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The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults.

The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Creative Commons-licensed videos can be found from within YouTube’s video editor through a special CC tab. These videos can then be trimmed, combined with other clips and synchronized to music, just like users have been able to do with their own uploads ever since YouTube launched its video editor a year ago. “It’s as if all the Creative Commons videos were part of your personal library,” explained Product Manager Jason Toff when I talked to him on the phone yesterday.

YouTube’s catalog of Creative Commons clips is being seeded with more than 10,000 videos from partners like C-SPAN, Voice of America and Al-Jazeera. Users also now have the ability to publish any of their own videos under CC-BY simply by selecting the licenses as an option during the upload process.

CC-BY only requires that users credit the original videographer, and YouTube is automating this process by adding links to the original work next to every mashup video. Toff said that the site might add additional Creative Commons licenses in the future if there was strong demand for it.

Creative Commons works by providing a framework for people to specify how their work can be used. Creators can use the Creative Commons website to choose the licence they want and generate the HTML code to include on their own website. The licences can allow people to copy it, remix it and share it and set various conditions under which those things can be done, for example allowing only non-commercial use of their work or allowing use only if they are credited as the source.

the licensing made possible new business models. She told the Telegraph that the existing system had failed because people saw the world as “either the chaos of piracy or the lockdown”. She added: “But the lockdown doesn’t work and it wouldn’t work even if it was ideal.”

Recently I re-read Richard Taylor’s An Introduction to Virtue Ethics, a classic published by Prometheus

Taylor compares virtue ethics to the other two major approaches to moral philosophy: utilitarianism (a la John Stuart Mill) and deontology (a la Immanuel Kant). Utilitarianism, of course, is roughly the idea that ethics has to do with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain; deontology is the idea that reason can tell us what we ought to do from first principles, as in Kant’s categorical imperative (e.g., something is right if you can agree that it could be elevated to a universally acceptable maxim).

Taylor argues that utilitarianism and deontology — despite being wildly different in a variety of respects — share one common feature: both philosophies assume that there is such a thing as moral right and wrong, and a duty to do right and avoid wrong. But, he says, on the face of it this is nonsensical. Duty isn’t something one can have in the abstract, duty is toward a law or a lawgiver, which begs the question of what could arguably provide us with a universal moral law, or who the lawgiver could possibly be.

Intellectual-property doctrine isn't a straightforward application of the ethical principle "Thou shalt not steal." At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal. The protections of copyright, for instance, are time-limited; once something passes into the public domain, anyone can copy it without restriction. Or suppose that you invented a cure for breast cancer in your basement lab. Any patent you received would protect your intellectual property for twenty years, but after that anyone could take your invention.

You get an initial monopoly on your creation because we want to provide economic incentives for people to invent things like cancer drugs. But everyone gets to steal your breast-cancer cure—after a decent interval—because it is also in society's interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives. This balance between the protecting and the limiting of intellectual property

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues in his new book "Free Culture": In ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. . . . I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don't have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had to put a picnic table in the backyard—by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing that I am taking then? The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though that is an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case—indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions—ideas released to the world are free. I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress—though I might seem weird if I do it every day. . . . Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and this is especially true when I copy the way someone dresses), "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Governments often fall down on all three: they have a particular ideology and so push a single-minded policy; they bet big; and they don’t bother to evaluate the results too carefully, perhaps through overconfidence. But markets can fail badly too, and for much the same reason. Just think about the subprime crisis. It failed the same three tests. First, many big banks and insurance companies were taking similar bets at similar times, so that when subprime loans started to go bad, much of Wall Street started struggling simultaneously. Second, the bets were gigantic. Fancy derivatives such as credit default swaps and complex mortgage-backed securities were new, rapidly growing, and largely untested. And third, many investment bankers were being paid large bonuses on the assumption that their performance could be measured properly – and it couldn’t, because profitable-seeming bets concealed large risks.

a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. The relationship even seems causal: churn today is correlated with fast economic growth tomorrow. The real benefit of this creative destruction, say Fogel and her colleagues, is not the appearance of “rising stars” but the disappearance of old, inefficient companies. Failure is not only common and unpredictable, it’s healthy.

We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. COMMENTS (7) SHARE: Twitter   Reddit   Buzz   More... But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night?

unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.

Seven centuries are an eyeblink in the scope of Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants, which looks back over some 50,000 years of history and peers nearly that far into the future. His argument is similarly sweeping: Technology, Kelly believes, can be seen as a sort of autonomous life-form, with intrinsic goals toward which it gropes over the course of its long development. Those goals, he says, are much like the tendencies of biological life, which over time diversifies, specializes, and (eventually) becomes more sentient.

We share a fascination with the long history of simultaneous invention: cases where several people come up with the same idea at almost exactly the same time. Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio—all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

I FIRST MET BJORN LOMBORG IN 2001 upon the publication of his Cambridge University Press book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I found to be a refreshing perspective on what had been the doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world scenarios that I had been hearing since I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. Back then we were told that overpopulation would lead to worldwide hunger and starvation, that there would be massive oil depletion, precious mineral exhaustion, and rainforest extinction by the 1990s. These predictions failed utterly. I felt I had been lied to for decades by the environmentalist movement that seemed to me to be little more than a political movement that raised money by raising fears.

Lomborg’s publicist thought that I might be interested in hosting him for the Skeptics Society’s public science lecture series at the California Institute of Technology that I organize and host. I was, but given the highly debatable nature of many of Lomborg’s claims I only agreed to host him if it could be a debate. Lomborg agreed at once to debate anyone, and this is where the trouble began. I could not find anyone to debate Lomborg. I contacted all of the top environmental organizations, and to a one they all refused to participate.

“There is no debate,” one told me. “We don’t want to dignify that book,” said another. I even called Paul Ehrlich, the author of the wildly popular bestselling book The Population Bomb — another apocalyptic prognostication that served as something of a catalyst in the 1970s for delimiting population growth — but he turned me down flat, warning me in no uncertain language that my reputation within the scientific community would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it.

The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.

The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.

The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.

Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks. The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”

“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.” Studiomates is an especially information-oriented bunch, and an influential one, too. In addition to her swissmiss blog and Twitter following of 200,000, Ms. Eisenberg is the founder of Creative Mornings, a popular monthly speaking series that has young designers in four cities talking.

Much of the content for her blog and Twitter feed comes from the casual conversations at Studiomates. “The day-to-day distraction level may be slightly higher,” Ms. Popova said. “But in terms of the influx of the building blocks of productivity — ideas, story tips, the interesting people who come in — an environment like this is priceless.”

pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme paid Elsevier to produce a fake medical journal that, to any superficial examination, looked like a real medical journal but was in reality nothing more than advertising for Merck

As reported by The Scientist: Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship. "I've seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies," Peter Lurie, deputy director of the public health research group at the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, said, after reviewing two issues of the publication obtained by The Scientist. "But even for someone as jaded as me, this is a new wrinkle." The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Exerpta Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database, and has no website (not even a defunct one). The Scientist obtained two issues of the journal: Volume 2, Issues 1 and 2, both dated 2003. The issues contained little in the way of advertisements apart from ads for Fosamax, a Merck drug for osteoporosis, and Vioxx.

there are numerous "throwaway" journals out there. "Throwaway" journals tend to be defined as journals that are provided free of charge, have a lot of advertising (a high "advertising-to-text" ratio, as it is often described), and contain no original investigations. Other relevant characteristics include: Supported virtually entirely by advertising revenue. Ads tend to be placed within article pages interrupting the articles, rather than between articles, as is the case with most medical journals that accept ads Virtually the entire content is reviews of existing content of variable (and often dubious) quality. Parasitic. Throwaways often summarize peer-reviewed research from real journals. Questionable (at best) peer review. Throwaways tend to cater to an uninvolved and uncritical readership. No original work.