Winter arrives Dec 22,

This is the first day of winter, fall has finally yielded to winter.  

Do you remember the joy of the first frost, the first snow, the magic of sledding; making snow angels in the backyard? 

Or as many of us have, have you equated winter with shoveling snow, poor driving, feeling locked in because of the storm?

Winter is a magical time for children, maybe it is time to make it a magical time for you again?

I love winter, 
Frost grabs the window
Refusing to yield to the warmth 
Of the morning sun. 
Slowly, very slowly, 
the sun wins the battle,
Frost retreats, 
slowly tracing patterns 
across the pane
while drops of water cry 
as they fall to the ground 
Frozen in time
The battle won, 
frost is done 
mountains fill the scene, 
Trees sway white with snow 
the wind shakes the world below
A child appears, 
wrapped from head to toe,
Laughing in delight, 
she catches snow flakes
drifting from the tree
Eyes bright, face flushed, 
winter is here, 
can Santa be far behind? 

Defining Collective Intelligence

What does it mean to say that a group is "intelligent"? According to new study co-authored by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Union College, group intelligence may not be quantified as the sum or average of the cognitive abilities of its members. Anita Woolley, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, set out to find the answer, which resulted in a study recently published in the journal Science.

 

For the study, she created teams of two to five people drawn from about 700 volunteers. The goal of the teams was to solve various kinds of problems, some of which had definitive answers and others that relied on innovative solutions via brainstorming. By studying small teams of randomly assembled individuals, researchers discovered that groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments, regardless of the sum or average individual cognitive abilities of the group's members.  For example, there were two sessions in which Woolley's students had to decide whether the star basketball player should be kept on the team after the school found out that he cheated on an exam.

When the conversation was fairly evenly distributed among all the participants, the groups were more collectively intelligent, coming up with the right answers and creative problem solving.   Further, a group's intelligence, or its ability to complete a series of demanding multi-functional tasks, is positively linked to higher levels of "social sensitivity," a more equal distribution of member participation levels, and to the number of women in a group. On the other hand, in the sessions where one person dominated the conversation, the groups tended not to be as creative or balanced and thoughtful in coming up with solutions. In short, to do well, the group as a whole had to consider multiple perspectives.

Social scientists had long contended that a measurable level of intelligence in each individual person is a predictive measure of an individual's ability to fare well on diverse cognitive tasks.
"Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups" has been accepted for publication in the scientific journal Science and was pre-published online in the Sept. 30 Science Express.