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New Releases by Richard GreeneRichard Greene is the author of The Little Guide to Writing for Impact (2024), The National Fifth Reader (2023), The Caterpillar and the Butterfly (2022), A Curmudgeon's Guide to Postmodern Times (2022), Collected Poems (2021).
The Little Guide to Writing for Impact
release date: Mar 12, 2024
The National Fifth Reader
release date: Jul 23, 2023
The Caterpillar and the Butterfly
release date: Jul 21, 2022
A Curmudgeon's Guide to Postmodern Times
release date: Jun 13, 2022
release date: Dec 23, 2021
release date: Dec 02, 2021
release date: Nov 08, 2021
release date: Oct 26, 2021
The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene
release date: Jan 12, 2021
Roulette russa. La vita e il tempo di Graham Greene
release date: Jan 01, 2021
The National Fourth Reader
release date: Sep 10, 2020
release date: Sep 08, 2020
release date: Dec 24, 2019
Matchless Beauties: The Art of Pin-Up Matchbook Covers
release date: May 28, 2019
release date: May 21, 2019
Spoilers get folks upset—really upset. One thing that follows from this is that if you pick up a book that’s all about spoilers, it may seriously disturb you. So anyone reading this book—or even dipping into it—does so at their peril. Spoilers have a long history, going back to the time when some Greek theater-goer shouted “That’s Oedipus’s mom!” But spoilers didn’t use to be so intensely despised as they are today. The new, fierce hatred of spoilers is associated with the Golden Age of television and the ubiquity of DVR/Netflix/Hulu, and the like. Today, most people have their own personal “horror story” about the time when they were subject to the most unfair, unjust, outrageous, and unforgivable spoiler. A first definition of spoiler might be revealing any information about a work of fiction (in any form, such as a book, TV show, or movie) to someone who hasn’t encountered it. But this isn’t quite good enough. It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say “The next Star Trek movie will include a Vulcan.” Nor would it be a spoiler to say, “The story of Shawshank Redemption comes from a short story by Stephen King.” There has to be something at least a bit unexpected or unpredictable about the information, and it has to be important to the content of the work. And you could perpetrate a spoiler by divulging information about something other than a work of fiction, for example details of a sports game, to someone who has tivoed the game but not yet watched it. Timing and other matters of context may make the difference between a spoiler and a non-spoiler. It could be a spoiler to say “There’s a Vulcan in the next Star Trek movie” if spoken to someone raised in North Korea and knowing absolutely nothing about Star Trek. It can also be a spoiler to say something about a movie or TV show when it’s new, and not a spoiler when it has been around for some years. This raises the distinction between “personal spoilers” and “impersonal spoilers.” Personal spoilers are spoilers for some particular individual, because of their circumstances. You should never give personal spoilers (such as when someone says that they have never seen a particular movie, even though the plot is common knowledge. You can’t tell them the plot). Sometimes facts other than facts about a story can be spoilers, because they allow people to deduce something about the story. To reveal that a certain actor is not taking part in shooting the next episode may allow someone to jump to conclusions about the story. Spoilers need not be specific; they can be very vague. If you told someone there was a big surprise ending to The Sixth Sense or Fight Club, that might spoil these movies for people who haven’t seen them. You can spoil by mentioning things that are common knowledge, if someone has missed out on that knowledge (“Luke and Darth Vader are related”), but you usually can’t be blamed for this. People have some obligation to keep up. This means that in general you can’t be blamed for spoilers about stories that are old. “Both Romeo and Juliet are dead at the end” could be a spoiler for someone, but you can’t be blamed for it. This is a rule that’s often observed: many publications have regulations forbidding the release of some types of spoilers for a precisely fixed time after a movie release. However, some spoilers never expire, either because the plot twist is so vital or the work is so significant. So, if you’re talking to young kids, you probably should never say “Darth Vader is Luke’s father,” “Norman Bates is Mother,” “Dorothy’s trip to Oz was all a dream,” “All the passengers on the Orient Express collaborated in the murder,” “in The Murder of Roger Akroyd, the narrator did it,” “Soylent Green is people,” “To Serve Man is a cookbook,” and finally, what many consider to be the greatest and worst spoiler of them all, “The Planet of the Apes is really Earth.” Some famous “spoilers” are not true spoilers. It’s not going to spoil Citizen Kane for anyone to say “Rosebud is his sled.” This piece of information is not truly significant. It’s more of a McGuffin than a plot twist. A paradox about spoiling is that people often enjoy a work of fiction such as a Sherlock Holmes story over and over again. They remember the outline of the story, and who did the murder, but this doesn’t stop them re-reading. This demonstrates that the spoilage generated by spoilers is less than we might imagine. It’s bad to spoil, but how bad? People do seem to exaggerate the dreadfulness of spoiling, compared with other examples of inconsiderateness or rudeness. Are there occasions when it’s morally required to spoil? Yes, you might want to dissuade someone from watching or reading something you believed might harm them somehow. Also, you might issue a spoiler in order to save the world from a terrorist attack (Yes, this is a philosophy book, so it has to include at least one totally absurd example). A more doubtful case is deliberate spoiling as a protest, as occurred with Basic Instinct. The book ends with three spoiler lists: the Most Outrageous Spoiler “Horror Stories”; the Greatest Spoilers of All Time; and the Greatest Spoilers in Philosophy.
Historical Facts and Incidents Relating to the Family of Richard Greene
release date: Mar 04, 2019
release date: Jul 12, 2018
Stray Studies from England and Italy
release date: Jul 01, 2018
The Ten Commandments of Peak Performance
release date: Jan 21, 2018
The IronMan Mind Book of Quotes
release date: Jan 01, 2018
La filosofia di zombie e vampiri
release date: Oct 03, 2017
The Ten Commandments of Productive Meetings
release date: Jun 12, 2017
release date: Nov 17, 2016
release date: Jan 01, 2013
Supporting What? Kinds of Cooperating, Functioning, Competitive Unit, Performance - Evolving Mixes of All These are What is There to Support
release date: Jan 01, 2013
Social & Idea Plasmas from Social & Idea Fusions -- Replicating Silicon Valley in China Using 45 Models of Innovation
release date: Jan 01, 2013
Multiple Models of Creativity
release date: Jan 01, 2013
64 Functions (& 4 Dimensions) of Leadership and Management
release date: Jan 01, 2013
Assessing Notice & Handling of 256 System Effects
release date: Jan 01, 2013
48 Capabilities of Highly Educated People
release date: Jan 01, 2013
RESEARCH QUESTIONS -- causes of top performance in traditional fields, effective operations across disciplines, & solving problem in gaps between fields 1. What causes certain people to rise to the top of all traditional disciplines? 2. What is a scientific basis for cross-discipline work? 3. What will solve the narrowness problem of traditional disciplines causing more and more problems to fall in the cracks between them? 4. Is there such a thing as “educatedness” distinct from effectiveness and creativity, such that people can be effective and/or creative in various ways yet underperform for lack of “educatedness”? The Excellence Science research project got 315 eminent people in 63 strata of society, half American, half global, to nominate what enabled the best people in their own field to rise to the top, producing 54 orthogonal fields, cutting across all traditional fields and determining who rises to their tops, then they were asked to nominate 150 people in each of those 54 orthogonals. One of those orthogonals was “educatedness”. This paper reports what 150 highly educated-acting people, thusly nominated, said constituted their own “educatedness” and “educatedness” as they encounter it in others. In doing so it provides answers, some quite partial, to all the above research questions. RESEARCH APPROACH & METHOD -- two level nomination process identifies highly educated acting people asked to specify what educatedness is: 1. tap social consensus on what “highly educated people” are capable of, if it is there and accessible via indirect approaches 2. to bypass and/or heal ideological factions blocking policies to promote higher levels of educatedness attainment 3. by asking a highly diverse set of eminent people to nominate the most “highly educated-acting” people that they know 4. then surveying those “highly educated acting” people for what constitutes, in their view, their own “educatedness” 5. then surveying them for what behaviors and capabilities they expect from highly educated persons like themselves 6. get both representational and relational definitions of educatedness from these “highly educated-acting” persons LITERATURE POINTS -- Philosophers of education have distinguished education from learning (Arendt, 1954. 1993), procedural from declarative knowledge (Russell and Norvig, 2003), literacy in one''s own civilization from literacy in handling diverse civilizations (Geertz, 1983), training for performing existing social roles from training for inventing new social roles from training for refounding existing social roles on new technical and social substrates (Brown and Duguid, 2000), educating in order to socialize kids to your favored values from educating to free kids from your favored values (Anderson, 1983). These distinctions, are lost in a clutter of ideological conflicts about what sorts of human beings “to make” via education system Goliaths. GET BEYOND 5 DYSFUNCTIONS -- Five dysfunctions in policy discussions by publics and policy makers on “educating” and what it is to produce, from ideological contexts of discussion, are identified in this paper. Nevertheless, there might be considerable social consensus on what “educated person behavior” is, in various situations, available, perhaps, if we approach people outside of their usual ideological contexts. This paper reports the tapping of that latent consensus using artificial intelligence techniques from expert system building “protocol analysis” and customer requirements assessment techniques from total quality programs. The model it produced potentially resolves the five dysfunctions in policy discussions of “educating” and its intended outcomes. 150 people, nominated as “highly educated-acting” by 315 eminent people, half American, half global, in 63 strata of society, were given surveys asking them in over 20 diverse ways what their own “educatedness” was and what “educatedness” was in others. This paper reports a thorough bottom up categorization of their collective answers. RESEARCH RESULTS -- two categorical models of the 48 capabilities shared by most “highly educated-acting” people, one from 150 highly educated people and another from philosophers of education, for comparison purposes. Content analysis of survey results was done, marking behaviors unique to educatedness, marking distinctions of educatedness from effectiveness and creativity, naming marked ideas, grouping similar such ideas, ordering them, resulting in a model having 48 distinct dimensions of “educated person behavior” (each dimension of the 48 in the model was mentioned by at least 20 nominees). The same procedures were applied to texts by well cited philosophers of education, getting their behaviors of educated-acting people to form a basis of comparison with the first model. Use of the first model to assess the degree of “educatedness”, produced by various institutions and instructors, and to specify exact solutions, for certain hard-flaws-to-correct in business persons, that any manager encounters, is described.
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