Webmonkey’s MP3 Overview

I’ve been saying all week with relief that at least it’s not another Bush-Quayle ticket. Now: How Dick Cheney Is Like Dan Quayle by Timothy Noah Slate

The new issue of the Journal of Mundane Behavior is out, and has several worthwhile articles (and one impenetrable one which I’m not blinking). First, Validating Your Merit in Letters of Application for Employment: “We

find and describe five supporting sources that letter writers use to convince readers of their merit:

Self-report, important others, objective indicators, achievements, and previous roles and experiences.

The idea of introducing evidence to convince target people (e.g., potential employers) can be generalized

to any context in which actors seek to convince a judgmental audience about self-presentation claims.

This idea, which we label ‘self-validation,’ suggests that the ‘truth’ in self-presentation and in

applications for employment is not as clear as may be thought.” This could actually be useful in thinking about how to write these letters.

Tilting at Windmills Why physicians need to learn to be more mundane with their patients. We psychiatrists already understand this as the essence and the privilege of the way we interact with and help our patients. Journal of Mundane Behavior

The mundane and the limits of the human. About storytelling and its relationship with the mundane.

A useful way to think of the mundane is as a story that, we assume, does not need to be told. If something is mundane, we

assume, it is something with which everybody is so well acquainted that relating these details is not only boring but redundant.

The assumption that the mundane does not bear examining is the same assumption as that of a story that does not need telling.

But it is precisely these stories that we assume are so self-evident they don’t need to be told that play crucial roles in

determining who we are and, more crucially, what we exclude, silence and ignore in order to maintain this determination.

Considers the fascinating comeuppance anthropologist Elizabeth Bohannon (Shakespeare in the Bush) received when she explored her hypothesis of the universal resonance of Hamlet by telling the story to a group of elders of the Tiv, a West African tribe that had never heard of Shakespeare. Journal of Mundane Behavior

(Sort of) New Hacker Resource site: ‘Hacker News Network announced earlier this week that it will be merging its

website with the websites of its “parents,” L0pht Heavy Industries and @stake. All

three groups focused on improving knowledge about computer and Internet security,

and now the three related websites will consolidate to offer news analysis (currently

covered by Hacker News Network), security advisories, white papers, and tools

(currently offered by the L0pht), and comprehensive security services (from

@stake).’ Geek News