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How to encourage big ideas. Scientists are much more likely to produce innovative research when using long-term grants that allow them exceptional freedom in the lab, according to a new study co-written by MIT economists. The work shows that biologists whose funding encourages them to take risks and tolerates initial research failures wind up producing about twice as many highly influential papers as some peers whose funding is dependent upon meeting closely defined, short-term research targets. “If you want people to branch out in new directions, then it’s important to provide for their long-term horizons, to give them time to experiment and potentially fail,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an author of the study. “The researcher has to believe that short-term failure will not be punished.” Measuring creativity The researchers identified 73 life scientists given HHMI support in three years — 1993, 1994, and 1995 — and tracked their work through 2006.

Psychology 1

Creativity-tools. Topology. Psychology 2. Creative class. The Creative Class is a posited socioeconomic class identified by American economist and social scientist Richard Florida, a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. According to Florida, the Creative Class are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the United States. Overview[edit] Florida describes the Creative Class as comprising 40 million workers (about 30 percent of the U.S. workforce). He breaks the class into two broad sections, derived from Standard Occupational Classification System codes: Super-Creative Core: This group comprises about 12 percent of all U.S. jobs.

It includes a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, computer programming, research), with arts, design, and media workers forming a small subset. Florida considers those belonging to this group to “fully engage in the creative process” (2002, p. 69). Background[edit] See also[edit] The Most Destructive Creativity Myths. Photography: quinn.anya You should be able to spot a creative type from a mile away.

In Mad Men, the AMC show set in a 1960s advertising agency, that’s not so easy. Both the executives and the creative staff wear suits. Both chain smoke as though it were going out of fashion. Here are several more. Brainstorming is the Best Way to Generate New Ideas Whenever a firm is looking for a new direction, a new product or a solution to an aching problem, the temptation is often to call together a bunch of heavy-thinkers for a brainstorming session. In fact, creativity just doesn’t work like that. And instilling a sense of competition makes the situation even worse. In general, the best ideas come from people who are passionate about their work, and allowed to mull them over in private.

Deadlines Generate Creativity And with plenty of time too. Teresa Amabile, who runs the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and whose research program specializes in creativity, agrees. Non-profit Ideas. Site Home : Non-Profit As a companion to my pages on early retirement, this document presents some ideas for useful and fun things to do with one's money. Simple: Donate money to Wikipedia If you're too lazy to start a new non-profit organization, donate money to Wikimedia Foundation, the folks who publish Wikipedia. In 2007, Wikipedia was the ninth most popular Web site in the world and probably accounts for a significant portion of the world's self-education. What's the budget for this cornucopia of knowledge, provided free to the world in hundreds of different languages?

Internet Content Prizes Suppose that Joe Generous writes the greatest English-language novel ever and posts it on his Web site for anyone in the world to read at any time of day or night. Most writers get paid minimally by publishers. Here are the categories for a set of annual prizes: How are winners determined? The cost of running ? Teaching High School Math and Science in the Context of Engineering The cost? Social computation and creativity » Blog Archive » Bugs of colle. One of my early posts was about idea killers and idea helpers. Idea killers are common phrases that kill creativity at its origin. Recently, Matt May wrote a piece called Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking, where he identified ‘Seven Sins of Solutions,’ routine patterns of thinking that prevent people from being creative. He suggests that idea stiffling is the worst sin being the most destructive. He illustrated the point by a nice experiment: This is a good example illustrating repeated failure of collective intelligence.

Matt suggests that in collective problem-solving workshops groups discuss the right answer and still commonly propose the wrong one as the chosen solution, “because members second-guess, stifle, dismiss and even distrust their own genius.” Collective problem solving involves iterated innovation and selection of solutions. The Matt May manifesto is found thanks to Guy Kawasaki post The Seven Sins of Solutions. Swarm Creativity Blog. Internet and memetics. Garry Marshall School of Computing Science, Middlesex University, Trent Park, Bramley Road, London N14 4XS, England. e-mail: Garry2@mdx.ac.uk Abstract The functioning and usage of the Internet are examined in terms of memes and memetics.

It is shown that memetic systems can be distinguished at various levels of Internet operation, and that these systems become increasingly simple as they move further from the user level. In this way, memetics provides a unified framework for examining the overall behaviour of the Internet and its users. 1. Memetics provides a powerful new way to think about things such as, for example, creativity (Gabora, 1997). The Internet, like all computer networks, is designed and constructed in a layered fashion, with layers of software added to the basic hardware. In fact, as this paper shows in a limited way, the functioning of the various layers can be interpreted memetically. 2. We begin by considering the World Wide Web. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Gabora, L. Marshall, G. Social computation and creativity. Knowledge market is a distributed social mechanism that helps people to identify and satisfy their demand for knowledge. It can facilitate locating existing knowledge resources similarly to what search engines do (the name social search refers to this). It can also stimulate creation of new knowledge resources to satisfy the demand (something that search engines can’t do).

The goal of this post is to compare several free knowledge markets created by 3form, Naver, Yahoo, Mail.ru, and Google to identify their common elements and differences. All these sites organize collaborative problem solving activity of a large number of participants providing means and incentives to contribute participants’ intelligent abilities to the distributed problem solving process. MIT Tech Review published an attempt to make a comparison of Q&A sites by Wade Rush. Unfortunately, that comparison was of low quality and too superficial to be useful (see the readers comments). Background Incentive systems Features. Social computation and creativity. Berkun blog » Blog Archive » Idea helpers: ways to grow ideas.

John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion. - Popular Mechanic. Lateral Thinking Problems - Fact. Lateral thinking problems that are based on fact. 1. A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink of water. The bartender gives the man a drink of water, but the man says the water is no good. The bartender thinks for a minute, pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, "Thank you," and walks out. Hint: Please do not try this at home. Solution: The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun. A Colombian man accidentally shot his nephew to death while trying to cure his hiccups by pointing a revolver at him to scare him, police in the Caribbean port city of Barranquilla said on Tuesday, the 24th of January 2006. After shooting 21-year-old university student David Galvan in the neck, his uncle, Rafael Vargas, 35, was so distraught he turned the gun on himself and committed suicide, police said.

The incident took place on Sunday night while the two were having drinks with neighbors. "They were drinking but they were aware of what was going on," one witness said. 2. That\u2019s impossible. How good scientists reach bad conclusions by Ralph C. Merkle Principal Fellow, Zyvex www.zyvex.com April, 2001 This web page is also available at "The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it. " Peter Medawar, Nobel Laureate, for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance Introduction Self replicating programmable manufacturing architectures were known by von Neumann in the 1940’s (Von Neumann, 1966). Drexler’s synthesis of the ideas of Feynman and von Neumann implies that nanotechnology is feasible. How can this be? This is, of course, just one example of the slow acceptance of new ideas. While the resistance to nanotechnology and assemblers is just a new instance of an age old pattern, the specifics are still instructive.

In the following discussion, names are omitted to protect the guilty. Thermal noise The first and most sweeping rejections were based on general principles. σ2 = kT / ks Power Fear. Slow Leadership: How to Kill Creativity. Creativegeneralist.com. Life 2.0: The little book of Flow - revised. Here is the 'Little book of Flow' in one long post. The premise of this essay is that those exquisite but all too rare moments when we experience 'flow', when we are truly creative, happy and intuitively know exactly what is needed, are simply those instances when we glimpse our original and true nature.

It sets out to show how, instead of trying to fathom the conditions for flow, we can realise this 'true nature' and make 'flow' our normal way of being, wherever we are and in whatever we do. You can use the chapter links below to navigate. (links probably won't work within a feed-reader) Chapters links: This is an early draft of something I would like to publish so any criticism/feedback/pointers are welcome and appreciated. [UPDATE] Here is a printer friendly version that you can save to read offline or print out.

Related article: Finding Flow by Letting Go Chapter 1 Introduction Many sports people have told stories about being in ‘the zone’. Chapter 2 Thinking about thinking So who are we? FAQ: Genius and Creativity. What is creativity? Science/Nature | Meet the citizen scientists. Around the world, day and night, people are observing, recording, discovering. Many of them are not paid, professional scientists; they do it as a passion, even an obsession. These are citizen scientists, the subject of a short series of documentaries on BBC Radio 4. A couple of centuries ago, most science was done by amateurs, often clergy or people of private means who were simply curious about the world around them. They include now famous names such as the Rev Gilbert White who patiently recorded the natural history around his Hampshire village of Selbourne, and William Herschel and his sister Caroline who painstakingly scanned the night sky discovering, among other things, the planet Uranus.

Technology leaps Today, when almost every city has a university or research institute with departments funded and dedicated to science, you might imagine that the days of the amateur scientists are over. Not a bit of it. Comet hunters Astronomy provides good examples. Galaxy files Dedicated amateurs. GoCreate.com. Discover Why a 10 Year Old Boy Can Teach You Creative Thinking |