The 3 R’s, the long held foundation of teaching, are adding another letter to their crew.  Looking to increase the effective communication of knowledge, several companies are shifting to visual tools and technologies.  Amongst them, different approaches are beginning to emerge.

While SSRN has recently beta tested adding audio and video content to the eLibrary, JoVE

is making a huge splash in biological experiments.  JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, is a journal for biological   experiments and the content is entirely in video format.

Several others are making everyday content more appealing by visualizing it.  One example is Pulse – a beautiful news aggregator that creates a “visual mosaic” of your individualized content.

It seems that the days of using the Encyclopedia Britannica to write your term paper are quickly coming to an end.  YouTube has become an increasingly popular source for research – from ‘how to’s, to gathering topic specific content – and questions are being raised like, “Is YouTube The Future of Online Education?”  It goes without saying that iTunes U has changed educational content with their video Podcasts.  Purdue OWL has even added reference formatting for online videos and Podcasts.

Visual learning is as old as the first picture books. And like day-glo fashions, what’s old is certainly what’s new again.

A couple of weeks ago we blogged about taking contemplative time to find innovative solutions. Along the same theme, I wanted to visit another interesting behavior: the wandering mind.

A friend shared a Wall Street Journal article that explores how a wandering mind can lead to creative insights. Today, more than ever, innovators are eager to advance creative thinking and find those Eureka moments faster. However, it wasn’t until recently that researchers were able to record and study the complex brain activity during a moment of insight.

“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As measured by brain activity, however, “mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”

Using brain scanners and EFG sensors, Dr. John Kounios (Drexel University) and his collaborator Mark Jung-Beeman (Northwestern University) recorded brain activity from study volunteers working with word puzzles. They recorded a variety of results, but some of the subjects had sudden (and confident) solutions from seemingly out of nowhere. During these moments the scanners and sensors showed  “a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain’s right hemisphere”.

These intriguing studies suggest that we need to give our brain’s credit for working hard when we think they are taking it easy.  And, that hard work can result in an “Aha” moment.  Maybe we need to give our brains more time-off so that they can do more hard work.

All this breakthrough thinking and brain research is literally mind-boggling …

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the April 10th Hardest Problems Symposium that took place at Harvard University. The one day symposium brought together twelve panelists from top universities to share, in their view, the toughest social science challenges.

The panelists identified the top thirty hardest, most important, unsolved problems in social science today, including:

- How do we develop a better intercultural relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds?

- How we can achieve inclusive growth in the population and sustainable development?

- How do we achieve world peace?

Videos of the symposium (proposals and discussions) can be found here.

So what’s next? From now until the end of June, you can voice your opinion by submitting your hardest problems or voting on problems already identified. This web initiative is equally important because each new proposal presents new ideas and perspective. While narrowing down the toughest, most complex issues of our time is important, The Indira Foundation’s goal is to inspire us to bring these challenges to light AND eventually solve them.  In June, Harvard will announce the problems that receive the highest votes.

Nicholas Nash (Indira Foundation) commented on the famous Hilbert problems saying, “…having important, unsolved problems is essential to the vitality of a discipline. And, as important, by identifying those problems, we can inspire future generations to solve them.”

Vote here: Toughest Questions Poll

Panel experts included: Nick Bostrom (Oxford), Susan Carey (Harvard), Nicholas Christakis (Harvard), James Fowler (UCSD), Roland Fryer (Harvard), Claudia Goldin (Harvard), Gary King (Harvard), Emily Oster (Chicago), Ann Swidler (Berkeley), Nassim Taleb (NYU/Polytech), and Richard Zeckhauser (Harvard).

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The highly anticipated National Football League Draft begins tomorrow evening (4/22/10) and, for the first time, will be televised during prime time on ESPN and NFL Network.  This is the NFL’s most important off-season event and followed closely by fans around the world.  But, two scholars suggest the process is flawed because teams significantly overvalue early draft picks.

Richard Thaler’s (Booth School of Business, University of Chicago) recent New York Times’ article takes a look at how the NFL draft works, specifically giving underdog teams earlier picks to improve their ranks and win games. Yet, he writes, “We found that the teams choosing early in the draft generally don’t, in fact, get the players that provide the most value per dollar.”

He and Cade Massey (Yale School of Management) recently revised their paper “The Loser’s Curse: Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft” that says late first-round picks actually generate more value than early first-round picks.  Download the paper from SSRN.com: The Loser’s Curse.

Last year I asked our managers to schedule a 30 minute “contemplative meeting” every day on their calendars. I realized that I was much more innovative when I scheduled this meeting with myself than when I double booked meetings all day.

While I thought I was getting more done by over scheduling, I was actually spending a lot of time managing my calendar, switching between tasks, and not having as many “ideas in the shower.”  Problems are solvable when you give yourself a chance to attack them with a clear mind.

It wasn’t long after I happened to read an interview with the husband/wife co-founders of Flickr. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield make it a point to be home for dinner most nights.

Caterina explains, “Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world.  Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather  than how you want them to be.”

Clearing Your Mind

A classic book in this area is Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and he talks about looking beyond a specific project to see how it fits in the bigger picture.  Having a clear mind that allows you to see the bigger picture is one of the first steps to being innovative.

Last month’s WIRED featured Brendan Koerner’s (@BrendanKoerner) essay, Driven By Distraction. The article   argues against the concept that micro-blogging costs billions of dollars of efficiency. While he doesn’t argue for the use of Minesweeper, the article suggests that stepping back from a project and taking a moment is more than just a nice idea, but a required ingredient for success. He also says that, “A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision.”  Since my simple definition of innovation is the creation of new things by being exposed to a broader and deeper set of existing things, I fully support Koerner’s argument.

Two recent articles in the Journal of Wine Economics by Roger Hodgson and discussed in Leonard Mlodinow’s Wall Street Journal article A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion throw cold water on expert ratings and wine competition awards.

The articles, An Analysis of the Concordance Among 13 U.S. Wine Competitions (abstract, PDF) and An Examination of Judge Reliability at a Major U.S. Wine Competition (abstract, PDF) provide some of the best empirical data about the awarding of medals and the variability of wine judges’ scoring. Based on a fair bit of experience, I can’t say that I am surprised. Most knowledgeable wine people I know pay attention to ratings and medals but don’t treat them as gospel. They believe as I do that the best bottle of wine is the one you drink with friends.

For oenophiles, the Journal of Wine Economics looks like an interesting journal. For SSRN, it looks like I need to follow up with the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) to get their articles into the SSRN eLibrary.

iSSRN, our free iPhone App, was released recently.  It provides instant access to the latest Social Science and Humanities research in the SSRN eLibrary from scholars around the world. iSSRN is available from Apple‘s iTunes store.

iSSRN allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to search over 250,000 papers and read the full text of the papers directly on their device.

Note: This is an updated version of the previous iSSRN App and this version, not the previous one, will be updated in the future.

Not to sound boastful but I was wonderfully surprised to see that SSRN was number one on the current  Ranking Web of World Repositories. The ranking is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain and includes a very impressive list of repositories from around the world.  I know and greatly respect many of the other repositories.

Thank all of you for your continued support of SSRN!

Gregg Gordon (President/CEO) and Diane Baltadonis (Director of Sales & Marketing) will be attending the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International Conference and Annual Meeting, April 26-28 in Orlando, FL.

Gregg will be presenting a session entitled “The Future of Scholarly Publishing”, which will offer insight into trends, technologies and advances associated with scholarly publishing.

Session: A2
Date: Monday, April 27, 2009
Time: 10:30am to 12pm

Description: The senior executives of two independent commercial publishing organizations present their views on the industry, its trends and likely direction. The scholarly publishing industry both mirrors, and shapes, the business school industry, and many of the same pressures and influences play on both — the relevance/rigor debate; role in wider society; globalization; impact of technology; and others. From different standpoints, the presenters will explain some of the workings of the industry, the factors which are shaping it, and what the future for publishers, scholars and students of business might hold.

Presenters: Gregory J. Gordon, president, Social Science Electronic Publishing, and John Peters, chief executive officer, Emerald Publishing

Additionally, Gregg and Diane will be available throughout the conference to speak with individuals regarding SSRN and its services. If you would like to set up a meeting, please email Diane_Baltadonis@ssrn.com.

Welcome to the SSRN Blog, the official blog of the Social Science Research Network.

Since its start in 1994, SSRN has grown significantly — we currently have 18 focused research networks, more than 200,000 papers in the eLibrary, and surpassed 25 million total downloads in December (the number is now more than 27 million). As we reached and surpassed several milestones, we realized that not everyone knows our history or has access to news about the latest updates or changes to the website. The SSRN Blog comes as a natural outcome of our desire to share information and keep the SSRN Community up to date. Hopefully, it will also enhance our already wonderful connections with our users.

The SSRN Blog will not be a broadcast vehicle. We want to engage you in an ongoing conversation. Readers will get updates regarding SSRN’s eLibrary and services, weekly “Top Ten” lists, and announcements of new networks, conferences, and presentations. Our posts will explore and share our perspective on issues such as Open Access, new publishing models and directions for scholarly research, and the technologies that affect us all. We will also be linking several articles and other blog posts in the “Media Mentions” section on the right side of the page.

We are very excited about launching the SSRN Blog, and I personally invite you to join us as we grow and expand the SSRN Community.

Thanks,
Gregg