Man Makes Music Out of an Old Game Boy Here’s a use for your old Game Boy that might not have occurred to you. A German Game Boy fan named Sebastian Bender has released a music video on YouTube that is made up of clicks, spring-twiddling and button-pressing on the device. With 200,000 views since April 6, it’s catching on. It’s a unique use for the game player, for sure, but maybe not as unique as you think. Last year, another fan netted more than 1 million views for an all-Game Boy rendition of Michael Jackson’s "Beat It." The latest generation of Nintendo handheld devices, the 3DS, was released March 27.
How to Train Your Brain to Stay Focused As an entrepreneur, you have a lot on your plate. Staying focused can be tough with a constant stream of employees, clients, emails, and phone calls demanding your attention. Amid the noise, understanding your brain’s limitations and working around them can improve your focus and increase your productivity. Our brains are finely attuned to distraction, so today's digital environment makes it especially hard to focus. Related: 8 Tips for Finding Focus and Nixing Distractions While multitasking is an important skill, it also has a downside. To make matters worse, distraction feels great. Related: The Truth About Multitasking: How Your Brain Processes Information Ultimately, the goal is not constant focus, but a short period of distraction-free time every day. Try these three tips to help you become more focused and productive: 1. In order to focus effectively, reverse the order. 2. Related: 4 Ways to Disconnect and Get More Done Without Unplugging Completely 3.
Lessons in Well Drilling Spill into the Classroom A project to bring clean water to residents of Namawanga, Kenya, serves as an example in lesson plans for middle-school students. Update Nov. 12, 2012: Curricula videos now on YouTube, see belowSince 2006, student engineers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have teamed with residents of Namawanga, Kenya, to clean the town's drinking water – and teach U.S. students in more than 100 middle and high schools math, science, and social studies. Pastures flank the town's streams and tests detected e.coli in the water. To solve the problem, the residents and students in Engineers Without Borders at UMass are drilling a well and building spring boxes around the water source to protect it from contamination. At the same time, the UMass project is meshed with a multi-disciplinary curriculum for middle and high schools. The students learn about waterborne disease and well drilling, but they also discover that lasting solutions are more than just technical. They get their hands dirty, too.
The Science of Stress, Orgasm and Creativity: How the Brain and the Vagina Conspire in Consciousness “The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’” philosopher Alain de Botton argued in his meditation on sex, “the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.” But in his attempt to counter the reductionism that frames human sexuality as a mere physiological phenomenon driven solely by our evolutionary biology, de Botton overcompensates by reducing in the opposite direction, negating the complex interplay of brain and biology, psychology and physiology, that propels the human sexual experience. That’s precisely what Naomi Wolf, author of the 1991 cultural classic The Beauty Myth, examines in Vagina: A New Biography (public library) — a fascinating exploration of the science behind the vastly misunderstood mind-body connection between brain and genitalia, consciousness and sexuality, the poetic and the scientific. Wolf writes:
Study links emotional and neural responses to musical performance It is well known that music arouses emotions. But why do some musical performances move us, while others leave us flat? Why do musicians spend years perfecting the subtle nuances that bring us to tears? The study, titled "Dynamic Emotional and Neural Responses to Music Depend on Performance Expression and Listener Experience," published in the December 16 issue of PLoS One, was conducted at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences (CCSBS) in FAU's Charles E. The researchers first recorded an expert musician's performance of Frédéric Chopin's Étude in E- Major, Op. 10, No. 3 on a computerized piano (the "expressive" performance), then they synthesized a version of the same piece using a computer, without the human performance nuances (the "mechanical" performance). They combined behavioral analysis with fMRI neuroimaging, a specialized MRI scan which measures change in blood flow related to neural activity in the brain, as participants listened to both performances. Video
Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives “If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve,” Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: “Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities…” Far from Pollyanna platitude, this advice actually reflects what modern psychology knows about how belief systems about our own abilities and potential fuel our behavior and predict our success. Much of that understanding stems from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, synthesized in her remarkably insightful Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (public library) — an inquiry into the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and how changing even the simplest of them can have profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, Dweck found in her research, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality.
Indian schools adopt tablets. Will they improve education? Richard Mahapatra, a 42-year-old journalist, recently attended a parent-teacher meeting at his daughter’s private school in Delhi. During the meeting, he said, teachers encouraged him to buy a tablet. The school was selling several tablets made by HCL, a leading Indian technology company, for about 6,000 rupees, or $120. Some parents, Mahapatra said, bought the tablets. “For a father like me, it’s not a cultural change but almost like a genetic jump,” he said, recalling that he began his education with chalk and slate at a small tribal school in the state of Orissa on the eastern coast of India. Over the last 15 years, a growing number of Indian schools have been upgrading their technology to include state-of the-art computers accessible to all students. But school-owned technology available to all the students is one thing -- asking students to buy their own tablets is another. The Indian government envisions all the country’s children, rich and poor, studying from tablets. Prasanto K.
On the Origin of Truly Innovative Ideas Last week, I wrote about increasing innovation in your company. This week, in Part 2, we'll talk about how to create the right environment and incentives for innovation to flourish. Today's post outlines a few key ideas and strategies I've found to be extremely effective. Fear of Failure = Fear of Innovation The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. But few companies actually try crazy ideas — especially the most successful ones. Fear of failure paralyzes creativity, stops risk-taking, and ultimately slows innovation down to a halt. Why do people fear failure? Three principal reasons… Fear impacting their reputation: “If I fail, I won’t get the promotion.”Fear of losing time: “I’ve invested two years of my life, we can’t fail now!” How do you minimize fear of failure? The right environment and the right incentives. The 5-5-5 Program Here's the basic idea: Teams of 5: Break your company (division, group, etc.) into teams of five people. Why 5 people? Peter Diamandis Dr. Dr.
Nudge Select 1 of 8 different Sound Patterns from the small Matrixes icons on the right. Use your mouse to draw notes on each 16 Step Matrix. Adjust the volume of the iNudge. Click MORE for advanced adjustment abilities. For each Pattern, adjust Volume, Mute, Clear, or set Audio Pan from Left to Right. Click on the Tempo numbers and click up or down to change the overall Tempo. <div class="block"><div class="full"><div class="content info"><h3>Important information!