Read Everything Research Articles

The Read Everything Michael White Published Project

This paper tells the history of The Read Everything Michael White Published Project, in which I read all the works available to me that were published by Michael White, the co-originator of narrative therapy. I describe the reading project’s conception, its effects on my work, some practices that Michael White believed were useful for therapists, tips for others considering a reading project of their own, and new initiatives this project was generative of in my work.

The Clinical Exercise Physiologists Interview Series: Barry A. Franklin, PhD, ACSM-CEP, ACSM-PD, FACSM, FAHA, MAACVPR, FASPC, FPCNA (Hon)

The Clinical Exercise Physiologists Interview Series: Barry A. Franklin, PhD, ACSM-CEP, ACSM-PD, FACSM, FAHA, MAACVPR, FASPC, FPCNA (Hon)

PROMOTING EFL STUDENTS ENTREPRENEURSHIP ENTHUSIASM: USING PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN EXTENSIVE READING ACTIVITIES

This article discusses how Extensive Reading (ER) activities promote English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students’ entrepreneurship enthusiasm by giving the chance to the individual student to select the topic to be read based on the most interesting one in his/her life. As ER is defined as pleasure reading, most of the previous research reports promoting ER activities for EFL students deal mostly with reading literary texts. For EFL college students, however, ER should not focus on reading literary texts, but also on the academic and popular ones. They need to be able to read a wide range of academic and popular texts for school task demands and for their prospective work purpose. They should be encouraged to read other types of texts other than literary one—which can improve their entrepreneurship enthusiasm. The method used in this study is classroom action research by implementing Project Based Learning (PBL) in two cycles. The results of this study showed that in the first cycle the students were able to read everything about the most interesting thing in their life guided by the mind map usage, made papers of reading reports based on both printed and digital resources, made the slides of oral report contained project plan of entrepreneurship products or services. In the second cycle the students were able to complete the project in form of portfolio contained the complete plan of entrepreneurship products and/or services. It is concluded that the implementing of PBL can promote EFL students’ entrepreneurship enthusiasm.

The social conditions of possibility of “flop”: production, intermediation and reception

For the tenth issue of the journal Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales on the theme of “flops” and coordinated by Sarah Benhaïm and Lambert Dousson, we wished to discuss this topic with three young researchers in social sciences whose doctoral research focused on the different levels of circulation of musical goods – production, intermediation, reception – and how they interrelate. We decided to interview them together, in order to obtain a variety of perspectives on the complex object that is the musical “flop” and to have the benefit of seeing these different views side by side.The following exchanges are the result of an interview conducted on Friday, January 29, 2021 via a shared online document. The interviewees were invited to connect to it simultaneously for a period of several hours in order to answer questions that had been previously entered by the interviewers. Beyond its obvious convenience in times of pandemic and restricted access to public meeting places, this experimental interview process was chosen and tested for the possibilities it seemed to offer in terms of discursive production and scientific exchange. Halfway between a live, oral group interview via videoconference (where the responses are recorded and then transcribed) and a collective interview carried out entirely via email (where the different responses are written and then compiled offline), the aim here was to encourage a form of spontaneity and interactivity between the participants while allowing a certain degree of self-reflection and formalization of the answers. Being connected to a shared document, where it was possible to read everything that was written in real time, encouraged each participant to react or adjust to the others’ comments, leaving the freedom to clarify, amend or correct their own answers over the relatively long duration of this virtual meeting. The resulting text was then proofread and edited by the two interviewers before being validated by the three interviewees. The footnotes were written by the interviewees.

Do Engineering Educators Read?: Appraising a University Reading Program

Abstract: This paper sought to find out how effective implementing a reading program called Project Read Everything About your Field, Digest, and Share (Project READS) among the School of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology Education (SEAITE) faculty members of the University of Saint Louis, Philippines, because of the underutilization of library resources. As it has been five years since its implementation, the need to find out how well the Project Implementation was necessary. This descriptive study then presents the evaluation of the Project READS program of the among full-time and part-time engineering educators. The results reveal that most of them are engaged in professional readings along their field of specialization. Moreover, Project READS is effective and sustainable. Suggestions to further improve the Project's implementation are also advanced to fully appreciate this professional reading project's effect on engineering educators and learners. Keywords: Project READS, Reading program, Effectiveness of a Reading Program in Engineering and Architecture

Exploring Reading Strategies and Difficulties among Bangladeshi Undergraduates

Reading being one of the four skills has to be mastered properly to be a successful language learner. In an ESL (English as a Second Language) context, particularly in Bangladesh, the newly admitted University students who are from Bangla medium background, often find it difficult to understand English textbooks especially when they are in the Department of English. For most of the students, reading everything in English, decoding the words, understanding the deeper meanings becomes quite difficult and leads them to anxiety. This paper aims to identify the types of difficulties the English Department Undergraduates encounter during reading and also points out the kinds of strategies they implement to prevail over the problems.

A Bookman Remembers Charles Bowden

A Bookman Remembers Charles Bowden Walt Bartholomew* (bio) I moved to Tucson in August 1994 and the first week I got here, or maybe the first day, I started looking for bookstores. First one I found was a place called the Book Mark on Speedway. It screwed up my life. I walked in and saw a display of local authors, new releases, this sort of thing, and then the clerk, Gloria Chivers, came over and said, "Have you ever heard of Chuck Bowden?" I had heard his name before, in conjunction with Edward Abbey, when I was living in Seattle. I had read everything by Edward Abbey, but never anything by Bowden. I'd never even seen any of his books in the Seattle area, where there are lots of bookstores. Gloria said, "Here. Try this." So the first book I read was Blue Desert, and then it was Mezcal. She had copies of Red Line and Desierto, but Blood Orchid wasn't out yet. So, that was my introduction to Chuck. I read Blue Desert and I liked it. Blue Desert was pretty mild. This was before the Blood Orchid thing. That was something a little different. Then Chuck had a book signing at the Book Mark for Blood Orchid. I brought him a bottle of wine, which is hilarious, because we set the bottle of wine down and it got tipped over and soaked the whole stack of books. The bookstore lost, because they threw these drenched burgundy-colored books away. He got a little tipsy. I read it the day it came out. I went and Gloria was opening the boxes. She was slicing one open and I said, "Here, give me that." And I went over on my patio in midtown, got a beer, and sat there and read the whole book. I said, "I don't know if I like this. I don't know." I had to read it, but there was something disturbing. At the signing, I told Chuck, "Something disturbs me about this book." His line was, "There's no big words in there." That was his joke. [End Page 149] No, there are no big words in there, but there's something in there that bothers me. And so I read every book that came out, and every magazine article—we're talking about things coming out in Mother Jones and the Atlantic. This is when he started doing the drug writer for Blood Orchid. I just started reading everything. I just couldn't stop. I thought, "Maybe this is weird," but I couldn't stop. I just get addicted to things. So that was '94, '95, '96, and somewhere around '97 I found out that Chuck lived about a mile away from me. So I asked Gloria, "What if I write him a letter. Will he tell me to drop dead?" That is what I would expect. So I wrote him a letter and said, "I live nearby and maybe I'll drop by some time." And he said, "Sure. Come over at 2." That started a twelve-year run. About every three months I went over to his place and it was never less than four hours. I would get there and he was always back in the purple writing shack. Mary Martha Miles, Chuck's partner at the time, would just point back there. The place should be a historic landmark. I'll pitch in for the brass plaque. It had been a garage, converted, and he had the floor tiled and an air conditioner put in. He had a little refrigerator there with the beverages. It was to give them space, I'm sure. She could stay in the house and say, "Chuck, go to your shack and don't return until it's dark." That works. Chuck, I don't know what he's doing. I think he writes in the morning, and this was after lunch, so he's back there in his shack and he's mellowing out. Sometimes there was someone else there, or not, and I'd be given an espresso and some wine, another espresso, another wine, and he'd just...

Introduction

Introduction Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) Possessed by Memory: the Inward Light of Criticism is the latest of Harold Bloom innumerable volumes of authored and edited criticism and theory. His first book appeared in 1959, Shelley's Mythmaking, and he has more books scheduled to be published later this year and next. As I began graduate school in 1970, it was his book Yeats that preoccupied my mind, as Yeats was my poet, having written a senior thesis on The Tower in college, and I would go on to write a dissertation on his Autobiographies, which became my first book Tragic Knowledge (1981). Because Bloom was so critical of Yeats, I was defensive with respect to his book, even as I went back to read everything by him he had written before it, and would go on to follow him closely over the years, modifying my critique to grudging respect, to more understanding, till in the last decade or so, to affection and marvel. I like to think he had slowed down enough for even I could catch up to him, and learn something. However that may be, I organized this forum for the purpose of demonstrating that his work still possesses our memories, whether we emphasize and understand him, or not. Given that with The Anxiety of Influence (1973) he added, as Kenneth Burke, one of his favorite theorists might say, a new motive to the critical grammar of motives literary critics use to comprehend what we espouse, that Harold Bloom continues to write books means the discipline of literary study, however shrunken, still lives on, and with ever more imaginative life. [End Page 309] Daniel T. O'Hara Temple University Daniel T. O'Hara DANIEL T. O'HARA, Emeritus Professor of English and the Humanities at Temple University, is the author and editor or coeditor of fifteen books, including Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal (2015). Currently, he is completing a book entitled Thomas Mann and the Travesty of Innocence: the Role of the Narrator in Modernism (forthcoming). Copyright © 2019 Symplokē

SemPCA-Summarizer: Exploiting Semantic Principal Component Analysis for Automatic Summary Generation

Text summarization is the task of condensing a document keeping the relevant information. This task integrated in wider information systems can help users to access key information without having to read everything, allowing for a higher efficiency. In this research work, we have developed and evaluated a single-document extractive summarization approach, named SemPCA-Summarizer, which reduces the dimension of a document using Principal Component Analysis technique enriched with semantic information. A concept-sentence matrix is built from the textual input document, and then, PCA is used to identify and rank the relevant concepts, which are used for selecting the most important sentences through different heuristics, thus leading to various types of summaries. The results obtained show that the generated summaries are very competitive, both from a quantitative and a qualitative viewpoint, thus indicating that our proposed approach is appropriate for briefly providing key information, and thus helping to cope with a huge amount of information available in a quicker and efficient manner.

Gallery Interactives: From Grizzlies to Polar Bears by Canadian Museum of Nature

“Gallery Interactives: From Grizzlies to Polar Bears”. Canadian Museum of Nature, 16 Dec. 2009, http://nature.ca/discover/exm/frmgrzzlstplrbrs/index_e.html. Accessed 14 Feb. 2017.This short, educational game is designed to teach children about both polar and grizzly bears’ adaptations. It uses matching to allow users to choose between two different versions of an adaptation and drag them to either the polar or grizzly bear side. With the correct answer, a picture demonstrating that adaptation will appear and a box will pop up that explains in more detail the different adaptations. This game is educational in that it provides detailed information explained in simple language. It is also clear the user must drag the answer to a side, and what buttons to press once the box of information comes up. It holds the user’s hand almost too much but does not disrupt interaction. The interactivity of the game is limited because the only decisions users can make are by choosing the answers and if the wrong side is chosen, it moves back to the center. The graphic design is simple, using a muted blue color scheme, simple shapes, and a few static images but it could have used brighter colours or videos with audio to bring the animals to life. There also does not seem to be anything inventive because it is simply a matching game, with only two choices for each of the five levels, three of which focus on appearance. By having some incentive for the user to learn about each of the bears such as a mission or a problem to be solved, or by having more intuitive ways of choosing the answers, it would allow users to demonstrate their perceptiveness, build confidence and give them a feeling of investment in the material. For example, they could learn about the claws/pads by examining a trail of bear tracks. Overall this game is sufficient in its educational purpose but could do more to engage users.Recommended with reservations: 2 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Ellen NorlanderEllen Norlander is currently an MLIS student at the University of Alberta and hopes to enter the fields of either health sciences or academic librarianship. Her interests are reading anything and everything, playing piano, and blogging.

"Publish Little, but Publish Well": An Interview with the Founders of Tramp Press

"Publish Little, but Publish Well":An Interview with the Founders of Tramp Press Paige Reynolds (bio) Tramp Press is an independent Irish publishing house founded by Lisa Coen and Sarah Davis-Goff "to find, nurture, and publish exceptional literary talent."1 Named for the transgressive figures who people the drama of J. M. Synge, Tramp has, since its founding in 2014, published a small, steady stream of award-winning books, including Sara Baume's Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015) and Mike McCormack's Solar Bones (2016). They have also published reprints of neglected fiction in the Recovered Voices series, among them Charlotte Riddell's A Struggle for Fame (1883; reprint 2014) and Maeve Kelly's Orange Horses (1990; reprint 2017). They have produced timely collections as well, including Dubliners 100 (2014), in which contemporary writers reimagine Joyce's famed stories, and A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance (2015), a collection of short stories from international writers considering distance as a theme. Coen and Davis-Goff have created a nimble business model that is simultaneously approachable and rigorous: They are committed to reading everything in the "slush pile," the sobriquet used to describe unsolicited manuscripts received by publishers, as well as to integrating their progressive politics with their mission to publish extraordinary fiction. In their endeavors they have successfully merged new and traditional practices to support writers, employing social media such as Twitter and Instagram very effectively to promote the brand, but also meeting face-to-face with booksellers and attending public readings with their authors. In December 2016 Coen and Davis-Goff met with Paige Reynolds to discuss Tramp's past, present, and future.2 [End Page 372] PAIGE REYNOLDS: Can we begin with Tramp's origin story? How did you initially conceptualize the press after you met working together at Lilliput Press here in Dublin? I have read articles in which the decision to start Tramp sounds like the start of a caper movie: "Well, we're young women in publishing and we'll just have to create a job for ourselves!" LISA COEN: That is literally the case! I remember having lunch in [the restaurant] Seven Seven Seven, where Sarah said, "This'll probably just be part-time." SARAH DAVIS-GOFF: I cannot believe I said that. I mean, we are not people who work part-time at anything, ever. Apart from the fact that we could not find jobs, there was a real need for a fresh look at publishing in Ireland. We were, as you mentioned, working at Lilliput, and while there, this incredible manuscript from Donal Ryan came in that took a while to get people interested in, even though it was obviously something very special. That put the frighteners on me, thinking that there are great manuscripts out there that are being completely ignored on the slush piles. Those manuscripts really need a voice and a champion. Publishers were not publishing with their gut, and publishing according to what you think the market wants is always death. Plus, we wanted to provide diversity to the publishing industry in Ireland. If for example only middle-aged guys are in a position to say yes or no to manuscripts, my experience is that they will generally be saying yes to works by other middle-aged guys. LC: We knew there were important manuscripts being neglected. I remember people saying, "Why did the Celtic Tiger not produce any great writers?" I think there are two reasons for that. One is that people actually had jobs, and so maybe did not take the risk because they had to pay the mortgage. But I also think publishers were not looking for great, challenging work. There are a lot of very conservative choices being made, particularly by large U.K. houses. They are leaving a lot of good stuff behind and publishing things that are very similar. I am very wary of this conversation about this great new wave of Irish literature. The great work has always been there, but there has not been anyone to champion it. [End Page 373] PR: Has new media created ways to find new voices? SD-G: Lisa McInerney is a...

Laurence W. Mazzeno, The Critics and Hemingway, 1924–2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon

Laurence W. Mazzeno, The Critics and Hemingway, 1924-2014: Shaping an American Literary Icon. Camden House, 2015, 302 pp., $85, cloth. It implies no criticism of the rest of the book to say that the most impressive section of The Critics and Hemingway is the Works Cited. These fifty pages may not list everything published on Hemingway since 1924, the date of the first of what became a tidal wave of publications set off by the man and his work; but Laurence Mazzeno has aspired to read everything of any significance that expressly takes Hemingway or his writing as a topic. He has further aspired to report on all this stuff, and to provide a summary, with at least one representative quotation, from most of the items cited, organized in a way that will bring out first the chronology of commentary on Hemingway, and second its themes. Regarding chronology, the book covers nine decades of Hemingway criticism in ten chapters, so that--with some variations--each chapter reports on a decade's worth of work. The interest of this macrostructure is that it permits readers to see how the nature of the subject changed over time. To a large extent, of course, it is his works that constitute Hemingway, and which ones mattered changed not only during when he was alive and publishing, but also posthumously, since no decade has yet passed without Hemingway material appearing. But to an equal extent the subject has been the person himself, and the things that have interested critics about his character, behavior, and relationships have changed drastically. Within chapters, Mazzeno has grouped responses by type (i.e., Midcentury Assessments) to provide some sense of organization and pattern in what might otherwise seem a numbing series of paraphrases of material on index cards--or whatever the equivalent may be in a digital era. In chapters on later decades, when Hemingway criticism became largely academicized, the groupings become thematic (i.e., Gender, Race, and Ethnic Studies). Regarding themes in Hemingway criticism, Mazzeno effectively demonstrates the trends in literary analysis, in particular the fascination exercised on the New Critics by the iceberg technique he used (basically of telling little but implying much). This style of narrative was perfect for the kind of close reading that became the academic standard during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Mazzeno also provides a good record of the numerous revisionist approaches that sustained Hemingway studies into new century (on which more below). But what stands out most strongly in this account is that almost from the beginning interest in the writings competed with the interest in Hemingway the man, the legend, and eventually the icon. Hemingway's celebrity might seem a ludicrous distraction from his literary achievements, yet it cannot be ignored. Much of each chapter in this book is taken up with Hemingway's public persona, the question of his decline (literary and personal), the cultural stereotypes associated with him, and, alas, gossip about his private life. Aside from anything else, Hemingway was and has remained a best-selling writer, and the role of money in relation to the continued circulation of his work becomes a significant topic in Mazzeno's account. Although this compendium is well done--even very well done--as far as it goes, the question arises as to what purpose it might serve. Mazzeno does not say much about this in his introduction, where one might expect an author to explain why he wrote a book (and why we should read it, or how we might use it). He does make clear several things that the book is not. For one thing, it is not an annotated bibliography, intended to guide novice readers among the primary and secondary documents: there already exist impressive works of this kind, which belong to the corpus Mazzeno surveys. Nor does The Critics and Hemingway constitute a fan's notes: Mazzeno calls himself an outsider to the community of Hemingway scholars (9), who has aimed to record the development of that community. …

Profile of Patricia L. Crown

For more than four decades, Patricia Crown, a professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, has conducted field investigations in the Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam areas of the American Southwest. Her work has revealed important aspects of these cultures concerning ceramics, trade, rituals, diet, gender roles, and more. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, Crown five years earlier uncovered the first evidence of chocolate consumption in North America north of Mexico. Crown has also conducted an extensive analysis of organic residues from archaeological sites in the US Southwest and the Mexican Northwest, revealing widespread use of cacao and holly in communal, ritual gatherings dating from AD 750 to 1400. Portrait of Patricia Crown. Image courtesy of Wirt H. Wills (photographer). Excavations in room 28 of Pueblo Bonito; Patricia Crown is in the orange vest. Image courtesy of Wirt H. Wills (photographer). Crown’s father was an art professor at the University of Southern California, as well as a landscape painter. “He did most of his painting outside and often took his three children along,” Crown says, adding that her mother, a public school teacher, was also an artist, as were her two older sisters. “I had no talent for painting,” she says, “and so had to amuse myself in other ways.” One diversion was searching for artifacts during summer family camping trips to places in the American Southwest. It was during one such trip to New Mexico when 15-year-old Crown decided to become an archaeologist after years of being intrigued by landscapes and ruins. She says, “My parents both encouraged me to do whatever I was passionate about, and that was archaeology. So I read everything I could get my hands on and only applied to colleges that had good archaeology programs.” Crown chose the …

Click here to consent forever: Expiry dates for informed consent

The legal basis for processing personal data and some other types of Big Data is often the informed consent of the data subject involved. Many data controllers, such as social network sites, offer terms and conditions, privacy policies or similar documents to which a user can consent when registering as a user. There are many issues with such informed consent: people get too many consent requests to read everything, policy documents are often very long and difficult to understand and users feel they do not have a real choice anyway. Furthermore, in the context of Big Data refusing consent may not prevent predicting missing data. Finally, consent is usually asked for when registering, but rarely is consent renewed. As a result, consenting once often implies consent forever. At the same time, given the rapid changes in Big Data and data analysis, consent may easily get outdated (when earlier consent no longer reflects a user’s preferences). This paper suggests expiry dates for consent, not to settle questions, but to put them on the table as a start for further discussion on this topic. Although such expiry dates may not solve all the issues of informed consent, they may be a useful tool in some situations.

Click Here to Consent Forever: Expiry Dates for Informed Consent

The legal basis for processing personal data and some other types of Big Data is often the informed consent of the data subject involved. Many data controllers, such as social network sites, offer terms and conditions, privacy policies or similar documents to which a user can consent when registering as a user. There are many issues with such informed consent: people get too many consent requests to read everything, policy documents are often very long and difficult to understand and users feel they do not have a real choice anyway. Furthermore, in the context of Big Data refusing consent may not prevent predicting missing data. Finally, consent is usually asked for when registering, but rarely is consent renewed. As a result, consenting once often implies consent forever. At the same time, given the rapid changes in Big Data and data analysis, consent may easily get outdated (when earlier consent no longer reflects a user’s preferences). This paper suggests expiry dates for consent, not to settle questions, but to put them on the table as a start for further discussion on this topic. Although such expiry dates may not solve all the issues of informed consent, they may be a useful tool in some situations.

A Patchwork Paper: What Paediatricians Should Read

This paper honours a paediatrician whose career has been patchwork but distinguished, with many facets. It is a light-hearted look at the printed (infinitely preferable to the electronic) word. Although the obvious response is "read everything I have written", this would only drive down the stores of Prozac. Read the scientific literature of course. The oldie reads to stay one jump ahead on the ward round. Meta-analyses and systematic reviews rely on the judgement of others, so should be regarded with suspicion. Do your own research, and do not rely on the thoughts of other people. Read beyond PubMed. "There is more in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than is dreamed of in your PubMed" (Shakespeare). Read the giants of the past. Richard Asher has so much to teach. What are the seven sins of medicine, and how many have you committed? Asher is top read of the talk. Learn from the mistakes of the past. Your patient comes first. Read how the medical profession covered up the death of Steve Biko and never compromise with patient safety and your integrity. Finally, remember thou art mortal - read a real book for pleasure. Kindle reading must be like making love to an inflatable doll (not that I have done either). Choose what you relax with; for me, PG Wodehouse, Jane Austen, Billy Bunter and Wisden. Who said and why: 'Madam, under similar circumstances I would have kicked the Archangel Gabriel!'.

What is this duplicate publication thing?

What is this duplicate publication thing?

Hedge Fund Fraud and the Public Good

Abstract The current financial crisis resonates with every American, regardless of their connection to the securities markets. Many struggle to understand how and why the American financial and securities markets collapsed last year. In essence, why did the regulators fail to prevent the collapse? Government officials continue to analyze the relationship between the structural collapse of the markets and regulators' limited jurisdiction over a class of entities whose transactions substantially impact the markets: hedge funds. Congress can no longer deny hedge funds' detrimental impact on the financial and securities markets. The impetus for financial re-regulation has arrived. It is incumbent upon Congress to enact laws which extend the jurisdiction of federal regulators to hedge funds. At a minimum, such supervision is necessary to protect the investing public. The elusiveness of hedge funds and their investment strategies is of particular concern. Federal regulation may take the form of a registration requirement. Perhaps publicly-traded companies should disclose their transactions with hedge funds. More comprehensive regulatory reform options include the creation of a hybrid regulatory hedge fund governance matrix based upon the dollar volume, frequency of trades and potential losses that hedge funds may experience. It is incumbent upon Congress to create the proper balance between protecting the investing public and maintaining sustainable American financial and securities markets, which in turn stabilizes the global economy. Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, of individual men and women and of whole nations. Blame not government alone for this. Blame ourselves in equal share. . .. - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt1 INTRODUCTION He that is of opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money. - Benjamin Franklin2 The red light on my office phone flashed incessantly, demanding attention. I ignored it. My small, government issued office, courtesy of New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, would seem to the casual observer the epitome of efficiency; no space was left unused. Each square inch of the office had documents appropriately labeled, categorized, read and re-read. Ah, the duty to read. The fiduciary duty to read, established by the court in Francis v. New Jersey Bank,21 remained with me years after my corporations class. I read and re-read everything. My attention was pulled back to the flashing red light on my phone. I wondered if that strange woman who kept leaving me all those bizarre messages about mutual funds, late trading, capacity, hedge funds and market timing had called again. She had left at least three messages all in rapid fire, exacting phrases like, you should look into mutual funds and hedge funds late trading stocks. What they are doing is illegal!4 She left no explanation and certainly not her name. More importantly, she did not indicate how she knew about the alleged fraud. But there was something about her tone that got my attention and piqued my interest. I brought her phone calls to the attention of Roger Waldman, my immediate supervisor.5 I wanted to find out if he knew anything about terms such as capacity, timing, and late trading, which I may have missed during my own corporate transactional days on Wall Street, from his days at Sullivan & Cromwell. He knew nothing. I could tell because he had no reaction when I mentioned mutual funds and late trading. I also shared the curious messages from the strange woman with Bureau Chief, Eric Dinallo.6 I received permission to offer her transactional immunity and to have her come to the New York State Attorney General's Office to be queen for the day and share her story. All I had to do was find her, convince her to testify, and turn state's witness - because it was her civic duty. …

Diversifying customer review rankings

E-commerce Web sites owe much of their popularity to consumer reviews accompanying product descriptions. On-line customers spend hours and hours going through heaps of textual reviews to decide which products to buy. At the same time, each popular product has thousands of user-generated reviews, making it impossible for a buyer to read everything. Current approaches to display reviews to users or recommend an individual review for a product are based on the recency or helpfulness of each review.In this paper, we present a framework to rank product reviews by optimizing the coverage of the ranking with respect to sentiment or aspects, or by summarizing all reviews with the top-K reviews in the ranking. To accomplish this, we make use of the assigned star rating for a product as an indicator for a review’s sentiment polarity and compare bag-of-words (language model) with topic models (latent Dirichlet allocation) as a mean to represent aspects. Our evaluation on manually annotated review data from a commercial review Web site demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming plain recency ranking by 30% and obtaining best results by combining language and topic model representations.

Theology for Non-Believers

There are many ways of reading a book of the book. One could take a look at the table of content, read a few pages and skip the rest; one could look for the main line of reasoning not bothering about details; one could read carefully from cover to cover (this does not happen to often); and one could not only to read everything, and also to ponder over the argument (this is rather exceptional) but even to enter into discussion with the author. Such readers should be precious to every author. I had a happy chance to have at least one such reader on whose critical remarks I now want to comment. After politely praising my book, professor Burdzy carefully classified his remarks into four groups: errors, omissions, misleading information, and discussion. Errors (happily enough, only a few have been found) are not to be discussed with but corrected. I readily admit omissions; at least in some cases they could be called selection effects. As far as misleading material is concerned, I should say that to mislead the specialist is not the same as to mislead a common reader. In such a subtle matter as probability calculus many things depend on interpretation and interpretations are usually manifold. My account of interpretative questions related to probability are based on standard monographs and textbooks in the field (they are quoted in the book). It is a pity that, when working on the book, I did not know the book by professor Burdzy; if I did, perhaps my presentation of subjective interpretation would have been different. And finally, discussion…, I am open for it. A book that not excite discussion is a failed book.