changing minds

An interesting list of words - all beginning with "re-" and involved in changing minds as explained in a book by Howard Gardner:

* research

* resistances

* representations

* resonance

Furthermore an interview with Howard Gardner about education: edge.org

They're questions which kids ask all the time: who am I, where do I come from, what's this made out of, what's going to happen to me, why do people fight, why do they hate? Is there a higher power?
These are also the questions that historically have been looked at in religion, philosophy, science. While it's great for people to ask these questions on their own, and to make use of their own experience, it's crazy for people not to take advantage of the other attempts to answer those questions over the millennia.
And the disciplines represent to me the most concerted efforts to provide answers to those questions. History tells us where we come from. Biology talks about what it means to be alive. Physics talks about the world of objects, alive or not.
...
there's a joke in my field which is ÷ in elementary school we love the kids, in high school we love the disciplines, in college we love ourselves. I don't think disciplines ought to be loved for their own sake; they ought to be seen as the best way to answer questions that human beings are interested in. Therefore I see the purpose of education as helping people understand the best answers that cultures and societies have come up with to basic questions, what I would call essential questions. So at the end we can form our own personal answers to those questions, which will be based to a significant extent on how other people have approached them, and will at the same time allow us to make our own syntheses.

data mining

Prof. Higgs, inventor of the particle concept that might raise gravity, explains in an interview in the new scientist that the particle might have been found already with Fermilab or the former cyclotron at CERN, but the main difficulty is and will be the data mining problem. Searching traces in a lot of data is always a challenge as the Google business models succesfully shows. Equally, finding the effect of genes on a phenotype, or the effect of signals in the brain is a domain where better data mining techniques might be needed.

mindset

As hint from an interview in "The New Scientist" I am reading a great book on Mindsets by Stanford psychologist C. Dweck. The book explains how we can have two forms of mindsets: a static mindset and a growing mindset. The static mindset deals with difficulties and frustrations by avoiding them, whereas the growing mindset sees difficulties as challenges and chances for development and growth. The book mainly deals with achievements of kids, but also with other personalities from sports, science and business, and It's great to learn how effort was rewarded in many paths of lifes.

culture-change and software

an interesting blogpost on what makes a company succeed in business:

Our culture shifts its relationship to technology.

Google allows to access information easy... semantic networks might provide the next steps to provide better acces to information.