Eric Blue's Blog

In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creat­ive self.

John Houtz is a psychologist and professor at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Educational Psychology of Creativity (Hamptom Press, 2002).

Julia Cameron is an award-winning poet, playwright and filmmaker. Her book The Artist's Way (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002) has sold more than three million copies worldwide. Her latest book is The Writing Diet.

Robert Epstein is a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego. Contributing editors for Scientific American Mind and former editor in chief of Psychology Today, Epstein has written several books on creativity, including The Big Book of Creativity Games (McGraw-Hill, 2000).

Source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unleash-your-creativity

One key take away I had from this article was Robert Epstein's model of Four Different Competencies of Creative Expression:

• “capturing” — preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.


• “challenging”— giving ourselves tough problems to solve.


• “broadening” — The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things.


• “surrounding” — which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments.

Definitely an interesting read......

Posted by EricB at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The memex ( "memory extender") is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. The memex has influenced the development of subsequential hypertext and intellect augmenting computer systems. Bush's vision for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism which might augment the research of one individual working in isolation. In Bush's vision the ability to connect, annotate and share both published works and personal trails would profoundly change the process by which the "world's record" is created and used.

Excerpts from Bush's article:

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ... The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. "

-- As We May Think

And

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

It seems to me that the Bush's concept and proposal of a memex, while fanciful and even bordering on futuristic fantasy (having been written in 1945), is obviously becoming a reality for normal, everyday people. Yes, there are definitely parallels with hyperlinking systems, the WWW (yes, it's 2008 and I said WWW), and the recent surge in social networks. There is nothing particularly revolutionary with this comparison. However, the real power in this type of personal knowledge manager is putting the memex to use for personal applications. By putting to use, I mean augmenting your personal knowledge (learning new information and recalling existing knowledge) and creating a "trusted system" for storing your most important and cherished information.

Much of my time the last few months has been devoted to the topic of Personal Knowledge Managment, and in particular, the application and use of Semantic Wikis. I've been experimenting with a few different applications of my own memex, and so far the results have been very promising. So far, I'm working on the following:

• Personal Journal - Basic forms for filling out a diary/journal entry
• Dream Journal - Detailed form and record of dreams. Complete with semantic, table-based, and calendar views (Simile)
• Travel Log - Travel details including geographic information and integration with Google Maps
• Personal Learning History - Tracking all books and audio/dvd courses completed in the last few years. Complete with semantic, table-based, and calendar views (Simile)

In some upcoming posts I plan on sharing how to implement these applications.

Credit: Thanks to Jamie at Semantic Wave for bring the work of Vannevar Bush to my attention a couple years ago. It wasn't until recently that I really started making progress in implementing some of these ideas for my personal use.

Link to the online version of the Atlantic Monthly article is here. And, excerpts of this post were taken from the Memex article at Wikipedia.

Posted by EricB at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I've been personally waiting for something like this for a while....

What is JIT?

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques.
The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

Read more at http://blog.thejit.org/javascript-information-visualization-toolkit-jit/

Posted by EricB at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in March, I began evaluating some open source Document Management Systems (DMS) to help compliment my wiki-based Personal Knowledge Manager (PKM). That's a little bit of acronym-overload. But, in simple terms I really am looking for a way to easily store, categorize, and retrieve a number of my documents related to research and learning (PDFs, Word Docs, etc).

I quickly discovered that although my wiki can manage attaching simple documents, there was no way to easily store metadata for the documents or search within the wiki itself. As I alluded to in my original post, I narrowed down my search to 3 main DMS choices: SCAN, Alfresco, and Knowledge Tree. Of these three, SCAN (Smart Content Aggregation and Navigation) ended up being the most feature-rich and least complicated. Alfresco and Knowledge tree are both fantastic products, but they ended up being too complex for my needs. I believe this ultimately boiled down to the fact that my DMS is for one person (me) and not an entire team or company. Many features related to roles, access restrictions, and document workflow aren't a concern to me right now.

At a high-level, SCAN supports the following features:

• Java-based UI with a multitude of browsing, searching, and tagging functions (Can run on a variety of platforms - Linux, Mac, & Windows
• Support (with plugins) for PDF, Word, Excel, XML/XHTML, Plain text
• Tag cluster browsing for both Documents and Del.icio.us links
• Sophisticated tagging and text analysis

A full list of features can be found here. I received an anonymous tip the other day (well, it was actually from a guest Google chatter) that SCAN version 1.3 was just released. This release has a number of UI enhancements for browsing the document collections, adding document annotations, and better management of metadata through document properties.

For the most part, SCAN ended up being my "Killer App" for Document Management Systems. One slight drawback on my wishlist is that there is no web-interface for SCAN. Most of my time spent searching, browsing, and tagging will more than likely be on my primary desktop where SCAN is installed. Using the SCAN GUI is fine for 90% of the time, however if I am remote I would like to have access to my documents.

For the short-term I've simply configured my wiki to display my document repository so I can download documents as needed. What's convenient is that I can preserve the document directory hierarchy however I like in the file system. And with SCAN, I can choose to create multiple document repositories and organize & aggregate my document collections with tags. Sure, I can only get a hierarchy (file system) list for my web view, but this is OK for now.

Long-term, I would like to experiment with adding the following features for my own needs (I am a fan of Eating My Own Dog Food or Sipping My Own Champagne):

• Add support for password-protected PDFs (if this is possible with Lucene)
• Add support for indexing and searching MindManager mindmaps. This is a *huge* must have for me given the number of mindmaps I've created for my own research.
• Create a basic SOAP-based service layer on top of SCAN so I can access metadata, create tag clouds, and search from a web-interface. This web-interface will more than likely be a barebones MediaWiki plugin.

This, of course, will need to be added to my ever-growing Personal Pet Project Queue.

I'd highly recommend giving SCAN a whirl, especially if you're interested in wrangling a large number of documents. SCAN is simple, effective, & powerful. And, best of all, it's free!

Posted by EricB at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chuck Frey has just published an extensive comparison chart of the major web-based mind mapping applications - MindMeister, Mindomo, Mind42, Comapping and Mead Map - covering over 60 features and capabilities of these apps.

This detailed chart covers criteria such as:

* Overview (versions, pricing)
* Map formats supported
* Map level features
* Topic-level features
* Import options
* Export options
* Publishing options
* Collaboration
* Other features

Click here to read more!

Posted by EricB at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every 6 months or so I mix things up and alternate my primary area of focus between studying philosophy and pursuing my creative technical interests (e.g. my multitude of pet/geek projects). I decided to switch gears a couple weeks ago and have been back into academic mode. My primary focus has been studying the history of philosophy; notable figures, major schools of thought, etc. I've also been creating a series of detailed mindmaps based on this research and hope to share those sometime next month.

Over the last 6 months much of my time and writing has been focusing on learning and personal knowledge management. So, it occurred to me that this might be a good opportunity to blend my interests in learning, technology, and philosophy. I've been using the Semantic MediaWiki for the past few months as my Personal Knowledge Manager and just recently started adding my own semantic data for major philosophers (date of birth, place of birth, influences, influenced by, school of thought).

I figured it would be uber cool (and geeky) to be able to query this type of metadata and aggregate it in the hopes of seeing new patterns. At a high level, here is what I'd like to do:

* View all philosophers on a timeline broken down by date and time period (Ancient Greek, Early Christian, Dark Ages, Modern, Post Modern, etc). Something like http://radicalacademy.com/diahistphil.htm.

* Map of philosophers based on place of birth, origin of school, or place of death.

* Graphical representation of lineage of influences by philosophers. This is somewhat similar to The Genealogy of Influence I posted about last year.

* Faceted Browsing on various metadata. Make something similar to the amazingly cool Elastic Lists?

In theory, this sounds very cool but could get complicated pretty fast. Luckily there are some great projects like Simile at MIT that solve some interesting problem domains. One particular subproject called Exhibit offers many of these features. I would just need to find a way to export my philosophy wiki data as RDF (which I believe it currently does) and reformat to JSON. This will definitely get some priority on my existing Pet Project Queue ;) More to follow later......

Posted by EricB at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

No matter how perfect you may think you are, the fact this there’s always some small way you can improve upon yourself. Whether it’s broadening your knowledge or reducing your impact on the earth, there are seemingly endless little things you can do to make a change for the better. Here, we’ll discuss 100 of these steps, and how you can go about doing them.

Read more here.

Posted by EricB at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)