This is a little strange: Google just launched a suite of wedding planning “tools” called Google for Weddings. It’s essentially a page explaining how to use free Google tools like Sites (web site creation), Picnik (image editing), Docs (planning), and Picasa (image sharing) to plan your big day, linking to various site and document templates designed with that goal in mind. [Google Weddings]

If you are on Twitter for fun and tweet only to connect with your friends, please skip this.

Let’s say you want to find out the best time to write a tweet such that it gets read by a maximum number of your followers on Twitter who in-turn may decide to retweet it to further help spread the word?

There are two approaches to this problem. For instance, you may find the time period when your followers are least active on Twitter and avoid tweeting during that time. This increases the likelihood of them noticing your tweets.

Timely is however a more innovative solution to finding the perfect time for tweeting. The app analyzes your last 200 tweets and then shortlists the ones that have been retweeted. The more retweets you get in a particular time bucket, the more you should try to tweet in that bucket.

Just enter your Twitter handle in the Timely box to find your perfect time.

Also, there can’t be a standard time that works for all Twitter accounts because it mostly depends on your followers as well as their location. If you are based in U.S. but a majority of your followers are in India, your tweets will probably perform better if you tweet according to the Indian time zone.

Related: Twitter Guide

‘ + google_ads[i].line1 + ‘‘ + google_ads[i].visible_url + ‘
‘ + google_ads[i].line2 + ‘ ‘ + google_ads[i].line3 + ‘ ‘; if (i   ‘; } u = ‘

Ads by Google ‘ + u + ‘

‘; } google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length; document.write(u); return; } google_ad_client=’pub-3152670624293746′;google_ad_output = ‘js’;google_ad_type = ‘text’;google_feedback = ‘on’;google_language = ‘en’;google_encoding = ‘utf8′; google_max_num_ads = ’2′; google_ad_channel=’4355338828′;google_skip=google_adnum;

Reposted from Labnol.org Timely is a great service for tweeting to your followers.

Awhile back I wrote a post about how to run a workshop, in the general sense. I thought that I would write out the steps for a concepting workshop in particular. Concepting workshops are ones that we do a lot at Adaptive Path. They are great for when you need to generate a lot of ideas around an issue in a short amount of time. They can be done with large or small groups, with designers, developers, and managers.

1. Create the agenda for the day. Determine what it is you will be sketching and what your goal is for the end of the session. For a full day workshop, say from 10-4, plan on 20 minutes of sketching, then 30-40 minutes to discuss what was created. You might have four sketching heats in a day, each focused on a different topic or nuance of the issue. Be sure to include a hour for lunch and a break in the morning and afternoon, as people do get tired.

2. Gather your materials. You are going to need lots of Sharpies or markers, drafting dots or tape to hang the sketches up, sticky notes, and the paper to draw on. Give participants options with different colors and sizes of markers and different color sticky notes.

3. Use a Sketch Sheet. I’ve found that having stacks of Sketch Sheets (PDF: 12 KB) work really well. They are a half-sheets of paper, so they aren’t as intimidating as full sheets. They include room for the sketch as well as a description (in words) of what it does and what it’s like. This is very helpful since sometimes it’s hard to tell what is going on in a quick sketch. You can certainly use blank paper for sketching too. Just be sure to always have participants title their sketches. It helps to focus the sketch and remember it later.

4. Capture the discussion on the board with the stickies. After everyone sketches, have them paste their sketches up on the wall. As a group go through and talk about them. Capture the discussion on sticky notes as you talk. You’ll want to include things like descriptions for how the sketch works and additional ideas or concerns that are raised in the discussion.

5. Review and refine after the workshop. Once the workshop is over, the real work for you begins. You’ll want to review all of the sketches and refine or redraw the most promising. Duplicate ideas can be redrawn into a single representation. You might also want to work in ideas from the conversation to strengthen the sketch.

6. Create a concept book. Not all of the sketches you produce in the workshop will make it into your design. But you don’t want to lose the good ideas that were generated. Document all the sketches that were created in a concept book. Scan in the sketches and then add annotations to explain what is happening. This provides a great resource that you can refer to later.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Methods, Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Activity helps protect the brain from the strains of aging. Several different forms of mental exertion seem to provide a bit of reserve that helps hold off the forgetfulness that frequently appears in the elderly, and may limit the impact of age-related dementia. But a study released by PNAS today suggests that it’s not just mental activity; physical exercise helps protect the brains of the elderly as well, and can even reverse some of the indications of aging.

The study involved a cohort of 120 older adults who were randomized into two groups: one that went on a program of three moderate-intensity aerobic workouts a week, and a second that spent an equal time doing stretching and toning exercises. Obviously, this sort of thing is difficult to do a double-blind study with—the participants presumably are aware of what their bodies are doing—but the researchers apparently kept themselves blinded to who did what when performing their analysis. MRI and memory tests were performed at the start, six months in, and when the program wrapped up after a year.

Over the course of the year, the control group that performed stretching exercises saw a small, 1.4 percent decline in the volume of the hippocampus, a brain region associated with memory. The exercising elderly, in contrast, saw the volume increase by a bit over two percent. The changes were specific to the anterior end of this structure, and weren’t apparent in other areas of the brain, like the thalamus. The magnitude of the volume changes also correlated with the improvements in fitness, as measured by the change in VO₂max. Exercisers also had higher levels of a brain growth factor called BDNF at the end of the year.

The good news for stretchers is that their volume loss didn’t seem to cause problems for spatial memory; both the experimental and control groups saw their performance on the memory test improve over the course of the year. Within the group doing aerobic exercise, memory test performance and hippocampal volume changes did correlate, but given the results for those doing non-aerobic exercise, it’s tough to ascribe too much importance to this finding.

The authors point out that exercise is a pretty cheap and easy-to-implement intervention, and we’ve got a growing population of people who could benefit from it. But they don’t even discuss the possible parallels between this finding and those that suggest that mental activity can protect against the impact of aging. It’s possible that the walking exercises pushed the spatial memory system more than the stretching did. Or, exercise may have simply increased the blood flow to the brain more generally, and acted a bit like neural activity in that regard. It would be nice to see these addressed in a future publication.

PNAS, 2011. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1015950108  (About DOIs).