Here’s an article I came across on the effective communication principle. It was written by Jonathon Hardcastle. It looks at some of the things that may cause barriers to effective commmunication and by default effective business practises. Read and enjoy…

According to Peter Drucker in his article “The Transnational Economy” written back in 1987, “To maintain a leadership position in any one developed country, a business-whether large or small, increasingly has to attain and hold leadership positions in all developed markets worldwide. It has to be able to do research, to design, to develop, to engineer and to manufacture in any part of the developed world, and to export from any developed country to any other. It has to go transnational.” But is going international as simple as it sounds in this passage, or business leaders and executives need to consider another usually unforeseen barrier commonly referred to as “the Effective Communication principle?”

Companies in developed countries such as the United States must engage in international business transactions or lose an important competitive advantage. Such firms have not only found tremendous commercial opportunities a thousand or ten thousand miles from their plants, but they have also found cooperative partnerships because of a community of interest. Community of interest is in fact the common ground upon which a business relationship can be based and later flourish. If a firm in Japan, for example, finds an American company with expertise in marketing and handling its products in foreign markets, then a community of interest has been found and remains to be exploited to the advantage of both. But how is that possible and on which factors does it depend upon?

Although the answer is rather complex, undoubtedly one factor is that the worldwide level of technology has greatly advanced easing the process of communicating among people located in different countries. Their ability to share information almost instantly has turned the globe to resemble a village, and as a village its citizens can communicate with one another quickly and easily with the use of various technology-based methods. But then again how come and the message is not received in the manner intended when sent by the messenger? The answer is simple: worldwide we share the much of the same information and technology, but no the same culture. Our family, recreational, financial and other values are different, as these values spring from diverse experiences, expectations and habits. Even if the language used to communicate is the same, the cultural differences between states are evident and a message can be distorted or at least not understood as one intended.

Technological advances in the last 100 to 200 years have spread and been adopted and refined worldwide. But cultures based on thousands of years of development are slow to change. For many, they should not change, as these cultural differences among societies and nations give individual identity to each group. In fact, this persistence diversity in the thinking of human beings has made this world an exciting place to be in. But at the same time it has also created barriers that constitute a major challenge for communicators. Even with the advancement in the transition of information, when words and actions are not understood in the same way because of differences, communication can suffer. This is a key factor for people to remember when dealing with different cultures or employed in different countries from that of their origin. Verbal or nonverbal communication can have different meanings to different people and thus careful consideration and examination of the others’ environment can ensure a better delivery of a message and overall a much more successful communication process.

Jonathon Hardcastle
http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/the-effective-communication-principle-66923.html

Michael Noone is The publisher of communication skills articles at the site http://www.topcommunicationskills.com

Barriers To Effective Communication-The Effective Communication Principle is a post from: Effective Communication

Technorati Tags: barriers to effective communication, communication skills, Effective Communication

Effective Communication is good, right? Personally, I believe it’s next to impossible to have a healthy, rewarding relationship without it. Sure, the level of required relationship communication depends on your level of intimacy with the person you are communicating with. But, can open communication ever be destructive, even when the communicator thinks they are providing a helpful message for the recipient? I would say it all boils down to knowing your audience. Think about what you are about to convey, and then try to predict how your recipient is going to react. Is the message sensitive or volatile enough to destroy the relationship you currently have? If so, it’s best to think twice. Sounds simple enough, right?

Take this story, for example. I know a woman that, for her whole life, carried resentment about how her father raised her. This story begins when she was 50 years old and her father was 72. She felt she had not been nurtured and supported as much as she needed when she was growing up. Her father was a “hard-liner”. We all know the type. A man made of mostly discipline and not enough encouragement, keeping his feelings to himself. Something compelled the woman to spill her guts and write her father a letter. In this letter she described how she felt about her relationship with her father. She pointed out many of the shortcomings in her life and how she felt he was the cause of them because she “didn’t get what she needed from him”. She pointed these things out in a very polite manner; obviously assuming her father would understand and feel compassion for her. What actually happened was quite the contrary. The father was very angry after reading her letter and felt he was being attacked. What was once an acceptable relationship was now broken beyond repair. At the time the daughter wrote the letter, she thought it would benefit her to get those things off her chest and didn’t take time to ponder how her father would deal with such things.

The case above could be considered “bad communication” as it damaged the relationship it was meant to improve. Here are some things you might want to consider before initiating a discussion with someone, especially when your message contains sensitive, blaming or potentially negative information.

1. What do you expect to accomplish with your message?

2. Try to predict how your audience will respond. Are you prepared for an unexpected outcome?

3. Is it so important for you to get your message across that it’s worth the risk of breaking the relationship? In some cases it may be, such as a case with a friend or spouse.

4. If you predict that your message may cause undesirable results, you may want to use a good friend or family member as a sounding board, so you can clear your head of your thoughts. Even more so, it can be very beneficial for you to write the person a letter but never deliver it. I believe this works better than spilling your guts to a third party.

5. You can ask advice from a trusted friend or family member (especially if they know the recipient of the message). However, always make the final decision on what to do. Your advisor probably has nothing to lose and may not give you proper advice in the matter.

Relationship communication is important in everyone’s life, whether with friends, family, business associates or complete strangers. For that reason, care should always be taken on how to communicate sensitive information. Can communication be a bad thing? I think it always depends on the circumstances. Sometimes you need to choose to hold back or potentially lose the relationship.

Carl Herkes
http://www.articlesbase.com/advice-articles/communication-in-relationships-is-there-such-a-thing-as-bad-communication-10767.html

Relationship Communication – Is There Such a Thing as Bad Communication is a post from: Effective Communication

Here is another interesting article I recently came across by Dennis Jaylon. Had you ever considered that you could learn how to improve your Communication skill by using the telephone ?

Read on….

Who would not want to create a smart and enchanting persona? And is that possible even on telephones? Yes… It is Possible!

The modern day telephones enable us to do more than we could do with them till some years back. But before we get to that, let us look at some of the features that are there in telephones today  Caller ID (CLIP), Voice Mail, LCD screen, call back facilities and many many more. Plus there are added enhancements to make our conversations crystal clear like  superb sound quality, digital speakerphone, even stylish designs add the zing factor in our messages.

Now coming to the features of modern telephones and how they help us in creating a charismatic and effective personality over the phone.

Let us start with Caller ID or CLIP facility  Caller ID shows us the numbers that are calling us. If the number looks familiar, we can tweak our voice a little to create just the image we have or desire to have in the caller’s perception. For example, if it is from office or from a colleague, you can sound professional and smart. And if it is from a dear one, you can turn down the professionalism and present a softer you.

Then there is ‘Voice Message Recording service’ which enables you to drop a message when the receiver on the other end, is unable to pick up the call. You can record your message by clearly telling your name and the reason for which you called. If you are calling someone who does not know you, you should clearly tell your name (spell it, if required) and leave your contact number. Give a time when you can receive the call back and also give a brief summary for why you called up.

The more clarity you have in your message, the more you create a good impression. And with the help of modern day telephones and their multiple features, utilise all your capabilities to make your mark.

Dennis Jaylon is a renowned business writer who has years of experience in writing technical reviews, product descriptions and product feature analysis of technical gadgets and gizmos. He has won appreciation especially for enlightening people about the latest communication gizmos…the Telephones.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dennis_Jaylon
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-Telephones-Help-You-Improve-Communication-Skills&id=589848

How To Improve Communication Skills By Using The Telephone is a post from: Effective Communication

Technorati Tags: communicatio skills training, communication skills, how to improve communication

I came across this today on the Casey Daily Dispatch. It confirms what you may have already suspected. that you are truly amazing. You can sign up for their free newsletter here. I get nothing from this as there is no commision payable here. it’s just good solid information.

If you ever felt inadequate when faced with the latest technology well, you can relax because your brain is still at least ten times faster than the worlds best super computer…and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Round One of The Fight of the Millennium

Wetware is a term applied to biologically based information processors. There aren’t any commercial devices of this sort on the market – you can’t go and pick one up at Best Buy – yet the world has a couple trillion of them running around. We’re talking about brains, the amazing computers that power every animal on the planet.  

And, of course, as evidenced by the fact that this article is both written and being read, we know there is no more advanced piece of wetware walking the earth than the human brain. But even calling the brain by such a term implies that it is some kind of supercomputer whose components can be analyzed as you would your Mac… and that an understanding of the interplay of hard- and software on our desktops allows us to model that most mysterious of organs.

But is what’s inside our heads really comparable to product offerings from Apple, Intel, and Microsoft?

Well, actually, in some ways it is.

After all, both are electrical at their core, and both are based on binary logic. But when it comes to relative computing power, there is simply no contest.

The building block of electronic computers is the logic gate, through which all information processing flows. It takes two or more input impulses and translates them into an output impulse according to the simple on/off, zeroes and ones, true/false binary structure with which most everyone is at least vaguely familiar.

Two simple ones are AND gates and OR gates, which schematically look like this:

(If you’d prefer to see a logic gate in action, here’s an entertaining video that uses dominoes to demonstrate the principle.)

Traditionally, the logic gate employs transistors. Sure, there are other options, such as optical and molecular. And out on the fringe, researchers are tinkering with crazy ideas like spintronics and quantum gates.

But for now we mostly have transistors, with the binary nature of their output determined by whether the current passing through them is “strong” or “weak.” The number of them that can be embedded in a computer chip has grown exponentially for the past half-century, more or less in accordance with “Moore’s Law.” This most famous law of information technology states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years, for the same unit cost. Thus, in 1971, we could fit only 2,300 transistors on a chip. In 2011, we can squeeze in something like 2.3 billion.

That’s a lot of decision-making logic gates, and it puts an enormous amount of computing power at our fingertips.

By contrast, our brains must seem puny. Right? 

In fact, that is far from the case. We may not be able to solve advanced math problems in our heads in microseconds, but that doesn’t mean we don’t each own our personal advanced supercomputer. We’re just tuned for very different tasks than your average computer, which doesn’t have to find food or watch out for predators.

The human brain is truly unique. To begin understanding its complexity, you have to look at it on the cellular level.

Although this certainly isn’t the whole story, the brain can be broken down very roughly into two different kinds of cells, neurons and glial cells. Neurons do the heavy lifting, i.e., they conduct electrical impulses. Glial cells do not; they’re the sidekicks to the big guys, irreplaceable yet usually uncredited. They surround neurons and provide support for them and insulation between them (i.e., prevent crossed wires). Bidirectional communication exists between glial cells and neurons, and between glial cells and vascular cells. Until recently, it was believed that the number of glial cells outnumbered neurons by 5-10 times, but the latest research indicates that their numbers are actually approximately equal.

The staggering thing is how many of these cells there are. Exactly how many, no one knows. There are just too many, and they are just too small, to actually count. There are only really rough ballpark guesses. If you search the data, you will find estimates ranging from 50 billion to a trillion, with 100 billion a nice round number that a lot of people tend to agree on.

A 2009 article in the Journal of Comparative Neurology attempts to pin it down more precisely and comes up with a similar figure: “… despite the widespread quotes that the human brain contains 100 billion neurons and ten times more glial cells, the absolute number of neurons and glial cells in the human brain remains unknown. Here we determine these numbers by using the isotropic fractionator and compare them with the expected values for a human-sized primate. We find that the adult male human brain contains on average 86.1 ± 8.1 billion NeuN-positive cells (‘neurons’) and 84.6 ± 9.8 billion NeuN-negative (‘nonneuronal’ or glial) cells.” (An isotropic fractionator is a technique for breaking down highly complex brain structures into just their nuclei, making them easier to count in a lab.)

Of the neurons, there seems to be a fairly general agreement that about 22 billion of them reside in the cerebral cortex alone, the 2- to 4-millimeter-thick layer on the outer region of the mammalian brain often dubbed “gray matter” after its appearance once preserved. The rest of the mass of the brain appears to be mostly made up of wiring in the form of axons to connect the brain’s specifically programmed regions to each other and the rest of the nervous system.

Whatever the case, it might be tempting to see a neuron as the functional equivalent of the computer’s transistor. That, however, would be an error. It’s way more complicated than that.

This, highly simplified, is what a garden-variety neuron looks like:

Every neuron has an axon (usually only one). The axon is an “output” fiber that sends impulses to other neurons. Each neuron also has a proliferation of dendrites – short, hair-like “input” fibers that receive impulses from adjacent neurons. When a dendrite is stimulated in a particular way, the neuron to which it is attached suddenly changes its electrical polarity and may fire, sending a signal out along its single axon where it may be picked up by the dendrites of other neurons.

The connections are made via synapses - conductive links between abutting neurons. The links are formed at narrow spaces between the sending and receiving neurons, known as gap junctions. One gap junction channel is composed of two connexons (or hemichannels), each of which is made up of six connexins that can move together to open and close the connexon, as pictured below. It’s much like a camera’s iris. The two connexons bond across the intercellular space, allowing electrical or chemical signals to pass from one cell to another.

The brain features both chemical and electrical synapses, with the latter most often used to trigger actions that require a quick response time, as in the “fight or flight” reflex. Electrical synapses, like the one above, are characterized by a microscopic gap junction, 2-4 nanometers, as you can see. Chemical synapses’ gaps are still tiny, but about 10 times larger.

These things are fast. Signals are transmitted across a chemical synapse in about 2 milliseconds (ms), and an electrical synapse in about 0.2 ms.

But the real eye-opener is how many there are. Babies are born with about 2,500 synapses in an average neuron. By the time the adult human brain is fully formed, that number has ballooned to 10-15,000.

Synapses are the true closest analogue to transistors. They are similarly binary, open or closed, letting a signal pass through or blocking it. So our biocomputer has – taking a median estimate of 12,500 synapses/neuron, and taking the consensus estimate of 22 billion cortical neurons – something on the order of 275 trillion transistors. In other words, our cerebral cortex alone contains the implied equivalent of about 120,000 of our most advanced chips.

As to processor speed, let’s assume a very conservative average firing rate for a neuron of 200 times per second. If the signal is passed to 12,500 synapses, then 22 billion neurons are capable of performing 55 petaflops (a petaflop = one quadrillion calculations) per second.

The world’s fastest supercomputer, a monster from Japan unveiled by Fujitsu at a conference this past June, has a configuration of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs. It tested out at 8 petaflops (which only five months later was upped to 10.51 petaflops). Our brains are nearly five times faster.

But that’s not even half the story. Unlike transistors locked into place on their silicon wafers, synaptic connections can and do move over time, creating an ever-shifting environment where the possible hookups are, for all practical purposes, limitless. Furthermore, there are another 78 billion neurons, give or take, outside of the cortex, hard at work on other complex functions.

The wiring complexity of our brains alone means that in the crude terms we understand computers today, our brains are much more complex than anything we’ve built, and still faster than even the most expensive supercomputer ever built.   

On top of that, we are only beginning to understand the complexity of that wiring. Instead of one-to-one connections, some theorists postulate that there are potentially thousands of different types of inter-neuronal connections, upping the ante. Moreover, recent evidence points to the idea that there is actually subcellular computing going on within neurons, moving our brains from the paradigm of a single computer to something more like a self-contained Internet, with billions of simpler nodes all working together in a massive parallel network. All of this may mean that the types of computing we are capable of are only just being dreamt of by computer scientists. 

Will our electronic creations ever exceed our innate capabilities? Almost certainly. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that there will be cheap computers with the same capabilities as the brain by 2023. To us, that seems incredibly unlikely. But on a slightly longer time frame, given the exponential advances of the field, it is quite possible that there are humans alive today who will live to see the day. 

The main stumbling block right now is that, as ever more powerful computers are built, there is a concurrent expansion of power, management, and structural issues. But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is putting its money on the line, betting that the problems can be overcome. And soon.

In late 2010, DARPA awarded the first grants to firms it wants to build so-called exascale computers, i.e., machines capable of performing a quintillion computations per second. DARPA expects the first prototypes to be working by 2018.

At that point, they’ll be faster than us, but the software will still be far behind. But even there things march forward rapidly, with advances in artificial intelligence. 

For the moment, at least, wetware reigns supreme.

Yet, instead of being built from exotic materials, involving hundreds of engineers, and plugging into a worldwide electrical grid, our brain both builds and powers itself with cheeseburgers and blueberries. And then uses what’s left over to help us dream up machines that may one day be as smart as we are.

Related Blogs

For those with any doubts about their intelligence is a post from: Effective Communication

I came across this today on the Casey Daily Dispatch. It confirms what you may have already suspected. that you are truly amazing. You can sign up for their free newsletter here. I get nothing from this as there is no commision payable here. it’s just good solid information.

If you ever felt inadequate when faced with the latest technology well, you can relax because your brain is still at least ten times faster than the worlds best super computer…and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Round One of The Fight of the Millennium

Wetware is a term applied to biologically based information processors. There aren’t any commercial devices of this sort on the market – you can’t go and pick one up at Best Buy – yet the world has a couple trillion of them running around. We’re talking about brains, the amazing computers that power every animal on the planet.  

And, of course, as evidenced by the fact that this article is both written and being read, we know there is no more advanced piece of wetware walking the earth than the human brain. But even calling the brain by such a term implies that it is some kind of supercomputer whose components can be analyzed as you would your Mac… and that an understanding of the interplay of hard- and software on our desktops allows us to model that most mysterious of organs.

But is what’s inside our heads really comparable to product offerings from Apple, Intel, and Microsoft?

Well, actually, in some ways it is.

After all, both are electrical at their core, and both are based on binary logic. But when it comes to relative computing power, there is simply no contest.

The building block of electronic computers is the logic gate, through which all information processing flows. It takes two or more input impulses and translates them into an output impulse according to the simple on/off, zeroes and ones, true/false binary structure with which most everyone is at least vaguely familiar.

Two simple ones are AND gates and OR gates, which schematically look like this:

(If you’d prefer to see a logic gate in action, here’s an entertaining video that uses dominoes to demonstrate the principle.)

Traditionally, the logic gate employs transistors. Sure, there are other options, such as optical and molecular. And out on the fringe, researchers are tinkering with crazy ideas like spintronics and quantum gates.

But for now we mostly have transistors, with the binary nature of their output determined by whether the current passing through them is “strong” or “weak.” The number of them that can be embedded in a computer chip has grown exponentially for the past half-century, more or less in accordance with “Moore’s Law.” This most famous law of information technology states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years, for the same unit cost. Thus, in 1971, we could fit only 2,300 transistors on a chip. In 2011, we can squeeze in something like 2.3 billion.

That’s a lot of decision-making logic gates, and it puts an enormous amount of computing power at our fingertips.

By contrast, our brains must seem puny. Right? 

In fact, that is far from the case. We may not be able to solve advanced math problems in our heads in microseconds, but that doesn’t mean we don’t each own our personal advanced supercomputer. We’re just tuned for very different tasks than your average computer, which doesn’t have to find food or watch out for predators.

The human brain is truly unique. To begin understanding its complexity, you have to look at it on the cellular level.

Although this certainly isn’t the whole story, the brain can be broken down very roughly into two different kinds of cells, neurons and glial cells. Neurons do the heavy lifting, i.e., they conduct electrical impulses. Glial cells do not; they’re the sidekicks to the big guys, irreplaceable yet usually uncredited. They surround neurons and provide support for them and insulation between them (i.e., prevent crossed wires). Bidirectional communication exists between glial cells and neurons, and between glial cells and vascular cells. Until recently, it was believed that the number of glial cells outnumbered neurons by 5-10 times, but the latest research indicates that their numbers are actually approximately equal.

The staggering thing is how many of these cells there are. Exactly how many, no one knows. There are just too many, and they are just too small, to actually count. There are only really rough ballpark guesses. If you search the data, you will find estimates ranging from 50 billion to a trillion, with 100 billion a nice round number that a lot of people tend to agree on.

A 2009 article in the Journal of Comparative Neurology attempts to pin it down more precisely and comes up with a similar figure: “… despite the widespread quotes that the human brain contains 100 billion neurons and ten times more glial cells, the absolute number of neurons and glial cells in the human brain remains unknown. Here we determine these numbers by using the isotropic fractionator and compare them with the expected values for a human-sized primate. We find that the adult male human brain contains on average 86.1 ± 8.1 billion NeuN-positive cells (‘neurons’) and 84.6 ± 9.8 billion NeuN-negative (‘nonneuronal’ or glial) cells.” (An isotropic fractionator is a technique for breaking down highly complex brain structures into just their nuclei, making them easier to count in a lab.)

Of the neurons, there seems to be a fairly general agreement that about 22 billion of them reside in the cerebral cortex alone, the 2- to 4-millimeter-thick layer on the outer region of the mammalian brain often dubbed “gray matter” after its appearance once preserved. The rest of the mass of the brain appears to be mostly made up of wiring in the form of axons to connect the brain’s specifically programmed regions to each other and the rest of the nervous system.

Whatever the case, it might be tempting to see a neuron as the functional equivalent of the computer’s transistor. That, however, would be an error. It’s way more complicated than that.

This, highly simplified, is what a garden-variety neuron looks like:

Every neuron has an axon (usually only one). The axon is an “output” fiber that sends impulses to other neurons. Each neuron also has a proliferation of dendrites – short, hair-like “input” fibers that receive impulses from adjacent neurons. When a dendrite is stimulated in a particular way, the neuron to which it is attached suddenly changes its electrical polarity and may fire, sending a signal out along its single axon where it may be picked up by the dendrites of other neurons.

The connections are made via synapses - conductive links between abutting neurons. The links are formed at narrow spaces between the sending and receiving neurons, known as gap junctions. One gap junction channel is composed of two connexons (or hemichannels), each of which is made up of six connexins that can move together to open and close the connexon, as pictured below. It’s much like a camera’s iris. The two connexons bond across the intercellular space, allowing electrical or chemical signals to pass from one cell to another.

The brain features both chemical and electrical synapses, with the latter most often used to trigger actions that require a quick response time, as in the “fight or flight” reflex. Electrical synapses, like the one above, are characterized by a microscopic gap junction, 2-4 nanometers, as you can see. Chemical synapses’ gaps are still tiny, but about 10 times larger.

These things are fast. Signals are transmitted across a chemical synapse in about 2 milliseconds (ms), and an electrical synapse in about 0.2 ms.

But the real eye-opener is how many there are. Babies are born with about 2,500 synapses in an average neuron. By the time the adult human brain is fully formed, that number has ballooned to 10-15,000.

Synapses are the true closest analogue to transistors. They are similarly binary, open or closed, letting a signal pass through or blocking it. So our biocomputer has – taking a median estimate of 12,500 synapses/neuron, and taking the consensus estimate of 22 billion cortical neurons – something on the order of 275 trillion transistors. In other words, our cerebral cortex alone contains the implied equivalent of about 120,000 of our most advanced chips.

As to processor speed, let’s assume a very conservative average firing rate for a neuron of 200 times per second. If the signal is passed to 12,500 synapses, then 22 billion neurons are capable of performing 55 petaflops (a petaflop = one quadrillion calculations) per second.

The world’s fastest supercomputer, a monster from Japan unveiled by Fujitsu at a conference this past June, has a configuration of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs. It tested out at 8 petaflops (which only five months later was upped to 10.51 petaflops). Our brains are nearly five times faster.

But that’s not even half the story. Unlike transistors locked into place on their silicon wafers, synaptic connections can and do move over time, creating an ever-shifting environment where the possible hookups are, for all practical purposes, limitless. Furthermore, there are another 78 billion neurons, give or take, outside of the cortex, hard at work on other complex functions.

The wiring complexity of our brains alone means that in the crude terms we understand computers today, our brains are much more complex than anything we’ve built, and still faster than even the most expensive supercomputer ever built.   

On top of that, we are only beginning to understand the complexity of that wiring. Instead of one-to-one connections, some theorists postulate that there are potentially thousands of different types of inter-neuronal connections, upping the ante. Moreover, recent evidence points to the idea that there is actually subcellular computing going on within neurons, moving our brains from the paradigm of a single computer to something more like a self-contained Internet, with billions of simpler nodes all working together in a massive parallel network. All of this may mean that the types of computing we are capable of are only just being dreamt of by computer scientists. 

Will our electronic creations ever exceed our innate capabilities? Almost certainly. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that there will be cheap computers with the same capabilities as the brain by 2023. To us, that seems incredibly unlikely. But on a slightly longer time frame, given the exponential advances of the field, it is quite possible that there are humans alive today who will live to see the day. 

The main stumbling block right now is that, as ever more powerful computers are built, there is a concurrent expansion of power, management, and structural issues. But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is putting its money on the line, betting that the problems can be overcome. And soon.

In late 2010, DARPA awarded the first grants to firms it wants to build so-called exascale computers, i.e., machines capable of performing a quintillion computations per second. DARPA expects the first prototypes to be working by 2018.

At that point, they’ll be faster than us, but the software will still be far behind. But even there things march forward rapidly, with advances in artificial intelligence. 

For the moment, at least, wetware reigns supreme.

Yet, instead of being built from exotic materials, involving hundreds of engineers, and plugging into a worldwide electrical grid, our brain both builds and powers itself with cheeseburgers and blueberries. And then uses what’s left over to help us dream up machines that may one day be as smart as we are.

Related Blogs

For those with any doubts about their intelligence is a post from: Effective Communication

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-aging-brain/2011/12/05/gIQAskhDWO_graphic.html?hpid=z2

Enjoy
Read more… preventing aging ? From the washington Post

Related Blogs

preventing aging ? From the washington Post is a post from: Effective Communication

The trouble with thinking is a post from: Effective Communication

“Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right”.

Did you know, Henry Ford was trying to raise money for his idea of producing cars on an assembly line, where each little bit was added at a certain place. The bank manager that he initially applied to, told him that the automobile was just a fad, and it would never catch on. He told him there was no point in lending him any money for that kind of frivolity.

So, whether you think you will, or whether you think you won’t, you’re right.

Beliefs structure our reality, they color our perception of what happens. They affect our values and attitudes. And how we experience the world.

Wouldn’t it make sense to adopt useful beliefs and assumptions about the world, and by doing so increase our effectiveness in what we do? Wouldn’t it be better to hold empowering beliefs instead of holding beliefs that don’t provide us with a useful system to get results?

You’ve probably noticed that the way some people think of things, is very often the way things happen. I’ve got friends who expect that things are not going to be successful and they get that belief fulfilled.

NLP, or neurolinguistic programming, has a set of assumptions and beliefs that are very useful in people’s lives. Because NLP is the study of how people succeed, what they do and what they believe in order to excel in their lives.

Now, NLP doesn’t claim these beliefs are necessarily true. But when you act as if they are true you can achieve much more easily what it is you want to achieve. They may not be true but they are definitely useful.

Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line in 1927. His ‘universal car’ was the industrial success story of its age. He was an American icon and one of the nation’s richest men.

By having useful beliefs about what is possible and not being deterred by other people’s unhelpful beliefs, he transformed the automobile itself from a luxury to a necessity.

What do YOU believe?

In future posts I’ll go into the different beliefs, or presuppositions, of NLP.
Read more… What Do You Believe?

What Do You Believe? is a post from: Effective Communication

[slideshow]
Read more… Some Images From An NLP Trainers Training

Some Images From An NLP Trainers Training is a post from: Effective Communication

Since you have read this far I assume that you’re serious or at least interested in getting a life you want. I say “A life” because it is likely that there is more than one life to which you aspire.
Most of the people who read my posts here are believers in human potential and our as yet untapped capabilities.

I’ll explain what the picture of the standing stones is about in a moment. First we need to clear up a few things.

One of the things that sometimes slows you down from getting what you want to get is the ability to imagine so many things. I am reminded of a saying by the Chinese sage Confucius.

“Man who chases two rabbits catches none”

So imagine what happens inside in your mind when you are free to chase a limitless number of possible futures. How focused are you ?

READ THAT LAST SENTENCE AGAIN

One of my teachers from the Western Mystical tradition was a lady named Dawn. She told me that you must focus like a standing stone on what you want. What she meant by that is…

A standing stone is a metaphor for durability.

Imagine having such clarity about what you want for your life that the image you have inside, will stand the test of time.

photo courtesy of TripAdvisor

Resolve like granite that withstands the winds and rains of the storms ravaging the mind.

Yet within the centre of the stone, all is calm.

It feels no wind and it feels no rain. it knows only it’s own self and the intent to be who and what it really is at the true core of it’s spirit.

This is a mindset carved out of solid rock and that moves mountains.

This is what Dawn meant when she spoke about being a beacon. A beacon will endure no matter what the climate is and even when it is blown into smaller pieces through the intervention of others, each resulting chip from the original carries the essence of it, as if it is DNA.

The danger with developing this level of intent is that you would be well advised to have thought through exactly what you want first. Imagination on this level has a spooky habit of coming true when you act upon it. It is a powerful force for motivation because it shimmers inside of your very being.

Before you go trying this we need to talk about values and how they shape who and what you are and how you can use them as a tool for lots of things. Including getting what you want from the inside out.

Because that’s where we’re heading in the next nlp tip next. I’ll also begin talking about sensory acuity and behavioural flexibility.

Inside…!
Read more… NLP tips and NLP videos # 4 – On Becoming a Beacon

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NLP tips and NLP videos # 4 – On Becoming a Beacon is a post from: Effective Communication