endurance book forward by malcome glagweell

#Endurance book forward by malcome glagweell serial

Inside the Mind of BTK (a three-letter abbreviation for bind, torture, kill), about Wichita, Kansas, serial killer Dennis Rader, 'was the protégé of the pioneering FBI profiler Howard Teten, who helped establish the bureau's Behavioural Science Unit, at Quantico, in 1972.' In turn, Teten was a protégé of James Brussel, who profiled New York's Mad Bomber in the mid-1950s. 'But wait,' Gladwell cautions: 'do we really know what mafiosi look like?' Alas for pit bulls, we do know what they look like.ĭangerous Minds profiles FBI profiler John Douglas (Thomas Harris's model for Agent Jack Crawford in On the face of it, doing random searches in the hunt for terrorists - as opposed to being guided by generalizations - seems like a silly idea.' Gladwell then cites an unnamed New York 'columnist' who opined that we know what jihadists look like, just as we know what mobsters look like, ''even as we understand that only an infinitesimal fraction of Italian-Americans are members of the mob.'' 'Following the transit bombings in London,' he writes, 'the New York City Police Department announced that it would send officers into the subways to conduct random searches of passengers' bags. This causes Gladwell agonies of political correctness. The dogs were bred for fighting, but not all pit bulls are vicious. Troublemakers opens with a graphic description of three pit bulls savaging two-and-a-half-year-old Jayden Clairoux in Ottawa, in February, 2005, the attack that led Ontario to ban pit bulls. Troublemakers can be believed, pit-bull terriers teach us about racial profiling. Bush does not.' Bush, we are told, 'moves like a boy, which is fine, except that, unlike such movement masters as Reagan and Clinton, he can't stop moving like a boy when the occasion demands a more grown-up response.' Oh dear me! 'Movement analysts tend to like watching, say, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan they had great phrasing. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive backward - even a quarter of an inch - means non-threatening.' Anyone who knows dogs knows this is a truism. The title essay, featuring Cesar Millan, host of National Geographic TV'sĭog Whisperer, turns ethology into pop psychology: 'A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. But Gladwell, as innocent of CRM as the Obama White House, thinks that complexity itself is sufficient cause for failure. Only in top-down organizations with military command structures (which amplify errors) is CRM problematical.

Hospital operating rooms use the CRM mantra of 'see it, say it, fix it' to stop disasters-in-progress. While Gladwell lectures about 'risk homeostasis,' he overlooks the CRM (cockpit resource management) procedure instituted after the 1978 crash of United Flight 178 in Portland, Oregon. Yet Morton Thiokol and NASA management overruled engineers who wanted to postpone the launch because of the freeze-up the night before. Morton Thiokol's solid-booster O-ring would shatter in cold weather, as the late Richard Feynman demonstrated by dropping one into a glass of ice water. Inīlowup, he asserts that no one can be blamed for the Challenger disaster 'and we'd better get used to it.' Engineers know their materials. Gladwell is clever, engaging, informative, funny, discursive, facile, glib, shallow and obtuse. Gladwell attributes the reviewer's spleen to his refusal to join Pinker 'on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism.' Worse, he charged Gladwell with 'a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical process in favour of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition.'

What the Dog Saw for The New York Times, accused Gladwell of bad spelling and banality. No slouch on the bestseller circuit himself, Pinker, reviewing Gladwell's disdain for pedagogical tests has triggered a spat with Harvard linguist (and fellow Canadian) Steven Pinker. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.' 'There are certain jobs,' Gladwell observes in the same essay, 'where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired. No test yet devised can divine who will make a great quarterback, a dilemma that applies to all human endeavours. An aspect of this is the so-called quarterback problem. Most Likely to Succeed, observes that intelligence-test results imperfectly model real-world performance.

Endurance book forward by malcome glagweell