Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Just as Amélie traipsed around like a Parisian Polyanna, we can always count on Citroën’s Gallic whimsy to liven up an auto show. The Tubik, a luxurious reinterpretation of the fabled H Van, does not disappoint.

Citroën envisions the Tubik as the group transit component of its Multicity platform, a connected transit service that integrates all modes of transit including planes, trains and automobiles. Passengers will enjoy a “lounge-style cocoon” interior that seats up to nine people in easily reconfigurable front- and rear-facing seats.

In other words, it’s the same kind of conversion van your aunt and uncle take on long drives down to Florida, but instead of crushed velvet captain’s chairs and Venetian blinds, the seats are made of felt and silk and the floor is leather.

For creature comforts, the Tubik offers both a flat screen display and a panoramic window. We sure hope those rear-facing felt seats are coated in Scotchgard, as the interior design sounds like a surefire recipe for carsickness.

The whimsy doesn’t stop in the passenger cabin. Up front, the driver is ensconced in what the designers refer to as a “cyclotron.” It’s not a particle accelerator, but it does have a gas pedal, steering wheel, seat and heads-up display. Geordi La Forge glasses are optional for passengers and driver.

Of course, it’s a hybrid. The exterior design emphasizes the dual diesel-electric drivetrain with a two-tone paintjob in pearl white and silver. Though it’s about as aerodynamic as a loaf of bread, Citroen says the Tubik has CO2 emissions on par with a full-size sedan.

The whole thing is just slightly less trippy than the Merry Pranksters’ bus, and that’s why we love it.

Images: Citroën

You may be purchasing services from people with magical talents (artists) and it’s a mistake to confuse them with vendors.

As we get more and more service oriented, it’s an easy mistake to make. You’re busy buying cleaning services or consulting or design, and sometimes the person you’re working with is a vendor, and sometimes they’re not–they’re an artist, “the talent.”

A vendor is someone who exists to sell you something. It doesn’t always matter to the vendor what’s being sold, as long as it’s being sold and paid for.

The quality of what’s being delivered is rarely impacted by the method of transaction. The turnips will still show up, the house will still get painted. You can send an RFP to a vendor, bid it out, get the lowest price, sign the contract and if you write the contract properly, will get what you ordered.

The quality of the work you get from the talent changes based on how you work with her.

That’s the key economic argument for the distinction: if you treat an artist like a vendor, you’ll often get mediocre results in return. On the other hand, if you treat a vendor like an artist, you’ll waste time and money.

Vendors happily sit in the anonymous cubes at Walmart’s headquarters, waiting for the buyer to show up and dicker with them. They willingly fill out the paperwork and spend hours discussing terms and conditions. The vendor is agnostic about what’s being sold, and is focused on volume, or at least consistency.

While the talent is also getting paid (to be in your movie, to do consulting, to coach you), she is not a vendor. She’s not playing by the same rules and is not motivated in the same way.

A key element of the distinction is that in addition to the varying output potential, vendors are easier to replace than talent is.

Target understood this when they reached out to Michael Graves to design a line of goods that sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of items. When I interviewed Michael a few years ago, he had nothing but great things to say about the way Target invited him in and gave him the ability to do his work. Threadless embraces this when they treat the designers of their t-shirts in a non-corporate way. Etsy is built on this single truth.

Most industry is built on vendor relationships, and vendors expect (and sometimes value) the impersonal nature of their relationships. This scales… until you lump in the talent.

Should you treat vendors with respect? No doubt about it. Human beings do their best work when they’re treated fairly and with enthusiasm. But when the provider is also digging deep to put something on the table that you can’t possibly write a spec for, you’re going to have to respond in kind.

A private, Chicago-based institution will be the first to put forth a deeply discounted deal on tuition via Groupon.

In an effort to bolster interest in its graduate teaching program, National Louis University will offer would-be teachers a Groupon for nearly 60% off tuition of an entry-level graduate teaching course.

The deal, set to go live Tuesday, will discount the cost for the three-credit introductory course from $2,232 to $950. The offer is open to as many as 25 buyers, who must possess an undergraduate degree to participate. Students will need to complete another 33 credits at full price to earn a graduate degree.

The deal will tip with 15 buyers and run through Wednesday, Julie Mossler, Groupon’s communications director, confirmed.

“There are all kinds of factors in the K-12 world that are really discouraging teachers and people seeking teaching degrees,” Jocelyn Zivin, vice president of marketing and communications for National Louis, told the Chicago Tribune.

The idea behind the deal, she says, is to encourage prospective teachers to “understand what the realities are, whether you are committed to this profession … and see if you have what it takes.”

The IPO-in-waiting Groupon, on the other hand, sees this new genre of deal as an experimental step in the right direction, whether it tips or not.

“This is… an opportunity for our subscribers to take the first step toward what could be a new career,” Mossler says. “National Louis joins an innovative list of merchants who were the first in their industry to experiment with collective buying power, and do it on Groupon.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, swanksalot

A Facebook security flaw – or, perhaps, a misunderstanding – lets Page admins boot the creator of the original Page from admin status, effectively hijacking the Page, Naked Security reports.

One could argue that this is working as intended: if the creator of a Facebook Page lets someone else in as admin, they have the same administrative rights as them, right? Wrong. Facebook’s FAQ clearly states that “the original creator of the Page may never be removed by other Page admins.”

Unfortunately, as visible in the video embedded below, a newly appointed page admin can remove the Page creator’s admin status, which can be very nasty in certain cases. Today, Facebook Pages are more than fun, they’re a serious part of business promotion and losing administrative access to a Page can lead to host of problems.

Is it a security flaw or simply an error in Facebook’s FAQ? According to the Register, it’s the latter. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: either way it will confuse users and cause problems, since the FAQ says one thing and the reality is very different.

We’ve asked Facebook for comment but haven’t yet heard from them.

Have you ever had a Facebook Page hijacked by another admin? Please, share your experiences in the comments.

via Naked Security

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.

Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work–they said they couldn’t afford to hire adults. It wasn’t until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they’re told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of worker who are trained to do 1925 labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they’re told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you’re capable of getting there.

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

What might the 2011 version of Orson Welles’s War of the World‘s radio broadcast look like using today’s fastest method of information-sharing?

Gerardo Buganza, the interior secretary for Veracruz state in Mexico, said it could very well be the “Twitter terrorism” caused by two people who allegedly spread false reports of gunmen attacking schools and kidnapping children. Those reports caused such panic when parents scrambled around the city to get to their children that there were dozens of car accidents and emergency phone lines were jammed.

The two people, a private school teacher and a radio presenter, now face 30 years in prison for charges under terrorism laws.

According to the Guardian, these are the most serious charges ever for inciting chaos or violence through Twitter.

Prosecutors claim one of the defendants tweeted, “My sister-in-law just called me all upset, they just kidnapped five children from the school.”

Both defendants claim that they only repeated what they saw elsewhere on the Internet.

Do you think people should be imprisoned for inciting violence or chaos using Twitter? How serious should the punishment be? (Welles received no punishment for the mass hysteria that the Halloween 1938 broadcast caused.)

While there may be a lot of them, they’re satisfied with what they’ve got, which means that they’re hard to attract.

No, the real opportunity is in reaching out to the dissatisifed, to those in search of something new.

The role of the resume has remained constant throughout its 500 years of existence — the point of the resume is to get a job.

Relative to other forms of communication, though, it hasn’t changed all that much. In fact, most of the changes have been merely cosmetic — most employers still require a one-sheet, black-and-white printed resume at interviews, regardless of the fact that we all use email and have had access to much better design options for years now. Not to mention, printing is unnecessary in the digital world we live in. At this point, even the role of cover letters in today’s job market is being scrutinized.

The proliferation of digital and social tools over the past decade has brought about the social media resume, the infographic resume and the video resume, among other creative options.

This infographic, created by RezScore, an online resume-grading tool, looks at the history of the resume.

Do you plan to change your approach to resume writing? Let us know in the comments below, and share your creative resume while you’re at it.

NASA has released its “Eyes on the Solar System” 3D environment, a free web browser-based application that lets you navigate a 3D version of the solar system. The app uses video game technology to let you control your point of view from anywhere in our solar system, speeding up time so you can see the motion of the planets, their satellites and NASA spacecraft.

We tried the Eyes on the Solar System app (download here), which first requires a download of the Unity Web Player for Mac and PC. Once you’ve done that, you can fly around beautifully produced models of all the planets, asteroids and the Sun. Or you can enter custom modules created by NASA that highlight missions such as Juno, the recently launched probe that’s currently on a five-year mission to Jupiter.

According to NASA:

“This is the first time the public has been able to see the entire solar system and our missions moving together in real time,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “It demonstrates NASA’s continued commitment to share our science with everyone.”

You can even keep tabs on the current locations of NASA spacecraft, with the help of NASA’s actual mission data. Don’t forget to click the Full Screen button for the full effect. Fantastic stuff.

Get the app here.

The Joy of Tech takes us on a grand tour of the various types of social media avatars you’ll encounter as you navigate this vast series of tubes.

Are you one who doesn’t want to use a current picture of yourself as your social media avatar? Or maybe you’ve developed a certain style of presenting yourself via an avatar that might not say exactly what you want it to say.

See if you recognize yourself among these 20 examples:

via The Joy of Tech