"An intangible goal, which requires building human relationships, is to meet elders' emotional, cognitive, and even spiritual needs.
To that end, Paul Raia in 1989 developed "habilitation therapy"-a communication technique based on the neuropathology of Alzheimer's. "The ability to feel, perceive, respond to, and evoke emotion is there in the brain until very near the end," he explains. The therapy aims at creating positive emotion and sustaining it "in whoever people become as they move through the stages of the disease." If a patient wants to visit her deceased mother, the caregiver does not "reorient reality" by asserting the truth but responds to the underlying feeling of sadness and loss by saying: "I hear your mother was a wonderful lady, let's talk about her," and taking out a photo of, say, a day at the beach mother and child shared, and talking about it...."
By Peter Taylor
"Some people suggest that race is coded in genes and genes determine IQ test scores. A slightly less simple but similar supposition is that differences among races are associated with differences in genes that people have, which, in turn, are associated with differences in IQ test scores. Yet everyone has a sense that such claims are controversial. What should you think about them?"
Among the first to sound the alarm, in 1677, was Anthony Wood, an Oxford academic. "Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the University?" he asked. "Answer: Because of Coffea Houses, where they spend all their time."
Fully funded -- no need for scientists to chase grants
No responsibilities besides research -- no teaching load, no administration
All scientists have to be hands-on -- at the bench
A focus on a fairly narrow set of difficult, high-payoff research challenges
No tenure -- senior scientists have a five year term and then may or may not be re-signed
(My favorite) Research groups can have no more than 6 members. This means that they cannot possibly have all the skills they need inside their team and so will have to get out of their own lab and get to know the other people in the place so they can get the help they need.
All of this is nestled in a facility with amenities intended to increase mingling, interaction and ultimately collaboration.
"We are a growing community of researchers devoted to designing scalable solutions that drive better care at the most critical moments in people's lives everywhere. Our goal is not a grant or publication, but simple discoveries that actually produce better outcomes, greater value, and more caring across the world."
"Explaining the ecosystemic dependencies out of which new pathogens arise isn't nearly enough, however. Quammen rarely touches the processes occurring farther upstream. Pathogens are embedded in circuits of capital in such a way as to reverse conclusions based on ecology alone."
Proponents of such programs, including President Obama, have contended secretly collecting our internet and phone metadata-when, where and with whom we connect-is about our protection.
I must say that as an evolutionary epidemiologist I find it a fascinating defense, if only because there have been several efforts aimed at producing geographies of deadly influenzas for which it has been nearly impossible to get governments worldwide, including the U.S., to provide the locales and dates of livestock and poultry outbreaks.
"You are told: use policies that work. And you are told: RCTs - randomized controlled trials - will show you what these are. That's not so. RCTs are great, but they do not do that for you. They cannot alone support the expectation that a policy will work for you" [i.e., here, not there where the RCT was done].
