Gifts That Keep Giving (if Not Exploding)

Gregory Tobias/Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections

A Chemcraft set from the mid-1950s. More Photos »

Ask scientists of a certain age about their childhood memories, and odds are they’ll start yarning about the stink bombs and gunpowder they concocted with their chemistry sets. Dangerous? Yes, but fun.

“Admittedly, I have blown some things up in my time,” said William L. Whittaker, 64, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who unearthed his first chemistry set, an A. C. Gilbert, in a junkyard around age 8. By 16, he was dabbling in advanced explosives. “There’s no question that I burned some skin off my face,” he recalled.

Under today’s Christmas tree, girls and boys will unwrap science toys of a very different ilk: slime-making kits and perfume labs, vials of a fluff-making polymer called Insta-Snow, “no-chem” chemistry sets (chemical free!), plus a dazzling array of modern telescopes, microscopes and D.I.Y. volcanoes. Nothing in these gifts will set the curtains on fire.

“Basically, you have to be able to eat everything in the science kit,” said Jim Becker, president of SmartLab Toys, who recalled learning the names of chemicals from his childhood chemistry set, which contained substances that have long since been banned from toys.

Some scientists lament the passing of the trial-and-error days that inspired so many careers. “Science kits are a lot less open-ended these days,” said Kimberly Gerson, a science blogger who lives outside Toronto. “Everything is packaged. It’s either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ If you don’t get the right result, you’ve done it wrong and you’re out of chemicals.”

Others, though, say the new crop of science toys — even with their cartoonish packaging and heavy emphasis on neon goo — actually represent progress. More entertaining, educational and accessible than earlier products, which relied heavily on a child’s inner motivation, these toys may actually help democratize the learning of science and introduce children to scientific methods and concepts at an earlier age.

“I grew up in the 1960s, and a lot of the chemistry sets were kind of boring,” said William Gurstelle, a science and technology writer. “You’d go through the book, and at the end of the experiment you’d get some light precipitate at the bottom of the beaker. Maybe at most it changes color or something.”

Mr. Gurstelle’s books, which include “Whoosh Boom Splat” and “Backyard Ballistics,” teach people how to make dangerous projectiles, like a potato cannon that uses hair spray as launching fluid. But he had high praise for commercial science kits, which show children (among other things) how to make slime.

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

William L. Whittaker at the Planetary Robotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University surrounded by the robots he has created.

“Well, that’s a pretty cool thing to have when you’re done,” Mr. Gurstelle said. “You’re not going to really learn to be a chemist from a chemistry set when you’re in seventh grade; you’re just going to be inspired. The point is that new chemistry sets and new toys are just better, because the manufacturers have figured out how to make them more fun.”

Some toy makers, like SmartLab, Mr. Becker’s company, have used this philosophy to give classic toys a makeover. One of SmartLab’s takes on a chemistry set, for instance, is the Extreme Secret Formula Lab, which comes with “squishy-lidded bubble test tubes” and “an abundance of glow-in-the-dark powder.” The game of Mousetrap has been re-envisioned as the Weird and Wacky Contraption Lab, meant to bring out children’s Rube Goldberg talents. And the slot car tracks that Mr. Becker recalls snapping together in his youth have been translated into a robot called ReCon 6.0, which children can program to roam around.

Mike Kane for The New York Times

Jim Becker of SmartLab Toys.

“What we do is give kids the opportunity to learn through problem solving,” Mr. Becker said.

Of course, technology has also remade the experience of learning science. Children may be more likely to click on a science app than to go play outside.

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Raging fire guts Kabul market

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Firefighters battled through the night to contain a raging fire that swept through a market in the Afghan capital.

No injuries were reported, but the blaze destroyed hundreds of stores and millions of dollars worth of merchandise, Afghan police and firefighters said at the scene. 

Dealers at the neighboring currency exchange, the city’s largest, said they evacuated cash, computer equipment and records from their shops as the flames approached during the night. But in the morning, the market was jammed with people haggling over thick stacks of notes as smoke billowed overhead.

Col. Mohammed Qasem, general director of the Kabul fire department, said he suspected an electrical short was to blame for the fire. 

Gas canisters used to heat the stores propelled the flames, along with the cloth and clothing sold by many of the vendors, Qasem said. “It made it very big in a short time.”

Firefighters from the Afghan defense department and NATO forces were sent to assist. But the city’s notorious traffic and the market’s narrow lanes made it difficult for responders to maneuver their vehicles, Qasem said.

Abdulrahman, who like many Afghans has only one name, squatted near a fire truck with his head in his hands  as responders aimed a hose at the blackened ruins of a building still smoldering at noon Sunday, more than 12 hours after the fire broke out.

He said the building had contained three shops that he owned and a warehouse full of glassware, crockery and kitchen utensils. 

“I lost everything,” he said.

Shirali Khan complained that police hadn't allowed him to remove the goods from his four clothing stores.

“They thought we were all robbers,” he said.  “There’s only ashes left.”

ALSO:

Pope pardons former butler convicted of theft

Bombing kills local official, 7 other people in Pakistan

Tensions high as vote on proposed Egyptian constitution continues

Special correspondent Hashmat Baktash contributed to this report.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Hourglass Nebula

This Hubble telescope snapshot of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula, reveals that the object has an hourglass shape with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. A planetary nebula is the glowing relic of a dying, Sun-like star.

The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter that accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. According to one theory on the formation of planetary nebulae, the hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud, which is denser near its equator than near its poles.

Image: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA [high-resolution]

Caption: Hubble Heritage site

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Reality TV star Bethenny Frankel and husband to separate

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Reality TV star Bethenny Frankel and her husband Jason Hoppy are separating, Frankel announced on Sunday.

“It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating. This was an extremely difficult decision that, as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family,” Frankel said in a statement confirmed by her representative.

“We have love and respect for one another and will continue to amicably co-parent our daughter who is and will always remain our first priority. This is an immensely painful and heartbreaking time for us.”

Frankel, 42, and Hoppy married in March of 2010. They have a daughter, Bryn, who was born in May of 2010.

On Sunday, Frankel tweeted, “I am heartbroken. I am sad. We will work through this as a family.”

Frankel first attracted attention in 2008 on the reality show “The Real Housewives of New York City,” which chronicles the exploits of wealthy New York women. She went on to star in two other reality TV shows, “Bethenny Getting Married?” and “Bethenny Ever After…,” both of which centered on the couple’s marriage and child-rearing.

Frankel also founded the Skinnygirl line of cocktails, and has written several diet and self-help books. In 2012 she launched a talk show, “Bethenny,” which is set to air nationally in 2013.

(Reporting By Andrea Burzynski; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

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N.Y.U. and Others Offer Shorter Courses Through Medical School

Training to become a doctor takes so long that just the time invested has become, to many, emblematic of the gravity and prestige of the profession.

But now one of the nation’s premier medical schools, New York University, and a few others around the United States are challenging that equation by offering a small percentage of students the chance to finish early, in three years instead of the traditional four.

Administrators at N.Y.U. say they can make the change without compromising quality, by eliminating redundancies in their science curriculum, getting students into clinical training more quickly and adding some extra class time in the summer.

Not only, they say, will those doctors be able to hang out their shingles to practice earlier, but they will save a quarter of the cost of medical school — $49,560 a year in tuition and fees at N.Y.U., and even more when room, board, books, supplies and other expenses are added in.

“We’re confident that our three-year students are going to get the same depth and core knowledge, that we’re not going to turn it into a trade school,” said Dr. Steven Abramson, vice dean for education, faculty and academic affairs at N.Y.U. School of Medicine.

At this point, the effort involves a small number of students at three medical schools: about 16 incoming students at N.Y.U., or about 10 percent of next year’s entering class; 9 at Texas Tech Health Science Center School of Medicine; and even fewer, for now, at Mercer University School of Medicine’s campus in Savannah, Ga. A similar trial at Louisiana State University has been delayed because of budget constraints.

But Dr. Steven Berk, the dean at Texas Tech, said that 10 or 15 other schools across the country had expressed interest in what his university was doing, and the deans of all three schools say that if the approach works, they will extend the option to larger numbers of students.

“You’re going to see this kind of three-year pathway become very prominent across the country,” Dr. Abramson predicted.

The deans say that getting students out the door more quickly will accomplish several goals. By speeding up production of physicians, they say, it could eventually dampen a looming doctor shortage, although the number of doctors would not increase unless the schools enrolled more students in the future.

The three-year program would also curtail student debt, which now averages $150,000 by graduation, and by doing so, persuade more students to go into shortage areas like pediatrics and internal medicine, rather than more lucrative specialties like dermatology.

The idea was supported by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to President Obama, and a colleague, Victor R. Fuchs. In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, they said there was “substantial waste” in the nation’s medical education. “Years of training have been added without evidence that they enhance clinical skills or the quality of care,” they wrote. They suggested that the 14 years of college, medical school, residency and fellowship that it now takes to train a subspecialty physician could be reduced by 30 percent, to 10 years.

That opinion, however, is not universally held. Other experts say that a three-year medical program would deprive students of the time they need to delve deeply into their subjects, to consolidate their learning and to reach the level of maturity they need to begin practicing, while adding even more pressure to a stressful academic environment.

“The downside is that you are really tired,” said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting agency for medical schools in the United States and Canada. But because accreditation standards do not dictate the fine points of curriculum, the committee has approved N.Y.U.’s proposal, which exceeds by five weeks its requirement that schools provide at least 130 weeks of medical education.

The medical school is going ahead with its three-year program despite the damage from Hurricane Sandy, which forced NYU Langone Medical Center to evacuate more than 300 patients at the height of the storm and temporarily shut down three of its four main teaching hospitals.

Dr. Abramson of N.Y.U. said that postgraduate training, which typically includes three years in a hospital residency, and often fellowships after that, made it unnecessary to try to cram everything into the medical school years. Students in the three-year program will have to take eight weeks of class before entering medical school, and stay in the top half of their class academically. Those who do not meet the standards will revert to the four-year program.

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Richard Adams dies at 65; gay marriage pioneer

Thirty-seven years ago, Richard Adams made history when he and his partner of four years, Anthony Sullivan, became one of the first gay couples in the country to be granted a marriage license. It happened in Boulder, Colo., where a liberal county clerk issued licenses to six same-sex couples in the spring of 1975.

Adams had hoped to use his marriage to secure permanent residency in the United States for Sullivan, an Australian who had been in the country on a limited visa and was facing deportation.

But Colorado's attorney general declared the Boulder marriages invalid. Several months later, Adams and Sullivan received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service that denied Sullivan's petition for resident status in terms that left no doubt about the reason:

"You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots," the notification read.

Adams, who later filed the first federal lawsuit demanding recognition of same-sex marriages, died Monday at his home in Hollywood after a brief illness, said his attorney, Lavi Soloway. He was 65.

Soloway described Adams and Sullivan as "pioneers who stood up and fought for something nobody at that time conceived of as a right, the right of gay couples to be married.

"Attitudes at the time were not supportive, to put it mildly," Soloway said. "They went on the Donahue show and people in the audience said some pretty nasty things. But they withstood it all because they felt it was important to speak out."

Born in Manila on March 9, 1947, Adams immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 12. He grew up in Long Prairie, Minn., studied liberal arts at the University of Minnesota and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1968.

By 1971 he was working in Los Angeles, where he met Sullivan and fell in love.

Four years later, the two men heard about Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex: She had decided to issue marriage licenses to gay couples after the Boulder district attorney's office advised her that nothing in state law explicitly prohibited it.

On April 21, 1975, they obtained their license and exchanged marriage vows at the First Unitarian Church of Denver.

The Boulder marriages attracted national media attention, including an article in the New York Times that called Colorado "a mini-Nevada for homosexual couples." Rorex received obscene phone calls, as well as a visit from a cowboy who protested by demanding to marry his horse. (Rorex said she turned him down because the 8-year-old mare was underage.)

After their marriage, Adams and Sullivan filed a petition with the INS seeking permanent residency for Sullivan as the spouse of a U.S. citizen. In November 1975, they received the immigration agency's derogatory letter and lodged a formal protest. Officials reissued the denial notice without the word "faggots."

They took the agency to court in 1979, challenging the constitutionality of the denial. A federal district judge in Los Angeles upheld the INS decision, and Adams and Sullivan lost subsequent appeals.

In a second lawsuit, the couple argued that Sullivan's deportation after an eight-year relationship with Adams would constitute an "extreme hardship." In 1985 a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the hardship argument and opened the way for Sullivan to be sent back to Australia.

Because Australia had already turned down Adams' request for residency in that country, the couple decided the only way they could stay together was to leave the U.S. In 1985, they flew to Britain and drifted through Europe for the next year.

"It was the most difficult period because I had to leave my family as well as give up my job of 18 1/2 years. It was almost like death," Adams said in "Limited Partnership," a documentary scheduled for release next year.

The pair ended their self-imposed exile after a year and came home. They lived quietly in Los Angeles to avoid drawing the attention of immigration officials, but in recent years began to appear at rallies supporting same-sex marriage, Soloway said.

They were encouraged by new guidelines issued by the Obama administration this fall instructing immigration officials to stop deporting foreigners in long-standing same-sex relationships with U.S. citizens.

Although the policy change came more than three decades after Adams and Sullivan raised the issue, it gave Adams "a sense of vindication," Soloway said.

The day before he died, Sullivan told him that the most important victory was that they were able to remain a couple.

"Richard looked at me," Sullivan told Soloway, "and said, 'Yeah, you're right. We've won.'"

Adams, who was an administrator for a law firm until his retirement in 2010, is survived by Sullivan; his mother, Elenita; sisters Stella, Kathy, Julie and Tammie; and a brother, Tony.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

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Terra/MODIS Color Image of Copahue Eruption Plume Across South America

For the first time since 2000, Copahue is erupting, sending an ash plume across southern South America. So far, the eruption is following the same patterns as the activity that ran from July to October 2000. That activity started with phreatic (water-driven) explosions, so it will be interesting to see if this eruption has new juvenile magma involved. Earlier this year, a study of the summit crater lake suggested new magma was intruding under Copahue and the SERNAGEOMIN report mentioned. that seismicity was rising before today’s eruption.

I grabbed the brand new Terra/MODIS imagery for South America and the plume from the Copahue was glorious – stretching over 350 km across Argentina to the east of the volcano. For a sense of scale on the image, the distance between Copahue and the Embalse los Barreales is ~225 km. The plume itself has been reported to be over 9.5 km / 30,000 feet tall.

UPDATE 12/22 5 PM EST: Eruptions reader Kirby pointed me to the SERNAGEOMIN webcam pointed at Copahue — check out the eruption live!

UPDATE 12/22 7 PM EST: ONEMI has not called for any evacuations on the Chilean side of Copahue — this article also has a nice gallery of pictures from the eruption as well.

Check out the original post with more details.

Erik Klemetti is an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University. His passion in geology is volcanoes, and he has studied them all over the world. You can follow Erik on Twitter, where you'll get volcano news and the occasional baseball comment.

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Iron Butterfly bassist Lee Dorman dies at age 70

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lee Dorman, the bassist for psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly, has died at age 70.

Orange County sheriff‘s spokeswoman Gail Krause says Dorman was found dead in a vehicle Friday morning. A coroner’s investigation is under way, but foul play is not suspected.

Krause said Dorman may have been on his way to a doctor’s appointment when he died.

Iron Butterfly was formed and rose to prominence in the late 1960s. Its second album, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” sold more than 30 million copies, according to the band’s website. The title track’s distinctive notes have been featured in numerous films and TV shows including “The Simpsons,” ”That ’70s Show” and in the series finale of “Rescue Me.”

Douglas Lee Dorman was born in September 1942 and had been living in Laguna Niguel, a coastal city in Southern California, when he died.

A message sent through the band’s website was not immediately returned.

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News Analysis: The Perils of Yoga for Men

MEN are famous for ignoring aches and pains. It’s macho. Men get physical exams less often than women. They tend to remain silent if worried about their health. When hurt, their impulse is to shun doctors and rely on home remedies, like avoiding heavy lifting to ease backaches. Male athletes play through injuries. It’s all about virility and manliness.

The stereotype has exceptions, of course. But denial of injury and ill health — from the relatively inconsequential to the grave — is common enough that physicians seek ways to encourage men to be more forthcoming.

So it pays to listen carefully when guys start talking about intolerable pain and upended lives. Doing so led me to an unexpected finding that I have confirmed in a trove of federal data. It suggests that yoga can be remarkably dangerous — for men.

Guys who bend, stretch and contort their bodies are relatively few in number, perhaps one in five out of an estimated 20 million practitioners in the United States and 250 million around the globe. But proportionally, they are reporting damage more frequently than women, and their doctors are diagnosing more serious injuries — strokes and fractures, dead nerves and shattered backs. In comparison, women tell mainly of minor upsets.

Men who are breaking the code of silence are doing so with physicians in hospital emergency rooms, who in turn report their findings to the federal government.

Their outspokenness reveals much about modern yoga and suggests ways it can be made safer. As a practitioner since 1970, I know some of the guy hazards personally and have learned through painful experience how to live with my inflexible body.

The male disclosures help explain one of the central mysteries of modern yoga — why it is largely a feminine pursuit. As Yoga Journal, the field’s top magazine, put the question: “Where Are All the Men?”

Science has long viewed the female body as relatively elastic. Now the new disclosures suggest that women who tie themselves in knots also enjoy a lower risk of damage. It seems like common sense.

Surprisingly, evidence of the male danger has, to my knowledge, never before been made public. Nor has its flip side — that women seem less vulnerable. The subject of male risk merits discussion if only because the booming yoga industry has long targeted men as a smart way to expand its franchise.

Informal observations hint at possible explanations. Yoga experts say women tend to see classes as refuges while men see challenges — their goal at times to impress the opposite sex.

Women say men push themselves too far, too fast. Men admit to liking the intensity but say the problem is pushy teachers who force them into advanced poses while urging them to ignore pain.

I stumbled on the issue after my book, published in February, laid out a century and a half of science and, in its chapter on injuries, contradicted the usual image of yoga as completely safe. The yoga establishment makes billions of dollars by selling itself as a path to healthy perfection. Predictably, it responded with sharp denials.

I also received a surprising number of moving replies from injured yogis — male and female — including stroke victims.

A letter initiated my inquiry. In April, a man told how an agonizing back injury had turned his life into “a living hell.” Too many instructors, he wrote, are “pushing us too hard and having us do dangerous poses.”

The “us” resonated.

Suddenly, I realized his cry sounded familiar.

I raced through a correspondence file and saw that many of the letters about serious damage had come from men.

Tara Stiles, a yoga teacher who runs a popular studio in Manhattan, told me that guys have more muscle (one reason for their relative inflexibility) and can thus force themselves into challenging poses they might otherwise find impossible. It seemed a plausible explanation for blinding pain.

Other teachers echoed her analysis and cited supporting anecdotes.

Yoga poses are unisex. But in my research, I found a world of poorly known information on gender disparity.

“Science of Flexibility,” by Michael J. Alter, explained how the pelvic regions of women are shaped in a way that permits an unusually large range of motion and joint play. In yoga, the pelvis is the central pivot for extreme bending of the legs, spine and torso.

In June, I turned to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and its National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital emergency rooms. In July, officials sent me 18 years of annual survey data that summarized the admission records for yoga practitioners hurt between 1994 and 2011, the maximum available span.

First, I needed a baseline that would let me compare the guy admissions to males doing yoga in the United States. Figures in the yoga literature described men as making up some 10 percent of practitioners at the beginning of the period and 23 percent at the end. So the middle ground seemed to be roughly 16 percent.

Then I dug into the medical data. The analysis took weeks, but the results spoke volumes.

William J. Broad is a science reporter for The New York Times and the author of “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards.”

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Amazon Book Reviews Deleted in a Purge Aimed at Manipulation

Giving raves to family members is no longer acceptable. Neither is writers’ reviewing other writers. But showering five stars on a book you admittedly have not read is fine.

After several well-publicized cases involving writers buying or manipulating their reviews, Amazon is cracking down. Writers say thousands of reviews have been deleted from the shopping site in recent months.

Amazon has not said how many reviews it has killed, nor has it offered any public explanation. So its sweeping but hazy purge has generated an uproar about what it means to review in an era when everyone is an author and everyone is a reviewer.

Is a review merely a gesture of enthusiasm or should it be held to a higher standard? Should writers be allowed to pass judgment on peers the way they have always done offline or are they competitors whose reviews should be banned? Does a groundswell of raves for a new book mean anything if the author is soliciting the comments?

In a debate percolating on blogs and on Amazon itself, quite a few writers take a permissive view on these issues.

The mystery novelist J. A. Konrath, for example, does not see anything wrong with an author indulging in chicanery. “Customer buys book because of fake review = zero harm,” he wrote on his blog.

Some readers differ. An ad hoc group of purists has formed on Amazon to track its most prominent reviewer, Harriet Klausner, who has over 25,000 reviews. They do not see how she can read so much so fast or why her reviews are overwhelmingly — and, they say, misleadingly — exaltations.

“Everyone in this group will tell you that we’ve all been duped into buying books based on her reviews,” said Margie Brown, a retired city clerk from Arizona.

Once a populist gimmick, the reviews are vital to making sure a new product is not lost in the digital wilderness. Amazon has refined the reviewing process over the years, giving customers the opportunity to rate reviews and comment on them. It is layer after layer of possible criticism.

“A not-insubstantial chunk of their infrastructure is based on their reviews — and all of that depends on having reviews customers can trust,” said Edward W. Robertson, a science fiction novelist who has watched the debate closely.

Nowhere are reviews more crucial than with books, an industry in which Amazon captures nearly a third of every dollar spent. It values reviews more than other online booksellers like Apple or Barnes & Noble, featuring them prominently and using them to help decide which books to acquire for its own imprints by its relatively new publishing arm.

So writers have naturally been vying to get more, and better, notices. Several mystery writers, including R. J. Ellory, Stephen Leather and John Locke, have recently confessed to various forms of manipulation under the general category of “sock puppets,” or online identities used to deceive. That resulted in a widely circulated petition by a loose coalition of writers under the banner, “No Sock Puppets Here Please,” asking people to “vote for book reviews you can trust.”

In explaining its purge of reviews, Amazon has told some writers that “we do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors.” But writers say that rule is not applied consistently.

In some cases, the ax fell on those with a direct relationship with the author.

“My sister’s and best friend’s reviews were removed from my books,” the author M. E. Franco said in a blog comment. “They happen to be two of my biggest fans.” Another writer, Valerie X. Armstrong, said her son’s five-star review of her book, “The Survival of the Fattest,” was removed. He immediately tried to put it back “and it wouldn’t take,” she wrote.

In other cases, though, the relationship was more tenuous. Michelle Gagnon lost three reviews on her young adult novel “Don’t Turn Around.” She said she did not know two of the reviewers, while the third was a longtime fan of her work. “How does Amazon know we know each other?” she said. “That’s where I started to get creeped out.”

Mr. Robertson suggested that Amazon applied a broad brush. “I believe they caught a lot of shady reviews, but a lot of innocent ones were erased, too,” he said. He figures the deleted reviews number in the thousands, or perhaps even 10,000.

The explosion of reviews for “The 4-Hour Chef” by Timothy Ferriss shows how the system has evolved from something spontaneous to a means of marketing and promotion. On Nov. 20, publication day, dozens of highly favorable reviews immediately sprouted. Other reviewers quickly criticized Mr. Ferriss, accusing him of buying supporters.

He laughed off those suggestions. “Not only would I never do that — it’s unethical — I simply don’t have to,” he wrote in an e-mail, saying he had sent several hundred review copies to fans and potential fans. “Does that stack the deck? Perhaps, but why send the book to someone who would hate it? That doesn’t help anyone: not the reader, nor the writer.”

As a demonstration of social media’s grip on reviewing, Mr. Ferriss used Twitter and Facebook to ask for a review. “Rallying my readers,” he called it. Within an hour, 61 had complied.

A few of his early reviews were written by people who admitted they had not read the book but were giving it five stars anyway because, well, they knew it would be terrific. “I am looking forward to reading this,” wrote a user posting under the name mhpics.

A spokesman for Amazon, which published “The 4-Hour Chef,” offered this sole comment for this article: “We do not require people to have experienced the product in order to review.”

The dispute over reviews is playing out in the discontent over Mrs. Klausner, an Amazon Hall of Fame reviewer for the last 11 years and undoubtedly one of the most prolific reviewers in literary history.

Mrs. Klausner published review No. 28,366, for “A Red Sun Also Rises” by Mark Hodder. Almost immediately, it had nine critical comments. The first accused it of being “riddled with errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation.” The rest were no more kind. The Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society had struck again.

Mrs. Klausner, a 60-year-old retired librarian who lives in Atlanta, has published an average of seven reviews a day for more than a decade. “To watch her in action is unbelievable,” said her husband, Stanley. “You see the pages turning.”

Mrs. Klausner, who says ailments keep her home and insomnia keeps her up, scoffs at her critics. “You ever read a Harlequin romance?” she said. “You can finish it in one hour. I’ve always been a speed reader.” She has a message for her naysayers: “Get a life. Read a book.”

More than 99.9 percent of Mrs. Klausner’s reviews are four or five stars. “If I can make it past the first 50 pages, that means I like it, and so I review it,” she said. But even Stanley said, “She’s soft, I won’t deny that.”

The campaign against Mrs. Klausner has pushed down her reviewer ratings, which in theory makes her less influential. But when everything is subject to review, the battle is never-ending.

Ragan Buckley, an aspiring novelist active in the campaign against Mrs. Klausner under the name “Sneaky Burrito,” is a little weary. “There are so many fake reviews that I’m often better off just walking into a physical store and picking an item off the shelf at random,” she said.

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