Results suggest that when agents are dealing with a complex problem, the more efficient the network at disseminating information, the better the short-run but the lower the long-run performance of the system. The dynamic underlying this result is that an inefficient network maintains diversity in the system and is thus better for exploration than an efficient network, supporting a more thorough search for solutions in the long run.
Watts draws attention to a similar flaw in the commonly held view that we can predict and control outcomes, provided that we seek out and analyze, in a rational way, all relevant information.
He notes that, paradoxically, this view is reinforced when outcomes fail to match the prediction or plan. This is because, once the result is known, it is always possible to work backwards and create a narrative that links this outcome to the starting condition. And it then becomes ‘obvious’ – or apparently so – that such-and-such a factor caused the observed outcome. This is the same pattern of thinking to which de Bono draws attention above. That is, since we can link cause and effect (at least seemingly so) post event, it must be possible to do so in advance. All that we need to do is to include in our initial analysis the missing factor that (in retrospect) was so obviously crucial to the outcome.
The problem is that, as Watts eloquently argues, the inherent complexity of organizations means that it is impossible to know in advance which of the unlimited number of factors at play in any situation might prove to be critical.
Netflix’s report of 3.57 million new streaming subscribers globally, which brings its total customer base to about 83 million paid users, comes a quarter after it reported its weakest subscriber expansion in three years. Growing the customer base is crucial for the company to offset its growing content costs, as it seeks to offer evermore shows and movies to appeal to customers all over the world.
Netflix has yet to prove its mettle globally. In the most recent quarter, it reported a sharp slowdown in subscriber additions in the U.S. and abroad, disappointing investors. Mr. Hunt has struck deals with cable companies to bundle Netflix with cable TV to accelerate growth.
Proper levels of stomach acid are needed to adequately absorb many nutrients including minerals (iron, copper, zinc and calcium), vitamin B12, folic acid and proteins.
Stomach acid is also a crucial part of the immune system. The acid barrier of the stomach during normal states of health easily and quickly kills bacteria and other bugs that enter the body. It also prevents bacteria in the intestines from migrating up and colonizing the stomach.
…the three most common patterns of hypochlorhydria that we see.
1. You Don’t Feel Good When You Eat Meat
…the reason is because she doesn’t have the ability to digest it. She needs more stomach acid to properly break down the protein structures
2. You Experience Frequent Acid Reflux After Eating
This is an especially paradoxical pattern to experience. On one hand you have stomach acid reaching unprotected areas of the esophagus causing burning pain. Then, if you take an antacid the pain usually goes away. Therefore, if A=B and B=C it is easy to make the jump to A=C. In this case, it’s easy to assume that high stomach acid levels cause heartburn or GERD. But that is simply untrue.
The modern media and drug marketing campaigns have brainwashed us to believe that acid reflux, or GERD, is due to high stomach acid levels. This is nothing more than propaganda from people who make money when you believe their message…
3. You Burp, Fart, or Get Bloated After Eating
So, what are the theories? The likely situation is the food you ate is being fermented by bacteria and the byproduct of their feast is gas. If your acid levels are low enough and bacteria are surviving the stomach, most people will get repeated burps after eating. Sometimes, you might even burp several hours after eating and taste ruminates of your meal. This is a strong indicator that the food is still in your stomach when it should be in your small intestine. The pH levels aren’t low enough to begin dumping the food into the intestines.
Bloating and farting following a meal could be explained by several problems. One of which is bacterial overgrowth in the stomach or upper small intestine. Lower acid levels would contribute to this by allowing these bacteria to live in the stomach or upper intestine. There also could be a slowing of the speed of digestion affording the bacteria longer access to the food.
Proper stomach acid production is vital to unlocking perfect digestion. The digestive process downstream from the stomach is controlled chiefly by pH changes. When the food (chyme) in your stomach reaches a pH of about 2-4, the valve at the bottom of the stomach (pyloric sphincter) starts to slowly release the stomach contents into the duodenum. From here, the pH raises up and down as it travels through the intestines and out the other end.
If the pH is wrong from the beginning, everything downstream from the small intestine to the large intestine will likely be compromised. Think of it like this: chewing your food is the first crucial step to perfect digestion and stomach acid is the next most important.
One of the most common methods of supplementing for low stomach acid is using Betaine Hydrochloride (HCL).
Betaine HCL increases the level of hydrochloric acid in the stomach necessary for proper digestion and assimilation of nutrients from food. Normal levels of hydrochloric acid are required for complete digestion of proteins and absorption of amino acids. It’s also required for the extraction of vitamin B12 from our food. Betaine HCL helps to restore the proper acid levels in the stomach and maintain healthy GI function.
In case you didn’t know, stomach acid is a key component of our immune system needed to kill off any potential pathogenic bugs in our food. If the acid levels aren’t strong enough, besides not properly sterilizing our food, the stomach could delay emptying which can cause a multitude of digestive problems.
…you need to simultaneously treat both the bacterial overgrowth and the maldigested carbohydrates (from grains and starches) as well as the root cause of low stomach acid
Stomach acid not only helps to digest food, but it also prevents infections. As you get older, your stomach acid levels can decrease (a condition called hypochlorhydria) and it may be why the population over 50 has a higher prevalence of infection.
Not only that, but H. pylori can suppress stomach acid levels, making the cycle even worse.
According to the Textbook of Functional Medicine, low stomach acid predisposes one to the growth of H. pylori and is also linked to SIBO and inadequate Vitamin B12 absorption. It’s also noted that low levels of vitamin C, and vitamin E in gastric fluids promote the growth of H. pylori. And while there aren’t decisive studies showing that H. pylori is the direct cause of heartburn and acid reflux, there is an implied association there.
[…]
Contrary to what you might have been told, there are 7 root causes of heartburn, acid reflux or GERD.And it starts with understanding that the main issue isn’t that you aren’t producing too much acid. Instead, it’s actually the opposite – you’re likely producing too little acid.The root cause of this low stomach acid can be multifactorial, but we do know that H. pylori infections can play a huge role.
The title really describes one theme in this presentation, and that’s the modern approach of how quality often becomes inversely proportional to scale, usually due to a consumerist-driven economical society and agenda’s of wealth extraction, rather than wealth creation (the latter being what we really want for the adaptability of a social organism.)
How? To sell most products in the supermarket with better shelf life and preservation; the consumer psychology knowing sugar is insatiable and a survival instinct related to starvation, so we take it up. This health care crisis of heart disease, diabetes and obesity has created new revenue streams for treatment, pharmaceuticals and fitness.
The heart of this presentation is quite interesting, explaining the metabolic pathways of glucose, fructose, and also LDL’s oxidisation and inflammation from both excess polyunsaturated fats and excess fructose.
It explains how excess fructose and polyunsaturated fats cause inflammation in the blood vessel walls and in the membrane of every cell wall in our body.
It mentions but doesn’t go into the microbiome, and how it helps regulate homeostasis (if we eat being conscious of what our bacteria need to eat, then they will help us thrive…)
The presenter (an orthopaedic surgeon) is very convinced of his model, which echo’s the recent change of thinking in the quality of macro-nutrient intake. He focuses on how the role of inflammation in nutrition is a major correlation to modern disease, and only briefly mentions other factors like: sleep, stress, sunshine, environment you live in, genetics, microbiome that make up the whole (unified) picture of your energetic prosperity.
“The sugar industry in the US paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
[…]
…One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become head of nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines. Another scientist was Fredrick J. Stare, chairman of Harvard’s nutrition department.”
Is Fruit good or bad for you?
Modern fruit has less fiber for better shelf life, and more sugar for better preservation
This decrease in perishability makes it a good candidate to transport to be eaten all year round
Fruit induces hunger as it bypasses satiety hormones, and it’s sweetness causes attraction, this is all part of sugar being a good fuel source to store fat for resilient energy expenditure in times of shortage
What was good about eating fruit in our evolutionary past
Fruit (and grains) were mostly available at the end of summer and autumn
Gorging on fruit may be an evolutionary design, as once the sugar is taken up by the muscles, brain, and some stored in the liver, the rest is stored as fat
During the winter we burned this stored fat for energy, along with any meat we hunted and other winter foods. Once we burn our modest amount of liver glycogen (glucose storage), we then burn our plentiful fat stores for energy, once that’s depleted, our bodies start turning protein into glucose for our energy needs…this is not a good sign as we lose muscle mass (basically it’s a path to death), so cortisol and uric acid are released to motivate us to find food.
What’s wrong with eating too much fruit, too much “refined” carbs, along with all the foods in the supermarket that are loaded with sugar?
We become obese (we only need so much for the muscles, brain and liver, so the rest is stored as fat)
We become diabetic via insulin resistance due to it always coming out to remove sugar from the blood stream to regulate it (more than a tea spoon of sugar in our blood stream is toxic,…both a slice of bread and an apple has 5 teaspoons, one will be used for energy, the other 4 stored as fat). Now think about how much sugar we eat at a time, and how frequently we do it.
We create too much uric acid that compromises the job of nitric oxide to maintain blood supply to the brain, blood vessel tension, and immunity)…so we are going to see more dementia, hypertension, and cancers
Too much sugar (fructose) will create the small dense variety of LDL (since fat is not water soluble, LDL is a boat to carry around proteins and fat). This form of LDL slip through into the blood vessel wall and clog your arteries…increasing cardiovascular disease. If the fat that’s in the LDL is polyunsaturated (rather than saturated) it will oxidise and add to the inflammation. Some LDL’s are bigger and don’t penetrate the vessel wall, these are the one’s filled with saturated fat.
Our bodies can deal with clearing some inflammation via macrophages, which need the help of Vitamin D (which we get from the sun). In evolutionary terms it makes sense to eat most of our sugar seasonally via fruit intake, as during these sunny times we get enough Vitamin D to clear any potential inflammation. But ingesting sugar when the sun’s not plentiful makes for less clearing of inflammation
My recent reading tells me…
Too much sugar in our system starts to benefit certain bacteria’s that will overcrowd the other bacteria, decreasing the diversity (therefore disabling the other bacteria to do their jobs for our bodies) creating gut dysbiosis (But one of the risks of cutting out sugar/carbs for too long is we continue to starve the good bacteria. So yes starving the good and bad bacteria is a way to deal with infection, but we need to re-introduce feed for the good bacteria to enable colon fermentation of fatty acids that keeps our gut lining in check…a compromised gut lining leads to inflammation and even neurological diseases (A better alternative is fruit and carbs in moderation, and more of our glucose/fructose intake from starchy vegetables which have a slower insulin response in the body, and have many fermentable soluble fibers and resistance starch so bacteria can make SCFA for additional energy that mostly goes to maintaining gut function)
A fast and easy way to feed the world is to give them energy from carbs (grains), sure this provides energy, but not many nutrients…so we have not done enough to tackle malnutrition. And if we look at this as a complex problem, this will just shift the costs to the healthcare department of the state. A diet less based on profit and convenience will help with our worlds malnutrition, and at the same time not debilitate states with health care costs.
Having been a community manager for a global engineering firm using Yammer, I was naturally interested in Facebook Workplace.
Many of these vendors have the same functionality, it’s really up to the UX.
Even though facebook workplace doesn’t have the starter advantage in enterprise social networks, what it does have is supreme familiarity which helps it mitigateloss-averse biases. There’s less of a learning curve as most people are already experienced with using facebook. There’s less need for buy-in given facebook is a household name and the ux is spot on.
Sure the workplace is a different beast, and one of their training videos clearly states that rather than posting on your timeline you will mostly be interacting in groups, a feature that Yammer is focusing its UX on.
I forsee purposeful collaboration apps as being part of the future (like we’ve seen in the former SAP Jam and Podio). We hope to see features to screenshot and mark-up images, to paste images into a post from the clipboard…perhaps some decision type tool (similar to polls), townhalls ala socialcast, and task management. Features such as video chat, and events are common activities and tools we use to do work. This is something Yammer could of leveraged earlier on, but now we see facebook taking the lead…and into new spaces like virtual office assistants.
I’m not sure what facebook workplace is providing in the ways of document management. This is a strength of Yammer given its integration with Office 365…and recently has enabled to co-collaborate on a file within Yammer.
Yammer has the headstart in reporting, but has done little in providing a community management suite of tools. ie. tools and dashboards community managers need to perform.
Yammer also has a first move at allowing groups to collaborate with 3rd parties. The external groups feature allows people outside your company to collaborate in specific posts, and soon even to be a member of the group (they participate either via email, or their own company’s Yammer)
Yammer has an advantage that it’s synched with the Office 365 identity, so new people to the organisation can automatically be joined to Yammer
Facebook workplace copped some backlash on their use of the term “engagement metrics”, and adoption…rather than engagement being emergent from social cohesiveness, and the community management involved both strategically and operationally in enabling this.
Landing page
I have had great success with Yammer, but feel they lack in the orientation - they have a webpage, they have an online community, they have a blog…but it’s all scattered. Compare this to Facebook Workplace; they have a facebook “page” as their landing page, it’s their lobby, it’s their homepage. Here you can see the latest news, updates, tips, use cases, also the learning videos.
And it’s here that I saw their marketing materials just as good as Yammer.
A good question is does Facebook Workplace allow you to create pages. This way a business unit could have it’s own type of intranet homepage (something Sharepoint Sites can do but is not designed specially that way), which could among other things list or even aggregate from various groups. A business unit may have lots of groups, and a way to list them somewhere or even re-syndicate select posts
There’s some nice instructional design in the flow as well
Yammer previewed some instructional design in the flow of creating a group, but don’t think they ever released it…now we see facebook workplace is using this
I wonder if you have a separate newsfeed for each category type of group??
I did mention events are a social object just as a group is, and am amazed Yammer didn’t further develop their dropped events feature
Something I really liked was that you can see a list of who has seen a piece of content…this is handy in the workplace context.
Not good practice to show an attachment in a private message…we also know this happens, but in a training video it may be good practice to link to the file in the document system…again I’m not sure where facebook is at with this.
Does workplace enable you to auto-suggest find and hyperlink to a group or even a file within a post. Jive leads in this functionality, and Yammer has a not well known command to hyperlink to a group
We await in the future for how Facebook Workplace evolves to make this tool purposefully designed for work. Yammer has this in mind with their focus on the inbox/notification, especially with their upcoming priority inbox feature. I feel managing my stuff, stuff I need to know and notifications is paramount in the enterprise, something much more sophisticated than the regular facebook notifications feature.
Bounded rationality is the idea that when individuals make decisions, their rationality is limited by the tractability of the decision problem, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the time available to make the decision. Decision-makers in this view act as satisficers, seeking a satisfactory solution rather than an optimal one
…logically, switching refined carbohydrates, which raise insulin significantly, for dietary fat, which does not, can lower insulin levels significantly even if you take the same total number of calories.
But what is so different about dietary fat compared to both protein and carbohydrates that makes this true? It all comes down to the different ways that proteins and fats are metabolized.
This also illustrates the difference between the insulin hypothesis and the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis (CIH). The carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis holds that insulin is the main driver of obesity, and that the main driver of insulin is carbohydrates. Therefore, if one simply reduces carbohydrates, insulin is reduced as well.
I think this is not entirely true. Animal protein, for example, is highly insulinogenic (provokes an insulin response), even to the same degree as many refined carbohydrates. If you eat according to this hypothesis, you should be able to eat as much protein as you like without problems. But this is not true.
[…]
…there’s a fundamental difference in dietary fat metabolism that differentiates it from proteins and carbs. It has almost no insulin effect. Why not? Because it doesn’t use the liver for metabolism. Insulin is only necessary for burning glucose, not fat.
[…]
So what happens to the excess amino acids? They cannot be stored directly as energy, so they are converted to glucose via gluconeogenesis. This is a metabolic pathway that generates glucose out of non carbohydrate molecules. Here there are differences between amino acids as well. Some amino acids are able to produce glucose (glucogenic), some produce ketones (ketogenic) and some do both.
Once again, these amino acids are absorbed into the portal circulation and directed towards the liver where excess amino acids get turned into glucose. Since it requires liver processing, insulin is required as a signalling molecule. Since the protein does not raise blood glucose, even though it raises blood insulin, glucagon is also stimulated, as well as incretins that help mitigate this effect and prevent hypoglycemia.
[…]
Dietary fat, on the other hand, is metabolized in a completely different manner than both carbs and proteins. Dietary fat is broken down into fatty acids by pancreatic enzymes (lipases) and bile salts. They are then absorbed into the lymphatic system as fat droplets (fat is insoluble in water) called chylomicrons. These do not go into the portal system and do not enter the liver. They empty directly into the bloodstream through the lymphatic circulation and then to the thoracic duct.
This is the reason why dietary fat does not require insulin. There is no further processing or handling, so insulin signaling in the liver is not required for metabolism. This dietary fat can be stored or used for energy.
Dr. Johnson explains just how closely tied uric acid levels are to fructose consumption:
“If you give animals fructose, they develop diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and fatty liver. And in most of these conditions, if we lower uric acid, we can prevent many of these conditions, [although] not completely. So lowering uric acid seems to benefit some of the mechanisms by which fructose causes disease.
So a very important point is that if you take two animals and you feed one fructose and feed the other one the exact same number of calories but give it as dextrose or glucose, it’s only the fructose-fed animal that will develop obesity, insulin resistance, fatty liver, and high triglycerides, signs of inflammation, vascular disease, and high blood pressure.”
Reading from another source tells me that excess uric acid can compromise our nitric oxide levels. It’s job maintains blood circulation to the brain, blood vessel tension, and immunity…not enough can lead to dementia, high blood pressure, immune dysfunction (infection/cancer)
I’ve briefly read that excess protein and the inability of the kidney to filter it can lead to increase in uric acid, but here’s a couple of other ways:
1. When we hibernate we first burn through our immediate fuel source ie. glycogen (glucose storage in the liver), then we burn our fat for energy (this fat has come from the carbs and fat we have eaten), and lastly we start burning protein called gluconeogenesis. At this stage we are losing muscle mass, which eventually becomes a sign of dying, so we release uric acid and cortisol to get us foraging for fuel sources.
2. One of the metabolic pathways of excess fructose is increased uric acid production
Could the dangers of excess fructose, and the epidemic of depression be linked somehow? Could a western diet with an overbalance in fructose intake, be creating excess uric acid, which in turn is affecting nitric oxide to the brain.
…keeping in mind this just being one of the elements that leads to depression (others being genetics, lack of confidence, microbiome, inflammation, etc…)
Social dysfunction is seen in several neurologic and neuropsychiatric conditions including autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, and certain types of dementia. Interestingly, these conditions are also associated with immune dysfunction, specifically with cells of the immune system called T cells
[…]
Researchers took mice deficient in T cells and showed that these mice, in contrast with normal, or “wild-type,” mice, showed no preference for social interaction over an inanimate object (yes, these are mice, but I think we can still agree this is social dysfunction). Then, these T cell-deficient mice were injected with normal immune cells, specifically with lymphocytes to supply the T cells they were previously missing. After a few weeks, allowing the immune system to respond to this lymphocyte injection, these mice showed a preference for normal social behavior. So the social dysfunction was reversed by restoring immune balance.
[…]
Brain imaging in mice with immune dysfunction has similar abnormalities to brain imaging in children with autism spectrum disorder. The brain imaging normalized after these mice were injected with lymphocytes restoring normal immune function.
[…]
This cytokine, IFN-𝛾, is produced when our immune system responds to a pathogen, like a bacteria or virus. So, IFN-𝛾 supports our normal social behavior, and (at least in mice) low IFN-𝛾 is associated with social dysfunction.
