Month: April 2013

Medical School is Outrageously Expensive

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

Bloomberg has an article on how outrageously expensive medical school is:

Median tuition and fees at private medical schools was $50,309 in the 2012-2013 academic year, more than 16 times the cost when Moy’s father became a doctor. The median education debt for 2012 medical-school graduates was $170,000, including loans taken out for undergraduate studies and excluding interest. That compares with an average $13,469 in 1978, said Jay Youngclaus, co-author of a February 2013 report on medical school debt. The 1978 amount would be about $48,000 in today’s dollars.

The median four-year cost to attend medical school — which includes outlays like living expenses and books — for the class of 2013 is $278,455 at private schools and $207,868 at public ones, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a nonprofit group of U.S. schools.

Keep in mind that most medical schools don’t subsidize the tuition with any kind of merit scholarships, and you are certain to have almost everyone graduate with massive debt. Ben Bernanke’s son apparently has $400,000 in debt:

Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s son can’t expect to escape the debt burden. The elder Bernanke testified before Congress last year that his son is on track to leave medical school with $400,000 in loans. The figure may include accrued interest and undergraduate costs. His son attends Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, according to the school directory. Bernanke, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment.

 

Who Are the Bitcoin Millionaires?

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Business Week profiles three people who are paper millionaires for having invested in Bitcoin:

Owners store their Bitcoins in electronic wallets, which are identified by a long string of letters and numbers. The wallet 1933phfhK3ZgFQNLGSDXvqCn32k2buXY8a, for example, currently owns 111,111 Bitcoins, which amounts to more than $15 million sitting on someone’s hard drive. Whose hard drive is a mystery: While anyone can view the wallets, the owners’ identities are not public. As of April 2, there were about 250 wallets with more than $1 million worth of Bitcoins. The number of Bitcoin millionaires, though, is uncertain—people can have more than one wallet.

Charlie Shrem, 23, discovered Bitcoins on a website in early 2011, when he was a senior at Brooklyn College. Shrem didn’t mine coins himself but bought them on Tradehill. His first purchase was 500 coins at about $3 or $4 each; he bought thousands more when the price hit $20. When he was still in college, Shrem started BitInstant, a company that allows its customers to purchase the digital currency from more than 700,000 stores, including Wal-Mart Stores and Duane Reade. Shrem wears a ring engraved with a code that gives him access to the electronic wallet on his computer. Friends tease him that a thief could cut off his finger to get the ring. “They started calling me four-finger Charlie,” he says.

My take: if they’re still invested in BitCoin, they might lose it all come next month. They better cash out quick. Oh wait, they can’t at the moment…

Google Street View Hyperlapse

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

A way to start the Thursday morning: getting dizzy by watching this Google Street view hyperlapse:

[vimeo 63653873 w=600 h=400]

 

Teehan+Lax has a tool so you can make your own hyperlapse from Google Street images:

Hyper-lapse photography—a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest—has been a growing trend on video sites. It’s not hard to find stunning examples on Vimeo. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine and release Google Street View Hyperlapse.

###

(via Colossal)

The Ring Theory: How Not To Say the Wrong Thing

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I really like this concept/idea about how to not say the wrong thing. Developed by Susan Silk, a clinical psychologist, the premise is “comfort in, dump out”:

Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. She calls it the Ring Theory.

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie’s aneurysm, that’s Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. One of Susan’s patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator.

Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.

When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.”

As someone who’s occasionally too brash with questions (and giving advice), I need to incorporate this Ring Circle theory into my thought and behavior pattern.

Alchemy: a Stunning Short Film on Transformation

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

Alchemy is a stunning five minute film created by Evosia Studios. They describe it thus:

Alchemy is a short film about transformation. In nature, everything is constantly changing: the earth, the sky, the stars, and all living things. Spring is followed by summer, fall and winter. Water turns into clouds, rain and ice. Over time, rivers are created, canyons carved, and mountains formed. All of these elements, mixed together, create the magic of nature’s alchemy. 

Turn up the sound and view this in full screen for maximum impact:

A few of my favorite screenshots from the film are below. Click here to read about the locations found in the film.

Alchemy_4

Alchemy_3

Screen Shot 2013-04-07 at 10.22.24 PM

Screen Shot 2013-04-07 at 10.23.07 PM

Why Amazon Acquired Goodreads

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

According to an industry research group Codex, about 19 percent of Americans do 79 percent of all our (non-required) book reading. This post at The Atlantic, then, summarizes why Amazon acquired Goodreads:

And the way those avid readers find their books is changing. According to Codex’s quarterly survey (in 2012, the company interviewed some 30,000 readers total), far fewer people are finding their reading material at brick and mortar bookstores than two years ago. Instead, they’re relying more on online media (including social networks and author websites) and personal recommendations from people they know (which tend to happen in person, but can also include some social network chatting). What they’re not relying on much more heavily are recommendation engines from online booksellers, like Amazon.

I actually reasoned the numbers would be further skewed, something like 5% of Americans do 95% of our non-required reading. I would like to see more than one source for this statistic.

###

(Hat tip: Tim O’Reilly)

The End of Everything

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

A great op-ed in The Washington Post on the proliferation of the “end of” in publishing:

Nature and truth. Money and markets. Men and marriage. Faith and reason. They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because leadership ended last year. History ended more than two decades ago, while the future ended just two years ago.

If you thought these things were still around, just pick up “The End of Sex,” by Donna Freitas, published last week, or Moises Naim’s “The End of Power,” which came out last month. Try David Wolman’s “The End of Money” or David Agus’s “The End of Illness.” Those came out in 2012, the same year that Hanna Rosin affirmed “The End of Men” and John Horgan imagined “The End of War.”

What do you think will end next?

RIP Roger Ebert

readingbyeugene 2 Comments

That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.

It is with a heavy heart that I learned of Roger Ebert’s death yesterday afternoon.

Thanks to Cheri Lucas for highlighting this blog post titled “I Remember You” Roger wrote about one year ago (which I read for the first time yesterday):

Memory. It makes us human. It creates our ideas of family, history, love, friendship. Within all our minds is a narrative of our own lives and all the people who were important to us. Who were eyewitnesses to the same times and events. Who could describe us to a stranger.

The passage below brought tears to my eyes, because in a hundred years we will remember, Roger.

Early one morning, unable to sleep, I roamed my memories of them. Of an endless series of dinners, and brunches, and poker games, and jokes, and gossip. On and on, year after year. I remember them. They exist in my mind–in countless minds. But in a century the human race will have forgotten them, and me as well. 

If you read one thing today, make it this.

Drew Magary and the Fake $1,500 Kidnapping

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

The editors of GQ Magazine sent Drew Magary on an adventure: to get kidnapped. It was all fake, but Drew’s account of how it went down is fascinating:

I had to fly all the way to Detroit to get kidnapped. Extreme Kidnapping is a company operated by Adam Thick, an entrepreneur and convicted counterfeiter from Oakland County, Michigan. Thick founded Extreme Kidnapping in 2002 after being inspired by the old David Fincher movie The Game. For $500, Adam and his crew will abduct you at gunpoint and hold you hostage for four hours. A thousand bucks gets you ten hours, along with a bit of customized sadism. GQ was curious to see what $1,500 would buy me.

If it strikes you as obscene that people would pay to be kidnapped at a time when it happens routinely to other people for real, the fact is that we live in an age when a normal life simply isn’t enough for many Americans. If you watch enough movies and TV (as I do), you end up yearning for a life that is more cinematic than blissful. Experiences are the newest, hottest luxury items. I looked at it like I was paying for a memory implant, Total Recall-style. But the one thing that didn’t make sense to me was how Adam could pull off the trick of making a kidnapping feel real when his client knows it’s not.

Capitalism in America, everybody.

The Love Conductor, Matchmaker on the Subway

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

This is a great New York Magazine story about Erika Christensen, a matchmaker who roams the New York City subways:

Known professionally as “The Love Conductor,” the 31-year-old has the perfect personality for this line of work. She’s charming, spunky, and positive, like an overwhelmingly likable aerobics instructor from the eighties. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s approachable and pretty in a Wasp-dream-girl sort of way: ski slope nose, light hair and eyes. Within five minutes of hanging out with her, I lose all journalistic decorum and confess, “I really want us to be friends.”

Erika has been matchmaking (pro bono) since college, but went professional last year. “I set my best friend up with the guy she married and I just started thinking, ‘This is something I could really do.’” The prophecy was fulfilled when she sent a fan letter to her mentor, the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. Carroll wrote back immediately and they ended up talking on the phone for three hours about starting a business and dating. Soon after, Erika made a business plan and Trainspottings, a boutique matchmaking business, was born.

I wonder if she can start a vertical for Atlanta’s MARTA. Then again, maybe that is a bad idea.