Saturday, June 30, 2018

"TEACHING WHILE BLACK."



"No one warned me about white students. They did not tell me the psychic violence that they could inflict upon my black body. Like the time I student wrote an entire 6 page paper defending the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade or the time when another student wrote in a midterm exam that U.S prisons were necessary to ensure the maintenance of black criminals behind bars. No one said they will question my authority and intelligence in ways that they would never do for another white instructor.

No one warned me about white students. How they would willingly enroll in a class that centers blackness and then get frustrated, resorting to defense that “this is just too complicated, why can’t we all just be one race” narrative when discussing race. No one prepared me for this. Not my colleagues nor my cohort. Surely not the administration. No one!"


Friday, June 29, 2018

"What’s in This?: Doritos Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips"



"5) Cheddar Cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes): The bread-and-butter of nacho-flavored Doritos, this cheddar cheese isn’t any different from your average processed cheeses, despite containing suspicious-sounding ingredients like “cheese cultures” and “enzymes.” “Starter cultures and enzymes are just used to accelerate the process of coagulating milk into cheese,” Shanahan explains. “Pretty much all cheese is made using some kind of enzyme to speed up the fermentation process.” That means the only thing to worry about with this cheddar cheese is that it’ll stain your fingers orange...

Weirdly, while the ingredients that sound like they’d be unhealthy (i.e., disodium inosinate) aren’t really all that bad, the ingredients we think we recognize (i.e., vegetable oils) are slowly waging the real war on our insides."


Thursday, June 28, 2018

"This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something"



"thinkers for thousands of years had more or less taken one definition for granted: Knowledge is “justified true belief.”...

The trick, Pritchard says, is first to notice that there are two distinct “master intuitions” about knowledge that seem to be two “faces” of a single intuition, but are not. These are the “anti-luck intuition” (your true belief, which Pritchard calls a “cognitive success,” can’t be lucky to be considered knowledge) and the “ability intuition” (your true belief has to be in some sense a product of your cognitive ability)...

So the way to have knowledge, Pritchard concludes, is have your relevant cognitive abilities produce a belief that’s not only true and creditable to your agency, but also safe. By “safe,” Pritchard means that your belief couldn’t have easily been false. Temp’s belief, for instance, is safe—there’s a hidden guy guaranteeing he’ll believe the correct temperature each time he checks"


This's makes me think about techniques in biology research to "know" something - biological systems are super chaotic and so if you are trying to measure some behavior (say, how active a cell's metabolism is depending on the type of sugar you put in the cell media; or how long you will be able to tolerate the air freshener your roommate bought) at least some of how that behavior change is going to be purely due to randomness. 

So to "know" that A causes B, you have to be able to measure something non-lucky: something about B that will always indicate a change in B (in the above examples, you might measure the amount of CO2 produced by the cells, or the number of times per day that you sneeze). You have to measure with ability: with enough sensitivity that you can pick up the change (your CO2 meter shouldn't be the same one that the city uses to measure pollution, and you shouldn't use a sneeze-measurement-system that relies on your cat freaking out at the loud sound [unrelated side note, what is it with cats and acting like the world is ending whenever a human sneezes?]). And, lastly, it needs to be safe: the measurement system needs to be accurate and reproducible so that you can trust the data you are getting.


Breaking that down was fun for me and probably no one else... 

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

"How Hollywood Whitewashed the Old West"



"Cowboy culture refers to a style of ranchingintroduced in North America by Spanish colonists in the 16th century—a time when most ranch owners were Spanish and many ranch hands were Native. None of the first cowboys were (non-Hispanic) white. And while historians don’t know exact figures, by the late 19th century roughly one in three cowboys (known as vaqueros) was Mexican. The recognizable cowboy fashions, technologies, and lexicon—hats, bandanas, spurs, stirrups, lariat, lasso—are all Latino inventions...

The story of one of America’s most eminent frontiersmen, Jim Beckwourth, formed the basis for 1951’s Tomahawk, which starred a white actor even though Beckwourth was black. The famous 1956 Western epic The Searchers was based on a black man named Britt Johnson. He was played by John Wayne, one of the genre’s biggest movie stars, who in 1971 told Playboy, “I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to the point of responsibility.” Even the fictional character of the Lone Ranger (who originally debuted in a radio show in 1933) shares striking similarities to Bass Reeves, believed to be the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal west of the Mississippi."




FB: "In a 1993 Chicago Tribune article about Beckwourth, the writer commended the aforementioned films for their palatable diversity while criticizing 1993’s Posse for being “too politically correct” with its all-black cast (which, historically, would have been more plausible). Both before and following the Civil War, many black men fled to the frontier for a cowboys’s life of freedom. The broad notion of “freedom” stitched into the seams of the Western canon has far more cultural significance than the genre has ever truly acknowledged.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

"The Right to Remain Silent"



"At his trial, Felix Garcia had no sign language interpreters, could not understand the testimony against him, nor the questions asked when he was on the stand...

Because we can’t say with certainty how many deaf prisoners exist, it’s impossible to prove that deaf people are a disproportionately incarcerated population. However, there are risk factors for the early deafened that arise in childhood and mirror the “pipeline” systems we understand to affect racial and socioeconomic minority populations in striking numbers...

Deaf inmates are punished for missing count or mealtimes, though the announcements are made over loudspeakers they cannot hear. They are beaten by guards for misunderstanding orders, and, when they successfully lip-read one interaction and fail the next, they are beaten for “feigning” their hearing loss. In addition, because prisons rarely provide certified ASL interpreters, the inmates struggle to defend themselves at disciplinary proceedings and have limited or no access to medical, mental health, or justice center professionals"




FB: "The ADA applies in prison, theoretically, but oversight is limited, given that it is extremely difficult for inmates to seek legal recourse. Assistive technology, including videophones with which to contact the outside world, are rarely available, and hearing aids are taken away as a form of punishment. Partly because of this lack of access to technology, the outside world hardly ever hears about the abuse of deaf inmates."

Monday, June 25, 2018

"Taraji P. Henson Made ‘Less Than 2 Percent’ of What Brad Pitt Did in Benjamin Button"



"Henson describes feeling humiliated by the process, but also pressured into taking the part, because of the scarcity of complex roles for black women. Henson writes:

The math really is pretty simple: there are way more talented black actresses than there are intelligent, meaningful roles for them, and we’re consistently charged with diving for the crumbs of the scraps, lest we starve.

This is exactly how a studio can get away with paying the person who’s name is third on the call sheet of a big-budget film less than 2 percent what it’s paying the person whose name is listed first."


Sunday, June 24, 2018

"The crimes against dopamine"

"Say you wandered into my house unannounced and, instead of throwing you out on your ear, I offered you a chocolate biscuit (McVities, obviously). Your dopamine neurons would burst into life, spiking dopamine. They signalled the error between what you predicted (being forcibly ejected with a hoof to the bum) and what you received (a nice biscuit). This prediction error was in your favour – it was a positive error.

Say I asked you to turn up at my house at 3 o’clock so I could you give you a chocolate biscuit. You turn up at 3 o’clock, and I give you the promised biscuit. What do your dopamine neurons do? Sod all. You predicted you’d get a biscuit at 3 o’clock, you got a biscuit at 3 o’clock; all is right with the world. Nothing surprising is going on. There was no error.

What if, when you turned up at 3 o’clock, I didn’t give you that chocolate biscuit? What if I just blithely ignored your presence instead? Then your dopamine neurons would briefly pause their activity, stopping the release of dopamine. They signalled the error between what you predicted (a chocolate biscuit) and what you received (nothing). This prediction error was not in your favour – it was a negative error... 

And that slow dopamine? The slowly changing, but always low, concentration soup of dopamine? It signals how motivated you are to work. The higher the concentration of this dopamine soup, the harder rats work for food. Take that dopamine soup right down, and rats won’t budge off their backsides to work for food. Dopamine soup is for wanting; is for signalling to your neurons: commit to this course of action. Not happiness... 

There’s no getting away from the fact that the way dopamine works in the brain is complex. We know that this fast and slow split is not as simple as we’d like. For example, it seems there are some dopamine neurons that use their fast firing to affect movement. On the one hand, this is potentially fantastic, as it helps make sense of why the loss of dopamine neurons in Parkinson’s disease causes movement problems. On the other, it does not fit with an error signal. It seems that the error signal is carried by a separate set of dopamine neurons."


So, I have this imediate reaction like 'no, dopamine is incredibly core and important!'. But I realize that my education never started from first principles on neurotransmitters, it presented the chemicals that are historically important to neuroscience research and the ones that are a focus of study right now. But I couldn't say which are the most widespread of involved in the most functions or cause the most dysfunction when absent... Or whatever quality would make a neurotransmitter particularly special.

But anyway, this is a Great description of what I think is cool and compelling about dopamine. 


FB: "There are so many other brain chemicals to chose from, we can guarantee the current fixation on dopamine is just a fad. Mark my words, soon it will by neuropeptide Y: NPY Diet! NPY Dressing! NPY Brain Training! Many more crimes are yet to be committed against poor defenseless brain chemicals."

Saturday, June 23, 2018

"Have We Been Thinking About Willpower the Wrong Way for 30 Years?"



"New research proposes another explanation for why we run out of steam. In a study conducted by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. Those participants who did not see willpower as finite did not show signs of ego depletion.
It appears ego depletion may be just another example of the way belief drives behavior... 

Perhaps the idea of ego depletion caught on because it satisfies a need to justify why we sometimes do things we know we shouldn’t, such as slacking off at work when we should be finishing a project.
But rather than looking for a hidden willpower gas tank in our heads that doesn’t exist, perhaps we should accept that we are fragile, distractible beings and cut ourselves some slack. Perhaps our flagging energies and wandering minds are trying to tell us something... 

Feelings are our bodies’ way of conveying information that our conscious minds might miss. When a lack of mental energy is chronic, we should listen to our willpower just as we should listen to our emotions — as a source of insight."


FB: "Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, believes willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what’s happening to us and how we feel. Viewing willpower through this lens has profound implications."

Friday, June 22, 2018

"Eliminating competition: Poison and mating regulate male-roundworm populations"



"Mating-induced death, which affects both sexes and many other Caenorhabditis species, may be an unavoidable consequence of reproduction, the researchers reported. Murphy and first author Cheng Shi, a Princeton postdoctoral research associate, reported in the journal Science in 2014 that female C. elegans perish after mating, a form of competition between males.
Male pheromone-dependent killing, however, is specific to males of hermaphroditic Caenorhabditisspecies. "We think it's a mechanism to get rid of males after they've been useful," Murphy said. The hermaphrodites have basically figured out a way to produce males when they need them for genetic diversity, and get rid of them again by making the males poison themselves... 

Mating-induced death results from the activation of genes — known as germline upregulation — the males normally never use that ultimately kill them, Murphy said. At the same time, germline upregulation and neurons seem to influence the production and reception of the male's deadly pheromone."

This delights me. 

Partially because of the science and the fact that I took a seminar from the PI and I really enjoy learning about this kind of research. 


But also because HaHa. 

Thursday, June 21, 2018

"The federal government has no idea how to grow marijuana. These photos prove it."



"Due to federal prohibition and regulations, all of the marijuana used for US research is provided by one facility at the University of Mississippi through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). But researchers have complained for years that the quality of marijuana that NIDA supplies is terrible — typically far below what you can get from state-legal medical or recreational marijuana markets or even the black market... 

The NIDA-provided marijuana was supposed to have 13 percent THC content, but the MAPS researchers’ own testing found it was closer to 8 percent. (In comparison, state-legal commercial marijuana is typically at 19 percent but can go up to 30 percent or more.)... 

One reason that pot remains a highly restricted, fully prohibited substance at the federal level is because there are no large-scale clinical trials proving its medical value and safety. But a major reason for the lack of large-scale clinical trials is that federal prohibition limits researchers’ access to good marijuana"



As a neurobiology researcher, this super pisses me off. 

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

"Your Company Expense Policies Are Hurting Women. Here's Why and How to Fix it"

"At most companies (and everywhere else I’ve worked), non-household expenses such as hotel stays, meals, transportation, and even laundry are reimbursable; expenses for maintaining your home while you are traveling or working (e.g. babysitting, cat sitting) are not. I have never been able to understand the difference between these groupings. If I incur an expense because I am doing something above and beyond for my company, shouldn’t my company pay for that expense? Does it matter if that expense happens inside my apartment or not?

Household expenses are not covered because expense policies (and IRS codes) are still biased toward men. Most of these policies were created when men were traveling, and women were home taking care of the kids...

The advertising industry loves to talk about the (lack of) balance of women in leadership, but there’s a lot of “admiring the problem,” and not enough action/financial investment that actually enables women to participate equally."



Decreasing inequality is an active, not passive, activity.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

"What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists"


"I put up a note on my blog offering physics consultation, including help with theory development: ‘Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.’
A week passed with nothing but jokes from colleagues, most of whom thought my post was a satire. No, no, I assured them, I’m totally serious; send me your crackpots, they’re welcome. In the second week I got two enquiries and, a little nervous, I took on my first customer. Then came a second. A third. And they kept coming... 
I haven’t learned any new physics in these conversations, but I have learned a great deal about science communication. My clients almost exclusively get their information from the popular science media. Often, they get something utterly wrong in the process. Once I hear their reading of an article about, say, space-time foam or black hole firewalls, I can see where their misunderstanding stems from. But they come up with interpretations that never would have crossed my mind when writing an article.
A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?... 

I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin."

Monday, June 18, 2018

"How non-English speakers are taught this crazy English grammar rule you know but have never heard of"



"Adjectives, writes the author, professional stickler Mark Forsyth, “absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”... 

The fact is, a lot of English grammar rules only come as a surprise to those who know them most intimately.
Learning rules doesn’t always work, however. Forsyth also takes issue with the rules we think we know, but which don’t actually hold true. In a lecture about grammar, he dismantles the commonly held English spelling mantra “I before E except after C.” It’s used to help people remember how to spell words like “piece,” but, Forsyth says, there are only 44 words that follow the rule, and 923 that don’t. His prime examples? “Their,” “being,” and “eight.”



Yes! I hate the "i before e" rule, I spent all of elementary school getting in my head about whether it was about exception or not. 

Sunday, June 17, 2018

"The Tetris Effect"


"When I was in fifth grade, we were sometimes allowed to use the computers in our school computer lab to play games. We were allowed to play them not because of them being fun or exciting but because they were “educational,” because they were supposed to teach us things about the world, things that would help us in the future, as we grew up. Most of them weren’t really games, it didn’t feel like, even if that’s what they were technically called. Just because you called typing or doing math problems a “game” didn’t make it a game, I didn’t think.

The game the boy is playing is an early arcade fighting game called Double Dragon in which two brothers kick and punch and grapple their way through hordes of anonymous enemies. When buying the bus ticket doesn’t work out, the brother pulls the boy away from the game to go but then, glancing back at the screen, he notices that in the short time he’s been playing, the boy has scored 50,000 points, an almost impossible amount. “How did you do that?” he asks. The boy is silent; he stares at the screen as it flashes his score. A young girl sitting nearby watches them, her face hidden behind an advertisement for sunscreen in Cosmopolitan.

“He didn’t regard himself as a tragedy; he thought, among other things, that his unusual personality enabled him to concentrate better than other people. All of it followed, in his mind, from the warping effects of his fake eye.”


FB: A beautiful essay that's hard to describe, sort of about a boy and the way his mind works and his obsession with video games and later his adulthood obsession with the stock market and it's all perfectly interwoven to really be about human systems and power and knowledge?


"My brother and I became addicted to cheating. After a certain point, to us, cheating was synonymous with playing; there was no separation between the two. At first we took out the Game Genie after every time we used it, only inserting it into the system again when we wanted to cheat on a particular game. After a few weeks, though, we just left it in there and didn’t take it out anymore. It stayed plugged into the system forever, its codes changing all our games and the way we played them. Once it was in the system, ultimately, there was no point in taking it out."

Saturday, June 16, 2018

"Intelligence: a history"



"The idea that intelligence could be quantified, like blood pressure or shoe size, was barely a century old when I took the test that would decide my place in the world. But the notion that intelligence could determine one’s station in life was already much older. It runs like a red thread through Western thought, from the philosophy of Plato to the policies of UK prime minister Theresa May. To say that someone is or is not intelligent has never been merely a comment on their mental faculties. It is always also a judgment on what they are permitted to do. Intelligence, in other words, is political... 

The late Australian philosopher and conservationist Val Plumwood has argued that the giants of Greek philosophy set up a series of linked dualisms that continue to inform our thought. Opposing categories such as intelligent/stupid, rational/emotional and mind/body are linked, implicitly or explicitly, to others such as male/female, civilised/primitive, and human/animal. These dualisms aren’t value-neutral, but fall within a broader dualism, as Aristotle makes clear: that of dominant/subordinate or master/slave. Together, they make relationships of domination, such as patriarchy or slavery, appear to be part of the natural order of things... 

This narrative of privilege might explain why, as the New York-based scholar and technologist Kate Crawford has noted, the fear of rogue AI seems predominant among Western white men. Other groups have endured a long history of domination by self-appointed superiors, and are still fighting against real oppressors. White men, on the other hand, are used to being at the top of the pecking order. They have most to lose if new entities arrive that excel in exactly those areas that have been used to justify male superiority."


I want to extend the end of this article, which asks us to imagine non-Western definitions of intelligence, and does that ~lazy thing of pointing at "Eastern philosophies" for a paragraph. 

But what is we just started over and asked ourselves what quality we were trying to define and for what purpose, who we are trying to define - if we are trying to group people and create hierarchical categories proactively, or retrospectively ascribe value. Or even if we ARE describing individuals, as opposed to some kind of emergent property of contexts and communities. 

Its current incarnation has just been so destructive 

Related: white people don't like meritocracy when it comes to Asians;

FB: "As well as determining what a person can do, their intelligence – or putative lack of it – has been used to decide what others can do to them. Throughout Western history, those deemed less intelligent have, as a consequence of that judgment, been colonised, enslaved, sterilised and murdered... 


This narrative of privilege might explain why, as the New York-based scholar and technologist Kate Crawford has noted, the fear of rogue AI seems predominant among Western white men."

Friday, June 15, 2018

"The Cost of Balancing Academia and Racism"



"At schools across the country, from the University of Missouri to Ithaca College to Stanford, students of color are showing that they feel disconnected from their respective schools, that implicit yet institutionalized racism creates emotional distance between them and their white peers and faculty. Being a black student on a predominantly white campus certainly doesn’t guarantee that the student will develop mental-health issues. However, various studies suggest that perceived or actual discrimination can make it hard for students of color to engage with their campus in the way that their white peers do...

By recognizing that uncomfortable campus climates can take a toll on black students’ mental health, perhaps colleges and universities will better understand the root causes behind the protests—unrest that some falsely interpret as responses to campus-specific controversies. Throughout these protests and subsequent discussions, a common thread appeared: College campuses haven’t shielded students of color from the effects of societal racism—and at times they have exacerbated it...

Framing the protests that have happened—and are likely to continue—on campuses as reflective in part of black student’s mental health raises at least one question about colleges’ handling of the racial tensions: Should colleges ask historically marginalized students to become grittier and more resilient, or should their focus be directed toward achieving greater racial justice so that black students do not have to compromise their mental and physical well-being by being resilient?"


Related: fix sexism by changing your brain


Fb: "Colleges rely on all the positive aspects of grit to define the “college experience” by paying attention only to its static definition: courage, resolve, the innate ability to bounce back from obstacles. But history, the researchers argue, has shown that the types of institutional biases that are at play in the U.S. education system are structured to devalue the work of students of color, which can’t be fixed with an extra dose of mental toughness"

Thursday, June 14, 2018

"10 Practical Ways to Support Someone Struggling Right Now"



"When you’re struggling, it’s hard to articulate exactly what you need. Sometimes, it’s difficult to even figure out what you need, let alone tell someone that you need it.
For many of us, it’s hard to ask for help even if we do know what we need. If your depression makes you feel worthless, it might also make you feel like you’re unworthy of help, or that you’re a burden to your loved ones.
One solution is to offer tangible suggestions instead of vague offers of support... 

Ensuring that your friend has nourishing, yummy food to eat is a really practical way to show you care.
And if you don’t have the time (or, uh, the talent) to go to their house and whip up something Chopped-worthy, ordering something for them is always an option... 

Ask someone if they need you to distract them. Make tangible suggestions, like: “Hey! Would you like to watch a movie together? Let’s go on a walk! Let’s craft together. Let’s go visit the animal shelter. Let’s take a long drive. Let’s sing show tunes really loudly! Come over and pet my kitten!”


Related: Ask to help comic

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

"The entire research literature on contagious yawning could be bogus"

"In a new paper, titled “Are Yawns Really Contagious? A Critique and Quantification of Yawn Contagion,” lead author Rohan Kapitány, a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University, argues that research on this topic suffers from a wide array of methodological problems and that these problems are so significant that they have almost certainly led to the mischaracterization of spontaneous, naturally occurring yawns as “contagious” ones. “The observation that yawning is contagious may have arisen as a consequence of our tendency to see patterns and causation where none exists, to misinterpret the clumpiness of randomness as something else,” he argues.. 

Kapitány’s yawns-aren’t-contagious case seems prima facie wrong. That yawns might spread from man to man is not some flashy theory concocted by psychologists in the 1980s but a widely held intuition that’s been around for millennia. “Why do men generally themselves yawn when they see others yawn?” asks the Problemata, an ancient text attributed to Aristotle. Even then, the question was phrased as if the fact of the phenomenon were self-evident. The idea spread and reappeared in Western literature and science over centuries... Then again, the mere fact that a view is widely held, or that it’s been held for many generations, does not make it true. Aristotle’s Problemata, for example, follows on its question about contagious yawns with another that now seems slightly out of date: “Why do men, while standing next to fire, have the desire to pee?” it asks."




FB: "When I talked to Kapitány on the phone, he suggested that what starts off as a fallacy could then sustain itself as a learned behavior—that we might yawn contagiously because we know that we’re supposed to yawn contagiously" 

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

""Positive thinking” has turned happiness into a duty and a burden, says a Danish psychologist"



"Happiness is simply not the appropriate response to many situations in life, says Brinkmann, whose Danish bestseller Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze is published in English by international publisher Polity this month. Even worse, faking it can leave us emotionally stunted.
“I believe our thoughts and emotions should mirror the world. When something bad happens, we should be allowed to have negative thoughts and feelings about it because that’s how we understand the world,” he says... 

“I think this is a dark side of positivity. Our feelings tend to become commodities and that means we’re very easily alienated from our feelings.”"



Why does it feel so much like this needed to be said? This is not a difficult concept. 

Monday, June 11, 2018

"Meet Mary Somerville: The Brilliant Woman for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined"



"That women should face such an Everestine climb toward inclusion and equality is a piece of curious and rather cruel cultural irony, for the very word “scientist” didn’t always have the overwhelmingly male connotations it has had in recent history. In fact, it was a coined for a woman — the Victorian polymath Mary Somerville (December 26, 1780–November 28, 1872), who had tutored pioneering computer programmer Ada Lovelace and later introduced her to Charles Babbage, thus sparking their legendary collaboration on the world’s first computer. Somerville’s 1834 treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences so impressed her peers, readers, and reviewers that “man of science” — the term used to refer to a person who had advanced the progress of knowledge — seemed suddenly inappropriate and obsolete... 

"According to Somerville’s biographer Kathryn Neeley, Whewell’s coinage of the word “scientist” was not meant to be merely a gender-neutral neutral term. Whewell wanted a word that actively celebrated “the peculiar illumination of the female mind”: the ability to synthesize separate fields into a single discipline.”"



FB: "In suggesting the term “scientist,” he emphasized its similarity to how the word “artist” is formed. Indeed, he had recognized in Somerville that singular creative genius of drawing connections between the seemingly disconnected, which is itself an artistic achievement."

Sunday, June 10, 2018

"Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine"



"Specializing in one part of the body isn’t what’s weird—it would be one thing if dentists were like dermatologists or cardiologists. The weird thing is that oral care is divorced from medicine’s education system, physician networks, medical records, and payment systems, so that a dentist is not just a special kind of doctor, but another profession entirely... 

the dental profession really became a profession in 1840 in Baltimore. That was when the first dental college in the world was opened, I found out, and that was thanks to the efforts of a couple of dentists who were kind of self-trained. Their names were Chapin Harris and Horace Hayden. They approached the physicians at the college of medicine at the University of Maryland in Baltimore with the idea of adding dental instruction to the medical course there, because they really believed that dentistry was more than a mechanical challenge, that it deserved status as a profession, and a course of study, and licensing, and peer-reviewed scientific consideration. But the physicians, the story goes, rejected their proposal and said the subject of dentistry was of little consequence... 

Otto: One of the most dramatic examples is that more than a million people a year go to emergency rooms with dental problems. Not like they’ve had a car accident, but like a toothache or some kind of problem you could treat in a dental office. It costs the system more than a billion dollars a year for these visits. And the patients very seldom get the kind of dental care they need for their underlying dental problems because dentists don’t work in emergency rooms very often. The patient gets maybe a prescription for an antibiotic and a pain medicine and is told to go visit his or her dentist. But a lot of these patients don’t have dentists. So there’s this dramatic reminder here that your oral health is part of your overall health, that drives you to the emergency room but you get to this gap where there’s no care...

But, yeah, there’s this marketplace issue. Private organized dentistry protects the marketplace for care and the power of private practitioners to provide it but that leaves a lot of people out. Stories like the battle of this dental hygienist in South Carolina, or the battle that’s going on over these midlevel providers called dental therapists in a number of states, really illustrate how fiercely that terrain is protected."



FB: "One dental researcher said at a meeting I was at, “Back in the days of the bubonic plague, medicine captured why people die. We don’t capture why teeth die.” There’s this gap in the way we understand oral diseases and the way we approach tooth decay. We still approach it like it’s a surgical problem that needs to be fixed, rather than a disease that needs to be prevented and treated. And we see tooth decay through a moral lens, almost. We judge people who have oral disease as moral failures, rather than people who are suffering from a disease."

Saturday, June 9, 2018

"The Still-Misunderstood Shape of the Clitoris"



"It wasn’t until 1981 that the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Clinics created anatomically correct images of the clitoris. Published in A New View of a Woman’s Body, the images were part of a wider attempt to provide thorough, accurate information to women to support their health. Decades later, in 2009, the first 3-D sonography of the stimulated clitoris was completed by French Researchers.

Ignorance persists today. As the University of Western Sydney clinician and physiotherapy researcher Jane Chalmers explains, the subject of the clitoris is still avoided or ignored. “Several major medical textbooks omit the clitoris, or label it on diagrams but have no description of it as an organ,” she says. “This is in great contrast to the penis that is always covered in-depth in these texts.”... 

Determined to do something about the problem, Fillod partnered with a Toulouse-based documentary-film production company to prepare a series of videos with alternative materials. In the process, Fillod realized that a life-size 3-D model of the clitoris would be a useful visual aid. In French biology textbooks,” she explains, “the clitoris is never correctly pictured in the drawings showing the female genital apparatus, and even quite often not pictured at all.”


So much bigger than I thought!


And now that I think about it, I just recently had a lecture on pathologies of the reproductive system and there was a big old diagram of the penis but the female diagram didn't have anything past the uterus. And it's not like we talked about the penis at all...