This falls in the category of:
What They Don’t Teach at Detective School.
Flâneur (feminine, “flâneuse”) translates literally as a loafer or a person who loiters, but the poet Charles Baudelaire defined it as a passionate observer.
“There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell’s dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.” (Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York)
The essential elements of the flâneur are also the essential elements of being a good investigator, reporter, researcher, and any other job that requires a well-developed ability to observe and report.
Autodidact (au·to·di·dact , ȯ-tō-ˈdī-ˌdakt, noun) is a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.A private investigator, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigations.
The economic downturn has left a lot of Private Investigators moaning about a lack of work. That’s an economic hardship, if you haven’t planned for it, but it is also an opportunity. Now is the time to learn some new skills. Here are two great blog articles on how to go about it:
The Cheapskate’s Guide to Educating Yourself
How to Set Up Your Personal University
An excellent CI related blog, Brand Killer Robots, offers this fun comparison of the black-hat hacker and the good guy training people to protect their assets.
Why have Ethical Hacker Training companies got it so wrong?
We ask, just who are the people that you are sending on Ethical hacker training courses and why are you sending them?
So lets first look at the white hats. Continue reading ‘Why Ethical Hacker Training Fails’
Anybody who writes reports should have some books at hand to learn from, and for reference.
My first and best recommendation is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Then a serious study of The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun is a must. Barzun may not be pleasant reading, but he has guided untold graduate students successfully through the theses writing process. If you haven’t noticed, good investigation reporting has a lot in common with academic writing.
The Oxford English Dictionary, in some form, and Fowler’s Modern English Usage are absolutely necessary reference works. Fowler’s sorts out questions of usage. For example, when does one use licence instead of license (the first is a noun, while the second is a verb) or when to use iterate, reiterate, and reiterant.
Three more books make my list of required reading in this area:
- The Craft of Research by Booth, et al.
- A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations by Turabian, et al. (an easier read than Barzun)
- How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia. An excellent section of how to avoid pompous writing is worth the price of the book alone.
An article titled THE BOSS CAN’T WRITE by Philip Quinn, appearing in the Financial Post on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, illustrates the difficulties faced by employees and businesses due to poor literacy skills.
The top performers are rarely more gifted than the also-rans, but they almost invariably outwork them. Scholars of elite performance speak of a 10-year rule: you have to put in a decade of focused work to master something to bring expert status within reach.
The expert Investigator develops two important cognitive skills. The first is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns. Second, the expert also learns to quickly identify which bits of information in a changing situation to store in working memory so that he can use them later. This facilitates a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practised, allowing him to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships.
Finally, most experts have at least one crucial mentor.