Innovation - Tangled up in Green

Sometimes I cover innovation on this blog, and usually more from a creativity side of things. Today I am sharing this business story because it is really a wake-up call for how complicated the legal side of innovation is becoming.

Photo credit: Cristian Andrei Matei from this web site.
Here is the scoop:

Newsweek's Michael Heller covers the troubles in "Innovation Gridlock- Today's inventors need to put together many bits of intellectual property. Too bad they are all patented."

Newsweek writes, the first decade of the 21st Century has seen startling advances in biology. Scientists have cracked the genomes of humans and many plants, animals and microbes. They've uncovered new cellular processes affecting inheritance of diseases. Likewise, investment in biotech research and development has been steadily increasing. So what happened to all the lifesaving cures that were supposed to come our way as a result?
Read this story.

Savantism - What Can We Learn about Creativity?

Scientific American is providing an interesting read this week with an interview with Daniel Tammet, a person SA says is an autistic savant. He talks some about creativity so I was interested in his take. The whole area of savantism is facinating so I have provided some links below.

One interesting statement Tammet makes that I can relate to since I have a fairly good visual recall of places I have been to - enough to drive somewhere in a city I have not been in for 20-30 years.

He says: "Here is another tip from my book. Researchers have found that you are more likely to remember something if the place or situation in which you are trying to recall the information bears some resemblance—color or smell, for example—to where you originally learned it. A greater awareness therefore of the context in which we acquire a particular piece of information can help improve our ability to remember it later on."

Read more. Also, while looking I came across this doctor who studies savants: Darold Treffert. He discusses Tammet here and many savants here. Photo credit. Evidently the world has been aware of Tammet since 2004 when he one the Pi contest -Tammet's web site.

Good quote: "My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’. "

Daniel Tammet is the author of two books, Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky, which comes out this month. He’s also a linguist and holds the European record for reciting the first 22,514 decimal points of the mathematical constant Pi. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Tammet about how his memory works, why the IQ test is overrated, and a possible explanation for extraordinary feats of creativity.

LEHRER: Your recent memoir, Born on a Blue Day, documented your life as an autistic savant. You describe, for example, how you are able to quickly learn new languages, and remember scenes from years earlier in cinematic detail. Are you ever surprised by your own abilities?

TAMMET: I have always thought of abstract information—numbers for example—in visual, dynamic form. Numbers assume complex, multi-dimensional shapes in my head that I manipulate to form the solution to sums, or compare when determining whether they are prime or not. For languages, I do something similar in terms of thinking of words as belonging to clusters of meaning so that each piece of vocabulary makes sense according to its place in my mental architecture for that language. In this way I can easily discern relationships between words, which helps me to remember them. In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather, I dance with them. None of this is particularly surprising for me. I have always thought in this way so it seems entirely natural. What I do find surprising is that other people do not think in the same way. I find it hard to imagine a world where numbers and words are not how I experience them!

Finding Your Creative - Moodstream

I read about an interesting creative tool posted by Conrad Lisco on thumbjockey.com today - called Moodstream, by Getty Images. Take a look and create your mood for music and images! This is a lot of fun, too!

Conrad says: Moodstream is an online tool that allows you to browse imagery and music based on keywords or moods. What you see and hear matches the particular mood and can be dialed up or down in a host of ways. Its a great way to find inspiration.

Getty Images has a customizable home page for you, too, where it aggregates latest tools, galleries, and ideas based on your selection of featured content on its site.

I've used an image from Smaller Indiana for this blog today.

Christmas Trees and Memories

I like to reflect back now and then on experiences I had with my Dad, Rodger Goodwin. He was born in 1911 and he lived for 90 years.

One of my favorite times to spend with my Dad was shopping for the Christmas tree and then decorating it. I know I am a lot like him - even as far as picking a tree based on the shape of the tree, the spacing of the branches, the pine needles and the size of the trunk.

We would visit the lots with all of the pine trees, and for the many years in Cleveland and then Lexington, Ky., I can remember how very cold it could be wandering around a snowy land of trees.

My Dad always wore his heavy leather mittens that could manage the cold and the snow, and then heave our tree into his station wagon. I can see him in his hat with fur trim and heavy winter coat, and his rubber galoshes.

We must have gone at night for our trees, because I recall how much I liked how the lots were circled with cords of large white bulbs - it always looked so magical.

Why so much fuss over the our trees over the years? We expressed our artistry many ways, and creating a beautiful tree was important! Putting the lights on to make sure there was plenty of color, and then placing the special ornaments just so was important. When it was all said and done we would just sit back and stare in a dreamy kind of way at the sparkle and take in the fragrance of the pine.

Outliers: Gladwell Weighs In

Greetings - I am interested in Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." So I went to his website and he discusses it there - and since I have not read it yet I am providing some of his thoughts. I like to cover innnovation, creativity and ways that people approach life. In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Dictionary.com says an outlier
is a person who lives away from his place of work or an extreme deviation from the mean.

Here is what Gladwell says.

"I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

"I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—"they're really smart," or "they're really ambitious?' Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren't worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations."