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Reading Test 42
The Importance of Business Cards
The exchanging of business cards is as close to a universal ritual as you can find in the business world
The ritual may be universal, but the design of business cards and how they are swapped vary across countries. Architects have their artistic cards; lawyers like it black; the Japanese make the exchange of cards an informal ceremony. While there are cards for the deceased, and obituaries are often crammed full of cards and tributes. Some business people hand out 24-carat gold cards, and there are kidney exchange cards with what not only with the new contact details, but also with the job descriptions of their parents and even grandparents. This practice has become so common in parts of New York. For example, that the use of such cards is now prohibited by some of the area’s institutions.
Cards have been around a long time. One form or another. The Chinese invented the paper notice that the intended to pay them a visit, but they were for social purposes only. Later in the 17th century, European businessmen invented a new type of card to act as miniature advertisements. In today’s world, business cards can cause people to have strong reactions ranging from hatred to embarrassment and respect. However, only very few changes can prove heated discussions among people more interested in social norms than functionality, the swapping of business cards.
Lots of companies try to promote themselves by designing the card. Employees at one famous toy company gave out little plastic figures containing contact details stamped on them. One fast-food company has business cards which are shaped like a portion of French fries. A Canadian flower shop once gave each customer a wooden card to redeem in their store for each of the bouquets. For many business commentators, such gimmicky business cards prove that the use of paper cards will ultimately end at an end. After all, why bother exchanging bits of thick paper at all when you can simply swap electronic versions by smartphone?
However, one can just as well argue the opposite: that business cards have a lot to say, and in a business world full of meetings and correspondence, it is more important than ever that your card is noticed. Attempts to reinvent business cards for the digital age have not been successful. Even all the latest technology won’t help people get selected after handing out a little rectangle of paper rather than using a digital file format.
The traditional business card is necessary to understand how business works. Business cards are thriving in a digital age. It is a powerful reminder that there is much about business that is timeless. According to Kate Jones, a business lecturer, there is one element and inescapable issue. Her 2006 study of more than 200 business executives in North America found that it was the key element for running a successful business. You need to be able to look someone in the eye and shake that sort of person; they are. In this way, you can transform acquaintances into relationships. A good proportion of business life will always be about building social connections — having dinner or playing sport with clients and colleagues — and while computers can deal with administrative tasks, it is still human skills that have to function on another level.
The rapid advance of globalisation means that this relationship-building process is becoming ever more demanding. Managers have to put more effort into dealing with international counterparts, especially when there is not a common language, which is so often the case these days. A recent UK survey showed that chief executives of global organisations must routinely spend three or four out of every four weeks on international travel. It is in these situations that business cards are doubly useful as they are a quick way of establishing connections. Cards can also remind you that you have actually met someone in a face-to-face meeting rather than just searched for them on the internet. Looking through piles of different cards can enhance your memory in ways that simply looking through old-time electronic lists would never do.
Janet McIntyre is a leading expert on business cards in today’s world. She maintains that as companies become more complex, cards are essential in determining the exact status of every contact you meet in multinational corporations. Janet also explains how exchanging business cards can be an effective way of initiating a conversation because it gives people a ritual to follow when they first meet a new business contact.
The business world is obsessed with the idea of creating and inventing new things that will change the way we do everything, and this does lead to progress. But there are lots of things that do not need to be changed and, in Janet McIntyre’s view, tradition also has an equally valuable role to play. Therefore, the practice of exchanging business cards is likely to continue in the business world.
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The importance of law
A
The law influences all of us virtually all the time, it governs almost all aspects of our behavior, and even what happens to us when we are no longer alive. It affects us from the embryo onwards. It governs the air we breathe, the food and drink we consume, our travel, family relationships, and our property. It applies in the bottom of the ocean and in space.
Each time we examine a label on a food product, engage in work as an employee or employer, travel on the roads, go to school to learn or to teach, stay in a hotel, borrow a library book, create or dissolve a commercial company, play sports, or else use the services of someone for anything from plumbing a sink to planning a city, we are in the world of law.
B
Law has also become much more widely recognised as the standard by which behavior needs to be judged. A very telling development in recent history is the way in which the idea of law has permeated all parts of social life. The universal standard of whether something is socially tolerated is progressively becoming whether it is legal, rather than something that has always been considered acceptable. In earlier times, most people were illiterate.
Today, by contrast, a vast number of people can read, and it is becoming easier for people to take an interest in law, and for the general population to help actually shape the law in many countries. However, law is a versatile instrument that can be used equally well for the improvement or degradation of humanity.
C
This, of course, puts law in a very significant position. In our rapidly developing world, all sorts of skills and knowledge are valuable. Those people, for example, with knowledge of computers, the Internet, and communications technology are relied upon by the rest of us.
There is now someone with IT skills or an IT help desk in every UK school, every company, every hospital, every local and central government office. Without their knowledge, many parts of commercial and social life today would seize up in minutes. But legal understanding is just as vital and as universally needed. The American comedian Jerry Seinfeld put it like this, “We are all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem, the lawyer is the only person who has read and made sense of the rules.” In other words, the lawyer is the only person who has read and made sense of the rules.
D
The number of laws has never been greater. In the UK alone, about 35 new Acts of Parliament are produced every year, thereby doubling thousands of new rules. The legislative output of the British Parliament has more than doubled in recent times from 1,100 pages a year in the early 1970s, to over 2,500 pages a year today. Between 1997 and 2006, the legislature passed 365 Acts of Parliament and more than 32,000 legally binding statutory instruments. In a system with so much law, lawyers do a great deal not just to vindicate the rights of citizens and organizations but also to help develop the law through legal arguments, some of which are adapted by judges to become laws. Law courts can and do produce new law and revise old law, but they do so having heard the arguments of lawyers.
E
However, despite their important role in developing the rules, lawyers are not universally admired. Anti-lawyer jokes have a long history going back to the ancient Greeks.
More recently the son of a famous Hollywood actor was asked at his junior school what his father did for a living, to which he replied, “My daddy is a movie actor, and sometimes he plays the good guy, and sometimes he plays the lawyer. For balance, though, it is worth remembering that there are and have been many heroic and revered lawyers such as the Roman philosopher and politician Cicero and Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian campaigner for independence.
F
People sometimes make comments that characterise lawyers as professionals whose concerns put personal reward above truth, or who gain financially from misfortune. There are undoubtedly lawyers that would fit that bill, just as there are some scientists, journalists and others in that category. But, in general, it is no more just to say that lawyers are bad because they make a living from people’s problems than it is to make the same accusation in respect of nurses or IT consultants. A great many lawyers are involved in public law work, such as that involving civil liberties, housing and other issues. Such work is not lavishly remunerated and the quality of the service provided by these lawyers relies on considerable professional dedication. Moreover, much legal work has nothing to do with conflict or misfortune, but is primarily concerned with drafting documents. Another source of social bad behaviour for lawyers, and dissatisfaction for the law, is a limited public understanding of how laws work and how it could be changed. Greater clarity about these issues, maybe as a result of better public relations, would reduce many aspects of public dissatisfaction with the law.
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Voynich Manuscript
A.
The Starkly modern Beinecke Library at Yale University is home to some of the most valuable books in the world first editions of Shakespeare, Gutenbergs Bibles and manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Yet the library’s most controversial possession is an unprepossessing vellum manuscript about the size of hardback book, containing 240-odd pages of drawings and text of unknown age and authorship. Catalogued as MS408, the manuscript would attract little attention were it not for the fact that the drawings hint at esoteric knowledge, while the text seems to be some sort of code one that no-one has been able to break. It’s known to scholars as the Voynich manuscript, after the American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who bought the manuscript from a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912.
B.
Over the years, the manuscript has attracted the attention of everyone from amateur dabblers to codebreakers, all determined to succeed where countless others have failed. Academic research papers, books and websites are devoted to making sense of the contents of the manuscript. Which are freely available to all. “Most other mysteries involve secondhand reports,” says Dr Gordon Rugg of Keele University, a leading Voynich expert. But this is one that you can see for yourself.
C.
It is certainly strange: page after page of drawings of weird plants, astrological symbolism and human figures, accompanied by a script that looks like some form of shorthand. What does it say and what are the drawings about? Voynich himself believed that the manuscript was the work of the 13th century English monk Roger Bacon, famed for his knowledge of alchemy, philosophy and science. In 1921 Voynich’s view that Bacon was the writer appeared to win support from the work of William Newbold, professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, who claimed to have found the key to the cipher system used by Bacon. According to Newbold, the manuscript proved that Bacon had access to microscopes centuries before they were supposedly first invented. They claim that this medieval monk had observed living cells created a sensation. It soon became clear, however, that Newbold had fallen victim to wishful thinking. Other scholars showed that his ‘decoding’ methods produced a host of possible interpretations. The Voynich manuscript has continued to defy the efforts of world-class experts. In 1944, a team was assembled to tackle the mystery, led by William Friedman, the renowned American codebreaker. They began with the most basic code breaking task: analysing the relative frequencies of the characters making up the text, looking for signs of an underlying structure. Yet Friedman’s team soon found themselves in deep water. The precise size of the ‘alphabet’ of the Voynich manuscript was unclear: it’s possible to have at more than 70 distinct symbols among the 170,000-character text. Furthermore, Friedman discovered that some words and phrases appeared more often than expected in a standard language, casting doubt on claims that the manuscript concealed a real language, as encryption typically reduces word frequencies.
D.
Friedman concluded that the most plausible resolution of this paradox was that “Voynichese is some sort of specially created artificial language, whose words are devised from concepts, rather than linguistics. So, could the Voynich manuscript be the earliest known example of an artificial language? Friedman’s hypothesis commands respect because of the lifetime of crypt analytical expertise he brought to bear,” says Rob Churchill, co-author of the Voynich Manuscript, that still leaves a host of questions unanswered, however, such as the identity of the author and the meaning of the many drawings. “It does little to advance our understanding of the manuscript as a whole,” says Churchill. Even though Friedman was working more than 60 years ago, he suspected that major insights would come really that the device that had already transformed codebreaking: the computer. In this he was right: it is now the key tool for uncovering clues about the pleasure from manuscript’s language.
E.
The insights so far have been perplexing. For example, in 2001 another leading Voynich scholar, Dr Gabriel Landini of Birmingham University in the UK, published the results of his study of the manuscript using a pattern-detecting method called spectral analysis. This revealed evidence that the manuscript contains genuine words, rather than random nonsense, consistent with the existence of some underlying natural language. Yet the following year, Voynich expert Renz Zandbergen of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany showed that the entropy of the text (a measure of the rate of transfer of information was consistent with Friedman’s suspicions that an artificial language had been used.
F.
Many are convinced that the Voynich manuscript isn’t a hoax. For how could a medieval hoaxer create so many telltale signs of a message from random nonsense? Yet even this has been challenged in new research by Rugg.
G.
Using a system, first published by the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano in 1550 in which a specially constructed grille issued to pick out symbols from a table, Rugg found he could readily generate text with many of the basic traits of the Voynich manuscript Publishing his results in 2004 Rugg stresses that he hadn’t set out to prove the manuscript. Publishing his results in that it’s feasible to hoax something this complex in a few months, he says. Inevitably, others beg to differ. Some scholars, such as Zandbergen, still suspect the text has genuine meaning, though believe it may never be deciphered. Others, such as Churchill, have suggested that the sheer weirdness of the illustrations and text hint at an author who had lost touch with reality. What is clear is that the book-sized manuscript kept under lock and key at Yale University has none of its fascination. “Many derive great intellectual pleasure from solving puzzles,” says Rugg. “The Voynich manuscript is a challenging puzzle as anyone could ask for.”
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