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Javier E

Older Americans Are 'Hooked' on Vitamins - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...amins-dietary-supplements.html

vitamins health supplements research

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When she was a young physician, Dr. Martha Gulati noticed that many of her mentors were prescribing vitamin E and folic acid to patients. Preliminary studies in the early 1990s had linked both supplements to a lower risk of heart disease.She urged her father to pop the pills as well: “Dad, you should be on these vitamins, because every cardiologist is taking them or putting their patients on [them],” recalled Dr. Gulati, now chief of cardiology for the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
  • But just a few years later, she found herself reversing course, after rigorous clinical trials found neither vitamin E nor folic acid supplements did anything to protect the heart. Even worse, studies linked high-dose vitamin E to a higher risk of heart failure, prostate cancer and death from any cause.
  • More than half of Americans take vitamin supplements, including 68 percent of those age 65 and older, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. Among older adults, 29 percent take four or more supplements of any kind
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  • Often, preliminary studies fuel irrational exuberance about a promising dietary supplement, leading millions of people to buy in to the trend. Many never stop. They continue even though more rigorous studies — which can take many years to complete — almost never find that vitamins prevent disease, and in some cases cause harm
  • There’s no conclusive evidence that dietary supplements prevent chronic disease in the average American, Dr. Manson said. And while a handful of vitamin and mineral studies have had positive results, those findings haven’t been strong enough to recommend supplements to the general American public, she said.
  • The National Institutes of Health has spent more than $2.4 billion since 1999 studying vitamins and minerals. Yet for “all the research we’ve done, we don’t have much to show for it,” said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute.
  • A big part of the problem, Dr. Kramer said, could be that much nutrition research has been based on faulty assumptions, including the notion that people need more vitamins and minerals than a typical diet provides; that megadoses are always safe; and that scientists can boil down the benefits of vegetables like broccoli into a daily pill.
  • when researchers tried to deliver the key ingredients of a healthy diet in a capsule, Dr. Kramer said, those efforts nearly always failed.
  • It’s possible that the chemicals in the fruits and vegetables on your plate work together in ways that scientists don’t fully understand — and which can’t be replicated in a table
  • More important, perhaps, is that most Americans get plenty of the essentials, anyway. Although the Western diet has a lot of problems — too much sodium, sugar, saturated fat and calories, in general — it’s not short on vitamins
  • Without even realizing it, someone who eats a typical lunch or breakfast “is essentially eating a multivitamin,”
  • The body naturally regulates the levels of many nutrients, such as vitamin C and many B vitamins, Dr. Kramer said, by excreting what it doesn’t need in urine. He added: “It’s hard to avoid getting the full range of vitamins.”
  • Not all experts agree. Dr. Walter Willett, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says it’s reasonable to take a daily multivitamin “for insurance.” Dr. Willett said that clinical trials underestimate supplements’ true benefits because they aren’t long enough, often lasting five to 10 years. It could take decades to notice a lower rate of cancer or heart disease in vitamin taker
  • For Charlsa Bentley, 67, keeping up with the latest nutrition research can be frustrating. She stopped taking calcium, for example, after studies found it doesn’t protect against bone fractures. Additional studies suggest that calcium supplements increase the risk of kidney stones and heart disease.
  • People who take vitamins tend to be healthier, wealthier and better educated than those who don’t, Dr. Kramer said. They are probably less likely to succumb to heart disease or cancer, whether they take supplements or not. That can skew research results, making vitamin pills seem more effective than they really are
  • Because folic acid can lower homocysteine levels, researchers once hoped that folic acid supplements would prevent heart attacks and strokes.In a series of clinical trials, folic acid pills lowered homocysteine levels but had no overall benefit for heart disease, Dr. Lichtenstein said
  • When studies of large populations showed that people who eat lots of seafood had fewer heart attacks, many assumed that the benefits came from the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil, Dr. Lichtenstein said.Rigorous studies have failed to show that fish oil supplements prevent heart attacks
  • But it’s possible the benefits of sardines and salmon have nothing to do with fish oil, Dr. Lichtenstein said. People who have fish for dinner may be healthier as a result of what they don’t eat, such as meatloaf and cheeseburgers.
  • “Eating fish is probably a good thing, but we haven’t been able to show that taking fish oil [supplements] does anything for you,
  • In the tiny amounts provided by fruits and vegetables, beta carotene and similar substances appear to protect the body from a process called oxidation, which damages healthy cells, said Dr. Edgar Miller, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Experts were shocked when two large, well-designed studies in the 1990s found that beta carotene pills actually increased lung cancer rates.
  • Likewise, a clinical trial published in 2011 found that vitamin E, also an antioxidant, increased the risk of prostate cancer in men by 17 percent
  • “Vitamins are not inert,” said Dr. Eric Klein, a prostate cancer expert at the Cleveland Clinic who led the vitamin E study. “They are biologically active agents. We have to think of them in the same way as drugs. If you take too high a dose of them, they cause side effects.”
  • “We should be responsible physicians,” she said, “and wait for the data.”
Javier E

The Politics of Fraudulent Dietary Supplements - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ulent-dietary-supplements.html

diet supplements medicine science skepticism

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • One pill makes you smarter. One pill makes you thin. One pill makes you happy. Another keeps you energized. And so what if tests conducted by scientists in New York and Canada have found that the substances behind these miracle enhancements may contain nothing more than powdered rice or houseplants. If enough people believe they’ll be healthier, well, it’s a nice racket.
  • Nice, to the tune of $13 billion a year in sales. And here in Utah, which is to the dietary supplement business what Northern California is to marijuana, a huge industry has taken hold,
  • To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 1994, when Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah midwifed through Congress a new industry protected from all but minimal regulation. It is also an industry that would make many of his closest associates and family members rich. In turn, they’ve rewarded him with sizable campaign contributions.
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  • These are the Frankenstein remedies — botanicals, herbs, minerals, enzymes, amino acids, dried stuff. They’re “natural.” They’re not cheap. And Americans pop them like Skittles, despite recent studies showing that nearly a third of all herbal supplements on the market may be outright frauds.
  • We’re not talking drugs, or even, in many cases, food here. Drugs have to undergo rigorous testing and review by the federal government. Dietary supplements do not. Drugs have to prove to be effective. Dietary supplements do not.
  • Even though serious illnesses, and some deaths are on the rise from misuse of these supplements, Hatch is determined to keep regulators at bay. “I am committed to protect this industry and the integrity of its products,” he told a gathering of potency pill-pushers and the like in Utah last fall.
  • what about the medical implications? These pills and powders can’t, by law, make specific claims to cure anything. So they claim to make you healthier. The consumer is left playing doctor, reading questionable assertions that course through the unfiltered garbage of the Internet.
  • there was this finding reported in the authoritative Annals of Internal Medicine: “Enough is enough: Stop wasting money on vitamin and mineral supplements.”
  • So, the industry keeps growing, with 65,000 dietary supplements now on the market, consumed by nearly half of all Americans. The larger issue is mistrust of authority, a willful ignorance that knows no political side. Thus, right-wing libertarians promote a freewheeling market of quack products, while left-wing conspiracy theorists disdain modern medicine in favor of anything sold as “natural” or vaguely countercultural. These are some of the same people who will not vaccinate their children.
lenaurick

Beyond Resveratrol: The Anti-Aging NAD Fad - Scientific American Blog Network - 0 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...eratrol-the-anti-aging-nad-fad

science research clinical trial

shared by lenaurick on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Mitochondria are our cells' energy dynamos. Descended from bacteria that colonized other cells about 2 billion years, they get flaky as we age.
  • While it's not clear why our mitochondria fade as we age, evidence suggests that it leads to everything from heart failure to neurodegeneration,
  • Recent research suggests it may be possible to reverse mitochondrial decay with dietary supplements that increase cellular levels of a molecule called NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide).
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  • In support of that idea, half a dozen Nobel laureates and other prominent scientists are working with two small companies offering NR supplements.
  • This time his lab made headlines by reporting that the mitochondria in muscles of elderly mice were restored to a youthful state after just a week of injections with NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide), a molecule that naturally occurs in cells and, like NR, boosts levels of NAD.
  • It should be noted, however, that muscle strength was not improved in the NMN-treated mice
  • a single dose of NR resulted in statistically significant increases” in NAD in humans—the first evidence that supplements could really boost NAD levels in people.
  • When NAD levels drop, as they do with aging, SIRT1 activity falls off, which in turn makes the crucial signals fade, leading to mitochondrial dysfunction and all the ill effects that go with it.
  • NAD boosters might work synergistically with supplements like resveratrol to help reinvigorate mitochondria and ward off diseases of aging
  • Test-tube and rodent studies also suggest that pterostilbene is more potent than resveratrol when it comes to improving brain function, warding off various kinds of cancer and preventing heart disease.
  • Even before Sinclair's paper, researchers had shown in 2012 that when given doses of NR, mice on high-fat diets gained 60 percent less weight than they did on the same diets without NR. Further, none of the mice on NR showed signs of diabetes, and their energy levels improved. The scientists reportedly characterized NR's effects on metabolism as "nothing short of astonishing."
Javier E

Taking B12 Energy Vitamins May Cause Lung Cancer - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...537654

vitamin risks research

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • around 50 percent of people in the United States take some form of “dietary supplement” product, and among the most common are B vitamins.
  • Worse than just a harmless waste of money, this usage could be actively dangerous. In an issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, published this week, researchers reported that taking vitamin B6 and B12 supplements in high doses (like those sold in many stores) appears to triple or almost quadruple some people’s risk of lung cancer.
  • Starting in 1998, researchers assigned 6,837 people with heart disease to take either B vitamins or a placebo.
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  • . In 2009, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that taking high doses of vitamin B12 along with folic acid (technically vitamin B9) was associated with greater risk of cancer and all-cause mortality.
  • Lung-cancer risk among men who took 20 milligrams of B6 daily for years was twice that of men who didn’t. Among people who smoke, the effect appeared to be synergistic, with B6 usage increasing risk threefold. The risk was even worse among smokers taking B12. Using more than 55 micrograms daily appeared to almost quadruple lung-cancer risk.
  • The research team is quick to note that the doses of B vitamins in question are enormous. The U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance for B6 is 1.7 milligrams per day, and for B12 it’s 2.4 micrograms. The high-risk group in the study was taking around 20 times these amounts.That could seem nonsensical, except that these are the doses for sale at healthy-seeming places like Whole Foods and GNC. Many sellers offer daily 100-milligram B6 pills. B12 is available in doses of 5,000 micrograms.
  • There are legitimate and important uses for B-vitamin supplements, but the emerging evidence suggests we’re best to treat them more like pharmaceuticals than like panaceas to be shoveled into us in pursuit of energy, metabolic fortitude, “cardioprotection,” “bone wellness,” or whatever way in which we’d like to be better.
  • The current law gives consumers no reason to expect that risks will be listed on the labels of these products, or that health claims are accurate. A product like a high-dose B6 and B12 supplement hits shelves, and only decades later do researchers begin to understand the long-term health effects, who might benefit from taking it, and who might be harmed.  
Javier E

AI is about to completely change how you use computers | Bill Gates - 0 views

www.gatesnotes.com/AI-agents

ai gates applications opportunities technology

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Health care
  • Entertainment and shopping
  • Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.
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  • agents will open up many more learning opportunities.
  • Already, AI can help you pick out a new TV and recommend movies, books, shows, and podcasts. Likewise, a company I’ve invested in, recently launched Pix, which lets you ask questions (“Which Robert Redford movies would I like and where can I watch them?”) and then makes recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past
  • Productivity
  • copilots can do a lot—such as turn a written document into a slide deck, answer questions about a spreadsheet using natural language, and summarize email threads while representing each person’s point of view.
  • before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.
  • Helping patients and healthcare workers will be especially beneficial for people in poor countries, where many never get to see a doctor at all.
  • To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. It will be able to write the code, design the look and feel of the app, create a logo, and publish the app to an online store
  • Agents will do even more. Having one will be like having a person dedicated to helping you with various tasks and doing them independently if you want. If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like
  • For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. It won’t replace teachers, but it will supplement their work—personalizing the work for students and liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job.
  • Mental health care is another example of a service that agents will make available to virtually everyone. Today, weekly therapy sessions seem like a luxury. But there is a lot of unmet need, and many people who could benefit from therapy don’t have access to it.
  • I don’t think any single company will dominate the agents business--there will be many different AI engines available.
  • The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.
  • They’ll replace word processors, spreadsheets, and other productivity apps.
  • Education
  • For example, few families can pay for a tutor who works one-on-one with a student to supplement their classroom work. If agents can capture what makes a tutor effective, they’ll unlock this supplemental instruction for everyone who wants it. If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.
  • your agent will be able to help you in the same way that personal assistants support executives today. If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. If you tell it you’d like to catch up with your old college roommate, it will work with their agent to find a time to get together, and just before you arrive, it will remind you that their oldest child just started college at the local university.
  • To see the dramatic change that agents will bring, let’s compare them to the AI tools available today. Most of these are bots. They’re limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences.
  • The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy. It can tutor students in math, science, and the humanities—for example, it can explain the quadratic formula and create math problems to practice on. It can also help teachers do things like write lesson plans.
  • Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.
  • other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?
  • In the computing industry, we talk about platforms—the technologies that apps and services are built on. Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.
  • A shock wave in the tech industry
  • Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision.
  • Agents will affect how we use software as well as how it’s written. They’ll replace search sites because they’ll be better at finding information and summarizing it for you
  • they’ll be dramatically better. You’ll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won’t be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter.
  • Companies will be able to make agents available for their employees to consult directly and be part of every meeting so they can answer questions.
  • AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Wysa and Youper are two of the early chatbots here. But agents will go much deeper. If you choose to share enough information with a mental health agent, it will understand your life history and your relationships. It’ll be available when you need it, and it will never get impatient. It could even, with your permission, monitor your physical responses to therapy through your smart watch—like if your heart starts to race when you’re talking about a problem with your boss—and suggest when you should see a human therapist.
  • If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive.
  • Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.
  • Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.
  • The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people
  • The ramifications for the software business and for society will be profound.
  • In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.
  • You’ll also be able to get news and entertainment that’s been tailored to your interests. CurioAI, which creates a custom podcast on any subject you ask about, is a glimpse of what’s coming.
  • An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision.
  • even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.
  • In the distant future, agents may even force humans to face profound questions about purpose. Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time? Would anyone still want to get an education when an agent has all the answers? Can you have a safe and thriving society when most people have a lot of free time on their hands?
  • They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.
sandrine_h

Can You Get Smarter? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...can-you-get-smarter.html

brain science education

shared by sandrine_h on 30 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Can you get smarter by exercising — or altering — your brain?
  • Although improvements were observed in every cognitive task that was practiced, there was no evidence that brain training made people smarter.
  • Our brain has remarkable neuroplasticity; that is, it can remodel and change itself in response to various experiences and injuries. So can it be trained to enhance its own cognitive prowess?The multibillion-dollar brain training industry certainly thinks so and claims that you can increase your memory, attention and reasoning just by playing various mental games.
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  • Americans are a captive market for anything, from supposed smart drugs and supplements to brain training, that promises to boost normal mental functioning or to stem its all-too-common decline.
  • we can clearly enhance learning, even if mental gymnastics won’t make us smarter.
  • Adderall enhanced performance on one of the tests, the embedded image test, which requires subjects to reassemble a whole image from a scrambled one.Still, these are subtle effects, and there is no evidence that any prescription drug or supplement or smart drink is going to raise your I.Q.
  • In the end, you can’t yet exceed your innate intelligence
oliviaodon

Are Diet Pills an Aggressively Marketed Scam? | Huffington Post - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...t-and-nutrition_b_5409651.html

scam knowledge

shared by oliviaodon on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • occasionally lured by the promises of effortless slimming
  • Dr.-Oz-endorsed Garcinia Cambogia pills are languishing in his kitchen cupboard - because they don’t seem to work. Bruni applauds the recent interest in fighting aggressively marketed junk-that-makes-us-fat, and wants to remind us that we should also pay attention to aggressively marketed pills
  • most of the supplements marketed as fat burners have little or no science to support their claims
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  • The ever increasing list of fat-burning supplements is industry driven, and is likely to grow at a rate that is not and cannot be matched by similar increase in scientific underpinning.
  • In other words, marketers are quick to announce miracle solutions based of the flimsiest of evidence collected on a few lab mice or a cell culture.
  • Health claims were introduced in 1994, have been so miserably abused and have become so utterly misleading that it’s just time to say goodbye.
  • oliviaodon on 27 Oct 16
     
    This article relates to knowledge claims that take advantage of one's time and money. 
carolinewren

'God made science': Louisiana teachers are literally using the Bible as science textboo... - 0 views

www.rawstory.com/...ce-textbooks-in-public-schools

science god schools

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • students in Louisiana literally use the Bible as their science textbook, according to recently obtained records
  • State law permits teachers to promote classroom discussion on evolution, but critics say the Louisiana Science Education Act allows creationism to be taught in public schools.
  • students read the Book of Genesis to learn creationism in biology class.
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  • “We will read in Genesis and them [sic] some supplemental material debunking various aspects of evolution from which the students will present,”
  • A teacher at Caddo Parish schools wrote a newspaper column saying that her job is to present both evolution and creationism.
  • God made science,” wrote fifth-grade teacher Charlotte Hinson.
  • “pushing her twisted religious beliefs onto the class,” another praised biology teacher Michael Stacy because he “discussed evolution and creationism in a full spectrum of thought.”
  • state law, passed in 2008, allows science teachers to introduce supplemental materials to “critique” scientific theories – lessons on creationism are still illegal under federal law.
  • schools are also violating prohibitions on teacher-led prayer in school.
Javier E

Health Facts Aren't Enough. Should Persuasion Become a Priority? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cts-importance-persuasion.html

knowledge psychology

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • In a paper published early this year in Nature Human Behavior, scientists asked 500 Americans what they thought about foods that contained genetically modified organisms.
  • The vast majority, more than 90 percent, opposed their use. This belief is in conflict with the consensus of scientists
  • The second finding of the study was more eye-opening. Those who were most opposed to genetically modified foods believed they were the most knowledgeable about this issue, yet scored the lowest on actual tests of scientific knowledge.
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  • A small percentage of the public believes that vaccines are truly dangerous. People who hold this view — which is incorrect — also believe that they know more than experts about this topic.
  • the study was also conducted in France and Germany, with similar results.
  • those with the least understanding of science had the most science-opposed views, but thought they knew the most
  • the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for the two psychologists who wrote a seminal paper in 1999 entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”
  • Most of them say they are unaffected by claims from experts contradicting the claims of manufacturers. Only a quarter said they would stop using supplements if experts said they were ineffective. They must think they know better.
  • Many Americans take supplements, but the reasons are varied and are not linked to any hard evidence
  • A lack of knowledge leaves some without the contextual information necessary to recognize mistakes, they wrote, and their “incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”
  • communication strategies on G.M.O.s — intended to help the public see that their beliefs did not align with experts — wound up backfiring
  • attempting to provide corrective information to voters about death panels wound up increasing their belief in them among politically knowledgeable supporters of Sarah Palin.
  • A 2015 study published in Vaccine showed that giving corrective information about the flu vaccine led patients most concerned about side effects to be less likely to get the vaccine.
  • “knowledge deficit model,” an idea that the lack of support for good policies, and good science, merely reflects a lack of scientific information.
  • Scientists need to be formally trained in communication skills, they said, and they also need to realize that the knowledge deficit model makes for easy policy, but not necessarily good results.
  • It seems important to engage the public more, and earn their trust through continued, more personal interaction, using many different platforms and technologies
  • Bombarding people with more information about studies isn’t helping. How the information contained in them is disseminated and discussed may be much more important.
cvanderloo

Feeding cows a few ounces of seaweed daily could sharply reduce their contribution to c... - 0 views

theconversation.com/ution-to-climate-change-157192

cows climatechange seaweed methane science technology

shared by cvanderloo on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • About 70% of agricultural methane comes from enteric fermentation – chemical reactions in the stomachs of cows and other grazing animals as they break down plants. The animals burp out most of this methane and pass the rest as flatulence.
  • A 2015 study suggested that using seaweed as an additive to cattle’s normal feed could reduce methane production, but this research was done in a laboratory, not in live animals.
  • If these findings can be scaled up and commercialized, they could transform cattle production into a more economically and environmentally sustainable industry.
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  • This process also generates byproducts that the cow’s body does not take up, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Methane-producing microbes, called methanogens, use these compounds to form methane, which the cow’s body expels.
  • In that work, we showed that supplementing dairy cows’ feed with about 10 ounces of seaweed a day reduced methane emissions by up to 67%. However, the cattle that ate this relatively large quantity of seaweed consumed less feed. This reduced their milk production – a clear drawback for dairy farmers.
  • We wanted to know whether the seaweed was stable when stored for up to three years; whether microbes that produce methane in cows’ stomachs could adapt to the seaweed, making it ineffective; and whether the type of diet that the cows ate changed the seaweed’s effectiveness in reducing methane emissions. And we used less seaweed than in our 2019 study.
  • As we expected, the steers released a lot more hydrogen – up to 750% more, mostly from their mouths – as their systems produced less methane. Hydrogen has minimal impact on the environment.
  • We also found that seaweed that had been stored in a freezer for three years maintained its effectiveness, and that microbes in the cows’ digestive systems did not adapt to the seaweed in ways that neutralized its effects.
  • For example, we calculate that a producer finishing 1,000 head of beef cattle – that is, feeding them a high-energy diet to grow and add muscle – could reduce feed costs by US$40,320 to $87,320 depending on how much seaweed the cattle consumed.
  • We don’t know for certain why feeding cattle seaweed supplements helped them convert more of their diet to weight gain. However, previous research has suggested that some rumen microorganisms can use hydrogen that is no longer going into methane production to generate energy-dense nutrients that the cow can then use for added growth.
  • Commercializing seaweed as a cattle feed additive would involve many steps. First, scientists would need to develop aquaculture techniques for producing seaweed on a large scale, either in the ocean or in tanks on land.
kaylynfreeman

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? - The New York Times - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...liable-are-the-social-sciences

psychology science research knowledge brain science

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.
  • A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved.  Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science? 
  • Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.  The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive. 
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  • While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not.  The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved.  For one thing, we are too complex: our behavior depends on an enormous number of tightly interconnected variables that are extraordinarily difficult to  distinguish and study separately
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
  • How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do
  • our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Social sciences may be surrounded by the “paraphernalia” of the natural sciences, such as technical terminology, mathematical equations, empirical data and even carefully designed experiments. 
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
Javier E

Functional medicine: Is it the future of healthcare or just another wellness trend? - I... - 0 views

www.independent.ie/...r-wellness-trend-37437566.html

functional medicine healthcare future wellness health science research

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Functional Medicine is the alternative medicine Bill Clinton credits with giving him his life back after his 2004 quadruple heart by-pass surgery. Its ideology is embraced by Oprah and regularly features on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop.
  • Developed in 1990 by Dr Jeffrey Bland, who in 1991 set up the Institute of Functional Medicine with his wife Susan, today the field is spearheaded by US best-selling author Dr Mark Hyman, adviser to the Clintons and co-director of the controversial Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine.
  • "Functional Medicine is not about a test or a supplement or a particular protocol," he adds. "It's really a new paradigm of disease and how it arises and how to restore health. Within it there are many approaches that are effective, it's not exclusive, it doesn't exclude traditional medications, it includes all modalities depending on what's right for that patient."
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  • Functional Medicine isn't a protected title and a medical qualification isn't a prerequisite to practice. The result is an unregulated and disparate field, with medical doctors, nutritionists, naturopaths and homeopaths among the many practitioners.
  • Some other chronic illnesses the field claims to treat include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, depression, anxiety and arthritis
  • ll kinds of different reasons, some might have gluten issues, gut issues, others might have a deficiency causing neurological issues, MS is a symptom."
  • "There are components of Functional Medicine that absolutely lack an evidence base and there are practitioners of what they call Functional Medicine, they charge people for intravenous nutritional injections, they exaggerate claims, and that is professionally inappropriate, unethical and it lacks evidence.
  • On Dr Mark Hyman's view of MS he says, "there are a lot of terms put together there, all of which individually make a lot of sense, but put together in that way they do not.
  • "What does FM actually mean? It means nothing. It's a gift-gallop of words thrown together. It's criticised by advocates of evidence-based medicine because it's giving a veneer of scientific legitimacy to ideas that are considered pseudoscientific. For example, it'll take alternative medicine modalities like homeopathy and then call them 'bio-infusions' or something similar, rebranding it as something that works.
  • "It's a redundant name, real medicine is functional."
  • Next month the third annual Lifestyle and Functional Medical conference will take place in Salthill, Galway on November 3. Last year's event was attended by more than 500 people and featured a keynote address by honorary consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, author of bestselling The Pioppi Diet (which was named one of the top five worst celebrity diets to avoid in 2018 by the British Dietetic Foundation).
  • Dr David Robert Grimes is physicist and visiting fellow of Oxford and QUB. His research into cancer focuses on modelling tumour metabolism and radiation interactions. For Dr Grimes, the lack of definition, or "double-speak" as he puts it, in FM is troubling.
  • As well as the cost of appointments, FM practitioners commonly charge extra for tests. An omega finger prick test is around €100. A vitamin D test can cost upwards of €60, full thyroid panel more than €150 and a gut function test €400. Prices vary between practitioners.
  • "If I, as a GP, engaged in some of these behaviours I would be struck off." Specifically? "If I was recommending treatments that lacked an evidence base, or if I was promoting diagnostic tests which are expensive and lack an evidence base.
  • GPs engage every year in ongoing continuous professional development, I spend my evenings and my weekends outside of working hours attending educational events, small-group learning, large-group learning, engaging in research. This is an accusation that was levelled at the profession 30 years ago and then it was correct, but the profession has caught up…
  • "Obviously promoting wellness and healthy diet is very welcome but going beyond that and stating that certain aspects of 'functional medicine' can lead to reduced inflammation or prevent cancer, we have to be very careful about those claims.
  • Often the outcome of such tests are seemingly 'benign' prescriptions of vitamins or cleanses. However, dietitian Orla Walsh stresses that even these can have potentially harmful effects, especially on "vulnerable" patients, if not prescribed judiciously.
  • FM has five basic principles. 1. We are all genetically and biochemically unique so it treats the individual, not the disease. 2. It's science-based. 3. The body is intelligent and has the capacity for self-regulation. 4. The body has the ability to heal and prevent nearly all the diseases of ageing. 5. Health is not just the absence of disease, but a state of immense vitality.
  • She began her Functional Medicine career while training as a medical doctor and now travels the world working with high-profile clients. Dr McHale charges €425 for an initial consultation and €175 for follow-up appointments. Straightforward lab tests are €250 to €750, for complex cases testing fees can be up to €2,000.
  • "The term [Functional Medicine] tends to be bandied around quite a bit. Other things people say, such as 'functional nutritionist', can be misleading as a term. Many people are Functional Medicine practitioners but don't have any real medical background at all... I think regulation is always probably the best way forward."
  • "There's an awful lot to it in terms of biochemistry and physiology," she says. "You do need to have a very solid and well ingrained bio-chemistry background. A solely clinical background doesn't equip you with the knowledge to read a test.
  • "Evidence-base is the cornerstone of medicine and that has to be maintained. It becomes problematic in this area because you are looking at personalised medicine and that can be very difficult to evidence-base."
  • GP Christine Ritter travelled from England to attend the Galway conference last year with a view to integrating Functional Medicine into her practice.
  • "It was very motivating," she says. "Where it wasn't perhaps as strong was to find the evidence. The Functional Medicine people would say, 'we've done this study and this trial and we've used this supplement that was successful', but they can't show massive research data which might make it difficult to bring it into the mainstream.
  • "I also know the rigorous standard of trials we have in medicine they're not usually that great either, it's often driven by who's behind the trial and who's paying for it.
  • "Every approach that empowers patient to work on their destiny [is beneficial], but you'd have to be mindful that you're not missing any serious conditions."
  • Dr Hyman is working to grow the evidence-base for Functional Medicine worldwide. "The future is looking very bright," he says. "At the Cleveland Centre we're establishing a research base, building educational platforms, fellowships, residency programmes, rotations. We're advancing the field that's spreading across the world. We're seeing in China the development of a programme of Functional Medicine, South Africa, the UK, in London the Cleveland Clinic will hopefully have a Functional Medicine centre."
  • For Dr Mark Murphy regulation is a moot point as it can only apply once the field meets the standards of evidence-based medicine.
  • "Despite well intentioned calls for regulation, complementary and alternative medical therapies cannot be regulated," he says. "Only therapies that possess an evidence-base can enter our standard regulatory processes, including the Irish Medical Council, the Health Products Regulatory Authority and Irish advertising standards. In situations where complementary and alternative therapies develop an evidence base, they are no longer 'complementary and alternative', but in effect they become part of mainstream 'Medicine'.
  • l What are the principles?
  • "There's a huge variation between therapists, some are brilliant and some are okay, and some are ludicrous snake oil salesmen."
  • He is so concerned that patients' health and wealth are being put at risk by alternative therapies that earlier this year he joined Fine Gael TD Kate O'Connell and the Irish Cancer Society in introducing draft legislation earlier this year making it illegal to sell unproven treatments to cancer patients. Violators face jail and heavy fines.
  • Dr Grimes says criticism of variations in the standards of traditional medical research can be fair, however due to the weight of research it is ultimately self-correcting. He adds, "The reality is that good trials are transparent, independent and pre-registered.
  • "My involvement in shaping the Bill came from seeing first-hand the exploitation of patients and their families. Most patients undergoing treatment will take some alternative modalities in conjunction but a significant portion are talked out of their conventional medicine and seduced by false promises
katieb0305

Beyond Resveratrol: The Anti-Aging NAD Fad - Scientific American Blog Network - 0 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...eratrol-the-anti-aging-nad-fad

shared by katieb0305 on 30 May 16 - No Cached
  • Mitochondria are our cells' energy dynamos. Descended from bacteria that colonized other cells about 2 billion years, they get flaky as we age. A prominent theory of aging holds that decaying of mitochondria is a key driver of aging. While it's not clear why our mitochondria fade as we age, evidence suggests that it leads to everything from heart failure to neurodegeneration, as well as the complete absence of zipping around the supper table.
  • t may be possible to reverse mitochondrial decay with dietary supplements that increase cellular levels of a molecule called NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide).
  • This time his lab made headlines by reporting that the mitochondria in muscles of elderly mice were restored to a youthful state after just a week of injections with NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide), a molecule that naturally occurs in cells and, like NR, boosts levels of NAD.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Sinclair group's NAD paper drew attention partly because it showed a novel way that NAD and sirtuins work together. The researchers discovered that cells' nuclei send signals to mitochondria that are needed to maintain their normal operation. SIRT1 helps insure the signals get through. When NAD levels drop, as they do with aging, SIRT1 activity falls off, which in turn makes the crucial signals fade, leading to mitochondrial dysfunction and all the ill effects that go with it.
  • Test-tube and rodent studies also suggest that pterostilbene is more potent than resveratrol when it comes to improving brain function, warding off various kinds of cancer and preventing heart disease.
kushnerha

Why People Are Confused About What Experts Really Think - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-experts-really-think.html

new york times research language bias sources

shared by kushnerha on 15 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • GIVEN the complexities of the modern world, we all have to rely on expert opinion. Are G.M.O. foods safe? Is global warming real? Should children be vaccinated for measles? We don’t have the time or the training to adjudicate these questions ourselves. We defer to the professionals.
  • And to find out what the experts think, we typically rely on the news media. This creates a challenge for journalists: There are many issues on which a large majority of experts agree but a small number hold a dissenting view. Is it possible to give voice to experts on both sides — standard journalistic practice — without distorting the public’s perception of the level of disagreement?
  • This can be hard to do. Indeed, critics argue that journalists too often generate “false balance,” creating an impression of disagreement when there is, in fact, a high level of consensus. One solution, adopted by news organizations such as the BBC, is “weight of evidence” reporting, in which the presentation of conflicting views is supplemented by an indication of where the bulk of expert opinion lies.
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  • Both studies suggest that “weight of evidence” reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus — even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception.
  • In one study, all the participants were presented with a numerical summary, drawn from a panel of experts convened by the University of Chicago, of the range of expert opinion on certain economic issues.
  • One group of participants, however, was presented not only with the numerical summary of expert opinion but also with an excerpted comment from one expert on either side of an issue.
  • Then, all the participants were asked to rate their perception of the extent to which the experts agreed with one another on each issue. Even though both had a precise count of the number of experts on either side, the participants who also read the comments of the opposing experts gave ratings that did not distinguish as sharply between the high-consensus and the low-consensus issues. In other words, being exposed to the conflicting comments made it more difficult for participants to distinguish the issues most experts agreed on (such as carbon tax) from those for which there was substantial disagreement (such as minimum wage).
  • This distorting influence affected not only the participants’ perception of the degree of consensus, but also their judgments of whether there was sufficient consensus to use it to guide public policy.
  • What explains this cognitive glitch? One possibility is that when we are presented with comments from experts on either side of an issue, we produce a mental representation of the disagreement that takes the form of one person on either side, which somehow contaminates our impression of the distribution of opinions in the larger population of experts.
  • Another possibility is that we may just have difficulty discounting the weight of a plausible argument, even when we know it comes from an expert whose opinion is held by only a small fraction of his or her peers.
  • It’s also possible that the mere presence of conflict (in the form of contradictory expert comments) triggers a general sense of uncertainty in our minds, which in turn colors our perceptions of the accuracy of current expert understanding of an issue.
  • the implications are worrisome. Government action is guided in part by public opinion. Public opinion is guided in part by perceptions of what experts think. But public opinion may — and often does — deviate from expert opinion, not simply, it seems, because the public refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of experts, but also because the public may not be able to tell where the majority of expert opinion lies.
sissij

Apple removed the New York Times app in China. Why now? - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...pple-china-20170105-story.html

new york times language social media bias

shared by sissij on 06 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • California’s Internet companies may have once dreamed of liberating China through technology, but these days they seem more willing than ever to play the Communist Party's game
  • "This is a restoration of the Cultural Revolution or another historical retrogression," said another.
  • The Washington Post is one of many Western newspapers that carries a regular paid supplement by China Daily, another Communist Party mouthpiece.
  • sissij on 06 Jan 17
     
    The censorship in China has long been a controversial issue that's widely discussed. I think it's very natural that those internet companies play the government the rules to enter the Chinese market because most companies are profit-driven rather than being all idealistic. However, I found the tone of this article very uncomfortable. He used the word "liberating" as if China is in bad condition or great suffer that need American freedom to save. Also, looking back to American history, American heroism plays a big part in what the American government did. They "liberated" Canada, "liberated" Vietnam, "liberated" Pakistan, and now America tries to "liberate" China. However, they never fully understand the pros and cons of censorship and how China is a totally different country to America. One's medicine can toxic for another. --Sissi (1/6/2017)
Javier E

Coursekit Raises $5 Million to Reinvent the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 0 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...lion-to-reinvent-the-classroom

education online social networks entrepreneur startups

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Coursekit is a new tool that lets teachers and educators create mini social networks around individual courses and lectures.
  • The goal of the service, said Joseph Cohen, its co-founder and chief executive, is to take some of the most successful elements of social networking — especially the fluid exchange of ideas that comes natural to online interactions — to revitalize the education experience. Students are already accustomed to interacting online and supplementing their daily lives with the Web and social media. Why should that stop when it comes to learning? “Our education experience is truly offline,” he said. “We want to build what Facebook has done for your personal life, but for your school.”
  • Using Coursekit’s software, teachers can upload homework assignments, answer questions, grade work and facilitate discussions with their students. In addition, students can use the software to chat with one another, collaborate on projects and share relevant materials with their classmates
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  • Coursekit is free to both the instructors and students that want to have access to it. The company says its main focus is attracting users, not making money
carolinewren

Louisiana science education: School boards, principals, and teachers endorse creationis... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...pals_and_teachers_endorse.html

louisiana science education

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • For some Louisiana public school students, their science textbook is the Bible, and in biology class they read the Book of Genesis to learn the “creation point of view.”
  • In another email exchange with Rowland, a parent had complained that a different teacher, Cindy Tolliver, actually taught that evolution was a “fact.” This parent complained that Tolliver was “pushing her twisted religious beliefs onto the class.” Principal Rowland responded, “I can assure you this will not happen again.” Advertisement
  • permits science teachers to use supplemental materials to “critique” evolution, opening a backdoor that these teachers are using, as intended, to teach creationism. Such lessons are allowed under this Louisiana law, but they are illegal under federal law
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  • one in eight high school biology teachers advocate for creationism, even though it's unconstitutional,”
  • many teachers are interpreting the Louisiana Science Education Act as allowing such unconstitutional and scientifically-misleading lessons.”
Javier E

E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s 'Cultural Literacy' in the 21st Century - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...397334

language vocabulary cultural literacy Common Core commonality knowledge social media

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.
  • What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been.
  • The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion.
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  • Conservatives thus embraced Hirsch eagerly and breathlessly. He was a stout defender of the patrimony. Liberals eagerly and breathlessly attacked him with equal vigor. He was retrograde, Eurocentric, racist, sexist.
  • Lost in all the crossfire, however, were two facts: First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.
  • A generation of hindsight now enables Americans to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as the United States, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.
  • So, first of all, Americans do need a list. But second, it should not be Hirsch’s list. And third, it should not made the way he made his. In the balance of this essay, I want to unpack and explain each of those three statements.
  • If you take the time to read the book attached to Hirsch’s appendix, you’ll find a rather effective argument about the nature of background knowledge and public culture. Literacy is not just a matter of decoding the strings of letters that make up words or the meaning of each word in sequence. It is a matter of decoding context: the surrounding matrix of things referred to in the text and things implied by it
  • That means understanding what’s being said in public, in the media, in colloquial conversation. It means understanding what’s not being said. Literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power.
  • his point about background knowledge and the content of shared public culture extends well beyond schoolbooks. They are applicable to the “texts” of everyday life, in commercial culture, in sports talk, in religious language, in politics. In all cases, people become literate in patterns—“schema” is the academic word Hirsch uses. They come to recognize bundles of concept and connotation like “Party of Lincoln.” They perceive those patterns of meaning the same way a chess master reads an in-game chessboard or the way a great baseball manager reads an at bat. And in all cases, pattern recognition requires literacy in particulars.
  • Lots and lots of particulars. This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an ideologically controversial point. After all, parents on both left and right have come to accept recent research that shows that the more spoken words an infant or toddler hears, the more rapidly she will learn and advance in school. Volume and variety matter. And what is true about the vocabulary of spoken or written English is also true, one fractal scale up, about the vocabulary of American culture.
  • those who demonized Hirsch as a right-winger missed the point. Just because an endeavor requires fluency in the past does not make it worshipful of tradition or hostile to change.
  • radicalism is made more powerful when garbed in traditionalism. As Hirsch put it: “To be conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.”
  • Hence, he argued, an education that in the name of progressivism disdains past forms, schema, concepts, figures, and symbols is an education that is in fact anti-progressive and “helps preserve the political and economic status quo.” This is true. And it is made more urgently true by the changes in American demography since Hirsch gave us his list in 1987.
  • If you are an immigrant to the United States—or, if you were born here but are the first in your family to go to college, and thus a socioeconomic new arrival; or, say, a black citizen in Ferguson, Missouri deciding for the first time to participate in a municipal election, and thus a civic neophyte—you have a single overriding objective shared by all immigrants at the moment of arrival: figure out how stuff really gets done here.
  • So, for instance, a statement like “One hundred and fifty years after Appomattox, our house remains deeply divided” assumes that the reader knows that Appomattox is both a place and an event; that the event signified the end of a war; that the war was the Civil War and had begun during the presidency of a man, Abraham Lincoln, who earlier had famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”; that the divisions then were in large part about slavery; and that the divisions today are over the political, social, and economic legacies of slavery and how or whether we are to respond to those legacies.
  • But why a list, one might ask? Aren’t lists just the very worst form of rote learning and standardized, mechanized education? Well, yes and no.
  • it’s not just newcomers who need greater command of common knowledge. People whose families have been here ten generations are often as ignorant about American traditions, mores, history, and idioms as someone “fresh off the boat.”
  • The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.
  • as the pool of potential culture-makers has widened, the modes of culture creation have similarly shifted away from hierarchies and institutions to webs and networks. Wikipedia is the prime embodiment of this reality, both in how the online encyclopedia is crowd-created and how every crowd-created entry contains links to other entries.
  • so any endeavor that makes it easier for those who do not know the memes and themes of American civic life to attain them closes the opportunity gap. It is inherently progressive.
  • since I started writing this essay, dipping into the list has become a game my high-school-age daughter and I play together.
  • I’ll name each of those entries, she’ll describe what she thinks to be its meaning. If she doesn’t know, I’ll explain it and give some back story. If I don’t know, we’ll look it up together. This of course is not a good way for her teachers to teach the main content of American history or English. But it is definitely a good way for us both to supplement what school should be giving her.
  • And however long we end up playing this game, it is already teaching her a meta-lesson about the importance of cultural literacy. Now anytime a reference we’ve discussed comes up in the news or on TV or in dinner conversation, she can claim ownership. Sometimes she does so proudly, sometimes with a knowing look. My bet is that the satisfaction of that ownership, and the value of it, will compound as the years and her education progress.
  • The trouble is, there are also many items on Hirsch’s list that don’t seem particularly necessary for entry into today’s civic and economic mainstream.
  • Which brings us back to why diversity matters. The same diversity that makes it necessary to have and to sustain a unifying cultural core demands that Americans make the core less monochromatic, more inclusive, and continuously relevant for contemporary life
  • it’s worth unpacking the baseline assumption of both Hirsch’s original argument and the battles that erupted around it. The assumption was that multiculturalism sits in polar opposition to a traditional common culture, that the fight between multiculturalism and the common culture was zero-sum.
  • As scholars like Ronald Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror, the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.
  • The truth, of course, is that since well before the formation of the United States, the United States has been shaped by nonwhites in its mores, political structures, aesthetics, slang, economic practices, cuisine, dress, song, and sensibility.
  • In its serious forms, multiculturalism never asserted that every racial group should have its own sealed and separate history or that each group’s history was equally salient to the formation of the American experience. It simply claimed that the omni-American story—of diversity and hybridity—was the legitimate American story.
  • as Nathan Glazer has put it (somewhat ruefully), “We are all multiculturalists now.” Americans have come to see—have chosen to see—that multiculturalism is not at odds with a single common culture; it is a single common culture.
  • it is true that in a finite school year, say, with finite class time and books of finite heft, not everything about everyone can be taught. There are necessary trade-offs. But in practice, recognizing the true and longstanding diversity of American identity is not an either-or. Learning about the internment of Japanese Americans does not block out knowledge of D-Day or Midway. It is additive.
  • As more diverse voices attain ever more forms of reach and power we need to re-integrate and reimagine Hirsch’s list of what literate Americans ought to know.
  • To be clear: A 21st-century omni-American approach to cultural literacy is not about crowding out “real” history with the perishable stuff of contemporary life. It’s about drawing lines of descent from the old forms of cultural expression, however formal, to their progeny, however colloquial.
  • Nor is Omni-American cultural literacy about raising the “self-esteem” of the poor, nonwhite, and marginalized. It’s about raising the collective knowledge of all—and recognizing that the wealthy, white, and powerful also have blind spots and swaths of ignorance
  • What, then, would be on your list? It’s not an idle question. It turns out to be the key to rethinking how a list should even get made.
  • the Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. As barriers to culture creation have fallen, orders of magnitude more citizens—amateurs—are able to shape the culture in which we must all be literate. Cat videos and Star Trek fan fiction may not hold up long beside Toni Morrison. But the entry of new creators leads to new claims of right: The right to be recognized. The right to be counted. The right to make the means of recognition and accounting.
  • It is true that lists alone, with no teaching to bring them to life and no expectation that they be connected to a broader education, are somewhere between useless and harmful.
  • This will be a list of nodes and nested networks. It will be a fractal of associations, which reflects far more than a linear list how our brains work and how we learn and create. Hirsch himself nodded to this reality in Cultural Literacy when he described the process he and his colleagues used for collecting items for their list, though he raised it by way of pointing out the danger of infinite regress.
  • His conclusion, appropriate to his times, was that you had to draw boundaries somewhere with the help of experts. My take, appropriate to our times, is that Americans can draw not boundaries so much as circles and linkages, concept sets and pathways among them.
  • Because 5,000 or even 500 items is too daunting a place to start, I ask here only for your top ten. What are ten things every American—newcomer or native born, affluent or indigent—should know? What ten things do you feel are both required knowledge and illuminating gateways to those unenlightened about American life? Here are my entries: Whiteness The Federalist Papers The Almighty Dollar Organized labor Reconstruction Nativism The American Dream The Reagan Revolution DARPA A sucker born every minute
Javier E

A German Writer Translates a Puzzling Illness Into a Best-Selling Book - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-into-a-best-selling-book.html

emotion psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Back in 2007, after a series of mostly ineffective treatments prescribed by doctors, Ms. Enders, then 17, decided to take matters into her own hands. Convinced that the illness was somehow associated with her intestines, she pored over gastroenterological research, consumed probiotic bacterial cultures meant to aid digestion and tried out mineral supplements.
  • The experiments worked (although she is not sure which one did the trick), leaving her with healthy skin and a newfound interest in her intestines. “I experienced with my own body that knowledge is power,” she writes of the episode in “Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ,”
  • growing body of research indicating that our intestines may have a far greater influence on our feelings, decisions and behavior than previously realized. The primary evidence for this, Ms. Enders writes, is the vast network of nerves attached to our guts that monitors our deepest internal experiences and sends information to the brain, including to those regions responsible for self-awareness, memory and even morality.
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  • Just how much your lunch will affect ethical decision making remains unclear; we still know very little about this “gut brain,” as Ms. Enders refers to it. But this byzantine neural architecture suggests that our intestines may play a large part in determining who we are and what we do.
Javier E

For Exposure, Universities Put Courses on the Web - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...01iht-educLede01.html

online courses education

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Michigan all now offer substantial portions of their courses online. In Britain, the Open University, which has been delivering distance learning for over 40 years, offers free online courses in every discipline on the OpenLearn Web site; the Open University also maintains a dedicated YouTube channel and has often had courses listed on the top 10 downloads at iTunes University. There, students can gain access to beginner courses in French, Spanish and German as well as courses in history, philosophy and astronomy — all free.
  • the Open Education movement as having three pieces: “There’s the content piece — can I get the material? And the pedagogy piece — what are the ways we can teach each other using the Web? How can we make this better for learners and teachers? And finally there’s the question of accreditation and certification.”
  • One reason M.I.T. decided to “give away” its courses, Ms. Forward said, was “we didn’t think we could replicate the quality of a student’s experience on campus.”
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  • M.I.T. students can use OpenCourseWare courses to get a feel for a subject or an instructor, while students at other universities can use them to supplement their own courses. “If you’re taking a course on Pompeii, and you want to know more about volcanoes, we have a course for that,” Ms. Forward said. But while OpenCourseWare students attend the same lectures, and take the same tests as M.I.T. students do, they do not get M.I.T. credit, or an M.I.T. degree.
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