Category: ideas

America has long led the world in innovation and patent applications. But is the U.S. losing its competitive edge? “The scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength. Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world. We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be lost – and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed it can be regained at all.”

“Researchers said a sample of children who either have or are at high risk for bipolar disorder, which was formerly called manic-depressive illness, score higher on a creativity index than healthy children.”

A new study claims that technology in the workplace is so complicated, that some workers waste up to a month per year trying to figure out how to make technology on their jobs work. “The demands of the 21st century office leave almost one in five workers (17 per cent) struggling to get their heads round simple tasks asked of them, according to the report.”

“Cool is a word that often crops up when describing art or artists. It’s always been a term that has bugged me. The minute something is described as cool, my instincts tell me that it is on the wane. For me, being creative is being prepared to make a fool of myself — in a nutshell, the opposite of cool. In my experience embarrassment is not fatal. Coolness somehow implies that there is a right thing to do, whereas creativity is mistakes. I recall in sixth-form art lessons that the coolest boy just churned out copies of his favourite album covers… In years to come we will look back at our obsession with appearing cool as we look at the medieval chivalric code. I think the time has come for adulthood and wisdom to be seen as things worth aspiring to.”

Trying to make its case for protecting copyrights, NBC Universal commissioned a study to measure the economic impact of the “intellectual property” industry on the US economy. “The report estimates that growth in U.S. gross domestic product from 2002-2010 would be reduced from $3.1 trillion to $2 trillion without the contribution of the IP industry. ‘Digital piracy is an issue that goes far beyond illegal downloading of music or movies. Theft and counterfeiting of intellectual property of all types is a serious and growing problem for the U.S. economy. This study provides important empirical evidence of just how much is at stake’.”

“Nearly 14 million visitors troop through Venice each year, turning parts of the 1,500-year-old former island republic into a clichéd tourist destination. Locals grumble that day-trippers have transformed the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark’s into an Italian Disneyland. But outlying neighborhoods like Castello see few tourists. The nearly two-hour tour, dubbed History Unwired, features five recordings by local residents – ranging from a glass blower to a ska musician – along with flash animations, maps, and movie clips, all uploaded onto a PDA. Three Bluetooth sensors peppered along the route trigger a virtual tour of a Venetian home and two art installations, one projected on a building, another on hanging laundry.”

When Britain’s Parliament begins debate this week on a new bill designed to combat terrorism, the country’s academics and university librarians will be watching closely. Some in the academic world fear that the bill as currently worded would brand the dissemination of some chemistry textbooks (which include basic explosive ingredient lists) as a terrorist act. “The Association of University Teachers says the new offences of encouraging or training for terrorism could effectively outlaw an ethics debate about political violence, or a chemistry lesson.”

“California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, a $400 million research consortium assembled over the last five years,” is in the process of nurturing a groundbreaking collaboration between science and art, housing a team of artists in what is primarily a research facility and encouraging them to collaborate with in-house scientists on all sorts of projects. “The juxtaposition of digital art with next-generation science and technologies like wireless networks, biosensors and optical supercomputers gives Calit2 a degree of panache that has largely been lost in the American scientific and corporate research worlds in the face of financial cutbacks over the last decade.”

“Copyright holders have been batting a thousand at the Supreme Court over the last decade. So why the complaints? The Property Rights Alliance and its allies know the real copyright debate isn’t about whether intellectual property should be protected (virtually everyone agrees that it should) but over recent attempts to expand copyright far beyond its traditional boundaries. Those expansions are hard to defend, so copyright hawks are doing their best to change the subject.”