{ Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the BP oil spill, in New Orleans on Tuesday. | Image: Visualizing the BP Oil Spill | More: Fears oil may continue spewing into the Gulf of Mexico for another two months into the hurricane season wiped $23 billion off BP’s market value on Tuesday and sent the cost of protecting its debt soaring. | And: There Was ‘Nobody in Charge’ }
“Creativity is a complex concept; it’s not a single thing,” he said, adding that brain researchers needed to break it down into its component parts. Dr. Kounios, who studies the neural basis of insight, defines creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way.
Everyone agrees that no single measure for creativity exists. While I.Q. tests, though controversial, are still considered a reliable test of at least a certain kind of intelligence, there is no equivalent when it comes to creativity — no Creativity Quotient, or C.Q.
Dr. Jung’s lab uses a combination of measures as proxies for creativity. One is the Creativity Achievement Questionnaire, which asks people to report their own aptitude in 10 fields, including the visual arts, music, creative writing, architecture, humor and scientific discovery.
Another is a test for “divergent thinking,” a classic measure developed by the pioneering psychologist J. P. Guilford. Here a person is asked to come up with “new and useful” functions for a familiar object, like a brick, a pencil or a sheet of paper.
Dr. Jung’s team also presents subjects with weird situations. Imagine people could instantly change their sex, or imagine clouds had strings; what would be the implications?
In another assessment, a subject is asked to draw the taste of chocolate or write a caption for a humorous cartoon, as is done in The New Yorker magazine’s weekly contest. “Humor is an important part of creativity,” Dr. Jung said.
related { How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity. | Why They Triumphed | full story }
photo { Michael Casker }
We often find ourselves wondering what people will do next. Will partners still love us? Our employers keep us in work? (…) When contemplating predictive dilemmas people often evoke the folk wisdom that the only person who can truly know what will happen next is the person in question. (…)
Psychologist Timothy D. Wilson, however, disagrees. His book Strangers to Ourselves uses wide-ranging psychological research to show that when it comes to predicting our own behaviour other people can be as good, or even better, than we are. How can this be?We like to think of our introspected motivations as predictive facts that will tell us what we will do. However, as Wilson demonstrates, our inner reflections discover not facts but a story we tell to ourselves about ourselves. These stories tend to be rose-tinted. We see ourselves as more consistent, admirable and steadfast than we turn out to be. We forget contrary behaviour and previous weakness and focus on being better.
What do brains and computer chips have in common? Not that much. Sure both use electricity, but in neurons the origin of electrical pulses is chemical while for computer chips it comes from electrical currents. Neurons are highly plastic, rearranging their connections to adapt to new information while computer chips are locked in their arrangement for their entire existence. But one thing they do share is the pattern of connections in their overall structure, specifically both brains and computer chips use the shortest and most efficient pathway they can to avoid the costs associated with taking long detours for the signals to get to their destination. Evolution and chip designers seemed to have reached the same conclusions when bumping up against the same very basic and very important limits, says a recent research paper from a small international team in PLoS. (…)
First, the human brain, the nematode’s nervous system, and the computer chip all had a Russian doll- like architecture, with the same patterns repeating over and over again at different scales. Second, all three showed what is known as Rent’s scaling, a rule used to describe relationships between the number of elements in a given area and the number of links between them.
The first finding confirms the research being done on intelligence and cognition in insects and mammals. (…) The second finding also seems to confirm something we know about evolution, mainly that natural selection tends to trim down waste and excess if it can and over a long period of trial and error, it will eventually arrive at efficient solutions to basic problems.
video { Jackson Pollock painting, 1950 | more }
{ A quick draw beetle that fires volatile liquids with the pulse of a Tommy Gun, aphids that self-combust at the threat of a predator and a double-pistoled worm that sprays its victim with streams of goo. Of course, these insects are not the only invertebrates carrying chemical artillery—bees are maybe the most famous projectile-launching bugs around. | Meet the ballistics experts of the bug world. | ESA | full story | Photo: Ann Johansson for The New York Times }
Are you worried that we are passing our debt on to future generations? Well, you need not worry. Before this recession it appeared that absent action, the government’s long-term commitments would become a problem in a few decades. I believe the government response to the recession has created budgetary stress sufficient to bring about the crisis much sooner. Our generation — not our grandchildren’s — will have to deal with the consequences.
illustration { Autumn Whitehurst }
Dr. Raymond Mar, of On Fiction: An Online Magazine on the Psychology of Fiction, published a research bulletin the other day summarizing a psychological study whose results apparently suggest that, in the words of the blog headline, “words reveal the personality of the writers.” After presenting the background, experimental procedure, and findings, Dr. Mar concludes that “From these findings, it appears that creative writing can indeed reveal aspects of the author’s personality to readers. An encouraging result for those of us who feel we’ve come to know an author by reading his or her books.”
I was excited by the headline. Typically, I approach reading as entering into a relationship with a writer and, when it comes to reading the works of cherished writers, I often work with the fantasy that I’m getting to them better, more intimately. I even once had the experience of hallucinating an encounter with a dead author while visiting with his widow in their apartment in Paris. But as I read through Dr. Mar’s report of the study I was left with some questions and even some objections.
First, the background to the study. According to Dr. Mar:
A fascinating study currently In Press in the Journal of Research in Personality (Kufner et al., in press), provides evidence that in some ways, we can infer what an author is like based solely on their writing. Although previous studies on inferring personality from written text have been conducted, this was the first study to look at creative writing as opposed to personal essays.
{ Yago Colás/ScientificBlogging | Continue reading | Thanks Emma }
For 40 years, Barnes & Noble has dominated bookstore retailing. In the 1970s it revolutionized publishing by championing discount hardcover best sellers. In the 1990s, it helped pioneer book superstores with selections so vast that they put many independent bookstores out of business.
Today it boasts 1,362 stores, including 719 superstores with 18.8 million square feet of retail space—the equivalent of 13 Yankee Stadiums.
But the digital revolution sweeping the media world is rewriting the rules of the book industry, upending the established players which have dominated for decades. Electronic books are still in their infancy, comprising an estimated 3% to 5% of the market today. But they are fast accelerating the decline of physical books, forcing retailers, publishers, authors and agents to reinvent their business models or be painfully crippled.
“By the end of 2012, digital books will be 20% to 25% of unit sales, and that’s on the conservative side,” predicts Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Co., publishing consultants. “Add in another 25% of units sold online, and roughly half of all unit sales will be on the Internet.”
Nowhere is the e-book tidal wave hitting harder than at bricks-and-mortar book retailers. The competitive advantage Barnes & Noble spent decades amassing—offering an enormous selection of more than 150,000 books under one roof—was already under pressure from online booksellers.
It evaporated with the recent advent of e-bookstores, where readers can access millions of titles for e-reader devices.
related { Book sales, frumpy readers, and mental rotation of book titles }
illustration { vb infinite swell in infinite indumentum | Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }
An international study of almost 500,000 people has confirmed that eating fruit and vegetables does not ward off cancer, debunking a 20-year-old edict by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
It also casts a shadow over the federal government’s $4.8 million advertising campaign, launched five years ago, to encourage people to eat two pieces of fruit and five serves of vegetables a day.
But cancer experts yesterday urged people not to disregard the advice, saying a high intake of fruit and vegetables was still beneficial against heart disease and that some cancers, such as bowel and breast, were linked to obesity.
photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }
{ Identity chip implanted into man gets computer virus | BBC video | Illustration: R. Crumb }
So, this is about the word “so.” (…) “So” may be the new “well,” new “um,” new “oh” and new “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
Last year, grammatical tragedy struck in the heart of England when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes were to be forever banished from public addresses. To the horror of purists and pedants alike, place names such as St Paul’s Square were banned and unceremoniously replaced with an apostrophe-free version: St Pauls Square.
The council’s reasoning was that nobody understands apostrophes and their misuse was so common in public signs that they were a hindrance to effective navigation. Anecdotes abounded of ambulance drivers puzzling over how to enter St James’s Street into a GPS navigation system while victims of heart attacks, strokes and hit ‘n’ run drivers passed from this world into the (presumably apostrophe-free) next.
Why the confusion? Part of the reason is that apostrophes are not particularly common in the English language: In French they occur at a rate of more than once per sentence on average. In English, they occur about once in every 20 sentences. So English speakers get less practice.
But the rules governing apostrophes are also more complex in English. In both French and English, apostrophes indicate a missing letter, such as the missing i in that’s or the v in e’er. But in English, apostrophes also indicate the possessive (or genitive) case. They are used to show that one noun owns another: St James’s Street is the street belonging to St James.
The complexity is compounded because in English, the plural is often formed by adding an s. So the word boys means more than one boy. How then do you form the possessive to indicate, for example, a ball belonging to the boys? Is it the boy’s ball or the boys’s ball or the boys’ ball?
And then there are the exceptions. Pronouns, for example, do not take a possessive apostrophe: you can’t say I’s ball or me’s bat. The truth is that knowing when to use an apostrophe is not always easy.
{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading | Mind your p’s and q’s: or the peregrinations of an apostrophe in 17th Century English | PDF }
photo { Marco Ovando }
