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A year ago, exciting news about publishing 2.0 reached the blogosphere. Thriller writer Paulo Coelho had started to tell people how he was using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more

His American publisher wasn’t too pleased though. After a rather imitating call from CEO Jane Friedman, Coelho chose a middle way and made the book viewable – but not downloadable. The torrent links are still up there though. Why? Coelho: “You’ll have to share in order to get some revenue”.

“At the end of the day, it doesn’t hurt your sales. People download the book but don’t read it They wait for the hard copy anyway”, Coelho continued. “Don’t be fooled by the publishers who say that piracy costs authors money.”

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.

A good example of manual curation vs. crowdsourced curation is the competing app markets on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phone operating systems.

Apple is a monarchy, albeit with a wise and benevolent king. Android is burgeoning democracy, inefficient and messy, but free. Apple is the last, best example of the Industrial Age and its top-down, mass market/mass production paradigm.

They manufacture cool. They rely on “consumers”, and they protect those consumers from too many choices by selecting what is worthy, and what is not.

One of the more unpleasant aspects of the New Labour government was its anti-Hayekian pretence that central government could acquire knowledge which, in fact, is unobtainable.

it is impossible to predict what research will be commercially useful. History is full of examples of businessmen and scientists - let alone politicians - utterly failing to anticipate commercial uses, for example:“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable”"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value.” "Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.""While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility." “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."“This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

The notion that government can cut only “useless” science funding is an egregious pretence to know things that cannot be known. Instead, such cuts operate much as financial constraints for business operate: they diminish the ecology upon which natural selection operates.

First, Time carried out a reader poll, in which individuals got the chance to vote and rate their favorite nominees. Zuckerberg ended up in 10th place with 18,353 votes and an average rating of 52 behind renowned individuals such as Lady Gaga, Julian Assange, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, et cetera. On the other end of the spectrum, Julian Assange managed to grab the first place with a whopping 382,026 votes and an average rating of 92.It turns out that the poll had no point or purpose at all. Time clearly did not take into account its readers’ opinion on the matter.

ulian Assange should have been named Person of the Year. His contribution to the world and history — whether you see it as positive or negative — has been more controversial and life-changing that those of Zuckerberg. Assange and his non-profit organization has changed the way we look at various governments around the world. Specially, the U.S. government. There’s a reason why hundreds of thousands of individuals voted for Assange and not Zuckerberg.

even other nominees deserve the title more than Zuckerberg. For instance, Lady Gaga has become a huge influence in the music scene. She’s also done a lot of charitable work for LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] individuals and support equality rights. Even though I’m not a fan, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has also done more than Zuckerberg. His opinion and mandate at Apple has completely revolutionize the tech industry.

The first group are those with an overly simplistic or naive sense of how science functions. This is a view of science similar to those films created in the 1950s and meant to be watched by students, with the jaunty music playing in the background. This view generally respects science, but has a significant underappreciation for the flaws and complexity of science as a human endeavor. Those with this view are easily scandalized by revelations of the messiness of science.

The second cluster is what I would call scientific skepticism – which combines a respect for science and empiricism as a method (really “the” method) for understanding the natural world, with a deep appreciation for all the myriad ways in which the endeavor of science can go wrong. Scientific skeptics, in fact, seek to formally understand the process of science as a human endeavor with all its flaws. It is therefore often skeptics pointing out phenomena such as publication bias, the placebo effect, the need for rigorous controls and blinding, and the many vagaries of statistical analysis. But at the end of the day, as complex and messy the process of science is, a reliable picture of reality is slowly ground out.

The third group, often frustrating to scientific skeptics, are the science-deniers (for lack of a better term). They may take a postmodernist approach to science – science is just one narrative with no special relationship to the truth. Whatever you call it, what the science-deniers in essence do is describe all of the features of science that the skeptics do (sometimes annoyingly pretending that they are pointing these features out to skeptics) but then come to a different conclusion at the end – that science (essentially) does not work.

The only way to guarantee either a daughter or son is to undergo pre-implantation genetic diagnosis: a genetic analysis of an embryo before it is placed in the womb. This is illegal in Britain except for couples at risk of having a child with a life-threatening gender-linked disorder.

It’s also illegal for clinics to offer sex selection methods such as MicroSort, that sift the slightly larger X chromosome-bearing (female) sperm from their weedier Y chromosome-bearing (male) counterparts, and then use the preferred sperm in an IVF cycle. With a success rate hovering around 80-90 per cent, it’s better than Mother Nature’s odds of conception, but not immaculate.

Years ago I agreed with this ban on socially motivated sex selection. But I can’t defend that stance today. My opposition was based on two worries: the gender balance being skewed—look at China—and the perils of letting society think it’s acceptable to prize one sex more than the other. Unlike many politicians, however, I think it is only right and proper to perform an ideological U-turn when presented with convincing opposing evidence.

Rosling has maintained a fact-based worldview – an understanding of how global health trends act as a signifier for economic development based on hard data. Today, he argues, countries and corporations alike need to adopt that same data-driven understanding of the world if they are to make sense of the changes we are experiencing in this new century, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

the world has changed so much, what people need isn’t more data but a new mindset. They need a new storage system that can handle this new information. But what I have found over the years is that the CEOs of the biggest companies are actually those that already have the most fact-based worldview, more so than in media, academia or politics. Those CEOs that haven’t grasped the reality of the world have already failed in business. If they don’t understand what is happening in terms of potential new markets in the Middle East, Africa and so on, they are out. So the bigger and more international the organisation, the more fact-based the CEO’s worldview is likely to be. The problem is that they are slow in getting their organisation to follow.

Companies as a whole are stuck in the rut of an old mindset. They think in outworn categories and follow habits and assumptions that are not, or only rarely, based on fact.

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.

We're confused because we seem to think that to be black is to be "cool". We seem to think that being black has something to do with playing sport very well, or being very handsome, or very beautiful, or very sexy. We seem to think it has something do with multi-millionaire musicians who make music that uses words like "nigger", "bitch" and "whore". We seem to think, or some people seem to think, that knowing a black person, or having had sex with a black person, is something to boast about to another black person, or even to a white person. Something that will make us look "cool".

On the benefit side, people become more engaged when they can filter information that is presented visually and make discoveries on their own. On the risk side, Professor Shneiderman says, tools as powerful as visualizations have the potential to mislead or confuse consumers. And privacy implications arise, he says, as increasing amounts of personal, housing, medical and financial data become widely accessible, searchable and viewable.

In the 1990s, Professor Shneiderman developed tree mapping, which uses interlocking rectangles to represent complicated data sets. The rectangles are sized and colored to convey different kinds of information, like revenue or geographic region, says Jim Bartoo, the chief executive of the Hive Group, a software company that uses tree mapping to help companies and government agencies monitor operational data. When executives or plant managers see the nested rectangles grouped together, he adds, they should be able to immediately spot anomalies or trends. In one tree-map visualization of a sales department on the Hive Group site, red tiles represent underperforming sales representatives while green tiles represent people who exceeded their sales quotas. So it’s easy to identify the best sales rep in the company: the biggest green tile. But viewers can also reorganize the display — by region, say, or by sales manager — to see whether patterns exist that explain why some employees are falling behind. “It’s the ability of the human brain to pick out size and color” that makes tree mapping so intuitive, Mr. Bartoo says. Information visualization, he adds, “suddenly starts answering questions that you didn’t know you had.”

data visualization is no longer just a useful tool for researchers and corporations. It’s also an entertainment and marketing vehicle.