Wednesday News: Facebook=life extender; Amelia Earhart’s bones (maybe), research PTSD, and recommend one book
Publishing NewsAmelia Earhart / book recommendations / Facebook / Patricia Cornwell / PTSD / research9 Comments
Facebook users live longer, study finds – Despite the way this study is being described in headlines, it’s not so much that Facebook extends your life expectancy – it’s that using Facebook to enhance sociability extends life. In other words, it’s Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone for the online world:
A new study suggests that using Facebook increases longevity. However, this is only the case when Facebook is used to maintain and improve real-life social connections, according to the authors.
The study looked at 12 million Facebook users and was led by University of California-San Diego researchers William Hobbs and James Fowler. . . .
The results of the study have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which the researchers matched California Facebook users with vital records from the California Department of Public Health.
They studied people born between 1945 and 1989, and monitored their online activity over a period of 6 months. The researchers compared the activity of those still living with those who had died. – Medical News Today
Amelia Earhart mystery deepens with study of castaway bones – I SO want someone to solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, although I don’t have a lot of hope that it will ever happen. The possibility that Earhart died on the uninhabited island, Nikumaroro, has been buoyed by the revelation that the skeleton found there has “unusually long forearms,” as Earhart did. Unfortunately, the bones are no longer available (they disappeared, too!), so it seems like a long shot. Still, enough for a headline.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) evaluated the original medical files in 1998 and found the measurements could actually be consistent with “a female of Earhart’s height and ethnic origin.” In October, Tighar released an update on the bones that focuses on the measurements of the humerus and radius arm bones, which indicate unusually long forearms. Tighar brought in forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman to evaluate a historic photograph of Earhart.
“Jeff found that Earhart’s humerus to radius ratio was 0.76 – virtually identical to the castaway’s,” Tighar notes. Proponents of the Nikumaroro theory will take this information as further support for the concept that Earhart died as a castaway on the island. – CNET
Cornwell: Scarpetta book research left me traumatized – You need access to the BBC News or iPlayer to watch the whole interview, but in this clip Patricia Cornwell talks about how she basically has PTSD (she refers to having given herself a “disease”) from all of the things she has seen and heard over the years in the course of her book research. I’ve often wondered how authors write about particularly horrific things, and I wonder how common a claim like this is, especially for an author who has written so many books.
“I have images and things that are like malware. I can’t get them out of my head. I’ve seen things that I don’t show my readers, I heard things I don’t ever tell my readers,” she said. – BBC News
Imagine you worked in a bookstore. What’s the one book you’d recommend? – This is a really great question, and one I don’t think I have an answer to yet. Do you?
You wake up and your dream has come true: You work in a bookstore. You get to recommend your favorite books all day long.
So what book do you pick? If you could recommend just one book to an eager customer, what would it be? – MPR News
If you recommended only your favorite book to customers, your imaginary manager would come out of her imaginary office and fire your imaginary a$$ for being the WORST imaginary bookseller.
I worked in a bookstore for 4 years. Which books I recommended depended on the customer and their tastes. Different people enjoy different things, and I want to recommend something I think they’d enjoy.
That said, I did have my ‘go to’ in each genre. But generally I enjoyed trying to find books that would fit people’s specific desires.
What the previous two commenters said. I worked in a bookstore for three years and only one time did a customer (who I think was flirting with me) really, really want to know what I would recommend. I told him that what I wanted to read and suggest might not line up with his tastes, and tried to steer him to something I thought he might like. But he insisted. “I want to know what YOU would read!” So I showed him a new collection of short stories by E. L. Doctorow, he gave me the RCA dog look and I took him to get a new Jo Nesbø book.
I recommended books all the time to customers, but as said above, that was based on what I knew they liked. I could also squee about new arrivals under the same circumstances.
Recommending a favorite book, however, is so deeply personal. I think we put ourselves out there when we open up about our books to a possibly-less-than-receptive audience. Not here at DA, not in the ether, but face-to-face. I made the mistake of sharing with my BIL my love for a particular book and he laughed, not in the good way. When my enthusiasm for THE EYRE AFFAIR by Jasper Fforde made him roll his eyes, I realized I was done talking about books with him, the English literature teacher.
Wow, that still smarts. Asshat.
My favorite book seems to be out of print in physical form, so I probably wouldn’t be recommending much if I wanted to keep my job. Plus it’s a bit too niche to be what most people would be looking for. (If historical novels set between WWI & WWII, mostly in Germany, whose main character is a vampire, are your catnip, I have a recommendation.)
@Lostshadows: *perks up* Please, details. This sounds interesting and vaguely familiar.
@Darlynne: Tempting Fate, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It’s the fifth book in her Saint Germain series. (They all stand alone)
Warning, part of it makes me cry every time I read it.
What everyone said. One to one recommendations should be tailored to the reader’s needs.
There is a whole field of study in library science — “Reader Advisory” — which is all about how to do effective, successful book (and music, and film, and website, etc.) recommendations: both one on one and “passively”, i.e. through booklists, shelftalkers, displays and the like.
It’s a very active field, built mostly on anecdote and experience, but more and more research-driven.
But one watchword has been consistent throughout; just like authors, readers advisors are strongly recommended to “kill your darlings”, that is, not rely on personal favorites. It’s like evaluating your own child’s beauty or talent; it’s hard to be objective, and even harder not to take it personally if the other person doesn’t agree with your judgment.