Natalie Angier reports from the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco, including this insight into how smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled: “With a phone number, if you get a new one, a week later you may have forgotten the old one,” Dr. Herz said. “With smells, it’s the other way around. The first association is better than the second.”
At some point in your surfing escapades you begin to grasp that the profound impact of the internet on learning is not its vast stores of content, but its ability to support the various facets of social learning. You begin to appreciate that knowledge is not just a lump of something that is passed on via various pedagogical tactics, and your attention begins to shift from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interventions around which that content is situated. John Seely Brown identifies this as a shift from “learning about” to “learning to be.” And “learning to be” calls for interpersonal skills not easily acquired by textbook learning. It’s in this context I found myself reading back issues of In Character, which examines virtues within our communities our families and ourselves. The current issue delves into compassion; this observation from Howard Behar who emphasizes compassion as a vital component of acquiring personal leadership skills caught my attention:
People are not assets. Caring isn’t just about admiring the charismatic leaders, the people that everybody likes, or the in crowd. This is the big caring we do that shows we “care, like we really mean it.” It’s about words and actions that everybody sees and recognizes. There’s an old adage that says, “People don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.”
Victor Newman on the futility of everyone sharing everything in an organization: The first problem is the implicit economic paradigm people apply to ideas and knowledge: if everything is shared, it will be perceived to have little or no value. Second, you can spend as much time interpreting shared things of low value as high. Third, people will only share with those whom they respect and from whom they can expect a return or who share the same problem of preserving or reinventing identity. These people don’t always work in the same organization. And fourth, not everyone is either pre-disposed or equipped to create (leave alone share) knowledge.
“Pity the readers,” advises Kurt Vonnegut, whom he calls “imperfect artists,” struggling to master the difficult task of making sense of thousands of scribbles on the page. This is my favourite bit advice from Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to Write With Style” (originally published in Palm Sunday, 1981) that remains relevant in the networked age: “Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales. This is the bad news.” The good news? We can write about whatever we please.
Marketing research involving making choices reveals the brain as a muscle: when depleted it comes less effective. Making choices exhausts what is known as executive resources, and “downstream” decisions are affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Not only does this explain why I always pick plain yogurt in the refrigerator isle, but suggests that if we’ve just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we’ve just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn’t try to make a major decision.
Is the web narrowing scientists’ expertise? Sociologist James Evans’ work identifies that as more journals become available online, dramatically fewer articles are being cited in the research papers within them. “Rather than measuring the length of the tail, it seems that modern science is actually focusing on a tiny bit of it.” The reasons for this phenomenon are unclear, but he does suggest that online databases make it less likely now than in the past for researchers to integrate serendipitous gems of discoveries into their research. Perhaps proving the old adage that, an “expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing.”
Advertising deconstructed: Stock photography suppliers must be able to guess which abstract concepts clients want to illustrate, and then have photos and video on hand that resonates. So,what can we glean from the ubiquitous “Everywhere Girl” and mid-ocean oil rig in a storm?
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