Have you ever seen the TV show "Naked and Afraid"? A man and a woman go (naked) into the wild with no food or tools and have to survive for 3 weeks. If they make the full 3 weeks it they usually come back emaciated. Guess what? That’s the norm for mammals, humans included. When you live in natural state, you don’t get 3 meals a day. Maybe 3 meals a month is more like it, and then if you’re lucky. Those are the conditions for which mammalian bodies were designed. To live without food for long periods and then maybe once in a while gorge on something if you are lucky enough to find it. In other words, the human body was designed for sporadic eating and drinking. It’s very good at that. It’s terrible at getting fed regularly because it just was never designed for that. If you are eating 3 meals a day, doing a lot of snacking to boot, then things get really ugly. As we are seeing now with the global epidemic of obesity. The current fashionable remedies for obesity are diet and exercise. But the diet part still assumes you eat 3 meals a day. I think the problem is less the amount of calories you take in, and more so how regularly you do it. In other words I think that regularity rather than just calorie count is the real culprit. Not that calories aren’t a problem either. There’s a mountain of evidence now that shows conclusively that calorific reduction extends lifespan and leads to better health outcomes. This can even be seen at the molecular level where we now know that the more calories you take in, the shorter are your telomeres (OK look here) which are a powerful indicator of remaining longevity. But the 3 meals a day problem is a difficult one to get rid of. Moms everywhere insist that you have breakfast because their reptilian brains know as only a mom can know that in the coming days you are certain to experience a famine and won’t survive it. If you have breakfast that insulates you from this extremely common occurrence. If your mom has the slightest inkling that these repeated breakfasts will make you obese or overweight, no matter, damn the torpedoes. There’s several million years of evolution backing her up and she’s not about to dump this certainty now in favor of some new-fangled theory that says you shouldn’t eat 3 - or more - meals   day. I’m a runner and I usually run every day. I rarely have breakfast and I will never run a long run, like a half-marathon, after having breakfast. That’s because it saps my energy. I would like to think I'm abnormal, but, sad to say, I definitely am not. We also have another snippet of knowledge doing the rounds. That is, that when you eat food regularly, especially if it’s rich or sugary food, it makes you want to eat more. The idea that much of modern eating is a symptom of addictive behavior is now well-established. Eating 3 meals a day aids and abets global food addictions; basically giving alcohol to an alcoholic. But we have a modern food industry and modern supply chains that are themselves addicted to the business of supplying 3 or more meals a day to people. In fact, these industries see it as their bounden duty to keep us eating essentially continuously. That’s why we now have things like protein bars and frappuccino that are meant to allow us to graze continuously no matter what activity we happen to be engaged in at that particular time. It certainly isn’t in the interest of food vendors, supermarkets, restaurants, fast food joints and the like to tell you that eating their food several times a day is actually regularly poisoning yourself. No-one wants you to realize that regular food is a toxin that your body wasn’t designed to tolerate. And so is going to lead to disease and a shorter life. Food in limited quantities is food. In quantities of 3 meals a day or more it’s essentially a toxin. The body treats it as such. That’s why it revolts against the excess by going into obesity, shutting down essential organs and processes and giving you diabetes. That’s why diabetes type 2 is still increasing rapidly in every country of the world. What our bodies worldwide are telling us is not that we are just eating too many calories, but that we are eating way too many meals and that is overloading all of our mammalian physiological processes. The world is very slowly waking up to this gargantuan problem. People are starting to realize that fasting is useful, although it’s still not the complete answer. You might have heard of the 5/2 diet; that’s where you eat normally for 5 days and have minimal calories for the remaining 2 days a week. It’s a step in the right direction but here’s my tip. If you want to do it properly and enjoy fantastic health and a great figure, you should go on a 2/5 diet (invented by yours truly) that is 5 days a week with minimum calories (300-500 calories a day depending on your size and age) and for 2 days a week you can eat "normally", that is, be a glutton. The side benefit is that you will assuredly become a millionaire. Something to console you for an annoying gain in health and fitness and the loss of all that deliciously toxic "food". It could be worse. Like going on "Naked and Afraid".Read More

I guess you’ve all been reading about MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. It’s hit South Korea and we don’t know where it will go next. It’s not an epidemic though. For the media that’s kind of a pity, they all love to talk about an impending epidemic, preferably a pandemic. Of course, there’s not too many of those. Or are there? The Economist just ran an article on mental illness last week. Seems like, if you include things like depression and ADHD, it affects 20% or so of the population. That’s a lot. Just to put that into perspective, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that in 2014, around 10% of the US population had diabetes. Diabetes is the gold standard for measuring the scale of an epidemic. On that scale, mental illness is twice the size. That sounds like a pandemic to me. So why aren’t the literati and the policy wonks cottoning on to that? The amazing thing is that for all our modern technology and all the sophisticated medical research that is being done, we still have little or no idea as to how mental illness is caused. We’ve moved on from the idea that it’s self-inflicted or purely genetic. But other than that we are none the wiser. There are some intriguing findings that the cause of some diseases like schizophrenia could be bacterial (as in chlamydia) or viral and that OCD could be caused by other bacteria. This has led to some speculation that mental disease could be infectious. The increasing evidence of the importance of the microbiome is leading some to think that gut bacteria are one cause. There is evidence as to links with parasites, especially those carried by cats which are responsible for toxoplasmosis and mental disease. Antibiotics have also been implicated, both as a direct cause and through their impact on the microbiome. In other words, we don’t have a clue. At present the state of the art is to treat the symptoms, mostly with drugs. They can certainly help but they rarely cure. One widely misunderstood treatment is ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) which is surprisingly effective, but we have no reason why, and it’s only useful sometimes. Behavioral cognitive therapy) BCT, aka talking, is also sometimes effective but it’s no use with most psychoses and we don’t even understand how it works either. Mental illness has enormous social impacts. A huge proportion of all inmates in the "corrections" systems are estimated to be suffering from mental illness. A US Department of Justice report in 2005 estimated that 56% of State prisoners, 45% of Federal prisoners and 64% of jail inmates had a mental health problem. A similarly high proportion of police arrests are for people with mental health problems. It’s now becoming tragically clear that a disproportionate number of mass shootings are committed by people with mental health problems. And we also know that a high proportion of the homeless, together with the (mostly but not always) petty crime that is associated with this, have mental illness of some kind. And that doesn’t even include the many people amongst us who also suffer from mental illnesses that are not visible to others, except when they break out. These illnesses include attempted suicide, depression, and pathological behaviors such as OCD and bipolar disease. Many of these are subclinical for much of the time but can suddenly become alarmingly clinical. There are many problems in families, which might appear to be caused by poverty, that are actually caused by mental disease of a family member. And it’s not just at home. The invisible millions who suffer from mental illness mostly go to work. So many of the problems we see in organizations might not be due to sloth, incompetence (although some most assuredly are) but to mental health issues. How about the German pilot of the plane that crashed into the side of a mountain in the Alps not so long ago? How many other work "crashes" happen without us knowing the true cause? What about vehicular suicide? Given the pandemic nature of mental illness, why isn’t it being given the attention it most assuredly deserves? Well by its very nature, it’s invisible. There aren’t any lesions, tumors, obvious physical manifestations, no visible scars. And it’s still stigmatized, albeit things are improving. But most people still don’t want to talk about it, whether it’s concerning themselves or a relative or loved one. It can cause problems with employment and there are knotty legal issues. But mostly it’s just not fashionable. HIV got its start because just at that time being homosexual had become part of the avant-garde counterculture. Ironically when homosexuality was considered a mental illness, mental health as a social cause might have received more attention. But now that LBGT lifestyles are becoming part of the mainstream, that aspect isn’t going to help either. Obamacare requires parity in health insurance between physical and behavioral health needs. But that side of ObamaCare just isn’t working out as it was supposed to. So mental health is still an orphan in the health systems of the US. Mental illness simply hasn’t become a cause celebre. It doesn’t have the raw public relations firepower of HIV, Ebola, Alzheimer’s or even MERS. So it isn’t getting the political support, and therefore the funding that comes from being one of the fashionable medical causes. When will the world actually see the pandemic that is going on right in front of its face?                    Read More

You’ve probably heard about Obama’s big brain project, the BRAIN Initiative? Also the European Union Human Brain project? You might be tempted to think that these are just one last big push to figure out exactly how the brain really works. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reigning theory is that our brain works something like a computer; with electrical signals making neurons fire. In this telling our brain is just like a von Neumann machine. Sure there are brain chemicals up there that doing something but we have no idea exactly how these two systems, electrical and chemical relate. We now know that there are many more glial cells in the brain than neurons but we don’t know what they really do from the perspective of thinking. The current view is that they scavenge the byproducts of normal brain functioning but that’s just a theory. So in reality we are still the dark ages of brain science, even though there are valiant efforts to turn this around. We are in need of our own brain theory of relativity to give us a breakthrough into seeing what’s actually happening up north. So here’s another try. What if the brain is really a quantum computer? That it works using entangled photons, just like the quantum computers were close to building in the lab? Of course that’s at the very least a heretical and maybe totally stupid idea. After all, how could the brain invent something we haven’t been able to? But of course, the brain evolved millions of years before anyone knew what electricity was, and it somehow worked that one out. And, as I have pointed out in another post, it’s now clear that biology uses quantum effects. We are in the early days yet in our research but you can no longer claim that quantum effects only have an impact at the levels of atomic particles. We now know that biological systems have evolved to use some of these effects in at least some biological systems. Who’s to say that mammalian biology hasn’t already beaten us to the punch and leveraged quantum effects for thinking? Since its beaten us at just about everything else, it might be more surprising if that weren’t the case. Of course if you believe this there’s some heavy stuff to swallow. First and foremost is that a quantum computer can, in principle, calculate all possible values from a single computation. Surely our brain doesn’t do that? Wouldn’t we get totally overloaded with results if that were the case? But here’s a thought. Maybe our brain is so big because it’s using a huge amount of its processing power to block out and filter the vast majority of computational results. In this perspective our brain is really a giant filter to go through the massive dumps we routinely create and to bring them down to a size we can cope with. So in this case our brain is really a filter for the Big Data it creates. We are drinking out of a fire hose and just getting the good water molecules. And is another piece of evidence about the quantum nature of our brain the fact that humans have such powerful conceptual vision? That we can even see to the end of our own universe, as awesome as this feat is, and even to multiple universes? For the religious-minded, is that what helps us see God? So what evidence could one possible have for such an outlandish idea? Well here’s one piece: how about the existence of idiots savants? How can they perform the prodigious feats of computation if it isn’t a mechanism way beyond our current theories? You no doubt have heard about the movie "Rain Man"? It’s loosely based on a real person, Kim Peek, who died in the US in 2009 at the age of 58. In the movie, idiot savant Raymond Babbitt (played by Dustin Hoffman) was able to carry out his prodigious feats in the casinos of Las Vegas. Was he really looking at all the possible combinations in real time? And was that why he was so dysfunctional from a social point of view? That unique thinking mode was using up all his mental energy? And is the autistic nature of many idiots savants an adjustment of their awesome processing power? A warning of what happens if you let your brain go its natural quantum way? Maybe idiots savants are people whose blocking mechanism doesn’t work properly? Technologists are currently working on a quantum computer with 3 or 4 qubits of capacity. Is this a new way of defining the evolution of animal intelligence? Early mammals had one qubit, gibbons have 2, humans have five? Wouldn’t that make more sense in any case than talking about IQ? And if this were true, maybe all of us are really idiots savants in drag. We all have the quantum computer up north but for the vast majority of us, it’s kept in check by the blocking mechanism that conceals the iron fist behind that velvet glove? Remember the movie "A Few Good men" starring Jack Nicholson? Jessep: I'll answer the question. You want answers? Lieutenant Kaffee: I think I'm entitled to them. Jessep: You want answers?! Lieutenant Kaffee: I want the truth! Jessep: You can't handle the truth! Maybe the notion that we have a quantum computer between our ears is equally hard to swallow.          Read More

A couple of blog posts ago I discussed the huge problem of mental illness ("The Invisible Pandemic"). I pointed out that we still don’t know how mental illness is caused which put a severe limit on what we can currently do to help people suffering from it. But we do know something that can help, although as usual there are constraints here too. That something is getting people to walk in natural environments with lots of trees and vegetation. There have been numerous studies showing this; e.g. see here and this area have been nicely summed up by the Harvard School of Public health in its Natural Environments Initiative. What this Initiative’s major report demonstrates conclusively is that walking in nature has a significant and positive effect on the level of mental health. It also, incidentally, shows that living in natural areas reduce mortality. It isn’t just their analysis, but a meta-analysis of numerous studies. In other words, if you have mental health issues, something that can help improve your condition is regular walks in the park, or living in an area with lots of lush vegetation. And the effect also extends to cognitive performance. There is now good research evidence which shows that exposure to children to green spaces improves cognitive performance. Of course the idea that communing with nature could improve mental attitude has been knocking for around for a couple of thousand years at least. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had more than a couple of things to say about it as you may recall (notably in his novel "Emile"). It’s just that it’s only recently that humans have deserted green spaces and started to face down the many perils of urban living that we have started to count some of the many costs. But the latest studies are not just talking about political and human philosophy but real clinical outcomes. So what could be having this powerful impact in alleviating mental illness if we walk in the forest aka commune with nature? Modern science is throwing up the answer. It turns out that natural vegetation throws off a lot of chemicals. Some of these are in a category called the phytoncides. These are antimicrobial allelochemic volatile organic compounds derived from plants. They are related to phytochemicals, the ones that are associated with good dietary outcomes due to their oxidative nature. And there’s more. Vegetation also throws off a class of chemicals in the class if the terpenes. These also have medicinal properties. You might be fascinated to know that marijuana also contains high amounts f certain terpenes and these are amongst the chemicals that give marijuana some if its medicinal impacts. So just a word to the wise; walking in nature can also give you a whiff of the good stuff, hence maybe that’s why people can get a natural high just from the activity. Another way of looking at this is that when you are walking in green spaces you are actually exposed to a natural air freshener comprised of natural medicinal agents. Did you know that of the top 180 prescription drugs, 118 are based on plants? By walking in nature you are taking in a pot-pourri of natural medicines, the vast majority of which we know nothing about. Although some people might be skeptical, this is one effect that is being attempted in aromatherapy. In other words, odor can have a positive impact on mental health and cognitive performance, providing you have the night odors. A recent study shows that the scent of rosemary actually has a significant impact on cognitive performance. These findings open up a lot of doors for improving health, especially mental health and cognitive performance. If you are a runner, don’t do it indoors (see my blog post "Are gyms bad for your health?") Run where there’s plenty of trees and vegetation. Or if you are not disposed to running, walk there anyhow. If you are stressed, same thing. Bring your kids too; it will help them in multiple ways. If you have older parents or grandparents who have cognitive problems, or even if they don’t, take them along too. It’s going to give them a bit of a cognitive burst. Is there a business in this? An indoor air freshener based on these natural chemicals? My name for them is neuroceuticals but I’m sure the companies that produce domestic cleaners can think of something more imaginative. It might sound fanciful, but if there’s anything we can do to help all those suffering from mental health issues, we should do it.              Read More

The Secret Society of Happy People - yes they are a real group - declared August "Happiness Happens Months" in 1999. What a beautiful concept!So let’s make happiness happen this month. How can you bring more happiness to your team? To your friends? To your home?In this busy, always-on-the-go world, I am continuing to step away from my phone more. And focusing on finding happiness in every moment.In his recent blog, Richard Branson said, "But don’t just seek happiness when you’re down. Happiness shouldn’t be a goal, it should be a habit. Take the focus off doing, and start being every day. Be loving, be grateful, be helpful, and be a spectator to your own thoughts."Well said, Sir Branson.This week’s tip is to make happiness a habit. Find ways  to enjoy the moments every day.Where will you focus?The post Fierce Tip of the Week: Make Happiness a Habit appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

The Best Sales Questions to Ask on a Second Call Life would be fantastic if initial sales calls resulted in every question being answered, in full, with enough detail to go straight to the close. That rarely — if ever — happens. That’s why it’s necessary to plan the best sales questions very carefully for the second sales call. In my previous post, The Art of Asking Sales Questions to Engage Prospects, I discussed the kinds of questions and strategy that salespeople should use in calls with prospects and clients. Now, let’s consider the best sales questions to focus on for the second call. One of the first things to do is share your understanding of the initial conversation. The reason is twofold: it validates your understanding of the situation based on what you heard, and you can gauge reactions and uncover additional perspectives in various areas. What I typically do is to put together a conversation summary, highlighting my understanding of the conversation and what the prospect is trying to accomplish. This makes for a good starting point for a second meeting, and I always ask if there are others who need to be engaged in these conversations. The questioning strategy at this point should be designed to drill down into more detail of the initiative under discussion. Many of these would focus on implementation and on uncovering each individual’s point of view: How do you see this working within your organization? What are the roadblocks? Who are the stakeholders with an interest in this initiative? You might begin to pressure test a sketch of your recommendation, making this a collaborative conversation instead of a pitch: What’s your reaction to this recommendation … and why? What challenges do you see with this? What are next steps and your time frames for implementation? When can we schedule time for a presentation to all of the decision makers? There’s another area of questioning that is beneficial for salespeople to explore. Prospects may decline to answer, but it doesn’t hurt to ask: Who else are you considering as a partner for this initiative? What criteria will you use in making this decision? What have I not addressed that you’ve heard about and are intrigued by from other potential partners? The reason for asking about the competition is that it’s good to know who you’re up against. Sometimes, that knowledge can guide you to change your approach or highlight certain aspects of your expertise. It’s never a good idea to badmouth the competition. What you can do is help the prospect reshape his/her thinking based on your knowledge of the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. You might say, "I know you’re doing your due diligence, and I wanted to share that ABC is a fantastic XYZ organization. You just might want to ask who would actually be delivering the onsite services, as my clients have told me that’s not their area of expertise." One thing I often do in preparation for a second meeting is try to establish my first contact as a coach and champion within the company. I will ask what success looks like for our second meeting. Then, I will request to have one-on-one conversations with all of those who will be invited to the second meeting. I do this to uncover individual perspectives and the key things they want to learn from me, so they’ll consider the meeting time well spent. Prospects may not agree to this approach every time, but when they do, it usually works great. One last thing I’ll share that works for me is this: Before a second meeting, I try to get my hands on as much information as I possibly can. I’m not afraid to ask more information because I’m never going to get it if I don’t ask. This also shows the prospect that I’m serious about the engagement and committed to its success. What are some of the best sales questions you ask on a second call? Let us know. Learn more about Richardson’s Consultative Selling Sales Training Solutions. The post The Best Sales Questions to Ask on a Second Call appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

Ben Stiller is back as everyone's favorite dim-witted male model, Derek Zoolander.

Building a Magnetic Culture: How to Attract and Retain Top Talent to Create an Engaged, Productive Workforce The perils of a disengaged workforce are well known—low productivity, high employee turnover, and failure to meet organization-wide goals. Less well known is what to do about it. How do you create a workforce that is always ready, able, and eager to take the organization to the next level? You have to create a MAGNETIC CULTURE. As CEO of leading employee survey and HR consulting firm HR Solutions, Inc., Kevin Sheridan...

The "Last Week Tonight" host presents a "new" song about the 50 states with help from an assembled contingent of adorable children.

  An employee handbook is essential for the well-being of every organization. It communicates the employer’s mission, vision and culture, as well as information on rules, policies and benefits. It also contains information on state and federal employment laws.  When well-constructed, employee handbooks help employers build trusting relationships with workers, avoid conflicts and ensure fair treatment in the workplace. When poorly written, they can create a nightmare of situations for HR, ranging from hostile work environments to lawsuits.  According to Allan H. Weitzman, head of the Labor and Employment Law Department in the Boca Raton office of Proskauer Rose LLP,...

Hi there - my name is Jennifer Catrambone and I am the Director of Evaluation & Quality Improvement at the Ruth M Rothstein CORE Center in Chicago, Illinois. That’s an Infectious Disease Clinic specializing in HIV/AIDS. I’m presenting on my favorite nerdy topic - the what and how of Nonparametric Statistics. I’ve taught both parametric and nonparametric stats at the graduate and undergraduate levels and have done stats consulting. Hang on!! Before you go running away because I used the word Statistics a bunch of times already, let me get a couple more lines out. It hurts my soul (not like sick puppies or mullets, but still…) when people just reach for the parametric stats, e.g., ANOVAs, T Tests, etc…, without thinking carefully about whether those are the best ones for their data. Why? Because those tests, the parametric ones that we all spent all that time learning in school, are sometimes wildly inappropriate and using them with certain very common kinds of data actually decreases your likelihood of finding that sought-after p<.05. The trick is to match your data set, with its imperfections or unpredictable outliers, to the right kind of stats. Lesson Learned: So, what situations require nonparametric statistics? They can be broken down into a few major categories: The data set is very small. Sometimes that N just does not get to where we want it to be. The subgroups are uneven. Perhaps there are many pretests and very few post tests, or maybe you let people self-select which group they were in and no one chose the scary sounding one. The data is very skewed. Bell Curve, Schmell Curve. Your variables are categorical or ordinal. There aren’t a lot of resources on Nonparametric Statistics out there. College/grad school statistics textbooks offer minimal information on nonparametric stats, focusing disproportionately on Chi Squares but rarely include info on the post hoc tests that should follow that test. One excellent Nonparametric Stats resource, though published in 1997, is by Marjorie Pett and is entitled, "Nonparametric Statistics for Health Care Research." The popular stats texts by Gravetter and Wallnau have also introduced decision trees for nonparametric stats that are incredibly useful for determining what test to use. OK - so all of that being said, the bad news is that many of us just use Parametric Stats because that’s what we know, regardless of the data, and accept that with our messy data, effects will be harder to come by. The great news is that that’s not necessary. Nonparametrics take all that into account and slightly modifies parametric tests (e.g., using medians instead of means), making it so that things like skew and tiny samples are not effect-hiding problems anymore. Want to learn more? Register for Nonparametric Statistics: What to Do When Your Data Breaks the Rules at Evaluation 2015 in Chicago, IL. This week, we’re featuring posts by people who will be presenting Professional Development workshops at Evaluation 2015 in Chicago, IL. Click here for a complete listing of Professional Development workshops offered at Evaluation 2015. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

87% of organizations cite culture and engagement as one of their top challenges, and 50% call the problem "very important." (source) Advice from Diana Oreck, Vice President of The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center: If you really want your organizational culture to be embraced consistently, the following should be non-negotiable: Every employee in your organization, regardless of role, should be able to articulate the culture. A well-articulated culture establishes a framework and foundation for expectations, accountability and engagement. At The Ritz-Carlton, the Gold Standards encompass the values and philosophy by which we operate. All of our employees—also known as our Ladies and Gentlemen—review the Gold Standards at Daily Line-Up and apply them throughout the day. When your culture is enlivened daily, this ensures everyone is marching in the same direction toward success. ∞ Join us for a one-day symposium, "Your Journey to Service Excellence." The day includes a keynote speaker, a Q&A session with The Ritz-Carlton executive panel, an optional networking reception and presentations about legendary service, employee engagement and developing a customer-centric culture. The Blog Post Significant Stat: Culture and Engagement appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

Photo credit: PublicDomainPictures, published under CC Unless you happen to be a corporate trainer working for a huge multinational business, you probably don’t get the chance to travel the globe that much. But why not create your own glamorous training opportunities abroad? The internet and budget airlines have made it far easier to travel and work in other countries. Just call your LinkedIn or Facebook connections through Skype (so you don’t have to pay the international phone call fees) and ask them for a reference. Here are 5 guidelines to help you expand your horizons. Don’t sell ice to Eskimos - don’t try to compete in a saturated market that already has all the training it needs. Just because your skills are in high demand in your home market does not mean they are overseas. Do your research. Get the numbers for the local market. Avoid direct competition with the locals - you don’t speak the language, don’t know the customs, so you’ll always lose. You have to bring something unique to the table. Play to your strengths. For instance, maybe you have in-depth knowledge about a specific market in your home country that overseas manufacturers are interested in. So, train the sales people of the overseas manufacturers on the local customs and business regulations in your country. In marketing speak: you’re looking for a unique selling proposition in your target market. Photo credit: Oliver Berghold, published under CC Focus your efforts on the most promising market. Be specific: training Chinese tour operators who travel to the UK is better than "training workers in the Chinese tourist industry". The reason is that you can get your idea validated sooner, build more relevant references (who also inform each other about the opportunity you represent for them), and re-use your experience with similar customers. Start selling your training services from your home. There’s no need to wait till you reach foreign soil. Pick up the phone, reach out through LinkedIn or Facebook and try to get into contact with key decision makers in your target market. Photo credit: Wikipedia, published under CC If you like traveling for the sake of it, consider doing all of your training online, through webinars, Skype conferences and online training platforms (learning management systems). Follow the lead of the digital nomads (check out the guys over at tropicalMBA)  and create a location independent training business. This means, in essence, that you’re doing all the work online, from the comfort of your hotel room - or with your laptop on a beautiful tropical beach. Share this post: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.     The post Create Your Own Glamorous Training Opportunities Abroad appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

The debut season of the BBC smash "Poldark" wrapped up its U.S. run tonight with Ross arrested and a grieving Demelza left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

Everything falls apart in the penultimate episode of 'True Detective' season two.

It's Tom Cruise's biggest opening weekend since 'War of the Worlds' in 2005.

But here’s the thing: the history of social media actually goes back a lot further, and its roots can be found in blogging, Google, AOL, ICQ, the beginnings of the world wide web and, perhaps surprisingly, CompuServe.  Source: www.mediabistro.com Can anyone predict the next 33 years of Social Media? We don’t know it but the History of Social Media belongs to our digital culture. Let’s meet  the pioneers of digital life. 

My name is Rebecca Woodland and I have had the pleasure of working to evaluate and cultivate organizational collaboration in a range of contexts and for many different purposes. In this post I’ll share tips that evaluators can use in the developmental, formative, and summative evaluation of inter-organizational and inter-personal collaboration. I’m excited to be delivering an AEA 2015 pre-conference workshop that goes into detail about these hot tips - maybe I’ll see you there! Hot Tip #1 - Make collaboration less messy. Though ubiquitous, "collaboration" persists as an under-empiricized concept. One of the first things that evaluators looking to assess collaboration will need to do is to operationlize the construct. Familiarize yourself with collaboration theory and find specific suggestions for facilitating a shared understanding of collaboration in…Utilizing Collaboration Theory to Evaluate Strategic Alliances, and the Collaboration Evaluation and Improvement Framework.  Hot Tip #2 - More collaboration is not always better. Levels of integration between organizations matter, but the scope and scale of integration should match the purpose and goals of the alliance. The Levels of Organizational Integration Rubric (LOIR) describes five possible levels of inter-organizational integration and the purposes, strategies/tasks, leadership/decision-making, and communication characteristics that tend to be present in each. Use the LOIR to measure and cultivate ideal levels of inter-organizational collaboration. Hot Tip #3 - Avoid "co-blaboration." The evaluation of inter-personal collaboration can help organizational stakeholders avoid "collaboration lite," whereby mere congeniality and imprecise conversation are confused with the type of disciplined inquiry vital to the diffusion of innovation and attainment of essential outcomes. The Team Collaboration Assessment Rubric (TCAR) describes four fundamental elements of high-quality inter-personal collaboration: dialogue, decision-making, action, and evaluation. Evaluators are encouraged to adapt and administer the TCAR in ways that are most feasible, useful, and appropriate for the context of their program evaluation. Hot Tip #4 - Use Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods (if you don’t already). SNA is a sophisticated, yet accessible, means for assessing organizational collaboration. Evaluators can use SNA to mathematically describe and visually see how "ties" between organizations or people form, and how these "links" may influence program implementation and the attainment of desired outcomes. You’ll find lots of information provided during SNA TIG week at AEA365.org, including these tips for getting started. Rad Resource: Coalitions that Work® offers excellent tools for evaluating coalitions and partnerships that are available in .pdf format. Want to learn more? Register for Evaluating and Improving Organizational Collaboration at Evaluation 2015 in Chicago, IL! This week, we’re featuring posts by people who will be presenting Professional Development workshops at Evaluation 2015 in Chicago, IL. Click here for a complete listing of Professional Development workshops offered at Evaluation 2015. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Sixteen years after his last album, Dr. Dre is finally throwing his suffering fans a bone. The rapper and record producer announced on his Beats 1 radio show this Saturday that his soundtrack to "Straight Outta Compton," an upcoming biopic about seminal 1980s gangsta rap group N.W.A.—which included Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E—will be released Friday as an Apple exclusive.

It’s no secret that formative assessment is vitally important to any classroom. How can we know what to teach or review with our students if we don’t know what our students know? Do you know what I mean? As a flipped teacher, I am always looking for tools that can quickly, easily, and effectively help […] The post How to Use Formative to Assess Student Learning appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

The Irish band's tour mixed up new songs, rarities, and a bevy of special guests.

One interesting tech trend that didn’t seem to draw any attention at a first-rate "Top Tech Trends" presentation at the American Library Association (ALA) 2015 Annual Conference here in San Francisco last month is inspiring me to write about the panel discussion nearly a month after it took place: the trend toward (and digital-literacy skill of) using online resources to extend a moment of conversation over a potentially very long period of time. The extended moment we’re going to have as a case study here is the one that began with that session on June 28, 2015, continues as I write this on July 31, 2015, and extends further into whatever day you’re reading and, with any luck, joining the conversational moment by responding to it. There were plenty of notable tech trends covered during that session (viewable in an archived recording) sponsored and facilitated by the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), and I’ll return to those by drawing from what we might call a Tweeter’s Digest version created in the form of an edited Storify transcript of the tweets coming out of the session. But let’s focus, for a moment, on the larger, paradoxical situation/long-term trend in which we are, at the same time, driven to respond as quickly as possible online to what we encounter and yet, at the same time, are equally at ease finding something that has been online for an extended period of time before we discover and—more importantly—respond to it as if it were newly created rather than disdainfully treating it as something waiting for someone to breathe new life into it. That’s what we might call "conversing, fast and slow" if we were to puckishly name it by modifying the title of Daniel Kahneman’s thoughtful treatise Thinking, Fast and Slow. At a time when we are sometimes (mistakenly) encouraged to believe that responses to online posts (e.g., in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a variety of other social media tools) must receive immediate responses if they are to receive any response at all, I’m encouraged to find that responding to older posts, articles, or other resources leads to some amazingly reflective and rewarding exchanges creating those very long moments I’m attempting to describe here. And that’s what is inspiring me to return to what some might consider to be "old news"—a brief summary and reaction to an event that happened last month—with the understanding that the delay in calling attention to the panel discussion is far less important than the act of extending the reach of that conversation via this article, the link to the archived recording, and the link to the Storify transcript which includes attendees’ initial in-the-moment reaction to the descriptions of the tech trends under review. An interesting and important theme connecting the various panelists’ tech trends descriptions was something library staff members often try to foster: collaborative efforts combined with a commitment to providing access to useful resources. As we heard about continuing efforts to provide "free, ubiquitous internet access in cities," we had the visceral example of the LinkNYC project, a collaborative effort between City Bridge, New York City officials, and others; it’s designed to provide around-the-clock free Internet access and touchscreen-tablet interface with City services and other resources. As we heard about cross-sector collaboration as a tech trend, we had the possibility of previously-unimagined sharing of data between a variety of organizations in ways that served those using services provided by those organizations. And when we heard about an apparent renaissance in podcasting, we had colleagues jumping into the onsite-online conversation via Twitter to suggest partnerships between library staff and podcast producers, and other colleagues tweeting podcasts that might be of interest to those engaged in the session. There is plenty more to explore in the Storify transcript and the archived recording, but what brings us full circle here is the realization that by reading this article, following the links to resources of interest to us, and responding, we immediately become part of the extended moment that transforms a one-time panel discussion into part of a continuing conversation that enriches all of us, fast and slow. And adds to what we as trainer-teacher-learners can foster. N.B. - This is the third in a series of reflections inspired by the American Library Association 2015 Annual Conference in San Francisco and the fourth in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions "Rethinking Digital Literacy" course.

One famous time capsule that was dug up early was created by the cast of "M*A*S*H," one of the most popular programs in TV history.

The preview will run July 10.