Rewarding Black Swans

Consider this, a bank can only safely loan before it soon runs out of credible borrowers who are willing to service their debt. Fortunately, for bankers, this is the age where commitment to quarterly increases in share prices holds paramount over ethics and preservation of capital. In other words, bankers can turn to creative measures like continual and sophisticated rebundling of debt via credit default swaps and/or lending to borrowers with little or no credit worthiness. Armed with such an arsenal and newfound priorities, a globalised world with interlinked financial markets is the ideal playground to play for maximum returns.

Regardless of the color of our parachutes, we should all be Bankers when we grow up. Why? Never has one profession held the entire world at ransom while amassing great wealth for all its member (ok, maybe just for the upper ranks). Banking has become a profession whereby you are not held accountable for results and given a free rein to exploit the system to the hilt.

What the bankers didn't expect was for the world to come crumbling down. They doubt property prices will ever fall. But household prices fell as the property bubble burst. In an instance, nobody trust anybody and resulted in a global credit crunch. Carry trades crumble overnight. Commodities prices and currencies tanked. Yen surged as investors flee for safe harbor.

Though the dust has yet to settle and markets show little signs of bottoming out, bankers are still congratulating themselves for a job well done. They argued that hindsight is always 20-20 but they could not have been held accountable for such a collapse. Instead they are only responsible for their actions based on what they know when they made their decisions. Hence they have executed their duties to the very best of their abilities and should be rewarded handsomely. In fact, if they were not rewarded well, they will have to leave for greener pastures.
While much has been said about such compensation packages, Nassim Nicholas Taleb summed it up very well in his Financial Times article entitled "How bank bonuses let us all down".

"The incentive system put in place by financial companies has produced the worse possible economic system mankind can imagine: capitalism for the profits and socialism for the losses." Taleb wrote. (Bold by me)

He left this parting advice "No incentive without disincentive. And never trust with your money anyone making a potential bonus."

BookExpo America, Los Angeles 2008 [Update 7 (Final)]

There were a total of 12 workshops and seminars on the subject of graphic novels. The state of comics has evolved. Its no longer whether libraries need to stock comics but which comics to stock and how many. Saturday was officially dubbed “Graphic Novel Day.”

Diversity. From attempts to lure in both younger (pre-teen) and older (post-teen and beyond) readers, to changing the formats in which manga is delivered, the industry as a whole is looking to maintain the strong readership that has driven years of rapid growth in the book market. John Cunningham, Diamond Comics Vice President of Sales said he found that in 2006, 11% of all trade paperback sales in the U.S. were graphic novels. “But you can bet that graphic novels were not 11% of the books shelved in most bookstores,” he said, citing the problem of getting more inventory into a dwindling amount of retail shelf space.

Iron Man. The first film released in 2008 to pass the $300 million mark at the domestic US box office. Marvel capitalised on the success and launched a new ongoing series called Invincible Iron Man, by writer Matt Fraction, and a new miniseries Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas by movie director Jon Favreau. Even though the film was rated PG-13 (for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and brief suggestive content) , the comics remain unrated even when they should be Rated R for intense and graphical violence.

Library Classification. Libraries, presently, tend to shelve all the comics together or by age. However it is important to realize the relevance of context.

Publisher Tokyopop (www.tokypop.com/ratings) has established an in-house committee of three. They are tasked to look through their content armed with content indicators to highlight themes of concern, for readers especially parents.
Themes of concern include, language, bullying, violence (intensity and goreness), sex (sexual and non sexual nudity) to substance abuse. There is a general public acceptance of violence and intolerance of sex. Marvel Carnage series are a prime example of bad storylines but popular among kids for its violence. Hence rating systems must be belivable and reliable to work.

BookExpo America, Los Angeles 2008 [Update 6]

How Libraries Buy: Librarians Reveal Their Methods for Collection Development
[Moderator: Nora Rawlinson - Founder, EarlyWord.com, the Publisher/Librarian Connection]

Librarians need to recognize the goals of selection like patron satisfaction. The library system should be able to generate shelf list report to allow close examination of the collection. Staff can then use weeding to fine tune the collection accordingly. Likewise reader recommendations should be reflected in circulation statistics.

SF public libraries (28 branches) & Phoenix City public libraries (16 branches) use the following standards to generate purchase orders; 3 holds for books, 6 holds for media and 10 holds for all other materials.

Circulation. Fiction and audio books continue to attract the highest circulation especially among the commuting adults and seniors. Newspaper databases, however, are not as popular due to their online presence. Online resources like electronic databases remain the best in the provision of 24/7 services and to support an otherwise small print reference collection.

Selection Aids. The panel agrees that a wide array is needed to build any collection, namely,

• International book fairs which showcase different kinds of materials;
• Promote vendor rapport with publishers to establish comprehensiveness so as to allow anticipatory selection before media review. This will further allow selectors to focus on finding independent and new publishers. Librarians must realize that small authors are challenged by distributorship structure and thus need to prove themselves with both circulation and media coverage.
• Tender. Even though awarded, the tender serves as a first stop service point. If the title is not available then selectors should go elsewhere to source for it. Bestsellers only account for 5% of total sales in America. Hence other material can and do matter.