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By Patricia Prijatel

A little evergreen tree has died alongside our road and, as we walked by it yesterday, my husband wondered why. All the other trees around it are healthy and it did not look like it had been hit by lightning or damaged by wind or attacked by bugs. The tree is about six feet tall, so it lived several years. We are in the Rocky Mountains and this little guy took root on its own, growing precariously in that place by the road.

Oak Tree. Photo by Glyn Baker. Creative Commons License.

Could we have done something to save it? If we were in the city, would we have babied it and maybe kept it alive? Or would it have died sooner there?

These are the same questions we ponder about why some people get sick, why one disease affects one person more than others, why people who live healthy lives still can’t beat some illnesses, yet people with deplorable habits keep going and going.

It’s the old nature versus nurture argument. Bad genes or bad environment? Or both?

I am sort of over being angry at people who have dodged major illnesses — largely because there aren’t that many of them. Seems like most people I know have something to contend with — debilitating arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s somewhere in their network of family and friends. But when I first got cancer I did look around at people who obviously were not living as healthy as I was and wondered: why me and not them? And then I realized that I had no idea what they were dealing with and I should just stop being so angry and judgmental and get over myself. It was not their fault I got sick.

Still, you have to wonder about this poker game we all play with our health. Some seem to be dealt a good hand to begin with, some make the best of a poor hand, some try but can’t make a straight out of a pair of twos, and some look at their cards and just fold.

I have one friend who never exercises and has a diet full of fat, yet she is in her mid-80s, hale, hearty, and youthful-looking. Another smoked all his life, drank, and never exercised, yet he is pushing 80 and has nothing seriously wrong physically, although I do think he looks back at his life with serious regret. But the big C didn’t get him, nor did any major illness. I wouldn’t swap places with him, though, even if I knew my cancer would return.

I also know a wide variety of cancer patients who approach the disease like the individuals they are — fighters who refuse to let the disease get the upper hand; questioners who search for their own information rather than listening to the docs; accommodators who go along with whatever the doctor says; worriers who can’t get beyond the fact that they might die. Most of us are a mix of these traits, fighting one day, living in worry the next. But we are all built differently, both physically and mentally, so we all react to our disease differently. Nobody is right, nobody is wrong. We’re all just us, being our own little trees fighting our own little battles.

We cannot escape our genes — they make us prone to certain diseases, give us the strength to fight others, and offer a blueprint for either a long or a short life. Still, we can change some of that; the science of epigenetics demonstrates that lifestyle and environmental factors can influence our genetic makeup so that, by improving things such as diet and physical activity and by avoiding unhealthy environmental pollutants including stress, bad air, and chemicals, we can eventually build a healthier DNA.

I was born into a history of cancer. My grandmother and both of my parents had forms of cancer, although none of them had breast cancer. I was the pioneer there. But both parents lived into their 80s and remained in their home until they died, surrounded by their family. So, I might have a tendency toward cancer, but perhaps my genes also mean I will hang around for a couple more decades. And my particular mix of nature and nurture has given me an ability to love, to laugh, to process health information in a way that might make me proactive, and to keep going, assuming all will be well, at least at some level.

Maybe I won’t end up as one of the stronger trees in the forest; maybe I will be the gnarled, crooked one. Maybe disease might slow me, but I feel I am rooted deeply in decent soil — family, friends, community — so I am going to push on, grow how I can, and, in the process, help shade and nurture the other trees around me.

Patricia Prijatel is author of Surviving Triple-Negative Breast Cancer, published by Oxford University Press. She is the E.T. Meredith Distinguished Professor Emerita of Journalism at Drake University. She will do a webcast with the Triple Negative Breast Cancer Foundation on 16 October 2012. Read her previous blog posts on the OUPblog or read her own blog“Positives About Negative.”

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The post Questioning the health of others and ourselves appeared first on OUPblog.

Jewish-American novelist Belva Plain has passed away. She was 95-years old and published a total of 22 novels in her lifetime.

In 2004, Random House released her last book,  Crossroads. Plain broke into print in 1978 with the novel, Evergreen.

The New York Times reports: “Ms. Plain was fiercely private about her life, but she spoke about her novels, often to Jewish groups. ‘I got sick of reading the same old story, told by Jewish writers, of the same old stereotypes-the possessive mothers, the worn-out fathers, all the rest of the neurotic rebellious unhappy self-hating tribe,’ she said. ‘I wanted to write a different novel about Jews-and a truer one.’”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

High schooler, techno-head Marcus and his band of ARG friends ditch school to follow clues in their new Harajuku Fun Madness game, when the San Francisco ground rocks as the Bay Bridge is bombed by terrorists. In trying to escape the now dangerous subway system, friend Daryl is stabbed. As Marcus, Julu and Van try to hail official looking vehicles to help they are arrested for their suspicious behavior. After a humiliating interrogation that lasts days, Marcus is released. His experience with Homeland Security's "Severe Haircut Woman" Marcus faces fighting the injustice without friends who are too frightened, and with fractured support from his parents. With clever technical skills, a new posse and a new girl friend he spares with the HS giant for human rights in the military occupied San Francisco.

This techno-suspense is a 2011 Evergreen Award nominee

ENDERS' Rating: *****

Cory's Website (He has more sites, linked from this one)

The Howe Library in Hanover NH has just moved their ILS to Evergreen. They sent out a very cool press release. Here is the first paragraph.

In a technology move designed to cut taxpayer costs, Howe Library is pleased to announce it has moved its entire bibliographic catalog and circulation system to Evergreen, an open-source integrated library system used by hundreds of libraries nationwide and in Canada. Moving to Evergreen will save considerable taxpayer dollars, primarily in annual service fees and upgrades.

Talk about upbeat! Instead of saying “Hey we’re going to have some downtime.” or “Here is all the new stuff you need to know.” they focus on the things that will affect everyone, lower fees and stable trusted software. Nice work team.

High school students of Washington State are as amazed and shocked by UNWIND as I still am. My hat off to their gutsy choice! See my review in this blog, September 2009.

I’ve been really lucky lately that the talks I’ve been giving have been at conferences that I’ve really enjoyed attending as well as speaking at. This past week I was in Athens, Georgia giving the closing keynote talk at the Evergreen International Conference. I was able to show up a day early and went to a full day of programs where I got to learn how the Michigan Evergreen project is doing and heard about a multi-lingual Evergreen instance in Armenia which will have documentation and catalog entries in not just three languages, but three alphabets! As you probably know, the library that I am helping automate is using Koha, not Evergreen, so I talked a little about our project and the things that make FOSS projects more similar than different.

There was a real excitement to being part of the first annual conference. People were really jazzed about Evergreen generally, and Equinox Software did a great job as one of the co-sponsors both talking about what they were doing, but keeping the conference from being a single vendor-focussed event. Karen Schneider was my main point of contact for the whole big shindig and did a wonderful job with preparation, communication and high energy on-the-ground cat herding during the conference. You can see some of the slide decks over on slideshare and I know they recorded video at many of the talks. It was so darned relaxing to be among a group of people committed both to libraries and open source projects, I almost forgot my day-to-day library job fighting with Overdrive, OCLC and Microsoft. It also fortified me for my long trip home. Here are my slides, available in the usual formats.

• A big fan of open

Thanks to all the sponsors and all the people who showed up to make this conference terrific.

A few links that have been keeping me from inbox zero for the past few weeks.

• “…the increased popularity of the Internet in America has not been correlated with an overall increase in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gone steadily down in the last 18 years” Note: this does not say “oh the internet is safe!” It just says that the internet getting more popular doesn’t correlate with sexual offenses against children. More from the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
• Speaking of Berkman people, I’ll be hanging out in the Boston area over the turkey weekend and likely going to this event that Saturday. Anyone in the area should consider going, it looks like fun.
• Evergreen is gaining traction as an ILS that works even for big/complicated systems. The Traverse Area just went live with their Evergreen implementation. Doesn’t that look nice? More about Michigan’s open source ILS project.
• I’ve been reading more lately. I read Cory Doctorow’s book Content (my review) and think it should be required reading for librarians or anyone else in the various digital content industries. If you’d like a copy, you can read it for free online, or if you’re a librarian or a teacher, you can request a donated copy from the website. I already gave mine away.
• FCC broadband bill passed. This might help Farmer Bob [my generic term for the people over on this side of the digital divide] get broadband.
• Pew Report “When Technology Fails” (and even really great technology sometimes does). The results will likely not surprise the librarians. “15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices” and “48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.”

Congrats to Evette Atkin and the other superstars from the Michigan Library Consortium for getting the Branch District Library up and running on Evergreen without mishap. They give their own shoutout to Equinox for being great to work with. Yays all around.

The Michigan Library Consortium (MLC) is thrilled to announce that Branch District Library is our first Michigan Evergreen library to migrate to the open-source Evergreen software. Their new catalog is part of Michigan Evergreen, Michigan’s open-source ILS project. Migrations for the remaining Michigan Evergreen pilot libraries are scheduled for this fall.

[maintainIT]

Special thanks to the Chicago Public Library whose 2008 list of the Best of the Best included Knuffle Bunny Too, My Friend is Sad!, and Today I Will Fly! (Little known Mo-trivia: while New Orleans is my hometown, I was actually born in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines) Brooklyn-wise, I spent last evening at the “State of the Borough Address”, where Knuffle Bunny Too and I were ‘

The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do men and women really speak different languages? by Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that gender needs to be viewed in more complex ways than the prevailing myths and stereotypes allow. In the article below Cameron looks at historical stereotypes of female orators and reflects on Hillary Clinton’s primary run.

After Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in Iowa, the London Times columnist David Aaronovitch suggested that part of Mrs. Clinton’s problem might lie in our contradictory attitudes to women’s public speech. If their style is assertive they are labeled “shrill” and “strident”; if it is softer and more conciliatory, that casts doubt on their ability to lead. However she speaks, it seems a woman cannot win. (more…)

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(This is true) As some of you may know, my family is Dutch. Now, you don’t have to know much about Holland or my family for this story except for this: There is no Halloween in the Netherlands and my mother’s birthday is October 31st. So, during a cold October evening in the suburbs of Chicago almost forty years ago, my folks were quietly hanging out when the doorbell rang. At the door were a