Bicycling
Knowledge Workers
- Evolution of the Knowledge Worker
“Do you believe that the Information/Knowledge Worker Age we’re moving into will outproduce the Industrial Age fifty times? I believe it will. We’re just barely beginning to see it…Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, puts it this way: ‘The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1000X but by 10,000X.’ Quality knowledge work is so valuable that unleashing its potential offers organizations an extraordinary opportunity for value creation.”
Stephen R. Covey, The 8th Habit
Spiritual Intelligence
I suggest that we can better understand our ancestors and their stories by trying to understand how they developed and used their 4 intelligences to accomplish their ends:
- Physical intelligence (PQ)
Our ability to maintain and develop our physical fitness. It corresponds to body. - Mental intelligence (IQ)
Our ability to analyze, reason, think abstractly, use language, visualize, and comprehend. It corresponds to mind. - Emotional intelligence (EQ)
Our self-knowledge, self-awareness, social sensitivity, empathy and ability to communicate successfully with others. It corresponds to heart. - Spiritual intelligence (SQ)
Our drive for meaning and connection with the infinite. It corresponds to spirit.
From Wikipedia
Zohar and Marshall introduced 12 qualities of SQ. They derive these principles from the qualities that define complex adaptive systems. In biology, complex adaptive systems are living systems that create order out of chaos, they create order and information and defy the law of entropy.[10]
Those principles are:
- Self-awareness: Knowing what I believe in and value, and what deeply motivates me
- Spontaneity: Living in and being responsive to the moment
- Being vision- and value-led: Acting from principles and deep beliefs, and living accordingly
- Holism: Seeing larger patterns, relationships, and connections; having a sense of belonging
- Compassion: Having the quality of “feeling-with” and deep empathy
- Celebration of diversity: Valuing other people for their differences, not despite them
- Field independence: Standing against the crowd and having one’s own convictions
- Humility: Having the sense of being a player in a larger drama, of one’s true place in the world
- Tendency to ask fundamental “Why?” questions: Needing to understand things and get to the bottom of them
- Ability to reframe: Standing back from a situation or problem and seeing the bigger picture; seeing problems in a wider context
- Positive use of adversity: Learning and growing from mistakes, setbacks, and suffering
- Sense of vocation: Feeling called upon to serve, to give something back
Sources
This page was copied from
http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/2007/05/19/developing-a-balanced-you-using-coveys-4-intelligences/
Emotional Intelligence
Think about the role of emotional intelligence as you read the diaries and letters of your ancestors. Feel free to comment or create your own posts to share letters, diary excerpts, or memories here which particularly illustrate how this strength helped our ancestors accomplish their goals.
Emotional intelligence
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) describes the ability, capacity, skill or, in the case of the trait EI model, a self-perceived grand ability to identify, assess, manage and control the emotions of one’s self, of others, and of groups.[1] Different models have been proposed for the definition of EI and disagreement exists as to how the term should be used.[2] Despite these disagreements, which are often highly technical, the ability EI and trait EI models (but not the mixed models) enjoy support in the literature and have successful applications in different domains.
The earliest roots of emotional intelligence can be traced to Darwin‘s work on the importance of emotional expression for survival and second adaptation.[3] In the 1900s, even though traditional definitions of intelligence emphasized cognitive aspects such as memory and problem-solving, several influential researchers in the intelligence field of study had begun to recognize the importance of the non-cognitive aspects. For instance, as early as 1920, E.L. Thorndike used the term social intelligence to describe the skill of understanding and managing other people.[4]
Similarly, in 1940 David Wechsler described the influence of non-intellective factors on intelligent behavior, and further argued that our models of intelligence would not be complete until we can adequately describe these factors.[3] In 1983, Howard Gardner‘s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences[5] introduced the idea of multiple intelligences which included both Interpersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people) and Intrapersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one’s feelings, fears and motivations). In Gardner’s view, traditional types of intelligence, such as IQ, fail to fully explain cognitive ability.[6] Thus, even though the names given to the concept varied, there was a common belief that traditional definitions of intelligence are lacking in ability to fully explain performance outcomes.
The first use of the term “emotional intelligence” is usually attributed to Wayne Payne’s doctoral thesis, A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence from 1985.[7] However, prior to this, the term “emotional intelligence” had appeared in Leuner (1966). Greenspan (1989) also put forward an EI model, followed by Salovey and Mayer (1990), and Goleman (1995). The distinction between trait emotional intelligence and ability emotional intelligence was introduced in 2000.[8]
As a result of the growing acknowledgement by professionals of the importance and relevance of emotions to work outcomes,[9] the research on the topic continued to gain momentum, but it wasn’t until the publication of Daniel Goleman‘s best seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ that the term became widely popularized.[10] Nancy Gibbs’ 1995 Time magazine article highlighted Goleman’s book and was the first in a string of mainstream media interest in EI.
Health Secret: Warrior Mentality
“…In the course of a long peace, the people relax into sloth and indolence…”-Manners of the Germanic Tribes by Cornelius Tacitus (end of 1st Century CE)
Perhaps the secret to health is recognizing the reciprocal duty and bonds between oneself and ones countrymen–and endeavoring to maintain the health reserves you could potentially need to pull your weight in an emergency.
Consider the lyrics of the Norwegian National Anthem:
“And, as warrior sires have made her
Wealth and fame increase,
At the call we too will aid her
Armed to guard her peace.”
–And the Norwegians take this seriously as evidenced by the popularity of the Biathlon. Here is a video that shows just how much of an athlete one must be to do well at this sport.
What’s their secret?
The ultimate purpose of genealogy is to promote an understanding of what it means to leave a healthy legacy so that we who live in the present may behave adaptively. We leave a healthy legacy when we are good stewards of our physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and material resources. Aside from our massive debt, the real elephant in the living room is the poor health of our people and it behooves us to include health as part of our blog discussion-in which anyone can comment. This organization would do a disservice to its community if it provided only one additional sedentary activity for individuals. But it does more than that–genealogy motivates us for an active lifestyle.
For history, like the archaic torso in Rilke’s famous poem, reminds us that we must change our lifestyle.
“Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;
und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Neue Gedichte 1908
My English translation of the above:
Else this stone would stand stillted and short under the shoulders’ insubstantial droop and fail to glisten like the fur of a carnivorous beast;
and would not brake through all constraints as a star, there is not a place [on this statue], that can’t see you. You must change your lifestyle.
Since our people have been uprooted from our ancestors’ vigorous lifestyle, they need to compensate, or else the sculptures they leave behind will forever stand stunted, covered, and ashamed. Sedentary Death Syndrome is destroying the quality and shortening the length of our people’s lives. All of our appetites were selected under conditions that were very different from those we have today. Our ancestors worked physically in the field all day, and came in to eat natural foods grown organically. They needed to be ever ready to defend their community. In contrast, we sit in a tractor, in a cubicle, at a bench, or in front of a TV and then we stop by MacDonalds/QuickTrip/Kum&Go for our MSG (excitotoxin) laden, trans-fat (cellular signal disrupting, cancer causing) ridden junk food that we wash down with diluted corn syrup or diluted artificial sweeteners.
And so, let’s change our lifestyle by asking the members of the community who manage to stay in the healthy range, what is your secret?
| Age | Underfat | Healthy Range | Overweight | Obese |
| 20-40 yrs | Under 8% | 8-19% | 19-25% | Over 25% |
| 41-60 yrs | Under 11% | 11-22% | 22-27% | Over 27% |
| 61-79 yrs | Under 13% | 13-25% | 25-30% | Over 30% |
Source: Gallagher et al. Am J Clin Nut 2000; 72:694-701
Seeking AV Digitization Equipment
Giants is currently working on setting up a media digitization station for members to digitize their VHS, Hi8, digital8, etc videos. We hope to preserve important video for our community and for local families on a large server that we hope to make accessible to our community for genealogical and historical purposes over the internet. Specifically, we need a VHS player with s-video, component, and RCA out or even better firewire or HDMI out (if they even make these). Secondly, we could use 2-3 flatscreen monitors and perhaps a computer that has firewire/1394 in and an Esata port. Finally, we could use a small business server with expandable/swappable hard drives that could hold many terabytes of info.
IT Blog
Giants of the Earth is excited by the power that computer technology brings for storing, editing, and sharing older community videos. While ancestry.com and geni.com provide a great framework for uploading your ancestral images, they currently do not have the storage space to upload all your high definition videos to.
Giants is seriously considering providing a digitization station for Giants of the Earth members at our Heritage Center. This might be one or two stations with a VHS VCR, and one in which people can attach their own video cameras in VCR mode, whether they be digital 8, hi8, or something else. Because demand is likely to be high for these stations, we may need to develop at first a policy in which those videos most related to the community have digitization preference. These include videos which have community events, interviews with senior citizens, trips to Norwegian family farms, important speeches and sermons, etc. In addition, pre-1995 videos that are community related are of particular importance. These are degrading quickly as the years pass and must be digitized to prevent them from degrading to the point of not being watchable.
We are currently deliberating how we might store the digitized data, and while we will certainly return the original tapes, whether or not we can initially afford to make a double density DVD copy of every video that gets brought in. Currently, Windows Movie Maker allows for very high resolution digitization, resulting in the use of 13 megabytes per hour of video. At that rate, one family that brings in 19 hours of videos could quickly fill up 1/2 TB of space (using RAID storage). Currently, the price of a terabyte of space if we went with an external hard drive is a little over $100. Thus, if we figured that we had about 40 families and that we would need to have additional space for edited projects for public Spring Grove movies that would be displayed at the Spring Grove Cinema, one could imagine that within two years we could fill up a server with expandable and hot swappable drives sufficient eventually to hold 40 TB of community videos. Alternative ideas would be to buy online storage space, but the limiting agent there is uploading, downloading, and editing, since even with a high speed connections, 13 GB per hour equals 3.6 MB/s–something that would use up much of the bandwidth for the center. Further, editing online would be limited to crawl rates unless we compressed and degraded the quality of the videos, which would be undesirable if we ever wanted to view them in higher definition.
In contrast to slow online storage, having a media uploading and editing station within the Giants of the Earth Heritage Center building would be lightning fast. If we had an external hard drive or server with eSata connection we would get 200MB/s interaction with the media and not use up any Internet bandwidth at all. We could make videos available over the Internet to families, but this would probably require a passwords for everyone, so we would have to look into IT software which would do the work for us while maintaining people’s privacy. A starting 7.5 TB server currently runs about $2200. I have included a link below to one that could possibly suit our needs and be hot swappable so that we could expand later as we needed more drives with minimal additional expenses or changes. If families wanted to buy their own swappable drives that they could take home with them for private storage, that might help defer the cost and provide people with a sense that they had more control over what they decided to share. Again, the fastest type of connection is eSATA, so getting hardware with this connection speeds things up a lot. Personally, I would imagine that many people’s videos would contain scenes of public importance interspersed with private videos that they might not want to share. Thus, the best way for us to collect these videos would be for residents to bring in pre-made digitized media on an external hard drive that contained only those clips (at the best resolution possible) that they wanted to share with our public. Alternatively, with a server, they might be able to edit their videos at home and upload them to the server space. This might require investment in the services of an IT professional or perhaps user friendly software that does the work for us.
Finally, feel free to comment on the risks associated with different types of storage during unforeseen disasters. For example, although RAID technology helps allay fears of drive failure cauusing a loss of data, do we need to back up everything additionally online in case there is a fire? Or do we need to physically remove a backup drive/drives from the building every night? What about lightning strikes to the building we are in or other power surges? What kind of surge protectors will we need? Also include more remote concerns and affix links to help people understand new potential threats such as electromagnetic pulse weapons, computer viruses, spam, etc.
Speaker April 27th!
Foreword from
The Hooked X: Key to the Secret History of North America
by Scott Wolter
who will be speaking Spring Grove on April 27, 2010-for details click here
or for a printable flyer, select one of the options below:
History needs to be rewritten.
The North American Continent is awash with evidence of pre-Columbian visitors who left their imprint on the landscape and their writing on stones and boulders as markers for those who followed. Ogham and Runic inscriptions tell a story of Celtic and Viking penetration into the very hinterland of the New World (North and South America).
These early seafarers must have felt very much at home as they found one watercourse leading into another with a never-ending string of lakes replete with fish and waterfowl to meet their inner needs. They had found a Paradise – a Garden of Eden – which was rich in wild grapes, blueberries and huckleberries, and which was so teeming with game that the word ‘wild’ seemed to be singularly inappropriate to describe animals who had still to learn to fear the sound of gun-shot.
What happened to bring an end to this idyllic scene? Historians have been singularly slow in finding an answer or, when they can’t explain the presence of runic inscriptions, they describe them as ‘fakes’ which, as will be seen, is a convenient excuse to hide their own ignorance. Fortunately, there are those who have been prepared to challenge such arbitrary findings so that we might have a better understanding of those who left their imprint on pre-Columbian America. One such man is Scott Wolter, whose new book The Hooked X: Key to the Secret History of North America, is a masterly combination of science and logic, as well as being a gripping detective story which leaves no stone unturned (literally as well as figuratively).
Scott’s book is guaranteed to make us take a fresh look at the rich evidence which lies beneath our feet and which, even when discovered, has been brutally pushed aside by the academic establishment for no better reason than to protect the ‘status quo’.
I have read Scott’s book. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for the perseverance and determination which he has shown in bringing an important part of America’s early history to light. In his book, he quotes an inscription which is to be found in the Sinclair family chapel at Rosslyn in Scotland. In ends with the words: “The truth conquers all”. There can be no better summary to describe Scott’s richly revealing and richly rewarding manuscript. It deserves to be read.
– Niven Sinclair
Niven Sinclair, born in Scotland in 1924, is chairman of the Friends of Rosslyn (the chapel featured in the film The Da Vinci Code), Founder of the Niven Sinclair Library and Study Centre at Noss Head, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (Scotland). Mr. Sinclair is a businessman, filmmaker, writer, broadcaster and has traveled throughout the world. He served as a Major in the Seaforth Highlanders and Kings African Rifles in Ethiopia and Burma during World War II. Prior to his work with the BBC, he farmed in Tanganyika for thirty years.
Presentation on Runestones
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 6:45 pm at Spring Grove Theatre (presentation begins at 7PM, but please come a little early). Doors open at 6PM for booksigning and questions.
please click here for more details
Scanning
Please, don’t throw away those old images in your attic. Even if you don’t know, right now, who they are, WE WILL HELP YOU IDENTIFY AND PRESERVE THEM, at some point.
Ideally, you have a scanner and you can scan the images and submit them to this site in the Blog. Alternatively, you can become a member of ancestry.com and preserve these photos on that site.
Eventually, we are working to create a physical place where you can bring your old images and scan them. We are hoping to have an individual there who will be of assistance to you in preserving and classifying those images which we hope to use in the creation of a Spring Grove Bygdebok, or book about our community and all the families and individuals who have ever been a part of our community.
“Genealogy for Beginners” class
“Genealogy for Beginners” class offered through Spring Grove Community Education
When: March 2, 9, 16, 23, 2010 6:00 – 7:30
Topics: March 2 – What does Giants of the Earth have to offer genealogists and non-genealogists?
March 9 – How do I add my family story to the Spring Grove Collaborative Database and to my family history?
March 16 – What other resources are out there and how can I take advantage of the subscribership sources as well was the free sources?
March 23 – What can i do now to further my search for my family history?
Fee: $5 for Giants of the Earth members $10 for nonmembers
Site: Spring Grove High School Computer labs located on the lowest floor of the high school on the south end of the building.
Spring Grove has been a starting point for Norwegian immigrants in America. Local genealogists have compiled a database of more than 30,000 names using Ancestry.com as a host. These records represent decades of research. Giants of the Earth is committed to providing help to genealogists of all skill levels. These sessions will teach how to use this database and well as how to contribute to the database. Our local writing guru Mary Deters will be available to assist those who wish to write their family stories on March 9th. Attendees will have time to explore various family trees from Ancestry.com as well as free genealogy resources on the net.
Questions about the class may be directed to Bill Fried at bfried@springgrove.coop or by calling 507 498-5611 after 5:00 pm.