Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in BTRIPP's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, May 20th, 2012
7:33 am	"Does a dog have Buddha-nature?" I'm not sure how The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable got on my radar … it probably showed up on one of those Amazon lists of books I might like. It's a follow-up to Seth Godin's Purple Cow, and is credited to “The Group of 33”, and edited by Godin. It's a collection of essays from “33 of the world's smartest business thinkers” including Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, and Mark Cuban. Oddly, there are 72 essays here, and none of them are attributed to individual writers, so one figures that there are multiple essays from most, but no way to tell for sure. There are a few that sound very much like authors whose work I know well, but, again, it's all attributed to the “group” (and all the proceeds were donated to charity). The pieces range from a few sentences to about 7 pages (with most being 2-3 pages long), so are easy to blow through fairly quickly. However, there's little coherence in theme or subject, and the reading swings from one place to another ... at one point you're reading a scant half-page piece about a button that top Sarah Lee execs were wearing to get across a message, and at another you're reading a “play” of a borsht-belt routine which illustrates three principles of being remarkable. While I enjoyed reading this, I didn't hit anything while in it that I was driven to bookmark, which, in my reading style, is fairly unusual. While I take it that these pieces were produced specifically for this book (“they distilled their best secrets for creating sustainable and shared remarkability”), there isn't that much that's particularly remarkable in any of these. Frankly, not knowing who wrote what was a significant irritant … I mean, in some cases you could guess, but it really was quite a jumble of voices, points, and approaches … with most so short that it would have been helpful to have the “background” of knowing where that person was coming from. Also, I assume that the 72 essays are unevenly distributed across the 33 authors … with my guess being that most just weighed in with one piece, so who wrote the rest? Did Godin seed this with his own bits? In the Introduction Godin writes: “We {didn't credit the individual contributions} because it makes it easier to read the book as a whole, to avoid being interrupted by the noise your brain makes as it shifts gears from one voice to another.” … I feel he's wrong here, and that the unavoidable shifts between voices are more distracting when they happen “in the flow” of the book, without having the context of knowing who's currently at the mic! It could be argued that Godin “does the heavy lifting” up front here, and the rest of the book is just a series of footnotes illustrating the main points. Interestingly, he also encourages copying of material from the book, since it's all done pro bono, so in that spirit, I think I'll pass along a chunk of the Preface where he pretty much defines his terms: Let's begin with … two things that are true: 1. The only way to grow is to be remarkable. 2. The only barrier to being remarkable is your ability to persuade your peers to make it happen. In the old days, showing up was 95 percent of success. If you offered a good product at a good price in a reliable way, you'd be fine. Being local was a good thing. Having a long track record helped. Decent quality and personal service mattered as well. No longer. Good enough isn't good enough, because now everything is good enough. Our expectations of quality are unrealistic – and are being met every single day. We don't just want to be satisfied, we want to be blown away. Not only that, but today everything is a click away. Being local isn't good enough either. {detailing various depressing business scenarios} … But wouldn't it be better to leave that fear behind and grow instead? You will grow as soon as you decide to become remarkable – and do something about it. Remarkable isn't up to you. Remarkable is in the eye of the customer. If your customer decides something you do is worth remarking on, then, by definition, it's remarkable. … Remarkable is not in the eyes of the marketer. It doesn't matter one bit how hard you worked on something or how cool you think it is. It's up to the consumer. If the consumer thinks it's worth remarking about, then you've got a purple cow. … A big moo is the extreme purple cow, the remarkable innovation that completely changes the game. Godin goes on to say “This is a book about how and why to grow. It is not a book of facts or logical reasoning. … My colleagues and I are intent on slipping some subversive ideas into your subconscious ...”, and perhaps this is why the book seems to be such a cacophony – it's going for a non-linear impression. I enjoyed reading The Big Moo, but it's hardly my favorite Godin book. It's still in print, and the on-line big boys have it at about a third off of cover, but the new/used vendors have “like new” copies going for a penny, plus the $3.99 shipping (which is how I got my mine), so that would likely be your best bet. This is good if you're looking to be a Godin “completist”, or if you've got the “remarkable” fetish, but it's not exactly one I'm recommending for “all and sundry”. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
7:07 pm	A book from a book ... This is a perfect example of a “dollar store find” that if it hadn't been there for a buck, I would never have connected with it. How to describe Jan Karon's A Continual Feast: Words of Comfort and Celebration, Collected by Father Tim? The term “meta” certainly comes to mind. The book, despite the title, etc. on the dust jacket, purports to be a journal of Father Timothy A. Kavanagh, and, once the dust jacket is removed, appears to be just that, with a faux lizard cover, and his gold stamped name on the front, with no other identification on the book. I take it that “Father Tim” is the main character in a series of books that Jan Karon has written in the “Mitford series”, books about an Episcopalian minister in the small mountain town of Mitford, NC. Needless to say, “Christian Fiction” is not high on my list of things to read, but this is not a fiction book, but a book that relates to the books, being a journal kept by the protagonist ... similar, I suppose, to the Quidditch rule book that was out in the wake of the Harry Potter movies. The book is set in a hand-written font (I had initially thought it had been hand-written and scanned, but after 20 or so pages, I realized there were too many identical characters to not be a font), in both blue and black ink, with an occasional “insert”, both “post-its” (not particularly well executed in grey), or typed pages “taped” in (and in some cases with “smudges” under the tape), and even the particulars of the very old-style typewritten pages (it seems that Fr. Tim has a problem with typing “ii” instead of “i” a lot of the time) … the sort of detail that is quaint here, but might be “meaningful” in the stories. I'm guessing that some of the names, etc. that crop up in these (notes to send things to particular people) would also be familiar to readers of the series. Most of the book are quotations … about half coming from the Bible, and half from other sources … just enough balance to not have it feel too “preachy”. There's also some subtle humor, like the “post it” that says: “God sings!! remind choir”, and the occasional note about a birthday, or something that needs to be bought, or even a recipe … all breaking up the flow of quotations. I could have done without the sermons (several of which are typed up and “taped in” here), but I guess that goes with the territory in context of the “meta” aspects of the book. There are also a few sketches in here, very convincingly looking like they'd been done in pencil. One thing that drove me nuts here was the lack of page numbers, so I could never tell where I was, or how I was progressing (I'm terrible with the OCD habit of figuring out what percentage of a book I'm at, or have just read, etc.), which reminds me with one of my main gripes of reading e-books, which was a bit of a revelation to me (i.e. that I'd like e-books better if I had page counts). Oddly, this doesn't stand alone … there's at least another collection of quotes and a cookbook in the series. However, if you appreciate collections of quotes, A Continual Feast will probably appeal to you. The sources range from Founding Fathers to modern authors, the classics to religious figures, and, of course, the Bible. This is still available (Amazon has it at 60% off), so this must have been something “slipping through” to the dollar stores from Wallmart, etc. … used copies (of the paperback, not the hardcover) are also out there for a penny (plus $3.99 shipping, of course) as well. I'd certainly recommend this as something to keep an eye out for if you're at the dollar store, but “your mileage may vary” as to how much you'd be interested in paying for it. I enjoyed it, but liked it almost for its quirkiness than anything else! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2012
11:12 pm	Anachronistic advice? This was another Dollar Store find, and it's probably a good thing, or I would have been having “buyers' remorse” otherwise. Although the book did redeem itself to a certain extent by the time it was over, it was a long strange trip (and not in a good way) through a lot of very anachronistic advice! As regular readers of this space know, I read quite a lot of social media, web, and other “digital space” material. Being that much of this is “bleeding cutting edge” at the time of composition, it frequently has a less than stellar shelf-life, and I've frequently commented that “a book that's seven years old, might as well be seventy years old”. Well, Bette Daoust's Networking: 150 Ways to Promote Yourself hails from 2005, and, for most of it, reads like it might as well have been written in the 1940's! Now, I've been in a seemingly unending job search, and make a point of getting out to 2-4 networking events per week, so the subject of this book is certainly of interest to me. However, the tone here is more “your grandfather's networking” than anything that I'm familiar with. Of course, I live in downtown Chicago, and much of the advice here seems targeted to Mayberry … and certainly appears aimed more at insurance salesmen or aluminum-siding reps than the job seeker, or tech start-up partner. Frankly, as I was reading through this, I kept trying to imagine who the audience was for the book, or why it read the way it did. Stylistically, it has the pontificating tone of Napoleon Hill's books back in the early parts of the last century … lots of “you must do this” or “you should never do that” sorts of instruction … all reflecting a business world that I've not seen a trace of since the 70's, unless you count the stories of my father-in-law! As one might guess from the subtitle, this has 150 entries, each just under a page in length, assembled into ten subject sections: Event Marketing, What to Join, Strategic Alliances, Announcements, Speaking Engagements, Relationships, Power Pad {note: this is not some tech item, but a note-taking system the author concocted}, Business Card Marketing, Web Relationships, and Printed Networking … each with fifteen individual “chapters”. I wasn't exactly keeping score, but I think she mentioned the web, or the internet, or even e-mail only 2-3 times before she got to the ninth section there … this in a book that was written a full decade after I'd launched my first e-commerce web site ... as I noted above, this was a bit like reading a book from the 1940's that had been re-written with a few updates in 2005 to give a nod to that “new fangled” stuff! Even outside of the section on business cards, she spends a lot of time fixated on the subject, and is very proud of her own (as she frequently reminds the reader: “Some people have even said it is the most professional and great looking card they have ever come across.”), and quite dismissive of others that she doesn't consider being up to snuff. Given her attention to micro-managing instructions for the subject, she'd evidently never heard of VistaPrint, which had already been around for ten years when she wrote this! Again, the focus here seems to be on the guy out there trying to move a few extra pallets of widgets, or sell a few more insurance plans than it is for “networking” per se., and the setting is certainly in a small town or suburb (this is especially evident when she talks about doing out-reach to the press). That somebody, even seven years ago, could write: Whether you understand it or not, the Web is likely here to stay; those businesses that do not yet have a web presence, or at least e-mail addresses, are likely to get left in the dust. with a straight face is pretty amazing! Sure, that statement is true, but by 2005 who didn't have e-mail??? She elsewhere declares: “a website is like an electronic brochure”, putting the sensibilities of that aspect of the book squarely in the mid-90's. I'm not saying that Networking: 150 Ways to Promote Yourself was a useless read (there were several points that made me think, or led to considering a couple of new approaches), but it was bizarre in the context of the chronology of its composition. I suppose if you have a small business-service operation in small-town America, this might be your business-building bible, but in other settings it's a bit like trying to take a WW2-era business book for your template … good luck with that! Incredibly, this appears to still be in print (although Amazon has it at nearly 2/3rds off the cover price), but, as I said, it's currently showing up in the dollar stores. Needless to say, unless you fit the profile I'm suggesting is the plausible target audience for this, I'm not exactly recommending it, but if you do stumble across it for a buck, you might consider picking it up. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 11th, 2012
11:59 pm	Oh ... My, how quickly things go quiet in here when a NaBloPoMo is over! I have, frankly, wished to post several times this week, but have not gotten around to actually opening up the "Post an Entry" page and getting to it. Part of this is due to having a mental image of this being a chore since in doing a NaBloPoMo, I am frequently "manufacturing" posts, and (in the case of the ones featuring The Job Stalker, and, more recently the scans of the The Terminal Journal) there might be considerable amounts of "development" time involved before those get to the "writing it up" phase. What I need to do is to remind myself that this is a place for my blitherings, and that while I do, for various reasons (looking attractive to potential Hiring Managers checking out my "digital footprint", and not wanting to have uncomfortable discussions with the Secret Service), have to edit myself to a certain degree, I can pretty much just spew verbiage in here. I have, however, been hard up against that unyielding issue of there only being so many hours in the day, and am frequently finding myself falling farther and farther behind on the stuff I want to get done, or even need to get done, so there is often the trade-off of "do I post to LJ, or do I get another couple of resumes out?" or "do I post to LJ, or do I get another couple of hours of my Twitter backlog read?" or "do I post to LJ, or do I zzzzzzzzzz?". The past couple of weeks have been "interesting". I've been unceremoniously kicked to the curb on a couple of job things that had looked very promising (in one case, the interviewer had indicated that I was one of two finalists, and then never followed up with me ... I had to ping him 3 times over a six-week period before outright asking if there'd been a decision!), and am currently "back to square one" (AGAIN) on looking for actual employment. But I have also picked up 3 new "projects", although 2 of the 3 are of the "for stock/equity" type, so I'm not actually getting paid for my (not inconsequential amounts of) time, and the 3rd has only generated a single billable hour so far. I have a couple of books which are currently awaiting reviewing, so you'll have those to look forward to, and maybe I might be able to remind myself that this isn't as much work as it sometimes seems to be (as opposed to my endless 140-character communications elsewhere), and just wander in here to vent. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 5th, 2012
9:33 pm	Happy LJ Bday 2 Me! Today's my TWELFTH anniversary here! I've made 4,366 posts which is just shy of one per day over that time (about 364/year). I was the 2,663rd member on LiveJournal ... I wonder how many they're up to now? To celebrate, here's a total non sequitur of a picture ... Geese & goslings out on Elston Ave. this afternoon. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
9:30 am	ARRRGH! OK, if this is LiveJournal's way of "manipulating" us, it's working. As "change averse" as I am, I, for one, can hardly wait for the new graphic management module to be functional, because the old "Scrapbook" thing is WAY screwed up. What has typically gone click - 1 - 2 - click - 1 - 2 - click - 1 - 2 ... is now going click - wait 20 seconds - click - wait 20 seconds - click - etc. with extra steps having to be inserted as work-arounds since none of the formatting is there (it looks like the CSS file has gone missing), so instead of having a form with clearly defined places to update things, I'm having to go in via the directory structure and use the "manage image" function just to name the files ... so not only is every individual step taking ten times what it usually would, there's a whole extra set of steps (with waits) added on ... so getting up the images for that last post probably took 20x what it would have typically ... so BRING ON THE NEW SYSTEM! Anyway, if you felt cheated by having 7 of the same graphic in the last post, you can now feast your eyes on 7 different thumbnails linking to the various The Job Stalker posts from April. Had an odd thing happen last night. I've been using the same little one-ear headset since the early months of 2008 (when my boss at Simuality came in with a big bag of them he'd gotten at a deep discount over the weekend), and I'd been having (predictably for being 4 years into using a sub-$10 headset) some issues of late with the sound cutting out. I'd ordered a new mic/headphones unit from Meritline a week or so back for a whopping $6.99 (with no tax or shipping), and this had just arrived yesterday ... and what decided to up and die (or at least move into having more "no signal" than audio) last night? Yes, my old headset. How did it know that its replacement had arrived??? Heh. It was also weird that I can't hear Pandora in the new headset when it's up in FireFox (where I've been listening to it for years), but all the other audio is coming through OK ... and when I load up Pandora in Chrome it plays fine. Very strange. I started on a new project yesterday. It's another (you would think I'd have learned by now, but noooooo) of those "we're not paying you upfront but if this comes together the way we think it will you'll be getting a significant percentage" deals, so it's not producing any checks in the short term, but it has some substantial upside potential, so they're getting me for free at the moment. Hope I'm not getting "fooled again"! (Comment on this)
Monday, April 30th, 2012
11:41 pm	Oh, what the heck ... PLEASE PARDON THE MESSED UP GRAPHICS ... LIVE JOURNAL IS IN THE MIDST OF SWITCHING ITS GRAPHIC HANDLING PROGRAM AND IT'S NOT LETTING ME UPLOAD THE PICS ... I'LL FIX THIS AS SOON AS THEY GET THE NEW THING IN PLACE!                                         So, if you're coming to this later you may see seven different thumbnail images above, if you're coming to this sooner, you're seeing seven of the same image ... which was all I was able to upload before LiveJournal went wonky on me. I guess when they say "early May", they mean VERY early May (after all, it's already May in Moscow, isn't it?), so I can just hope that they scheduled "ancient" accounts like mine (I was, after all, one of the first 3,000 users here!) for the first to get the new system, and it will be functional soon. Needless to say, I'll get the various thumbnails uploaded and coded in as soon as I can! The links, however, associated with those thumbnails, DO point off the the actual posts they're supposed to, and since I really need to get a post up tonight (it would really suck to get to the last day of a NaBloPoMo month and not get that last entry up!), I figured I'd just make do with what I could on this. As you can see, however April was a far more active month than I've had over on The Job Stalker in a long time, with seven posts. These are, predictably, pretty much split between book features and link dumps. Ever since Gordon Dymowski stated taking the Wednesday spot, I've done a book feature on Monday (if I had a book appropriate to discuss there), and the links on Friday (or soon after). Anyway, here's how they break down: 04/02/2012 - a look at Rubies In The Orchard 04/07/2012 - talking about "pro bono" work, plus a "link dump" 04/09/2012 - a look at Six Tires, No Plan 04/16/2012 - a look at Résumé 101 04/21/2012 - some navel-gazing on the need for just ONE job, plus a "link dump" 04/23/2012 - plugging Scott Ginsberg's making his first 13 books available for free 04/29/2012 - a bit of "tap dancing", plus a "link dump" As always, I'd appreciate clicky-clicky so that I can see the numbers go up in both the daily Chicago Now reports, and in Bit.ly! It makes the effort put forth in all this feel just a bit less pointless if I can see that some folks are bothering to read what I've cranked out. And, as noted ... this does complete yet another NaBloPoMo ... and clears my entire backlog of The Job Stalker posts to push on folks over here! I had hoped (following the "theme" of POEM for the month's challenge) to have gotten all of my The Terminal Journal issues scanned and posted, but fell a bit short on that. I mean, I did get five of the seven years done, but you're going to have to wait a while for me to get that finished up (it takes me a couple of hours per issue to get it scanned, organized, output to .pdf, synced into DropBox, and set up over on my Ning site ... after four of which I'm then able to do a screen grab, and dump that graphic in here for a link back to the set in question - so each of those posts represented about 8 hours of work on my part!). Again, hopefully LiveJournal will get this switch-over to the new "scrapbook" program finished soon and I'll be able to get the other thumbnails up in this post! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
5:19 pm	And Volume 5 ... Well, I thought I might end up getting all of the issues of The Terminal Journal scanned and posted this month (with NaBloPoMo having a "POEM" theme), but I really had to push to get this done for you today (and didn't work on some very important stuff, so you should feel appropriately appreciative!). There are still two Volumes to go, so 8 more issues ... I'm sure I'll get to those eventually. There are some significant changes coming up in those ... first of all, I switch from color cover stock to a grey and changed the header graphic (incorporating the old graphic as a logo), giving them a more consistent look. Secondly, after the first of the grey issues, I quit putting my poems in and started doing "essays", most of which are very edgy and political. In the last volume (which slid away from the old dating in the last couple of issues, which were going to be very late had I stayed with the seasonal attributions) there were also a couple of issues with almost no poems/stories and mainly had political pieces. The financial woes of Eschaton were also manifesting, as we had new projects appearing in the catalog pages, but getting "delayed" annotations on them ... none of those "new editions" (or new titles) ever saw the light of day. We had been through the debacle with the distributor by the time the last of the TJs came out and were dragging along "on fumes", and I could no longer justify the cost of printing a magazine which had veered off from its initial vision, and wasn't producing any income to speak of. Anyway ... to Volume 5 ... it's very odd how my scanner deals with the color covers ... the color of the Winter 1997 edition up there is in reality a very bright, slightly orangey red, but it's coming through as a pink, almost "flesh tone", and the Spring 1998 edition, which looks to be almost exactly the same color, is actually a salmony sort of buff/tan! The other two are pretty close, although the green should be "brighter" and the pink less purpley. Color issues had manifested previously (for instance, the printed version of Winter 1995 is a very intense pumpkin orange, not the "aged newsprint" color that came through on the scan), but this is the first time I felt I should mention it. Maybe I'll dig around and find graphics on the web with "color chips" for cover stock, and do something that indicated what these things should look like (I'm thinking of doing some OCR processing on the indexes and putting them in a listing, so I could add those colors there). No specifically "themed" things here, but there are some pieces of note ... In the Summer 1998 issue I reprinted a piece by Ron Paul, which sort of surprised me that he had been on my radar back then ... and starting in that issue, and carrying through the next three, is a long piece about working with Kieth Haring by one of his early collaborators, Art Long / Tullio DeSantis ... which was definitely "classing up the joint" content-wise! Also, the "Blatant Plug Pages" started to expand to a second page, and (like the content), getting political at times. As in previous of these posts, clicking on the graphic up there will take you to the appropriate page over on my Ning site. Hope you enjoy! (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 28th, 2012
11:12 pm	Her name is written on the Clouds This was another of those Dollar Store finds … and I actually went back to pick up another copy to pass along to a friend, so I guess that says something. Swami Ramananda's Bliss Now!: My Journey with Sri Sri Anandamayi Ma is certainly not the typical fare for the dollar store, and, I have a hard time imagining that this was remaindered off of the Walmart shelves, given its subject matter, but it's over at Dollar Tree in quantity, yet is still available on-line. Bliss Now! is a “spiritual autobiography”of Swami Ramananda (on who I was unable to dig up any biographical information, beyond what's in the book, so I can't even give you his “real name”). In his youth, he had recurring dreams of a lady, who was encouraging him to come to India, and he managed to follow this and come in contact with his guru, the famed Sri Anandamayi Ma. This book owes an inspirational debt to Ram Dass' Be Here Now from 1971 … a relationship that Ramananda is certainly cognizant of, mentioning it on a number of occasions. There is a connection, as Ram Dass' teacher, Karoli Baba, is one of the figures here, but I'm pretty sure that the “look” of this book isn't accidentally evocative of the older one (and there's a quote here suggesting that Bliss Now! completes a trilogy, with Bhagavan Dass' It's Here Now, Are You? being the middle expression). This is one of those books that likely has less to do with the author's history as it does with his inner journey. There is a lot happening within its pages, but not so much in its text. Ramananda (or whatever his birth name was) has visions, convinces his family that he needs to go to India, gets there and (in the narrative) almost immediately hooks up with his first teacher, Swami Shankarananda Giri, and begins traveling visiting various holy men. His teacher decides it's time to part ways (he believes it's his time to die), and begins the long walk to Benares … leaving Ramananda behind, but also set up as his dharma successor. The author begins to wander, when suddenly a car lurches through the forest he's in, and who happens to be there, but Sri Anandamayi Ma, who “recognizes” him from previous lives and tells him to get in the car. Now, obviously, one has to either have experiences that include these sorts of belief systems or be able to “suspend disbelief” a lot here, as there is a recurring element of “spiritual recognition” going on from “past lives” (and it seems that the author and his main teachers seem to hold that he's a reincarnation of the 15th century Indian saint, but not to be confused with other teachers concurrently going by the same name). There is also a lot of “spiritual experience” being presented as literal happenings (people “glowing”, etc.) which likewise requires a cognitive jump for most folks. One thing I wondered about here was the timing of the book … Sri Anandamayi Ma died in 1982 at age 86, but the autobiographical part of the book only tracks up to that point. Yet Bliss Now! did not come out until 2002 … when Ramananda got his PhD (in Indian Philosophy and Yoga, from a U.K. university). Following his guru's death, Ramananda goes back to the US, and begins to be a Yoga teacher … but there is scant info on that. The second part of the book is a collection of pictures of and devotional poems about Sri Anandamayi Ma, which is then followed by his explaining about the various types of Yoga that his teachers practiced, the obvious Bhakti Yoga (focusing on devotion to the deity), Japa Yoga (using mantras), and then a long section on Hatha Yoga featuring him demonstrating (in photos) a couple of dozen poses (which, one has to ask, are of what use here? … one can hardly do a practice out of a single picture and a paragraph of description!), before getting into Karma Yoga, with a lot of diet and houskeeping suggestions, and finally discussing building communities. The book closes out with suggested reading and web sites, and a fairly extensive listing of Sanskrit terms and their definitions. Frankly, it feels like Ramananda really wanted to do two books here, one the autobiographical part up front, and the other the explanatory material in the back. I think this would have been better had he been able to flesh out the first section of the book to more than the 54 pages he applies to his spiritual journey. I'm sure he has fascinating stories to tell about many of the spiritual teachers that he largely only name-checks there. Ramananda keeps falling back to his theme of “bliss” rather than talking about the who/what/when/where of the situations, which may be sort of the point, but “I was at this place with this person and it was so blissful” only goes so far as literary structure. I did enjoy Bliss Now!, however, and found a number of things that will be interesting to follow up on. I should probably note that I have never “gotten” the Bhakti Yoga path, and that's clearly the central element here, so there's a lot of the essence of the book that I just wasn't connecting with … but that's likely to be more me than him. As noted, this is still available via the big on-line companies (Amazon has it at a whopping 60% discount), but if you have a Dollar Tree handy, you might well be able to find a copy for a buck out there … the one I went to today had a dozen or more copies on hand, so I'm guessing it's out there pretty broadly at the moment! (Comment on this)
Friday, April 27th, 2012
11:41 pm	the sky tumbling down As I have no doubt mentioned previously, until my recent job search, I had never been given to reading “business books”. Over the past several years, however, I have read quite a number (due in large part to my writing The Job Stalker blog over on Chicago Now), so one would think that I would be past “old biases” towards the genre … still, I had approached Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, a bit hesitantly as it was from Forrester Research, and published through Harvard Business Press … I mean, how boring a read was I setting myself up for? Well, I'm happy to report that it's quite an engaging book, and while it has its moments of going into more details than I felt I needed to know, it never drags itself into an “MBAs Only!” zone. I suppose to start off, you're wondering, “Uh, what's this groundswell thing, anyway?” … I had the same question, although it didn't start bugging me until I was several chapters into the book. Here's their definition: A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. Yes, I think that's pretty vague, but I guess they were going for a broadly inclusive frame to include a varied range of particulars. On its surface, this echoes Napster and the demise of the entertainment industry, but that's the “blunt instrument” manifestation of the concept, and the dynamics of this “groundswell” weaves its way through more subtle channels as well, manifesting as blogs, forums, ratings, reviews, wikis, and the “live” channels such at Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, among others. Structurally, Groundswell is in three sections: “Understanding the Groundswell”, “Tapping the Groundswell”, and “The Groundswell Transforms” … with most of the heavy lifting done in the middle section which looks at strategies for, listening to, talking with, energizing, helping, and embracing the groundswell. In each of these (well, all throughout the book, actually) there are specific cases discussed, frequently companies that Forrester was working with, but also others who had made public mistakes or successes. One of the latter was Unilever's Dove skin-care brand, which had, in 2006, a video released to YouTube that went viral … and ended up driving more than twice the traffic to their website than their 2006 SuperBowl commercial did. Cost of placement of the video: zero; cost of placement of the ad: $2.5 million! That's obviously an impressive “ROI” for working with the dynamics of the groundswell. While this is interesting, accessible, and even entertainingly written, it's at base a book for the business reader, and it helps to keep that in mind. Here's what seems to be the basic call to action:       You're about to fundamentally change how your company relates to its customers. This will require not only fortitude on your part but difficult negotiations with other people throughout your company. We've identified some mistakes you may make, and you'll probably find a few we haven't thought of. At this point you might ask yourself, “Why should I bother?”       Here's why.       You cannot ignore this trend. You cannot sit this one out. Unless you are retiring in the next six months, it's too late to quit and let somebody else handle it. The groundswell trend is unstoppable, and your customers are there. You may go a little slower or a little faster, but you have to move forward. There is no going back.       We will leave you with this: there is no one “right way” to engage with the groundswell.       While there are plenty of wrong ways to join the groundswell – not listening, for example, or trying to fool people – there are also many effective strategies. Each company must adopt the tactics that are right for its customers and its way of doing business and adapt as the technologies change. Copying others doesn't work because your company, your customers, and your goals are not the same as anybody else's.       So it's time to engage with the groundswell. Your company will be better for it. The book is robust in delivering its message, with numerous examples that run the gamut from extremely specific to broad-strokes overviews, leaving the reader with the impression that they've been toured through an entire tapestry of how these technologies are impacting businesses. I do have one fairly substantial gripe, however. The notes point to a place on the Forrester website for a LOT of supporting material (and additional resources) with the address groundswell.forrester.com/site#-# … but they've apparently changed the directory structure, and this ends up at a “server not found” page. Since the forrester.com domain is certainly still active, having all the links in the book be bad is almost unforgivable … and not only are the links not working, there's no trace (that I could find) on the forrester.com site. Now, I have a copy of the 2008 hardcover edition, and there is an “Expanded and Revised Edition” paperback that came out in 2011, which I assume has updated links (I would hope), but it's a big “slap in the face” to anybody who is reading the original version that there's not even a page on their site that the links from this would go to that would explain that the info was someplace else. I tried to get an answer from them via Twitter today on this issue, but have not heard back … there may be something out there, but it certainly isn't easy to find (and I went looking for anything that would provide those links, even through archive.org's “wayback machine”)! Anyway, I found Groundswell a very engaging and informative read, and would recommend it to anybody with a business interest in the new communications technologies (with the caveats above). As noted, there are two versions of this kicking around out there, the 2008 hardcover (which is what I have), and an updated paperback. There are “like new” copies of the hardcover available through the new/used vendors for as little as 14¢, but, given the abandonment of the supporting materials by Forrester, I'd probably have to recommend getting the paperback. I very much enjoyed the “groundswell experience” until I tried checking out the links … and really feel “cheated” that I was unable to follow up on that information, and find it somewhat inexplicable that, in the obvious case of the directory structure having no good reason to be gone, there shouldn't have been the absence that there is of those! (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 26th, 2012
11:43 pm	We all need control. Another Dover Thrift Edition, another “hole” in my education plugged. Here's something you may not know … the term “robot” is derived from a word in a Czech dialect meaning “forced labor” or “drudgery”, and was coined by a Czech writer. Now, I had some idea about the broad strokes of this, but hadn't encountered the writer, nor the book in which the term had been introduced previously, so I was thrilled to pick up Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). As widespread and persistent as the idea of robots have been in popular culture (let alone their less-glamorous, but more productive, non-anthropomorphic cousins on factory production lines), it is fascinating to take a look at where the word originated. The idea of the automaton or other artificial being had, of course (be it Dr. Frankenstein's re-animated corpse, or the Golem of Jewish folklore, etc.) preceded this depiction, but I believe that Čapek introduced the idea of industrially manufactured beings. Interestingly, Prague was the scene for the most famous Golem narrative, and it was in Prague that Čapek published, in 1920, R.U.R. . I should say published and staged, as this is a play (something that had not filtered into my mental file on the work, and something that I certainly did not expect). The play features the daughter of some government head, who is on a trip visiting the Rossum factory, where she meets with the factory director, and eventually with various of the department heads there. What is quite interesting is that the process for making the robots is organic and that they are artificial biological creatures, rather than mechanical devices. This has a key element to play in the course of the plot (and, by the way, if you're “allergic to spoilers”, you may want to quit reading as I'm going to discussing all the major points here). Anyway, this young woman arrives and meets with the factory's director, who gives her the background on the development of the robots … a scientist named Rossum (derived from "reason") had come up with “artificial living matter” that he could coax to differentiate into various tissues and forms … but it wasn't until his son, an engineer, got involved that they were able to make artificial humans. Once developed, factories could be set up to make the new workers in whatever quantities were necessary. As one would expect, this quickly turns into a dystopian vision, with the robots causing unemployment, and then being armed and turned into fighting forces that eventually turn of their creators and seek to destroy the humans. This happens between acts one and two in the play. In the latter part of the book (ten years after the first act) the remaining humans are trying to figure a way to survive. At one point the main character, Helena, burns the files that end up containing the only formulas for making the materials from which the robots are made. This, of course, becomes inconvenient as nobody else has been able to independently figure out what was involved in producing this, and without it there will be no new robots, and the robots have been doing a fairly efficient job of eliminating the humans. The robots are shocked to find that the few remaining humans in the factory can't discover how to recreate the formula, and are facing their own extinction (they, like the Replicants in Blade Runner only last a certain amount of time, about 20 years). However, the stress of this situation appears to be enough to evolve the robots, and two of them start exhibiting emotional behavior (in trying to protect each other), and eventually become a new “Adam and Eve” at the very end of the play. This is a very short work, under 60 pages, so there's not a lot of room for “fleshing out” a lot of the finer details or filling in too much of the wider “historical” story arc. Most of the action (in terms of wars and massacres, etc.) happens off stage and in vague reports. The actual dialog is presented within a few rooms in the factory complex with a 10 year span happening between. Because it is a play, most of the story line is carried forward by discussions and interactions between the main characters, so there isn't much opportunity to detail the happenings beyond those walls. Needless to say, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a fairly quick read, but an entertaining one that does closely hold one's interest. There were certainly parts of this where I would have liked to have had more information on what was happening in the wider world, but, within the context of the play, one is limited to the sources the characters have available to them, so there's not much temptation to get cranky about not having long descriptive passages inserted into the dialog. As you would expect for a book from the 1920's, it can be found free on the web, however, the Dover Thrift Edition of R.U.R. has a mere $2.50 cover price, so is one of those things you should keep in mind when ordering from the on-line big boys where free shipping kicks in at twenty-five bucks, and one often finds your order is just a buck or two shy of that. I enjoyed reading this, and feel like I've added a “key piece” to some part of the puzzle of recent culture in having read it! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
10:43 pm	Paraphrasing from the Persian ... This is a perfect example of why I love picking up those Dover Thrift Editions to fill in holes in my education … now, of course I knew of The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám, and certainly was familiar with the more famous excerpts from it, but I'm pretty sure I'd never read it, and I certainly didn't know about it, at least to the extent I do after reading the introductory materials here. While the source material of the book originates with an 11th century Persian “mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher” (who was not known as a poet during his life, but it seems that the core writings of this were in his papers, and over the centuries more and more material was “attributed' to him). What is an eye opener in Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám: First and Fifth Editions is that its translator was actually more of an interpreter of the material, and that what we know as “The Rubáyát” (which pretty much is Arabic for “quatrains”) is really FitzGerald's “take” on the original rather than an attempt to make a literal translation, making the “classic” work an expression of 19th century English composition instead of an work of Sufi poetry the likes of Rumi. It at first seemed odd that this slim volume would contain two editions of FitzGerald's work, the first edition (1859) and the fifth edition (1889), but by including both it allows one to take a look at what was happening here. First of all, when this initially came out, it was an anonymous translation, purporting to be Omar Khayyám's writings … in fact, FitzGerald's hand in the “translation” did not come to light until 1875, prior to the fourth edition in 1879. FitzGerald died in 1883, but he had “marked up” a copy of the fourth edition, and this served as the basis of the posthumous fifth edition. There are significant differences between the first and the fifth editions, with the former having only 75 quatrains, and the latter 101. Of these only 12 were the same (with only punctuation and capitalization changes) between editions, and 3 of the first's are missing (or sufficiently “spread out” over other quatrains as to be unidentifiable), #37, #38, and #45, with 28 “new” quatrains in the fifth edition (two of the fifth's, #83 and #87 use half of the first's #60, thus bringing the total up to 101). Most of the new material appears between #38 and #53 in the fifth (which come in a gap between the first's #36 and #39), with most of the the fifth's 60's new (but for #63 which is a version of the first's #26). Many of the quatrains are only slightly changed between the versions, with (as noted) 12 being basically unchanged, and another 20 having only 1 line out of 4 differing, and only 10 exhibiting changes to all four lines. However, one would expect that if this were a translation, especially by the same person, there would be a lot more consistency. It seems that FitzGerald was more interested in having the poems “live” than having them express exactly what the Persian sources said, and so there was a lot of trying to create a poetic expression that was over-riding any literalism. To take an example, here's a quatrain that probably provides the most famous line from The Rubáyát … “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou” … in both its versions: I – 11 Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou       Beside me singing in the Wilderness – And Wilderness is Paradise enow.   V – 12 A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou       Beside me singing in the Wilderness – Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! Obviously, with a book of this vintage and renown there are many free versions to be found (just do a Google book search), but I found the juxtaposition of these two editions here quite charming, as they do provide a window onto the reality of this “paraphrasing” by an English writer of the medieval original. Of course, one of the other “charming” things about the Dover Thrift books is that they're so inexpensive, this has a cover price of a mere $2.00 … which is very handy when one's on-line order is not quite at $25 to get free shipping and you're not wanting to throw in another “regular” book! Aside from those concerns, the poetry itself is quite enticing, as FitzGerald really did a very nice job of making the quatrains “live” in English. It's something you should keep in mind for that next order. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
11:16 pm	And, catching us up till April ...                         See, that wasn't too painful, was it? This batch of thumbnails/links brings us up to the end of last month ... meaning the odds are pretty good that I'm not going to inflict more of The Job Stalker on you until the next time I opt to do a NaBloPoMo (which has been going swimmingly this month). Soooo ... what do we have here? First, a bit of navel-gazing about my struggles, and a link dump ... then a plug for Chicago Career Tech's job re-training program (plus some bitching about how *I* don't qualify!) and a link dump ... a bit about a presentation by Howard Tullman, with some general rah-rah for getting out and networking, and a link dump ... a rare Tuesday post with some info on a few "webinars" that had come across my desk ... and, finally, a post about the big lottery prize I didn't win, with complaining about the sort of people who generally produce "webinars" (irony alert!), and yet another link dump. If nothing else between the five of those you've got 48 interesting job-search pieces to check out! So, I had a Very Bad Day today and would just as well not get into the details (suffice it to say, that my 16-year-old daughter who was home from school today insisted that we go out to lunch just so I would quit being Tourettes/Hulk at the top of my lungs towards my monitor). She is one of the mere handful of people on the planet who disagrees with my assessment that everybody would be better off if I just freak'n DIED. I swear, there are more similarities to being in the job search and being on a prison chain gang than there are differences ... I spend all day working on stuff that I hate, having no opportunity to work on stuff that I'm good at and that has any point to it, and there's NO END TO IT. It's like prison. It's like HELL. It's some sick sentence that's draining away my life without any purpose, and all I can ask is "what did I do to deserve this punishment?". I'm almost hoping to be the victim of some violent crime just to be released because being on a slab in the morgue is looking better and better compared to another day/week/month/year/decade of grinding out resumes into the black hole of indifference out there! Anyway, the clicky-clicky on the thumbnails up there will at least move the numbers and sometimes that makes me feel that the time I waste spend on doing The Job Stalker isn't as pointless as it usually seems. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 23rd, 2012
1:15 pm	Holey moley! I suppose that I really should read the descriptions of the books being offered in the LibraryThing.com “Early Reviewers” program more carefully, but in my defense, the only indication that this was a kids' book was an offhand thing saying “children and adults alike”, so I was surprised to find that it was a book targeted for the 9-12 age range. Ooops. I suppose that I have looked at other science-books-for-kids previously, so the “Almighty Algorithm” might have taken that into consideration when matching me with this, but frankly, I think there were better matches among the several I'd requested in the February batch. Fortunately, I happen to have a 12-year-old handy, and cajoled her into reading the book, and providing me with her review of Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano's A Black Hole Is Not a Hole, which follows below. I must admit, however, that I found the book delightful, even from a perspective of having read numerous books which have dealt with the subject. At no point was the science trivialized, although being brought down into language and “idea units” targeted for a Junior High audience. One of the great strengths of the book is its gorgeous and quite informative illustrations, helping to envision some of these difficult concepts much better than most of the “general reader” books on black holes have done. Before I end up “stealing her thunder”, let me plug in here the review that my daughter Claire wrote about this, as it's, obviously, more germane to the book than my opinions: A Black Hole is NOT a Hole By Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano Reviewed by Claire Tripp      “A Black Hole is NOT a Hole” is all about explaining the qualities of a black hole. Although it may sound like you are about to read a text book, that is not true! The author was very uplifting and explanatory on the topic. She kept the reader informed and entertained by being very creative in her writing. She also balanced the book out with the history of science and how people approached the topic of outer space, stars, gravity, planets, etc.      One of the main qualities that surprised me was that not for one minute was I bored or, well, reading a science textbook! I do not really enjoy science, but this book was very enjoyable and fun! The way she approached the topic was clear and kid-friendly, she also included connections to our day-to-day lives as kids! The illustrator, Michael Carroll, also did an amazing job at creating clear and beautiful pictures. They were very accurate to the book.      The author also had little “chat bubbles” that had little sayings such as “Then what is it?” in reference to the title. This was another example of her creativity in her writing. Overall, the book was very fun and exciting while it was still educational and informed me on the topic. While I wish she was more interested in Science, I think it's telling that she was as enthusiastic about A Black Hole Is Not a Hole, and I was pleased and surprised that she got her review written up and into my hands with only the barest minimum of reminding (she had put it off until her History Fair project was presented at the Regionals). Anyway, as I said, this is a remarkably informative and comprehensive look at the current theories involving black holes. Obviously, the author was challenged by the nature of her target audience to step things back to very basic levels, and so the book starts with looking at the Solar system, and the concepts of really big numbers, then comes up with a parallel of a black hole and a whirlpool, and explains that it's “kind of” like that, but not exactly … which then sets up a discussion about gravity (complete with a sketch of an apple bouncing off of Newton's head), with the basic concepts spun out along with some tables of how much various things of a particular size would weigh (a “snowball-sized” black hole would weigh more than 10 earths!). This leads to the very difficult concept of the “event horizon”, which then proceeds into a look at the life cycle of stars, and how stars of various sizes end up doing quite different things when they die. At this point the book shifts a bit back to some basic astrophysics, looking at how light behaves in assorted contexts (and why it can't get out of a black hole, thus making it “black”), how we can find black holes out in the universe, and lots of pictures of galaxies, etc. in which they've determined there are black holes. Finally, they get to the “thought experiment” part with the obvious question about “what happens to stuff falling in?” and getting into Relativity and non-Newtonian space. I had sort of expected them to get into the “hole in space/time” diagram earlier, but it comes in at this point as a final look at “a hole”. The book concludes with a very interesting timeline (from Newton on), an illustrated glossary, and the author presenting (in a very conversational mode) her sources for the information in the book, along with a more standard list of resourses. Considering the difficulty and complexity of the subject, and the age of its audience, A Black Hole Is Not a Hole does an amazing job of making this understandable, while not (in my daughter's words) making it like reading a textbook. While I might not have learned anything new per se here, I certainly picked up good “images” of how to frame the concepts (like the snowball-sized chart noted above), and I can appreciate the efforts of the illustrator to make these things visible to us terrestial-bound life forms! This has only been out a couple of months, so it should be available in the bigger book stores, but (of course) the on-line guys have it, with a discount that would make it cheaper (assuming you add it to other stuff to get free shipping) at this point than getting it from the new/used vendors with their shipping add-on. Again, this is a really remarkable book, and a tour de force in making something very challenging both accessible and entertaining. It's a volume every kid (especially those with an interest in science) should get a hold of! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012
4:06 pm	"Who controls the present ..." I heard Erik Qualman do a presentation on Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business at the December 2009 meeting of the Social Media Club of Chicago (along with Shel Israel talking about his Twitterville), just a couple of months after it came out. I suppose it's a testimony to the book's popularity (and my on-going poverty) that I was unable to get connected with a “reasonably priced” used copy until just this January … notably, getting to it after I'd read his new book Digital Leader. While this is a very good book for its time (it's amazing how a book that's not quite 3 years old at this point can feel “dated” already), but it suffers from the author's evident excitement over Barack Obama (whose campaign, admittedly, did make significant use of Social Media tools) ... were the Obama election just one case study among many (it gets its own chapter, and the Obamas have more mentions than anything else in the index), it would be less of a problem here, but, as it is, this imparts to Socialnomics something of the same "irrelevant" feel that most political books have within a year or two of their publication. The book starts off with laying some groundwork about word-of-mouth information distribution, and how communication systems are changing … We have shifted from a word where the information and news was held by a few and distributed to millions, to a world where the information is held by millions and distributed to a few (niche markets). … While {the} traditional mediums were still trying to grasp how to handle the upshot of blogs and user-generated content, social media suddenly came along, causing yet another significant upheaval in the status quo. Once this basis has been established he moves into “behavior”, outlining two types, “preventative” and “braggadocian”. The former of these can be brought down to the phrase “Live your life as if your mother is watching.” … and is, basically, the herald of the recent dystopian “self-edit or else” vibe that one needs to conform to social norms and expectations or be indelibly branded a pariah (since, as he also notes: “What happens in Vegas stays on You Tube”). The latter is the trend to documenting one's existence via Social Media tools, and how various “generations” interact with these. In both of these chapters there is a lot of “what's good for society” at the expense of the individual, side-by-side with case studies from various businesses. This segues into the political chapter: In 2008 … several companies gave away freebies on Election Day. Generally most marketers steer clear of anything political, but in this case, the brand marketers wanted to be a part of a community, and the community in this instance, thanks to social media, was the American community. ...This is the sense of community that human beings long for, and it is something that isn't lost with social media. In fact, it is part of the reason for social media's meteoric ascendancy in our lives. Face-to-face interaction still can't be beat, but social media does help you feel part of a community. It is even able to help keep an intimate community feel on a national or global level. This at least had an interesting bit about how search engine traffic can serve as a predictive measure of future events, from emerging pop stars to patterns of flu outbreaks (before they're recognized as outbreaks). There is a rather dystopian spin here too, talking of ways the government could become more involved in our daily lives. The next sections are about how people prefer to get recommendations from peers rather than marketing messages from companies. The 30-second commercial is being replaced by the 30-second review, tweet, post, status update, and so on. Not all great viral marketing ideas need to originate in the marketing department – businesses need to be comfortable with consumers taking ownership of their brands. The marketers' job has changed from creating and pushing messages to one that requires listening, engaging, and reacting to potential and current customer needs. And it's not just marketing that changes; businesses models need to shift. Simply digitizing old business models doesn't work; businesses need to fully transform to properly address the impact and demands of social media. Again, most of the illustrative stories here are specifics of how various companies did or did not succeed in using Social Media and associated web technologies … the details are interesting in context, but really not suitable for extracting as examples here … ultimately, the over-all tone of Socialnomics is very much that of an introductory volume for business people who may not have any experience with Social Media, but are quite conversant with advertising and marketing challenges. As much as the assorted business "snapshots" here provided fascinating illustrations of how Social Media affected the success or failure of numerous companies, I was disturbed by the "meta" implications of some of the over-riding themes. Qualman keeps returning to the at least the suggestion of personal sublimation to the Society … he refers to “The Death of Social Schizophrenia” positing that having a private self and a public self is a symptom of a disease and that one needs to make one's personality and activities “transparent” and congruent, “for the good of society” ... with the obvious implication that if one's personal orientation, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs are not “approved”, one will be shunned by the less-individualistic masses (or at least their HR department keepers). Admittedly, I suspect that most people reading this book wouldn't even notice the "dystopian meta themes" running through Socialnomics, but they were ongoing "nails on a chalkboard" to my Libertarian sensibilities. Unlike many of the Social Media books I've read, this is very much oriented as a business “primer”, so the feeling was less that of enthusiasm for the new technologies of communication and interaction, and more looking at how these could be brought to bear on beating the competition. As noted, it's been very popular, and is currently widely available in a paperback edition. This certainly has worthwhile material in it, and I'm sure that I'm an "extreme outlier" in my visceral reactions to the societal spin I found implied in it, but I don't think this would be near the top of my recommended Social Media reading list for general audiences, although it might be an ideal intro book for MBAs and fans of big government. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 21st, 2012
6:31 am	"Put the glasses on! Put 'em on!" I don't know why these books never crossed my radar back when they were coming out … they sold tons of copies, and I guess got lots of ink, but I was oblivious to them until much later. In fact, I tried to get an interview with Lois Weisberg, the Chicago Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, some years back (related to a job opening I'd seen), having seen her mentioned in a magazine article, and I got a note from “her people” saying that ever since appearing in The Tipping Point , she was so swamped with requests that she just couldn't do any … and I had no clue! So, although I came late to the books of Malcolm Gladwell, I've been catching up ... in this case, with Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This book is a collection of stories from a wide array of contexts and settings, all dealing with the way our perception works. From the instant “read” we might have on something (in the first piece here, a forgery of a statue), that can be more accurate than expert study, to how our unconscious can mis-read the “truth” in a situation, and to how this can be managed and even trained. There is an awful lot of individual bits and pieces of research, background, and narrative here, so it's not something where I can sketch out the “story arc”, instead, I've pulled out a few quotes that I think give a taste of what's in here. First is a thing that deals with looking at which doctors get sued, and which don't. Contrary to what one would expect, this has very little to do with their competence or track record. Even odder, the research leading into this was based on studying couples with an eye to which were going to break up or not. {The researcher} listened to {the study's} tapes, zeroing in on the conversations that had been recorded between just surgeons and their patients. For each surgeon, she picked two patient conversations. Then, from each conversation, she selected two ten-second clips of the doctor talking, so her slice was a total of forty seconds. Finally, she “content-filtered” the slices, which means she removed the high-frequency sounds from speech that enable us to recognize individual words. What's left after content-filtering is a kind of garble that preserves intonation, pitch, and rhythm but erases content. Using that slice – and that slice alone – {she} did a Gottman-style analysis. She had judges rate the slices of garble for such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness, and she found that by only using those ratings, she could predict which surgeons got sued and which didn't. So, from less than a minute of meaningless speech patterns, signals came through which allowed accurate predictions of which surgeons were sued … how? It tuns out that the attitude of the doctors, which came through all this reduction, was the key element … those that were treating patients like a case and not like a person were the ones that ended up being sued if things went wrong. There were other experiments that showed that subtle elements could change results dramatically … asked to think of professors or soccer hooligans before taking a test, the former (randomly selected) group of subjects got 55.6% right while the latter got only 42.6% correct … a huge difference just from thinking of a particular “type” before the test! More dramatically, a study of Black students showed that the group asked to fill out a questionnaire before the test that had a place to identify their race, scored only half as well as a similar group whose pre-test form did not have that question. The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. What was striking here was that the pattern of influence was evident in a wide swath of studies, quizzes full of items about senior citizens had their college student subjects moving far more slowly and hesitantly on their way out of the testing center than peers who didn't have those cues … people “primed” with word scrambles that either had “rude” or “polite” entries in them acted out the programming in a subsequent “accidental” encounter, with 82% of the “polite” subject never interrupting in an structured inconvenient situation. It makes you wonder how close movies like They Live are about the messages being fed to us! On the flip side “they” don't necessarily have a firm grasp on all this … there's a section dealing with “sensation transference” where product packaging totally overwhelms things that one would expect to be top difference-makers, like taste or brand name … or situations where our “gut reaction” has five times the accuracy than when we're asked to analyze why we prefer A to B. One of the issues raised here is that people are rather change averse, and “different” is often taken for “bad”: The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different. … {in initial testing of All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show} Viewers said they hated them. But, as quickly became clear when these sitcoms became two of the most successful programs in television history, viewers didn't actually hate them. They were just shocked by them. And market researchers at CBS utterly failed to distinguish between these two very different emotions. The challenge is to find out what is just so new that it shocks, but then is embraced, and what is actually bad and will never find a wide audience. There's also a test you can try at home … do a blind “sip” test between Coke and Pepsi, and many (but by no means all) can pick which is which, but throw in a third cup, and a second serving of one of these, the average success rate drops to 1/3rd – right at chance – and Gladwell reports that when he tried this on a group of his friends, they all failed to make the correct identifications! Finally, as though to validate the “happy smiley”, “fake it till you make it” people, it appears that just trying to look a particular way effects the whole body/mind complex … suggesting that those (irritating) people who go through the day smiling like they're having a great time, are actually ending up happier than those of us with a firmer grip on reality … {Researchers} gathered a group of volunteers and hooked them up to monitors measuring their heart rate and body temperature – the physiological signals of such emotions as anger, sadness, and fear. Half of the volunteers were told to try to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half were simply shown how to create, on their faces, the expressions that corresponded to stressful emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. The second group, the people who were acting, showed the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature as the first group. Again, this is just a small sampling of what's covered in Blink … it's an amazing collection of things that will shake how you see the world, and maybe even change the way you go about things (I know that the next time I need to take a test, I'm going to start making a list of “genius things” before I go in!). Despite being out for seven years, Blink is still in print, available in both hardcover and paperback, so it should be available in the brick-and-mortar stores, but the on-line big boys have it at about 1/3rd off of cover, and the new/used vendors have “very good” copies of the hardcover for as little as a penny (plus shipping). This is one that is such a “shock to the system” that I really wish everybody would read it … it's in the intersection of a good read, an interesting study of human psychology, and a satori-like unfolding of an unsuspected reality. If enough folks read this, maybe we won't need George Nada's sunglasses to see the “obey” and “consume” signs! 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Friday, April 20th, 2012
12:55 am	And here's Volume 4 ... Ah, yes ... Volume 4 ... not only does it vaguely echo another Vol.4 which was significant in my youth, but it's probably the most "themey" of any of the 7 Terminal Journal volumes. While the first of these was pretty much like those before it, each of the next three had some unifying element. The Spring 1997 issue (V4N2) had the unfortunate honor of featuring an "in memoriam" section for Adam Walks-Between-Worlds, a regular contributor, whose untimely death (see HERE for more info) came just before this issue. This featured both pieces that Adam had sent in, plus memorials written by others. The Summer 1997 issue (V4N3) was a somewhat playful look at UFOs, Cthulhu, and other creepy things ... featuring some fun art we'd been given permission to use from Chaosium. Finally, the Fall 1997 issue (V4N3) was the "artless" issue, featuring no graphics except on the "marketplace" ad page and the book catalog. Frankly, I don't recall why this was text-only ... I may have found pieces filling up the pages without gaps and just opted to make that a "thing", or I may have been doing some passive-aggressive pout about not getting promised art in ... I seriously don't recall, but those would seem to be plausible explanations. One other feature that premiered in Volume Four was the "Blatant Plug Pages" which allowed me to shill for other folks' projects outside of the actual "content" of the mag. Back then I did most of the distribution in the "free literature" racks of stores around town and the T.J. must have gotten on some lists as I started seeing the occasional press release. Unfortunately, most of these were for theatrical productions, which, being a quarterly, were very hard to fit in (as the release would not go out until just before the show started, and unless that hit my desk very close to when we were going to press, their run would be over before we had the issue out). I did, however, see the potential for getting free stuff, so started putting in album reviews to sort of "prime the pump" (and I did from time-to-time get review CDs sent in, like the Karma To Burn album in V4N3), but that never became the great fountain of freebies that I had sort of hoped it would be. In some ways '97-'98 was "the best of times" for Eschaton. We were still growing, still getting out new books, and the stark realities that would later come to bear were only shadows along the horizon. On many levels, especially given my current financial states due to being now within weeks of having been out of work for three years, it's very hard for me to go back through the later volumes, as the track the demise of the company that I spent fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, building, and that I pumped in nearly every dollar I ever made in my PR career. It really got ugly ... yes it did. Anyway, staying with the "poem" theme of this month's NaBloPoMo, there you have another full year of The Terminal Journal (and some of the later volumes are very thin on poetry and very heavy on essays, political rants, and assorted polemics ... something I'm sure you'll be looking forward to). (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 19th, 2012
1:11 pm	Will you look at that ... Well, this is monumental ... I'm actually going to reference something from Pinterest! Oy. You see, Scott Stratten (aka @unmarketing) Tweeted something about this groovy Twitter-word-cloud-made-into-a-Wordle thing, and posted a link to a "pin" on his Pinterest (geez, it sounds so weird to say his Pinterest ... do guys actually use that?). Anyway, this was a pic of a big graphic he had done of the "word cloud" of his Tweets. How cool is that? While this doesn't take it the extra step (he does detail how he got it done), but if you go to http://tweetstats.com/ you can have it grab your Tweet stats (which can take quite a while, I just fired it up again and I was queued with over a thousand other folks), and you can then get it to generate a word cloud. When that comes up you'll see a link going to http://www.wordle.net/ that will automatically send the word cloud data with or without "@"'s (i.e., you can filter out the Twitter handles that would otherwise be in the graphic). I should have probably seen if I could have tweaked it to get rid of "RT" (i.e. "ReTweet"), since that's so huge in this (along with the evidence of my heavy ellipses addiction). Anyway, once you get it in Wordle, you can mess around with it pretty much all you want, there are several color schemes, a long list of fonts, and various options for how it lays out in the frame. One thing it does NOT have is a handy way of saving the graphic, as the program is in Flash. The Wordle folks suggest two ways, first is doing a screen grab, which is what I did after using the Zoom command in FireFox so it was as big as my screen would allow (I didn't feel like doing a ton of cut-and-paste to make a HUGE graphic out of a bunch of separate screen grabs) ... the second (which I only found out by reading the FAQ when getting ready to post this) is to install something that will allow you to print to a .PDF file, which will be scalable. I'm assuming that's what Scott did to allow him to get this looking good at poster-size. Not that I'm going to be running out to get a poster made (my walls are pretty much either windows or bookcases anyway, it would have to go on the ceiling), but it's a very cool idea! I do, however, want to point out how depressing it is that the #1 biggest word (once one gets past the "noise" of the RT and the ellipsis) is "JOB" ... meaning that my job search has swamped all other conversation by me on Twitter. I hate that ... hate it, hate it, hate it. I feel like the Biblical "Job" when it comes to my search for employment ... doomed, cursed, the plaything (with a cosmic "kick me" sign taped to my back) of forces that I can't control. How much nicer if that big word was "FUN" instead. Like's that has a chance of happening in this lifetime. :-( Oh, and, by the way ... if you click on the image up there, you'll get to see it in a much larger form. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
10:20 pm	Some splainin' about human origins ... This was another of those delightful dollar store finds … always a treat to discover a nice hardcover, in perfect condition, for a buck! The randomness of the dollar store books is one of the most attractive (well, aside from the $1 price, of course) parts of the find, as these will, obviously, not be things that I went out looking for, but often are quite interesting, and expand my reading outside of its habitual ruts. Not, of course, that paleoanthropology is a particular stretch for me, my having read many books on the subject … it's just one that I don't typically go out looking for. So, Donald Johanson & Kate Wong's (he's the paleoanthropologist, she's the co-author who happens to be the Editorial Director of ScientificAmerican.com) Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins was a particular treat to discover some weeks back at one of my periodic trips to the dollar store. As I was coming to this “by accident”, I didn't have much preconceived expectations of the book, and found that it was a very interesting interweaving of Johanson's personal reminisces and current research into the early predecessors of Homo sapiens. Johanson, of course, is a major player in the unfolding of the story of that research, having been the discoverer of “Lucy”, the famed fossil remains of a young Australopithecus afarensis female in the Hadar area of Ethiopia's Afar region back in 1974. Lucy's Legacy follows his career, from the early '70s up through when the book was published in 2009, with much of the “action” happening in Ethiopia, from the later days of Haile Selassie's reign, and resuming in the 1990's. One is tempted to assume that the writing division here is Johanon providing the “boots on the ground” material, and Wong filling in the scientific background, as the narrative swings in and out of “what was happening” and into “what it means”. One certainly gets an interesting look into the day-to-day activities of a working camp in a fossil-rich area, with all the inter-disciplinary work that's involved on dating finds, etc. There is also quite a bit of drama involved with the changing political landscape … as the Marxist military regime that ousted and succeeded Selassie was varying in how it related to “outsiders”, and for the better part of a decade forbidding any paleoanthropological research in the country. Later expeditions were also saddled with military escorts, but these were more in a “protective” role (despite having the predictably dampening role to open investigation) with active rebel activity in the regions Johanson and assocaites were working, as well as having significant tribal issues to deal with (at various times they needed to maintain close, or at least cordial relations with two tribes that were on either side of generations of hostilities). The main thrust of the book is the efforts to figure out the “family tree” leading from our Australopithecine predecessors (in various manifestations, the relation of which are still very much under debate) on up the assorted branches of Homo, leading to our current sapiens “humanity”. One fascinating point is presented late in the book: Geneticists believe that sometime around 140,000 years ago, the founding populations of modern humans underwent a catastrophic event that slashed their numbers from around 12,800 breeding individuals to a mere 600. Those 600 people gave rise to the modern humans that would one day leave Africa and colonize the rest of the world. I'd read about “population bottlenecks” before (like the Toba event about 70,000 years ago), but this is the lowest number I'd seen for “surviving population”! Needless to say, with these sorts of realities in the mix, it's no wonder it is sometimes difficult to “connect the dots” between numerous sets of fossils. I'm not going to even try to summarize the over-all paleoanthropological info from the book here … just suffice it to say, that this is not a “dry” presentation of the theory of Human Origins, but a tapestry of stories from the field, reminiscences from academia, and solid background information that only occasionally directly relates to the narrative (not a bad thing, it fills in the gaps that Johanson didn't specifically work on). If you have any interest in this field, I'm pretty sure you will find Lucy's Legacy quite an engaging read. It is still available, in a new paperback edition, although the hardcover can be had (at Dollar Tree, if you're lucky) in “very good” condition via the new/used on-line vendors for under a buck (but with $3.99 shipping, of course). I suspect that even more “general readers” might appreciate the “story” here, and I'd certainly recommend it as both informative and a good read. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
7:26 am	But, wait ... there's MORE!                         Don't you just love these NaBloPoMo months when you get to get caught up with my The Job Stalker posts? Sure you do! And here's another month's worth for you to check out. Yes, some months I'm just doing four posts there, due to now sharing the duties with another blogger, and pulling back a bit on my OCD and letting myself not post when I don't have anything particularly prepared. On this latter point, I end up doing a whole lot less "tapdancing" just to fill space over there, so one might conclude (not that I would claim this) that the quality of what I do post is improved. The pics above are for the four posts in February. The first one features a "link dump" but also has me discussing the Superbowl and my usual schedule for getting out resumes, with some high-quality bitching about how some job sites are laid out. Next, there's another book feature post which takes a look at Chris Brogan's book on Google+, along with a link specific to using G+ in the job search. Next was a fun one, a post pointing to the RésuméSmith site where I was the “featured job seeker” that week ... nice to be able to get my "Swiss Army Knife" description out in print (especially after I heard another local guy stealing my riff on that!). Finally, there's a "Guest Post" by Ford Myers, in which he gave me permission to reuse a thing of his on "Re-Discovering Your Career Passion", along with some hand-out materials that I'd found elsewhere on the web. Now, don't those just sound fascinating? Don't you want to click your way through to the delightful verbiage awaiting on the other side of those links? Of course! So, get with the clicky-clicky ... again, I don't make anything for page views anymore, but it's always nice to see (in the reports from Chicago Now) that people are reading! By the way ... I have a follow-up phone interview this morning for a position that I'm really hoping will fall to me ... it's been a long time "out there", so I may just be getting the "thanks, but no thanks" talk, but I have my fingers crossed that it's still being developed and that I'm still "in play" for the gig ... wish me luck! (Comment on this)