Closing The Mind Gap

We have always struggled, as human beings. But our struggle today is exacerbated by a gap between the increasingly complicated world we have created and the default ways we think about it. Twenty-first-century challenges are qualitatively different from the ones that generations of our ancestors faced, yet our thinking has not evolved to keep pace. We need to catch up. To make smarter decisions -- as governments, organizations, families and individuals -- we need more sophisticated mental strategies for interpreting and responding to today's complexity. Best-selling author and business leader Ted Cadsby explores the insights of cognitive psychology, anthropology, biology, neuroscience, physics and philosophy to reveal the gap between how we typically tackle complex problems and what complexity actually requires of us. In an accessible and engaging style, he outlines ways to close the gap -- the strategic mental shifts that increase decision-making effectiveness. The bottom line? We need greater complexity in our thinking to match the increasing complexity in our world, and Cadsby shows us how. "... Cadsby has done us all a favour with this lucid tour of humanity's approach to thinking through the complexity of our world ... a helpful guide in how to think about our thinking." --ROGER MARTIN, Academic Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and author of Playing to Win "Brimming with insight ... a book of ambitious scope, explaining why we so often make poor decisions -- and how to do better. Professionals in all fields will find it highly valuable." --PHIL ROSENZWEIG, PhD, Professor of Strategy and International Business, IMD, and author of Left Brain, Right Stuff "... draws masterfully on a wide range of scientific findings ... a remarkable wake-up call ...." --ROBIN M. HOGARTH, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and author of Educating Intuition "William James said we are only half awake. Ted Cadsby shows there is a lot of scientific truth wrapped inside that metaphorical truth." --PHILIP E. TETLOCK, PhD, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania Psychology Department and Wharton School of Business, and author of Expert Political Judgment "A courageous synthesis of cognitive psychology, complexity theory and systems theory. Cadsby provides readers with practical implications for improving their decision-making process." --GARY KLEIN, PhD, Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC and author of Seeing What Others Don't "... distills the latest research in complexity theory and cognitive science, and shows how we can debug our 'mental software' to think and act more effectively." --DAVID ORRELL, PhD, mathematician and author of numerous books, including Truth or Beauty and Economyths

We have always struggled, as human beings. But our struggle today is exacerbated by a gap between the increasingly complicated world we have created and the default ways we think about it. Twenty-first-century challenges are qualitatively different from the ones that generations of our ancestors faced, yet our thinking has not evolved to keep pace. We need to catch up. To make smarter decisions -- as governments, organizations, families and individuals -- we need more sophisticated mental strategies for interpreting and responding to today's complexity. Best-selling author and business leader Ted Cadsby explores the insights of cognitive psychology, anthropology, biology, neuroscience, physics, and philosophy to reveal the gap between how we typically tackle complex problems and what complexity actually requires of us. In an accessible and engaging style, he outlines ways to close the gap -- the strategic mental shifts that increase decision-making effectiveness. The bottom line? We need greater complexity in our thinking to match the increasing complexity in our world, and Cadsby shows us how.

This publication offers sage advice on how to close the achievement gap by addressing the "attitude gap" that often affects underperforming students of all racial and ethnic groups.

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.

The way you parent, the clothes you buy, your relationships with your boss and your daughter, your attitude to money and sex, are, to an extraordinary extent, defined by the era into which you were born. Parents, the church, teachers and employers think they understand youngsters because they, too, were young once. But adults no longer live in the world that existed when they were teenagers. We may occupy the same space, home, classroom or office but we live in different worlds. And these worlds often collide. We've moved in one century from a 'built to last' to a 'throwaway' society. No wonder age differences are so vast. In this book you will discover your generation and those of the people who make up your life. Once you understand what makes them, and you, tick, the 'gen gap' begins to shrink. Fasten your seatbelt for a generational roller coaster ride - you may never think the same way again! In this book you'll understand why: your boss insists on endless meetings and conferences; your 20-something student doesn't want a 50-something computer teacher; you're in your 40s but still trying to prove yourself to Mom and Dad; your teacher should be learning from you.

Fleeing her mother’s murderers, a London teenager discovers an underground world of thieves and ghosts in this dark urban fantasy series debut. Jasmine Towne and her mother have always been taken care of by men known only as the Uncles. But Jazz was raised to always beware. And she discovers why on the day she finds her paranoid mother murdered. Her mother’s last words, scrawled in her own blood, demand action: JAZZ HIDE FOREVER. Seeking cover in the London Underground, Jazz slips through a mysterious gate—and seemingly through time. Inside an abandoned city of bomb shelters and forgotten Tube stations, she finds temporary refuge with a gang of petty thieves. But flashes of the past, spectral and haunting, share the tunnels with no regard for the living. Now Jazz must ask herself a difficult question: how long can she hide from the terrors of both her worlds? "Magical realism at its finest…with mystery, magic, ghosts and a fascinating subterranean world.”—Sfrevu.com

In 2013, a little known mathematician in his late 50s stunned the mathematical community with a breakthrough on an age-old problem about prime numbers. Since then, there has been further dramatic progress on the problem, thanks to the efforts of a large-scale online collaborative effort of a type that would have been unthinkable in mathematics a couple of decades ago, and the insight and creativity of a young mathematician at the start of his career. Prime numbers have intrigued, inspired and infuriated mathematicians for millennia. Every school student studies prime numbers and can appreciate their beauty, and yet mathematicians' difficulty with answering some seemingly simple questions about them reveals the depth and subtlety of prime numbers. Vicky Neale charts the recent progress towards proving the famous Twin Primes Conjecture, and the very different ways in which the breakthroughs have been made: a solo mathematician working in isolation and obscurity, and a large collaboration that is more public than any previous collaborative effort in mathematics and that reveals much about how mathematicians go about their work. Interleaved with this story are highlights from a significantly older tale, going back two thousand years and more, of mathematicians' efforts to comprehend the beauty and unlock the mysteries of the prime numbers.

This book offers a novel and proven approach to the retention and success of underrepresented students. It advocates a strategic approach through which an institution sets clear goals and metrics and integrates the identity support work of cultural / diversity centers with skill building through cohort activities, enabling students to successfully navigate college, graduate on time and transition to the world of work. Underlying the process is an intersectional and identity-conscious, rather than identity-centered, framework that addresses the complexity of students’ assets and needs as they encounter the unfamiliar terrain of college.In the current landscape of higher education, colleges and universities normally divide their efforts between departments and programs that explicitly work on developing students’ identities and separate departments or programs that work on retaining and graduating higher-risk students. This book contends that the gap between cultural/diversity centers and institutional retention efforts is both a missed opportunity and one that perpetuates the opportunity gap between students of color and low-income students and their peers.Identity-consciousness, the central framework of this book, differs from an identity-centric approach where the identity itself is the focus of the intervention. For example, a Latino men’s program can be developed as an identity-centered initiative if the outcomes of the program are all tied to a deeper or more complex understanding of one’s Latino-ness and/or masculinity. Alternately, this same program can be an identity-conscious student success program if it is designed from the ground up with the students’ racial and gender identities in mind, but the intended outcomes are tied to student success, such as term-to-term credit completion, yearly persistence, engagement in high-impact practices, or timely graduation.Following the introductory chapter focused on framing how we understand risk and success in the academy, the remaining chapters present programmatic interventions that have been tested and found effective for students of color, working class college students, and first-generation students. Each chapter opens with a student story to frame the problem, outlines the key research that informs the program, and offers sufficient descriptive information for staff or faculty considering implementing a similar identity-conscious intervention on their campus. The chapters conclude with a discussion of assessment, and suggested “Action Items” as starting points.