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qkirkpatrick

Babies' memory develops while napping: study | CTV News - 0 views

www.ctvnews.ca/...-while-napping-study-1.2189862

memory brain science

shared by qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Babies' memory develops while napping: study For babies, the best time to learn something is right before a nap of at least 30 minutes, according to a new study. (ambrozinio/shuttersto
  • babies
  • Naps during the day of at least a half hour help infants retain new behaviors learned earlier, according to researchers from the University of Sheffield
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  • ambrozinio
  • e study, which is believed to be the first of its kind, researchers worked with 216 healthy babies between six and 12 months old.
  • To test their ability to retain newly learned behaviors, they taught them how to take the mitten off a hand puppet and gave them opportunities to repeat the skill after four hours had passed, and again after 24 hours had passed.
  • qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15
     
    Babies' memory develop while napping. Connects with lesson on memory.
nataliedepaulo1

Are Babies Wired to Understand the World From Birth? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513005

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Can Babies Understand the World From Birth?
  • Over the past couple of decades, researchers like Saxe have used functional MRI to study brain activity in adults and children. But fMRI, like a 19th-century daguerreotype, requires subjects to lie perfectly still lest the image become hopelessly blurred. Babies are jittering bundles of motion when not asleep, and they can’t be cajoled or bribed into stillness. The few fMRI studies done on babies to date mostly focused on playing sounds to them while they slept.
  • But Saxe wanted to understand how babies see the world when they’re awake; she wanted to image Arthur’s brain as he looked at video clips, the kind of thing that adult research subjects do easily.
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  • Do babies’ brains work like miniature versions of adult brains, or are they completely different?
  • We’re only beginning to understand how babies’ brains are organized; it will require many more hours collecting data from a larger number of babies to have a fuller picture of how their brains work. But Saxe and her colleagues have shown that such a study can be done, which opens up new areas of investigation. “It is possible to get good fMRI data in awake babies—if you are extremely patient,” Saxe said. “Now let’s try to figure out what we can learn from it.”
johnsonel7

China Quietly Confirms a Third CRISPR-Edited Baby Has Been Born - 0 views

www.sciencealert.com/ms-there-s-a-third-crispr-baby

china bioethics

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Given that China condemned He's research almost immediately after he announced the births of the twin babies, it's not particularly surprising to hear that the researcher is being punished for his controversial experiment.But included in Xinhua's latest report was a bit of news we thought we might never hear: a third gene-edited baby has officially been born.
  • The report doesn't include any additional information on the baby. We don't know its sex, its health status, whether the birth involved any complications - or if the baby is even still alive.But we do know this baby was born, meaning that at some point last year, there were not two, but three genetically engineered humans walking - or, more likely, crawling - the Earth
knudsenlu

How badly do you want something? Babies can tell | MIT News - 0 views

news.mit.edu/...abies-can-tell-value-goal-1123

babies effort psychology research

shared by knudsenlu on 02 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • Babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard University.
  • This ability requires integrating information about both the costs of obtaining a goal and the benefit gained by the person seeking it, suggesting that babies acquire very early an intuition about how people make decisions.
  • “This paper is not the first to suggest that idea, but its novelty is that it shows this is true in much younger babies than anyone has seen. These are preverbal babies, who themselves are not actively doing very much, yet they appear to understand other people’s actions in this sophisticated, quantitative way,”
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  • “This study is an important step in trying to understand the roots of common-sense understanding of other people’s actions. It shows quite strikingly that in some sense, the basic math that is at the heart of how economists think about rational choice is very intuitive to babies who don’t know math, don’t speak, and can barely understand a few words
  • “Abstract, interrelated concepts like cost and value — concepts at the center both of our intuitive psychology and of utility theory in philosophy and economics — may originate in an early-emerging system by which infants understand other people's actions,” she says. 
  • In other words, they apply the well-known logic that all of us rely on when we try to assess someone’s preferences: The harder she tries to achieve something, the more valuable is the expected reward to her when she succeeds.”
  • “We have to recognize that we’re very far from building AI systems that have anything like the common sense even of a 10-month-old,” Tenenbaum says. “But if we can understand in engineering terms the intuitive theories that even these young infants seem to have, that hopefully would be the basis for building machines that have more human-like intelligence.
johnsonel7

Do Babies Cry in Different Languages? - NYT Parenting - 0 views

parenting.nytimes.com/...prespeech-development-wurzburg

research language nature vs nurture

shared by johnsonel7 on 18 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • This was the moment Dr. Wermke, a biologist and medical anthropologist who studies babies’ first sounds, had been waiting for. She made a recording for later analysis in her lab, Würzburg University Clinic’s Center for Pre-Speech Development and Developmental Disorders. But even without the aid of computerized tools, Dr. Wermke could make out a distinctive pattern in Joris’s wail.“He really cried in German just now, right?” she said, smiling as she packed up her equipment.
  • In 2009, Dr. Wermke’s and her colleagues made headlines with a study showing that French and German newborns produce distinctly different “cry melodies,” reflecting the languages they heard in utero: German newborns produce more cries that fall from a higher to a lower pitch, mimicking the falling intonation of the German language, while French infants tend to cry with the rising intonation of French. At this age, babies experiment with a wide variety of sounds, and can learn any language. But they are already influenced by their mother tongue.
  • After they are born, young babies mimic many different sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb, which becomes a handy guide to the strange sounds coming from the people around them. Through stress, pauses and other cues, prosody cuts up the stream of sound into words and phrases – that is, into speech.
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  • The 2-month-old with hearing problems also makes a leap. Nine days after receiving a hearing aid, his irregular, choked cries have given way to confident experiments with vowel sounds.
  • All parents, Dr. Wermke said, have an innate ability to understand and respond to their babies. Indeed, it was mothers who supported her research from the beginning, even as other scientists were skeptical. In the 1980s, when Dr. Wermke first began recording babies’ sounds, many researchers viewed crying as a mere biological alarm signal, worth investigating only in the context of problems such as colic. But mothers never doubted that their tiny babies were worth studying. As Judith Fricke, little Joris’s mother, said, “I think you’d recognize the sound of your own child among a hundred others. You develop an ear for that.”
maxwellokolo

Birth may not be a major microbe delivery event for babies - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...-microbe-delivery-event-babies

shared by maxwellokolo on 16 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 16 Feb 17
     
    Babies are born germy, and that's a good thing. Our microbiomes - the microbes that live on and in us - are gaining cred as tiny but powerful keepers of our health. As microbes gain scientific stature, some scientists are trying to answer questions about how and when those germs first show up on babies.
qkirkpatrick

US science leaders to tackle ethics of gene-editing technology - BuenosAiresHerald.com - 1 views

www.buenosairesherald.com/...hics-of-geneediting-technology

science ethics knowledge

shared by qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The leading US scientific organization, responding to concerns expressed by scientists and ethicists, has launched an ambitious initiative to recommend guidelines for new genetic technology that has the potential to create "designer babies."
  • The technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, allows scientists to edit virtually any gene they target
  • Although the embryos were not viable and could not have developed into babies, the announcement ignited an outcry from scientists warning that such a step, which could alter human genomes for generations, was just a matter of time.
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  • In response, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and its Institute of Medicine will convene an international summit this fall where researchers and other experts will "explore the scientific, ethical, and policy issues associated with human gene-editing research," the academies said in a statement
  • It is a step reminiscent of one in 1975, when NAS convened the Asilomar Conference. That led to guidelines and federal regulations of recombinant DNA, the gene-splicing technology that underlay the founding of Genentech and other biotech companies and revolutionized the production of many pharmaceuticals
  • qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15
     
    ethics in science of designing own baby. 
Javier E

Opinion | Reflections on Stephen L. Carter's 1991 Book, 'Reflections of an Affirmative ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ive-action-stephen-carter.html

affirmative action racism essentialism preference race reflections

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.”
  • “I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”
  • The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face
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  • The fact that Thomas was very likely nominated because he was Black and because he opposed affirmative action posed a conundrum for many supporters of racial preferences. Was being Black enough? Or did you have to be “the right kind” of Black person? It’s a question Carter openly wrestles with in his book.
  • What immediately struck me on rereading it was how prescient Carter was about these debates 32 years ago. What role affirmative action should take was playing out then in ways that continue to reverberate.
  • The demise of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”
  • Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.
  • Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”
  • But the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.
  • An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”
  • A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.
  • , it’s hard to imagine Carter welcoming the current vogue for white allyship, with its reductive assumption that all Black people have the same interests and values
  • He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”
  • In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.”
  • Carter took issue with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race consciousness would be central to overcoming racism
  • However well intentioned you may be, when you reduce people to their race-based identity rather than view them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you risk making sweeping assumptions about who they are. This used to be called stereotyping or racism.
  • he rejected all efforts to label him, insisting that intellectuals should be “politically unpredictable.
  • “Critics who attempt to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the Black right wing will be making a mistake. He is not a conservative, neo- or otherwise. He is an honest Black scholar — the product of the pre-politically correct era — who abhors the stifling of debate by either wing or by people of any hue.”
  • This strikes me as the greatest difference between reading the book today and reading it as an undergrad at a liberal Ivy League college: the attitude toward debating controversial views. “Reflections” offers a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas, something academia, media and the arts still prized in 1991.
  • Today, a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away
tornekm

Of bairns and brains | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...hy-humans-are-so-clever-bairns

science brain science knowledge

shared by tornekm on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • especially given the steep price at which it was bought. Humans’ outsized, power-hungry brains suck up around a quarter of their body’s oxygen supplies.
  • . It was simply humanity’s good fortune that those big sexy brains turned out to be useful for lots of other things, from thinking up agriculture to building internal-combustion engines. Another idea is that human cleverness arose out of the mental demands of living in groups whose members are sometimes allies and sometimes rivals.
  • human infants take a year to learn even to walk, and need constant supervision for many years afterwards. That helplessness is thought to be one consequence of intelligence—or, at least, of brain size.
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  • ever-more incompetent infants, requiring ever-brighter parents to ensure they survive childhood.
  • The self-reinforcing nature of the process would explain why intelligence is so strikingly overdeveloped in humans compared even with chimpanzees.
  • developed first in primates, a newish branch of the mammals, a group that is itself relatively young.
  • found that babies born to mothers with higher IQs had a better chance of surviving than those born to low-IQ women, which bolsters the idea that looking after human babies is indeed cognitively taxing.
  • none of this adds up to definitive proof.
  • Any such feedback loop would be a slow process (at least as reckoned by the humans themselves), most of which would have taken place in the distant past.
Javier E

Millennials Are More 'Generation Me' Than 'Generation We,' Study Finds - Students - The... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...131175

youth values traits research social science generation US millennials students study

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • The study, which compares the traits of young people in high school and entering college today with those of baby boomers and Gen X'ers at the same age from 1966 to 2009, shows an increasing trend of valuing money, image, and fame more than inherent principles like self-acceptance, affiliation, and community. "The results generally support the 'Generation Me' view of generational differences rather than the 'Generation We,'
  • college students in 1971 ranked the importance of being very well off financially No. 8 in their life goals, but since 1989, they have consistently placed it at the top of the list.
  • "I see no evidence that today's young people feel much attachment to duty or to group cohesion. Young people have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves."
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  • That view is apparent in the new study's findings, such as a steep decline in concern for the environment. The study found that three times more millennials than baby boomers said they made no personal effort at all to practice sustainability. Only 51 percent of millennials said they tried to save energy by cutting down on electricity, compared with 68 percent of baby boomers and 60 percent of Gen X'ers.
  • The study also found a decline in civic interest, such as political participation and trust in government, as well as in concern for others, including charity donations, and in the importance of having a job worthwhile to society.
  • "The aphorisms have shifted to 'believe in yourself' and 'you're special,'" she says. "It emphasizes individualism, and this gets reflected in personality traits and attitudes."
  • Even community service, the one aspect where millennials' engagement rose, does not seem to stem from genuine altruism. The study attributes that gain to high schools in recent years requiring volunteer hours to graduate. The number of public high schools with organized community-service programs jumped from 9 percent in 1984 to 46 percent in 1999, according to the study.
grayton downing

Newborn Immune Systems Suppressed | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38187/title/Newborn-Immune-Systems-Suppressed/

newborn immune systems science research

shared by grayton downing on 13 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • sterile world of the womb, at birth babies are thrust into an environment full of bacteria, viruses, and parasites. They are very vulnerable to these infections for their first months of life—a trait that has long been blamed on their immature immune systems.
  • “This more intricate regulation of immune responses makes more sense than immaturity,” said Sing Sing Way, who led the study, “because it allows a protective response to be mounted if needed.” This may explain why newborn immune responses, though generally weak, also vary wildly between different babies and across different studies.
  • njecting 6-day-old mice with splenocytes (a type of white blood cell) from adults. Newborn mice are normally 1,000 times more suspectible to bacterial infections than adults, but despite receiving working immune cells, they became no less vulnerable.
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  • Way added that there might be other reasons why newborns should carry immunosuppressive cells
  • Baby formulas contain small amounts of arginine. Sidney Morris, a biochemist from the University of Pittsburgh, said that it may be important to avoid fortifying them with extra arginine, lest it swamps the arginase activity of CD71+ cells, releases the immune system, and causes problems for the developing infants’ guts.
  • “Whether the precise mechanism of immunosuppression is the same or different in each of these circumstances remains to be determined,” he said.
grayton downing

Three-Way Parenthood | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37594/title/Three-Way-Parenthood/

parenthood science research ethics designer genes

shared by grayton downing on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The ability to manipulate human reproduction was viewed in many circles as an attack on the traditional family and an odious attempt to assert human dominion over nature. Terms such as “designer babies” and “playing God” were commonly applied to IVF.
  • proposed the concept of a “three-parent” fertility procedure to treat mitochondrial disorders
  • prevent defective mtDNA from being passed from mother to child, scientists in the U.K. are planning to offer a “three-parent” fertility procedure.
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  • potential for creating children from multiple parents is not limited to the halting of the passage of mitochondrial disorders.
  • these genetic engineering procedures raise both legal and ethical concerns. Legal issues include: Who are the legal parents of a child generated from genetic material obtained from multiple donors? Would such a child have the right to know the identity of all his gene donors? In an article to be published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender (in press), we propose a legal solution to address some of these issues
  • many ethical concerns raised by such technologies is whether these advances in reproductive medicine could lead to the creation of “designer babies,” in which parents select the genetic composition of their children for enhancement or for health reasons. The fear in creating designer babies is that it may herald a new era of “consumer eugenics” with potentially unknown consequences for humankind.
kushnerha

Will Chinese babies be like Prada bags? (Opinion) - CNN.com - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

opinion cnn china education children class

shared by kushnerha on 08 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • China's decision to end its 36-year-old one-child policy imposed on 1.3 billion people was surprising but not entirely unexpected.
  • By 2025, the U.N. projects that China will be the most elderly nation on Earth, with more Chinese 60 and over than 14 and under, drastically burdening social welfare infrastructures and slashing workforce productivity.
  • Will the new two child policy really encourage Chinese parents to start having two children?
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  • After all, four decades of social pressure and sometimes coercive enforcement have deeply engrained the one-child norm into Chinese identity — and it may well take as many decades to root it out. And given the economic realities associated with raising a child in modern China, a second child could be an expensive luxury, reserved largely for the wealthy.
  • Chinese culture has long valued children above all things. Families with large broods were seen as exceptionally fortunate — because more offspring are signs of wealth, or meant more hands to work for the family.
  • having two or fewer children was a patriotic duty that ensured the nation would have enough resources for all
  • one child has become a social standard, with the consequence that for every household, a single son or daughter is now doted upon by two parents and four grandparents, showered with material possessions, pushed to excel academically and entrusted with the entirety of a family's hopes and expectations.
  • Americans spend about $13,600 per year on each child they have. That's about 27% of the median U.S. household income. Chinese spend around $3,745 per year on their kids — or about 50% of China's median household income. Almost three-quarters of that money goes toward education and enrichment; it's seen as an investment in the future
  • most of China's 140 million rising middle-class families feel they simply can't afford the financial burden of raising more than one. Which is why China's attempted doubling down on childbirth may ultimately have little near-term effect on Chinese demographics.
  • The affluent have always been able to pay the penalties for multiples. Fong points out that the three richest men in China all have more than one child. But for middle class families, simply removing penalties isn't enough. "I think many will be resistant to have second children unless the measures are accompanied by financial relief — tax breaks, scholarship guarantees, things like that.
  • Will second children simply be a luxury of the wealthy? And if so, how will that impact Chinese society?My prediction: Within a few years, no Chinese millionaire's Mercedes will be fully complete without two baby seats in back, and Bugaboo Donkey double strollers will become the new Prada bags.
Javier E

Hearing Bilingual - How Babies Tell Languages Apart - NYTimes.com - 4 views

www.nytimes.com/...11klass.html

bilingual language advantage

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different. In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.
  • Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function. These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said. Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.
  • Richard Monari on 25 Oct 11
     
    I had no idea that language could play such a huge role in the development of an infant! This makes me wonder as to what other external social factors can come into consequence, like music or visual perceptions.
marvelgr

THE BASES OF THE MIND:THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT | by Koç Unive... - 0 views

medium.com/...guage-and-thought-a0bf30375528

shared by marvelgr on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”
  • Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.
  • In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.
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  • In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language.
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
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  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
maxwellokolo

Stolen baby found alive in South Carolina 18 years on - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-38614824

shared by maxwellokolo on 14 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 14 Jan 17
     
    This very sad article about a baby stolen, found 18 years later made me think of some questions. Like, how can one live with themselves knowing that they ruined a whole family's life?
Javier E

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...beyond-billboards.html

Christianity Christmas myth sin

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al
  • at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.
anonymous

Opinion | Why Were Strangers Allowed to Hide Part of Me From Myself? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...closed-adoption-laws.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • For 50 years, my state denied me the story of my birth. All adoptees deserve better.
  • In 1968, a woman appeared for an interview at the Children’s Bureau, an adoption agency in Indianapolis
  • “a very attractive, sweet looking girl,” who seemed “to come from a good background” and was “intelligent.”
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Her reason for coming was obvious. She was around 40 weeks pregnant
  • She was an office worker in Ohio when she became pregnant by a man who wasn’t going to marry her. The most remarkable part of her story was this: When she knew she was about to give birth, she drove westward out of Ohio, stopping at Indianapolis only because it was the first big city she encountered
  • She arranged to place the baby for adoption and gave birth the next day.
  • The baby was me. If she’d driven farther, I’d be a native of Chicago or St. Louis, but Indianapolis it was
  • Life is a journey, and I was born on a road trip.
  • Secrecy was considered best for all concerned. In recent decades, open adoption has been replacing this practice, but rules governing past adoptions change slowly, and I was barred from seeing my birth records.
  • Everything I just told you about my biological parents was unknown to me growing up; they were such a blank that I could not even imagine what they might be like.
  • I accepted this until I became an adoptive parent in 2012 and a social worker suggested that my adopted daughter might want to know my story someday
  • She’s from China, and like many international adoptees, she also had no story of her biological family.
  • I requested my records from the State of Indiana and was denied.
  • Next I called the Children’s Bureau, where a kind woman on the phone had my records in her hands, but was not allowed to share them.
  • Typed notes from the Children’s Bureau recorded a visit with my biological mother in the hospital. Asked how she felt, she cried
  • It’s been nearly two years since I first read those documents, and I’m still not over it. Knowing that story has altered how I think about myself, and the seemingly simple question of where I’m from
  • It’s brought on a feeling of revelation, and also of anger. I’m not upset with my biological mother; it was moving to learn how she managed her predicament alone.
  • Her decisions left me with the family that I needed — that I love. Nor am I unhappy with the Children’s Bureau, which did its duty by preserving my records.
  • I am angry that for 50 years, my state denied me the story of how I came to live on this earth. Strangers hid part of me from myself.
  • While I now have the privilege of knowing my information, many people’s stories are still hidden.
  • About 2 percent of U.S. residents — roughly six million people — are adoptees
  • A majority were adopted domestically, with records frequently sealed, especially for older adoptees
  • I was never able to tell a doctor my family medical history when asked. It’s one of those little things that never bother you until it does.
  • The people who blocked me from learning my past must have thought their motives were pure.
  • Closed adoption began as “confidential” adoption in the early 20th century, enabling parents and children to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy.
  • Records were sealed to all but people directly involved
  • But nobody asked if I wanted my identity hidden from me.
  • Should adoptees and biological families contact each other, after the law forbade it for so long?
  • Not without mutual consent:
  • information alone is powerful.
  • As records are opened, people’s privacy should be respected; that’s why I’m withholding my biological mother’s name and any details that might identify her. But my story is mine, and other adoptees have a right to recover theirs.
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