Don’t know what to believe about all the news regarding health care reform, H1N1, insurance plans, vaccines, or other health issues? For quick access to a wide range of reliable health promotion and wellness resources, try visiting HealthFnder.gov.
A federal government website, HealthFinder provides credible consumer-oriented health information, quick reference guides, personal health calculators, tools to locate health care providers, and a whole lot more!
For more assistance using this or any other research tool, please contact a librarian at the Reference Desk on the main floor, call 608-342-1668 or click "Ask a Librarian" from the library homepage.
Anyone needing to pump up bike tires can check out a bike pump from the library’s Circulation Desk on the main floor. This is just one way your library is helping with many green initiatives and also is looking for ways to serve the needs of the university community!
Please remember, UWP offers access to RefWorks, the web-based citation tool. You and your students (even after graduation!) can build personal databases of citations to journal articles, complete with links to the full text of the articles when available! RefWork allows users to manage those citations or references, as in filing them into folders by topics.
RefWorks also assists users creating bibliographies of those references — in any of dozens of citation styles, including customized styles.
RefWorks will assist with building a bibliography with the many new changes to the seventh edition of the Modern Language Association’s (MLA’s) style, too.
Access RefWorks through the library's web page. Click "Reference Resources" and then "RefWorks".
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Reviewed by James Hibbard, Archivist
This book will be shelved on the library’s third floor with the call number BF637.S8 G533 2008, though at this printing, it is temporarily shelved on the main floor in the Current Reading section.
What makes highly successful people successful: Innate talent, hard work, opportunity, or something else? In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell suggests an answer that may surprise you. He dubs highly successful people as outliers: "something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body." As the author persuasively shows, "It is not the brightest who succeed. . . Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf." Instead, success comes to outliers because they are performing, what they consider, very satisfying work, recognize opportunities when they arise, and have "the strength and presence of mind to seize" those opportunities.
The author demonstrates this by taking the reader on an eye-opening journey that shows "that success follows a predictable course." Among his numerous examples, the author explains the phenomenal success of Canadian hockey players born in the months of January through March, why the road to success for the Beatles went through Hamburg, Germany, not Liverpool, England, and why Bill Gates’ date of birth led to his incredible success. The author, moreover, delves into certain cultural legacies, showing how and why they have been helpful or harmful. The rice paddy agriculture of China and Japan, for example, has led to higher math scores in those countries, whereas the "culture of honor" in the American South has often led to violence.
I highly recommend this book. It will change the way you view the world, especially famous people. It is a quick and fascinating read–even through the acknowledgments. As the author convincingly shows, pop stars, famous lawyers, and great writers "appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t." This book goes a long way toward explaining why.
Kay Young, Editor
608.342.1134
young@uwplatt.edu