A Word about Local History

A word about words.

The title of my paper comes from an essay by Václav Havel. In his essay, Havel addressed most evocatively the question of the unique power of words for thinking and to influence, for good or for harm, as well as to inform and to educate. As analysts our medium is the word. I suggest that it is of inestimable importance that we are able to listen deeply to our patients' words and to be aware of ...

A Final Word about Stories

I STARTED THIS series talking about stories—how we learn best from hearing what others like us have experienced. I often rail at our community for not encouraging a more scienti c approach to decisionmaking. A question I commonly ask is, “How many of you looked at the randomized, double-blind, controlled experiments that clearly show that is better than <whatever you were...

Bertrand’s Paradox Revisited: More Lessons about that Ambiguous Word, Random

The Bertrand paradox question is: “Consider a unit-radius circle for which the length of a side of an inscribed equilateral triangle equals 3 . Determine the probability that the length of a ‘random’ chord of a unit-radius circle has length greater than 3 .” Bertrand derived three different ‘correct’ answers, the correctness depending on interpretation of the word, random. Here we employ geomet...

Local History Collections: A Symposium

HILE THE L o c a l H i s t o r y Col lec t ion and the U n i v e r s i t y A r c h i v e s a r e housed in the s a m e r o o m s and a d m i n i s t e r e d by the s a m e staff in the U n i v e r s i t y of R o c h e s t e r L i b r a r y , each h a s i ts o w n ident i ty , its dist inc t h i s to ry and its s e p a r a t e p u r p o s e s and goals . T h e re l a t ionsh ip of the t w o col ...

A Word or Two about Gardening