The University of Minnesota has produced an online guide designed to assist families prevent and address disputes over estates. Who Gets Grandma’s Yellow Pie Plate offers information and resources to aid families in making tough, emotionally fraught decisions over the inheritance of personal property.

There are free articles available as well on this site, along with some quizzes to assess your estate planning preparedness.

Mediators, however, will come away disappointed. Although this excellent site offers useful material and resources, mediation was somehow omitted from a web site created to assist families prevent, reduce, and address conflicts over estate-related issues.

(Thanks to Joel Schoenmeyer, author of the Death and Taxes Blog, for the link.)

In “Why Religion Must End“, a Beliefnet interview that will surely offend almost any person of faith, controversial author Sam Harris argues that the only way to end world conflict is for people to embrace reason over religion.

What do you think? You can read reactions to Harris’s interview here.

As anyone who has attended one knows, brainstorming sessions can be productive or they can be an utter mind-numbing waste of time. To prevent an organizational brainstorming session from degenerating into “coblabberation,” experts suggest that a skilled facilitator together with a well-designed process is the best way to get the most out of brainstorming, according to a recent article from the Wall Street Journal–something which mediators know from their own experience.

(Via Boing Boing.)