At Caveserv, the goal is to provide you with exciting new ways of understanding the world through the eclectic combinations of data analysis, design, strategy review, photography, and statistical thinking.
com·mu·ni·ca·tion: noun - A process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior; also: exchange of information.
Communicating in the Internet Age results in information that is communicated instantly, pervasively, and permanently. Communication methods, tools, and styles have also grown exponentially as the Internet has made so many new options available to us. In this millieu of communications, Facebook has become one of the primary tools by which people now communicate with one another via the Internet, but its owners think that it is more than a tool. They think it should be THE tool for online communication, which is why I have chosen to begin using it in a creatively odd way to make it just a tool once more. Keep reading for more detail...
April 1st is an increasingly annoying day for one reason, and that is that the signal-to-noise ratio of that day goes WAY up (or down, depending on how you wish to measure it) with each passing year. In the past, and I mean before the Internet, the April 1 noise ratio was pretty well contained. But with the rise of the interconnected communications of the Internet age, now EVERYONE can pull a prank with a few tappy taps on the keyboard or touchscreen. This isn't funny. It isn't funny because with all of the additional communication options these days, my available time to pour through all of these communications is very short. So I simply don't have time to waste an entire day sifting through what's true and what's not. It's not that I'm a curmudgeon, a gullible idiot, or just a cranky guy - I just can't stand the importance this non-holiday is taking on due to the ease of communications these days. It's not even a flipping holiday, for goodness sake!
An interesting talk during a TED conference may be relevant to my previous story about the best states to live in which I posted on Saturday. In this talk, Daniel Kahneman points out that our happiness is often judged in very different ways depending on our memory of how happy or miserable we were with something, some place, some event, or some person rather than the reality of what we experienced.
A not-so-recent Forbes article (March 2009) highlighted which American states were the best to live in based on a national survey conducted by Gallup. Do the results live up to some other measurements? Let's see...
The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by Gilmore and Pine has quickly become one of my favorite books, alongside another very popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. Both books feature what I believe to be some of the more unique, and applicable, thinking about the world in the new millennium that we find ourselves now a part of in everyday life. Let me describe to you, briefly, why:
An article titled "The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World" by Jack A. Goldstone in the magazine, Foreign Affairs, is primarily about how different factors will impact one megatrend: world population; or perhaps its about how the megatrend of population will affect other world concerns. Either way, this is an interesting article with a positive, albeit politically unpopular, outlook on how to manage changes in the coming decades. So how can Western businesses, non-profit organizations, and government institutions adjust their strategies to cope with these impending changes and their impacts?
ColumbusUnderground.com recently ran an article about a LibraryJournal.com study which ranked The Columbus Public Library #2 in the nation for overall quality in terms of large library systems. I have written before about how much I love the Columbus Public Library system, but is my love misplaced? Curiously, Ohio has a lot of highly ranked library systems, but we fail when it comes to many other literacy and education related metrics: education level, reading proficiency, crime levels, and unemployment percentage. Why is this?
I completed reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in April of this year, and it was a thoroughly invigorating book. During the final evening of reading this page-turner of a book, I finally came to the author's primary assertion that reality is far more Mandelbrotian than Guassian in nature. In other words, we live in a world of chaos and the unexpected rather than a world of bell curves of normality...
I just received my invite for Google Wave! Google Wave is the new communications/collaboration/website... thingy, from Google. A better explanation of what Google Wave is can be found here: http://completewaveguide.com/guide/Meet_Google_Wave. So far I am finding it to be somewhat like Facebook on steroids, minus the complete vendor lock-in, but still everything in one place. Anyway, it's hard to explain, but if you would like an invite I have 19 left to give out, so feel free to contact me and I will send you one while supplies last! cavemanf16@gmail.com
by Gilmore and Pine has quickly become one of my favorite books, alongside another very popular book, 
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in April of this year, and it was a thoroughly invigorating book. During the final evening of reading this page-turner of a book, I finally came to the author's primary assertion that reality is far more Mandelbrotian than Guassian in nature. In other words, we live in a world of chaos and the unexpected rather than a world of bell curves of normality...
