Human Behavior

Brown as Warning

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Looking back, I realize I didn’t begin with the positive, and I agree with Kennedy there appears to be plenty of positive: Brown, even under fire, remains honest, with a sense of humor and the apparent self-confidence and humility that comes with such humor, and he also appears, well, hot.

He’s helped though by a pent-up irritation: policies we thought unwise have deteriorated into policies we find foolish, the unseemly has slid into the mire of outright bribery, the short-sighted has so dominated that disaster lurks. On a not unrelated note, attitudes that rankled those of us in fly-over territory have become pervasive and bizarre. They are not the attitudes of those with a sense of humor nor apparent self-confidence, and, especially, without humility. (Arrogance is not self-confidence.)

Even citizens of a state that seemed to give pre-Revolutionary respect to family succession appear annoyed a candidate disses their sports heroes, shrinks from handshaking and winter politicking, and seems appalled by pick-ups. (Whatever Marie Antoinette actually said or actually meant, the inappropriateness of her response defined her – and beheaded her – even when such kingly rights were more widely accepted).

My husband’s uncle, far into retirement and deep into Texas, has proclaimed that he intends for the first time in years to “pull an all-nighter” – to see Brown triumph, he hopes. And, in the tradition of these parts, Ray Stevens disses Obamacare.

The Uncle of Science

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The King and the CrookHow do you make a tired and aging political system supple and flexible enough to adapt to a changing world? A recent Wired Magazine article offers this:

[M]ost scientific change isn’t abrupt and dramatic; revolutions are rare. Instead, the epiphanies of modern science tend to be subtle and obscure and often come from researchers safely ensconced on the inside. “These aren’t Einstein figures, working from the outside,” [Kevin] Dunbar says. “These are the guys with big NIH grants.”

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

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Kind of Spooky

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CNN:

James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

According to the article, there have been more than 1000 posts to a forum for people trying to cope from the depression they experienced after seeing this film..and not being able to stay within it permanantly.

(Via Neptunus Lex, who says: “Some folks don’t get the point. You have to come home when it’s over.)

When I saw this story, I immediately thought of the old Chinese opium dens…which were largely inhabited by people whose lives were so miserable that their desire to disappear in dreams was entirely understandable.

But what misery or bleakness are the would-be permanant habitués of the Avatar den seeking to escape?

Innovation of Institutional Cultures

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John Hagel is in a small category of thinkers who manage to routinely be thinking ahead of the curve ( he calls his blog, where he features longer but more infrequent posts than is typical, Edge Perspectives). I want to draw attention to the core conclusion of his latest:
Challenging Mindsets: From Reverse Innovation to Innovation Blowback

Innovation blowbackFive years ago, John Seely Brown and I wrote an article for the McKinsey Quarterly entitled “Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia.” In that article, we described a series of innovations emerging in Asia that were much more fundamental than isolated product or service innovations. We drew attention to a different form of innovation – institutional innovation. In arenas as diverse as motorcycles, apparel, turbine engines and consumer electronics, we detected a much more disruptive form of innovation.In these very diverse industries, we saw entrepreneurs re-thinking institutional arrangements across very large numbers of enterprises, offering all participants an opportunity to learn faster and innovate more effectively by working together. While Western companies were lured into various forms of financial leverage, these entrepreneurs were developing sophisticated approaches to capability leverage in scalable business networks that could generate not just one product innovation, but an accelerating stream of product and service innovations.

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Love and the Government

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Linguists define the pulls and pushes on our identity: Biology & nature (man is a symbol-making, language using animal), society & nurture (we speak the language that surrounds us), and, finally, our separate and individual selves. We express our own vision, our own interpretation of life in our unique sentences. The unique nature of our choices is what contemporary tests for plagiarism reset on – the series of words we choose from our flexible language are not likely to be repeated in another document on Google or Turnitin. But biology is important. I don’t come from demonstrative people. The family jokes that I avoid hugs, touching, commitment. But that isn’t because I don’t think part of love’s impetus and expression is physical. Instinctive, it is biology, defined by culture; of course, it is also expressed in the unique ways of our clan, of ourselves.

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