The New Perspectives Quarterly Fall 2008 issue, now on the rack, addresses itself to globalization and power shifts. Shall the West remain dominant, or is a new paradigm at hand? As usual, a clutch of world thought leaders ponder 'big picture' topics such as China's rise to dominance after centuries of eclipse, the new "crisis of faith" facing Western secularism, challenges to globalization, and more. Contributors include German sociologist Jurgen Habermas, Chinese intellectual Wang Hui, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, author Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine), former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, economist Joseph Stiglitz, former Cal Tech President David Baltimore and others. Check it all out on the Jackson Current Periodicals rack.
According to an article in the New York Times the DVD market is slumping because of the changing viewing habits of consumers. DVDs are now where the industry makes its money, and Nielsen VideoScan reported a 9 percent drop in DVD sales in the third quarter over the quarter a year earlier — before the economy ran into a buzz saw.
Read more about it.
   
There is always an interesting crop of fresh arrivals showing up on the Jackson New Books rack, located near the Trader's Pit.
Code Red: An Economist Explains How To Revive The Healthcare System Without Destroying It (RA395.A3 D743 2008) by David Dranove, a leading expert in healthcare economics, offers pragmatic remedies, some controversial, designed to restore the existing system to vitality. Reviewing the plight of the uninsured, he proposes a new direction for national healthcare, and explains why a century of public and private sector efforts have failed.
Face Time (E906.H54 2008) by Dan Hill analyzes the emotional dynamics at play during the recent presidential race. Using a tool called 'facial coding', Hill studies the faces of the candidates to gauge who was authentic, who was emotionally engaged, and when.
Mark Zandi, Chief Economist and Co-Founder of Moody's Economy.com, takes a panoramic view of the subprime mortgage implosion in his Financial Shock (HF2040.5 U5Z36 2009). Zandi tries to systematically address our questions about the current crisis, and offers advice for investors, policymakers and ordinary citizens.
Finally, Human Resource Transformation: Demonstrating Strategic Leadership in the Face of Future Trends (HF5549.R6358 2008) by Rothwell, Prescott and Taylor spells out what it will take to move HR from the end of the business process chain to a position as the strategic leader in aligning talent with organizational goals. With data gathered from a 20+ year longitudinal study, plus case studies, the book argues the power of human resource professionals to drive organizational change in the future.
 Have you ever wanted to try an e-book reader? Jackson Library has Amazon’s e-book reader Kindle available for you to check out with a sample of five e-books. Get the details in JacksonLine.
In addition to digital books, please check out some of our analog versions. Peter Drucker’s Managing in Turbulent Times is a classic and still relevant today.
This month’s JacksonLine has all of this and much more.
 Yahoo! (YHOO) announced today that Jerry Yang, who helped build the company and has been its CEO since June last year, is stepping down. Upon the appointment of his successor, Yang will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo! , and will remain on the company's board.
"Having set Yahoo! on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader. I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo! realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation," said Jerry Yang. Read the story in New York Times .
 Sallie L. Krawcheck gained national attention in 2002 when Fortune magazine put her on its cover. She was a largely unknown research director at Sanford C. Bernstein then, and the magazine called her one of the “last honest analysts” — at a time when Wall Street was plagued with conflict-of-interest scandals.
She was recruited to Citigroup in 2002 in a bid to burnish the bank’s tainted reputation, her $15 million-plus pay package made headlines. She gained even more prominence two years later when Citigroup, then the world’s biggest bank, appointed her its chief financial officer. A subsequent reshuffling landed her atop the wealth management group.
Ms.Krawcheck left Citibank in September 2008. Read more about it.
GSB Alum Alvaro Fernandez continues to keep us posted on developments in brain fitness research. In his latest dispatch from the front he refers to a blog on the site of his firm, SharpBrains.com that speaks to the challenges of our ageing society, the need to maintain both cognitive and physical fitness, and the importance of developing a healthy ageing agenda for our society.
Th!nk began in 1991 in Norway. By 1998, it produced 1,000+ electric runabouts sold in Norway. In 1999, it was bought by Ford to meet California's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate. By 2003, EV program ended in the US and Ford sold Think. In 2006, a group of investors purchased Think for $15 million. Now Think's chief executive, Willums has raised about $93 million, much of it from Silicon Valley, to help lift Think off the ground.
The company opened an office in Menlo Park, Calif., earlier this year with plans to sell cars statewide in 2009.
Seattle Times, 7/18/08
Related news
Is it 'curtains' for California? The American magazine (November / December) opines that our state is in eclipse, its economic and political dominance a thing of the past. Filled with discouraging statistics, cover story 'Sundown for California' notes growing out-migration from the state, a declining job growth rate, unaffordable housing in urban centers, statewide budget troubles and the 15th highest poverty rate in the nation. The cause? Well ... take a look at the issue, on the Current Periodicals Rack in Jackson Library.
Just a reminder : Capital IQ training session is today, November 12, at Noon, in S150. Feel free to bring your lunch; cookies will be available. Session is for the GSB community only, please.
Can 'surfing' make you smarter? UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function. The most interesting finding was that Internet surfing seemed to activate neurons in the brain more than reading, long thought to be a beneficial activity for the aging. So come on in, the water's fine !
Eric Schmidt was recently interviewed by James Manyika at McKinsey on Google's view on the future of business. It is part of McKinsey’s ongoing work exploring technology's evolving impact on business management and the economy.
You may view the video at the McKinsey site.
Looking for a little comic relief after the tensions of the past political campaign? Check out the October 30 New Yorker article Bound For Glory by Jill Lepore. The author highlights some of the more hilarious aspects of American presidential campaigns of the past two centuries. For example, allegations of alcoholism against Franklin Pierce, whose horse supposedly fell on him during the Mexican War, prompted the Whig party to mock him as the "hero of many a bottle". The Whigs got as good as they gave, when in turn a critic of their 1848 candidate, Zachary Taylor, declared Taylor's only qualification for office "sleeping forty years in the woods and cultivating moss on the calves of his legs". Lepore observes how, after President Andrew Jackson's 'Everyman' image took root, it became almost obligatory for each presidential candidate to show his rustic roots in a log cabin, literally plowing his way up from backwoods fields to the White House. The model endured, in some form, even into the Twentieth century. Adlai Stevenson was probably doomed when he noted, in 1952, "I wasn't born in a log cabin, I didn't work my way through school nor did I rise from rags to riches, and there's no use trying to pretend I did." An amusing romp from the early Republic to the latest campaign shenanigans.
Capital IQ will be providing the GSB some in-person training Wednesday November 12, Noon-1pm in room S150. Current members of the GSB community are welcome. Cookies will be available.
 An article in the NY Times reviews a book written by Stephen Baker titled "The Numerati".
Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t believe that the kind of person you are can be deduced by an algorithm and expressed through shorthand categorizations like “urban youth” or “hearth keeper.”
But the kind of people — “crack mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers” — whom Stephen Baker writes about in “The Numerati” clearly see things differently. In fact, they probably regard such skepticism as more fodder for the math-driven identity formulas they’ve created to satisfy the consumer-product companies and politicians who hire them.
Read more about the book.
For availability of The Numerati in Jackson Library, check the catalog record.
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