(Not) Counting Trees

While I am not a huge fan of NPR's Terry Gross and Fresh Air, I've always appreciated Jeff Nunberg, a linguist with a frequent column. This evening, he shares his insights on bad apples and their implications for lot--it might not be what you think.

In recent years, we have become obsessed with counting things, that somehow numbers will provide documentation of effort and impact, and ultimately improve what we do. Michael Power, a professor of accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has something to say about this faith in numbers.

How can social network analysis help managers improve (or at least understand) performance? Rob Cross and Andrew Parker take on this important topic in their scholarly grounded, but highly accessible book, The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations.

Per the recommendation of Kathy Walsh (colleague in Political Science), I just finished reading Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America . The book relates a study of who leaves, stays, and returns to one NE Iowa agricultural town. It is an interesting, well-written descriptive qualitative study, but I wish it was a bit more grounded in the rural sociology literature.

I recently finished a fascinating book, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2006), by Richard Lanham. Lanham is an emeritus professor of English who draws on Homer, Peter Drucker, and Barbie to suggest that our society and economics are redefined.

Barchester Towners is an 1857 novel by Anthony Trollope that currently inhabits my nightstand. I like English literature and find that Trollope's characters are a bit more real than that other famed author writing about the same time, Charles Dickens.

Two recent papers on loggers in the NJAF...

Egan & Taggart. 2009. Public Perceptions of the Logging Profession in Maine and Implications for Logger Recruitment. Northern Journal of Applied Forestry 26(3):93-98.