Quotable

Stephanie, on why she doesn’t want to see Titanic in 3-D:

I thought it was overhyped in the first place. And at the scene were the ship hits the iceberg, and the guy says “How long do we have?!” I looked at my watch and said “You have an hour and a half.”

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Window Watchers in a City of Strangers

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Window Watchers in a City of Strangers – NYTimes.com.

The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of our homes — and the knowledge that they can often watch us, as well — has long been a staple of city life, one that was immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film “Rear Window.” It has provided material for countless movies and books since then, most recently “The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York,” a book of drawings by Matteo Pericoli that asks well-known New Yorkers to describe what they see from their windows, and is the subject of “Out My Window NYC,” a new series of photographs by Gail Albert Halaban.

This often inadvertent voyeurism gives rise to relationships that can be deeply meaningful, although the people involved may never actually meet, said Ethel Sheffer, an urban planner and past president of the American Planning Association’s New York Metro Chapter. “One doesn’t always know their names, but it’s a connection of some sort and it becomes part of the fabric of your life,” Ms. Sheffer said. “The density and the closeness, even if it’s anonymous,” creates a sense of intimacy, she added, and “makes for an understanding that we’re all here” together.

The concept of windows as both literal and metaphorical lenses through which we view the world around us has always held a unique place in our urban experience. As we peer into the lives of others, the boundaries between public and private seem to blur, allowing us to forge connections — or perhaps more accurately, illusions of connection. In a similar vein, the installation of windows in our homes can dramatically alter our relationship with the outside world.

Whether it’s maximizing natural light, improving insulation, or enhancing the aesthetic of a room, the right windows offer an entirely new perspective on the spaces we inhabit. For those seeking expert advice and top-quality installation, top-rated services www.EurosealWindows.com offer reliable solutions to ensure your windows are both functional and visually striking.

The art of window installation goes beyond simply placing glass into frames. It requires a keen understanding of both design and engineering, ensuring that the window not only fits seamlessly into the architecture of a building but also provides long-term performance.

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Episodic v. Serial – Complications Ensue

Episodic v. Serial – Complications Ensue:

So when we actually saw Rob Thomas (creator of VERONICA MARS) giving a talk at Banff, DMc asked him about his thoughts on episodic vs. serial.

Rob busted out a factoid I’d heard before, but which really hadn’t sunk in. When people say they watch a show, on average, they watch one out of four episodes.

One out of four.

It’s a shock, because when I watch a show, I really want to see every episode. I missed maybe one or two FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTs last season, and I was really unhappy about it. One out of four? So the average audience member is really not that involved in the season arcs even of a soap opera like FNL; they’re just going along for the episodic ride.

Rob said if he’d been able to do a fourth season of VM, he’d have made it entirely episodic. No serial story at all. That was a shock.

Wow, one of the better shows developed for episodic viewing, and the writer wouldn’t do it that way again. Also – who watched Friday Night Lights that way? Good god. That show was amazing for layers and building. Why would you watch it for an episode here or there?

Maybe many people watch TV that way, but I sure don’t. There’s got to be two camps on this – I wonder what the split is?

And could you write a show that works for both camps?

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Brainstorming and Groupthink

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From the New Yorker – Groupthink: The brainstorming myth, by Jonah Lehrer

In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets…. His book “Your Creative Power” was published in 1948. An amalgam of pop science and business anecdote, it became a surprise best-seller. Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output…

But Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm,” which means “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.” For Osborn, brainstorming was central to B.B.D.O.’s success. Osborn described, for instance, how the technique inspired a group of ten admen to come up with eighty-seven ideas for a new drugstore in ninety minutes, or nearly an idea per minute. The brainstorm had turned his employees into imagination machines.

The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The most important of these, Osborn said—the thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity—was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” he wrote. “Forget quality; aim now to get a quantity of answers. When you’re through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you’ll be disgusted. Never mind. You’re loosening up your unfettered imagination—making your mind deliver.” Brainstorming enshrined a no-judgments approach to holding a meeting.

The trouble with the absence of criticism was that it doesn’t work – groups working together to solve problems come up with fewer solutions than individuals working alone. But what does work with groups? Critique does. A group can come up with better, more creative solutions if ideas are criticized and evaluated and discarded if they aren’t used. Challenges to our thought process cause us to reevaluate our ideas and take us off in new directions.

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”

Another factor that helps open the door to mass group creativity is the makeup of the group itself. Brian Uzzi began studying what ideal teams should look like by studying teams responsible for creating Broadway Musicals. He picked a particularly successful period of Broadway shows and analyzed their creative teams:

Uzzi wanted to understand how the relationships of these team members affected the product. Was it better to have a group composed of close friends who had worked together before? Or did strangers make better theatre? He undertook a study of every musical produced on Broadway between 1945 and 1989. To get a full list of collaborators, he sometimes had to track down dusty old Playbills in theatre basements. He spent years analyzing the teams behind four hundred and seventy-four productions, and charted the relationships of thousands of artists, from Cole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Uzzi found that the people who worked on Broadway were part of a social network with lots of interconnections: it didn’t take many links to get from the librettist of “Guys and Dolls” to the choreographer of “Cats.” Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density of these connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teams of artists that had worked together several times before—a common practice, because Broadway producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky—those musicals would have an extremely high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q.

He discovered that having a low Q was bad, but having a really high Q wasn’t the most successful configuration of a team either. It took having mostly incumbent members with a few new folks to challenge their thinking to keep interactions from becoming stale.

Another important component of creative thinking on teams is space and how it’s arranged. Physical proximity matters to group interactions, and having creative teams run into one another and interact in a casual way sparks lots of creative ideas. Steve Jobs understood that concept and continually reworked the architecture of Apple to generate those sorts of spontaneous interactions among his employees.

And a famous lab building at M.I.T – Building 20 – was ground zero for some of the most successful scientific and cultural collaborations in American history, simply because it had a ramshackle design that encouraged creative thought – researchers could rearrange their space they way they wanted and routinely knocked out walls and rebuild their labs if needed – and the building’s convoluted layout meant that researchers from wildly divergent teams ran into one another in the hallways, formed friendships and triggered intellectual thought outside of their area of expertise.

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Goodbye, Movable Type

Moving

Pardon the dust, please; I’m moving this site out of Movable Type and into Word Press, and from an old-school host to Media Temple. I took the week off to make this move because I have to configure Word Press and get plugins in place, and I have over 6,000 posts and hundreds of images to import, relink and potentially update.

The site will also sport a new design; I’m using a theme that is built using responsive design framework so the site will be optimized for mobile devices, and which is also customizable so I can put my design on that framework.

Things will be a bit quiet around here until I get things up to speed, but they’ve been pretty quiet anyway since I’ve struggled with the site in the old content management system and at the old site host. Once I get things squared away, expect posting to pick up some speed.

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10 Anthems for a Feminist Revolution

According to spinner magazine, these are the tops: (linked to mp3 download or album on Amazon.com)

10. Salt-n-Pepa, ‘None Of Your Business’
(from the album Very Necessary)

9. Carole King, ‘<(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' (from the album 30 Greatest Hits)

7. Bratmobile, ‘Cool Schmool’
(from the album Pottymouth)

6. The Raincoats, ‘Lola’
(from the album The Raincoats)

5. Bikini Kill, ‘Rebel Girl’
(from the album Pussy Whipped)

4. Destiny’s Child, ‘Independent Women Part I
(from the album Survivor

3. Patti Smith, ‘Piss Factory
(from the album Land (1975-2002))

2. Nina Simone, ‘Four Women’
(from the album The Best Of Nina Simone)

1. Team Dresch, ‘She’s Amazing’
(from the album Personal Best)

Their analysis of what each song brings to the table is solid; check it out.

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Current Knitting Project: Doctor Who Scarf

Current Knitting Project: Doctor Who Scarf

I’m really in love with the way this scarf is looking. It took me a bit of trial and error to get the colors right; they don’t match the original perfectly (the purple should be more red, the green more brown-ish and the brown should be more orange), but they do balance well together the way the colors in the original did, and honestly, I prefer my variations of color to the ones that perfectly match. I’m surprised how quickly I’ve blazed through this. It is a long scarf however; even though it’s going quickly it’s not going to be finished soon.

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Buffy Vs. Edward – Pop-up Video style

Rebellious Pixels produces this cool video mash-up remix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Edward from the Twilight series, highlighting how creepy and stalker-like inappropriate Edward’s behavior is during Twilight, and how Buffy would have handled the behavior in a healthier way than Bella does. This latest version contains “pop up video” annotations that provide info about the remix and commentary on the action.

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