Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to tell you about the latest additions to my ongoing project to catalog ADR blogs world-wide at the World Directory of ADR Blogs.

They include:

NYC Family Mediation and Collaborative Law
is published by mediator and collaborative lawyer Joy Rosenthal, whose motto is “Let’s talk!”. This blog offers reflections on family-based and divorce mediation and collaborative law from the heart of New York City.

Mediation Stuff, published by New Hampshire-based John Lassey (which means he is practically my neighbor), brings perspectives and ideas on mediation and ADR from someone who’s been a trial lawyer for 30 years and a mediator for 15.

The next four I owe to the web-surfing talents of mediator and barrister Geoff Sharp:

The ZapaBlog (which I first mistook for a misspelled tribute blog to the immortal Frank Zappa) is the work of Brandon Krieg, president of Zapacap Mediation. Brandon’s work and this blog focus on the needs of small businesses.

Malaysian Mediation is published by Chan Kheng Hoe, Advocate-Mediator, who has extensive experience in commercial dispute resolution and serves as a mediator on the panel of the Malaysian Mediation Centre. This is also the first Malaysian blog added to ADRblogs.com.

My Weblog by James South is published by a New Zealand barrister and solicitor, who also serves as a director for the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR). He launched this blog with the intention of recording his experiences in many different countries to establish mediation in civil justice systems around the world.

Global Conflict Resolution and Mediation Discussion posts conflict resolution and mediation articles and comments, from the Mediation Training Institute International.

I’d like to wish a warm welcome to the ADR blog neighborhood to all of these bloggers.

Incidentally, if you publish a blog and would like it added to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, don’t be shy — let me know about it.

Dear friends,

Last night the unthinkable happened: someone hacked my blog, vandalizing my database. Needless to say, this has been very upsetting. I feel sad, and yes, really, really pissed off that someone would target my blog this way, particularly when my work — conflict resolution — is involved in trying to make the world a nicer place to be.

I had thought I had taken the appropriate precautions, but it turns out that the newest version of Wordpress I upgraded to over the weekend may have a vulnerability that someone was able to exploit. Please take care, fellow bloggers.

In the meantime, please bear with me as I try to recover the site and all my hard work over three years.

Help and moral support would be gratefully accepted.

Thanks, friends,

Diane

American magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant once posed the following question, submitted by a reader:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you, “Do you want to pick door #2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?

A large majority number of readers answered that question with “No”. Many assumed that the host’s action in opening one of the three doors changes the probability of the remaining choices, so that there was now a 1/2 chance that the door you selected is a winner, meaning you should probably stick with your original decision.

The answer, surprisingly though, is yes, it is to your advantage to change your mind:

Yes; you should switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance…

The winning odds of 1/3 on the first choice can’t go up to 1/2 just because the host opens a losing door. To illustrate this, let’s say we play a shell game. You look away, and I put a pea under one of three shells. Then I ask you to put your finger on a shell. The odds that your choice contains a pea are 1/3, agreed? Then I simply lift up an empty shell from the remaining other two. As I can (and will) do this regardless of what you’ve chosen, we’ve learned nothing to allow us to revise the odds on the shell under your finger.

This answer provoked enraged responses, many from mathematicians who were certain vos Savant’s answer was wrong. Even in the face of proof that she was correct, people insisted that it could not be so.

It’s fascinating to observe cognitive error in action as people fiercely refuse to change their minds, despite evidence to the contrary.

For a discussion of why this is so, read “Are You Smart Enough to Change Your Mind?” from 7P Productions, which links to the vos Savant article and to a fun interactive version of the Monty Hall problem, goats included, which includes an explanation of how the game works.

From filmmaker Stefan Nadelman comes “Food Fight“, a stop-animation depiction of war using food as the actors:

Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

Although I’m a huge fan of animation, I have to say that viewing the film left me uneasy, as I watched the Holocaust reduced to shots of menacing pretzels blasting matzohs to smithereens, or Hiroshima rendered as a hamburger patty laying waste to rows of sushi. It was difficult not to conclude that the use of food as proxies for human beings to stage scenes of violence and death trivializes catastrophic human suffering, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth. The final scene though provokes reflection on the senseless waste of war, as toiling ants move in when the conflict ceases.

Click here to view Food Fight.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Throughout the world, courthouses tower above the street in busy urban centers or stand with quiet dignity in town squares. Blindfolded Justice waits close by, her sword unsheathed as she lifts her scales.

What do these depictions of Justice say about democracy and law? What messages do the stone or concrete buildings themselves convey about adjudication and human rights? What elements are lost or missing from 21st century representations of justice and the law?

Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has explored these questions in a recent lecture available now in print and visually captivating, “Representing Justice: From Renaissance Iconography to Twenty-First Century Courthouses” (PDF). From the abstract:

This Lecture provides a multi-century, cross-cultural visual narrative of both continuity and change in the use of adjudication by governments seeking to legitimate their authority to impose their law through judges. From the story of the Judgment of Solomon to the Town Halls of Siena and Amsterdam, one can find examples of adjudication, a task of governance that predates democracy. From those walls and the allegories that they represent, one can learn how adjudicatory practices contributed to democratic ideology by generating norms that decisionmakers not be corrupted by payments from one side, that their decisions be predicated on information rather than be arbitrary, and that they hear both sides (audi alterum partem).

Mediators and lawyers both will have much to ponder:

Despite the cutting-edge construction techniques and abstract paintings, many new courthouses, centered on their courtrooms, are both old fashioned and dysfunctional.

Even more troubling, one might read the buildings as gestures seeking to instill a sense of legitimacy to state-based processes by making it seem as if trials were a major modality and thereby rendering the predominance of the alternatives to trial less visible. From a more positive vantage point (if you are, as we are, skeptical of some forms of alternative dispute resolution), one could interpret the ongoing building as evidence of the deep ambivalence that government leaders have about their own promotion of settlement and privatization in lieu of public processes.

This exhaustively researched lecture invites readers to remove the blindfold from their own eyes and judge the courthouse and depictions of Justice anew.

(Hat tip to The Situationist.)

Andrea Schneider at ADR Profs Blog is wondering whether there’s a “Crisis in Dispute Resolution?”

This past weekend, the Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution here at Marquette hosted noted scholar Bernie Mayer. Bernie was mostly speaking about his book, Beyond Neutrality and, on Saturday, was invited in a point-counterpoint format to discuss his arguments with equally well-noted practitioner Howard Bellman. One point of the discussion was about Bernie’s argument, outlined in his book, that the dispute resolution field is marginalized in the most important disputes. In other words, in the biggest crises of the day and over the biggest problems (think war, state of the economy, etc.), the dispute resolution field does not generally have a seat at the table…

Andrea wants to know what the blogosphere makes of all of this:

Are we marginalized? Should dispute resolution professionals be called on more often in public policy and international disputes? Should we just get over ourselves–we are called on when we are needed? Let us know what you think!

Come join me in the discussion and tell Andrea what you think.

Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim had a wish that undoubtedly many others share: she wished for world peace. She said, “I think that the first step toward world peace is for people to meet each other”. She envisioned the use of film to create a kind of exchange program to help people around the world truly see and understand each other better.

Out of Noujaim’s wish came Pangea Day, a world-wide celebration of the things that people across the globe have in common:

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

To learn more or to find out how you can take part, visit the Pangea Day web site.

Since I began blogging over three years ago, I’ve been a devotee of Blawg Review, the review of the best in legal blogging hosted each week by a different blogger. I read it regularly, and I’ve even served as host on three occasions (once with fellow blogging mediator Geoff Sharp).

Why do I read Blawg Review? When law is so integral to our political, social, commercial, and civic interactions, never has it been more important to stay informed about the impact the law produces on the way we live and work together.

But it’s more than just the weekly synopsis of the major stories affecting the law that draws me to Blawg Review every Monday. It’s the fact that each week a new host provides another spin, a different viewpoint, on law and justice.

It’s like a box of assorted chocolates. You reach into the box, not knowing what you’ll get until you take a taste. Sometimes it’s a playful caramel in milk chocolate, a sophisticated dark chocolate truffle with a hint of espresso, an angelic praline enrobed in a white chocolate shell, or a tart raspberry edged with bittersweet chocolate. (Of course at times you may encounter a nut or two.) If one is not to your taste, then wait but a week and then sample again.

Consider how different are the most recent two hosts of Blawg Review:

Last week, it was David Harlow hosting Blawg Review #154 at Health Blawg to honor World Health Day 2008, dedicated to protecting health from the effects of climate change.

And this week Greg May at California Blog of Appeal good-naturedly hosts Blawg Review #155 and celebrates (or, some might say, desecrates) National Poetry Month.

And next week will be something entirely different when Virtually Blind, a blog that discusses legal issues impacting virtual worlds, plays host.

Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.

When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:

Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).

To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.

(Via On the Ground.)

How perceptive are you? How accurately do you see the world?

With a quiz created by Jeremy Wolfe, Ph.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Visual Attention Lab and Harvard Medical School, test yourself for change blindness — the perplexing difficulty that all of us have in perceiving alterations in the things that are right in front of our eyes.

As philosopher Henri Bergson once said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

(Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for so kindly sending me the link to this story.)

On Tuesday, June 24, 2008, influential thinker and ADR pioneer Albie Davis presents an “Intuition and Creativity Workshop” for mediators at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.

Albie enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a true innovator who has made significant contributions to the development and advancement of mediation and conflict resolution during the course of her decades-long career.

From the workshop description:

You tune up your car every few thousand miles. Schedule annual health exams. Is it time for an Intuition and Creativity Tune-up of your mediator readiness? Mediators must think on their feet; use the famed five senses, plus ones with no name; make rapid assessments of the need of parties and momentum of negotiations; be on the lookout for “magical moments,” draw upon theory, research, ethics and personal practice; separate the wheat from the chaff; and more. In this day-long seminar, we will revisit various theories about mediation, negotiation, creativity, change, culture and human behavior. Drawing upon the experience of presenters and participants, we’ll role-play, invent and try new things; be irreverent, if we must. Each person will leave with a self-administered intuition checkup sheet with strengths identified and tips for improving one’s personal best.

I am proud to say that Albie Davis recently joined my firm, OptionBridge, as an affiliate, and my partners and I are deeply honored to be able to offer this program to our colleagues in the mediation community in June. To register, visit the OptionBridge web site, or for more information click here to download the flyer in PDF.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Forty years ago today Robert F. Kennedy spoke those inspiring words as he announced the tragic death of Martin Luther King, Jr., to an African-American audience gathered in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Forty years later these words remain relevant. If you’ve never heard this speech before, or long to hear it again, read it or listen to it now.

Women don’t ask.

That was the premise — and the title — of a book published in 2003 by Linda Babcock, James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, and successful writer and editor Sara Laschever.

Women Don’t Ask explored the uncomfortable truths about gender and negotiation and exposed the obstacles that keep women from negotiating effectively for themselves. While men seem to have no trouble negotiating and asking for what they need, women hesitate or fail to ask at all.

Social conditioning and cultural expectations are among the causes of these gendered differences. Tragically these differences produce well-documented economic costs for women, haunting them over the course of a lifetime. For example, according to the Women Don’t Ask web site, “By not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60 — and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary.”

This book touched a raw nerve for the many women who read it; indeed, so overwhelming was the response to Women Don’t Ask that Babcock and Laschever went to work on a sequel.

The result is Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want, a book filled with practical advice; real-world negotiation stories from the authors, the women who have contacted them as a result of their work, and Babcock’s students; and a detailed four-phase program with exercises for preparing for and succeeding in life’s negotiations.

Phase One teaches women to recognize that “Everything Is Negotiable”. As anyone knows, the toughest negotiation can be with yourself, and the authors help readers begin by asking questions of themselves to identify and clarify their professional and personal goals. Phase Two teaches readers how to “Lay the Groundwork”, reviewing the skills and concepts of basic negotiation strategy. Among the most important lessons? Information is power — and the authors explain how and where to get it to strengthen your bargaining position.

Phase Three, “Get Ready”, pushes women to aim high when it comes to negotiating. It covers cooperative bargaining; ascertaining your worth; using logrolling or trade-offs to get past jams and build value; and how to make the first offer. Best of all, it even comes equipped with a “Negotiation Gym” — a six-week program of increasingly difficult negotiation exercises that will help women build negotiation muscles and develop stamina and strength in preparation for tougher negotiation challenges. No one will ever kick sand in your face again.

Phase Four shows how women can “Put It All Together” — to practice in advance by role playing with a friend, to avoid making concessions prematurely, to create the right impression to influence your counterpart at the table, and, finally, to close the deal.

An appendix helpfully provides a detailed worksheet to help women prepare for negotiations, along with a link to the web site where readers can download a PDF version.

Ask for It recounts numerous stories of women facing negotiations at work and in their lives, across a range of industries and professions, which bring the lessons to memorable life. However, as convincing as these anecdotes may be, I would have welcomed more examples of negotiations in blue-collar settings, my one quibble with an otherwise excellent book.

What makes this book a must-read for men, too, and not just for women are its unpleasant revelations about the realities of hidden bias against women at the negotiation table. The authors exhort readers to take responsibility themselves for combating gender bias, not just that of others but particularly their own. They remind readers that all of us regardless of gender possess assumptions and unexamined beliefs about women in negotiation. They point to studies that indicate that while aggression earns men points at the negotiation table, it punishes women with backlash and disapproval. And, while the authors fiercely advocate for women at the negotiation table, the chapter on “Likability” with its insistence that women avoid aggressive tactics and “be nice” while bargaining, will no doubt leave some readers bristling. However, until the world changes how it views women in negotiation, it’s hard to argue with the studies the authors cite.

There is much to admire about this gutsy book with its commitment to helping women really succeed at negotiating. Even the title itself serves as a defiant call to action. Babcock and Laschever explain in the forward that the title represents a deliberate effort to reclaim a phrase weighted with negative meaning for women and instead assert it as an emblem of power:

For centuries the phrase “asking for it” has been used as an accusing finger to point at women. A woman who’d been sexually assault was “asking for it”. A woman who’d been the victim of spousal abuse must have provoked her partner — she “asked for it”.

Our goal is to help women ask for and get the things they — we — really want, to claim the phrase “asking for it” as our own and transform it into a dynamic tool for increasing our happiness and pursuing our dreams.

This is not simply a book about changing the way women negotiate. Instead, Babcock and Laschever have ambitiously set out to change women’s lives.

Any of us can join the revolution — all we have to do is ask.

Two years ago I introduced readers to the web site ChangeThis, which I described as

a web site born of a radical and hopeful idealism: to virally transmit ideas through a culture medium of community, respect, and dialogue.

Recognizing that “the best discussions in science, medicine, business and politics have always been the civil ones”, ChangeThis publishes what it calls manifestos — proposals for change which serve as “a reasoned, rational call to action, supported by logic and facts”. The goal is to provide a forum for “the rational and thoughtful arguments that help people change their minds to a more productive point of view.” In the egalitarian spirit with which ChangeThis was founded, anyone is welcome to submit ideas for a manifesto.

This online experiment in changing minds has thrived, amassing in the past two years a considerable inventory of innovative thinking, and consequently I continue to stop by in search of ideas to invigorate my work.

On a recent visit to the site I was struck by the premise of a newly published manifesto, “Questionating“, by business consultant Corinne Miller. Miller celebrates the power of the question and its role in creativity and fresh thinking:

Questions have been the enablers of innovation for centuries. As Albert Einstein said, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science”…

Questions use verbs and words that activate key areas of the brain that, in turn, increase the volume and variety of questions. The more questions, the more creativity and innovation. We like to say that questions open the innovation pipeline.

Despite the role of the question in stimulating discoveries and advancements, Miller observes that people seem to lose the willingness to ask questions as they grow older:

As we age, we disengage… from asking questions. Questions decrease as aging increases. Think about it. Why does the typical 5-year old ask about 65 questions a day, while the typical 40-something asks only about 6 questions a day? Why is it that the older we get, the fewer questions we ask? We’ve found that the most popular answers to this question have been: asking a question makes one look stupid; asking a question is a sign of weakness; and people think they know the answer so they don’t feel the need to ask.

What a sad state that we have created a business culture where asking questions is seen as a weakness. Shouldn’t it be the opposite, where not asking questions is a weakness?

How can we change this?

Indeed. How can we change this? What can any of us do to challenge the notion that asking questions displays weakness or even disrespect? What can we do to make it safe to ask questions of our institutions, of our leaders, of each other? Questions reflect, reveal, resolve; they shine light into the dark corners. Most importantly, questions give us the ability to see the world afresh. As Bertrand Russell once said, “In many affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

Fans of Blawg Review, the weekly review of the best in legal blogging, get a two-fer this week thanks to host George M. Wallace, a lawyer in Pasadena, California.

George hoists the Jolly Roger at the pirate-themed Blawg Review #153 at Declarations & Exclusions, warning readers with these ominous words:

But tell me true now: It be Blawg Review ye’ve really come seekin’, eh? Thought as much.Well, yer appeal’s been heard and ye’ve come to the proper place. And properly warned ye be, sez I.

But here ye’ll find no more o’ yer namby-pamby “Blawg Review,” savvy?

No, matey, that be fer the lace and waistcoat gentry, an’ the lords o’ the Admiralty an’ such-like luckless landlocked lumpers, wi’ their clerks an’ their cubicles an’ their quills an’ their copiers.

No, me hearty: for the likes o’ us — bold ‘n’ dangerous sorts that we be, don’cha know — hencefor’rd this be . . .Blarrgh Review!

Meanwhile, for landlubbers, George has produced a second edition of Blawg Review, in the form of an April Fool’s Day appendix at his other blog, A Fool in the Forest.

Highlights from these editions of Blawg Review include a look at how many innocent people remain behind bars, tips on negotiating with sociopaths, discussion of a check written on toilet paper, and a revealing glimpse into the sexual fantasies of lawyers (hint: it involves bargaining).