I wasn't paying attention last Friday, but apparently, I have now been posting here for 1 year.

Here's my first post, from one year ago.

I've had 309 posts for the year.  A lot more productive than I thought I would be when I began!

Good article comparing and contrasting the first Integral (and eastern) guy, with the mod western guy.

Saw this article at the Times.

This article is about change at the icecaps, that they are melting, and will continue to melt.  The "point of no return" is almost upon us. 

There is still debate on whether this all man-made, or whether some of the effect is a warming that occurs naturally.

At any rate, things are different now at the polar icecaps, than they have been, and will be more different in the near future.

Thanks to a comment left on this blog recently, I was introduced to "Be the Change" or "Memestream" - (I actually prefer Be The Change, but eh, whatever works.)

I mentioned before the Seva Cafe, and this blog has at least a couple of good posts on it.

He of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle fame.

The interview is conducted in Reason magazine, and I find it interesting, as he is one of my favorite authors.

Worth taking a look at.

Make sure to take the tour.  It's pretty cool-looking.

I'm hoping someone who reads this blog can provide me with some education.

How does this compare, with some of the other photo-editing tools out there?

Is it like Picasa?  It's not really a competition for Photoshop.

So why the $500 price?

Very heartwarming story.  It would be amazing if something like this could be duplicated in the U.S.

Saw this article from Slashdot, on the comparison between United States and other countries in the penetration, bandwidth, and cost, of internet access.

Very revealing.  And again, quite the lesson in civics, like others I've had on this site.  Once again the hand-in-glove working of corporations buying laws and politicians to write laws, indifferent to the effects of these to the U.S. well-being.

So what's the answer?

The people who buy the most TV ads buy money.
The politicians who are friendliest to businesses get the most money.
The TV channels for the most part are extensions of corporations, and have similar interests to most other corporations. (This is a simplification, of course, but the point is valid).
These politicians allow lobbyists to either have a big say, or write themselves, laws benefitting corporations for the short-term.


And the cycle continues.

Saw this article on communities of practice, utilizing the internet. 

This whole space is in flux, as "communites of practice - maybe one could say "communities of interest", as this is more accurate - these tools keep changing, and getting better.

From Yahoo Groups, to Google Groups, to MySpace, to blog cross-fertilization, to mega-blogs utilizing Scoop software, to newer tools such as Multiply or Project Comet.

As a sideline - am I the only who is completely annoyed by Yahoo Groups?  And who also isn't very excited by the typical online forum space?  (Such as what is available at Integral Naked or Integral Review)

Stylistically, I don't know - these just don't motivate me.  I much prefer the blog back-and-forth, combined with RSS.

What are other people's favorite online community software/environments?

At least for me. 

How to use GMAIL as CRM. 

Tip to Lifehack, as per usual!

First this one at Indistinct Union. 

It's pretty hard to bring a holistic and spiritually informed view to subjects like "outsourceing", but CJ has a go of it.

Second, the Human Bean points me to the Ken Wilber's Towards A Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies.

What I like about this article are the diagrams.  But I really wish that Wilber would get better at sourcing some of the major work that has been done in this area.  

For example, as "new-agey" as it may be, there's quite a lot of work on subtle energies done by Barbara Brennan.  As a former NASA physicist, she is very aware of the the empirical methodology as well.

Please feel free to correct me, but at this moment I can't think of anytime Wilber has referenced this.

(By the by, does Wilber employ a stable of research assistants?  Even if he would "outsource" this to India, I would think the comprehensive nature of "The Theory of Everything" would require fact-checkers and research assistants...)

Last week I pointed out how a complete "physical" component of integral practice had 3 parts - cardio, resistance training, and stretching. 



Thinking about it, in my experience, this is true for meditative practice as well.

A complete meditative practice involves meditation on:

a. Awareness practice
b. Heart practice
c. The orientation and feedback with community/teacher to the Right View. (This part is what teachers/gurus are for.)

Without one of the three above, realization is missing either depth, understanding, or intimate connection.

As most people who read here know - and if you don't, here's the news - Integral Life Practice Starter Kit is accepted pre-orders.

In my experience at I-Wet, I would heartily recommend:

a. Big Mind process.
b. 3-2-1 Shadow process.

Less interesting to me is the cognitive theoretical framework, but this part was well done.  My lack of interest is based on the fact I know quite a lot about this.

I think that the physical component, however, left a lot to be desired.

An integrated physical practice includes -

cardio
resistance training
breath and stretch work.

I personally - run, work out with weights, and do yoga, for the above.

The physical component seemed a step down for what I already do. 

Any other thoughts on this?

Link here.

In the e-learning space, this is a big announcement.  Also, in terms of online integral, I think this is a big announcement as well, for the following reasons.

These systems have developed some of the better technology engines for individual learning paths functionality, as well as competency functionality.  The majors pretty much write the specifications that technically how competencies and assessments are defined and generated. 

How does this relate to integral? As I've been saying on this blog, PRACTICE is the bridge between learning and proficency/competency.  While the education world focuses on learning, and (usually) an evaluation of an individual's learning, the business world's focus on learning is a means to an end - the real goal is an assessment of a person's proficiencies and competencies, in order to have the right person in the right job.

The same type of concept is applicable to integral modules.  You learn the module, you practice, you gather feedback (from the environment, from others), you adjust, you practice again.

This is also the best way to acquire honest and authentic feedback from the environment, is by using some of the assessment modalities to truly and honest gather feedback from self, family, teachers, gurus, and peers, without all the dependence relying on ONE guru as the source of all wisdom. 

a. You define the role.
b. You identify the competencies, proficiencies, skills identified with that role.
c. You create the assessments that measure the skillset. 
d. You generate questionnaires and review in a 360 manner that assures a "ballpark estimate" of proficiency. Anything from EEG to measure meditative depth, to teacher reviews, to the depth of mental understanding of "Non-duality", to the level of psychological non-reactivity to the second-order seeming separations of body, mind, world.
e. Based on the assessments - gaps in the module are identified, with hopefully proscriptive practices, and adjustments in practice engaged.

Click here for details. 

Now, do I really WANT a video I-Pod?  Do I need to be running into poles when I am walking?

I've been using RSS feeds a lot at Integral Practice, as well as personally.  If you look around at the side columns, I bring in four RSS feeds from the front page, as well as a couple of others in sub-sections. 

Since I update the "Integral Blogs" infrequently, as well as keep a list myself, I've been looking for the best manner in which to display new feeds for blogs, publicly, for sharing.

In our particular small corner of the universe, there have been a few different solutions to this challenge.

Probably the best web solution for this is Bloglines - but they don't have much of a PUBLIC share, of one's own feed interests. - at least that I am aware of. (And now of course we have the Google Reader, which when integrated with the home page, and the google blog, should be very good.

Coolmel's solution is KosmicBlogger.  If you scroll down the right column, and get to the "blogroll", you find a list of blogs, that if they have been updated recently, will have a [new stuff] entry beside it. Then you can click on what new stuff interests you, and proceed from there.  (Or ignore stuff you aren't interested in.)

On this site, I use Blogdigger for the Integral Voices In The Moment feed.  Not a bad solution, and then your own personal syndication can be made public - as a feed, or simply by loading this page.

Michael at Integral Visioning uses a one page solution, where all the articles from various feeds are separated by the author. (Although some of the feeds aren't working there...)

Why am I bringing this up?  Well, because recently, I was looking at referral sites, and I followed a referral back to the source. 

And I found DatingGod's Kinja feedlist. 

I have been reading Katherine's DatingGod blog for awhile now, but I didn't know about her Kinja feedlist.

I would have to say that the organization of the feeds, and the look, is probably one of the "better" public ways to organize feeds.

Does anyone else know of good ways to publicly organize feeds?  Of the 4 feed organizers I have listed, do you have a preference?

Link here

Come check it out, in the comfort of the LJ's Martini Bar and Grill at the Metreon.

 

I was looking at the numbers my bloghost was providing, and I saw some strange things. I'm trying to find out how this works from my bloghost, but I'm also putting this out there, in case someone may have a clue -

Blogware (this weblog tool) is a platform that tracks RSS feeds, one of which is Newsgator - also now including FeedDemon - both are ways of viewings RSS posts.

In looking at the stats that Blogware is providing, I'm getting some awfully insane numbers:

For the month of September, so far, I show 22400 Newsgator/FeedDemon hits.  And for September 20th, as an example, I had over 800 hits from Newsgator alone.

If anyone uses Newsgator - do you know how it is used?  Do you know in what possible scenario one gets "automatic" or script-based hits via a Newsgator or FeedDemon site?  The numbers I am getting for September total are something like 36,000 xml requests (4 times the amount of html requests), and this is probably 80 to 90 percent too large. 

Who and what utilizes automated newgator/feedDemon scripts?

Thanks in advance.

I'm still attempting to digest Integral Methodological Pluralism. 

I do notice a curious thing about one of the more complete diagrams.

There are three different poles, or opposites here -

the I/WE
the Interior/Exterior
The Subjective/Objective (IN the circle or  OUT of the circle).  This would clearly be better a three-dimesional image, I think.

Forgive me for being stupid, but does it seem to anyone else that the Interior/Exterior shades over a bit into the Subjective/Objective?

In the Integral Spirituality paper, K.W.  talks about the simple experience of the "I". 

The "objective" study of the Interior I, Wilber relates to structuralism.

However, from the Wikipedia, here's a quote about structuralism.

This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word).

The article goes on to describe structuralism in anthropology - which is definitely a "we" mode of investigation - so this is definitely out.

At any rate, it doesn't seem to me that the modes of investigation - on of the 8 possibilities of the three poles - are as clear-cut.

However, structuralism in philosophy does seem to be what Wilber is speaking of:

Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way that human behavior is determined by various structures

At any rate, I'm interested in hearing others' thoughts.  Is there really some sort of sharp dividing line between Interior-Exterior, and Objective-Subjective?

The always interesting Inner-net points us to a collection of some of the absurd and unequal facts about the world. 

Good, although rather long, article on Web 2.0