In poignant tribute to the U.S. service members who have lost their lives in the Iraq war, the New York Times has created a graphic that literally puts a face to the numbers who have perished.

Each face that appears is made up of many small squares, each representing another face. Click on any square to see another face appear, with information about that person displayed to the right. The squares are ordered by date of death, the most recent deaths appearing in the upper left corner of the image. You can also search by last name, home state, or home town.

(With thanks to ICT4Peace. Please read Sanjana Hattotuwa’s observations, including his thoughts on those who are missing from this moving depiction of the human cost of war.)

This may ultimately create more disputes than it resolves, but the DNA testing laboratory INDENTIGENE is selling at-home paternity tests.

For only $29.99 (and $119 for the lab fee), you can find out once and for all who’s your daddy.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing Gadgets.)

In “Settlement Demands Have Their Risks,” Simple Justice reports that a New Hampshire jury found a recently admitted attorney guilty of theft by extortion for threatening to sue a hair salon over gender-based differences in prices of services and demanding payment of $1,000 to avoid a lawsuit. He apparently sent demand letters to approximately 19 salons in the Granite State. The attorney, who had claimed that the difference in pricing caused him stress and mental anguish (despite the fact that men were charged less than women), argued that the conviction violated his First Amendment rights and plans to appeal.

In considering the lawyer’s conviction, Simple Justice asks,

Where do we draw the line? People often feel the “lawyer letter,” that demand that you pay money “or else” or stop doing something “or else,” is extortionate. After all, the express threat is “pay me or pay to go to court and then pay me.” There’s certainly something extortionate there.

The question deepens when it’s no longer a matter of threatening to take someone to court if they don’t settle a claim, but when it reaches the point of becoming a crime. Does it turn on the lawyer’s good faith? Does it turn on whether the claim has a reasonable basis in law?

Bear in mind that there are claims brought to lawyers that ultimately turn out to be frivolous or baseless, but lawyers pursue them because they seem colorable at the time. There’s a huge difference between the claim being shot out of the water for being frivolous and the lawyer being convicted of a crime for pursuing it.

Well said. I agree that these are important questions to raise. However, my own line of inquiry differs, since this case leaves me uneasy for additional reasons. I have to wonder what this young lawyer was thinking. I am struck by his statement, reported in the Concord Monitor, about why he pursued this path:

Asked why he sent letters to salons instead of contacting the [New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights] directly, Hynes said lawyers often settle out of court.

“I believe it’s more appropriate to attempt as amicable a resolution as possible,” he said.

What did this lawyer learn in law school? What lessons did his professors impart of settlement and negotiation, of the resolution of disputes? Who taught him that such action, in a case like this, constitutes effort to effect an “amicable resolution”?

Ironically, had he involved the Commission for Human Rights, he might have had the opportunity to mediate his concerns. How sad that this ill-conceived attempt at settlement leaves no winners in its wake.

Issue #215 of the Mediate.com newsletter is now available.

Highlights include “Ten Questions on Leadership for Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama“, “Sincere Opening Statements Bring Best Mediation Results“, and “Film Review: “John Adams” - The Reluctant Revolutionary and the Negotiation of the Declaration of Independence. There’s also a round-up of great blog posts.

To subscribe to the Mediate.com newsletter, go to the Mediate.com web site, scroll down to the subscription widget in the left sidebar, and enter your email address to get the latest news and ideas affecting the ADR field delivered to your inbox weekly.

I’ve just added two new blogs to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, my ongoing project to track and catalog ADR and negotiation blogs around the globe. Allow me to introduce them to you:

• Arabulucu Blog, a Turkish language blog, bears the distinction of being Turkey’s first and only blog about mediation and negotiation. It is published by mediator Samil Demir, who is based in Ankara.
• dominique.lopez-eychenie is the eponymous blog of French lawyer and mediator Dominique Lopez-Eychenie who practices in Lille. In addition to her many other professional accomplishments, Dominique is the Vice President and founding member of Nord Mediation. She blogs about mediation, negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, and collaborative law.

I’d like to wish both these bloggers the best of success and to offer them a warm welcome to the ADR blogosphere.

I’m always on the look-out for blogs to add to the World Directory. If you publish or know of a blog that you’d like me to add, please let me know. It’s a commercial-free site, and there is no cost to be listed. The Directory has information on submitting your blog and some simple submission guidelines.

(With thanks to Negotiation Guru Jens Thang for kindly introducing me to Dominique and her blog.)

Technolawyer (”all the legal technology and practice management news that’s fit to blog”) hosts Blawg Review #152, the weekly review of the best in legal blogging.

Highlights of this week’s Blawg Review include the most shocking court transcript of the year starring a bad-ass court reporter, pointers on strong marketing in a weak economy, and the 20 worst Beatles songs as proof that “no-one [sic] ever achieves a consistently high standard.”

Five years ago Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever published Women Don’t Ask, a book that ripped the lid off of one of negotiation’s most intractable problems: the challenges that women face in negotiating successfully. They examined the barriers — institutional, cultural, and social — that hold women back and provided strategies to help women conquer the gender divide at the negotiation table to ask for and get what they want.

Women Don’t Ask touched a responsive chord in women nationally and internationally, many of whom had encountered these barriers up close. Many women contacted the authors to thank them for writing a book that opened up their eyes to negotiation’s possibilities and to ask for help with their own negotiations. This enthusiastic response motivated Babcock and Laschever to write a second book, the recently published Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want.

I plan to post a review of this book later this week, but one thing I can tell you right now is that it may be one of the best books on negotiation I’ve ever read. What Tammy Lenski recently did for mediation marketing, Ask for It does for real women facing real-world negotiations — women who want practical, common sense advice and tools for being effective negotiators. The advice is so good though and the revelations about gender issues at the negotiation table so disturbing that men should read it, too — not just to learn better ways to negotiate but to find out how any of us can battle gender bias in negotiation.

The Ask for It web site provides support for negotiating women, everything from downloadable worksheets and information to links to online resources, including Babcock’s work helping girls learn to negotiate.

There’s even (be still my heart) a blog. Although the blog is new with just three posts so far, if “Scary Monster(.com)” and “Cut Throat Bitch“, with their gutsy commentary on negotiation and gender, are any indication of what’s to come, this is one negotiation blog you’ll want to follow.

On television, on the glossy pages of magazines, on the billboards we speed past, images fill our visual landscape.

But what effect do the images that appear in the media have on us? How do they influence our judgments, our economic choices, and our assumptions about ourselves and each other? To what extent do they hold up a mirror to cultural values about gender, race, authority, sex, or violence? How do we decode their messages to separate what’s false from what’s not? And how can we immunize ourselves against their effects?

These are questions that media critics, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, teachers, parents, and others have struggled with. But it is up to all of us to confront and examine these images for ourselves. One blog, Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing, provides images for discussion in sociology and other classes — or for anyone interested in coming face to face with the images that bombard us daily. Visitors can browse the categories of images this blog has collected, which include violence, education, gender, race/ethnicity, and many more. A word of caution — not all images are workplace safe and some may give offense.

Seeing Is Believing offers a fascinating — and at times disturbing — foray into the world of media images. Presented with minimal text, these images at once provoke and invite us to decipher their messages about society and ourselves.

Far be it from me, a mediator, to encourage conflict, but this sounds like good, clean, wacky fun.

On Saturday, March 22, people will be gathering in cities all around the world (including my own, Boston, in Copley Square) to take part in a pillow fight in honor of International Pillow Fight Day. Instructions and rules of engagement are available for starting your own public pillow fight.

What are the benefits? According to the Pillow Fight Day web site,

people will make new friends, re-unite with old ones, meet future lovers, and revel in the blissful one-ness of a free, fun, social gathering.

And who knows? If this a sign of things to come, perhaps in the not-too-distant future there’ll be an International Food Fight Day. In anticipation, you can order yourself one of these spring-loaded catapult spoons.

(Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri.)

(Hat tip to the Atlantic Review.)

Straight from the folks who got me wondering what would be on your mediator’s playlist comes another question suitable for a Friday: “Besides ‘Animal House’, What Pop Culture References Inspire You?”

I’d like to ask the same thing of mediators and negotiators: what pop culture references inspire you?

The haggling scene from “Life of Brian”?

The conflict resolution episode of “The Office”?

“The Wedding Crashers”? (Please, God, not that.)

To get your creative juices flowing, there are a couple of lists, one here and another here with some ideas.

Thanks to the always vigilant Geoff Sharp, I’ve just added a new mediation blog to my World Directory of ADR Blogs project, this one from across the pond.

The Mediation Times is the creation of Amanda Bucklow, a full-time commercial mediator for the past 12 years based in the U.K. Here’s what Amanda has to say about Mediation Times:

Why a blog and not a web site? There are a number of good mediation web sites but web sites don’t have quite the same level of interaction as a blog. I also like the idea of the mediation community making this blog what it can be. It fits the mediation model so much better! A weblog or blog is much more sophisticated and flexible. It offers a much higher level of interaction and it suits my preferred method of communicating: conversation. It is also very simple…

I also wanted to design something that could be international. You will find language translators powered by Google on this site for French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Greek. I will add more and if people post in those languages you will be able to translate into English using the same tools.

This is a blog that really encourages full participation in the conversation — and I like the idea of Google translators so that language is never a barrier to joining in. Not so different from what we mediators try to do with our clients, I’d say.

I hope you’ll stop by Mediation Times and join me and Geoff in wishing Amanda a warm welcome to the ADR blogosphere.

[Note to readers: Mediation Channel is not a political blog, so I don't typically use it as a vehicle for expressing my political views. Sometimes though I must when an issue implicates the work I do or when it has affected me or my family directly, as it did when I wrote "When the political gets personal: what the Military Commissions Act of 2006 means to one mediator and her family".

Today marks another one of those times when I must speak up. That shouldn't be surprising, though, to hear from a mediator -- not when our work means empowering people to do precisely that. But by all means give this post a pass if you'd prefer to keep your mediation blog reading and political punditry separate.]

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Last night on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I found myself picking up a book my son gave me for Mother’s Day two years ago, Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy by Lewis Lapham, an account of the silencing of dissenting voices in American political discourse during the days between the towers falling and the bombing of Baghdad.

Those were dark days for many, particularly those among us who see the value of the hard questions and the give-and-take of dialogue, who know the dangers of the uninformed agreement or the decision made in haste. It was a time when many who supported the war against Iraq accused its critics of a lack of patriotism, or worse, of treason — of hating America, of giving comfort to its enemies, of aiding terrorism.

While five years later dissent has regained some of its former vigor, these old libels still stain our public discourse.

Yet we depend upon the critics and the naysayers of this world to temper our judgments. Both good decisions and democracy alike depend upon candid dialogue, the availability of information, and access to the truth.

And so today, on the fifth anniversary of a war that seems will never end, while I join those who mourn the tragic loss of thousands of lives, both military and civilian, or who struggle to comprehend the economic costs of a war that some have calculated to be $3 trillion, I pause today to recall the first casualty of war. I grieve for dissent.

Attorney Nancy Hudgins, who shares the wisdom won from her experience mediating thousands of disputes in her blog Civil Negotiation and Mediation, today describes her first mediation. It’s a story, wonderfully told, about discoveries — how one party discovers empowerment, another closure, and a mediator discovers the quiet satisfaction in helping others help themselves.

It made me wonder how many other first-time stories await their telling.

While Nancy’s story stands in part for the hope mediation restores to parties, my own first mediation resembled more closely Geoff Sharp’s “The Extra Mile“.

I got my start in community mediation, and believe me, there is no tougher initiation into the trenches of conflict. Here you gird yourself for the escalating battle between neighbors over boundary lines and unleashed dogs, or the full-scale war of feuding teens in a public housing project. Fought in deadly earnest, these disputes emit a lethal heat.

My first mediation involved a dispute in which one of the parties was a woman with profound physical disabilities. The medical attendant who was supposed to arrive failed to show up for the mediation. During a break, the woman asked my co-mediator and me for assistance in the bathroom; we helped her empty her urostomy bag.

Although time has blurred the other details of that day, I remember one thing vividly. That experience revealed something no mediation training prepared me for — not the corrosiveness of anger or the frustration of tears — but instead, despite the hardship and indignities that daily life inflicts, the courage that inhabits the human heart.

Fellow mediators, what was your first time like?

In my experience, one of the most persistent sources of interpersonal conflict is the inability to own up to and correct mistakes. Our first impulse may be to conceal an error, or to deny it exists. We may try to shift the fault and blame it on the negligence of others. We may be paralyzed by embarrassment, shame or a sense of personal failure. Or, perhaps, we just don’t know what to do.

Dumb Little Man presents a remarkable story of one lawyer’s workplace error — missing a critical filing deadline, every attorney’s nightmare — and describes the courageous steps she took to make things right in “How to Recover from a (Big) Mistake at Work“. While avoiding mistakes in the first place is important, it’s a mark of character and rare ingenuity to fix one — making her the kind of lawyer I’d want to hire.

Lex Ferenda hosts a special St. Patrick’s Day presentation of Blawg Review, the weekly review of the best in legal blogging.

Lex Ferenda, published by Daithí Mac Síthigh, a graduate researcher in the School of Law in Trinity College Dublin, capably covers cyberlaw — including “Internet governance, intellectual property, and the control of media and information flows across national and regional borders”.

Blawg Review #151 will introduce you to the wit and wisdom of Irish legal bloggers, as well as a delightful assortment of blog posts from elsewhere in the world.

(Photo credit: Sarah Williams.)