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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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lchic - 09:16am Sep 3, 2002 EST (# 4152 of 4154)

Creativity (6)
a competency approach

"" Four “core competencies” – underlying skills and tendencies – that help people express their creativity. Remember that everyone has roughly equal creative potential. People who express creativity frequently have mastered certain core skills, and anyone can master these skills:

1. Capturing. New ideas are often fleeting. They come, they go, they’re gone, like a rabbit scurrying through the woods. “Creative” people have learned to preserve new ideas as they occur – to preserve first and evaluate later. Fortunately, it’s easy to learn ways to capture new ideas, and strengthening skills in this competency area alone will often boost creative “output” by a factor of 10 or more.

2. Challenging. Failure sets in motion a behavioral process called “resurgence” – the reappearance of old behaviors that used to work in situations like the current one. If you have trouble turning a door knob, for example, you’ll quickly resort to methods that used to work on other doors: turning harder, kicking the door, shouting for help, even shouting for your mom. The good thing about this process is that it gets multiple behaviors competing with each other, and when behaviors compete, new behaviors are often born. In other words, failure spurs creativity. The bad thing about this process is the way it feels: Behavioral competition feels confusing or frustrating. This competency area involves a variety of techniques for managing failure – for eliminating the fear of failure, for seeking and limiting failure, and for managing the emotions that accompany failure.

3. Broadening. If you’re writing your first symphony, and you’ve never heard any music other than symphonies by Beethoven, your style will probably be limited. The more diverse your existing “repertoires of behavior,” the more interesting and diverse the interconnections. Therefore, one of the simplest ways to boost creativity is to broaden your knowledge base. In other words, instead of taking another course on Windows architecture, try one on Medieval architecture.

4. Surrounding. Multiple behaviors are also set in motion by multiple or unusual stimuli in the environment. Imagine approaching a stop light, for example, on which both the red and green lights are illuminated. How would this very unusual (and very broken) stimulus make you feel and behave? Your right foot will probably tap dance between the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal, during which time you’ll feel somewhat confused or uncertain (great emotions when it comes to creativity). The point is that we can accelerate and direct the creative process by managing our environment systematically – both the physical environment (the decorations in our office, for example) and the social environment (the people with whom we work and play).

A variety of research also suggests that mangers, teachers, parents, and other supervisors need some special competencies – eight in all- in order to elicit creativity in other people. These competencies include encouraging the preservation of new ideas, challenge other ideas, encourage broadening of knowledge and skills, manage surroundings to stimulate creativity, manage teams to stimulate creativity, manage resources, provide feedback/recognition and model appropriate creativity-management skills.

http://www.tech.purdue.edu/cg/courses/cgt112/reading/creativity.htm

lchic - 09:28am Sep 3, 2002 EST (# 4153 of 4154)

On 'brainstorming' for creative 'ideas' the author of a text i glanced today said he'd become less enthusiastic regarding brainstorming because his experience was that the 'big ideas' were slow in coming and didn't occur often!

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Dasgupta (1994) Creativity in invention and design ... is concerned with the 'process' of creation - says theorists skip over it, ignore it, and yet it is extremely important. The same person adopting varied approaches can produce more than one 'novel' creative solution.

[Will investigate Dasgupta's furtherance of the State of the Art of the process of creativity in future postings]

Creativity seems key to the world moving out of it's current Nuclear malaise.

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