Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 10 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!
How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries
It’s time for a new definition of big data
Finding a Sense of Wonder
Kelli Anderson: Design to Challenge Reality
3 Steps To Pursuing Your Ideal Career
IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous
Ideas
Building Babel: Lost in Machine Translation
Software Translates Your Voice Into Another Language
How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries
Adam Savage walks through two spectacular
examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative
methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's
circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of
light in 1849.
It’s time for a new definition of big data
Two words seemingly on every technologist’s
lips are “big data”. The Wikipedia
definition for big data is: “In information technology, big data
consists of datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with
using on-hand database management tools”. This approach to describing the term
constrains the discussion of big data to scale and fails to realise the key
difference between regular data and big data. The blog posts and books which
cover the topic seem to converge on the same approach to defining big data and
describe the challenges with extracting value from this resource in terms of
its size.
Big data can really be very small and not all
large datasets are big! It’s time to find a new definition for big data.
Finding a Sense of Wonder
Often we look at kids and wish we could
recapture some of that magic of childhood. One of the many things that make
children magical is that complete willingness to have a sense of wonder.
“We need a renaissance of
wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream,
the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.”
- E. Merrill Root, educator and poet
- E. Merrill Root, educator and poet
Kelli Anderson: Design to Challenge Reality
Kelli Anderson shatters our expectations about
reality by injecting humor and surprise into everyday objects. At TEDxPhoenix
she shares her disruptive and clever designs.
3 Steps To Pursuing Your Ideal Career
There's often a gap between identifying what
you naturally gravitate toward and gain energy from and how that translates
into your full-time work. Take a deep breath and dive in with these three steps
that'll start closing it.
Here are three steps
that will help you gain internal clarity so you can plan toward your ideal
future.
- Gain clarity around what to focus on.
- Define the world you imagine.
- Replace old thoughts with new ones.
IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous
Ideas
Imagine for a second if you could somehow wrap
up the creative chaos of a kindergartner's life and apply it at work. You'd go
on field trips, make stuff, hatch crazy ideas, and be awed by the world on a
daily basis. Sound ridiculous? At the renowned international design consultancy
IDEO,
it's how work gets done every day.Psychologists tell us that as we age, we
become self-conscious in classroom and other public settings, and quietly begin
to suppress our playful tendencies for fear of being childish or breaking with
social norms. Creativity requires that we fight against this trajectory.
At IDEO, being playful is almost an obsession. The company believes that great, innovative work cannot happen without trial-and-error, experimentation, and maybe even a little tomfoolery. Few know this better than Brendan Boyle and Joe Wilcox of IDEO's Toy Lab.
At IDEO, being playful is almost an obsession. The company believes that great, innovative work cannot happen without trial-and-error, experimentation, and maybe even a little tomfoolery. Few know this better than Brendan Boyle and Joe Wilcox of IDEO's Toy Lab.
Building Babel: Lost in Machine Translation
Automatic language translation is a long way
off, given the overwhelming complexity of language. University of Edinburgh's
Philipp Koehn says there are so many possible language rules that they cannot
all be written down, and there also are too many exceptions to those rules. The
statistical approach to translation currently is the chief focus of most
machine translation research. "Essentially, we are translating using
probabilities to find the best solution," says University of Oxford's Phil
Blunsom. "The computer doesn't understand the languages or know any
grammar, but might use statistics to determine that 'dog the' is not as likely
as 'the dog.'"
Vast numbers of source texts are required to improve computers' ability to make such decisions, with Blunsom noting that at least 30 million words or 1 million sentences are typically needed. Automatic spoken language translation is even more challenging than text translation because of a multitude of factors that include false starts, references to things that were said earlier, or the lack of a written form.
Vast numbers of source texts are required to improve computers' ability to make such decisions, with Blunsom noting that at least 30 million words or 1 million sentences are typically needed. Automatic spoken language translation is even more challenging than text translation because of a multitude of factors that include false starts, references to things that were said earlier, or the lack of a written form.
Software Translates Your Voice Into Another Language
Microsoft researchers have developed speech
recognition software that can learn the sound of a user's voice and translate
it into a new language. The researchers say the system that could be used to
make language learning more personal or make traveling easier. "For a
monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we'll do speech recognition
followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output [in] a
different language, but still in his own voice," says Microsoft's Frank
Soong. The researchers also note that providing sample foreign phrases in a
person's own voice can make learning a new language easier for users.
The system requires about an hour of training to develop a model able to read out any text in a user's own voice. The model is converted into one that can read text in another language by comparing it with a stock text-to-speech model for the desired language. The software can convert between any pair of 26 supported languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. University of Southern California professor Shrikanth Narayanan says using a person's own voice for speech translations could make interactions that rely on translations more reassuring for users, particularly in situations such as doctor-patient consultations.
The system requires about an hour of training to develop a model able to read out any text in a user's own voice. The model is converted into one that can read text in another language by comparing it with a stock text-to-speech model for the desired language. The software can convert between any pair of 26 supported languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. University of Southern California professor Shrikanth Narayanan says using a person's own voice for speech translations could make interactions that rely on translations more reassuring for users, particularly in situations such as doctor-patient consultations.
12-Year-Old Speaks The Truth
About Plain Doughnuts
A bit random - but I suspect you’ll get this
from somewhere else too :)
Visualization Technologies for Human-Environment Interactions
The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis
Center (SESYNC), a national fusion center funded by the U.S. National Science
Foundation, has invited computational and domain scientists to participate in a
workshop on visualization technologies that support research on
human-environment interactions. The workshop will focus on the visualization
and use of spatial datasets from the social and environmental sciences. Domain
scientists will have an opportunity to learn about visualization tools and
resources available for their work, and computational scientists will get a
chance to learn about the as-yet unmet visualization needs in the domain
sciences. The workshop will address some of the visualization challenges in
using spatio-temporal datasets, recommend possible collaborative information
technology efforts that could be supported by SESYNC's programs or through
other funding mechanisms, and establish a network of researchers to share
information and exchange ideas on a regular basis. SESYNC will accept abstracts
related to the main topics of the workshop until April 20. The workshop is scheduled
for July 23-24 in Annapolis, Maryland.
