Tonight! Yep. Student performances, a silence auction, plenty of food. 25 bucks is what we are asking, but if that is too much, please, just make a donation.
All the money goes directly into the student activities fund which the kids use for field trips, projects that benefit the whole community, guest instructors, charities, and other worthy things.
The whole affair starts revving up around five p.m. See you there.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
New President, New FDA chief....
Dan Carlat goes over the candidates. This very important. After years of the revolving door between industry and the Food and Drug administration there is a chance that someone actually critical of falsifying data, paying off doctors, and deceiving consumers might be appointed.
I’m not sure who I would pick. I personally know Dr. Steve Nissen and think he would be an fantastic choice, because he amply understands the challenges and imperfections of the FDA and has clear plans for fixing the agency. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that he has never been afraid to call out drug companies for hiding inconvenient data about drug side effects. Dr. Nissen, if you’ll recall, was the one who broke the Avandia story . But he is hardly anti-pharmaceuticals. As chair of cardiovascular medicine of the Cleveland Clinic, he has conducted industry-funded research, and he has focused on using intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging for treating coronary atherosclerosis. His disclosures are listed here, but note that he receives no personal income from these relationships, insisting that companies donate all honoraria to charity.
Susan Wood is another great choice. A heroine when it comes to women’s rights, Wood was the FDA’s Director of the Office of Women's Health until 2005, when she resigned on principle over the delay in approving “Plan B,” an emergency over–the–counter contraception (not to be confused with the “abortion pill,” RU-486). She is currently a professor in the School of Public Health at GW University. You can read up on her here and here. As far as I know, she has no financial relationships with any pharmaceutical company, and she is the only candidate who is not an M.D., for better or for worse.
Josh Sharfstein, who is currently head of the Baltimore Health Department, has an interesting psychiatric connection in that his father, Steve Sharfstein, is the former president of the American Psychiatric Association. Steve Sharfstein made a splash by publishing this column in which he urged clearer boundaries between physicians and industry enticements. Josh Sharfstein has an equally strong sense of ethics, and has in the past called Pfizer onto the carpet for improper promotion (he once alerted the New England Journal of Medicine that Pfizer was inviting docs to a “rack ‘em up and toss ‘em down” event including billiards and lots of alcohol). He has also worked on the staff of Representative Henry Waxman, who is now chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Sources tell me that he has no financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry.
The only truly bizarre entry on Obama’s short list is Dr. Robert Califf, vice chancellor for clinical research and professor in the cardiology department at Duke. I have no problem with his experience and extraordinary academic achievements. And I hesitate to criticize a fellow grad of UCSF Medical School. But c’mon folks, look at these industry disclosures. He took money—lots of money--from 18 different pharmaceutical or device firms. Most of this was not for research, but for consulting and speaking, including CME. If Dr. Califf believes that it is ethical for physicians to help drug companies market their products, that’s his own business. But to elevate him to a position in which he is the country’s chief watchdog over unsafe medications and foods seems a dangerous move. With money from 18 drug companies padding his bank account, he will presumably spend most of his FDA career recusing himself from crucial decisions. Not a good idea.
I have good feeling about how this will end up.
I’m not sure who I would pick. I personally know Dr. Steve Nissen and think he would be an fantastic choice, because he amply understands the challenges and imperfections of the FDA and has clear plans for fixing the agency. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that he has never been afraid to call out drug companies for hiding inconvenient data about drug side effects. Dr. Nissen, if you’ll recall, was the one who broke the Avandia story . But he is hardly anti-pharmaceuticals. As chair of cardiovascular medicine of the Cleveland Clinic, he has conducted industry-funded research, and he has focused on using intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging for treating coronary atherosclerosis. His disclosures are listed here, but note that he receives no personal income from these relationships, insisting that companies donate all honoraria to charity.
Susan Wood is another great choice. A heroine when it comes to women’s rights, Wood was the FDA’s Director of the Office of Women's Health until 2005, when she resigned on principle over the delay in approving “Plan B,” an emergency over–the–counter contraception (not to be confused with the “abortion pill,” RU-486). She is currently a professor in the School of Public Health at GW University. You can read up on her here and here. As far as I know, she has no financial relationships with any pharmaceutical company, and she is the only candidate who is not an M.D., for better or for worse.
Josh Sharfstein, who is currently head of the Baltimore Health Department, has an interesting psychiatric connection in that his father, Steve Sharfstein, is the former president of the American Psychiatric Association. Steve Sharfstein made a splash by publishing this column in which he urged clearer boundaries between physicians and industry enticements. Josh Sharfstein has an equally strong sense of ethics, and has in the past called Pfizer onto the carpet for improper promotion (he once alerted the New England Journal of Medicine that Pfizer was inviting docs to a “rack ‘em up and toss ‘em down” event including billiards and lots of alcohol). He has also worked on the staff of Representative Henry Waxman, who is now chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Sources tell me that he has no financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry.
The only truly bizarre entry on Obama’s short list is Dr. Robert Califf, vice chancellor for clinical research and professor in the cardiology department at Duke. I have no problem with his experience and extraordinary academic achievements. And I hesitate to criticize a fellow grad of UCSF Medical School. But c’mon folks, look at these industry disclosures. He took money—lots of money--from 18 different pharmaceutical or device firms. Most of this was not for research, but for consulting and speaking, including CME. If Dr. Califf believes that it is ethical for physicians to help drug companies market their products, that’s his own business. But to elevate him to a position in which he is the country’s chief watchdog over unsafe medications and foods seems a dangerous move. With money from 18 drug companies padding his bank account, he will presumably spend most of his FDA career recusing himself from crucial decisions. Not a good idea.
I have good feeling about how this will end up.
Thursday, and a couple of reminders...
Musicians and other artists should be sure to check out the discussion on the TASmusicwblog.
And Remember: Our Annual Fundraiser is Friday Evening! Student performances, coffee, tea, and a silent auction.
And Remember: Our Annual Fundraiser is Friday Evening! Student performances, coffee, tea, and a silent auction.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Welcome, Wodens Day
There are quite a few interesting classes going on at TAS these days. They are small, and modest; some are very successful, with the students doing excellent work and making progress, some are mixed. There is a great deal of up and down in teaching (in anything) and today I am feeling both.
The long view is that one kid after another turns out beautifully. It takes time and it requires a teacher to have faith in the student. Without that, a young person can't get a sense of what is possible.
Do all people this age have such resistance to structure? Is writing so hard for even those without obvious difficulties? Why is it that most of the students in my psychology class are so clueless about writing outlines? Keeping the demands up is the other end of the dialectic: expectations are part of having faith in someone.
When I watch Elizabeth Quigley, who has taught for 35 years and never seems to head to the well and find it dry, I get a clear idea of what I have yet to understand. We have another wonderful person coming to present us with some new perspectives in April. And next week, we have a workshop in differential learning, in teaching to different abilities. Sometimes I resist the inservice "culture" of modern education. Much of it is professionalized hooey. But some of that resistance is plain old resistance on my own part, and very much in parallel with my students'.
In our psychology class we are currently discussing sexuality and gender. What a wonderful subject to discuss with 17 and 18 year olds. I frame the discussion, and try to point out what is down the road, both in a college gender studies class and in their lives and the mature and their relationships deepen. We speak frankly and in considerable detail. The students are motivated and insightful.
I think of the storm my own mother provoked in 1975 when she and a friend began teaching sex education at our parish in Stamford, Ct. Rumors swirled that they were anti-catholic, and actually lesbians. But they won, they kept teaching, and people came around.
We still have a long way to go. And biology apparently isn't helping:
...in a "shocking" finding, [Susan] Fiske (a researcher at Princeton) noted, some of the men studied showed no activity in the part of the brain [while viewing pictures of bikini clad women] that usually responds when a person ponders another's intentions.
This means that these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds," Fiske said. "The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens."
Here is the National Geographic link. I found it in an Italian paper, which, of course, is festooned with pictures of scantily clad women. I am surprised it didn't receive more copy in the U.S. I am also surprised it was covered (as it were) in Italy.
The article doesn't say that such patterns in the brain are fixed, but rather that men who test as "hostile sexists" had quite different processing patterns. The implications of this are very interesting. Are they retrainable? Probably. Is there a history of trauma amongst the most "hostile" of these men? Or is there a relationship between learning new patterns and early disruption of attachment with a caretaker? Fascinating. But despite the deterministic tone of the article, i.e. standard issue simple-minded copy making, it is nothing of the sort. There is a subset of men whose attitudes are deeply ingrained and not counter balanced by the kind of processing usually seen in healthy, mature males.
The article doesn't say that such patterns in the brain are fixed, but rather that men who test as "hostile sexists" had quite different processing patterns. The implications of this are very interesting. Are they retrainable? Probably. Is there a history of trauma amongst the most "hostile" of these men? Or is there a relationship between learning new patterns and early disruption of attachment with a caretaker? Fascinating. But despite the deterministic tone of the article, i.e. standard issue simple-minded copy making, it is nothing of the sort. There is a subset of men whose attitudes are deeply ingrained and not counter balanced by the kind of processing usually seen in healthy, mature males.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Perhaps a fundamental assumption?
from a brief talk this morning in meditation:
"The ability to choose the focus of your attention is the most important skill you can develop."
Perhaps this, and the ability to quietly perceive the world around you, are the things we should always attend to at TAS.
"The ability to choose the focus of your attention is the most important skill you can develop."
Perhaps this, and the ability to quietly perceive the world around you, are the things we should always attend to at TAS.
Bias
If, as is often said these days, that reality has a liberal bias, then nature has a mathematical one:
Mathematics: The Only True Universal Language
On a related note, I have been listening to Richard Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces"...if you ever need a primer on physics, this is a great place to start.
Mathematics: The Only True Universal Language
On a related note, I have been listening to Richard Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces"...if you ever need a primer on physics, this is a great place to start.
Welcome to Tuesday morning...
There is quite a bit to comment on around school these days, and I am inclined to do it. This takes some thinking, because one must do so only generally, to preserve everyone's privacy. For now let us say that it is busy in such a way that points out our school's weaknesses, and as such points out clearly a direction of growth. Some reflections will follow.
Some of you may find interesting an open discussion that musician Vic Rawlings and I are having over at TASmusicblogw. We are trying to rejigger the music program. Buffy Morgan, one of our art teachers, is helping rework the art program. Both will eventually more deeply rooted in zen practice. We hope.
Our yearly fundraiser is this Friday. Please come to the school, see the performances, and buy at the silence auction. All the money goes to the student activities fund. Some of that goes to our "Books through Bars" program and our gift raising for a family shelter during Christmas.
Finally, every wonder about the relationship between population, metro area, patent application, and wealth? Check out this great graphic and article over at The Atlantic.
Some of you may find interesting an open discussion that musician Vic Rawlings and I are having over at TASmusicblogw. We are trying to rejigger the music program. Buffy Morgan, one of our art teachers, is helping rework the art program. Both will eventually more deeply rooted in zen practice. We hope.
Our yearly fundraiser is this Friday. Please come to the school, see the performances, and buy at the silence auction. All the money goes to the student activities fund. Some of that goes to our "Books through Bars" program and our gift raising for a family shelter during Christmas.
Finally, every wonder about the relationship between population, metro area, patent application, and wealth? Check out this great graphic and article over at The Atlantic.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Semi-nonsense, as the press simplifies memory research
Here it is:
(Reuters) - A widely available blood pressure pill could one day help people erase bad memories, perhaps treating some anxiety disorders and phobias, according to a Dutch study published on Sunday.
(Reuters) - A widely available blood pressure pill could one day help people erase bad memories, perhaps treating some anxiety disorders and phobias, according to a Dutch study published on Sunday.
The generic beta-blocker propranolol significantly weakened people's fearful memories of spiders among a group of healthy volunteers who took it, said Merel Kindt, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who led the study.
"We could show that the fear response went away, which suggests the memory was weakened," Kindt said in a telephone interview.
There is quite a bit wrong with the article, but this highlight does it justice. For instance, are "bad memories" really a problem for anyone? That vacation that didn't go so well, or that time I lost my keys and spent a day wondering around my Boston neighborhood until my roommate got home? Or are we talking about trauma here?
The article, and the researchers, make a huge leap from a "mild shock" and "pictures of spiders" (which is merely a type of conditioning) and post-traumatic stress disorder, which may involve and alter entire sub-systems of the brain, including those that involve intense emotions, information processing, planning, and dissociation. Perhaps, as Jennifer Freyd suggests, true trauma is characterized by an altogether different sort of memory processing. The above study may be just a start, but it is also trivial and, I believe, over-generalized. What bugs me is that it assumes that all memory, no matter what the level of arousal or what the amount of disruption it causes in one's life, is essentially the same. This seems intuitively wrong. Being phobic of spiders is different than having been tortured.
"The Coming Dark Age"
Maggie Jackson, a researcher and author, is interview in Wired magazine:
While there is still debate among attention scientists, most now conclude that there are three types of attention. The first is orienting — the flashlight of your mind. In the case of visual attention, it involves parts of the brain including the parietal lobe, a brain area related to sensory processing. To orient to new stimuli, two parts of the parietal lobe work with brain sections related to frontal eye fields. This is what develops in an infants' brain, allowing them to focus on something new in their environment.
The second type of attention spans the spectrum of response states, from sleepiness to complete alertness. The third type is executive attention: planning, judgment, resolving conflicting information. The heart of this is the anterior cingulate — an ancient, tiny part of the brain that is now at the heart of our higher-order skills. It's executive attention that lets us move us beyond our impulsive selves, to plan for the future and understand abstraction.
We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli: Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. So in this very fast-paced world, it's easy and tempting to always react to the new thing. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals.
The anterior cingulate is a pretty fascinating part of the brain- these days I am reading a lot about trauma and its neurological consequences and it comes up all the time- and I am intrigued that an "ancient" part of the brain is so key to the functions we consider most human. Another intriguing point might be that our gadgets exploit a similar reward and novelty system that drugs do, and that the very organ systems involved are so fundamental that they are difficult to alter after a certain critical window. For instance, doing everything you can as a parent to prevent drug and alcohol use in early adolescence is crucial, as early addictions become life long struggles. Will it be the same with our futz-pods and futz-phones?
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Presidents' Day, early edition
Tomorrow, due to busing complexities, I will picking up a bunch of students in the school van. This means I will have less time than ever to get my morning in, so an early post to tide you all over until later in the morning.
This blog is perfectly analogous to a garage band. More hobby than vision.
As the resident American History teacher, a y-chromosomer, and a member of my generation (lover of lists, maps, and all things almanac), I bring you C-span's presidential rankings, with which I mightily disgree...Moreover, being born in 1965, I have survived NO SUCESSFUL PRESIDENCIES! So I think Presidents' Day is pretty silly.
the top 15:
Abraham Lincoln (of course)
This blog is perfectly analogous to a garage band. More hobby than vision.
As the resident American History teacher, a y-chromosomer, and a member of my generation (lover of lists, maps, and all things almanac), I bring you C-span's presidential rankings, with which I mightily disgree...Moreover, being born in 1965, I have survived NO SUCESSFUL PRESIDENCIES! So I think Presidents' Day is pretty silly.
the top 15:
Abraham Lincoln (of course)
George Washington (sui generis)
Franklin D. Roosevelt (of course)
Theodore Roosevelt (with Lincon, the most brilliant, and certainly the nuttiest. Notice that the modern GOP never mentions him)
Harry S. Truman (give me a break. why why why?)
John F. Kennedy (again, give me a break. If TR gave us modern solutions, JFK passed on most of the problems of the ensuing decade)
Thomas Jefferson (as president, dubious; a bit like Polk. A great man, though, like Ben Franklin)
Dwight D. Eisenhower (c'mon! Did a bunch of 70 year olds make this list?)
Woodrow Wilson (pretentious moralizer who lied us into war. And got pwned by the rest of the world's powers. Sound familiar?)
Ronald Reagan (I promise you he'll be lower and lower on this list. What was his lasting achievement?)
Lyndon B. Johnson (tragic. epic. Who knows where he belongs.)
James K. Polk (violent imperialist who did what he said he was going to do. Lincoln cut his political teeth opposing Polk's Texas policy)
Andrew Jackson (violent imperialist who was nevertheless the first truly democratically elected president. The poor voted for him. They couldn't really vote before.)
James Monroe (stumbled into the War of 1812)
Bill Clinton (will sink like a stone. A very middling man.)
and now the bottom:
Rutherford B. Hayes
Herbert Hoover (He orchestrated the relief effort in Europe after WWI and was one of the most admired men in the world at the time. He couldn't adjust to the new era, that is, 1929.)
John Tyler
George W. Bush (natch, and will drop. Bush will bounce off the floor that Buchanan provides, of course, only if we recover from this economic mess.)
Millard Fillmore
Warren G. Harding
William Henry Harrison
Franklin D. Pierce
Andrew Johnson
James Buchanan (He utterly failed to lead in the years prior to the Civil War. Pennsylvania's only president is a more than adequate stand-in for its political culture of the last 150 years.)
What a bunch of overmatched reactionaries.
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