Here's one below:
Then you could discuss the real difference between communism and capitalism. Built in inequality. As Ed points out 25% of the American capital is frozen in the upper 1% of the nation. 1% who float in their own culture through many countries at various times of the year like butterflies with no loyalty anywhere but to their own kind. They have frozen the tax structure in America and regulation through their support of the GOP and the underlying structure of the Alice in Wonderland tea party. They pollute the ideals of the Democratic Party with bribes when Democrats are in power but they are Republican and Aristocratic status culture folks in essence. Their loyalty is only to their own narrow interests. They are subverting whole governments to sell gene modified food that will enslave traditional peoples farms. My old teacher Dorothy Uris went to Russia to give lectures in vocal diction many years ago. When she came back she said to me: "Ray I got the difference between them and us. They are trying to do their culture without rich people." Of course once we broke the Soviet System down, rich Russians and the Russian mafia came on like a plague. They are now feeding on the structure that once gave equal education to every child no matter where they were born. Keith says strata is built in. That is very English as we Americans who know our history are aware. Those are the Americans that did not support England in the Falklands. We supported the Monroe Doctrine. I say strata, in reality, is competence based and that neo-classic economics creates false stratas that may initially be competence based, if not just dumb luck, but by the second and third generations have decayed and become nothing more that speculative parasites on the structure. Even Warren Buffet speaks of it. "What are my children going to be?" All he sees are people who are simply motivated to consume and spend with no creativity, like the aristocracy of England. America was an answer to that but the wealthy have torn that to shreds. REH http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100930143339.htm Collective Intelligence: Number of Women in Group Linked to Effectiveness in Solving Difficult Problems ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2010) - When it comes to intelligence, the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts. A new study co-authored by MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Union College researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups' individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group. Many social scientists have long contended that the ability of individuals to fare well on diverse cognitive tasks demonstrates the existence of a measurable level of intelligence in each person. In a study published Sept. 30, in the advance online issue of the journal Science, the researchers applied a similar principle to small teams of people. They discovered that groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments, a finding with potential applications for businesses and other organizations. "We set out to test the hypothesis that groups, like individuals, have a consistent ability to perform across different kinds of tasks," says Anita Williams Woolley, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "Our hypothesis was confirmed," continues Thomas W. Malone, a co-author and Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "We found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group's performance in many situations." That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of "social sensitivity" were more collectively intelligent. "Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other's emotions," says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York. "Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed," adds Woolley. And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women. To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers conducted studies at MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence and Carnegie Mellon, in which 699 people were placed in groups of two to five. The groups worked together on tasks that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments. The researchers concluded that a group's collective intelligence accounted for about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks. Moreover, the researchers found that the performance of groups was not primarily due to the individual abilities of the group's members. For instance, the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall. Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. "We didn't design this study to focus on the gender effect," Malone says. "That was a surprise to us." However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average. "So having group members with higher social sensitivity is better regardless of whether they are male or female," Woolley explains. Malone believes the study applies to many kinds of organizations. "Imagine if you could give a one-hour test to a top management team or a product development team that would allow you to predict how flexibly that group of people would respond to a wide range of problems that might arise," he says. "That would be a pretty interesting application. We also think it's possible to improve the intelligence of a group by changing the members of a group, teaching them better ways of interacting or giving them better electronic collaboration tools." Woolley and Malone say they and their co-authors "definitely intend to continue research on this topic," including studies on the ways groups interact online, and they are "considering further studies on the gender question." Still, they believe their research has already identified a general principle indicating how the whole adds up to something more than the sum of its parts. As Woolley explains, "It really calls into question our whole notion of what intelligence is. What individuals can do all by themselves is becoming less important; what matters more is what they can do with others and by using technology." "Having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn't necessarily make the group smart," concludes Malone. In addition to Woolley, Malone and Chabris, the other co-authors were Alexander Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts & Science at the MIT Media Lab; and Nada Hashmi, a doctoral candidate at MIT Sloan. Story Source: The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by <http://www.mit.edu/> Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 8:39 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; 'Keith Hudson' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture Keeping with the discussion underway I guess I would ask: What is the question to which we don't have an answer? arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 2:02 AM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture The only status is whether you can do the job or not. Everything else is just faking it. Competence. Nothing is complex if you know how to do it. What you are all describing is an inability to come up with an answer and so you are blaming history, nature, the world, etc. Fess up. You don't know the answer. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 1:27 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture At 14:15 03/10/2010 -0700, Sandwichman wrote (in a civilized and non-abusive way): On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 4:51 AM, Christoph Reuss <[email protected]> wrote: > > Do you really believe that 21st-century Future of work can be determined > by a 1843 Predator (i.e. a technical illiterate)? You must be kidding. > > Chris The lad doth protest too much, methinks. I'm reminded of the 'family values' Republicans who time and again get caught with their pants down on the wrong side of town. Or the law and order zealots taking kick-backs from mobsters. As a shorter work time advocate even I must confess to the hypocrisy of burning the midnight oil for the cause of leisure. But this one-note refrain of "predator" leaves me especially unconvinced. For starters there's the black and white dichotomy of predators and prey. No colors. No shades of gray. Dichotomy is the cradle for delusion. Precisely. And I would gently suggest to one or two FW subscribers who find it hard to accept, that human society is instinctively predisposed to a multitude of status levels, each generally deferring to the one above, and each generally "predating", as it were, on the next one lower down. And predation occurs in many guises, physical, financial -- even verbal. Keith -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
