Archive for 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »How To Increase Productivity & Creativity? Be Crazy, Get Paid Less
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 29, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, May 29th, 2010To be creative it might help if you’re slightly insane, and strangely, financial reward can actually IMPEDE quality and productivity.
There are an amazing number of books and blogs offering advice on how to enhance creativity and improve productivity. Which has always struck me as rather amusing. In my opinion, if you find yourself systematically looking for ways to be creative, well, you probably aren’t. And although reviewing processes and refining or developing skills or knowledge are crucial keys to being productive, the real key to productivity is to (ahem) PRODUCE. Which is something you aren’t doing when you’re spending all day looking for ways to be more productive, right? So what’s the secret to being more creative? I’ve always been of the opinion that the most creative people I’ve known bordered on being case studies from the DSM-IV. And finally, science is backing me up. Yes, creativity is essentially a form of insanity. And frankly, if scientists were more creative, they would have realized this already, like I did. In an analagous fashion, one of the big keys to being productive and creating a successful new market is also akin to insanity, i.e.: Disruptive Innovation. Disruption is something that the creators of Skype understand well; in fact they’re funding more of it as you read this. And regarding productivity? Well, get to work. But if you need to make others get to work, you may find the concepts in this presentation by Dan Pink (also below) surprising. Being self-employed and not raised in the corporate culture, I’ve always found the number of “warm seats” at most larger companies perplexing. We needn’t go into all the theories about 20-70-10 workforces or whatever, it’s a common sense observation that large organizations inevitably end up with lots of moderately well-paid employees that produce very little in relation to their real potential. Pink’s presentation – which is based on information from top-notch academic studies – is an informative and entertaining look at the myth of “greater reward equals greater performance”. It turns out that if you want people to produce, simply paying them more can actually be counterproductive. Read the rest of this entry »
The Future Of Musical Instruments?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on May 28, 2010 by admin in Music
Friday, May 28th, 2010The Eigenharp and the Misa Digital Guitar are amazing devices. Are instrument designers finally making devices that aren’t just silly keyboard/guitar mashups?
I’ve always been intrigued by new ways to make musical sounds. In fact, the very first post here on Dissociated Press was about the Moog Guitar. Although I call myself a guitarist on occasion, my main “axe” for a long time was a Rickenbacker 481* with custom pickups, usually run through odd combinations of a Big Muff
Fetal Distraction: Splice The Movie
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 27, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Thursday, May 27th, 2010In theaters June 4th, Vincenzo Natali’s “Splice”, starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, promises to be the best bad movie of the summer.
It is with a moderate amount of shame that I admit that the next film release that intrigues me is Splice, which will be in theaters June 4. The film looks like it falls comfortably into a genre that I for reasons beyond my comprehension am fascinated with, the slickly-produced film that may be really bad but knows that it is, and is therefore exceptional in a twisted sort of way. I have a long list of these that I’ll share someday (it would be very different from Rotten Tomatoes’ list based on the same idea), but recent examples would be Teeth or Hissss. The recent Repo Men should have made it into this realm, but failed, for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on. In any case, Splice’s premise is from the familiar territory of Frankenstein-meets-egotistical-gene-splicing-scientist stuff, but apparently director Vincenzo Natali (The Cube
There’s An Elephant In The Room
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 26, 2010 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010The GOP’s mascot is an excellent symbol for the dysfunctional oblivion of America these days.
There’s a big elephant in the room we call America, and it’s making me a little uneasy. Although I joked recently that a monkey would be the perfect mascot for the American voter, it had never struck me until today how appropriate the GOP’s mascot is if you can pause and view the nation as one big dysfunctional family. After one of the most self-righteous and elitist administrations of my lifetime gutted the economy and destabilized the world in general with their clearly ill-conceived agenda, we now have to listen to former Bush buttboys like Karl Rove implying that the BP spill in the gulf is somehow “Obama’s Katrina”, as if a man-made and Bush-enabled catastrophe can somehow be compared to a hurricane and a shockingly inept and profoundly unqualified FEMA director. And this is just the most recent glaring example of the self-deceit of a typical GOP supporter these days. Don’t get me wrong, I hardly define myself as a Democrat; what makes me even crazier is that this kind of self-delusion seems to cross all party lines when it comes to economics. Have you noticed that as huge segments of the global economy skid into the ditch, what mostly is going on is that people in general and the media in particular keep acting like somehow the trillions in imaginary money that the world is loaning itself is somehow going to materialize later in some magic fairy bank of the future? To me it feels like the global economy is a cartoon character that just skidded off a cliff and hasn’t fallen into the abyss because it hasn’t looked down yet.
Offshore Wind Power Project Coming To Great Lakes
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 25, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010Stop with all your hot air about the gulf oil spill. Sell your car and put all that wind to use more positively.
If you live in America, the next time you’re looking at depressing photos of the oily black sludge washing up on the coasts and in the wetlands of Louisiana, look for your reflection in the oil slick. It’s probably there. And after you ponder YOUR part in the latest tragedy, try visualizing this: instead of black oil spewing from the bottom of the ocean, picture rows of gracefully twirling white turbine blades supplying the same energy. I’m pretty excited that alternative energy is finally becoming a reality; Texas expects to derive 20% of their power from non-petrol sources by 2030 (and they’re WAY ahead of schedule) , Horns Rev off the coast of Denmark has been generating offshore windpower since 2002, there’s a plan for Cape Cod to generate 75% of the area’s power from wind by 2012, and as someone who currently lives in the Great Lakes area, it’s exciting to see that an offshore windpower project is being launched on Lake Erie. Especially since it’s such an amazing example of turning things around; at one point in time, Lake Erie was so filthy that it was joked that walking on it was safer than swimming in it. And wouldn’t it be awesome if the state best known for building gas-guzzlers became a haven for cutting-edge clean tech? After all, they say there’s over 300 Gigawatts waiting to be exploited here.