91-94: Cold Noodles

91-94: Cold Noodles

You begin with a parent bubble. Pressing Tab creates another bubble in the same color and level of hierarchy as the bubble you tabbed from. Pressing Enter in a bubble will create a new level of hierarchy with a different colored bubble. Naturally, levels of the bubble tree are connected with lines and are movable around the workspace while remaining connected to each other. Each bubble also has an “Unpin” function. This resets all bubbles that you might have moved back under its appropriate parent. Bubbl.us also has an amusing deletion confirmation for each bubble you wish to omit. Once you press the X in the corner of a bubble a counter will begin counting down from three to zero as the line connecting the bubble to its parent acts as a lit fuse. Once it reaches zero the bubble will blow up in a cloud of fire. Neat.

Saving and loading is simple and fast. The navigation found on the right of the website is neatly made and holds all your current projects. Multiple brainstorming projects can be saved to folders in the side bar and loaded again at any time. Of course you’re also able to rename any of your projects using the side menu. Directly above the side menu is the link to edit your account information if necessary as well. A printing function has also been implemented so that your newly mapped out ideas can be printed out whenever you wish. They have included options for printing to the minimum height and width of your bubble tree, or simply a full screen print. Simply zoom out/in to what you feel is presentable, then print. There’s no hassle.

Another web-based mapping tool: Bubbl.us

Preparing, Protecting,
Preserving Family Treasures<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->


<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="content" -->


Welcome to “Preparing, Protecting, Preserving” your Family
Treasures. No one likes to think about disasters, whether natural or
man made, but thinking ahead and preparing, together with
knowledge about first steps, can save those family treasures from ruin.




This website provides simple instructions, as well as links to more
comprehensive information for “Preparing, Protecting, Preserving” many
types of family treasures. Using this information, you will have the
means to prepare ahead of time, to protect everyday, and if need be to
preserve your family treasures after a disaster. Proper care, handling
and storage of your treasures will help to ensure that they are
available for generations to come.




This website has been created through generous support from the American
Library Association (ALA) Carnegie-Whitney Award and from the Library
of Congress Preservation Directorate.







Preparing Your Family Treasures Storage Location Emergency Plan Insurance Additional Links

Shut It Mostly, or Shut It All?

Foundation Testing Potential of Philanthropy via Internet

A World Consumed by Guilt

Who Invited the Dog?

A Village Where Even New Yorkers Slow Down

Google knows the public mind

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff  |  December 13, 2007

Looking for insight into the collective soul? Google today releases 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist, an annual X-ray of the hottest searches.

Zeitgeist gives a glimpse of Google's role as multipurpose oracle, with people turning to the search engine for information about diets, recipes, the Nintendo Wii, and the travails of Britney Spears. People even trusted Google to guide their romances, with searches for "how to kiss" and "what is love" atop the open-ended question category.

There's a season for every search. Top winter queries included Anna Nicole Smith and the IRS; spring saw Virginia Tech, Don Imus, and the iPhone in the spotlight. Radiohead, the Red Sox, and Pavarotti spiked this fall.

Then, there's the evanescence of what's hot - the fastest-falling search terms included Shakira and Sudoku.

Compete, a Boston company that tracks Web traffic, said US Web users set a record with over 8.1 billion searches on the top engines in November. Google had a nearly 70 percent share.

Gazing into Google's lens offers hints about what's on the public mind: The number one search beginning with "Who is" asked "who is god," while "who is satan" came in at number 10. In-between was "who is buckethead," a guitarist who played with Guns N' Roses and who has a song featured in the video game Guitar Hero II.

Report ties meat, body fat to cancer

By Emily Brown, Bloomberg News  |  November 1, 2007

WASHINGTON - Excess body fat and red meat are linked to an increased risk of common cancers and should be avoided, the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research said.

About 40 percent of all cancers are linked to food, lack of exercise, and body weight, the organizations said in a 571-page report released yesterday. A panel of 21 researchers who compiled the report said it was the most comprehensive evaluation ever of evidence linking personal habits to cancer risk.

The findings are meant to guide future scientific research, cancer prevention education programs, and health policy around the world, panelists said.

"Part of the purpose of the report was to show that prevention of cancer by means of food, nutrition, and associated factors is as feasible and crucial as prevention of coronary heart disease," the researchers wrote. "The evidence that high body fatness and also physical inactivity are causes of a number of cancers, including common cancers, is particularly strong."

Hundreds of specialists evaluated more than 7,000 studies over five years to compile the report. Panelists found "convincing evidence" that carrying extra weight, particularly around the waist, may lead to cancer of the esophagus, pancreas, colon, kidney, and uterus, as well as postmenopausal breast cancer.

The panelists recommended keeping extra weight off, exercising at least 30 minutes a day, and limiting consumption of alcohol and high-fat foods, such as burgers, french fries, milk shakes, pastries, and sugary drinks. The guidelines also apply to cancer survivors, the report said.

Researchers said men should limit their alcohol intake to two drinks a day, and women one.

Red meat, such as beef, pork, and lamb, which are linked to colorectal cancer, should be replaced with poultry, fish, and eggs. Processed meats that include bacon and lunchmeat should also be avoided, researchers said.

Release of the report spurred some objections yesterday.

The causes of cancer are "extremely complex and involve factors like genetics, the environment, lifestyle, and a host of other issues," said Randy Huffman, vice president of scientific affairs at the Washington-based American Meat Institute, in a statement.

For more information, go to dietandcancerreport.org

A few months back, I was at an event held by Microsoft Research where some of the company’s eggheads were discussing the implications for technology users of rapidly increasing storage capacities for rapidly decreasing costs. Apparently, at Microsoft Research, a favorite concept is that as it becomes common to get a terabyte of capacity, it will also become common for people to overhaul their storage habits. Specifically, they make the point that a terabyte is enough storage to archive audio files for every conversation you will ever have in your life.

For whatever that’s worth, there is no question that great deals on high capacity drives are now upon us, especially if you’re willing to order online. Whether you’re in the market for a new computer, or you want to upgrade a drive, or you want an external drive, unprecedented deals abound.

For example, just this week, Iomega introduced a group of hard drives within its Home Network Hard Drive line with 500GB capacities for $199 each. The company also has a 360GB drive available for $149. Those kinds of prices are what we used to associate with low-capacity external drives. That’s not all, though.

If a terabyte drive represents the holy grail for you, pay attention to a few other recent announcements. Seagate is getting set to ship a set of 1TB drives within its Barracuda line for $399.99 per drive, where the cost-per-gigabyte is almost exactly in line with Iomega’s.

If you go for your terabyte drive within a new computer you’re buying, you can get an even better deal. For example, Dell and its subsidiary Alienware have been offering terabyte drives from Hitachi within select PCs, including XPS, Aurora and Area 51 systems, for about $320. That makes the cost-per-gigabyte significantly lower than what Iomega and Seagate are offering.

Meanwhile, there are also some extraordinary deals appearing in external and removable drives. Dell is offering a Western Digital 160GB external hard drive, in its Passport line, for $93. I have found external hard drives to be a very convenient way to share backed up data between home and office computers. As you can see from the photo here, where the WD drive is sitting next to a laptop, it’s about the size of a paperback book.

Artwork by disabled reaches wider audience

By Jason Dearen, Associated Press  |  October 10, 2007

OAKLAND, Calif. - Daniel Miller scrawls words with a Sharpie pen: "Drill. Saw. Lumber. Pine. Carpenter. Router." Within minutes, he fills the page with a dense cloud of letters and lines.

Miller, who is severely autistic and speaks mostly in one- or two-word bursts, has worked for the past 15 years at Oakland's Creative Growth Art Center - an influential program for disabled artists.

Creative Growth's decades of activism and tireless promotion of its artists have helped push the work of disabled artists into the mainstream. While in the past the work of Miller and others might have appeared in shows and exhibits dedicated to artists with disabilities, it's now more likely to hang alongside that of other contemporary artists.

One Miller drawing was recently purchased by New York's Museum of Modern Art for its drawing collection. Another Creative Growth artist, Judith Scott, has had her work posthumously displayed since May at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"It's a significant moment," said Matthew Higgs of New York's White Columns art gallery, which has shown Miller and other Creative Growth artists. "This indicates the level that [Miller's] work is operating at. Dan's work is now permanently in the preeminent collection of drawing in the world."

Founded in 1974 by psychologist Elias Katz and his wife, teacher Florence Ludins-Katz, Creative Growth grew out of the '70s disability rights movement. It was to give people with severe physical and mental disabilities a chance to develop as artists.

Just as evolving public policies like the Americans With Disabilities Act have created more protections and opportunities for the disabled, Creative Growth has helped do the same in the art world.

"They were only classified in the past as disabled artists or as 'outsider' and 'folk' artists," said Katherine Sherwood, a painter and professor who teaches a class on art, medicine, and disability at the University of California at Berkeley. "There was no comparison to the mainstream. They were sequestered away in that category."

The program's resident artists aren't teachers, as such, but they encourage the artists to work with new materials and techniques and then leave them alone to work.

That spurs creativity like San Francisco artist William Scott's large, colorful architectural renderings of his home city, and portraits of gospel singers. Scott, diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia, has had his paintings and sculptures sold in prominent galleries, from Paris to Tokyo and beyond.

One of Creative Growth's biggest success stories was the late sculptor Judith Scott.

Scott - who had Down syndrome and was deaf and mute - had been institutionalized until she came to the center at age 40. With no sign language or any other communication skills, her only interface with the world was through sculptures made of twined fibers, string, and other materials.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently put Scott's work on display alongside other contemporary artists with no biographical information to call attention to her disability. Janet Bishop, SFMoMA's curator for painting and sculpture, said the museum made "a conscious choice to show the piece with other examples of contemporary art."

"That's what distinguishes Creative Growth - the way that they further the careers of the artists by contextualizing the work with other contemporary artists. They've made huge strides in that area," Bishop said.

Sherwood said the additions of the center's work to collections at SFMoMA and MoMA in New York indicate a historic shift in attitude.

"Judith Scott prominently displayed alongside [Mark] Rothko and Ann Hamilton is a sign of change," she said. "Before the last few years, these artists would be shown together. Only recently do we see disabled and non-disabled artists showing in the same shows."

That shift is also beginning to permeate arts education. Sherwood's graduate and undergraduate students study alongside William Scott and other artists for part of her course.

"There's been an aesthetic shift in art schools and MFAs and contemporary art galleries where academically trained artists are searching for something fresh and new," said Tom di Maria, Creative Growth's director.

Of course, the success of Creative Growth's artists has also meant a steadier stream of money for the nonprofit.

William Scott's paintings can earn anywhere from $1,000 to $2,500. A drawing by Miller, who can turn out more than a dozen in a day, recently sold for $1,800, di Maria said. Other work can go for $10,000 or more.

Fifty percent of the art sold through the center goes back into the program; the other half goes to the artist. As a state-approved day program for the disabled, Creative Growth is also partly funded by the government.

While much has changed in the opportunities for disabled artists, di Maria believes the success of Creative Growth hinges on getting people to focus less on the artists' backgrounds. Creative Growth's mission, says di Maria, is to have its artists' work seen for its merits.

"We are really looking at changing some of the definitions around what is seen as an art object," he said. 

Supermarket checkout bills rising

Food inflation at its highest since 1990

By Associated Press  |  October 9, 2007

NEW YORK - The forces behind the rise in food prices - China's economic boom, a growing biofuels industry, and a weak US dollar - are global and not letting up anytime soon. Grocery receipts are bulging because the raw ingredients, packaging, and fuel that go into the price of foodstuffs cost more than they have in decades.

It's the worst bout of food inflation since 1990, but not yet worrisome to the economy, said John Lonski, chief economist of Moody's Investor Service. While high food prices can cut into consumers' discretionary spending, the 4 percent rate of food inflation is still far below the crippling double-digit levels of the 1970s.

Still, consumers anxious for relief in the checkout line may have to wait.

Andrea Williams, 32, can track the rise in prices of the food she buys for herself, her husband, and their three children by looking back at the receipts she says she meticulously saves.

"In 2004, I bought a gallon of milk, it was a $1.63," Williams said before heading into a Wal-Mart in Savoy, Ill.

A gallon of milk cost nearly $3 a gallon last month in her area.

A couple of years ago, Williams would spend about $250 a month on one big grocery trip. Now she says she spends $250 every two weeks.

It is possible to trace the jump in food costs to the commodities markets, where the price of agriculture products and energy have reached multidecade highs this year. Crude oil, which helps dictate the price of gasoline and plastic packaging, hit a record in September. Wheat prices also climbed to a record.

The run-up in commodity prices has as much to do with short-term supply and demand in each market as with long-term shifts in who produces and consumes those products.

China is the juggernaut. Rapid growth there - and in Brazil, Russia, India, and other developing nations - has led to massive demand for raw materials, including energy to run factories and cars, metals to build infrastructure, and beans and grains to feed livestock and people. China will import almost 50 percent of the world's oilseeds within a decade, becoming the world's largest importer, according to estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Oils made from oilseeds such as soybeans are used widely in packaged foods, while corn is used to make high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener found in everything from soda to bread.

China's oilseed demand reflects another trend: The world is using more of its food supply to make fuel. Corn in the United States and China is being converted to ethanol, a gasoline additive. Europe is using more wheat for ethanol and rapeseed for biodiesel, a cleaner burning fuel that is mixed with regular diesel. Brazil has bulked up its production of sugarcane to make ethanol.

Demand from the burgeoning ethanol industry in the United States helped drive corn prices to a peak this year, setting in motion a domino effect of price increases through the food chain as livestock raisers, food makers, and retailers tried to recover costs

For every tease, though, I found a thoroughly unexpected surprise. Sitting next to me as I ate my box lunch was Joshua Klein, who would later show off a machine he designed to train crows to pick up spare change. It’s a gizmo that first gives crows peanuts and coins together. Over time, it is meant to show them how to drop coins in a slot to get the nuts. Don’t call this useless, he insisted.

“There is $216 million in lost coins every year,” he said.

There certainly were lots of demonstrations of dubious utility. A rocket-powered motorcycle jetted around the parking lot. Meanwhile, others experimented with an instant barbecue using a huge welding torch. (Watch out, Iron Chef.)

The Department of Homeland Security showed a device I hope it never uses: a gun that blasted a pattern of colored light in a pattern meant to make someone start vomiting.

But there was also real science, still mixed with offbeat humor. Joy Hirsch, the director of the Columbia Functional MRI Research Center, did have enough time to show her scan of Dan Dubnow’s brain, which monitored his reaction to various subjects.

“When he got engaged in Gadgetoff, his brain went nuts,” she said.

There were a few commercial products on display, such as iRobot’s new devices. One was a slender device with a propeller in the front meant to root out clogged gutters. The other was a flat rolling disk — much like its Roomba vacuumbot — with a Webcam, microphone and speaker. Hook it up, they said, so you can drive it around Grandma’s house to chat with her every morning, see how her poodle is doing, and look around to see if she has fallen anywhere. The possibilities for mischief are endless.

In the saving-the-world department, the Mobile Fab Lab was an attempt at techno-economics. It is truck outfitted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with four computer-controlled machines that can shape material by cutting it with knives, lasers and so on. It is heading for the Bronx, where it will be used to train people to make furniture and other products.

View out the back of the Mobile Fab Lab

Tilting at skyscrapers

By Jan Gardner  |  October 7, 2007

John Silber may have retired as president of Boston University, but he is still offering acerbic commentary, as he does in "Architecture of the Absurd: How 'Genius' Disfigured a Practical Art," due out next month.

Silber admits in the introduction that he may seem an unlikely person to write a book about architecture. His credentials include his role - between the ages of 8 and 23 - assisting his father, who was an architect, and his involvement in the planning and construction of buildings at BU over 30 years.

The stinging rebuke Silber delivers in the thin volume is an expansion of a talk he gave to a convention of architects in 2003. He closes with a critique of the Stata Center at MIT, designed by Frank Gehry. Featured on the cover of the book, the building is, according to Silber, the "pièce de résistance of absurdity in architecture." Silber invokes a Mother Goose verse about a "crooked man" living in a "crooked house" to convey the depth of his contempt for the Stata Center, and suggests that a rereading of "The Emperor's New Clothes" may inspire an end to architecture of the absurd.

Designs for living

Cambridge architect Matthew Frederick uses a lighter touch in his new illustrated book, "101 Things I Learned in Architecture School." Frederick, who attended Boston Architectural College, invokes the pratfalls of Dick Van Dyke in a lesson about the right number of steps between floor levels and quotes Gertrude Stein regarding a room with a view ("I like to sit with my back turned to it").

Many of the lessons are germane to non-architects, including two in particular: "If you can't explain your ideas to your grandmother in terms that she understands, you don't know your subject well enough" and "Manage your ego."

Transforming Norman

The inaugural issue of The Mailer Review, a literary journal devoted to the author's life and work, will be heralded at the Norman Mailer Society's fifth annual conference, which begins in Provincetown on Thursday. The theme of the conference is "Mailer the Novelist," starting with "The Naked and the Dead" from 1948. The 84-year-old Mailer is scheduled to do a reading on Saturday evening. Details at normanmailersociety.com.

Conclave in Concord

The 15th annual Concord Festival of Authors will host a celebration of Bob Dylan as well as a 50th-birthday party for the Dr. Seuss book "The Cat in the Hat." Most of the 24 events taking place Oct. 17 to Nov. 4 are free, including readings by Augusten Burroughs and brother John Elder Robison, the author of a memoir about growing up with Asperger's syndrome. Also appearing are Tess Gerritsen, E. L. Doctorow, and John Hope Franklin. Details at concordfestival ofauthors.com.

Coming out

"Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy," by Matthew Reinhart (Orchard)

"World Without End," by Ken Follett (Dutton)

"Blonde Faith," by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown)

Pick of the week

Anita Silvey, professor of children's literature at Simmons College, recommends "The Arrival," by Shaun Tan (Scholastic): "One of Australia's premier artists explores the immigrant experience in a wordless graphic novel. Along with the protagonist, readers enter a new country - with everything appearing bizarre and surreal. It's one of those rare books that speak on different levels to readers ages 9 to 90."