Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)
Malcolm Gladwell
309 pages

I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell way back, but just wanted to briefly write about it. It’s a book that I’ve recommended to anyone who has asked me simply because it is so well-written. Gladwell could write three-hundred pages about dead fish and I’d probably still read it (actually that would be kind of interesting, curious about all the dead animals that have been cropping up– quick someone tell him).

The title of the book is to some degree misleading for anyone who may be seeking a self-help book or an inspirational book (better look at Tony Robbins for that). This book actually counters bootstrapping individualism prevalent in certain societies, notably the United States, by describing how structural elements in society can shape our lives.

The central thesis of the book is that while talent and dedicated practice are necessary for success, early advantage and privileged social standing are what truly make the outliers. The importance of legacy and opportunity for success is not really a new development and has in fact been around since at least 19th the century (some dude named Karl Marx wrote something about it), but what Gladwell does well is break down academic terms for the layman. The book begins very factually, focusing on how the birth months of professional Canadian hockey players gives them a demographic advantage. In the junior leagues players are picked on January-December basis, and players born earlier in the year are physically larger than other players. This means that the physical talent becomes concentrated in those born in between January to March, and creates a feedback loop in which kids born earlier in the year perform better, and consequently encouraged even more, reinforcing and even broadening the performance gap. Gladwell makes a strong case that these types of structural disadvantages can be mitigated if we take a different approach to the selection process.

I believe the strengths of Outliers are also its weaknesses. Gladwell’s background as a journalist enables him to string many stories and anecdotes together to reinforce his central thesis, he also reduces everything to the simplest terms and introduces very few new ideas outside the thesis. This makes the book very clear, concise and truly enjoyable to read. However, in simplifying concepts the book can be quite reductionist at times. In relating all the anecdotes and stories back to the central thesis, many of which don’t have the factual support that the ‘demographic advantage’ story does, the book can at times grasp at straws (the case of the Jewish New York lawyers comes to mind in particular) and suffers from a serious case of confirmation bias.

To conclude, Outliers is an enjoyable book, but by no means groundbreaking or academic. If you’re up for a book on the topic of performance that has been called groundbreaking, check out this 918-page treatise on expertise by Cambridge University (I still haven’t read it yet, need to get a hold of a copy).

he printing press was developed and first used in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg. It was quickly adopted across the world and laid the foundation for technological, socio-political and scientific revolutions in the following centuries. It has been estimated that since the time of Gutenberg some 130 million books have been published worldwide ^[1], and in the United States some 270-290 thousand books continue to be published annually ^[2]. However, with the advent of the internet and the introduction of digitization technologies, how books are published, marketed, distributed, and the way people interact with them have begun to transform.

*Image source

The digitization of books has been heralded by proponents as having the potential to democratize knowledge and push the kind of revolutionary impact that Gutenberg’s printing press did. These groups argue that digitization helps preserve knowledge by storing newer books and recovering rare and lost books and making them easily accessible to the public ^[3]. Others, however, take a more skeptical perspective noting that the digitization of books may lead to some undesirable technical externalities including taking publication rights out of the hands of authors and publishers, and threatening user privacy ^[4]. In this paper I examine what the digitization of books entails, the technologies currently being used to digitize books, the issues and complicating factors involved in digitization, and how some of these issues might be resolved.

Contents

1. Digitization of Books
2. From Paper to Screen
3. Complicating Factors
4. Future Directions
5. References

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Today is international Towel Day, a day of tribute to the late Douglas Adams, the brilliant author of, among many works, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Despite passing away quite young, Douglas Adams has had an undeniable influence on popular culture. When I first read Hitchhiker’s Guide in my late teens, I felt as though I had finally been let in on a big universal joke. The sci-fi genre was one I was well-acquainted with, but this was something entirely different– it was the seriously funniest or the funniest serious work I’d ever read. I finished the rest of the series within the span of a few weeks that summer and keep going back to them to this very day for wisdom and insight that just can’t be found elsewhere.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Chapt. 3)

While Douglas Adams was indeed onto something, if I were to travel across time and space carrying only a towel, I’d only be comfortable with one which had the following printed on it:

*Source: Topotaco via Gizmodo

To Mr. Adams, faeries or not, I’d like to think you are enjoying the view of the garden from the restaurant.

My first article in the Daily! Pretty exciting for me…

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6715

Alberta: Tar sand wasteland
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, November 19th, 2007

Author decries rush to exploit Canada’s natural resources

In northern Alberta, an estimated 174-billion barrels of black gold lie trapped in grains of sand, and capitalizing on this dormant cash cow has become a national obsession.

In the recently published Stupid to the Last Drop, award-winning investigative journalist William Marsden critically examines the oil boom in the Alberta tar sands, a sprawling industry that has promised to make Canada the new Saudi Arabia. In his non-linear but fluid style, Marsden argues that, while Albertans may see some marginal gain from this relentless resource exploitation, Canadians stand to lose a lot.

The tar sands are thought to have been made by geological forces which pushed oil up into the limestone and sand landscape. Composed of bitumen – a viscous form of crude oil, silica sand, clay, and water – the tar sands present a unique challenge in resource extraction and are famously expensive to exploit. Just how much are people willing to sacrifice to extract this oil? Marsden contends: everything.

Stupid to the Last Drop begins in 1957 with an American paleontologist, Manley Natland, and his proposition for Alberta’s future: a nine kilo-ton nuclear bomb set 1,300 feet below ground in the Athabasca tar sands to create a giant underground cavern, with enough heat and pressure to force oil into it. In spite of the obvious environmental hazards, including radiation leakage and land collapse, Marsden details the quick acceptance of this proposition. In just two years, the inconspicuously-dubbed “Project Oil Sands” gained support from a major oil company, approval from the U.S. Senate, a nod from the Canadian federal government, and a nuclear-bomb-to-go.
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