CogZest

Response to Tom Monahan’s “If I Were 22: Embrace Your Ignorance”

While differing widely in the little bits we know, or rather guess, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal. (Karl Popper).

Tom Monahan (Chairman and CEO at CEB) published an interesting article on LinkedIn yesterday: “If I Were 22: Embrace Your Ignorance”. He admitted that he graduated from Harvard feeling that he was “master of not only my own nascent trade, but pretty much anything else under the sun”. I.e., overconfident about his knowledge and abilities. Looking back, he would embrace his own ignorance, be a curator of good questions, and ask questions of more people. Good advice!

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Working with a Great Graphic Designer: A Case Study of Extended Cognitive Productivity

To extend our own effectiveness, it is, of course, not sufficient to study. We often need to turn to experts. Often, they are consultants. Success here is partly a matter of finding the right person. It equally is a matter of being an excellent client.
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Sleep Onset, The Cognitive Shuffle and Productivity: Our Presentation at the 2014 SFU Learning Together Conference

Sheryl Guloy and I will be giving a presentation on the cognitive shuffle and cognitive productivity on Friday May 9 at the SFU Learning Together 2014 Conference. That’s an annual conference put on by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University.

The title of our presentation is:

Decreasing sleep-onset latency for better cognitive performance in faculty and students: Super-somnolent mentation and the new “cognitive shuffle” technique compared with monotonous imagery training.

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Cognitive Productivity and Clinical Psychology

I’ve released a substantial update to Cognitive Productivity today. The changes are summarized on the release notes page.

The main change here is that I have renamed and completely rewritten Chapter 15, Meta-effectiveness framework and clinical psychology.

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Announcing mySleepButton – The First Sleep App Based on Cognitive Science (Serial Diverse Imagining, The Cognitive Shuffle and Super-Somnolent Mentation)

I’m delighted to announce that CogSci Apps Corp. has just released mySleepButton on the Apple App Store. It’s the first sleep app based on cognitive science.

It uses a radically different approach to sleep from all the other apps on the market.

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News: CogZest Spins Off CogSci Apps Corp. to Develop and Market Its Software Portfolio

I’m very happy to announce that CogZest has given birth to a new venture, CogSci Apps Corp..

In a nutshell

The short of it is that On Feb 27, 2014, I closed a deal in which I transferred CogZest’s software/ intellectual property portfolio to CogSci Apps Corp.™ in exchange for shares in the new privately held company.

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Release Notes for Cognitive Productivity Book

Ever since I published the first revision of Cognitive Productivity in June 2013, I have been making private notes of changes I make to this book. Now that the book is complete, I’ve concluded I really should publish release notes on my website for as many revisions of the book as possible. It’s not that I anticipate many revisions. At this point, I’m just handling errata and making minor changes in preparation for Amazon and iBookstore versions of the book (which incidentally might get a different title).

Why release notes for a Leanpub book?

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Call for Papers: Workshop on Computational Modeling of Cognition-Emotion Interactions: Relevance to Mechanisms of Affective Disorders and Therapeutic Action

On July 23, at the CogSci 2014 conference in Quebec City, there will be a workshop on “Computational Modeling of Cognition-Emotion Interactions: Relevance to Mechanisms of Affective Disorders and Therapeutic Action”. I am on the workshop’s panel committee, with a great set of researchers. I will also be submitting a paper.

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Helping Girls: 4th Annual “Give Her Wings Gala” of the Soroptimist International of the TriCities

I received an invitation from my friend and former Abatis/Redback Networks colleague, Alison Berg to attend the 4th Annual “Give Her Wings Gala” of the Soroptimist International of the TriCities. Alison will be presenting awards at the event, which will be held on Saturday, April 12 6:30PM in the Inlet Theater of Port Moody, the city where CogZest was founded.

Soroptimist International of the TriCities [Metro-Vancouver, BC, Canada] is part of Soroptimist International – an organization for business and professional women who work to improve the lives of women and girls, in local communities and throughout the world. Almost 95,000 Soroptimists in about 120 countries and territories contribute time and financial support to community–based and international projects that benefit women and girls.

CogZest is making two donations to the “Give Her Wings” silent auction:
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Emotion as Perturbance, Draft of ACT in Three Acts (Performed)

I was asked to assemble a service for Beacon Unitarian. I accepted and decided to meet several constraints, some of which are mentioned below.

As I said in my last post, I am trying to relate (a) acceptance and commitment therapy/training to (b) H-CogAff (a theory of affect). This is to better understand mental phenomena and to develop new solutions that promote well-being and cognitive productivity (including “meta-effectiveness”, the skills and propensity to use knowledge to become more effective.)

So, I decided to create a service entitled Emotion as Perturbance: A Draft of ACT in Three Acts to informally present the perturbance theory of emotion in combination with acceptance and commitment therapy/training and the work of Jacques Brel. That allowed me to pursue several CogZest projects in one Zest of Brel production.
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