Getting To The Bottom Of Top

Getting to the Bottom of Top

People demand authentic participation in decisions that affect their lives. ToP methods answer that call because they reflect how humans think, growing out of reflective inquiry into what works in real life and the study of phenomenology and existentialism. This book explores the foundational understandings of this body of knowledge and its practice. Getting to the Bottom of ToP works at two levels: as a guide to processes that elicit participation to bring insights to the surface and ensure participants collaborate to bring the resulting plans to fruition and as a theoretical basis drawn from the field of phenomenology—an answer to any of us who have pondered what principles or theory about personal and group change underlie those processes. —Peter J. Taylor, Critical and Creative Thinking Graduate Program, UMass Boston I have longed for decades for this book, a profound and helpful exploration of the phenomenology of practice of ToP. In this breakthrough work, the Nelsons expose the philosophical foundations of the ICA’s ToP methods in ways that scholars and facilitators alike will find useful. By tracing ToP’s ancestry to the existentialist’s insights of Kierkegaard and Sartre and the phenomenological methods of Husserl and Heidegger, this book not only provides conceptual clarity but releases a deep wellspring of motivation and skillfulness for practitioners of ToP. I will definitely use this book in teaching my NYU Wagner grad courses on innovative leadership. —Robertson Work, author of A Compassionate Civilization, NYU Wagner professor, and UN consultant

Getting to the Bottom of Tourism on Top of the World

The Sherlock Effect

Forensic science is in crisis and at a cross-roads. Movies and television dramas depict forensic heroes with high-tech tools and dazzling intellects who—inside an hour, notwithstanding commercials—piece together past-event puzzles from crime scenes and autopsies. Likewise, Sherlock Holmes—the iconic fictional detective, and the invention of forensic doctor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—is held up as a paragon of forensic and scientific inspiration—does not "reason forward" as most people do, but "reasons backwards." Put more plainly, rather than learning the train of events and seeing whether the resultant clues match those events, Holmes determines what happened in the past by looking at the clues. Impressive and infallible as this technique appears to be—it must be recognized that infallibility lies only in works of fiction. Reasoning backward does not work in real life: reality is far less tidy. In courtrooms everywhere, innocent people pay the price of life imitating art, of science following detective fiction. In particular, this book looks at the long and disastrous shadow cast by that icon of deductive reasoning, Sherlock Holmes. In The Sherlock Effect, author Dr. Thomas W. Young shows why this Sherlock-Holmes-style reasoning does not work and, furthermore, how it can—and has led—to wrongful convictions. Dr. Alan Moritz, one of the early pioneers of forensic pathology in the United States, warned his colleagues in the 1950’s about making the Sherlock Holmes error. Little did Moritz realize how widespread the problem would eventually become, involving physicians in all other specialties of medicine and not just forensic pathologists. Dr. Young traces back how this situation evolved, looking back over the history of forensic medicine, revealing the chilling degree to which forensic experts fail us every day. While Dr. Young did not want to be the one to write this book, he has felt compelled in the interest of science and truth. This book is measured, well-reasoned, accessible, insightful, and—above all—compelling. As such, it is a must-read treatise for forensic doctors, forensic practitioners and students, judges, lawyers adjudicating cases in court, and anyone with an interest in forensic science.