10 Myths About Creativity

Insights are actually the culminating result of prior hard work on a problem.

There is no such thing as a creative breed. People who have confidence in themselves and work the hardest on a problem are the ones most likely to come up with a creative solution.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229600#ixzz2j0z6DpTZ

Latex-suite and reference autocomplete

latex-suite requires grep to be installed on your system.  Once grep has been installed, you have to make it reachable via the windows environment variable PATH. 

You have to use Python 2.7.* 32-bit version in order for gvim to use Python to complete the function

[Repost] A Primer on Heart Rate Variability

It is well known that longer, more intense training sessions increase the risk of overtraining when not followed by an adequate recovery period. The main problem for athletes is measurement — it is difficult to assess the effect of training on the body with a high degree of accuracy. However, heart rate variability (HRV) can provide athletes with this information, which can be used for such purposes as to determine how well the body is adapting to training, if more rest is necessary, and if the athlete is receiving the right training effect.*

Traditionally, training zones have been considered the best measure of training intensity. These can be established through heart rate, maximum oxygen uptake (VO2 max), lactate threshold, or a combination of several of the above. However, these training zones do not take into consideration the cumulative effect of exercise over a number of workouts. This means that finding the balance between training intensity/duration and rest/recovery in order to achieve optimal fitness can be difficult.

How it Works

Heart rate is regulated by the autonomic nervous system, which is made up of sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. The sympathetic nerves excite the heart, causing heart rate to increase, while the parasympathetic nerves cause the heart rate to decrease. Variation in heart beats was discovered in 1966, reports Biocom Technologies, when it was shown that disparities of a few milliseconds between heart beats was normal. The variation in heart rate is due to the attenuation of the parasympathetic activity when a person inhales, meaning heart rate tends to speed up during inhalation and slow down during exhalation.

HRV can help signal whether you are overtraining, and as such hindering any efforts to achieve optimal performance. During exercise, heart rate speeds up and heart rate variability becomes less pronounced, explains Peak Performance. In contrast to this, your heart rate variability is increased when you are more physiologically relaxed and unstressed. Therefore, a reduced HRV after an exercise session suggests an incomplete recovery, reduced hydration, or other external stressors. Your heart rate variability can also be affected by age, gender, genetic makeup, type of exercise and environmental factors, says Peak Performance.

As useful as heart rate variability can be, questions remain regarding its reliability as a metric; lack of measurement standardization and accuracy are the most widely cited concerns. For many, though, these issues are offset by HRV’s accessibility and ease of use.

In the broadest sense, heart rate variability helps reduce the guesswork involved when trying to assess your body’s physiological state of recovery from training. This information can be quite useful in determining when your body is ready for additional effort.

*At rest, the body system is in balance. A workout disturbs this balance by putting the body under adaptative stress. Together the stress and reaction is known as the training effect.

http://my.moxymonitor.com/blog/bid/271109/A-Primer-on-Heart-Rate-Variability

Multirow and multicolumn spanning with latex tables by Dr. Andrew J. Page

http://www.andrewjpage.com/?archives/43-Multirow-and-multicolumn-spanning-with-latex-tables.html

The easiest way to do multirow and multicolumn spanning in latex is to use the package multirow. Just put
\usepackage{multirow} at the top of your latex file.

Above is a simple example of this in action.
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|} \hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Schedulers} \\ \hline
\multirow{3}{*}{Immediate} & RR & Round Robin \\
& EF & Earliest First \\
& LL & Lightest Loaded \\ \hline
\multirow{4}{*}{Batch} & MM & Min-Min \\
& MX & Max-Min \\
& DL & Dynamic Level \\
& RC & Relative Cost \\ \hline
\multirow{4}{*}{Evolutionary} & PN & This paper \\
& ZO & Genetic Algorithm\\
& TA & Tabu search~\cite{GLOV1986j}\\
& SA & Simlulated Annealing \\ \hline
\end{tabular}


The main things to note are, to span multiple columns in a latex table you just use \multicolumn followed by the number of columns to span and how you want it positioned, e.g. l for left, r for right, c for centered. Spanning multiple rows in a latex table is the same, except using \multirow followed by the number of rows to span, and how you would like it positioned. * basically means best fit. Remember that the first element of each row needs to be empty, since you have some piece of information spanning multiple rows.

Some Thoughts on Dissertation Proposal Writing by Chris M. Golde

http://chris.golde.org/filecabinet/disspropose.html

Writing a dissertation proposal is, in my opinion, the hardest part of the dissertation process. In Education, where few students are working closely with an established research project led by a faculty member, the student is developing a project on their own. In creating a proposal you are crafting something out of nothing. Developing an understanding of an issue, identifying, reading and summarizing the relevant literature, and developing your own take on the problem are time consuming and often frustrating processes. In many ways the methodology is the easiest part to develop. Once you have a clear idea of the first pieces, the methods should follow easily.

Sometimes the more you know the less things hang together. This is normal. Writing a proposal is an iterative process. You cycle through the various pieces over and over. In the end, you are trying to create a linear argument which takes the reader from knowing little to a point where the reader wants you to do this project more than anything in the world. However, the construction of the proposal is not linear. It is common to work on a proposal for several months, and to write 15-20 drafts.

In general I think that proposals should be in the 20 page range. I think that a proposal should have the following parts:

1. Introduction

   	Summary of the larger puzzles and issues
   	Locating your work in a larger issue
   	Main research question

2. Problem Statement

   	What is the issue?
   	What are the specific questions?
   	What is the context and background?
   	Why does this matter?

3. Conceptual Framework

   	How do you look at this puzzle?
   	What is the theoretical framework (what is this a case of?)?
   	What are the key constructs?
   	What are specific terms you are using and how do you define them?
   	Model of what you think is going on

4. Methods

   	What do you plan to do and why
   	How do these link to the questions and the CF?

5. Bibliography
6. Appendices

   	Survey drafts
   	Pilot data
   	Timeline

In general I do not like a separate section labeled "Literature Review" although I know that people have different opinions about that. In addition, some projects may be more appropriately organized that way. Instead, I think that you should interweave the literature into the PS and the CF. This informs the reader of what we do know and what we need to know. This serves to bolster the argument which you are crafting. Rather than summarizing the various pieces of literature in detail (by reviewing the methods and the dependent variable and the findings) you should be explaining what matters about that study. This can be as brief as (these examples are from my own proposal):

The decisions of students are a complex interaction of internal, external and institutional factors (Cabrera, Castaneda, Nora, & Hengstler, 1992).

Or take a paragraph to summarize several studies:

While this macro-level description of women in doctoral education turns attention to systemic problems, problems are also located at the individual level. The sexist micro-inequities which many women endure have been dubbed the academic "chilly climate," which impacts female graduate students as well as undergraduates (Berg & Ferber, 1983; Female Graduate Students at MIT, 1983; Hall & Sandler, 1982; Sandler & Hall, 1986). For example, women may be rendered invisible, and rarely asked for their advice or expertise, or may be interrupted. Lott has analyzed the ways in which competent women are evaluated less favorably than comparable men (1985), a bind women are unable to escape. Women doctoral students may be the victims of sexual harassment, and may be particularly reluctant to speak out, given their reliance on faculty support for their chosen careers (Dziech & Weiner, 1984; Schneider, 1987). Women students may be less likely to find mentors, as faculty are more likely to mentor same-sex students (Berg & Ferber, 1983).

Only when there is direct bearing on the study you are doing, might you want to describe a study in depth. (I don't have a very good example of this, because I don't do this much.)

Bowen and Rudenstine (1992) computed doctoral student attrition rates for a 10 university sample, of which Stanford was one participant. They found a 52% attrition rate for the entering cohorts of 1972-76 (p. 108). They also computed rates for two groups of departments (English-History-Political Science and Math-Physics) in a sub-set of 4 universities (including Stanford), and found a 40% attrition rate for the EHP departments and a 24.7% rate for the MP group. Like many studies, these data are quite old. More recent data from the Stanford Provost's Committee on the Recruitment, Retention and Graduation of Minority Graduate Students (Stanford University, 1994) suggest an attrition rate near 20%.

Regardless of what organizational strategy you use to present the literature, keep in mind to do ANALYSIS of the literature. What are the conceptual and methodological strengths and weaknesses? What are the things we can say with confidence, and what is speculative and tentative? What is clearly established and what is missing? By identifying the gaps, you can locate your own work. In the CF you want to convince the reader of your way of looking at things. Here you take the literature and summarize and reorganize it in order to bolster the points you are trying to make. Rather than marching through a number of studies (A said this, B said that, C and D are contradictory) I used this strategy, as an example.

As described in detail in the section which follows, the research literature has identified four primary forces which shape the departmental context of the doctoral student experience. Figure 3 identifies these four forces, two of which are external influences from the larger communities in which the department is located, the campus community and the disciplinary area. The other two forces are internal, they categorize the way in which organizational members and organizational rules, policies and practices create the departmental organization.

I also believe strongly in drawing diagrams and models of what you think is going on and how you see the world. Others might disagree, but I think this can be done for exploratory and qualitative work. Even if you are not hypothesis testing, you have an idea of what components are salient. And if you revise your view in the light of the data, so much the better.

By the end of the CF you want the reader convinced both of the importance of this problem and of your way of looking at it. The Methods then flow from the questions and your way of looking at them. While you may be doing exploratory work, you still need to explain how the things you are looking at or asking about relate to the way you understand and conceptualize the problem. (Let me also say that I STRONGLY disagree with those who suggest for exploratory research you should read the literature after you collect the data. This is utter nonsense and could only lead to haphazard and ill-informed data collection. Exploratory, theory-building research must still proceed in light of previous knowledge. How else would you know that it was treading new ground?)

Your understanding and conceptualization may, of course, change as you collect the data. The proposal is not cast in cement. Instead, it is a blueprint. It is a map which guides you on your data collection and analysis journey. The more thoroughly you have thought about the issues in advance, the more likely you are to be on sure ground later.

Finally, I strongly believe in the importance of sharing your work with others. One key person is your dissertation chair. You want to make sure that you clear major changes in direction with her/him, so that you do not regard one another with horror further down the road. You may want to identify other committee members towards the beginning of the process and chat with them about suggestions and directions. Exactly what their role is, and whether they read drafts of the proposal, is a highly varying process and needs to be negotiated with each person and your chair.

I also believe (and virtually require for students whose dissertations I chair) that you should find a group of other students and form a writing group. (See Tips for Writing Groups). This is a place to share your writing as it evolves, and a group to provide feedback on the concept, the implementation and the larger process. If you find a group you trust and can work with, you will create much stronger work, and use your advisor's time more effectively. In addition, you will learn to write better, and learn how to ask for and give feedback.

Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story

Storytelling is joke telling. It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.

The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is "Make me care" -- please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. We all know what it's like to not care. You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. That's not by chance, that's by design.

So it got me thinking, what if I told you my history was story, how I was born for it, how I learned along the way this subject matter? And to make it more interesting, we'll start from the ending and we'll go to the beginning. And so if I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story.

And the most current story lesson that I've had was completing the film I've just done this year in 2012. The film is "John Carter." It's based on a book called "The Princess of Mars," which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator. And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, "See me at once." But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property.

(Video) Butler: You won't find a keyhole. Thing only opens from the inside. He insisted, no embalming, no open coffin, no funeral. You don't acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us, huh? Come, let's go inside.

AS: What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise. You could do it an infinite amount of ways. Sometimes it's as simple as "Once upon a time ... " These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it. And I always thought it was such a fantastic device. It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "Here, let me tell you a story. It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time." A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end.

In 2008, I pushed all the theories that I had on story at the time to the limits of my understanding on this project.

(Video) (Mechanical Sounds) ♫ And that is all ♫ ♫ that love's about ♫ ♫ And we'll recall ♫ ♫ when time runs out ♫ ♫ That it only ♫ (Laughter)

AS: Storytelling without dialogue. It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. It's the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that. That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. We're born problem solvers. We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. There's a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. It's not just that they're damn cute; it's because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. And it's like a magnet. We can't stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in.

I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on "Finding Nemo." And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. Make the audience put things together. Don't give them four, give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable.

I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. And I learned a key insight to character. She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine. And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch. She gave a wonderful example of Michael Corleone, Al Pacino's character in "The Godfather," and that probably his spine was to please his father. And it's something that always drove all his choices. Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch. I took to this like a duck to water. Wall-E's was to find the beauty. Marlin's, the father in "Finding Nemo," was to prevent harm. And Woody's was to do what was best for his child. And these spines don't always drive you to make the best choices. Sometimes you can make some horrible choices with them.

I'm really blessed to be a parent, and watching my children grow, I really firmly believe that you're born with a temperament and you're wired a certain way, and you don't have any say about it, and there's no changing it. All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it. And some of us are born with temperaments that are positive, some are negative. But a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it. As parents, you're always learning who your children are. They're learning who they are. And you're still learning who you are. So we're all learning all the time. And that's why change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die, because life is never static.

In 1998, I had finished writing "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. So I researched everything I possibly could. And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." It's an incredibly insightful definition.

When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? An example would be in "Finding Nemo," in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory's short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean?

In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts. And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good. You've got to remember that in this time of year, 1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin," "Lion King." So when we pitched "Toy Story" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, "You don't want me to sing, do you?" And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation.

We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. And they were: No songs, no "I want" moment, no happy village, no love story. And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking. So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions. And we got a hold of that fax. And the fax said, there should be songs, there should be an "I want" song, there should be a happy village song, there should be a love story and there should be a villain. And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. And a year after that, we did conquer it. And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules.

Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character. And we had naively thought, well Woody in "Toy Story" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from someplace. So let's make him selfish. And this is what you get.

(Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing? Off the bed. Hey, off the bed! Mr. Potato Head: You going to make us, Woody? Woody: No, he is. Slinky? Slink ... Slinky! Get up here and do your job. Are you deaf? I said, take care of them. Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. I don't think what you did was right. Woody: What? Am I hearing correctly? You don't think I was right? Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener?

AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable? We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. After that, all bets are off. And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story.

In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia." And I saw that thing seven times in one month. I couldn't get enough of it. I could just tell there was a grand design under it -- in every shot, every scene, every line. Yet, on the surface it just seemed to be depicting his historical lineage of what went on. Yet, there was something more being said. What exactly was it? And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it.

(Video) Boy: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Cyclist: Who are you? Who are you?

AS: That was the theme: Who are you? Here were all these seemingly disparate events and dialogues that just were chronologically telling the history of him, but underneath it was a constant, a guideline, a road map. Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.

When I was five, I was introduced to possibly the most major ingredient that I feel a story should have, but is rarely invoked. And this is what my mother took me to when I was five.

(Video) Thumper: Come on. It's all right. Look. The water's stiff. Bambi: Yippee! Thumper: Some fun, huh, Bambi? Come on. Get up. Like this. Ha ha. No, no, no.

AS: I walked out of there wide-eyed with wonder. And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. It can't be artificially evoked. For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling -- to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder. When it's tapped, the affirmation of being alive, it reaches you almost to a cellular level. And when an artist does that to another artist, it's like you're compelled to pass it on. It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower. Do unto others what's been done to you. The best stories infuse wonder.

When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn't see them because of my hair. And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn't fully baked; I was very, very sick. And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, "He's not going to live." And I was in the hospital for months. And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special.

I don't know if I really believe that. I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong. Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given.

(Video) (Crying) Marlin: There, there, there. It's okay, daddy's here. Daddy's got you. I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo.

AS: And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesn't always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core. And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today.

Shekhar Kapur: We are the stories we tell ourselves

So when I look at a film, here's what we look for: We look for a story on the plot level, then we look for a story on the psychological level, then we look for a story on the political level,then we look at a story on a mythological level. And I look for stories on each level. Now, it is not necessary that these stories agree with each other. What is wonderful is, at many times, the stories will contradict with each other.
......

But ultimately, what is a story? It's a contradiction. Everything's a contradiction. The universe is a contradiction. And all of us are constantly looking for harmony. When you get up, the night and day is a contradiction. But you get up at 4 a.m.That first blush of blue is where the night and day are trying to find harmony with each other.Harmony is the notes that Mozart didn't give you, but somehow the contradiction of his notes suggest that. All contradictions of his notes suggest the harmony. It's the effect of looking for harmony in the contradiction that exists in a poet's mind, a contradiction that exists in a storyteller's mind. In a storyteller's mind, it's a contradiction of moralities. In a poet's mind, it's a conflict of words, in the universe's mind, between day and night. In the mind of a man and a woman, we're looking constantly at the contradiction between male and female, we're looking for harmony within each other.

The whole idea of contradiction, but the acceptance of contradiction is the telling of a story, not the resolution. The problem with a lot of the storytelling in Hollywood and many films, and as [unclear] was saying in his, that we try to resolve the contradiction. Harmony is not resolution. Harmony is the suggestion of a thing that is much larger than resolution.Harmony is the suggestion of something that is embracing and universal and of eternity and of the moment. Resolution is something that is far more limited. It is finite; harmony is infinite. So that storytelling, like all other contradictions in the universe, is looking for harmony and infinity in moral resolutions, resolving one, but letting another go, letting another go and creating a question that is really important.