Review: The Checklist Manifesto

Atul Gawande. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. New York. Metropolitan Books. 2009. $24.50.

This book’s argument can be stated in six words: In complex situations, checklists prevent mistakes.

Or to raise the stakes: In complex situations, checklists save lives.

Gawande (MacArthur Fellow, surgeon, med school professor) tells stories from the worlds of aviation, construction, and medicine that make these points. Alas, The Checklist Manifesto offers little evidence of how checklists are designed and improved, of how they are made useful and more useful — in short, of what they look like. There’s not a single photograph, not a single list. I wouldn’t expect Gawande to be Edward Tufte, but the subject seems to call for at least a modest array of sample documents. (And now I’m thinking about what Tufte could do with this subject matter.)

For a reader outside medicine, the value of The Checklist Manifesto might be loosely inspirational, prompting thought about what practices in life and work might be improved with the use of a checklist. Worth reading, but best borrowed from a library. (That’s how I read it, following the advice in this note to self.) Or just read Gawande’s New Yorker piece “The Checklist.”

Related posts
Blue crayon (Checklist for an imaginary camping trip)
Whose list? (A found checklist)

The iPad and dolphins (for real)

[June 3, 2010: This story is now everywhere. I’m thrilled to have been the guy who got the story out, by following up on the comment that Jack Kassewitz left on my post about the Onion story.]

Back in March, in the pages of The Onion, Beepo the Dolphin wondered whether the iPad and other tablet devices owned up to the hype. Now a May 23, 2010 press release from Jack Kassewitz at SpeakDolphin describes a non-fictional dolphin, Merlin, using — really using — the iPad:

Last week, a young bottlenose dolphin named Merlin became the first of his species to join the growing number of enthusiasts using the Apple iPad. Dolphin research scientist, Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, introduced the iPad to the dolphin in early steps towards building a language interface.

“The use of the iPad is part of our continuing search to find a suitable touch screen technology which the dolphins can activate with the tip of their rostrums or beaks. After extensive searching and product review, it looks like our choice is between the Panasonic Toughbook and the Apple iPad,” Kassewitz explained. “We think that once the dolphins get the hang of the touch screen, we can let them choose from a wide assortment of symbols to represent objects, actions and even emotions.”

Kassewitz explained the requirements of the technology. “Waterproofing, processor speed, touch-sensitivity, anti-glare screens, and dolphin-friendly programs are essential. As this database of dolphin symbols grows — we’ll need fast technology to help us respond appropriately and quickly to the dolphins.”

The research was being conducted at Dolphin Discovery’s dolphin swim facility in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, along the picturesque coast now referred to as the Riviera Maya. The dolphin, Merlin, is a juvenile, born at the facility only two years ago. “Merlin is quite curious, like most dolphins, and he showed complete willingness to examine the iPad,” said Kassewitz.

For now, the researchers are getting Merlin used to the touch screen by showing him real objects, such as a ball, cube or plastic duck, then asking the dolphin to touch photos of those same objects on the screen. “This is an easy task for a dolphin, but it is a necessary building block towards our goal of a complete language interface between humans and dolphins,” Kassewitz said.



[Merlin, iPad 3G, and Jack Kassewitz in Mexico. JK notes that when this photograph was taken, the iPad was not yet available in Mexico. It was thus an object of human as well as dolphin curiosity. Thanks to Jack Kassewitz, who sent me the press release after seeing my post about the Onion spoof.]

The dash

Marie Murray considers the dash:

Taking time out to consider the dash is therapeutic. It is an indulgence that is available and free. For the dash is a positive signal. It is going somewhere — a mark on the move — not something that arrests development of the sentence, but something that elaborates and expands, deviates and delights, in one stroke.

Read more:

When times are tough, we need to dash (Irish Times)

Overheard

“And Chris is gonna be unemployed, which is gonna be awesome!”

[In the words of Peter Wheatstraw in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), “You kinda young, daddy-o.”]

Related reading
All “Overheard” posts

Memorial Day

One hundred years ago. From “Taft Coming Here for Memorial Day; Parade of Regulars, Guardsmen and War Veterans Will Pass in Review Before Him,” New York Times, May 29, 1910.

Selling salt

The New York Times has a long article by Michael Moss on the food industry and salt. A sample:

When health advocates first petitioned the federal government to regulate salt in 1978, food companies sponsored research aimed at casting doubt on the link between salt and hypertension. Two decades later, when federal officials tried to cut the salt in products labeled “healthy,” companies argued that foods already low in sugar and fat would not sell with less salt.

Now, the industry is blaming consumers for resisting efforts to reduce salt in all foods, pointing to, as Kellogg put it in a letter to a federal nutrition advisory committee, “the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for salt.”

See? It’s our fault. It’s as if cigarette companies were to blame smokers for the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for nicotine. But an intractable appetite needn’t be forever. Once one gets some distance from processed foods, Cheez-Its and Wheat-Thins and all the rest taste too dang salty. Homemade pita chips are much better (cheaper too).

And did you know that Alton Brown is shilling for salt? “It’s the finest compound to ever grace our palates,” says he. Yes, and more doctors smoke Camels.

“[T]he social value of reading”

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device.

That goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared libraries. That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture.

Read more:

Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader (New York Times)

A related post
No Kindle for me

Van Dyke Parks in Barcelona

Good news from Music Clip of the Day: Van Dyke Parks can be heard tomorrow on WFMU-FM, performing at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival. “Tune in” (online) at at 7:25 PM (EDT) tomorrow night.

Thanks, Richard!

[May 29, 2010: Van Dyke Parks on fire! His set sounded like the performance of a lifetime: songs from Jump!, the unreleased “Black Gold” (yes, oil and catastrophe), “Orange Crate Art,” Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Danza,” “The All Golden,” and “Wings of a Dove.” I think that I was hearing violin and cello with VDP’s piano and voice. WFMU plans to archive all Primavera performances for streaming.]

Manhattan expanding

In Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen, 1977), young Alvy Singer is worried that the universe is expanding. He’s so worried that he’s stoppped doing his homework. His mother rebukes him: “What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” And a doctor reassures him: “It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy.”

Brooklyn is not expanding. But Manhattan is, at least on paper. And Staten Island is shrinking. Look. See?

New York Subway System Is Getting a New Map (New York Times)
An Overhaul of an Underground Icon (New York Times)

Infinite Jest, telephony

“Video telephony” v. “good old voice-only telephoning”:

It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice‐only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice‐only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio‐only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural‐only conversation — utilizing a hand‐held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6²) or 36 little pinholes — let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi‐attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine‐groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone‐pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign‐language‐and‐exaggerated‐facial‐expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Fugue goes back to the Latin fuga, flight: “a disturbed state of consciousness in which the one affected seems to perform acts in full awareness but upon recovery cannot recollect the acts performed” (Merriam-Webster OnLine). If you can find a phone with a traditional handset, you’ll find, yes, six and thirty-six holes.