"Study Of More Than 3,500 Human Brains Reveals The Cause Of Alzheimer's Disease"

"After investigating 3,618 brains, they found that amyloid accumulation was strongly linked with a decline in cognition; however, if the extent of tau aggregation was also taken into consideration, the relationship disappeared. Furthermore, the level of tau accumulation, but not amyloid, predicted age at onset of cognitive decline, disease duration and final score on a test of mental function. According to the researchers, this indicates that tau is the main driver of Alzheimer’s."
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/study-suggests-tau-not-amyloid-major-driver-alzheimers

This is actually a big deal. Maybe I have missed something in the past few years, but the last time I discussed Alzheimer's, the tau hypothesis and the amyloid hypothesis were being debated. TBH, this has been going on for like decades now so I found it kinda boring, but if we can focus on one thing... 

“Atlanta Police Shooting Victim Tried to Live a Life That Mattered”

“A state investigation of the shooting is underway. But according to friends and family, Mr. Hill had been told by doctors that he had bipolar disorder after returning from Afghanistan. They believe that his bizarre antics before the shooting — in which he removed his clothes and repeatedly jumped from a second-floor balcony — were symptoms of his illness.

In Moncks Corner, the grief and anger commingled with incredulity. Mr. Hill was the last man anyone would ever have expected to tangle with the police, they said. And he deserved better.

“To come home from Afghanistan and be killed by someone who’s supposed to protect you – that I don’t understand,” said James A. Hill, 29, Mr. Hill’s brother.

“Why would you go directly to deadly force for someone who clearly does not have a weapon?” said his father, who is also named Anthony Hill.

“I don’t hate him,” said Mr. Hill’s mother, Carolyn Giummo, referring to Officer Olsen, who has been placed on administrative leave pending the investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “I’m very disappointed in him.””

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/us/atlanta-police-shooting-victim-tried-to-live-a-life-that-mattered.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

It’s weird to think about how many stories are being told now that were just ignored before. Or not ignored- disconnected, lacking a mainstream narrative that it could be clipped to so that it could be told. In addition to race, there is a lot here about mental healthcare and the deadly prejudice that surrounds mental illness.

"How Netflix Broke The Unbreakable Spoiler Alert"

"This, I propose, is what Netflix, Amazon, and HBO should do. They need to bring back the schedule, updated to modern lives. That schedule should be:

Every day, a new episode is released,
always at the same time, and blind to time zones.

Imagine if House of Cards had played out over two weeks, like a mini-series. Today, we would be finishing up the 13-day marathon from when the show first dropped:

Marathon — such a better metaphor than our current term, binge.

Can you imagine? The conversation around this viewing window would be massive, almost unbearable. Fans would feel compelled to catch up every night, so as to be involved in tomorrow’s discussion. And if you missed a day or two, catching up would be painless."
https://medium.com/message/how-netflix-broke-the-unbreakable-spoiler-alert-f0215bf930cf

“Review - 'Get Hard' Is Hilariously Offensive With A Point”

“Instead, I saw that the film’s jokes surrounding prison rape — and there are many such jokes and situations — as absolutely mocking and skewering the homophobic undertones and paranoia of male social attitudes and culture. It transpires within a broader vicious satirizing of white privilege and sense of self-entitlement rampant in our society. The film’s primary focus is attacking the toxic mixture of racism and homophobia that leads to white panic over the prospects of prison rape at the hands of ethnic minorities, as a reflection of white fear that their own complacency and tacit acceptance of — if not outright participation in — oppression of minorities and perpetuation of racism, misogyny, and homophobia will inevitably lead to them being assaulted and victimized once they are no longer in a position where power structures favor them for their white skin and male gender.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2015/03/27/review-get-hard-is-hilariously-offensive-with-a-point/

Huh.

"Inside The Lives Of The Wives And Widows Of ISIS"

"Even as Twitter tries to delete accounts associated with ISIS, women claiming to be members of the group continue to use the platform as both a recruiting tool and a support group, providing outsiders with a unique glimpse into the everyday lives of female jihadis.

Six months after its initial investigation, BuzzFeed News takes another look at the women who travel to Syria and join ISIS. Some are new mothers, many are widows, and others have died... Many of the images appear to be an attempt to convey the “normalcy” and “freedom” of life in ISIS-controlled territory... Since so many ISIS members use social media, it’s possible to track a relationship from marriage to “martyrdom.”"
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/inside-the-lives-of-the-wives-and-widows-of-isis#.ewAdK8LNG

Fascinating. Fascinating fascinating fascinating. I am recognizing a set of assumptions that I have when I see these images and posts that are totally in the context of 2015 social media. I had this idea in the back of my head of sort of subdued victims distant from modern technology.

“Joyable raises $2M, launches app to help people get over their social anxiety”

“Joyable is debuting its web service people can use to track and eventually improve their mental condition. Joyable has also assembled a group of coaches who can motivate participants and keep them engaged with the app…Rather than requiring people to visit their therapists for a long sitting, then, Joyable is allowing people to go through their therapy in very small doses, from anywhere, so long as you have an Internet-connected computer or mobile device handy.

The therapy lasts for 12 weeks on average. It costs $99 a month, and people can pay $239 for a three-month package. More than 50 people have participated in a pilot.”

http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/18/joyable-raises-2m-launches-app-to-help-people-get-over-their-social-anxiety/

“Shine Theory: Why Powerful Women Make the Greatest Friends”

“But even if it were somehow possible to objectively evaluate all of our female peers against ourselves, it’s worth asking why we’re spending all this time creating a ranking system in our minds. When we hate on women who we perceive to be more “together” than we are, we’re really just expressing the negative feelings we have about our own careers, or bodies, or relationships.

Here’s my solution: When you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you better…

Approaching and befriending women who I identify as smart and powerful (sometimes actively pursuing them, as with any other crush) has been a major revelation of my adult life. First, there’s the associative property of awesomeness: People know you by the company you keep. I like knowing that my friends are so professionally supportive that when they get a promotion, it’s like a boost for my résumé, too, because we share a network and don’t compete for contacts. Also, it’s just plain tough out there — for all the aforementioned reasons about the economy and the dating scene and body-image pressures. I want the strongest, happiest, smartest women in my corner, pushing me to negotiate for more money, telling me to drop men who make me feel bad about myself, and responding to my outfit selfies from a place of love and stylishness, not competition and body-snarking.”

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/05/shine-theory-how-to-stop-female-competition.html

Shine Theory started to be a ting a while ago, but I just recently discovered it and I love this.

I attended a high school graduation speech by Marissa Myer (before she became, like, MARISSA MYER, so it wasn’t a big deal at the time) and she gave some really great advice for college/life: Always have friends who are better than you are at something. Never be the smartest person you know.

I love this advice, and it makes me think of friendships as a way to learn about another way of being, and sort of an outsourcing of knowledge and skills (in addition to love and support and warm fuzzies). People should build each other up.

FB: How did I totally miss Shine Theory?

"UP FROM LEEDS: The people, the place and the privilege that made Charles Barkley a role model"

"Barkley's message is devoid of any mention of white supremacy to overcome, racial progress to be made or playing fields in need of leveling. It lacks the self-awareness that might come from reflecting on throwing a man through a plate-glass window, punching an obnoxious fan in the nose, serving a weekend in jail for drunken driving or spitting on a small girl at a game.
Barkley's comments at this weighty moment seem to fit right in with a man who defended the Ferguson cop who killed Michael Brown, labeled looters "scumbags" and suggested Garner shouldn't have resisted arrest. They might even inspire another op-ed from his "Inside the NBA" partner Kenny Smith, who was so unnerved by Barkley's Ferguson comments he implied that Barkley was unqualified to be in the conversation.
But such assessments would be incomplete. Maybe flat wrong...

"Barkley's views, as far as I can see, a lot of black people think that way -- 'You got to get your thing together,'" Marbury shares.

Although many high-profile black activists justifiably focus on politics, police or correcting systemic issues, he declares, "In the South, many black people are still just trying to survive. They're not even at that level."

A 2014 Pew poll supports this view, stating that 43 percent of black respondents said racial discrimination is the main reason black people can't get ahead, whereas 48 percent said blacks who can't get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition...

The ultimate in privilege is the luxury of ignoring the past. When Barkley steps before a room full of kids today, as he often does, preaching the value of education, as Booker T. Washington continually did, he's not the bar brawler or the practice skipper or the drunk driver. He's a famous black man who rose from poverty and now makes millions by thinking quickly on live television. He is a role model and a leader, as surely as Alabama is hot in the summer.

But to accept that reality, Barkley would have to renounce his most famous declaration, the phrase from the 1993 Nike commercial that confirmed he was no ordinary jock, the quote engraved onto Barkley's public persona.

"I am not a role model."

In 30-plus years of Barkley sound bites, this remains his quintessential statement. It's defiant, laden with good intentions and bad connotations, and born of his deep desire to uplift society by the force of his personality.

Barkley made a valid point in the commercial: "Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids." But his effort to encourage stronger families ignored the social forces that destroy them...

Barkley's money furthers the careers of minority scientists and supports research into the environmental factors that cause poor minorities to make bad health choices.

He knows structural racism exists, but self-responsibility still reigns supreme as his solution.

When the significance of those Leeds train tracks outlasts the laws designed to end segregation, when privilege distorts the true difficulty of escaping poverty, self-responsibility can seem like the only sensible solution.

Behavior as savior."

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12289603/how-former-nba-star-charles-barkley-became-role-model

This is making me thing about this concept of 'the black voice'; who gets to have that label, and what does the label entitle them to? How is it a burden? And who gives it - is it black people, is it academia, is it mainstream media? 

Also, the always-present struggle between asking people and structures that are outsude of your control to change, and feeling a full sense of agency: "A century has passed, and the question remains the same: What should black folk do now? Slavery ended in Washington's lifetime; a black president was elected in Barkley's. Suffering and strife endured. Who must end it? Us or them?"

Also, this, on the necessarily different answers to that question based on personal context; it's so much - "Geography has traditionally influenced the tone and strategy of black leadership. W.E.B. Du Bois was born free, raised in an integrated community, based and educated at Harvard. Booker T. Washington was born in chains, educated at Hampton Institute and rooted in Alabama. Martin Luther King lived and died in the heart of Dixie's violent Jim Crow system. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad built the Nation of Islam and critiqued King from the relative safety of New York and Chicago. In the North, Marcus Garvey showcased defiant, back-to-Africa oratory, but in the South he thanked Southerners for "lynching race pride into Negroes" and insisted America was a "white man's country."

"We experience life and culture from a different perspective," says John Curtis, 28, a Tuskegee grad from Leeds. "People from up North may not come to grips with racism. We experience it.""

(credit to KM)

"Mario Savio, the First Free Speaker"

"This young man, UC Berkeley philosophy student Mario Savio, would be hauled away to jail with nearly 800 other people that day in December 1964 — but his words would shake up an emerging, politically charged generation and create a mainstream protest movement. Across the country, people of color were fighting against years of legalized oppression. But many people Savio’s age — especially white students — were unaware of many of the nation’s worst issues. Today we associate the ’60s with student protest, but for many, forming a picket line or taking to the streets was still a fringe activity in 1964...During one 36-hour stand-off with police, he clambered barefoot atop a police car and dispersed a whole angry crowd with a few words. “I ask you to rise quietly and with dignity, and go home,” Savio called out to the sit-in protesters — and they did just that. Four thousand of Savio’s fellow students came out to see him speak on Berkeley’s steps in opposition to UC President Clark Kerr. With his incandescent “bodies upon the gears” speech, Savio’s righteous anger and a willing audience gave birth to what would become known as the Free Speech Movement — and prompted the largest mass arrest in California’s history."

http://www.ozy.com/flashback/mario-savio-the-first-free-speaker/37581

"The Unbearable Whiteness Of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—Tina Fey's Racist New Show"

"I've never seen a show with such a diverse cast that was written so obviously and exclusively for privileged white people...

These characters could have been something. They could have been rich, surprising, and very very funny. But they aren't. Instead, these characters are accessories that this show about a young, pretty white woman wears like a colorful scarf. As Kimmy grows into a strong, capable woman, the characters of color around her devolve further into caricature. If there's one thing this show makes clear, it's that a white woman can live underground for 15 years and when she emerges she'll still be white. And that's really all you need to make it in this world."
http://www.ravishly.com/2015/03/13/unbreakable-kimmy-schmidt-review-racism-tina-fey-new-netflix-show?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=askmeanother&utm_term=artsculture&utm_content=20150318

I really agree with this. It's sort of like all the moments I was uncomfortable with in 30 Rock pushed together into one show. I enjoyed the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt sometimes, I sometimes found it funny and interesting, but it made me just a little uncomfortable all of the time. I am very confident that I would not get along well with many of the writers.

The show was often intentionally racist in order to make a commentary about the racism, and mock the racism as a way to reduce it in viewers - but, sometimes, it didn't quite finish the joke, so it was just racist. Like the thing where it is offhandedly mentioned that one white character accidentally shot her black husband "because it was the 70s and a black man was trying to get into my bed in the dark". Just - not funny, unless you identify with the fear of black men and think 'Ya, I could see myself doing that!' in which case, I don't want to be watching the same show that you are.

"Don’t upload that selfie to Instagram — make a gift wrapping pattern out of it instead"

“While Gift Wrap My Face is a silly product, it’s still an interesting development in our society’s fascination with selfies and silly representations of ourselves. And even more than the finished product, what is most impressive might be the company’s achievement in building out the process that allows for the gift wrapping to go from a pattern the customer designs on the website to a roll of wrapping paper.”

http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/04/dont-upload-that-selfie-to-instagram-make-a-gift-wrapping-pattern-out-of-it-instead/

Mmm #innovation?

"Three Months Without Breathing"

"Women are socialized to swallow pain with a smile. We are taught to put ourselves last and others first, to make the dinner and then serve ourselves the worst cut, the most nourishing morsels reserved for those we do and should love more than ourselves.

Like many women, many mothers in particular, I’d had the fantasy of a mysterious ailment that would send me on a hospital vacation. I’d get sick, but not sick enough to die, just sick enough to have to rest and have someone else do it all for me. I’d get a few weeks in a bed somewhere where other people brought me my meals and no one needed me.

After my illness, it struck me: why did my fantasy of relaxation still require me to suffer? If I was daydreaming, why not make it a solo vacation I’d take after winning the lottery or something? Why did I need an excuse, even in my own imagination, for wanting some time alone, some time not serving others?"

https://medium.com/the-archipelago/three-months-without-breathing-b52c58781e9a

This is a beautiful series of vignettes about a woman's illness. 

I have so much appreciation for breathing right now.

This - "I believe my body more now. I rest before I’m fully exhausted."

Related to: Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

FB: "There’s something in this: learning to breathe, learning to take up space, to ask for help. Learning to embrace self and selfhood. I love my children and my husband, but I don’t want to be second to them in my own life. I don’t want to teach my sons to expect women to serve them first, or to teach my daughter that she must shrink herself and her words to please others. And I need to remember that my individual example isn’t enough to counter all of the other messages my children will be receiving. My husband never wanted a silent wife or a household drudge, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t imbibing poisons from a culture that still suggests these extremes as ideals alongside other pernicious sisters, like the sexy wife and the financial helpmeet. All of these Perfect Women exist to serve the changing needs of others."

"Ellen Pao Might Not Win, and That’s OK"

"The stakes feel both very high—for the minority of women working in technology who are paid less and overlooked more—and very low—for everyone involved is, by any measure, paid very, very well.

But as the details have been revealed over several weeks of testimony, it’s become clear that Ellen Pao’s case is not the one on which women in tech should hang all their hope. There may never be one. Ideally, there will be many.

Few industries appear as openly confused about its own discrimination as tech, where the delusion of a meritocracy still survives despite all evidence to the contrary. Homogeneity is baked in to the Silicon Valley workplace and business model, with “culture fit” and “pattern-matching” guiding personnel and investment decisions from start to finish, consistently and often explicitly privileging white men over everyone else."

http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/ellen-pao-might-not-win-and-thats-ok

I'm loving this "openly confused with their own discrimination" - also academic research. 

I've gotten so skeptical of anything where cultural fit is centralized; it limits severely the options for people who are not part of the dominant culture. 

Credit to JD

"Facebook Clarifies Rules on What It Bans and Why"

"Facebook walks a delicate line when it tries to ban violent or offensive content without suppressing the free sharing of information that it says it wants to encourage. Its audience is vast, with a huge variance in age, cultural values and laws across the globe. Yet despite its published guidelines, the reasoning behind Facebook’s decisions to block or allow content are often opaque and inconsistent.

For example, the company flip-flopped repeatedly on whether to allow beheading videos on the service before recently deciding to ban them. In December, it blocked a page in Russia that was promoting an anti-government protest, then allowed copycat pages to stay up. And in October, it created an exception to its requirement that people use their real names on the service when it allowed San Francisco’s drag queens to use their stage names while continuing to crack down on others using false names.

“We’re trying to strike the balance based on the way our community works,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, said in an interview. “The landscape is complicated.”"

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/facebook-explains-what-it-bans-and-why/?_r=0

non-obvious questions; huge implications for how people communicate and sort of the moral norms of social media. 

"Missing brains mystery solved at the University of Texas"

"After several news stories appeared Wednesday about 100 brains vanishing from the college, someone called from the University of Texas in San Antonio to say the 100 specimens in glass jars full of formaldehyde were just fine, and they'd been at the school for years."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/100-missing-brains-found-san-antonio-article-1.2031727

I love this because it demonstrates how fundamentally disorganized and arbitrary the world can be when we don’t have records of why and how and who. Those brains were there, so everyone assumed that they were just sort of supposed to be there, and in the building where the brains were missing people probably just thought there were only supposed to be 100 brains or whatever, because if you take a slice in time without any knowledge of what happened before then there is no reason to assume that anything is wrong.

"Why Our Memory Fails Us"

“When he was first asked for the source of Mr. Bush’s quotation, Dr. Tyson insisted, “I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the president. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere.” He then added, “One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”

That is how we all usually respond when our memory is challenged. We have an abstract understanding that people can remember the same event differently… But when our own memories are challenged, we may neglect all this and instead respond emotionally, acting as though we must be right and everyone else must be wrong… Erroneous witness recollections have become so concerning that the National Academy of Sciences convened an expert panel to review the state of research on the topic. This fall the panel (which one of us, Daniel Simons, served on) released a comprehensive report that recommended procedures to minimize the chances of false memory and mistaken identification, including videotaping police lineups and improving jury instructions.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/opinion/why-our-memory-fails-us.html?src=me

Memories are so funny. I sometimes, kind of, keep a diary and it’s really strange to go back and re-read what I wrote about some important moment because there are always not just details I have forgotten but really important nuances and contexts.

I also feel like there are things I don’t even bother trying to remember anymore, because I know that I can look them up later (as a friend of mine said recently “I have so many memories of this place… and by memories, I mean facebook photos).

"A Road to Mental Health Through the Kitchen"

“Psychologists say cooking and baking are pursuits that fit a type of therapy known as behavioral activation. The goal is to alleviate depression by boosting positive activity, increasing goal-oriented behavior and curbing procrastination and passivity.

“If the activity is defined as personally rewarding or giving a sense of accomplishment or pleasure, or even seeing the pleasure of that pumpkin bread with chocolate chips making someone else happy, then it could improve a sense of well-being,” says Jacqueline Gollan, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-road-to-mental-health-through-the-kitchen-1418059204?mod=e2tw

"Everything You Believe About East African Women Is Wrong"

"East African womanhood is a minefield between the region's war zones and too-simple Western understanding thereof. The experiences of women from Ethiopia and Somalia serve largely as a barometer of the nations' violence. But our foremothers taught us resistance long before we had a name for it. Their stories alchemize the violence that forced them out of the arms of their families and toward countries that don't recognize their strength. Spinning blood into honey and bone into gold, they transformed their pain into our power...

Aida showed us that words can make magic. She makes phone calls as she cooks, cleans, categorizes, catches, contorts. Her voice is soothing, full of warmth. To receive a phone call from her is to know you are loved — wherever you may be — part of her patchwork, and she wants you to know your beauty completes the whole. Relatives everywhere from Canada to Ethiopia sense the honey in her "hello," and in the Ethiopian proverbs that roll gently off her tongue, even when she's scolding. The one she repeats most often is simple. Translated into English, it highlights the beauty of the collectivism she and the women around her model: "For one person, 50 lemons is a burden. But for 50 people, those same 50 lemons are simply decorations.""
http://www.buzzfeed.com/hgiorgis/everything-you-believe-about-east-african-women-is-wrong

I love this proverb.

"550: Three Miles"

"There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide. We hear what happens when you get to see the other side and it looks a lot better."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/three-miles

This was so, so good. It told these stories in such a good way, through these voices that are not commonly heard. And the way that it reaches its conclusions. I sort of don’t want to reflect on it here because I want everyone to experience that progression. Listen listen listen listen.

But – if you have already listened –

The thing about social belongingness is so, so real, and about how much effort it takes to convince yourself that you belong when the evidence all opposes that feeling.

And the teacher’s mis-remembrance of a happy ending is so telling of something I have been trying to tease apart. It’s sort of how America loves an underdog story (“As Allison puts it, "Although rooting for the underdog is pervasive, the effect is a mile wide and an inch deep."), but what is the full humanity of the underdog and how do we relate to them when they fail? There is this spectators’ ownership of underdog-stories.

And there is this narrative of the plucky-brown-person who pulls themself through adversity (gangs! poverty! abusive/missing parent(s)!  no mention of systemic prejudices… or really, any prejudice if the narrative is after 1960) and sort of ‘prove’ that hard work can get anyone anywhere in #America. It’s this hugely addicting narrative in our culture, and so it makes sense to me that someone would remember that narrative on top of what the actual reality of the situation was.

And it’s also the only narrative, there isn’t a narrative about a group of people achieving because of communal effort  (outside of sports or maybe being in a band – which is itself sort of a narrative trap), and because the privileged spaces they enter change to advance everyone’s success. Asking for help isn’t in that narrative (unless it’s from, like, one White Savior). And that’s what actually needs to happen, but it feels like a failure to reach for it.

"CSR Announces Winners of its America COMPETES Challenges to Maximize Fairness in NIH Peer Review"

“The NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR) has revealed the winners of its two America

COMPETE Act challenges to help identify new methods to detect bias in peer review and

identify strategies to strengthen fairness and impartiality in peer review. This effort to

study the possibility of bias is part of a much larger NIH effort to respond to the study that

showed Black applicants for NIH grants do not fare as well as White applicants after

researchers controlled for various factors.”

http://public.csr.nih.gov/Documents/LearnMoreabouttheWinningIdeas.pdf

This is really cool, and the paragraph-long proposal descriptions are worth reading.

I’m not super convinced by the last one, the pledge, because I doubt that most people walk into the room intending to be biased and most probably avidly consider themselves non-racist and not requiring any kind of intervention. In my dreamland, every potential reviewer would have to take an IAT or something first in order to observe their own biases, and then be presented with some quick thought process to help them process and be aware while reviewing.

"Secret Service Wants a Fake White House to Help Protect the Real One"

"In testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, Joseph P. Clancy, the director of the Secret Service, on Tuesday urged lawmakers to give him money to build a detailed replica of the White House to aid in training officers and agents to protect the real thing. Beltsville, about 20 miles from the real White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is the location of a 500-acre Secret Service training site in the verdant terrain of southern Maryland.

“Right now, we train on a parking lot, basically,” Mr. Clancy said. “We put up a makeshift fence and walk off the distance between the fence at the White House and the actual house itself. We don’t have the bushes, we don’t have the fountains, we don’t get a realistic look at the White House.”"
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/us/secret-service-wants-a-fake-white-house-to-help-protect-the-real-one.html?_r=0&referrer=

This is slightly ridiculous and slightly definitely real.

"Younger Women Hesitate To Say They're Having A Heart Attack"

"even when women suspected that they were having a heart attack, many said they were hesitant to bring it up because they didn't want to look like hypochondriacs.

"We need to do a better job of empowering women to share their concerns and symptoms," Lichtman says.

And medical professionals may need to do a better job of listening, she adds. Several women reported that their doctors initially misdiagnosed the pain, assuming that the women were suffering from acid reflux or gas."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/02/24/388787045/younger-women-hesitate-to-say-theyre-having-a-heart-attack

Ugh, society, so many levels of oppressiveness.

"R for cats and cat lovers"

"Writing code is fun. Since you're a cat, not having opposable thumbs may be a bit of an issue, but surely you're clever enough to find a way around that.

So open up R"

http://rforcats.net/

fun!

"NEWSFLASH: Biden Announces Millions to End Rape Kit Backlog"

"There are approximately 400,000 untested rape kits gathering dust in U.S. crime labs. (That’s considered a conservative estimate since police departments are not required to report these numbers). While these kits sit in storage facilities, the rapists they could have put behind bars continue to roam the streets, and sometimes go on to commits other acts of sexual violence.

Though certain cities like Detroit, Houston and New York City have taken leadership on the rape-kit backlog by allocating funding and resources to make sure they are tested, activists have been urging the federal government to step in and make a more significant contribution."
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/03/17/newsflash-biden-announces-millions-to-end-rape-kit-backlog/

I spoke to a bunch of forensic scientists for a task for work and the thing that came up repeatedly was the small size of the available workforce. There is a huge backlog in DNA evidence; that is definitely partly because of a lack of funding for more efficient equipment and more people, but there also just aren't enough people in forensic labs to do all of the work.

“How to Develop New Antibiotics”

“What if the United States government — maybe in cooperation with the European Union and Japan — offered a $2 billion prize to the first five companies or academic centers that develop and get regulatory approval for a new class of antibiotics? As the XPrize — a foundation that runs competitions to spur innovations for difficult problems that often aren’t being addressed — and others have demonstrated, prizes for lofty goals can catalyze the creation of hundreds of unexpected research teams with novel approaches to old challenges. The prestige, bragging rights and renewed sense of mission created by such a prize would alone make an investment in research worthwhile.

Because it costs at least $1 billion to develop a new drug, the prize money could provide a 100 percent return — even before sales. From the government perspective, such a prize would be highly efficient: no payment for research that fizzles. Researchers win only with an approved product. Even if they generated just one new antibiotic class per year, the $2-billion-per-year payment would be a reasonable investment for a problem that costs the health care system $20 billion per year.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/opinion/how-to-develop-new-antibiotics.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

These kinds of prizes are actually totally common and very exciting – (see this report on all – well, most – of the prizes held by the Federal government in FY13, a bunch are super cool).

"When a Rapist’s Weapon Is a Drug"

“Another is coercion; the perpetrator is aroused by domination, forcing his (or rarely, her) sexual will on the target. “This is common enough that we debated whether to include it as a diagnosis in the D.S.M. 5,” psychiatrists’ influential diagnostic manual, said Dr. Michael First, a Columbia psychiatrist who edited it. But the idea was shelved, in part because of concerns that doing so would give rapists added recourse in legal cases, he said.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/health/when-rapists-weapon-is-a-drug.html?_r=0

This fascinates me – I would love to hear more about that conversation.

"Building the First Slavery Museum in America"

“It’s something I bring up all the time in my lectures,” says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” “If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven’t yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history. To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”

"On Dec. 7, the Whitney Plantation, in the town of Wallace, 35 miles west of New Orleans, celebrated its opening, and it was clear, based on the crowd entering the freshly painted gates, that the plantation intended to provide a different experience from those of its neighbors. Roughly half of the visitors were black, for starters, an anomaly on plantation tours in the Deep South. And while there were plenty of genteel New Orleanians eager for a peek at the antiques inside the property’s Creole mansion, they were outnumbered by professors, historians, preservationists, artists, graduate students, gospel singers and men and women from Senegal dressed in traditional West African garb: flowing boubous of intricate embroidery and bright, saturated colors. If opinions on the restoration varied, visitors were in agreement that they had never seen anything quite like it. Built largely in secret and under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney had been turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of its kind in the United States... 
space and language to address collectively what is too difficult to process individually. Forty-eight years after World War II, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington. A museum dedicated to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks opened its doors in Lower Manhattan less than 13 years after they occurred. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, however, no federally funded museum dedicated to slavery exists, no monument honoring America’s slaves. “It’s something I bring up all the time in my lectures,” says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” “If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven’t yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history. To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”"
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/building-the-first-slave-museum-in-america.html?_r=0&referrer=

So many things in here about memory and American distance from the past - I fully did not realize how much of a thing these plantation tours are (I fully don't understand how people can be that unaware, that able to romanticize). And this - "The State of Mississippi did not acknowledge the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery until 1995 and formally ratified it only in 2013, when a resident was moved to galvanize lawmakers after watching Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”"

Also, I love that this project involves a Senegalese guy who won a Fulbright to come to the American South.

"The Billionaires’ Park"

“While it’s hard to argue with more parks, or the generosity of donors like Mr. Diller, this isn’t just about new patches of green. It’s more evidence of how a hollowed-out public sector is losing its critical role, and how private wealth is taking the wheel and having a growing say over basic parts of American life… One result of this influx of funds into putatively public parks is that the city’s more affluent sections have nicer open spaces and playgrounds. Central Park is now a gleaming jewel thanks to $700 million in private investments, and two years ago a hedge fund manager — who lives in a mansion steps from the park — gave $100 million to shine it further. Private money now covers 75 percent of the park’s annual operating budget.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/opinion/the-billionaires-park.html?rref=opinion

There are probably some equivalences in the ways that science is being funded by private organizations as the Federal funding amount decreases.

"White Anxiety and the Futility of Black Hope"

“What really strikes me now, as I think about your question, is how old I was — around 30 — before I ever engaged whiteness philosophically, or personally, for that matter. Three decades where that question never came up and yet the unjust advantages whiteness generally provides white people fully shaped my life, including my philosophical training and work..

I think that white people have a small but important role to play in combating white domination. Small, because the idea isn’t that white people are going to lead that work; they need to be following the work and leadership of people of color. But important because, given de facto racial segregation, there still are many pockets of whiteness — in neighborhoods, businesses, classrooms, philosophy departments – where you need white people who are going to challenge racism when it pops up. Which it often does.

But I think I have to add that this role is absurd. I mean absurd in the technical existentialist sense that, for example, Kierkegaard and Camus gave it. I don’t have a lot of hope that our white-saturated society is ever going to change, and at the same time it is crucial that one struggles for that change. Those two things don’t rationally fit together, I realize. It’s absurd to struggle for something that you don’t think can happen, and yet we (people of all races) should...
James Baldwin said it best when he argued that white people will have to learn how to love themselves and each other before they can let go of their need for black inferiority."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/white-anxiety-and-the-futility-of-black-hope/

hmmm, “philosophy of race/whiteness”. There is a lot in this interview. The piece about violence and options for change.

"Genetics And That Striped Dress"

"While we first looked at genetic associations with different color perceptions, we went on to see if there were other associations related to different phenotypes. The strongest association we found was with age. Our researchers found that the effect of age comes in two phases — for people up to 60 years old and for those who are over 60. According to our data the proportion of those who see white and gold increased up until the age of 60, but after 60 the proportion of those who see white and gold starts to decrease...Our researchers also looked at whether other eye conditions — age related macular degeneration, cataracts and red-green color blindness — clearly influenced how color was perceived. Customers with cataracts were about 50 percent more likely to see black and blue instead of white and gold. Those who are color-blind were more likely to see white and gold, and there was not a strong effect with macular degeneration."

http://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/genetics-and-that-striped-dress/#h0ydLbmCy7zHTD7v.99

This totally advances my thesis that this #thedress thing is good for science and science communication.

"Who Owns the Biggest Biotech Discovery of the Century?"

"Not dressing up that night was Feng Zhang (see 35 Innovators Under 35, 2013), a researcher in Cambridge at the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute. But earlier this year Zhang claimed his own reward. In April, he won a broad U.S. patent on CRISPR-Cas9 that could give him and his research center control over just about every important commercial use of the technology.

How did the high-profile prize for CRISPR and the patent on it end up in different hands? That’s a question now at the center of a seething debate over who invented what, and when, that involves three heavily financed startup companies, a half-dozen universities, and thousands of pages of legal documents."

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/532796/who-owns-the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century/

#crispr

(credit to MA)

"Confessions of a Mortician | Matter | Medium"

"He watched me for a second to see how I’d react, his eyes sort of twinkling and abashed at the same time, as if he were asking me to dance. Before I could formulate a response, his attention had moved on to lunch.

“Have you tried them Pogs down in Coatesville?” he asked Caleb while they heaved the woman’s body off its gurney. “P-O-G-S. Hot dog wrapped in a slice of pizza. Best thing you’ll ever eat, I tell you.”"

https://medium.com/matter/confessions-of-a-mortician-7a8c061bbda3

This is a tremendous, beautiful introspective semi-longread on death and the funerary industry. The quote I pulled isn't really a summary, it's just a moment that felt really vivid to me for some reason. 

Better summary: "It’s what I longed to be, of course: comfortable in silence. Not just God’s silence, but the pungent silence emanating from the back of the [hearse]. And the truth is, Caleb did seem comfortable. It was rare enough to meet an American who’d talk earnestly about death without sounding like a Hallmark card; rarer still, I suspected, was the utter lack of fear in his eyes. There was something almost spooky about it — a monkish sort of calm. The overall impression was of someone who’d had a long staring contest with Death, and had won. As Caleb put it, you have to pass through death in order to get to Eden."

It makes me think about death differently, and our weird rituals around it and how genuinely strange the things we do with loved ones' bodies are. We all have individual relationships to our love ones, shouldn't we have individual ways we treat their bodies after death? But I imagine that something out-of- the-box would genuinely horrify and offend strangers, would almost be perceived criminally, because that's how we are with death. We just aren't, with death; let's not have to think about it too much.

**Sort of slightly related to: what makes you you. (I just happened to read them I the same siting and they were intersting to think about together). And the NYT piece by the doctor who just wrote a book about mortality.