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Test Your Creativity: 5 Classic Creative Challenges

Test Your Creativity: 5 Classic Creative Challenges
Fascinated by how brains and creativity work, we frequently share new research on the 99U twitter feed, showing how everything from drinking alcohol, to taking vacations, to moving your eyes from side to side can make you more creative. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that most of these studies rely on just a small group of core creativity tests – and you don’t need any special lab equipment to take them. Below, we’ve collected five of the most commonly used creativity challenges for your self-testing pleasure. While creativity “testing” is far from an exact science, trying your mettle at these challenges could yield insight into when, where, and how you’re most creative. 1. Developed by J.P. Hold papers togetherCufflinksEarringsImitation mini-tromboneThing you use to push that emergency restart button on your routerKeeping headphones from getting tangled upBookmark The test measures divergent thinking across four sub-categories: 2. 3. 4. 5.

Robert Bates, Oklahoma Reserve Deputy, Pleads Not Guilty to Manslaughter Robert Bates, Oklahoma Reserve Deputy, Pleads Not Guilty to Manslaughter Robert Bates, the Oklahoma reserve sheriff's deputy who says he mistook his gun for his Taser when he shot and killed a man earlier this month, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to second-degree manslaughter. A judge set a hearing for July 2. The judge allowed Bates to take a previously planned vacation to the Bahamas. Bates, a 73-year-old retired insurance executive who volunteered with the sheriff's department in Tulsa, was providing backup during a sting on April 2. A lawyer for the Harris family, Dan Smolen, said he was not surprised that Bates had pleaded not guilty — but he was surprised about the vacation. "Whether intended or not, Mr. Sheriff Stanley Glanz apologized to the Harris family on Monday — "We are sorry Eric was taken from you" — and said it was proper for Bates to have been on the operation. Bates told TODAY last week that shooting Harris was "No. 1 on my list of things in my life that I regret."

Fostr | Support, Follow & Cultivate Creativity 5 Words You’ll Never Hear on the Campaign Trail In this (and every) election year, I find myself amazed all over again at the phenomenal effort our elected and would-be elected officials put into the denial of their own mistakes. They don’t ever want to fess up to anything, it seems. 5 words you’ll never hear on the campaign trail: “Here’s How I Screwed Up.” I get it; I understand their motives. They want to get nominated, elected, or re-elected, and they don’t want to give any more grist to their competitors’ meat-grinding mill than absolutely necessary. I understand that leadership in the political arena is, in many ways, different from the day-to-day, up-close-and-personal leadership you and I practice in our places of work. There’s no such thing as a perfect human being, and the minute one tries to appear to be perfect, he or she is automatically suspect. So, how about we all stop trying so hard to market ourselves as flawless? Here’s the question: How bold and public are you willing to be with your own valuable screw-ups?

DEA Chief Michele Leonhart Retires Over Handling of Colombia Sex Scandal When Jacob Lemay invites you into his bedroom, he wants to give the full tour. He'll show you his books, the planets and stars on the wall, his bunk bed and the stuffed animals he's lined up all in a row. "This one is Chase, and that one is Zizzy," he says in the voice of a confident five-year-old. "And that one is Biscuit, and that one is Zarzo, and that one is Cheety, and that one is Snowflake, and that one is Fuzz." Jacob is a happy, healthy, well-adjusted pre-schooler. But it wasn't always this way. NBC's National Correspondent Kate Snow shares Jacob's story on Nightly News, Part One of a special series on transgender kids. When Jacob was born, his name was Mia. Last year, when he was four, they made a decision: to let him live as he has always identified — as a boy. Courtesy of the Lemay family Gallery: Jacob's Life as a Transgender Child For those children, she and other pediatricians say, it can often be better to make a change sooner. "He's gonna go out there in the world.

Franco-German Cultural Fund - Brand Identity on Behance [FR] LE CONCEPTNotre proposition s’articule autour de la notion d’échange croisés. L’allemagne est symbolisée par un axe horizontal, et la France par un axe vertical. Une couleur est attribuée à chacun de ces deux axes. La superposition des deux couleurs au croisement des deux axes symbolise la collaboration, le dialogue et l’échange interculturel entre la Fance et l’Allemagne.Le lien d’échange et de collaboration est renforcé par l’utilisation commune du mot «fonds». En effet, ce mot est le seul qui soit identique dans les deux langues. [EN] THE CONCEPTOur proposal is based on the notion of cross exchange.

How to Motivate People: Skip the Bonus and Give Them a Real Project Science has managed to reveal some crazy things that fly in the face of almost every commonly accepted management practice. Here's the latest: Rewards for top performers lead them to worse performance. And if you want to foster innovation, bonuses won't work either. Rather, it's all about letting people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about. Dan Pink lays all that out in this new video, which illustrates a talk he gave at the RSA (a kind of British version of TED): Wild stuff, and all the more unsettling because of the current mess on Wall Street. The fact that science has also created a new vision for workplace performance--fueled less by management and more by individual goals--is shocking. Pink tackles those themes at length in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

12-year-old Morristown girl is a horse whisperer in training Catherine Zimmerman, 12, will spend the next three months training a two-year old wild mustang as part of the 2015 Youth & Mustang Challenge (YAM). Rising to the challenge, Catherine, a resident of Morristown, will attempt to establish an enduring bond with a wild animal — in this case a two-year old sorrel mustang mare named Monche. The purpose of the challenge is to demonstrate that wild horses can be adopted and trained, said Sarah Price, Catherine's mother, who explained that approximatley 50 wild Mustangs are euthanized each day in order to cull the herd. The Youth & Mustang Challenge program is administered by the Mustang Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit organization that facilitates adoptions for mustangs and burros. The foundation also sponsors a Trainer Incentive Program, open to children ages 8 to 17. Students accepted into the Mustang Challenge program have 90 days to gentle and train a previously untouched mustang. Staring down Monche Offering an opportunity to build self-esteem

illustrator tuts Since its release, Adobe's Illustrator has grown to become the designer's right-hand man when it comes to creating premier vector graphics and elements. There's so much you can do with it that it can be difficult to know where to start. Happily, we're here to round up the best Adobe Illustrator tutorials, covering everything from illustration to logo design, adding depth to your typography and much more, to help you get the most from this amazing app. Jump directly to a section using this handy category guide, or just get started browsing the whole list! With so many to choose from, you're sure to find a project to inspire you, whether you're using an older version of Illustrator or are signed up to the Creative Cloud. Adobe Illustrator for beginners: 11 top tips If you're just starting out with Illustrator, here's a fantastic guide to some of its tools. Setting up a new document In this video tutorial presented by Angie Taylor, you'll learn how to set up a new Illustrator document.

How to Keep Kids Engaged in Class Have you ever plunked yourself down in a staff meeting where some of your colleagues were, for lack of a better phrase, not paying attention? Grading homework? Having private conversations? Texting? As we know all too well, kids aren't a whole lot different than adults: If they aren't absorbed by what's going on, they'll find something else that interests them. Getting all your students focused, eager, and on task at the beginning of class is challenging enough. Still, unless you manage to capture and keep students' focus, whether at the beginning of or midway through class, the engine of student learning that you are trying to drive simply isn't even in gear. From Dead Time to Active Learning I call this lack of engagement dead time. I have come to feel that dead time is so pernicious that I will do everything I can to prevent even the hint of an outbreak. They call students at Level 4, the lowest level, the work avoiders, and on level 3 are the halfhearted workers. Building Your Arsenal

Welcome to Forbes As the bestselling coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, I’m often asked to break down what emotional intelligence is and why it’s so important. Here goes… Emotional Intelligence Is the Other Kind of Smart. When emotional intelligence first appeared to the masses in 1995, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. Personal competence is made up of your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen. Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior, and motives in order to improve the quality of your relationships.

Education 2.0 – Social Networking and Education In the last decade, the Internet has changed how teachers and students learn in the classroom. Companies like Google, Wikipedia, and WordPress have opened the door to instant exploration of subjects and questions that haven’t been available in the classroom before. Students are now able to explore the ancient Egyptian pyramids using Google Maps, see updated facts and information on a wiki, or read a famous explorer’s blog posts on their expeditions, all safely from their desks. Classrooms, schools and even districts are able to share and collaborate in private social networks, expanding collective knowledge and relationships to new horizons. With our culture’s shift to “social,” companies have created tools that offer free platforms for blogs, wikis and private social networking sites. Blogs share the knowledge of the classroom, projects, and/or experiences with others who can greatly benefit from the shared knowledge.

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