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Showing posts from May, 2012

Creative Problem Solving by Analogy

I am currently reading Jonah Lehrer's excellent and insightfull book "Imagine - How Creativity Works". http://www.amazon.com/Imagine-Creativity-Works-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/0547386079 http://vimeo.com/38840832  - Lehrer's NPR Talk on the Creative Process I came a cross an interesting discussion on creative problem solving by analogy - Lehrer refers to the famous tumour puzzle. He had also mentioned about the earlier work on the tumour puzzle by psychologists Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak. I could find their original paper here: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/23210/1/0000139.pdf http://www.nbu.bg/cogs/personal/kokinov/COG501/AnalProblem.pdf Suppose you are a doctor faced  w i th a  p a t i e nt who has a  m a l i g n a nt tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on  the  p a t i e n t,  b ut unless the  t umor is destroyed  the pa t i ent will die. There is a  k i nd of ray  that can be used to destroy  the  tumor. If th

Video to improve Reproducibility - by jove, did you know that ?

We often say a picture is worth a thousand words. Then a Video must be worth a ten thousand words. If this is true, then what took us this long to figure out that scientific journals should publsih videos instead of text.  Here it is - an online journal that publishes videos of experiments.   The Idea: Journal of Visualized Experiments— JoVE  an online journal where video is the main medium rather than a supplement. Each JoVE article consists of a short video segment that visually documents the required steps for performing an experiment. The video is supplemented by several paragraphs of peer-reviewed text. JoVE has developed a following in the life sciences, where being able to reproduce the results of an experiment in a timely fashion is a critical component to becoming a successful researcher.   http://www.jove.com/  - 1765 video articles published, 50 articles per month ! - spans across Neuroscience, Bioengineering, Applied Physics, Immunology, Medicene etc - ama

7 Rules to spot a great innovation - WIRED

How to figure out which kinds of innovation are most worth paying attention - Wired has come up with ways to "size up ideas and separate the truly world-changing from the merely interesting."  Thomas Goetz  lists seven rules for what to look for in great innovations: Look for cross-pollinators; surf the exponentials; favor the liberators; give points for audacity; bank on openness; demand deep design; and spend time with time wasters. Click here to read the Wired article http://tinyurl.com/85n7ole