Distant Friends Research Articles

Everyday Life in the "Tourist Zone"

This article makes a case for the everyday while on tour and argues that the ability to continue with everyday routines and social relationships, while at the same time moving through and staying in liminal or atypical zones of tourist locales, is a key part of some kinds of tourist experience. Based on ethnographic field research with grey nomads (retirees who take extended tours of Australia in caravans and motorhomes) everyday life while on tour is examined, specifically the overlap and intersection between the out-of-the-ordinary “tourist zone” and the ordinariness of the “everyday zone.”

Exploring Privacy Management on Facebook: Motivations and Perceived Consequences of Voluntary Disclosure

This study examined the perceived motivations and consequences of voluntary disclosure of Facebook active users using a survey administered to college students in a public-speaking course. College-age students who took the survey were motivated to use Facebook because they perceived their relationships improved with friends and family, although using Facebook could become negatively habit forming. The research suggests that users of Facebook use it more for disclosing to distant friends rather than to close friends, which is divergent from most early disclosure research that equates disclosure with intimacy. This research utilizes Communication Privacy Management Theory for the theoretical framework.

Mobile Data Services using Open Protocols and Internet

The aim of this work is to develop such a methodology whose implementation help the companies, institutions etc to easily communicate with another person without any cost. This gives a new dimension to communication. Our system is competent without GPRS or Telecom service providers. Free of cost communication with the help of this system along with some enhanced security features which will provide a hassle free and safe communication. Person often wants to share mobile data like images, videos, etc. to our distant friends. This technology removes the overhead of copying data to PC/Laptop then sends over the internet and reverse process on the other hand. Whether the person is in car, train or anywhere else and he/she has Bluetooth enabled mobile phone and Laptop then the person can transfer any urgent data to any person who also fulfills such requirements. To accomplish our task we have successfully implemented the communication, using messages and voice mails, and media/data file transfer. Our design is based on request-reply architecture. We have also implemented an access control mechanism that allows user to receive services from everyone except for the members of the blacklist. This is necessary as the service involves virtually no cost. To authenticate the sender currently we are using a PIN number because to detect the IMEI number of the cell phone our mobile application must be digitally signed by the mobile vendor.

Good Neighbours or Distant Friends?

Agencification has extended and intensified the delegation problem. It has created new (administrative) principals, who are confronted with even more uncertainty as agents operate at arm's length. Trust is suggested as a new mode of governance. Based on the literature seven hypotheses are deduced on conditions that politicians can use to build trust: autonomy; contacts; policy involvement; and involvement in the design of monitoring devices. These hypotheses are tested using survey data on 219 Dutch executive agencies. Contrary to the expectations, executive agencies with low degrees of autonomy have a more trusting relationship with their parent ministry than agencies with high autonomy. Proximity and frequent interactions appear more important to trust than autonomy. Monitoring is not always perceived as a sign of distrust. These findings raise new questions on how principals can reduce the delegation problem and control executive agencies.

The Sensitivity of Respondent-Driven Sampling

SummaryResearchers in many scientific fields make inferences from individuals to larger groups. For many groups, however, there is no list of members from which to draw a random sample. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a relatively new sampling methodology that circumvents this difficulty by using the social networks of the groups under study. The RDS method has been shown to provide unbiased estimates of population proportions given certain conditions. The method is now widely used in human immunodeficiency virus related studies among high risk populations globally. We test the RDS methodology by simulating RDS studies on the social networks of a large Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Web community. The robustness of the RDS method is tested by violating, one by one, the conditions under which the method provides unbiased estimates. Simulations indicate that the bias is large if networks are directed or respondents choose to invite people on the basis of characteristics that are correlated with the study outcomes. The bias and variance increase if participants invite close as opposed to more distant friends whereas sampling in denser networks sharply reduces variance. However, the RDS method shows strong resistance to sampling without replacement, low response rates and certain errors in the participants’ reporting of their network sizes, as well as the selection criteria of seeds. The effects of network structure and the number of seeds and coupons are also discussed.

Social Media for Healthcare Makes Sense

MY EARLY MEMORIES of hospitals included scary emergency rooms and sharp needles - I was pretty sick as a kid. At 18, I nearly died and spent two weeks in the hospital (over Christmas, New Year's, and my birthday). I vaguely remember the nurses and doctors being kind and compassionate and honestly trying help me and my parents understand what was happening. But I was sick and scared, and the experience was bewildering. When I left the hospital feeling better, I tried hard forget my time there and do whatever it took never go back into a hospital again. Except for the fact that I now work for a hospital, my experience is not unique. Most people don't think about hospitals until they absolutely have to, at which point they are filled with fear - about their health, their future, and their impending hospital experience. Many people don't like hospitals. What does this have do with social media? Before social media became popular, hospitals approached communicating and marketing traditionally: through broadcast, one-way messages. And the patients and community were forced accept the messages being fed them. This approach wasn't natural. Health is personal, something in which each of us is individually invested. We patients were scared of our health statuses, unprepared for hospital experiences, and lost in the confusion of healthcare, grasping at the information healthcare marketers pushed at us. No wonder the approach wasn't working - traditional marketing doesn't fit in healthcare. Social media has leveled the playing field. Now patients can communicate about health at any time. They can share fears about diagnoses with distant friends and families. They can connect with people across the world who struggle with similar health conditions, finding support and companionship. They can question whether the doctor gave the right diagnosis or express displeasure with a recent emergency room visit. Social media is natural for patients. IT'S A TWO-WAY STREET It's dangerous - and inaccurate - view social media as another way broadcast one-way messages the community. Marketers who see social media as a way talk at, not with, their followers are not fully engaging them. Angelle and Rose state that their social media strategy is to participate in any conversation about Methodist and its and rightly concede cannot hope control such conversations. The authors reference the guideline that 30 50 percent of posts address patient health rather than promote the hospital. My philosophy is that the majority of posts on a hospital's social media sites should be patient centered. The last thing patients want when following a hospital on social media is marketing; they are seeking content that applies themselves. At Inova Health System, we strive for 80 90 percent of our posts center on our audience's needs, not our own promotion. Thielst provides an example of an organization whose effective social media strategy embraces two-way communication. Torrance Memorial Medical Center (TMMC) receives increasing feedback on what people want hear about .... Social media humanizes TMMC and lets the organization offer what people want. But what do they want? THEY'RE JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU No matter how well-executed, a hospital's social media presence can't make people care. Consumers use the Web search for health information, but they usually find that information on other sites, such as WebMD, about.com, or Wikipedia. People today use the Internet find answers their medical questions, but few of them expect purchase surgical services or have their cancer tumor diagnosed online. Healthcare is still practiced face-to-face, and a comprehensive marketing strategy should include multiple ways for the community engage with the hospital. Providing clinical content that's already available online should not be the focus of hospitals' social media plans; offering wellness, general health, and communityspecific information is a better approach. …

Distant friends, close strangers? Inferring friendships from behavior

Social network analysis (SNA) researchers often must rely on self-report data for many topics, the limitations of which for some questions are well documented (1, 2). Eagle et al. (1) make an important contribution to this literature by using mobile phone data to infer friendship network structure, as a method overcoming some of these limitations in self-report data. Eagle et al. evaluate their method’s ability to reproduce self-reported local social network patterns (1). Social network data are also commonly used to assess sociometric measures, describing the arrangement of ties along important structural properties of networks, or the potential flow of goods across actors in the network (2). Although not the focus of Eagle et al., figure 5 in their work raises the question of how readily these global network …

Peer Effects and Social Networks in Education

This paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education. We first develop a model that shows that, at the Nash equilibrium, the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her Katz-Bonacich centrality measure. This measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual but puts less weight to her distant friends. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks. We show that, after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors, the individual’s position in a network (as measured by her Katz-Bonacich centrality) is a key determinant of her level of activity. A standard deviation increase in the Katz-Bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7 percent of one standard deviation.

Close neighbours and distant friends—perceptions of cultural distance

In this paper we call for a better understanding of cultural distance and its importance to managers across borders. We report on the structuring and interpretation of cultural distance by managers from Germany, the UK and Poland. In particular we are interested in the German/Polish, and the UK/Polish contrast. We examine how managers living within these contrasts create and interpret frameworks within which they can understand one another, and also explain their failures of understanding. We argue that differences, which are understood, are differences that can be managed. The paper is based on empirical data collected during 63 face-to-face interviews with managers from Germany, the United Kingdom and Poland. The findings are the result of qualitative, interpretive analysis. We argue that cultural distance should be treated as relative and not absolute and that it should be treated on a bilateral basis. This approach contributes to a better understanding of when cultural distance matters, and when it does not, and it should be treated as complementary to the objective measures which have been predominant in cross-cultural management literature.

Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions: Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg (1690-1762) and Jesuit Missionaries in China and Vietnam (review)

Reviewed by: Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions: Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg (1690-1762) and Jesuit Missionaries in China and Vietnam Liam Matthew Brockey Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions: Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg (1690-1762) and Jesuit Missionaries in China and Vietnam. Edited by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia. [Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Series Nova, Volume 2.] (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu. 2006. Pp. 365.) The history of the overseas missions conducted by the Catholic religious orders in the early modern period has been fertile terrain for scholars during the past two decades. New analyses of evangelization efforts in the Americas, Africa, and Asia have enriched a field which had long been the province of chroniclers from the orders involved, or other participants in missionary efforts. As the study of the mission churches has expanded, however, the history of the European networks which supported the enterprises has largely been eclipsed. Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions, a volume that combines an introductory essay with transcriptions of correspondence between Europe and China in German, French, and Latin, is a highly useful contribution toward helping to balance out this burgeoning field of study. In addition to examining the global flow of information in the 1700s, this book gives valuable insights into the little-studied (albeit crucially important) subject of mission finance. Moreover, R. Po-Chia Hsia has skillfully edited and annotated the correspondence between one patroness and a set of Jesuits in Asia for the benefit of other scholars to examine. The documents found in this volume come from the Fugger-Archiv in Dillingen and were primarily written by Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg, Florian Bahr, and Johann Siebert. Hsia's introductory essay places [End Page 188] these three individuals in the context of Catholic Germany in the mid-eighteenth century, showing how the Countess von Fugger-Wellenburg encountered the two Jesuits during the early stage of their voyage to Asia (Bahr eventually arrived in China and Siebert worked in Cochinchina). He examines the patterns of female devotional life of Southern German Catholics and explains why Maria Theresia sustained her correspondence with these distant friends over the course of more than two decades. Hsia also explains the mechanics of global finance in the eighteenth century, showing how it was possible—though never easy—for a patron to offer material support to clients on the other side of the globe. After tracing the history of the relationship between Maria Theresia and her correspondents, especially Bahr, he presents transcriptions of her letters and their responses (with intervals of months or years), as well as related documents such as Annual Letters and other reports from the Asian missions. The figure that emerges most clearly from this volume is Maria Theresia, whose letters reveal a great deal about her character and personal piety. We learn that she was especially moved by reports from China about the plight of abandoned infants at the imperial capital, perhaps as a result of her personal misfortune of losing a child. With the help of Bahr in Beijing and other Jesuit agents in Paris, Maria Theresia sent funds to China to help support of a corps of lay assistants organized by the missionaries who visited the city's gates in search of children to deliver to orphanages (or at least to baptize). Yet the countess also showed concern for the well-being of the missionaries and the dignity of the divine cult and Jesuit enterprise in far-off China. She inquires after boxes of European objects that she sent to Asia and seeks to defend the good name of the Society of Jesus among her peers at the courts of Munich and Paris. Maria Theresia also reveals herself as an avid reader of devotional books, as well as reports of the global missionary efforts printed in works such as the Welt-Bott and the Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses. In sum, Hsia paints a portrait of her that is far more complex and textured than one would have imagined. How many other such scenes of patronage lie hidden in the archives, waiting to be discovered? Liam Matthew Brockey Princeton University Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Peer Effects and Social Networks in Education

This paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education. We first develop a model that shows that, at the Nash equilibrium, the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her Katz-Bonacich centrality measure. This measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual but puts less weight to her distant friends. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks. We show that, after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors, the individual's position in a network (as measured by her Katz-Bonacich centrality) is a key determinant of her level of activity. A standard deviation increase in the Katz-Bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7 percent of one standard deviation.

Zaokeanskie partnery: Amerika i Rossiia v 1830-1850-e gody [Partners across the Ocean: the United States and Russia, 1830s-1850s] (review)

Zaokeanskie partnery: Amerika i Rossiia v 1830-1850-e gody. [Partners across Ocean: United States and Russia, 1830s-1850s]. By I.I. Kurilla. (Volgograd:Volgograd State University Press, 2005. Pp. 487. Illustrations. Cloth.)Since 1970s, studies of early Russian-American relations have multiplied, and pioneering books and articles of two specialists, N.N. Bolkhovitinov and Norman E. Saul, have laid groundwork for more focused monographs. Ivan Kurilla's new book concentrates on middle decades of nineteenth century, a fascinating period of revolution, warfare, and technological change. Drawing on an impressive array of archival materials, Kurilla elaborates many of themes discussed in Saul's Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763-1867 (Lawrence, KS, 1991) and Bolkhovitinov's Russian-American Relations and Sale of Alaska, 1834-1867 (Moscow, 1990; trans. 1996). Kurilla affirms traditional interpretation of Russian-American partnership based on commercial growth, Anglophobia, a lack of potential sources of discord, and mutual public sympathy. The result constitutes a depiction of an era of confidence and fruitful collaboration during which Russia appears as foremost benefactor.Discussions of wide-ranging diplomatic relations constitute book's core, yet Kurilla also deals with America's role in economic and technological modernization of Russia and evolution of national images through prisms of travel accounts and popular press. The first part of book focuses on central mechanisms of Russian-American cooperation: international politics, geopolitical ambition, and technology transfer. The Russian Empire, led by efforts of its minister in Washington, Alexander Bodisko, supported United States against British expansion in North America and enhanced diplomatic position of United States in Pacific. In turn, American entrepreneurs played a major role in modernization of Russian navy, merchant marine, river transportation network, small arms industry, and telegraph system. At a time when Russian transportation was relatively primitive, American specialists provided advice on railway construction and established contracts for thousands of locomotives and wagons. In 1840s George Washington Whistler was such an important railway consultant that his son pondered what Russia would do without his father when they returned home (169). Kurilla acknowledges that the construction of Petersburg-Moscow railway line became one of first large projects in which Russian state relied on American technology and American engineers (174). Meanwhile, Russian journalists' coverage of American entrepreneurial activity helped fuel a growing sentiment in favor of United States among reading public.In Part Two, Kurilla surveys impressions left by Russian and American travelers who visited each other's countries. In general, Americans were impressed with pace of Russia's development, its resources, and power of autocrat, yet there was some variation: American shipping magnate Silas Burrows referred to Tsar Nicholas I as the Napoleon of our day, while Ambassador George Mifflin Dallas thought tsar's willingness to do good would have made him an excellent president (219); Tennessee Governor Neil Brown deplored Russian climate, but Ambassador Charles Stewart Todd claimed Russian winter was good for his health (251). Most Russian visitors came to America on official business, keen to observe industrial, maritime, and technological practices, but a few emigrants also recorded their thoughts about democratic organization of country. …

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Jean-Michel Rabaté Imagine that you want to write something original and powerful about well-known modernist authors, each of them guarded by more glosses, guides, and Google entries than one can hope to survey in a lifetime. This modernist issue gives you a modest tip, a simple method, which I will abbreviate for easier mnemonic manipulation as the three C's: Complicate, Couple, Contextualize. This is what has been done, with various inflections and tactics, of course, by the authors of this fine group of essays dealing with canonical modernist writers (the usual suspects are almost all there: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Samuel Beckett; Laura Riding and Joseph Cornell have been thrown in to test the conceptual limits of what we tend to call "late modernism"). These essays attempt to complicate our usual notions regarding the "canon" by reading these formidable authors in hitherto unexplored contexts that either bring new information to bear on the texts (as is the case of Pound's "Seafarer" presented in the framework of The New Age, a context that gives a new political dimension to the famous creative translation from the Anglo-Saxon) or add a dialogical dimension that had not been worked through previously (such as when Cornell is seen dialoguing with Moore, or Stein discussing with Riding the poetic use of private correspondence). With the emergence of these new contexts, "couples" tend to be constituted: they can be real-life acquaintances like Pound and Orage or Eliot and his Swiss doctor Vittoz. These "couples" could also include one-time lovers like Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, deeply frustrated or would-be lovers like Yeats and Maud Gonne, or more distant friends and collaborators like Moore and Cornell, Stein and Riding. These couples encompass the dynamic function of interiorized models, such as philosophers—Bertrand Russell or her own father—for Woolf as she debates whether to accept or reject philosophy, or the critical and literary models provided by a strong predecessor, which Eliot found in Chapman's works. My list seems to imply that only Beckett was left to stand alone—but this is not true, as we see him in front of his mirror, carefully preparing the image of isolation, alienation, and exclusion that served him [End Page v] so well in the launching of his career, according to Stephen John Dilks's not so pious revisionist interpretation. Thus we move from biography to literary and cultural history, a modernist historiography that pays attention to the crucial role played by little magazines, as Lee Garver does innovatively in "Seafarer Socialism: Pound, The New Age, and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism." Yet these essays never bracket off the constitutive function of hermeneutics, as we can see best in Janet Neigh's engaged essay, which takes a feminist and post-colonial problematic as a point of departure. A central cluster focuses on T. S. Eliot, with Steven Matthews, "T. S. Eliot and Chapman: 'Metaphysical' Poetry and Beyond," Amanda Jeramin Harris, "T. S. Eliot's Mental Hygiene," and Jewel Spears Brooker's review essay "Sleuthing Around in The Waste Land," in which she reviews two important books by Lawrence Rainey. Then Woolf is submitted to new couplings and contextualizations by Victoria L. Smith in "Ransacking the Language: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf's Orlando" and Michael Lackey in "Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism and Virginia Woolf's Critique of Philosophy." Issues of space — the literary space opened by letters, or contained in boxes and in poems defined by strict syllabic counts — produce an interesting contrast between the practices of Stein and Riding on the one hand (as we discover in Logan Esdale's "Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters") and Moore and Cornell on the other (as Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta shows in "Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure"). Finally, Yeats's and Beckett's various strategies of self-dramatization and auto-mythification are scrutinized without complacency by Janet Neigh in "Reading from the Drop: Poetics of Identification and Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan'" and by Stephen John Dilks, in "Portraits...

‘untranscended / life itself’: The Poetry of Pam Brown

There are many ways to peel an onion: sharp knife and tears; under water like your mother taught you; surreptitiously, creeping in, layer by layer; or with sunglasses on. And cunning poet Pam Brown knows them all. There they are, those devastatingly onion-like little poems, with furled skins and layers, offering up biting streetscapes and cafes, half-remembered far-away places, distant friends, 'rock & roll', and lost, ordinary cities; that deceptive, seemingly autobiographical voice cruising between wit, boredom, disillusion, nostalgia, paranoia, irony. Always irony. Always the slippery poetics of knowledges warping, even as the poet obsessively scans the texts for narrative: a seeking of 'untranscended / life itself ('Patti Smith Was Right'; Cordite 9).

Gender Differences in Social Adaptation to a Retirement Community: Longitudinal Changes and the Role of Mediated Communication

Many American elders migrate to age-restricted planned communities in the Sun Belt. Women and men may react differently to these migrations. For women in particular, the use of mediated communication may preserve supportive relationships with distant persons. Men may be advantaged by relocation to planned communities with highly structured social environments. Results are reported from a 4-year longitudinal study of 255 migrants. During the study period, men reported gains in persons providing emotional support, practical assistance, advice, and help with illness. Women reported losses or no change. Consistent with previous work on long-distance relationships, women reported more e-mail contact with their children. For both sexes, the use of e-mail was positively correlated with perceived social support after 4 years of residency. For women, contact with distant friends was particularly associated with levels of emotional support. The role of mediated communication in compensating for negative relocation effects is discussed.

Keeping Connected: Travelling with the Telephone

This paper examines the uses of mobile and fixed telephone communications by travellers and the implications of that use for their experiences of travel. Based on interviews conducted with people travelling in New Zealand, we argue that travellers give specific attention to the accessibility of phone services while planning their travel. Once travellers' journeys and communication with distant friends and families had commenced, travellers made clear distinctions between the relative uses, benefits and drawbacks of using oral phone communications and 'texting' (short message service). Both forms of communication had similar impacts on travellers' sense of an ongoing integration into relationships from which they were temporarily physically distant. However, the two modes of communication differed with respect to what they were seen to offer. That is, oral phone communication was characterised by its 'emotionality', while texting in particular was seen to offer distinctive opportunities for spontaneous contact.

Concord and conflict: the United States and Russia, 1867-1914

In 1867 Mark Twain cruised into Black Sea on first American tourist ship to visit in Russia. Just a few years later Russian Grand Duke Alexis in turn was hunting buffalo and drinking champagne on Nebraska prairie. Both were taking advantage of a growing, if precarious, alliance between two of worlds most influential nations. In fact, as Norman Saul reveals, between 1867 year of Alaskan purchase and beginning of World I, Russian and American dignitaries, diplomats, businessmen, writers, tourists, and entertainers crossed between two countries in far greater numbers than was previously known. Following widely praised Distant Friends, volume one of Saul's trilogy on Russian American relations, and provides first comprehensive investigation of this highly transformational and fateful era in Russian-American relations. Excavating previously unmined Russian and American archives, he explores flow and fluctuation of economic, diplomatic, social, and cultural affairs; personal and professional conflicts and scandals; and evolution of each nation's perception of other. At first concentrating on their similarities following American Civil War, Saul contends, Russian and American people established a tradition of friendship in absence of major controversy. In many ways, they felt bound by a sense of common destiny, corresponding periods of reform and progress, and a mutual hostility toward older European powers. Throughout Russia, American trademarks became familiar as U.S. companies such as Singer, New York Life, Westinghouse, and International Harvester took root. Hard winter wheat today a vital American crop was introduced by Russian immigrants. The Smithsonian established an information exchange with Russian government. War and Peace was translated into English and widely distributed in United States. And first YMCA was established in Russia. As progressive reform waned in 1880s Russia, however, Americans became increasingly leery of Russia's repressive internal tactics, hostility toward Jews, open-door policy toward China, and expansion in Far East while Russians found America's actions and attitudes hypocritical and equally confusing. Yet despite deterioration of diplomatic ties, Saul shows, a semblance of kinship endured into twentieth century as cultural exchanges and business opportunities continued to escalated. Illuminating fifty of most significant and surprisingly open years of this frequently tumultuous and contradictory association, Concord and Conflict reaffirms Saul's status as the leading American authority on Russian-American relations before 1917 (Journal of American History).

Economic relations between Latin America and the European Union

Two opposing trends are currently shaping relations between the European Union and Latin America. On the one hand, political signals in both regions are positive and point the way to closer ties in the future; on the other hand, the situation with regard to the Union’s trade with Latin America has worsened appreciably, with the region’s trade surplus giving way to a deficit for the first time in four decades. This trend may jeopardize the progress made thus far. If we do not act now, trade-related tensions, the reduction of development assistance and the appearance of social or environmental trade restrictions may cast a shadow over the bilateral situation, causing the two regions to become what we might describe as distant friends.

Postcards from Max, as Remembered by Paul Halmos

Max was a friend of mine, a good ..... friend. We became acquainted in 1969, when I gave a colloquium talk at Bloomington. Max came to the tea before the talk-he came to tea every day, whether there was a colloquium or not-and, in accordance with his custom, he came prepared. On a wrinkled slip of paper (it might actually have been the back of a used envelope) he 4 ...... had scribbled the questions he wanted me to answer-what is my opinion on the work of so-and-so?, how is this work connected with something I wrote ten years before?, has there been any recent progress along the lines of suchand-such? I don't remember any colloquium at which he didn't ask a question afterward (and sometimes during)-a relevant question, a pertinent question, a sharp question. His questions showed that he understood the subject, understood the talk, and was ready to understand and remember the answers. His questions were not intended to be embarrassing, but if the speaker was not thoroughly checked out on all aspects of the subject of his own talk, they could become embarrassing. Max didn't mean to cause pain, and he cheerfully indicated a friendly acceptance of even a vague answer. Does everybody remember the Piccayune Sentinel? Yes, I spelled it right-the misspelling is Max's own and I faithfully copied both c's. I don't know just when he started it; the first issue that I have a copy of is dated November 1950. It was a one-sheet affair that Max called the world's smallest newspaper and that he gave to a few friends (usually by putting copies into his colleagues' mailboxes, and rarely, for distant friends, by mailing them). One issue I have is labelled partially late. The contents of the Piccayune Sentinel were of the same kind as Max himself and his postcards (and as unpredictable and as confusion-inducing)-just longer and more widely distributed.

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices