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Corner kick goals are super hard. What is one athletic talent that we don't recognise enough, and why should we care?

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Corner kick goals are super hard. What is one athletic talent that we don't recognise enough, and why should we care?

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Why It’s Almost Impossible to Score a Corner Kick Goal in Soccer / Football | WIRED

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What's worth knowing about The Meg and why?

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What's worth knowing about The Meg and why?

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The Meg, Hollywood's latest shark tale, is opening wide this week in anticipation of summer audiences in the mood for a scare.

Proposing that the extinct Megalodon, a large prehistoric relative of the great white shark, has survived to the present day, the film follows its subsequent encounter with humanity.

But how much do we really know about the giant predator?

And what impact do shark attack films have on their real subjects?

Shark researcher and Megalodon expert Catalina Pimiento from Swansea University wants to break down a few myths.

Dead or alive?

"It's very much extinct," says Dr Pimiento. "There's no way it can be still around."

Researchers have pinned the date of Megalodon's extinction at about 2.6 million years ago - roughly when its cousin the great white shark was just becoming established.

In The Meg, Megalodon has survived the ages in a previously unknown (to humans) area of deep ocean off the coast of China.

However, Dr Pimiento points out that Megalodon likely lived in water no more than 200 metres deep, in and around coastal areas.

We would, she says, have noticed something of Megalodon's size if it was swimming off our shores.

What did it look like?

Much of what we know about the species comes from its teeth, which are some of the only remains that have been preserved.

Estimates of its full body length range from at least 13 metres up to a maximum of 18 metres, or about the length of a double decker bus.

While this dwarfs great white sharks, it's not quite the submarine-crunching 25 metres featured in The Meg.

What did it eat?

Melagodon's remarkable size is fascinating to researchers, as an animal that large would have had to work very hard to find enough food.

"If you think about that on land for example, all the largest animals are herbivores... if you're that big then you need to eat a lot of prey and you need to hunt a lot to find that much food," explains Dr Pimiento.

"So that's why Megalodon is so amazing; because it was a predator and it was huge!"

Although it's very difficult to know much about how Megalodon would have moved and behaved, Dr Pimiento has her suspicions about what kind of hunter it would have been. She hopes to build a 3D model of the shark in order to study this in more detail.

"If I had to guess, I wouldn't think it was an agile predator. It could even have been more of a scavenger. Sharks are opportunistic, and they will eat anything they can. If they can hunt, they will hunt. If they see a carcass, they will eat the carcass."

So even if we had lived at the same time, a small human snack might not have been worth the energy.

Why did it die out?

There's no evidence that Megalodon's remarkable size was the cause of its extinction, but food was almost certainly a factor.

Rapidly changing sea levels about 2.6 million years ago impacted the coastal ecosystem that the giant shark inhabited.

Over the course of a few million years, around 36% of sharks, sea turtles, sea birds and marine mammals became extinct.

Megalodon was the last of its lineage of giant sharks, and it was succeeded by smaller, more agile hunters like the great white.

All publicity is good publicity?

Although The Meg's creators put a good deal of research into reviving Megalodon, before adding some artistic licence, previous shark attack films have been thought to affect their real life counterparts.

"Movies have such an impact," says Dr Pimiento.

"We shouldn't take them lightly. Jaws had a huge impact on the protection of sharks, and a role in giving them a bad reputation. People don't realise how vulnerable they are."

It was speculated that shark populations off the US coast were affected after Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster, with fishers setting out to catch "trophy sharks."

Nowadays, sharks are threatened by human encroachment on their hunting grounds, competing for the same prey.

If Megalodon had survived to encounter humans, it's likely we would be the far greater danger.

Follow Mary on Twitter.

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The Meg: the myth, the legend (the science)

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The Meg, Hollywood's latest shark tale, is opening wide this week in anticipation of summer audiences in the mood for a scare. Proposing that the extinct Megalodon, a large prehistoric relative of the great white shark, has survived to the present day, the film follows its subsequent encounter with humanity.

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As an artist, what can you learn from the work of Christoph Niemann?

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As an artist, what can you learn from the work of Christoph Niemann?

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Which musician is the voice of your generation? What makes you say so?

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Which musician is the voice of your generation? What makes you say so?

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Complete this personality test--review how accurate you find the results to be

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Complete this personality test--review how accurate you find the results to be

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Free personality test - take it to find out why our readers say that this personality test is so accurate, "it's a little bit creepy." No registration required!

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Follow the steps here to explore and reconsider how your values may drive you

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Follow the steps here to explore and reconsider how your values may drive you

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Brene Brown talked about organizational values in her keynote address at the WorkHuman Conference in April. She articulated three steps for connecting people to an organization's values:

1. Values need to be operationalized

2. Values need to be lived - starting at the top

3. Values need to be communicated
(globoforce blog: When Human Values and Organizational Values Overlap )
Organizational values reflect the collective judgment of what's important in an organization. When organizational values are operationalized, lived and communicated people know where to put their attention. They make decisions more quickly and they commit more fully to those decisions.

While companies are eager to talk about organizational values, they tend to shy away from personal values. The term "personal values" conjures up images of knock-down drag-out arguments between people with different "values." HR professionals get uncomfortable just reading the words "personal values."

The simple definition of a value is one's judgment of what's important in life. It's that simple.

In a recent workshop, three graduate students did a brief exercise to name three of their values. These are their lists:

Student 1: Curiosity Individuality Creativity

Student 2: Autonomy Success Self-Reliance

Student 3: Teaching Adventure Excellence

When they shared their personal values, they were amazed at how the differences in their values could so accurately reflect the different kinds of jobs they were considering.

Each of these graduate students was naturally looking at jobs that reflected their own personal values. When their value words were up on the wall, they could instantly see that they were operating from different values. If they had articulated their personal values before their search, how much more clear and intentional could they be about the jobs they were seeking and considering? If they evaluated different opportunities through the lens of what's important to them, how much more likely would they be to choose the job that's right for them?

According to Richard Barrett of the Barret Values Centre, "Values-based decision-making allows you to create a future that resonates deeply with who you really are. It creates the conditions that allow authenticity and integrity to flourish."

If you're interested in identifying your personal values and creating "the conditions that allow authenticity and integrity to flourish," try this five-step process:
STEP ONE
Think of one or more:

Favorite childhood memories

Times that you made a difficult decision and acted on it

Moments when you felt proud

Jobs, experiences or times in your life when you felt frustrated

Challenging experiences and how you made it through

Jobs, projects or teams in which you felt clear and aligned

Times that you felt at your very best

Reflect on the themes that run through these experiences. Consider asking a friend or colleague to listen to you tell the stories of these experiences so they can help you identify the themes.
STEP TWO
Once you've identified the themes, look for three to five words that reflect those themes. Give each word a definition that is meaningful for you.
STEP THREE
Operationalize your personal values by completing this statement: When I'm living these values, people will see me...
STEP FOUR
Live your values by consistently asking yourself, "Does this decision/action/behavior reflect my value of ..."
STEP FIVE
Communicate your values by sharing your value words, definitions and how you live your values with colleagues, friends and family. When you make a decision, be transparent about how your values played into that decision.

Bonus: If you really want to step into this process, ask people to hold you accountable for the values you've chosen by letting you know when you don't appear to be acting in alignment with your values.

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Organizational Values Are Important. What About Personal Values?

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Brene Brown talked about organizational values in her keynote address at the WorkHuman Conference in April. She articulated three steps for connecting people to an organization's values: 1. Values need to be operationalized 2. Values need to be lived - starting at the top 3.

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What are your top ten recommendations for students hoping stay balanced this year?

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What are your top ten recommendations for students hoping stay balanced this year?

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In order to lead a more enlightened life, it is important, first of all, to understand how the human mind works. We are often unknowing prisoners of our minds, swept away by whatever thought we may be having at the time. We give our thoughts too much power.

Lost in regretting the past, or catastrophizing about the future, we miss out on experiencing the present moment, where all the promise and true joy lie. This video, recorded in Lhasa, Tibet in May 2012, is a brief "how-to-meditate" guide. It describes using the breath as an anchor to the present moment, in order to cultivate a more mindful, meaningful and happy life.

Mindful-awareness (shamatha-vipassana) meditation instructions can be used to develop a personal practice and enter the path to greater wisdom, understanding and well-being. Watched once in the morning and/or once at night, followed by a period of personal sitting practice, this 10-minute video provides helpful and gentle reminders of what to do during mindfulness meditation practice.

Mindfulness is used by psychologists, teachers, sports coaches and workplace consultants to help people develop skills to enhance presence to the here and now of experience. A growing body of empirical scientific research confirms what has been known for over 2,500 years: mindfulness leads to greater presence. (1-2) Greater presence leads to enhanced peace of mind. Enhanced peace of mind leads to more happiness, and more happiness leads to greater physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. As meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh writes, "The breath is the intersection of the body and mind."

Please check with your doctor or psychologist before undertaking physical or mental training exercises.

( Video of mindfulness meditation instructions.)
Mindfulness Meditation Instructions
1. Set aside time each day to develop a personal meditation practice. When undertaken with discipline, meditation can lead to clarity and peace of mind.

2. Select a place where you can sit, uninterrupted.

3. Practice meditation for at least five to 10 minutes in the morning and five to 10 minutes at night.

4. Sit in an erect and upright position on a chair or on a meditation cushion. Have a sense of regality in your posture, an inner confidence and a sense of self-worth.

5. Either close your eyes, or softly focus them on a spot on the floor about three to four feet in front of you.

6. At the same time, heighten attention to all five senses: touch, taste, scent, sight and sound.

7. Feel the skin of your palms resting gently on the top of your thighs. Hear the sounds of traffic or birds outside the window. Smell the scent of rain, or dinner cooking on the stove. Taste the mint you recently finished. Experience, through your senses, the richness of colors, shapes, scents, sounds and flavors of everyday things.

8. Now, while maintaining awareness of the five senses, bring attention to the flow of your breath as it comes in and goes out.

9. Heighten attention particularly to the out-breath, as you practice letting go of all thoughts and feelings.

10. At the end of the out-breath, notice a small gap, a space in time, before the in-breath occurs. Similarly, at the end of the in-breath, notice a small gap before the out-breath occurs.

11. Repeat the process of maintaining attention on the breath, as it naturally comes in and goes out.

12. When you find that you are lost in a thought while meditating: "What do I have to do tomorrow?" for example, or if you feel an emotion like anger or envy, or even joy, simply label that thought, "thinking," silently, within your mind, and return your attention, very gently, to the breath, acting as anchor the present moment. Follow the breath as it slowly goes out and dissolves.

13. At the end of the out-breath, notice the gap, and then bring awareness to the in-breath.

14. Repeat this pattern of following the breath, over and over again.

15. During sitting practice, when you realize that you are caught in a thought, swept away by a story in your mind, silently label the thoughts, "thinking," and return attention once again to the out-breath. Withhold self-judgment. Be kind to yourself.

16. Continue the pattern of following the breath in-and-out, labeling thoughts as "thinking," and returning attention to the breath. Meanwhile, maintain heightened awareness of the five senses.

17. Shifting awareness from thought, to the here and now of the present moment, is the practice of meditation.

18. Set aside time each day to develop a personal meditation practice. When undertaken with discipline, meditation can lead to clarity and peace of mind.
Questions about meditation practice? Write to mindfulnessineverydaylife@gmail.com.
Videotaped interviews with Dr. Rockwell on the value of mindfulness can be found at PyschAlive: Psychology for Everyday Life.

Some mindfulness meditation resources:
Shambhala International
Insight Meditation Society
Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society
UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center

Follow Dr. Rockwell on Facebook, and Twitter @drdonnarockwell, and at her website: donnarockwell.com.

References:
(1) Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (January 01, 2003). "The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 4, 822-848.

(2) Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (November 12, 2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science, 330, 6006, 932.

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Mindfulness in Everyday Life: How to Meditate: 18 Tips to Successful Sitting Practice

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In order to lead a more enlightened life, it is important, first of all, to understand how the human mind works. We are often unknowing prisoners of our minds, swept away by whatever thought we may be having at the time. We give our thoughts too much power.

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Should we encourage AI to immortalise actors? Why or why not?

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Should we encourage AI to immortalise actors? Why or why not?

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AUDREY HEPBURN DIED in 1993, but in 2013 she nevertheless starred in an advertisement for Galaxy, a type of chocolate bar. She was shown riding a bus along the Amalfi coast before catching the eye of a passing hunk in a convertible. In 2016 Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his role as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars film "Rogue One". Such resurrections are not new, but they are still uncommon enough to count as news. Yet advances in special effects-and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence (AI)-are making it ever easier to manufacture convincing forgeries of human beings.

In recent months this has led to concern that propagandists will use the technology to generate videos in which political figures appear to say compromising things. A video created by BuzzFeed, a news website, in April shows Barack Obama apparently saying "We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time," for example. In May a Belgian political party produced a fake video of Donald Trump saying implausible things about Belgium's climate policy. In both cases the video looks slightly off, and the voice is provided by an impersonator. But the technology is improving fast, prompting a dozen AI researchers to place bets on whether a fake video will disrupt America's midterm elections later this year. (Tim Hwang, a Harvard academic, is overseeing the wager.)

Whatever happens in the arena of fake news, the same techniques are sure to revolutionise fiction of a different kind, in the form of film and television. In future, actors need not be creatures of flesh and blood, but could, like so many other things in an increasingly digitised world, exist as nothing more than long strings of 1s and 0s. Such digital actors would sit quietly in digital storage systems until their services were needed-there would be no need for luxury trailers, chefs and make-up people.
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Actors would be able to star in 100 different films in the same year, and carry on full and productive careers decades after their deaths. They would never age, and versions of them at different ages could appear in different films. (In the month of her death in 2016, a digitally rejuvenated Carrie Fisher appeared at the end of "Rogue One", reprising the role of Princess Leia from the original "Star Wars" in 1977.) Directors would also be able to tweak the casts of their films to match the tastes of their audiences, suggests Darren Hendler at Digital Domain, a visual-effects company. Donnie Yen might play the leading role in the Chinese release of an action film, say, while Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson stars in a version for the American market. Actors need not even be based on real humans at all, but could be focus-group-approved composites, or designed by committee.

My fair CGI lady
Hepburn was resurrected thanks to the efforts of Framestore, a special-effects company based in London. She was not the first actor to be brought back in this way. In 1993, for instance, Brandon Lee-son of Bruce-died during the filming of "The Crow". The film was eventually completed with a mix of script rewrites, body doubles, existing footage of Lee and an early form of the digital trickery used by Framestore on Hepburn. Over the years a trickle of other stars, from Oliver Reed in "Gladiator" to Marlon Brando in "Superman Returns", have returned to the screen thanks to the power of special effects based on computer-generated imagery (CGI).

But doing that well is hard work, says Tim Webber, Framestore's head of visual effects. For the Hepburn ad, Framestore employed two actors to work as doubles, one whose body looked like Hepburn's, and one whose face bore a general resemblance. Teams of digital artists then used historical footage of Hepburn and painstakingly replaced the real actor's head with a computer-generated replacement. Close-ups are especially tough, says Mr Webber, because humans are hyper-sensitive to even small imperfections in how computer-generated faces look.

All this is hugely labour-intensive. But this year's fake videos of Mr Obama and Mr Trump were made in a different way that is much cheaper and faster. They are so-called "deepfakes", created using a technique that, as the name suggests, uses a form of AI called deep learning to create fake videos. Essentially, a multi-layered (ie, "deep") neural network is shown images of a particular face, taken from different angles and with different expressions. Given enough such examples (ideally, hundreds or thousands) the network learns what the face looks like, and how to redraw it from any angle and with any expression. It is then just a matter of picking a video to edit, and instructing the network to replace a face in the video with the one it has been studying.

This technique first came to prominence in 2017, when an anonymous user uploaded a pornographic video to the internet in which the original actor's face had been replaced (without permission from anyone involved) with that of Gal Gadot, an actor best known for portraying Wonder Woman in a series of superhero films. This led to the creation of an entire sub-genre of porn videos, as well as a cavalcade of comic face-swapped clips, as people downloaded the necessary software, which is available free online. The quality of this amateur face-swapping varies enormously; getting good results takes some fiddling, a powerful PC and a large selection of images of the face being superimposed. But none of those would be a problem for a Hollywood studio. As deepfake technology is incorporated into professional video-editing tools, face-swapping will surely become much faster, cheaper and more convincing than it is today.

Looks aren't everything, however. So deep learning is also being applied to copying voices, not just faces. In this case, a neural network is trained using recordings and transcripts of someone speaking, so that it learns how they map words onto sounds. Given new text, the network can then generate convincing audio. Earlier this year CereProc, a Scottish company, used this technique to synthesise the voice of John F. Kennedy making the speech he was due to give on the day of his assassination in 1963. Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, an image-manipulation tool, has developed a program called VoCo, which has been called "Photoshop for voice". It can simulate someone's voice saying almost anything, given 20 minutes of their speech to analyse. In 2017 Baidu, a Chinese technology firm, published details of a similar voice-cloning system called Deep Voice, which works with as little as three seconds' worth of training data. Other technology firms, including Google DeepMind, are doing similar work.

Digital rights and wrongs
What happens when faces and voices can be manipulated as easily as text, images and video? Low-paid actors who roughly match the proportions and appearance of big stars might work as human puppets, their features and voices digitally replaced after filming. Hollywood itself has speculated on where the trend might end up. In "The Congress," a film released in 2014, Robin Wright plays a washed-up actor (also called Robin Wright), who allows herself to be digitised, signing over the rights to her likeness to MiraMount, a fictional film studio.

One advantage is clear from the film: Ms Wright's character is notorious for being demanding and fickle and generally hard to work with. Her digital doppelganger throws no tantrums and requires no pay; meanwhile, she gets a pile of cash and a quiet life. But the price is a loss of control over what her likeness does and how it-and therefore she-is perceived. In the film, the contract is a one-off sale, meaning all rights go to the studio forever. Ms Wright specifies that her likeness will not appear in porn films, nor any movies to do with the Nazis. But it ends up starring in a schlocky but wildly popular science-fiction series that she would never have agreed to herself.

The question of who owns the rights to an actor's digital likeness has already arisen in reality. Framestore had to negotiate with Hepburn's family in order to make its advert. But a star's fans often feel a sense of ownership, too. In 2013 a computer-generated version of Bruce Lee was used in an advert in China for Johnnie Walker, a brand of whisky. Johnnie Walker says it consulted with Shannon Lee, Bruce's daughter, who approved the idea. But many fans were cross, pointing out that Lee had been teetotal for much of his adult life, and asserting that, had he still been alive, he would never have appeared in such an advertisement.

The advent of deepfakes has heightened legal concerns. SAG-AFTRA, an American actors' union, says it is taking steps to protect its members from unauthorised use of their digital likenesses, whether in advertisements, marketing, "fake news" propaganda, movies, video games or pornography. Meanwhile, a bill being considered by the New York state assembly, which would restrict the creation of "digital replicas" of individuals without their permission, came under fire in June 2018 from both Disney, the studio behind "Star Wars", Marvel and other franchises, and the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents entertainment companies. Disney said that while the bill was "presumably well-intended" because it could prevent the use of celebrity images in unauthorised pornography, it would make it difficult for "companies like ours to tell stories about real people and events", for example in biopics. The MPAA said that although "the emerging 'deepfake' problem deserves attention", the bill's vague wording would result in "unintended, harmful consequences and is likely unconstitutional". Hollywood, it seems, is opposed to today's unauthorised face-swapping, but wants to ensure it has a free hand to use such technology itself in the future.

It is easy to see why actors' unions might be worried about digital actors, and why studios might wish to protect their ability to create and use them. Digital actors could make life much easier for movie studios, while making things much harder for actors-or at least, the majority of them. Acting is already a winner-takes-all game, in which a small number of participants take the lion's share of the rewards. Being able to clone themselves, in effect, might allow big stars to take an even bigger share of the pie. Meanwhile, up-and-coming actors will find it much harder to catch a director's eye while working as an extra. "Ben Hur" famously had a cast of thousands. But these days, the swarming crowds and clashing armies seen in blockbuster films consist of computer-generated characters instead.

I'll be back, and back, and back
The rise of digital actors could also entrench the film industry's existing conservatism. Movies, especially blockbusters, are expensive to make, which is why studios are so keen on sequels and remakes: the low-risk strategy is simply to give viewers more of what they already know they like. There have been five "Terminator" films since the first one was released in 1984, and Arnold Schwarzenegger-or his computer-generated likeness-has been in every one. There is no reason he could not appear in five more over the next 34 years. Similarly, there have so far been 20 films set in Marvel's Cinematic Universe, which is based on that firm's comics. Comic-book characters are infamous for never ageing, never staying dead and being available for endless reboots or side-stories. Virtual actors offer all the same benefits.

Those fed up with watching their hundredth Hugh Grant romantic comedy might have other options, however, if face-swapping technology can be made to work on the fly. Why not let viewers pick the actors they would like to see swapped into particular roles-or even let viewers splice themselves and their friends into their favourite films? Not everybody watches films for the acting; sometimes the communal act of viewing is just as important, and could be extended onto the screen.

This may all be decades away, and it may never happen. Auteurs will no doubt refuse to use digital actors in their films on principle (though some might prefer them, since they will uncomplainingly follow even the most tyrannical director's every command). But the rise of immortal digital actors is the logical outcome as today's effects-heavy film-making techniques embrace the versatility of artificial intelligence. A trick that is currently resorted to only rarely could easily become a standard cinematic tool, like matte shots, green screens and CGI before it. Digital actors open up new possibilities in storytelling. But they also raise many new questions-and they will be able to answer them using any face, or voice, you like.

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AUDREY HEPBURN DIED in 1993, but in 2013 she nevertheless starred in an advertisement for Galaxy, a type of chocolate bar. She was shown riding a bus along the Amalfi coast before catching the eye of a passing hunk in a convertible.

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Is BTS the best K-Pop Band of all time? Why?

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Is BTS the best K-Pop Band of all time? Why?

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BTS Announce First U.S. Stadium Show in New York City

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Korean boyband BTS will make history by becoming the first Korean artists to perform a stadium show in the U.S.

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Which of these terms is the MOST important for students today? What makes you think so?

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12 new tech terms you need to understand the future

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From crowdturfing to brainjacking, BBC Future Now explores the unusual and intriguing vocabulary emerging from technology advances this year.

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Which nominees matter the most to you and why?

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Which nominees matter the most to you and why?

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The first wave of nominees for the 2018 Teen Choice Awards was announced today (June 13), with the biggest stars of music, movies, television and sports from the past year receiving nods. Taylor Swift, Drake, Cardi B and Shawn Mendes are just some of the artists featured in the music category, which recognizes stars of every genre including J Balvin, Calvin Harris and Carrie Underwood.

Outside of music, box office hits Black Panther and The Greatest Showman received several nominations in the movie field, and the television category includes hit shows such as Riverdale and This Is Us. But these are only a handful of the nominees, and more are expected to be revealed in the coming weeks, along with this year's presenters, performers and hosts.

Voting is open now, and fans can cast their votes at TeenChoice.com and on Twitter through June 19. Fans are allowed 10 votes per category, per day, per platform user ID. To vote on Twitter, fans can tweet the category hashtag (each indicated below) with the nominee's name, either @nominee or #nominee if they don't have an account. Only one Teen Choice nominee can be mentioned per tweet.

The 2018 Teen Choice Awards will air live Aug. 12 on FOX. Check out the first wave of nominees below.
Choice Male Artist (#ChoiceMaleArtist) Choice Female Artist (#ChoiceFemaleArtist) Choice Music Group (#ChoiceMusicGroup) Choice Country Artist (#ChoiceCountryArtist) Choice Electronic/Dance Artist (#ChoiceElectronicDanceArtist) Choice Latin Artist (#ChoiceLatinArtist) Choice R&B/Hip-Hop Artist (#ChoiceRBHipHopArtist) Choice Rock Artist (#ChoiceRockArtist) Choice Song: Female Artist (#ChoiceSongFemaleArtist) Choice Song: Male Artist (#ChoiceSongMaleArtist) Choice Song: Group (#ChoiceSongGroup) Choice Collaboration (#ChoiceCollaboration) Choice Action Movie (#ChoiceActionMovie) Avengers: Infinity War
Justice League
Maze Runner: The Death Cure
Pacific Rim: Uprising
Tomb Raider Choice Action Movie Actor (#ChoiceActionMovieActor) Choice Action Movie Actress (#ChoiceActionMovieActress) Choice Sci-Fi Movie (#ChoiceSciFiMovie) Black Panther
Blade Runner 2049
Rampage
Ready Player One
Thor: Ragnarok Choice Sci-Fi Movie Actor (#ChoiceSciFiMovieActor) Choice Sci-Fi Movie Actress (#ChoiceSciFiMovieActress) Choice Fantasy Movie (#ChoiceFantasyMovie) A Wrinkle in Time
Coco
Peter Rabbit
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Choice Fantasy Movie Actor (#ChoiceFantasyMovieActor) Choice Fantasy Movie Actress (#ChoiceFantasyMovieActress) Choice Drama Movie (#ChoiceDramaMovie) A Quiet Place
Midnight Sun
Murder on the Orient Express
The Greatest Showman
Truth or Dare
Wonder Choice Drama Movie Actor (#ChoiceDramaMovieActor) Choice Drama Movie Actress (#ChoiceDramaMovieActress) Choice Comedy Movie (#ChoiceComedyMovie) Daddy's Home 2
I Feel Pretty
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Love, Simon
Overboard
Pitch Perfect 3 Choice Comedy Movie Actor (#ChoiceComedyMovieActor)
Dwayne Johnson - Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Eugenio Derbez - Overboard
Jack Black - Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Kevin Hart - Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Mark Wahlberg - Daddy's Home 2
Will Ferrell - Daddy's Home 2
Choice Comedy Movie Actress (#ChoiceComedyMovieActress) Choice Drama TV Show (#ChoiceDramaTVShow) Choice Drama TV Actor (#ChoiceDramaTVActor) Choice Drama TV Actress (#ChoiceDramaTVActress) Choice Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV Show (#ChoiceSciFiTVShow) Choice Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV Actor (#ChoiceSciFiTVActor) Choice Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV Actress (#ChoiceSciFiTVActress)
Choice Action TV Show (#ChoiceActionTVShow)
Choice Action TV Actor (#ChoiceActionTVActor) Choice Action TV Actress (#ChoiceActionTVActress) Choice Comedy TV Show (#ChoiceComedyTVShow) Choice Comedy TV Actor (#ChoiceComedyTVActor) Choice Comedy TV Actress (#ChoiceComedyTVActress) Choice Animated TV Show (#ChoiceAnimatedTVShow) Choice Reality TV Show (#ChoiceRealityTVShow) Choice Throwback TV Show (#ChoiceThrowbackTVShow) Choice TV Personality (#ChoiceTVPersonality) Choice Comedian (#ChoiceComedian) Choice Male Athlete (#ChoiceMaleAthlete) Choice Female Athlete (#ChoiceFemaleAthlete)

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Taylor Swift, Drake, Cardi B & More Among Teen Choice Awards 2018 Nominees: See the Full List

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The first wave of nominees for the 2018 Teen Choice Awards was announced today (June 13), with the biggest stars of music, movies, television and sports from the past year receiving nods. Taylor Swift, Drake, Cardi B and Shawn Mendes are just some of the artists featured in the music category, which recognizes stars of every genre including J Balvin, Calvin Harris and Carrie Underwood.

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How figure skaters choose their music, explained with Adam Rippon

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What's been the most influential meme for your generation and what does that say about your generation?

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What's been the most influential meme for your generation and what does that say about your generation?

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Pick one episode of 'how I built this.' As an entrepreneur which episode would you MOST be interested in checking out and why?

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Pick one episode of 'how I built this.' As an entrepreneur which episode would you MOST be interested in checking out and why?

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A podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and their stories about the movements they built.

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Does the tv/film you consume make you MORE or LESS biased towards others? How do you know?

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Does the tv/film you consume make you MORE or LESS biased towards others? How do you know?

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Why Does Every Hollywood Fantasy Character Have a British Accent?

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How is completing a school year similar to Ed's process of composing this song?

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How is completing a school year similar to Ed's process of composing this song?

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Ed Sheeran's 'Shape of You': Making 2017’s Biggest Track | NYT - Diary of a Song

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Which musical influences do you find the most interesting and why?

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Which musical influences do you find the most interesting and why?

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The sound that connects Stravinsky to Bruno Mars

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If you could freeze time and make space to take ANY of MIT's open courses, which one would you take and why?

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If you could freeze time and make space to take ANY of MIT's open courses, which one would you take and why?

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Find Courses by Topic | MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials

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MIT OpenCourseWare makes the materials used in the teaching of almost all of MIT's subjects available on the Web, free of charge. With more than 2,400 courses available, OCW is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge. Learn more "

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Make your list of TEN things you want to spend more time thinking about this year.

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Make your list of TEN things you want to spend more time thinking about this year.

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That's one of the most important lists you can have. The list of things worth thinking about.

We live in the age of information surplus, when there are answers and shortcuts and highlights and notes and summaries for everything. But not nearly enough time to even be aware of them.

The key question isn't, "what's the answer?"

The key question is, "what's the question?"

Is this area worth thinking about?

Should I maintain the status quo?

Is this good enough?

Your focus is the heart of your organization's future. Your attention is irreplaceable.

The real question, then, is, "how much time are you spending deciding what to spend time on?"

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That's one of the most important lists you can have. The list of things worth thinking about. We live in the age of information surplus, when there are answers and shortcuts and highlights and notes and summaries for everything. But...

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Do you have an amazing pet and PS skillz? Check this out, and try to emulate the stylings of Christopher Cline.

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Do you have an amazing pet and PS skillz? Check this out, and try to emulate the stylings of Christopher Cline.

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Photographer Christopher Cline and his Goldendoodle Juji (pronounced Joo-ji) are a match made in Photoshop heaven. After moving from Virginia to Minnesota a few years ago, the artist was feeling homesick and "sliding into a sad place in life." Then, his girlfriend Christine brought home Juji. "I wasn't exactly open to getting a dog," Cline told Mrs. Sizzle, "but I immediately fell in love with him. He has turned my life completely around and we are now absolutely inseparable. I have found a new outlook on life and in my artwork and I owe it all to him."

After Juji came into his life, Cline began expressing himself through Photoshop. He'd take photos of himself and Juji and later alter them to make it look as though his canine pal was a giant. "I just wanted to share a little of our adventures together," Cline explains, adding that he wants his edits to have a "kids' book feel." Whether they're lounging on the couch or taking on outdoor adventures, both Juji and his human seem to have a ton of fun together-no matter what their size!

Just in case you're wondering what these two look like without Photoshop:

Christopher Cline: Facebook | Instagram
via [ Mrs. Sizzle, The Pet Matchmaker]

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Imaginative Photographer Takes His "Gigantic" Dog on Extraordinary Adventures

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Photographer Christopher Cline and his Goldendoodle Juji (pronounced Joo-ji) are a match made in Photoshop heaven. After moving from Virginia to Minnesota a few years ago, the artist was feeling homesick and "sliding into a sad place in life." Then, his girlfriend Christine brought home Juji.

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Read up on the history of emoji here. Which emoji would you invent, and why?

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Read up on the history of emoji here. Which emoji would you invent, and why?

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Why did emoji become part of Unicode? Until Unicode decided to standardize emoji, the symbols wouldn't look the same across different platforms, according to Mr. Davis of the Unicode Consortium. So, an emoji might not display in a message where the sender and receiver used different carriers. Now, with one standard alphabet for companies to use, the emoji can be displayed more successfully across platforms.

So it all works perfectly now? It's worth noting that not all the kinks are gone, and when an emoji symbol isn't compatible, you'll see an empty square box typically.

Who controls emoji? Well, Unicode's Mr. Davis says that the Unicode Consortium is the one managing requests for new emoji symbols -- a subcommittee is tasked with all things emoji. They convene once a quarter to review requests for new emoji and decide which ones they should focus their time on. But each individual carrier decides which characters to include on their keyboards.

There's an emoji I'd really like to see. How can I make that happen? The emoji characters in Unicode now were added because they were already in use on smartphones and other platforms. Unicode says that for new characters to be considered, they typically need to be in widespread use. You can fill out an application for a new emoji via Unicode, though it's probably easier to reach out to your tech company of choice to see if they can enable a certain emoji on their keyboard. It's possible that the emoji you want already exists but isn't yet on your device's keyboard.

How often are emoji keyboards on each device updated? It varies with each company. For instance, since Apple made emoji available with its launch of iOS5 in June 2011, the emoji keyboard has changed with iOS6 but not with iOS7.

How do I enable emoji on my phone?

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Why did emoji become part of Unicode? Until Unicode decided to standardize emoji, the symbols wouldn't look the same across different platforms, according to Mr. Davis of the Unicode Consortium. So, an emoji might not display in a message where the sender and receiver used different carriers.

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Interested in being an innovative business-leader? Read this. Discuss how these ideas can put of use to you now, in your academic career.

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Interested in being an innovative business-leader? Read this. Discuss how these ideas can put of use to you now, in your academic career.

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What's Possible We tend to believe that true innov

What's Possible

We tend to believe that true innovators are a rare breed. But most people are quite capable of original thinking, and leaders can set them up for success by building a culture of nonconformity.

What Gets in the Way

Unfortunately, leaders often fail to do this because they have trouble moving past their flawed assumptions-for instance, believing that doing fewer things leads to better work, and that strong cultures squash originality.

What to Do

Give employees ways and reasons to generate lots of new ideas (being prolific actually increases quality). Have fellow innovators evaluate the ideas (they do the best job of predicting success). And strike the right balance between cohesion and dissent in your organization (you need both).

If there's one place on earth where originality goes to die, I'd managed to find it. I was charged with unleashing innovation and change in the ultimate bastion of bureaucracy. It was a place where people accepted defaults without question, followed rules without explanation, and clung to traditions and technologies long after they'd become obsolete: the U.S. Navy.

But in a matter of months, the navy was exploding with originality-and not because of anything I'd done. It launched a major innovation task force and helped to form a Department of Defense outpost in Silicon Valley to get up to speed on cutting-edge technology. Surprisingly, these changes didn't come from the top of the navy's command-and-control structure. They were initiated at the bottom, by a group of junior officers in their twenties and thirties.

When I started digging for more details, multiple insiders pointed to a young aviator named Ben Kohlmann. Officers called him a troublemaker, rabble-rouser, disrupter, heretic, and radical. And in direct violation of the military ethos, these were terms of endearment.

Kohlmann lit the match by creating the navy's first rapid-innovation cell-a network of original thinkers who would collaborate to question long-held assumptions and generate new ideas. To start assembling the group, he searched for black sheep: people with a history of nonconformity. One recruit had been fired from a nuclear submarine for disobeying a commander's order. Another had flat-out refused to go to basic training. Others had yelled at senior flag officers and flouted chains of command by writing public blog posts to express their iconoclastic views. "They were lone wolves," Kohlmann says. "Most of them had a track record of insubordination."

Kohlmann realized, however, that to fuel and sustain innovation throughout the navy, he needed more than a few lone wolves. So while working as an instructor and director of flight operations, he set about building a culture of nonconformity. He talked to senior leaders about expanding his network and got their buy-in. He recruited sailors who had never shown a desire to challenge the status quo and exposed them to new ways of thinking. They visited centers of innovation excellence outside the military, from Google to the Rocky Mountain Institute. They devoured a monthly syllabus of readings on innovation and debated ideas during regular happy hours and robust online discussions. Soon they pioneered the use of 3-D printers on ships and a robotic fish for stealth underwater missions-and other rapid-innovation cells began springing up around the military. "Culture is king," Kohlmann says. "When people discovered their voice, they became unstoppable."

Empowering the rank and file to innovate is where most leaders fall short. Instead, they try to recruit brash entrepreneurial types to bring fresh ideas and energy into their organizations-and then leave it at that. It's a wrongheaded approach, because it assumes that the best innovators are rare creatures with special gifts. Research shows that entrepreneurs who succeed over the long haul are actually more risk-averse than their peers. The hotshots burn bright for a while but tend to fizzle out. So relying on a few exceptional folks who fit a romanticized creative profile is a short-term move that underestimates everyone else. Most people are in fact quite capable of novel thinking and problem solving, if only their organizations would stop pounding them into conformity.

When everyone thinks in similar ways and sticks to dominant norms, businesses are doomed to stagnate. To fight that inertia and drive innovation and change effectively, leaders need sustained original thinking in their organizations. They get it by building a culture of nonconformity, as Kohlmann did in the navy. I've been studying this for the better part of a decade, and it turns out to be less difficult than I expected.

For starters, leaders must give employees opportunities and incentives to generate-and keep generating-new ideas, so that people across functions and roles get better at pushing past the obvious. However, it's also critical to have the right people vetting those ideas. That part of the process should be much less democratic and more meritocratic, because some votes are simply more meaningful than others. And finally, to continue generating and selecting smart ideas over time, organizations need to strike a balance between cultural cohesion and creative dissent.

Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom

People often believe that to do better work, they should do fewer things. Yet the evidence flies in the face of that assumption: Being prolific actually increases originality, because sheer volume improves your chances of finding novel solutions. In recent experiments by Northwestern University psychologists Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren, the initial ideas people generated were the most conventional. Once they had thought of those, they were free to start dreaming up more-unusual possibilities. Their first 20 ideas were significantly less original than their next 15.

Matt Carr/Getty Images; Photo illustration: Stephen Webster

Across fields, volume begets quality. This is true for all kinds of creators and thinkers-from composers and painters to scientists and inventors. Even the most eminent innovators do their most original work when they're also cranking out scores of less brilliant ideas. Consider Thomas Edison. In a five-year period, he came up with the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon transmitter used in telephones-while also filing more than 100 patents for inventions that didn't catch the world on fire, including a talking doll that ended up scaring children (and adults).

Of course, in organizations, the challenge lies in knowing when you've drummed up enough possibilities. How many ideas should you generate before deciding which ones to pursue? When I pose this question to executives, most say you're really humming with around 20 ideas. But that answer is off the mark by an order of magnitude. There's evidence that quality often doesn't max out until more than 200 ideas are on the table.

Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes that the Pixar movie Cars was chosen from about 500 pitches, and at Skyline, the toy design studio that generates ideas for Fisher-Price and Mattel, employees submitted 4,000 new toy concepts in one year. That set was winnowed down to 230 to be drawn or prototyped, and just 12 were finally developed. The more darts you throw, the better your odds of hitting a bull's-eye.

Though it makes perfect sense, many managers fail to embrace this principle, fearing that time spent conjuring lots of ideas will prevent employees from being focused and efficient. The good news is that there are ways to help employees generate quantity and variety without sacrificing day-to-day productivity or causing burnout.

Think like the enemy.

Research suggests that organizations often get stuck in a rut because they're playing defense, trying to stave off the competition. To encourage people to think differently and generate more ideas, put them on offense.

That's what Lisa Bodell of futurethink did when Merck CEO Ken Frazier hired her to help shake up the status quo. Bodell divided Merck's executives into groups and asked them to come up with ways to put the company out of business. Instead of being cautious and sticking close to established competencies, the executives started considering bold new directions in strategy and product development that competitors could conceivably take. Energy in the room soared as they explored the possibilities. The offensive mindset, Carnegie Mellon professor Anita Woolley observes, focuses attention on "pursuing opportunities...whereas defenders are more focused on maintaining their market share." That mental shift allowed the Merck executives to imagine competitive threats that didn't yet exist. The result was a fresh set of opportunities for innovation.

Test Yourself

Psychology Quiz

The answers, based on decades of research, might surprise you.

Solicit ideas from individuals, not groups.

According to decades of research, you get more and better ideas if people are working alone in separate rooms than if they're brainstorming in a group. When people generate ideas together, many of the best ones never get shared. Some members dominate the conversation, others hold back to avoid looking foolish, and the whole group tends to conform to the majority's taste.

Evidence shows that these problems can be managed through "brainwriting." All that's required is asking individuals to think up ideas on their own before the group evaluates them, to get all the possibilities on the table. For instance, at the eyewear retailer Warby Parker, named the world's most innovative company by Fast Company in 2015, employees spend a few minutes a week writing down innovation ideas for colleagues to read and comment on. The company also maintains a Google doc where employees can submit requests for new technology to be built, which yields about 400 new ideas in a typical quarter. One major innovation was a revamped retail point of sale, which grew out of an app that allowed customers to bookmark their favorite frames in the store and receive an e-mail about them later.

Since employees often withhold their most unusual suggestions in group settings, another strategy for seeking ideas is to schedule rapid one-on-one idea meetings. When Anita Krohn Traaseth became managing director of Hewlett-Packard Norway, she launched a "speed-date the boss" initiative. She invited every employee to meet with her for five minutes and answer these questions: Who are you and what do you do at HP? Where do you think we should change, and what should we keep focusing on? And what do you want to contribute beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities? She made it clear that she expected people to bring big ideas, and they didn't want to waste their five minutes with a senior leader-it was their chance to show that they could innovate. More than 170 speed dates later, so many good ideas had been generated that other HP leaders implemented the process in Austria and Switzerland.

Bring back the suggestion box.

It's a practice that dates back to the early 1700s, when a Japanese shogun put a box at the entrance to his castle. He rewarded good ideas-but punished criticisms with decapitation. Today suggestion boxes are often ridiculed. "I smell a creative idea being formed somewhere in the building," the boss thinks in one Dilbert cartoon. "I must find it and crush it." He sets up a suggestion box, and Dilbert is intrigued until a colleague warns him: "It's a trap!!"

But the evidence points to a different conclusion: Suggestion boxes can be quite useful, precisely because they provide a large number of ideas. In one study, psychologist Michael Frese and his colleagues visited a Dutch steel company (now part of Tata Steel) that had been using a suggestion program for 70 years. The company had 11,000 employees and collected between 7,000 and 12,000 suggestions a year. A typical employee would make six or seven suggestions annually and see three or four adopted. One prolific innovator submitted 75 ideas and had 30 adopted. In many companies, those ideas would have been missed altogether. For the Dutch steelmaker, however, the suggestion box regularly led to improvements-saving more than $750,000 in one year alone.

The major benefit of suggestion boxes is that they multiply and diversify the ideas on the horizon, opening up new avenues for innovation. The biggest hurdle is that they create a larger haystack of ideas, making it more difficult to find the needle. You need a system for culling contributions-and rewarding and pursuing the best ones-so that people don't feel their suggestions are falling on deaf ears.

Developing a Nose for Good Ideas

Generating lots of alternatives is important, but so is listening to the right opinions and solutions. How can leaders avoid pursuing bad ideas and rejecting good ones?

Lean on proven evaluators.

Although many leaders use a democratic process to select ideas, not every vote is equally valuable. Bowing to the majority's will is not the best policy; a select minority might have a better sense of which ideas have the greatest potential. To figure out whose votes should be amplified, pay attention to employees' track records in evaluation.

At the hedge fund Bridgewater, employees' opinions are weighted by a believability score, which reflects the quality of their past decisions in that domain. In the U.S. intelligence community, analysts demonstrate their credibility by forecasting major political and economic events. In studies by psychologist Philip Tetlock, forecasters are rated on accuracy (did they make the right bets?) and calibration (did they get the probabilities right?). Once the best of these prognosticators are identified, their judgments can be given greater influence than those of their peers.

So, in a company, who's likely to have the strongest track record? Not managers-it's too easy for them to stick to existing prototypes. And not the innovators themselves. Intoxicated by their own "eureka" moments, they tend to be overconfident about their odds of success. They may try to compensate for that by researching customer preferences, but they'll still be susceptible to confirmation bias (looking for information that supports their view and rejecting the rest). Even creative geniuses have trouble predicting with any accuracy when they've come up with a winner.

When aviator Ben Kohlmann set out to build a culture of nonconformity in the U.S. Navy, he found inspiration in many sources. Here's a sampling of the items he recommends to people who want to think more creatively, along with his comments on how they've influenced his own development.

Speeches

"Lead Like the Great Conductors"
TED talk by Itay Talgam
Much can be learned from professions we have no understanding of. People are people-and recognizing the commonalities is useful.

"How Great Leaders Inspire Action"
TED talk by Simon Sinek
Sinek cracks the code of influence: Deep-seated desire is what inspires followers and builds movements.

Fiction

Dune
by Frank Herbert
A compelling story about insurgency and taking on established powers, Dune explores the ambiguous nature of messianic saviors.

Nonfiction

TV Shows

Sherlock (BBC series)
Each episode is pure fun-but yields lots of learning at the same time.

Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images; Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images

Research suggests that fellow innovators are the best evaluators of original ideas. They're impartial, because they're not judging their own ideas, and they're more willing than managers to give radical possibilities a chance. For example, Stanford professor Justin Berg found that circus performers who evaluated videos of their peers' new acts were about twice as accurate as managers in predicting popularity with audiences.

Make it a contest.

Idea competitions can help leaders separate the wheat from the chaff, whether they're sifting through suggestion-box entries or hosting a live innovation event. At Dow Chemical, for example, employees participate in an annual innovation tournament focused on reducing waste and saving energy. The tournament calls for ideas that require an initial investment of no more than $200,000, and those costs must be recoverable within a year. Peers review the submissions, with monetary rewards going to the winners. Innovation researchers Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich report that over more than a decade, the resulting 575 projects have produced an average return of 204% and saved the company $110 million a year.

When an innovation tournament is well designed, you get a large pool of initial ideas, but they're clustered around key themes instead of spanning a range of topics. People spend a lot of time preparing their entries, which can boost quality, but the work happens in a discrete window of time, so the contest is not a recurring distraction.

Thorough evaluation helps to filter out the bad ideas. The feedback process typically involves having a group of subject matter experts and fellow innovators review the submissions, rate their novelty and usefulness, and provide suggestions for improvement.

With the right judges in place, an innovation contest not only leverages the wisdom of the crowd but also makes the crowd wiser. Contributors and evaluators get to learn from other people's successes and failures. Over time, the culture can evolve into one where employees feel confident in their ability to contribute ideas-and develop better taste about what constitutes quality. Because successful innovators earn recognition and rewards, everyone has an incentive to participate.

So start by calling for ideas to solve a problem or seize an opportunity, and then introduce a rigorous process for assessment and feedback. The most promising submissions will make it to the next round, and the eventual winners should get the staff and resources necessary to implement their ideas.

Cultivating Both Cohesion and Dissent

Building a culture of nonconformity begins with learning how to generate and vet ideas, but it doesn't end there. To maintain originality over time, leaders need to keep fighting the pressures against it.

We used to blame conformity on strong cultures, believing they were so cultish and chummy that members couldn't consider diverse views and make wise decisions. But that's not true. Studies of decision making in top management teams show that cohesive groups aren't more likely than others to seek consensus, dismiss divergent opinions, and fall victim to groupthink. In fact, members of strong cultures often make better decisions, because they communicate well with one another and are secure enough in their roles to feel comfortable challenging one another.

Here's the evidence on how successful high-tech founders in Silicon Valley built their start-ups: They hired primarily for commitment to the mission, looking for people who would help carry out their vision and live by their values. Founders who looked mainly for technical skill or star potential didn't fare nearly as well. In mature industries, too, research shows that when companies place a strong emphasis on culture, their performance remains more stable.

Yet there's a dark side to strong, cohesive cultures: They can become homogeneous if left unchecked. As leaders continue to attract, select, and retain similar people, they sacrifice diversity in thoughts and values. Employees face intense pressure to fit in or get out. This sameness can be advantageous in predictable environments, but it's a problem in volatile industries and dynamic markets. In those settings, strong cultures can be too insular to respond appropriately to shifting conditions. Leaders have a hard time recognizing the need for change, considering different views, and learning and adapting.

Consider BlackBerry: After disrupting the smartphone market, senior leaders clung to the belief that users were primarily interested in efficient, secure e-mail. They dismissed the iPhone as a music player and a consumer toy, hired like-minded insiders who had engineering backgrounds but lacked marketing expertise, and ultimately failed to create a high-quality web browser and an app-friendly operating system. The result? A major downsizing, a billion-dollar write-off, and a colossal collapse of market share.

So to balance out a strong culture, you also need a steady supply of critical opinions. Even when they're wrong, they're useful-they disrupt knee-jerk consensus, stimulate original thought, and help organizations find novel solutions to problems. In the navy's rapid-innovation cell, the norm is "loyal opposition," says Joshua Marcuse, one of Ben Kohlmann's collaborators in the Pentagon. "Agitating against the status quo is how we contribute to the mission."

In short, make dissent one of your organization's core values. Create an environment where people can openly share critical opinions and are respected for doing so. In the early days of Apple, employees were passionately committed to making the Mac a user-friendly household product. But each year, the Mac team also gave an award to somebody who had challenged Steve Jobs. Every one of those award winners was promoted.

Cohesion and dissent sound contradictory, but a combination of the two is what brings novel ideas to the table-and keeps a strong culture from becoming a cult. Here are some ways to hold these principles in productive tension:

Prioritize organizational values.

Give people a framework for choosing between conflicting opinions and allowing the best ideas to win out. When companies fail to prioritize values, performance suffers. My colleague Andrew Carton led a study showing that across hospitals, heart attack readmission rates were lower and returns on assets were higher when leaders articulated a compelling vision-but only if they spelled out no more than four organizational values. The more values they emphasized beyond that, the greater the odds that people interpreted them differently or didn't focus on the same ones.

istockphoto; Photo illustration: Stephen Webster

Values need to be rank-ordered so that when employees face choices between competing courses of action, they know what comes first. At the software company Salesforce.com, trust is explicitly defined as the number one value, above growth and innovation. That communicates a clear message to employees: When working on new software, never compromise data privacy. At the online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos.com, CEO Tony Hsieh prioritizes employee happiness over customer happiness. The airline WestJet identifies safety as its most important value. And at GiveForward, a company that helps people raise money for causes, compassion tops the list. Although media coverage is critical to the company's success, cofounder Ethan Austin notes, "We will not push a story in the media unless we are certain that the customer whose story we are sharing will benefit more than we do."

Once you've prioritized the values, keep scrutinizing them. Encourage new hires to challenge "the company way" when they disagree with it. They're the ones with the freshest perspective; they haven't yet gone native. If they familiarize themselves with the culture before speaking up, they'll have already started marching to the same drummer. At Bridgewater, when new employees are trained, they're asked about the company's principles: Do you disagree?

Solicit problems, not just solutions.

When working with executives, organizational psychologist David Hofmann likes to ask them to fill in the blanks in this sentence: "Don't bring me ____; bring me ____." Without fail, they shout out, "Don't bring me problems; bring me solutions! "

Although leaders love it when employees come up with solutions, there's an unintended consequence: Inquiry gets dampened. If you're always expected to have an answer ready, you'll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete, missing out on the chance to learn from a range of perspectives. This may be especially common in the United States: In a recent study comparing American and German decision groups, the Germans made twice as many statements about problems and 30% fewer statements about solutions. "Americans are driven to find solutions quickly," the researchers observe, "often without a complete and thorough analysis of the problem."

When individual members of a group have different information, as is usually the case in organizations, it's smarter to get all the problems out there before pursuing solutions. At the digital music company Spotify, instead of working on projects, people organize around long-term business problems. "If they were easy to solve," chief technology officer Oskar Stål notes, "we would have solved them already. When we create a new team, people typically stay together on a business problem for at least a year. If it becomes successful, the team and mission will exist for a long time." Angie's List cofounder Angie Hicks holds weekly office hours to hear concerns from employees. And when Anita Krohn Traaseth became the CEO of the Norwegian government's innovation efforts, she again used "speed dates" to give employees a voice. To make sure she had full visibility into problems, she asked people to name their three biggest bottlenecks and what they would like to safeguard or change. Only after gathering problems across a tour of 14 offices did she begin implementing solutions.

Don't appoint devil's advocates-go find them.

Research by UC Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth shows that assigning someone to play devil's advocate doesn't overcome confirmation bias. Though people may pay lip service to considering the counterargument, they'll stick to their own views in the end.

To make a difference, the devil's advocate has to actually hold a dissenting view, not just voice it for argument's sake, and the group has to believe that the dissent is authentic. Under those circumstances, groups look at more information against the majority view than for it, and they're less confident in their original preferences. It's rare that role-played disagreement is forcefully argued or taken seriously; actual disagreement is what stimulates thought.

Inti St. Clair/Getty Images; Photo illustration: Stephen Webster

Groups with authentic dissenters generate more-and better-solutions to problems. Abraham Lincoln famously asked his political rivals to join his cabinet, knowing they would genuinely hold contrarian views. At a recent Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett invited a trader who was shorting the stock to share his criticisms. Of course, this strategy works only if the dissenter's input is clearly valued and respected.

Model receptivity to critical feedback.

Many managers end up promoting conformity because their egos are fragile. Research reveals that insecurity prevents managers from seeking ideas and leads them to respond defensively to suggestions. Employees quickly pick up on this and withhold ideas to avoid trouble. One way to overcome this barrier is to encourage people to challenge you out in the open.

Years ago at the software company Index Group, CEO Tom Gerrity gathered his full staff of about 100 people and had a consultant give him negative feedback in front of everyone. When employees saw their CEO listen to critical opinions, they were less worried about speaking up. And managers became more receptive to tough comments themselves.

You can also get people to challenge you by broadcasting your weaknesses. "When you're the leader, it is really hard to get good and honest feedback, no matter how many times you ask for it," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says. "One trick I've discovered is that I try to speak really openly about the things I'm bad at, because that gives people permission to agree with me, which is a lot easier than pointing it out in the first place." For example, Sandberg tells her colleagues that she has a habit of talking too much in meetings. "If I never mentioned it, would anyone walk up to me and say, 'Hey, Sheryl, I think you talked too much today'? I doubt it."

For a culture of originality to flourish, employees must feel free to contribute their wildest ideas. But they are often afraid to speak up, even if they've never seen anything bad happen to those who do.

To fight that fear in the navy, Ben Kohlmann rejected the military's traditional emphasis on hierarchy. Everyone communicated on a first-name basis, ignoring rank. "If you have an idea, pitch it to the crowd and run with it," he told members of his rapid-innovation cell. And he introduced them to people who had successfully championed creativity and change in the navy, to show them it was possible.

Other ways to nip fear in the bud include applauding employees for speaking up, even when their suggestions don't get adopted, and sharing your own harebrained ideas. Without some degree of tolerance in the organization for bad ideas, conformity will begin to rear its ugly head. Ultimately, listening to a wider range of insights than you normally hear is the key to promoting great original thinking.

If at first you don't succeed, you'll know you're aiming high enough.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2016 issue (pp.86-94) of Harvard Business Review.

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What's Possible We tend to believe that true innov What's Possible We tend to believe that true innovators are a rare breed. But most people are quite capable of original thinking, and leaders can set them up for success by building a culture of nonconformity.

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Write a shout-out for a coach you’ve had at some point in your life 

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Write a shout-out for a coach you’ve had at some point in your life 

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My former high school basketball coach, Kevin Grieman, passed away this past week. He was not just a coach to me, but he was like a second dad growing up, and he was affectionately known by my friends as simply "Coach". His impact on my learning and leadership at such a young age, has stuck with me for years, and I would venture to say that no other "teacher" had as much of an impact on my life. I lived and breathed basketball, but Coach was about so much more than that.

Two stories that came to mind...

In my grade 11 year, we had a pretty good team, and we won a coveted tournament for the first time in a long time. We didn't just win, but we won easily. In fact, we really started showboating and got a little mouthy to other players, coaches, and maybe even fans. After we were handed the trophies and went back to the dressing room, Coach ripped us apart. Winning was great, but how we carried ourselves meant more than anything, and we had let him down. I remember being so bothered by getting in trouble after winning, I mean, we won the tournament, right? Isn't that what we were supposed to do? But Coach wasn't developing basketball players, he was focused on developing good people that were basketball players. Although he could be extremely hard on us, I know that he wanted the best for us, and I think of all my friends that played on those teams (that I am still friends with) and how well they are all doing now. Coach had a tremendous influence on us today by what he did then.

The second story I remembered was in my last couple of games in high school. We were off to provincials, and I had won MVP of the team that year. It really meant a lot, but my last two games I was off. This was not the way that I wanted to go out, and no matter how hard I tried, I just was playing the way I usually had. We lost in the provincial semi-finals, and were now playing for bronze. Down by 9 points with about 30 seconds to go, we thought we had no chance, but somehow had now come back and were down by 3 with about 15 seconds left. Coach called a time out and said, "We need to foul them as soon as they get the ball, and hopefully they miss their free throws and we will see what happens." They threw the ball in and right to a player in front of me, who I immediately fouled. Since this was my last foul, I watched the last game of my basketball career from the bench and we miraculously won the game by two. There were so many heroics in this game, in which I didn't play well, but we won, and we were all so excited. A few years later, a player on the current team came up to me and told me how Coach always told the story that when I was asked to do something for the team, that would ultimately leave me watching from the side, that I didn't even think twice about it, and did what was best for the team. I never thought about it until then, but I realized that the kid who started playing in grade 10 would have done everything to not be out of that game, but Coach taught us that the team was more important than any individual. It was the way we had all thought, not just me. These lessons stick with me to this day.

All I know is that the world lost a great man who had an impact on so many youth growing up, and the town I grew up in was better off because of him, as well as all of the other places that his influence has spread through the people he has developed. His last post on Facebook was about the 25th anniversary with his wife Susan (who I have always called "mom" because of her caring nature) and how he proposed at the half time of one of our games to her, and my mom had to calm her down after. People like Coach do not come around too often, and his impact was immense.

Rest in peace Coach Grieman...you will be deeply missed.

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My former high school basketball coach, Kevin Grieman, passed away this past week. He was not just a coach to me, but he was like a second dad growing up, and he was affectionately known by my friends as simply "Coach".

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Start by watching this 59 second video: how have you benefited from a difficult experience?

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Start by watching this 59 second video: how have you benefited from a difficult experience?

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Buy the book (UK): http://goo.gl/9JaJx3 Buy the book (USA): http://goo.gl/0lGtDR Richard Wiseman is based at the University of Hertfordshire http://www.herts.ac.uk Intro and Outro animations by Cognitive http://www.wearecognitive.com Music: https://cameronwattmusic.wordpress.com

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Every April since 2012, a group of designers, artists, and musicians has gathered in Belgrade, Serbia, for Resonate. The conference bills itself as a "forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture," and its lineup of speakers is predictably eclectic: This year's roster includes a pioneering data-viz designer, a machine learning scientist, the founder of a line of DIY technology kits, and a slew of digital artists. Whatever their industry, these are the people at the forefront. You can imagine that no two years of Resonate are alike.

With that in mind, Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell created a visual identity for Resonate that's primed for change. The jumble of circles and lines comes off as a bit avant-garde (the festival's monogram is an abstracted 'R' comprised of a circle and two lines), but the graphic designers, who are brothers and work at Pentagram's London office, built the bespoke font with logic in mind. It lives atop a grid, and the vectors and points of each glyph follow one basic rule: They must pass through points on the grid. The idea, the designers say, was to create a framework for the typeface that would enable future Resonate-rs to easily repurpose it. "As long as your work fits on this grid in some way, then anything is fair game," Powell says. It's a little like a elementary school handwriting chart, in that each letter gets drawn within preexisting scaffolding.

Resonate thrives on what Hudson-Powell calls "a culture of collaboration." Much of the festival exists thanks to the work of volunteers, so some of its basic infrastructure-the website, the signage, the marketing-is created by different people each year. The designers see their geometric font as a framework for those volunteers-Hudson-Powell calls it "a graphic kit-of-parts for people to play and explore"-and a tool that lets them exercise some creativity. "I don't feel anyone feels completely engaged when they're just handed something," Hudson-Powell says. "Instead of asking people to stick to a rigid set of guidelines ... this fosters a really vibrant energy."

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Pentagram's Punchy, Shapeshifting Typeface Takes Countless Forms

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Every April since 2012, a group of designers, artists, and musicians has gathered in Belgrade, Serbia, for Resonate. The conference bills itself as a "forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture," and its lineup of speakers is predictably eclectic: This year's roster includes a pioneering data-viz designer, a machine learning scientist, the founder of a line of DIY technology kits, and a slew of digital artists.

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The NBA all-stars are coming if you could put together a team of any five basketball players living or dead, who would be on your starting roster and why?

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The NBA all-stars are coming if you could put together a team of any five basketball players living or dead, who would be on your starting roster and why?

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Stephen A. Smith‘s top 5 NBA players of all-time | Golic and Wingo | ESPN

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Check out Austin Kleon’s list of 100 things that made his year.  Review anything from that list or come up with a list of things which are ‘making your year.’

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Check out Austin Kleon’s list of 100 things that made his year.  Review anything from that list or come up with a list of things which are ‘making your year.’

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Grilled pimento cheese with red onion and tomato sandwiches. Crying on airplanes. Watching Buster Keaton's The General with J Dilla's Donuts as the

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Which single TED talk has done the most to influence you and why

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Which single TED talk has done the most to influence you and why

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

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Check out Vi Hart’s “Mathed Potatoes”: describe your favorite meal in a creative ‘Vi Hartesque’ way.

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Check out Vi Hart’s “Mathed Potatoes”: describe your favorite meal in a creative ‘Vi Hartesque’ way.

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With Thanksgiving just around the corner here in the US, it is important to know how to arrange mathed potatoes on your plate for maximum gravy. Also shown are bread spheres, butter prism, and gelatinous cranberry cylinder.

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 What do you think are the FIVE most beautiful words you know (you may use any language, but please translate the word to English for your readers)?

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 What do you think are the FIVE most beautiful words you know (you may use any language, but please translate the word to English for your readers)?

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Words like mother and love often appear on lists of beautiful English words. But so do defenestration and lollygag. Obviously, they are not all chosen for the same reason. Some words tug at the heart, some pique the mind and others are simply euphonious. Perhaps the strangest member of the last category, the purely harmonious, is the otherwise ordinary phrase cellar door.

The claim that cellar door is beautiful to the ear - in opposition to its prosaic meaning - has been made by and attributed to a wide variety of writers over the years. "Poetry, in fact, is two quite distinct things," H. L. Mencken wrote in a 1920 magazine column. "It may be either or both. One is a series of words that are intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm, as the single word cellar-door is musical. The other is a series of ideas, false in themselves, that offer a means of emotional and imaginative escape from the harsh realities of everyday."

More recently, the superior sound of cellar door was mentioned in the 2001 movie "Donnie Darko," in which a cellar serves as a time-twisting portal. In one scene, the main character, Donnie, sees the phrase on a schoolroom chalkboard. He asks his teacher why it's on the board, and she explains that the words are thought to be especially lovely, vaguely attributing the idea to a "famous linguist."

The fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien, who was also a philologist, might well be the linguist she had in mind. He mentioned the idea of cellar door's special beauty in a speech in 1955 and is often given credit for it. Other supposed authors abound; the story is tangled. But Tolkien, at least, can be ruled out as the originator. He was, after all, just 11 years old in 1903 when a curious novel called "Gee-Boy" - which also alludes to the aesthetic properties of cellar door - was published by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. Hooper's narrator writes of the title character: "He even grew to like sounds unassociated with their meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American."

There is no reason to conclude that Hooper was the founder of the cellar door fan club, either, but it is notable that he used a template according to which the story often has been told since: a person of note - brainy, foreign or both - declares the sounds of cellar door to be exceptional, to the surprise of native but less discerning English speakers.

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Words like mother and love often appear on lists of beautiful English words. But so do defenestration and lollygag. Obviously, they are not all chosen for the same reason. Some words tug at the heart, some pique the mind and others are simply euphonious.

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How has technology changed the way you relate with others? Is the change for the better?

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How has technology changed the way you relate with others? Is the change for the better?

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Why Are You Ignoring My iMessages?? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

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Tweet us! http://bit.ly/pbsideachanneltwitter Idea Channel Facebook! http://bit.ly/pbsideachannelfacebook Talk about this episode on reddit! http://bit.ly/pbsideachannelreddit Idea Channel IRC! http://bit.ly/pbsideachannelirc Email us! pbsideachannel [at] gmail [dot] com Why are you ignoring my messages? Are read receipts AMAZING or INFURIATING?

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What are your thoughts on the uses of failure?

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What are your thoughts on the uses of failure?