Archive for January, 2006
January 31st, 2006 by Matt
In my last post about mind mapping, I wrote about another way mind maps can express information in a succinct, efficient manner. I also described how you can use mind mapping to effectively capture information in context, which can be easier to use in some cases than simple written text.
This time I want to show an example of using mind mapping to take take notes in a meeting, and compare the notes in mind maps to the same notes in a Word file and a PowerPoint presentation.
I created some notes from an imaginary meeting with four attendees, and three prepared agenda points. There are a few bullet-point notes and then some action items. The notes are taken from the perspective of the person chairing the meeting.
First, the notes in the form of simple text, as an MS Word file. (click on the image to see the PDF of the full Word file).
Now, here are the exact same notes, but in the form of a PowerPoint presentation (again, click on the image to see the PDF version of the PowerPoint file).
Now, here are the exact same notes in the form of a mind map. I’ve also created a PDF version of the map and the actual MindManager map file below.
I think that the map form has several advantages over the Word and PowerPoint formats – it’s easier to quickly see the different types of information it contains (attendees, notes, actions); consequently it is easier to quickly find a specific part of the information you are looking for; it is also easier to highlight the specific actions and their deadlines for later reference; finally, the notes in map form all fit easily on one page, while the Word file is 2 pages, and the PPT file contains several charts.
In my next post, I will talk about some different mind mapping applications.
Hopefully this simple example helps display some of the qualities of mind maps and how you could use them to capture information in context. Have these examples been useful or interesting to you? Have any other thoughts on what I’ve discussed so far? Please let me know, I’d love to hear from you.
January 31st, 2006 by Matt
I gave the very late notice about BarCamp Dallas, which occurred this past weekend. I understand it was a fantastic time with some great conversations. Chris Messina of Flock was on hand, as well as Dallas’ own Jeremy Dunch of Greasemonkey, among many others.
I understand that the BarCamp Dallas wiki will have updates and recordings of all the presentations soon. Some of the presentations are already available from the wiki.
You can also see pictures on flickr, tagged with barcampdallas:
There are more BarCamp events coming up:
You can also subscribe to the web calendar for all BarCamp events: webcal://feeds.technorati.com/events/http%3A//barcamp.org/
January 31st, 2006 by Matt
The consumer electronics market is a thriving, robust industry, turning out wonderful, useful, powerful, amazing products (“toys” my wife calls them) at a break-neck pace. Look no further than the Consumer Electronics Show for example of the desire, demand – dare I even call it lust – for new digital machines that wow us, entertain us, streamline us and make us cool.
Yet consider this: how would you rate the quality of your entire “digital experience” with these products – the way they work alone, the way they work together, the ease of which you can configure them, the type of support you receive from the companies that make them, etc. I suspect your end-to-end digital experience is fractured and inconsistent at best. James Womack, in an article in the current edition of Fast Company asks the question: “How can individual goods and services get better and better while the experience of using them doesn’t?”
Continue reading ‘Selling a True Digital Experience’
January 28th, 2006 by Matt
The medical profession is one of the most promising vertical markets for the Tablet PC. Many hospitals and doctors offices are experimenting with tablets already, and their popularity is growing.
For a great site that tracks the latest news, discussions and articles about using portable tablet tablet-like devices in the medical profession, see the MedicalTabletPC.com site.
Hat tip to James Kendrick for noticing this.
January 28th, 2006 by Matt
How “connected” was your college dorm? Mine had a phone line, electricity, a window and 5 digit dialing for on-campus phone extensions. The year after I moved out they installed cable tv connections in each room, but I don’t regret not having that distraction available for me. Although somewhat technologically spartan, my dorm wasn’t too uncommon, and that was not too many years ago (it wasn’t 1976, by the way 
).
Today’s college dorms must meet the increased needs of today’s students for Internet connectivity and availability of technology tools. Forbes has an article reviewing the third annual edition of the Princeton Review’s Most Connected Campuses report.
The report evaluated the following factors in determining which campuses offered the best connections to students:
Continue reading ‘The Most Connected College Campuses’
January 28th, 2006 by Matt
vs. 
Nortel and Lucent are often considered peer companies in the telecom vendor industry. The two companies are roughly equivalent in number of employees, revenue, market focus stock price, market cap, and outlook. Two weeks ago, Lucent announced that it was lowering its sales outlook for 2006, sending both its and Nortel’s shares significantly lower. Then, this week, Lucent reported fourth quarter results of a loss of $104M, or $0.02 per share.
This had many analysts and investors renewing concerns about both the short term and long term viability of both companies.
Thursday, however, a BusinessWeek article describes what may be a growing confidence in the future of Nortel, while Lucent’s outlook seems less bright. Nortel’s new CEO, Mike Zafirovski has made several structural and personnel changes, and has begun to re-invigorate the employee and investor base with his vision and goals. There are several areas for Nortel that could be tapped for further cost reduction and efficiency, as well as product portfolio decisions that could stimulate growth. However, Lucent has already made several cuts and strategic moves, and could have fewer easy targets to hit for cost savings and growth, many analysts believe.
Nortel will report its fourth quarter and year-end results in early February.
January 27th, 2006 by Matt
This is a very late notice, but I wanted to at least make mention of an exciting event taking place tomorrow, January 28, in Dallas for the technical community. BarCampDallas will be a congregation of any and all people interested in computers / web 2.0 / app development / app usage or otherwise technically– or geek-minded to come and interact about cool stuff. There have been similar BarCamp gatherings in Palo Alto, Amsterdam, Toronto, Paris, Las Vegas during the CES, and New York City.
Labelled as an un-conference, it is an unstructured forum where there are no spectators, only participants. Everyone comes with something to offer, whether giving a presentation, helping with a presentation, helping with podcasting/blogging/pictures or other means of contribution. I’m excited to see what will come of this for Dallas, as we have a lot of technical talent that I believe goes unrecognized.
If you’re in Dallas and want to attend, there is still time – just go to the BarCampDallas wiki and sign yourself up! However, you have to sign up to go, since the building is officially closed on Saturdays and you’ll have to be on the list to get in.
January 27th, 2006 by Matt
I am able to report another overall positive experience with Toshiba support after “suffering” the loss of my hard drive last week. I will offer some details and thoughts about this experience in a moment, but first, I will quickly recount the opportunities I’ve had for Toshiba to support me thus far.
So far I have been through a faulty system board that appeared at first to be an LCD problem; after the system board was fixed the automatic screen orientation / rotation utility did not work and I had to open a new support case to have this resolved. and a broken fan that required some extra work to get right. Then, in December, one of the M200’s fans broke and the system was overheating. I again went through the Toshiba support process to have a local service technician replace the fan, but again, the screen orientation mechanism did not work 100%. I was so disappointed with the situation that I did not even write about it here; in stead, just like my first situation with the faulty system board, I took matters into my own hands to resolve. After a little bit of disassembling, tweaking, and reassembling the M200, it was back in tip top working condition, replete with a nice new LCD screen, new system board, 2 new fans and a working screen orientation mechanism. My Tablet PC life has been great since then.
Until last Friday, that is.
Continue reading ‘Another Satisying Support Experience With Toshiba’
January 27th, 2006 by Matt
I’ve created my own domain now for this blog, and have updated the URL.
I’m now at: http://www.nontrivialexercises.com/ and my email is now updated to matt [a t] nontrivialexercises.com
Note that the current URL, http://matthew.blogs.com/nontrivialexercises still works. Feeds are also the same, though I am setting up new feeds with FeedBurner, and will note when these are available.
Technorati Profile
January 19th, 2006 by Matt
photo from rahimadatia on flickr
The January 23rd issue of BusinessWeek has a great article about C.J. Prahalad, a business strategist / consultant / professor who has very innovating and challenging views about how global business will change over the next several decades. He points to his native India – specifically to Bombay for this article – and shows that while some people see abject poverty, filth and apparent hopelessness, he sees a hotbed of capitalism and innovation without equal anywhere in “first world” countries.
He goes so far as to argue that the third world economies are producing some of the the best innovations in cost reduction, process efficiency and quality in the world. He looks at the streets of Bombay and sees money-making enterprises – from sugar-cane stands to faxing services to hot dog stands, people are making money – however little it may be – in just about every place you look.
Continue reading ‘The Great Process Innovators of the 21st Century’
January 19th, 2006 by Matt
I wrote about how using a map can capture both the information and its context in a very succinct, dense yet clearly readable format. I referred to this as Information in Context. Today I want to continue this thought but demonstrate not how maps can simply capture the context of information, but how they can actually convey it back to the reader / viewer in an efficient and effective manner.
What if, in stead of taking down notes of a meeting, conversation, or list for your use later, you in stead wanted to convey a complex idea or concept using both words and visual cues? I’ve shown how maps can efficiently record and display some types of information that is related – e.g. actions, items in lists – but you can use the visual and spatial features of maps to convey something more conceptual in a much more effective way than by words alone.
For example, some friends and I have been reading and discussing a book about faith (When Faith is All You Have). The book reviews the people listed in Hebrews chapter 11 in the Bible, and how each of them displayed faith in their lives. One of the first elements of our initial discussion was to understand just what faith is. Is faith the same thing as belief? Is faith the same thing as action? Is there such thing as blind faith? Does everyone have faith in something? We had a terrific discussion about these points and used both our own reasoning and some cues from the Bible to help come to a working definition.
After the meeting, as I thought about our discussion further, I thought that a way to express the ideas we were wrestling with might be better with a picture rather than just a collection of words. I wanted to capture the idea that faith is what bridges the gap between belief and action, whether the action is actually a physical action or whether it is more of a decision. Faith obviously has implications in the context of religion and one’s belief about God, but I wanted to express the idea in a more basic, somewhat generic manner.
I came up with the following representation in the form of a small, yet I believe powerful, map:
To me, this simple map communicates exactly what I wanted to say about faith: that it doesn’t exist apart from action or from belief, but is the mechanism that turns belief into action. You can believe something, but unless you act on it you don’t really have faith in that thing. Similarly, you can take any sort of random action, but unless it is based on a belief or knowledge, then it is not an expression of faith.
A map can not only help you make note of information or ideas in a quick yet contextually-meaningful way for your use later, it can also help you convey complex ideas and relationships in a very succinct way.
In my next post on this subject, I will discuss maps as a means to capture “information in context” for a meeting, and compare the use of maps to two other popular forms of meeting communications: a text file (MS Word) and bulleted charts (PowerPoint). Please come back and check it out!
January 17th, 2006 by Matt
This is one of my first, humble (very humble) attempts to create a video slideshow. Over the holidays I used the simple and free Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft and assembled some pictures I took of my son’s Christmas party in his four year old preschool class on Dec 15, 2005.
The complete set of pictures is available as one of my Flickr sets as well. Enjoy!
Click on the download Windows Media icon to the left to download.
January 16th, 2006 by Matt
Previously, I introduced the concept of mind mapping as a more efficient means of communicating certain types of information compared to traditional written prose. Maps contain information arranged visually to help quickly convey a message or data that is categorized, grouped or otherwise related.
Today I want to talk about what I’ve found to be the most succinct way to characterize the value of maps: Information in Context. Usually, when we want to capture or communicate information, we implicitly capture the context of the information along with the actual data.
For example, when you attend your boss’s weekly staff meeting, if you take notes, you would (hopefully) write a heading at the top of the paper indicating “Staff Meeting, 1/16/06” or something similar. Then, when you came across that piece of paper later, you would know to categorize the information you wrote down as having come from that meeting.
At a much lower level, most other information has specific contexts, or relationships, to other information. When you make a grocery list, the obvious context is the grocery store. Without understanding the list of items represents things you specifically need to buy, and by when you need to buy them, the list is of little value.
When you write down an action you need to take, it only fully makes sense when you understand who gave you the action, when they gave it to you, and why. Knowing part of the discussion that took place beforehand may also help give more meaning to the action and allow you to meet the complete intent of the action.
How do mind maps help communicate contexts?
Continue reading ‘Mind Mapping - Information In Context’
January 16th, 2006 by Matt
…”a whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC” – quote from Apple’s new ad campaign showing off their new iMac and MacBook Pro with the Intel Core Duo processor.
This great picture was taken by my friend Blake Burris, who produces the Cocoa Radio podcast, during Steve Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld in San Francisco last week. Mr. Jobs spent some time talking about the iMac with the Intel processors and the new MacBook Pro laptop with the Intel dual processors, and how they are significantly faster than the current generation of PowerPC-based Mac platforms. Both machines look very neat, and if I had extra money lying around I would be very tempted to acquire one – probably the MacBook Pro. I’ll have to wait, however, and stick with my Toshiba M200, which is still great.
If you haven’t watched Steve Jobs’ keynote address from last week (see the link in the paragraph above), I highly recommend taking a look at it. It is impressive in several aspects:
Continue reading ‘What’s An Intel Chip Doing in a Mac?’
January 13th, 2006 by Matt
I have mentioned a couple of times that I have become very intrigued by the concept of mind mapping. What exactly is mind mapping? Well, it does not refer (in this context anyway) to any type of psychological exercise or Freudian assault on your psyche.
The term actually means representing information with pictures and connections, rather than simply by words. There is a history of thought and research on the subject (see wikipedia) and it is not necessarily a new concept. However, the utility and availability of mind mapping has significantly increased in the past few years, due to advances in software applications – both free and commercial – that allow easy access to this technique.
I have been using probably the most popular tool available for mind mapping – MindManager from MindJet – for several months now, and I want to write about how it has enhanced the way I capture, catalogue, use, and communicate information.
First, the use of the term “Mind Maps” is trade-marked by The Buzan Organisation, Ltd. in the UK and the USA, so I will simply use the term “maps” to apply to my subject at hand. Some of my readers will be well-versed in mapping and especially with MindManager, but some may not be. I learned about the concept myself from reading other blogs about the subject, so I want to add my input on the value that I derive from maps and how I use them.
So, to the point – what is a “mind map” or map?
Continue reading ‘Mind Mapping - What Is It?’
