When most people imagine their dream home, they probably think of a large, sprawling vacation house that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. When Steve Areen thought about building his dream home, all he had to do was find $9,000 and a place to build. He did just that and, in a few weeks, he had a vacation home in the middle of Thailand that could make anyone drool.
In just 6 weeks, Steve was able to create the home of his dreams.
Hajjar Gibran, the friend that helped Steve build his dream home, has a dome building company. If you’d like to learn more information on the process, check out his websiteand sign up for a workshop.
Steve has traveled all over the world, collecting photos and stories to share. See them here on his online profile.
"Interacting with the world requires creative problem solving every day. Every sentence we utter is unique. We don’t just have robotic answers (...). Our brains are creativity machines".
In her new book, InGenius: a Crash Course on Creativity , Tina Seelig , executive director of Stanford University’s Technology Ventures Program, describes two young entrepreneurs with an idea: an iPhone app for sharing your location with your friends. The product wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped, so they kept adding features to see if they would increase the popularity of the app. One new feature enabled people to use their cell phones to shoot photos and quickly edit and post them. That feature was “a huge hit,” writes Seelig, and the pilot saw membership rise to one million users in two months. A year later, there were 12 million users. The entrepreneurs are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who last week sold their company, Instagram Inc., to Facebook for $1 billion.
For Seelig, this tale illustrates not how to get rich quick, but three factors––attitude, knowledge, and imagination––that can spark creativity. For example, the attitude that unexpected outcomes are not failures, but rather data to learn from, is crucial to creativity and innovation, according to Seelig, who is a neuroscientist and earned her PhD at Stanford University School of Medicine.
“There’s a huge problem with the word failure,” she says. “As a scientist, when I do an experiment that doesn't work as I expected, what do I call it? Data. It’s not a failure. In fact, some of the most interesting scientific research comes from experiments that have unexpected results. The key is to look at the things that don’t come out as expected as data that provides interesting clues to what is really happening. If you are afraid of failure, you won’t try anything new.”
Systrom and Krieger’s success “would never have occurred had they not been willing to experiment and to learn form all the surprising results along the way,” she writes in Chapter 9, Move Fast––Break Things. “…[They] viewed each early trial as fertilizer for the next experiment.” (Systrom and Kreiger discuss Instragram during a talk at Stanford.)
In her Stanford University course on creativity and innovation, Seelig requires students to write failure resumes so that they remold their attitudes and realize that failure is a natural part of the learning process. That is “the spark that jump-starts your creativity,” she writes. It is one of the six factors in her Escher-like model of an Innovation Engine that can unleash creativity.
Knowledge, which provides the fuel for imagination, was also critical to the Instagram team. “They are engineers and could not have created their product without knowing how to build it,” says Seelig. “Scaling Instagram was a complicated technical problem. When they hit challenging problems, they had to continue to build their knowledge to provide them with the tools to address the challenges. To be creative you must have a depth of knowledge as a starting point. It doesn’t have to be a direct match with the problems you are trying to solve. In fact, some of the most interesting innovations come from those outside of a particular domain.”
In Seelig’s Innovation Engine model, attitude, knowledge, and imagination overlap and are internal because they reside in the mind, whereas culture, habitat, and resources are of the outside world. Culture, habitat, and resources influence the process by which imagination catalyzes the transformation of knowledge into ideas. Thus the individual and the environment are interdependent in interesting and non-obvious ways and essential for creative problem solving.
Habitat, for example, is outside of imagination and parallel to it. Why? “Because our habitat is the externalization of imagination,” according to Seelig. “We can’t build environments that stimulate the imagination unless we imagine them first. In turn, the environment affects the way we think. So the way we think affects the types of environments we build, and those spaces and the organization affects our imagination.” This is true for knowledge and resources as well.
Knowledge is parallel to resources in the model, because the more you know, the more you can unlock resources, says Seelig. The type of resources in your environment also determines what you know. Someone in Silicon Valley is likely to know about venture capital, and the more he or she knows about venture capital, the more likely he or she is to get funding. “It’s really important to look at the interrelationship of all these pieces and not look at them in isolation,” Seelig advises.
One creativity technique Seelig advocates is working with forced constraints, which she says lead to better products. By spending the least amount of time on a product before releasing it, for example, developers can get faster customer feedback. Asked whether in the software arena that can result in buggy code and trading off lower standards for super-fast innovation, Seelig suggested instead considering hypothetical constraints--how might you accomplish something with fewer resources?
“If you have a zillion dollars, then you probably will spend that,” she says, “but if you have less, you may come up with an interesting, more efficient solution.”
Amazon uses this technique, she says, identifying constraints and considering what would happen if they tightened or loosened them. Similarly, although Twitter’s 140-character constraint seemed terribly limiting initially, people have found remarkable, innovative ways to use it. One of Seelig’s favorites: micro recipes tweeted by @cookbook’s Maureen Evans.
Seelig believes creativity can be taught, that we are all naturally creative, and that we just have to unlock our Innovation Engines. We are inherently creative in communicating and responding to the world around us, she says. “Interacting with the world requires creative problem solving every day. Every sentence we utter is unique. We don’t just have robotic answers,” she says, “Our brains are creativity machines.” The problem is that our environment and culture have squashed that and our education system is to blame, Seelig says, because it assigns problems with one right answer, and favors multiple-choice tests. “Yet we are frustrated that people are less creative,” she says. Putting pressure on students to memorize facts instead of learning to solve problems is stultifying, she says. While we need to teach information, there are myriad ways to do so, she says, for example, exams could ask students to design an experiment.
In college, Seelig took a test that required her to design a process for creating a genetic clone. “I walked out of the exam feeling empowered because I was able to solve a problem that I hadn’t seen before.” She recommends giving exams that make students use material in interesting and unexpected ways. Furthermore, Seelig says, she is “terribly saddened” that her graduate students have never been taught techniques to jump-start creativity. “They should be exposed to this in elementary school, high school and college,” she says.
Despite such hurdles, we all “have the power to overcome challenges and generate opportunities of all dimensions,” Seelig concludes at the end of InGenius. But the Innovation Engine has an ignition key and it’s not easy to turn. “It’s hard to get beyond obvious answers,” Seelig says, “It takes work and commitment to get beyond the first, second, and third waves of ideas to get to the ones that are really interesting.”
Sir Mick Jagger is "completely shocked and devastated" by the apparent suicide of his girlfriend, fashion designer L'Wren Scott, a spokesman says.
Scott, 49, was found at 10:00 local time (14:00 GMT) on Monday by her assistant in her New York City flat.
Police are understood to be treating it as a suicide, though the medical examiner has yet to determine an official cause of death.
The Rolling Stones are currently on tour in Australia.
Scott and Sir Mick, 70, began dating in 2001.
'Horrible loss'
Scott, born Luann Bambrough, was raised by Mormon adoptive parents in the US state of Utah.
She began her career as a model in Paris, then moved to Los Angeles to become a fashion stylist, according to a biography on her company's website.
Scott founded her own high-end fashion label in 2006 and recently created a more affordable line of clothes with Banana Republic.
According to its last UK filing her firm, LS Fashion Limited, owed creditors about $5.9m (£3.5m), as of 31 December 2012. It had assets of $1.7m.
She was said to be 6ft 3in (1.9m) tall, towering over her rock legend partner.
Scott and Sir Mick had been together for 13 years
Scott's death comes a month after she cancelled a show at London Fashion Week, saying production delays had left key pieces unready for the show.
Tributes poured in from around the fashion world.
Fashion website Style.com praised her as "skilled in costume design" and said she was responsible for Sir Mick's performance outfits on the Rolling Stones' current tour.
The band are due to play in Perth, Western Australia, on Wednesday, though it is unclear if the performance will go ahead.
Scott had dressed actresses such as Nicole Kidman, Oprah Winfrey, Sarah Jessica Parker and Angelina Jolie for red carpet events and was a costume consultant for films including Ocean's Thirteen and Eyes Wide Shut.
"This is a horrible and tragic loss," singer Madonna said. "I loved L'Wren's work and she was always so generous with me."
Steven Colb, chief executive officer of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, wrote: "So very sad today. L'Wren Scott was such a great talent and beautiful person. My thoughts are with her loved ones."
Bianca Jagger, one of Sir Mick's two former wives, tweeted: "Heartbroken to learn of the loss of the lovely and talented L'Wren Scott. My thoughts and prayers are with her family. May she rest in peace."
And pop band Duran Duran added: "Such sad news. Our condolences are with L'Wren's family and friends."
Police stand guard outside L'Wren Scott's home on Monday
We exist to make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system a reality within the next 100 years. We unreservedly dedicate ourselves to identifying and pushing the radical leaps in knowledge and technology needed to achieve interstellar flight, while pioneering and transforming breakthrough applications that enhance the quality of life for all on Earth. We actively seek to include the broadest swath of people and human experience in understanding, shaping and implementing this global aspiration.
Taking up this task ignites not only our imagination, but the undeniable human need to push ourselves to accomplishments greater than any single individual.
the why
When we explore space, we garner the greatest benefits here at home. The challenge of traveling to another star system could generate transformative activities, knowledge, and technologies that would dramatically benefit every nation on Earth in the near term and years to come.
We believe that pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow will build a better world today.
Today, people take very much for granted (but would loath to surrender) the benefits space exploration has provided right here on Earth.
Global positioning satellites (GPS); remote sensing for water, minerals, and crop and land management; weather satellites, arms treaty verifications; high-temperature, light-weight materials; revolutionary medical procedures and equipment; pagers, beepers, and television and internet to remote areas of the world; geographic information systems (GIS) and algorithms used to handle huge, complex data sets; physiologic monitoring and miniaturization; atmospheric and ecological monitoring; and insight into our planet’s geological history and future – the list goes on and on.
Also remarkable is the boom in other science and engineering fields - and the accompanying wave of social creativity, artistic expressions, and educational innovation - that followed the Apollo missions and each successive leap in space exploration.
Technologies created for and made possible by space exploration permeate, shape and are an integral part of our world.
Travel to the stars will require: the development of revolutionary non-chemical technologies to generate, harness, control and store enormous quantities of energy safely; radical advancements in closed-loop life-support systems and sustainable habitats; new insights into human development, health, behavior and training; quantum leaps in agriculture, communication and handling massive data sets; advances in robotics, automation, intelligent systems, and manufacturing techniques; as well as deeper, robust understanding and innovative approaches to social structures, education, economics and finance, legal frameworks, politics and international collaboration.
Programs to establish a human presence on the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere in our solar system will be stepping-stones to the stars.
All the capabilities needed to accomplish human interstellar travel are the same ones required for successful human survival.
reality check
The concept of humans traveling to other star systems may appear fantastical, but no more so than the fantasy of reaching the Moon was in the days of H. G. Wells. “The First Men in the Moon” was published considerably less than 100 years before humans landed on the Moon (1901 vs. 1969), and the rapidity of scientific and technological advances was not nearly as great as it is today. The truth is that the best ideas sound crazy at first. And then there comes a time when we can’t imagine a world without them.
Alternative driving days are being introduced in the French capital, Paris, in an attempt to tackle dangerous levels of air pollution.
From Monday, drivers will only be able to use their vehicles every other day.
This is only the second time since 1997 that such a restriction has been enforced.
The French government made the decision after air pollution exceeded safe levels for five days running in Paris and surrounding areas.
Motorcycles will also be covered by the ban, which will allow only vehicles with number plates terminating in an uneven digit to take to the roads, beginning at 05:30 (04:30 GMT) on Monday.
On Friday, public transport was made free of charge for three days in an attempt to encourage people to leave their cars at home. This measure will continue on Monday.
The smoggy conditions have been caused by a combination of cold nights and warm days, which have prevented pollution from dispersing.
The capital's air quality has been one of the worst on record, French environmental agencies say, rivalling the Chinese capital, Beijing, one of the world's most polluted cities.
On Friday, pollution levels hit 180 microgrammes of PM10 particulates per cubic metre, more than double the safe limit of 80.
PM10 particulates are emitted by vehicles, heating systems and heavy industry.
The government will review pollution levels on Monday, before deciding whether to extend the driving restrictions for longer.
