Laser Forest is the lastest creation from a creative studio known as Marshmallow Laser Feast comprised of Memo Akten, Robin McNicholas, and Barney Steel who have focused almost exclusively on creating interactive experiences over the past two years. This latest installation involves a forest of 150 interactive rods installed in an empty factory space that when touched trigger both light and audio cues, effectively creating a large interactive instrument. Laser Forest was commission for the STRP Biennale in Eindhoven last month, and you can learn much more about at the Creators Project.
Built as a municipal bathhouse in the late 19th century, Les Bains-Douches would eventually become one of the hottest night clubs in Paris known simply as Les Bains, a destination for the likes of Kate Moss, Mick Jagger, Johnny Depp and even Andy Warhol. Due to some faulty construction in 2010 the building was declared a safety hazard and is now slated for complete renovation in just a few days to pave way for La Société des Bains, a new space that will open in 2014. In the meantime, owner Jean-Pierre Marois turned over the building to 50 street artists commissioned by Magda Danysz Gallery who have been working since January to turn the decaying building into an endless canvas of artwork.
While the entire space will unfortunately remain closed to the public, photographers Stephane Bisseuil and Jérôme Coton were allowed in to shoot many of the artworks in progress. Above is just a small selection, head over to Les Bains “One Day One Artist” page to see much more. (via creative review)
Six years ago, industrial designer Sam Pearce was sitting in an airport when "I saw a mother pushing her child in a buggy," he writes. "The front wheel hit a slight kerb [sic] and the child jolted forward because of the impact. It happened several times in the time I was waiting there." He then did what many ID'ers do, which is to find the nearest piece of paper and sketch out a potential solution. What he drew in his notebook was this:
A simple idea for a wheel with built-in suspension.
Two years later, while off-road cycling, he remembered the sketch and began thinking if a suspension system like that could be built into a bike wheel. Now, many years of tinkering later, what Pearce has come up with is this:
It's called the Loopwheel, and its system of "tangential suspension"—essentially leaf springs folded back in on themselves—are not only workable, but they provide a gentler ride over sharp obstacles due to physics:
For now, Pearce is focusing on developing Loopwheels for smaller bikes, because the design "[allows] suspension where suspension can't normally fit," as with a folding bike design.
Last month Pearce debuted his creation at the UK's Bespoked Bicycle show. Response was tremendous, and he's now seeking Kickstarter funding to get the Loopwheel into proper production; up until now he's been making them as one-offs in his shop.
After premiering last year, Evangelion 3.33 You Can (Not) Redo, the third of four films in the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, gets its Blu-ray release today in Japan. While that's good news—over-the-top mecha action is always good news—it also makes a good opportunity to revisit some classics.
Besides the mecha craziness, whether it's 80s space opera or 90s cyberpunk, anime has awesome user interfaces, computer screens and heads-up displays. This is some really serious futuristic tech porn.
You should add more of these below in the comments! In order, the featured ones here are from Bubblegum Crisis (twice), Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gunbuster, Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01, Macross Plus, Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Patlabor.
In early February, Door-to-Door escaped winter in New York City and went to record interviews with the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida. The museum was a 2012 recipient of a national medal from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Through the interviews, we got a look at the many wonderful aspects of the museum’s programming. From artists to volunteers; educators to musicians; and students to curators, we heard about how MOCA has worked to make contemporary art accessible for people across Miami.
On our last morning, Jill Hernandez and Anya Wallace, good friends and coworkers, came in to talk about their role in Women on the Rise. As a young woman and art student, Jill had become passionate about feminist art, at one point making a film about the experiences of women in Miami. After graduating from college, she went to work at MOCA. One morning, Jill heard a story on the radio about an increase in the number of young women being detained in juvenile justice centers, and decided that she wanted to start doing programming at some of those centers.
As Jill began going to the detention centers, she was nervous, because she didn’t have a clear-cut plan or agenda. However, “things just happened” as she started to meet the young women there and talk about the artists whose work she would present to them. Their reactions, she says, were the best part, as the girls were bringing a wide range of experiences to their readings of the images. She remembers that the conversations they had “not only showed me what the art could teach the girls, but how the girls challenged what the work is, or what I think about what the work is.” The second year of the program, they received a grant from the Women’s Fund Network, and it began to take off.
Jill Hernandez and Anya Wallace
Jill and Anya met later, at a Women’s Studies conference, and found instant friendship. Anya had been working with young women in Savannah, Georgia, and remembered feeling that their meeting was serendipitous. Anya was also surprised by finding someone who shared her feminist perspective “not just on working with girls, but how we connect with them.” Shortly after meeting, Jill offered Anya a position at Women on the Rise. When they began to talk about their favorite memories from their work at the program, it turned out they shared quite a few. Reflecting on their work, Jill said, “I know it feels good to write something. I know it feels good to make something. I want to give girls a space and a reason to do that.”
During our stay in DC, I met Allyson Robinson, who came to StoryCorps with her wife Danyelle and shared her story of coming out as a transgender woman and, in her own words, eventually living a life with honesty reflecting who she truly is.
Allyson, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, spoke about having to suppress her feelings of who she really was throughout her Military career. During her time at West Point, she said she was in denial and would overwork to suppress her needs to express herself as a woman and felt guilty whenever she did. “I lied and I hid a lot. I kept a suitcase inside another suitcase in a a trunk room at West Point where I would keep some clothes and make up,” she said.
Allyson spoke about contemplating suicide as the only way out before realizing she had to “live life with honesty, quit fighting and just be,” she added. This is when she decided to come out to her wife, who she was married to since 1994, and their four children.
Her wife, Danyelle, talked about what went through her mind as her then husband came out to her as a transgender woman. ” I remember being bewildered and knowing it was better to know, but at that point I didn’t know what it meant. There were questions out there that I didn’t know”.
Danyelle said she admired Allyson’s honesty and stood by her side. “I let time work through all of the questions and details.” She explained how their four kids were accepting and how easy they took it. “They were wonderful, they were the easiest part.”
Allyson explained what she feared the most through the years, which was to lose her family, did not happen after she came out and how glad she is of it. She took the opportunity to thank her wife for sticking by her side throughout the difficult transition.
In 2012, after serving four years as first Deputy Director for Employee Programs at Human Rights Campaign, Allyson Robinson became the executive director of OutServe-SLDN, a leading advocacy organization serving active-duty LGBT members of the military and veterans. She lives in Maryland with her wife and four children.
StoryCorps met Leslie Salazar and Bill Sears during a recording trip to Los Angeles, California. Leslie and Bill met at Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center when Bill, a cardiac patient liaison , formed a friendship with Ruben Salazar, Leslie’s father. Leslie and Bill came to StoryCorps to remember Ruben’s life and his final moments.
Bill Sears and Leslie Salazar
Leslie reflected on Ruben’s life and the legacy he leaves behind for his family.
“My dad was a phenomenal man, the son of a immigrant father. My dad created everything on his own, from the time he was 18 he had nothing. He broke a cycle of drug addiction, alcoholism and gang violence and created an amazing family tree that will continue to flourish.”
“You also told me how he sang in the desert at nighttime.” Bill spent a lot of time with Ruben in his room, listening to stories of his military service and career as an air-traffic controller. Bill became an adopted member of Ruben’s family, learning about the family’s traditions.
“That’s the one thing I miss, he would play guitar and ukelele.” Leslie recalled, “he taught us all Mexican Folk songs.”
Ruben Salazar
Ruben passed away at Cedar Sinai medical center and the family guided him through his last moments, being present as he took his last breathe. Leslie and her family sang Ruben’s folk songs in the hospital after his passing and later had a bonfire and send off for him on his favorite beach in California.
“I think if your dad was looking down he’d say wow, how proud he is of you.”
“I think he is very proud of his family”
Though it was the difficulty of losing that brought Leslie and Bill together, their friendship remains strong and they continue to bond over the memories they share.
StoryCorps Legacy provides people of all ages with serious illness and their families the opportunity to record, preserve and share their stories.
iPhonography again. Just a quick one with some iPhone shots from the Ganesh Chaturthi procession in Mumbai this last Sunday. I was with a small group of photographers that came for the workshop so did not really shoot so much, but I still managed to sneak in a few snaps. You must have already noticed […]
As part of StoryCorps ongoing Military Voices Iniative and in partnership with The Service Project, participants Major Amy McGrath and Major Tegan Owen talk about being Marines and one of the first women in combat (McGrath).
She recalls watching a documentary as a 12 year old girl in Kentucky that inspired her to fly air craft carrier fighter jets. There McGrath’s journey began. There were obstacles. After learning of the combat exclusion law she wrote letters to her local congressman, senator and house armed services committee members, asking them to change the law so that she could fulfill her dream to be a fighter pilot. None of them said she could be a pilot, one said there were a lot of other jobs in the military that she could pursue, perhaps nursing. The dream carried her to the Naval Academy. Good fortune followed McGrath there. At the end of 1993 congress repealed the combat exclusion law, opening many of the jobs that had previously excluded women. After graduation from the academy, she was commissioned as a Marine and began flight school. She became the first woman Marine aviator to fly in Afghanistan.
“A lot of people ask me if it’s harder being a woman flying? I don’t think it is. I just try to take it in stride”.
She continued, “what the guys were looking for is ‘what does she do when she fails?’ Once they found out that I’m gonna pick up and learn from that mistake and move on and do better next time, they were ok. There is pressure but you just have to know about it and deal with it”.
Guevara, as a leading intellectual and as Cuba’s preëminent film czar, remained faithful to Fidel Castro, and served as a behind-the-scenes advisor both to him and to his younger brother and successor, Raúl. In recent years, Guevara was best known to the outside world as the president of Havana’s annual film festival.
[Fiction] Two college friends speculate about a stranger in town:
"We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen. This was how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits, a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light, or a long street with a shovel jutting from a snowbank, no one in sight."
Herman Blake and his six siblings struggled so much during the '40s that one brother decided to drop out of school and help support the family. A friend of the family stepped in and made sure that didn't happen, despite her own meager means. That sacrifice taught the Blake children the value of an education.
Touring with The Show About the Rat was probably one of my most miserable professional experiences. The show was extremely popular which meant doing at least two shows a day in most cities, and the schedule was tightly packed. Show, show, drive, sleep. Show, show, drive, sleep. Show, show, drive, sleep. The booker who’d built the schedule counted days with only a four-hour drive as a day off. This person had obviously never had to sit in a van for at least four hours every day for twenty five days in a row.
The misery caused by this gruelling itinerary was compounded by personal problems many members of the cast were going through. Sheep had decided to go on this tour as an escape from the maelstrom of family and relationship issues that had been plaguing her for over a year. She could regularly be found crying in her dressing room. Or hotel room. Or the van. Or on stage.
Cat and Rat, a couple, had decided to go on a crazy person diet that required all meals to be eaten before 6 PM, and restricted them from eating any catering, restaurant food, and partaking in the lifeblood of any tour, alcohol. This meant that they had to travel with a suitcase filled with over 60 pounds of kitchen equipment and food, and that they couldn’t go out to any bars or hotel room parties. Rat even refused to go out for Cat’s birthday, so that he wouldn’t have to face the temptation to break his diet. That’s when you know your diet is a crazy person diet—when you refuse to go out for your girlfriend’s birthday to keep at it.
Octopus had been experiencing a great deal of career success outside of touring children’s theatre, and as such regretted accepting the tour to begin with.
Shooting Star was dancing on a foot injury that required surgery, and Dusteroo was still recovering from a severe back injury. The head of Rat’s costume was designed too heavy and was causing him a great deal of neck pain. I sprained my shoulder trying to lift Cat and Rat’s fully stocked kitchen/pantry/suitcase into the van.
I also started to develop the Stump Complex from my ridiculously simple and unrewarding role in the show, and so sought to fill my life with purpose through writing—which meant spending most free time by myself.
It all added up to a fragmented and isolated cast that grew increasingly miserable with each passing day. Even those with normally sunny dispositions were sullen and bitchy by day twenty five, which was when we finally got our first real day off.
There was one day, near the end of the our twenty five day marathon, that stands out in my memory as the one ray of sunshine from this tour, even though it was during a twelve hour drive day. It was the day of the nine-hour Trivial Pursuit marathon.
There are a lot of ways to kill time on a drive day. I always start each tour with the best intentions of using the time to get some writing or reading done. But once the van starts moving, all hopes of productivity get tossed aside. Looking at a page or word processor while driving across the mountains in the middle of winter is a recipe for instant pukesville. I can watch TV or movies on my laptop for a few hours as long as the roads aren’t too bad. My wife can fall asleep pretty easily in the van, but I’ve never mastered the art of sleeping while cramped in a moving vehicle. I usually spend a lot of time listening to music and staring out the window until my nausea has abated enough to watch another episode of whatever show I’m power watching at the time.
I found the almost thirty-year-old edition of Trivial Pursuit at a used clothing store. I convinced a couple other people to play a heavily modified, board-less version of the game (that I called The Ultimate Trivial Pursuit Championship) while we drove from somewhere in the southern Canadian prairies up to somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.
We started the game with two teams—split up by rows in our fifteen passenger van. Each team was given a few minutes to answer all the questions on a single card, after which the other team could steal the questions for points. I didn’t expect the game to last more than an hour, but eventually everyone joined the game (except Sheep who was too busy hating life) and the game went on and on and on.
We finally had to end the game after the tenth hour when it became too dark to read the cards. Everyone who participated was amazed at how quickly the day had passed.
From this point on, most of the cast seemed to make a more concerted effort to spend time together outside of when we were obliged to be together in the van or in the dressing room. I eased up on how much writing I was expecting myself to accomplish, and embraced how ridiculous my role in the show was. Cat eased up some of her dietary restrictions (though Rat maintained his diet and misery until the end of tour).
The irony is that when you start to feel like you need to get away from the people you work with, the problem may be that you aren’t actually spending enough time together at all. You just have to choose to be together and invest emotionally in that time.
What the Libor and ISDAfix scandals reveal about manipulation of the global economy by banks:
"All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system."
In spring of 1971 the New York Times got hold of a top-secret, seven-thousand-page history of the Vietnam War. When the Times ran a series based on the Pentagon Papers, it sparked one of the biggest First Amendment battles of the last century. Leading the Times’s defense was the young lawyer James Goodale. In his new memoir, Fighting for the Press, Goodale gives a fascinating blow-by-blow account of the legal arguments, personal rivalries, and inspired teamwork behind that famous defense, which started from the principle that there is nothing inherently illegal about publishing classified information. “My philosophy as a publishing lawyer,” Goodale writes, “was that anything could be published. I had always found that if you took a word out here and there, shifted a paragraph here and there, anything was possible.” In later years, Goodale worked his way up to become house counsel for The Paris Review: we look forward to volume two. —Lorin Stein
When Albertine Sarrazin’s L’astragale was published in 1965, the autobiographical novel, about a young woman who escapes reform school and embarks on a life of prostitution and petty crime, became an overnight sensation. The fact that the glamorous, enigmatic author died at the height of her fame, at only twenty-nine, has only added to the book’s mystique. In her introduction to a fresh edition from New Directions, Patti Smith describes the book as her youthful talisman and Sarrazin as “my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps.” I think it is a book to read when you are young; in some ways I am too old to have just discovered it. But even knowing this, I reveled in its entertaining, gritty weirdness. It bears mentioning, too, that the translator is Patsy Southgate, writer and fellow traveler of the Paris Review. —Sadie Stein
Mobile communications entrepreneur, billionaire, and philanthropist, Mohamed 'Mo' Ibrahim is optimistic about the continent's future. He's invested millions of dollars to support good governance there. Host Michel Martin sits down with Ibrahim to talk about Africa's economic and social development.
Yesterday was my last class with my SVA senior portfolio students. Like I did last year, I thought I’d share a selection of their work. (Some of this stuff was made in our class, some in other classes with different teachers.)
From 1934 until 1948 long-playing records (LPs) were almost exclusively the domain of the visually impaired. But they weren’t being used for music. Instead, they helped blind people listen to a brand new invention—the audiobook.
In the early 1930s, the American Foundation for the Blind took on the project to get “talking books” into the hands of blind Americans, with a mixture of funding from public and private money. In the early 20th century, the major record companies had found success selling records that could only hold about five minutes of music, but they struggled during the Great Depression to develop technology for long-playing records that sounded good while playing tunes.
However, long-playing records were satisfactory for voice recordings, and in 1932, the American Foundation for the Blind approached Frank L. Dyer to license his technology for audiobook LP players. Dyer granted the Foundation royalty-free use of his invention. As we see today, though, there was one major issue: the intellectual property rights of publishers.
If Talking Books were to command a wide audience among blind readers, they would have to include new and current books as well as literary classics in the public domain. In principle, authors and publishers who had long permitted their copyrighted books to be reproduced in braille were equally well disposed to making their work available to blind readers in this new form, but they raised some understandable objections.
Those objections were publishers worrying how these new talking books would be delivered and to whom. The April 21, 1934, issue of Publishers Weekly explained that public performance would be absolutely out of the question: “If such discs were used for public halls, or especially for broadcasting purposes, they would fall into the realm of public performance and therefore would be decidedly in competition with books in print.”
The American Foundation for the Blind made contracts with the Author’s League as well as the National Association of Book Publishers to ensure that they could produce talking books for a nominal license fee of $25 per title. The Foundation also agreed to other terms that would guarantee recorded audiobooks would only be used by blind people, making sure that each record was labeled with “solely for use of the blind” and that no record or record player would be sold to sighted people. As Koestler points out in his book, the Foundation also agreed that these new audiobooks or players would never be used in groups open to the public nor would they be broadcast on radio.
In late 1934, the program, which would lend out both record players and LPs, finally began. Within a year of the program’s implementation, 27 different audiobook titles were being distributed across the U.S. While equipment was loaned out to those who couldn’t afford it, those who could were expected to buy their own. But again, LP record players and the audiobooks themselves were only allowed to be sold and lent to blind Americans.
In 1935 the Foundation’s Talking Book project (now working in conjunction with the Library of Congress to ensure the broadest possible access) officially received funding from the Works Progress Administration. Between 1935 and 1942 the Talking Book project produced about 23,000 record players at a cost of approximately $1.2 million, employing around 200 people in its factory. Almost half of the employees were visually handicapped themselves. Though funding from the WPA dried up in 1942, the program continued until 1951, when the Foundation stopped producing its own record players because they were now readily available to the general public and there was no longer a de facto ban on sighted persons buying the equipment. Though the Foundation no longer produced players, the Library of Congress’s National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) continued to make materials accessible through a variety of media—eventually migrating to tape cassettes, CD, and today’s digital technologies.
Over the past decade, organizations that control the licensing of copyrighted works in the U.S. have not been particularly kind to the visually impaired. The Author’s Guild has argued that technologies like Kindle’s text-to-speech is a derivative work and thus copyright infringement. The Guild relented when Amazon gave publishers veto power over which works would be allowed to make use of the text-to-speech feature. Amazon’s Paperwhite doesn’t include the text-to-speech feature that came with older Kindles, but it recently purchased IVONA, a sign that Amazon may be taking the experimental feature more seriously in future releases of its various e-readers.
As Koestler points out in his book, Americans with severe visual impairments generally lag behind their sighted counterparts when it comes to access to media. And organizations like the Author’s Guild are certainly making that no easier today. But for a 14-year span this new media technology (and the people that held the keys to the intellectual property) seemed to work for the betterment of humankind.
A profile of Ben Jealous, the president and CEO of the NAACP:
"'Governor,' said Jealous. 'You know the death penalty is used exclusively on poor people.'
"'Yes.'
"'You know it’s used disproportionately against blacks and Latinos.'
"'Yes.'
"'Well, Governor, this is what I want you to do: imagine the person you most worry about in trying to explain why you abolished the death penalty. I want you to imagine telling that person this: "Every time a prosecutor seeks the death penalty, it pulls hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, out of our state treasury. Dollars that therefore cannot be used for anything else. And in our state, like any state, there are places where 30, 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of the homicides go unsolved every year. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and decided that we as a state would be safer if we spent that money on homicide units rather than killing the killers we’ve already caught and put in cages. So I’ve abolished the death penalty, and I’ve asked the counties to send their savings to the homicide units and get the uncaught killers off the street."'"
Listen to Life in the Data, Episode 3, featuring Paul Theroux:
In the absence of information the only certainty in travel is suspense, with the suggestion of risk, and the possibility of danger. The usual presumption, amounting almost to a conceit of many travelers, is that they will be able to brainstorm a trip before they set out—downloading data, solving the issues of transfer and transition, places to stay, places to eat, the condition of roads, the mood of the locals, the sights, the diversions. It’s pretty to think so.
Sometimes, as I have found, this amounts to pure fancy and is a lesson in frustration. Even the best libraries can be unhelpful; maps can be misleading; some places are still little known, even unknown, unstable, and blighted, which I suppose is one of the uses of that odd duck on the literature shelf, the travel narrative. When in the late 1990s I planned a trip down the Shire River (pronounced “sheer-ay”), a tributary of the Zambezi that flows from southern Malawi into Mozambique, I looked for data, confident that I’d find what I wanted—after all, the river was first mapped by David Livingstone in 1859, as Tim Jeal recounted in dramatic detail in his newly republished and expanded biography Livingstone. You can see from a map that the river flows across a border in the bush, with no town nearby—so where do you get your passport stamped? Where do you find provisions? I had many questions, none of which I found answers to until I arrived at the village of Marka on the banks of the Shire, with my folding kayak and camping equipment.
Even the best libraries can be unhelpful; maps can be misleading; some places are still little known, even unknown, unstable, and blighted.
My map had not shown that the river flows through a labyrinthine marsh; that the dotted national boundary on the map represents a shed where a Mozambican official in a torn shirt under a tree examines your passport; that the confluence of the Shire and Zambezi is a muddy whirlpool; and that the bold place-name Caia is little more than a cluster of grubby sheds but, strategically sited, is marked by fish trucks and beat-up minibuses carrying wayfarers to the coast.
A few years ago, researching a trip to Angola for my new book, I found almost nothing relating to the condition of roads in the southern provinces of the country: no helpful books, nothing on the Internet. The maps of Angola I located looked a bit too coherent and colonial to represent a country that had endured 27 years of civil war. I went anyway, hoping for local knowledge, but even in Namibia I drew a blank. People who lived near the border had never crossed it—and it is a characteristic of those who don’t travel that they fantasize, exaggerating the dangers.
“It’s a nightmare,” an Ovimbundu man said to me near the border, in the Namibian town of Ondangwa, en route to Angola.
He wasn’t wrong, but he was short on particulars.
Nothing in print or on the Net (even now on the bird’s-eye Google Earth, with its dartboard of on-the-ground images) indicated that the road north from the border to the Angolan town of Lubango was mostly theoretical: paved in part, deeply potholed, and in places not a road at all but a series of wide detours, zigzagging through the bush. The road map was a fiction, but outside Angola this was unknown. Angola is a rarity in Africa, a country without big game and almost without wild animals, oil rich, xenophobic, and muddled, almost without tourists.
Still, ignorant but undaunted, I crossed the border and headed north. When travel information is scarce, or nonexistent, I make the assumption that if there are enough residents in a small roadside town in the African bush, there will be a market and a local mode of transportation that the traveler can use—a bush taxi, a van, a truck, or the sort of chicken bus that is too ramshackle to rate a mention in the wider world.
It is silly to think that any of this will be efficient or comfortable, but if you have no objection to traveling like everyone else (and that includes old women with sacks of vegetables, freelance evangelists with Bibles under their arms, amateur emigrants, and wiseguys wearing baseball hats turned back to front), you will find, as I did, something to eat, somewhere to stay, and a way out.
What would you give for a tangible achievement that carries enormous professional prestige?
If you’re an economist, and the achievement is a paper published in the American Economic Review, the answer seems to be three-quarters of a year of your life. Or, looking at it a different way, about three-quarters of a thumb.
That’s the tentative conclusion of three economists from Erasmus University in the Netherlands. They took an offhand comment by a colleague—“I would give my right arm for a publication in the American Economic Review”—and decided to test whether, for the average member of their profession, that would literally be true.
The study raises fascinating questions about what we value, and the tradeoffs we are willing to make.
Thankfully, they found it was not. But their results, recently published in the journal Economic Inquiry, suggest economists—and perhaps other academics—place enormous value in the sort of recognition publication in a prestigious journal conveys.
The researchers–Arthur Attema, Werner Brouwer, and Job van Exel–conducted a survey of 69 of their colleagues (a small number, they concede). All had already published at least one recent article in one of six major economics journals.
In their questionnaire, they described an admittedly far-fetched scenario. If a medicine existed that would give them a day-long surge in brainpower—enough to formulate an article good enough for one of four major journals—would they take it? If so, would they still do so if they knew it would slightly reduce their lifespan?
In a finding that will no doubt please the publication’s editors, they found “economists are willing to give up more lifetime for an additional publication in AER than for the other top economics journals.”
Specifically, the average study participant was willing to give up 0.77 years for a paper published in the American Economic Review, but only 0.55 years for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 0.42 years for the Review of Economic Studies, and 0.38 years for the European Economic Review.
Interestingly, the researchers found this willingness to give up a few months was not related to any anticipated higher income such an article might bring. “This suggests that economists … seem to care about other, non-monetary aspects such as status and quality of the journal,” they write.
A separate, only slightly less macabre question measured the value of their thumb. Right-handed economists were asked: “Suppose you can live either 20 more years without your right thumb, or a shorter period with your right thumb. How long should the latter period be such that you are indifferent between these options?” (Left-handed economists were asked about their left thumbs.)
The researchers found that, on average, study participants were willing to give up 1.02 years of life in exchange for keeping their dominant-hand thumb. Since they’re willing to give up 0.77 years for publication in AER, “we can infer that a publication is worth about three quarters of a thumb,” the researchers conclude.
Of course, the rest of us may conclude this is another example of economists trying to quantify the unquantifiable. But the study nevertheless raises fascinating questions about what we value, and the tradeoffs we are—at least theoretically—willing to make.
After all, many high-prestige jobs are also high-pressure jobs, and stress may very well take a physical toll, ultimately leading to a shorter life. Is that a fair exchange? For some, it seems the answer is yes.
Lactarius indigo, also known as the indigo milk cap grows naturally in eastern North America, East Asia, and Central America; it has also been reported from southern France.
The milk, or latex, that oozes when the mushroom tissue is cut or broken is also indigo blue, but slowly turns green upon exposure to air. Oozes blue then turns green. Is that not the most awesome thing you've ever heard?
The cap is typically between 5 to 15 cm (2 to 6 in) broad, and the stem 2 to 8 cm (0.8 to 3 in) tall by 1 to 2.5 cm (0.4 to 1.0 in) thick. It is an edible mushroom, and is sold in rural markets in Mexico, Guatemala, and China. [wiki]
Tremella mesenterica also known as yellow brain, golden jelly fungus, yellow trembler, and witches' butter is a common jelly fungus.
The gelatinous, orange-yellow fruit body of this fungus, which can grow up to 7.5 cm (3.0 in) diameter, has a convoluted or lobed surface that is greasy or slimy when damp. It grows in crevices in bark, appearing during rainy weather. Within a few days after rain it dries into a thin film or shriveled mass capable of reviving after subsequent rain
It doesn't escape my notice that the word "gelatinous" has been used here at Frimmbits HQ twice in the last week.
Yellow jelly fungus is widely distributed in temperate and tropical regions that include Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America. Although considered bland and flavorless, the fungus is edible [wiki]
Aseroe rubra, also known as the anemone stinkhorn, sea anemone fungus and starfish fungus, is common and widespread and recognizable for its foul odour of carrion and its sea anemone shape when mature.
Like you couldn't tell it stunk the moment you looked at it.
Found in gardens on mulch and in grassy areas, it resembles a red star-shaped structure covered in brownish slime on a white stalk. It attracts flies, which spread its spores.
For something so common, I've never seen one before. *reads* Oh, it's common in Australia.
It begins as a partly buried whitish egg-shaped structure 3 cm (1¼ in) in diameter, which bursts open as a hollow white stalk with reddish arms erupts and grows to a height of 10 cm (4 in). It matures into a reddish star-shaped structure with six to ten arms up to 3.5 cm (1½ in) long radiating from the central area. These arms are deeply divided into two limbs.
The top of the fungus is covered with dark olive-brown slime or gleba, which smells of rotting meat. There is a cup-shaped volva at the base that is the remnants of the original egg. [wiki]
Rhodotus palmatus, also known as netted Rhodotus, the rosy veincap, or the wrinkled peach is found in eastern North America, northern Africa, Europe, and Asia; declining populations in Europe have led to its appearance in over half of the European fungal Red Lists of threatened species. Typically found growing on the stumps and logs of rotting hardwoods, it is declining in numbers in Europe and is on their Red list of threatened species.
It is not toxic but because of its bitter taste it is classified as inedible. [wiki]
Clavaria zollingeri, commonly known as the violet coral or the magenta coral produces striking tubular, purple to pinkish-violet fruit bodies that grow up to 10 cm (3.9 in) tall and 7 cm (2.8 in) wide.
It has a widespread distribution, and has been found in Australia, New Zealand, North America, South America, and Asia. In North America, the distribution is restricted to the northeastern regions of the continent. It seems to have no special powers. [wiki]
Mycena interrupta, commonly known as the pixie's parasol, is a species of mushroom. It has a Gondwanan distribution pattern.
Gondwanan, you say? Why yes. It's a *sniff* paleogeographical reference. Means when earth consisted of Pangea, Gonwana was the Southern of the two super-continents. Laurasia was the other one.
So Pixie's umbrellas exist in parts of New Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia and Chili.
So why did the writer of the wiki article decide to explain this mushroom's range by saying it was Gondwanan? I have no idea but if you have to explain your explanation you're trying to hard. [wiki]
How can you not look at these little blue fungi and not love them just because they're blue?! I don't even care if the caps are often sticky and appear slimy looking, particularly in moist weather. Or that they ooze out of the earth in little slimy balls called globose. They're blue!
The University of Chicago Press has sent along a copy of a new book by DePaul professor Ted Anton, The Longevity Seekers. It's a history of the last thirty years or so of advances in understanding the biochemical pathways of aging. As you'd imagine, much of it focuses on sirtuins, but many other discoveries get put into context as well. There are also thoughts on what this whole story tells us about medical research, the uses of model animal systems, about the public's reaction to new discoveries, and what would happen if (or when) someone actually succeeds in lengthening human lifespan. (That last part is an under-thought topic among people doing research in the field, in my experience, at least in print).
Readers will be interested to note that Anton uses posts and comments on this blog as source material in some places, when he talks about the reaction in the scientific community to various twists and turns in the story. (You'll be relieved to hear that he's also directly interviewed almost all the major players in the field, as well!) If you're looking for a guide to how the longevity field got to where it is today and how everything fits together so far, this should get you up to speed.
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. It's a history of the last thirty years or so of advances in understanding the biochemical pathways of aging. As you'd imagine, much of it focuses on sirtuins, but many other discoveries get put into context as well. There are also thoughts on what this whole story tells us about medical research, the uses of model animal systems, about the public's reaction to new discoveries, and what would happen if (or when) someone actually succeeds in lengthening human lifespan. (That last part is an under-thought topic among people doing research in the field, in my experience, at least in print).