Monday, May 12, 2003

Reading - Brain Development and why school is in such trouble I spent two days last week with Dr Doug Wilms, one of the top researchers in the world on the topic of child development. There were many aha's - here is one of them. Human development is linked to trajectories. When we are 2, small differences in vocabulary, of only 150 words, will drive the type of trajectories that my poor diagram tries to show you. This small difference at 2 spreads out by 15 to a 10 year spread in grade 10. The upper quartiles will have the cognitive ability to work at second year university. The lower quartile will be at the grade 5 level. Those in the middle will be therefore 5-7 years off the extreme at both ends. The same is true say for journeys. If Columbus's three ships stated off from Spain with a 3 degree difference. One would have landed in Greenland. One in Hispaniola and the other in Argentina. Small differences over time slope out to be large and not fixable. Some conclusions: In Chaos Theory, we know that "Initial Conditions" are important. This graph shows us why. Only 150 word difference at 2 drives over time a huge differential. The effort to change these trajectories builds on a log scale. We can do a lot with a little when we are very young but by the time we are about 15 we are locked in. Most of the remedial work is done at school where it will have little effect. Especially by grade 4. The optimal time to ensure that your kids will do well is to read a lot to them from 4 MONTHS ONWARDS. You might say that this is ridiculous. A Baby can't comprehend at 4 months. But they build pattern recognition. Their vocab is built as a direct result of the vocab that you use with them. So read up a level all the time. To read to a 4 month old demands that you hold the baby as well. Touch is the other driver for development. We know that monkeys that are not touched and we know that orphans that are not touched develop very poorly. So reading to babies hits the two big drivers - vocab and touch. The revolution in development will come less from a revolution at school and more from our recognition that the optimal time to learn is before 6!  Infants and young children learn only one way - from play based experience - the opposite from how we teach at school.     5:27:07 PM    comment []

DANGEROUS MEME #2: WHY YOU HATE YOUR JOB. From Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, on wage slavery: Ordinary businesses don't burden themselves with obligations to people. Most obviously, they don't "take care" of their workers. To do so would introduce them to a whole suite of problems in which there's no profit whatever. Instead, they pay salaries and expect workers to take care of themselves. From the company's point of view, it doesn't matter whether the salary is adequate for any particular worker. It's not the company's fault if the worker has a large family to take care of, or an ailing parent to support, or is just a bad manager of money. The company can afford to be hard-nosed about this. It doesn't risk losing a worker to a competitor, because the competitors are equally hard-nosed about it. This unspoken agreement among corporations to limit their obligation to issuing a paycheck is precisely what gives our society its prison ambiance. Workers have no way out. Whether they move from company to company or nation to nation, their employers' obligation ends with the paycheck, an arrangement that obviously suits employers very well. Prisons are always arranged to suit the wardens. The fact that 60% of us believe we are under-employed, and are not doing the things we do best or even things we like doing, attests to how pervasive this wage slavery has become. Setting up a tribal* venture is the only way out of the prison. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." (*A tribal venture is an enterprise run by a self-organized, self-selected non-hierarchical group, each member of which contributes importantly to the group's ability to make a living and takes complete responsibility for the welfare of all members of the venture. That doesn't mean the members live together. A tribal venture is not the same as a family business or a commune. A tribal venture's ultimate purpose, its measure of success, is its ability to provide for the welfare and well-being of its members, all of its members, as equals and as they define well-being. Tribal ventures don't have absentee shareholders, so profit per se doesn't matter.) [How to Save the World] Dave, I think that the New Renaissance will be built on reinterpreting the Tribe. What does a Tribe feel like? One of Quinn's great metaphors is the Circus. A Circus has a ringmaster or manager who he is is charge of the organizing. He lives in the same type of trailer as the rest. The young kids learn a skill. The 16 year old trapeze flyer becomes the star. Her father is the catcher. Her mother teaches trapeze and makes costumes. Her Granny looks after the younger kids and collects tickets and so on. The Circus is a social and economic unit as is a tribe. All tend to live in similar circumstances. All perform all the group activities such as putting up and down the tent. All have many "jobs" all make a number of contributions. There are no unemployed teens or old folks in a home - everyone works. Art and effort are combined. The money is shared around. No One knows what the next town will be like but there is a cycle of regular movement so while the next town is unknown it is also known from a history. People tend to marry and have relationships within the circus world. People have been known to run away to join the circus. It seems to me that my own life is becoming more like being a member of a circus. I have a strengthening set of bonds with a set of collaborators and clients. Our work tends to be mainly creative. We are as much friends as colleagues and clients. Our children are starting to join either this network or are bringing their own networks into the orbit of the larger group. We look out for each other's children - jobs and experience. We are missing the elders but I think our parents who are in their 70's and 80's are too much the old world. But we may become the elders. We help with the equivalent of tent raising - ie work for free to set up larger work for each other. We all seem to have the same type of life style and income - odd not by design but by outcome. We all used to work in the corporate world but now cannot. Being human is too important for us. None of our children feel good about the corporate world and the older ones have already escaped. Other than manufacturing, I can't think of any endeavour that can't fit into this new type of tribal model. 4:14:57 PM    comment []

Help filling a Radio weblog's sidebar. Julie Wiggins has written up some useful Radio UserLand newbie tips on "how to use the blank space under my calendar for phrases, other links, mysubscriptions (and anything else that I didn't want to put or couldn't figure out how to put into my navigator links) and how to align/center the text and change the font size of mysubscriptions.opml with a little help from the discussion boards and a friend at radio." [Workbench] Newbies like me need all the help that we can get. I intend to build a collection of great advice like this piece in a category called Radio 1:09:46 PM    comment []

90 degrees. How passé.. Forget the Angles   I have a preacher friend who lives in an old farmhouse that he is restoring himself. He's one of those "do everything" guys. Gardening, carpentry, repair work, he does it all.   Robert is not a bullshit, pantywaist, white-collar preacher with soft theology and a degree in marketing. His faith and knowledge are deep and wide. He started his real learning after seminary.   The best thing I can say about him is this: His heart is soft enough to be broken, and his hands are strong enough to mend your shed.   A few months ago Robert hosted a retreat at his farm for misfit pastors. There were four of us, all slightly irregular, all in danger of not passing inspection. Hell, a couple of us have already been rejected and are now on the discount table.   I was wandering through the rooms, admiring the old farmhouse, when Robert said, "You know what I love most about this place?"   "What?"   "You won't find a 90-degree angle anywhere."   I ran my hand up and down the nearest corner and looked at it closely. He was right. The angle was acute by about ten degrees. The next corner was an obtuse mirror of the first. Euclid says I didn’t need to check the other corners, but you know I did. And yes, they were all irregular.   "Robert, how can the angles be this off? Was the guy who built it a spectacularly bad carpenter, or has it shifted over the years?"   Robert didn't look at me when he replied. He was looking at the wall and running his hand back and forth over it, like you'd run your hand down a horse's flank. "It was built this way, and the man was a wonderful carpenter. He just didn't care about 90-degree angles."   I was confused. How can you be a good carpenter and not care about right angles? I shook my head, not understanding. "Is it safe? Why hasn't it fallen apart? How does it hold together?"   He smiled. "How indeed? And yet, here it stands, apparently doing quite well for itself these last 125 years. There's nothing sacred about 90 degrees. You're worshipping at the wrong altar. What you want are straight walls and good joints. You connect four straight walls, and the angles will take care of themselves. They will always come out to a perfect 360 degrees. Why worry about it? God’s got your back!”   I experienced a moment of mental slippage. 90-degree angles meant craftsmanship and solidity to me, and I resisted letting this go. My mind flashed with visions of strange, Seuss-like houses with weird walls jutting out at odd angles.   And then the scales fell from my eyes, and I could see. In my mind I saw an imaginary floor plan. The interior walls were not perpendicular to the exterior walls, but all the angles were snuggling. Every acute was spooning with its obtuse mate.   I saw the truth of it, and I loved the truth.   All I could say was "Holy Shit!"   Robert jerked his head toward the kitchen. The coffee was ready, and the other guys were gathering. I followed him, rolling this new thought around in my head and loving the feel of it. Four connected, straight walls will always have angles that total 360 degrees. What have we been worrying about?    “Rob, I don't know if it's God or geometry, but something's definitely watching out for us.”   We took our seats with the other misfits, and there we were. Four irregulars joined perfectly around a sacred wooden table. Robert poured himself a cup of coffee and had his last say on the matter.   “God. Geometry. What's the difference? Be straight, and make good connections. Don't feel like you have to know all the angles. Let things work themselves out.”   “As for the carpenter who built this house, I think he was a lot like another carpenter I've read about."     Postscript: I had no idea how badly I would need this wisdom. Now, more than ever, I need to write straight, make good connections, and quit trying to figure out all the angles.   P.   [Real Live Preacher] [Curiouser and curiouser!] What a great post! 12:55:07 PM    comment []

If ants are so dumb, how are they so smart?. How does an insect with a brain the size of a poppy seed decide to carry out a particular task?   "An ant can assess the tasks of another ant using hydrocarbons that are specific to that task. It's not an intellectual achievement; it's a perceptual achievement. The ant doesn't have to think to get the difference between one hydrocarbon and another. It just has to have the right receptors to smell the difference," explained Gordon --context weblog:   Reminds me of Remo's favorite book on web design:  Don't make me think.   Also reminds me of a half-idea I've had several times.  TCP/IP Packets should come in different "flavors" to facilitate low level processing and other functionality.  For instance, millipayment packets could hand pay for distributed web services on route .... [Jon Schull's Weblog] More on the perils of the Cartesian world - "I think therefore I am" We place such weight on conscious thought and the process of thinking. Yet as the post above tells us, ants do not think and we know that we only scan web sites. I have been "thinking" about how much I need to use "thinking" to get though my day and my life. Some big decisions. Marriage - I fell in love with Robin the moment I met her and "knew" that we were going to be partners. 29 years later we still are. No thinking on that decision. Leaving the conventional world of banking for self employment. I was having dinner with a friend who at the end of the meal looked into my eyes and said - "So Rob, you want to leave the Bank" I told her that this was nonsense and that I loved the bank. She reminded me that all my meta conversation that night had told her that this was my intention. After a month or so of confusion, my thinking brain caught up with my inner self and I spent the next 18 months preparing a parallel track. When the day came I stepped of the deck into a new life without a pause. Moving to PEI - I got a call one morning early from Marie MacDonald who had never met me but who had heard me speak. Would I like to come to PEI to talk to the Deputies. At that moment I knew that this was a destiny call and I knew that I would be moving. So if I think about my life, many of the really momentous decisions did not rely on any "thinking". What about daily life. If I think too much in the car, I drive badly. If I think to much when I write I write badly. If I think too much while making love .....- and so on. So where does "thinking" help? Not much really. When faced with a decision I rely on my feel. Then I think out the details. I am coming to the conclusion that "Thinking" is a useful secondary process. The critical faculty is I am beginning to suspect, Intuition. Intuition is built upon experience and the ability to listen to the quiet inner voice. 8:00:57 AM    comment []

Be careful what filters you use. DR PHIL'S TIP ON FILTERS When you and I engage in conversation, I can't control how well you communicate; I can only control how well I receive what you're telling me. I can go on the alert to things that may distort the messages you're sending me - I call them filters. To be a good listener, you've got to know what you filters are. Maybe you're coming into a given conversation with an agenda. Maybe you're judging the speaker and don't trust him at all. Maybe you're angry. Anyone of these psychological filters can distort what you hear. Filters cause you to decide things ahead of time. You may have prejudged your partner and decided that he's a hound dog and that he doesn't love you anymore. Result: No matter what he says to you, you're going to distort it to conform to what you're already thinking, feeling and believing. Take an inventory of your filters. If you're not aware of them, you can defeat the best communicator in the world because you'll distort the message, regardless of how well it is sent. Source: Dr. Phillip C. McGraw, The Oprah Magazine,March 2003 More Monday morning wisdom from the Listening Leader.  Haven't you subscribed yet? [Curiouser and curiouser!] This post by Matt struck a chord with me. One of my filters is to listen for "mutton dressed as lamb". What I mean is when someone uses the language of the human and the network when they are really gripped by the mindset of the machine. "KM" for me often falls into this category. When I hear the term KM, I imagine vast effort to "manage" and capture for the organization itself information as an end in itself. I find the word "Manage" itself a word that causes a frisson in me. So it is hard for me to look more deeply when I hear it. It is so hard to break out of the Cartesian world that we have been raised in. In the "Manage" world information and knowledge is I think an object. In the natural world information is a "flow" In the Mange world we would attempt to accumulate and structure knowledge, in a natural world we would seek to enhance the pace and thickness of the flow. Examples. In a former life I was a trader. In the forex market the key is to maximize flow. The more contacts, the more volume that rolls over the desk, the more flow you have and the better handle you have on what is going on. Excellent forex organizations seek to build flow as the building block for their business. But they do not seek to capture it. They immerse themselves in it. Example - the brain. My mother has had a series of strokes over the last few years. As the quality and quantity of neuron connections die, so does her ability to think and understand. Her "flow" - the mix of the number of connections and their quality is being reduced. Sometimes stroke victims can get back cognition and function by working in other parts of the brain to build up synaptic connections. This brings me back to the original point of Matt's post. If we can actively reduce our own filters, our own flow will increase. So Rob - more of an open mind about "managing" stuff for me     7:30:02 AM    comment []