I just read an interesting article in Wired magazine about how we learn. The author interviewed Robert Bjork, the director of UCLA's Learning and Forgetting Lab (yes, there is such a place). Below are a few take-homes. Interleaving. Instead of trying to master one topic or skill at a time, interleaving is the process of rotating through several related skills or topics. According to Bjork, memory works better when many different connections are made as opposed to just one. Get mobile. In other words, vary the places where you study. If you will need to know the information in more than one location, Bjork suggests studying in more than one location. Wait. "The more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is." Bjork suggests spacing your studying times in a way that requires the mind to dig deeper and work harder at remembering what you studied the first…
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Why do people in churches seem like cheerful brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?. . . On the whole I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return. -- Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
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A good article appeared last week in Forbes' online magazine about how to retain top talent. Actually, it sought to answer the question: "Why does top talent leave?" The author boiled ten reasons down to two primary factors: Top talent doesn't like being poorly managed Top talent doesn't like "organizational lameness" (shifting priorities, no vision, uninspiring atmosphere) So, to flip this over to the positive side, how do you retain top talent? If you are a manager, learn to manage well. Your staff or employees don't require perfection; but they respond well to a leader who is growing and sharpening their skills. If you are in a hiring position, hire managers with good people skills. Competencies can be supplemented with additional hands and feet. You can't contract out people skills. Secondly, examine your culture. High capacity people want to make more than a marginal difference. They can't swim long in…
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Passing this along from yesterday's Wall Street Journal. ********************* Thinking Outside the Box - Literally By Christopher Shea Just how potent is the metaphor “thinking outside the box”? To find out, researchers built a literal box out of PVC pipe and cardboard — 5′ cubed. Roughly 100 test subjects were given a 10-question word-association test designed to measure one kind of creativity (sample item: What one word links “measure,” “worm,” “video”?). As they answered, participants sat inside the box, sat outside of it, or sat in a room sans box. People sitting outside the box answered more questions correctly than either of the other two groups (and the difference couldn’t be explained by claustrophobia or confusion, both of which were measured). Creativity seemed to be spurred by the acting out of a familiar figure of speech, the researchers said. (The cover story for the experiment was that was exploring the…
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Is this customization run a muck? You can order personalized M&M's by clicking the image above.
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