On Blurbs and Blurbing

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Alan Levinovitz has a great piece on blurbs, those short endorsements found on the front and back covers of books. Coined in 1906 by children’s book author and civil disobedient Gelett Burgess, blurbs have a fascinating history:

In 1936 George Orwell described them as “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.” He admitted the impossibility of banning reviews, and proposed instead the adoption of a system for grading novels according to classes, “perhaps quite a rigid one,” to assist hapless readers in choosing among countless life-changing masterpieces. More recently Camille Paglia called for an end to the “corrupt practice of advance blurbs,” plagued by “shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole.” Even Stephen King, a staunch supporter of blurbs, winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” and calls for sincerity on the part of blurbers.

The excesses and scandals of contemporary blurbing, book and otherwise, are well-documented. William F. Buckley relates how publishers provided him with sample blurb templates: “(1) I was stunned by the power of [ ]. This book will change your life. Or, (2) [ ] expresses an emotional depth that moves me beyond anything I have experienced in a book.” Overwrought praise for David Grossman’s To the End of the Landinspired The Guardian to hold a satirical Dan Brown blurbing competition.

Have you ever been swayed to purchase a book based on a blurb as opposed to a description/summary of the book? Bill Morris performed an informal survey of his friends/colleagues last year, and the results of his blurbing query are here.

How Alzheimer’s Disease Spreads

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Researchers at Columbia and Harvard performed an experiment with genetically engineered mice that could make abnormal human tau proteins and have found a path for the spread of Alzheimer’s disease:

Alzheimer’s researchers have long known that dying, tau-filled cells first emerge in a small area of the brain where memories are made and stored. The disease then slowly moves outward to larger areas that involve remembering and reasoning.

But for more than a quarter-century, researchers have been unable to decide between two explanations. One is that the spread may mean that the disease is transmitted from neuron to neuron, perhaps along the paths that nerve cells use to communicate with one another. Or it could simply mean that some brain areas are more resilient than others and resist the disease longer.

The new studies provide an answer. And they indicate it may be possible to bring Alzheimer’s disease to an abrupt halt early on by preventing cell-to-cell transmission, perhaps with an antibody that blocks tau.

According to Wikipedia, there are more than 25 million sufferers of Alzheimer’s worldwide. This is a disease that is predicted to affect 1 in 85 people globally by 2050. It’s encouraging to see progress being made in this field, even if we are many years away from a cure.

The Culture That is Japan

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

This is a fascinating piece on the culture of Japan. Over the last twenty years of recession, the Japanese have traveled abroad and returned with acquired international tastes. In fact, as the piece attests, Japan may be a better destination than its foreign counterparts where the product is made. If you want to test fine French cuisine, head over to Tokyo rather than Paris, and this piece explains why.

Japan has become the most culturally cosmopolitan country on Earth, a place where you can lunch at a bistro that serves 22 types of delicious and thoroughly Gallic terrines, shop for Ivy League–style menswear at a store that puts to shame the old-school shops of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend the evening sipping rare single malts in a serene space that boasts a collection of 12,000 jazz, blues and soul albums. The best of everything can be found here, and is now often made here: American-style fashion, haute French cuisine, classic cocktails, modern luxury hotels. It might seem perverse for a traveler to Tokyo to skip sukiyaki in favor of Neapolitan pizza, but just wait until he tastes that crust.

An interesting factoid about the quality of food:

Though many Japanese foodies and critics deride the Michelin Guide for a perceived ignorance of traditional Japanese food culture, the publication of the first Red Guide to Tokyo just four years ago signaled a tectonic shift in the international culinary scene. In the latest guide, 247 of Tokyo’s restaurants have stars—almost four times the number in Paris, and more than the total number in London, New York City and Paris, pointing to the spectacular appeal of this city to foreign palates. 

It’s no surprise to see the top ranks of Japan’s Red Guide populated by tiny sushi bars and extravagant kaiseki restaurants, but each year there are also more and more non-Japanese restaurants earning stars for their creative cooking. One of Tokyo’s three-star establishments—an honor awarded to only 15 restaurants in the main cities of Europe but to 16 in Tokyo alone—is Quintessence, which serves contemporary French food created by a young Japanese chef named Shuzo Kishida.

On Japanese bars:

It’s this embracing of bartending as a vocation that makes Japan’s bars better than those anywhere else in the world. There’s also the hyperspecialization encouraged by the fact that bars can be so small—and that almost every narrow pursuit can find enough customers to at least break even. But maybe the central reason this city is so amazing for drinkers is that the quest to find the best is, by definition, a Sisyphean task.

Read the piece to find out about Katsuyuki Tanaka, an owner of a coffee shop who requires his baristas to train for at least a year before they can serve espressos.

I’ve never been to Japan, but from what I’ve read, the country is quickly becoming the best place in the world in which to eat, drink, shop, and sleep.

Wikipedia’s List of Lists of Lists

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Wikipedia’s list of lists of lists seems to be popular on the internet right now. And for a good reason. It’s a treasure-trove of meta awesomeness.

So dive in and spend a few hours on the internet, learning. My top five suggestions:

1) List of books

2) List of centenarians

3) Lists of most expensive items

4) List of small Solar System bodies

5) List of websites

What I’m looking forward to next: a list of lists of lists of lists on the internet.

Graffiti Artist to Make $200 Million from Facebook Stock

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

Facebook announced its IPO yesterday, in an effort to raise $5 billion (perhaps more), which will be the largest internet public offering ever. Many people who hold Facebook shares are poised to become millionaires overnight. The New York Times reports a story of one David Choe, a graffiti artist who painted murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, California. He chose to be paid in stock rather than in cash. Now, he’s poised to become an ultra-millionaire, to the tune of $200 million or more.

Many “advisers” to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion. Mr. Choe’s payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives.

Sounds like Choe has won the lottery (by comparison, a $380 million Mega Millions jackpot in 2011 had a cash payout of $240 million, the largest in the history of the American lottery).

On a final note, what is the artist’s advice for living? “Always double down on 11. Always.”

The Farewell Letter to Your Coworkers

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

The Wall Street Journal has a fun piece on funny or awkward farewell emails people have written to their coworkers upon departure from their employer:

At the law firm Alston & Bird, one departing associate baffled his colleagues by sending everyone a black-and-white photo of himself, with only his name and start and quit dates written beneath “as if it was a tombstone,” says John E. Stephenson, a partner in Atlanta who has been keeping a “Dead Soldiers” file of his colleagues’ goodbye notes for 27 years. “It caused a firestorm because people thought he had died.” The associate had to follow up with another email saying, “I’m not dead. I’m sorry to have concerned so many of you,” Mr. Stephenson says.

I like this parody farewell email from Chris Kula:

For nearly as long as I’ve worked here, I’ve hoped that I might one day leave this company,” he began. “I have been fortunate enough to work with some absolutely interchangeable supervisors on a wide variety of seemingly identical projects—an invaluable lesson in overcoming daily tedium in overcoming daily tedium in overcoming daily tedium.

But the best way to get someone’s attention? Write an email with the subject line “FREE FOOD.”

Virtual Reality and Pain Relief

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

In “Burning Man,” Jay Kirk tells the incredible story of Sam Brown, who was set on fire by an improvised explosive device while on tour in Afghanistan. He survived, only to find himself doomed to a post-traumatic life of unbearable pain. When hallucinogen-grade drugs offered little relief, he turned to virtual reality. And partaking in a video game called SnowWorld helped Sam Brown cope with pain more than anything else he tried:

Last July, Maani and Hoffman published the results of the study in which Sam Brown had participated. Echoing the civilian studies, soldiers reported significant drops in pain while immersed in SnowWorld. Time spent thinking about pain, which is an inextricable contributor to actual pain, dropped from 76 percent without SnowWorld to 22 percent with SnowWorld. Amazingly, some of the biggest drops were for the most severe levels of pain, which went against every previous expectation. Since then, SnowWorld has received a good deal of enthusiasm from several well-lit corners of the Pentagon. At least one four-star general, after seeing the results from the ISR study, has gone so far as to say that he foresees a day coming soon when VR pain distraction might become standard care. There is nearly equal excitement about Hoffman’s other applications, including one called IraqWorld, a virtual-reality exposure therapy he built to treat soldiers with PTSD.

Hoffman knows that more studies need to be done before VR becomes a regular part of a medic’s field kit. To that end, he and his colleagues at HITLab are now using $7.5 million in NIH grants to further investigate how VR affects the mind and how better to apply it in clinical situations. One part of the study is looking at using small doses of ketamine to enhance the sense of presence. But he is confident that eventually, as the technology becomes more sophisticated, VR will be exponentially more effective. Soon, he predicts, VR worlds will be customized, personally tailored, and as in social networks or Second Life, they’ll allow patients to bring along other people—a vet’s mother, girlfriend, buddies. Hoffman imagines programs that will tap into a patient’s happy memories—of a ski vacation or a honeymoon or a morning rowing on a river, sunlight dripping from the oars.

Hoffman can also see battlefield applications. Customized VR worlds will be pre-programmed right into the soldier’s eye gear. He’s already experimenting with piezoelectric crystals to that end. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to imagine a near future in which combat patients could simultaneously distract themselves from their own pain while inflicting it on a virtual and remote enemy. A soldier could put his mind inside a drone instead of watching as a medic changed his bandages. In such a future of techno-utopian warfare, at least for those combatants equipped to fight outside the pain matrix, victory will indeed belong to those who have rid themselves of the inconvenience of being men and who, for all we know, may as well bleed snow.

An incredible story.

Gaming the College Rankings

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

In education news this week, there’s a big story on an administrator at Claremont McKenna College who admitted to falsely reporting SAT statistics since 2005. The scores for each fall’s freshman class were generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each. While seemingly insignificant, these scores most likely affected Claremont McKenna’s overall rankings in the U.S. News & World Report for best colleges.

The New York Times notes that in recent years, colleges have been gaming the system by twisting the meanings of rules, cherry-picking data, or simply lying:

In one recent example, Iona College in New Rochelle, north of New York City, acknowledged last fall that its employees had lied for years not only about test scores, but also about graduation rates, freshman retention, student-faculty ratio, acceptance rates and alumni giving.

Other institutions have found ways to manipulate the data without outright dishonesty.

In 2008, Baylor University offered financial rewards to admitted students to retake the SAT in hopes of increasing its average score. Admissions directors say that some colleges delay admission of low-scoring students until January, excluding them from averages for the class admitted in September, while other colleges seek more applications to report a lower percentage of students accepted.

What I don’t understand is why there isn’t some standardized system for colleges to report their scores, admissions statistics, and the like. For example, when I take the SAT or the GRE, the company who administers the tests forwards my scores on my behalf. There is no ambiguity that these are my scores, and they are valid. I understand that colleges aren’t obligated to report their figures, but I think some kind of verification process would be helpful for millions of students that rely on this kind of data as they are (supposedly) making an informed decision about which college they want to attend.

The Woes of Atlanta’s Housing Market

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

The New York Times has a story on Atlanta’s depressed housing market. It paints a dire picture of my hometown:

The reasons for Atlanta’s housing woes are both representative of the nation’s troubles and special to this former boomtown, where housing appreciated handsomely, though not to the lofty heights of Las Vegas, Miami and New York.

Where the region once attracted thousands of prospective home buyers drawn by plentiful jobs and more affordable living, that influx has dwindled. Local unemployment, at 9.2 percent, is slightly higher than the national rate, in part because one in every four jobs lost was connected to real estate, a much higher rate than in the rest of the country. Those jobs have yet to return, while even people with work are having trouble qualifying for loans.

The region, plagued by mortgage fraud and developers who dotted the exurban landscape with large luxury homes that never sold, is inundated with foreclosed properties. In fact, Atlanta has the most government-owned foreclosed properties for sale of any large city, according to the Federal Reserve.

Quite simply, it’s a buyer’s market right now:

Atlanta has suffered greatly from a contracting pool of home buyers. The number of people moving from within the United States to Atlanta peaked at 100,000 in 2006 and plunged to just 17,000 by 2009, the latest census figures available.

On The Diversity and Genetics of Dogs

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

This short National Geographic piece explains how the enormous diversity of dog breeds can be explained away by a relatively small change in genetic manipulations:

The difference between the dachshund’s diminutive body and the Rottweiler’s massive one hangs on the sequence of a single gene. The disparity between the dachshund’s stumpy legs—known officially as disproportionate dwarfism, or chondrodysplasia—and a greyhound’s sleek ones is determined by another one.

The same holds true across every breed and almost every physical trait. In a project called CanMap, a collaboration among Cornell University, UCLA, and the National Institutes of Health, researchers gathered DNA from more than 900 dogs representing 80 breeds, as well as from wild canids such as gray wolves and coyotes. They found that body size, hair length, fur type, nose shape, ear positioning, coat color, and the other traits that together define a breed’s appearance are controlled by somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 genetic switches. The difference between floppy and erect ears is determined by a single gene region in canine chromosome 10, or CFA10. The wrinkled skin of a Chinese shar-pei traces to another region, called HAS2. The patch of ridged fur on Rhodesian ridgebacks? That’s from a change in CFA18. Flip a few switches, and your dachshund becomes a Doberman, at least in appearance. Flip again, and your Doberman is a Dalmatian.

This is in stark contrast to genes in humans, where something like human height is controlled by interaction of 200 or more genes. So why is there such a difference in dogs? The answer lies in domestication of dogs:

Sheltered from the survival-of-the-fittest wilderness, those semidomesticated dogs thrived even though they harbored deleterious genetic mutations—stumpy legs, for instance—that would have been weeded out in smaller wild populations.

The most fascinating part of the piece is the relevance of dog to human diseases, and how they may be related:

Cornell researchers studying the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa—shared by humans and dogs—found 20 different canine genes causing the disorder. But a different gene was the culprit in schnauzers than in poodles, giving researchers some specific leads for where to start looking in humans. Meanwhile a recent study of a rare type of epilepsy in dachshunds found what appears to be a unique genetic signature, which could shed new light on the disorder in us as well.

Here is the link to the Cornell genetic diversity project in dogs.

###

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)