Claude Forthomme's Blog, page 42

Ready for Radical Life Extension? Americans Are Wary of Living to 120 and Beyond, According to Pew Research

A recent Pew Research study  reported on how Americans view "living to 120 and beyond". Current medical advances already mean that more than half of babies born in 2000 in countries with long-life expectancies - read: Japan, Australia and Western developed countries - can expect to live past 100 years old. I've blogged about this before (see here).





So "living to 120 and beyond" is no longer in the realm of impossible dreams. Indeed, Bolivia has just achieved a record of sorts, the oldest living person ever documented: an Aymara herder who is 123 years old! You can read about him (check this) and here he is, cutting a venerable figure:







What does it mean for most of us? Is it viewed as a beneficial advance or a burden? 



Not unsurprisingly, most Americans do not look on happily at the prospect. Here's an interesting highlight from the Pew Report:



Asked whether they, personally, would choose to undergo medical
treatments to slow the aging process and live to be 120 or more, a
majority of U.S. adults (56%) say “no.” But roughly two-thirds (68%)
think that most other people would. And by similarly large
margins, they expect that radically longer life spans would strain the
country’s natural resources and be available only to the wealthy (highlight added).



To find out more, you can link to the Pew study here. Or read an excellent opinion piece by Charles M. Blow here. 



Does it mean as Pope Benedict XVI once wrote, that "disposing of death in reality is the most radical way of disposing of life"? 



A 'radical way of disposing of life', I love that expression.





Undoubtedly that's why young people love to live dangerously, taking risks and driving at high speed. 



Like James Dean did. 



Dying young in a car crash after making only three films that turned him into a household name, he stayed young in our memories forever. 



Here's the trailer for Rebel Without a Cause, a perfect 1950s movie yet so close to us, if only because of the inter-generational conflicts:





 
The central question is: how do you value life when death is increasingly delayed? What is your take on this? 



I tried to answer the question in my FOREVER YOUNG serial novel, particularly in Part One, I Will Not Leave You Behind that zeroes in on what I believe will be the main defining feature of our world 200 years from now: the fact that medical advances will tend to benefit only the ultra rich. They will be the ones able to afford the expense of staying, and most important, looking young. 



And that raises issues of its own. Because if you live and love that long, how do you part from your loved one who may be much younger than you, particularly if you have never told him how old you really are, and you didn't because you looked young?



You might believe such issues are not for you, but they are likely to press on you sooner than you think...Are you ready to undergo medical treatment to slow the aging process and look 'young forever'?



Update on FOREVER YOUNG: I plan to rename Part One Programmed to Die and make it much shorter, actually a prologue to the whole book (and I'm dropping the reference to the year 2213 in the title too - but that's a detail). Part Two will also be renamed A Troubled Inheritance and become the first part of the book which will have three parts in total. The last two parts (not yet published and called The Immortality Trip and The Hibernation Party) are fully written and I'm busy editing them with the able (and indispensable) help of beta readers. The whole book is scheduled to come out in the fall. In the meantime, if you haven't read it, start with Part One, it will give you a taste of what's coming and it's only 99 cents. To see it on Amazon, click here.



 

Beautiful Boomer Women: Where Are They Now?

On Yahoo movies, you get a look at "80s Babes Then and Now", a peek at how they've handled the passing of years, which is an elegant way of saying "aging" (!), to see click here.



It really should be Now and Then, on the left you have the current look, on the right the way these movie stars looked when they achieved success. 



Of the 12 photos, four struck me more than the others. Here is Sharon Stone:









Yes, handled well. She looks more intriguing than ever.



Here is Kim Basinger:













Fascinating if not the sex bomb she once was (but who is?).



Here is Brooke Shields: 















The virgin look is lost replaced by the beauty of maturity...Which do you prefer?



And here is a poignant Carrie Fisher who once sported a metal bikini in The Return of the Jedi (1983):













Yes, you guessed it, her life has been tough, fighting drugs and alcoholism but she's come out the winner. Thumbs up!



Go take a look at all 12 of them and share your views!

A Warning to Writers: Beware of Small Presses!

Something awful happened to one of our fellow authors. I first came across it on the Passive Voice (a must website for anyone interested in publishing, in case you don't know it). I was shocked. It seems a small press - in spite of the generally good reputation they have - went ahead and applied for the copyright of a book of one of its authors on behalf of itself ! Yes, that's not a typo, you read it right. They want the copyright to a book written by someone else who happens to also be one of their clients.



Of course, it's a complex story. The author, Tricia Drammeh, possibly made the mistake of signing up too quickly with a new press: Iconic Publishing started only two years ago and on their website they only show a dozen published books for 2012 and none (yet) for 2013 - apparently they are slow at updating their site. They have also earned a Strongly Not Recommended listing from P&E in late 2012, enough to turn anyone away! 



Tracie Drammeh's troubles reached a crisis point when she tried to break the contract with them and they retaliated by trying to steal her copyright.



Here's the story as she tells it on her website: click here.



The moral of the story is clear: always file your own copyright, don't let a publisher or anyone else do it for you!



Unfortunately Tracie is in trouble and she hasn't the funds to contract a good lawyer but she certainly needs to be defended. One thing all of us can do, is share the story on every internet forum you happen to be on, from Facebook to Twitter to wherever you are or repost on your blog.



Please support Tracie's case!





Author Tracie Drammeh

How to Promote Discovery of Quality Reads: the Awesome Indies Model

With the tsunami of self-published books, variously estimated at one to two million titles/year or more, finding a really good read has become a titanic enterprise. 



How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? 



Award-winning author Tahlia Newland who writes magical realism and contemporary fantasy has come up with what looks like a very good answer. She founded an evaluation site, Awesome Indies (to visit, click here), putting together a group of professional reviewers who are tasked with using unassailable review criteria and a clear 5-star rating system to present on the site a list of "AIA-approved" self-published books deemed to be of the same quality of craftsmanship as books published by mainstream publishing houses.



Brilliant, the idea to adopt the standard set by mainstream publishing houses...No doubt, an excellent model of book discovery as long as the site maintains intact two aspects: the excellence/respectability of its reviewers and the correct use of review criteria. 



The site is new and its Alexa ranking is still relatively modest (my own blog is better!) but it is rising fast and has all the right features: it engages men and women about equally, it attracts a college-educated population and is read at home as well as in the office, the "bounce rate" (people leaving without reading a page) is satisfyingly low, the number of daily pageviews and time spent on the site is rising fast and its audience is very global, only about half of the visitors are American (see here). 



How does Awsome Indies work? 



Simple, you have to submit your book to them with a 4 or 5 star review either using one you received from their own vetted and trusted list of reviewers (the list is on the Awsome Indies site and you can contact them for a review of your book) OR from someone who is deemed to be professional in the publishing industry (in that case, along with the review you must submit a cv of your reviewer). 





Author Tahlia Newland

They will NOT accept reviews from people or site who get paid, eg. Kirkus Reviews. That is particularly important as any professional writer knows and in the case of Kirkus, it makes a lot of sense: their reviews of Indie books are disappointingly  unprofessional and do not follow the review criteria that Awesome Indies requires and which are basically standard for good fiction writing. To see those criteria, click here.



Recently, Tales from the Reading Room posted an interesting interview of Awsome Indies founder, Tahlia Newland, see here.



I haven't yet submitted one of my books to them but it is certainly something I mean to do. Has anyone of you done so? What was your experience? Do you know of any other book evaluation site based on this model? Any opinion about what works to promote book discoverability?



   

Good News: Why Hype Works and Negative Comments Don't

A new research into marketing has revealed something that is counter-intuitive but oh, so encouraging to anyone, writers especially, who have received bad reviews of their work. It seems that a thumbs-down view elicits a counter-reaction from other readers. By contrast, hype can work and feeds on itself as well.



Who says so? Not just anybody. Those are the very words of one of the researchers, Sinan K. Aral, a professor of information technology and marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Besides Mr. Aral, other scholars from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and New York University were involved in this new internet study. 



The question they sought to answer is key to figuring out what works in marketing:

is something popular because it is actually good or just because it is popular?



More details on how they answered that question can be found in an article by NYT's science reporter  Kenneth Chang here.



The implications for marketing are enormous and suggest a way forward to ensure success. The downside is that quality of work may not matter as much as one might like.


When searching for a good read on Amazon, what do you read first, the
negative reviews or the good ones? Which do you believe in and why?



What do you think works, thumbs up or thumbs down?

Why did Amazon Buy the Washington Post?

A good question and it has left many people wondering. Amazon's founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos (the current Steve Jobs of the e-industry but I wish him a long life!) paid $250 million for the Washington Post. To some, it looks like a pittance, after all he's a billionaire and can afford it. Others buy yachts, antique cars and islands in the Pacific. He likes a historic newspaper that is America's political clarion.



Good for him!



Indeed, the $250 million he paid could be considered generous: after all, this is a paper that's been bleeding money and subscribers - losses are substantial and readers are down to about half of what they were a decade ago. He paid much more than what the Boston Globe went for (only $70 million). Interestingly, the Globe had cost the Times Corp. $1 billion to purchase ten years ago. 



Click here for a comprehensive New York Times article about this. I love the picture in that article of Bezos together with Donald Graham of the Washington Post (he's the third generation to lead the paper), Bezos is on the left, Graham on the right:







So all newspapers are in a downward spin, we know that. On the face of it, not a good investment. Why did Bezos do it? 



He's not going to run the paper himself, he said so quite clearly, he likes his "daily job" in Seattle. He's not a political activist, merely a liberal with a small 'l': he supports gay marriage but he's against taxing the wealthy (small wonder).



Could it be nostalgia for the printed word? After all, Bezos launched Amazon with the business of selling printed books online (since then of course, he's famously branched into e-books and all manners of electronic goods). Presumably he likes the printed word. One would like to think so - especially me as a writer, I love printed books, the feel of the paper, the sense of owning a book, a precious product of the mind...



Could it be the latest fashion among billionaires? After all, Warren Buffett has recently bought a slew of newspapers. He believes in the strength of the printed word for local papers.



Could it be a clever way for Amazon to make itself heard on the Washington political scene? If so, it would be a very indirect voice because Washington Post journalists are not likely to let themselves be pushed around.



What do you think?

How to Clean Up Dog Poop: Mail Back the Poop to the Dog's Owner!

One mayor in Spain had a brilliant idea: send back the dog poop to the dog's owner in a nice, registered mail package, "cacaexpress". He sent it to some 150 dog owners and it worked! Dog owners in Brunete (pop. 10,000) are now seen busy picking up behind their dogs...



Here's the story in the Huffington Post: click here.



And here's a video from Jay Swanson that makes it very clear how prevalent the problem is also in France, starting with Paris:







And I can tell you the problem exists in Rome where I live and how!



The Spanish method has gone viral on Twitter with the hashtag #cacaexpress...It might be a good thing to imitate, what do you think?

Mayhem in Rome: The Roman Forum is Closed to Traffic and Open to Tourists

The proposed closure of one of Rome's main streets, the Via dei Fori Imperiali that crosses the Roman forum from Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, has been controversial from the start...it began thirty years ago!



For some, practical people who prefer to live in the present rather than the past, it would cause catastrophic traffic jams and hurt the sales of shopkeepers. For others - mostly Green-minded and lovers of History - it would at last give back to Humanity the fora of Imperial Rome, the Cradle of Western Civilization and, incidentally, help boost tourism.



This is the Fori Imperiali without traffic on a recent Sunday (the avenue has been closed on Sundays for years):







And here are some of the people who wanted the measure:







With Rome's new mayor, center-left Ignazio Marini, the closure has come to pass. Marini is a
Sicilian born in Genoa and an organ transplant surgeon who worked 20
years in the US and held chairs as professor of surgery in two prestigious American
universities (Pittsburgh and Philadelphia) and only returned to Italy in
2006.  He applied this measure almost as soon as he was elected, it was
one of the promises of his election campaign.



The closure was implemented Saturday August 3 and concerned only half the avenue linking Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, a very short segment:









No doubt, he came to it with a "can do" attitude he'd learned in America forgetting that he was dealing with Italy. The chorus of complaints has been deafening.Traffic jams have been enormous, people drove up against police barriers unaware of the closure:





A mess! 



Will Romans get used to it? Probably. They don't have much of a choice anyway. My guess is that the closure is here to stay.



Will tourists get a kick out of this new walk? Maybe.



The real beneficiaries are no doubt the Roman ruins that will be freed from traffic vibrations and fumes. 



And the Mayor? Oh, he's very happy. He's even asked the Government to refrain using the Via dei Fori Imperiali for its "blue cars" (official cars). Look how happy Marini is on his bike:









 So is everything fine in the best of worlds? Not really. Traffic jams mean more pollution. Closing a central avenue in the heart of a city means you divide the city in two, it becomes hard to go from East to West.



Am I in favor? I would be, one hundred percent, if only Rome had a reasonable public transport system but it doesn't. Buses are few and slow, there are only two Metro (underground) lines, and Rome has been waiting already 6 years for completion of the third line - which may never be finished, given the current recession...



Well, we still have the Italian sun and the beauty of Rome's ruins!

Is San Diego Comic-Con's Festival A Harbinger of The Next Big Hit?

This year the big hit at San Diego's Comic-Con Festival held in mid-July has been the space story SAGA, created by writer Brian K.Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples (according to Time reporter Douglas Wolk, see here; Saga however was a hit at several Comic Con festivals around the country since it first came out in 2012). Saga Volume One is ranked at number 2  for fantasy graphic novels in the Kindle Store, and number 5 for science fiction.



Is it a harbinger of the next popular theme/genre to hit the publishing industry and Hollywood?



Maybe. 





It happened with the series THE WALKING DEAD first published a few years ago, in 2003 to be exact: remember how we subsequently all fell into and wallowed in paranormal fiction mania filled with zombies and Twilight vampires etc?



Perhaps not coincidentally, Stephanie Meyer recounts the exact day when she thought up Twilight (see here): it was in June 2003. Her book of course was published two years later, in October 2005 (the hardcover edition). 



Now this new SAGA is focused on parenthood and the difficulties of raising a child during an interplanetary war, particularly when the parents, winged Alana and horned Marko come from two warring worlds - a little like a sci-fi Romeo and Juliet who would have had a child in conflict-ridden Verona.



What strikes me about this fantasy world is how it is focused on a key human relationship: mothering and fathering. Are basic human emotions entering even the most far-fetched, fantastic, other-worldly science fiction?



Personally, I hope so. I find way-out fantasy science fiction ultimately uninteresting - even the most astounding displays of imaginative pyrotechnics after a while become repetitive and hence boring. An injection of good old human emotion can only improve it...That's my take, I like science fiction that sheds a light on the world I happen to live in, not the world some other guy has made up and that has nothing to do with anything in my experience.



What do you think?

Italys' Brain Drain is UK's Brain Gain or How One Young Italian Made a Discovery that Could Help Fight Cancer

In 1953, two Cambridge scientists, Watson and Crick, famously discovered the DNA's double helix structure. Now, sixty years later, Cambridge researchers have made yet another amazing discovery: they found a quadruple helix structure that appears to be linked to cell proliferation, hence cancer. 



The discovery raises the interesting possibility of "sequestering" these so-called "G-quadruplexes" and in so doing, one might eventually be able to control cancer. This is still early days, but it is a confirmation that science is on the right "genetic" path to find a cure. For more on this, read here



What I find intriguing is that the experiment, while done by a team as is always the case, was nonetheless designed by a young Italian woman, Giulia Biffi, age 26, who also co-wrote the paper that was published on Nature Chemistry last January. She was recently interviewed by the Italian magazine Espresso that showed a nice picture of her at her graduation (she got her Ph.D. from Cambridge):









When asked whether she'd like to return to Italy, she was quick to reply that there was no possibility, no funding to allow for research...Where she is now in Cambridge, working in a lab with many co-workers and plenty of advanced equipment, the research is funded by Cancer Research UK.



Italy's brain drain is UK's brain gain, and just as often, you come across similar cases in the US and Canada.



Yet another symptom of Italy's sick economy...