As I ponder the year that is almost finished and the year ahead, I am thankful for many things. Here are a few:
I am thankful to be spending today with my family who are loved and loving.
I am thankful to be living in a comfortable home and sharing a wonderful meal together.
I am thankful to work with thoughtful, talented and dedicated people.
I am thankful to be living in a country where freedom of expression and freedom of religion are such an important part of our legal and social framework.
I am thankful to be living in an age where so much knowledge is instantly available.
I was born in the final months of the Eisenhower administration and I have a great deal of respect for his accomplishments during the Second World War and afterward. However, that does not mean that I would like to see a return to the deportation policies or the tax rates of the Eisenhower era.
Politics often frustrate me. When I hear politicians or elected officials support policies which are based on either bad economics, bad psychology or both, I worry about future of our country and planet. That future is important enough that I have decided to comment more on political issues than I have in the past.
I agree with those who claim that there is a bias in the media. There are examples of extremely biased news on both the left and the right. The most consistent bias is the preference for sensationalism. Every medium wants to enhance their ratings and the most unusual, most radical, most provocative statements are the ones that bring in viewers.
This bias is most unfortunate during the election cycle because it reduces the conversation to the lowest level and tends to boost the popularity of the most outrageous candidates. The bravado that sounds good in a debate or a news sound bite, does not serve us well in working through difficult social issues in our own country or with our neighbors.
One of the best ways to move beyond the hype cycle is to read the books that have been written by the candidates. These books, whether biographical or prescriptive, provide a much greater insight into the decision making process that will be used in forging future policies.
My reading for this week is Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices. Focusing on her years as Secretary of State, Hard Choices is great review of recent world history and a wonderful lesson in what you can accomplish when your goal is to tear down walls rather than build walls.
When Lytro introduced their first light field camera in February of 2012, it was the first commercially available camera to capture images which could be focused after the image is captured is saved.
The original Lytro camera captured the light field by using an 8x optical zoom lens
to focus the scene on a micro-lens array adhered to a standard digital
image sensor. The micro lenses allow each area of the sensor to capture
the image from one view with a total capture of 11 million rays. From
these rays, a two dimensional or three dimensional representation can be
computed for any view and these can be recalculated based upon input
from the viewer.
Last week, Lytro introduced a very unusual looking spherical camera that captures the light field in 360 degrees. By capturing all of the rays of light in a 360 degree circle, the Lytro Immerge is designed for creating virtual reality content that can be used with the upcoming Occulus Rift and other virtual reality headsets.
By capturing the entire spherical light field, the Immerge will allow software to calculate exactly what a viewer would see in the original scene as they move their head in the virtual reality headset. Even the light and shadows will be calculated correctly.
The Immerge platform, including a camera rig and custom server, is expected to ship in early 2016.
We have a remarkable ability to learn quickly through direct experience, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. We seem to be hardwired to understand that the results we experience from an event will be be similar the next time we see the same event. By itself, this learning method would be greatly limited by the fact that no two events are exactly the same.
We are also endowed with the power of analogy. Analogy gives us the capability to recognize when situations are similar and extend the conclusions we make from our direct experience to other experiences which appear similar.
Our ability to learn through analogy grows as our experience grows and we have a greater knowledge base to mine for similarities. One of the best ways to stimulate creativity is to actively cultivate analogical thinking.
Here are some questions that can develop analogical problem solving:
How does this situation resemble anything I have experienced before
What worked and didn't work then?
What could I have done differently?
Who else has experienced a similar situation?
How did they handle it?
How did that turn out?
What if they had done something differently?
Is this part of a long term trend?
When in history have similar patterns occurred?
Who were the winners and losers that time?
Is this part of a cyclical pattern?
How does the rest of the cycle typically play out?
Like most creative skills, the ability to see useful analogies is strengthened by a rich pool of knowledge and a strong sense of history.
