Archive for February 22, 2012

Just Use Code

admin / February 22, 2012 / No comments

Barcodes have a long and storied history that begins in the USA in 1948. Over 60 years later, just about any retail item is packaged with one to facilitate pricing, keep inventory, or shipping. Anybody can buy a barcode. Otherwise known as upc codes, barcodes are simply machine-readable patterns of colored lines, blocks and circles; they can both encode data within the patterns according to a set symbology and link the patterns to a separate database to store various articles of information.

Barcodes have become ubiquitous in the modern age: they are a sign of machine-friendly organization, marketing, international standardization and wordless communication. Barcodes are used on merchandise, mail, medicine, and even man. As such a symbol of institutionalization, it seems counter-intuitive at first to create something as whimsical as art out of rigid barcodes.

Nevertheless a number of artists have turned their craft to representing and interacting with barcodes. Publicly able to purchase barcodes and scanners, through apps on smart-phones and similar portable media devices, barcodes which were designed to replace human interactivity with machine efficiency, now encourage humans to play and learn with some of the uses toward which they have been turned.

Scott Blake is one artist who integrates barcodes with artwork. Some works are collages of barcodes relevant to the whole piece, such as Barcode Elvis using the barcodes of Elvis Presley’s music CDs to represent a large-scale digital portrait of the singer. The barcodes in the portrait can be scanned by a barcode reader to access Elvis’s entire discography. A Japanese company, D-Barcode, integrates images into working merchandise barcodes. In these and other ways, barcodes have become a viable user interface.

Category: Management / Tags:

Eric Schiffer: Propagating Emotions Driven Learning System Successfully

admin / February 22, 2012 / No comments

Eric Schiffer is the founder and CEO of the Trainings cape which is a corporate leadership development firm. His book called Emotionally Charged Learning that has been highly acclaimed by professionals is a book that talks about the development and learning that is required in an establishment for it to grow. No company can grow without allowing its employees an opportunity to learn and grow. In this book, it talks about the link between emotions and learning. Emotions play an important role in one’s learning journey.

In his book, Emotionally Charged Learning, Eric Schiffer talks about the various strategies and methods that an employer should adapt so that his employees learn which will give them motivation to their work. In today’s world, employees are considered as an asset; thus, employer should make sure that employees are continuously learning. It talks about the how emotion is very important for a person to learn. No matter what is the learning style of a person, emotions can highly inspire a person to learn more. His methods are somewhat easy to apply and since he has talked about the techniques of learning and given examples which are proven by his own experience, it does makes it authentic and the readers are ready to accept and apply it to their business areas.

‘Emotionally Charged Learning’ book is an asset to any entrepreneur or to a leader in an organization. Eric Schiffer has written his book in such a way that people might think that they know the learning techniques but somehow they have never thought about applying them to their business. But after reading this book, many readers will definitely be ready to apply some with their employees and their teams. His methods of leadership driven learning techniques are quite simple and easily understood. He has done a brilliant job of breaking down some difficult concepts of management and explaining them in a concise and simple manner. Anybody who is not very thorough with management terms can easily understand them and apply them to their business.

It shows that it doesn’t take long term planning and costly tools and innovations to bring success in a business. If one can learn and apply a few techniques of learning into their organization and when the employees can relate their own visions to the visions of the company, only then long-term success and growth for a company is possible.

Category: Tips / Tags: