Stem Cells, Nursing, and the Architecture of Learning

I know, I know, way different subjects. But that's why I'm a generalist and not a specialist. All at levels that the generalist can understand, I assure you. I indexed all of the following, copyedited and proofread the psychiatric nursing book, and proofread the other two nursing education books. Whew! Several seven-day weeks in this.

Stem Cells For Dummies, by Lawrence S.B. Goldstein and Meg Schneider, is another in the Dummies series on what seems to be almost everything. And again, they've picked a couple of authors who can explain the complex in direct terms for the rest of us, including a careful description of the controversy surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells in particular. The main point they make, and an important one for the uninitiated, is that there are "adult" tissue stem cells as well as embryonic ones, so even if one objects to the use of embryos, there are other options that don't destroy what some would categorize as a human entity. There is a definite lean to sticking to the facts of the issue, which I found refreshing. The authors also bring us back down to reality about both the potential and the current limitations of stem cell research. Some of the potentials are nice, but they are not likely to become reality real soon. All in all, a very good explication of the field of stem cell research and its political and moral aspects.

Spent so much time on three nursing textbooks over the past couple of months that I almost feel like an expert on psychiatric nursing and nursing education. Points to ponder include the plethora of drugs for mood-related illnesses with side-effects that will blow you away, and the educational issues involved in treating folks from different cultures (they may not properly acknowledge what you're teaching, even if they understand the language). People have their own folk remedies and ideas about illness from different cultural/religious backgrounds, which can make education on treatment rather complex.

The Architecture of Learning, by Kevin Washburn continues the general theme of learning styles and teaching approaches that was covered in the (unrelated) nursing books, but Washburn is focused on changing the way general teaching is done, to emphasize the importance of going through a process to reach true understanding, rather than simply memorizing facts, etc. I liked the idea, actually, and he had a number of real-world examples to make his program clear.

Next week, I'll get to the SQL For Dummies (always wondered what that was all about?) and Medicaid (Yep, got another one) books.

Medicare Reform, Conflict Resolution, and Farm Workers

Interesting variety in the indexing project biz over the last month or so.

My conservative think-tank client, the American Enterprise Institute, is busy coming up with free market alternatives for all the healthcare reform ideas, and this is one of them. Medicare Reform is a proposal to expand Medicare Advantage, the privately insured portion of Medicare, using the argument that private insurers can take care of medical consumers' needs better than single-payer, government-run options. And, again, the economic conservatives have some efficiency points, but they still fail to understand that "consumers" of healthcare do not shop for healthcare services on price. If they have a choice between the Lord and Taylor version of healthcare and the WalMart version, they will choose Lord and Taylor, particularly if their physician recommends it, regardless of the cost, because it is life and death, health and illness that are at stake. Capitalism has too much potential to create perverse buying incentives in the healthcare biz. The doctors are in danger of moral hazard by running businesses and investing in products and services they will benefit from seeing used. It just makes no sense to me, but the authors at least provide rational arguments backed by statistics, which is more than I can say for the politicians currently debating healthcare in the U.S. Senate.

Conflict Resolution For Dummies is a very good overview of all the elements and processes required for successful conflict resolution among human actors. I actually internalized some of the techniques for my own family situation, so these tips are not just for diplomats by any means. The main point is to not let your emotions carry you away into escalating conflict. Resolution often means that one person needs to step back and look at things from a more neutral perspective, or, if this is not possible, find a third party who can. And for successful resolution, one often needs to give up the goal of being right. That doesn't mean giving in to the other person's demands, necessarily. It's an attitude thing that causes one to ask questions and seek understanding first, rather than automatically trying to defend a position, often without having all the facts and motivations of the other person on the table. Like most of the For Dummies series, the author for this book was obviously chosen for experience and expertise in these conflict resolution techniques.

Farm Workers and the Churches, by Alan Watt is an analysis of the role of religion in the farm worker labor movement of the 1960s in both California and Texas, and how it worked well in the former location, but not so well in the latter (big surpise! not.) Watt explains how Cesar Chavez used Mexican traditional religious practices (a combination of official Catholicism and pre-Christian amerindian practices) to inspire the workers to strike and carry on a march to Sacramento, as well as to keep them focused on their goal and away from violent reaction to farm owners' resistance. The result was a set of collective bargaining agreements and better working conditions. In Texas, by contrast, the movement was not as coherent, and along with seasonal conditions that ended up favoring the commercial farming owners, worked to subvert the farm workers' strike and march-to-Austin efforts. The Texas Rangers' harassment and the overt racism against Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas also contributed to a failure to obtain agreements and better working conditions. I live in Texas now (although I'm a Yankee from New England by origin), and I would agree that any kind of labor movement here would be subverted, largely by the continued availability of cheap and often illegal labor from south of the border that is easily exploited by Anglo business interests.

Garden Cemeteries and the Green Living Movement

Last time I promised to tell you about Glenwood Cemetery here in Houston. New coffeetable book with lots of great photos, called Houston's Silent Garden by Sally Turner and Joanne Wilson. I thought Houston had bulldozed and condo-ized almost everything of any historical value, but I was wrong. Just west of downtown, there's this garden cemetery. Instead of the traditional method of burying people next to a church, Glenwood was part of a 19th-century trend toward larger, beautifully landscaped municipal cemeteries, with spots for folks from different religions in a calming, pastoral environment. Calm and pastoral settings are pretty much a thing of the past in business-is-everything Houston, so I was quite surprised to see that this place was intact. Many historical figures from the growth of Houston are interred there, along with the most famous "resident" of all, Howard Hughes. I was actually inspired to drive into town and see it, take some photos of my own. Fascinating place, indeed, with some of the oldest and therefore largest, live oak trees in the area. I agree with publisher (Texas A&M Press) and authors alike that it's way past time for Glenwood Cemetery to be more visible. Indexing this large-format and photo-heavy book was a bit of a challenge. Lots of entries under "angels" and "children" (most unfortunate, but a common event a century or more ago), and "monuments." Death and life juxtaposed as only humans can manage it.

And speaking of green space, sort of a segway), I got to index two little books on living green in general, and making your home greener. Another of Labyrinth Publishers' how-to books in lesson form. Sustainability is defined, and then various tips given on things like recycling, reusing, reducing, shifting to renewable energy, composting and expanding the individual effort to the local community level. A nice synopsis of the green movement to this point. Did you know that candles and room fragrance stuff can be just as toxic as tobacco smoke and cleaning solvents? I advocate beeswax candles over the icky paraffin kind you normally find in the stores, and I'll have to talk to my daughter about her Glade habit. Might be better to get to the Whole Food market and look up some essential oils instead.

I am now in a short hiatus from work while awaiting my next indexing project (due in tomorrow), a book on farm workers and the churches. I'll let you all know the details on that one in my next post.

From Trust to New Software

Definitely need to get a regular thing going with this blog. So many interesting books to work on, and the story of their indexing and editing needs to be told.

In my last post, I hinted at a book about trust. This is social science stuff about how trust works in groups of people. Social networks are key to building trust, of course, and ethnicity is a factor, but not as strong as personal knowledge of someone. Trust is also not necessary for cooperation to occur. Social institutions can foster cooperation even where personal trust is not evident. The book used experimental (game-theory based) and survey studies on ethnicity and cooperation, experience with the court system, credit and creditworthiness, behavior expectations, availability of information about others, institutional roles, community structures and leadership, and the physician-patient relationship to analyze the roles of trust. This multi-authored book is designed for the social science scholarly audience, but it gave me some interesting things to think about, particularly that we need to go for cooperation even when full personal trust is not available.

The next book to index was also a scholarly tome, but one with great applicability to a current and very hotly debated topic in the media and every neighborhood in the land: health care reform. Now, don't get fussy, dear liberals. This book is being published by the American Enterprise Institute (Medicare and the FEHBP) and takes a consumer-oriented, economically conservative view of providing health care. My only real problem with the book's viewpoint was their assumption that folks purchase health care with the same kind of price-conscious comparison shopping they use for an LCD TV screen. Unfortunately, this is largely not the case. And they also don't take into account both insurance and medical community greed in making decisions on health care provision. But the focus of the book is actually on how and how well certain reformed aspects of Medicare (did you know that there is more than just the original "socialized" version?) and the federal employees health insurance program actually work already and could be used as models for expanded health care coverage. Remember when Pres. Obama said something about the rest of us having access to something like what he and all the members of Congress get? Well, the FEHBP is that program. It and Medicare Advantage (the new Medicare version that works in addition to the original) work more like regular health insurance programs. The idea is to have the spending on health care come out of the premiums, not the taxpayers, just like it's supposed to do in the private insurance sector. Overall, both programs looked like pretty good models for a public option for health care for the rest of us, and they are already in place and working. Also, I don't see how they would "threaten" private insurance companies (not that I have much sympathy for them since they abandoned the whole point of insurance in order to make way too much money). The funny thing is how this fairly reasonable analysis is coming from a conservative think tank, while some right-wingers are raving against anything administered by the government. Although the author here doesn't totally take into account the psychology of health care consumption, he does have some good ideas.

And now for the techy part. Things slowed down a bit in late August/early September (getting really busy again now in October, which is good for pocketbook catch-up), but I mainly worked on techy how-to docs in September. The first Photoshop Elements For Dummies. I always thought Photoshop was too hard to dig into, but they cleared up a bunch of things.

Next comes this new thing, Google Voice, in this case in the form of Google Voice For Dummies. Basically centralizes all your phone stuff, work, landline home, cell, to be managed mostly online. It even transcribes your voice mails into written messages that come to your email. You can really control which phone rings for what purpose and control time better. But, I didn't see it applying to everyone, certainly not me. I am a cell-phone-only person with maybe 20 contacts who does 90% of her business via email anyway. But if you work for a company (and they let you forward to Google Voice), have a home landline and a cell, and especially if you're in a job that fields a lot of calls, this could be a good tool. There are some glitches, like not being able to transport your current phone number into being your Google Voice number, but this book provides a number of management tools to deal with whatever challenges may occur. It's a neat idea.

Just last week, I got to do my annual re-index of Kathy Ivens's Running QuickBooks Premier Editions (this time for the 2010 version). Kathy, an accounting specialist, has been writing these how-to guides to supplement the official software guides for about five years, I think. At least I know I've indexed them several times. QuickBooks, like Quicken, has all these interesting quirks that don't seem to apply to other programs. Would be nice if they were all standardized and fixed, but in the meantime, Kathy keeps us sane. Although QuickBooks is a great tool for running small businesses, it does have limitations, and Kathy helps you tweak the software to get the best out of if for your type of business. And when I index it now, I just have to take out the old index, strip the page numbers, and go through the document as I normally would, changing page numbers, adding and subtracting content. It's a little faster than doing an index for a new book.

Next up, finishing the index for the Glenwood Cemetery here in Houston, another accounting book, living green, and copyediting a psychiatric nursing textbook. Now you can see why I rarely ever get bored. I promise to be back in a couple of weeks this time. Hold me to it and nag me on Twitter if I don't (http://twitter.com/muselady11).

Windows 7, Citizenship, and Social Enterprise

Two scholarlies and a how-to indexed since I last posted.

Got a nice peek at Windows 7 through Windows 7 For Dummies indexing project. It seems to be tweaked to take care of some of Windows Vista's issues that drove everyone crazy (I stuck with XP and so did not have the Vista experience). Sounds like we're stuck with enhanced security and having Windows 7 try to do everything for us, which is often frustrating for savvy users, but this book tells you all about customizing and working around whatever issues you have so that Windows 7 will be a more satisfying operating system experience. Net judgment is that Windows 7 should be the next Microsoft OS that everyone ends up getting. Meanwhile, I'm thinking seriously about rejoining the Apple Mac world after fourteen years with Windows. I do enjoy indexing these kinds of books, though. Nice and straightforward.

The American Enterprise Institute (my conservative think-tank client) is publishing a nice comparison of how citizenship works in America vs. Europe. It reminded me of some of the truths that are left about American exceptionalism and the interesting democratic experiment we embarked on over 200 years ago. Our Constitution is so ... short compared to the bloated ones that other nations and the European Union try to put together these days, and yet the U.S. version's generalities are also its flexibility and therefore its strength. The Europeans are so intent on listing out every human right that folks have coming to them that they lose a lot of flexibility. On the other hand, the Europeans are moving, slowly, past the idea of the nation-state and into the more universal realm of human rights. But citizens also have responsibilities, and the EU doesn't really deal well with those. The U.S. has lost sight of the obligations of citizenship as well, and this imbalance does not bode well for the long-term survival of democratic polities.

Social enterprise seems to be a process of making nonprofit or social-purpose organizations more business-like, and to have them use capitalist practices to raise money through for-profit partners or subsidiaries. Charitable giving and government support systems having declined in most places, nongovernmental organizations are looking for alternative ways to keep funding flowing to meet their social welfare goals. And some for-profit businesses are actually looking at something besides the bottom line for a change. This is a global comparison of social enterprise, so it compares American, Argentine, southern African, and Asian methods for using social enterprise.

Next up are Marketing For Dummies and a scholarly book on trust from a social science perspective.

Literary Criticism and Psychoanalysis

Well, the Mac server documentation is in hiatus again. The March/April project has turned into a may-be-done-by-August project. Typical. So, while I've been waiting for more docs from Apple, I've worked on indexes for totally different books, in this case three literary criticism tomes in a row (really, don't attempt this at home) and a lovely take on transference in the psychoanalytic relationship, Jungian style.

In the lit crit area, I must say that I do think that this particular ivory tower activity can get really overwrought, but I did learn some things about 19th- and early 20th-century fashion in the process. First up was an analysis of Edith Wharton and clothing. She was quite the fashion maven and wrote fashion liberally into her work to demonstrate moral stances, social status, and emotional states. I learned all about the shift from corsets to brassieres in the early 20th century as part of the liberation of women. This one of the lit crit books was the most readable, largely because of the historical content.

Earlier in the 19th century, and perhaps surprisingly to some, Emily Dickinson turned out to be quite conscious of fashion and appearances. She didn't really become a recluse until later in life, and had quite an active social circle, primarily centered around her household. She used clothing in symbolic fashion in her poetry to hint at eroticism and emotional states, as well as talking social status in her many letters to friends and family. The most enjoyable part of this project was actually reading the poetry excerpts. Emily had quite the gift.

The most opaque lit crit book was one on immigrant stories and the importance of place, which illustrated the social, economic, political, and emotional issues raised by the immigration of Europeans and Jews in the late 19th/early 20th century, and the conditions for Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicanos in the Southwest in the second half of the 20th century. The author analyzed several fictional pieces where place was instrumental in creating new cultural homes for immigrant populations.

Must remember not to take any more lit crit books unless they have a good historical narrative of their own. From an indexing perspective, they are complex semantically, filled with lit crit jargon, and often seemingly disconnected from the real world. And they take a long time to index, but do not command a fee commensurate with their complexity.

The Jungian psychoanalysis book was fun, though, but I like that sort of thing anyway. Also semantically complex, but I favor Jung's ideas about the collective unconscious and the psychoanalytic path to psychological healing. Jan Wiener, the author of this book, did a fine job of explaining how Jung sees the therapeutic relationship and its dichotomy of transference (projection) from patient to therapist, and the countertransference feelings that the therapist has to deal with.

So, still waiting for more Apple docs, and in the meantime, I'll be indexing Windows 7 For Dummies. Should be a nice peek at the new operating system. Nothing like variety to keep my interest in indexing going.

Tech Docs and Finding Pete

My series of server documents for the Apple Mac OS X Server platform has been taking up most of my time (it's now a May/June project). Indexing them involves not just reading and typing in terms into my indexing program, but also embedding those terms as index elements in the XML-based program that Apple uses to create their documents. A bit awkward, but it does mean that when they make any changes, the index elements will ensure that the page numbers in the index stay accurate. I've had some not unexpected delays in getting to play with all of these thirty guides on everything from managing your wiki service to mail, firewalls, directory domains, user management, remote management, web services. Looks like we're moving up against the release date for the new version, so, I'll have to get access to the rest of the docs soon and get them all indexed. Ah, the technology world; they never plan in enough time to do anything, I think.

Also in the technical documentation world, but much more basic, are the cell phone guides for Nokia. I worked on part one of this project earlier, and did part two in late April. Indexed one more guide as a sample for the writers to get the idea, and then used the three guides I'd indexed to build them a standard vocabulary so their technical writers can take it from here and make future indexes more consistent. A standard vocabulary is harder than you think to put together, especially when you're dealing with two versions of English (British and American), but they settled on British as their preference, so that makes things simpler. So, buy a Nokia phone or PDA and you should have a much better index in the back in case you want to do something specific that's not in the table of contents (how do I change the lighting on my display?).

And, just to keep my hand in on real narratives, I worked on Finding Pete, a memoir by Pete Hunting's sister, Jill, of her search for his memory after he died in Vietnam in 1965. Jill's mother hid all his letters in her grief and wouldn't allow the family to talk about him. The silence was deafening. Jill was a teen at the time of his death and ended up taking a 40-year journey through the grief process before actually finding all his letters and going to Vietnam (1991 and 2006) and getting closure.
The really neat thing about Pete is that he wasn't a soldier or sailor or airman. He was a civilian in a nongovernmental foreign aid organization called the International Voluntary Service (an inspiration for the Peace Corps) that was working in the hamlets of rural Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I never knew. All the historical analysis I've seen has been on the military presence. These guys and girls in the IVS were out there in the hamlets helping people to grow food, raise animals, build schools and teach basic skills. Unfortunately, since they were a) American and b) helping the Vietnamese people, the Vietcong did not like them at all. The risk of being killed by Vietcong units grew as the war escalated, and Pete ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the Mekong Delta in November of 1965. A wonderful person was taken from the world on that day. He's still got windmills of his own design bringing up water in hamlets north of Saigon, and a series of libraries inspired by one that started from his memorial fund. Quite the legacy for a tall, blond, twenty-something kid from the Midwest. The other really cool thing about this story is that it is well-written. Sometimes memoirs can end up being a bit amateurish in their writing style, but Jill is a professional writer on other topics, and it shows in the great way she organized this material and told her story. A great read.