How We Misunderstand 'Innovation'
1. How we misunderstand innovation... a meditation.
"But there is another form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of innovation. The way this is exhibited is in the misuse of the term and the inability to discern the difference between novelty, creation, invention and innovation. The result is a failure to understand the causes of success and failure in business and hence the conditions that lead to economic growth. My contribution to solving this problem is to coin a word: I define innoveracy as the inability to understand creativity and the role it plays in society. Hopefully identifying individual innoveracy will draw attention to the problem enough to help solve it."
"The bots generate 30 million phony video views a day, but could potentially serve 80 million fake views if unwitting advertisers bought all the fraudulent inventory... Also, the bots are contaminating advertiser cookie data, Lopatecki said. The bots go to sites that gather user data for advertisers—like a cars.com—and plant thousands of fake target segments. This increases the likelihood that advertisers who tap that data wind up buying fake audiences on the bots’ preferred websites."
"He also has cut out almost all social media, rarely posting or checking his mentions on Twitter and almost completely ending his previous habit of studying his play in YouTube videos. 'It's helped,' Griffin said of the decision to cut back on all forms of media consumption. 'You get rid of negativity, you kind of play a little bit freer, you live a little bit more free. Not as much clutter.'
4. A project to bring open data to bear on the problem of depleted uranium in Iraq.
"These discrepancies have resulted in confusion and stagnation in assistance for Iraq’s public health projects. That’s why after presenting the bGeigie Layth came up to me and told me about the conflicting reports of cancer rates and depleted uranium in Iraq. Layth suggested that perhaps by creating an open data project that brought together a survey of hospital patients and the areas people live in who’ve gotten sick alongside a map produced by the Safecast API that could help create clarity around the issues of depleted uranium and the purported increase in cancer and birth defect rates. We started to devise a plan to connect his NGO with the hackerspace in Iraq called Fikra Space to assist in taking the bGeigie out into Basra for samples. I work with a hackerspace crew in Iraq called Fikra Space and I suggested that we gather a team from the hackerspace and train them for future work in Basra. So after the PeaceTech camp ended I headed out to Baghdad and met up with the Fikra Space to run a radiation mapping workshop."
5. Life could exist not just on planets outside the solar system, but moons.
"This paper outlines the first attempt to produce climate models of exomoons which possess all the above sources and sinks of energy. We expand on our previous 1D latitudinal energy balance models (LEBMs), which follow the evolution of the temperature on an Earthlike moon orbiting a Jupiterlike planet, by adding planetary illumination. "
Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip
bathetic, bathotic. These are made in imitation of pathetic, chaotic; but pathetic s not analogous, & chaotic is itself irregular. An adjective for bathos is, however, almost a necessity to the literary critic, & the OED states that bathetic is 'A favorite word with reviewers'; it is the better of the two.
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