Thursday, December 03, 2009
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Irate Students
I had another faculty member proctor an exam for me the other day because I was asked to speak at a state meeting on education reform. This happens occasionally as I have been asked on several occasions to speak at different state functions like this. The meeting was about 2.5 hours from here, so it really was an all day affair and I could not be present for the student's exam.
Unfortunately, one student became irate at the proctor because of some past issue the two of them had in another class the student had taken from him. A loud, argument ensued, which involved many others in the Department and upper Administration.
Fortunately, I am not *actually* involved in any of the problem... but because it was my student in my class, I am going to work today to try to smooth over the issue with the respective parties. Wish me luck.
PipeTobacco
9:39 AM
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
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Nothing Much to Write
Today's post is brief because I am heading home for the day and I found out we have lost phone and Internet service at home. It apparently will be a few days before the repair people are able to fix the situation. So, my posts will only come from work.
PipeTobacco
5:38 PM
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
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Interesting Hormone Study
The following story from Science News is quite thought provoking due to the widespread change in the role of plastics in the food service industry over the last 35 years. Think of the difference.... in 1975... almost all food was held in metal or glass containers. NOW, virtually everything is in plastic. These plastics ALL leech out compounds that can mimic steroid hormones like estrogens and androgens. What have we done to ourselves?
Plastics Ingredients Could Make a Boy's Play Less Masculine: Study Links Boys' Fetal Phthalate Exposure to Tendency Toward Gender-Neutral Play Later On
By Janet Raloff
Even monkeys show gender-linked preferences in toys. In children, the brain's hard-wiring tends to explain why boys like fighting and adventure toys and girls will nurture dolls and animals.
Exposures in the womb to a ubiquitous family of industrial chemicals can subtly perturb preferences of boys for certain types of child’s play thought to be hardwired in the brain, a new study suggests. Phthalates are widely used solvents and plastics softeners. In this study, the greater a boy’s fetal exposure to certain phthalates, the less often he tended to engage in typically masculine play.
Girls’ play was unaffected, according to the study, set to be published in an upcoming International Journal of Andrology.
The reason boys like trucks and girls like dolls relates to fetal differences in brain development, explains Heather Patisaul, a neuroendocrinologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Males develop differently from females — physically and behaviorally — only through programming by androgens, male sex hormones such as testosterone, she says In animals, anything that dampens the testosterone signal during fetal development, such as a chemical or genetic defect, can trigger a subtle demasculinization in males.
Because phthalates can exhibit anti-androgenic activity (SN: 9/2/2000, p. 152), Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in Rochester, N.Y., and her colleagues investigated whether testosterone-programmed behaviors in young children might be undermined by fetal exposure to the pollutants.
Researchers measured phthalates during the last trimester of pregnancy in women participating in a four-state project in the United States called the Study for Future Families. Three to six years later, Swan’s group asked these women to answer questions about play by their children — 74 boys and 71 girls.
On a one-to-five scale, with one being “never” and five being “very often,” each mom rated how frequently in the past month her child had done such things as play house, play at fighting, climb, play with dolls, dress up in girls’ clothes or show interest in wheeled cars.
Boys with the highest fetal exposures to phthalates — particularly to diethylhexyl phthalate, or DEHP, and dibutyl phthalate, or DBP — tended to exhibit lower scores on typical male play (such as playing with toy guns or pretending to play with guns) and higher on gender-neutral play (such as puzzles or sports). DEHP is in plastic tubing, including types used widely in food processing, Swan notes. DBP is a solvent in many cosmetics, including nail polish and hair sprays.
The results stood out even after accounting for potentially confounding factors, including parents’ age and education as well as parents’ attitudes about gender-typical play.
Play in the most highly phthalate-exposed boys wasn’t “feminized,” Swan explains, since these kids didn’t preferentially play with dolls or don dresses. Rather, she says, “we’d describe their play as less masculine.”
The new study is not the first to link pollutants with alterations in gender-typical play, but it does appear to be the strongest, says David Carpenter of the University of Albany in Rensselaer N.Y. Bolstering confidence that the new findings are not a fluke, he adds, is earlier research by Swan’s group: It showed fetal exposure to phthalates could alter the genital tracts of infants — again, only in boys.
Kimberly Yolton of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital considers the new findings “a potentially big deal — primarily because we all have exposure to phthalates.” The Pre-School Activities Inventory test used to assess these children “is not super sophisticated,” the developmental psychologist says. Then again, for this age group, she says, “it really is the only means out there.”
Even if socialization or other factors cause affected children to later assume gender-typical play, “their brains will still be a little different,” Patisaul says. “And it’s not clear how that will play out when they get a little older.”
Indeed, Yolton says, “There’s a significant difference here [in gender-typical play] but we don’t know yet that this is bad. Who knows,” she adds, affected boys “might be less violent.” Clearly, more research is needed, she says, in part because this study was so small.
Swan agrees. She’s just beginning a bigger follow-up study, with 800 children whose mothers will be recruited during pregnancy from four regions of the country. These children, like those in the current study, will be followed into school age. “We’ll be looking at lots of physiological factors that are shaped by testosterone,” she says — from size and body build to sexually dimorphic differences in mental processing.
Please do not get me wrong... the issue is not the gender neutral play.... the issue of concern is the physiological changes to the brain that occured and what this may affect in terms of reproductive system health, emotional health, and identity. The impact could be enormous.
PipeTobacco
7:41 AM
Monday, November 30, 2009
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Lets Talk Turkey
I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. I was fortunate to have FOUR wonderfully relaxing days of family and fun. I hope the respite will give me adequate stamina to finish out the semester with a joyous flourish instead of a grumbly, grudging stomp of the feet.
I am also another year older now, and of course another year grayer in the beard, mustache (and hair of course). I keep teasing my wife that I am going to borrow some of her Nice & Easy and "brown" myself back up. But, actually, for the most part I enjoy the gray. Actually, I am all sorts of colors and always have been.... my beard and mustache made me look a bit like a calico when I was younger.... some brown, some red, some blond, even a little bit of black. I still have those five colors, but in lower quantities... gray is more prominent than the other five colors.
There is no Flash Fiction this week, as the creator, Cormac Brown, thought it best to have the starter sentence contest during Thanksgiving week. I agree... and look forward to writing and reading stories anew next week.
PipeTobacco
12:01 PM
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
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Day 428
Through all the craziness, I have still managed to walk EVERY day now for 428 days! Of that, I am very pleased!
PipeTobacco
9:37 AM
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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FFF #11
A brief aside... I am bound and determined to damn well post my flash fiction effort BEFORE the deadline this week, so here it goes:
* * * * * *
The Den
"Why do I have to take out the garbage?" Mike said to his father, with a bit of a whine to his voice. His mother was at the sink washing dishes, and his younger sister, Olivia, sat in her high chair, coloring on a piece of paper she had been given after the dinner table was cleared.
"Do not be a pest about it...." started his mother from across the kitchen.
Mike's father held up his hand toward's his wife to indicate that she should hold off saying anything more.
"Because I am the Pater familias, intoned Augustus with deep, rich, round tones. "Do you remember what that phrase means, Michael?"
"Yes, dad." Mike sighed, "It means you are the head of the house. And, what you say, goes."
Mike's father grinned approvingly, with a furry-faced grin, because Mike had remembered the definition. "Exactly. Now, hurry and finish that task, and you can work on your homework with me in the den, or you can read one of my books."
Mike, being only eight years old, did not always have a full understanding of the vocabulary he used or knew, only that these were the terms he was familiar with for he heard them regularly. Mike's dad, Augustus, was a man of books and words, and found great joy in tying his tongue around as many syllables in a word as possible just for the shear joy of the experience. Augustus was an English teacher, with a robust, yet graying beard and mustache, and the requisite elbow patches on his sleeves. But, he was no stereotype filled with egregious and bombastic blustering. He worked long and hard to figure out ways to help his students see the beauty and grace found in words of all sorts and of all origins. It is through this background that Mike, even though only a young pup, still wet behind the ears, had a fairly sophisticated vocabulary... and an even more robust taste for adventure and experience.
Augustus had a den in his home that was his inner sanctum. It was a place where he would store his vast array of books, filling to the brim, wall upon wall of the room with knowledge acquired from all across the globe. Also in the den was a beautiful oak framed desk where Augustus worked and toiled late into the evening, reading the hard wrought essays of his students, trying to see beauty in their efforts. His pipe always nearby, he would toil and struggle with each page of each paper, making red marks when necessary, but offering ample encouragement as well with his comments.
Mike loved his father's den, and learned to quietly sit in the room when his father was deep in thought. Mike usually sat on the worn leather couch that sat facing the window looking out into the back yard as he would carefully pull out a book of one sort or another to examine and try to read. Mike also relished the odor of his father's pipe tobacco. In the closed, hushed space, the heavy, yet appealing odor of the pipe smoke that hung in the air reminded him of the incense used at mass on holy days of obligation. When Mike was not trying to wade through an adult text of one sort or another, he would quietly watch his father work using a side-ways glance, sitting perpendicular to his father's desk so his father would not feel his stare so readily. Mike was especially engrossed in watching his father as he smoked his pipe. He saw all manners of behavior with the pipe... often his father nurtured and coaxed his pipe into life in an almost absent-minded manner as he would focus primarily on his student's papers. Or, if frustrated at the words he read on the page, he would gnaw on the stem of his pipe with a furrowed brow as he decided how much red to slash across the page of the egregious effort. The sites and smells and different manners with which Mike observed his father smoking his pipe in the den made Mike grow curious himself about what smoking a pipe would be like.
"Schlemiel!" sputtered Augustus, as he read head-long into an especially onerous passage. Mike knew that the word his father uttered meant the student was being especially stupid, but Mike also smiled slightly, for even his father's cuss words always sounded more interesting than those of his friend's fathers.
Mike continued to read through the book he had selected, and also continued to try to watch his father surreptitiously, but the weight of sleep eventually got hold of him, and he nodded off on the couch and quickly was fast asleep. When his father noticed, Augustus went over, picked the boy up off the couch and carried him to his room and tucked him into bed.
"Robust and adventurous dreams, Micheal." whispered Augustus as he pulled the blanket up to Mike's shoulders and kissed him quietly on the cheek.
That night, Mike did dream, he dreamed about the adventure he would try to undertake the next day. He would try to get one of his father's pipes and try it.
* * * * *
That is it for this week everyone. I hope you enjoyed the essay. It is actually setting me up for a story I'd like to write about Mike's first try at smoking one of his father's pipes. Perhaps it will be possible in next week's Flash Fiction. Today is my father's actual birthday. If he were still here with us, he would be 86 years old today. Happy Birthday, Dad! I love you greatly and miss you enormously! Please think of me often. And both you and Mom, please try to talk to me from Heaven, even if it is only in my dreams. Please.
PipeTobacco
6:01 AM
Monday, November 23, 2009
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Update & Note to Cormac
I apologize to all for being away for such a spell. The attending deer camp did work some magic on me, for I feel better than I have for a spell. That said, the reason for my continued absence has been due to two factors:
1. Unfortunately, this is the most hectic and harried time of the semester. Coupling this to an enormously busier semester than usual, and I unfortunately let it get the best of me time-wise. I have really been doing little other than getting through tests, exams, book ordering decisions and the like every since I returned from deer camp.
2. I also had a new, looming grant deadline that I met today. It is a grant I feel I have a good shot at... one for some science education work I wish to explore. It is only a small grant (roughly a bit over $15,000) but small or large, all grants require a helluva lot of busy work and running around all over the hinterland.
So, now that the grant is finished and I have found new footing with all the work related deadlines, I wanted to get back on here to talk with all of you. I hope to now incorporate greater consistency in my frequency of writings for the whole of December in an effort to feel comfortable in setting a new goal of 365 consistent days of posting in 2010.
A final note to Cormac... thank you so much for the advice on how to get my blog up to snuff in regards to having the widget work. When I am feeling a bit more daring, I will try out your advice.
PipeTobacco
11:25 PM
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