Crowdsourcing: Why The Power Of The Crowd Is Driving The Future Of Business / by Jeff Howe

The information technology boom along with the "flattening" of the world in the modern era has made it possible for amateurs to work with the same precision and accuracy as professionals. This situation has created for a far more inverted structure to the basic synergy involved in economic production and division of labor, or so Jeff Howe, a computer engineer and contributing columnist for WIRED magazine, surmises in his book covering a phenomenon he's coined as "crowdsourcing". Crowdsourcing theorizes that the digital age has enabled a far greater mass of people with the ability to accomplish feats which were once relegated to the specialized skills and talents of smaller, more exclusive groups of individuals. The increasing abundance of social networking technology and interactive web resources in which the user participates not only as a receptor but, in fact, as a contributor to the original content, fermenting the product so to speak--think Wikipedia--has introduced a thoroughly new mode of organizational structure within the labor force.

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The collaborative creativity made possible with technology has and will continue to infiltrate every conceivable aspect of our society. With crowdsourcing, work patterns are structured differently, research is more stratified, management is constantly redelegated and marketing tactics are continuously rediversified. Crowdsourcing also allows for a more "coagulated meritocracy" where the quality of the work is all that matters, eliminating biases of sex, ethnicity, creed and even educational qualifications from worker profiles. This, of course, disrupts the theory and practice of equal division of labor, making employment in certain sectors as unpredictable as ever. But Howe observes--and others agree with him--that this trend is unlikely to change anytime soon; thus managerial economies worldwide must adapt. Howe's book captures an intriguing and vitally important function of our society, one which will invariably impact every facet of the world's economy, culture and behavior for years to come.

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stuff and things

Monster Mashups -- they're not just for Halloween anymore

The Huffington Post recently posted a guide to the recent spate of what they're calling "monster mashups" -- books that take classic novels, insert werewolves, zombies or vampires, and then stand back and let the mayhem ensue. Sure, they're silly, but if you don't take your Jane Austen too seriously, they can be pretty fun. Click here for the link to the Huffington Post's web display.

18 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer | Photo 1 of 19 | EW.com

18 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer | Photo 1 of 19 | EW.com

Entertainment Weekly's slideshow gives you a glimpse of what are expected to be some of the biggest sellers of the summer.

The Cartoon Introduction to Economics: Volume One: Microeconomics / by Grady Klein & Yoram Bauman, Ph.D.

Traditionally, economics has been characterized as a way in which a simple concept is made difficult (i.e., stuffy sounding terms such as "profit maximizing" and "margin analysis" are little more than budgeting and getting the best bang for your buck). Authors Klein and Bauman ("The World's First and Only Stand-up Economist") offer an enlightening, comprehensible and entertaining examination of all facets of economics.

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The problems and concepts involving microeconomics, or personal finance, are wonderfully illustrated and the text reads nothing like a textbook lecture, but rather as a feasible examination of the way in which individuals (microeconomics) approach the world of buying and selling. Even some of the more labor intensive math formulas like perpetuity values and compound interest are well dissected and applied to easily understood practical examples. As informative and detailed as any fundamental classroom lesson, the book--its artwork, figure designs, comical narrative and terminology easily explained--create a fascinating and uniquely plausible education resource.

Secrets of Eden / by Chris Bohjalian

A Brooklyn native, Chris Bohjalian and his wife decided to move away from the city to Vermont after a harrowing experience inside a taxi cab driven by a terrorist permanently ended any plans for raising their two young children in New York City. Their subsequent years lived in peaceful suburban tranquility would ultimately enmesh itself into much of Bohjalian's later fiction. A novelist since the late nineties, he's been critcally acclaimed for his books Before You Know Kindness, Skeletons at the Feast and The Double Blind--all New York Times bestsellers--as well as Midwives, an Oprah Book Club selection. His most recent novel, Secrets of Eden, examines mental and emotional dissolusionment of a small town pastor, Rev. Stephen Drew, after one of his parishioners is murdered.
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"Believe no one. Trust no one. Believe all of our stories are suspect." p. 16

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Rev. Stephen Drew thought it a bit odd the way Alice Hayward, a 35-year-old married mother of one, had behaved at her baptism--a little too morbid. A few hours later, after the bodies of both Alice and her husband George had been found dead of an apparent murder-suicide, Stephen knew he wasn't mistaken. Shock and dismay inevitably follow in the immediate wake of the tragedy and, as well might be expected, Stephen himself is confronted with a severe crisis of faith as the theological doctrines and long-attenuated personal convictions of divine sovereignty are replaced by doubts, fears and perpetuating uncertainty. His angst and tormented soul are only somewhat quieted after meeting Heather Laurent, the author of several humongously popular books on alternative spirituality. Heather, coincidentally, witnessed the murder-suicide of her own parents and is fittingly in a position to relate to Katie, Alice's now orphaned adolescent daughter who may seem to know more than she's telling. Heather is also able to proffer some encouraging words and comforting inspiration to Stephen, and with time the pair develop an unlikely bond.

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But just as Stephen and Heather's relationship begins to blossom into something more and Stephen (a bachelor) begins to see the world and his life with a different outlook, new questions arise in the case, particularly about whether Alice's husband George actually killed himself after all? Was George murdered as well? Were both Alice and George killed together with the act only arranged to look like a murder-suicide? When the state's attorney uncovers new evidence, strange illegible passages in Alice's diary, which link Stephen himself to the crime, it seems the true nature of things may run a bit deeper than originally thought and more than one person may share responsibility for this horrible tragedy.

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Bohjalian hasn't turned out a bad book yet and this effort keeps the streak alive. The storyline more than the characters, who at times can come off a bit flaky, gives the book its appeal, employing the similar but no-less-likable tactic used in Before You Know Kindness and Skeletons at the Feast of an initial traumatic event highlighting the beginning pages and allowing the multi-perspective narrative to work in the context. Readers unfamiliar with Bohjalian will find his themes and featured topics fit the same mold as Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve, who share an affinity for New England serenity and domestic disquietude. The mood reflects a more removed setting, and conversely, a more personalized atmosphere. Despite the grisly nature of the proceedings and accompanying investigation, the novel's neither mystery nor hard-boiled crime fiction and could barely be categorized as a thriller with the action focusing more intensely on intuitive reflections, character observations and relationships.

The Second Coming: A Novel / by Walker Percy

A native of the American South, Walker Percy (1916-1990) was born into a family of distinguished lineage and one which held particularly tragic heritage. When he was thirteen his own father committed suicide and then, two years later, his mother was killed when she drove off a bridge (an act Percy also considered a suicide). Throughout his life, Percy would feel the impact and impression these events had on his youthful conscious and subsquent life, struggling for years to come to terms with his family's tragic legacy. His second-to-last novel, The Second Coming, is a book--among his most autobiographical works--which explores the themes of clinical depression, existensialism, semiotics and faith in a cleverly entertaining way.
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"The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's lives were, they generally gave no sign it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself?" p. 4
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Fed up with what he feels is an utterly useless existence, wealthy bachelor Will Barrett decides on a course of action which, conceivably, will bring about his end on earth. Rather than shoot himself, he moves from his comfortable existence in his opulent house situated on the green of a golf course to a cave, where, without food and only a little water, he plans to extinguish his life through natural deprivation. Figuring that, if there is a God, his life and faith will be somehow restored, Will follows through on his plan, living out his literal 'dark night of the soul', gradually, as the hours then days, then weeks pass by, growing weaker, fainter and less in touch with reality. At long last when he's brought to the point of no return and as hallucinations begin overtaking his sanity, he inadvertently tumbles out of the cave, down the hill and into the backyard of a neighbor where a peculiar, memory-challenged young woman named Allison, herself having just escaped from a mental institution, sits watering the plants in a greenhouse.

Percy's 1980 novel was actually a sequel to his earlier book The Last Gentleman, which concerned Will Barrett at an earlier point in his life. And while this volume presents many of the same characteristics and quirky running narrative about its protagonist which were prominently featured in the first book, The Second Coming sits at a higher intellectual plane. Much more of the author's own existential and spiritual consternations highlight the story as Will's inner turmoil, his philosophical assessments of his life--deeply rooted in suicides of both his father and grandfather--and that of the world around him resonate from page one till the final dialogue between Will and Allison. The world of internal emptiness which depression evokes is uniquely manifested through Percy's prose.
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Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero / by William Makepeace Thackeray

Overshadowed for much of his relatively short writing tenure by others, W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863) was nonetheless a notable scribe, satirist and observer of human nature, particularly well-regarded for his fiction and editorial anecdotes by the reading public as well as the very same members of the British upper-class which he so cleverly caricatured. Born in India, Thackeray was brought to England permanently in 1815 after the death of his father. During the passage, his ship was shortly detained on the island of St. Helena where the then exiled Napoleon Bonaparte was pointed out to him. The emperor's permanent deposition, brought about as a result of the Battle at Waterloo, was an event which indirectly forms the backdrop for his 1848 serially published book Vanity Fair, the author's most celebrated novel and a prized work of Victorian literature.
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"Revenge may be wicked. But it's natural".

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Becky Sharp is a sly, artful woman always scheming towards a better deal in life. Orphaned as a girl after the deaths of her artist father and opera singer mother, Becky was kept at a privately run finishing school until she came of age and inherited a moderate income, though not one guaranteeing her financial independence. With her beauty, wit and devilishly clever charms of which few women can match, eligible bachelors and married men alike routinely fall prey to her wiles, exemplified when her hasty marriage to the easily manipulated Rawdon Crawley, done solely for want of financial security, is brought about without the consent or blessing of any of the man's relations. With Rawdon now her willing pawn, Becky feels no less limited to tampering with those in her immediate circle. She routinely intermingles herself into the company of men in high standing such as General Tufto and Lord Steyne, both fashionable aristocrats, while still finding time to aid Rawdon in cheating at cards and fleecing wealthy members of the ruling class out of their money.
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Though her flirtatious cocquetry is always winning her new male friends, Becky's shrewd, self-promoting lifestyle, enacted without conscience, has essentially eliminated the potential for female companionship. Amelia Sedley is the exception to the rule. A benevolent and compassionate though naievely ignorant and, in her own way, vainly fanciful girl brought down in society by her family's financial ruin, Amelia has remained Becky's loyal ally ever since their days at finishing school together, even spurning rumours that her own beloved husband Capt. George Osborne has been lured in by Becky's arts. But when the captain is killed in the war with Napoleon, Amelia's misfortune seems to only increase as her own father's spendthrift ways and misuse of her meager widow's legacy plunge Amelia and her newborn son into further destitution and misery while Becky's amoral behavior, often executed at Amelia's expense, seems to only elevate her financial status and social standing. Yet, tragically, such is the lot of those in 'Vanity Fair', where "the general impression is forever one more melancholy than mirthful".
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The title Vanity Fair is a direct homage to the term's original inception in John Bunyan's seventeenth century Christian allegorical treatise, The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a town called Vanity holds a year-round fair devoted to worldly novelties, tawdry attractions and all kinds of "licentious, fleshly" activities--"moreover at this Fair there is at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, knaves, and rogues, and that of all sorts." (Bunyan, 96)*. Thackeray's novel is in parts full-on parody while at other times soliciting solemnly stern lessons. Yet the narrative is always whimsical, the author's personal running commentary on the "upraised curtain" of life routinely conjecturing, as if a casual member of the audience, about the stage on which the world and its actors tread, their lives driven by pretentious yearnings and carnal desires perpetually leading to greivous, lamentable and often absurdly cruel consequences. The character of Becky Sharp, one of the most popular female literary figures ever since, was one of the first prominently featured anti-heroines to appear within an English novel.
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*Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 1972.

Election (1999) DVD / a film by Alexander Payne; based on the novel by Tom Perrotta; starring Matthew Broderick & Reese Witherspoon

"None of this would have happened if Mr. McAllister hadn't meddled the way he did."
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All Jim McCallister ever wanted to do was teach. A man of modest means and wants, he sincerely enjoys his days instructing the students in his US Government classes at Carver High, interacting with their young intellects and watching their growing minds confront the world. He likes it when they do well, when they achieve and, in most cases, when they excel. But one thing he does not like, in fact, something he's recently come to loathe vehemently (exceedingly more so since a pivotal indiscretion got his best friend fired) is students driven to succeed at all costs, ones like junior Tracy Flick who unswervingly pursue selfish aims at the expense of others and proceed to make a hollow mockery out of the democratic notion of an election--especially one as trivial as the race for student body president. For Mr. McAllister, the Tracy Flicks of the world do the most damage; they're far more harmful than any combination of troublemakers, burnouts or juvenile miscreants and more determined besides. Tracy might be able to conceal her covetous ill-tempered demeanor behind a facade of way-too-perky cheerfulness, but Jim knows, even if no one else does, that she's a ruthless, wanton firebrand who must be stopped.
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Everyone at Carver knows who Tracy Flick is, even if they're not really friends with her (or would want to be). Tracy is a compulsive overachiever, the kind of student who promptly shoots up her hand to answer every question, studies fastidiously and stays everyday after school participating in all manner of transcript-worthy activities and every possible extracurricular, particularly ones befitting the 'leadership' mold, hence her devotion to the student council. With her impeccable grades, tenured SGA track and abundant publicity material (posters, banners, pens, buttons, cupcakes, etc.), Tracy's confident of her impending nomination and forthcoming election as student body president, even more so as it looks like she'll be running unopposed. That is, until out of the blue, a second candidate enters the race, popular jock Paul Metzler, and then even more bizarrely, a third, his sister Tammy, who's nomination speech is wildly applauded for its decidedly anarchist platform. Convinced her destiny is being interfered with ("The weak are always trying to sabotage the strong") an insistent Tracy sets her sights firmly on her goal, taking the action she feels is necessary to ensure her success on election day.
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Election really isn't a high school movie, even with Matthew Broderick's ironic and deviliciously satirical portrayal of well-meaning educator brought to his knees by the headstrong actions of one of his students. It's a movie about people and personalities, how the confluence of individuals confined within institutions inevitably breeds far-reaching repurcussions which are usually harmless, but can, at times, be totally life altering. The film's use of voiceover narration is spot on; input by all four principle characters presiding 'above' the action in a monotone, even-keeled delivery provides a clever nuance to this admirably introspective film. There's a pervading sense of open-mindedness about things. The mood's never overly demonstrative or mean-spirited, just observant and mildly curious, offering a story which plays like a fable or parable as much as an anecdotal piece. Directory Alexander Payne's (Citizen Ruth, About Schmidt) use of satire is refreshingly omnidirectional and without malice, providing a non-partisan, even-handed take on the world and its wrongdoers who might ruin things for others and create a mess but are never all that bad--just, well, real.

The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards' Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal that Brought Him Down / by Andrew Young

By the year 2000, John Edwards meteoric rise from trial lawyer to North Carolina senator had been well documented and more than a few political pundits prognosticated an unlimited future for the homegrown Democrat who preached family values, equal housing opportunities and "college for everyone". He became a household name during the 2004 presidential campaign when he was selected as running mate to then presidential hopeful John Kerry. Their subsequent defeat prompted Edwards' own ambitions for the highest office in the land and his campaign for the 2008 democratic nomination began in earnest in 2005. But in 2007, a scandal broke about an extramarital affair between Edwards and staffer Rielle Hunter, the latter claiming Edwards had fathered her child. Though denied by Edwards initially, the relationship and ultimately the parentage were finally acknowledged after months of abnegation. The presidential hopeful's dreams came to an end as his political career and life began spiraling downward.
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Author and former political consultant Andrew Young recounts his time as not only an inside man with tactical access to the senator, but, candidly and with remorse, as a primary player in the scandal--Young was induced by Edwards to initially claim (falsely) that he had fathered Rielle Hunter's child. Young chronicles his time with Edwards'--John and his family--from beginning to end: first as a volunteer in the campaign for the initial gubernatorial seat, becoming more intimate as the Democratic party eagerly adopted and promoted Edwards, and finally as the senator's right-hand man in his bid for the presidency. With time Young was drawn more and more into a series of comprimising assignments that culminated with Edwards asking him to help conceal the Senator's adultery and ultimately lie about the parentage of his own illegitmate child. More than a few sordid moments are encountered throughout the text as the reader is drawn closer in to this epic, personally wrenching scandal.

New Poetry

The Continual Condition / by Charles Bukowski; edited by John Martin
An American cult hero, Charles Bukowski was not only a well-known poet, but a highly sought after intellectual and contemporary scholar. Deceased since 1994, this collection of previously unpublished poems reveals the irreplaceable verboseness and quirky humor of this literary icon.
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Incident Light: Poems / by H.L. Hix
Poet and scholar Hix’s eighth volume of poems is as inventive as any of his previous works. Hix tells the biography of German sculpter Petra Soesmann in verse, using a clever pentameter form to convey the artist’s unique life and impact.
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Dizzy in Your Eyes: Poems About Love / by Pat Mora
In this personalized rendition of love in the teen years, Mora’s poetry is conveyed through teen narrators, each sharing their thoughts, feelings and convictions about the phenomenon they’ve just come to know.
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Partly Cloudy: Poems of Love and Longing / by Gary Soto
Well-known YA fiction author Soto presents a collection poems written from the teenage perspective, each poem sharing things like emotions leading to a first kiss, first broken heart and lessons learned.
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The Dance of No Hard Feelings / by Mark Bibbins
A scathing assessment of bureaucracies trying to gloss over glaring errors with rudimentary words, Bibbins’ poetry is an embittered take on life in America during the George W. Bush administration, lines like “wrong decisions are harder to make than most people realize” accurately describing the overall mood and concept of the writer’s objective.
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77 Love Sonnets / by Garrison Keillor
Prominent radio personality and one of America’s premier storytellers, Keillor’s one-of-a-kind humor, irony and appeal are present in this, his first ever collection of “love” poems. Keillor writes like he talks, and readers will appreciate (and laugh) at his pleasant, quaintly comforting style of exposition.