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FEATURES
PUBMED SEARCHING FOR THE NOVICE
by Julie D. Melvin, Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal, Chicago, IL
MARKETING & THE LIBRARY: BEST PRACTICES FOR WORKING IN TANDEM
by Shannon Sankstone, Quarles & Brady LLP, Chicago, IL & Charlotte Graesser Henderson, Quarles & Brady LLP, Phoenix, AZ
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
compiled by Donna M. Fisher, Senniger Powers LLP, St. Louis, MO
BOOK REVIEWS
YOUR CALL IS (NOT THAT) IMPORTANT TO US
reviewed by Sarah Mauldin, Chamberlain, Hrdlicka, White, Williams & Martin, Atlanta, GA
WHAT THE DOG SAW AND OTHER ADVENTURES
reviewed by Janice A. Collins, Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, Chicago, IL
BAD MONEY
reviewed by Sarah Dowson, D'Amato and Lynch, New York, NY
PLL NEWS
FROM THE CHAIR
by Kate Martin, McKenna, Long & Aldridge LLP, Washington, DC
Kate Martin, McKenna, Long & Aldridge LLP, Washington, DC
Unless you've been living on a desert island without cell or satellite coverage, you can't help but be aware of the convulsions law firms are going through. There has been no shortage of reporting on attorney and staff layoffs, the fate of the billable hour, and the death of law firm life as we know it.
What does all this mean for librarians? What can we do during these uncertain times to assure our survival?
To meet these challenges, the PLL SIS has designed an innovative program of learning opportunities for law firm librarians, organized by a Blue Ribbon Committee of some of our most innovative and experienced law librarians.
Aimed at providing librarians with the tools, skills, and understanding to successfully face whatever the new law firm realities will be, this innovative educational initiative includes a series of webinars on five critical topics culminating in a day-and-a-half Summit scheduled just before the 2010 AALL meeting in Denver. The five topics include: understanding the business of law firms, gaining staffing success, rethinking physical/cyber space issues, developing new collection models, and making change work for you.
The Denver Summit will offer an intense learning and information exchange, building on the foundations laid in the webinars. It will include provocative keynoters on law firm trends, case studies of libraries that have faced similar challenges (such as news and accounting libraries), and discussion groups on the five critical topics explored throughout the year leading up to the Summit.
There will also be a half-day section on honing practical skills such as writing persuasive memos, talking to C-level people, and insuring positive outcomes.
Watch for a special PLL website designed to further our discussions, to report on innovative trends, best practices and surveys, and to offer a document bank of practical, proven work product.
Our first webinar, held on December 9th, was led by Carolyn P. Ahearn and Scott Bailey and covered law firm economics — Succeed in the New Law Firm Library Reality — Learn the Business Side of the Firm. Barry Strauss, CEO of Wiley Rein in Washington, DC, gave a frank and no-holds-barred C-level perspective on new law firm realities. What are the changing business models? How do we deal with shifting user expectations? Will the death of the billable hour alter how we do business?
In January 2010, Joan Axelroth and Lucy Curci-Gonzalez will lead a discussion on Staffing for Success, which will explain staffing models that reflect new economic realities. See how you can lower costs and increase efficiencies in your firm by exploring new staffing paradigms that echo changes in library services.
March 2010 will usher in a webinar on new standards in evaluating physical/cyber space, led by Monice Kaczorowski and Kay Todd. If you’d like to be part of this effort, please contact me. We welcome your input.
Kate Martin
kmartin@mckennalong.com
202-496-7752
GET THREE AALL CONFERENCE RECORDING SETS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!
For a limited time, when you purchase the full AALL 2009 Annual Meeting program recordings set, you’ll also receive the full 2008 and 2007 recording sets for free. With this purchase you’ll have access to nearly 200 educational programs developed and presented specifically for law librarians. You can purchase the sets in three ways: MP3 downloads available on AALL2go, MP3 CDs, or audio CDs.
This offer is only good until March 1, 2010. Additional shipping and handling charges apply for CD purchases.
To order, go to http://www.softconference.com/aall/slist.asp?C=2794 or AALL2go at http://www.softconference.com/aall.
AALL ELECTION RESULTS
AALL announced the winners of the recent Executive Board Elections on December 2, 2009. The new Board members are:
Vice-President/President Elect: Darcy Kirk
Treasurer: Susan Lewis-Sommers
Board Members: Lucy Curci-Gonzalez and Ronald E. Wheeler Jr.Congratulations to the winners, especially PLL’s own Lucy Curci-Gonzalez!
PUBMED SEARCHING FOR THE NOVICE
by Julie D. Melvin, Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal, Chicago, ILSearching the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database can be an intimidating experience, even for us hardened veterans of monolithic legal databases such as Lexis and Westlaw. There are several reasons why this gold mine of material may put off the novice user even though it is that rarest of commodities: a FREE resource. In the past, PubMed has been somewhat cumbersome and complex to use, the content and subject matter can be overwhelming, and there may be more than one step involved in accessing relevant results in full text format. This article is intended to give the new PubMed user a few tips to help you become comfortable enough to dive in and dig for some buried treasure. If you have used PubMed in the past, but not in recent months, you should be aware that the database was completely redesigned and the new interface became fully operational on Tuesday, October 27, 2009. The old version is no longer publicly accessible. Some useful notes about some of the major changes due to the redesign are available here: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign.html. These changes were intended, at least in part, to make the PubMed search experience easier. Give it a try and see what you think.
For those readers who may not be familiar with the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/): “PubMed lets you search millions of journal citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. It includes access to MEDLINE and to citations for selected articles in life science journals not included in MEDLINE. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources. PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Publishers of journals can submit their citations to NCBI and then provide access to the full-text of articles at journal Web sites using LinkOut.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bookshelf/br.fcgi?book=helppubmed&part=pubmedhelp#pubmedhelp.PubMed_Quick_Start). In addition, for our purposes here, it should be noted that this is also a useful resource for finding articles on the business of healthcare. The materials contained in PubMed are not limited to clinical scientific resources and it is in this way law librarians may get the most use from this robust tool.
The PubMed website has several helpful resources that are well designed to aid the novice searcher, but as with all databases they take some time to work through in order to get the full benefits of the intended instruction. The main drawback of these instructional tools is that they are not just written for novice PubMed users, but for novice SEARCHERS. As a result, for experienced reference librarians, the search aids can be somewhat tedious when trying to use them to find that one kernel of useful information when you already understand Boolean logic and the difference between a publisher and a journal search. Despite the basic nature of some of the instructions, the search aid topics are all worth further exploration as time allows. The aid topics include:
- PubMed Help
- FAQs
- PubMed Quick Start
- Search Field Descriptions and Tags
- Searching PubMed
- Advanced Search
- Understanding Your Search Results
- Displaying and Sorting Your Search Results
- Finding Related Resources for a Citation
- Displaying the Search Details
- Saving and E-mailing Results and Searches
- My NCBI
- How to Get the Journal Article
- Other Services Including the MeSH and Journals Databases
Note that the PubMed Quick Start and some of the other areas contain instructional search videos that self-propel through the lesson.
As with any content rich database, the best approach for achieving focused results on PubMed is to use the Advanced Search option (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/advanced). Far beyond the standard of author, title, and subject, this feature allows the searcher to focus results by numerous fields including: language, investigator, substance name, and pharmacological action, just to name a few. Additionally, results may be narrowed by selecting various restrictions: full text; free full text or abstracts; human or animal subjects; various age range categories; and even types of article, such as clinical trials, editorials, or bibliographies. Another useful search feature is the ability to limit searches to journal groups: nursing journals, dental journals, or clinical journals. The nursing journals tend to be particularly helpful resources for issues related to healthcare workers as a group. So, for example, if you were trying to find articles about wage or hour disputes in hospitals, it might be a good idea to start with the nursing journal group and see what results are obtained rather than including all journal types in the search. Finally, the “More Resources” option, located at the bottom of the Advanced Search page, provides other ways to refine the search. This category includes: sample clinical queries, topic-specific queries, MeSH, and journals and single-citation matcher.
Just as with any database that contains professional materials for particular skilled professions, PubMed includes articles that use highly specific and specialized language. In law, for example, when one wishes to find an article on res judicata the best terminology to use to get relevant results is the phrase “res judicata.” You may get hits with other phrases, but, for the most part, it will take longer and the results will not be as focused or as on point. For this reason it is best to use the MeSH terms whenever possible for searching in PubMed. MeSH (or Medical Subject Headings) is NLM's controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing MEDLINE articles. The MeSH database, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh, can be searched for MeSH terms and available subheadings to use with them. Additionally, other related terms will be suggested for the most thorough search. The MeSH search page will help you not only find an appropriate term, but also limit the term with applicable subheadings or designate it as a major focus of the article. Once you have identified appropriate MeSH terminology, you can then send the selection to PubMed for searching. The new PubMed interface builds in browsing for MeSH, journal titles, and other functions into the advanced search page. NLM has librarian/indexers assigning subject headings according to well-defined standards, so PubMed articles are carefully indexed. It is important to note though that new articles are added to PubMed even though they may not have been fully indexed yet, so newer articles may be more easily identified by keyword text searching until MeSH terms have been assigned.
With the relatively new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access policy (see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm), free copies of the articles supported in part by NIH research grants will be posted to the PubMed Central web site at (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The PubMed search results will link to these articles available in PubMed Central as well as to publisher web sites where the article may be available, sometimes at a cost. While this will make getting a broader range of free articles possible, pre-published copies of an article supplied by an author under the NIH public access policy could differ a bit from the final published version. The “linkout” feature on PubMed will also connect the search with possible resources for obtaining additional articles of interest. This can be a very useful feature, particularly if your library does not have databases that may contain this type of material. Just as a cost savings reminder, it is always best to check whatever resources you already subscribe to prior to incurring additional costs – you may learn you have access to something you did not realize you had just by checking the PubMed abstracts against your own subscription databases. For obtaining full text articles, the PubMed help recommends the following:
- Free copies of some articles may be obtained through links in PubMed. To locate these articles more easily, try limiting your search to citations with free full text available. Note: When you click on LinkOut icons or links in the LinkOut display, you leave PubMed and are directed to the full text at an external site. Please review all use and copyright information on the full-text provider’s site before using or distributing their material.
- If you are a health professional or are affiliated with a hospital, university, or other institution, you should check your local medical library, or consider registering for Loansome Doc, an NLM-sponsored document delivery service.
- You may also want to check with your local library, or go directly to the publisher.
Finally, if you are unable to obtain certain articles otherwise, my former employer, the American Hospital Association Resource Center (http://aharc.library.net/), has a document delivery service available and they may be able to provide identified articles for a reasonable fee. They are also staffed by experts in health care administration research who may be able to assist with your research needs. If you have made it to this part of the article you should be ready to give PubMed a valiant effort and see what treasure you find. Good luck and happy hunting!
MARKETING & THE LIBRARY: BEST PRACTICES FOR WORKING IN TANDEM
by Shannon Sankstone, Quarles & Brady LLP, Chicago, IL & Charlotte Graesser Henderson, Quarles & Brady LLP, Phoenix, AZThe market for legal services has been changing for quite some time. Outside counsel consolidation, an eye toward cost savings, and increasing competition for decreasing work has led law firms to require a greater degree of sophistication in their business development efforts as well as in their service to existing clients. These, along with other trends, have fueled opportunities for collaboration between the Marketing and Library Departments. Having best practices in place to understand the critical differences will facilitate a smooth workflow and a successful partnership.
Collaboration: Understand Marketing Team Pressures
Walking a mile in the shoes of the marketing department for a day could result in eye-opening shin splints. Rush requests, demanding expectations, incredibly broad questions, and no-context search expectations with minimal detail are all too often the only experience the Library Department has with the Marketing Department. Could there be more?
You bet there is. If the librarians are feeling pressured by marketers, it is because marketers are under a great deal of pressure and scrutiny from the partners. When the attorneys request work from the Marketing Department - be it research, a response to an RFP, a customized brochure - it is often at the last minute, and with little in the way of description. The attorney will simply say, "I'm meeting with the GC of XYZ Company," and the marketer is left to decipher what, exactly, the attorney requires. Their process, too, is often constrained by individual personalities. Some partners welcome the marketing equivalent of a reference interview, while others - and often the ones that request the most from the Marketing Department - see any follow-up questions as a nuisance, or worse, as a sign of incompetence. Further, confidentiality is often an issue, which can compromise including additional individuals in meetings, even when doing so would help define a librarian's research.
Where do you begin? One easy way to remember is to put a SOC in it! I just don’t recommend you say that out loud. Knowing about the communication challenges faced by our colleagues, the onus is on the researcher to develop techniques that maximize opportunities for successful collaboration while simultaneously mitigating risks to working together seamlessly. If there are typical research requests, creating an intake form with samples of work products, open-ended questions, and customizable templates [SOC] will make sure everyone is on the same page before a request comes to either Marketing or the Library. Expectations of time and resource costs, as well as deliverables, should be stated at the initial stages of the research, rather than when the research findings are presented and the Westlaw/LexisNexis bill comes in the mail.
It is helpful to view Marketing-Library collaboration as a relationship that needs to be cultivated. After a large project, debriefing meetings can uncover best practices and areas in which the process can be improved, thus making future projects that much easier. Voice mails and check-in emails are always appreciated. Attorneys request updates at unexpected times, and keeping the marketer apprised of progress empowers them to respond swiftly and intelligently. Lastly, a one-on-one conversation over lunch or a cup of coffee or tea can personalize the relationship, and help each department understand the other better.
Workflow: Anatomy of a Research Request
Marketing research differs from legal research. Research requests usually come to the librarian from an attorney and the librarian works directly with that attorney to determine the best authority and research path to get the needed information. The deliverable is usually one or multiple documents obtained from a print or online source, delivered in print format which would mimic the book-look, electronic format which can be text-text-text, Internet screen prints, nuff-said, or combinations of all of the above.
Even when librarian research does follow a direct linear path, marketing research workflow does not follow the routine library process. Marketing may also need to rely on a third-party reference interview strategy that needs to be recognized and respected. Requests are triggered by an event - such as an RFP, client meeting or a potential new lateral hire - and may or may not come from an attorney. Even if the request originated from an attorney with an office ten feet from the library, the marketing staff may instruct researchers to send all questions and concerns to marketing, rather than asking the attorney directly. The library researcher should always ask the marketing department if it’s permissible to email results directly to the attorney and cc: marketing or not. The third-party strategy is another crucial checkbox that should be included on the research intake form. This will enable marketing staff to anticipate areas that need clarification, while at the same time providing researchers with additional and necessary details.
Deliverables, too, differ from legal research. Presentation is everything and requires extra effort from researchers. The Marketing Department expects research to be collated into one document. This oftentimes requires pulling information from multiple sources. A single source may be insufficient to satisfy their needs. For example, they may want articles summarized and main points highlighted. They also may require a report with important elements bullet-pointed and recent color photos of maps, buildings, or individuals included. Creating customized templates for the typical "going to a meeting" packets that include format options can solve this dilemma.
Efficiency: The Real Definition
Legal research generally requires locating an exact law, treatise, article, etc. that will either bring up new questions or complete the research request. In marketing research, this is not the case.
For example, a profile pulled from Martindale Hubble may provide a biography of an attorney, but, in most cases, it will not satisfy the information needs of the Marketing Department. In requesting a bio, the marketer is actually requesting a custom report on an individual, including narrative on the person's personal and professional life and one or more photos. The researcher may have to use several sources and search strategies, and the research process becomes a cycle:
This diagram mirrors the legal research cycle save for one aspect. In legal research, the attorney will provide clarification of priorities and give feedback when the librarian identifies possible additional research questions, while the Marketing staff may or may not provide any priorities. In many respects, the Marketing staff is expecting the researcher to know intuitively what is important - sometimes without so much as a reference interview - and to make judgments accordingly. In a worst case scenario, contacting Marketing staff for input could create a bottleneck of back-and-forth emails and voice mails between the researcher, marketer, and attorney, stalling the research and compromising a deadline. What’s a researcher to do? These challenges are actually an opportunity for the librarian to take initiative and shine.
By this time you may be ready to create your own customized intake form and report templates and may be wondering where to begin. Samples of work products are all over the Web. Microsoft offers free downloadable templates, and you may also check blogs and consulting firms' sites. To get some ideas of what fields to include on your forms, look at existing products from other professionals. For example, a researcher needing bios might consult firm bios, competitor firms' bios, as well as corporate executive bios (available on company websites for free) to note the information that is typically presented. Further, the librarian can gain much-needed context by searching firm-internal client databases. Knowing the practice groups and partners serving the client and the types of matters handled can go a long way in informing the decision-making process for any research request. Taking these steps before contacting Marketing for more guidance will not only impress them and the attorneys, it will speed up the research process and eliminate the wait for a response.
Moolah: The Budget Reality Check
Doing more with less seems to be a catch-phrase during this, the Great Recession. However, marketing and business development professionals have been doing everything with almost nothing since legal marketing began in the 1980s. Librarians need to understand that marketing and business development costs are often paid from disparate budgets. One client development initiative may require funding from three practice groups budgets, two office budgets, and seven individual partner client development accounts. Absent from this list is the Marketing / Business Development budget. That is because most are simply so small that one event would absorb most, or all, of the budget.
Keeping costs low and communicating effective budgeting are key to the Marketing Department's internal PR. Expenditures are closely examined just as they are in the library department. However, while libraries are tracking budget costs and returns on investment in one fiscal year, marketing departments may not realize a return for two or three fiscal years down the road. Librarians who assume a proactive approach in advance through active dialogs with marketing to understand sensitive research budgets can offer cost-effective solutions before any research is started. For ongoing research tasks, such as monitoring and alerting, care should be taken to utilize cost-effective sources limited, where possible, to only existing all-you-can-eat contracts.
Marketing departments need information professionals to provide accurate and timely information and intelligence to enhance firms' competitive advantage. This new partnership is critical to the success of both departments as well as the firm. Having best practices or strategies in place to facilitate a smooth workflow and successful collaboration is an important step in providing a higher level of customer service to the firm. Collaboration is more nuanced than simply working together; it is also working in tandem and being aware of unique and evolving hybrid service requirements in the law firm setting.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
compiled by Donna M. Fisher, Senniger Powers LLP, St. Louis, MOHere is a sample of some of PLL members' favorite digital collections. Enjoy!
Collection
URL
Comments
Submitted By
Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford
These digital collections are fabulous. I love the variety. I use them for "leisure reading", for those 5 minute breaks in a hectic day when I need to change gears... for amazement!
Patricia L. Orr, Dykema
Flickr
Everyone may know Flickr by now, but it's my favorite collection of digital photography because it's something I can contribute to... and because I can spend hours browsing other peoples' photos of Paris , France , Europe , etc.! It brings back memories of places I have been, or I can explore new places I hope to go... Here is the link to Flickr, and to one of the Paris photo groups.
Whitney A. Beal, Ward and Smith, P.A.
HeinOnline
I'm sure you'll get this same response from many other librarians, but HeinOnline has saved us beaucoup bucks, and lots of shelf-space, thanks to its phenomenal law review collection. They also have some great old treatises in their "legal classics" library that have saved us many a trip to the local county law library or law school.
Carmen Valero, Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps, LLP
Indiana Attorney General Opinions Archive 1941-1976
My library has been responsible for creating this. I like it because it provides access to electronic versions of our states older AG opinions that are not available electronically anywhere else.
Cheryl L. Niemeier, Bose McKinney & Evans LLP
Legacy Tobacco Documents Library ( University of California , San Francisco )
I use this in some unusual ways. Recently it was unpublished cases cited by opposing counsel regarding contingent fees. The cases were related to the states' tobacco litigation from the early '80's. Some were actually there in full-text!
Janet Moore, Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP
Library of Congress
All of these collections are wonderful but my favorite is the Performing Arts collections.
Donna M. Fisher, Senniger Powers LLP
Los Angeles Public Library Image Collection
I like the LAPL image collection, because I grew up in the area and like to look at the photos of places I remember.
Jaye A. H. Lapachet, Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP
RefDesk.com
It's like having an entire reference collection at your finger tips. I use it to find links to such things as: dictionaries, currency converters, phone numbers and a lot of other things without having to bookmark a lot of sites.
Ruth G. Balkin, Balkin Information Services
[ BOOK REVIEWS ]
YOUR CALL IS (NOT THAT) IMPORTANT TO US
Emily Yellin, Free Press, 2009, ISBN 9781416546894
reviewed by Sarah Mauldin, Chamberlain, Hrdlicka, White, Williams & Martin, Atlanta, GAEveryone has a telephone customer service horror story. You may have been stuck on hold for what seemed like hours, been trapped in an impossible phone maze, or spoken to a representative who couldn't or wouldn't help you. In her new book Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us, author Emily Yellin explores the history and current state of telephone customer service in the U.S. and around the world.
Yellin begins the book with horror stories of customer service at Comcast and AT&T. This leads to a discussion of measures of customer service satisfaction, including the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index and the Customer Rage Study. These measures tell us that Americans are increasingly frustrated with customer service, especially that of businesses like cable companies, that offer no real customer choice because they have a virtual monopoly in many markets. Since the Customer Rage Study debuted in 2003, the percentage of those surveyed who felt some level of rage over a customer complaint has not dipped below 70 percent.
The author goes on to give a brief history of telephone service and the rise of "complaint departments," the first stab at providing telephone customer service. From these early days Yellin continues to the advent of interactive voice response (IVR) systems. IVR began as a system that provided recorded messages and sought a keypad response ("press 1 for English"). More advanced systems, like Amtrak Julie, can both speak and listen. While these systems have improved service in some areas, they have also increased frustration for some, leading to new sites like GetHuman.com that provide instructions for circumventing IVR and being connected to a customer service representative.
Two chapters consider the work of those who toil in call centers, or, in the new parlance, contact centers. Yellin profiles agents at JetBlue and also discusses working conditions for those across the industry. Yellin then considers agents who work in centers outside the United States, taking calls from consumers around the world. The author even travels to Argentina to meet a customer service supervisor for Office Depot who helped her, and discusses how difficult it was to be connected to the same person in the same country twice.
After discussing how contact centers work, Yellin goes on to discuss why and how customer service goes wrong. She concludes that the problems are many, but that they boil down to a view of customer service as a cost center to be dealt with only when things go wrong, instead of as a profit center that can help to create brand loyalty and provide a view of how customers really interact with a company and use products and services. She opines that it is vital that successful companies take a holistic approach, integrating customer service knowledge into all levels of the company. She also notes that most breakdowns in customer service are due to either a lack of information about the customer or a lack of authority on the part of the agent to solve the problem.
Yellin closes the book with a chapter that describes customer service successes. These companies include FedEx, Zappos.com, and Credit Suisse. Each company has a unique way of creating a culture of excellent customer service.
While few, if any of us, as librarians will ever work in a contact center environment, the lessons about what makes for good and bad customer experiences can be highly instructive for us as we provide service for those in our firms. Remembering that every interaction that our customers have with us can be considered marketing can help us to provide better service, giving people what they need right now and being able to see patterns that lead to better service overall. This peek into the world of those on the other end of the phone may also make us more understanding and kind when we speak to those who work to solve our problems.
WHAT THE DOG SAW AND OTHER ADVENTURES
Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown, 2009, ISBN 9780316076075848
reviewed by Janice A. Collins, Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, Chicago, ILWhat the Dog Saw and Other Adventures is a collection of favorite articles published by Gladwell in the New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996. In the preface he states, “In the best of these pieces, what we think isn’t the issue. Instead, I’m more interested in describing what people who think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals think about homelessness or ketchup or financial scandals…if we look at the problem through someone else’s eyes, from inside someone else’s head?”
The book is divided into three parts. Part One is called "Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius." In this section, the articles focus on people whom he describes as “Minor Geniuses,” not the Einsteins of the world, whose work alters our perception of the universe, but people who have found small niches in which to be brilliant. One such genius profiled is Cesar Millan, popularly known as "The Dog Whisperer." The title of the book is taken from this article. The article focuses on Milan’s body movements and presence when interacting with both dogs and humans. Karen Bradley, who heads the graduate dance programs at the University of Maryland, says of Millan's movements: “He’s beautifully organized intraphysically. When we meet someone like this what do we do? We give them their own TV series. Seriously. We are drawn to them…” The article also focuses on how dogs interpret the body language of humans “because a dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward - even a quarter of an inch - means nonthreatening.”
Part Two, "Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses," is devoted to organizing experience. “How should we think about homelessness, or financial scandals, or a disaster like the crash of the Challenger?” In this section there is an article titled “Open Secrets,” about Enron and the journalists who made the public aware of the financial problems within the company. The article discusses a struggle faced by research librarians who perform competitive intelligence: the battle between wanting or needing more information versus analysis of the information you already possess. In the case of Enron, the information was available for the world to see; however, the user had to know how to interpret what they were seeing. Gregory Treverton, a national security expert whom the author interviewed for this article, describes this as a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. With puzzles, the solver is looking to increase the amount of information received. To solve a mystery, the solver wants to improve the analysis of the information. As the author so aptly puts it, “Puzzles require the application of energy and persistence; mysteries demand experience and insight.”
In Part Three, "Personality, Character, and Intelligence," the author wonders about the predictions we make about people. How do we know whether someone is bad or smart, or capable of doing something really well? The articles included in this section show he is skeptical about how accurately any of those judgments can be made. A case in point is the article “Late Bloomer.” Gladwell tries to determine if creativity is a gift of youth or a gift of experience. He compares the ages when several artists hit their peak creatively, and how it was expressed, either conceptually or experimentally.
This book can best be summed by a sentence from the preface: “Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands.” I enjoyed this collection immensely. Gladwell's writing style draws the reader into the world of his subject. As any fan of the Dog Whisperer will tell you, Gladwell accurately captures the presence that makes him so captivating to watch. The Enron article reminds us that analysis is a crucial skill very much needed to understand the information explosion we deal with every day.
BAD MONEY: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
Kevin Phillips, Viking, 2008, ISBN 9780670019076
reviewed by Sarah Dowson, D'Amato and Lynch, New York, NYBad Money warns that an explosion of debt, frequent bail-outs of financial institutions so that risk-takers aren’t allowed to fail, and opacity of U.S. financial products could have unpleasant consequences for the United States. Moreover, it ventures, entrenched interests in contemporary Washington may render us incapable of the kind of problem-solving we need to turn America onto a more sustainable economic and political path – for ourselves, and in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Phillips is a political historian and commentator. In 1968, he was a strategic advisor to President Richard Nixon. In 1969, his first book, The Emerging Republican Majority, accurately predicted the rise of a Republican majority. Since then, his criticisms of the Republican party have won accolades from liberals. In Bad Money, as in other books of his that I have read, he introduced me to ideas that were new to me — not reported in the media I consume. He backs these ideas up with facts, figures, and sources.
For example, in his chapter, “Finance”, he explains his concept of “financial mercantilism” (p. 55) whereby Washington and the financial industry work together to minimize untoward market forces. He discusses the “plunge protection team,” a nickname for the Federal Reserve’s efforts to stabilize markets by buying or selling products in the financial markets (p. 58). In his chapter, “Bullnomics”, Phillips says the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics changed the way it measured inflation in 1997 – 1999, essentially debasing the consumer price index so that inflation measures less (p. 84).
Phillips discusses oil and the dollar. President Nixon ended sales of gold to foreign banks in 1971. In 1974, OPEC oil producing nations got price increases for their oil, but Saudi Arabia agreed to price its oil in dollars so that buyers would need to use dollars. In this century, the global oil business is controlled by Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other state-run firms which show signs of moving away from the dollar’s dominance (p. 122). If oil production has peaked, as some say, serious challenges exist for the United States (p. 153).
He chronicles the rise and fall of the imperial countries of Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain speculating that the United States could be following their patterns of manufacturing and world dominance, followed by financialization of their economies, then moribund political will due to entrenched special interests, and finally, decline. The U.S., he points out, may be spared some of the discomforts of the three countries in the 30-to-50 year period of their declines because the U.S. has a larger resource and population base than they did. And, he says, all three of these countries are more prosperous now than they were at their imperial heights. Finally, he recommends that the U.S. abandon military and financial imperialism.
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