Studies have found that if you do nothing further with newly acquired knowledge, after a few hours you only retain a fraction of what you read, saw or heard. As more time goes on, your retention slides even further.
Learners Retain Approximately:
90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.
75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.
50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.
30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration.
20% of what they learn from audio-visual.
10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading.
5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from lecture.
Ascension University — Source Material
Senate Testimony of Oil and Gas Executives on Ending Subsidies
Oil and gas industry executives testified on ending tax breaks for the largest multinational oil and gas companies. Senate Democrats and the Obama administration had proposed ending $21 billion in subsidies for oil companies as a budget deficit reduction measure. The executives said the plan would do little to reduce gas prices and hurt their exploration efforts.
The Kickoff Event for Startup America
National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, Council of Economics Advisers Chairman Austan Goolsbee, SBA Administrator Karen Mills and other Administration officials participate in a kickoff event for Startup America, a national campaign to help America achieve these goals by promoting high-growth entrepreneurship across the country.
Standing Out from the Crowd
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. — George Orwell
Five Powers that Get Ideas off the Ground
Getting ideas off the ground can require a power surge. In years of detailed observation of successful leaders across sectors and fields, I’ve seen that getting the credibility to reach important goals comes from uplifting actions that increase five personal and organizational powers.
Showing up: the power of presence. There’s a well-known saying that 90% of success in life comes from just showing up. It’s a cliché because it’s true. Digital and other remote communications are efficient and helpful, but there’s much to be said for being there, face-to-face with others. I coined the term Management by Flying Around to reflect the work of CEOs of the vanguard companies in my book SuperCorp. Instead of ruling from headquarters, they go out to the field, meet major customers, and press the flesh with government officials.
Speaking up: the power of voice. It doesn’t matter who runs the meeting; the de facto leader is the one who frames the debate and articulates the consensus. The power of voice is not mere noise; it comes from the ability to put into words what might be only embryonic, thus shaping the direction for action. Memorable themes provide meaning out of a mass of verbiage. They echo and are repeated, providing a guidance system for companies or countries. Great speeches make great leaders. That’s why every schoolchild should be given opportunities and encouragement to stand up in front of peers and parents to make speeches
Teaming up: the power of partnering. Most things worth achieving can’t be done alone. Entrepreneurs need a founding team. Innovators in established companies need a coalition of backers and supporters. Sports teams perform better when athletes help one another hone skills. Physicians seem to get better results for patients when part of a team that shares information and advice. U.S. foreign policy now stresses building regional alliances to promote peace and prosperity. Partnership invites reciprocity — giving as well as getting. Helping a partner can increase individual self-confidence, as my former student Kathy Korman Frey is showing in her new “sisterhood of success” program for women entrepreneurs.
Looking up: the power of values. Higher principles help people transcend the conflicts and concerns of the moment. Standing for something larger than mere self-interest gives leaders moral grounding and provides a basis for inspiring and motivating the work. Those who are honored as great leaders are not merely good at getting results efficiently, they are able to find grander goals that help people look up to see the big picture and set their sights higher. NASA chief Charles Bolden, a retired Marine general and former Harvard Advanced Leadership Fellow who is African-American, has spoken eloquently of the role his parents’ values played in his success. They helped him achieve in school and, later, lift himself and others to high places — which he did literally, as an astronaut.
Not giving up: the power of persistence. Remember Kanter’s Law and repeat often: Everything can look like a failure in the middle. CEOs and elected officials in the middle of controversial changes have told me that they feel comforted by this idea — if it’s still the middle, there’s always hope. Keep at it, make mid-course adjustments, and surprise the naysayers. Change agents in companies sometimes get approval after repeated turndowns just because they wear out their critics, who run out of arguments. Turnaround leaders certainly know the truth of this. General Motors’ interim CEO Edward Whitacre or New York City school chancellor Joel Klein, from two wildly different sectors, are among those who faced a barrage of criticism when they took office, yet succeeded in silencing the critics by persevering in pursuit of results.
Achieving goals is always a matter of hard work, and success is never guaranteed. Still, cultivating these 5 powers can shift the odds in your favor.
Ascension University — Source Material
How to get inspired for a job search
What is it about a job search that takes the wind out of a person’s sails? If you’ve been lying low for any reason, or even if you’ve been trying hard but getting discouraged at your job search, now’s the time to start fresh. Here are a few thoughts to help get you going.
● Stop focusing on what could go wrong in your search or in a new job, and start thinking of all the ways this could go well.
● Don’t hold yourself back by worrying about age bias. Yes, of course employers may discriminate. But what if that’s the furthest thing from their minds and you come in with a chip on your shoulder? You need to start each conversation with optimism.
● Don’t hold onto past jobs as the model for the next one. So much has changed in just the last couple of years. One of the changes may have been a decline in wages for your industry. If so, that’s bad news, but it won’t help to stay out of the game waiting for someone who pays more.
● Allow yourself to consider jobs that just pay the bills, and a lifestyle that is centered on something other than work. It’s hard to say this, but for some people, the career-building stage of life may need to go on hold.
● Play this game to win. Don’t dabble at a job search and then get discouraged when the results are lackluster. Decide: Are you going to get a job or aren’t you? If no, then stop searching and spend your time more fruitfully. But if yes, then get this task done so you can go on with your life.
● Re-energize yourself. Maybe you need better skills, a better set of contacts or a better image. Whether it’s a new degree or just a new haircut, figure out what’s going to give you fresh energy for this process.
● Embrace the future. Sound like a cliché? Many good ideas do. If embracing the future means choosing a strategic path away from what you used to think was your destiny, so be it. The recent economic situation has turned a lot of plans upside down. You’ll be in good company if you have to reinvent your career or the place your career holds in your life.
Ascension University — Source Material
BP says plans to invest in biofuels this year
ST. GALLEN, Switzerland (MarketWatch) — BP PLC’s (BP.LN) plans to invest $1.5 billion in biofuels in 2011 but won’t do so at the expense of food security in the countries where it does invest, Chief Executive Robert Dudley said Friday.
“It is our policy…We will not invest in biofuel, in corn-based ethanol, on lands used for food, it will be in the Brazilian grasslands” which are used specifically for fuel crops, Dudley told an audience at a business conference here.
Ascension University — Source Material
Serving Mammon
Throw Out the Money Changers The Money Changer — Rembrandt van Rijn (1627)
Essay by Chris Hedges These are remarks Chris Hedges made on April 18, 2011 in Union Square in New York City during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.
We stand today before the gates of one of our temples of finance. It is a temple where greed and profit are the highest good, where self-worth is determined by the ability to amass wealth and power at the expense of others, where laws are manipulated, rewritten and broken, where the endless treadmill of consumption defines human progress, where fraud and crimes are the tools of business.
The two most destructive forces of human nature—greed and envy—drive the financiers, the bankers, the corporate mandarins and the leaders of our two major political parties, all of whom profit from this system. They place themselves at the center of creation. They disdain or ignore the cries of those below them. They take from us our rights, our dignity and thwart our capacity for resistance. They seek to make us prisoners in our own land. They view human beings and the natural world as mere commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. Human suffering, wars, climate change, poverty, it is all the price of business. Nothing is sacred. The Lord of Profit is the Lord of Death.
The pharisees of high finance who can see us this morning from their cubicles and corner officers mock virtue. Life for them is solely about self-gain. The suffering of the poor is not their concern. The 6 million families thrown out of their homes are not their concern. The tens of millions of pensioners whose retirement savings were wiped out because of the fraud and dishonesty of Wall Street are not their concern. The failure to halt carbon emissions is not their concern. Justice is not their concern. Truth is not their concern. A hungry child is not their concern.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky in “Crime and Punishment” understood the radical evil behind the human yearning not to be ordinary but to be extraordinary, the desire that allows men and women to serve systems of self-glorification and naked greed. Raskolnikov in the novel believes—like those in this temple—that humankind can be divided into two groups. The first is composed of ordinary people. These ordinary people are meek and submissive. They do little more than reproduce other human beings in their own likeness, grow old and die. And Raskolnikov is dismissive of these lesser forms of human life.
The second group, he believes, is extraordinary. These are, according to Raskolnikov, the Napoleons of the world, those who flout law and custom, those who shred conventions and traditions to create a finer, more glorious future. Raskolnikov argues that, although we live in the world, we can free ourselves from the consequences of living with others, consequences that will not always be in our favor. The Raskolnikovs of the world place unbridled and total faith in the human intellect. They disdain the attributes of compassion, empathy, beauty, justice and truth. And this demented vision of human existence leads Raskolnikov to murder a pawnbroker and steal her money.
The priests in these corporate temples, in the name of profit, kill with even more ruthlessness, finesse and cunning than Raskolnikov. Corporations let 50,000 people die last year because they could not pay them for proper medical care. They have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, Palestinians and Pakistanis, and gleefully watched as the stock price of weapons contractors quadrupled. They have turned cancer into an epidemic in the coal fields of West Virginia where families breathe polluted air, drink poisoned water and watch the Appalachian Mountains blasted into a desolate wasteland while coal companies can make billions. And after looting the U.S. treasury these corporations demand, in the name of austerity, that we abolish food programs for children, heating assistance and medical care for our elderly, and good public education. They demand that we tolerate a permanent underclass that will leave one in six workers without jobs, that condemns tens of millions of Americans to poverty and tosses our mentally ill onto heating grates. Those without power, those whom these corporations deem to be ordinary, are cast aside like human refuse. It is what the god of the market demands.
When Dante enters the “city of woes” in the Inferno he hears the cries of “those whose lives earned neither honor nor bad fame,” those rejected by Heaven and Hell, those who dedicated their lives solely to the pursuit of happiness. These are all the “good” people, the ones who never made a fuss, who filled their lives with vain and empty pursuits, harmless perhaps, to amuse themselves, who never took a stand for anything, never risked anything, who went along. They never looked hard at their lives, never felt the need, never wanted to look.
Those who chase the glittering rainbows of the consumer society, who buy into the perverted ideology of consumer culture, become, as Dante knew, moral cowards. They are indoctrinated by our corporate systems of information and remain passive as our legislative, executive and judicial branches of government—tools of the corporate state—strip us of the capacity to resist. Democrat or Republican. Liberal or conservative. It makes no difference. Barack Obama serves corporate interests as assiduously as did George W. Bush. And to place our faith in any party or established institution as a mechanism for reform is to be entranced by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave.
We must defy the cant of consumer culture and recover the primacy in our lives of mercy and justice. And this requires courage, not just physical courage but the harder moral courage of listening to our conscience. If we are to save our country, and our planet, we must turn from exalting the self, to subsuming of the self for our neighbor. Self-sacrifice defies the sickness of corporate ideology. Self-sacrifice mocks opportunities for advancement, money and power. Self-sacrifice smashes the idols of greed and envy. Self-sacrifice demands that we rise up against the abuse, injury and injustice forced upon us by the mandarins of corporate power. There is a profound truth in the biblical admonition “He who loves his life will lose it.”
Life is not only about us. We can never have justice until our neighbor has justice. And we can never recover our freedom until we are willing to sacrifice our comfort for open rebellion. The president has failed us. The Congress has failed us. The courts have failed us. The press has failed us. The universities have failed us. Our process of electoral democracy has failed us. There are no structures or institutions left that have not been contaminated or destroyed by corporations. And this means it is up to us. Civil disobedience, which will entail hardship and suffering, which will be long and difficult, which at its core means self-sacrifice, is the only mechanism left.
The bankers and hedge fund managers, the corporate and governmental elites, are the modern version of the misguided Israelites who prostrated themselves before the golden calf. The sparkle of wealth glitters before them, spurring them faster and faster on the treadmill towards destruction. And they seek to make us worship at their altar. As long as greed inspires us, greed keeps us complicit and silent. But once we defy the religion of unfettered capitalism, once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, once we learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, once we love our neighbor as ourself, we break our chains and make hope visible.
Online Biofuels Library
Journey to Forever has established an online biofuels library with a wide variety of books and articles available at no charge.
Consider the Source: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library.html
