Bad Reviews: What’s a Novice Author To Do?

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Hooray! I thought all the book reviews were done some time ago, but one more appeared in the December 2006 edition of the Literary Review of Canada.

Boo! Not only is the review (not available online) almost entirely negative, but it also misrepresents the book entirely. I don’t mind the negative, but the misunderstanding and misrepresenting pisses me off something terrible.

I have a response forthcoming in the January/February 2007 edition, in which I do what you are supposed to do and take the high road. It seems to be common wisdom that it is Not The Done Thing to argue with reviewers, although Peter Woit does it all the time (that is, argues with reviews of his string theory book Not Even Wrong) regularly in his blog, and it comes over OK.

So should I post what I really think here on this little corner of the Internet or not? Do I descend into the gutter, biting and scratching and swearing and generally lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, or do I stay up here, tight-lipped and dignified on the lofty high ground, breathing the etherial air that we morally pure people breathe.

What’s the right … Continue reading

Technology Makes You Stupid

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Labour saving devices save you physical effort, so unless you deliberately do something about it, labour saving devices cut down your physical exercise and make you unfit.

New research (via Slashdot and the Independent) shows that brain-saving devices cut down your brain exercise and make you stupid.

On the bright side, the research also shows that those who share my laziness are not condemned to remain stupid, because our brain can still develop.

Satellite navigation systems can stunt your brain, preventing it from developing, according to scientists. They have discovered that taxi drivers have actually grown more brain cells because of all the knowledge they keep in their heads.

When the scientists compared the brains of taxi drivers with those of other drivers, they found the cabbies had more grey matter in the area of the brain associated with memory.

They believe that this part of the brain, the mid-posterior hippocampus, is where black-cab drivers store a mental map of London, including up to 25,000 street names and the location of all the major tourist attractions.

The research is the first to show that the brains of adults can grow in response to specialist use. It has been known … Continue reading

Popularity Rises With Price

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Here’s why people who say that the unemployed should offer to work for less are wrong. It’s actually about tuition fees, but it’s a reminder that price can act as a signal of quality. What’s a little odd is that the price seems to be taken as a signal of quality even though the university itself did not change – that is, there is no guarantee that students who pay the full fees get what they are paying for.

John Strassburger, the president of Ursinus College, a small liberal
arts institution here in the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, vividly
remembers the day that the chairman of the board of trustees told him
the college was losing applicants because of its tuition.

 

At Ursinus College officials determined that tuition was too low to
draw enough students. So they raised it, and applications surged.

It was too low.

So
early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent,
to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help
soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen.

Ursinus
received nearly … Continue reading

Bureaucracy: it ain’t just the government

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A glimpse inside the world of that old efficient, lean and mean, innovative private industry, Microsoft style, from someone who spent a year working on the shutdown menu.

The scary thing about the story is that you can imagine how it happens, one step at a time, with a good reason for each step. This is not a "what’s wrong with Microsoft" story, this is a "what happens in big organizations" story. Read and weep.

Link: moblog: The Windows Shutdown crapfest.

So just on my team, these are the people who came to every single planning meeting about this feature [the shutdown menu]:

  • 1 program manager
  • 1 developer
  • 1 developer lead
  • 2 testers
  • 1 test lead
  • 1 UI designer
  • 1 user experience expert
  • —
  • 8 people total

    • These planning meetings happened every week, for the entire year I worked on Windows.
    In addition to the above, we had dependencies on the shell team (the guys who wrote, designed and tested the rest of the Start menu), and on the kernel team (who promised to deliver functionality to make our shutdown UI as clean and simple as we wanted it). The relevant part of … Continue reading

    Best Seller!

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    Not quite the New York Times best seller list, but I am on the nearly-as-important Words Worth Books best seller list, appearing at number 5 on their paperback nonfiction list (ahead of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth but behind Stephen Lewis, Jane Jacobs and "Waterloo Trails and Bikeways").

    Paperback Non Fiction

    212 – Race Against Time 2/E – Stephen Lewis
    116 – Waterloo Trails & Bikeways
    87 – Fantastic Realities – Frank Wilczek
    80 – Dark Age Ahead – Jane Jacobs
    63 – No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart – Tom Slee
    61 – Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore
    61 – End of Food – Thomas Pawlick
    50 – Guidebook to Woolwich Trails – Trails Group
    49 – Manitoulin Rocks – Peter Russell
    45 – Temperament – Stuart Isacoff
    42 – Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder

    I know that part of the reason is that the staff has been helping to sell the book (Dave, this means you), so many thanks to Words Worth Books for their support of No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart.

    Link: Best Sellers.

    Also see the Words Worth blog, called (I have no idea why) How … Continue reading

    On Doing My Homework

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    The Story So Far

    Anthony Evans and I, as well as the Dorset Dipper,
    got into a bit of argy-bargy in the comments following Chris Dillow’s
    review of No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart. The story so far is this:
    Chris Complained
    that I didn’t address Hayek’s argument "that markets are a way of
    processing countless dispersed pieces of information on people’s tastes
    and technologies."
    I Indicated
    that "I’ve never read much of [Hayek]. The bits I have always seemed to
    be talking about a reality I didn’t recognize. So I can’t really
    address the point, and will go and read. Mea culpa." 
    Anthony Asserted
    that "To write a book on the subject of individualism and free markets
    without reading Hayek is shocking", and on that basis he wouldn’t read
    my book and I’m poorer by $2.
    Now Anthony has followed up with a full-length post of his own, arguing — well, a whole bunch of things actually, which I am going to argue … Continue reading