Change the World 1 Grain of Rice at a Time

Free Rice is one of my favourite ever charity websites its so simple, so addictive and a great cause.  Basically it is a vocabulary game (there are now also other subjects including geography, chemistry and languages) where you get a word, four potential meanings and you have to know the right one.  For each correct answer 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program to help end hunger.  

I have decided to set a challenge.  I want all you loyal readers to play this game as much as possible (its a great way to procrasinate at work - and then bamboozle your boss with your new vocabulary when explaining why you haven't finished that project) keep track of how many grains you have donated (go to options and select 'remember my personal rice donation...') then by the 20th of December I want you each to send me a screenshot of your total rice donated - along with a picture of yourself.  I will make it my personal mission to go onto Free Rice and equal the total amount donated as my Christmas present to the world...Clearly after this my posts will get a lot more sophisticated and less accessible to the non-charitable reader :-)

Good luck and I'll post a reminder closer to the time.

Project 10 to the 100

Hippo Morph by Aizxana on Deviant Art

Google wants us to change the world and is willing to pay $10million for the best ideas.  A great example of a very simple idea that appears on the Youtube video on the competition web page and which neatly fits in with the animal theme that seems to be appearing on this blog, is the 'Hippo Roller' a rolling cannister that allows villagers (mainly in Africa) to more easily transport fresh water.

Coincidently this week we have been given a number of interesting lectures by Dr. Eyþór Ívar Jónsson of the Copenhagen Business School on techniques for idea generation and opportunity recognition.  Two particularly interesting techniques were mind mapping (FreeMind is free software for doing this, see also Imindi a social network based upon mind maps - currently in Beta) and Blue Ocean strategy.  Over the next few days I will be uploading the mind maps I have created to see if I can find an area in which there is an opportunity to change the world and then attempt to use a Blue Ocean Strategy to map the current state of affairs within that field and how they might be changed to create a new idea - hopefully to change the world...