Blog
Addressing Unemployment with Social Innovation
Below you can see two shocking statistics about (un)employment, as well as youth.
The world needs to create more than 500 million new jobs by 2020 to provide career opportunities for the currently unemployed; as well as young people who will be joining the workforce.
Young and jobless in numbers: 75 million or 12.6% of young people are unemployed worldwide; 3x more likely to be jobless; 7.5 million are not in education or training; Youth unemployment is highest in North Africa (27.9%) and lowest in East Asia (9%).
Source: ILO 2012
This means that a lot of action and commitment is needed to address this ticking time bomb.… more
Generalists Unite!
By their very nature generalists tend not to congregate. Our interests are so many and so varied that it’s almost counter-intuitive to try to gather us around a common theme. But it is indeed possible and this site will prove it.
When I started this blog, Creative Generalist, in April 2002 I did so really just to bookmark websites and quotes that I found to be personally interesting. It was just my own solo link list, and having just quit my job and moved to Montreal (on a whim) I had a little free time to wander around – literally and digitally – and post such dispatches.… more
The Virtual Choir
A truly impressive project. Eric Whitacre and his forming of a choir around hundreds and then thousands of virtual voices. Via TED.… more
Cuddles Proxy
My friend Aron is up to some mischief with his latest project: My After Sex Buddy doll. Be sure to check out the video.… more
Pause
Well, it’s certainly been a while since my last post. Yikes.
I used to hold to a pretty steady and disciplined regimen of about three posts a week – even long after that new blog smell faded away. But I’ve slowed over the last year – obviously – for, I suppose, a variety of fairly typical reasons: blog fatigue, Twitter distraction (@shardy12), info overload, very busy and engaging day job, little time to tap out anything worth reading (like now), and even some (happy) recognition that the generalist mantra which I felt was so under-represented several years ago is alive, well, and thriving widely these days.… more
Boundary Matrix
How to overcome the challenges inherent to cross-disciplinary collaboration: Creating a boundary matrix.
Work in the Conceptual Age
The three paragraphs on this page at gigaom offer a variety of links leading to some great posts touching on various aspects of generalism and work. As the intro lines state: “‘Big-picture thinking and inventiveness are going to be the key to professional success in a new “conceptual age.’ In a series of posts over at WebWorkerDaily, Imran Ali has been musing on the type of work that we might be doing in the future, the skills that will be required, and the type of teams we might be working in.” (Hat tip to augustdiva!)
Separate but related – work in the conceptual age – is this TED Talk by Dan Pink.… more
The Cove
The Cove. It’s a remarkably restrained film in that most of it describes the teamwork, planning, and logistics involved with covertly documenting one of the grisliest activities on earth: Japan’s slaughter of dolphins. Not much of the brutal footage is actually shown, and it’s obvious that the producers spared us the especially gory bits, but what is seen quite vividly shows the ugliest and cruelest of what humanity can unleash upon another sentient, self-aware mammal.
The Cove centres on an Oceans 11 type team of photographers, ex-military, free divers, props designers, and others assembled by Director Louie Psihoyos and OPS (Oceanic Preservation Society) and their efforts to expose the brutal round-up of dolphins each year in a tiny cove in Taiji, Japan.… more
