As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.
Quote of the Week: “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.†Ted Miller
Humor Break:
Bev: You know Al, money can’t buy happiness.
Al: Yeah, well all I am asking for is a chance to prove it.
Stat of the Week: 2 reports using the same data: It appears that “upper-class individuals†behave more unethically than “lower-class individuals.” And the “poor†are more generous and give higher proportions of their income away to charity. The good news, according to one of the reports, the “rich†can be trained to be more generous with a little prompting and some learning that giving leads to happiness.
Action Tip: What attracted me to these reports initially was a shared PBS video that begins with a loose analysis of who stops at crosswalks to allow pedestrians the right-of-way. I don’t want to give too much away, but here is some free advice. If you are about to cross a street and see an expensive car coming your way … step back on to the sidewalk! Check out the video.
Self-Development Corner: Given the volume of new Coursera offerings this week, summer is over and school is back in session. Several involve the use of a computer … both entry and expert levels: Computational Investing, Part I (August 26, 8 weeks, Georgia Tech); Web Intelligence and Big Data (August 26, 12 weeks, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi); Designing and Executing Information Security Strategies (August 28, 10 weeks, University of Washington); Information Security and Risk Management in Context (August 28, 10 weeks, University of Washington); Building an Information Risk Management Toolkit (August 28, 10 weeks, University of Washington); Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics (August 28, 10 weeks, University of Washington).
You can’t argue with this reason to go online: Think Again: How to Reason and Argue (August 26, 12 weeks, Duke University).
For those who wish to nurse Mother Earth there is Introduction to Sustainability (August 26, 8 weeks, University of Illinois) or when Mother Earth feels she didn’t get enough nursing – Disaster Preparedness (August 26, 6 weeks, University of Pittsburgh).
And speaking of nursing, for nurses-to-be how about Preparation for Introductory Biology: DNA to Organisms (August 26, 4 weeks, UC Irvine) or the somewhat related Caries Management by Risk Assessment (CAMBRA) (August 26, 6 weeks, UC San Francisco).
If you want to learn more about business finance consider Microeconomics Principles (August 26, 4 or 8 or 16 week versions available, University of Illinois).
And finally, you might want to get connected to Networked Life (August 29, 7 weeks, University of Pennsylvania).
Well that should be enough offerings to keep you busy, at least until next week.
Happy learning.
Bill Bradley
Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.
