Farewell Sunday Times, the Star and the Cape Times

more about "untitled", posted with vodpod

This is Gary Vaynerchuk in full cry, bleeding with passion, and spelling out the possibilities for the new “Word of Mouth”. At speed comes a changing of the guard. Out with the old in with the new. But how many people see it coming. Wait till the real people see it, he urges….

Tweet Tweet: Follow Charles Bryant (and Creating Possibilities) on Twitter

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.

Thinking like a student – creatively

A bed frame of stacked honeycomb cardboard, by Galen Wolfe-Pauly

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 computer chip to match the brain’s creativity?

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

Designing the Creative Computer

Creating Posibilities out of $700bn

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.

Noam Bar – Mixing creativity and business

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.

Out of the blue – $500,000 – No strings for creativity

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).