The Wall Street Journal's Science Journal has an excellent article by Sharon Begley about perception. It is an article that focuses on how Westerners and Easterners see things differently and how this has implications on, among other things, politics and business. It disputes the widely held view by cognitive scientists that all humans perceive and reason the same way.

"Westerners and Asians literally see different worlds," says Prof. Nisbett. "Westerners pay attention to the focal object, while Asians attend more broadly -- to the overall surroundings and to the relations between the object and the field." These generalizations seem to hold even though Eastern and Western countries each represent many different cultures and traditions.

 
Psychology Today has this to say about The Difficulties of Multi-tasking:

Multi-tasking, the mental act of juggling, may not actually be the best way to save time or get things done well. A new body of research has found that multi-tasking makes people less efficient and reduces the level of brainpower used for each task. Also, people who overburden their minds with too many tasks at once can have problems with short-term memory.

One study, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that the mind slows down when it switches back and forth between tasks. The only way to turn off this mental friction is to put more time, even just a few seconds, between tasks. A second study, in the journal NeuroImage, also notes that the mind does not cope well with multitasking. It asked participants to listen to sentences while comparing two rotating objects. Even though these tasks use different parts of the brain, visual input dropped 29 percent and listening success fell 53 percent.

For people doing too many things at once, additional worry can build up into a stress response. This adrenalin rush can damage the cells that form new memories. It can also weaken attentiveness and alertness. So what can people to get their act together? Focus on fewer tasks.

 
Why do we yawn? Is yawning contagious (like laughing)?

 
Poster and flyer art by designers promoting concerts and other events: gigposters.com. Some interesting stuff here.

(via MeFi)

 
Positives. U.S. News & World Report recently published a "Special Collector's Edition" titled "American Ingenuity: The Culture of Creativity that Made a Nation Great". It's jam-packed with a beautiful mix of American stories about innovation, focusing on such people as Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, Rachel Carson, Charles Kettering, Levi Strauss, scientist Leo Sternbach (inventor of Valium), adman Leo Burnett and Willis Carrier (inventor of air conditioning). I don't believe that it is online anywhere but here is the introduction by editor Jodi Schneider anyway:

For many, America is not just a place but a dream, an idea, an aspiration. For immigrants, it has long meant the end of suffering under tyranny; the hard work required to be a success here was part of their dream. For the thinkers and creators - musicians, scholars, inventors, and innovators - America has offered the freedom to explore their pursuits and take their ideas to the masses, and the hope of financial rewards as well. But America is also a landscape. By exploring uniquely American parts of our geography - the Lower East Side of New York, in 1900 and in 2000; Coney Island, then and now; and Las Vegas, which is becoming an all-American city - one can see into the nation's people and its soul, and wrestle with the notion of what makes up the American spirit.

 
I must admit that I didn't know what "Mondrian" was when, in a comment to an earlier post, Jack characterized the woefully underdesigned look of this site as "post-Mondrian". But now I do. Piet Modrian (1872-1944), Dutch Neo-Plasticist painter of rigid abstraction in which a canvas is subsected into rectangles by vertical and horizontal lines and colored using only a very limited palette.

 
Wired's two cents on space travel to Mars:

The Columbia's loss gives us an opportunity to take a step back - and prepare a giant leap forward. Keeping humans in space isn't an end in itself. We are there to explore, which means going places we haven't been before rather than building destinations in the places we can just about reach. The exploration of Mars in particular offers immense scientific promise. To understand Earth as a planet - one of the great developing themes of contemporary science - we need to understand other planets, too, and Mars is both the most accessible and the one most likely to have supported life at some point in its past. But Mars isn't the only possible destination: There are arguments to be made for the moon as well. (Astronomers would love to install telescopes there, to look for life around other stars.) The specific destination is not the most important thing; the most important thing is to define a program that goes somewhere for some real purpose rather than justifying its circular orbits with circular arguments.

Speaking of space, did you know that you can legally purchase plots of land on the moon?

The UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 stipulated that no government could own extraterrestrial property. However, it neglected to mention individuals and corporations. Therefore, under laws dating back from early US settlers, it was possible to stake a claim for land, and register it with the US Government Office of claim registries. A declaration of ownership was filed with the United Nations as well as the US and Russian governments in 1980 by Mr. Dennis M. Hope of the Lunar Embassy, to ensure that a legal basis for the ownership of the properties sold here can be claimed.

 
The following is part of the introduction to a wonderfully articulate and intelligent academic paper, Towards Solving the Interdisciplinary Language Barrier Problem by Sébastien Paquet, curator of an equally inviting weblog called Seb's Open Research.

While specialization is desirable from that particular point of view, it also has a downside: the more a person becomes specialized, the less he can meaningfully discuss problems that matter to him with other people. In effect, the specialist is very often restricted to collaboration with other specialists in the same area. As one gets more and more specialized, pools of colleagues grow ever smaller. This is unfortunate because discussions with specialists in another area often prove to be fertile ground, as ideas and strategies which were first developed in one field often turn out to be adaptable to a problem in a different field. Indeed, breakthroughs often result from interdisciplinary collaboration: it is not unusual that effective tools for tackling a long-standing problem in an area are found in another area. For instance, the recent scientific successes of genome sequencing owe much to the collaboration between biologists and computer specialists. Another adverse consequence of the isolation arising from specialization is that many people reinvent the wheel for themselves because they are unaware of similar work that has been done elsewhere.

Interdisciplinary communication is thus desirable from the point of view of progress: that is, it is helpful in solving problems, especially the more important and challenging ones. Consequently, finding efficient ways of communicationg with outsiders is becoming an increasingly pressing problem for people who are not content with speaking only with an inner circle of colleagues. A way to alleviate the problem is to learn another specialty, which will provide opportunities for discussion with a larger circle of people. However, learning a specialty usually involves a considerable time investment: moreover, there are so many different specialties that even selecting a promising one can be a difficult problem in itself.

 
"The world's first exhibition of contemporary character design." Pictoplasma. (Cool idea: the PictoOrphanage).

 
For those who wish to escape the omnipresent political discussions you'll want to skip this post. ... Last year The New Yorker published a very insightful article titled The Next World Order. In it Nicholas Lemann takes a very candid look at a collection of developments and documents (particularly the chilling "Rebuilding America's Defences") that point towards a rather profound shift in international affairs; a shift that is made considerably more apparent this week with the discrediting/failure of the United Nations. Foreign affairs, of course, is perhaps one of the ultimate forums for generalism - a wide variety of views must come together and fashion some sort of cooperation. Diversity breeds diversity, and diversity fuels progress by providing opportunity for different ideas to rub together and create something better and new.

 
A few weeks ago a link was posted here to a great online collection of time lapse video creations. Today, the opposite. A captivating series of stop motion Flash visuals. Shot by David Crawford in late 2002 in Göteborg, London, Paris, Boston and New York, "the body language of the subjects becomes the basic syntax for a series of Web-based animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage. Many sequences document a person’s reaction to being photographed by a stranger. Some smile, others snarl, still others perform. Some pretend not to notice. Underneath all of this are assumptions and unknowns unique to each situation."

 
Alas, the sense of community that a common faith brings to a people spelled trouble for me. In time, my religious doings went from the notice of those to whom it didn't matter and only amused, to that of those to whom it didn't matter - and they were not amused.
"What is your son doing going to temple?" asked the priest.
"Your son was seen in church crossing himself," said the imam.
"Your son has gone Muslim," said the pandit.
Yes, it was all forcefully brought to the attention of my bemused parents. You see, they didn't know. They didn't know that I was a practising Hindu, Christian and Muslim. Teenagers always hide a few things from their parents, isn't that so? All sixteen-year-olds have secrets, don't they? But fate decided that my parents and I and the three wise men, as I shall call them, should meet one day on the Goubert Salai seaside esplanade and that my secret should be outed. It was lovely, breezy, hot Sunday afternoon and the Bay of Bengal glittered under a blue sky. Townspeople were out for a stroll. Children screamed and laughed. Coloured balloons floated in the air. Ice cream sales were brisk. Why think of business on such a day, I ask? Why couldn't they have just walked by with a nod and a smile? It was not to be.We were to meet not just one wise man but all three, and not one after another but at the same time, and each would decide upon seeing us that right then was the golden occasion to meet that Pondicherry notable, the zoo director, he of the model devout son. When I saw the first, I smiled; by the time I had laid eyes on the third, my smile had frozen into a mask of horror. When it was clear that all three were converging on us, my heart jumped before sinking very low.
The wise men seemed annoyed when they realized that all three of them were approaching the same people. Each must have assumed that the others were there for some business other than pastoral and had rudely chosen that moment to deal with it. Glances of displeasure were exchanged.
...
After the "Hellos" and the "Good days", there was an awkward silence. The priest broke it when he said, with pride in his voice, "Piscine is a good Christian boy. I hope to see him join our choir soon."
My parents, the pandit and the imam looked surprised.
"You must be mistaken. He's a good Muslim boy. He comes without fail to Friday prayer, and his knowledge of the Holy Qur'an is coming along nicely." So said the imam.
My parents, the priest and the pandit looked incredulous.
The pandit spoke. "You're both wrong. He's a good Hindu boy. I see him all the time at the temple coming for darshan and performing puja."
My parents, the imam and the priest looked astounded. ...

An excerpt from Chapter 23 of Yann Martel's celebrated novel Life of Pi.

 
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet meets modern-day teenager's SMS/IM L33T-speak and scratchy Flash. LOL!

 
The Beastie Boys weigh in on the whole war thing with a new, just-released track from their current recording sessions: In a World Gone Mad...

 
Yes, I specialize in generalism.

 
Well, he lives up to his job title as technology forecaster. Paul Saffo wrote this article, Information Surfing, for Personal Computing in 1989. The gist of it is that with new technology has come and over abundance of information. And with this over abundance there has become a strong need for generalists, or information surfers, over specialists. This would seem like common knowledge now but he wrote about it before the internet took off.

An information surfing future will be one of generalists capable of teasing knowledge and understanding out of large information flows. Information surfers will be pattern finders applying new intellectual skills and working in close concert with radically more powerful information tools. Specialists won't be totally obsolete, but the nature of their work will also change radically.

As exotic as information surfing sounds, it is not without precedent. Our culture has faced information overload on other occasions, and each time the invention of new information tools has in turn triggered new intellectual skills. The emergence of a print culture soon after 1500 is but the most famous example in an intellectual history spanning several millenia. In the mid-1400s, memory was prized as the scholar's most important intellectual tool, and literacy was but an exotic and secondary skill. But within a century of Gutenberg's invention, literacy synonymous with scholarship, and the formal arts of memory began a long slide into obscurity. This represented nothing less than a shift from the use of the brain as storage to the brain as a processor of print-based information.

[...] Still, information surfing instincts can have practical value even before an appropriate infrastructure arrives. Just as Exxon's sluggish bureaucracy was outrun by a creeping oil slick, many corporations are learning that traditional management structures simply cannot cope with events in todays information overloaded, interrupt driven world. Economist Peter Drucker suggests that the result may be an entirely new form of organization which is information-based and organized around supporting small high-performance teams of knowledge professionals. Information surfing organizations are more likely to resemble symphony orchestras than General Motors.

This is commented on, quite accurately I would say, by Azeem Azhar in his March 12th post at his weblog:

Being a generalists can be tough: generalism is something that isn't often valued by firms because of three pressures. Firm's processes are so specialised that they need to slot in someone, in Adam Smith's terms, to hammer the head of the pin. (Ironically, these processes are often designed by generalists). There are more specialists around because of the system that was created by increasing urban density, mass education and rigid command-and-control systems in organisations. This is a perfect substrate for growing specialists, not generalists. Generalists who can, in the words of Jed Bartlett, "see the whole board" can be threatening to specialist managers worried about limited fixed objectives.

 
I just learned of this amazing technology today. Shift Magazine (which, incidentally, just suspended operations) had it at the bottom of their list of "10 technologies that haven't taken off...yet". It is the decopier - a photocopier that works in reverse to remove toner from paper. Cool, huh? The technology has existed for years apparently and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of trees by re-using paper and reducing the need for security paper shredding.

Discover Magazine gave an environmental award to the inventor of this innovation, Sushil Bhatia, president of Imagex Technologies in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1998. Here's what they wrote:

The difficulty with copiers and laser printers, he found, is that "the toner is embedded deeply in the paper because of the heat and pressure used in the process." Newsprint ink, by contrast, lies mostly on the surface, which is why it rubs off on your hands but makes newspapers easier to recycle. So Bhatia and a team of researchers found a chemical that sunders the bond between the toner and the paper. In demonstrations, Bhatia placed a piece of paper on a heated surface, brushed a milky liquid containing the secret chemical over the paper, and in a few seconds brushed the printing away. Imagex is now building a prototype "decopier" that, while it would look much like a photocopy machine, would work in reverse: a printed page will be fed in, and a few seconds later, out will pop a crisp, blank sheet.

By September 1997, Bhatia had figured out how to decopy paper from 15 different copiers in addition to overhead slides. He envisions his Office Paper Decopier being put to work mainly in large companies. By decopying and reusing white paper instead of throwing it away, a big office could in theory cut paper costs by 70 percent or more.

 
Always good for a laugh or two: Screaming Midget.

 
Toronto-based web designer/programmer Patrick Jordan offers this eloquent essay, Renaissance Child, about technology and a generalist approach to understanding.

 What does all of this mean? You can already see the beginnings of a culture of creative generalists emerging; people who are equally interested in exploring all aspects of science and art - a new rennaisance. We're empowered by modern technology to learn about anything that interests us, from quantum physics to fashion design, from any street-corner or coffee shop. And as time goes on, the price of these tools will become so cheap that we'll have no concern placing them in the hands of children. However, we must keep in mind that it is no good placing digital cameras in the hands of five-year-olds if you don't teach them about aesthetics and meaning. And what good is teaching about science and technology if we don't encourage ingenuity and exploration?

His is a very nicely designed site - worth exploring, especially his photography collection.

 
The next American city - The three-acre lot versus the town center: where do americans want to live?

Whatever one thinks about suburban sprawl, one must acknowledge that it has, for the past two generations, been the choice for most Americans with any degree of mobility. Smart growth will only succeed if communities and developers can create dense, walkable urban and suburban communities that large numbers of people will choose over suburban sprawl.

(via Urbanphoto.org)

 
Fortune has an article about Brand Blue - as in the Blue Man Group, those tall bald blue-coloured performance artists that some of us have seen at shows in NY, Boston, Chicago or Vegas but most of us have only seen on those interesting Intel commercials. The article goes on to describe some of their growing pains - moving from a core group of three (the founders) and an understudy to a natioanl troupe of sorts consisting of 38 blue men. The Blue Man Group brand has been carefully guarded and is hailed as a great business example of managing success.

Their first real breakthrough didn't come until several years later, when they belatedly saw the wisdom of advice they received from noted business philosopher Penn Jilette, half of the irreverent Penn & Teller comedy-magic duo. "He saw the show in, like, the first month," says Goldman, who has a recurring grin that suggests he just got away with something. Jilette is a big man, and to recreate the moment, Goldman stands and looms over me, waving his hands. "He said, 'Oh, my God! You guys can do what Teller and I can never do! You can clone yourselves!' And we said, 'No, you don't get it, we're more like a band.' I actually thought he was, like ..." he searches momentarily and finally settles on, "a wackhead."

(via Pure Content)

 
Crispin Glover has fleshed out various films with truly inspired performances. He was the affected, druggie Layne in River’s Edge (’87), a mute baddie in Charlie’s Angels (2000) and had a hilarious cameo as Andy Warhol in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (’91). He’s also attracted the attention of some of the most influential directors working, landing roles in the films of David Lynch (Wild at Heart), Lasse Hallstrom (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape), Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man) and Neil LaBute (Nurse Betty).

Meanwhile, Glover has not limited himself to acting, having written several novels, most notably Rat Catching, published by his family’s own Volcanic Eruptions Press. Claiming to be intrigued by "the aesthetic of discomfort," Glover also recorded a spoken-word and music album, The Big Problem [does not equal] the Solution. The Solution = LET IT BE, in ’89, and in ’99 released his directorial debut, What Is It?, a film that starred a group of actors with Down’s Syndrome. This year Glover is again starring as a freakish figure, playing the title role in Willard, the remake of the ’70s cult movie.

 
How does the world look like up close and no more than 30cm from the ground? Check out this cool photography site to see - retrospectiv. It's a collection of "low perspective" photography - some breathtaking, some mundane - from contributors all around the world. (Thanks for the link, Ellen!)

 
CBC's Venture had a great piece last night about the hydrogen fuel cell and its increasing momentum as a major energy supply. Powering the Future examines Iceland, an isolated island heavily influenced by the cost of oil; a small society with a bounty of natural energy literally bubbling up from the ground; a population with the most automobiles per capita in the world; and a marketer's perfect self-contained test market for a new technology. The government of Iceland is determined to replace fossil fuels with the cleaner, cheaper hydrogen and has even convinced major energy, research and car companies to join them (or was it the other way around? Tough to say.)

 
Found at a fansite called the Calvin and Hobbes Resurrection, this 1998 newspaper article - Calvin Creator's Secret Hideout - chronicles the reclusive, publicity-shy nature of legendary cartoonist Bill Watterson.

It has been almost three years since Calvin and Hobbes rode a toboggan off the comic pages to go exploring. And Watterson would like it if the two of them would just go on without him. "He would like it all to fade away," said his father, Jim, a patent lawyer, the same profession as Calvin's dad, who was satirized often in the strip. "He doesn't get his kicks by being famous. He was just doing something he enjoyed doing."

 
Articles like this one about the music industry are interesting to read, not because they offer much new information but because they highlight the ineptitude of an industry that had a golden opportunity and killed it. These articles read like an ongoing obituary. The music industry could have embraced a new - albeit unexplored - direction with the aid of the internet but has instead set itself up to be the web's most prominent victim.