Wild and Wacky Friday: All you need is music ....

British psychologist Catriona Morrison states "Music is a powerful cue for storing and retrieving data ... you can use music to process new information more deeply. You can train yourself by associating what you want to remember - your new PIN for example - with a particular piece of music."

In her most recent project, Morrison uses the works of the Beatles to explore this music-memory link. She allows people to share the recollections sparked by the mention of particular album, song or band memory.

Check it out: http://www.magicalmemorytour.com/

Take the Rework out of Reviews

Use Review Spice to get detailed feedback on storyboards, graphics, narration scripts, and screen text.

You no longer have to take handwritten notes, faxes, multiple emails, and reviewer edited PowerPoints and consolidate them into one cohesive set of changes. Instead, you can have one report with all feedback consolidated for each slide. You can print the report, or if you have a Print to PDF product you can save it to your project files.

Check it out: http://www.reviewspice.com/default.html

Wolfram Alpha: A new kind of search engine

There's a new kid on the block worth checking out. "WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

Ok - let's try something simple. Type in today's date or the name of your town and state. Pretty interesting. There's a tiny link at the bottom of the page that lets you save your query as a PDF file. If you use Vista, you can download a gadget for your desktop.

Thanks to Anne for bringing this to my attention!!!

Check it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wolframalpha19-2009may19,0,5810966.story

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Play Stock Game

StockNewsGame presents a fun new way to learn fundamental financial analysis principles on stock. Play the stock game without real money!

Check it out: http://www.stocknewsgame.com/

Financial Analysis links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis
http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:overview:fundamental_analysis
http://www.investopedia.com/university/fundamentalanalysis/

Jakob Nielsen Critiques Twitter

Continuing my investigation on using Twitter ... “Twitter lets people know what’s going on about things they care about instantly, as it happens,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and co-founder. “In the best cases, Twitter makes people smarter and faster and more efficient.”

Check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/technology/internet/14twitter.html?_r=1

Not everyone is hearts and flowers over Twitter. Web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen discusses the hazards and limitations of tweeting.

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_037210.htm