How much is your knowledge worth?

How do we select employees these days? For what they know, can or potentially can? When you have to choose between a highly knowledgeable (read "walking encyclopedia") or someone who's more analytical, who's better?

How do we reward our employees? Do we reward for performance or for skills? WorldatWork suggests that both are equally acceptable, but surely there are advantages and disadvantages. Pay-for-performance and pay-for-competence models are widely discussed in the HR field and there is no unity of opinion on those.

In any case, the corollary is that knowledge as "stuff" has lost its significance in the modern world. I mean that if you need to find out some information, you google it (or better, ask your assistant to do it). What matters is what you do with that data, how you massage it, re-construct and what meaning you derive from it. It is a different type of knowledge, let's call it "insight".

So "stuff" vs "insight" - which will win? (this is not a World Cup question, really! not even Eurovision! there are rumors that whatever competitions are coming up in the next couple of decades, only Germany can win them, as only it can pay for hosting the event the following year, but we are digressing....).

Quite understandably, you would not want a low-IQ person working for you even in an envelope-licking paper-shifting type of routine, and we are not talking about such here. Besides, IQ is not about "stuff" - it is exactly about "insight" - it is about the connections that you can see (and CREATE) in the world around you. Trivial Pursuit is fun, but has little value in the workplace.

However, specially for you - here is a limited edition of rather useless but highly interesting and somewhat exciting facts about a miscellaneous bunch of stuff :)

Think you know everything...?

• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
• A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• A snail can sleep for three years.
• Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
• All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
• Almonds are a member of the peach family.
• An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
• Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
• Butterflies taste with their feet.
• Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
• "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
• February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon
• In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
• It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
• Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
• On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
• "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand; "lollipop" with your right.
• The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
• The Bible does not say there were three wise men; it only says there were three gifts.
• The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
• The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
• The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.
• The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
• There are more chickens than people in the world.
• There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
• There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
• Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
• TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
• Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
• Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself.

....................now you know everything