Category: Education

Attraction

The difference that makes the difference!

As a follow-up to my last Post on Learning from Dogs “Managing in a mad world“, I got to thinking about the so called “Law of Attraction“.

I say that because I beginning to believe that this ‘Law’ is more about what we think about and focus our attention on than anything that has a tangible force of attraction. But it is well known that the brain (to protect our sanity!) filters out on a huge scale so this ‘attraction’ may be our minds remaining receptive or, as it were, allowing us to ‘resonate’ with others sharing our ideas and emotions.

Again, I notice this common ground between my psychotherapy clients and my business clients. Successful people tend to focus on the positive and usually have a strong belief in themselves and their abilities, and unsuccessful people who have suffered any sort of difficulty for an extended time, tend to be preoccupied with focussing on the negative and tend to have a negative self-view.

Naturally, we become orientated around our belief systems. This, I believe is where good, consistent parenting comes in because many of our beliefs are taken on from our parents. Even if the parenting style has been ‘tough’ as long as there’s consistency, balance is maintained and there is a solid reference point for the youngster to come away from.

Management styles resemble parenting styles, and why shouldn’t they, as the higher qualities of facilitating structured learning in a safe environment is exactly what good management is all about. Delegating is about empowering and confidence building. Parenting styles that are loose or have little or no structure or that are overbearing and dictatorial tend to be damaging.

Of course, there are no hard and fast rules here, just tendencies but it’s interesting how these are played out everywhere, in every situation where we are in relationship with others. Even more interesting in a recession where companies are really struggling!

How fascinating to clock the number of companies struggling badly who have an autocratic management style, where staff are told what to do and there is little empowerment, and then compare them to ones where the opposite is true and people are free to interact, communicate, feel they’re reasonably empowered and work together in an environment of mutual trust.

The correlation in this part of the South West UK where I mainly work is significant. It’s as if when we feel empowered and we’re working together with a group of like-minded people, all problems and challenges are solvable, because our self-belief is high and we visualise success. Also, adversity is seen as a challenge and one that can be mastered.

We certainly are living in interesting times!

By Jon Lavin

The Greenwich Meridian

Don’t know what time it is? Hardly surprising in Spring and Autumn.

Today is exactly one month before the United Kingdom ‘moves’ its clocks forward and enters British Summer Time; 1am (UTC) on Sunday 28th March 2010. Is that date the same across the world? One would think so because it makes life, especially international air transport, so much easier.

But no! In fact the way that time zones are applied and changed for Daylight Saving is a complete hotch-potch.

In the United States of America, daylight saving starts at 2am on March 14th, 2010. And just three years ago that start time would have been the first Sunday in April. Changes were made in the US Energy Policy Act of 2005.

From this geographic site comes the following:

Other parts of the world observe Daylight Saving Time as well. While European nations have been taking advantage of the time change for decades, in 1996 the European Union (EU) standardized an EU-wide “summertime period.” The EU version of Daylight Saving Time runs from the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October. During the summer, Russia’s clocks are two hours ahead of standard time. During the winter, all 11 of the Russian time zones are an hour ahead of standard time. During the summer months, Russian clocks are advanced another hour ahead. With their high latitude, the two hours of Daylight Saving Time really helps to save daylight. In the southern hemisphere where summer comes in December, Daylight Saving Time is observed from October to March. Equatorial and tropical countries (lower latitudes) don’t observe Daylight Saving Time since the daylight hours are similar during every season, so there’s no advantage to moving clocks forward during the summer.

Of course, someone had to create a web-site to track all these various time zones and changes. Here it is.

Last year, the BBC News website published an interesting article about the Greenwich Meridian aka The Prime Meridian. The setting of the Prime Meridian was done just over 125 years ago, in October 1884. When one thinks of the importance in having a standard meridian, both for time keeping and navigation, I would have guessed that it went back much further in time.

The other aspect that was news to me was that the conference had been convened at the request of the American President Chester Arthur.

From that BBC article:

Until the 19th Century, many countries and even individual towns kept their own local time based on the sun’s passage across the sky and there were no international rules governing when the day would start or finish.

Maps with multiple meridians were confusing

Enlarge Image

However, with the rapid expansion of the railways and communications networks during the 1850s and 1860s, setting a standard global time soon became essential.

“The world was in a very big mix-up,” explains Dr Avraham Ariel, author of Plotting the Globe. “People had lots of prime meridians. Earlier in Europe there were 20 prime meridians. The Russians had two or three, the Spanish had their own and so on.”

Thus that famous line in the grounds of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London is not as old as many might have thought.

By Paul Handover

Now this IS smart!

A very good idea from the Canadians

Read this quote:

“Time and again we see behaviour by people – we are talking highly educated, high income people – who are making less than ideal financial decisions for themselves and their families,” said one source. “Other countries that have developed a strategy have focused on education in high schools. This task force has come to the early conclusion that, while enhanced financial education is vital over the long term, it is insufficient.”

The first sentence is so important, to my mind, that it is worth repeating, “Time and again we see behaviour by people – we are talking highly educated, high income people – who are making less than ideal financial decisions for themselves and their families,”

This comes from a piece published by the Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, about a Canadian taskforce that is

donald_stewart — Group will be headed by Sun Life's Don Stewart

looking into ways of making Canadians “more savvy” about their personal finances.

The financial industry is very adept at producing complex financial products that are almost beyond the limits of the understanding of good common people. We, the people, need to be much smarter and that’s why this initiative from the Canadians seems, on the surface, to be such an excellent idea.

By Paul Handover

Managing in a mad world.

Even in the midst of great pain, we must think through our choices

The last week has been really mad. I have been working in different companies and organisations and having to be part of redundancies, power struggles and people rebuilding their lives.

For example, I was in a company that had just let its second lot of people go in as many months. It’s gone past losing ‘dead wood’ and now people with valuable skills needed for recovery are going. I’ve noticed previously that good, employable people with key skills start to get concerned and will often take voluntary redundancy rather than hanging around to see how things pan out.

It’s the shocking way that it’s done as well that’s unbelievable. No warning, just a phone call to attend a meeting, no hint as to what the meeting is about, then an envelope slid across the table and then a rapid escort off site. All done and dusted in 5 minutes.

Having been through this myself some years ago, it’s not something you forget in a hurry. Lots of feelings of rejection and feeling unvalued and unwanted are what I remember. Perhaps its part of being bought up in a job-for-life culture and then having that illusion shattered.

Working with people in this situation is literally quite shocking and traumatic because it clearly affects them and their lives and the lives of their families, and it affects me because the work we started comes to an abrupt end usually with little or no warning, and so does a source of income to be brutally honest. I don’t even have chance to say good-bye in many cases.

Every Thursday I become a trainee psychotherapist and work with people who mostly struggle to hold down any sort of job. The reasons for this are generally because of upbringings that are awful beyond description. The shock and trauma that is in the air when working with these people is amazing, and so scary for them that the idea of being present in the room with me and is virtually impossible.

So that brings us to managing in a world where lots of mad and non-integrous things happen. I believe that mindfulness can provide a key to these situations; being present for another does more than any instruction manual!

Being present means we make ourselves available at many levels to someone who is suffering. By avoiding the subtle invitation to join someone in their shock and trauma but by being there for them, to the best of our ability and listening to them at depth, we can provide an environment where real reflection can take place. Then options may be chosen which are not born of panic and reaction but come from reflection and response.

I believe that this approach gets us out of the ‘noise machine in our heads‘ (that is forever churning and worrying, in my case) that we have no control over, and creates space for more subtle things to come through the quiet and calm.

Most people I’ve met in my engineering work like to assume that they think their way out of tight situations but I’m not convinced that this process is actually effective. I have heard and practised many times the activity of ‘sleeping on something’ and then being able to decide on a course of action the following morning with relative ease. My psychotherapy clients can’t think their way out the awfulness because thinking about things has got them into a spiral

process which is highly addictive, predictable and virtually impossible to break without the intervention of a higher level of awareness. I think it was Einstein who said something like, “you can’t use the same intelligence that created a problem to solve it“! In other words, a different approach or level must be used.

I believe that this different approach or level can be used to solve most problems we have. By bringing a different level of awareness to a challenge, whether it is redundancy or some other sort of deeper problem always gives different results and provides more options. It’s just that initially it needs to be facilitated, until we can do it under our own steam. I am heartened that even in the depths of a recession that there are still companies out there that support this approach and the work I do.

By Jon Lavin [This article from the BBC is worth reading in conjunction with Jon’s excellent Post. Jon may be contacted via learningfromdogs (at) gmail (dot) com]

Old age!

A piece of Internet fiction still carries an important message

One of the features of the Internet is that stories can circulate widely across the globe. This poem is one such example. The ‘story’ behind the poem would appear to be fiction but so what! It serves as a good reminder of something that affects us all (except those tragically cut off before they grow old!).

But before getting the poem, the reason that it was decided to publish the Post is that old age, whatever that really means, is a much bigger issue for societies than many care to acknowledge. Because, I guess, the ‘many’ tend not to be old, or let us say, the right side of 60.

And look how even the terminology is so biased towards youth. Why should it be the ‘right’ side of 60? What is ‘wrong’ with being older than 60, or 70 or whatever age?

Of course, in so many ways nature’s purpose is for us to breed the next generation to continue our gene pool and once we have achieved that then our ‘natural’ use is limited. But that is to ignore the value of wisdom, the huge advantage the next generation has in being able to tap into the experience and knowledge of the ‘ancients’.

Here’s an interesting piece from Aging and the Elderly by Hampton Roy MD and Charles Russell PhD

Wisdom has been attributed to older people in nearly all world societies from ancient times, but modern research on the psychology of aging has paid little attention to this quality of the late years

………………..
A number of researchers, however, have assessed the psychology of aging quite differently. Instead of measuring decline, their aim has been to measure the unique and special characteristics of mind possessed by older people.

………………….

These researchers might typically define wisdom as Kenyon did when he described it as “the ability to exercise good judgement about important but uncertain matters of life” -where “uncertain matters” refers to problems that may not have come up before, or to which there are competing or conflicting solutions, and so forth. These researchers describe the old as having “self-creating” powers because they seem to be more independent in their decisions, and less subject to external influences like the fads and trends that sweep over the young.
They propose also that the old are better able to live with contradictions in life and that they quickly see the essentials of situations because of their greater experience. Wisdom, they observe, includes the intent to do good, which in turn depends on holding favorable attitudes toward other people.

Then again, popular culture defines the ancient American Indian warrior as many things but old and decrepit doesn’t figure in that list!

So here’s that poem – may you live to a great age!

Read the rest of this Post

Collecting bridges!

Maybe not the strangest thing to collect, but close!

I doubt if very many people have heard of an American by the name of Eric Sakowski and, to be honest, neither had I until I opened a copy of The Arizona Republic newspaper on a recent visit to Payson, Az. There on the front page was an article about Eric and his passion for bridges! Yes, bridges. As the article starts:

Eric Sakowski’s fixation with bridges began as it has for many.

As a kid, he bought the “Guinness Book of World Records” every year and read it cover to cover. He began to ponder: What is the world’s second-highest bridge? Or the 100th.

In 2004, Sakowski took his interest to the next level. He embarked on a five-year quest that would take him halfway around the world three times and cost him thousands of dollars. He became an amateur sleuth, digging out what he says are the real heights of mammoth bridges and snapping pictures.

Sakowski’s endeavor culminated last month in a tidy room of his parents’ home in Sun City West, where at age 44, he completed his project by launching a Web site, highestbridges.com, that catalogs the 500-highest bridges in the world. His findings challenge some long-held claims.

In fact, the website is really quite interesting and some of the photos are stunning. Here’s one of the Hegigio Gorge Pipeline Bridge in Papua New Guinea.

EGorgeBridge — Hegigio Gorge Pipeline Bridge

It’s 1,289 feet high (393 m) and until 2009 was the world’s highest bridge.

Sakowski has also found some interesting errors in the statistics concerning some bridges.

Using a laser range-finder, he has measured about 100 bridges in the U.S. and about a dozen in China. He found some interesting discrepancies. For example, he determined that the highest bridge in the United States, the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, is 98 feet lower than officially reported. In western China, he said, he first identified the latest bridge to become the world’s highest. He is trying to get “Guinness World Records” to publish the claim next year.

Eric is a professional film-maker but I sense that the day may not be too far off when someone is going to make a film about Eric the Bridge Man!

By Paul Handover

Free speech!

Hats off to some intrepid commentators

We are going through unprecedented troubled times and the way ahead looks very uncertain. The whole world could be participating in the ‘lost decade’ that Japan experienced previously.

But this article is not about doom and gloom! It is about recognising the commitment to open and honest reporting being undertaken by (at least) these three individuals. Three commentators that this author follows in admiration and awe.

Learning from Dogs has nothing like the following of James Kwak, Yves Smith and Karl Denninger but the LfD authors do have an inkling of the work involved in writing not one but often several articles each day. It is a huge commitment.

First James Kwak of Baseline Scenario. Simon Johnson is, perhaps, the more well-known of this duo that comprise Baseline Scenario but it is James that puts in the leg-work. Here’s a taste of a recent article from James:

Radio Stories

I spend a lot of time in the car driving to and from school, so I end up listening to a lot of podcasts (mainly This American Life, Radio Lab, Fresh Air, and Planet Money). I was catching up recently and wanted to point out a few highlights.
Last week on Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Scott Patterson, author of The Quants, and Ed Thorp, mathematician, inventor of blackjack card counting (or, at least, the first person to publish his methods), and, according to the book, also the inventor of the market-neutral hedge fund.

Large chunk snipped ……

I finally got around to listening to Planet Money’s interview with Russ Roberts from December. Russ Roberts and I are pretty sure to disagree on almost any actual policy question. But what I liked about his interview was that he basically admitted that policy questions cannot be settled by looking at the empirical studies. On whether the minimum wage increases or decreases employment for example, he says that he can poke holes in the studies whose conclusions he doesn’t agree with, but other people can poke holes in the studies he agrees with. In Roberts’s view, people’s policy positions are determined by their prior normative commitments.

I don’t completely agree. I don’t think that these questions, like the one about the minimum wage, are inherently unanswerable in the sense that the answer does not exist. But I agree that empirical studies are unlikely to get to the truth, particularly on a politically charged question, because there are so many ways to fudge an empirical study. As one of my professors said, there are a million ways you can screw up a study, and only one way to do it right. But I agree with the general sentiment. We are living in an age of numbers, where people think that statistics can answer any question. Statistics can answer any question, but they can answer it in multiple ways depending on who is sitting at the keyboard.

By James Kwak

Read about Yves Smith & Karl Denninger

How Earth Made Us …

... and the way we treat it!

Once again the British Broadcasting Company, BBC, has put together a spectacular television production; the epic story of how geology, geography and climate have influenced mankind. It is remarkable and fabulous viewing as you can sample in these opening minutes from the first episode on Deep Earth.

The four programmes, Deep Earth; Water; Wind; Fire, are testament to both the incredible symbiosis between mankind and the elements and how that relationship is critically balanced in a way that allows us to survive. Some of the images are truly outstanding, for example, the section on Prof. Iain Stewart exploring the Naica Cave system in Mexico.

This theme of the balance of geological circumstances that allows, just, mankind to survive comes across time and time again in these films. For example, our relationship with fresh water which we all take completely for granted.

Have any of us really pondered how long we would survive if there was insufficient clean, safe drinking water to go around?

The programmes also reveal something of the technological prowess that mankind has achieved to allow the way these films have been produced.

So why, oh why, are we also such a stupid, stupid species – so stupid that we foul our own nest to an incredible degree.

Continue reading “How Earth Made Us …” →

Are you really sure about your cell phone?

Society may be cooking up one hell of an issue.

Like most people if most western nations, for many years I had a cell phone, or a mobile phone as they are known in the UK.

I can recall a few years ago there being a scare in the UK about the microwave radiation hazard involved in using a cell phone but it certainly passed me by in terms of not really worrying about it.

Now a recent report in GQ Magazine seems to be gathering some momentum: once again, it’s about how your cell phone may be hazardous to your health. It would be too easy just to dismiss this as just another poke at a very successful technology but something about this article caused me to write this Post – make of it what you will.

Here’s an extract:

Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”

Continue reading “Are you really sure about your cell phone?” →

Organic milk in the USA

The unacceptable face of the big agricultural businesses

Another wonderful link from Naked Capitalism. This one refers to the way that the definition of ‘organic’ as in organic milk is being twisted and distorted to favour the huge indoor milking herds, up to 10,000 cattle, that in any sensible mind could never be regarded as the organic production of milk.

This to me is a picture of organic production of milk:

This to me is NOT! Yet the milk from these cows is defined as organic!

This last picture is courtesy of The Cornucopia Institute, another web site worth a visit whether or not you take an interest in farming – after all, one presumes that you do eat!

The article is on the Politics of the Plate website, worth your visit whether or not you are an American, and is, to me, so important that I am taking the liberty of publishing the article in full.
Here it is:
Read this very important article

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