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Does Mom Know When Enough Is Enough? Missed Satiety Cues From Infants Linked To Obesity (May 12, 2009) -- As the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States continues, researchers are examining whether early parent and child behaviors contribute to the problem. Mothers who miss signs of satiety in their infants tend to overfeed them, leading to excess weight gains during the 6 month to 1 year period, according to new research. ... > full story
////////////////BECKER-FRASIER-CHARLIE-ROSS
/////////////////
The highest tree hath the greatest fall.
~Proverb, (Latin)~
SO I RMND SD
//////////////////PBAMA-IS HE REAL? SENT FRM THE FUTRURE?
////////////////////////Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them
///////////////////////PIANO YDP140 COMES IN-GRT DLVRY-RSHLL INSTRMNTS -BCNSFLD
///////////////////////ADJUSTING EQUIPMENT IN PBLC
//////////////////////HOW TO SHOOT FRNDS AND INTRRGT PPL
/////////////////////Condoms 'too big' for Indian men
By Damian Grammaticus
BBC News, Delhi
There is a "lack of awareness" over condom sizes
A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men.
The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms.
//////////////////////LARRY K-7 HRS PAST HIS BDTIME
//////////////////........Men have always been taught to perceive themselves as the superior
sex, said Jyotsna Chatterjee.....It is this conditioning, she said,
that makes them believe they have to control their wives, especially
if they are considered disobedient.
"...researchers found that the highest rates of sexual violence were
among highly educated men."
and
"A similar pattern was seen when the problem was analyzed according to
income and socioeconomic standing. Those at the lowest rungs of the
socio-economic ladder--migrant labor, cobblers, carpenters, and
barbers--showed a sexual violence rate of 35 percent. The rate almost
doubled to 61 percent among the highest income groups."
///////////////////........."I am very happy in my new home in this friendly country and the liberal atmosphere of Princeton."
Albert Einstein, 1935
ALBERT EINSTEIN’S YEARS IN PRINCETON (USA)
From 1902–1909 Einstein spent successful years in Bern. After that time he stayed in Zurich and in Prague for a short time, returned to Zurich and from then on worked as professor at the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin from 1914–1932. Due to political reasons he had to emigrate in 1933. He found his last workplace in Princeton (New Jersey), a magnificent little town 100 km south of New York.
Already at the end of 1930 did Einstein receive the permission of the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Arts to lecture in the winter month for one guest semester. He did this every year until his emigration so that he lived in Princeton in the winter month and in Berlin in the summer month. American scientists made great efforts in the 1920ies to send their famous European colleagues to the USA. This tendency even increased due to the events of 1933. Thus they wanted to support the development of science and technology in the USA more than ever. Abraham Flexner, the founder of the “Institute for Advanced Study” in Princeton had in 1932 received Einstein’s promise, to participate in this institution which resembled the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin. The financial means were guaranteed by a foundation. Einstein should have the possibility to solely devote himself to his research, like he did in Berlin, and not have any firm lecturing hours.
At the end of 1932 the Einstein's, Albert and his second wife Elsa, took their preparations for their third journey to America. In the meantime the anti-Semitic campaign against Einstein in Germany increased. In America there was also a wave of protest against him because of his actions for pacifism. Albert and Elsa arrived in California at the beginning of January in 1933. First they went to Pasadena and later followed their first longer stay in Princeton. In the Mount Wilson Observatory he debated the mysteries of universe with Edwin Hubble, the discoverer of the big bang.
In the middle of March 1933 Einstein decided to return to Europe. Already during the way home on board of the ship "Belgenland" they heard further alarming news from Germany. Einstein wrote his resignation to the Berlin Academy already during his crossing to Europe. After his arrival in Antwerpen, Einstein decided not to return to Germany and to never again enter German ground. He spent some time in Belgium and England.
In autumn it was finally decided to leave Europe and to emigrate to the United States. On October 7 in 1933 Einstein and his wife Elsa, his secretary Helen Dukas and his assistant Dr. Walther Mayer, travelled from Southampton to the USA with the steamship "Westerland".
A new beginning in Princeton (USA)
After the arrival in New York – while the reception was no longer as tumultuous as in previous years - Einstein and his company were taken to Princeton with the car. Later his stepdaughter Margot, Hans Albert, Einstein’s older son from his first marriage and Einstein’s sister Maja also followed the emigrants. It was a new beginning for all of them.
Einstein’s new workplace was the "Institute for Advanced Study" which he stayed loyal to until his death in 1955. This institute had back then a good reputation all over the world. As Jewish scientists were driven out of the country after the national socialists seized power, the leadership of physics, the "science of fate of the 20th century" changed over from Germany to the United States. Through Albert Einstein, the "pope of physics" the "Institute for Advanced Study" became in the following years the most famous research centre of the world. Einstein liked the working conditions at the institute. In the morning he could be met at the institute most of the time. In the afternoon he liked being at home, meeting friends and famous persons from science and politics. He recovered while doing long walks in the park.
In August 1935 Einstein bought a single family house at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, near the institute, in which he lived with his wife Elsa, his stepdaughter Margot and his secretary Helen Dukas. Unfortunately his wife fell ill a short time later and died in December 1936. He had to face another death only a short time after that when his former fellow student Marcel Grossmann died. There was so much to thank him for.
Einstein’s residential building in Princeton, 1935–1955
In December 1936 the 150 years celebration of the "Naturforschende Gesellschaft Bern" took place in the assembly hall of the university of Bern. On this occasion Albert Einstein was made a honorary member for his work. After having received the certificate of honour, Einstein was very pleased and gave it a place of honour in the flat in Princeton. His beloved violin, with which he also liked to play Mozart or Bach even in far-away countries, belonged to his most important souvenirs of his time in Switzerland. The little Swiss military service book, which nowadays is kept in the Einstein archive in Jerusalem, counted to the few documents he took with him.
At the "Institute for Advanced Study" the great Einstein was given the best research possibilities. No pressure was exerted on him to do research. This fact permitted his further work on his theory of gravity with the aim to enlarge it to a "Unified field theory". Besides, he continued to take care of pacifistic and Zionistic organisations and, with the help of friends and colleagues, supported the steadily growing number of emigrants.
University and institute
It must also be mentioned that Princeton, near the capital Trenton in the State of New Jersey, also has an excellent university besides the "Institute for Advanced Study", at which, however, mainly young people from well-off families are given the possibility to study. The Princeton University, at which Einstein held lectures, too, is among the most famous universities of the United States. A striking number of Nobel laureates of recent years have studied at this private university, especially physicists and mathematicians. The buildings of the university, which are located about 3 km away from the institute, are situated in an English garden. The time-honoured architecture resembles the ones of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The university and the institute conveys a bit of the style of living and working, of the special character of these places of research: the mixture of British country house and American way of life.
The last years of his life
In October 1940 Einstein became an American citizen. But he also kept the Swiss citizenship which he had been given in Zurich in 1901. He communicated again and again with his former colleagues and friends. Thus he wrote, among other things, in 1949 to his friend and former working colleague from the Patent Office Michele Besso: "The best that remains are a few honest friends who have head and heart in the right place and understand each other like we do." Also in later years Einstein was stricken with homesickness after the cosy Kramgasse in Bern and wrote: "Yes, it was a nice time back then in Bern."
Albert Einstein in Princeton, ca. 1950
At the beginning of the 1950ies Einstein developed health problems. Despite that fact he constantly worked on his field theory, but his efforts were not successful.
After short illness Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76. He had been politically active until his last days. As he hated personality cult, he prohibited any funeral service. Only his closest relatives and friends bode him farewell in the crematory.
Dr. Adolf Meichle
The author has been member of the board of executive directors of the Albert Einstein-Gesellschaft (Albert Einstein Society) in Bern for years. He is bearer of the Einstein Medal which is awarded by the Albert Einstein Society every year to persons who have rendered outstanding services through their work in connection with Albert Einstein.
//////////////////////Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."
– Harvey Fierstein
///////////////////GT U BY THE GNDS
////////////////////DIDNT HELP U,JST HURT ME
/////////////////////I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value. -- Hermann Hesse
/////////////////////////BTO-MDFY OWN RCTN
/////////////////////You must learn to be still in the midst
of activity and to be vibrantly alive in
repose."
///////////////////////
Men suffer from “man flu” because they have weaker immune systems than women and so are more susceptible to infections, new research claims.
////////////////.......The Human Genome Project, a global effort that identified all the genes in human chromosomes, found that any two individuals' genomes are 99% identical. Compared with the world's three main "ancestral" populations — Caucasian, African and Asian — the Mestizos had significant genetic differences, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Beyond the current topic of influenza, we're experiencing huge increases in very complex diseases like diabetes," Julio Frenk, Mexico's health minister when the genomic medicine institute was created five years ago, said at a news conference.
//////////////////........Stanford Report, May 28, 2003
DNA suggests humans descend from small ancestral population
BY MARK SHWARTZ
Human beings may have made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago, according to a new study by geneticists from Stanford University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers estimate that the entire population of ancestral humans at the time of the African expansion consisted of only about 2,000 individuals.
"This estimate does not preclude the presence of other populations of Homo sapiens sapiens [modern humans] in Africa, although it suggests that they were probably isolated from one another genetically, and that contemporary worldwide populations descend from one or very few of those populations," said Marcus W. Feldman, the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor at Stanford and co-author of the study.
The small size of our ancestral population may explain why there is so little genetic variability in human DNA compared with that of chimpanzees and other closely related species, Feldman added.
The study, published in the May edition of the journal, is based on research conducted in Feldman's Stanford laboratory in collaboration with co-authors Lev A. Zhivotovsky of the Russian Academy and former Stanford graduate student Noah A. Rosenberg, now at the University of Southern California.
"Our results are consistent with the 'out-of-Africa' theory, according to which a sub-Saharan African ancestral population gave rise to all populations of anatomically modern humans through a chain of migrations to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Oceania and America," Feldman noted.
Ancient roots
Since all human beings have virtually identical DNA, geneticists have to look for slight chemical variations that distinguish one population from another. One technique involves the use of "microsatellites" -- short repetitive fragments of DNA whose patterns of variation differ among populations. Because microsatellites are passed from generation to generation and have a high mutation rate, they are a useful tool for estimating when two populations diverged.
In their study, the research team compared 377 microsatellite markers in DNA collected from 1,056 individuals representing 52 geographic sites in Africa, Eurasia (the Middle East, Europe, Central and South Asia), East Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
Statistical analysis of the microsatellite data revealed a close genetic relationship between two hunter-gatherer populations in sub-Saharan Africa -- the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Khoisan (or "bushmen") of Botswana and Namibia. These two populations "may represent the oldest branch of modern humans studied here," the authors concluded.
The data revealed a genetic split between the ancestors of these hunter-gatherer populations and the ancestors of contemporary African farming people -- Bantu speakers who inhabit many countries in southern Africa. "This division occurred between 70,000 and 140,000 years ago and was followed by the expansion out of Africa into Eurasia, Oceania, East Asia and the Americas -- in that order," Feldman said.
This result is consistent with an earlier study in which Feldman and others analyzed the Y chromosomes of more than 1,000 men from 21 different populations. In that study, the researchers concluded that the first human migration from Africa may have occurred roughly 66,000 years ago.
Population bottlenecks
The research team also found that indigenous hunter-gatherer populations in Africa, the Americas and Oceania have experienced very little growth over time. "Hunting and gathering could not support a significant increase in population size," Feldman explained. "These populations probably underwent severe bottlenecks during which their numbers crashed -- possibly because of limited resources, diseases and, in some cases, the effects of long-distance migrations."
Unlike hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of sub-Saharan African farming populations appear to have experienced a population expansion that started around 35,000 years ago: "This increase in population sizes might have been preceded by technological innovations that led to an increase in survival and then an increase in the overall birth rate," the authors wrote. The peoples of Eurasia and East Asia also show evidence of population expansion starting about 25,000 years ago, they added.
"The exciting thing about these data is that they are amenable to a combination of mathematical models and statistical analyses that can help solve problems that are important in paleontology, archaeology and anthropology," Feldman concluded.
The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.
///////////////////........Culture
Books
Science and nature
The origin of Origin
Steven Rose enjoys a tale of the anxious strategising behind a great idea
Steven Rose
The Guardian, Saturday 9 May 2009
Article history
Charles Darwin's bicentenary has generated such an armada of books, conferences and TV programmes that it may be hard to find anything new to say. Nonetheless, Iain McCalman, an Australian cultural historian, has made a brave try. Darwinian evolution by natural selection rests on three indisputable axioms: like breeds like, with minor variations; all organisms can produce more offspring than can survive to adulthood; the best adapted variants are the most likely to survive to reproduce in turn. Therefore, species change with time - that is, evolve. There is nothing in these principles that Darwin could not have deduced from his observations of the English countryside, from his work with pigeon breeders, and from rereading Reverend Malthus, all of which he pursued assiduously. Furthermore, evolution was not a new idea; it had been a matter of common discussion among European biologists since the late 18th century.
Darwin's Armada : Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution
by Iain McCalman
423pp, Norton, £20
Buy Darwin's Armada at the Guardian bookshop
Yet Darwin's evolutionary epiphany came during his five-year voyage as a naturalist on the Beagle, the small vessel chartered in 1831 to chart the waters and coastline of South America, New Zealand and Australia. Such expeditions had been a routine part of British Admiralty policy since the 17th century, and it had become common practice to include on board someone with expertise in the emerging sciences of geology and biology to identify novel species and collect specimens. Naturalists making these arduous trips would be, as Darwin was, exposed for the first time to an abundance of living forms alien to European eyes.
As a young man of means, Darwin travelled as a companion to the ship's captain. The more usual practice was to employ a suitable person directly, as happened on the slightly later voyages of two rather less wealthy young men. The self-made zoologist Thomas Huxley was later to become "Darwin's bulldog", a ferocious advocate of natural selection; the botanist Joseph Hooker was a scion of the Hookers who were for decades to direct the botanical gardens at Kew. The fourth member of Darwin's armada was Alfred Russel Wallace, who for many years eked out a living as a collector and seller of tropical specimens. It was Wallace's independent formulation of the axioms of natural selection, sent by him to Darwin in 1858, that precipitated Darwin's long-ruminated publication of On the Origin of Species, as an abstract of the much longer book he had postponed writing for two decades.
The stories of all four men have been well told previously, so there is little new material here. What McCalman does is to link them together by way of their voyages. He provides an antipodean perspective on the time spent in Australia by Hooker, and especially by Huxley. As his subtitle suggests, McCalman is using the concept of an armada in a second sense: the alliance of three old sea salts, later to be joined by Wallace. The "battle" was to make natural selection not just a theory, but a universally accepted mechanism for evolutionary change. When Darwin received Wallace's letter, seemingly establishing primacy in developing the theory, he summoned Hooker and Huxley to his country retreat, where the three anxiously strategised. Propriety demanded they acknowledge that Wallace had anticipated Darwin, whose heterodox ideas had been buried for decades in his notebooks. The solution was to publish short notes from Darwin and Wallace simultaneously and let Darwin work at full pelt on the "abstract" that was published as Origin a year later. Wallace seems to have taken it all in good part, but he remained an outsider, a Christian socialist who was never to accept that human intelligence could have evolved by entirely natural causes.
Rather like Wallace, McCalman knows he is an outsider to mainstream Darwin studies, but he tells his story well. It reads as a combination of Boy's Own travellers' tales stretching from the Amazon to Antarctica, and a scientific adventure as racy as any historical novel.
• Steven Rose's The 21st Century Brain is published by Vintage.
/////////////////,,,,,,,,,,,,,,HOW DAVID BEATS GOLIATH
When underdogs break the rules.
by Malcolm Gladwell
MAY 11, 2009
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A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?
KEYWORDS
Vivek Ranadivé; Coaches; Basketball; Daughters; Mumbai; David and Goliath; Underdogs
hen Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”
FROM THE ISSUECARTOON BANKE-MAIL THIS
avid’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.
But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina “on the defensive, immobile.” There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.
////////////////..............Chapter XVI: The Yoga of the Division Between the Divine and the Daemonical
XVI.6. DWAU BHOOTASARGAU LOKE'SMIN DAIVA AASURA EVA CHA;
DAIVO VISTARASHAH PROKTAH AASURAM PAARTHA ME SHRINU.
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
There are two types of beings in this world-the divine and the
demoniacal; the divine has been described at length; hear from Me,
O Arjuna, of the demoniacal!
XVI.7. PRAVRITTIM CHA NIVRITTIM CHA JANAA NA VIDURAASURAAH;
NA SHAUCHAM NAAPI CHAACHAARO NA SATYAM TESHU VIDYATE.
The demoniacal know not what to do and what to refrain from;
neither purity nor right conduct nor truth is found in them.
///////////////////////GOING HOME ALREADY-NO I AM GOING TO THE OPERA-BERTA
//////////////WMN WITH IQ SIMILAR TO THEIR AGE
////////////////WEEKEND SUN-DONT BATHE 48 HRS FOR OPTIMUM VIT D ABSORPN
////////////////UVA WHICH PASSES THRU WINDOW GLASS REDUCE VIT D,GLASS BLOCKS UVB WHICH ACTUALLY MAKES VIT D
UVA CAUSES PHOTO AGEING,TANNING,MELANOMA
///////////////////////......thalidomide clue offered by scientists
12TH MAY 2009
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen have claimed they understand the reason why the drug thalidomide produced limb deformities in babies.
Women were given the drug to relieve the symptoms of morning sickness in the 1950s and 1960s. The drug caused around 10,000 children to be born with disabilities.
The most prevalent side-effect of the drug was to stunt the growth of limbs, causing babies to have short arms, legs or missing limbs.
The researchers in Scotland said an element of the drug prevented the development of new blood vessels in the growing embryo.
They proposed that thalidomide could possibly be used again to treat other conditions if this component was removed.
Research has shown the drug could be used to treat conditions such as leprosy and cancer.
Lead researcher Dr Neil Vargesson said: "We have put to rest a 50-year puzzle, in finally deducing how thalidomide triggers limb defects and why it appears to target limbs preferentially."
He added that the "specific timeframe" when the drug was taken - usually between five and nine weeks into the pregnancy - was very important as this was when babies' limbs formed.
"Many theories have been put forward but this is the first paper to conclusively show that it is the antiangiogenic property of the drug - that element that inhibits new blood vessel formation - that is to blame for the defects," he said.
//////////////////////"A new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress, and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later."
—Diana Vreeland
//////////////////////
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