Ever since Richard Florida published his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, urban planners and thinkers around the U.S. have been lining up either to sing Florida’s praises or to knock his ideas as half-formed and unrealistic. “Many of Richard Florida’s critics try to marginalize his theory of the creative class as being just about a few kooky artists in Austin. They are wrong… As governments take a serious look at his ideas, billions of dollars spent on subsidies of politically-connected industries hang in the balance.” So isn’t it time for a serious, substantive debate on the issues that Creative Class raised?
Category: ideas
Get Paid For Your Opinions!
You can make a nice little income as a focus-group member: “If they ask you whether you’ve done one in the past six months, just say no. They never check. If they ask you something off-the-wall, like “Have you purchased a treadmill in the past year?,” say yes; they wouldn’t ask if that weren’t the answer they wanted. If they ask you what brands you purchase most often, always name big ones: Sprint, Budweiser, Marlboro. They’re representing either one of those companies or a smaller one trying to figure out how to steal you away. And, most important, let the recruiters lead you. Before you answer a question you’re not sure about, pause for a couple of seconds. They’ll tip their hand every time.”
Do Dogs Understand Language?
Ask any dog owner, and he’ll tell you: it’s not what you say to a dog, it’s how you say it, with your tone of voice the key to the dog’s understanding. But a team of German scientists and a border collie named Rico say different, and their evidence that dogs can understand language is compelling. Rico can fetch up to 200 objects by name, and can even figure out which object his master wants when confronted with a word he’s never heard. “Rico’s abilities seem to follow a process called ‘fast mapping,’ seen when young children start to learn to speak and understand language.”
Kimball: Pining For The Melting Pot
Roger Kimball writes that multiculturalism is destroying America. “Multiculturalism and ‘affirmative action’ are allies in the assault on the institution of American identity. As such, they oppose the traditional understanding of what it means to be an American. This crucible of American identity, this ‘melting pot,’ has two aspects. The negative aspect involves disassociating oneself from the cultural imperatives of one’s country of origin. One sheds a previous identity before assuming a new one. One might preserve certain local habits and tastes, but they are essentially window-dressing. In essence one has left the past behind in order to become an American citizen. The positive aspect of advancing the melting pot involves embracing the substance of American culture.”
What World Problem Would You Try To Fix With $50 Billion?
What would you do if you could spend $50 billion fixing one of the world’s great problems? “To answer that question, Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and environmental iconoclast, brought eight economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, to this harbor city last week to rank the world’s 10 worst problems. Forget politics, they were told, just look at how to get the most bang for the buck. After studying all the contenders and running the numbers, the economic “dream team” decided”
The Crowd Knows
Crowds are more often right than the individual. “The simplest demonstration of this is the jellybean experiment. Ask a group of 50 people how many jellybeans are in a jar, and the group’s average answer will be uncannily accurate — within 2% of the right number — and it will be better than the answers of nearly everyone in the group. And though the jellybean experiment is artificial, the truth is that groups demonstrate the exact same intelligence in the face of far more complicated problems.”
How Boston Invented The World
Boston has a long tradition of innovation, and some of America’s great inventions have been born there. “There’s a continuous thread, stretching across centuries, of powerful new ideas developed and commercialized in Boston. But that thread is always vibrating, at least faintly, with worry: Will there ever come another idea as big as the last? What new industry will create jobs sufficient to replace those lost as older industries fade? And how does the environment for company-creation here compare with other parts of the country, particularly Silicon Valley?”
Lone Inventor Rides Again
It used to be that great inventions were the product of odd individuals working in home workshops. But sometime in the past century most of the lone inventors moved inside large corporations where they found resources to work with. Now, some are arguing that being inside large corporate structures inhibits true innovation. So how about a return to the lone inventor?…
Dare To Be Wrong
The author of a new book says scientists have forgotten how to be wrong. “In any branch of science there are only two possibilities. There is either nothing left to discover, in which case, why work on it, or there are big discoveries yet to be made, in which case, what the scientists say now is likely to be false. The problem is, the top scientists seem to have forgotten that. The result is a generation of scientists who have become a little too confident that their understanding of the world is more scientifically accurate than it will be proved to be.”
The Asperger’s Connection
Michelangelo is the latest historical figure to be diagnosed posthumously with Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s conjecture, of course, but “what is the link between this condition and creativity, be it in the arts or sciences?” Some experts suggest that it makes people more creative. “People with it are generally hyper-focused, very persistent workaholics who tend to see things from detail to global rather than looking at the bigger picture first and then working backwards, as most people do.”