Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

The Top Ten Reasons to Go to Mindshare

May 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Mindshare logo

“This is what happens when you are raised by Wiccans at sci-fi conventions.” So said Jason Porath, effects artist and technical director at Dreamworks Animation. His comment was the first thing I heard when I walked into a steamy downtown Los Angeles warehouse on a Saturday earlier this month for Mindshare50/, the West Coast’s premier gathering of quirky, transcendent arts and engineering talent—and it was a good prologue for an only-on-the-West-Coast event. Mindshare organizer Doug Campbell invited Porath and dozens of others to present and perform at a blow-out 50th-month ... Read More

More like this: Culture
Tags: ,

A Flash of Green Enhances Creativity

March 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Want to be more creative? You might want to take a stroll through the park, eat a spinach salad, or catch a few minutes of the Muppets — keeping your eye on Kermit the Frog. According to newly published research, innovative thinking seems to be stimulated by the color green. A research team led by University of Munich psychologist Stephanie Lichtenfeld reports the color of limes and leaves “has implications beyond aesthetics.” Specifically, a glimpse of green appears to activate “the type of pure, open (mental) processing required to do well on creativity tasks.” The ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
Tags: , ,

Prop Planes: The Future of Eco-Friendly Aviation?

February 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Glenn Research Center

Since the days of Kitty Hawk, propeller-driven engines have been at aviation’s forefront — even today’s jet-powered turboprops are arguably mere extensions of this century-old technology. Now NASA and companies such as General Electric and Rolls-Royce are developing a new generation of fuel-efficient “open rotor” engines that are definitely not your granddaddy’s propeller. The goal is to introduce these new engines into a regional jet market with the promise of boosting airlines’ struggling bottom lines while meeting future international fuel-efficiency ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , , , ,

Pressure to Conform Can Inspire Creativity

February 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Do you think of yourself as not particularly creative? Well, you might have more innovative ideas than you realize. To access them, you just need to feel some pressure to conform. Admittedly, that sounds like an oxymoron; creative thinking and conformity are usually considered mutually exclusive. But newly published research finds a specific sort of arm twisting can help people who aren’t terribly innovative increase their creative output. The key is pressuring them to think independently, within the confines of a group project. In the journal Organizational Behavior and Human ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
Tags: , ,

Time for a More Sensible, Permanent Calendar?

December 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar

This year, the federal government has created a public holiday for New Year’s Day on, oddly, January 2. The scheduling quirk is a byproduct of our roaming Gregorian calendar. Every year, New Year’s Day — or any other notable fixed date, from your birthday to Christmas to the Fourth of July — moves forward in the week one day (and two in leap years). Last year, New Year’s Day fell on a Saturday. This year, it’s a Sunday. And no Sunday holiday can come between the American people and a three-day weekend. There is a kind of democratic virtue in this calendar tic: no one gets a ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , ,

Detroit’s Tech Town: An Incubator of Creativity

November 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

According to the latest census figures, Detroit’s population continues to plummet while its public school system remains largely dysfunctional and FBI statistics report an increase in violent crime after several years of decline. But Detroit, the buckle of the “Rust Belt,” is also a city of paradoxes. In the city’s midtown, an innovative project, Tech Town, stands out as living up to its motto, “Reigniting Detroit’s Entrepreneurial Culture.” The city has been counted out before — “Decline in Detroit” was Time magazine’s headline in 1961 – so talk of a comeback has ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , ,

The iPod Touch as a Crop Saver

November 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

On the heels of Cellscope, a device that clips onto a smartphone to analyze blood samples, comes Gene-Z, a device that can clip onto an iPod Touch and identify diseases in crops and plants. The traditional approach to identifying plant pathogens is to collect field samples, send them to a laboratory, and await the results. With Gene-Z, researchers said, they can take a swab of plant pathogens, transfer the sample to a kind of “lab-on-a-chip,” insert the chip into the device, and get results within 10 to 30 minutes via smartphone technology. Gene-Z was unveiled November 7 at a conference ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Science
Tags: , ,

Do the Rich Really Make All the Jobs?

September 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In Washington shorthand, many politicians have begun interchangeably substituting the phrase "people who have a lot of money" with the more hopeful term "job creators." With every new debate over raising taxes or lowering the deficit, the two meanings seem to move closer. All job creators, this rhetoric implies, are rich. And all rich are job creators. But are these two groups really one and the same? "Everything I've studied says the answer is yes," said Tim Kane, a senior scholar with the entrepreneur-oriented Kauffman Foundation. He adds, though, that there isn't a single data set ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
Tags: , , , ,

Humayun Finding Medical Advances in Plain Sight

August 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

By the standards of the unsexy world of university research scientists, Mark Humayun is something of a media darling. By his count, he's been interviewed more than 500 times, popping up on 20/20 with Barbara Walters, in the pages of Popular Mechanics and onstage with Stevie Wonder. It's always about the same thing — his amazing invention. Humayun is the chief researcher behind the world's first commercially available artificial retina, a breakthrough that literally helps the blind see. The artificial retina — technically, a retinal prosthesis — is the culmination of nearly 20 years ... Read More

More like this: Health, September-October 2011
Tags: , ,

Are Professors Picking the Public’s Pockets?

August 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

From his arrival in the U.S. some 25 years ago, Tatsuya Suda deftly cut a path to the upper echelons of academic computer research. Fresh from prestigious Kyoto University, he steadily rose to become a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine, earning a reputation for dynamic theories in computer networking at the dawn of the cell-phone age. He even wed Grammy-winning singer Rita Coolidge. But along this intellectual course, studded with access to valuable discoveries—Suda was one of the first nanotechnology researchers to explore the idea of using biological molecules ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , , , , , ,