The following information is used for educational purposes only.
No te rindas
Mario Benedetti
No te rindas, aun estas a tiempo
de alcanzar y comenzar de nuevo,
aceptar tus sombras, enterrar tus miedos,
liberar el lastre, retomar el vuelo.
No te rindas que la vida es eso,
continuar el viaje,
perseguir tus sueños,
destrabar el tiempo,
correr los escombros y destapar el cielo.
No te rindas, por favor no cedas,
aunque el frio queme,
aunque el miedo muerda,
aunque el sol se esconda y se calle el viento,
aun hay fuego en tu alma,
aun hay vida en tus sueños,
porque la vida es tuya y tuyo tambien el deseo,
porque lo has querido y porque te quiero.
Porque existe el vino y el amor, es cierto,
porque no hay heridas que no cure el tiempo,
abrir las puertas quitar los cerrojos,
abandonar las murallas que te protegieron.
Vivir la vida y aceptar el reto,
recuperar la risa, ensayar el canto,
bajar la guardia y extender las manos,
desplegar las alas e intentar de nuevo,
celebrar la vida y retomar los cielos,
No te rindas por favor no cedas,
aunque el frio queme,
aunque el miedo muerda,
aunque el sol se ponga y se calle el viento,
aun hay fuego en tu alma,
aun hay vida en tus sueños,
porque cada dia es un comienzo,
porque esta es la hora y el mejor momento,
porque no estas sola,
porque yo te quiero.
Gracias, E.S..C.M.
Fuente: http://www.textosypretextos.com.ar/no-te-rindas
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Monday, February 22, 2016
Saturday, February 13, 2016
ECON/BUS/GralInt-TED Talks-Dambisa Moyo: Economic growth has stalled. Let's fix it
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed December 2015 at TEDGlobal>Geneva
Dambisa Moyo: Economic growth has stalled. Let's fix it
Economic growth is the defining challenge of our time; without it, political and social instability rises, human progress stagnates and societies grow dimmer. But, says economist Dambisa Moyo, dogmatic capitalism isn't creating the growth we need. As she shows, in both state-sponsored and market-driven models, capitalism is failing to solve social ills, fostering corruption and creating income inequality. Moyo surveys the current economic landscape and suggests that we have to start thinking about capitalism as a spectrum so we can blend the best of different models together to foster growth.
Transcript:
Our ability to create and sustain economic growth is the defining challenge of our time.
Of course there are other challenges -- health care, disease burdens and pandemics, environmental challenges and, of course, radicalized terrorism. However, to the extent that we can actually solve the economic growth challenge, it will take us a long way to solving the challenges that I've just elucidated.
More importantly, unless and until we solve economic growth and create sustainable, long-term economic growth, we'll be unable to address the seemingly intractable challenges that continue to pervade the globe today, whether it's health care, education or economic development.
The fundamental question is this: How are we going to create economic growth in advanced and developed economies like the United States and across Europe at a time when they continue to struggle to create economic growth after the financial crisis?
They continue to underperform and to see an erosion in the three key drivers of economic growth: capital, labor and productivity. In particular, these developed economies continue to see debts and deficits, the decline and erosion of both the quality and quantity of labor and they also see productivity stalling.
In a similar vein, how are we going to create economic growth in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives and where, on average, 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25? In these countries, it is essential that they grow at a minimum of seven percent a year in order to put a dent in poverty and to double per capita incomes in one generation. And yet today, the largest emerging economies -- countries with at least 50 million people -- continue to struggle to reach that seven percent magic mark. Worse than that, countries like India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and even China are falling below that seven percent number and, in many cases, actually regressing.
Economic growth matters. With economic growth, countries and societies enter into a virtuous cycle of upward mobility, opportunity and improved living standards. Without growth, countries contract and atrophy, not just in the annals of economic statistics but also in the meaning of life and how lives are lived. Economic growth matters powerfully for the individual. If growth wanes, the risk to human progress and the risk of political and social instability rises, and societies become dimmer, coarser and smaller.
The context matters. And countries in emerging markets do not need to grow at the same rates as developed countries.
Now, I know some of you in this room find this to be a risky proposition. There are some people here who will turn around and be quite disillusioned by what's happened around the world and basically ascribe that to economic growth. You worry about the overpopulation of the planet. And looking at the UN's recent statistics and projections that the world will have 11 billion people on the planet before it plateaus in 2100, you're concerned about what that does to natural resources -- arable land, potable water, energy and minerals. You are also concerned about the degradation of the environment. And you worry about how man, embodied in the corporate globalist, has become greedy and corrupt.
But I'm here to tell you today that economic growth has been the backbone of changes in living standards of millions of people around the world. And more importantly, it's not just economic growth that has been driven by capitalism.
The definition of capitalism, very simply put, is that the factors of production, such as trade and industry, capital and labor, are left in the hands of the private sector and not the state.
It's really essential here that we understand that fundamentally the critique is not for economic growth per se but what has happened to capitalism. And to the extent that we need to create economic growth over the long term, we're going to have to pursue it with a better form of economic stance.
Economic growth needs capitalism, but it needs it to work properly. And as I mentioned a moment ago, the core of the capitalist system has been defined by private actors. And even this, however, is a very simplistic dichotomy. Capitalism: good; non-capitalism: bad. When in practical experience, capitalism is much more of a spectrum. And we have countries such as China, which have practiced more state capitalism, and we have countries like the Unites States which are more market capitalist.
Our efforts to critique the capitalist system, however, have tended to focus on countries like China that are in fact not blatantly market capitalism.
However, there is a real reason and real concern for us to now focus our attentions on purer forms of capitalism, particularly those embodied by the United States. This is really important because this type of capitalism has increasingly been afforded the critique that it is now fostering corruption and, worse still, it's increasing income inequality -- the idea that the few are benefiting at the expense of the many.
The two really critical questions that we need to address is how can we fix capitalism so that it can help create economic growth but at the same time can help to address social ills.
In order to think about that framing, we have to ask ourselves, how does capitalism work today? Very simplistically, capitalism is set on the basis of an individual utility maximizer -- a selfish individual who goes after what he or she wants. And only after they've maximized their utility do they then decide it's important to provide support to other social contracts. Of course, in this system governments do tax, and they use part of their revenues to fund social programs, recognizing that government's role is not just regulation but also to be arbiter of social goods. But nevertheless, this framework -- this two-stage framework -- is the basis from which we must now start to think about how we can improve the capitalist model.
I would argue that there are two sides to this challenge. First of all, we can draw on the right-wing policies to see what could be beneficial for us to think about how we can improve capitalism.
In particular, right-leaning policies have tended to focus on things like conditional transfers, where we pay and reward people for doing the things that we actually think can help enhance economic growth. For example, sending children to school, parents could earn money for that, or getting their children inoculated or immunized, parents could get paid for doing that.
Now, quite apart from the debate on whether or not we should be paying people to do what we think they should do anyway, the fact of the matter is that pay for performance has actually yielded some positive results in places like Mexico, in Brazil and also in pilot programs in New York.
But there are also benefits and significant changes underway on left-leaning policies. Arguments that government should expand its role and responsibility so that it's not so narrowly defined and that government should be much more of an arbiter of the factors of production have become commonplace with the success of China. But also we've started to have debates about how the role of the private sector should move away from just being a profit motive and really be more engaged in the delivery of social programs. Things like the corporate social responsibility programs, albeit small in scale, are moving in that right direction. Of course, left-leaning policies have also tended to blur the lines between government, NGOs and private sector.
Two very good examples of this are the 19th-century United States, when the infrastructure rollout was really about public-private partnerships. More recently, of course, the advent of the Internet has also proven to the world that public and private can work together for the betterment of society.
My fundamental message to you is this: We cannot continue to try and solve the world economic growth challenges by being dogmatic and being unnecessarily ideological. In order to create sustainable, long-term economic growth and solve the challenges and social ills that continue to plague the world today, we're going to have to be more broad-minded about what might work.
Ultimately, we have to recognize that ideology is the enemy of growth.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Bruno Giussani: I want to ask a couple of questions, Dambisa, because one could react to your last sentence by saying growth is also an ideology, it's possibly the dominant ideology of our times. What do you say to those who react that way?
DM: Well, I think that that's completely legitimate, and I think that we're already having that discussion. There's a lot of work going on around happiness and other metrics being used for measuring people's success and improvements in living standards. And so I think that we should be open to what could deliver improvements in people's living standards and continue to reduce poverty around the world.
BG: So you're basically pleading for rehabilitating growth, but the only way for that happen without compromising the capacity of the earth, to take us on a long journey, is for economic growth somehow to decouple from the underlying use of resources. Do you see that happening?
DM: Well, I think that I'm more optimistic about human ability and ingenuity. I think if we start to constrain ourselves using the finite, scarce and depleting resources that we know today, we could get quite negative and quite concerned about the way the world is.
However, we've seen the Club of Rome, we've seen previous claims that the world would be running out of resources, and it's not to argue that those things are not valid. But I think, with ingenuity we could see desalination, I think we could reinvest in energy, so that we can actually get better outcomes. And so in that sense, I'm much more optimistic about what humans can do.
BG: The thing that strikes me about your proposals for rehabilitating growth and taking a different direction is that you're kind of suggesting to fix capitalism with more capitalism -- with putting a price tag on good behavior as incentive or developing a bigger role for business in social issues. Is that what you're suggesting?
DM: I'm suggesting we have to be open-minded. I think it is absolutely the case that traditional models of economic growth are not working the way we would like them to. And I think it's no accident that today the largest economy in the world, the United States, has democracy, liberal democracy, as it's core political stance and it has free market capitalism -- to the extent that it is free -- free market capitalism as its economic stance. The second largest economy is China. It has deprioritized democracy and it has state capitalism, which is a completely different model. These two countries, completely different political models and completely different economic models, and yet they have the same income inequality number measured as a Gini coefficient.
I think those are the debates we should have, because it's not clear at all what model we should be adopting, and I think there needs to be much more discourse and much more humility about what we know and what we don't know.
BG: One last question. The COP21 is going on in Paris. If you could send a tweet to all the heads of state and heads of delegations there, what would you say?
DM: Again, I would be very much about being open-minded. As you're aware, the issues around the environmental concerns have been on the agenda many times now -- in Copenhagen, '72 in Stockholm -- and we keep revisiting these issues partly because there is not a fundamental agreement, in fact there's a schism between what the developed countries believe and want and what emerging market countries want. Emerging market countries need to continue to create economic growth so that we don't have political uncertainty in the those countries. Developed countries recognize that they have a real, important responsibility not only just to manage their CO2 emissions and some of the degradation that they're contributing to the world, but also as trendsetters in R&D. And so they have to come to the table as well. But in essence, it cannot be a situation where we start ascribing policies to the emerging markets without developed countries themselves also taking quite a swipe at what they're doing both in demand and supply in developed markets.
BG: Dambisa, thank you for coming to TED. DM: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Filmed December 2015 at TEDGlobal>Geneva
Dambisa Moyo: Economic growth has stalled. Let's fix it
Economic growth is the defining challenge of our time; without it, political and social instability rises, human progress stagnates and societies grow dimmer. But, says economist Dambisa Moyo, dogmatic capitalism isn't creating the growth we need. As she shows, in both state-sponsored and market-driven models, capitalism is failing to solve social ills, fostering corruption and creating income inequality. Moyo surveys the current economic landscape and suggests that we have to start thinking about capitalism as a spectrum so we can blend the best of different models together to foster growth.
Transcript:
Our ability to create and sustain economic growth is the defining challenge of our time.
Of course there are other challenges -- health care, disease burdens and pandemics, environmental challenges and, of course, radicalized terrorism. However, to the extent that we can actually solve the economic growth challenge, it will take us a long way to solving the challenges that I've just elucidated.
More importantly, unless and until we solve economic growth and create sustainable, long-term economic growth, we'll be unable to address the seemingly intractable challenges that continue to pervade the globe today, whether it's health care, education or economic development.
The fundamental question is this: How are we going to create economic growth in advanced and developed economies like the United States and across Europe at a time when they continue to struggle to create economic growth after the financial crisis?
They continue to underperform and to see an erosion in the three key drivers of economic growth: capital, labor and productivity. In particular, these developed economies continue to see debts and deficits, the decline and erosion of both the quality and quantity of labor and they also see productivity stalling.
In a similar vein, how are we going to create economic growth in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives and where, on average, 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25? In these countries, it is essential that they grow at a minimum of seven percent a year in order to put a dent in poverty and to double per capita incomes in one generation. And yet today, the largest emerging economies -- countries with at least 50 million people -- continue to struggle to reach that seven percent magic mark. Worse than that, countries like India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and even China are falling below that seven percent number and, in many cases, actually regressing.
Economic growth matters. With economic growth, countries and societies enter into a virtuous cycle of upward mobility, opportunity and improved living standards. Without growth, countries contract and atrophy, not just in the annals of economic statistics but also in the meaning of life and how lives are lived. Economic growth matters powerfully for the individual. If growth wanes, the risk to human progress and the risk of political and social instability rises, and societies become dimmer, coarser and smaller.
The context matters. And countries in emerging markets do not need to grow at the same rates as developed countries.
Now, I know some of you in this room find this to be a risky proposition. There are some people here who will turn around and be quite disillusioned by what's happened around the world and basically ascribe that to economic growth. You worry about the overpopulation of the planet. And looking at the UN's recent statistics and projections that the world will have 11 billion people on the planet before it plateaus in 2100, you're concerned about what that does to natural resources -- arable land, potable water, energy and minerals. You are also concerned about the degradation of the environment. And you worry about how man, embodied in the corporate globalist, has become greedy and corrupt.
But I'm here to tell you today that economic growth has been the backbone of changes in living standards of millions of people around the world. And more importantly, it's not just economic growth that has been driven by capitalism.
The definition of capitalism, very simply put, is that the factors of production, such as trade and industry, capital and labor, are left in the hands of the private sector and not the state.
It's really essential here that we understand that fundamentally the critique is not for economic growth per se but what has happened to capitalism. And to the extent that we need to create economic growth over the long term, we're going to have to pursue it with a better form of economic stance.
Economic growth needs capitalism, but it needs it to work properly. And as I mentioned a moment ago, the core of the capitalist system has been defined by private actors. And even this, however, is a very simplistic dichotomy. Capitalism: good; non-capitalism: bad. When in practical experience, capitalism is much more of a spectrum. And we have countries such as China, which have practiced more state capitalism, and we have countries like the Unites States which are more market capitalist.
Our efforts to critique the capitalist system, however, have tended to focus on countries like China that are in fact not blatantly market capitalism.
However, there is a real reason and real concern for us to now focus our attentions on purer forms of capitalism, particularly those embodied by the United States. This is really important because this type of capitalism has increasingly been afforded the critique that it is now fostering corruption and, worse still, it's increasing income inequality -- the idea that the few are benefiting at the expense of the many.
The two really critical questions that we need to address is how can we fix capitalism so that it can help create economic growth but at the same time can help to address social ills.
In order to think about that framing, we have to ask ourselves, how does capitalism work today? Very simplistically, capitalism is set on the basis of an individual utility maximizer -- a selfish individual who goes after what he or she wants. And only after they've maximized their utility do they then decide it's important to provide support to other social contracts. Of course, in this system governments do tax, and they use part of their revenues to fund social programs, recognizing that government's role is not just regulation but also to be arbiter of social goods. But nevertheless, this framework -- this two-stage framework -- is the basis from which we must now start to think about how we can improve the capitalist model.
I would argue that there are two sides to this challenge. First of all, we can draw on the right-wing policies to see what could be beneficial for us to think about how we can improve capitalism.
In particular, right-leaning policies have tended to focus on things like conditional transfers, where we pay and reward people for doing the things that we actually think can help enhance economic growth. For example, sending children to school, parents could earn money for that, or getting their children inoculated or immunized, parents could get paid for doing that.
Now, quite apart from the debate on whether or not we should be paying people to do what we think they should do anyway, the fact of the matter is that pay for performance has actually yielded some positive results in places like Mexico, in Brazil and also in pilot programs in New York.
But there are also benefits and significant changes underway on left-leaning policies. Arguments that government should expand its role and responsibility so that it's not so narrowly defined and that government should be much more of an arbiter of the factors of production have become commonplace with the success of China. But also we've started to have debates about how the role of the private sector should move away from just being a profit motive and really be more engaged in the delivery of social programs. Things like the corporate social responsibility programs, albeit small in scale, are moving in that right direction. Of course, left-leaning policies have also tended to blur the lines between government, NGOs and private sector.
Two very good examples of this are the 19th-century United States, when the infrastructure rollout was really about public-private partnerships. More recently, of course, the advent of the Internet has also proven to the world that public and private can work together for the betterment of society.
My fundamental message to you is this: We cannot continue to try and solve the world economic growth challenges by being dogmatic and being unnecessarily ideological. In order to create sustainable, long-term economic growth and solve the challenges and social ills that continue to plague the world today, we're going to have to be more broad-minded about what might work.
Ultimately, we have to recognize that ideology is the enemy of growth.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Bruno Giussani: I want to ask a couple of questions, Dambisa, because one could react to your last sentence by saying growth is also an ideology, it's possibly the dominant ideology of our times. What do you say to those who react that way?
DM: Well, I think that that's completely legitimate, and I think that we're already having that discussion. There's a lot of work going on around happiness and other metrics being used for measuring people's success and improvements in living standards. And so I think that we should be open to what could deliver improvements in people's living standards and continue to reduce poverty around the world.
BG: So you're basically pleading for rehabilitating growth, but the only way for that happen without compromising the capacity of the earth, to take us on a long journey, is for economic growth somehow to decouple from the underlying use of resources. Do you see that happening?
DM: Well, I think that I'm more optimistic about human ability and ingenuity. I think if we start to constrain ourselves using the finite, scarce and depleting resources that we know today, we could get quite negative and quite concerned about the way the world is.
However, we've seen the Club of Rome, we've seen previous claims that the world would be running out of resources, and it's not to argue that those things are not valid. But I think, with ingenuity we could see desalination, I think we could reinvest in energy, so that we can actually get better outcomes. And so in that sense, I'm much more optimistic about what humans can do.
BG: The thing that strikes me about your proposals for rehabilitating growth and taking a different direction is that you're kind of suggesting to fix capitalism with more capitalism -- with putting a price tag on good behavior as incentive or developing a bigger role for business in social issues. Is that what you're suggesting?
DM: I'm suggesting we have to be open-minded. I think it is absolutely the case that traditional models of economic growth are not working the way we would like them to. And I think it's no accident that today the largest economy in the world, the United States, has democracy, liberal democracy, as it's core political stance and it has free market capitalism -- to the extent that it is free -- free market capitalism as its economic stance. The second largest economy is China. It has deprioritized democracy and it has state capitalism, which is a completely different model. These two countries, completely different political models and completely different economic models, and yet they have the same income inequality number measured as a Gini coefficient.
I think those are the debates we should have, because it's not clear at all what model we should be adopting, and I think there needs to be much more discourse and much more humility about what we know and what we don't know.
BG: One last question. The COP21 is going on in Paris. If you could send a tweet to all the heads of state and heads of delegations there, what would you say?
DM: Again, I would be very much about being open-minded. As you're aware, the issues around the environmental concerns have been on the agenda many times now -- in Copenhagen, '72 in Stockholm -- and we keep revisiting these issues partly because there is not a fundamental agreement, in fact there's a schism between what the developed countries believe and want and what emerging market countries want. Emerging market countries need to continue to create economic growth so that we don't have political uncertainty in the those countries. Developed countries recognize that they have a real, important responsibility not only just to manage their CO2 emissions and some of the degradation that they're contributing to the world, but also as trendsetters in R&D. And so they have to come to the table as well. But in essence, it cannot be a situation where we start ascribing policies to the emerging markets without developed countries themselves also taking quite a swipe at what they're doing both in demand and supply in developed markets.
BG: Dambisa, thank you for coming to TED. DM: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
ENV/GralInt-TED Talks-Mike Velings: The case for fish farming
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed October 2015 at Mission Blue II
Mike Velings: The case for fish farming
We're headed towards a global food crisis: Nearly 3 billion people depend on the ocean for food, and at our current rate we already take more fish from the ocean than it can naturally replace. In this fact-packed, eye-opening talk, entrepreneur and conservationist Mike Velings proposes a solution: Aquaculture, or fish farming. "We must start using the ocean as farmers instead of hunters," he says, echoing Jacques Cousteau. "The day will come where people will demand farmed fish on their plates that's farmed well and farmed healthy — and refuse anything less."
Transcript:
So I come from the tallest people on the planet -- the Dutch. It hasn't always been this way. In fact, all across the globe, people have been gaining height. In the last 150 years, in developed countries, on average, we have gotten 10 centimeters taller. And scientists have a lot of theories about why this is, but almost all of them involve nutrition, namely the increase of dairy and meat.
In the last 50 years, global meat consumption has more than quadrupled, from 71 million tons to 310 million tons. Something similar has been going on with milk and eggs. In every society where incomes have risen, so has protein consumption. And we know that globally, we are getting richer. And as the middle class is on the rise, so is our global population, from 7 billion of us today to 9.7 billion by 2050, which means that by 2050, we are going to need at least 70 percent more protein than what is available to humankind today. And the latest prediction of the UN puts that population number, by the end of this century, at 11 billion, which means that we are going to need a lot more protein.
This challenge is staggering -- so much so, that recently, a team at Anglia Ruskin Global Sustainability Institute suggested that if we don't change our global policies and food production systems, our societies might actually collapse in the next 30 years.
01:35
Currently, our ocean serves as the main source of animal protein. Over 2.6 billion people depend on it every single day. At the same time, our global fisheries are two-and-a-half times larger than what our oceans can sustainably support, meaning that humans take far more fish from the ocean than the oceans can naturally replace.
WWF recently published a report showing that just in the last 40 years, our global marine life has been slashed in half. And another recent report suggests that of our largest predatory species, such as swordfish and bluefin tuna, over 90 percent has disappeared since the 1950s.
And there are a lot of great, sustainable fishing initiatives across the planet working towards better practices and better-managed fisheries. But ultimately, all of these initiatives are working towards keeping current catch constant. It's unlikely, even with the best-managed fisheries, that we are going to be able to take much more from the ocean than we do today.
We have to stop plundering our oceans the way we have. We need to alleviate the pressure on it. And we are at a point where if we push much harder for more produce, we might face total collapse. Our current systems are not going to feed a growing global population.
So how do we fix this? What's the world going to look like in just 35 short years when there's 2.7 billion more of us sharing the same resources? We could all become vegan. Sounds like a great idea, but it's not realistic and it's impossibly hard to mandate globally.
People are eating animal protein whether we like it or not. And suppose we fail to change our ways and continue on the current path, failing to meet demands.
The World Health Organization recently reported that 800 million people are suffering from malnutrition and food shortage, which is due to that same growing, global population and the declining access to resources like water, energy and land. It takes very little imagination to picture a world of global unrest, riots and further malnutrition. People are hungry, and we are running dangerously low on natural resources. For so, so many reasons, we need to change our global food production systems.
We must do better and there is a solution. And that solution lies in aquaculture -- the farming of fish, plants like seaweed, shellfish and crustaceans. As the great ocean hero Jacques Cousteau once said, "We must start using the ocean as farmers instead of hunters. That's what civilization is all about -- farming instead of hunting." Fish is the last food that we hunt.
And why is it that we keep hearing phrases like, "Life's too short for farmed fish," or, "Wild-caught, of course!" over fish that we know virtually nothing about? We don't know what it ate during its lifetime, and we don't know what pollution it encounters. And if it was a large predatory species, it might have gone through the coast of Fukushima yesterday. We don't know. Very few people realize the traceability in fisheries never goes beyond the hunter that caught the wild animal.
But let's back up for a second and talk about why fish is the best food choice. It's healthy, it prevents heart disease, it provides key amino acids and key fatty acids like Omega-3s, which is very different from almost any other type of meat. And aside from being healthy, it's also a lot more exciting and diverse.
Think about it -- most animal farming is pretty monotonous. Cow is cow, sheep is sheep, pig's pig, and poultry -- turkey, duck, chicken -- pretty much sums it up. And then there's 500 species of fish being farmed currently. not that Western supermarkets reflect that on their shelves, but that's beside that point.
And you can farm fish in a very healthy manner that's good for us, good for the planet and good for the fish. I know I sound fish-obsessed --
(Laughter)
Let me explain: My brilliant partner and wife, Amy Novograntz, and I got involved in aquaculture a couple of years ago. We were inspired by Sylvia Earle, who won the TED Prize in 2009. We actually met on Mission Blue I in the Galapagos. Amy was there as the TED Prize Director; me, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands and concerned citizen, love to dive, passion for the oceans.
Mission Blue truly changed our lives. We fell in love, got married and we came away really inspired, thinking we really want to do something about ocean conservation -- something that was meant to last, that could make a real difference and something that we could do together.
Little did we expect that that would lead us to fish farming. But a few months after we got off the boat, we got to a meeting at Conservation International, where the Director General of WorldFish was talking about aquaculture, asking a room full of environmentalists to stop turning from it, realize what was going on and to really get involved because aquaculture has the potential to be just what our oceans and populations need.
We were stunned when we heard the stats that we didn't know more about this industry already and excited about the chance to help get it right.
And to talk about stats -- right now, the amount of fish consumed globally, wild catch and farmed combined, is twice the tonnage of the total amount of beef produced on planet earth last year. Every single fishing vessel combined, small and large, across the globe, together produce about 65 million tons of wild-caught seafood for human consumption.
Aquaculture this year, for the first time in history, actually produces more than what we catch from the wild.
But now this: Demand is going to go up. In the next 35 years, we are going to need an additional 85 million tons to meet demand, which is one-and-a-half times as much, almost, as what we catch globally out of our oceans. An enormous number.
It's safe to assume that that's not going to come from the ocean. It needs to come from farming. And talk about farming -- for farming you need resources. As a human needs to eat to grow and stay alive, so does an animal. A cow needs to eat eight to nine pounds of feed and drink almost 8,000 liters of water to create just one pound of meat. Experts agree that it's impossible to farm cows for every inhabitant on this planet. We just don't have enough feed or water.
And we can't keep cutting down rain forests for it. And fresh water -- planet earth has a very limited supply. We need something more efficient to keep humankind alive on this planet.
And now let's compare that with fish farming. You can farm one pound of fish with just one pound of feed, and depending on species, even less. And why is that? Well, that's because fish, first of all, float. They don't need to stand around all day resisting gravity like we do. And most fish are cold-blooded -- they don't need to heat themselves. Fish chills.
(Laughter)
And it needs very little water, which is counterintuitive, but as we say, it swims in it but it hardly drinks it. Fish are the most resource-efficient animal protein available to humankind, aside from insects.
How much we've learned since. For example, on top of that 65 million tons that's annually caught for human consumption, there's an additional 30 million tons caught for animal feed, mostly sardines and anchovies for the aquaculture industry that's turned into fish meal and fish oil.
This is madness. Sixty-five percent of these fisheries, globally, are badly managed. Some of the worst issues of our time are connected to it. It's destroying our oceans. The worst slavery issues imaginable are connected to it. Recently, an article came out of Stanford saying that if 50 percent of the world's aquaculture industry would stop using fish meal, our oceans would be saved. Now think about that for a minute.
Now, we know that the oceans have far more problems -- they have pollution, there's acidification, coral reef destruction and so on. But it underlines the impact of our fisheries, and it underlines how interconnected everything is. Fisheries, aquaculture, deforestation, climate change, food security and so on.
In the search for alternatives, the industry, on a massive scale, has reverted to plant-based alternatives like soy, industrial chicken waste, blood meal from slaughterhouses and so on.
And we understand where these choices come from, but this is not the right approach. It's not sustainable, it's not healthy. Have you ever seen a chicken at the bottom of the ocean? Of course not. If you feed salmon soy with nothing else, it literally explodes. Salmon is a carnivore, it has no way to digest soy.
Now, fish farming is by far the best animal farming available to humankind. But it's had a really bad reputation. There's been excessive use of chemicals, there's been virus and disease transfered to wild populations, ecosystem destruction and pollution, escaped fish breeding with wild populations, altering the overall genetic pool, and then of course, as just mentioned, the unsustainable feed ingredients.
How blessed were the days when we could just enjoy food that was on our plate, whatever it was. Once you know, you know. You can't go back. It's not fun. We really need a transparent food system that we can trust, that produces healthy food.
But the good news is that decades of development and research have led to a lot of new technologies and knowledge that allow us to do a lot better. We can now farm fish without any of these issues.
I think of agriculture before the green revolution -- we are at aquaculture and the blue revolution. New technologies means that we can now produce a feed that's perfectly natural, with a minimal footprint that consists of microbes, insects, seaweeds and micro-algae. Healthy for the people, healthy for the fish, healthy for the planet.
Microbes, for example, can be a perfect alternative for high-grade fish meal -- at scale.
Insects are the -- well, first of all, the perfect recycling because they're grown on food waste; but second, think of fly-fishing, and you know how logical it actually is to use it as fish feed. You don't need large tracts of land for it and you don't need to cut down rain forests for it. And microbes and insects are actually net water producers.
This revolution is starting as we speak, it just needs scale. We can now farm far more species than ever before in controlled, natural conditions, creating happy fish.
I imagine, for example, a closed system that's performing more efficiently than insect farming, where you can produce healthy, happy, delicious fish with little or no effluent, almost no energy and almost no water and a natural feed with a minimal footprint. Or a system where you grow up to 10 species next to each other -- off of each other, mimicking nature. You need very little feed, very little footprint. I think of seaweed growing off the effluent of fish, for example.
There's great technologies popping up all over the globe. From alternatives to battle disease so we don't need antibiotics and chemicals anymore, to automated feeders that feel when the fish are hungry, so we can save on feed and create less pollution. Software systems that gather data across farms, so we can improve farm practices.
There's really cool stuff happening all over the globe. And make no mistake -- all of these things are possible at a cost that's competitive to what a farmer spends today. Tomorrow, there will be no excuse for anyone to not do the right thing.
So somebody needs to connect the dots and give these developments a big kick in the butt. And that's what we've been working on the last couple of years, and that's what we need to be working on together -- rethinking everything from the ground up, with a holistic view across the value chain, connecting all these things across the globe, alongside great entrepreneurs that are willing to share a collective vision.
Now is the time to create change in this industry and to push it into a sustainable direction. This industry is still young, much of its growth is still ahead. It's a big task, but not as far-fetched as you might think. It's possible.
So we need to take pressure off the ocean. We want to eat good and healthy. And if we eat an animal, it needs to be one that had a happy and healthy life.
We need to have a meal that we can trust, live long lives. And this is not just for people in San Francisco or Northern Europe -- this is for all of us. Even in the poorest countries, it's not just about money. People prefer something fresh and healthy that they can trust over something that comes from far away that they know nothing about. We're all the same.
The day will come where people will realize -- no, demand -- farmed fish on their plate that's farmed well and that's farmed healthy -- and refuse anything less.
You can help speed this up. Ask questions when you order seafood. Where does my fish come from? Who raised it, and what did it eat? Information about where your fish comes from and how it was produced needs to be much more readily available. And consumers need to put pressure on the aquaculture industry to do the right thing.
So every time you order, ask for detail and show that you really care about what you eat and what's been given to you. And eventually, they will listen. And all of us will benefit.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed October 2015 at Mission Blue II
Mike Velings: The case for fish farming
We're headed towards a global food crisis: Nearly 3 billion people depend on the ocean for food, and at our current rate we already take more fish from the ocean than it can naturally replace. In this fact-packed, eye-opening talk, entrepreneur and conservationist Mike Velings proposes a solution: Aquaculture, or fish farming. "We must start using the ocean as farmers instead of hunters," he says, echoing Jacques Cousteau. "The day will come where people will demand farmed fish on their plates that's farmed well and farmed healthy — and refuse anything less."
Transcript:
So I come from the tallest people on the planet -- the Dutch. It hasn't always been this way. In fact, all across the globe, people have been gaining height. In the last 150 years, in developed countries, on average, we have gotten 10 centimeters taller. And scientists have a lot of theories about why this is, but almost all of them involve nutrition, namely the increase of dairy and meat.
In the last 50 years, global meat consumption has more than quadrupled, from 71 million tons to 310 million tons. Something similar has been going on with milk and eggs. In every society where incomes have risen, so has protein consumption. And we know that globally, we are getting richer. And as the middle class is on the rise, so is our global population, from 7 billion of us today to 9.7 billion by 2050, which means that by 2050, we are going to need at least 70 percent more protein than what is available to humankind today. And the latest prediction of the UN puts that population number, by the end of this century, at 11 billion, which means that we are going to need a lot more protein.
This challenge is staggering -- so much so, that recently, a team at Anglia Ruskin Global Sustainability Institute suggested that if we don't change our global policies and food production systems, our societies might actually collapse in the next 30 years.
01:35
Currently, our ocean serves as the main source of animal protein. Over 2.6 billion people depend on it every single day. At the same time, our global fisheries are two-and-a-half times larger than what our oceans can sustainably support, meaning that humans take far more fish from the ocean than the oceans can naturally replace.
WWF recently published a report showing that just in the last 40 years, our global marine life has been slashed in half. And another recent report suggests that of our largest predatory species, such as swordfish and bluefin tuna, over 90 percent has disappeared since the 1950s.
And there are a lot of great, sustainable fishing initiatives across the planet working towards better practices and better-managed fisheries. But ultimately, all of these initiatives are working towards keeping current catch constant. It's unlikely, even with the best-managed fisheries, that we are going to be able to take much more from the ocean than we do today.
We have to stop plundering our oceans the way we have. We need to alleviate the pressure on it. And we are at a point where if we push much harder for more produce, we might face total collapse. Our current systems are not going to feed a growing global population.
So how do we fix this? What's the world going to look like in just 35 short years when there's 2.7 billion more of us sharing the same resources? We could all become vegan. Sounds like a great idea, but it's not realistic and it's impossibly hard to mandate globally.
People are eating animal protein whether we like it or not. And suppose we fail to change our ways and continue on the current path, failing to meet demands.
The World Health Organization recently reported that 800 million people are suffering from malnutrition and food shortage, which is due to that same growing, global population and the declining access to resources like water, energy and land. It takes very little imagination to picture a world of global unrest, riots and further malnutrition. People are hungry, and we are running dangerously low on natural resources. For so, so many reasons, we need to change our global food production systems.
We must do better and there is a solution. And that solution lies in aquaculture -- the farming of fish, plants like seaweed, shellfish and crustaceans. As the great ocean hero Jacques Cousteau once said, "We must start using the ocean as farmers instead of hunters. That's what civilization is all about -- farming instead of hunting." Fish is the last food that we hunt.
And why is it that we keep hearing phrases like, "Life's too short for farmed fish," or, "Wild-caught, of course!" over fish that we know virtually nothing about? We don't know what it ate during its lifetime, and we don't know what pollution it encounters. And if it was a large predatory species, it might have gone through the coast of Fukushima yesterday. We don't know. Very few people realize the traceability in fisheries never goes beyond the hunter that caught the wild animal.
But let's back up for a second and talk about why fish is the best food choice. It's healthy, it prevents heart disease, it provides key amino acids and key fatty acids like Omega-3s, which is very different from almost any other type of meat. And aside from being healthy, it's also a lot more exciting and diverse.
Think about it -- most animal farming is pretty monotonous. Cow is cow, sheep is sheep, pig's pig, and poultry -- turkey, duck, chicken -- pretty much sums it up. And then there's 500 species of fish being farmed currently. not that Western supermarkets reflect that on their shelves, but that's beside that point.
And you can farm fish in a very healthy manner that's good for us, good for the planet and good for the fish. I know I sound fish-obsessed --
(Laughter)
Let me explain: My brilliant partner and wife, Amy Novograntz, and I got involved in aquaculture a couple of years ago. We were inspired by Sylvia Earle, who won the TED Prize in 2009. We actually met on Mission Blue I in the Galapagos. Amy was there as the TED Prize Director; me, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands and concerned citizen, love to dive, passion for the oceans.
Mission Blue truly changed our lives. We fell in love, got married and we came away really inspired, thinking we really want to do something about ocean conservation -- something that was meant to last, that could make a real difference and something that we could do together.
Little did we expect that that would lead us to fish farming. But a few months after we got off the boat, we got to a meeting at Conservation International, where the Director General of WorldFish was talking about aquaculture, asking a room full of environmentalists to stop turning from it, realize what was going on and to really get involved because aquaculture has the potential to be just what our oceans and populations need.
We were stunned when we heard the stats that we didn't know more about this industry already and excited about the chance to help get it right.
And to talk about stats -- right now, the amount of fish consumed globally, wild catch and farmed combined, is twice the tonnage of the total amount of beef produced on planet earth last year. Every single fishing vessel combined, small and large, across the globe, together produce about 65 million tons of wild-caught seafood for human consumption.
Aquaculture this year, for the first time in history, actually produces more than what we catch from the wild.
But now this: Demand is going to go up. In the next 35 years, we are going to need an additional 85 million tons to meet demand, which is one-and-a-half times as much, almost, as what we catch globally out of our oceans. An enormous number.
It's safe to assume that that's not going to come from the ocean. It needs to come from farming. And talk about farming -- for farming you need resources. As a human needs to eat to grow and stay alive, so does an animal. A cow needs to eat eight to nine pounds of feed and drink almost 8,000 liters of water to create just one pound of meat. Experts agree that it's impossible to farm cows for every inhabitant on this planet. We just don't have enough feed or water.
And we can't keep cutting down rain forests for it. And fresh water -- planet earth has a very limited supply. We need something more efficient to keep humankind alive on this planet.
And now let's compare that with fish farming. You can farm one pound of fish with just one pound of feed, and depending on species, even less. And why is that? Well, that's because fish, first of all, float. They don't need to stand around all day resisting gravity like we do. And most fish are cold-blooded -- they don't need to heat themselves. Fish chills.
(Laughter)
And it needs very little water, which is counterintuitive, but as we say, it swims in it but it hardly drinks it. Fish are the most resource-efficient animal protein available to humankind, aside from insects.
How much we've learned since. For example, on top of that 65 million tons that's annually caught for human consumption, there's an additional 30 million tons caught for animal feed, mostly sardines and anchovies for the aquaculture industry that's turned into fish meal and fish oil.
This is madness. Sixty-five percent of these fisheries, globally, are badly managed. Some of the worst issues of our time are connected to it. It's destroying our oceans. The worst slavery issues imaginable are connected to it. Recently, an article came out of Stanford saying that if 50 percent of the world's aquaculture industry would stop using fish meal, our oceans would be saved. Now think about that for a minute.
Now, we know that the oceans have far more problems -- they have pollution, there's acidification, coral reef destruction and so on. But it underlines the impact of our fisheries, and it underlines how interconnected everything is. Fisheries, aquaculture, deforestation, climate change, food security and so on.
In the search for alternatives, the industry, on a massive scale, has reverted to plant-based alternatives like soy, industrial chicken waste, blood meal from slaughterhouses and so on.
And we understand where these choices come from, but this is not the right approach. It's not sustainable, it's not healthy. Have you ever seen a chicken at the bottom of the ocean? Of course not. If you feed salmon soy with nothing else, it literally explodes. Salmon is a carnivore, it has no way to digest soy.
Now, fish farming is by far the best animal farming available to humankind. But it's had a really bad reputation. There's been excessive use of chemicals, there's been virus and disease transfered to wild populations, ecosystem destruction and pollution, escaped fish breeding with wild populations, altering the overall genetic pool, and then of course, as just mentioned, the unsustainable feed ingredients.
How blessed were the days when we could just enjoy food that was on our plate, whatever it was. Once you know, you know. You can't go back. It's not fun. We really need a transparent food system that we can trust, that produces healthy food.
But the good news is that decades of development and research have led to a lot of new technologies and knowledge that allow us to do a lot better. We can now farm fish without any of these issues.
I think of agriculture before the green revolution -- we are at aquaculture and the blue revolution. New technologies means that we can now produce a feed that's perfectly natural, with a minimal footprint that consists of microbes, insects, seaweeds and micro-algae. Healthy for the people, healthy for the fish, healthy for the planet.
Microbes, for example, can be a perfect alternative for high-grade fish meal -- at scale.
Insects are the -- well, first of all, the perfect recycling because they're grown on food waste; but second, think of fly-fishing, and you know how logical it actually is to use it as fish feed. You don't need large tracts of land for it and you don't need to cut down rain forests for it. And microbes and insects are actually net water producers.
This revolution is starting as we speak, it just needs scale. We can now farm far more species than ever before in controlled, natural conditions, creating happy fish.
I imagine, for example, a closed system that's performing more efficiently than insect farming, where you can produce healthy, happy, delicious fish with little or no effluent, almost no energy and almost no water and a natural feed with a minimal footprint. Or a system where you grow up to 10 species next to each other -- off of each other, mimicking nature. You need very little feed, very little footprint. I think of seaweed growing off the effluent of fish, for example.
There's great technologies popping up all over the globe. From alternatives to battle disease so we don't need antibiotics and chemicals anymore, to automated feeders that feel when the fish are hungry, so we can save on feed and create less pollution. Software systems that gather data across farms, so we can improve farm practices.
There's really cool stuff happening all over the globe. And make no mistake -- all of these things are possible at a cost that's competitive to what a farmer spends today. Tomorrow, there will be no excuse for anyone to not do the right thing.
So somebody needs to connect the dots and give these developments a big kick in the butt. And that's what we've been working on the last couple of years, and that's what we need to be working on together -- rethinking everything from the ground up, with a holistic view across the value chain, connecting all these things across the globe, alongside great entrepreneurs that are willing to share a collective vision.
Now is the time to create change in this industry and to push it into a sustainable direction. This industry is still young, much of its growth is still ahead. It's a big task, but not as far-fetched as you might think. It's possible.
So we need to take pressure off the ocean. We want to eat good and healthy. And if we eat an animal, it needs to be one that had a happy and healthy life.
We need to have a meal that we can trust, live long lives. And this is not just for people in San Francisco or Northern Europe -- this is for all of us. Even in the poorest countries, it's not just about money. People prefer something fresh and healthy that they can trust over something that comes from far away that they know nothing about. We're all the same.
The day will come where people will realize -- no, demand -- farmed fish on their plate that's farmed well and that's farmed healthy -- and refuse anything less.
You can help speed this up. Ask questions when you order seafood. Where does my fish come from? Who raised it, and what did it eat? Information about where your fish comes from and how it was produced needs to be much more readily available. And consumers need to put pressure on the aquaculture industry to do the right thing.
So every time you order, ask for detail and show that you really care about what you eat and what's been given to you. And eventually, they will listen. And all of us will benefit.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
HEALTH/GralInt-El inmenso barco hospital que les devuelve la sonrisa a los chicos
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
El inmenso barco hospital que les devuelve la sonrisa a los chicos
Crónicas del nuevo milenio: Médicos solidarios.Ariel Cukierkorn
Gentileza Ariel Cukierkorn/Diego Steinberg
Médico, cirujano plástico, argentino. ¿Qué hace Diego Steinberg en el atardecer de Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, a bordo de un helicóptero de la Marina de Estados Unidos? El salvavidas le aprieta el cuerpo, las antiparras se le empañan y los auriculares sólo le permiten escuchar su propia respiración. De entre la niebla del océano Atlántico emerge de pronto una enorme ballena blanca con cruces rojas, el USNS Comfort. El bólido pisa cubierta, las hélices no dejan de girar y Steinberg se dispone a participar de una de las experiencias más intensas y gratificantes de su carrera, esos episodios en que la medicina y la ciencia transforman la vida a quienes más lo necesitan.
Se trata de su sexto trabajo voluntario para Operation Smile, una fundación con sede en Virginia Beach, Estados Unidos, que presta cirugías gratuitas a niños con malformaciones congénitas de labio leporino y paladar hendido. Después de haber formado parte en tres misiones en México, una en Honduras y otra en China, que esta vez el escenario sea el barco hospital más grande del mundo la convierte en un capítulo especial. Niños de distintas regiones de Nicaragua, que en muchos casos apenas si tienen para cubrir las necesidades básicas, son operados por cirujanos de primer nivel mundial, en instalaciones que sólo se ven en las películas. El resultado inmediato: una sonrisa sin pudores y un futuro más saludable.
El trayecto hasta Puerto Cabezas no es un viaje de placer. Previa escala en Miami, Steinberg aterriza en el aeropuerto Sandino, de Managua. Allí aborda una avioneta Cessna Caravan de la aerolínea Costeña, con capacidad para 12 personas, pero no para su valija. Por una hora y media se sienta detrás del piloto, quien no disimula los ronquidos en algunos lapsos del vuelo que bordea el litoral de Nicaragua rumbo norte.
Puerto Cabezas remite a la película La Costa Mosquito, en la que Harrison Ford traslada a su familia a Honduras, en busca de una vida utópica fuera de la civilización. De población en gran mayoría indígena, en este paraje de Nicaragua la economía en base a la pesca y la actividad forestal sólo alcanza para la subsistencia, los habitantes viven en condiciones precarias y hablan en la lengua miskitu, de nula similitud con el castellano.
No por casualidad Operation Smile eligió este punto como una de sus paradas para esta misión. La fisura labio alvéolo palatina en los niños, uno de los campos en los que Steinberg trabaja durante su agenda habitual en el Hospital Austral de la Argentina, se explica entre otras razones por los grupos étnicos. Entre poblaciones indígenas americanas y asiáticas, hay 1 caso entre 500, mientras que entre los caucásicos la proporción se reduce a 1 entre 750. Esa malformación física deriva en problemas estéticos y funcionales, que afectan la alimentación y la comunicación. Para esta misión en el barco se toman 70 casos primarios.
Sin importar el origen o la condición socioeconómica, el USNS Comfort genera asombro en quien lo tenga enfrente. Concebido en 1975 como un barco petrolero, sus 272 metros de longitud (eslora) y 32 metros de altura albergan ahora 12 quirófanos, 80 salas de terapia intensiva, 1000 camas de internación común, equipos de rayos x y tomografía computada de última generación, entre otras prestaciones.
Junto al Mercy, su buque gemelo que opera en las costas del Pacífico, el Comfort cubre parte de los objetivos humanitarios del Comando Sur de la Marina de Estados Unidos. Los 38 voluntarios de la Operation Smile, profesionales de Estados Unidos, Italia, Inglaterra, Suecia, Australia y Canadá, se adaptan por una semana a la dinámica de este micromundo permanente de 1.000 tripulantes.
Como en todo escenario militar, los horarios son estrictos. De 5 a 7, desayuno. De 10 a 13, almuerzo. De 16 a 19, cena. De 23 a 24, una comida “refuerzo”. Steinberg no tarda en encontrar un cómplice italiano, Domenico Scopelliti, para alterar un poco las reglas. “¿A quién se le ocurre cenar a las 4 de la tarde?”, se preguntan, mientras despliegan con disimulo una horma de queso parmesano que se erige como la perla culinaria de la travesía.
A las 5.45 suena el despertador para los médicos y, luego de un típico desayuno americano, el deber llama. El equipo se junta en la Holding Area y el coordinador clínico reparte los casos. Para cualquier cirujano, la tijera y el bisturí son como la extensión de sus dedos. Por una vez, Steinberg no necesita transportar más que sus lupas, el frontoluz y sus pañuelos de Buzz Lightyear y El Hombre Araña, para cubrirse la cabeza con una empatía inmediata con los chicos. El instrumental que aporta Operation Smile está a tono con los cirujanos que participan de las misiones: un lujo.
Más allá del prestigio de cada médico, los egos no suben al barco. Durante cada jornada se genera un espíritu único de acción y colaboración. Como la mayoría de los cirujanos argentinos, Steinberg está acostumbrado a un ritmo exigente, pero la energía de Operation Smile le permite completar, en una sola jornada, cinco intervenciones de labio, paladar y nariz. Tampoco forman parte de su rutina laboral en nuestro país la posibilidad de compartir experiencias directas con colegas como el inglés Norman Waterhouse y el italiano Roberto Brusati.
Los chicos nicaragüenses perciben la buena sintonía. “¡Qué divertido el viaje en el helicóptero! Cuando sea grande quiero ser doctora, como tú”, dice Naria G.R., de 7 años, proveniente de un pueblito a tres horas de Puerto Cabezas. Steinberg pone manos a la obra para solucionarle su labio hendido unilateral primario. Las alegrías duran poco, hasta el próximo paciente.
Pero el plan de descanso no es para desdeñar: reciben la brisa caliente del Caribe y el cielo más estrellado del planeta.
Un marine estadounidense patrulla la cubierta. De unos 25 años, aspecto de modelo publicitario, estudia el horizonte con los binoculares. “Hmmm, esa luz allí lejos no me gusta nada. Tendré que avisarle al capitán”, dice, con la seriedad de quien ensaya para una próxima vigilia en Afganistán u otra zona de conflicto.
El doctor Waterhouse rompe el mínimo momento de tensión con historias cotidianas de su vida en Londres y con intimidades del extinguido romance de su hija Suki, modelo, con el actor Bradley Cooper. La charla se extiende hasta que los cuerpos ya están listos para el descanso. A los cirujanos no los espera una habitación privada con televisor, sino una cama sencilla en una cucheta triple. Suficiente para caer rendidos hasta la mañana siguiente y otro día a puro trabajo en el quirófano.
La tarea de Steinberg en el USNS Comfort se cierra cinco días después, con la cirugía de Abner O. En total, 17 chicos, que entraron como pacientes con malformaciones faciales y vuelven a su casa con la seguridad de que podrán afrontar la vida con menos trabas, aunque con un camino de esfuerzo por delante. Tras la cirugía y, en la medida de sus posibilidades, siguen con la supervisión permanente de fonoaudiólogos, odontólogos, pediatras y otorrinolaringólogos.
Ya de vuelta en tierra en Puerto Cabezas, los médicos tienen el tiempo y el espacio para conocer más de cerca a los chicos y sus familias. Steinberg comparte un rato con Jaimito Henríquez Martínez y su padre, quien, más allá de agradecerle, quiere hablar del tópico universal cuando se tiene a un argentino enfrente: Lionel Messi.
El barco hospital zarpa hacia nuevos rumbos, objetivos estratégicos en Panamá, Barbados y Guantánamo. Con la ilusión de que la Argentina se sume a los otros 70 países cubiertos por Operation Smile, Steinberg proyecta cuál será su próxima misión.
Fuente: www.clarin.com
El inmenso barco hospital que les devuelve la sonrisa a los chicos
Crónicas del nuevo milenio: Médicos solidarios.Ariel Cukierkorn
Gentileza Ariel Cukierkorn/Diego Steinberg
Médico, cirujano plástico, argentino. ¿Qué hace Diego Steinberg en el atardecer de Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, a bordo de un helicóptero de la Marina de Estados Unidos? El salvavidas le aprieta el cuerpo, las antiparras se le empañan y los auriculares sólo le permiten escuchar su propia respiración. De entre la niebla del océano Atlántico emerge de pronto una enorme ballena blanca con cruces rojas, el USNS Comfort. El bólido pisa cubierta, las hélices no dejan de girar y Steinberg se dispone a participar de una de las experiencias más intensas y gratificantes de su carrera, esos episodios en que la medicina y la ciencia transforman la vida a quienes más lo necesitan.
Se trata de su sexto trabajo voluntario para Operation Smile, una fundación con sede en Virginia Beach, Estados Unidos, que presta cirugías gratuitas a niños con malformaciones congénitas de labio leporino y paladar hendido. Después de haber formado parte en tres misiones en México, una en Honduras y otra en China, que esta vez el escenario sea el barco hospital más grande del mundo la convierte en un capítulo especial. Niños de distintas regiones de Nicaragua, que en muchos casos apenas si tienen para cubrir las necesidades básicas, son operados por cirujanos de primer nivel mundial, en instalaciones que sólo se ven en las películas. El resultado inmediato: una sonrisa sin pudores y un futuro más saludable.
El trayecto hasta Puerto Cabezas no es un viaje de placer. Previa escala en Miami, Steinberg aterriza en el aeropuerto Sandino, de Managua. Allí aborda una avioneta Cessna Caravan de la aerolínea Costeña, con capacidad para 12 personas, pero no para su valija. Por una hora y media se sienta detrás del piloto, quien no disimula los ronquidos en algunos lapsos del vuelo que bordea el litoral de Nicaragua rumbo norte.
Puerto Cabezas remite a la película La Costa Mosquito, en la que Harrison Ford traslada a su familia a Honduras, en busca de una vida utópica fuera de la civilización. De población en gran mayoría indígena, en este paraje de Nicaragua la economía en base a la pesca y la actividad forestal sólo alcanza para la subsistencia, los habitantes viven en condiciones precarias y hablan en la lengua miskitu, de nula similitud con el castellano.
No por casualidad Operation Smile eligió este punto como una de sus paradas para esta misión. La fisura labio alvéolo palatina en los niños, uno de los campos en los que Steinberg trabaja durante su agenda habitual en el Hospital Austral de la Argentina, se explica entre otras razones por los grupos étnicos. Entre poblaciones indígenas americanas y asiáticas, hay 1 caso entre 500, mientras que entre los caucásicos la proporción se reduce a 1 entre 750. Esa malformación física deriva en problemas estéticos y funcionales, que afectan la alimentación y la comunicación. Para esta misión en el barco se toman 70 casos primarios.
Sin importar el origen o la condición socioeconómica, el USNS Comfort genera asombro en quien lo tenga enfrente. Concebido en 1975 como un barco petrolero, sus 272 metros de longitud (eslora) y 32 metros de altura albergan ahora 12 quirófanos, 80 salas de terapia intensiva, 1000 camas de internación común, equipos de rayos x y tomografía computada de última generación, entre otras prestaciones.
Junto al Mercy, su buque gemelo que opera en las costas del Pacífico, el Comfort cubre parte de los objetivos humanitarios del Comando Sur de la Marina de Estados Unidos. Los 38 voluntarios de la Operation Smile, profesionales de Estados Unidos, Italia, Inglaterra, Suecia, Australia y Canadá, se adaptan por una semana a la dinámica de este micromundo permanente de 1.000 tripulantes.
Como en todo escenario militar, los horarios son estrictos. De 5 a 7, desayuno. De 10 a 13, almuerzo. De 16 a 19, cena. De 23 a 24, una comida “refuerzo”. Steinberg no tarda en encontrar un cómplice italiano, Domenico Scopelliti, para alterar un poco las reglas. “¿A quién se le ocurre cenar a las 4 de la tarde?”, se preguntan, mientras despliegan con disimulo una horma de queso parmesano que se erige como la perla culinaria de la travesía.
A las 5.45 suena el despertador para los médicos y, luego de un típico desayuno americano, el deber llama. El equipo se junta en la Holding Area y el coordinador clínico reparte los casos. Para cualquier cirujano, la tijera y el bisturí son como la extensión de sus dedos. Por una vez, Steinberg no necesita transportar más que sus lupas, el frontoluz y sus pañuelos de Buzz Lightyear y El Hombre Araña, para cubrirse la cabeza con una empatía inmediata con los chicos. El instrumental que aporta Operation Smile está a tono con los cirujanos que participan de las misiones: un lujo.
Más allá del prestigio de cada médico, los egos no suben al barco. Durante cada jornada se genera un espíritu único de acción y colaboración. Como la mayoría de los cirujanos argentinos, Steinberg está acostumbrado a un ritmo exigente, pero la energía de Operation Smile le permite completar, en una sola jornada, cinco intervenciones de labio, paladar y nariz. Tampoco forman parte de su rutina laboral en nuestro país la posibilidad de compartir experiencias directas con colegas como el inglés Norman Waterhouse y el italiano Roberto Brusati.
Los chicos nicaragüenses perciben la buena sintonía. “¡Qué divertido el viaje en el helicóptero! Cuando sea grande quiero ser doctora, como tú”, dice Naria G.R., de 7 años, proveniente de un pueblito a tres horas de Puerto Cabezas. Steinberg pone manos a la obra para solucionarle su labio hendido unilateral primario. Las alegrías duran poco, hasta el próximo paciente.
Pero el plan de descanso no es para desdeñar: reciben la brisa caliente del Caribe y el cielo más estrellado del planeta.
Un marine estadounidense patrulla la cubierta. De unos 25 años, aspecto de modelo publicitario, estudia el horizonte con los binoculares. “Hmmm, esa luz allí lejos no me gusta nada. Tendré que avisarle al capitán”, dice, con la seriedad de quien ensaya para una próxima vigilia en Afganistán u otra zona de conflicto.
El doctor Waterhouse rompe el mínimo momento de tensión con historias cotidianas de su vida en Londres y con intimidades del extinguido romance de su hija Suki, modelo, con el actor Bradley Cooper. La charla se extiende hasta que los cuerpos ya están listos para el descanso. A los cirujanos no los espera una habitación privada con televisor, sino una cama sencilla en una cucheta triple. Suficiente para caer rendidos hasta la mañana siguiente y otro día a puro trabajo en el quirófano.
La tarea de Steinberg en el USNS Comfort se cierra cinco días después, con la cirugía de Abner O. En total, 17 chicos, que entraron como pacientes con malformaciones faciales y vuelven a su casa con la seguridad de que podrán afrontar la vida con menos trabas, aunque con un camino de esfuerzo por delante. Tras la cirugía y, en la medida de sus posibilidades, siguen con la supervisión permanente de fonoaudiólogos, odontólogos, pediatras y otorrinolaringólogos.
Ya de vuelta en tierra en Puerto Cabezas, los médicos tienen el tiempo y el espacio para conocer más de cerca a los chicos y sus familias. Steinberg comparte un rato con Jaimito Henríquez Martínez y su padre, quien, más allá de agradecerle, quiere hablar del tópico universal cuando se tiene a un argentino enfrente: Lionel Messi.
El barco hospital zarpa hacia nuevos rumbos, objetivos estratégicos en Panamá, Barbados y Guantánamo. Con la ilusión de que la Argentina se sume a los otros 70 países cubiertos por Operation Smile, Steinberg proyecta cuál será su próxima misión.
Fuente: www.clarin.com
EDUC/BR/GralInt-Dehaene: "La educación es una fuerza mucho más potente que la genética"
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Dehaene: "La educación es una fuerza mucho más potente que la genética"
Diálogos a fondo: Stanislas Dehaene.Claudio Martyniuk
Stanislas Dehaene por María Eugenia Cerutti
El cerebro presenta una enorme plasticidad. Y esa propiedad posibilita, entre otras cosas, leer y realizar cálculos matemáticos. Stanislas Dehaene, un destacado neurocientífico francés, es un apasionado investigador de las operaciones intelectuales.
¿Qué hace el cerebro cuando leemos?
Cuando uno lee, cuando se ha aprendido a leer, las neuronas son reorientadas para reconocer las formas de las letras, y así se pueden traducir las letras en sonidos. Esto puede salir mal: en la dislexia los circuitos fallan. Hay varios genes que están involucrados, pero los niños con dislexia, si son entrenados intensamente, pueden aprender a leer. La dislexia no es una fatalidad, incluso si tiene bases genéticas, porque aún así la plasticidad del cerebro puede reorganizar los circuitos.
¿Cómo es posible la matemática?
Aun un niño pequeño tiene algún conocimiento acerca de los números, y eso se localiza en una región del cerebro. Sería una suerte de semilla a partir de la cual el conocimiento matemático puede crecer. Luego, la educación y el conocimiento de símbolos y operaciones matemáticas van a refinar el circuito cerebral.
¿Cómo llegamos a construir números infinitos o irracionales?
Cómo nuestro cerebro representa el infinito es un misterio maravilloso. No sabemos cómo es posible. Tenemos mucho por entender acerca de cómo el cerebro hace símbolos. Es algo particular del cerebro humano. Los animales no tienen esta habilidad simbólica.
¿El coeficiente de inteligencia (IQ) se puede calcular científicamente?
Todos los niños tienen cerebros muy similares, pero sí serán diferentes en la eficacia de algunos circuitos, algunos tienen áreas más grandes, otros conexiones más rápidas. Y también varía la velocidad de aprendizaje, y este es el componente más significante. Cuando la misma información es expuesta, algunos niños aprenderán más rápido y otros más lento, aunque todos realizan los mismos pasos. Las fracciones matemáticas son difíciles para todos los niños, pero algunos lo superan más rápido, y esto es solo un aspecto de la inteligencia. Por eso creo que el IQ es un concepto muy viejo, que no refleja completamente la diversidad de talentos que tiene el cerebro. El cerebro es como una colección de órganos, hay muchos órganos diferentes y algunos pueden estar más y otros menos desarrollados. Aunque haya muchas diferencias de IQ, todo niño que hoy va al colegio aprende algo muy similar a lo que Isaac Newton descubrió hace 300 años, y esto es extraordinario, ya que muestra el poder de la educación, que puede superar las diferencias entre individuos.
La educación es una fuerza mucho más potente que la genética.
¿Las neurociencias acaban con el dualismo conciencia-cuerpo?
La ciencia está mostrando que cada aspecto de nuestra personalidad se relaciona con circuitos cerebrales. No hay nada que quede afuera.
¿Qué lejos están las computadoras del cerebro?
Como aún no entendemos por completo el cerebro, aún no sabemos cómo reproducir en una computadora todas sus operaciones. Pero ya tenemos máquinas que reproducen casi exactamente mucho de la actividad neuronal. Ante un test de fotografías, una computadora va a identificar si es una cara, un caballo, un edificio, etc., en el mismo nivel de un cerebro humano. Incluso los fenómenos llamados subjetivos caen dentro de esta perspectiva, de modo que la computadora sufrirá la misma clase de ilusiones o errores.
¿Qué le sucede al cerebro cuando siente algo bello?
De acuerdo a la ciencia cognitiva no hay diferencia entre emoción y cognición; cada una de nuestras emociones, por nuestra historia evolutiva, orienta al cerebro hacia cierta dirección. La belleza identifica condiciones que son buenas para nuestra supervivencia, sea identificando ambientes vitales como árboles, flores, sombra, agua, o condiciones para la reproducción, por eso percibimos belleza en las personas.
¿Qué es la identidad personal?
La identidad es una obra del cerebro, que construye una representación de sí mismo. Hay redes en el cerebro que se preocupan por la gente, el cerebro social, dentro del cual representamos a nuestra persona como representamos a las otras. En esa red puedo pensar en tus pensamientos y también pienso en los míos, y en la misma red puedo representar qué hice y que haré. La identidad es la suma de estas representaciones mentales.
¿La neurociencia elimina a las disciplinas humanísticas?
No creo que las neurociencias estén reemplazando a la lingüística o a la antropología. Profundizan nuestro saber y están integradas a las ciencias sociales y la psicología.
¿Por qué a un neurocientífico le debería interesar la literatura?
Los científicos contribuyen enormemente a la vida de las ideas. Y creo que hay un mundo de ideas, uno que no se divide entre ciencia y humanidades. Por eso cuando leo a Nabokov veo ideas maravillosas.
Seño
Stanislas Dehaene
Estudia las bases cerebrales de las principales operaciones intelectuales humanas. Formado como matemático en la École Normale Supérieure parisina y doctorado en psicología cognitiva, en el Collège de France inauguró la cátedra de Psicología Cognitiva Experimental. Es autor, entre otros libros y artículos científicos, de “El cerebro lector”, “La conciencia en el cerebro” y “El sentido del número” (editados en Buenos Aires por Siglo XXI).
Copyright Clarín, 2016.
Stanislas Dehaene On Consciousness (Full Interview)
The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow
Published on Mar 22, 2014
Lecture by Dr. Stanislas Dehaene on "Reading the Brain"
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
Published on Apr 30, 2013
Dr. Dehaene was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Peter Wall Institute and spoke at the Chan Centre on April 7, 2012. He is Professor and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology, Collège de France, Paris, and Director, INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Orsay, France.
Professor Dehaene is one of Europe's leading cognitive neuroscientists. His work uses advanced techniques in functional magnetic resonance imaging, electro-encephalography, interacranial electrodes, and psychological manipulations to study how culture and biology interact in the human brain. He is internationally known for his work on the neural bases of reading abilities, mathematical language, bilingualism, and consciousness. In his acclaimed recent book, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Cultural Invention, Professor Dehaene examines the brain circuitry at work behind reading and describes groundbreaking research on how the brain processes languages. He proposes a powerful "neuronal recycling" hypothesis, which postulates that cultural inventions invade evolutionarily older brain circuits, and while doing so inherit many of their structural constraints. In The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge Is Embedded in Our Brains, Stanislas Dehaene argues that humans have an inbuilt "number sense" capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems begin when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.
Fuente/Source: www.clarin.com/www.youtube.com
Dehaene: "La educación es una fuerza mucho más potente que la genética"
Diálogos a fondo: Stanislas Dehaene.Claudio Martyniuk
Stanislas Dehaene por María Eugenia Cerutti
El cerebro presenta una enorme plasticidad. Y esa propiedad posibilita, entre otras cosas, leer y realizar cálculos matemáticos. Stanislas Dehaene, un destacado neurocientífico francés, es un apasionado investigador de las operaciones intelectuales.
¿Qué hace el cerebro cuando leemos?
Cuando uno lee, cuando se ha aprendido a leer, las neuronas son reorientadas para reconocer las formas de las letras, y así se pueden traducir las letras en sonidos. Esto puede salir mal: en la dislexia los circuitos fallan. Hay varios genes que están involucrados, pero los niños con dislexia, si son entrenados intensamente, pueden aprender a leer. La dislexia no es una fatalidad, incluso si tiene bases genéticas, porque aún así la plasticidad del cerebro puede reorganizar los circuitos.
¿Cómo es posible la matemática?
Aun un niño pequeño tiene algún conocimiento acerca de los números, y eso se localiza en una región del cerebro. Sería una suerte de semilla a partir de la cual el conocimiento matemático puede crecer. Luego, la educación y el conocimiento de símbolos y operaciones matemáticas van a refinar el circuito cerebral.
¿Cómo llegamos a construir números infinitos o irracionales?
Cómo nuestro cerebro representa el infinito es un misterio maravilloso. No sabemos cómo es posible. Tenemos mucho por entender acerca de cómo el cerebro hace símbolos. Es algo particular del cerebro humano. Los animales no tienen esta habilidad simbólica.
¿El coeficiente de inteligencia (IQ) se puede calcular científicamente?
Todos los niños tienen cerebros muy similares, pero sí serán diferentes en la eficacia de algunos circuitos, algunos tienen áreas más grandes, otros conexiones más rápidas. Y también varía la velocidad de aprendizaje, y este es el componente más significante. Cuando la misma información es expuesta, algunos niños aprenderán más rápido y otros más lento, aunque todos realizan los mismos pasos. Las fracciones matemáticas son difíciles para todos los niños, pero algunos lo superan más rápido, y esto es solo un aspecto de la inteligencia. Por eso creo que el IQ es un concepto muy viejo, que no refleja completamente la diversidad de talentos que tiene el cerebro. El cerebro es como una colección de órganos, hay muchos órganos diferentes y algunos pueden estar más y otros menos desarrollados. Aunque haya muchas diferencias de IQ, todo niño que hoy va al colegio aprende algo muy similar a lo que Isaac Newton descubrió hace 300 años, y esto es extraordinario, ya que muestra el poder de la educación, que puede superar las diferencias entre individuos.
La educación es una fuerza mucho más potente que la genética.
¿Las neurociencias acaban con el dualismo conciencia-cuerpo?
La ciencia está mostrando que cada aspecto de nuestra personalidad se relaciona con circuitos cerebrales. No hay nada que quede afuera.
¿Qué lejos están las computadoras del cerebro?
Como aún no entendemos por completo el cerebro, aún no sabemos cómo reproducir en una computadora todas sus operaciones. Pero ya tenemos máquinas que reproducen casi exactamente mucho de la actividad neuronal. Ante un test de fotografías, una computadora va a identificar si es una cara, un caballo, un edificio, etc., en el mismo nivel de un cerebro humano. Incluso los fenómenos llamados subjetivos caen dentro de esta perspectiva, de modo que la computadora sufrirá la misma clase de ilusiones o errores.
¿Qué le sucede al cerebro cuando siente algo bello?
De acuerdo a la ciencia cognitiva no hay diferencia entre emoción y cognición; cada una de nuestras emociones, por nuestra historia evolutiva, orienta al cerebro hacia cierta dirección. La belleza identifica condiciones que son buenas para nuestra supervivencia, sea identificando ambientes vitales como árboles, flores, sombra, agua, o condiciones para la reproducción, por eso percibimos belleza en las personas.
¿Qué es la identidad personal?
La identidad es una obra del cerebro, que construye una representación de sí mismo. Hay redes en el cerebro que se preocupan por la gente, el cerebro social, dentro del cual representamos a nuestra persona como representamos a las otras. En esa red puedo pensar en tus pensamientos y también pienso en los míos, y en la misma red puedo representar qué hice y que haré. La identidad es la suma de estas representaciones mentales.
¿La neurociencia elimina a las disciplinas humanísticas?
No creo que las neurociencias estén reemplazando a la lingüística o a la antropología. Profundizan nuestro saber y están integradas a las ciencias sociales y la psicología.
¿Por qué a un neurocientífico le debería interesar la literatura?
Los científicos contribuyen enormemente a la vida de las ideas. Y creo que hay un mundo de ideas, uno que no se divide entre ciencia y humanidades. Por eso cuando leo a Nabokov veo ideas maravillosas.
Seño
Stanislas Dehaene
Estudia las bases cerebrales de las principales operaciones intelectuales humanas. Formado como matemático en la École Normale Supérieure parisina y doctorado en psicología cognitiva, en el Collège de France inauguró la cátedra de Psicología Cognitiva Experimental. Es autor, entre otros libros y artículos científicos, de “El cerebro lector”, “La conciencia en el cerebro” y “El sentido del número” (editados en Buenos Aires por Siglo XXI).
Copyright Clarín, 2016.
Stanislas Dehaene On Consciousness (Full Interview)
The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow
Published on Mar 22, 2014
Lecture by Dr. Stanislas Dehaene on "Reading the Brain"
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
Published on Apr 30, 2013
Dr. Dehaene was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Peter Wall Institute and spoke at the Chan Centre on April 7, 2012. He is Professor and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology, Collège de France, Paris, and Director, INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Orsay, France.
Professor Dehaene is one of Europe's leading cognitive neuroscientists. His work uses advanced techniques in functional magnetic resonance imaging, electro-encephalography, interacranial electrodes, and psychological manipulations to study how culture and biology interact in the human brain. He is internationally known for his work on the neural bases of reading abilities, mathematical language, bilingualism, and consciousness. In his acclaimed recent book, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Cultural Invention, Professor Dehaene examines the brain circuitry at work behind reading and describes groundbreaking research on how the brain processes languages. He proposes a powerful "neuronal recycling" hypothesis, which postulates that cultural inventions invade evolutionarily older brain circuits, and while doing so inherit many of their structural constraints. In The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge Is Embedded in Our Brains, Stanislas Dehaene argues that humans have an inbuilt "number sense" capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems begin when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.
Fuente/Source: www.clarin.com/www.youtube.com
MUS/GralInt-L.E.J - SUMMER 2015
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
L.E.J CONQUISTA CON EL 'MASHUP' DEL VERANO
Unas "amigas del barrio" francesas, el nuevo fenómeno viral musical
Violonchelo, percusión y las dos espectaculares voces de LEJ consiguen más de 6 millones de reproducciones en Youtube con sus versiones de Rihanna, Pharrell Williams o David Guetta
Foto: L.E.J., el trío francés formado por Lucie, Elisa y Juliette (Julien Jaulin)
L.E.J (pronúnciese Èlijèy) son Lucie, Elisa y Juliette y forman uno de los grupos del momento sin necesidad de tener un álbum en el mercado. Estas tres "amigas del barrio" de Saint-Denis (París), de 21 años, han conquistado este agosto internet haciendo el mashup del verano. ¿Eim? Un personal popurrí de canciones de artistas como Pharrell Williams, Rihanna o Stromae que ha dado la vuelta al mundo, supera los seis millones de reproducciones en Youtube en quince días y se ha hecho hueco en la portada de Le Parisien, la revista Time y está teniendo repercusión en media Europa, EE UU y África. ¿Por qué? Escuchen:
Lo que acaban de oír es un mix de Freedom, de Pharrell Williams; Learn on, de Major Lazer; Carmen, de Stromae; Hey mama, de Nicki Minaj y David Guetta; Gangsta, de Bigflo et Oli; Laissez passer, de Maître Gims; Conmigo, de Kenji Girac; Bitch better have my money, de Rihanna; Uptown Funk, de Bruno Mars; Cheerleader, de OMI y CoCo, de Genasis.
Y en esta (aparente) sencilla combinación de violonchelo, percusión y el espectacular contraste de las voces de Lucie y Elisa está la respuesta de esta revolución estival. Su formación clásica sumada a una interpretación minimalista (como mucho utilizan bases instrumentales o con coros grabados por ellas mismas) es lo que atrae de sus versiones. "Creo que gustamos por la técnica, porque son canciones conocidas actualizadas de una forma lírica. Es una forma de hacer esta música accesible al gran público", cuenta Juliette (violonchelo) por teléfono a El Confidencial.
"No entendemos muy bien de dónde viene toda esta locura. Son sólo once canciones conocidas aunque cantadas con un estilo clásico y mucha presencia de la voz, pero la verdad es que no sabemos qué ha pasado. Es de locos. Nos están llamando de todo el mundo", prosigue. Agradece que no se están dando cuenta de la magnitud (viralidad) del asunto, algo positivo que les hace tener los pies en el suelo, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que varios de los artistas que versionan o actores como Ashton Kutcher se han hecho eco en las redes sociales de su trabajo. "Son sólo números. Nada más. Cuando das un concierto y ves ahí a 1.000 personas eso sí es importante. Eso es lo que impresiona", añade.
La sorpresa, por tanto, ha sido mayúscula para L.E.J. Especialmente teniendo en cuenta que el verano pasado ya hicieron otro mashup [arriba], pero con el de este año la bola no ha parado de crecer. Conciertos por el sur de Francia para verano y otoño, varias discográficas interesadas en ellas y, en el horizonte, un disco con canciones propias para abril o mayo de 2016. Tienen ya cinco temas escritos, dos de los cuales están tocando en sus conciertos. "Un disco con nuestras composiciones sería un sueño porque es nuestra música, nuestra personalidad y nuestra historia", explica Juliette.
Precisamente esta historia empezó hace un par de décadas viviendo en el mismo barrio, prosiguió con su formación musical y ha pasado de convertir eso tan natural de reunirse para cantar las canciones que le gustan a su futuro profesional. Hoy viven de la música y Lucie acaba de terminar Psicología, Juliette ha hecho lo propio con Mediación Cultural y Elisa con Arquitectura de Interiores. Además, llevan diez años estudiando música: Juliette, violonchelo en el conservatorio y Lucie y Elisa canto en la escuela de música clásica y participaron en un coro profesional en Radio France.
"Todo empezó hace dos años en un concurso del Tryo [un grupo de ska acústico francés] en el que pedían una versión de una de sus canciones [arriba y aquí la canción original]. Ganamos el concurso, hicimos un concierto con ellos y ahí empezó todo. Hace seis meses subimos otro vídeo con una cover de Seine Saint-Denis Style, de NTM y con la participación del poeta Grand Corps Malade [abajo] y fue cuando empezó a despuntar", asegura.
Desde esa versión ganadora de Désolé pour hier soir todo ha ido hacia arriba dejando claro la combinación que triunfa hoy en el mercado musical: redes sociales y unos (adictivos) covers de Destiny's Child, Mackelmore, Antoniette Costa, The Eagles o Moriarty mejoran en muchos casos a las canciones originales. Así que tomen nota porque esta fusión de música clásica con pop, dance o hip hop gusta (y mucho).
Source: www.youtube.com/http://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2015-08-16/lej-cover-mashup-musica-verano-francia-clasica_967872/?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral
L.E.J CONQUISTA CON EL 'MASHUP' DEL VERANO
Unas "amigas del barrio" francesas, el nuevo fenómeno viral musical
Violonchelo, percusión y las dos espectaculares voces de LEJ consiguen más de 6 millones de reproducciones en Youtube con sus versiones de Rihanna, Pharrell Williams o David Guetta
Foto: L.E.J., el trío francés formado por Lucie, Elisa y Juliette (Julien Jaulin)
L.E.J (pronúnciese Èlijèy) son Lucie, Elisa y Juliette y forman uno de los grupos del momento sin necesidad de tener un álbum en el mercado. Estas tres "amigas del barrio" de Saint-Denis (París), de 21 años, han conquistado este agosto internet haciendo el mashup del verano. ¿Eim? Un personal popurrí de canciones de artistas como Pharrell Williams, Rihanna o Stromae que ha dado la vuelta al mundo, supera los seis millones de reproducciones en Youtube en quince días y se ha hecho hueco en la portada de Le Parisien, la revista Time y está teniendo repercusión en media Europa, EE UU y África. ¿Por qué? Escuchen:
Lo que acaban de oír es un mix de Freedom, de Pharrell Williams; Learn on, de Major Lazer; Carmen, de Stromae; Hey mama, de Nicki Minaj y David Guetta; Gangsta, de Bigflo et Oli; Laissez passer, de Maître Gims; Conmigo, de Kenji Girac; Bitch better have my money, de Rihanna; Uptown Funk, de Bruno Mars; Cheerleader, de OMI y CoCo, de Genasis.
Y en esta (aparente) sencilla combinación de violonchelo, percusión y el espectacular contraste de las voces de Lucie y Elisa está la respuesta de esta revolución estival. Su formación clásica sumada a una interpretación minimalista (como mucho utilizan bases instrumentales o con coros grabados por ellas mismas) es lo que atrae de sus versiones. "Creo que gustamos por la técnica, porque son canciones conocidas actualizadas de una forma lírica. Es una forma de hacer esta música accesible al gran público", cuenta Juliette (violonchelo) por teléfono a El Confidencial.
"No entendemos muy bien de dónde viene toda esta locura. Son sólo once canciones conocidas aunque cantadas con un estilo clásico y mucha presencia de la voz, pero la verdad es que no sabemos qué ha pasado. Es de locos. Nos están llamando de todo el mundo", prosigue. Agradece que no se están dando cuenta de la magnitud (viralidad) del asunto, algo positivo que les hace tener los pies en el suelo, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que varios de los artistas que versionan o actores como Ashton Kutcher se han hecho eco en las redes sociales de su trabajo. "Son sólo números. Nada más. Cuando das un concierto y ves ahí a 1.000 personas eso sí es importante. Eso es lo que impresiona", añade.
La sorpresa, por tanto, ha sido mayúscula para L.E.J. Especialmente teniendo en cuenta que el verano pasado ya hicieron otro mashup [arriba], pero con el de este año la bola no ha parado de crecer. Conciertos por el sur de Francia para verano y otoño, varias discográficas interesadas en ellas y, en el horizonte, un disco con canciones propias para abril o mayo de 2016. Tienen ya cinco temas escritos, dos de los cuales están tocando en sus conciertos. "Un disco con nuestras composiciones sería un sueño porque es nuestra música, nuestra personalidad y nuestra historia", explica Juliette.
Precisamente esta historia empezó hace un par de décadas viviendo en el mismo barrio, prosiguió con su formación musical y ha pasado de convertir eso tan natural de reunirse para cantar las canciones que le gustan a su futuro profesional. Hoy viven de la música y Lucie acaba de terminar Psicología, Juliette ha hecho lo propio con Mediación Cultural y Elisa con Arquitectura de Interiores. Además, llevan diez años estudiando música: Juliette, violonchelo en el conservatorio y Lucie y Elisa canto en la escuela de música clásica y participaron en un coro profesional en Radio France.
"Todo empezó hace dos años en un concurso del Tryo [un grupo de ska acústico francés] en el que pedían una versión de una de sus canciones [arriba y aquí la canción original]. Ganamos el concurso, hicimos un concierto con ellos y ahí empezó todo. Hace seis meses subimos otro vídeo con una cover de Seine Saint-Denis Style, de NTM y con la participación del poeta Grand Corps Malade [abajo] y fue cuando empezó a despuntar", asegura.
Desde esa versión ganadora de Désolé pour hier soir todo ha ido hacia arriba dejando claro la combinación que triunfa hoy en el mercado musical: redes sociales y unos (adictivos) covers de Destiny's Child, Mackelmore, Antoniette Costa, The Eagles o Moriarty mejoran en muchos casos a las canciones originales. Así que tomen nota porque esta fusión de música clásica con pop, dance o hip hop gusta (y mucho).
Source: www.youtube.com/http://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2015-08-16/lej-cover-mashup-musica-verano-francia-clasica_967872/?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral
Monday, February 8, 2016
BUS/TB/GralInt-How small shifts in leadership can transform your team dynamic (unedited version)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
How small shifts in leadership can transform your team dynamic Simple tweaks in communication and role-modeling based on the latest behavioral research can nudge employees into top form and create a more productive environment for everyone. February 2016 | byCaroline Webb Once upon a time, saying “the soft stuff is the hard stuff” was a snappy challenge to business convention. Now, it’s a cliché. Everyone knows that it’s not easy to suddenly make your colleagues more creative, adaptable, or collaborative, however well-intentioned you may be. But thanks to research on human behavior, we know what it takes for the average person’s brain to perform at its best, cognitively and emotionally—even under the pressures of the modern workplace. These new insights suggest that simple tweaks in leaders’ communication and behavior can potentially create a much more productive atmosphere for any team. In this article, I’ll describe three leaders who knew enough of this science to spark positive behavioral shifts in their organizations. The two-system brain Antony heads a successful technology consultancy that has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2011. Before starting the firm, he worked for a big agency with a toxic culture. “There was a sort of ‘cultural presenteeism’—you needed to look like you were always working.” At his new company, he wanted to forge a very different culture that would enable people to be both innovative and focused, collaborative and emotionally balanced. He and his two cofounders did all the usual things—hired carefully, developed an inspiring vision for the company, and designed an inviting workspace. But Antony knew enough of the research on optimal brain function to see that more tangible measures were needed. In particular, he raised the issue of information overload and multitasking and how their team could avoid it. Antony knew that the brain’s activity is split across two complementary systems—one deliberate and controlled, the other automatic and instinctive. The deliberate system is responsible for sophisticated, conscious functions such as reasoning, self-control, and forward thinking. It can only do one thing at a time and tires remarkably quickly. The brain’s automatic system lightens this load by automating most of what we do from day to day, but as the brain’s deliberate system becomes more exhausted, the automatic system increasingly takes the reins, leaving us prone to make misleading generalizations and kneejerk responses. That’s why multitasking is such a problem. We think we can parallel process, but each tiny switch from one conscious task to another—from email to reading to speaking on a conference call, for example—wastes a little of the deliberate system’s time and mental energy. And those switches cost us dearly. Research shows that people are less creative, more stressed, and make two to four times as many mistakes when they deal with interruptions and distractions. Another way that the deliberate system’s limitations play out in the workplace is that decision-making quality drops the longer people go without a break. Classic cognitive biases like groupthink and confirmation bias take firmer hold, and we’re more prone to sloppy thinking in general. In one study, where hospital leaders were trying to encourage the use of hand sanitizer, they found that compliance rates fell when people worked long hours without a break. But here’s the silver lining: if leaders can encourage people to go offline when doing their most important work, as well as taking more frequent breaks, they’ll see an uptick in productivity, innovation, and morale. As Antony thought about how to do this, he knew that a common hurdle to taking breaks and avoiding multitasking was that people often feel they need to show their responsiveness to senior colleagues by being constantly available, whether on email, instant messaging, or in person. So he knew that his own behavior would be central to shifting norms in his organization. He decided to place a timer on his desk to signal that he was taking 25 or 45 minutes to go offline—something that also helped him focus his brain on the task at hand—and wore enormous noise-canceling headphones to amplify the message. And then, between deep working sessions, he would “bugger off for a walk,” as he puts it. The role modeling worked, he says. “It’s become a collective thing in the office now. And everyone’s decided that breaks are a legitimate use of time because we get so much more done afterward.” Antony and his cofounders also created a “Monday meeting” for all of the staff to discuss how they were working together as a company. After some time, it surfaced that pressures were mounting, threatening to derail their commitment to focusing and recharging. “It was an emerging cultural behavior, and we wanted it to stop. So we set some rules, like ‘we encourage each other to have lunch’ and ‘we schedule breaks between meetings.’” Most important, he felt, was that “we as leaders had to take responsibility for our behavior and give out the right signals, use the right language, celebrate the right behaviors in others. So we cheered people for leaving the office to go for a run. Later, we adopted the phrase ‘leaving by example,’ encouraging people to use it instead of a mumbled, guilty excuse for taking a break.” In the Monday meeting, the leaders took one further step to reduce cognitive overload, by asking everyone to name their two priorities for the week. Antony says “the ‘two priorities’ rule encourages people to be realistic and focused in their work. Sometimes you really have to force yourself to decide what really matters this week. But it always pays off.” They also use the meeting as an opportunity to highlight opportunities to redistribute work. “When it looks like someone has too much on, people are encouraged to offload rather than suffer in silence.” The result: great creativity and camaraderie, without a foosball table in sight. The discover-defend axis Ros is one of the most senior leaders in the UK’s state-run healthcare system. She oversees the complex web of relationships between the system’s many payers and providers and ensures that the interactions between the two help rather than hinder improvements in patient care. Budgets are tight and the outcomes of her team’s work are often subject to scrutiny by politicians and the media. So Ros has to help her colleagues stay energized and on their game as they pursue their noble goals, even when the going gets tough. Resilience is key. The problem is, our brain is constantly looking for threats to fend off or rewards worth pursuing. When we’re more focused on threats than rewards, we’re in defensive mode. Our brain diverts some of its scarce mental energy into launching a ‘fight’, ‘flight,’ or ‘freeze’ response, and as those instinctive responses unfold—looking more like ‘snap, sulk, or skulk’ in the workplace—brain scans show less activity in the parts of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. To put it another way: some of our more emotionally sophisticated neural machinery has gone offline. This matters, because it takes surprisingly little to put someone’s brain into defensive mode—anything threatening a person’s self-worth, even the smallest social slight. This can create vicious circles in the workplace when, for example, people feel daunted from the start, triggering an instinctive defensive reaction that makes it harder for them to solve the problem at hand. But then there’s discovery mode, where people’s brains are focused on the potential rewards in a situation—for instance, a feeling of belonging or social recognition, or the thrill of learning new things. If leaders can foster a rewarding environment even amid the most difficult situations, it’s likely that they can dampen that primal feeling of being under threat just enough to nudge people out of defensive mode and back into top form. Ros has put this insight at the heart of her leadership style. First, she creates a positive frame for difficult tasks or discussions. “We’ve got a huge project where 95 percent of it is going fine, but three things aren’t going so well,” she says. “We’re getting a lot of questions about those three things, and I can see my team tensing up whenever we talk about them. So now I always begin our meetings by talking about what we’ve done well. And you can see how it calms everyone down and helps people think more clearly.” She’s keen to emphasize that “it’s not about trying to spin or gloss over the problems. But beginning with what’s working well puts everyone in a more open frame of mind, meaning we can look at what’s not working without people getting defensive.” By focusing on something positive before getting into the tough stuff, leaders can help people stay in high-performance discovery mode. It doesn’t take much. Research found that when volunteers were given a puzzle where they had to navigate a little mouse out of a maze, all it took to lift their performance by 50 percent was seeing a picture of some cheese next to the exit instead of a menacing owl. In a meeting, the metaphorical “cheese” can even be as simple as discussing the ideal outcome everyone’s shooting for, before talking about the steps to get there. Ros also reinforces her team’s feelings of autonomy and competence—two things that feel highly rewarding for the average brain. Usually, when a colleague has an issue, leaders help by offering advice or direction. But that can backfire, because a well-intentioned “have you tried this/that . . .” can be subconsciously interpreted as a judgment, as in: “why haven’t you tried this/that?” And this mild cognitive threat can be enough to constrain the deliberate system and make people less creative in their own thinking. The alternative: create space for people to do their own best quality thinking. Ros uses the “extreme listening” technique. She asks someone what they want to think through, and lets them talk without interrupting or making suggestions. Sounds simple, but Ros says it’s rare enough to feel a little strange initially. She describes the first time she used it with her deputy, Alex. “He had an issue he wanted to talk about” and “I actually explicitly told him the ‘rule’ I was following. I nodded, encouraged him, and asked ‘what else?,’ when he flagged. Within five minutes, he’d literally solved the whole thing himself. We both laughed so hard. It absolutely worked.” Alex went on to use the technique with his colleagues, too, and now it’s a team habit. Ros is clear on the lesson for leaders: helping colleagues feel capable of handling matters on their own “is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone,” providing a great boost to their resilience and confidence. The social self Charles heads the marketing function of a major retail chain. He’s overseeing a lot of change in the way his team works, as they take advantage of new technology. “Marketing is evolving fast,” he says. “Traditional marketing requires creativity.” He adds, “Modern marketing still requires that, but we now get to benefit from new analytical tools that allow us to track return on investment of our marketing campaigns. And that data crunching requires quite a different type of skillset—much more quantitative.” That means he’s had to hire new types of people in the marketing department, alongside existing staff. It sounds like nothing but upside for the marketing team. As Charles says, “it’s fantastic to be able to combine the best of both skillsets.” So what’s the challenge? “Whenever you have a very new group of people joining an existing team, you’ve got to pay real attention to motivation,” Charles warns. The reason for this lies deep in our highly social brains. Of all threats, social slights are especially high on the list of things against which our brains seek to defend us. This social sensitivity probably helped keep us safe when tribal belonging determined whether we’d survive the dangers of the prehistoric savannah—but in the workplace, it means leaders have to meet three main types of deep social needs if they want their colleagues to thrive: Inclusion: “Do I belong?” In Charles’s case, existing staff may be worried that they’re going to be excluded from the exciting new work. The newbies, meanwhile, will be wondering whether they truly fit in. Respect: “Do people recognize the value I bring?” Everyone on the team wants to feel that their efforts are useful and appreciated. Fairness: “Am I being treated just like everyone else—or do I at least understand the reason that things are the way they are?” If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” people’s brains can quickly go into defensive mode—which, as we learned earlier, is a sure recipe for dysfunctional behavior. Indeed, Charles said “people were clearly feeling anxious and nervous. As a result, they started complaining about things they’ve never complained about before—making snide comments or questioning things that they saw as scope creep or turf invasion. People here are generally polite and friendly, and passionate about their work. So they weren’t hostile. Just unsettled.” To boost feelings of inclusion, Charles deliberately created opportunities for both groups of staff to get to know each other and later collaborate in cross-functional teams to work on new product innovation. In addition to emphasizing these shared wins from teamwork, Charles also takes the time to make everyone feel respected for their individual contribution. “You have to make sure to give people ‘spotlight moments.’ I look for opportunities to get them in front of the management team. I hate it when someone works on a presentation and then their boss delivers it. If people have done the work, they present it.” Finally, he’s transparent about the rationale behind his decisions. As he explains, “it’s a great investment in minimizing suspicion and defensiveness later on.” In doing so, he personally takes time to balance his time between the creatives and the technical folks, and if someone’s giving up some responsibilities to one of the new hires, he says, “I make sure to explain why that’s happening and emphasize the opportunities they will have to do new stuff in other areas—often areas that they’re better at and enjoy more.” As a result, Charles says, “both sides are learning and growing by being exposed to each other.” It’s not something he sees as a one-off effort, either. “The company never stops changing. The people who are currently ‘new’ will become the ‘old guard’ and then there will be a new generation of skills needed.” After all, he says, “this sort of attention to the social dimension is important in any industry where systemic change is happening.” The evidence is pretty clear. Colleagues will behave more like their best selves, more of the time, if leaders take a few modest steps to foster an environment where people’s brain’s aren’t overloaded—more focused on rewards than threats—and have their fundamental social needs met. With a little behavioral science in their toolkit, leaders can build a more productive team—and a happier one at that. About the author Caroline Webb is a senior adviser to McKinsey and an alumnus of the firm’s London office. This article is based on research in her new book, How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life (Crown Business, February 2016). Source: www.mckinsey.com
How small shifts in leadership can transform your team dynamic Simple tweaks in communication and role-modeling based on the latest behavioral research can nudge employees into top form and create a more productive environment for everyone. February 2016 | byCaroline Webb Once upon a time, saying “the soft stuff is the hard stuff” was a snappy challenge to business convention. Now, it’s a cliché. Everyone knows that it’s not easy to suddenly make your colleagues more creative, adaptable, or collaborative, however well-intentioned you may be. But thanks to research on human behavior, we know what it takes for the average person’s brain to perform at its best, cognitively and emotionally—even under the pressures of the modern workplace. These new insights suggest that simple tweaks in leaders’ communication and behavior can potentially create a much more productive atmosphere for any team. In this article, I’ll describe three leaders who knew enough of this science to spark positive behavioral shifts in their organizations. The two-system brain Antony heads a successful technology consultancy that has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2011. Before starting the firm, he worked for a big agency with a toxic culture. “There was a sort of ‘cultural presenteeism’—you needed to look like you were always working.” At his new company, he wanted to forge a very different culture that would enable people to be both innovative and focused, collaborative and emotionally balanced. He and his two cofounders did all the usual things—hired carefully, developed an inspiring vision for the company, and designed an inviting workspace. But Antony knew enough of the research on optimal brain function to see that more tangible measures were needed. In particular, he raised the issue of information overload and multitasking and how their team could avoid it. Antony knew that the brain’s activity is split across two complementary systems—one deliberate and controlled, the other automatic and instinctive. The deliberate system is responsible for sophisticated, conscious functions such as reasoning, self-control, and forward thinking. It can only do one thing at a time and tires remarkably quickly. The brain’s automatic system lightens this load by automating most of what we do from day to day, but as the brain’s deliberate system becomes more exhausted, the automatic system increasingly takes the reins, leaving us prone to make misleading generalizations and kneejerk responses. That’s why multitasking is such a problem. We think we can parallel process, but each tiny switch from one conscious task to another—from email to reading to speaking on a conference call, for example—wastes a little of the deliberate system’s time and mental energy. And those switches cost us dearly. Research shows that people are less creative, more stressed, and make two to four times as many mistakes when they deal with interruptions and distractions. Another way that the deliberate system’s limitations play out in the workplace is that decision-making quality drops the longer people go without a break. Classic cognitive biases like groupthink and confirmation bias take firmer hold, and we’re more prone to sloppy thinking in general. In one study, where hospital leaders were trying to encourage the use of hand sanitizer, they found that compliance rates fell when people worked long hours without a break. But here’s the silver lining: if leaders can encourage people to go offline when doing their most important work, as well as taking more frequent breaks, they’ll see an uptick in productivity, innovation, and morale. As Antony thought about how to do this, he knew that a common hurdle to taking breaks and avoiding multitasking was that people often feel they need to show their responsiveness to senior colleagues by being constantly available, whether on email, instant messaging, or in person. So he knew that his own behavior would be central to shifting norms in his organization. He decided to place a timer on his desk to signal that he was taking 25 or 45 minutes to go offline—something that also helped him focus his brain on the task at hand—and wore enormous noise-canceling headphones to amplify the message. And then, between deep working sessions, he would “bugger off for a walk,” as he puts it. The role modeling worked, he says. “It’s become a collective thing in the office now. And everyone’s decided that breaks are a legitimate use of time because we get so much more done afterward.” Antony and his cofounders also created a “Monday meeting” for all of the staff to discuss how they were working together as a company. After some time, it surfaced that pressures were mounting, threatening to derail their commitment to focusing and recharging. “It was an emerging cultural behavior, and we wanted it to stop. So we set some rules, like ‘we encourage each other to have lunch’ and ‘we schedule breaks between meetings.’” Most important, he felt, was that “we as leaders had to take responsibility for our behavior and give out the right signals, use the right language, celebrate the right behaviors in others. So we cheered people for leaving the office to go for a run. Later, we adopted the phrase ‘leaving by example,’ encouraging people to use it instead of a mumbled, guilty excuse for taking a break.” In the Monday meeting, the leaders took one further step to reduce cognitive overload, by asking everyone to name their two priorities for the week. Antony says “the ‘two priorities’ rule encourages people to be realistic and focused in their work. Sometimes you really have to force yourself to decide what really matters this week. But it always pays off.” They also use the meeting as an opportunity to highlight opportunities to redistribute work. “When it looks like someone has too much on, people are encouraged to offload rather than suffer in silence.” The result: great creativity and camaraderie, without a foosball table in sight. The discover-defend axis Ros is one of the most senior leaders in the UK’s state-run healthcare system. She oversees the complex web of relationships between the system’s many payers and providers and ensures that the interactions between the two help rather than hinder improvements in patient care. Budgets are tight and the outcomes of her team’s work are often subject to scrutiny by politicians and the media. So Ros has to help her colleagues stay energized and on their game as they pursue their noble goals, even when the going gets tough. Resilience is key. The problem is, our brain is constantly looking for threats to fend off or rewards worth pursuing. When we’re more focused on threats than rewards, we’re in defensive mode. Our brain diverts some of its scarce mental energy into launching a ‘fight’, ‘flight,’ or ‘freeze’ response, and as those instinctive responses unfold—looking more like ‘snap, sulk, or skulk’ in the workplace—brain scans show less activity in the parts of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. To put it another way: some of our more emotionally sophisticated neural machinery has gone offline. This matters, because it takes surprisingly little to put someone’s brain into defensive mode—anything threatening a person’s self-worth, even the smallest social slight. This can create vicious circles in the workplace when, for example, people feel daunted from the start, triggering an instinctive defensive reaction that makes it harder for them to solve the problem at hand. But then there’s discovery mode, where people’s brains are focused on the potential rewards in a situation—for instance, a feeling of belonging or social recognition, or the thrill of learning new things. If leaders can foster a rewarding environment even amid the most difficult situations, it’s likely that they can dampen that primal feeling of being under threat just enough to nudge people out of defensive mode and back into top form. Ros has put this insight at the heart of her leadership style. First, she creates a positive frame for difficult tasks or discussions. “We’ve got a huge project where 95 percent of it is going fine, but three things aren’t going so well,” she says. “We’re getting a lot of questions about those three things, and I can see my team tensing up whenever we talk about them. So now I always begin our meetings by talking about what we’ve done well. And you can see how it calms everyone down and helps people think more clearly.” She’s keen to emphasize that “it’s not about trying to spin or gloss over the problems. But beginning with what’s working well puts everyone in a more open frame of mind, meaning we can look at what’s not working without people getting defensive.” By focusing on something positive before getting into the tough stuff, leaders can help people stay in high-performance discovery mode. It doesn’t take much. Research found that when volunteers were given a puzzle where they had to navigate a little mouse out of a maze, all it took to lift their performance by 50 percent was seeing a picture of some cheese next to the exit instead of a menacing owl. In a meeting, the metaphorical “cheese” can even be as simple as discussing the ideal outcome everyone’s shooting for, before talking about the steps to get there. Ros also reinforces her team’s feelings of autonomy and competence—two things that feel highly rewarding for the average brain. Usually, when a colleague has an issue, leaders help by offering advice or direction. But that can backfire, because a well-intentioned “have you tried this/that . . .” can be subconsciously interpreted as a judgment, as in: “why haven’t you tried this/that?” And this mild cognitive threat can be enough to constrain the deliberate system and make people less creative in their own thinking. The alternative: create space for people to do their own best quality thinking. Ros uses the “extreme listening” technique. She asks someone what they want to think through, and lets them talk without interrupting or making suggestions. Sounds simple, but Ros says it’s rare enough to feel a little strange initially. She describes the first time she used it with her deputy, Alex. “He had an issue he wanted to talk about” and “I actually explicitly told him the ‘rule’ I was following. I nodded, encouraged him, and asked ‘what else?,’ when he flagged. Within five minutes, he’d literally solved the whole thing himself. We both laughed so hard. It absolutely worked.” Alex went on to use the technique with his colleagues, too, and now it’s a team habit. Ros is clear on the lesson for leaders: helping colleagues feel capable of handling matters on their own “is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone,” providing a great boost to their resilience and confidence. The social self Charles heads the marketing function of a major retail chain. He’s overseeing a lot of change in the way his team works, as they take advantage of new technology. “Marketing is evolving fast,” he says. “Traditional marketing requires creativity.” He adds, “Modern marketing still requires that, but we now get to benefit from new analytical tools that allow us to track return on investment of our marketing campaigns. And that data crunching requires quite a different type of skillset—much more quantitative.” That means he’s had to hire new types of people in the marketing department, alongside existing staff. It sounds like nothing but upside for the marketing team. As Charles says, “it’s fantastic to be able to combine the best of both skillsets.” So what’s the challenge? “Whenever you have a very new group of people joining an existing team, you’ve got to pay real attention to motivation,” Charles warns. The reason for this lies deep in our highly social brains. Of all threats, social slights are especially high on the list of things against which our brains seek to defend us. This social sensitivity probably helped keep us safe when tribal belonging determined whether we’d survive the dangers of the prehistoric savannah—but in the workplace, it means leaders have to meet three main types of deep social needs if they want their colleagues to thrive: Inclusion: “Do I belong?” In Charles’s case, existing staff may be worried that they’re going to be excluded from the exciting new work. The newbies, meanwhile, will be wondering whether they truly fit in. Respect: “Do people recognize the value I bring?” Everyone on the team wants to feel that their efforts are useful and appreciated. Fairness: “Am I being treated just like everyone else—or do I at least understand the reason that things are the way they are?” If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” people’s brains can quickly go into defensive mode—which, as we learned earlier, is a sure recipe for dysfunctional behavior. Indeed, Charles said “people were clearly feeling anxious and nervous. As a result, they started complaining about things they’ve never complained about before—making snide comments or questioning things that they saw as scope creep or turf invasion. People here are generally polite and friendly, and passionate about their work. So they weren’t hostile. Just unsettled.” To boost feelings of inclusion, Charles deliberately created opportunities for both groups of staff to get to know each other and later collaborate in cross-functional teams to work on new product innovation. In addition to emphasizing these shared wins from teamwork, Charles also takes the time to make everyone feel respected for their individual contribution. “You have to make sure to give people ‘spotlight moments.’ I look for opportunities to get them in front of the management team. I hate it when someone works on a presentation and then their boss delivers it. If people have done the work, they present it.” Finally, he’s transparent about the rationale behind his decisions. As he explains, “it’s a great investment in minimizing suspicion and defensiveness later on.” In doing so, he personally takes time to balance his time between the creatives and the technical folks, and if someone’s giving up some responsibilities to one of the new hires, he says, “I make sure to explain why that’s happening and emphasize the opportunities they will have to do new stuff in other areas—often areas that they’re better at and enjoy more.” As a result, Charles says, “both sides are learning and growing by being exposed to each other.” It’s not something he sees as a one-off effort, either. “The company never stops changing. The people who are currently ‘new’ will become the ‘old guard’ and then there will be a new generation of skills needed.” After all, he says, “this sort of attention to the social dimension is important in any industry where systemic change is happening.” The evidence is pretty clear. Colleagues will behave more like their best selves, more of the time, if leaders take a few modest steps to foster an environment where people’s brain’s aren’t overloaded—more focused on rewards than threats—and have their fundamental social needs met. With a little behavioral science in their toolkit, leaders can build a more productive team—and a happier one at that. About the author Caroline Webb is a senior adviser to McKinsey and an alumnus of the firm’s London office. This article is based on research in her new book, How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life (Crown Business, February 2016). Source: www.mckinsey.com
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
GralInt-Why you might want to think twice about getting your wisdom teeth removed
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
DON'T DO IT
Why you might want to think twice about getting your wisdom teeth removed
by Rob Wile
January 27, 2016
As far as I can remember, when I had my wisdom teeth removed in my early teens, about 15 years ago, they were not causing any problems. I wasn’t in pain. They were somewhat impacted, or growing in at a bit of an angle. My parents decided to go ahead with the surgery to remove them anyway.
“There was a lot of blood,” the doctors told me first thing after waking up — i.e., hemorrhaging. That, and the lingering effects of anesthesia, explained why, for the next several hours, I had to be rolled around in a wheelchair.
The following weeks involved a mostly liquid diet and lots of pudding. I hate pudding.
The inside of my mouth, as one friend aptly put it, resembled a “lunar landscape.” And it hurt. My then-frail teenage body was not prepared to handle intensive surgery. Even as my mouth slowly began to heal, my body did not respond to the ordeal well, and I caught pneumonia. This entailed temperatures of 103 degrees and fever dreams of fighting the Nazis on Normandy beaches.
I have never been sicker in my life.
And after researching this topic further, I am now convinced that the wisdom teeth industry is probably a scam.
As of 2011, 10 million wisdom teeth get hacked out of the back of Americans’ mouths a year.
For decades, the procedure was performed only when the teeth, also known as third molars, were causing real trouble, like in the case of appendectomies. After World War II, however, the ranks of dentists exploded, and with them recommendations that people get their third molars removed as a precaution. As dental care got more advanced—and the financial incentive to perform the procedures increased—wisdom teeth removal began to become as routine as getting braces.
Today, many still undergo this procedure for legitimate reasons: ingrown or impacted wisdom teeth can lead to infections, tooth decay, and generally unpleasant levels of pain.
But a large percentage of patients choose to undergo this act of sawing, bleeding, and stitching merely as a precaution, often putting up more than $1,000 for the experience. This is not entirely surprising: America excels at ordering up unnecessary medical procedures. It’s an epidemic: By one count, Americans waste $750 billion a year on unproductive care, more than our nation’s entire budget for K–12 education.
For 30 years, Dr. Jay Friedman has been on a one-man crusade to halt the tide of wisdom teeth removal, which he says is one of the most egregious examples of unnecessary medical procedures. In 2007, Friedman published a study in which he estimated that at least two-thirds of the millions of wisdom teeth extracted each year could or should have stayed in, but were instead removed out of unfounded fears of what would happen otherwise.
In Friedman’s estimation, you risk more enduring complications from wisdom teeth removal surgery than just leaving the suckers in your mouth. Consider this list of potential complications from wisdom teeth removal surgery:
“It is specious to contend that less than 3 days of temporary discomfort or disability is a small price to pay to avoid the future risks of root [destruction], serious infections, and cysts,” he wrote in his paper. “Also ignored is the risk of incidental injury such as broken jaws, fractured teeth, damage to the [mouth] joints, temporary and, especially, permanent paresthesia or dysesthesia (numbness and dysfunction of the lower lip and the tongue).”
Friedman is not a lone voice crying in the dental wilderness. A 2002 paper published in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association estimated that the complication rate from wisdom teeth surgery was between 7% and 10%. A 2011 study of more than 6,000 patients in Greece found that only 2.7% of in-tact wisdom teeth result in problems. And an older study often cited by critics of routine extraction found that only 12% of surveyed middle-aged patients experienced a complication from keeping impacted wisdom teeth.
And then there’s the specter—rare, but possible—of death. Sydney Galleger, a teen in Minnesota, had just finished her junior year of high school last summer when she went under. Everything seemed to be going well until the very end, when Sydney’s blood pressure shot up, her pulse dropped, and she went into cardiac arrest. Press coverage of Galleger’s death pointed the finger squarely at her wisdom teeth removal procedure. An autopsy did not do much to dispel this as the main cause.
In the face of all of this, the other side of the debate maintains that, in fact, there is no debate. At the center is the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (AAOMS), the doctors who specialize in wisdom teeth removal. In a just released white paper, the association gave this policy statement on the procedure:
…while not all third molars require surgical management, given the documented high incidence of problems associated with third molars over time, all patients should be evaluated by someone experienced and expert in third molar management.
As evidence of this “high incidence of problems,” they point to a review that looked at seven papers examining what happened when young adults left their wisdom teeth in. The review concluded that the risk of having to undergo removal appeared to increase as subjects aged.
But at least one of the studies in the AAOMS’ review concluded no such thing. Rather, the British study found that 83.13% of patients survived the one-year study period symptom-free, and just 5% had to have teeth removed.
Indeed, Britain’s National Health Service now advises the following on wisdom teeth removal:
Your wisdom teeth don’t usually need to be removed if they’re impacted but aren’t causing any problems. This is because there’s no proven benefit of doing this and it carries the risk of complications.
Even if they’re impacted!
Another study published in 2006 by the Cardiff University in Wales found a slightly higher incidence of teeth eventually having to be removed, but also concluded that there was “little support for the reintroduction of prophylactic removal of wisdom teeth,” referring to the already declining practice in the region.
Dr. Julia Boughner, a cell biologist at the University of Saskatchewan, has been following the debate closely for about five years since she opened a research lab to look into how human jaws evolved. In 2013, she published an article on the state of the debate, writing:
…Evidence directly linking third molars to oral diseases is lacking. Further, it is not clear if the age-associated risk of disease23 (i.e., the older the patient, the greater the apparent risk posed by impacted third molars) is simply due to the increased likelihood of bacterial accumulation and tissue inflammation with time.
At a minimum, she told me, there remains a distinct absence of comprehensive, unbiased studies on the wisdom teeth question.
“The trick is that clinicians still don’t have all the tools and data available that would make them comfortable with a sit-and-wait approach,” she said.
In a 2011 New York Times story on this debate, health writer Roni Caryn Rabin said that the price of leaving your teeth in was that you’ll have to be extra fastidious about your own dental care, with frequent cleanings and X-rays if necessary.
If that’s the price to pay for avoiding major surgery, it seems like a bargain.
Source: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1wj5Xo/:1ZLZ!sTvA:l31nPi8k/fusion.net/story/252916/should-i-get-my-wisdom-teeth-removed-no
DON'T DO IT
Why you might want to think twice about getting your wisdom teeth removed
by Rob Wile
January 27, 2016
As far as I can remember, when I had my wisdom teeth removed in my early teens, about 15 years ago, they were not causing any problems. I wasn’t in pain. They were somewhat impacted, or growing in at a bit of an angle. My parents decided to go ahead with the surgery to remove them anyway.
“There was a lot of blood,” the doctors told me first thing after waking up — i.e., hemorrhaging. That, and the lingering effects of anesthesia, explained why, for the next several hours, I had to be rolled around in a wheelchair.
The following weeks involved a mostly liquid diet and lots of pudding. I hate pudding.
The inside of my mouth, as one friend aptly put it, resembled a “lunar landscape.” And it hurt. My then-frail teenage body was not prepared to handle intensive surgery. Even as my mouth slowly began to heal, my body did not respond to the ordeal well, and I caught pneumonia. This entailed temperatures of 103 degrees and fever dreams of fighting the Nazis on Normandy beaches.
I have never been sicker in my life.
And after researching this topic further, I am now convinced that the wisdom teeth industry is probably a scam.
As of 2011, 10 million wisdom teeth get hacked out of the back of Americans’ mouths a year.
For decades, the procedure was performed only when the teeth, also known as third molars, were causing real trouble, like in the case of appendectomies. After World War II, however, the ranks of dentists exploded, and with them recommendations that people get their third molars removed as a precaution. As dental care got more advanced—and the financial incentive to perform the procedures increased—wisdom teeth removal began to become as routine as getting braces.
Today, many still undergo this procedure for legitimate reasons: ingrown or impacted wisdom teeth can lead to infections, tooth decay, and generally unpleasant levels of pain.
But a large percentage of patients choose to undergo this act of sawing, bleeding, and stitching merely as a precaution, often putting up more than $1,000 for the experience. This is not entirely surprising: America excels at ordering up unnecessary medical procedures. It’s an epidemic: By one count, Americans waste $750 billion a year on unproductive care, more than our nation’s entire budget for K–12 education.
For 30 years, Dr. Jay Friedman has been on a one-man crusade to halt the tide of wisdom teeth removal, which he says is one of the most egregious examples of unnecessary medical procedures. In 2007, Friedman published a study in which he estimated that at least two-thirds of the millions of wisdom teeth extracted each year could or should have stayed in, but were instead removed out of unfounded fears of what would happen otherwise.
In Friedman’s estimation, you risk more enduring complications from wisdom teeth removal surgery than just leaving the suckers in your mouth. Consider this list of potential complications from wisdom teeth removal surgery:
“It is specious to contend that less than 3 days of temporary discomfort or disability is a small price to pay to avoid the future risks of root [destruction], serious infections, and cysts,” he wrote in his paper. “Also ignored is the risk of incidental injury such as broken jaws, fractured teeth, damage to the [mouth] joints, temporary and, especially, permanent paresthesia or dysesthesia (numbness and dysfunction of the lower lip and the tongue).”
Friedman is not a lone voice crying in the dental wilderness. A 2002 paper published in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association estimated that the complication rate from wisdom teeth surgery was between 7% and 10%. A 2011 study of more than 6,000 patients in Greece found that only 2.7% of in-tact wisdom teeth result in problems. And an older study often cited by critics of routine extraction found that only 12% of surveyed middle-aged patients experienced a complication from keeping impacted wisdom teeth.
And then there’s the specter—rare, but possible—of death. Sydney Galleger, a teen in Minnesota, had just finished her junior year of high school last summer when she went under. Everything seemed to be going well until the very end, when Sydney’s blood pressure shot up, her pulse dropped, and she went into cardiac arrest. Press coverage of Galleger’s death pointed the finger squarely at her wisdom teeth removal procedure. An autopsy did not do much to dispel this as the main cause.
In the face of all of this, the other side of the debate maintains that, in fact, there is no debate. At the center is the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (AAOMS), the doctors who specialize in wisdom teeth removal. In a just released white paper, the association gave this policy statement on the procedure:
…while not all third molars require surgical management, given the documented high incidence of problems associated with third molars over time, all patients should be evaluated by someone experienced and expert in third molar management.
As evidence of this “high incidence of problems,” they point to a review that looked at seven papers examining what happened when young adults left their wisdom teeth in. The review concluded that the risk of having to undergo removal appeared to increase as subjects aged.
But at least one of the studies in the AAOMS’ review concluded no such thing. Rather, the British study found that 83.13% of patients survived the one-year study period symptom-free, and just 5% had to have teeth removed.
Indeed, Britain’s National Health Service now advises the following on wisdom teeth removal:
Your wisdom teeth don’t usually need to be removed if they’re impacted but aren’t causing any problems. This is because there’s no proven benefit of doing this and it carries the risk of complications.
Even if they’re impacted!
Another study published in 2006 by the Cardiff University in Wales found a slightly higher incidence of teeth eventually having to be removed, but also concluded that there was “little support for the reintroduction of prophylactic removal of wisdom teeth,” referring to the already declining practice in the region.
Dr. Julia Boughner, a cell biologist at the University of Saskatchewan, has been following the debate closely for about five years since she opened a research lab to look into how human jaws evolved. In 2013, she published an article on the state of the debate, writing:
…Evidence directly linking third molars to oral diseases is lacking. Further, it is not clear if the age-associated risk of disease23 (i.e., the older the patient, the greater the apparent risk posed by impacted third molars) is simply due to the increased likelihood of bacterial accumulation and tissue inflammation with time.
At a minimum, she told me, there remains a distinct absence of comprehensive, unbiased studies on the wisdom teeth question.
“The trick is that clinicians still don’t have all the tools and data available that would make them comfortable with a sit-and-wait approach,” she said.
In a 2011 New York Times story on this debate, health writer Roni Caryn Rabin said that the price of leaving your teeth in was that you’ll have to be extra fastidious about your own dental care, with frequent cleanings and X-rays if necessary.
If that’s the price to pay for avoiding major surgery, it seems like a bargain.
Source: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1wj5Xo/:1ZLZ!sTvA:l31nPi8k/fusion.net/story/252916/should-i-get-my-wisdom-teeth-removed-no
Monday, February 1, 2016
BUS/GralInt-Habilidad menospreciada: aunque es fundamental para la creatividad, subestimamos el poder de la perseverancia
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Habilidad menospreciada: aunque es fundamental para la creatividad, subestimamos el poder de la perseverancia
Martina Rua
DOMINGO 31 DE ENERO DE 2016
Foto:Alma Larroca
Thomas Edison experimentó con más de 1600 filamentos, incluidos pelos de la barba de un amigo, antes de dar con el diseño definitivo de la lamparita de luz eléctrica. Perseverar, el acto de invertir esfuerzo de manera continua para alcanzar un objetivo, es esencial para aumentar la creatividad y un motor de productividad. Y aunque son numerosos los estudios empíricos que lo sostienen, subestimamos su poder para resolver las cosas de todos los días.
Esto es lo que demostraron dos académicos de la Escuela de Negocios Kellogg, de la Universidad de Northwestern, a través de siete investigaciones que recopilaron en el paper People Underestimate the Value of Persistence for Creative Performance, que fue publicado recientemente en el Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. En él, Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren argumentan que esta subestimación se debe a que el pensamiento creativo requiere un esfuerzo procesual durante el que las personas consideramos demasiado difícil dar con nuevas ideas o soluciones adicionales. Y, simplemente, nos damos por vencidos erosionando nuestra capacidad creativa.
En todos los estudios se siguió el mismo mecanismo. Primero se les daba a los participantes una tarea a resolver; luego, se les preguntaba cuántas ideas creían que podrían haber aportado de tener tiempo adicional y, finalmente, se les daba el tiempo adicional para seguir trabajando. En todos los estudios las personas subestimaron su productividad en la perseverancia. Por ejemplo, un ejercicio era referido a generar ideas creativas para comer y beber el día de Acción de Gracias. Los participantes generaron un promedio de 21.79 ideas en el período inicial y luego generaron en promedio 5 ideas más sobre el número que ellos habían proyectado para la segunda etapa. Además, en todos los casos las ideas del tiempo de perseverancia fueron más originales y creativas.
Tiene sentido. Siempre las primeras cosas que nos vienen a la mente son obvias, están al alcance de cualquiera, suelen ser poco creativas y definitivamente no generan resultados innovadores. Es la perseverancia la única manera de cambiar de territorio, hacia un espacio más fértil. Tenemos la tendencia de dividir a las personas entre creativas o no creativas, pero según los hallazgos de estas investigaciones se trata mucho más de cuánto tiempo y esfuerzo se puso en la generación de ideas, más que con un don heredado. La creatividad es el resultado del trabajo duro, de la adquisición de hábitos, de la perseverancia ante la adversidad.
En otra de las investigaciones, los académicos se preguntaron si esta subestimación de la perseverancia era sólo cuestión de novatos o si también ocurría en personas experimentadas en sus trabajos y los resultados fueron similares. Aquí se trabajó con expertos en comedia musical y se propuso una escena para la que había que pensar distintos finales. Aún los expertos en sus campos pensaron que tendrían menos ideas y menos creativas que lo que finalmente lograron en el tiempo adicional.
El aumento de la creatividad y la productividad desvela a las compañías que invierten en constantes intentos por despabilar a sus cerebros más brillantes, sin embargo, la solución parece estar a la vista sin ser explorada. Repensar el valor de la perseverancia se presenta como un gran motor hacia la creatividad. Si en vez de rendirnos seguimos pensando, seguimos investigando, seguimos intentando un poco más, quizás aparezcan nuestras mejores ideas que estaban ahí, esperando a ser descubiertas.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Habilidad menospreciada: aunque es fundamental para la creatividad, subestimamos el poder de la perseverancia
Martina Rua
DOMINGO 31 DE ENERO DE 2016
Foto:Alma Larroca
Thomas Edison experimentó con más de 1600 filamentos, incluidos pelos de la barba de un amigo, antes de dar con el diseño definitivo de la lamparita de luz eléctrica. Perseverar, el acto de invertir esfuerzo de manera continua para alcanzar un objetivo, es esencial para aumentar la creatividad y un motor de productividad. Y aunque son numerosos los estudios empíricos que lo sostienen, subestimamos su poder para resolver las cosas de todos los días.
Esto es lo que demostraron dos académicos de la Escuela de Negocios Kellogg, de la Universidad de Northwestern, a través de siete investigaciones que recopilaron en el paper People Underestimate the Value of Persistence for Creative Performance, que fue publicado recientemente en el Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. En él, Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren argumentan que esta subestimación se debe a que el pensamiento creativo requiere un esfuerzo procesual durante el que las personas consideramos demasiado difícil dar con nuevas ideas o soluciones adicionales. Y, simplemente, nos damos por vencidos erosionando nuestra capacidad creativa.
En todos los estudios se siguió el mismo mecanismo. Primero se les daba a los participantes una tarea a resolver; luego, se les preguntaba cuántas ideas creían que podrían haber aportado de tener tiempo adicional y, finalmente, se les daba el tiempo adicional para seguir trabajando. En todos los estudios las personas subestimaron su productividad en la perseverancia. Por ejemplo, un ejercicio era referido a generar ideas creativas para comer y beber el día de Acción de Gracias. Los participantes generaron un promedio de 21.79 ideas en el período inicial y luego generaron en promedio 5 ideas más sobre el número que ellos habían proyectado para la segunda etapa. Además, en todos los casos las ideas del tiempo de perseverancia fueron más originales y creativas.
Tiene sentido. Siempre las primeras cosas que nos vienen a la mente son obvias, están al alcance de cualquiera, suelen ser poco creativas y definitivamente no generan resultados innovadores. Es la perseverancia la única manera de cambiar de territorio, hacia un espacio más fértil. Tenemos la tendencia de dividir a las personas entre creativas o no creativas, pero según los hallazgos de estas investigaciones se trata mucho más de cuánto tiempo y esfuerzo se puso en la generación de ideas, más que con un don heredado. La creatividad es el resultado del trabajo duro, de la adquisición de hábitos, de la perseverancia ante la adversidad.
En otra de las investigaciones, los académicos se preguntaron si esta subestimación de la perseverancia era sólo cuestión de novatos o si también ocurría en personas experimentadas en sus trabajos y los resultados fueron similares. Aquí se trabajó con expertos en comedia musical y se propuso una escena para la que había que pensar distintos finales. Aún los expertos en sus campos pensaron que tendrían menos ideas y menos creativas que lo que finalmente lograron en el tiempo adicional.
El aumento de la creatividad y la productividad desvela a las compañías que invierten en constantes intentos por despabilar a sus cerebros más brillantes, sin embargo, la solución parece estar a la vista sin ser explorada. Repensar el valor de la perseverancia se presenta como un gran motor hacia la creatividad. Si en vez de rendirnos seguimos pensando, seguimos investigando, seguimos intentando un poco más, quizás aparezcan nuestras mejores ideas que estaban ahí, esperando a ser descubiertas.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
TECH/BUS/MANAG/GralInt-Creatividad y empleo: el círculo virtuoso de Google/Ideas que inspiran. Matt Cutts: ¿Por qué no encarar algún desafío nuevo por 30 días?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Creatividad y empleo: el círculo virtuoso de Google
El gigante de Internet adoptó una serie de políticas de trabajo para facilitar y potenciar la innovación dentro de su estructura
Eugenio Marchiori,Andrés Hatum
LUNES 01 DE FEBRERO DE 2016
"Las buenas ideas venden productos. Las ideas grandiosas cambian vidas. Desde abrir nuestra marca hasta abrir museos, vemos la creatividad como una manera de resolver problemas grandes y pequeños." Así se expresa en una nota Lorraine Tworill, VP de Google de Marketing global. Pero, ¿cuáles son las razones que llevaron a Google a ser una de las empresas más admiradas y respetadas por su creatividad? ¿Cómo es que poco tiempo llegó a ser una de las marcas más valiosas del mundo? Cuando se exploran las estrategias empleadas se observa que algunas han sido clave para conseguir el éxito.
1. Contratar el mejor talento
Según explican Eric Schimdt (CEO hasta 2011) y Jonathan Rosenberg (asesor de Larry Page, uno de los fundadores y actual CEO) en su libro Cómo funciona Google, identificar y atraer a los mejores es la tarea más importante que tienen los líderes en la compañía. Los candidatos son evaluados por su capacidad cognitiva, su conocimiento del rol y su experiencia de liderazgo. A estas tres condiciones se le suma una cuarta definida como "Googleyness": una cualidad sutil, vinculada a lo interesante que esa persona resulta. En Google se buscan técnicos excelentes en lo suyo, pero generalistas, con múltiples inquietudes e intereses, estilo que suele tener la gente creativa. Para saber si el candidato cumple el requerimiento, el entrevistador debe hacerse la pregunta: "¿Pasaría seis horas clavado en un aeropuerto con esta persona sin aburrirme?" El test busca detectar si el potencial empleado o empleada tiene "fit cultural", es decir, muestra condiciones para integrarse fácilmente y para aportar valor a la cultura de la empresa. Además de las obvias ventajas derivadas de nutrirse de talento excelente, se busca generar el "efecto manada", ya que un grupo de gente brillante atrae a otros como ellos. Muchos que ingresan a Google lo hacen con el deseo de trabajar codo a codo con los mejores.
Foto:LA NACION
2. Crear el ambiente adecuado
Google es célebre por el diseño de sus oficinas que, para muchos, parecen jardines de infantes para adultos. Toboganes gigantes, metegoles, mesas de ping-pong y de pool, bicicletas multicolor para trasladarse, zonas de relax, gimnasio con personal trainer, restaurantes gourmet de diferente origen étnico, cafeterías provistas con bebidas, frutas y snacks. Todo inserto en una arquitectura luminosa y con espacios amplios que facilitan los encuentros casuales entre empleados de diferentes áreas. El clima es tan amistoso y distendido que ir a trabajar deja de ser una carga y se convierte en un momento esperado. Se diluye el tabú de la frontera entre la vida personal y laboral. En la práctica desaparece el "balance vida laboral-personal" como dimensiones opuestas y se observa una integración entre ambas.
3. Estimular la serendipity
Steve Jobs también empleaba en sus empresas los espacios amplios para producir serendipity, esa afortunada conjunción de preparación, sagacidad e ideas que dispara la creatividad. Tanto en Pixar como en Apple existen los "atrios" que son grandes hubs (distribuidores) en lugares centrales de sus campus. En su biografía decía: "Si un edificio no estimula la colaboración se pierde un montón de innovación y la magia que es disparada por la serendipity. Entonces diseñamos un edificio que saque a las personas de sus oficinas y permita que se mezclen en un espacio central con personas que de otra manera no verían". Larry Page y Sergei Brin, los fundadores de Google, eran admiradores de Jobs, por lo que no es casual que hayan adoptado algunas de sus enseñanzas.
4. Tiempo libre
De poco serviría la generación de ideas si no se brindan los recursos para que prosperen, y el recurso más valioso es el tiempo. Schimdt cree que "las personas innovadoras no necesitan que se les diga que lo sean, necesitan que se les permita serlo". Por eso es que los googlers pueden disponer de un 20% de su tiempo para trabajar en los proyectos que les interesen. Si bien el 20% es más bien el 120%, ya que la investigación suele ocurrir en los fines de semana o durante la noche, nadie les impide que lo hagan. El 20% tiene más que ver con la libertad creativa que con el tiempo en sí. Fue durante estos espacios de creación que nacieron productos como Google News, Google Now, Google Maps, Street View y muchos otros.
5. Gestión de éxitos y fracasos
Para que la creación tenga sentido debe generar innovación, es decir, debe poder implementarse y producir cambio social. En Google todos quieren ser innovadores, y no exactamente por el premio económico que eso pueda suponer. Diversos estudios muestran que lo que motiva a las personas creativas es la necesidad de satisfacer su curiosidad y la de idear productos y servicios que mejoren la vida de muchos. Google busca innovaciones que produzcan cambios disruptivos aunque sin despreciar las incrementales, producto del trabajo diario y silencioso. Todas las ideas deben tener la posibilidad de nacer, pero -en un proceso algo darwiniano- no todas evolucionarán hasta producir un impacto lo bastante amplio como para convertirse en la siguiente estrella de Internet.
Google
Nada se pierde
Aprendizaje
En 2009, Google lanzó su servicio Google Wave, que nunca logró levantar vuelto. Sin embargo, algunos de los aprendizajes obtenidos durante el desarrollo de la plataforma que prometía revolucionar el correo electrónico fueron utilizados posteriormente para mejorar Google+ y Gmail.
Los autores son profesores de la Escuela de Negocios dela Universidad Di Tella
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Ideas que inspiran. Matt Cutts: ¿Por qué no encarar algún desafío nuevo por 30 días? (Rep)
El director de Google nos invita a escapar de la rutina poniéndonos un nuevo desafío cada mes
LUNES 01 DE FEBRERO DE 2016
"Piensen en algo que hayan querido añadir a sus vidas e inténtenlo durante los próximos 30 días", invita, provocador, el director de Google Matt Cutts.
Matt Cutts
Durante una breve charla TED, que tuvo lugar en California, Cutts parte del siguiente dato: resulta que 30 días es la cantidad de tiempo justa para añadir o quitar un nuevo hábito. Y lo propone con un método para escaparle a la rutina y hacer el tiempo más memorable.
Cutts, que integra el equipo Google desde el año 2000 y hoy se encuentra al frente del grupo que trabaja contra el spam en la web, lleva tiempo intentando nuevos desafíos cada mes. Las ventajas, asegura, son notables. "Aprendí unas cuantas cosas: la primera es que, en lugar de pasar volando los meses, olvidados, el tiempo es mucho más memorable. También noté que, al empezar a aumentar la dificultad de los desafíos, aumentó la confianza en mí mismo. Nunca antes había sido tan aventurero. También descubrí que si uno quiere algo lo suficiente, puede hacer cualquier cosa durante 30 días", asegura.
"Aprendí que cuando hago cambios pequeños, sostenibles, las cosas que podía seguir haciendo, tenía más probabilidades de que se afianzaran. No hay nada malo con los desafíos grandes y locos, pero es menos probable que se afiancen", agrega Cutts, quien cierra su exposición con un desafío: "Los próximos 30 días pasarán, nos guste o no. Entonces por qué no pensar en algo que siempre hayamos querido probar y darle una oportunidad?"
¿Y a vos qué desafío te gustaría intentar por los próximos 30 días?
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Creatividad y empleo: el círculo virtuoso de Google
El gigante de Internet adoptó una serie de políticas de trabajo para facilitar y potenciar la innovación dentro de su estructura
Eugenio Marchiori,Andrés Hatum
LUNES 01 DE FEBRERO DE 2016
"Las buenas ideas venden productos. Las ideas grandiosas cambian vidas. Desde abrir nuestra marca hasta abrir museos, vemos la creatividad como una manera de resolver problemas grandes y pequeños." Así se expresa en una nota Lorraine Tworill, VP de Google de Marketing global. Pero, ¿cuáles son las razones que llevaron a Google a ser una de las empresas más admiradas y respetadas por su creatividad? ¿Cómo es que poco tiempo llegó a ser una de las marcas más valiosas del mundo? Cuando se exploran las estrategias empleadas se observa que algunas han sido clave para conseguir el éxito.
1. Contratar el mejor talento
Según explican Eric Schimdt (CEO hasta 2011) y Jonathan Rosenberg (asesor de Larry Page, uno de los fundadores y actual CEO) en su libro Cómo funciona Google, identificar y atraer a los mejores es la tarea más importante que tienen los líderes en la compañía. Los candidatos son evaluados por su capacidad cognitiva, su conocimiento del rol y su experiencia de liderazgo. A estas tres condiciones se le suma una cuarta definida como "Googleyness": una cualidad sutil, vinculada a lo interesante que esa persona resulta. En Google se buscan técnicos excelentes en lo suyo, pero generalistas, con múltiples inquietudes e intereses, estilo que suele tener la gente creativa. Para saber si el candidato cumple el requerimiento, el entrevistador debe hacerse la pregunta: "¿Pasaría seis horas clavado en un aeropuerto con esta persona sin aburrirme?" El test busca detectar si el potencial empleado o empleada tiene "fit cultural", es decir, muestra condiciones para integrarse fácilmente y para aportar valor a la cultura de la empresa. Además de las obvias ventajas derivadas de nutrirse de talento excelente, se busca generar el "efecto manada", ya que un grupo de gente brillante atrae a otros como ellos. Muchos que ingresan a Google lo hacen con el deseo de trabajar codo a codo con los mejores.
Foto:LA NACION
2. Crear el ambiente adecuado
Google es célebre por el diseño de sus oficinas que, para muchos, parecen jardines de infantes para adultos. Toboganes gigantes, metegoles, mesas de ping-pong y de pool, bicicletas multicolor para trasladarse, zonas de relax, gimnasio con personal trainer, restaurantes gourmet de diferente origen étnico, cafeterías provistas con bebidas, frutas y snacks. Todo inserto en una arquitectura luminosa y con espacios amplios que facilitan los encuentros casuales entre empleados de diferentes áreas. El clima es tan amistoso y distendido que ir a trabajar deja de ser una carga y se convierte en un momento esperado. Se diluye el tabú de la frontera entre la vida personal y laboral. En la práctica desaparece el "balance vida laboral-personal" como dimensiones opuestas y se observa una integración entre ambas.
3. Estimular la serendipity
Steve Jobs también empleaba en sus empresas los espacios amplios para producir serendipity, esa afortunada conjunción de preparación, sagacidad e ideas que dispara la creatividad. Tanto en Pixar como en Apple existen los "atrios" que son grandes hubs (distribuidores) en lugares centrales de sus campus. En su biografía decía: "Si un edificio no estimula la colaboración se pierde un montón de innovación y la magia que es disparada por la serendipity. Entonces diseñamos un edificio que saque a las personas de sus oficinas y permita que se mezclen en un espacio central con personas que de otra manera no verían". Larry Page y Sergei Brin, los fundadores de Google, eran admiradores de Jobs, por lo que no es casual que hayan adoptado algunas de sus enseñanzas.
4. Tiempo libre
De poco serviría la generación de ideas si no se brindan los recursos para que prosperen, y el recurso más valioso es el tiempo. Schimdt cree que "las personas innovadoras no necesitan que se les diga que lo sean, necesitan que se les permita serlo". Por eso es que los googlers pueden disponer de un 20% de su tiempo para trabajar en los proyectos que les interesen. Si bien el 20% es más bien el 120%, ya que la investigación suele ocurrir en los fines de semana o durante la noche, nadie les impide que lo hagan. El 20% tiene más que ver con la libertad creativa que con el tiempo en sí. Fue durante estos espacios de creación que nacieron productos como Google News, Google Now, Google Maps, Street View y muchos otros.
5. Gestión de éxitos y fracasos
Para que la creación tenga sentido debe generar innovación, es decir, debe poder implementarse y producir cambio social. En Google todos quieren ser innovadores, y no exactamente por el premio económico que eso pueda suponer. Diversos estudios muestran que lo que motiva a las personas creativas es la necesidad de satisfacer su curiosidad y la de idear productos y servicios que mejoren la vida de muchos. Google busca innovaciones que produzcan cambios disruptivos aunque sin despreciar las incrementales, producto del trabajo diario y silencioso. Todas las ideas deben tener la posibilidad de nacer, pero -en un proceso algo darwiniano- no todas evolucionarán hasta producir un impacto lo bastante amplio como para convertirse en la siguiente estrella de Internet.
Nada se pierde
Aprendizaje
En 2009, Google lanzó su servicio Google Wave, que nunca logró levantar vuelto. Sin embargo, algunos de los aprendizajes obtenidos durante el desarrollo de la plataforma que prometía revolucionar el correo electrónico fueron utilizados posteriormente para mejorar Google+ y Gmail.
Los autores son profesores de la Escuela de Negocios dela Universidad Di Tella
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Ideas que inspiran. Matt Cutts: ¿Por qué no encarar algún desafío nuevo por 30 días? (Rep)
El director de Google nos invita a escapar de la rutina poniéndonos un nuevo desafío cada mes
LUNES 01 DE FEBRERO DE 2016
"Piensen en algo que hayan querido añadir a sus vidas e inténtenlo durante los próximos 30 días", invita, provocador, el director de Google Matt Cutts.
Matt Cutts
Durante una breve charla TED, que tuvo lugar en California, Cutts parte del siguiente dato: resulta que 30 días es la cantidad de tiempo justa para añadir o quitar un nuevo hábito. Y lo propone con un método para escaparle a la rutina y hacer el tiempo más memorable.
Cutts, que integra el equipo Google desde el año 2000 y hoy se encuentra al frente del grupo que trabaja contra el spam en la web, lleva tiempo intentando nuevos desafíos cada mes. Las ventajas, asegura, son notables. "Aprendí unas cuantas cosas: la primera es que, en lugar de pasar volando los meses, olvidados, el tiempo es mucho más memorable. También noté que, al empezar a aumentar la dificultad de los desafíos, aumentó la confianza en mí mismo. Nunca antes había sido tan aventurero. También descubrí que si uno quiere algo lo suficiente, puede hacer cualquier cosa durante 30 días", asegura.
"Aprendí que cuando hago cambios pequeños, sostenibles, las cosas que podía seguir haciendo, tenía más probabilidades de que se afianzaran. No hay nada malo con los desafíos grandes y locos, pero es menos probable que se afiancen", agrega Cutts, quien cierra su exposición con un desafío: "Los próximos 30 días pasarán, nos guste o no. Entonces por qué no pensar en algo que siempre hayamos querido probar y darle una oportunidad?"
¿Y a vos qué desafío te gustaría intentar por los próximos 30 días?
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
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