Why You Have Your Best Ideas When You’re Least Productive | Gizmodo
Researchers have been studying how innovation and creativity varies with circadian rhythms—the natural patterns that make you a morning person or an evening type—and the findings are suprising. A lot of studies have shown that we perform best—or at least, get most done—during peak times in our circadian rhythms when we’re most alert. But the new study, by Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks, reveals that during the lulls in productivity we’re more easily distracted, and that those distractions can help aid creativity. Their conclusion: you have your best ideas when you’re least productive.
A Data Scientist You’ve Never Heard of Is Now the Master of Your Domain. Crowdsourcing analysis of big data achieved a 340% improvement over Allstate’s ability to predict claims. Via Andrew Mcafee
(via smarterplanet)
Obama Explained
(via Instapaper)
Four Ways Enterprise Social Networks Drive Value
Indeed.
Despite their promise and potential, enterprise social networks (ESNs) have only received moderate traction. The problem is that most deployments are treated as technology deployments with a focus on adoption and usage. A different way to think about this is that enterprise social networks represent a new way to communicate and form relationships — and because of that, can bridge gaps.
Encourage sharing. Remember how revolutionary email was? It fundamentally changed the way we communicated by reducing the cost/effort and collapsing the time frame and scaling it to include multiple recipients. Social represents a fundamental change, simply because, at its essence, it encourages sharing.
Capture knowledge. Capturing the collective knowledge of an organization is a daunting task because it includes a wide range of facts, information, and skills gained through experience. Yet few people proactively sit down each day to document and capture their knowledge. ESNs provide an opportunity to do just that, by capturing glimpses of knowledge through profiles, activity streams, and interactions.
Enable action. Having an ESN in place means that operations and processes can begin to change as well. This happens when the day-to-day process changes because the ESN enables new relationships and behaviors that address a gap that prevented actions from being taken.
Empower employees. The last way ESNs drive value is that they empower and embolden people to speak up and join together, as well as gives them opportunities to contribute their skills and ideas.
(Via Altimeter Group)
(via smarterplanet)
Could Twitter Help Us Create Smarter Transit Routes?
“Traditional city maps visualize just one aspect of urban design—the city’s intended structure, full stop. But add in a layer that visualizes how people actually use the city, and then the map becomes much more interesting. Eric Fischer did exactly that when he used Twitter’s API to collect tens of thousands of geotagged tweets and map them onto the streets of New York, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. The maps amount to something close to adesire path on a macro scale: The maps show where our buses and subways should be, if they conformed to the way we actually move and live.”
via studio630:
12 smart grid startups to watch in 2012 taking a fresh approach to analytics, distributed sensing, & efficiency http://t.co/rC7gmE3g
