How creative are you? Depends where you're from

                                         

With the 'creative class' on the rise, many businesses are trying to capitalize on imagination and innovation. But when it comes to creative juices, some societies have a faster flow than others. That's because, as new research suggests, creativity is tied to culture.

The study, recently published in The Journal of Business Research, compared nearly 300 individuals from Taiwan, a collectivist society, and Canada, a more individualistic country. Results show that those from individualist societies generate a greater number of ideas as compared to their collectivist counterparts -- though the cultures were on nearly equal footing when it came to the quality of that creative output.

Gad Saad, a professor at Concordia's John Molson School of Business, co-authored the study with Concordia graduate student Louis Ho and Mark Cleveland from the University of Western Ontario. They theorized that where a country falls on the individualism vs. collectivism continuum would affect the creative juices that might be "permitted" to flow from members of a particular culture.

"Brainstorming is often used as a proxy for creativity, so we decided to conduct brainstorming tasks using culturally neutral stimuli in Taiwan and in Canada," Saad says.

He and his co-authors hypothesized that members of an individualistic society would perform particularly well in a task that promotes out-of-the-box thinking such as coming up with the proverbial million-dollar idea, compared with those from a collectivist ethos, who wouldn't be as willing to engage in that kind of thinking because they would be more reluctant to stand out from the group.

The researchers recruited students from two universities in Taipei and Montreal and collected data on five measures that will be familiar to anyone who has had to brainstorm in a group:

1.       The number of generated ideas

2.       The quality of the ideas, as evaluated by independent judges

3.       The number of uttered negative statements within the brainstorming groups, such as "This is a 
       dumb idea that will fail."

4.       The valence of the negative statements -- "This is the all-time dumbest idea" has a stronger 
       negative connotation than "This idea is rather banal."

5.       The confidence level exhibited by group members when asked to evaluate their performance in 
       comparison to other teams.

When it comes to creativity, quality trumps quantity

"The study largely supported our hypotheses," Saad says. "We found that the individualists came up with many more ideas. They also uttered more negative statements -- and those statements were more strongly negative. The Canadian group also displayed greater overconfidence than their Taiwanese counterparts."

But when it came to the quality of ideas produced, the collectivists scored marginally higher than the individualists.

"This is in line with another important cultural trait that some collectivist societies are known to possess -- namely being more reflective as compared to action-oriented, having the reflex to think hard prior to committing to a course of action," Saad says.

Studies like this one are instrumental in understanding cultural differences that increasingly arise as the globe's economic centre of gravity shifts towards East Asia.

"To maximize the productivity of their international teams, global firms need to understand important cultural differences between Western and Eastern mindsets," Saad says. "Brainstorming, a technique often used to generate novel ideas such as new product innovations, might not be equally effective across cultural settings. Even though individuals from collectivistic societies might be coming up with fewer creative ideas, the quality of those ideas tends to be just as good as or marginally better than those of their individualistic counterparts. Employers need to recognize that."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Concordia University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

1.     Gad Saad, Mark Cleveland, Louis Ho. Individualism–collectivism and the quantity versus quality dimensions of individual and group creative performance. Journal of Business Research, 2015; 68 (3): 578 DOI:10.1016/j.jbusres.2014.09.004

How Beliefs Shape Effort and Learning

 If it was easy to learn, it will be easy to remember. Psychological scientists have maintained that nearly everyone uses this simple rule to assess their own learning.

Now a study published in an upcoming issue Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests otherwise: "Individuals with different theories about the nature of intelligence tend to evaluate their learning in different ways," says David B. Miele of Columbia University, who conducted the study with Bridgid Finn of Washington University in St. Louis and Daniel C. Molden of Northwestern University.


It has long been known that these theories have important effects on people's motivation to learn. So-called "entity theorists" believe each person possesses a fixed level of intelligence, and no amount of effort can change it. "As a result, entity theorists tend to disengage when something is challenging. They decide that they're not really capable of learning it," says Miele. Meanwhile, "incremental theorists" believe that intelligence is malleable. "They keep forging ahead when faced with a challenge, believing that more time and effort will yield better results."

To test whether these theories also affect the way people assess their own learning, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 75 English-speaking students studied 54 pairs of Indonesian to English translations that varied in terms of how effortful they were to learn. The easy pairs consisted of English words that were nearly identical to their Indonesian counterpart (e.g, Polisi-Police) and required little effort to learn; many of the medium pairs were still connected in some way (e.g, Bagasi-Luggage) but required more effort to learn than the easy pairs; and the difficult pairs were entirely dissimilar (e.g., Pembalut-Bandage) and required the most effort to learn. After studying each pair for as long as they liked, the participants reported how confident they were about being able to recall the English word when supplied the Indonesian word on an upcoming test. Once they had finished studying and reporting their "judgments of learning" for all of the pairs, they then took the recall test. Finally, at the end of the experiment, they completed a questionnaire which assessed the extent to which they believed that intelligence is fixed or changeable.


The results of the experiment showed that, although all of the students did better at recalling the easy pairs compared to the difficult pairs, only entity theorists (who expressed more confidence the less time they spent studying) accurately predicted the magnitude of this effect. Incremental theorists (who expressed more confidence the more time they spent studying) tended to be overconfident about how likely they were to remember the difficult pairs and under confident about how likely they were to remember the easy pairs. This finding was also supported by the results of the second experiment. Thus, simply holding different beliefs about the nature of intelligence can lead people to form very different impressions of their own learning.



And which theory of intelligence is correct? "The truth lies somewhere in between," he says. "We have to be sensitive to personal limitations" -- say, a learning disability -- "and at the same time not feel those limitations are the end all-be all. Effort can always lead to some amount of improvement, but you also need to be aware of the law of diminishing returns." 

principals of tesla inventions incorporated in generating free energy/latest developments science technology

Fascinating demonstration of a new energy invention with the potential to vastly transform our world. Using only magnets, two plastic strips, and securing components, this video clip shows how a freestanding device can be built to generate power using nothing but natural magnetic forces. This is only a proof of concept video. There are many variables to be worked out, but the potential is clearly demonstrated. If you take the small model in the video and extend it for 20 feet upwards or so, the magnet should easily jump up 12 feet or more. A simple device could then pull the magnet off the track dropping it down and thus generating energy through gravity by passing through one or more rotors. Double the length and get twice the energy. After dropping, a curved track at the bottom could then slip the magnet right back into the bottom of the device where magnetism would again pull it up, thereby creating perpetual motion while generating power. A circular track might also create a similar effect. Any tinkerers want to play this one and potentially transform our world? For more on the origin, specifications, and future development ideas of this project, see http://www.PerpetualMotors.com. We ask you to spread the word and help to make this exciting project a reality. License is hereby granted for this invention. You are free to copy it, alter it, develop it, and include it in any non-commercial applications free of charge. Invite your friends and colleagues to work on it with you. If you do find a way to make a commercially viable product using this concept and profit financially from it — and we hope you will — then as an acknowledgment for our help in creating something useful, send us a royalty fee of ten percent of sales for units actually sold at the above website. We offer this powerful concept and demonstration into the creative commons. For more on this, please consult the website http://creativecommons.org and look under their licensing section. Let’s join our forces and work together to transform our world for the good of all of us!

Physicists discover new way to visualize warped space and time

When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven’t been able to understand the details of what goes on—until now. “We’ve found ways to visualize warped space-time like never before,” says Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

By combining theory with computer simulations, Thorne and his colleagues at Caltech, Cornell University, and the National Institute for Theoretical Physics in South Africa have developed conceptual tools they’ve dubbed tendex lines and vortex lines.

Using these tools, they have discovered that black-hole collisions can produce vortex lines that form a doughnut-shaped pattern, flying away from the merged black hole like smoke rings. The researchers also found that these bundles of vortex lines—called vortexes—can spiral out of the black hole like water from a rotating sprinkler.

The researchers explain tendex and vortex lines—and their implications for black holes—in a paper that’s published online on April 11 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Tendex and vortex lines describe the gravitational forces caused by warped space-time. They are analogous to the electric and magnetic field lines that describe electric and magnetic forces.

Tendex lines describe the stretching force that warped space-time exerts on everything it encounters. “Tendex lines sticking out of the moon raise the tides on the earth’s oceans,” says David Nichols, the Caltech graduate student who coined the term “tendex.” The stretching force of these lines would rip apart an astronaut who falls into a black hole.

Vortex lines, on the other hand, describe the twisting of space. If an astronaut’s body is aligned with a vortex line, she gets wrung like a wet towel.

When many tendex lines are bunched together, they create a region of strong stretching called a tendex. Similarly, a bundle of vortex lines creates a whirling region of space called a vortex. “Anything that falls into a vortex gets spun around and around,” says Dr. Robert Owen of Cornell University, the lead author of the paper.

Tendex and vortex lines provide a powerful new way to understand black holes, gravity, and the nature of the universe. “Using these tools, we can now make much better sense of the tremendous amount of data that’s produced in our computer simulations,” says Dr. Mark Scheel, a senior researcher at Caltech and leader of the team’s simulation work.

Using computer simulations, the researchers have discovered that two spinning black holes crashing into each other produce several vortexes and several tendexes. If the collision is head-on, the merged hole ejects vortexes as doughnut-shaped regions of whirling space, and it ejects tendexes as doughnut-shaped regions of stretching. But if the black holes spiral in toward each other before merging, their vortexes and tendexes spiral out of the merged hole. In either case—doughnut or spiral—the outward-moving vortexes and tendexes become gravitational waves—the kinds of waves that the Caltech-led Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) seeks to detect.

“With these tendexes and vortexes, we may be able to much more easily predict the waveforms of the gravitational waves that LIGO is searching for,” says Yanbei Chen, associate professor of physics at Caltech and the leader of the team’s theoretical efforts.

Additionally, tendexes and vortexes have allowed the researchers to solve the mystery behind the gravitational kick of a merged black hole at the center of a galaxy. In 2007, a team at the University of Texas in Brownsville, led by Professor Manuela Campanelli, used computer simulations to discover that colliding black holes can produce a directed burst of gravitational waves that causes the merged black hole to recoil—like a rifle firing a bullet. The recoil is so strong that it can throw the merged hole out of its galaxy. But nobody understood how this directed burst of gravitational waves is produced.

Now, equipped with their new tools, Thorne’s team has found the answer. On one side of the black hole, the gravitational waves from the spiraling vortexes add together with the waves from the spiraling tendexes. On the other side, the vortex and tendex waves cancel each other out. The result is a burst of waves in one direction, causing the merged hole to recoil.

“Though we’ve developed these tools for black-hole collisions, they can be applied wherever space-time is warped,” says Dr. Geoffrey Lovelace, a member of the team from Cornell. “For instance, I expect that people will apply vortex and tendex lines to cosmology, to black holes ripping stars apart, and to the singularities that live inside black holes. They’ll become standard tools throughout general relativity.”

The team is already preparing multiple follow-up papers with new results. “I’ve never before coauthored a paper where essentially everything is new,” says Thorne, who has authored hundreds of articles. “But that’s the case here.”