The iPhone arrived in South Africa, well in Cape Town anyway and being the sucker I am, made the inevitable purchase. Inevitable, yes because it seemed like a step up in technology. At first i wasn’t convinced but I have to admit that its in another league from other cell phones and PDA’s. Actually its unfair to classify the iPhone as a cell phone. I think after using it for 2 days that its more like a laptop minimised !
What”s there to like about it? Well firstly it makes Twitter come alive. (See previous post.) Secondly its’ 3G connection to Gmail is awesome and thirdly it synchs with the iTunes program; no,not just music, but photos, podcasts,contacts,calendar,videos…. and more.
So you get an iPod, a phone,internet that is highly readable and oh yes… a host of apps (applications) that you can download and makes the engine purr. Like WordPress (lets you blog from the iphone with ease), Twittelator (lets you manage Twitter), and an emulation of the 12C HP calculator. Thats all I have had time for so far. But it made me wonder about the philosophy of Apple, who have for so many years have demonstrated not only creativity, but its’ application – innovation - in their range of products. I think in further posts it may be worth exploring the mind of Steve Jobs. Stay tuned…
All aboard the bandwagon: Charles Bryant and Creating Possibilities is now on Twitter.
If you know what that means, you can sign up to follow the blog and other occasional “tweets” at http://twitter.com/blackwhitelemon.
If you’re a Twitter newbie like myself let me explain.
Twitter is a quick means of disseminating small bites of information (“tweets”) via computer, cell phone or some other device to a group of “followers” who receive updates on their Blackberry, iPhone, laptop or some other techno device.
In my case, I’ll send tweets when new blog entries are posted or when something else interesting strikes me.
Let me know what you think.
CONSIDER, in these economically difficult times, that inspiring model of creative home design, the college student.
Yes, we understand that you already know how to throw all your clothes in a pile on the floor.
But there is still much that can be learned from students who’ve managed to put together great looking places on what a grown-up might pay for a one-way ticket to Paris.
First and foremost is fearlessness. You’d be embarrassed if your friends knew you’d gotten a piece of furniture off the street. College kids call up their friends to get their help carrying furniture home from the street, and brag about it. Many are genuinely concerned about recycling and the environment, and delighted when they can turn construction cast-offs into the trappings of home.
Where others see garbage, students see potential: a wooden futon frame, less the futon, becomes a towel rack. An old-fashioned school desk and bench that might well have come out of a one-room schoolhouse upstate? Use it as a bedside table.
Nor do they have a fear of strong color or pattern: They’ll paint a dorm room a dark green, or stencil blue and white polka dots on the wall beside a 19th-century fireplace. They’ll find somebody’s tired old bedside stand that faintly recalls Versailles, paint it a pale robin’s-egg blue, shellac it, top it with a bare branch in a found glass vase, and put it in the living room, where it will look smart and playful.
Sure, you can argue, it’s easy for them to paint a bedroom green; they don’t own the place.
But that’s not giving their creativity its due. Their thinking can be so far outside the box that the box is forgotten. Kayt Brumder, a fifth-year architecture student at the Cooper Union, was strolling along New York’s Bowery four years ago with her boyfriend, Jorge Pereira, then an architecture student at Columbia and now an architect, when they saw a stack of dresser drawers on the sidewalk. It was not a perfect find; the dresser itself was missing. But that made it kind of interesting. The couple threw the drawers into a taxi, took them up to their apartment in East Harlem and turned them into wall-mounted storage.
Craigslist is a basic resource for students, as are the low-cost, big box stores. But these sources are often merely starting points. Tyler Velten, a student at the Yale School of Architecture, transformed his $35 Billy bookcases from Ikea into artful cabinets with the addition of plywood doors he made and a few $3 hinges.
You don’t have a woodworking studio? Do as Mr. Velten did: Set up the equipment on the street and plug it into a 50-foot extension cord tossed out the window. And when you find a knot in the plywood, don’t panic; make it part of the design.
Phil Mansfield for The New York Times
By JOYCE WADLER
A tower design competition was held for the 1889 Paris World Exhibition. The winner was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. No less than 68 designs were submitted. The designs all bore some similarity to the Eiffel Tower but were still different, since every designer has a unique design style.
This leads me to the subject of creativity. Creativity can lead to a diversity of solutions for a narrowly defined problem.
Understand the ‘how’
In thermodynamics, when a person creates something that wasn’t there before, it is called “noise”; there is an “output signal” that we cannot infer from the input.
This is a playful comparison that does not do justice to creative people, but it means that if we want computers to be creative, they must have a method to be creative.
They need a smart program for smart, non-trivial solutions. For that to happen, people must understand the “how” of their own creativity.
One of the first “computers” was an 18th century weaving machine that was programmed by punched holes in a card. This punched-card idea was adapted by IBM founder Herman Hollerith for the 1890 U.S. census. The rest is history.
Racing the brain
The brain has some 100 billion neurons. That leads to a number of possible interconnection patterns. Assuming each neuron can fire 10 to 20 times a second, the brain’s information processing capacity is in the order of 1023bit/s.
When can we make a chip with that capacity?
Applying Moore’s Law and assuming a continued increase in processing capacity by a factor of 10 every five years or so, we cannot expect to have the required capacity before 2070.
Be pragmatic
The creative computer may not become a reality anytime soon. But the principles of creative behavior and learning are already being applied in clever ways in our browsers, our communications, our planning tools and our user interfaces.
Being creative requires us to be pragmatic at the same time: While we strive for perfection, let’s not try to reach it immediately.
- Cees Jan Koomen
Entrepreneur and Founder, Point-One Innovation Fund
Following the story from the previous post the following You Tube video shows the dance on 3.11 of the 5 min 33 sec insert.
By Nancy Benac
What else could the US government do with a $700 billion blank check? There are, well, billions of possibilities.
It could ensure universal health care coverage for six years, for example, or upgrade the country’s most deficient bridges four times over. All the work to upgrade coastal levees that’s been done since Hurricane Katrina? It’s a mere drop in the proverbial $700 billion bucket — $7 billion, or just 1 percent.
You could build 1,750 bridges to nowhere.
Or run an entire country. Seven hundred billion dollars is more than twice the size of the economy of Denmark, which had a gross domestic product of $312 billion in 2007.
Seven hundred billion dollars would buy 70 Hubble-type space telescopes. Or about seven international space stations. It would finance the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier medical research institute, for two decades. Or pay the U.S. national intelligence budget for 15 years.
According to the Wall Street Journal, half the money F.D.Roosevelt spent on his New Deal program in 1933 to lift the country out of the Depression and banking crisis was for public works projects. For $250 billion in today’s dollars, the nation got 8,000 parks, 40,000 public buildings and 72,000 schools.
But that’s thinking small. Read the rest of this entry »
Did you live a coddled childhood filled with unbridled playtime and few reminders of the harsh real world? You might have been dumber as a result.
Children coaxed into a jovial mood performed worse on a simple test of geometric shape recognition than kids put in a dourer mood, report Simone Schnall, of the University of Plymouth, UK and colleagues in a recent issue of Developmental Science.
You may wonder whether these psychologists hate happy kids or just fun, but their conclusion is supported by other research. For instance, adults in good spirits do worse than sad adults on similar tests.
To uncover the same effect in children, the researchers, thankfully, didn’t resort to insults or mind-altering drugs.
Instead they played one of two classical tunes to 10- and 11-year olds. Fifteen kids heard Mozart’s jolly ditty Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, while the other 15 had to suffer through Mahler’s doleful Adagietto. Previous research suggested these songs put kids in happy and sad moods, respectively, and Schnall’s team confirmed that by surveying the kids.
While listening to the tunes the children played a game where they hunted for a specific geometric shape – a triangle joined to a rectangle, for instance – within a picture. The merry Mozart kids took noticeably longer finding the shapes than the children who were forced to listen to Mahler.
Not content with proving that happy pre-teens are daft, the researchers aimed their hypothesis at 61 six and seven-year olds. Instead of hearing classical music, the kids watched three movie scenes.
One, from Disney’s Jungle Book, features the singing and dancing of an ebullient bear. A neutral scene from The Last Unicorn shows a knight reaching a castle. The sad scene comes from The Lion King, another Disney cartoon. Even this reporter, who watched the movie as a teen, shed a tear when Simba mourns his father’s death. Read the rest of this entry »
Every now and again the worlds of business and the holy creative (in this case food), blend to strip out the extreme and especially the ugly side of business. I came across this CV of Noam bar, a senior partner in Ottolenghi, the London based foodie experience.
Noam Bar
Having oscillated between a job in the City and time in a Buddhist monastery, Noam shrugged off the urge to choose between the two worlds, and is now both a homeopath and the strategic thinker of Ottolenghi.
As the former, he practices in London and in Africa. As the latter, he knows enough about the business to understand it perfectly, but not enough to be drawn into the day to day details.
Any business, Ottolenghi included, can be viewed as an organism, just like the human body. And the same ideas of health and disease are applicable to both: it is necessary to listen carefully, to identify the core of the imbalance, and to apply a minimal intervention that would help the organism repair itself.
Noam, like the other managers of Ottolenghi, believes that people are happy, creative, and inspiring when they are in their naturally balanced state. Consequently, much management time is dedicated to ensuring that our staff is fulfilled, satisfied and content; that they are empowered enough to deal with the challenges life brings them. Amazing food, customer satisfaction, and a positive Profit and Loss account are simply by-products of this constant effort.
Miguel Zenón is a young jazz musician who is expanding the boundaries of Latin and jazz music through his elegant and innovative musical collages. As both a saxophonist and a composer, Zenón demonstrates an astonishing mastery of old and new jazz idioms, from Afro-Caribbean and Latin American rhythmical concepts to free and avant-garde jazz. Beginning with his 2001 recording Looking Forward, Zenón has exhibited a high degree of daring and sophistication in the manipulation of conventional jazz forms. His third album, Jíbaro (2005), illuminates his intense engagement with the indigenous music of his native Puerto Rico. Forgoing the Afro-Caribbean sound that characterizes most Latin jazz, Zenón was inspired by la música jíbara – string-based folkloric music popular in the Puerto Rican countryside. Unlike other attempts to fuse jazz and jíbaro, which have retained the traditional instrumentation with little harmonic variation, in Zenón’s hands the essential elements of jíbaro serve as the compositional and rhythmic underpinning of his contemporary jazz arrangements. The result is a complex yet accessible sound that is overflowing with feeling and passion and maintains the integrity of the island’s music. This young musician and composer is at once reestablishing the artistic, cultural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st century.
Miguel Zenón received a B.A. (1998) from the Berklee College of Music and an M.A. (2001) from the Manhattan School of Music. His additional recordings include Ceremonial (2004) and Awake (2008). He has performed at venues and in festivals throughout the United States and abroad, including the Jazz Standard, the Village Vanguard, and Carnegie Hall.
Every now and again I find myself low on creativity and in need of some inspiration. The thing with creativity though is that you can’t force it on. Instead, you need to feed it with “creative fuel” (random stimuli) and eventually your AHA! moment takes place.
I’ve listed below some websites that I often visit to spark some of my own right brain activity. Which ones do you go to?
Leila Josefowicz is a young violinist who is captivating audiences with her technically precise and emotionally resonant performances of both traditional and contemporary works. Since her Carnegie Hall debut at the age of sixteen, Josefowicz has blossomed into one of today’s preeminent soloists, performing around the globe with the world’s most prestigious orchestras and conductors. Her recent recording of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Violin Sonata (2006) features eloquent interpretations of these haunting and sorrowful pieces, written in Stalinist Russia. Not content to simply master the standard repertoire of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, Josefowicz is stretching the mold of the classical violinist in her passionate advocacy of contemporary composers and their work. She is a close and regular collaborator with the leading composers of the day, often premiering their new compositions. Through her performances, recordings, and recital programs, she introduces traditional, classical music audiences to noteworthy new works, illustrating the excitement and beauty that emanates from the juxtaposition of the avant-garde and eclectic with the more traditional. Josefowicz’s genuine commitment to the music of today, coupled with her keen musical intelligence and virtuosity, is inspiring new compositions for the violin and significantly broadening the instrument’s repertoire.
Leila Josefowicz received a B.Mus. (1997) from the Curtis Institute of Music. She has performed with orchestras throughout the United States and internationally, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the London Symphony.
Tara Donovan is an inventive young sculptor whose installations bring wonder to the most common objects of everyday life. Donovan’s site-specific, sculptural works transform ordinary accumulated materials into intriguing visual and physical installations. Choosing a single object – such as a transparent drinking straw, scotch tape, a Styrofoam cup, or a paper clip – Donovan experiments with assembling it in different ways. Sensitive to the specific needs of her materials and the nature of her exhibit spaces, her installations are often arranged in ways reminiscent of geological or biological forms. For her 2003 installation entitled “Haze,” Donovan stacked over two million clear plastic drinking straws against a 42-foot-long gallery wall. The resulting effect, with its shifts in color, form, light, and surface, was that of a fog bank or a diaphanous cloud, providing the viewer with a compelling, perceptually transformative experience. In a 2007 untitled work, Donovan created a 50×60-foot installation using over three million seven-ounce plastic drinking cups in rows of different heights, resembling a serene, iridescent ice field. This singular artist is creating a dazzling body of work that will enrich the fields of contemporary sculpture and installation art for years to come.
Tara Donovan received a B.F.A. (1991) from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and an M.F.A. (1999) from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Walter Kitundu is a young sound artist and inventor of original musical instruments that navigate the boundary between live and recorded performance. Inspired by hip-hop, other modern musical forms, and traditional Asian and African instruments, Kitundu’s phonoharps are hybrids of turntables and stringed instruments. At once highly sculptural art objects and functional instruments, the phonoharps offer a wide range of melodic possibilities and are surprisingly versatile in performance. The turntable’s pickup collects and amplifies any sound transmitted to it, allowing the performer to employ percussion and string resonance as well as digital manipulation, or sampling, of prerecorded material. Kitundu takes full advantage of the phonoharp’s flexibility in electro-acoustic compositions that seamlessly incorporate experimental, jazz, and pop music influences. Many of Kitundu’s artistic pursuits, including ambitious proposals for public installations of his instruments, reflect his ongoing interest in the interaction between technology and the natural world. His elemental phonoharps, for example, draw on natural forces such as wind, waves, light, and the movement of birds to produce unique sound sculptures. An experimental instrument builder, composer, and musician, Kitundu’s interdisciplinary approach to music-making and performance is inspiring a wide range of musicians and audiences.
Walter Kitundu has been affiliated with the Exploratorium Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception since 2003, where he is currently a multimedia artist. In 2008, he is the Wornick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Wood Arts at the California College of the Arts and artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His work has been exhibited and performed at such national and international venues as the Singapore Arts Centre, the Gunnar Gunnarsson Institute, Iceland, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. He has also created instruments for and performed with the Kronos Quartet at several venues across the U.S.
Alex Ross is a critic whose
writing captures the often-elusive aesthetic and technical aspects of
classical and contemporary music with clarity, grace, and wit. A staff
writer for the New Yorker, his frequent essays display an
expansive knowledge of music and a facility for guiding his readers,
who range from professional musicians to scholars to the general public
alike, to a richer experience of the complex pieces and artists he
explores. With a finely tuned grasp of a full spectrum of styles, he
places works by a broad variety of artists – from Mozart to Schoenberg
to Bob Dylan – within a continuum and sets aside categories and
classifications that impede the appreciation of works on their own
terms. In each article, Ross strives to demonstrate how a specific
piece of music, be it centuries or months old, conveys meaning and
feeling in the present. In addition to his work in essay form, he
recently published the book The Rest Is Noise (2007), a
cultural history of 20th-century music that journeys through pre-World
War I Vienna, Paris of the 1920s, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia,
and New York of the 1960s and 1970s. Through a widely read blog of the
same title (www.therestisnoise.com),
he further expands the reach of his interpretive skills and enthusiasm
for championing overlooked composers and out-of-the-way ensembles. In
an era when many proclaim the imminent demise of concert halls due to
waning attendance, Ross offers both highly specialized and casual
readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place
in our future.
Alex Ross received a B.A. (1990) from Harvard University. He has been the music critic for the New Yorker since 1996 and served previously as a music critic for the New York Times (1992-1996). His writing has also appeared in the New Republic, Slate, Lingua Franca, and the London Review of Books.
CHICAGO, Sept. 23
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation today named 25 new MacArthur Fellows for 2008. This past week, the recipients learned in a single phone call from the Foundation that they will each receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years. All were selected for their creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future.
“The MacArthur Fellows Program celebrates extraordinarily creative individuals who inspire new heights in human achievement,” said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton. “With their boldness, courage and uncommon energy, this new group of Fellows — men and women of all ages in diverse fields — exemplifies the boundless nature of the human mind and spirit.” Recipients this year include: — an astronomer designing experiments and devices to advance understanding of the geometry of the universe and the story of both its beginning and its end (Adam Riess); — a neuroscientist tracing the natural interactions of differentiating neurons, bringing us closer to developing effective methods for treating central nervous system damage (Sally Temple); — a novelist inspired by events in her native Nigeria, exploring the circumstances that lead to ethnic conflict (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie); — an inventor of new musical instruments that transform and transcend the musical experience and navigate the boundaries between live and recorded sound (Walter Kitundu); — an urban farmer bringing low-cost technology to the cultivation, production and delivery of healthy foods to underserved urban populations here and abroad (Will Allen); — a geriatrician transforming treatment for millions suffering from painful life-threatening and end-of-life illness into more humane and effective care (Diane Meier); — an optical physicist demonstrating that power can be transmitted wirelessly, opening the door to the possibility of a range of devices operating free of traditional power sources (Marin Soljacic); — a saxophonist drawing from a variety of jazz idioms and the music of his native Puerto Rico to create complex, accessible sounds overflowing with passion (Miguel Zenon); — a critical care physician devising life-saving, clinical practices to improve patient safety in hospitals and to spare countless lives from deadly human error (Peter Pronovost); — a structural engineer restoring cathedrals and castles of the distant past and identifying ancient technologies for use in contemporary construction (John Ochsendorf); — a stage lighting designer pushing the visible boundaries of her art form with painterly lighting evoking mood and sculpting movement in dance, drama and opera (Jennifer Tipton); — an anthropologist illuminating the intellectual and emotional life of ancient Mesoamerican peoples through insightful interpretations of hieroglyphic inscriptions and figural art (Stephen Houston). Read the rest of this entry »
One of the most famous quotes of Einstein is when he said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Einstein was putting value on creativity here. His theories and ideas were all about creativity. When he made a working boxcar for his son out of shoestring and some boxes, that was creativity. When he was down and out and needed money and posted an ad for tutoring lessons; that was creativity in making money.
Since Einstein accomplished some of the greatest thoughts of our time, an argument could be made that he was one of the most creative people of all time. You can know more about your product than anyone and have more degrees than anyone you know, but if you don’t have a little bit of creativity to take advantage of what you have, then it is useless.
Credentials and knowledge will do you little good if you lack the creativity to take advantage of them. Einstein once said, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” I think he was being a little humble and a lot humorous here, but he was once again acknowledging the importance of being creative!
So you may ask yourself, “What is creativity?”
That is an excellent question — let’s go straight to the source to answer it. Einstein said, “CREATIVITY is seeing what other see and THINKING what no one else has thought.” Read the rest of this entry »
Its late Friday night and I’m trawling through videos of songs I grew up with as a teenager. Wishbone Ash, Pat Methany, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd and the amazing John Mayall doing Room to Move on the harmonica. Strange to put images to music one knew so well! And then as I got into the 80’s I came accross Jacques Loussier playing with Bobby Mc Ferrin. Its classic Bach yet how many of us would recognise it… Try this by clicking the title above to better centre the video.
Tate Linden
(Click on the title of the blog to get the video correctly sized)
Rachel Thomas
The connection between mathematics and music has always found fertile ground in the work of Mozart. Many scholars have analysed the mathematical nature of his music, for example investigating if he used formulae like the golden ratio to decide how to section his movements. It has even been suggested that there is a “Mozart effect” – that listening to pieces by this composer can help students concentrate or even improve their test scores!
This effect has been a subject of much debate in the scientific community, but regardless of whether the theory can be proved, students at Windhill Primary School in Southern Yorkshire appear to be benefitting from the Mozart treatment.
The school is part of a one-year pilot program to investigate the effect of listening to music on the students’ overall educational experience. And it is not just Mozart that is on the play list. Chopin and Brahms are used for assemblies, Beethoven is played for its calming effects and even pop music such as the Mission Impossible theme or a tune from Kylie are suitable for more active moments.
However it is Mozart that seems to be particularly suitable for accompanying maths lessons. In one experiment, the pupils from a Year 6 class which listened to the composer performed 10% better than those taught without. “We have found that Mozart symphonies which have complicated note patterns stimulate mathematical thinking,” the head teacher Doulla Simon said. “The music reaches certain parts of the brain which other composers do not.”
So perhaps Mozart is music to a maths student’s ears after all!
Bryan Eaton
You’ve just made a salad of mango and shrimp on Boston lettuce with avocado, red pepper and cilantro. But what do you dress it with? How about a salad of Romaine lettuce with almonds, carrots and strawberries?
No worries. Doug Morris knows just what it takes to dress up an inventive salad.
Morris, the owner of Old Town Bakery in Rowley, led a workshop on salad dressings recently at Pettengill Farm in Salisbury. The farm hosts several events throughout the year, including a few food demonstrations led by Morris that are designed to be educational, inventive and fun.
Last month’s Potluck Salad Night was no exception. The 30 attendees were asked to bring a salad of their own choice, for which Morris would create a complementary dressing. With a counter stocked with various oils, vinegars, spices and condiments, plus a bunch of potted fresh herbs, he was ready for the challenge. Read the rest of this entry »
