I just found a neat little URL you can use to check whether or not your airport has one of those backscatter scanners and, if it does, if it is in use. I can’t vouch for its veracity, but it’s a pretty cool idea.

Thanks, Mental Floss, for the pointer.

How often do you find the bandwidth falling short of your audience’s needs at a large ballroom or convention center? Yeah, me too. The New York Times has an interesting article explaining why this is the current state of affairs (which the NYT seems to think is mainly a problem at tech conferences, but I’d say it’s an equal-opportunity annoyer — or will be in the very near future). Though other things exacerbate the problems, it mainly boils down to:

“Wi-Fi is meant for homes and other small spaces with more modest Internet demands, says Ernie Mariette, founder of Mariette Systems, which installs conference Wi-Fi. ‘You’re asking a technology to operate beyond its capability.’”

This Rapiscan Santa and reindeer card just made me burst out laughing:

By Eric Mueller, via BoingBoing (with thanks to T for sending me the link!).

I read an interesting article in The Boston Globe today about the intelligence of groups — which, it turns out, has nothing to do with the average intelligence of the group’s members or how smart the smartest person in the group is. Instead, the research so far shows

A group’s motivation, satisfaction, and unity were unimportant. Instead, the researchers found that when a group had a high level of collective intelligence, the members tended to score well on a test that measured how good they were at reading other people’s emotions. They also found that groups with overbearing leaders who were reluctant to cede the floor and let the others talk did worse than those in which participation was better distributed and people took turns speaking. And they also found that the proportion of women in the group was a predictor of collective intelligence — a factor they believe was likely influenced by women’s generally superior social sensitivity.

I’d eat up this type of research if I planned teambuilding, sales, or other meetings that hope to result in more successful teams or solidify a working group into an intelligent community. But even if your meeting’s goals are simply to disseminate information, I’d pay attention to the part about having one person dominate the discussion instead of inviting more participation. That may be fine for getting the word out about something, but if you want them to be able to do something with the information later as a professional group, you may want to rethink using a lecture format. Just saying…

Brought to you courtesy of the New York Times: apps to make parking, flight-tracking, airport navigation, and other aspects of travel a little easier.

I’m not sure how I feel about Planely, a service I recently read about on TechCrunch that lets people enter their flights into Facebook to find out who else will be on their plane or at their departure or arrival airport at the same time. It sounds like a great application for meetings on one hand (and the item says Le Web 2010 used it) because it could enable more connections and conversations from the (literal) get-go. On the other hand, I have some hesitation around using anything that announces I’m not home, so c’mon down, robbers and thieves.

I don’t know — do you think something like this could catch on?

Love this story about the candy sales (dis?)incentive trip: Since they didn’t make their numbers, they got to go to Fargo, N.D., instead of Honolulu.

Still, they got to tour two North Dakota wineries (who knew there were wineries in N.D.? I didn’t) and go for sleigh rides, tobogganing, and sip some hot toddies, so what’s to complain about? And maybe that $5-a-plate spaghetti dinner at the VFW wasn’t exactly a luau, but still, they got to watch “Fargo” in Fargo, which had to be fun in a surreal sort of way.

If you’re a meeting professional who’s working on your own, you might want to check out what I think is a pretty cool community for solopreneurs. It’s for independents in all walks of life, not just meetings, but there’s a wealth of information and opportunities to learn from each other that I think would be really useful.

Whether or not you want to join up, you might want to take part in the The Solopreneur Life 2010 End-of-Year Survey. I’m curious to see what the current state of the solopreneur state is, seeing as I was a solopreneur back before that term was coined.

Yep, the US News and World Report made it official when it included meeting planning among its list of hot jobs for 2011.

The meeting planning section admits that the job entails a lot of stress and physical and mental work, it also says, “Employment of meeting and convention planners, who hold 56,600 jobs nationwide in 2008, is expected to grow faster than the average for all professions over the next decade or so. The Labor Department projects that the number of meeting planner jobs will jump 16 percent, thanks to the growing importance of meetings to increasingly global companies.”