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Malcolm Gladwell: Employers love personality tests. But what do they really reveal?

The problem, as Paul points out, is that Myers and her mother did not actually understand Jung at all. Jung didn't believe that types were easily identifiable, and he didn't believe that people could be permanently slotted into one category or another. "Every individual is an exception to the rule," he wrote; to "stick labels on people at first sight," in his view, was "nothing but a childish parlor game."

# 2004/11/13 Read More Source: www.gladwell.com

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Malcolm Gladwell: Employers love personality tests. But what do they really reveal?

Ernest Miller: Regulation Turns Broadcasters into Gatekeepers

Keep your eye on Sinclair Broadcasting, in my view a new kind of media company-- a political empire with television stations. It was built to prosper in the conditions I have described. It already has a self-conscious political identity. It is already steeped in culture war. And it admires and imitates the Bush method of changing the world, but keeping the same language for the new situation.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Sinclair is the result of our current broadcast regulatory scheme that turns broadcasters into gatekeepers. Change the regulation to reduce gatekeeping and you solve the Sinclair problem. Unfortunately, too many entrenched interests, including politicians and, more importantly, other broadcasters, like gatekeepers.

Malcolm Gladwell: Human Nature

Malcolm explores why we can't trust people's opinions -- because we don't have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke's market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller's Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail.

When consumers tell you what they think, they're just making up stories.

The Perils of Instrospection: people don't have the language to explain thier preferences, so they change their choices to make them easier to explain.

There are a class of products that are difficult to interpret.

Read More Source: www.itconversations.com

John Dagenais: The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture:

John Dagenais argues that the entire physical manuscript must be the basis of any discussion of how meaning was made. Medievalists, he maintains, have relied too heavily on critical editions that seek to create a single, definitive text reflecting an author's intentions. In reality, manuscripts bear not only authorial texts but also a variety of elements added by scribes and readers: glosses, marginal notes, pointing hands, illuminations, and fragments of other, seemingly unrelated works.

Medieval Manuscript Culture

Medieval European culture was fundamentally oral rather than written, in that the commonest means of composing and transmitting most texts (in the sense of imaginative stories and poems and also formal, legal and ritual discourses) was by speaking them aloud from memory and/or imagination.

Medieval writers? sense was that their job was to reinterpret older works and to ?gloss? them ? either in the general sense used by Marie de France, which is to make them into new texts by expanding and explaining them, or in the more technical sense of writing in a translation or commentary between the lines of the text or in its margins. Because of this, much medieval manuscript production was in the form of recopying and adapting, and often translating, earlier texts, and usually declaring what these earlier texts are, in order to carry over some of their authority into the new work.