Creativity Top 5: Week of March 25, 2013
/The "Imagine" spot for the Anti-Defamation League at #5 is chilling. At #1, Oreo and Kit Kat are full of chocolate social media win.
Inventing Magic Toys, Puzzles And Video Games
/More fantastic episodes from PBS Digital Studios Inventors Channel. Inventors is a series of portrait videos by filmmaker and photographer David Friedman, chronicling the work of contemporary inventors from all walks of life. It offers rare glimpses into the inspiration for their creations.
Mark Setteducati is a magician and artist who uses principles of mathematics and illusions in the toys and puzzles he invents. He's also a founder of the Gathering For Gardner, a biennial celebration of the life of mathematician and writer Martin Gardner. Here he talks about how math and magic influence him as an inventor.
The patents for many of Mark's clever inventions can be found here.
Ralph Baer is often called the father of video games. His invention, the Magnavox Odyssey, was the first home console system. Last year he celebrated his 90th birthday the same year the Odyssey turned 40. Here he talks about those early days of video game history and why now, at 90 years old, he's still inventing.
You can see the original patent for the Magnavox Odyssey here.
Are Piracy, Knock Offs and Minecraft Good For Us?
/PBS Idea Channel recently celebrated their one year anniversary. One year of provocative and funny questions to view the world from a new perspective. I am a big fan of the Idea Channel from PBS Digital Studios. In honor of their anniversary, over the next couple of days I'll be sharing some of their recent work, catching up with some and introducing new ones.
If you're like us, you LOVE Game of Thrones. But if you're also like us, you may not, technically, have... cable. So how are we seeing this amazing show on HBO, which is stuck behind a pay wall? A huge amount of viewers (not us of course, no no no) are downloading the show illegally. But despite being the most pirated show of 2012, the Game of Thrones DVDs are top sellers, breaking HBO's own sales records! Could it be that piracy is actually HELPING the show?
Living in the consumer culture that we do, we've learned that specific brands can carry very different meanings and values. We're willing to pay hundreds or thousands more for a specific brand name item, but sometimes it can be tempting to go the way of the knock-off for a fraction of the price. The counterfeit industry is huge and isn't going anywhere, and companies spend huge amounts to dissuade people from buying "fakes". But are knock-offs REALLY a negative for the brand?
If you've watched past episodes of Idea Channel, you know we're huge fans of Minecraft. This totally amazing video game allows you to build your own world from scratch, what's not to like? But it may be good for more than just fun and games. Some experts have brought Minecraft into the classroom, allowing teachers to customize lessons and students to engage with concepts in new ways. And while educational games aren't new, Minecraft has some unique advantages that could usher in a new direction in education. In the future, students across the world may spend their class time punching trees.
A meteorite crashed into earth! This wasn't the first time and it won't be the last, but it is the first time such an event was captured by SO MANY CAMERAS! The incredible number of views and angles filmed was made possible by Russia's bizarre driving culture and the MILLIONS of car dash cams installed all over the country. But besides providing the world with some hilarious, frightening, and amazing footage, the dash cams also make us think about surveillance, and what role it will play in the future.
If you've ever played Team Fortress 2, you know how valuable hats are. To those who haven't: yes, HATS! If a community agrees on the value of something, then that thing can become a currency, to exchange for other goods. Just like american dollar bills (or euros, yen, or any other currency), or... bitcoins. Bitcoins are an online currency worth over $200,000,000, and though they are just 1s and 0s, some think that this is the future of money. On the other hand... mo bitcoins mo problems.
Transhumanism is a scientific philosophy that says technology will solve all our human biological constraints and that immortality is right around the corner (well not RIGHT around the corner, but WAY closer). They envision a world of endlessly euphoric robo-humans that represent the next step in evolution. And while this sounds super awesome, we had to ask, will this really make us happy? If you watch Futurama, than you know that the answer is probably NO. While not an exact illustration of transhumanism, Futurama does show a future of vast technological ability, where today's everyday problems are rendered moot, and yet the characters on the show still seem to find themselves in some very non-euphoric emotional states. Does this disprove what transhumanists expect for our future?
If you've ever talked to a vinyl purist (or are one yourself) you know that people can be pretty passionate about what format is king when it comes to music. And based on how much people like to brag about what band they saw live and how many times, we clearly value the authenticity of the live performance above all else. But when we see a performer live, we're judging them based on what we know from the mp3 or record that we've already listened to 1000 times. . . because what is a song SUPPOSED to sound like anyway? As music has evolved from solely performance into "media", the issue of what the most authentic even IS has become increasingly complicated. So which is the most authentic?
The Week's Links: March 22, 2013
/All the links posted on social networks this week:
- Underground Library Lets Subway Riders Sample Books On iPhones ➞
- And You Can Dance. For Inspiration. (Five Views On Dance) ◉
- List of inventors killed by their own inventions - Wikipedia ➞ /via @radiolab
- UX Design: Designing For The Multifaceted User ➞
- The Photographer Who Made Architects Famous ➞
- How did I miss this: National Geographic Found, a new photo tumblr. ➞ /via @kottke
- Everything You Need To Know About Quotes and Accents ➞
- Cool: loads.in - test how fast a webpage loads in a real browser from over 50 locations worldwide ➞
- Google Art Project adds nearly 2,000 works, from street art to prized photos ➞
- Apple Finally Adds Two-Step Verification to iCloud and Apple ID ➞
- The Devil Is An Artistic Director ◉
- Harry Houdini: Audio of the escape artist introducing his famous "water torture" escape ➞
- A Modest Proposal By John Bohannon: Get Rid Of Powerpoint And Use Dancers Instead ◉
- NEA ARTS: Beyond Museum Walls: The Smithsonian Institution's Mobile Strategy ➞
- Can’t Get That Song Out of My Head: An Animation of a Psychological Phenomenon We All Know ➞
- J.K. Rowling criticizes TV for romanticizing adolescence ➞
- App Building DIY Way: Non-Techie Entrepreneurs Find Outside Resources to Help Them Create Software ➞
- Get Scott Berkun's Mindfire 1.1 Free for the next 48 hours ➞
- 5 steps to get crisp about that idea floating in your head ➞
- The 150 Things the World's Smartest People Are Afraid Of ➞
- What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years ➞
- "Applied Design" at MoMA is the first exhibition to include the 14 video games the museum acquired last year. ➞
- La Sagrada Familia: Under Construction For Over 130 Years ◉
- Literary Magazines Adapt to the Digital Age ➞
- Dance Your PH.D. ◉
- Responsible Considerations For Responsive Web Design ➞
- From Google Ventures: 4 Steps For Combining The Hacker Way With Design Thinking ➞
- A Map of the World According to Illustrators and Storytellers ➞
- The GitHub Generation: Why We're All in Open Source Now ➞
- Aaron Sorkin was right: Kill Your Meeting Room — The Future's in Walking and Talking ➞
- How will we manage and market the arts of the future. Good article: My Arts Utopia ➞
- Will Authors Get Compensated for Used E-Book Sales? ➞
- Transmedia Storytelling Comes Alive With Secret Cinema ➞
- Creativity Top 5: Week of March 18, 2013 ◉
- FOUND: A New Collection of Rare Photos from the National Geographic Archives ➞
- The Algorithm That Helps You Friend People You Don't Know ➞
- Announcing the 2013 winners of The Brain Prize ➞
- David Parsons' Caught vs Wrecking Crew Orchestra's Tron ◉
- Researchers Explain Goals and Structure of Brain Activity Map: MIT Technology Review ➞
- The Gamification of Education? ➞
- Dan Ariely's Course on "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior" Open for Enrollment! ➞
- A Photo Service That Understands the Contents of Your Images ➞
- So great: Father hacks Donkey Kong so his daughter can play as Peach and save Mario. ➞
- Email Best Practices for Teams ➞
- Milestones ◉
- Even Bees Get a Buzz When They Drink Caffeine ➞
- Mapping How the Brain Thinks ➞
- The Secret Lives Of Dancers ◉
- Lousy Sleep Isn't Good For Your Body, Either ➞
- Digital Files and 3D Printing—in the Renaissance? ➞
- Transforming Raw Scientific Data Into Sculpture and Song ➞
- This Is What 15,000 Volts Look Like Going Into a Piece of Wood ➞
- Is Cursive Handwriting Going Extinct? ➞
- Hello World! Processing: A Smart New Documentary On The Awesome Potential Of Creative Coding ➞
- Why Great Ideas Get Rejected: From TEDxOU ➞
- The New Psychology of Marketing ➞
- Fascinating: Danse Macabre - A Scandal at the Bolshoi Ballet, The New Yorker ➞
- I Want My Music Videos: The Art Form Gets Its Own Museum Exhibition ➞
- Research has shown that we are not very good judges of how effectively we're learning new information. ➞
- "Embracing Analog" at SXSW: What the growing fascination with the physical means for marketers ➞
- The Stax Records Guide To Overcoming Setbacks ➞
- Reflections on the First Hackathon at the White House: MIT Center for Civic Media ➞
- Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas on the wildly successful Kickstarter movie campaign ➞
- Can’t Get That Song Out of My Head: An Animation of a Psychological Phenomenon We All Know ➞
- Valentina Lisitsa, The Justin Bieber of Classical Piano ➞
- TED Playlists: What does the future look like? ➞
- Sleep Deprivation Effects: 8 Scary Side Effects Of Too Little Shut-Eye ➞
- A new website for CERN ➞
- Whose Idea Were Cruises, Anyway? ➞
- Can You Make Sad Songs Sound Happy (And Vice Versa)? ➞
- Pixar's Senior Scientist explains how math makes the movies and games we love ➞
- Neil Tyson Pounds The Table, Demanding A Future, Now! ➞
- 12 Steps to Incorporate Exercise into Your Life ➞
- Classic worth revisiting: Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling ➞
- Jesse Rosen: Doing More About Diversity in America's Orchestras ➞
- 4 inspiring kids imagine the future of learning ➞
- A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013 - Technology ➞
- How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for 'Star Wars' ➞
- Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You ➞ /via @davepell
- Brilliant idea, can't wait to try it: Hack the Met - Metropolitan Museum of Art Tour ➞
- I'm Not Your Consumer: How Research Misses The Human Behind The Demographic ➞
Recommended This Week:
The Devil Is An Artistic Director→
/Adweek covers the promotion of Anna Wintour last week:
Powerful Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour is expanding her role at Condé Nast. Today, the publisher announced that Wintour—who is also the editorial director of Teen Vogue—was named artistic director of Condé Nast. In the newly created role, Wintour will be responsible for "curating and cultivating the creative vision" for the company, according to a statement.
In an interview with The New York Times, Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend said that Wintour would be assuming some of the responsibilities left open by Si Newhouse, the 85-year-old chairman of Condé Nast parent Advance Publications, when he scaled back his role, including oversight of Condé Nast's editorial division, last fall. "Si Newhouse leaves a void, inevitably," Townsend told the Times. "Anna, without even having to think twice about it, is the most qualified person to pick up that torch and carry it into the future."
Townsend added that the role of artistic director had been created, in part, to keep Wintour at Condé Nast, telling the Times that he "would go to great distances to avoid losing Anna, particularly in the prime of her career." Wintour had been rumored last year to be a possible Obama administration appointee to the U.K. ambassadorship, but she maintained that she had no plans outside of Condé Nast.
I find Wintour to be truly fascinating. While everyone is discussing the death of publishing as we know it she secures herself an even bigger position of leadership at Condé Nast. At this moment it's not clear what this new position really means for publications like Wired, Epicurious or The New Yorker and I can not help but find myself very curious to see how her obvious influence will extend beyond the world of fashion.
In conversations I often compare Wintour to Steve Jobs. Most of us were willing to dismiss his most demanding character traits while acknowledging that he was a visionary genius, and yet similar behavior and success from Wintour results in her being branded a Prada-wearing devil.
I gained a better understanding of who Wintour is from a film, not that one, the other one. The R.J. Cutler directed documentary The September Issue (available for streaming in the usual places.) Cutler spent eight months following Wintour and filming over three hundred hours of footage.
While making The September Issue, I observed Anna Wintour day-in and day-out as she single-handedly commanded the $300-billion global fashion industry. In a business where last week's fashion shows are already old news, she has been at the top of her field (and the top of her game) for two decades and counting. Shortly after we began filming, I observed to a friend who asked what it was like to watch Anna work, "Well, you can make a film in Hollywood without Steven Spielberg's blessing, and you can publish software in Silicon Valley without Bill Gates' blessing, but it's pretty clear to me that you can't succeed in the fashion industry without Anna Wintour's blessing."
Cutler even learned four lessons in management by watching Wintour work.
Another reason to watch the documentary is to discover Grace Coddington. Every influential public figure always has a behind-the-scenes person who is equally, if quietly, influential to the work.
Watch the above trailer for the documentary. At around the 2:00 mark there is a moment that resonated with me when I watched the film and that I confess I've stolen. In many meetings over the past few years I've been known to paraphrase her and demand "where is the quality?, where is the elegance?, where is the follow through? Come on, elevate it."
If God is in the details, so is the Devil and she is an Artistic Director.