May 18th, 2012
Last night I was blessed by attending my oldest child’s Senior Art Show, and then the final Honors Night of her high school career. Clearly, my focus was on her – that child….young woman…blows me away with her focus and dedication, and as thanks for that she will walk in her commencement with an honor cord denoting her achievement. I am amazed by her – and by God, who has given me what I asked for in her, in every way.
It was also a lot of fun to see all of these other kids – kids she started Kindergarten with and girls who were in her Brownie and Girl Scout troops also going up to receive their honors. Some of them received the highest recognition their teachers are able to give for outstanding performance as students. I was just so pleased and impressed to see so many of them achieving such great things.
Granted, after 13 years of education, there were many who also weren’t up there, but it made me look back over this time – between her birth and now – and all these kids she has been friends with, or really not been just friends with. Kids I have watched grow, right alongside my daughter, into adults in their own right. I saw my daughter standing among a group of people who DO have the power and motivation to be world changers.
Today, God has blessed me with so much love – love for all those kids, love for …well, it’s just going to sound cheesy, but it’s true…love for everyone. My heart breaks for everyone around me that I see struggling, and while I know there may be little things I can do to make the struggle easier, the love that God has given me for them leads me to the best thing possible – prayer for them. But to hurt for people, you have to love them in some measure – and God has poured that out to me in a measure larger than I could fathom!
Another interesting moment last night…one of Kelsey’s best friends for several years was a boy – I’ll call him A. As a young single mom, A’s parents became good friends of mine, and invited me everywhere with them. I was absorbed into their family for awhile, until things tapered off in 2nd grade or so. When the kids were in kindergarten, they were instrumental in trying to get things ‘heated up’ between our kids’ teacher and me. And by heated up, I mean – he was single, I was single, and he was a really, really nice, sweet guy. But – cooler heads prevailed, and we decided trying to date when my daughter was one of his students would be a bad idea….ESPECIALLY since it was his first year teaching! Well, apparently A’s parents had had dinner with that teacher last weekend, and ended up talking about me. Which…odd, right? It was just weird to have that brought up after so long. I haven’t seen him in 12 years, and have been madly in love with my hubby for the last 8.
Something about that part of my past just felt…off kilter. Awkward. Unhappy. A reflection that looks like me, but isn’t really me. Instead, I have a life God has filled to the brim with people to look after, to care for, to love, to work on not being annoyed by, to be patient with, to be completely utterly silly with, and just….to GROW with!
I laid cuddled up to my husband last night, as he dealt with a disappointment from his day. His hurts are my hurts – and I don’t like hurting, so of course, I wanted it to go away! But God is leading him through this – and me in turn.
I can’t help but think – we realize it about our children, because they grow before our eyes. We blink, and they’re adults. But the same is true with marriage. We are so deep in the day to day, it’s hard to see that our time together is flying by. Time that – while for those of us who are saved, ticks toward a very great reward in the end – but even so…it’s the end of the time that I will be here, with my husband, crazy in love with him. How many of those seconds…minutes…hours…days…weeks…months…even years…have gone by without me realizing how precious they were?
I am crazy in love with my husband. I have crazy love for every person in my life. And ALL of that, is 100% a God Thing. The best reflection of His love for me.
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May 18, 2012 Friday at 8:13 am
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May 18th, 2012
 Here you are…YOU…fabulous, or not. Happy, or not…Exactly where you want to be, or not.
So, what brought you here – what were the circumstances, situations, people, events, or happenstance brought you here?
At some point in your journey through life, you made decisions to “switch it up” or “jump start” what was within you. You decided to open your life to a greater possibility, a different point of view and it worked, or didn’t.
In either case, you wanted to create a new way of experiencing your life and whether you are aware or not, you are always making this proactive decision. Life is meant to be fulfilling and the only people who don’t experience that are the ones that don’t make the decision to re-invent or re-ignite themselves. It is a conscious choice that requires action and with that action a determination to experience what you envision.
The mind is a gift that each human being was granted and with that gift you have the power to focus the mind and direct it into the experience you want to have in your life. It is not difficult to have what you want – just at look at how easy it is to have what you don’t. It is a matter of putting yourself on the other side of the equation and experiencing what you want either by choosing to re-invent or re-ignite what is already there.
You can be, do, and have anything – anytime- anywhere – the choice is yours.
=====>>>>CREATE YOUR FUTURE NOW
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May 15th, 2012
For many women inventors in years past, the invention process was twice as difficult because, in addition to the hardships of inventing, they also faced the skepticism of a world that didn’t believe women could create something of value. Fortunately, over the years, that perception has been blown out of the water by women inventors like Margaret E. Knight, who were willing to fight for the accolades and recognition they unquestionably deserved.
Born in Maine in 1838 and raised by a widowed mother, Margaret Knight showed a proclivity toward inventing from a very young age – a characteristic of many of the world’s famous inventors. After observing an accident at a textile mill at the age of 12, Margaret went to work producing her first real invention. Knight conceived a device that would automatically stop a machine if something got caught in it. By the time she was a teenager the invention was being used in the mills.
 After the Civil war, Margaret Knight went to work in a Massachusetts paper bag plant. While working in the plant, Knight thought how much easier it would be to pack items in paper bags if the bottoms were flat (they were not at the time). That idea inspired Margaret to create the machine that would transform her into a famous woman inventor. Knight’s machine automatically folded and glued paper-bag bottoms – creating the flat-bottom paper bags that are still used to this very day in most grocery stores.
Of course, no story of triumph would be complete without a villain. In this case, the villain was a man named Charles Annan – who attempted to steal Knight’s idea (he spied on the woman hired to make her prototype) and receive credit for the patent. Not one to give in without a fight, Margaret took Annan to court to vie for the patent that rightfully belonged to her. While Annan argued simply that a woman could never design such an innovative machine, Knight displayed actual evidence that the invention indeed belonged to her. As a result, Margaret Knight received her patent in 1871.
 Knight’s invention immediately had a huge impact on the paper industry – and paper bags began to proliferate throughout the retail landscape. To this very day, thousands of machines based on Margaret Knight’s idea are still used to produce flat-bottom paper bags. Knight didn’t stop there though; throughout her lifetime she would receive over 20 patents and conceive almost 100 different inventions – including a rotary engine, shoe-cutting machine and a dress and skirt shield. At the time of her death, an obituary described Knight as a “woman Edison.” In actuality, she was something greater – she was a woman inventor named Margaret Knight.
From the woman’s Inventor Blog – Author unknown
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May 15th, 2012
Management by cliché is dangerous, if not fatal. But it happens. I am not in favour and I think that it’s high time we ditched a particularly dangerous but well-worn business cliché and accept that routinely and regularly re-inventing the wheel is a healthy practice, not a waste of time.
After all, where would the world be if our ancestors had decided to sit pat, once the early wheel had been invented?
Presumably, if resistance to progress and change had prevailed, our transport and technology would still be like the world of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.
Thankfully, though, wiser counsel has driven the progress of technology so the wheel has been regularly refined and routinely re-invented, with widely recognised and appreciated benefits.
So why do we still use ‘re-inventing the wheel’ as a pejorative metaphor in our business dialogues?
Very often, in my experience, this has been a quick and dirty way of putting-down a potentially good idea before it has been properly expressed, let alone explored and properly evaluated.
Premature evaluation is a serious [but widespread] business risk, facilitated by the deliberate [but inappropriate] use of business clichés.
Instead of proscribing the re-invention of our business wheels, we should prescribe the regular and routine re-invention of every business process and system in our organisations.
Of course, to make sure this happens, we would not only have to build process reviews into our risk management regimes but also adopt quite a different mindset which genuinely values re-inventing the wheel.
What do you think?
 Re-inventing the wheel should be a badge of honour for every forward-looking organisation, not a forbidden thought.
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May 12th, 2012
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May 12th, 2012
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May 9th, 2012
According to GISS, Africa is one of the fastest warming places on the planet. But how reliable are their temperature records?
The first thing to notice is that the anomalies are based on the period 1950-1980, but if we look at a couple of long running South African stations, we immediately see the familiar story of a much cooler interlude between about 1940 and 1980.
So it would hardly be surprising to see that current temperatures are warmer than 1950-1980. Nevertheless we should surely be able to trust the temperature record in recent years. After all there are 538 African GHCN stations listed in the GISSTEMP record, so there ought to be a pretty good coverage across the continent. However, if you thought that you would be wrong.
I have analysed all of these stations to see which ones fulfil the following criteria :-
1) A record from 1941 or earlier up to 2011. ( There are many stations with gaps in their record, but I have not excluded these).
2) No more than 20% missing data between 2001 and 2011.
Out of 538 stations, only 40 stations actually meet these two conditions. Furthermore, of these , 39 are urban / small towns, leaving just 1 rural station. Bear in mind, that according to GISS methodology, urban stations are only included in the GISS temperature analysis if there exists a nearby rural station so as to make adjustments for UHI. Therefore it would appear that the temperature analysis for most of Africa is based either on stations with a record not long enough to give proper long term trends or on stations with large gaps in their records in the last decade (or both!)
For interest the only rural station to meet the criteria is Calvinia, a small town in South Africa with a population of 8146. The temperature graph for Calvinia shows no apparent long term trend.
What of the rest?
So what about the other 498 stations? I wondered if I was being too selective in omitting stations which were only set up after 1941. To check this out, I carried out a fuller analysis on 50 stations from one page of the GISS subset, which in their own words “ contribute to the final products”. (This particular batch seems to centre around the area from Angola/Congo/Gabon in the west across to Kenya in the east – in other words a fairly typical swathe across Central Africa).
The analysis showed that :-
1) There were 29 urban/small towns and 21 rural stations.
2) Of the 21 rural stations, only 7 had records up to 2011. None of the others extended past 1991.
3) Of the 7 current stations, 6 had no records prior to 1987.
4) Amongst these 6 stations, at least 67% of the monthly temperature readings were missing for the period 2001-10. The missing records were even worse for 2006-10 with at least 75% missing in all cases.
5) To cap it all, the other station (the only rural station with records prior to 1987) is Garissa in Kenya. Although GISS list this as “rural”, it is in fact a large town with a population of 65000, and the weather station is at an airport. Even here, a full 50% of monthly records between 2006 and 2010 are missing.
It is abundantly clear that in most of Africa, the temperature record simply does not exist to allow continent wide analysis. Temperatures may have risen there in the last 30 years, but that should not allow GISS to make up numbers, if the actual data does not exist to prove it.
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May 9th, 2012
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May 6th, 2012
[originally posted here]
To borrow a delightful phrase from Soren Hansen and Henning Sejer-Jakobsen, one of the chief benefits of change labs for social innovation is that they allow us to lift our change process –
“away from the swamp of everyday activities — routine, fear of failure, prejudice, bureaucracy and rules.”
Instead, change labs offer us environments that nurture and celebrate novel ideas, collaboration and experimentation. Sound a bit fanciful, like life on Mars? Well it is, sort of.
I just spent the last 24 hours in MaRS (yes - in MaRS, not on it) exploring the emerging world of change labs. The MaRS Discovery District is a collection of entities in downtown Toronto that share facilities and a passion for innovation. This morning, it was also the site of a “fishbowl” dialogue among 20 change lab and innovation leaders, who gathered to explore the potential of and challenges to developing change labs for social innovation.
Change labs have been bubbling up across the country in the last couple of years, and have demonstrated promise in tacking complex social problems. Now, thanks in part to the work of several organizations like MaRs, SiG and the BC Advisory Council for Social Innovation, interest in labs has piqued – and no where is it higher than in the public service. Offering public servants a chance to escape the “swamp” in which they’re mired to explore ways to co-create new solutions to social problems with a variety of partners has the same effect as offering a Winnipeger an all-inclusive trip to Mexico in February. Their faces split with a grin and they launch out of their chairs like a ski jumper going for gold.
This is all great for us at the Sauder Studio, as it confirms that we’re on the right track with our work - teaching business students design processes and tools for solving wicked problems, in an attempt to change the way they think (and ultimately act). Recently, we’ve expanded our programs to include external organizations, such as the BC Ministry of Health. Still, when the theme of design education surfaced in the fishbowl today, I was keen to discover how these change-makers saw organizations like ours fitting into the lab movement. It turned out that, leading the development and adoption of effective lab methodologies emerged as an obvious role for us to play. Specifically, the group articulated a need to help folks in other countries learn to start and run change labs.
“What a great opportunity for us!”, I thought. As I pictured this growing network of change labs around the world lighting little lamps of innovation everywhere, I realized that, at a certain point, the lamps will reach critical mass, eventually bathing the whole planet with their glow. And it dawned on me – that’s what we’re working for. That is the time when change becomes the norm.
So yes, change labs can and will play a key role in shifting our culture of innovation, by teaching those who use them to think and act differently. But we may wish to consider them as a transitional tactic only. Why limit the development of knowledge and skills in fostering social innovation to those working within the lab community? Shouldn’t our ultimate goal be to increase our innovation capacity across all sectors, all industries, all disciplines?
Rather than looking for ways to just vacation from the swamp in the lab, why not re-invent life in the swamp instead, and re-plant it with something other than weeds? Why not use change labs as seeds to sow a new culture; use them to help everyone learn to lead change? Why not create a culture of innovation that is pervasive and desirable, that is normal – not an anomaly?
Lofty? Sure. But a girl can’t just sit around!
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May 6th, 2012
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