Tag Archives: creativity

500th post

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Map of all readership distributionThis is the five hundredth post on this blog.  The first 21 posts were published randomly between July 11th, 2012, and January 4th, 2013; and the weekly posts only started on January 7th, 2013, so I have another 48 posts to publish before I can claim a decade of weekly posts.  Nevertheless, I feel it is worth shouting about 500 posts.

I am a little surprised to realise that I have written five hundred posts and it has made me pause to think about why I write them.  A number of answers came to mind, including because I enjoy writing – it empties my mind and allows me to move on to new thoughts or, on other occasions, it allows me to arrange my thoughts into some sort of order.  I also write posts to communicate ideas, to disseminate research, to entertain and to fulfill a commitment, initially to funding bodies (I started the blog as part of commitment to Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award) but increasingly to readers of the blog.  I am amazed that for the last five years the blog has been read in more 140 countries.  While I have a handful of statistics about the readership, beyond the small handful of readers who correspond with me or who I meet in person, I have no idea who reads the blog.  Most of time I do not give much thought to who is reading my posts and my intended reader is a rather vague fuzzy figure who barely exists in my mind.

The map shows the distribution of all readers over the 500 posts with the darker colour indicating more readers per country.

It is hard to remain positive

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Frequent readers of this blog will have noticed that I am regular reader of the FT Weekend pages.  I particularly like the ‘Life & Arts’ section for its balance of opinion and reviews.  However, one weekend last month I was depressed by two articles I read in quick succession.  Shannon Vallor described life as an ageing roller coaster with failed brakes and ‘accelerating climate change, a deadly pandemic and unravelling global supply chains’.  While on the facing page Nilanjana Roy wrote that the ‘past few decades have brought humankind and most other species on Earth to the brink of destruction’.  I was depressed because I agree with their analysis and our leaders seem either unaware of the impending crash of the roller coaster or unable to construct a global strategy to avert the looming destruction.  However, spiralling into negativity does not help because negativity tends to promote fight-or-flight survival mechanisms that can lead to narrow-mindedness, a lack of creativity and limiting one’s options to the tried and tested actions which are unlikely to avert destruction.  Whereas a positive outlook broadens your repertoire of options and builds physical, social and psychological resources.  Positive psychological capital, associated with hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism, leads to higher positive outcomes including commitment, successful outcomes, satisfaction and well-being.  In the face of apparently insurmountable challenges it is difficult to remain positive whether you are leading a small team, a department, an organisation or a country; nevertheless it is important to remain positive because research shows that the ‘happier and smarter’ approach works better than the ‘sadder but wiser’ style of leadership.  Of course, extreme positivity is usually delusional or irresponsible and can lead to complacency; so, you need to dodge that too.

Sources

Kelloway EK, Weigand H, McKee MC & Das H, 2013. Positive leadership and employee well-being. J. Leadership & Organizational Studies, 20(1), pp.107-117.

Nel T, Stander MW & Latif J. 2015, Investigating positive leadership, psychological empowerment, work engagement and satisfaction with life in a chemical industry. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology/SA Tydskrif vir Bedryfsielkunde, 41(1):1243.

Nilanjana Roy, Lessons from 1971 for eco-activists today, in FT Weekend 9 October / 10 October 2021.

Shannon Vallor, Tech’s future shocks, in FT Weekend 9 October / 10 October 2021.

Youssef-Morgan CM, Luthans F. Positive leadership: Meaning and application across cultures. Organizational Dynamics 42:3:198–208, 2013

Limited bandwidth

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Photograph of hills with walking boots in foregroundMany people take a week’s holiday at this time in the UK because Monday was the Spring Bank Holiday. We went walking in the Clwydian hills which we can see from our house to the south-west across the rivers Mersey and Dee. However, despite the walking on the wild side [see ‘Take a walk on the wild side‘ on August 26th, 2015], I did not feel particularly creative when I sat down to write this week’s blog post. Together with most of my academic colleagues, I am in the midst of reviewing student dissertations and marking end of year assessments. I have written in the past about the process of marking examinations and the tens of thousands of decisions involved in marking a large pile of scripts [see ‘Depressed by exams‘ on January 31st, 2018]. However, the constraints imposed by the pandemic have changed this process for students and examiners because the whole exercise is conducted on-line. I have set an open-book examination in thermodynamics which the students completed online in a specified time period and submitted electronically. Their scripts were checked automatically for plagiarism during the submission process and now I have to mark about 250 scripts online. At the moment, marking online is a slower process than for hardcopy scripts but perhaps that’s a lack of skill and experience on my part. However, it seems to have same impact on my creativity by using up my mental bandwidth and impeding my ability to write an interesting blog post [see ‘Depressed by exams‘ on January 31st, 2018]!

Hot air is good for balloons but cold air is better for cars

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photograph of a MDI Airpod 2.0Cars that run on air might seem like a fairy tale or an April Fools story; but it is possible to use air as a medium for storing energy by compressing it or liquifying it at -196°C.  The MDI company in Luxembourg has been developing and building a compressed air engine which powers a small car, or Airpod 2.0 and a new industrial vehicle, the Air‘Volution.  When the compressed air is allowed to expand, the energy stored in it is released and can be used to power the vehicle.  The Airpod 2.0 weighs only 350 kg, has seats for two people, 400 litres of luggage space and an urban cycle range of 100 to 120 km at a top speed of 80 km/h.  So, it is an urban runabout with zero emissions and no requirement for lithium, nickel or cobalt for batteries but a limited range.  A couple of years ago I tasked an MSc student with a project to consider the practicalities of a car running on liquid air, based on the premise that it should be possible to store a higher density of energy in liquified air (about 290 kJ/litre) than in compressed air (about 100 kJ/litre).  His concept design used a rolling piston engine to power a family car capable of carrying 5 passengers and 346 litres of luggage over a 160 km.  So, his design carried a bigger payload for further than the Airpod 2.0; however, like the electric charging system described a few weeks ago [see ‘Innovative design too far ahead of the market’ on May 5th, 2021], the design never the left the drawing board.