The 80/20 Librarian: Focusing on the 20% that matters

The Shadow Scholar: How I Made A Living Helping College Kids Cheat by Dave Tomar is a book that anyone concerned with the U.S. educational system should read. I found the book to be a serious when the topic called for it, but humor is used throughout so it is not dry at all.

The book starts by noting that Tomar revealed his work as a paper writer under the pseudonym Ed Dante in 2010 in the Chronicle of Higher Education. From here the reader gets a glimpse into the author’s disillusionment with higher education and his entrance into the paper writing business in 2001 while in his undergraduate senior year.

Tomar’s critique of the college/university experience is quite candid and concerns a number of points.  The first criticism has to do with the cost of attending a four year institution. On page 91 we learn that the author’s 98 year old great grandfather left him a trust fund which would only pay for a year and a half of tuition and housing thereby forcing Tomar to take on loans. The author comments, “It’s a shame to think that the legacy of a man’s long and remarkable life could be funneled into eighteen months of low-grade, high-fiber dining hall food and Yankee Stadium-size lecture halls.”

A second criticism has to do with the fact that Tomar sees a clear problem with the modern university’s set of priorities. Mainly the concern is that athletic departments get great financing, but the educational side of the university is forced to take budget hits. On page 30 Tomar notes that university professors in a history department had to surrender their desk phones, shrink their doctoral program, face the risk of being personally billed for making photocopies,  and were asked to pay out of their own pockets to access electronic academic journals. However, while all this was happening Tomar’s alma mater is cited as being at the top in terms of providing financial assistance to athletics.

A third criticism deals with the poor service students receive at the hands of academic bureaucracy. In particular much animosity is directed toward Tomar’s experience with the Parking and Transportation department at his alma mater. On page 28 he states, “The people who worked there were a special breed. Among heartless bureaucratic soldiers these were the Green Berets. They were taught to have rhinoceros skin, to breathe hate cloaked in onions.” I also like his quote on page 29, “To be sure, the school prioritized Parking and Trans above education, as though the reason we were there was to defy all laws of physics by parking matter where no space existed.”

Combined with his disillusionment with academia and his need to get out of the cleaning supply company where he worked at right out of school, Tomar found the paper writing business initially attractive. However, as the reader will discover that profession had its drawbacks too. Many issues came up in this line of work that I did not expect. There were customers who got angry at Tomar’s finished product, because they forgot to clearly communicate all the instructions to him and consequently got something that did not fulfill the instructor’s requirements (which never reached Tomar). Dealing with anxiety ridden or disgruntled customers tended to be a constant for Tomar. On page 111 he states, “I dedicated half my emotional energy on any given day just to breathing out the impulse to tell every customer exactly what I was thinking.” When customers nagged Tomar he deliberately tried less hard and claimed that he could write a five page paper in thirty minutes if he didn’t mind producing a piece of donkey excrement (page 97).

There were also parents who would actually interact with Tomar on behalf of their children so that their children would be assured of a great finished paper. On page 100 the author notes, “My customers- years in this business reveal- have been made half brain-dead by the suffocating proximity of their mothers. Credit cards are the new umbilical cord, and they allow childhood dependencies to stretch grotesquely into college and beyond.”

There was also the constant drive to keep on taking more and more assignment (especially around finals time) which eventually lead to Tomar’s burnout.  On page 96 he describes what the final exam season was like, “By the end of Thanksgiving, cheating in school is as pervasive as Charlie Brown specials, Salvation Army Bells, and songs about finding love on Christmas Eve. The students come to us in droves with their end of semester work, willing to pay a premium for a holiday season uninterrupted by school-related tedium. This is when I turn it on full blast. I am a robot. I am a machine. I am a cybernetic organism sent from the future to help John Conner ace his Environmental Design elective.”

Despite all the humorous anecdotes the severity of what was happening in the book hit me when the author noted that a PhD student (who was heavily reliant on Tomar to complete practically his entire PhD work) would in fact be committing fraud by using the entitle of Dr. in front of his name.

Libraries tend not to come out well in the book. The author used the Coastal Carolina University’s Kimbel Library website on cheating prevention to find a paper mill company he could apply to for a job. So the library website on cheating was used in the author’s own words as his own personal Monster.com. In one scene in the book Tomar journeys to his local library to get a book to assist him with a paper, but the librarians can’t find it so he finds the book online.  In general when professors asked that papers be written with traditional print sources instead of electronic sources Tomar found that he was stymied. He tended to disdain professors that did not accept online resources or wanted non-electronic sources for papers. Without the Internet the author claimed that he could not do research.

There are many topics that one will find in this book ranging from the problems of the modern university to parental influence of college age children to research in modern academy to the obvious issues of cheating. I encourage people to read the book and to keep the discussion of these important issues going.

Once upon a secret: My affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath by Mimi Alford is a book that in many ways relayed to me the great cultural changes that have taken place in our society since the early 1960s.  Alford was a nineteen year old from New Jersey who interned at the White House starting in the summer of 1962 and became involved in a nearly 18 month affair with the President. The affair started with visits to the White House swimming pool during her internship and contact continued after Alford returned to school. The President would call her dorm under the fictitious name of Michael Carter. Intrigued readers will want to read the book to learn about the details as to how the affair was carried out.

Making public an affair with the President would have been catastrophically damaging to one’s reputation in the 1960s. Alford discusses keeping the relationship secret for a great deal of her life until historian Robert Dallek’s book on President Kennedy was published in 2003 which alluded to the affair. It was at that point that Alford’s secret could not be kept any longer. I can’t help but feeling that in today’s world (post Monica Lewinsky) this revelation would be almost passé. Given that we live in a more accepting society than the one in the early 1960s Alford probably felt far more safer making the affair public now than at any other point since the end of the Kennedy administration. Alford herself discusses the contrast between the world she grew up in and modern society. On page 97, she writes, “Sex was a closed subject back then: There was no nudity in movies, television was chaste and wholesome; advertising was corny and square by today’s coarse standards. But among my crowd, boy crazy as some of us were, the topic of sex was taboo.”  So while revealing the affair several decades ago would have been almost suicidal, in today’s world all Alford had to do was place herself under house arrest to dodge the media for five days.

In part the book is an effort by the author to unburden herself with the pain the secret has caused her for several decades. Alford had to risk confiding in a few select individuals to attain a measure of peace. Unfortunately she found that her first husband’s reaction to the revelation was to forbid her from ever speaking about her relationship with President Kennedy to anyone ever again.

If you are looking for a brilliant political analysis of the great events that took place during the Kennedy Administration this book will not be for you. Alford discusses the President’s mood during the Cuban Missile Crisis and she notes the rise of the Civil Rights movement, but the events are not dissected in any detail. The book is strictly about the author’s relationship with the President and its impact on her life.

I do feel that the author was unnecessarily harsh on herself by stating that she is only a footnote to a footnote in the history books. It will be up to both historians and the book’s readers to make that decision. They may find that Alford’s book reveals more about President Kennedy than was initially known.

The Injustice System is a powerful account of attorney Clive Stafford Smith’s failed efforts to prove that his client Kris Maharaj was wrongfully convicted for the 1986 murder in Miami of Derrick Moo Young and his son Duane Moo Young. However, there are really two stories at work here. The first story is that of the author’s fruitless actions to have Maharaj set free. The second and equally important story is a critical analysis of the U.S. legal system’s deficiencies. It is this second story that I found profoundly intriguing.

A lot of points that Smith brought to light concerning the judicial system were new to this reviewer and merit mention here. One of the first arguments that the book makes concerns the role that politics plays in how the prosecutor’s office proceeds with their cases. On pages 81 and 82 Smith describes how politics has lead prosecutors away from doing justice and into obsessing over conviction rates. In addition there is often a bias with respect to the fact that many prosecutors inherently believe that anyone who makes it to the defendant’s table is automatically guilty. This reviewer also found it intriguing that Smith underlines the fact that judges, jurors, and prosecutors are asked to make a decision about a defendant’s life without having had the opportunity to meet with the defendant or to get to know the defendant in any meaningful way. A brilliant analogy is made to the hiring process where the author states that he makes better decisions about which employees to hire after spending more time talking to them or having them intern under his direction. Smith on page 85 highlights the three flaws of the prosecutors which are the mindset of those who take the job, the reinforcing nature of the prosecutorial club, and the way the system discourages any contact between prosecutors and the person on trial. An example of prosecutorial zealousness gone awry in the book concerns the case of Shareef Cousins in New Orleans who as a defendant had a prosecutor that willfully withheld evidence and distorted the key witnesses’ testimony.

Another aspect of the criminal justice system is that forensic science may not be all that it is made out to be.  On page 122 Smith argues that there is no scientist with an incentive to question the proposed hypothesis of a forensic scientist. As the author indicates on page 128, “There is no such person as an Anti-Forensic Hair Expert, someone who trains in hair analysis and then spends his entire life testifying that it is a sham.”  As the author notes there must be others in the field who have the ability to cast a critical eye on a scientist’s hypothesis if the scientific method is to work. While the author speculates that an impartial scientific watchdog may be in order here he is equally aware that the funding such an organization may be impossible. In the face of an apparent lack of scientists challenging existing forensic scientific procedures Smith found himself called to trial as an expert witness in the flaws of the forensic analysis of hair samples because he had written an article on the subject.

Another interesting argument Smith makes concerns the role of financial remuneration for those attorneys who work on behalf of capital trial defendants. A blistering critique of the difference in pay between death penalty defense attorneys and corporate attorneys is made by the author. On page 151 Smith indicates that corporate attorneys straight out of law school make over $150,000 a year while a court appointed defense attorney for a capital trial in Texas was only paid $11.84 an hour. The author notes that making sure someone on trial for their life has the best defense possible is of more importance than the litigation between corporations over contractual disputes. However, as Smith underscores on page 155, “The structural problems with the system make it inevitable that people who face the death penalty are represented by the worst lawyers available.”

Another component of the legal system that the author takes aim at is the jury. The author appears to make the argument that some may not be competent enough to be on a jury. We can consider the case of Jack Davis in whose trial not one of the jurors knew what the word mitigating meant (page 229). In addition Smith notes that he encountered a jury foreman who believed that through ESP they could determine that Davis was guilty even though the evidence indicated the contrary (page 229). In the case of Tony Tanner jurors drank alcohol through the trial, smoked marijuana, and two jurors used cocaine (page 231).

While the book takes a journey through the shortcomings of the U.S. legal system the wrongful conviction of Maharaj is a central part of the book. The legal journey that Maharaj has been through since 1986 includes a judge who was convicted of bribery, lying witnesses, a defense attorney who was threatened not to advocate for his client, and a judge who asked a prosecutor for a sentencing order before hearing all the evidence. It is Smith’s opinion that the Moo Youngs were involved in drug trafficking and that they were killed by a Colombian hit squad. In the book Smith notes that a Colombian businessman was staying in a room near the hotel room where the homicides took place. In his quest for the truth the author acknowledges that he cannot discover the truth until individuals come forward with more information that may tell the story of what happened.

If you have any information that may help Clive Stafford Smith please contact him at:

clive@reprieve.org.uk

phone: + 44 (0) 20 73534640

Reprieve, PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS

I liked this article from late January 2013 in the NY Times by Corey Kilgannon. It discusses the circulation of an American Girl doll, named Kristen, in the New York Public Library system. According to the article the demand to borrow Kristen is quite high.

This article may be of interest to children’s librarians out there.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/doll-of-pioneers-spirit-explores-the-city-one-loan-at-a-time/

An update to the story is available from the link cited below.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/at-a-library-an-outpouring-of-support-and-new-dolls/

Greg Smith’s book should be on your reading list if you want a behind the scenes look at the modern organizational culture of one of the most successful financial firms in the world. I found that the book was easy to read and a page turner. The most valuable aspects of this book are the ways in which Smith gives the reader advice as to how he was able to enter the industry and his sharing what ultimately lead to his disenchantment with his career.

Making it into the company was no small feat and I loved Smith’s recounting of his internship experience. One thing that the author did to increase his chances of getting an internship at Goldman was to get an internship after his sophomore year at Stanford. Smith landed an internship at Paine Webber in Chicago before his junior year and then was able to get the Goldman internship after his junior year. Getting the internship after his sophomore year probably gave him a leg up over his competition.

The Open Meeting was a question/answer forum that in which the Goldman managers running the internship grilled the interns on several important topics. The three most important topics were knowledge of the market, knowledge of Goldman Sachs history, and understanding of the business. Interns needed to have answers to whatever question was asked. Interns would be expected to find an answer immediately if they admitted not knowing the answer. Often interns had to scramble to find someone knowledgeable enough to help them out with these questions. Smith talks about how this allowed the interns to build up their relationships with current employees. Interns needed allies/mentors within the organization in order to be able to thrive at the internship. These helpful people were deemed “rabbis” by the author.

The most important part of the internship according to Smith was the intern’s ability to attract the interest of a company manager that wanted to hire them, a “rabbi”. On page 22 Smith notes, “Many interns labored under the misconception that if they did a good job over the summer, they’d be hired. You got hired because you found someone who wanted to hire you: it was as simple and as cruel as that.” Smith’s internship experience was particularly grueling and only half of the interns are given the opportunity to obtain a full time job once the internship is over.

I liked how Smith was able to become a Goldman recruiter and his manner of interviewing as explained on pages 114 to 115 gives one an insight as to what kind of person the financial services is looking for.  Student knowledge of finance and GPA were considered secondary to their judgment and enthusiasm for the business. Smith reasoned that new hires could learn the ins and outs of how finance worked, but they could not be taught judgment and awareness. Also the person had to have a pleasant personality and the ability to get along with others.  As Smith notes, “Arrogant budding finance gurus did not often make it through the Goldman interview process.”

A central dilemma for Smith is the fact that as time went on he began to see his company as a hedge fund instead of a financial institution devoted to serving its clients. In Chapter 8 the author describes the four types of clients. These are the Wise Client, the Wicked Client, the Simple Client, and the Client Who Doesn’t Know How to Ask Questions.  The Client Who Doesn’t Know How to Ask Questions, a simple and trusting investor, was deemed the most vulnerable to invest in exotic assets without knowing what exactly they were doing . On page 163 Smith informs us that top clients were determined by how much fees could be generated off of them.

The author came to see advancement at the company only based on how much business an employee brought in. While Smith had thought this was always important what he saw that was lost in the process were other qualitative measurements. Namely, there was a failure to promote based upon whether the person had leadership abilities, could set good examples for younger employees, was a team player, and had the ability to turn away business that could damage the firm in the long run. Readers will want to learn about Bonus Day, a day when employees would learn what their compensation was. It was not uncommon for workers to work 85 hour weeks and many saw the Bonus Day meeting as a time when they would learn their total self worth.

The author’s work experience in London seems to have set the final stage for disillusionment. It was in this post that Smith would break his silence by publishing his thoughts in the New York Times. In London younger workers no longer embodied the organizational values that had made Smith passionate about his work for many years. Clients were referred to as “muppets” as in effect they were viewed as incompetents that could be manipulated into carrying out trades that were not to their advantage or could cost them plenty of money. On the other hand when Smith tried to create a small U.S. derivatives based business he was told that he shouldn’t do that as the trades would not be lucrative enough to merit the effort. In essence the author saw this as a way in which his firm was turning away business. Finally, Smith did not get a warm reception from his supervisor, the “Black Widow”, a master of corporate assassination. On page 225 Smith sends his supervisor an email about some of his meetings. The reader will want to take note of the supervisor’s response which was, “I don’t typically talk to my employees more than once a month. The only time I want to hear from you is in the form of a one-line email that states how big the trade was and what the GCs (gross credits) were.”

The book leaves the reader grappling with the economic big picture and author’s calls for the political will to hold banks accountable and for an end to abusive practices. As Smith notes the reforms put into place at the end of 1929 allowed for decades of calm in the financial system. Right now the money that is being played with is that of teachers, pensioners, and retirees. Smith concludes that asymmetric information is what is causing the problem. As he notes, “The playing field is not even. The bank can see what every client in the marketplace is doing and therefore knows more than everyone else. If the casino could always see your cards, and sometimes even decided what cards to give you, would you expect it ever to lose?”

This was a wonderfully easy to read book that has some great advice. Basically the subtitle of the book explains it all, it is a Modern Guide to Finding and Keeping Love. Brunson defines himself as the modern day match maker.

I liked the importance of setting that Brunson discusses. In particular a place where one can grab coffee is seen as the best place to get to know someone for the first time. On page 191 the author lists some key attributes of the coffee setting. These are the fact that the venue is public (and hence safe), it is a low pressure environment (Brunson notes that it is laid back and communal), and the price is cheap. Also the caffeine causes one to stay alert which makes one pay more attention to the person that they are speaking to.

On page 193 the worst places to be on a date are the club and the movies. The club is seen by the author as loud, impersonal, and crowded which prevent any meaningful interaction. Also the movies are seen as a bad idea since both people are watching the screen, they cannot get to know one another and talk.

Additionally I enjoyed reading the emphasis that Brunson places on getting outside one’s comfort zone to do things that they would not normally consider doing. Page 189 has the author stating, “This means taking on activities- not just the bar scene- like day hikes, dance lessons, art gallery openings, conferences and trade conventions, martial arts classes, charity/volunteer work, book signings, boxing lessons, joining an amateur sporting league and outdoor city events, such as open markets, street fairs, carnivals, festivals, cookouts and other social gatherings. The more atypical the activity from what you’d normally do, the better.”

Also important are tips about trusting your gut (see page 172) to make sure that the person you are interacting with would be a good fit for a healthy relationship. Finally, the author advises one to not be defeated by hearing the word “No” this can be seen as simply being told to try someone else (see page 72).

I just recently got done reading The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle. Hamilton was on the Postal cycling team with Lance Armstrong, for several years during the time period in which Armstrong raced to the top of the pack at the Tour de France.

The book reads like a confession in which Hamilton unburdens himself by revealing the hidden world of doping that he witnessed starting in 1995 when his cycling career took off.  A professional cyclist in their first year of competition was optimistic and naïve about how things worked. By the cyclist’s second year the reality hit that they would be beaten by the competition if they did not follow the crowd and dope up. According to Hamilton, by the third year the cyclist would have to make a choice to either dope or leave the sport of cycling.

One performance enhancing concoction called EPO is given the nickname Edgar (for Edgar Allan Poe) and is mentioned throughout the book. On page 32 of the book it is noted that EPO acted as a “blood booster that added 20 percent to endurance by causing the body to produce more oxygen carrying red blood cells.” Blood transfusions were another way that cyclists could gain an advantage. The elaborate schemes that the cyclists created to have these performance enhancing treatments administered is incredible. Doctors from different European countries (Spain in particular is noted as being a place where Hamilton went to see several doctors) stored cyclist’s blood for a long period of time in refrigerated facilities and then clandestinely brought it to the cycling teams at certain stages of the race. A random hotel room for instance could be the place where a cyclist and doctor met to have transfusions administered. Prepaid telephones and cryptic text messages would allow doctor and cyclist to communicate about the next doping arrangement. Readers will also want to learn about the Motoman, a Frenchman who brought in performance enhancing drugs to certain Postal cyclists in the 1999 Tour de France on a motorcycle.

Another aspect of the book focuses on the very intimidating character of Lance Armstrong. In the book it seems like Lance was a guy who sure dropped the f bomb a lot. In the late 1990s he rattled a French rider, Christophe Bassons, who spoke out against the doping epidemic by writing about it in Le Parisien (see pages 95 to 96 in the book). Bassons was so intimidated by Armstrong that he had to drop out of the race as no other riders defended him. Also see page 115 when Hamilton recounts a scene where Armstrong actually pulls a French motorist out of his car and beats him up since the driver made the mistake of driving too close to Lance while he was on a training ride. Also you will want to find out what terrible treatment Hamilton got at a restaurant in Aspen, Colorado when he accidentally ran into Lance after his tell all 60 minutes interview (see chapter 15 starting at page 254).

This book is a real page turner and needs to be read by anyone who want to know what has happened to professional cycling in the last 15 years.

You might find it interesting to look at Jacob Bernstein’s October 10, 2012 article in the New York Times entitled “The Education of Tony Marx”.  See http://nyti.ms/ThiOKj. It talks about New York Public Library’s director Tony Marx.

I like Patricia Sullivan’s article in the Washington Post on October 3. She writes, “And public demand is as strong as ever, librarians say. Whether measured by circulation size, customer visits to branches or Web sites, or participation in classes, reading programs or information inquiries, people are using their public libraries. The American Library Association reports that a national 2010 study showed that 4.4 million Americans used their libraries for job-related activities, even as budgets shrank. A Pew Charitable Trusts study of 15 urban library systems, not including Washington, noted that library visits rose 6 percent from 2005 to 2011.”

Take a look at the article at http://wapo.st/VuPWga.

I am doing some catching up as I have not commented on much from August and September.

In looking at the August 3 article by Gary Price in Library Journal (see http://bit.ly/PF73vY) there is discussion about how the results of a UK survey showed that information seekers trust librarians second only to doctors. It is worth taking a look at.