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What do we have against creativity? Photo courtesy of Flickr user moriza

Who doesn’t love innovation?  It means progress and dynamism and brighter days ahead, right? What’s not to love?

Except, apparently, it’s the idea of innovation of which people are so enamored. The engine that drives it, not so much.

So concludes a new study by scientists from Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina. It found that when it comes right down to it, people are pretty conflicted about creativity. In fact, here are some of the words that study subjects associated with creativity: agony, poison and vomit.

Vomit? So much for brighter days ahead. The reality is that novel ideas make most people uncomfortable. Much more often than not, we reject them in favor of ideas that seem more practical—which usually means more familiar. The researchers believe that many of us have a deep-rooted bias against creativity, one that makes us dismiss innovative thinking even when we say that’s exactly what we want.

“Our findings imply a deep irony,” the scientists deadpanned.

They suggest that companies and organizations need to shift from blithely pushing for “creative thinking” to focusing more on recognizing what creativity really means. Ideas shouldn’t be dumped because they bring uncertainty or discomfort. Or as Todd Essig put it in Forbes: “..it may be time to recalibrate, time to recognize that something may be the right decision because it feels a little wrong.”

Science fiction to the rescue

Doing so would require a huge culture change for most companies, writes  science fiction author Neal Stephenson in World Policy Journal. Too much business these days is built around certainty, he argues. “In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks they know about … even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run,” writes Stephenson. “There is no such thing as ‘long run’ in industries driven by the next quarterly report.”

And that, he contends, means we’re increasingly living in a world “where big stuff can never get done.”

Real ray of sunshine, that guy.  Actually, Stephenson doesn’t think the situation is hopeless.  But the onus for innovation shouldn’t be on companies, which aren’t motivated to embrace imagination, but rather on science fiction writers. That’s right, science fiction writers. He proposes what he calls the Hieroglyph Project, a call to sci-fi writers to do what Isaac Asimov did for robots or William Gibson for the concept of cyberspace. A new wave of “techno-optimism,” he says, could help inspire scientists and engineers to do the big thinking.

This way to high road

The writer Francisco Dao offered a slightly rosier take on innovation in the Washington Post, although he doesn’t expect much from the business community either. Instead, he looks to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who used the fortune he made from the sale of PayPal to start SpaceX and Tesla Motors, the first modern electric car company. Dao believes Musk’s ambition comes from a more magnanimous place—he wants to do good things. Says Dao: “if moral obligation fades completely, I fear the big ideas and grand ambition to change the world for the better will fade with it.”

Study break

Here’s a sampling of new research about what makes us tick:

• Babies like fairness: They apparently know when adults aren’t playing fair and they’ll let you know, in their own special way.
• Be a fool, win friends: Embarassing yourself in public can endear you to others. So go ahead, spill coffee on yourself.  No pain, no gain.
• Don’t blame the game: Violent games won’t make your kid violent. But if he’s moody and impulsive, tell him to step away from the controller.
• Pollution dulls your brain: Now you can blame all the cars outside for you forgetting where you put your car keys.

Video bonus: Writer Elizabeth Gilbert opens up about fear of creativity.  Actually, her own fear of her own creativity.

The Singapore skyline, image courtesy of Flickr user chooyutshing

The web’s been full of Steve Jobs’ wisdom the past week, but one insight you didn’t see very often was his 2001 prediction that the Segway would be bigger than the personal computer. In fairness, he did hate the way it looked. It was inelegant. It was too traditional. Or, as Jobs put it, “It sucks.”

That said, the Segway got the engineering right and Jobs wasn’t the only one who saw it as an answer to urban congestion. Obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way—Segways are still about as common on city sidewalks as potty-trained pigeons. (Only 30,000 of the two-wheelers were sold in its first seven years on the market.) And that reminds us that no invention, no matter how technologically sound, is a slam dunk in the real world, particularly when that world is as maddeningly complex as a 21st century city.

But what if you could build a city that’s designed to be a laboratory, a place where engineers, government planners and university researchers can test ways of making cities smarter? Not timed-traffic-lights smart, but real digital intelligence, where all the high-tech infrastructure is woven together—you get the power grid talking to the traffic system and then surveillance cameras join the conversation.

That’s what Pegasus Global Holdings has in mind. A few weeks ago the Washington, D.C. tech firm announced that it will build something called the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Sounds like a white-coat wonderland. What it actually will be is more like is a robot ghost town. The place may cover as much as 20 square miles and include enough roads, buildings, homes, water lines and power grids to support 35,000 people. But no one will live there.

Already some are saying Pegasus may end up pulling a Segway. Sure, it’s an ambitious idea that could help urban thinkers fine-tune cities of the future. But without human beings on the premises, some of our more endearing qualities—unpredictability, randomness and irrational behavior—would seemingly be dropped from the equation. What about rampant double-parking? A hacker attack? Mass simultaneous toilet flushes? Flash mobs? A Justin Bieber sighting?

Not to worry, insists Pegagus co-founder Robert Brumley. With enough data and computing power, a city’s complexity can be replicated through algorithms. In fact, he says it has reached the point where human randomness can be built into the mix. For instance, sensors in toilets throughout his faux community can be programmed to mimic human behavior.

Smart moves

No question that keeping cities functioning will be one of the great challenges of the rest of this century. It’s projected that by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Already, 21 mega-cities have  populations of 10 to 20 million.

A lot of experts think the only way to deal with millions of people is to install millions of sensors throughout a city and hook them up to one big operating center. That’s the vision of Living PlanIT, a Portuguese firm which also is planning a model smart city, only it will have people. Nearly everything in that new community, scheduled to be built near Paredes, Portugal by 2015, will be connected to sensors, which will monitor traffic flow, energy consumption, water use, waste processing, even the temperature in individual rooms.

Ideally, its system will work like this: Cameras spot a fire and sensors set off alarms and flashing lights which direct people to safety. At the same time a fire station is alerted and then traffic lights are automatically manipulated so that fire trucks won’t have to slow down.

The trucks, apparently, won’t drive themselves.

Here’s more urban living news:

• Car Talk: A new study found that when cars are able to collect and share information with each other, commute time drops.
• Meter magic: Cities can now install sensors on parking spaces that will allow drivers to use a smartphone app to find open spots.
• Pedal mettle: A bike called the Faraday, which features a 24-volt motor to help with the hills, was selected the best urban utility bike in the Oregon Manifest challenge.
• Smog be gone: Boral Roofing has invented a roof tile that eats smog. Okay, it doesn’t actually eat it. Technically, the tile coating breaks smog down into a substance that washes away in the rain.
• Going underground: Talk about heading in new directions. A Mexican firm has designed an inverted pyramid called an “Earthscraper” that would extend 65 stories underground.

Bonus video: Wrap your head around this one: Cars that fold up, thanks to the whiz kids at the MIT Media Lab.

What will be the future of spaceflight? Credit: NASA/Glenn Research Center

Yesterday the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who discovered that the universe is being blown apart.

Well, it was a good run.

The upside is that we still have some time before all the energy is sucked out of the universe. So all the brainstorming at a conference in Florida this past weekend about space travel in the 22nd century was not for naught. The purpose of the 100-Year Starship Symposium was to get a hall full of scientists imagining a trip to another solar system. (And some people say no one thinks big any more.)

Not surprisingly, something so challenging and so beyond our experience opened up all kinds of unusual avenues of discourse. George Hart, an evolutionary paleontologist at Louisiana State University, predicted that other solar systems would be explored by robots with human brains. German philosophy professor Christian Weidemann pondered the significance of intelligent aliens in the universe in a talk titled, “Did Jesus die for Klingons, too?” His answer? No.

And a biologist named Athena Andreadis, from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, emphasized one perhaps under-appreciated challenge of prolonged space travel: Interstellar sex would be really difficult.

Somewhere out there

The symposium was part of a joint project by NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, the same Defense Department agency that financed the birth of the Internet. To show they’re serious, next month the agencies will award $500,000 to an organization to get the research rolling.

Of course, whatever outfit is chosen to take this on will have to wrestle with the universe’s daunting duo—time and distance. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is more than 25 trillion miles away. To give you some context, over the last 34 years Voyager 1 has traveled farther than any manmade object—a mere 11 billion miles.

Clearly, we need a new plan. Chemical fuel is out of the question—you could never store enough of it. Nuclear power is much more likely, and some scientists believe it could propel a spaceship at 15 percent the speed of light, or about 28,000 miles per second. Even so, it would probably take several generations to get to another solar system. (Which brings us back to that sex problem.) Plus, being exposed to cosmic radiation for years and years and years cannot be a good lifestyle choice.

Other challenges are more prosaic, such as how much would this mission cost? And who would be willing to pay for it? Still, DARPA knows that absurdly difficult projects like this spark amazing innovations. For instance, if you can solve the preposterous problem of shipping food trillions of miles and storing it for decades, imagine how easy it would be to send meals to the other side of our planet.

Meanwhile, back in China

Long-term, the United States might once again become the world leader in space exploration and innovation. But with our space shuttle fleet now retired, the short term lead could very well belong to China. Last week it launched a space module that’s an unmanned prototype for a space station it plans to have operating by 2020. And it’s seriously considering an idea that’s long been a pipe dream—getting solar power from an array of satellites in low Earth orbit. It hopes to have that up and running by the middle of the century.

Bonus: For old time’s sake, take a look at the PopSci slideshow of 10 tech innovations that came out of the space shuttle program, including the artificial heart pump and baby formula. Who knew?

Also, interested in other futuristic predictions? Check out our new Paleofuture blog that chronicles the history of futurism. See what scientists and thinkers from the past got right (and wrong) about modern technology.

New apps and gizmos are helping pets out. Image courtesy of Flickr user VerseVend

Usually when I write this blog, our dog Maz is lying somewhere nearby. He doesn’t say much, but I’ve come to take his silence as approval. Some may scoff that such a cross-species mind meld is possible, but just the other day, as I read that a new study found that people typically spend more than $26,000 on a pet in its lifetime, Maz sensed a great disturbance in the Force and discreetly left the room.

Not that he needed to worry. I’m not likely to indulge him any less. And now that digital technology has been thrown into the mix, that’s only going to ratchet up.

Take pet GPS. The recent tale of Willow, the calico cat tracked by a New York shelter—through an implanted microchip—to a Colorado family that last saw her five years ago was TV news gold. And while it turned out that Willow apparently didn’t stroll across country, the story undoubtedly raised anxiety among pet owners that their own furry friends might one day take a road trip.

One of the hottest digital pet items is a collar attachment that allows you to track your animal in real time. The Tagg Pet Tracker—$200, plus another $60 a year in wireless charges—lets you create a virtual fence, and if your pet strays out of bounds, you receive a text or email alert. Then you can locate it on a map on the Tagg website or with an iPhone or Android app.

Another tracker, called Retriever, would go even farther. It also will tell you the last five places your pet has been—now that’s obsessive—and it plans to connect you with other pet owners or services in the same area. It’s expected to go on the market in December.

A tool for dog walkers, Pet Check Technology, keeps track of where and how long your dog is walked: When the walker picks up the dog, he or she punches in by using a mobile app to swipe a QR code. Then the GPS takes over and your dog’s jaunt is tracked until the walker punches out by swiping the bar code again. Pet Check is being sold only to professional dog walkers now, but the assumption is that if walkers are smart, they’ll share all the doggy data with owners.

Pets rule

Here’s a little more evidence of burgeoning pet power: Nestle announced on Friday that it has begun airing in Austria the first TV commercial aimed at pets themselves. The ad for Beneful dog food includes a whistle sound, the squeak of dog toy and a high-pitched ping—all to draw your pet’s attention to the screen—and make you think this must be some really special chow.

Other pet tech advances:

• A leg up: Some truly remarkable things are being done with animal prosthetics these days. Check out this Wired slideshow, which includes Winter, the dolphin that inspired the recent film Dolphin Tale.
• Closed door policy: A British quantum physicist has invented a cat door called SureFlap. It keeps strays from wandering in and snarfing food because it’s activated only by your pet’s microchip.
• Smart pet tricks: When your dog gets within three feet of the battery-operated outdoor Dog Motion Activated Outdoor Pet Fountain, a motion sensor sets off a release of fresh drinking water. He moves away, the water stops. His friends are amazed.
• See me, feed me: If you can’t get home and don’t want to feel guilty about cheating your pet out of a meal, there’s the iSeePet360 Remote Pet Feeder. A webcam enables you to check in on your BFF, and then remotely release dry food into a bowl. He’ll no doubt be quite grateful, even if he has no idea how this happened. 
• Born to run: Running in circles isn’t just for hamsters anymore. Now there’s the Tread Wheel and your dog can jog to his heart’s content without bouncing off walls.

Bonus: You don’t want to miss AlphaDog, the latest robot hound funded by the Defense Department. This is a dog you’d want on your side.

Can you think of an invention you’d love to have for your pet?