The Tragic Triumph Of The MBAs “We’ve seen Mubarak fall,” said Salesforce’s Marc Benioff of the corporate need to focus on social networks at the recent Dreamforce conference. “We’ve seen Khadafy fall. When will the first CEO fall for the same reason?” What a fantastic comparison! Because, as we all know, dictators who brutalize, torture, and murder thousands of their own people over a period of decades are just like CEOs who miss quarterly profit targets. Benioff isn’t a bad guy, it was just a dumb thing to say — but it’s stuck in my mind, because Salesforce, cloud-computing’s poster child, is the future, and his seems to be the voice of the zeitgeist. And it seems that whatever survives the ongoing Mountain View bloodbath will be thoroughly monetized. Is this the right thing for Google to do? Nope. I suspect this is pretty common among CEOs and MBAs — but most techies don’t agree at all. Image credit: Paul G, Flickr.
SCHOPENHAUER'S 38 STRATAGEMS, OR 38 WAYS TO WIN AN ARGUMENT Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and narrow his or her propositions remain, the easier they are to defend by him or her. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer) Groundbreaking Research Methods and Skills for the Human Sciences and Humanities Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) August 26, 2011 A new book by professors of Transpersonal Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology offers research methods and skills from the field of transpersonal psychology. "Transforming Self and Others Through Research", released this month by SUNY Press, offers transformative approaches to those conducting research across the human sciences and the humanities. As co-author Dr. Anderson and Braud invite scholars to bring multiple ways of knowing and personal resources to their scholarship. Rosemarie Anderson is Professor of Transpersonal Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. William Braud is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and the author of Distant Mental Influence: Its Contributions to Science, Healing, and Human Interactions. About the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology Founded in 1975, ITP began as a groundbreaking center for integrative, whole-person learning and training.
handwriting tips You’ve decided you want to improve your handwriting and you’re probably hoping a fountain pen will do the trick -- maybe a friend told you it would. Maybe you’re just adventurous and you want to try your hand at calligraphy (or you might, once your handwriting improves). Good for you! A fountain pen may make your writing look a bit better, but if your writing looks as if frenzied chickens got loose on the page, chances are this won’t be enough. After coaching handwriting and teaching calligraphy over the years, I’ve learned to see the characteristics of those who’ll be able to pick up the necessary motions quickly from those who’ll have to work a bit harder. Crampy, uneven letters are often the result of drawing the letters with the fingers rather than using the whole arm to write. People who inevitably have trouble with handwriting and calligraphy write with their fingers. If you use the right muscle groups, your writing will have a smooth, easy flow and not look tortured. Fig. 1. Top
Human rights: Homophobia feels like a disease Dear Editor, Why is it that when a man with courage of his convictions like John Cummins speaks his mind, he is really lambasted in the press and on the radio? If a person dares speak up and says that homosexuality is unnatural and an abuse of the natural use of sex, he is subject to all kinds of abuse. Is the truth not allowed any more, or are we all supposed to be politically correct and bow to public pressure? The term homophobic makes us to feel that we are suffering from a disease. I am not proposing that gays be abused, either physically or verbally, but dont try to tell us that its just an alternate lifestyle. Even electricity needs a male and a female plug to connect the circuit. David J. © Langley Advance
Invasion of giant snails has Florida on alert - US news - Environment Florida is used to strange creatures, but the discovery of a non-native animal — a giant snail from East Africa — has got local officials really worried. A search-and-destroy advisory that went out included this bit of history: the last time the giant snails were found in Florida (back in 1966) they had multiplied from three to 18,000 in seven years and cost $1 million to eradicate. The new population of giant African land snails was found in Miami-Dade County, and several dozen technicians were quickly dispatched to search them out. About 1,000 were found Thursday within a one-square-mile radius, the Miami Herald reported. Several hundred were found in one backyard in Coral Gables. How they got there was not immediately known. The snails were sent to freezers to be frozen to death. Why worry? They also breed like crazy. The 1966 incident was tied to a boy who brought three into Miami as pets. It is illegal to import the snails into the United States. © 2013 msnbc.com Reprints
The Danger of Making College Too Career-Focused - Education This fall's crop of college freshmen and their anxious parents are probably already thinking about what major to choose. After all, college is a serious financial investment, and with fears of a double-dip recession looming, picking a major that promises entree to a lucrative and sustainable career—one that allows repaying student loans—seems like a no-brainer. But is the way we're increasingly connecting higher education with careers actually a good idea? Casey Wiley, an English lecturer at Penn State, writes in an op-ed for Inside Higher Education that he recently met with a student who pointedly asked him, “Can I get a job with an English degree?” Wiley wanted to "tell her not to worry about the college-to-job equation, that she’s in college to broaden her mind, to question, to grow intellectually—all the learning clichés that hold true." But that's not why students are heading to school anymore. screenshot via YouTube user FiendProducciones
Eyewitness Testimony Loses Legal Ground in State Supreme Court Is justice now less blind to science? Image courtesy of iStockphoto/spxChrome As science has long demonstrated, eyewitness accounts are frequently riddled with errors. Human memory in general is far from perfect—working less like a video camera than an ever-evolving collage, studies have shown. But in courtrooms across the country eyewitness testimony of alleged crimes have frequently been enough to convince juries to send defendants to jail—even without more reliable forms of evidence. Now, the courts seem to be finally catching up with the science. A recent survey found that some 63 percent of U.S. adults thought that memory passively records events, per the video camera model. Not only can people often miss obvious details in a scene (such as a person in a giant gorilla costume), but they can also be led, with relative ease, to “recall” things that never actually occurred. Also see this 2010 Scientific American MIND arrticle, “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts.”
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide | Guest Blog Today’s lesson from Sherlock Holmes deals with learning to cull and to cultivate knowledge in such a way that your decision process will be optimized for the question at hand, and not get bogged down in irrelevant minutiae – a lesson that is all too relevant in the age of the internet, when we have a constant stream of information at our beck and call. A mind is an attic: keep yours well organized In “A Study in Scarlet,” Dr. “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A cluttered mind prevents organized thought Holmes, of course, is exaggerating. Especially when it comes to decision making, Holmes’s analogy is remarkably apt. In a decision, it is crucial to ignore so-called distracters, things that are actually irrelevant but that can influence our judgment if we are not careful. Our attics can change, and this is a benefit worth exploiting Has the internet expanded our attics?
The "End of Work" And The Coming Revolution In Education