Thomas Armstrong’s eight principles of neurodiversity

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Neurodiversity: Differences among brains are as enriching and essential as differences among plants and animals. In other words, 'disabilities' or cognitive differences are essential to the human ecosystem.

Thomas Armstrong has come up with a list of eight 'principles of neurodiversity':

  1. The human brain works more like an ecosystem than a machine
  2. Human beings and human brains exist along continuums of competence
  3. Human competence is defined by the values of the culture to which you belong
  4. Whether you are regarded as disabled or gifted depends largely upon when and where you live
  5. Success in life is based upon adapting one’s brain to the needs of the surrounding environment
  6. Success in life depends upon modifying your surrounding environment to fit the needs of your unique brain
  7. Niche construction includes career and lifestyle choices and assistive technologies tailored to the needs of a neurodiverse individual
  8. Positive niche construction directly modifies the brain, which in turn enhances its ability to adapt to the environment

Entire article.

WolframAlpha now computing health indicators

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WolframAlpha is now crunching health indicators, including data from the WHO.

Specifically, WA recently added data on health indicators for more than 200 countries and territories. They now have World Health Organization data on health care workers, immunizations, water and sanitation, preventive care, tobacco use, weight, and more.

Example: Underweight children in Africa.

Data is also now available on specific types of health care personnel, such as physicians, nurses, and dentists, and Wolfram|Alpha can also compute per capita figures for each type of health professional. Other interesting indicators include figures on hospital beds, drinking water and sanitation, tobacco use, weight and obesity, and reproduction and contraception.

Singer: Religion’s regressive hold on animal rights issues

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Peter Singer wonders how we can promote the need for improved animal welfare when battling ancient religious views.

The chief minister's [Mohamad Ali Rustam of Malacca] comment is yet another illustration of the generally regressive influence that religion has on ethical issues – whether they are concerned with the status of women, with sexuality, with end-of-life decisions in medicine, with the environment, or with animals. Although religions do change, they change slowly, and tend to preserve attitudes that have become obsolete and often are positively harmful.

"Go forth and multiply" was a reasonable idea when the world had a few million humans in it. Now, unrestricted multiplication of our species has become a grave risk to the environment of our planet, and a significant cause of infant mortality and poverty. Yet some religious leaders continue to condemn not only abortion, but also contraception, and their condemnation of homosexuality also has the same roots in the non-reproductive nature of same-sex relationships.

In the same way, there has been great progress, worldwide, in attitudes to animals over the past century, but some religious believers, such as Mohamad Ali Rustam, remain stuck with attitudes that were formed many centuries ago.

Independently of the problems of reactionary religious belief, the trend to establish animal testing facilities in countries with weak or no regulations is an extremely worrying one. As regulations improve in Europe, North America, Australia and other countries, it seems that unscrupulous entrepreneurs are engaged in a race to the bottom.

If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals. At present, the only hope of reversing this trend seems to be pressure on companies not to test their products in countries without good animal welfare regulations, and pressure on research institutions not to have links with such countries. But to unravel the connections and make them clear to consumers is, unfortunately, going to be a difficult task.

We Swim in a World of Oil

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Photographer Chronicles Petroleum Planet

Edward Burtynsky is a photographer, and in his new photos he shows us how addicted to oil our country has become.  Our entire transportation system is built around oil — and the saddest thing is that it never had to be this way. The first cars were electric and we have always had the technical know-how to mass produce electric cars. We also have the technical capability of driving battery-powered cars. Where are they? Now that we are in the midst of a climate crisis and an oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s time to look at how we can get off of our oil addiction once and for all.  The article below is reprinted from Earth Island Journal.

Houston, Texas, photo by Edward Burtynsky

The fish, famously, doesn’t know it’s in water. Our relationship to petroleum is much the same. From our waking moments we are surrounded by oil: It helps grow the grains in our breakfast cereal, takes us to and from work, forms the plastics that wrap our products, and then delivers those very same items to us. Oil has become the sine qua non of our lives. And for that reason it’s so easy to forget that’s it’s even there.

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky wants to remind us. Burtynsky has spent most of his career focusing on the landscapes of manufacturing complexes, creating formal compositions of industrial scenery that are at once attractive and abhorrent. His latest project is titled, simply, Oil.

Ten years in the making, the collection is the result of Burtynsky’s travels throughout the globe to examine oil fields, refineries, car culture, and the eventual disposal of our oil-thirsty machines. The photos take us to places we’ve never seen and in the process reveal the massive, complicated apparatus that undergirds our lives of seamless convenience.

Oil, which toured North America and Europe last year, is divided into three categories. “Extraction & Refinement” examines the landscapes that have been formed (or deformed) by the petroleum industry. An image of oil pipelines snaking through the Canadian forest is unsettling. The stark contrast between the silver of the pipes and the trees’ green shows how alien our technologies can appear on our own planet.

The next section, “Transportation & Motor Culture,” then pivots to look at the built environments that, however artificial, have become our homes. Perhaps the best in this series is Burtynsky’s shot of Breezewood, PA, a town that could, with its riot of corporate logos, be Anywhere, USA. The image is incontrovertible proof of how we’ve remodeled much of our world – not to serve real people, but to accommodate the needs of our cars, which have become like second skins.

Burtynsky concludes with “The End of Oil.” [...]

OpenPCR: DNA amplification for anyone

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OpenPCR is a cool new project dedicated to building plans for an open source PCR machine. There’s not much inherently complicated about a PCR machine and it’s about time — a PCR machine built with $300 in parts using a modern software controller will likely be as powerful as any non-realtime PCR out there. Of course, the reagent pricing is what gets you.

Josh and Tito are raising money for this project using Kickstarter. $1024 gets them to build you a PCR machine, which is a reasonably good deal in the scheme of scientific equipment. I gave them $8, because I like stickers and already have a PCR machine that doesn’t exactly get a lot of use.

Various Works by Ron Hicks

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Born in Columbus, Ohio, Ron was a student whose artistic talents were immediately recognized. He has been interested in art since he was 4 years old and growing up in Columbus, Ohio. His mother pursued art as a hobby and took correspondence courses. The young Hicks would scan the critiques of his mother’s works and then trace some of the assignments himself.

As his talents became known in his neighborhood, he was called on to draw things for community events. Throughout high school Ron won several awards and contests, including Best of Show at the Ohio State Governor’s Art Show. During this period Ron was invited to attend Saturday art classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design and later received one of the highest scholarships awarded to attend the same school.

Hicks eventually moved west, where he graduated from the Colorado Institute of Art and studied with Quang Ho at the Art Students League. As a class monitor for Ho, he spent extra time talking and listening to him. Today he credits his teacher with exposing him to a new way of seeing. “A light bulb was turned on. I started seeing things in terms of shapes and edges, texture, line and color,” he says. “I no longer saw painting as a way of just transferring information; I started looking at what I wanted to say in a piece.”

After winning Best of Show at the 1994 Art Students League Exhibition, Hicks began painting full time. Since then, his career has escalated and he has become one of America’s finest emerging artists. Hicks worked for a time as a freelance illustrator. He also worked as a manager for a satellite dish company while he painted at night. “Maybe it’s three years of night painting that gave me my subtle palette,” he says half-jokingly.

Hick’s works have been characterized as a blend of representational art and impressionism. Some critics have compared them to paintings by Rembrandt and Daumier. The artist translates his own moody visions with a muted palette and rarely uses pure color. He finds tremendous variety and range in gray, which suits the atmospheric qualities of his compositions. Ron’s paintings move beyond simple documentation, capturing mood, gesture and layers of emotion.

You can learn more about Ron Hicks through the following links:

Ron Hicks official website

Ron Hicks at Arcadia Fine Arts

Ron Hicks at The Vail International Gallery

New medical dean named at Rowan University in Camden – Philadelphia Inquirer

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NJ.com
New medical dean named at Rowan University in Camden
Philadelphia Inquirer
Paul Katz, who recently helped start a medical school in Scranton, was tapped Wednesday to be founding dean of another medical start-up: ...
Cooper Medical School of Rowan University names founding deanPhiladelphia Business Journal
Rowan University, Cooper appoint dean to lead medical schoolNJ.com

all 8 news articles »

Teen crashed tied to earlier start at school – San Antonio Express

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Teen crashed tied to earlier start at school
San Antonio Express
... as 9 or 91/4 hours of sleep at night,” said Dr. Robert Vorona, associate professor of internal medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk. ...
Early School Start Times Raise Risk of Teen Car CrashesU.S. News & World Report
Starting school early could lead to more teen car accidentsWBIR-TV
Study: More sleep, fewer accidents for teenage driversWVEC.com (subscription)
NPR (blog) -DigitalJournal.com -Los Angeles Times (blog)
all 36 news articles »

Live octopus lollipop | Cosmic Variance

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Last week I visited the Institute for the Early Universe in Seoul, Korea, part of the World Class University project, an initiative of the Korean government to build forefront research institutions. It is situated on the Ewha Womens University campus, the world’s largest female-only University. I felt out-of-place walking around, not because I’m obviously a foreigner, but because I was male in a sea of women. The physics classes at Ewha are filled with women, which is (unfortunately) radically different from the majority of other institutions. In 18 months the IEU has built an impressive program, with a number of outstanding faculty (including George Smoot, Eric Linder, Uros Seljak, Bruce Grossan, and Changrim Ahn) and postdocs (including Reiko Nakajima, Scott Daniel, and Teppei Okumura) in both short and long-term residence, and a great visitor program (Ue-li Pen from CITA/Toronto was also in town last week). I’ve had productive collaborations with both Eric and Uros in the past, and it was great to get time with them. I’ve gotten temporarily excited about trying to test whether our Universe is described by a metric theory, but have been getting little traction thus far. Last Friday I wandered over to Yonsei and had a very interesting chat with Joe Silk, who was in town for a workshop.

George Smoot eats octopusMy inaugural dinner with the institute folk set the tone. We went out to a local seafood restaurant. Walking in one passed a number of tanks, filled with live fish, eels, octopus, and various other unrecognizable ocean dwellers. The table next to ours consisted of three Korean women enjoying octopus sashimi. We promptly ordered some for ourselves. The octopuses were extracted from their tank, hauled into the kitchen for a few minutes, and then presented neatly cubed. Octopuses have a fairly unusual autonomic nervous system, with many neurons present in the tentacles rather than the brain. This is a long-winded way of saying that a plate of fresh octopus is a writhing, tangled affair. You rapidly learn to coat the agitating bits in sesame oil before consuming, Octopus lollipopotherwise the suction cups stick to the interior of one’s mouth, somewhat compromising the whole experience. Needless to say, it is a strange sensation. But entirely delicious.

We were clearly amateurs. George managed to inveigle himself a personal lesson from one of the Korean women in how to eat octopus sashimi (only afterwards did she learn she was teaching a Nobel laureate). The lesson consisted of the woman taking an entire live octopus, carefully wrapping the tentacles around a wooden chopstick (metal doesn’t work), and then consuming the entire octopus popsicle in one fell swoop. As she indulged, there were tentacles coming out of her mouth and desperately grabbing her face, clearly displeased with the turn of events. It was starkly reminiscent of Aliens (with some amount of role reversal). It is one of the more unsettling things I’ve seen.