Author: Alex J. Mann

  • Your Job as an Artist

    Andrew Keen, the so-called Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, tackles his common ground of technology and creativity in a piece from the Telegraph where he hopes to discover Why are Artists so Poor? After a bit of Twittering, Andrew found that his: responses extended to everything from lucid one-worders like “oversupply” to philosophical tweets such as…

  • New Literacy Strategies

    Seth Roberts recently reflected on the New York Times article The Future of Reading | A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like with his own piece entitled Student Power.  Seth delivers his own constructive criticism regarding the American higher education system (emphasis his): 1.  Students in a class are treated all alike. They’re not. All…

  • In Defense of Sampling: Why Stealing is Inspiring

    Audio sampling in contemporary music is a form of budding innovation that proves not only the evolution of the industry, but a method to build on creative works that inspire us.  The practice of sampling is common in most creative industries, but often less obvious than it is in music.  Music sampling happens to receive…

  • Seeing with Tongues

    A new breakthrough device, recently covered in Scientific American, restores partial eyesight to the blind by using sensors in the tongue to send sign signals to the brain.  The research comes from neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. Experiments have shown that: within 15 minutes of using the device, blind people can begin interpreting spatial information via the…

  • To Invest is to Aim

    In the land of financial markets, the phrase too big to fail has been brought into a new light.  Two physicists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy, finding in numerous cases that 80% of a country’s market capital consisted of only a few shareholders.…