3.16.2008

Diversity, Science 2.0, Competencies, Millennials, & Six Degrees

March 16, 2008

Diversity: The Squint and the Wail - I.D.
I showed pictures of the gadgets to my left-leaning New York acquaintances of European descent. One friend gasped. "They couldn't have made this more offensive if they tried!" she said. Others erupted into cringing, nervous laughter.
Then I approached my left-leaning, first-generation Chinese-American friends, expecting the same indignation.
"I feel like punching them," Kathy said.
"Because they're derogatory?" I asked. "No, because they look like those inflatable toys that bounce back up when you hit them."

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? - Scientific American
A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have built up their knowledge about the world by "crowd-sourcing" the contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge through open debate.

Influencing Competency Management - CLO
Recent research from the Aberdeen Group showed that best-in-class performers are up to 86 percent more likely than "laggard" companies to know which skills and traits make top performers.

Millennials at the Gate - Workforce
"Some of them are the greatest generation," said Marian Salzman, an ad agency executive at J. Walter Thompson who talked to 60 Minutes in November and invoked the term used for the pre-boomers who fought World War II and held down the home front. "They're more hardworking. They have these tools to get things done. They are enormously clever and resourceful. [But] some of the others are absolutely incorrigible. It's their way or the highway."

Proof of six degrees of separation - c/net
The average path length, or degree of separation, among anonymized users probed was 6.6.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This research simply shows how we’re externally connected to each other. Soon, however, we will start discovering how internally connected we are, where we will see each other as living not in the bodies we see today, but in each other’s hearts.

Today, we lack the understanding of how the world becomes disclosed to us. For instance, our senses perceive something to the extent that this “something” is disclosed to them, and beforehand, it is as if this “something” had never existed. In other words, something we perceive is born in the same moment we discover it. Just take a look at the laws of nature we know about today: until we discovered them, it was as if they had never existed. Obviously, they had always existed, but we simply couldn’t perceive them: they existed in potential, instead of in action, with regard to us.

Baal HaSulam explains that the world is divided into a revealed and a concealed (secret) part. Therefore, the time we will discover the true connection among people (souls), we will know (with Mocha – mind) and feel (with Liba – heart), simultaneously, that everyone in the world is solely dependent on everyone else’s goodwill: People’s attitudes of love or hate will determine whether or not they will bring life or death upon others.