Slightly stale but still delicious readings from December 7th through the 13th.

• Alexander Wang, for Cool Kids, and Now You by Ruth La Ferla
  If you’ve ever met me, you know that I am a huge Alexander Wang fan. And it carries through to this article - I love everything about it. Looking at yourself not as an artist, but as someone making and producing clothing that real women have to wear is important, but more than that, I like that A.Wang is cognizant of the fact that he runs a business. So much of the “career path” in creative industries is laid out for you: there’s an expected path of success. That he’s able to go beyond that and define his own is inspiring.
• Score another one for Recombinant Innovation by Andrew Hargadon
  This article looks at how a couple of researchers modeled all the possible configurations for the H1N1 protein’s shape and then used this information to search the database of drugs for possible combatants. What I find most interesting is two fold: (1) the use of computing to solve these tricky biological problems is something we’re going to see more and more, and protein folding is a major part of that. (2) Is the discussion of the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is certainly broken in a lot of ways, and tools like this are an opportunity, if they can be leveraged in the right industry structure.
• Hiring Secret Sauce from the Meebo blog
  What I really liked about this was Meebo having the courage to re-evaluate the problem. Instead of just saying, ‘this is the way everyone else does this,’ having the guts to go in and say, ‘What are we really looking for here and how can we do that best?’ is fantastic. Clear thinking is such a rare thing these days. Also note that there’s so much that’s interesting about evaluation systems and the way they hit or miss their targets. They often end up becoming the end to themselves, where memorization or ability to be tested is ultimately more important for students to learn than knowledge.
• TOXO - A Conversation With Robert Sapolsky
  A really interesting video/transcript looking at this crazy parasite, Toxo, and the way in which it affects rats and humans. Which is to say, it makes them reckless. Sapolsky goes through and looks at the behavioral effects of this parasite, and the implications of it. I wonder if something like this could be used as ‘doping’ in extreme sports. Robert Sapolsky is just so generally fascinating.
• Analysis catalysis from the Economist
  A quick article about design and how it is different than what is traditionally taught at business schools, and about how it fosters new ideas. Also of note is this quick read on the Wallas Model for the Process of Creativity.
• Nueron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an iPod by Carl Zimmer
  If you haven’t heard of musical hallucinations, you will now. They’re a curious thing, and I found the article even more interesting in terms of the idea that a brain network can be “underworked.” I wish the writer had pushed the doctors and others a bit more on what the implications were for the brain in general.
• Technology First, Needs Last by Don Norman
  This article made a little bit of a splash in December. It’s really too bad I didn’t make a post about this, but maybe someday I still will. The short 30 second nugget is that Norman seems to have bought into a lot of the crap (excuse my language) that has been spun around “design thinking.” Sure, the technological innovations happened to be from inventors without much design experience, but I don’t think anyone ever kidded themselves that designers would be magically inventing transporters after understanding that people hate their morning commute. Also, most of science and invention is incremental, or at least building on the bricks of people in front of them. Similarly, in order to carry them through to the point where they were useful to people, inventions often required much more of the traditional design skills. I can point to one of those, the personal computer, and say that a long history of HCI facilitated its adoption, and had that thinking never taken place, the machines certainly wouldn’t be so useful today.