The internet always astounds me for the richness and diversity of the resources it makes available to anyone with the time and the curiosity to discover them.

Consider my latest web find: Social Innovation Conversations. Its motto proclaims its mission: “reinventing the world together one conversation at a time”.

Described as “an open and collaborative online platform for cross-sector and multidisciplinary learning for social change”, Social Innovation Conversations was launched to achieve an ambitious and inspiring goal:

From the pandemic of AIDS, to challenges posed by climate change, to substance abuse and global poverty, our world is faced with increasingly complex and pressing social and environmental challenges. While knowledge, tools, and technologies to develop innovative solutions exist, channels are still needed to reach the people who could use and apply them to social problems.

Social Innovation Conversations’ mission is to expand the reach of important and valuable knowledge to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it by recording and sharing the spoken words of thought leaders in all sectors and disciplines and offering listeners a multi-stakeholder perspective on the world grand challenges and social issues.

Teachers and students of negotiation will want to tune in to a recent podcast: “Myths and Truths About Negotiation“, a lecture by Margaret Neale, Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The five negotiation myths that are in for busting are:

1. Making the first offer is risky
2. Perceptions about dividing the pie
3. Honesty is the best policy
4. Emotions at the negotiation table are your enemy
5. I had no choice so I said yes

There is other knowledge worth exploring at Social Innovation Conversations — as you will discover for yourself.

Alltop, a newly launched news aggregation site described by founder Guy Kawasaki as

an ‘online magazine rack’ that displays the news from the top publications and blogs

has just added eight mediation blogs. They are:

• My blogs, Mediation Channel and World Directory of ADR Blogs
• CKA Mediation & Arbitration Blog (Chris Annunziata)
• Conflict Zen (Tammy Lenski)
• Engaging Conflicts(Gini Nelson)
• Idealawg (Stephanie West Allen)
• Mediator blah…blah… (Geoff Sharp)
• Settle It Now Negotiation Blog (Vickie Pynchon)

You can see us all at http://law.alltop.com.

I feel deeply honored to have both my blogs selected for inclusion in this “best of the best”. To Guy Kawasaki, Kathryn Henkens, and Will Mayall, thank you for finding a place for mediation blogs on Alltop. And congratulations and best wishes on Alltop’s launch!

Test your ability to distinguish genuine smiles from fake ones at BBC Science. You’ll get your results when you’ve finished, plus a discussion of why most people do a bad job at spotting fake smiles.

To put your ability to read faces to a different challenge, check out “Let’s face it: test your understanding of facial expressions” from the Mediation Channel vaults.

You can also test the sex of your brain, or amuse yourself with a full array of other online psychological tests and surveys.

(Hat tip to Cognitive Daily.)

Photo credit: Sanja Gjenero.

We mediators play midwife to decision making. We patiently assist in an arduous and sometimes painful process while parties labor, struggling to make the right choices in difficult circumstances. We strive to ensure that those who weigh those choices are able to reach rational decisions based on accurate and complete information.

But just how rational are the decisions that people make, whether at the mediation table or anywhere else? How much control do any of us really exert over those choices?

A new book has some surprising answers and explains why it is that we are more susceptible than we realize to the vagaries of our own minds and vulnerable to the forces of emotions and social norms. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, written by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a visiting professor at Duke University.

As much fun as the book (and of course more interactive) is the Predictably Irrational web site. Don’t miss the Demonstrations page with cool optical illusions and games you can test yourself with.

“A Sound Mind in a Sound Body” is the theme of the latest issue of The Complete Lawyer, an online magazine covering professional development, quality of life, and career issues for attorneys published by Don Hutcheson. It explores ways to reduce stress; a look at nontraditional careers; and the link between mind and body for better quality of life.

The last issue of The Complete Lawyer introduced “The Human Factor“, a column focusing on ADR from the perspective of four attorneys who mediate - me and three talented colleagues, Stephanie West Allen of Idealawg and Brains on Purpose, Gini Nelson of Engaging Conflicts, and Victoria Pynchon of Settle It Now Negotiation Blog.

In our latest Human Factor column, the four of us describe the different paths that led us from law school to the practice of mediation.

From filmmaker Stefan Nadelman comes “Food Fight“, a stop-animation depiction of war using food as the actors:

Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

Although I’m a huge fan of animation, I have to say that viewing the film left me uneasy, as I watched the Holocaust reduced to shots of menacing pretzels blasting matzohs to smithereens, or Hiroshima rendered as a hamburger patty laying waste to rows of sushi. It was difficult not to conclude that the use of food as proxies for human beings to stage scenes of violence and death trivializes catastrophic human suffering, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth. The final scene though provokes reflection on the senseless waste of war, as toiling ants move in when the conflict ceases.

Click here to view Food Fight.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim had a wish that undoubtedly many others share: she wished for world peace. She said, “I think that the first step toward world peace is for people to meet each other”. She envisioned the use of film to create a kind of exchange program to help people around the world truly see and understand each other better.

Out of Noujaim’s wish came Pangea Day, a world-wide celebration of the things that people across the globe have in common:

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

To learn more or to find out how you can take part, visit the Pangea Day web site.

How perceptive are you? How accurately do you see the world?

With a quiz created by Jeremy Wolfe, Ph.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Visual Attention Lab and Harvard Medical School, test yourself for change blindness — the perplexing difficulty that all of us have in perceiving alterations in the things that are right in front of our eyes.

As philosopher Henri Bergson once said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

(Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for so kindly sending me the link to this story.)

Five years ago Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever published Women Don’t Ask, a book that ripped the lid off of one of negotiation’s most intractable problems: the challenges that women face in negotiating successfully. They examined the barriers — institutional, cultural, and social — that hold women back and provided strategies to help women conquer the gender divide at the negotiation table to ask for and get what they want.

Women Don’t Ask touched a responsive chord in women nationally and internationally, many of whom had encountered these barriers up close. Many women contacted the authors to thank them for writing a book that opened up their eyes to negotiation’s possibilities and to ask for help with their own negotiations. This enthusiastic response motivated Babcock and Laschever to write a second book, the recently published Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want.

I plan to post a review of this book later this week, but one thing I can tell you right now is that it may be one of the best books on negotiation I’ve ever read. What Tammy Lenski recently did for mediation marketing, Ask for It does for real women facing real-world negotiations — women who want practical, common sense advice and tools for being effective negotiators. The advice is so good though and the revelations about gender issues at the negotiation table so disturbing that men should read it, too — not just to learn better ways to negotiate but to find out how any of us can battle gender bias in negotiation.

The Ask for It web site provides support for negotiating women, everything from downloadable worksheets and information to links to online resources, including Babcock’s work helping girls learn to negotiate.

There’s even (be still my heart) a blog. Although the blog is new with just three posts so far, if “Scary Monster(.com)” and “Cut Throat Bitch“, with their gutsy commentary on negotiation and gender, are any indication of what’s to come, this is one negotiation blog you’ll want to follow.

On television, on the glossy pages of magazines, on the billboards we speed past, images fill our visual landscape.

But what effect do the images that appear in the media have on us? How do they influence our judgments, our economic choices, and our assumptions about ourselves and each other? To what extent do they hold up a mirror to cultural values about gender, race, authority, sex, or violence? How do we decode their messages to separate what’s false from what’s not? And how can we immunize ourselves against their effects?

These are questions that media critics, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, teachers, parents, and others have struggled with. But it is up to all of us to confront and examine these images for ourselves. One blog, Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing, provides images for discussion in sociology and other classes — or for anyone interested in coming face to face with the images that bombard us daily. Visitors can browse the categories of images this blog has collected, which include violence, education, gender, race/ethnicity, and many more. A word of caution — not all images are workplace safe and some may give offense.

Seeing Is Believing offers a fascinating — and at times disturbing — foray into the world of media images. Presented with minimal text, these images at once provoke and invite us to decipher their messages about society and ourselves.

A friend shared with me a link to this extraordinary slideshow of photos of earth taken by astronaut Sunita Williams. In the images Williams captured you can see the retreat of day as night moves silently across a continent, or the stars shining as cities sleep.

These images cast a spell. View it in full screen to feel the full effect of their magic.

| View | Upload your own

The Complete Lawyer — an online magazine covering professional development, quality of life, and career issues for attorneys published by Don Hutcheson — has added an ADR column, “The Human Factor“.

Written by me and three smart, savvy women I am honored to call my friends — Stephanie West Allen of Idealawg and Brains on Purpose, Gini Nelson of Engaging Conflicts, and Victoria Pynchon of Settle It Now Negotiation Blog — “The Human Factor” seeks to make ADR relevant to the work of lawyers today. The inspiration for the title of our column comes from pioneering legal reformer Dean Roscoe Pound, whose work presaged the rise of the alternative dispute resolution movement:

A century ago, Dean Roscoe Pound exhorted the legal profession to transform its institutions of justice and adjust its principles “to the human conditions they are to govern,” “putting the human factor in the central place.”

Located in different parts of the U.S., each of us offers a unique way of looking at ADR and its connection to law and justice, in particular what that connection means for the human factor — the individuals whose lives the law affects. In our first column, we introduce ourselves to readers and let them know what to expect from future issues.

Besides “The Human Factor”, there’s plenty more worth reading at the latest issue of The Complete Lawyer, which focuses on the question, “What Do Women Lawyers Really Want?” (I’m one, and I’m still not sure myself.) Find out the answers by visiting The Complete Lawyer now.

They say you should believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.

There’s nothing like an optical illusion to remind us of the truth of that aphorism. At Cognitive Daily you’ll find not only a great optical illusion but also an explanation of why we see what we see.

In addition, there’s a link to Arthur Shapiro’s Illusions and Demonstrations for Visual Research, the source for this particular bit of visual trickery, along with several others that delightfully fool the senses.

And for still more, visit a site I recently discovered, Akiyoshi’s Illusion Pages — which actually come with a health advisory.

Online misunderstandings flare up easily, but there’s a way to prevent them.

For a crash course on internet etiquette, view “How To Behave On An Internet Forum“, created in old-school-style, 8-bit animation.

(Spotted on Boing Boing.)

The latest edition of the International Dispute Negotiation (IDN) podcast, a series of discussions on hot topics in cross-border commercial conflict resolution, is now available for listening or downloading.

In this episode Michael McIlwrath, Senior Counsel, Litigation for GE Infrastructure - Oil & Gas, and Kathleen Bryan, President of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution (CPR), interview Lord Harry Woolf of Barnes, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Royal Courts of Justice, U.K.

Lord Woolf spearheaded judicial reform in England’s civil justice system, his goal to make justice more accessible to all. His report, Access to Justice (1996), laid the groundwork for the widespread acceptance of mediation and other forms of ADR in England. In the interview, Lord Woolf describes the principles that informed the judicial reform movement and also discusses his views on mediation (”I wanted the litigants to be in control, not the lawyers”).

From the interview:

[We] tried to identify what was it that the litigation system should do. And the first one was to resolve disputes. And the second one was to do so justly.

If you seek intelligent discussion and thoughtful analysis of the issues most relevant to lawyers in international practice and in particular to dispute resolution professionals everywhere, look no further than the International Dispute Resolution podcast series.