Think you're smart?

Concidering the 'interview puzzle' book I introduce below, there's a website that will frustrate, but at the same time enlighten here.

Please give it a go. It's fun, at the same time ARRRRRR!

Click here.

I just found one of my favorite old book on requitment intervewing.

For years, high-techs have been posing riddles and logic puzzles like these in their notoriously grueling job interviews.

Now 'puzzle interviews' have become a hot new trend in hiring.

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, employers are using tough and tricky questions to gauge job candidate's intelligence, imagination, and problem-solving ability -- qualities needed to survive in today's hyperinnovative, globally intermixing, world economy.

For the first time, author William Poundstone discuses the toughest questions used at the likes of Microsoft and other Fortune 500 companies.

He traces the rise and controversial fall of employer-mandated IQ tests, the peculiar obsessions of Bill Gates (who plays jigsaw puzzles as a competitive sport), the ic mind games of Wall Street (which reportedly led one job seeker to smash a forty-third-story window), and the bizarre excesses of today's hiring managers (who may start off your interview with a box of Lego or a game of virtual Russian roulette).

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? is an indispensable book for anyone in a hard-edge business. Managers seeking the most talented employees will learn to incorporate puzzle interviews in their search for the top candidates. And anyone who has ever dreamed of going up against the best minds in business may discover that these puzzles are simply a lot of fun. Why are beer cans tapered on the end, anyway?

Click here for a good review of the book.

Or here to jump to amazon.

External Thought Leaders can inspire Breakthrough Innovation

It is quite funny when one considers this:

There's much muse at the mo' with regard's failed business (or at least disapointing results when it comes to innovation). But some bright help is at hand: Using thought leaders as inspration and insight for the new!

InnovationPoint's managing partners Soren Kaplan and Derrick Palmer, give up some pithy insighter.

They say:

'....efforts often deliver disappointingly short-term ideas and fail to identify longer-term growth platforms. An organization’s inwardly-focused and historically-biased view of the world limits its capacity for “strategic imagination”. Bringing in fresh, future-oriented perspectives from outside the organization is an essential catalyst for innovative, “stretch thinking”. External “Thought Leaders” from a variety of domains can be brought into the innovation process to help a team develop “Industry Foresight” – and to identify non-obvious opportunities. This brief paper describes how a non-traditional “Thought Leader Panel” approach inspires new levels of strategic thinking....'

Well, for many people I meet in the day-to-day business world, this is a stange, even funny concept - alian even.

Because if you ask them what they think here, and then ask them who they think is their industrys (and beyond) thought leaders are, 8 out of 10 give a quite distant look.

So, for even the converted anyway, please click here for full insight paper.

New Mission to Mars: First Extraterestrial Automated Research Airplane.

ARES Principal Insestigator, Dr. Joel S. Levine, discusses the ARES Mars Mission at TEDxNASA. The ARES Team is actively working toward being selected as the NASA's next Mars Scout Mission, enabling it to fly its high-value science payload on the first aircraft to soar over another planet. Mars Scout Missions are designed to be innovative, science-focused, Principal Investigator-led missions that can accomplish high priority science investigations and address recent discoveries. Mars Scout Missions are competitively selected by the Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters. Click Here to view his presentation.

VR and Haptics

for Rehabilitation

A combined device aims to help patients recover from a stroke or injury.

SenseGraphics demonstrates Curictus.

At the IEEE's Virtual Reality 2010 conference in Waltham, MA USA this week, researchers and companies are demonstrating technologies that combine virtual reality and haptics.

Some of these technologies are designed for medical rehabilitation. For example, a device made by Swedish company Curictus combines a haptic stylus from SensAble called the Phantom Omni with a pair of virtual reality glasses and monitor. The stylus moves freely on the mount, but becomes more or less resistant depending on the user's onscreen actions. In a demo at the conference, I donned 3-D glasses and used the stylus to push virtual blocks around. The stylus pushed back when one block was pushed into another as it would in the real world. Pressing a button on the device and rotating a block around produced the centripetal force, which I felt through the stylus.

This type of set-up can be used for rehabilitation. Turning exercises into a computerized game encourages patients to complete their exercises and keeps precise records of their performance, says Tommy Forsell at SenseGraphics, a company that provides open-source software for the combined device.

In another game, I used the stylus as a hammer to hit 3-D pop-up images. This game is designed to measure stroke patients' response times and the accuracy of their actions.

The technology from SenseGraphics and SensAble has also been used to train doctors and dentists, and by veterinary students at the Royal Veterinary College in London to learn how to treat pregnant cows, says Forsell.

The prototype is currently being used in several rehabilitation centers in Sweden. See an older version of the device in action here.

Genetic Diseases Already Dropping.

Some of mankind's most devastating inherited diseases appear to be declining, and a few have nearly disappeared, because more people are using genetic testing to decide whether to have children. Births of babies with cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs and other less familiar disorders seem to have dropped since testing came into wider use. More women are being tested as part of routine prenatal care, and many end pregnancies when diseases are found. One study in California found that prenatal screening reduced by half the number of babies born with the severest form of cystic fibrosis because many parents chose abortion. This decline is remarkable because it has happened so soon after genetic testing became available -- well before genetic engineering is capable of producing cures...... Read more

Acute insight into rapidly developing consumer trends.

One of my hot favorite sites at the moment is tendwatching.com. They overview their website like this:

'trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated trend firm, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. For the latest and greatest, we rely on our network of hundreds of spotters in more than 120 countries worldwide. Our trend findings help marketers, CEOs, researchers, and anyone else interested in the future of business and consumerism, to dream up new goods, services and experiences for (or even better, with) their customers. Many of these findings are aggregated in a free monthly Trend Briefing, which is sent to 160,000+ business professionals in more than 180 countries.'

Click here to see their site.