Slo-blogging Friday

As has become practice, not much on these boards Friday. Blogging will resume on Monday.

Fundraiser Success

I don't have the money numbers, but it was a good night for our growing community. Several students performed, and several others auctioned off some of their drawings and paintings. We drew more than a few first time visitors, and were blessed by the appearance of several former students and graduates.
This is one of two big events for TAS over the course of the school year. We will be developing another: an opening celebration for sometime in September. One of my thoughts on this is to make into a commitment ceremony of sorts.

For instance, what if seniors read aloud what is required of them and asserted their commitment to those goals? What if another older student described the two way responsibilities of the teacher-student relationship? There are many ways of approaching this, but the goal would be to underscore the importance of committing to a school year at TAS.

This is something a student group can take up and shape decisively. An excellent way for this year's senior to pass on what they have come to understand.

Big Pharma, same old story.

Why is this so often the pattern?

A powerful drug is developed with some benefits for a difficult to treat population.

It has significant side effects, which are downplayed.

Those side effects have huge impacts on the quality of studies done on the medication (e.g. drop out rates).

The studies are designed to make the drug look more effective than it is.

Studies that indicate no or little benefit (especially when balanced against the side effects) are aggressively suppressed.

The drug is marketed to populations that have not been studied for the drug's safety or efficacy (depressed adolescents, etc).

The lines between marketing and the research are obliterated by a web of professional and personal relationships, by advertising money, travel benefits, and other blandishments.

Finally, of course, thousands of people are grievously injured.

Again, from our friend at the Inquirer:

Does the world have the right to know about negative studies on AstraZeneca's potent antipsychotic drug Seroquel?

Or whether company representatives promoted the drug for unapproved uses?

And what about details of sexual relationships between Wayne Macfadden, AstraZeneca's former U.S. medical director for Seroquel, and two women who researched and wrote papers supporting the drug's safety and efficacy?

A federal judge in Orlando may answer those questions as soon as today in a case stemming from personal-injury claims by 15,000 people that Seroquel triggered weight gain, diabetes, and other health problems.

College?

Pennsylvania is among the most regressive states it terms of student college debt and the cost of a state college education. It seems that these issues, which are not only important to people, will eventually cost the state mightily in terms of the kind of folks who stay in Pennsylvania, raise families, start businesses, do research, and all the things that make for a dynamic, healthy economy. For 14 years, there has been little leadership on this issue. Gov. Ridge blew it and Gov. Rendell is currently blowing it.
We has numerous former students who simply cannot afford college. They don't dare shave their work hours to even take a few classes. There are in real fix and their expectations for themselves are shrinking mightily. This is tragic.
But perhaps there are options to consider, as per this morning's Inquirer article:

A private university in New Hampshire is offering students a "no-frills" option: more than a 50 percent cut in tuition if they take courses at a satellite campus and forgo many amenities.

In New Jersey, Richard Stockton College will allow students to take from 12 to 20 credits for a flat rate.

And elsewhere, some colleges are running three-year degree programs, so students can get through school more quickly and save money, using a model common in Europe.

The idea of less costly or "no-frills" universities - as proposed by Pennsylvania last month - is under discussion and in some cases is playing out in other communities around the country, as the economy worsens and the price tag for higher education continues to rise.

"It's an idea whose time has come," said Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a Washington think tank. "Right now, we're in a recession, and everyone is more cost-conscious than ever. College costs are rising faster than people's incomes, and this can't continue."

There has been quite alot of good reporting in the Philly papers lately.

Thursday! Some Good Sense from Congress...

from Hilzoy (Washington Monthly):

Yesterday, the House passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, which would make it illegal to "import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce" any nonhuman primate. (Humans are covered by the 13th Amendment.) This is one of those small-bore but really, really good bills that I've been rooting for for years. I wrote about it back in 2005; since I rather like my original post, here's a compressed and updated version, rather than a whole new one.

Owning primates as pets is a bad idea. Unlike dogs and cats, who have had thousands of years to adapt to us, nonhuman primates have the psyches they need to survive in a jungle or on a savannah, not in a human home. Most people buy them when they are cute little babies. At this point, like infants of most (mammalian) species, they are tractable and submissive. However, this (predictably) doesn't last. When they hit puberty, many of them become aggressive, and try to start dominance fights with members of what they think of as their pack (i.e., your household.) Sometimes they start with the pack's weakest members (i.e., your children.) Since most apes and monkeys are very strong, and have vicious bites, this is not pleasant.

Rolling Back One of the Worst Trends Ever

How stupid and counter-intuitive can a education "policy" get? Zero Tolerance is certainly among the worst. But to my mind, it must be how recess got pushed out of the school day. I doubt anyone actually positions themselves as "anti-recess", but when you pack a school day with mandates and testing that is going to be the result.
Finally, a little empirical support for something that most of us knew:

Recess is crucial for learning.

In the Pediatrics study, 30 percent were found to have little or no daily recess. Another report, from a children’s advocacy group, found that 40 percent of schools surveyed had cut back at least one daily recess period.

Also, teachers often punish children by taking away recess privileges. That strikes Dr. Barros as illogical. “Recess should be part of the curriculum,” she said. “You don’t punish a kid by having them miss math class, so kids shouldn’t be punished by not getting recess.”

Last month, Harvard researchers reported in The Journal of School Health that the more physical fitness tests children passed, the better they did on academic tests. The study, of 1,800 middle school students, suggests that children can benefit academically from physical activity during gym class and recess.

A small study of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder last year found that walks outdoors appeared to improve scores on tests of attention and concentration. Notably, children who took walks in natural settings did better than those who walked in urban areas, according to the report, published online in August in The Journal of Attention Disorders. The researchers found that a dose of nature worked as well as a dose of medication to improve concentration, or even better.

Here's the article. Hopefully we can turn the page on this nonsense and start making policy based on how children learn and not on what we want them to learn.

No Post Tuesday. No School.

Sorry, people.

Complex symptoms, simple answers, difficult changes

There is an unwieldy header for you. When parents or students describe the difficulties they are having with mood, concentration, irritability, obsessiveness, or any of the host of modern ills I usually inquire about three things: what do they eat and drink and when; how satisfactory are their primary relationships, and how well do they sleep. I have long believed that if one can address these three factors, life is going to be pretty good.

As the following article indicates, the causal arrow may point more in one direction than most clinicians have long believed: that sleeping problems may cause many of the so-called mood and though disorders.

This is a big worry- many of my students drink way too much caffeine. Not just in coffee (which I think is fine for the morning)(and which I think should be studied side by side with Ritilan for relief of ADD type symptoms) but in those crazy super-charged soft drinks that are loaded with sugar and taurine as well.
Our school day begins at nine. I wish we could start later. They need sleep. How much mood and attention difficulty is really just a function of sleep? How many car accidents?

Take anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don't sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems. The good news is that sleep treatments could help or even cure some of these patients. Shockingly, it also means that many people, including children, could be taking psychoactive drugs that cannot help them and might even be harmful.

No one knows how many people might fall into this category. "That is very frightening," says psychologist Matt Walker from the University of California, Berkeley. "Wouldn't you think that it would be important for us as a society to understand whether 3 per cent, 5 per cent or 50 per cent of people diagnosed with psychiatric problems are simply suffering from sleep abnormalities?"

First, we'd need to know how and to what extent sleep disorders could be responsible for psychiatric problems. In the few years since sleep researchers identified the problem, they have made big strides in doing just that.

Doctors studying psychiatric disorders noticed long ago that erratic sleep was somehow connected. Adults with depression, for instance, are five times as likely as the average person to have difficulty breathing when asleep, while between a quarter and a half of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suffer from sleep complaints, compared with just 7 per cent of other children.

Until recently, however, the assumption that poor sleep was a symptom rather than a cause of mental illness was so strong that nobody questioned it. "It was just so easy to say about a patient, well, he's depressed or schizophrenic, of course he's not sleeping well - and never to ask whether there could be a causal relationship the other way," says Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher at Harvard University. Even when studies did seem to point in the other direction, the findings were largely overlooked, he says.

Read the whole article. It is well worth your time.

Some Thoughts

One of our most wonderfullest graduates turned up at the coffeehouse Friday night. She was one of the students I visited Italy with last spring. Now that I have a new pet dove sitting on my head (who gazes lonely at our other outside pigeons) I was thinking of St. Mark's in Venice, and came across this passage from the early 1900's:

In Venice the pigeons do not allow you to forget them, even if one desired to forget a bird that is so intimately connected with the city and with a great ceremony of that ancient republic which has passed away. They belong so entirely to the place, and especially to the great square; they have made their homes for so many generations among the carvings of the Basilica, at the feet of the bronze horses, and under the massive cornices of the New Procuratie, that the great Campanile itself is hardly more essential to the character of the piazza than are these delicate denizens of Saint Mark's.

In the structure of the ducal palace, the wants of the pigeons have been taken into account, and near the two great wells which stand in the inner courtyard little cups of Istrian stone have been let into the pavement for the pigeons to drink from. On cold, frosty mornings you may see them tapping disconsolately at the ice which covers their drinking troughs, and may win their thanks by breaking it for them. Or if the wind blows hard from the east, the pigeons sit in long rows under the eaves of the Procuratie; their necks drawn into their shoulders, and the neck feathers ruffled round their heads, till they have lost all shape, and look like a row of slate-colored cannon-balls.

From Saint Mark's the pigeons have sent out colonies to the other churches and campi of Venice. They have crossed the Grand Canal, and roost and croon among the volutes of the Salute, or, in mild weather, wheel high and airly above its domes. They have even found their way to Malamocco and Mazzorbo; so that all Venice in the sea owns and protects its sacred bird. But it is in Saint Mark's that the pigeons "most do congregate"; and one can not enter the piazza, and stand for a moment at the corner, without hearing the sudden rush of wings upon the air, and seeing the white under-feathers of their pinions, as the doves strike backward to' check their flight, and flutter down at one's feet in expectation of peas or grain. They are boundlessly greedy, and will stuff themselves till they can hardly walk, and the little red feet stagger under the loaded crop. They are not virtuous, but they are very beautiful.

There is a certain fitness in the fact that the dove should be the sacred bird of the sea city. Both English "dove" and Latin "columba" mean the diver; and the dove uses the air much as the fish uses the sea, it glides, it dives, it shoots through its airy ocean ; it hovers against the breeze, or presses its breast against the sirocco storm, as you may see fish poised in their course against the stream; then with a sudden turn it relaxes the strain and sweeps away down the wind. The dove is an airy emblem of the sea upon which Venice and the Venetians live, but more than that—the most permanent quality in the color of the lagoons, where the lights are always shifting, is the dove-tone of sea and sky; a tone which holds all colors in solution, and out of which they emerge as the water-ripples or the cloud flakes pass—just as the colors are shot and varied on a young dove's neck.

There is some doubt as to the origin of these flocks of pigeons which shelter in Saint Mark's. According to. one story, Henry Dandolo, the Crusader, was besieging Candia; he received valuable information from the interior of the is-land by means of carrier-pigeons, and, later on, sent news of his successes home to Venice by the same messengers. In recognition of these services the government resolved to maintain the carriers at the public cost; and the flocks of to-day are the descendants of the fourteenth-century pigeons. The more probable tradition, how-ever, is that which connects these pigeons with the antique ceremonies of Palm Sunday.

On that festival the Doge made the tour of the piazza, accompanied by all the officers of State, the Patriarch, the foreign ambassadors, the silver trumpets, all the pomp of the ducal dignity. Among other largess of that day, a number of pigeons, weighted by pieces of paper tied to their legs, used to be let loose from the gallery where the bronze horses stand, above the western door of the church. Most of the birds were easily caught by the crowd, and kept for their Easter dinner; but some escaped, and took refuge in the upper parts of the palace and among the domes of Saint Mark's. The superstition of the people was easily touched, and the birds that had sought the protection of the saint were thenceforth dedicated to the patron of Venice. The charge of supporting them was committed to the superintendents of the corn stores, and the usual hour for feeding the pigeons was nine o'clock in the morning. During the revolution of 1797, the birds fared as badly as the aristocracy, and were left to take care of themselves; but when matters settled down again the feeding of the pigeons was resumed by the municipality, and takes place at two in the afternoon, tho the incessant largess of strangers can leave the birds but little appetite for their regular meal.

In spite of the multitudes of pigeons that haunt the squares of the city, a dead pigeon is as rare to see as a dead donkey on the mainland. It is a pious opinion that no Venetian ever kills a pigeon, and apparently they never die; but the fact that they do not increase so rapidly as to become a nuisance instead of a pleasure, lends some color to the suspicion that pigeon pies are not unknown at certain tables during the proper season.

Our "blogger" service is really messed up

And there is no way to figure out what is going on!