So, I caught wind of the interesting article Activity is the goods for true satisfaction from Rob, who cited our buddy Neema as the person bringing this article into our collective mental space. It's basically about reasearch conducted by psychologists (and the article opens with a great dig on economists) that shows that people actually garner more satisfaction from buying services than material artifacts. Experiences make us happier than stuff....

I've been reading Peter M. Snege's The Fifth Discipline for my Design, Management, and Organizational Behavior class taught by Dick Buchanan. At the end of the book there is a citation of a poem written by a Lebanese poet named Kahlil Gibran that captures the idea of leaders feelings toward their vision through his story of parents and children. I just thought is was somewhat inspiring: Your children are not your children. They are the...

I've been super busy the past couple of weeks. Lot's of reading, writing, and project work building up for the last week before spring break. There are a number of things I want to talk about but it will have to wait a week. Some thing's I intend on talking about are some lectures that I've attended in the past couple of weeks including Natalie Jeremijenko, Wendy Kellogg of IMB Research, Bill Gates of Microsoft,...

Ian and I are working on our thesis project together as a team. We're focusing on the process of academic inquiry as it relates to Ph.D. students in the Arts & Humanities. It's a tough problem to solve, but our solution should be interesting. As we were brainstorming this weekend, we made some interesting connections. We already had realized that our thesis essays were related, but we hadn't really analyzed how. Not only did we...

After reading a little Malinowski for my Theory and Practice in Anthropoly class, I stumbled across a paragraph that stopped me dead in my tracks. Specifically it related to my thesis essay. In general, Malinowski briefly discusses (The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis from Argonauts of the Western Pacific) the early discovery of an environmental factor (fire, use of a stick or stone) and how it becomes part of a culture, integrated into...

My original plan was to get this redesigned and up and running at the beginning of the new year. As with most resolutions, that simply didn't happen. But I forced my self to get it done by today--an appropriate birth day for my new site--my actual birthday. I hope to comment here often and share my thoughts, especially as today marks another year in my life and I'm not getting any younger. It is a...