August 08, 2008
Persuasion
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7540649.stm
By Alan Connor
BBC News Magazine
Your boss may be about to return from holiday, possibly fired up with some fresh and funky thinking picked up through their summer reading. If that's the case, here's some help on staying one step ahead.
David Cameron has set a reading list of 38 non-fiction books for Conservative MPs to work through on their sun-loungers.
And he's not the only boss who'll be dropping new buzzwords and outside-box thinking. Recent years have seen a spate of books marketed at managers, often from the worlds of "behavioural economics" and pop psychology, and yours may be the latest to enthuse about nudges, tipping points, wikinomics, or - for those behind the curve - long tails.
Oh wow
These books are easy to spot: they have a simple metaphor, usually expressed in a single word that makes for a large-type, grabby cover. They relate a string of Bill Bryson-style anecdotes or quirky experiments to elicit "oh wow" moments from the reader and to suggest that everything you believe is laughably wrong. Words like "secret" and "undercover" are likely to appear in the secondary title.
And they tend to insinuate that their central simple metaphor explains everything you've ever wondered about, from why people pick their nose to how wars start.
Economics getting tough
There's actually nothing new in explaining how people decide or why people believe - it's called sociology. But if your boss wouldn't want to be caught with a sociology book in their luggage, there is now a range of delicious bite-sized chunks in books with titles like The Undercover Economist, The Rogue Economist and The Hidden Side Of Everything. Economics - once academia's dry "dismal science" - has decided to get tough.
If your choice of reading is something lighter - or perhaps something heavier - fear not. Here's the Magazine's cut-out-and-keep guide to the snappy phrases and golly-gosh anecdotes of some of the most popular books, so you can nod along as the envelope gets pushed.
NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, & HAPPINESS
Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein
THE BUZZWORDS: You'll know your boss has read this if he or she starts talking about:
• Econs (people that are perfectly rational but sadly imaginary)
• Homers (real people who err, but in predictable ways - after Mr Simpson)
• Choice Architecture (designing objects and situations, preferably to anticipate and discourage those predictable errors)
• and, of course, the Nudge (a reminder that you might be about to do something you might regret)
THE ANECDOTES: Among a grab-bag of optical illusions and riddles, Nudge is rich in anecdotes - the favourite of most readers involves fake creepy-crawlies to improve hygiene in Dutch pissoirs, as described by Mark Easton [see links in box, right], the moral of which is that small things can make a big difference.
The book also tells of Chicago movie-goers who are given free tubs of stale popcorn. No-one enjoys it, but those with the king-sized buckets eat more than those with medium-sized buckets. (Moral: we're not good at exercising self-control.)
And shadow chancellor George Osborne is enamoured of the Minnesotan tax collectors who gave up on fines and leaflets reminding people to file their returns and instead publicised a statistic at a crucial moment: they told Minnesotans that most of their fellow tax-payers had already completed the forms. "The result?" enthuses Osborne, "the number of people submitting tax forms shot up almost overnight." (States can use the actions of one group of people to influence another.)
THE SURPRISING IDEA: Thaler and Sunstein claim to have the power to unite two warring camps: those who favour legislation and regulation to improve the lot of mankind, and those who have no truck with the nanny state, political correctness, or health and safety gone mad.
Others have claimed to square that circle before, of course - the book's final chapter is called The Real Third Way in a tip of the hat to New Labour-style thinking - but the authors maintain that Nudges, being low-cost and leaving people free to take the "wrong" decision if they wish, are the best of both worlds.
What is genuinely new is the sight of mainstream politicians taking an interest in what academics would call "explanatory mechanisms in the social sciences" - though they may find that they have to read a lot more books than Nudge before they have enough building blocks for a robust policy or two.
THE BLOGGER'S VERDICT: Will Davies at Potlatch is worried that politicians think there's something new in the idea of influencing people without constraining their choices: "[I]f this is news to government wonks, this suggests that government thinking lags behind business thinking by approximately forty years."
Davies also wonders whether anyone believes that the Econs ever existed in the first place, asking "when economists go and buy household cleaning products in the supermarket, do they think they select Mr Muscle on the basis of calculation?"
BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING
Malcolm Gladwell
THE BUZZWORDS: You'll know your boss has read this if he or she starts talking about:
• Thin Slicing (seeing patterns in situations and behaviour based on very narrow "slices of experience")
• The Locked Door (blocking off the mind from too much deliberation)
• Warren Harding Errors (or, judging a book by its cover - after the "presidential looking" Harding, now usually rated the worst inhabitant of the White House)
THE ANECDOTES: The epitome of Blink thinking is tennis coach Vic Braden's hunches about when a player is about to serve a double fault. Braden realised that he was always able to tell when a double fault was imminent, regardless of how well he knew the player and of the player's level of skill. "It literally scared me," said Braden. (Moral: we don't always know why we know what we know.)
We also hear about a "tasting booth" offering samples of jam to Californians, sometimes stocked with six varieties and other times with 24. 30% of customers who had six jams to choose from bought some; only 3% of those faced with 24 jams made a purchase. (When we are forced to go beyond snap judgments, we get paralysed.)
And we see snap judgments in action with an experiment which sent similar-looking, conservatively dressed customers to Chicago car dealers to enquire about their cheapest vehicles. In the experiment, the price offered by the salesmen varied noticeably by the race and gender of the customer, with black women offered $1195 over the odds, and white men $752. (Our snap judgments may cause us to lose customers.)
THE SURPRISING IDEA: Gladwell argues that we do not know why we make decisions, but that instinct can lead to the "right" decision better than thinking things through. His book is still selling well three years after publication, presumably as a result of many impulse buys.
A book called Snap Decisions: Sometimes They Work And Sometimes They Don't would presumably fly off fewer shelves, but it could equally describe the contents of Blink. Gladwell acknowledges that we need to be aware of contexts which can lead to snappy decisions being wrong, as in the case of auditions for classical musicians - if you can't see who's playing, you won't be swayed by whether they "look right".
How to tell the difference between good and bad hunches is another question - and possibly another book.
THE BLOGGER'S VERDICT: Gladwell has plenty of fans, grateful for some thoughts about the subconscious mind. At the forefront of his equally vociferous detractors is Steve Sailer at Vdare, who pithily and dismissively summarises the book as follows:
"Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right. And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect."
YES! 50 SECRETS FROM THE SCIENCE OF PERSUASION
Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin & Robert Cialdini
THE BUZZWORDS: You'll know your boss has read this if he or she starts talking about:
• Captainitis (leaders failing to recognise how servile their charges are likely to be)
• Franklin's Strategy (you are more likely to persuade someone that has helped you than someone you have helped, after Benjamin Franklin)
• The Magnetic Middle (when people are aware of the average behaviour of others, they gravitate towards it themselves)
THE ANECDOTES: As the title suggests, there are 50 opportunities for anecdotes in Yes!, and they come in thick and terse and fast. Many are based on experiments, for example: people in a photocopier queue are more likely to allow someone to queue-jump if they use the word "because" when asking to, regardless of the content of the reason given. (Moral: give reasons for requests, rather than assuming the other party already knows your reason.)
Wholesale beef buyers spend twice as much if they believe there is a beef shortage, and seven times as much if they're told that that this shortage is not generally known about. (To be persuasive, give inside information and indicate when it is scarce.)
Surveys were sent out - some with Post-It notes asking for completion; some with a handwritten note and some with no covering note. 75% of sticky note recipients duly filled in the survey, compared with 48% of the second group and 36% of the no-noters. Adding a sign-off of "Thank you!" and the sender's initials increased response rate. (Personalising a request makes it more persuasive.)
THE SURPRISING IDEA: In the preface, the authors write: "Persuasion is a science. It has often been referred to as an art, but this is an error."
Yes! is a prime example of a book which compiles experiments and exercises from psychology journals and presents them to the potential buyer as foolproof "secrets" that will give them the edge over colleagues and rivals - or, as in the subtitle in the American edition, "50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive".
THE BLOGGER'S VERDICT: Olivia Mitchell at Speaking About Presenting enjoys the sections which contradict the idea that you should "focus on the positive", preferring the idea of "loss aversion" as a persuasive tool, and takes from the book other tips for those forced to do presentations at work, such as the suggestion that asking people to give their name makes it more likely that they will be civil to you - a lesson still being learned by newspaper messageboards the world over.
FL!P: HOW TO SUCCEED BY TURNING EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ON ITS HEAD
Peter Sheahan
THE BUZZWORDS: You'll know your boss has read this if he or she starts talking about:
• Flipstars (people or companies that seek success through "freedom from convention")
• Innovations Clubs (readers of Flip who swap tips on flips)
• The Aspirational Inside (the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves - why you might prefer a Gucci bag to a convincing fake)
THE ANECDOTES: Sheahan is bigger on the friend-of-a-friend approach than on apparently clinical studies, such as his pal who vowed never to buy a BMW "because everyone has a BMW", then did buy one - but only after going through the motions of test driving a range of cars. (Moral: we create our own reasons for changing our minds.)
We also hear about Sherman Poppen, who strapped two skis together to make a toy for his daughter, and Jake Burton, who persuaded ski resorts to allow a version of this on to their slopes, anticipating the multi-billion-dollar snowboarding industry. (Persuade people that your crazy idea is not so crazy.)
And from history, we briefly meet John Harrison, the working class joiner who created a longitude clock that located a ship's position at sea with extraordinary accuracy but who had to fight to receive the £20,000 prize offered by the King for such a device. (Go outside your company when looking for innovation.)
THE SURPRISING IDEA: All of Fl!p [sic] is one relentless surprising idea, essentially that everything you ever thought you knew is 100% wrong, and more specifically that mass market success can be found by innovating in the fringes, expressed in a string of aphorisms like "to get control, give it up", "feelings are more important than facts" and, inevitably, "style is substance".
THE BLOGGER'S VERDICT: Rusty Weston at My Global Career asks about the Australian twentysomething Sheahan "When was the last time you learned something useful from someone a couple of decades younger than you?".
He finds "a lot of useful advice", but notes that the "over-the-top title is typical of non-fiction books these days. Unlike Sheahan, I'm not trying to exceed my wildest imaginings - I'm angling for meeting my goals."
Posted by chek at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2007
Top 150
http://www.biblio.com/details.php?dcx=111304861&aid=frg
FILM: THE CRITICS' CHOICE: 150 MASTERPIECES OF WORLD CINEMA SELECTED AND DEFINED BY THE EXPERTS - Geoff (ed.), Foreward by Bernardo Bertolucci Andrew
This survey of 20th-century cinematic highlights divides films into categories such as "America: The Studio Years" and "British Cinema." A range of critics have penned brief, contextualizing essays for each listed film, and illustrations accompany them.
Posted by chek at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2006
Shaahnaameh, New Translation
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5309016
New English Translation of 'Persian Book of Kings'
The epic was written over the course of 35 years, begun in the 10th century and finished in the 11th century by the poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi when the Persian Empire was a memory and Arabs dominated what is now the nation of Iran.
The story told in the Shahnameh begins with the origins of the world, recounts myths and legends of ancient times, then traces centuries of royal lineage, ending with the Arab invasion of Persia.
Translator Dick Davis is currently professor of Persian at Ohio State University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He takes an unorthodox approach to the epic, transforming Ferdowsi's verse into a combination of poetry and prose.
The Shahnameh's 60,000 couplets of Farsi roughly translate to 100,000 lines of English verse. It evolved from earlier oral epics and a Persian history commissioned by the royal family.
Davis says his translation is an effort to more closely mimic the cadence and feel of how storytellers have recited the Shahnameh for 1,000 years.
Posted by chek at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2006
O'Reilly Books Online
http://safari.oreilly.com/
Premier Electronic Reference Library
for programmers and IT professionals
Safari is a subscription based virtual library. Users can search across thousands of books from O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press and other leading publishers. Read full books from cover to cover, or flip directly to the section you need. Download chapters for printing and convenient offline viewing.
Samples:
Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition
Posted by chek at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2006
Babak & Friends
http://www.babakandfriends.com/babak/
Iranian children's products, entertaining and educational for multicultural kids who speak Farsi, Persian and English
Books, DVDs, and more ...
Daram Miram Beh Tehran, Music Video by Andy
Shabnam Rezaei's Live Interview on ABC
Posted by chek at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2005
eBook Stores
http://www.adobe.com/epaper/ebooks/ebookmall/main.html
Digital editions are electronic versions of books, magazines, newspapers, and other documents that can be viewed on a computer screen or PDA. Publishers, libraries, and retailers can now produce, manage, and distribute eBooks to anyone on a computer running Microsoft® Windows® or Mac OS X.
If you're looking for the latest eBooks and digital editions, check the retailers listed below who carry thousands of the best-selling entertainment and reference titles and the latest electronic documents and digital magazines in PDF.
Posted by chek at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2005
شازده کوچولو
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156012197/chekonim-20/?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2
اثر آنتوان دو سنتگزوپهری
برگردان احمد شاملو
The Little Prince
Text, Images and Sound in Farsi
Posted by chek at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2005
British Library - online gallery
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html
British Library
Turning the Pages
View
Sketches by Leonardo,
Jane Austen's Early Work,
The Original Alice,
Masterpiece of the Renaissance,
Glorious Hebrew Prayer Book,
First Atlas of Europe,
The Oldest Printed BOOK,
Baybars' Magnificent Qur'an,
and many more books and turn their pages using the "Turning the Pages" technology right on your computer screen.
Posted by chek at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)
The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312063865/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by chek at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/025333411X/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by chek at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0721654452/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by chek at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
Sex, Time, and Power
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142004677/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Sex, Time, and Power
How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
The Book
Book on Tape
Posted by chek at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2005
My California
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1883318432/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)
Funny in Farsi
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812968379/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)
June 01, 2005
Ajdar
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2092110330/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)
Persepolis, Tome 3
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2844141048/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)
Persepolis, Tome 2
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159497036X/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
Persepolis, Tome 1
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2844140580/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)
Embroideries
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375423052/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)
Persepolis 2
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375422889/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)
Persepolis
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037571457X/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by Chekonim at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2005
Golestan Saadi
http://www.payvand.com/news/05/mar/1209.html
13th Century Persian Literary Masterpiece in English: An Interview with Richard Jeffrey Newman
Saadi's "Golestan", one of the best-loved masterpieces of Persian literature has been newly translated into English by Richard Jeffery Newman. The 168-page new translation has been published by Global Scholarly Publications in association with the International Society for Iranian Culture, both of which are based in the United States.
Posted by chek at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
Journey from the Land of No
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400046114/chekonim-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1
Posted by chek at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2005
Rostam - Comicbook
http://www.hyperwerks.com/series/rostam.html
Hyperwerks: Rostam
Posted by chek at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2005
Womanhood-Motherhood
http://www.irannet.com/books/womanhood/
Womanhood-Motherhood (By Roya Monajem)
Posted by Chekonim at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)