Not that I’d mind, but I don’t think so.
I am:
William Gibson
The chief instigator of the “cyberpunk” wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.
Which science fiction writer are you?
[Original draft 2/13/2008. In preparation for my blog redesign, I went through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]
Seth Grodin writes about Getting serious about your meeting problem:
If you’re serious about solving your meeting problem, getting things done and saving time, try this for one week. If it doesn’t work, I ll be happy to give you a full refund.
- Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
- Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
- Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don’t, kick them out.
- Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I’m serious.
- If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.
- Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you’re done. Not your fault, it’s the timer’s.
- The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
- Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
- If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.
Even though I have some fear the results could be disastrous, I would love to try this at faculty meetings.
[In preparing for my blog redesign, I found draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them. Original draft 3/26/2009, but this one is timeless.]
2011: The pedant in me wants to know how someone can be “more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting” other than by being the only person who doesn’t turn up at all.
See also How to Run A Meeting (7/16/10).
Serious fog is rare in Miami. We get the occasional wisp of mist, but this morning’s drive was the foggiest I can recall in a long time: Visibility was maybe three car lengths in traffic.
Then again, there was much less traffic than usual too, so that was fine.
(Photo: Fog over downtown Miami, January 2008, by miami_jj. Some rights reserved.)
While you were having your vacation I was, among other things, enjoying various bits of diagnostic medicine, most of it fortunately not too invasive. Most of the tests were routine, one — that my doctor called “semi-routine” — was due to an inconclusive result of a routine test, and one was an ordinarily routine test made more salient as it would also rule out various unpleasant possible diagnoses not inconsistent with my condition. I might have been tempted to call some of it defensive medicine, except that with my recent history there do seem to be reasons for what otherwise might seem an excess of caution.
Anyway, all the results are now in, and they’re all good.
So here, to celebrate, is a video about luck:
Maybe I belong in the video?
A number of friends have been writing to me to ask what I think of the article in today’s NYT, Is Law School a Losing Game?, by David Segal.
Much of what I think can be found in last month’s blog post, Do Our Graduates Have Jobs? What Are They Making?, but here are a couple of additional thoughts prompted by the article.
Overall, there is a lot of truth in this article, but also some cherry-picking. In other words the article accurately shows how bad it can be in some cases, but not how bad it is for the average graduate (which can be tough these days, but not as bad as the examples in the article). The student who is the main example seems unusual in three ways: 1) He borrowed to the max, and not just for law school. 2) He went to Thomas Jefferson Law School, which is categeorized by US News as a Tier 4 law school — the lowest tier they’ve got. So, fairly or not, the diploma has less market value than most. We’re not told what his class rank was, either. 3) The guy seems somewhat irresponsible and disorganized: He picked TJL without doing any research: “Michael Wallerstein knew little about the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, other than that it was in San Diego, which seemed like a fine place to spend three years.” At another point in the article he’s quoted as saying, “I’m not really good at keeping records.” Honestly, would you want someone like that as your lawyer?
There is another way in which Wallerstein might be a bit more representative, though: “When Mr. Wallerstein started at Thomas Jefferson, he was in no mood for austerity.” He spent too much loan money on living expenses instead of trying to live cheap. There’s still a lot of that around.
The underlying economics for law students borrowing all the way up to the max does indeed look bad if they are not in a top-20-or-so law school unless they end up in the top 20% or so of their class, have connections, or a special skill (e.g. science for patent law). Most others need to be frugal, and also to decide whether they are in it just for the money. If a career in law promises no psychic returns — ie fun or fulfillment — then if you are going to even a mid-tier school and doing it all on borrowed money, it makes sense to question how sure you are that you can do well enough to make it a good financial investment.
If, as the NYT article suggests, more representative students will need to earn $65K per year to pay off their debt, that figure is in fact attainable for a chunk of graduates from Tier 1 (top 100) law schools, but exactly how many is hard to say and it is quite clearly not attainable for all of them. At least at UM (currently Do Our Graduates Have Jobs? What Are They Making?, and remember that only 68% of the graduates work in private practice, and only 33% of all graduates provided salary information, so discount accordingly), 2) a growing slice of the law grads in the US (something on the order of 10% at UM in 2009) can’t find legal jobs at all, 3) public interest work and government work almost always pays less than that $65K starting salary level. (Recall, though, that not everyone has the same debt overhang, so some of the others in the lower-paying public or non-profit sector may have self-selected because they can afford it, or may see the jobs as good ways to gain experience before going private.)
Bottom line: Almost everyone coming in used to think the big bucks were within reach. The facts tell a different story.
Global No Pants Subway Ride 2011 is scheduled for this Sunday in New York and 47 other cities in 22 countries. But Miami isn’t on the list.
OK. We don’t actually have a subway, just an elevated MetroRail, but even so, where are TransitMiami or SFDB when you need them?
You might ask, given all the beaches in Miami and the people wandering around in swimsuits, whether there would be a point to it, but here’s the thing: due no doubt to the same idiocy that makes the so many Metrorail stations difficult for pedestrians to access, the MetroRail doesn’t go to Miami Beach. In fact, I don’t think it goes to any beaches.
And anyway it won’t be all that hot this weekend. The forecast is that it will barely get into the mid-70s.
Jotwell Blenderlaw
