Ingenial

“Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen anything like it.”

…

And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.

Read the full story.

Here’s a question for you: If you had to come up with an “anti-creativity checklist” for your organization… a checklist guaranteed to stifle imagination, innovation, and out-of-box thinking… a checklist designed specifically for people who want nothing to do with disruptive change… what would your checklist look like?

If you had to pick someone to write the autopsy report on the Wall Street financial collapse 18 months ago, you couldn’t do any better than Michael Lewis. He is one of the country’s preeminent non-fiction writers with a knack for turning complicated, mind numbing material into fascinating yarns.

He wrote his first bestseller, “Liar’s Poker,” about his experiences as a young Wall Street bond trader when he was still in his 20s and has since followed up with seven more bestsellers on subjects ranging from Silicon Valley in “The New New Thing” to big time sports in “Money Ball” and “The Blind Side.”

His new book, called “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,” comes out later this week and it explains how some of Wall Street’s finest minds managed to destroy $1.75 trillion of wealth in the subprime mortgage markets.

“60 Minutes”  spent two days debriefing Lewis at his home in California:

Part I – how the collapse came about and who knew what was going on

Part II – the culture of bonuses and ratings and why it’s unnecessary

Extra: The $8.4 billion dollar bet

This question plagues GQ staff writer and correspondent Andrew Corsello and now it can plague you. In a tell-all profile of Manny and his entourage Corsello reveals the tangled web of politics, stealing, lies and downright weirdness surrounding the greatest lightweight fighter on earth.

Not to say Corsello’s picture of Manning is all bad either. He points out Pacman’s human elements in sometimes humorous ways but the overall tone of the piece: reverence. Awe even. Corsello’s oft-repeated phase: “Because he is Pacquiao” becomes a worshipful chorus by the end of the article.

In many ways the article is as scattered and splintered as Manny’s own life. It flits between the author’s rambling musings, snapshots of a dominating Manny Pacquiao in the ring, an epic tale about meeting the boxer, Pacquiao’s rags to riches story, insane glimpses of the boxer’s entourage and quotes from boxing’s greatest commentators. I will leave you with one of the articles’ random stories:

“Sometimes, the way things happen with Manny, it’s like, parables,” Ramos says. “Here’s one: At the last training camp there were about thirty of us there. Now, one of my jobs is to lower the overall costs of living. So we go to this Thai restaurant next to [Roach's gym]. Our bill there was between $500 and $700 every day. So I said, ‘Manny, why don’t we buy some food from the local Philippine restaurant and have it delivered to your apartment? It’ll only cost about $150.’ Manny took me by the shoulders and in front of everybody said, ‘Don’t ever mess with another man’s livelihood. Now let us enjoy their food.’ “

Read the article at GQ

100 years ago, Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin, a well known artist and illustrator of Russian Folk tales, traveled to northern Russia to collect folk art. He came across the wooden churches of Russia and fell in love with them, photographing them and bringing back to Moscow the sad news of their lamentable condition. Through his efforts and the sales of postcards like the one below, money was raised to restore the 300-year old churches.

100 years later, Richard Davies retraced Bilibin’s steps in northern Russia and photographed the now 400-year old churches, in their stunning condition considering their age. His photos will be exhibited in Finland and UK.

View the rest at RichardDavies.co.uk

There’s an undeniable obsession out there to marry the perfect spouse. This trend has bothered me for a while. It’s not because I got married young or because I don’t regret if for a minute. I mostly hate the “Mr. Perfect” ideal because I think Hollywood’s version doesn’t exist. Ultra-feminist Lori Gottlieb agrees whole-heartedly.

After giving up on marriage and dating she decided to conceive a child with donated sperm – a move she readily admits was a mistake in an article for the Atlantic. In the article she says that deep inside what she really wanted was a traditional family. She wants a teammate: someone to take out the trash, play with the kids for fifteen minutes and drop her son off at school. Here’s her advice to women,

“Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year.”

Ms. Gottlieb isn’t the only person discussing this topic. Somewhere along the path to 40 most single women pass up a lot of guys holding out for something better. John Molloy gives women some excellent pointers in his book “Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others” about how to maximize the chance of meeting and marrying a well-rounded, normal male. Here are a few of his pointers:

• Women with a large number of female friends are more likely to marry than women with a large number of male friends
  • Men don’t go out of their way to introduce their female friends to other men
• If you reach 30 and want to get married, you have to make finding a husband a primary goal. Once your friends start getting married, they are less likely to have an active social life with you. Don’t be the last one off the bus!
• Women who get married, even those with high-powered careers, make getting married a priority that they work at.
• The larger the number of single men and women you work with, the better your chances of marrying

Read the full Atlantic article or read the Slate article about Ms. Gottlieb
Read an outline of John Molloy’s book here

Away from professional stadiums, bright lights, and manicured fields, there’s another side of soccer.  Tucked away on alleys, side streets, and concrete courts, people play in improvised games.  Every country has a different word for it.  In the United States, we call it “pick-up soccer.”  In Trinidad, it’s “taking a sweat.”  In England, it’s “having a kick-about.”  In Brazil, the word is “pelada,” which literally means “naked”—the game stripped down to its core.  It’s the version of the game played by anyone, anywhere—and it’s a window into lives all around the world.

Pelada is a documentary following Luke and Gwendolyn, two former college soccer stars who didn’t quite make it to the pros.  Not ready for it to be over, they take off, chasing the game.  From prisoners in Bolivia to moonshine brewers in Kenya, from freestylers in China to women who play in hijab in Iran, Pelada is the story of the people who play.

Ever wonder what Harvard kids do in their stuffy ivory towers? A heck of a lot, it turns out. Harvard Magazine (biased?) just published an article highlighting the lives of their students. It’s worth a read.

Here are some of the highlights:

Groups of roommates are often so busy they only see each other once or twice during the semester:

Guzick rooms in a centrifugal Quincy House suite with four other driven young men who found themselves together (and awake) only twice during the fall term: once on Guzick’s birthday, and one night when they fortuitously encountered each other in the dining hall “and decided to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.”

Sometimes all the busyness in extracurricular activities actually kills creativity and debate:

“You don’t have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself—or to thoughts that you haven’t been taught to think.” Goldhill, educated at London’s venerable Westminster School, where discussion and debate are the warp and weft of the school day, marvels that, at Harvard, “there are so few intellectual discussions outside of classes.”

The unnecessary activities are designed to help the Harvard student get a leg up on the job market after college. Why are students putting such extreme pressures on themselves? Parents.

“Oftentimes, we get from parents a very definitive chart of where that student is going,” Dingman says. “We’ll hear, ‘So-and-so has always wanted to be a doctor and will be a pre-med at Harvard, use the summers to work in labs, go to med school, and begin a career in pediatric medicine.’ The parents’ letters are expressed with such certitude—it’s quite remarkable.”

Parents today plan each and every activity for their kids from the day they’re born. That continues into the college experience where parents track their kids on cell phones, facebook and skype making sure they’re busy all the time. The average Harvard undergraduate’s life is a string of never-ending “good things” designed to acheive a goal the student didn’t set for themselves.

We welcome your comments here at Ingenial. Things are a bit dead without your voice. Use the box below to give us a simple thumbs up or down and to sound off about this topic.

Read the lengthy article at Harvard Mag

An excellent dissection of what’s wrong with TED and in a general view, what’s wrong with the lecture-focused educational system. Some of the best parts are below, but I encourage you to read the whole transcript.

This is bullsh*t.

Why should you be sitting there listening to me? To paraphrase Dan Gillmor, you know more than I do. Will Richardson should be up here instead of me. And to paraphrase Jay Rosen, you should be the people formerly known as the audience.

But right now, you’re the audience and I’m lecturing.

That’s bullsh*t.

What does this remind of us of? The classroom, of course, and the entire structure of an educational system built for the industrial age, turning out students all the same, convincing them that there is one right answer — and that answer springs from the lecturn. If they veer from it they’re wrong; they fail.

What else does this remind us of? Media, old media: one-way, one-size-fits-all. The public doesn’t decide what’s news and what’s right. The journalist-as-speaker does.

——-

So we need to move students up the education chain. They don’t always know what they need to know, but why don’t we start by finding out? Instead of giving tests to find out what they’ve learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities.

——-

We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.

Read the whole transcript.

Blows your mind to see the scale of the cells compared to each other.

View the chart.