

My Way News - Legendary actor Paul Newman dies at age 83: "He sometimes teamed with his wife and fellow Oscar winner, Joanne Woodward, with whom he had one of Hollywood's rare long-term marriages. 'I have steak at home, why go out for hamburger?' Newman told Playboy magazine when asked if he was tempted to stray. They wed in 1958, around the same time they both appeared in 'The Long Hot Summer,' and Newman directed her in several films, including 'Rachel, Rachel' and 'The Glass Menagerie.'"

Sun Down: You better take care

NASA’s press conference on the state of the sun « Watts Up With That?: "The minimum we are in now is “unique for the space age”, but “within norms for the last 200 years”, but we are also surprised to learn how much the solar wind has diminished on a truly “entire sun” scale."

Talk about The Way Forward

Will Cellphones Save the World? | Popular Science: "If you live in the United States it can be difficult to understand the role mobile phone technology plays across the globe. Here, you may use your phone for calls and messaging, perhaps for some computing lite, but likely little more. In Senegal, however, farmers are using phones to track crop prices, in Japan, writers are SMSing whole novels, and in Sweden, they're texting to apply for instant loans. An app that lets you kill time on the subway, this is not.

Within a year and a half, half the world will use cellphones, predict analysts, and with the bulk of new users emerging from developing nations, the question of what phones can do for their owners has never before had such potentially world-changing answers.

Enter Nokia and Dean Kamen."

Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' - September 17, 2008 - The New York Sun

Reconsiderations: Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' - September 17, 2008 - The New York Sun: "But in building her case, Friedan made a fatal mistake that undermined her book's appeal at the time and permanently weakened the movement it helped create. She not only attacked a postwar culture that aggressively consigned women to the domestic sphere, but she attacked the sphere itself — along with all the women who chose to live there.

Friedan described herself as 'Diogenes with his lamp,' going from suburb to suburb in search of a mentally sound housewife. (None could be found, she concluded.) The job of housewife, in her estimation, was intrinsically unworthy and undignified, an occupation best suited to 'feeble-minded girls.' She called the suburban home a 'comfortable concentration camp' where women suffer a 'slow death of mind and spirit.' Like the inmates of the camps, she said, American suburban housewives had become 'walking corpses.'

That sort of language didn't sound any less ludicrous back then than it does now and, looking back, Friedan's lamp seems less illuminating than incendiary."

Stand up for education!

JS Online: Stand-up desks provide a firm footing for fidgety students: "This year, many of Seekel’s students are using new, adjustable-height stand-up desks produced by a Wisconsin company, as well as a big, tall table that lets students work in groups while standing and shifting their weight, leaning, stretching, wiggling and generally doing everything but sitting still.

As part of a small but growing movement in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota that many teachers say is bound to gain popularity elsewhere, several schools are experimenting with their physical learning environments by incorporating stand-up workstations in the classroom, or, in one school, stability balls instead of traditional school desk chairs.

Anecdotally, teachers have reported positive results after freeing their kids from the confines of “feet flat on the floor” and “no rocking!” — greater attentiveness, fewer behavioral problems, better posture and more enthusiasm. Kids who are habitually fidgety or who suffer from attention disorders appear to show the most improvement, teachers say."

The College Issue - The Tell-All Campus Tour - NYTimes.com

The College Issue - The Tell-All Campus Tour - NYTimes.com: "This month his Web site, called Unigo.com — a free, gigantic, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective applicants and their families — went live for the benefit of tens of thousands of trepidatious high-school students as they try to figure out where and how to go to college. Not coincidentally, it also aims to siphon away a few million dollars from the slow-adapting publishers of those elephantine college guidebooks that have been a staple of the high-school experience for decades. A lot of the classic narratives about a young man’s coming of age may seem fatally old-fashioned in the new century, but apparently, Horatio Alger still lives."

An Information Sabbath

The concept of Sabbath is a filter for your life to prioritize what is important.

Friends 2.0

I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com:

"In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. "

Coming to a conference near you...

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Audience of Twittering ***holes «:

"01:00: @markwallace Lacy didn’t do her homework on the audience. This is a geek/designer/creative audience. Not one focused on business.

01:01: They want to hear about APIs and platforms and what Facebook is going to do.

01:01: She is totally getting defensive now, really poor empathy for the audience.

01:02: The audience as getting outright hostile toward Lacy and she basically asked audience to send her a message about why she sucked.

01:04: The audience is asking Zuckerburg better questions than Lacy did. Totally agree with @heiko.

01:06: @techcrunch I know Zuckerberg is no easy interview. But yours was far far far better than Sarah’s.

01:07: @techcrunch she totally lost control of the interview and had no clue how she was coming across. Still doesn’t “I thought it was going well.

And on it went. Onstage it went worse. Audience members had taken over the interview and Lacy made things worse by trying to argue with them about how well the interview was going. The audience had decided that it wasn’t going well. Later Lacy rubbed it in, by Twittering: “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” She also went on YouTube to try to explain what happened"

I want to read this...

Amazon.com: Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become: Peter Morville: Books: "How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be 'findable' in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity. Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability.

Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet."

Paying Sprint more for the courtesy of using their cell phones at home!

Sprint AIRAVE review - Engadget Mobile: "If you're currently stuck in a Sprint contract and are beyond perturbed with the awful coverage at your house, we'd certainly recommend giving the AIRAVE a go. Granted, you could just wait it out and switch carriers in a few months, but if you're hoping to stay on that now-defunct SERO plan forever, this is a wonderful alternative to paying (lots) more on another provider.

Additionally, the AIRAVE is becoming more and more relevant with each passing day, as Sprint phases out the handsets in which 'Roaming only' is an option -- like, oh, the Samsung Instinct? We know, we know, it just feels dirty to hand Sprint money in order to make up for its lack of coverage in your area, but if you're utilizing a beautiful corporate discount or have one of the aforesaid SERO plans still in action, it may be worth your while to bite the bullet and take that whole 'improve my service' initiative into your own hands.

Now that you know what a tremendous difference the box makes, is it really worth the cost? Truthfully, that depends on just how horrible Sprint's coverage is in your area, whether or not your phone has a Force Roam option and of course, your annual salary. If you don't mind using the AIRAVE to burn through your plan minutes, you'll only be asked to pay $99.99 up front for the box itself and $4.99 per month for the service. If you're jonesing for unlimited in-home calling, you'll be coughing up another $10 per month (so $14.99 total); if you're looking for unlimited in-home calling for families, that'll be $24.99 per month. Of note, those with unlimited voice plans (i.e. Simply Everything) will only be asked to pay $4.99 per month, as the whole "unlimited" bit is obviously already taken care of.

To be frank, our only real beef with the AIRAVE is the monthly fees. Really, Sprint -- just let us lay down a Benjamin (up from the $49.99 price tag it initially launched with) and be done with it. We're using our broadband connection and our minutes (unless we opt for something else), and the additional $4.99 per month to make up for your lack of coverage is a soft (albeit noticeable) kick in the shin."

Thankfully I'm not stuck in a Sprint contract, so unless they throw this in for free I'm going to bid Sprint a frustrated goodbye very soon. I've had two years of dropped calls at my house with no hope of a new tower anytime soon. And the solution is to pay more for the service I'm already paying for. Perhaps there are some other cell phone companies that can provide coverage way out here 13 miles north of Boston.

I have had horrible service from Sprint over that past 3 weeks as my phone has died. I'll spare you the full excruciating tale but the nadir came when the seemingly all-powerful "cancellation" department promised to ship the phone I have been waiting on two weeks via overnight on Friday to keep my business. Here we are on Monday morning with no phone. She even promised to send me three emails with tracking numbers. I discovered this morning after painful conversation with the latest addled and confused Sprint representative that those email were never sent. The phone apparently was but will see...

It's a very bad sign when you have to threaten to cancel to get what you have already paid for. Sprint, your days are numbered in more ways than one.

As Captain Quint once intoned: Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies...

Process Learning Today

mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university: "Students are asked to imagine the world in the classroom. We create a map that mimics the geographical, environmental, and biological diversity of our real world. The map is laid onto a map of the classroom, and students are asked to imagine themselves living in the environment that maps onto them. The class is divided into 15-20 groups of about 12-20 students in each group. Each group is challenged to create their own cultures to survive in their own unique environments.

The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It all takes place in large room where all of the "cultures" interact with one another with props for currencies, natural resources, and other elements that recreate the world system. I will explain this in more detail in a future post, but essentially we attempt to simulate (not "act out") world history in an attempt to understand the underlying social and cultural processes that interconnect us all. The ultimate goal is to allow students to actually experience how the world system works and explore some of the most important questions now facing humanity such as those of global inequality, globalization, culture loss, environmental degradation, and in the worst case scenario, genocide.

The simulation is recorded on 5 roaming digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from "real world" history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together during the last week of class and have amazing moments together as we contemplate our world."

StormDevils

Pitchfork Nation: Pictures: Dennis Dome is Done: "The dome opened at a cost of $8.4 million in July. Tonight's storm wasted it in the span of about 45 minutes. I was parked by Four Peaks Brewing Company around 9:45 tonight and a gust of wind nearly picked up one side of my car. Power went out from about 8th Street and north at about the same time and in some places has not been restored. The following are my eyewitness pictures from the northeast corners of Arizona State University at around 1:00 AM.

The storm hurled pieces of the Dome across the north campus. We saw pieces of the canvas and of insulation as far away as Sun Angel Stadium and even a sizable chunk lodged in the trees and fence surrounding Packard Stadium."

For those interested in influence...

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » The Little Glass Dot:

"the little glass dot …

it too may not seem of any particular interest …

but consider again that dot …

That’s there.

That’s somewhere else.

That’s everybody.

On the other side of that little glass dot is everyone you love,

everyone you know,

everyone you have ever heard of,

everyone who is living out their lives that has access to the internet,

billions of potential viewers,

and your future self among them.

Some have called it both the biggest and the smallest stage,

the most public space in the world, from the privacy of our own homes.

It has been used for many things …

a political soapbox, a comedian’s stage, a religious pulpit, a teacher’s podium,

or just a way to reach out

to a next door neighbor or across the world

to people we love, people we want to love, or people we don’t even know …

to share something deep, or something trivial,

something serious, or something funny,

to strive for fame, or to simply connect …

it can be many things …

but it cannot be just one thing …

… and it cannot be only what you want it to be …

… it is not just what you make of it … it is what we make of it …

the little glass dot

the eyes of the world"

You Tube Gatherings

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Aesthetic Arrest: "Many YouTubers do create strong and tight relations on YouTube that extend beyond the screen into physical contexts, and there are a growing number of YouTube gatherings worldwide in which Tubers meet one another face-to-face (see Lange, 2007), but the experience of profound and deep connection with relatively (or even totally) anonymous strangers viewed on the screen from a distance remains an important phenomenon with important implications for how we understand ourselves and our relations with others."

Compassion for Needy; Honoring those who Give

Declarations - WSJ.com: "Another problem with the Michelle speech. In order to paint both her professional life and her husband's, and in order to communicate what she feels is his singular compassion, she had to paint an America that is darker, sadder, grimmer, than most Americans experience their country to be. And this of course is an incomplete picture, an incorrectly weighted picture. Sadness and struggle are part of life, but so are guts and verve and achievement and success and hardiness and…triumph. Democrats always get this wrong. Republicans get it wrong too, but in a different way.

Democrats in the end speak most of, and seem to hold the most sympathy for, the beset-upon single mother without medical coverage for her children, and the soldier back from the war who needs more help with post-traumatic stress disorder. They express the most sympathy for the needy, the yearning, the marginalized and unwell. For those, in short, who need more help from the government, meaning from the government's treasury, meaning the money got from taxpayers.

Who happen, also, to be a generally beset-upon group.

Democrats show little expressed sympathy for those who work to make the money the government taxes to help the beset-upon mother and the soldier and the kids. They express little sympathy for the middle-aged woman who owns a small dry cleaner and employs six people and is, actually, day to day, stressed and depressed from the burden of state, local and federal taxes, and regulations, and lawsuits, and meetings with the accountant, and complaints as to insufficient or incorrect efforts to meet guidelines regarding various employee/employer rules and regulations. At Republican conventions they express sympathy for this woman, as they do for those who are entrepreneurial, who start businesses and create jobs and build things. Republicans have, that is, sympathy for taxpayers. But they don't dwell all that much, or show much expressed sympathy for, the sick mother with the uninsured kids, and the soldier with the shot nerves.

Neither party ever gets it quite right, the balance between the taxed and the needy, the suffering of one sort and the suffering of another. You might say that in this both parties are equally cold and equally warm, only to two different classes of citizens."

'Basic Instinct' author writes book about faith

toledoblade.com -- 'Basic Instinct' author writes book about faith: "The upcoming release from the man who penned dark thrillers such as Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge tells the story of his spiritual conversion and his newfound devotion to God and family.

In Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith, to be published Sept. 2 by St. Martin's Press, Mr. Eszterhas describes how his life got turned around during the summer of 2001."

Christ on Campus Initiative

The Gospel Coalition | Christ on Campus Initiative: "The Christ on Campus Initiative (CCI) is a ministry created for the purpose of preparing and circulating literature for college and university students, addressing an array of important intellectual and practical issues from an evangelical Christian perspective. This initiative is made possible by generous support from the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, IL) and the MAC foundation (Fort Collins, CO). The editorial team, led by D.A. Carson, commissions top evangelical scholars to oversee the creation and distribution of a variety of resources for university students. The goal of these resources is that they be intellectually rigorous, culturally relevant, persuasive in argument and faithful to historic, evangelical Christianity."

Best U.S. Cities To Earn A Living

Forbes.com: "Right behind Houston are Minneapolis, home to more of the nation's top companies per capita than any other city; Boston, fueled heavily by the biotech industry; and Washington, D.C., where unless the government goes out of business, consulting firms will continue to make a killing."

Campus Crusader for Christ | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

Campus Crusader for Christ | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction: "In short, Crusade has grown into an evangelical powerhouse, the point of first contact for many college students who moved away from the churches that reared them. Crusade was overdue for the new critical, scholarly evaluation written by John G. Turner, assistant professor of history at the University of South Alabama. His book, Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America, has already rankled some of the late Bright's family and colleagues. Indeed, Turner admits in the introduction that some Crusade insiders who reviewed the manuscript 'in some cases vehemently disagreed' with his conclusions. But Turner's book succeeds precisely because he recorded the first-hand observations of so many Crusade insiders."

Mercy

Now they tell us

This year so far coolest for at least 5 years: WMO - Yahoo! News UK

The first half of 2008 was the coolest for at least five years, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Wednesday.

The whole year will almost certainly be cooler than recent years, although temperatures remain above the historical average.

Global temperatures vary annually according to natural cycles.

Ghost Cities Of 2100

Forbes.com: "In the U.S., towns in Kansas and the Dakotas face extinction mainly because of an exodus of young people. Some Kansas towns are fighting back by giving away free land, with mixed results.

But some bigger centers also face the risk of annihilation. Urban planners across Europe and North America are already grappling with what to do with 'shrinking cities.' After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, millions of residents of what had been East Germany moved west. More than a million apartments were simply abandoned.

In response, the German government sponsored the Shrinking Cities Project to study what is now a global phenomenon. The project has an exhibit on tour that examines shrinkage in Russia's Ivanovo, Leipzig in Germany, Manchester and Liverpool in Britain and Detroit in the U.S.

Whether these cities disappear entirely, of course, is an open question. Detroit's population has fallen by around a third since 1950 and now equals about 950,000. It is expected to shrink slowly but steadily until at least 2030; unemployment inside the city is more than 10%. (The suburbs around Detroit, meanwhile, are growing.) If trends hold, Detroit will be altered beyond recognition by 2100."

A Morning Prayer

I've always struggled to pray consistently. This helps.

Where is Georgia on Google Maps?

Official Google Blog: Where is Georgia on Google Maps?: "The recent conflict in Georgia has raised some questions about how Google Maps has handled mapping in that part of the world. The most obvious question is, why doesn't Google Maps show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan? The answer is we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren't satisfied with the map data we had available. We're constantly searching for the best map data we can find, and sometimes will delay launching coverage in a country if we think we can get more comprehensive data. Some of our customers have asked if we removed map data from any of these countries in response to the recent hostilities in that region and I can assure you that is not the case. Data for these countries were never on Google Maps in the first place.

But this has generated a lot of feedback that we are listening to and learning from. We're hearing from our users that they would rather see even very basic coverage of a country than see nothing at all. That certainly makes sense, and so we have started preparing data for the handful of countries that are still blank on Google Maps. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, as well as other significant regions of the world will benefit from this effort."

Empty Seats at China's Sellout Olympics

Empty Seats at China's Sellout Olympics: "Li Ligong had been trying to buy tickets for the Beijing Olympics since last August. In each round, he would camp out with friends three days before sales began hoping to buy seats for gymnastics, basketball, and swimming events, but he had no luck. 'We couldn't get any tickets,' says Li, 37, owner of a building decoration company and member of a Beijing soccer fan club.

All that changed on Aug. 11. Li got a call from the head of soccer fan club asking if he'd be interested in watching an Olympic doubleheader on Aug. 12 for free, including the game between Canada and Sweden."

A Christian in China

Want More Growth in China? Have Faith - WSJ.com: "One of the most important dissenting voices in China today belongs to Peter Zhao, a Communist Party member and adviser to the Chinese Central Committee. Mr. Zhao is among a group of Chinese intellectuals who look to the West to find the key to economic success. Mr. Zhao in particular believes that Christianity and the ethical system based upon its teachings are the reason that Western countries dominate the global economy. "The strong U.S. economy is just on the surface," he says. "The backbone is the moral foundation."

Without a unifying moral system enforced by common values, Mr. Zhao argues, there can be no real trust between people. Without faith among business partners and between management and shareholders, only the threat of the law can keep people honest. "There are problems of corruption emerging. . . . There is concern about whether China's market economy will ever become a sound market economy."

Mr. Zhao has made his case in both popular and academic publications in the past several years, publishing more than 200 articles -- for instance, "Market Economies With Churches and Market Economies Without Churches" -- explaining how Christianity leads to long-term growth. "From the ancient time till now everybody wants to make more money," Mr. Zhao told me. "But from history we see only Christians have a continuous nonstop creative spirit and the spirit for innovation."

Surprisingly, Mr. Zhao has been allowed to voice his thoughts on the country's need for more religion and religious freedom. And he has a growing audience for his message -- particularly among Christians, of course. One Chinese think tank claimed that Mr. Zhao's articles have produced more hits online than those of any other author in the country.

Mr. Zhao began formulating his ideas during a 2002 trip to the U.S. "In the U.S., the spires of churches are more numerous than China's banks and rice shops. On a street near Harvard Square," Mr. Zhao recalls, "I once stood and looked about me, only to find that in three different directions there were three churches." The trip seems to have made a personal as well as an intellectual impression. Shortly after returning home, Mr. Zhao became a Christian himself.

Mr. Zhao's argument goes beyond the need for common values. He claims that Christianity produces greater wealth than other religions or no religion. His view is partly historical -- the wealthiest societies are those that are traditionally Christian, either Catholic or Protestant. He says that Christianity provides three elements necessary for economic growth: motivation -- those who work for God rather than for pleasure, money or status don't tire of being productive; a moral framework that makes for less exploitation and less corruption; and a mandate to care for the poor and disenfranchised."

This is where I live...

Urban America: The New Solid South | Newgeography.com: "The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.

This left behind an increasingly impoverished, highly minority population with very little proclivity to support conservative or even moderate Republicans. Today in some cities — mostly old industrial centers in the East and Midwest — this population remains dominant and is likely to vote in huge numbers for Obama. Most of these cities suffer poverty rates at least 50 percent higher than the national average.

At the same time, some other cities — such as New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland — have done far better. They have done so by attracting a population of well-educated, white professionals. Pockets of this demographic, to be sure, also exist in some hard-hit industrial cities, but the new urban affluents tend to concentrate in cities with industries, such as financial services and media, that provide excitement and the prospect of high-wage employment in a glamorous setting.

Many new urbanites tend to be students or professionals enjoying city life during their first, highly experimental years of adulthood. At this point, they are most open to liberal ideas and causes; they have yet to worry much about taxes and crime, issues that drive people to the center. As they grow older, marry and raise families, many in this cohort — particularly those who do not ascend into the upper classes — leave the urban core for the suburbs or other more affordable regions."

Memo to Music Industry...

New In Rainbows Numbers Offer Lessons for Music Industry | Listening Post from Wired.com: "The hard lesson to the music business here is that it must license venues for music acquisition that fans prefer to file sharing networks or otherwise make the toleration of file sharing part of their business plans. If even Radiohead's freely available album was torrented 2.3 million times in the first three and a half weeks, how can more traditional offerings successfully clamp-down on file sharing? They can't, pure and simple."

Take That Colon Cancer

I eat these almost every morning:

The Slow Cook: Steel Cut Oats: "Steel-cut oats, on the other hand, start with the whole grain--meaning the unadulterated bran, germ and endosperm, where all the nutrition is--then are cut into small pieces with steel blades and left unrolled so they look like little nubs of brown rice.

A single serving, or 1/4 cup dry, of steel-cut oats contains 150 calories, no sodium, very little fat, and plenty of dietary fiber."

My recipe is easy and take about 3 minutes:

1/2 cup oats (bought in bulk)
1/2 cup water

Microwave one minute.
Stir.
Microwave one more minute.

Add generous shot of honey.
Add blueberries.

I think with a diet of oats, honey and blueberries, you might live to be 300.

I'm eating them right now. :-)

Go Devils

SI.com: ASU has No. 1 sports program: "Arizona State is ranked as the nation's top athletic program for 2007-08 according to Sports Illustrated.com."

That's nasty...

Forward Habit » Blog Archive » New Search Engine cuil is Not Cool At All: "I tried out the new search engine cuil today by trying a search for my name “Jason Mitchener.” While cuil did indeed show some of the web sites that are often associated with my name, it also did something that will have me never use their search engine again. cuil puts little pictures next to the search listings that supposedly are in context with the web pages listed. So what did cuil put next to the web pages associated with my name? The listing for my main site http://www.JasonMitchener.com features a photo of a flesh wound. Yes, you read that correctly … a flesh wound. The listing for my site’s shop (where I sell my book and music CD) features a photo of a plastic doll. The listing for the Soundclick site with my music features a photo of a clunky wheelchair. Yes, I’m disabled, but give me a break."

Genetic Mysteries

Op-Ed Columnist - The Luxurious Growth - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com: "It wasn’t long ago that headlines were blaring about the discovery of an aggression gene, a happiness gene or a depression gene. The implication was obvious: We’re beginning to understand the wellsprings of human behavior, and it won’t be long before we can begin to intervene to enhance or transform human life.

Few talk that way now. There seems to be a general feeling, as a Hastings Center working group put it, that “behavioral genetics will never explain as much of human behavior as was once promised.”

Studies designed to link specific genes to behavior have failed to find anything larger than very small associations. It’s now clear that one gene almost never leads to one trait. Instead, a specific trait may be the result of the interplay of hundreds of different genes interacting with an infinitude of environmental factors."

Welcome to my world...

I read this in the bulletin at Citylife yesterday and it sounded very familiar, especially lately:

We all automatically gravitate toward the
assumption that we are justified by our level
of sanctification, and when this posture is
adopted, it inevitably focuses our attention
not on Christ but on the adequacy of our
own obedience. We start each day with our
personal security not resting on the accepting
love of God and the sacrifice of Christ but on
our present feelings or recent achievements
in the Christian’s life. Since these arguments
will not quiet the human conscience, we are
inevitably moved either to discouragement
and apathy or to a self-righteousness [some
form of idolatry] which falsifies the record to
achieve a sense of peace...

Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life

The sacrament of communion reminds me that it's not about me. In fact, the whole "organized religion" thing remind me that it's not about me. I'm thankful for Citylife and membership in a community that requires a declaration of failure and need as an entrance exam.

Non-Profit Meetings

Here's a nugget from Dan Allan in our conversation today.

Anytime we're having a meeting here's what we should shoot for:

50% Vision and Shepherding
Vision = organizational vision or even better vision for the kingdom of God
Shepherding = caring for those present.

50% details = critical path steps etc. Details will fill all available time if allowed to.

In a non-profit, volunteer context this is very important because it compresses the tasks into the minimum time necessary and makes time for people and passion.

How do I work on making decisions?

6 powerful "look into" verbs (+ 1 to avoid) | 43 Folders: "You’ll notice I left off the verb you were really casting about for here, which is almost certainly “decide.” This is not an oversight.

This one I can’t help you with, because — unless you own and utilize a jokey “Executive Decision Maker” purchased from the Sky Mall catalog — deciding is most definitely not a physical action."

This post seems helpful to pull stuff out of your brain and into action so you can put it back into your brain and make a decision. The Lovin Spoonful know how hard this is.

What are conferences for in a wired world?

Many have been wondering what the purpose of conferences are if many of the elements of a conference are available without showing up.

This discussion has a nice introduction in this post by Seth Godin.

I've been thinking some of these same things since last year when I helped lead the Campus Ministry Days of Campus Crusade for Christ. Today I'm going to be working with Dan Allan on what this might mean for:

• Fall Getaway
• Weekly meetings
• Servant Teams
• Staff meetings
• National Summer Project meetings
• Christmas Conferences and Winter Conferences
• National Staff Conferences

Initially I think it means one thing: Do at conferences/events/meetings what you can only do or do best when everyone is physically gathered according to the purpose of the gathering.

For example:

• Instead of having a speaker give a talk, require attendees to listen to the talk beforehand and spend the time at the conference in Q and A.
• Crowd Activities: In 1984 I was a growing up in LA and I watched the Summer Olympics religiously since it was in my hometown. I will never forget what happened during the opening ceremonies: the capacity crowd held up individual square placards that created an enormous mural of all the flags of the world. I remember it like it was yesterday. I wish I could have been there. I'm sure everyone that was there was amazed by what they had participated in; they surely saved their placard to this day. This is the kind of once in a lifetime group activity that makes attending an event worthwhile.
  
• Allowing attendees to help create the content and conversations of the conference (see podcamp). This makes each conference a unique creation and collaboration and increased the value for each attendee.

What do you think?

I'm becoming a fan of Ubuntu...

Shuttleworth: Make Desktop Linux Better than Apple: "Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, which makes Ubuntu Linux, called for desktop Linux to improve to the point that its presentation layer is more visually exciting than Apple's."

It's free!

I don't mind Vista but others apparently do...

60 percent skipping Vista, so Ballmer looks to Apple | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET News.com: "A new survey by KACE, a systems management appliance company, suggests that 60 percent of those surveyed have no plans to deploy Microsoft Windows Vista, a 10 percent rise over a similar survey administered by KACE in November 2007. A full 42 percent of these are actively exploring Vista alternatives, with 11 percent having made the leap to alternative platforms like Mac OS X or Linux."

Write your own screenplay with Soularium

What 3 images describe your life right now?

Which 3 images represent what you WISH were a part of your life right now?

Imagine the first three images represent three scenes in the screenplay of your life, and the last three images represent 3 final scenes in the screenplay of your life. Imagine the movie between this beginning and end.

Would you pay to see the movie you just imagined? If not, it might help to begin to wish for something different.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)

I was invited to a sneak preview of Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D Wednesday night and it was fun from start to finish. I took my family and my kids loved it. My 9 year-old couldn't help but exclaim when it was over: "We gotta get that on DVD". Mind you, this isn't The Shawshank Redemption but you wouldn't want to take your kids to see that in the summer anyway. The film delivers on what it promises: kid-friendly adventure.

This is a great summer family movie with enough action and 3D effects to keep any kid interested. In fact 3D is very cool. It adds a new level of thrills to the action and even the adults were oohing and aahhing through the film.

As a parent the movie is helpful in creatively encouraging kids to read Jules Verne. Also, there is nothing inappropriate for children in this film except for a few 3D "gotcha" scare moments that might not go over too well with toddlers.

Perhaps my highest endorsement is this: My 12 year old son might actually read Jules Verne this summer. The fantasy world depicted in the film captured his imagination and he wants more.

My Rating: Big Screen

Stories from the Hatch Shell

Well, we did it. We did the whole "camp out at the Hatch Shell for the 4th of July Boston Pops Concert and fireworks" thing.

It was awesome and much easier than I expected. I showed up at 7:30 am to get in line with my kids. We sat in chairs until the line started moving approaching 9am when the Oval (the grassy area in front of the shell) opened. We got in easily, set down tarps with a great view of the stage right in the middle of the oval and settled in for a relaxing morning.

When you enter the Oval you get a wristband that allows you to come back anytime. I heard they give out 10,000 wristbands so my kids probably didn't need to come so early with me. Wristbands were still available after 1pm.

Alex came down to pick up the kids and I sat under my umbrella in a cool drizzle catching up on Google Reader on my phone. I learned about this: SimplyNoise How cool is that? And I learned about this. I can't wait.

Then came the moment: a low rumble in the column of speakers upon sub-woofers. Pealing into Also Sprach Zarathustra. My sternum began to shudder and quake. It was epic. It was the start of the program for all of us in the Oval.

I left to get my kids and got back in easily at 6:15. The crowd had swelled and was festive. Tents had come down and lights had gone up. Flags were everywhere. Sound checks, tributes and introductions and then the TV show portion began.

The National Anthem and the F-15 Flyover was a highlight.

The Boston Pops were amazing. They did several pieces by Leonard Bernstein that were pulsating with rhythm and very difficult. Hearing live music of this quality is a rare pleasure. Of course the 1812 Overture was rousing.

Rascal Flatts was/were really good. They can flat play.

The lowlight of the evening was biting into a sandwich that I has set on the ground earlier. I noticed a spicy, sour taste as I was chewing the first big bite. I looked down and saw a platoon of ants deployed on the sandwich all around my bite mark. Apparently some of this merry band were missing in action in my mouth. I took evasive action. Luckily it was during the Fireworks so eyes were drawn elsewhere. My kids now refer to this anecdote as "The Ant Sandwich".

Happy Birthday America.

Waited on the World to Change

Everything was gray: Movement detected but recognition shallow, distinctions blurry. Activity was more important than meaning because meaning was hard to see. Life was boring, more often than not because life had little color, flavor or fragrance.

Then, one day in college, the story of God (which I had heard plenty before) actually touched the facts of my world and the details of my life. I already believed in God, in particular the story of God come to earth in a person: Jesus of Nazareth. But this was almost entirely balm for my tender conscience and grace and truth to my fickle, wicked heart.

Almost overnight, the world became alive, fascinating, and profound. God was in language, logic, melody and harmony. God was in design, ethics and mathematics. God was in sex, justice and intimacy. God was not just in Christ, not just in my heart, but in all things.

I wish I could be awake always, to keep learning about everything, learning about The Word by whom all things were made. I think that would be Heaven.

The New Narrative Printing Press?

'Grand,' but No 'Godfather' - WSJ.com: "The new game took in more than $500 million in world-wide sales in its first week. The critical reaction has been widespread and adulatory and in certain corners beyond over-the-top: GTA IV is better than 'The Godfather,' better than 'The Sopranos,' better than say, a novel!"

Seriously, read this whole article if you want to get a taste of video game culture.

Another Boston Championship Trophy

"Undocumented" tracks

Piracy: Average Teen Stores 842 Stolen Tracks on Their iPod: "In a recent study by British Music Rights, 14- to 24-year-olds were polled as to how much stolen music they carried around on a daily basis. The finding was that almost half of said music was never purchased. 842 of the 1,770 tracks held on the average digital music player were reported as stolen—that's 48 percent."

What is a Revival?

The Reason for God by Tim Keller: "In an important history of the movement, David L. Chappell demonstrates that it was not a political but primarily a religious and spiritual movement... Chappell argues that black leaders were much more rooted in the Biblical understanding of the sinfulness of the human heart and in the denunciations of injustice that they read in the Hebrew prophets. Chappell also shows how it was the vibrant faith of rank-and-file African-Americans that empowered them to insist on justice despite the violent opposition to their demands. Thus Chappell says there is no way to understand what happened until you see the Civil Rights movement as a religious revival.

When evangelical Christians talk about revival we tend to go back to The Student Volunteer Movement or The Azusa Street Revival as the last revival in the United States.

Was the Civil Rights Movement a revival? Evangelicals tend to stress spiritual salvation over social and economic transformation. What do you think?

The Devil in the Details

Paradise Lost, Again and Again - WSJ.com: "Mr. Jacobs presents an impressive gallery of thinkers convinced of the reality of a hereditary stain in human nature. He starts with St. Augustine, who saw evidence for Original Sin 'everywhere, from the angry cry of a baby to his own tendency to be distracted from prayer.' There are classic Protestants like Luther and John Bunyan, as well as the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in the Gulag came to realize that the real fault line ran not between the guards and prisoners but within each human soul.

Of course, they are all Christians. When we turn to modern thinkers who take a dim view of religion – Marx, Freud, the current batch of evolutionary psychologists – Mr. Jacobs sees a pattern: They dismiss the idea of Original Sin but then try to sneak it through the back door and give it another name.

Kant, who had little use for Christian revelation, talked about 'the crooked timber of humanity.' For Marx, human behavior was skewed by immemorial social arrangements. Freud talked about the dark forces of the subconscious. One way or another, these thinkers were wrestling with the question that God directed to Adam and Eve after the Fall: 'Where are you?' In other words: Why are we not where we ought to be?"

How long O Lord?

Others are taking the Google plunge:

Salesforce and Google Apps partnership

Google and Salesforce announced Salesforce for Google
Apps<http://www.salesforce.com/products/google/apps/>,
a new product that brings the collaboration and communications features of
Google Apps directly into Salesforce.com. As you might know, Salesforce is a
customer relations management (CRM) program used by hundreds of non-profits
to manage constituent relationships, raise money, organize volunteer
opportunities and more. Read more about the new integration on the Official
Google Blog<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/posted-by-scott-mcmullan-googl...>
.

If you're already a Salesforce customer (which is free for eligible
non-profits <http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/product/>), it's easy to
start integrating with your Google Apps account. If you don't have Google
Apps, it's also free for
non-profits<http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/npo/index.html>

The Gospel in All its Forms | LeadershipJournal.net

This article helps explain why The Four Spiritual Laws has been so successful and unsuccessful depending on the context. It also explains and recommends how Campus Crusade has grown and will grow in presenting the gospel effectively.

Read the whole thing.

The Gospel in All its Forms | LeadershipJournal.net: "Just as Paul spoke about a gospel for the more religious (the "circumcised") and for the pagan, so I've found that my audience in Manhattan contains both those with moralist, religious backgrounds as well as those with postmodern, pluralistic worldviews.

There are people from other religions (Judaism, Islam), people with strong Catholic backgrounds, as well as those raised in conservative Protestant churches. People with a religious upbringing can grasp the idea of sin as the violation of God's moral law. That law can be explained in such a way that they realize they fall short of it. In that context, Christ and his salvation can be presented as the only hope of pardon for guilt. This, the traditional evangelical gospel of the last generation, is a "gospel for the circumcised."

However, Manhattan is also filled with postmodern listeners who consider all moral statements to be culturally relative and socially constructed. If you try to convict them of guilt for sexual lust, they will simply say, "You have your standards, and I have mine." If you respond with a diatribe on the dangers of relativism, your listeners will simply feel scolded and distanced. Of course, postmodern people must at some point be challenged about their mushy views of truth, but there is a way to make a credible and convicting gospel presentation to them even before you get into such apologetic issues.

I take a page from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. That is, I use the biblical definition of sin as idolatry. That puts the emphasis not as much on "doing bad things" but on "making good things into ultimate things."

Instead of telling them they are sinning because they are sleeping with their girlfriends or boyfriends, I tell them that they are sinning because they are looking to their romances to give their lives meaning, to justify and save them, to give them what they should be looking for from God. This idolatry leads to anxiety, obsessiveness, envy, and resentment. I have found that when you describe their lives in terms of idolatry, postmodern people do not give much resistance. Then Christ and his salvation can be presented not (at this point) so much as their only hope for forgiveness, but as their only hope for freedom. This is my "gospel for the uncircumcised."

"

6 "laws" to explain the Rebellion

two ways to live :: what is two ways to live?: "At the most basic level, Two Ways to Live is simply a memorable summary of the Christian gospel. Or to put it more accurately, it is the Christian gospel including some of its necessary presuppositions and background."

What is it with Americans and their guns?

Point and Shoot - WSJ.com: "Gatling was the prototypical Yankee tinkerer, a self-educated deviser of farm implements, including a mechanical planter that fed seeds from a hopper. From seeds, creators of life, it was an easy jump to bullets: Death too could be fed from a hopper. Gatling employed six rifle barrels in a tight cluster. A crank positioned each barrel in turn to have a new bullet dropped into its breech.

It was an elegant solution to a problem that had bedeviled armorers for a century – the best of soldiers could fire only two or three rounds a minute."

We Don't Need a Climate Tax on the Poor

As if the Biofuel Famine wasn't bad enough, now comes the Carbon Tax on the poor.

Sigh.

We Don't Need a Climate Tax on the Poor - WSJ.com: "Carbon caps will have an especially harmful impact on low-income Americans and those with fixed incomes. A recent CBO report found: 'Most of the cost of meeting a cap on CO2 emissions would be borne by consumers, who would face persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households.'

The poor already face energy costs as a much higher percentage of their income than wealthier Americans. While most Americans spend about 4% of their monthly budget on heating their homes or other energy needs, the poorest fifth of Americans spend 19%. A 2006 survey of Colorado homeless families with children found that high energy bills were cited as one of the two main reasons they became homeless.

Lieberman-Warner will also hinder U.S. competitiveness, transferring American jobs overseas to places where environmental regulations are much more lenient. Instead of working to eliminate trade barriers on clean energy and lower emitting technologies, the bill imposes a 'green,' tariff-style tax on imported goods. This could provoke international retaliatory actions by our trade partners, threatening our own export markets and further driving up the costs of consumer goods."

God help me

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

The Hub of Recent Grads

10 best cities for recent college graduates - Work in Progress - Worklife - Workplace - TIME: "Apartments.com and CBcampus.com evaluated the availability of entry-level job openings, rental prices for one-bedroom apartments and large resident populations of young adults in their early 20s to determine the top 10 cities for recent college grads. Here they are again, with average apartment rental prices for one-bedrooms:

1. Philadelphia, $962

2. Boston, $1,343

3. New York, $1,520

4. Phoenix, $741

5. Chicago, $1,029

6. Dallas-Fort Worth, $755

7. Los Angeles, $1,435

8. Houston, $778

9. Detroit, $699

10. Atlanta, $773"

MIDs and Chips

WSJ.com: "Chip suppliers for cellphones are moving aggressively to make products for the gadgets, dubbed MIDs, for mobile Internet devices."

Faster please.

A start on a political agenda...

Reason Magazine - The Top Ten Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems: "Copenhagen, May 30—Where in the world can we do the most good? Supplying the micronutrients vitamin A and zinc to 80 percent of the 140 million children who lack them in developing countries is ranked as the highest priority by the expert panel at the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Conference. The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.

"Eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, were asked to prioritize 30 different proposed solutions to ten of the world's biggest problems. The proposed solutions were developed by more than 50 specialist scholars over the past two years and were presented as reports to the panel over the past week. Since we live in a world of scarce resources, not all good projects can be funded. So the experts were constrained in their decision making by allocating a budget of an 'extra' $75 billion among the solutions over four years.

"Number 2 on the list of Copenhagen Consensus 2008 priorities is to widen free trade by means of the Doha Development Agenda. The benefits from trade are enormous. Success at Doha trade negotiations could boost global income by $3 trillion per year, of which $2.5 trillion would go to the developing countries. At the Copenhagen Consensus Center press conference, University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey explained, 'Trade reform is not just for the long run, it would make people in developing countries better off right now. There are large benefits in the short run and the long run benefits are enormous.'"

...

"So what proposed solutions are at the bottom of the list? At number 30, the lowest priority is a proposal to mitigate man-made global warming by cutting the emissions of greenhouse gases. This ranking caused some consternation among the European journalists at the press conference. Nobelist and University of Maryland economist Thomas Schelling noted that part of the reason for the low ranking is that spending $75 billion on cutting greenhouses gases would achieve almost nothing. In fact, the climate change analysis presented to the panel found that spending $800 billion until 2100 would yield just $685 billion in climate change benefits.

"Noting that he has been concerned about climate change for 30 years, Schelling argued that tacking climate change will take public policy responses such as carbon taxes to address the issue. Schelling added, "The best defense against climate change in the developing countries is going to be their own development." He explained that funding education to create a literate labor force boosts the productivity of a country enabling economic growth. Economic growth produces wealth that helps people address and adapt to the problems caused by climate change."

Reveal--Does It?

The Necessary Things: Reveal--Does It?: "Here are my questions: Is this graph a big surprise to you as you think about your own church? If programs are not the primary way you experience spiritual growth, what is?"

This is a very interesting question with the data provided. At this stage of my life, growth is caused by sharing my faith, serving my family, serving strangers, and raising money. Churches tend to help mostly with serving your family. Serving friends and neighbors is good but doesn't cause me to grow at the rate of these others.

One of the reasons that campus ministry can be such a green house for growth is that it can help students share their faith, serve strangers, and learn how to trust God with financial resources. Because students don't have jobs often in college this puts them in a position to raise money which requires and causes growth.

Fill the Earth and Subdue It

lgf: Tuesday Early Morning Open:

"Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

— Mark Twain"

Memorial Day Flag Flying

Old Glory: America's Flag and How to Fly It - Popular Mechanics: "Flag Holidays
Memorial Day is a flag holiday--one of 17 days specifically designated in the code on which citizens are encouraged to display the flag, if they're not in the habit of doing so daily.

Flag holidays are as follows:
1. New Year's Day - Jan. 1
2. Inauguration Day - Jan. 20
3. Lincoln's Birthday - Feb. 12
4. Washington's Birthday - third Monday in February
5. Easter Sunday - (variable)
6. Mother's Day - second Sunday in May
7. Armed Forces Day - third Saturday in May
8. Memorial Day (half-staff until noon) - last Monday in May
9. Flag Day - June 14
10. Independence Day - July 4
11. Labor Day - first Monday in September
12. Constitution Day - Sept. 17
13. Columbus Day - second Monday in October
14. Navy Day - Oct. 27
15. Veterans Day - Nov. 11
16. Thanksgiving Day - fourth Thursday in November
17. Christmas Day - Dec. 25"

Alternative Lifestyle Choices

TheStar.com | GTA | GTA's secret world of polygamy:

"Polygamy is happening in Toronto; it's not common, but it's happening," said Hindy, imam at Salahuddin Islamic Centre.

Hindy, hardly a stranger to controversy, is well known for his friendship with the family of Omar Khadr, the young Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and his outspoken views on the implementation of Islamic law. In the past five years, Hindy said he has officiated or "blessed" more than 30 polygamous marriages; the most recent was two months ago. Even some imams in the GTA have second wives, he added.

"This is in our religion and nobody can force us to do anything against our religion," he said. "If the laws of the country conflict with Islamic law, if one goes against the other, then I am going to follow Islamic law, simple as that."

Those who condone the practice rarely let their views be known, and those who practise it themselves tend to do so in secret, making it difficult to record how many such marriages have taken place in the GTA. Equally hard to determine is how many polygamous families have immigrated to the country, despite a 2005 report commissioned by the federal Status of Women that tried to find out the extent of polygamy and its implications.

But conducting such unions in clear violation of Canadian law is wrong, according to Syed Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, who speaks frequently on polygamy issues.

"Muslims should not enter into polygamy while they are living in Canada, because the local Canadian law prevails. It overrules the Islamic law if there is a conflict between the two," he said.

Under the Criminal Code, polygamy was deemed a crime in 1892. Those who enter into reside in, or officiate a polygamous union can be charged with a criminal offence and face up to five years in prison.

But the last time polygamy was prosecuted in Canada was more than 60 years ago. Fundamentalist Mormons in Bountiful, in southeastern British Columbia, have managed to get away with openly practising polygamy, believed to be an integral and necessary part of their faith, since the 1940s with little legal recourse."

The Problem of Evil

Instapundit.com -: "“This is not a natural disaster,” said Ren Yongchang, whose 9-year-old son died inside the destroyed school. His hands were covered in plaster dust as he stood beside the rubble, shouting and weeping as he grabbed the exposed steel rebar of a broken concrete column. “This is not good steel. It doesn’t meet standards. They stole our children.”"

Solar Warming Update

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Proof of global warming!

Well, gee …. what could be causing that global warming? Has Exxon-Mobil used its 8.3% profit margin to start refining oil on the solar system’s largest planet? Perhaps Jupiterians have bought too many SUVs over the last few years. Jupiter may also have an epidemic of bovine flatulence causing these storms.

Or, just maybe, the sun has affected Jupiter in a similar fashion as it has Mars and Pluto, and that the negligible warming Earth has experienced comes from the same source.

Very Cool

NASA - Phoenix

Guided Tour of Mars Landing

Rob Manning, chief engineer for JPL's Mars Program, walks us through a simulation of the Mars Phoenix

Man Down

Is There a Crisis in Education of Males? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs

But he said that in 1970, when he started his career in higher education policy analysis, there were 1.5 million more men than women in higher education and “I recall vividly that women complained that this was a crisis. Now there are 2.7 million more women than men in higher education and the feminists assert that this is not a crisis. What am I missing here?”

He noted the hugely disproportionate rates of suicide among men who are 25 to 34, and of incarceration, and asked how this could be anything but a crisis.

“The hypocrisy of the feminists — AAUW being a major part of this — astounds me,” Mortenson said. “The fact is male lives are falling apart at the growing margins of male welfare, and the utter failure of the education system to address male needs on male terms is indeed a crisis. We have shown what the education system can do for women when we set our minds to it.”

The new standard for meetings and conferences

Seth's Blog: The new standard for meetings and conferences: "I think the standard for a great meeting or a terrific conference has changed.

In other words, 'I flew all the way here for this?' is going to be far more common than it used to be.

If you think a great conference is one where the presenters read a script while showing the audience bullet points, you're wrong. Or if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don't provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you're wrong as well.

Here's what someone expects if they come to see you on an in-person sales call: that you'll be prepared, focused, enthusiastic and willing to engage honestly about the next steps. If you can't do that, don't have the meeting.

Here's what a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.

And here's what a conference organizer owes the attendees: surprise, juxtaposition, drama, engagement, souvenirs and just possibly, excitement."

Autism in Wired

The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

Autistics like Baggs are now leading a nascent civil rights movement. "I remember in '99," she says, "seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were and wished there was something like that for autism. Now there is." The message: We're here. We're weird. Get used to it.

This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn't be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.

A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. "If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago," says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, "I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong."

The Mind Body Problem

The REAL brain drain: Modern technology - including violent video games - is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist | the Daily Mail

Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School.

There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups.

The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano - but had nothing to do with the instrument at all.

And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises.

The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn't changed at all.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement.

But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons.

"The power of imagination" is not a metaphor, it seems; it's real, and has a physical basis in your brain.

Alas, no neuroscientist can explain how the sort of changes that the Harvard experimenters reported at the micro-cellular level translate into changes in character, personality or behaviour.

But we don't need to know that to realise that changes in brain structure and our higher thoughts and feelings are incontrovertibly linked.

One Reason Why I Go To Church

The REAL brain drain: Modern technology - including violent video games - is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist | the Daily Mail

I'm a neuroscientist and my day-to-day research at Oxford University strives for an ever greater understanding - and therefore maybe, one day, a cure - for Alzheimer's disease.

But one vital fact I have learnt is that the brain is not the unchanging organ that we might imagine.

It not only goes on developing, changing and, in some tragic cases, eventually deteriorating with age, it is also substantially shaped by what we do to it and by the experience of daily life.

When I say "shaped", I'm not talking figuratively or metaphorically; I'm talking literally.

At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.

The brain, in other words, is malleable - not just in early childhood but right up to early adulthood, and, in certain instances, beyond.

The surrounding environment has a huge impact both on the way our brains develop and how that brain is transformed into a unique human mind.

Randy Elrod on Manifestos and their shortcomings (via Hugh Hewitt)

Randy Elrod:

Viral loops, not manifestos, provide the opportunity for unparalleled influence. This is a world in which documents handed down by well-meaning alpha males result in a stifled yawn. However, this same world moves to the edge of their seat upon realizing that the responsibility to change the world need not be their legacy or burden. On the contrary, the creation of culture is the calling from which history speaks.

For example, Compassion International recently asked me to help form a group of influential bloggers for a historic trip to Uganda. A trip in which we visited slums, HIV/Aids hospitals and projects each morning. We then blogged, created video, and recounted stories raw with reality and emotion each afternoon. Thousands of people around the world followed our eight day journey real-time and over 400 children were sponsored and rescued from poverty. The viral loop that was created spawned hundreds of additional posts and offered the opportunity for thousands of additional people to experience the trip in an automagical way.

This “automagic” tested the corporate structure of Compassion. The trip was completely out of their control. The blog posts were not softened or censored and the videos and art spawned were not pre-approved by the marketing department. The servant leaders of this large organization flexed and collaborated to create culture.

Servant leaders have the ability to provide a new type of leadership. A collaborative mentoring and releasing of people with varied and mystical gifts in order to create culture. Alpha leaders value control, servant leaders value collaboration. Alpha leaders value individualism, servant leaders value community. Alpha leaders value affluence, servant leaders value influence.

Today, it is through viral loops that movements really snowball. In their latest issue, Fast Company says, “A destination such as Facebook grows via invitations, with each "friend" reaching out to her own set of contacts, which in turn do the same. More than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard joined within a month of Facebook's 2004 launch; four years later, it has 67 million active users. And at its current 3% weekly expansion rate, it will have 200 million users by the end of the year, equal to the population of the fifth-largest nation on earth.”

A Response

Townhall.com::Hugh Hewitt

"Evangelical Manifestos" of the future will not have to be read, but will be evidenced by the changes they have brought about. They will not have to be announced, merely recognized.

A Manifesto

Between Two Worlds: An Evangelical Manifesto: A Summary

This morning a document was released at the National Press Club entitled An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment, spearheaded by Os Guinness and signed by over 80 evangelical leaders. (You can read a brief interview I conducted this week with Dr. Guinness about the document.)

Where is they Sting?

Charity Navigator, a watchdog organization in Mahwah, N.J., that rates charities’ performance, has given bad marks to the musician Sting’s charity, which has raised money to preserve rain forests, reports the New York Post.

Sting’s Rainforest Foundation is planning its next fund-raising concert at Carnegie Hall for Thursday and expects such high-profile participants as Billy Joel and James Taylor, the paper reports.

After reviewing the charity’s tax filings, the Post found that just 41 percent, or about $887,000, of the more than $2-million raised at the organization’s 2006 concert ended up in the hands of charities working to save the rain forests.

“This one would fall to the bottom of the bucket,” Sandra Miniutti, a spokeswoman for Charity Navigator, tells the newspaper.

Charity Navigator has given the Rainforest Foundation a mark of zero for the last four years, the newspaper reports.

Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, who founded the organization in 1989, did not comment in the article.

But Ms. Styler, responding to the story in the Post, tells People magazine: “The Rainforest Foundation is celebrating its 20th year. We wouldn’t still be in business or have given out millions of dollars over the years if we’d spent everything we made immediately after it came in.”

Lawyers On Heparin

Townhall.com::On Heparin: A Few, Kind Words For Plaintiffs’ Lawyers::By Hugh Hewitt: "When I began covering the heparin story in February, I was astonished at how little attention it was receiving in the MSM. Perhaps because my father had used heparin for many years before he died (long before the heparin poisoning occurred), or perhaps because I have some very close, very successful friends in the plaintiffs’ bar and we regularly debate mass tort actions and their impact on the economy, I was fascinated by the story. As the number of deaths rocketed up to 81, and the long-term health effects on those who did not die but were sickened by the adulterated batches of the drug began to be debated, my curiosity increased. I am now hoping that the victims find the best plaintiffs’ lawyers in America because we need those litigators not just to get compensation for the families, but to force reform on China."