Recycled Electrons

March 2005    #54   
 

In this issue:

	Peace Night on the Equinox
	Businesses Embrace Sustainability
	Evoking Wholeness
	Effects of Meditation on the Brain
	Conditions for Intelligent Group Decisions
	and more!

 

 

"I was a coward not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place."

-Camilo Mejia
http://www.alternet.org/rights/21359/

 

Peace Songs and Sing-Alongs

March 20 7-10pm

Bring your harmonies, harmonicas, and poetry to bring/sing in the Equinox at Magdalena's Tea House. Information about local activities and peacemaking will be available. Announcements and information from local groups are welcome and invited between performers.

$5 suggested donation (minimum) supports local peace efforts.

Performers, poets, singers, and others, please call 336-7840 for info.

more information at www.re-news.net/peace

 

More Businesses Embrace Sustainability
Michigan Land Use Institute

“We’ve lived in an era of plenty where we have been taught that the economy drives everything. But we’ve learned that is not necessarily true. Ecology drives everything. The economy is a subset of ecology. If we destroy the ecology, we have no economy.”
- Bill Stough

 

Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.
-Bob Talbert 

 

 

We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often.  

- Malcolm Gladwell

 

Evoking wholeness
Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz, Groupware and the Great Turning, 1995.

	Vessel holder - holds image of the whole...
	Protector - maintains psychological safety...
	Navigator - guides the group through chosen processes...
	Learning facilitator - poses issues or questions for consideration...
	Weaver - integrates and synthesizes key points or themes...
	Evocateur - sees and asks what is needed, what’s missing, what has not been said...
	Fool - breaks the frame of the group’s focus to free from limiting perspectives...
	Guide/Shaman - experienced traveler who can take the whole group through dangerous passages...

 

The Effects of Meditation on the Brain
from Maggie Erotokritou

"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior.

 

Conditions for Intelligent Group Decisions
Coert Visser
 

The right circumstances for collective wisdom are:

1.    Diversity: when arguments, views and opinions do not differ from each other they don’t add anything to one another. Diversity guarantees that multiple perspectives are brought into the decision-making process and that a broader range of information is included.

2.    Independence: when individual group members are strongly influenced by arguments, information, experiences and onions of others this will suppress the diversity of input into the decision-making process. This increases the likelihood of groupthink.

3.    Decentralization: the chance to achieve collective wisdom is greatest when individuals get a chance to bring their own information and experience into the process. Surowiecki calls this ‘local experience’.

4.    Aggregation: a mechanism and a process to come to an integration of the different views and opinions. It is very important to prevent there will be too much interaction before each other to strongly so that the pressure to conform may get too strong and any deviating opinions will be suppressed.

 

more here

 

Exploring The Dynamics Of Polarization
http://www.omplace.com/articles/tom_atlee26.html
by Tom Atlee, Founder And Co-Director of the Co-Intelligence Institute

Tom Atlee is coming to East Lansing on Mar. 21

Wikipedia
a free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
 

Please send along your comments, words of wisdom, thoughts, questions, and suggestions.

Sincerely,

LeRoy

leroy@leroyharvey.net

web:  www.leroyharvey.net