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The February 2006 issue of Gourmet magazine has a nice ranked list of chocolate (available in the U.S.) that they tested in a brownie recipe. Valrhona was ranked #1, an relatively unknown at #2 (no one I know has heard of them), and Scharffen-Berger at #3.

(Click on Read This Post (right-side menu) for full entry. (CSS in the theme is screwing up the formatting if I leave the entire post to display here.))
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Creating Passionate Users: Mediocrity by “areas of improvement”
How many times in your life (school, career, relationships) have you been told about your “areas of improvement”? How much time and energy have you spent working on those areas? If you’re a manager, how much emphasis do you put on those areas during a performance review?

Maybe instead of working on our weaknesses, we should be enhancing and exploiting our strengths? What if the price for working on weakness (and who even decides what is and isn’t a “weakness”?) is less chance to be f’n amazing?

There are several books out about this, although I haven’t read them — but the idea gets my attention:

Teach With Your Strengths, which says on its Amazon page,
“Defying the orthodoxy that teachers, to be more well rounded, should work to strengthen their weaknesses, this book, drawing on research by the Gallup Organization, maintains that great teachers are those who teach with their greatest talents and abilities.”

WWdN: In Exile: Seeking a potential Marrow Donor
One of my fellow Los Angeles Poker Bloggers, StudioGlyphic (who won the WPBT Winter Classic last December) is looking for some help for one of his friends, whose girlfriend is very sick with cancer, and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. The odds of finding a donor match are about 1:20,000, but this girl’s odds are even longer because she is Fillipino:

So please, contact your friends, and ask them to contact their friends. Anyone you know who is Filipino and between the ages of 18 and 61 is a potential donor. The system is nationwide, so it doesn’t matter where they live. Signing up on the registry is easy and painless. All it requires is a simple blood test. Some hospitals charge a small fee for this blood test, however if your friends contact me directly, I can put them in touch with one of the hundreds of local organizations that will do the blood test for free. They can use this email address: jacobkrueger@gmail.com

…and…

There are lots of misconceptions about donating bone marrow. (I know I was terrified of doing it before I learned how minor the procedure actually is.) The procedure is simple and safe. You will be anesthetized the whole time, so you will not feel anything. When the procedure is over, you may have some soreness in the area for a few days and you may feel a little tired. That’s it. The bone marrow you donate is replenished within 3-4 weeks. And again, you will only undergo this procedure if your blood sample shows that you are a match and you decide to donate, in which case the slight soreness you’ll be feeling will be saving someone’s life.

Jupelo - Who Be Me?
The Most Basic Basics

Goal 1: Spend an entire year at Walt Disney World and record every second of it for you to see.

Goal 2: Begin building the world’s largest Disney collection (there’s more to this - see below).

Goal 3: Not go insane.

Play Again Games : MonopolyHomeRules
Monopoly Home Rules
These optional rules may make Monopoly a whole new game for you. Please let me know if you have played any good home rules that I have not mentioned, or if you play with any of these rules tell me what you thought of them. I mark the ones I recommend.

Creating Passionate Users: Crash Course in Learning Summary
Here’s a PDF (500k) with a two-page summary sheet (with the graphics as icon/reminders) of the full post I made previously. Do NOT look at this until you’ve read the earlier (big) post… it’s not meant to be stand-alone.

Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory
So, as promised in an earlier post, here’s a crash course on some of our favorite learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science, learning theory, neuroscience, psychology, and entertainment (including game design). Much of it is based around courses I designed and taught at UCLA Extension’s New Media/Entertainment Studies department. This is the long version, and my next post will be just the bullet points with the pictures–as a kind of quick visual summary.

This is not a comprehensive look at the state of learning theory today, but it does include almost everything we think about in creating our books. And although it’s geared toward blogs/writing virtually everything in here applies regardless of how you deliver the learning–you can easily adapt it to prentations, user documentation, or classroom learning. And remember, this is a BLOG, so don’t expect academic rigor ; ) but I do have references, so leave a comment if there’s something in particular you want.

Excerpt:
Wired News: Bush ‘Flat Wrong’ on Kyoto
The Canadians and others also saw Montreal as an opportunity to draw the outsider United States into the emission-controls regime, through discussions under the broader 1992 U.N. climate treaty.

But the Americans have repeatedly rejected the idea of rejoining future negotiations to set post-2012 emissions controls. The Canadians continued to press for agreement early Friday, offering the U.S. delegation vague, noncommittal language by which Washington would join only in “exploring approaches” to cooperative action.

While rejecting mandatory targets, the Bush administration points to $3 billion-a-year U.S. government spending on research and development of energy-saving technologies as a demonstration of U.S. efforts to combat climate change.

HW-PORN - Girls with Network Equipment

Excerpt:
Creating Passionate Users: Creativity on speed
One of the best ways to be truly creative–breakthrough creative–is to be forced to go fast. Really, really, really fast. From the brain’s perspective, it makes sense that extreme speed can unlock creativity. When forced to come up with something under extreme time constraints, we’re forced to rely on the more intuitive, subconscious parts of our brain. The time pressure can help suppress the logical/rational/critical parts of your brain. It helps you EQ up subconscious creativity (so-called “right brain”) and EQ down conscious thought (”left brain”).

Excerpt:

David Seah - Much To Do About Task Tracking
However, when it comes to my personal time, I’d rather be more free-form. Unfortunately, I tend to think of projects that are way too big for a single person to do in one free evening, so I…don’t do them. And this, my friends, is procrastination.

Intellectually, I know that it just takes determination: putting one foot in front of the other over and over again, until victory is just over the next foothill. But any procrastinator worth his salt has the uncanny ability to previsualize all the minutia that goes into a project, estimating with astonishing candor every bit of time, effort, heartbreak and disappointment it takes before anyone gets to sip from the Chalice of Higher Achievement. So taking that first step is awfully hard. When my faithful Tivo is stuffed to the gills with good TV and is just a remote-control click away, my resolve falters; laziness, as they say, always pays off right now.

I almost fell out of my chair when I realized that this was also the key:

Make achievement pay off right now, not later!

Cognitive Daily - What are we doing when we look away during a conversation?
In face to face conversation, we often look away from the person we’re speaking with. Somewhat paradoxically, the closer people sit to their conversation companions, the less often they look at them.

But other factors influence how often we avert our gaze, too. When we are asked personal questions, or difficult questions, or possibly when we are trying to deceive, we look away more often. When we talk with someone via a remote video monitor, we look at them more often than when we engage in the same type of conversation face to face.

So what’s the cause of this behavior? Do several different causes lead to looking away, or is the root cause the same for all of them? Perhaps we look away when we are feeling socially challenged. After all, difficult questions, or social intimacy, or the heightened social awareness involved in deceiving others could all lead to the same feeling of being put on the spot.

But another explanation is possible at least some of the time. We get a great deal of information by looking at faces, and this information places a significant load on our cognitive systems. Perhaps, when we’re asked a difficult question and need to concentrate, looking away from a face helps us focus on the cognitive demands of the question.