Can leeches be turned into bees?

In the German fairytale of the princess and the frog, a malicious witch had turned the prince into a frog. Only when a princess kisses the frog, will he become a human prince again. 

Is there such a kiss by the princess, to turn a human leech – a selfish person sucking the energy of others – into a bee – a creative highly collaborative person?


The good news is that it seems there indeed is a way to turn a leech into a bee. Our approach is based on virtual mirroring. This means that in the privacy of their own phone or social network analysis, all members of an organization get an individual assessment of their “leechiness”. This is either shown in a social network based on communication structure, dynamics and content in email in the Griffin tool, or using our SocialCompass tool on the smartphone.

The left picture shows the Griffin student network of a team of students participating in a seminar, the green nodes are “bees”, the red nodes are “ants”, and the few blue nodes are “leeches”, showing that there are very few “leeches” in this course. The right picture shows the SocialCompass of my own “beeness”, “antness”, and “leechiness” based on my own mailbox.

  



For the few students in this course which the system found to be leechy, knowing that they are mostly leeches has been very effective in changing the behavior of these leechy students for the better. So it seems there is indeed a “princess” available to kiss the leechy frog, and turn it into a bee!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter “I hope it is not as bad as I fear”

Image
We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz , predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office . Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley’s Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title. The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volum...
Read more

My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

Image
We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress. I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the...
Read more

How Blind Trust in Generative AI Undermines Creative Work

Image
This summer, we experienced firsthand the damage caused by blind faith in the "superhuman" capabilities of generative AI, even among otherwise intelligent individuals. Here's what happened. We submitted a research paper to an academic conference, and after it was accepted, I paid the registration fee, booked flights, and arranged accommodations. A week later, we received an abrupt email from the organizers stating that our paper had been rejected. The reason? Their AI-based plagiarism and ChatGPT-detection tool flagged it as containing both plagiarized content and text generated by ChatGPT. This accusation was entirely unfounded. Our paper presented highly original work by our team, proposing novel AI algorithms to predict animal emotions—a concept never explored before. We detailed the development of an AI model to validate this approach, something completely unique to our research. By its very nature, it was impossible for our work to be plagiarized or generated by Chat...
Read more