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Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

How to measure the performance of individual members | Opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...formance-when-its-hard-measure

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 09 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 09 Sep 15
     
    "But what about the kinds of jobs where measuring someone's "output" isn't about counting the number of widgets they produced, but rather it's about how they managed a team or influenced others or helped people collaborate better? While it might be easy to measure someone's output on an assembly line, how do we decide how well a manager manages or a leader leads?"
Spaceweaver Weaver

Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed - WSJ.com - 2 views

online.wsj.com/...3691804575254533386933138.html

culture evolution trade innovation collective intelligence

shared by Spaceweaver Weaver on 05 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly—bang!—culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?
  • Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.
  • It is precisely the same in cultural evolution. Trade is to culture as sex is to biology. Exchange makes cultural change collective and cumulative. It becomes possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not just in your neighborhood. The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex.
  • Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.
  • Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.
  • And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.
  • Spaceweaver Weaver on 05 Jun 10
     
    Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?
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