"Here are some exercises that I've found can help left-brainers to 'really see':

• Move in close, so you divert attention from individual objects and start to see instead colour, texture, shape, shadow, reflection, pattern
• Find an unusual perspective from which to look -- get down on the ground and look up, look at something through trees, through a microscope, or by candlelight, anything that will let you see things differently from usual
• Look at things under unusual conditions -- in the fog, at night, right after a heavy rain, just at dawn or dusk
• Stimulate your other right-brain senses -- get your nose up close to things, listen to birds, or insects, or train whistles, or music, walk in your bare feet
• Walk or bicycle without a pre-determined destination, direction or time limit
• Study something -- birds at your bird-feeder, time-lapse of a flower over the course of a day or a week, a spider-web, how moving or dimming the lights in a room changes its character, how a bottle looks different when viewed from different angles

In the book Easy Travel to Other Planets, Ted Mooney describes a future world where people are so bombarded with meaningless information, abstract facts that don't really matter, that they become psychologically paralyzed, unable to focus on anything, and succumb to what Mooney calls 'information sickness'. In some ways we are already there. The trappings of our society and culture have already separated us from, and deadened us to, most of what is real in this world, and surrounded us instead with artifice -- bland, manipulative, numbing 'entertainment', office and home lighting (and air conditioning, and jobs) that are artificial, news that shows wars as light-shows instead of people dead and dying, cars that insulate us from any exposure to real people or real weather."

A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk could make its debut in Britain next year.

Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide.

Its designers hope to see one of the first two in the world become a new tourist attraction in the centre of London.

The London Tholos would be linked to an identical one in Vienna. Through them, people in both cities will be able to see and hear each other in real time.

The cylindrical structure contains technology that simultaneously transmits and receives high definition live moving images.

People standing in front of London's Tholos would see a wrap-around picture of the scene in Vienna. At the same time, a similar London image is displayed in the Austrian capital.

Citizens in both countries would be able to face each other and talk via an array of directional microphones and loudspeakers, which keep conversations private.

Effectively, it is like meeting up in the town square - except that you might be on different continents.

"The answer to the first question — why are there no leaders on the Web? — has everything to do with the Web's architecture...

The single factor perhaps most important for the success of the Web is precisely the fact that we don't need permission to participate, to create a Web site, to post a page. The Web is a permission-free zone. In this it mirrors the Internet that will move anyone's bits from one point to any other point without needing to get permission first and without having to consult a central routing authority to find out how to do it.

[...]So, what lessons do we learn about leadership on the Web? That the people we pay attention to are the ones who speak not at us and not to us but with us. We listen to them carefully because they are so interesting, so wise, and even so funny. We learn that leadership isn't a quality that necessarily spreads across all areas and topics: the person who is worth listening to about, say, technology may be just another jerk when it comes to raising children. And we learn the lesson that is most troubling to marketers, businesses and real-world leaders of all sorts: We learn that we, talking together, are smarter, wiser, and more interesting than any single leader could ever hope to be."

"Knowing a Social Security number and a mother's maiden name is pretty much all it takes to loot a U.S. bank account, often without even knowing the number of that account. Yet the real question ought not to be, "Does this person know the right identifying information?" but, "Is this person really who they say they are?" ...

"What works against us is that we have a million years of societal and biological evolution based on the concept of small tribal groups, yet only a few centuries of urban life and less than two centuries of mass transit. One characteristic of tribes is that the members know each other. So when the lady at the bank recognizes you -- really recognizes you -- it decreases to almost zero percent the likelihood that somebody can come in the bank claiming to be you and steal all your money. This isn't some clever security design, but an artifact of tribal life. You don't resent the lady at the bank for knowing you. You are flattered that she does. You don't fear that because she knows you that you are more likely to be a crime victim. Just the opposite -- we feel safer because we are known. ...

"My system is based on a registry of friends because we all participate in virtual tribes that are geographically dispersed. Every person who wants to have credit, to make a big purchase, or to board a 747 has to have a list of 10 friends -- people who can vouch for their identity and know how to test it if needed. That takes us out of the realm of the mother's maiden name, replacing it with, "What was the nickname I called you in the fourth grade?"

I am Bob, and these are my 10 friends.

They don't even have to be friends -- just people who know you. You don't have to tell them they are on your list and you can change your list as often as you like.

Imagine an aerial view of this network of friends. It is so large it could only be analyzed by a big honking computer, but there is a great deal to be learned from that analysis. People could disappear and be noticed, perhaps to be found. Deadbeat dads could be tracked, as could sexual predators. Epidemics would ripple across the surface of the model, perhaps leading to targeted anticipatory preventive care, saving lives. Guys who buy enough fertilizer to blow up a Federal office building would stand out.

Now before you can say the words "Big Brother," remember that YOU choose your list of friends so they can be people from work, from school, from the tennis club, but perhaps not from your Communist cell or from your swingers club. You can keep private what you want to keep private because the big picture is what matters here.

The system would be tied together by phone, e-mail, and Internet messaging. Ultimately, it would come to function like a much larger version of eBay's feedback system which would result in subtle pressure toward more civil behavior -- something we don't have in any practical sense today.

Maybe this system wouldn't work. You tell me. But I know that what we have right now isn't working, and I am not sure it can be made to work. The only answer that makes sense to me is to hearken back to a simpler time when these crimes just didn't' happen. And it is only through clever application of technology that this can be done.
But when we try to scale this inherent security up to urban, regional, national, and international levels, it doesn't work. We either have to accept less security or impose an artificial system intended to emulate that lady at the bank. This emulation is at the heart of every security system everywhere, yet we don't think of it in these terms."

"The first magic of blogging, of course, is that everyone can self-publish. Everyone has a voice. The tools makes that possible.

But the next magic, much harder to achieve, is that everyone wants to be listened to...

[...] In the blogosphere, there's no shortage of airtime, but there's still a shortage of attention."

"Mirror worlds were not supposed to be an escape from reality; they were supposed to reflect reality. A modern-day city generates plumes of data the way 19th-century industrial towns generated smoke. There are block-by-block crime statistics, test scores for every student in every school, traffic reports updated by the second, demographic profiles by zip code, and so on. All of those numbers exist somewhere in cyberspace, but finding them is next to impossible. Gelernter envisioned a centralized repository for all this data, a virtual reconstruction of a space that would showcase everything going on in reality. Gelernter's simulated worlds were going to be mirrors. By comparison, the simulations we have now are fantasy islands.

In a true mirror world, data would be mapped onto recognizable shapes from real life. For instance, to find information on a local hospital, you would locate the building on a computerized map and click on it with an "inspector" tool. Within seconds, the big-picture data about the facility would come into focus: number of patients and doctors, annual budget, how many patients died in operating rooms last year, and more. If you were looking for more specific information—say you were considering giving birth at the hospital—you could zoom in to the obstetrics department, where you would see data on such subjects as successful births, premature babies, and stillborns. Information about how the hospital connects to the wider city—what Gelernter calls topsight—could be had by zooming out."

"My life, like your life, is a series of events in time, with a past, present, and future," Gelernter says, sitting in a conference room in the New Haven offices of Mirror Worlds Inc., the software company he cofounded. "And that's the way my software ought to look. The mirror worlds approach to organizing information is based on reality, as opposed to an engineer's or a computer scientist's fantasy. I don't want my personal life to be stored in an arbitrary UNIX file tree; I want it to be life-shaped—the shape of the way I live it." He gestures out the window, to the stately spires and ivy-covered buildings of the Yale campus. "I want information on New Haven to be New Haven-shaped, not in 10,000 separate databases."

One or more misconceptions:
FOX – 80%
CBS - 71%
ABC - 61%
NBC - 55%
CNN – 55%
Print Sources – 47%
NPR/PBS – 23%

None of the three misconceptions:
NPR/PBS – 77%
Print Sources – 53%
CNN – 45%
NBC – 45%
ABC – 39%
CBS – 30%
FOX – 20%

4. Why did you allow a private Saudi jet to fly around the US in the days after September 11 and pick up members of the Bin Laden family and fly them out of the country without a proper investigation by the FBI?

Private jets, under the supervision of the Saudi government - and with your approval - were allowed to fly around the skies of America, when travelling by air was forbidden, and pick up 24 members of the Bin Laden family and take them first to a "secret assembly point in Texas". They then flew to Washington DC, and then on to Boston. Finally, on September 18, they were all flown to Paris, out of the reach of any US officials. They never went through any serious interrogation. This is mind-boggling. Might it have been possible that at least one of the 24 Bin Ladens would have possibly known something?

While thousands were stranded and could not fly, if you could prove you were a close relative of the biggest mass murderer in US history, you got a free trip to gay Paree!

Why, Mr Bush, was this allowed to happen?

"The gigantic combine of capitalism has always obsessively pursued efficiency, and computers make the pursuit almost child play. Capitalism has succeeded in sowing a cornucopia of innovation up and down society. But capitalism is atrocious at distributing the fruits of innovation. Each labor-saving device means the idling of thousands of people, wasting their years of experience, rigorous training, and practical insights.

People who work with computers remain fixated on efficiency. Every week I hear the debates over whether businesses should use Linux or Windows, the commentators always wrangling over which systems will save the most money. I find this battle increasingly tiresome. I'm more interested in finding the systems that will put more people to work."

"What can I do to bring average people back into the process of wealth creation?"

"With the publication of 500 courses, MIT is delivering on the promise of OpenCourseWare that we made in 2001. We are thrilled that educators, students, and self-learners from all parts of the globe tell us that MIT OCW is having an impact on education and learning. We hope that in sharing MIT’s course materials, and our experience thus far with MIT OCW, we will inspire other institutions to openly share their course materials, creating a worldwide web of knowledge that will benefit mankind." - Charles M. Vest, President of MIT