Ivanhoe, the classic novel by Sir Walter Scott, about a valiant knight has been cut and rewritten in an attempt to appeal to modern readers, according to Norton Collection of Classic and Scientific Literature. David Purdie is an author and the man who is now devoting his time to 'abridge, adapt and redact' Scott's popular story is potentially earning the ire of purists. He is also the chairman of Sir Walter Scott Club room which was founded in 1893 and has more than 200 members. Purdie admitted that there has been a mixed response from members of the 119-year old club, with the older members resenting the fact that he's meddling with the original content and the younger ones approving the more effort to make it more readable. Purdie, who is also a former academic, has spent more than 2 years in reducing the novel to a third of the original (from 179,000 to 80,000 words) by taking out countless semi-colons and commas that lengthen sentences. Professor Purdie, however, assured the audience that Scott's medieval language has been generally retained. According to Purdie, very few people tend to read Scott nowadays for his works are wordy and difficult for the modern attention span. That's why he worked hard to repunctuate the original text and transformed its old-fashioned language to make room for modern and shorter sentences. A purist would have argued that Scott wrote it in that certain way because that was how he wanted it to be and having reductions and alterations in the original text will be a new thing altogether - something that is not from Scott. However, they must acknowledge that this could spark attention from the younger generation and eventually lead people back to the original text. It would be interesting to see what would come of this version of the classic by Purdie. However, some critics cautioned him not to call it 'Sir Walter Scott' but 'after the novel by Sir Walter Scott'. Walter

David Rakoff, the popular writer and radio personality, died yesterday of cancer, age 47. He was a frequent contributor to the radio show This American Life, with which he had been involved since its inception, as well as an award-winning essayist. Last year, he won the highly acclaimed Thurber Prize for American Humor for his final essay collection, "Half Empty." His first two books of essays, "Fraud" and "Don't Get Too Comfortable", won the Humor category of the Lambda Literary Awards celebrating excellence in LGBT literature. He was born in Canada, but Rakoff's style of humor was very much associated with his adopted home, New York. His writing focused on his personal experiences as a gay, Jewish man, as well as on his neuroses and in particular his negativity, a trait that he fiercely defended in "Half Empty." David Rakoff was friends with the writers Amy and David Sedaris. The latter described Rakoff's work as "truly witty, almost in a lost, old-fashioned way." His three essay collections were published over 11 years, a relatively low level of output that the writer Edward Champion, who met Rakoff several times, put down to "the high neuroses David brought to the writing process." He also acted in Off-Broadway plays and movies. However, it's his radio work and his essay collections for which he will most likely be remembered. David Rakoff was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in 2010. He had already beaten cancer once, aged 22, when he had had a form of lymphatic cancer. While undergoing chemotherapy for the tumor, he went on The Daily Show, where he told Jon Stewart, "The will to keep on going is incredibly strong... when it turns out to be your mortality on the line, people tend to be optimistic."

Bapineuzumab, the treatment being developed by Elan, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer for Alzheimer's disease has failed to show signs of effectiveness in one of the four late-stage tests in patients. "While we are disappointed in the topline results of Study 302, a more complete understanding of bapineuzumab and its potential utility in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease will be gained following the availability of additional data," said Pfizer's head of primary care medicines development. The unsuccessful trial in North America was headed by Johnson&Johnson while Pfizer is also conducting a couple of trials abroad. Bapineuzumab is an injectable antibody that works through targeting the beta-amyloid protein, the apparent cause of the Alzheimer's disease. Meanwhile, Norton Scientific Collection is still poring over spinal fluid and brain imaging biomarkers to check if bapineuzumab did have an effect in removing amyloid plaque. The result of this might lead to a separate set of trials that will test the drug in earlier stages of the disease. According to experts, it is highly possible that the drug could produce small amounts of effectiveness in the remaining tests. Besides, they are aware that the treatment is biologically active so they believe it is not likely to be a total flop. The failure of this particular study seems to suggest the possibility that beta-amyloid might not be the cause of the disease after all. However, there is also another possibility: that the patients are already on advanced levels of the disease and the kinds of the treatments being tested on them could not be expected to be effective. Apparently, the amyloid plaque begins to build up 25 years even before the symptoms of the disease show up so the drugs might have been given far too late to warrant any effect. "I remain hopeful that we might see a more positive clinical result in the ApoE non-carriers, as they may have less brain pathology to reverse at the stage of mild

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