Category Archives: Springer

Lead and Crime: Another Look

by MichelineConte Posted on January 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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A trio of researchers from the University of Missouri and the University of Iowa have a new paper out that calls into question the correlation between lead emissions and violent crime rates. I want to comment on it, but with two caveats:

I’m not knowledgeable enough to judge the analysis in detail. I can explain what the authors have done, and I can point out some questions, but that’s about it. Serious critiques will have to come from qualified researchers.
This post isn’t hard to follow, but it’s pretty long and the payback is slim. For that reason, I’m putting it under the fold. Click if you want to wade through the whole thing.

Continue Reading »

Link – 

Lead and Crime: Another Look

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Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

by BrentC68dttk Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Low-fat dietary dogma—and, by extension, the plethora of processed junk the food industry conjured up to indulge it—has passed its sell-by date. But cutting down on sugary foods can trigger rapid health improvements.

Those are the messages of two studies released last week. For the fat one, a team of Harvard researchers scoured databases looking for randomized, controlled trials—the gold standard of dietary research—comparing the weight-loss effects of low-fat diets to other regimens like low-carb. They found 53 studies that met their criteria for rigor.

The result, published in the British journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: low-carbohydrate diets “led to significantly greater weight loss” than did low-fat ones. People assigned low-fat diets tended to lose a small amount of weight compared to no-change-in-diet control groups, but cutting carbs delivered better results than reducing dietary fat. “The science does not support low-fat diets as the optimal long-term weight loss strategy,” lead author Deirdre Tobias of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said in a press release.

The study marks the latest indication that your fat-free fro-yo habit is not likely doing you any favors by cutting your fat intake. But its sugary jolt may be doing more harm than you already thought. That’s the suggestion of another new study, published in the journal Obesity, by a team led by longtime sugar critic Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist in at the University of California at San Francisco.

Lustig is a proponent of the idea that all calories aren’t created equal—specifically, that added sugars (in sodas, processed foods, etc.) do more harm than calorie-equivalent amounts of fats, starches, and complex carbohydrates. To test this theory, Lustig and his colleagues identified 43 kids diagnosed with obesity and metabolic syndrome—defined as a cluster of conditions associated with the risk cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes—and tweaked their diets.

For 10 days, the kids ate catered meals with caloric amounts equivalent to their previous diets but with all foods with added sugars removed, replaced with starches. Their overall sugar intake went from 28 percent to 10 percent (representing naturally sweet foods like fruit). Lustig summarized the results in an op-ed:

Diastolic blood pressure decreased by five points. Blood fat levels dropped precipitously. Fasting glucose decreased by five points, glucose tolerance improved markedly, insulin levels fell by 50%. In other words we reversed their metabolic disease in just 10 days, even while eating processed food, by just removing the added sugar and substituting starch, and without changing calories or weight. Can you imagine how much healthier they would have been if we hadn’t given them the starch?

It’s important to note that the results are suggestive, not conclusive. Unlike the studies conglomerated in the low-fat paper, Lustig’s project did not include a control group.

But both the Harvard study and Lustig’s reinforce an emerging consensus that fat is not necessarily a dietary devil, while quaffing sugar at typical US levels might just be.

More here – 

Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

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Why No One Really Knows a Better Way to Train Cops

by JaysonMuirden Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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After a year in which killings of unarmed suspects by the police have become a major national issue, activists, law enforcement experts, and political leaders have all stressed the importance of introducing more and better training for officers. Police departments across the country have begun to re-evaluate how they teach cops to use physical force, defuse tension with suspects, approach the mentally ill, and check their own unconscious biases. But what do we really know about police training as a solution? Will it be effective? Here are some of the key questions:

What specific steps have police departments taken? A recent survey by the DC-based Police Executive Research Forum revealed that the majority of an officer’s training on use of force consisted of firearms and defensive tactics. “We spend much less time discussing the importance of deescalation techniques and crisis intervention strategies,” Chuck Wexler, the group’s executive director, wrote in August. The Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, formed in response to Ferguson and other controversial police shootings, urged that “the need for expanded and more effective training has become critical.” Its top recommendations to law enforcement agencies include making classes on crisis intervention mandatory for basic recruits and officers in the field, and forming “training innovation hubs” between universities and police academies.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


Video Shows Arrest of Sandra Bland Prior to Her Death in Texas Jail


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

In 2012, Washington state’s police academy introduced cadets to a new curriculum that emphasized trainings in crisis intervention, building social skills, and critical thinking—a shift from its previous boot camp approach. The NYPD is currently retraining its officers on de-escalation, communication, and minimizing use of force. In early September, Cleveland introduced plans to ramp up training that teaches officers how to respond to suspects who may have mental illnesses—a change prompted by the city’s recent settlement with the US Department of Justice following a federal investigation into the Cleveland PD.

After the fatal police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Pasco, Washington, the DoJ announced in May that it would train Pasco officers for a year in order to “enhance trust and communication between the community and the police department.” And following a record number of officer-involved shootings in 2010, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department overhauled its training curriculum, which now includes instruction on implicit bias and “reality-based trainings” focused on appropriate use of force.

How do we know whether these kinds of reforms will help reduce officer-involved shootings? Some departments that have introduced training reforms, such as those in Las Vegas and Maryland’s Montgomery County, say the changes have lowered problematic use-of-force incidents. Yet researchers have little data on potential impacts with regard to use of force, mental-health crisis intervention, and building community trust. “We know virtually nothing about the short- or long-term effects associated with police training of any type,” Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan wrote in a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

In a report commissioned by the National Research Council in 2004, Skogan and others found that while it had long been assumed “that more and better police training leads to improved officer performance,” there were “scarcely more than a handful of studies on the effects of training,” and that “research on the effects of training content, timing, instructor qualifications, pedagogical methods, dosage, and long-term effects is virtually nonexistent.” In the decade since, Skogan says, “there has not been much progress.”

The lack of rigorous scientific assessments on police training programs means that in areas like crisis intervention or hostage negotiations, “we’re flying by the seat of our pants,” says Dave Klinger, a former officer and a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. That can be dangerous for both the officers and the communities they serve, he adds.

Why isn’t there more research available on these kinds of training programs? The argument that policing should be rooted in science is nothing new, but translating academic research into practice on the streets is complicated territory. As researchers at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy explained in a 2012 paper, what works at one department may not work in another. Scientists and police departments might also disagree, they said, on how to measure an agency’s effectiveness or define what “good policing” looks like. “The worlds of the practitioner and the scientist operate on vastly different timelines,” they wrote, “with police chiefs believing that they need quick solutions, and academics believing that without adequate deliberation, the quality of the science might be compromised.”

What does all of this cost? Officers spend hundreds of hours training both in the academy and out in the field, costing an average of $1.3 million per academy, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Municipal police agencies, for example, spent an average of $2.2 million on academy training in 2006, with basic recruit training taking up an average of 883 hours in the classroom and 575 hours in the field, according to the latest available data. Certified state training academies spent an average of $3.6 million per academy in the same year.

Why don’t we know more about what training works? Part of the answer is that ultimately it’s hard to know whether an officer’s behavior during any given scenario was directly affected by training that he or she received. There have also been some “serious methodological limitations” in past research on training, Skogan found in his 2004 report. It’s also hard to isolate the effect of training from other factors that could influence an officer, such as his or her workload, stress, or other factors influencing the operations of a police department and its personnel.

Lorie Fridell, a criminologist at the University of South Florida, says she has been thinking about how to better measure racial or other implicit bias in policing since 1999, when she wrote a book on the subject. She says it’s been “incredibly challenging” to come up with effective approaches. Fridell runs a training program that teaches officers to recognize and check their implicit bias, and she plans to conduct a controlled study on the effects of the training to determine how an officer’s attitude and skills may have changed as a result. But the study won’t be able to show how the training affected an officer’s behavior on the streets, she explains, because measuring bias in that setting would require pinpointing the motive behind an officer’s actions in any given situation.

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Why No One Really Knows a Better Way to Train Cops

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Federal Court to EPA: No, You Can’t Approve This Pesticide That Kills Bees

by DavidPigdon Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a federal appeals court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of a pesticide called sulfoxaflor. Marketed by agrichemical giant Dow AgroSciences, sulfoxaflor belongs to a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which have been implicated by a growing weight of evidence in the global crisis in bee health. In a blunt opinion, the court cited the “precariousness of bee populations” and “flawed and limited data” submitted by Dow on the pesticide’s effects on beleaguered pollinating insects.

Before winning approval for sulfoxaflor back in 2013, the company hyped the product to investors, declaring that it “addresses a $2 billion market need currently unmet by biotech solutions,” particularly for cotton and rice.

US beekeepers were less enthusiastic—a group of national beekeeping organizations, along with the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, quickly sued the EPA to withdraw its registration of sulfoxaflor, claiming that the EPA itself had found sulfoxaflor to be “highly toxic to honey bees, and other insect pollinators.”

Thursday’s ruling, a response to that suit, took their side. It applies only to sulfoxaflor, which Dow markets as a foliar spray on a variety of crops, including cotton, soybean, citrus, stone fruit, nuts, grapes, potatoes, vegetables, and strawberries. It has no bearing on the EPA’s equally controversial approval of other neonics like clothianidin and imidacloprid, which are widely used as seed treatments on the two most prominent US crops: corn and soybeans.

But Greg Loarie, an attorney for EarthJustice who argued the case for the beekeeper’s coalition, told me that the decision has broad significance because the ruling “makes clear” that when the EPA is assessing new pesticides, it must assess robust data on the health impacts on the entire hive, not just on individual adult bees.

In its opinion, the court rebuked the EPA for approving sulfoxaflor despite “inconclusive or insufficient data on the effects…on brood development and long-term colony health.” That’s a problem, the court added, because pesticides can cause subtle harm to bees that don’t kill them but that “ripple through the hive,” which is an “interdependent ‘superorganism.'” Indeed, many independent studies have demonstrated just such effects—that low-level exposure to neonics is “sub-lethal” to individual bees but compromises long-term hive health.

“The EPA doesn’t have that hive-level information on very many insecticides, if any,” Loarie said.

And in the case of sulfoxaflor, the agency didn’t try very hard to get that information. In January 2013, because of major gaps in research on the new chemical’s effect on bees, the EPA decided to grant sulfoxaflor “conditional registration” and ordered Dow to provide more research. And then a few months later, the agency granted sulfoxaflor unconditional registration—even though “the record reveals that Dow never completed the requested additional studies,” the court opinion states.

In an even more scathing addendum to the court’s main opinion, Circuit Judge N.R. Smith added, “I am inclined to believe the EPA…decided to register sulfoxaflor unconditionally in response to public pressure for the product and attempted to support its decision retroactively with studies it had previously found inadequate.” The judge added, “Such action seems capricious.”

Sulfoxaflor’s twisted path through the EPA’s approval process isn’t the first time the agency has green-lighted a neonicotinoid pesticide under dodgy circumstances, as I showed in this 2010 piece on clothianidin, a widely marketed pesticide marketed by Dow’s European rival, Bayer.

In 2013—the same year the EPA approved sulfoxaflor—the European Union placed a two-year moratorium on clothianidin and two other major neonics, citing pollinator health concerns. For a study released last year, the US Geological Survey found neonic traces in all the Midwestern rivers and streams it tested, declaring them to be “both mobile and persistent in the environment.” In addition to harming bees, neonics may also harm birds and fish, Canadian researchers have found.

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Federal Court to EPA: No, You Can’t Approve This Pesticide That Kills Bees

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Gamers guzzle a crazy amount of energy

by PrinceKilfoyle8 Posted on September 1, 2015

Gamers guzzle a crazy amount of energy

By on 1 Sep 2015commentsShare

The average gaming computer guzzles as much energy as three refrigerators — three refrigerators! And since gaming isn’t complete without snacks, we should probably make that four.

That’s because gaming computers are to your average PC what this tricked out monstrosity is to your mom’s Acura. Hardcore gamers enhance their machines with amped-up processors, fancy computer monitors, and fast graphics cards, so battling virtual monsters can end up requiring a lot of computing power. Here’s more from Motherboard:

A new study published in the journal Energy Efficiency finds that worldwide, gaming computers suck down $10 billion worth of electricity (or 75 terawatt hours) a year. Given that sales rates are projected to double by 2020, that figure is expected to do the same. The study finds that while gaming computers comprise just 2.5 percent of personal computers worldwide, they account for 20 percent of global computer energy use.

Evan Mills, a UC Berkeley energy researcher and the study’s co-author, calculates that “a typical gaming computer uses 1,400 kilowatt-hours per year, or six times more energy than a typical PC and 10 times more than a gaming console.”

Worldwide, “it’s like 25 standard electric power plants,” Mills tells me in an email. Imagine that: 25 massive power plants, the kind that power entire cities, running their electricity directly to people playing Counter-Strike and League of Legend. “It’s also like 160 million refrigerators, globally. Or, 7 billion LED light bulbs running 3 hours per day.”

Fortunately, gamers can cut down their energy consumption by as much as 75 percent by just “switching some settings and replacing a few components,” Motherboard reports. For more information, interested gamers can check out Greening the Beast, a website that Mills runs with his son, Nathaniel.

So the next time you’re trying to destroy your opponents’ nexus in League of Legends, think about all those emissions that you’re responsible for and consider making a few changes. And if you want to be really popular among your virtual teammates, tell them to follow suit. (Grist is not responsible for any virtual harm done to your avatar for telling others to green their beasts.)

Source:

Gaming Computers Use a Truly Astonishing Amount of Energy

, Motherboard.

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Gamers guzzle a crazy amount of energy

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Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

by PhoebeKmk753134 Posted on August 28, 2015

Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

By on 28 Aug 2015commentsShare

It’s a safe bet that most kids who make excuses for bad grades are just totally full of it. Couldn’t upload your homework because the internet was down? Nice try. The latest video in your YouTube series went viral, and you just had to spend all night responding to comments? You’re not that important. Dog ate your homework? Stop it. But if a kid says her GPA is a touch low because her home is shrouded in toxic air pollution, maybe listen to her.

In a recent study published in the journal Population and Environment, researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso reported that kids living in highly polluted areas tended to have lower GPAs than their peers — and that’s after the researchers accounted for the child’s age, race, and sex, their family’s household income, and the mother’s education level, age during pregnancy, and English proficiency.

Previous studies have shown correlations between students’ academic performance and air pollution levels around schools, but this is the first to look at home environments, where students likely spend most of their time. The researchers conducted the study using data from the EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment and the academic records of 1,895 fourth and fifth graders around El Paso. The overall differences in GPA were small, the researchers reported, but the association with home toxicity was strong, and that’s cause for concern:

Effects appear to be insidious, since they are mild, unlikely to be perceived, and, hence, unlikely to be addressed in any way. It would be important to note that seemingly trivial effects on children’s development may translate into substantial impacts throughout the life course, in terms of physical and mental health and personal success (e.g., lifetime earnings).

How exactly these pollutants influence a child’s academic performance is a bit murky. Sara E. Grineski, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at UTEP and one of the study’s coauthors, said in the press release that there could be a few things going on here:

“Some evidence suggests that this association might exist because of illnesses, such as respiratory infections or asthma. Air pollution makes children sick, which leads to absenteeism and poor performance in school. The other hypothesis is that chronic exposure to air toxics can negatively affect children’s neurological and brain development.”

The primary sources of the harmful pollution came from what the researchers called “non-mobile road sources” — things like trains, construction vehicles, and airplanes. That the researchers separated out these various sources of pollution is another reason that this study is unique compared to previous research that just looked at pollution in aggregate:

While point (e.g., factories) and on-road mobile (e.g., freeways) sources of air pollution have received the most attention in the policy and academic arenas, the contribution to non-road mobile sources to the overall pollution burden is increasingly being recognized nationwide. For example, new evidence suggests that the particle pollution generated from the Los Angeles International airport extends over 10 km and is of the same general magnitude as the entire freeway system in Los Angeles, California, USA (Hudda et al. 2014).

Since low-income and minority neighborhoods tend to be the most popular dumping grounds for air pollution compared to their more affluent counterparts, this is clearly a job for — oh, sorry. It’s just that environmental justice gets violated so often these days that it seems like it should have its own superhero by now — a Superman to its Metropolis, a Batman to its Gotham. Do you think we could get Captain Planet to spearhead an Environmental Justice League?

Source:

Study Links Air Pollution to Children’s Low GPAs

, UTEP News.

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A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15


That 15-foot-long tiger shark need wrestling? Leave it to the prosYou probably aren’t going to tango with a tiger shark anytime soon — but David Shiffman does it on a weekly basis, for science.


These first-time fishermen know all the best (and worst) parts of fishingAndrew and Sophie never planned to be commercial fishermen — but they tried it for a summer. Here’s what they learned.


How to feed the world, with a little kelp from our friends (the oceans)Paul Dobbins’ farm needs no pesticides, fertilizer, land, or water — we just have to learn to love seaweed.


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Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

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Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail

by AlissaBateman Posted on August 26, 2015

Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail

By on 26 Aug 2015commentsShare

Does the Ted Cruz in you ever wonder whether global warming really is just a hoax? Whether skeptics really are the Galileos of our time? Whether climate scientists really do just want to make money? Well, wonder no more. A group of researchers just tried to replicate 38 peer-reviewed studies that support skeptic talking points, and surprise! They ran into some trouble.

In a paper published last week in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, the researchers reported a number of problems with the 38 studies, including questionable physics and incomplete data sets. They also found that some of the studies were published in peer-reviewed journals that didn’t specialize in climate science, and therefore probably didn’t have the proper experts looking over the work.

One of the most common problems the researchers encountered was something called “cherry-picking.” Not to be confused with actual cherry-picking (which is now endangered thanks to climate change), data cherry-picking is a big science no-no in which researchers falsify results by including only the data that support those results and not the data that don’t.

Dana Nuccitelli, one of the coauthors of the study, gave an example of such cherry-picking in an article he wrote for the Guardian. In the example, Nuccitelli and his colleagues were trying to reproduce a 2011 study linking climate change to the moon and solar cycles:

When we tried to reproduce their model of the lunar and solar influence on the climate, we found that the model only simulated their temperature data reasonably accurately for the 4,000-year period they considered. However, for the 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data they threw out, their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes. The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past.

As long as we’re predicting the future with a faulty model of the past, give me your hand — I’ll tell you how happy you’ll be in 10 years. And speaking of magic, another problem that Nuccitelli and his colleagues came across in multiple studies was a disregard for basic physics:

In another example, Ferenc Miskolczi argued in 2007 and 2010 papers that the greenhouse effect has become saturated, but as I also discuss in my book, the ‘saturated greenhouse effect’ myth was debunked in the early 20th century. As we note in the supplementary material to our paper, Miskolczi left out some important known physics in order to revive this century-old myth.

Dubious physics came up again in the context of “curve fitting” — what scientists do when they fit data to a certain trend like rising temperatures. It’s pretty easy to abuse this practice, otherwise known as “mathturbation” or “graph cooking,” as Nuccitelli points out on the website Skeptical Science. Take, for example, the time that Peabody Energy found a positive correlation between life expectancy and coal use. In order to do it right, Nuccitelli writes in the Guardian, scientists should at least obey the laws of physics:

Good modeling will constrain the possible values of the parameters being used so that they reflect known physics, but bad ‘curve fitting’ doesn’t limit itself to physical realities. For example, we discuss research by Nicola Scafetta and Craig Loehle, who often publish papers trying to blame global warming on the orbital cycles of Jupiter and Saturn.

OK — so these contrarian studies are a bit dodgy. But then again, Galileo wasn’t perfect, either. When it came to understanding how tides worked, he was totally off! Granted, he was at least obeying the laws of physics as scientists understood them at the time, but who knows? Maybe these climate change contrarians just know something that we don’t.

Fortunately, Nuccitelli and his colleagues made the software that they used for their research open source, so anyone can replicate their replications. And then someone else can replicate their replication of the replications, and so on and so forth until we’re all burnt to a crisp and microbes have taken over the Earth.

Source:

Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers

, The Guardian.

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Oceans 15


Sweden’s oceans ambassador fights for a sustainable blue economyLisa Emelia Svensson wants to figure out the value of the seas.


How to feed the world, with a little kelp from our friends (the oceans)Paul Dobbins’ farm needs no pesticides, fertilizer, land, or water — we just have to learn to love seaweed.


This surfer is committed to saving sharks — even though he lost his leg to one of themMike Coots lost his leg in a shark attack. Then he joined the group Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation, and started fighting to save SHARKS from US.


This scuba diver wants everyone — black, white, or brown — to feel at home in the oceanKramer Wimberley knows what it’s like to feel unwelcome in the water. As a dive instructor and ocean-lover, he tries to make sure no one else does.


Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail

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Jazz Heavyweight Terence Blanchard Won’t Turn a Blind Eye

by EnidChristmas Posted on August 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Terence Blanchard

Fifty-three year-old New Orleans-born trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard is a heavyweight among his musical peers, and not only for his passion as an amateur boxer. As a bandleader, he has released 20 albums over the past three decades. A prolific composer for film and television—he created the soundtracks for every Spike Lee film since Jungle Fever—Blanchard has a gift for constructing narrative and nuanced mood in his music.

His new album Breathless, released this past May, is his first with the electric E-Collective band and features vocal contributions from Maroon 5’s PJ Morton and Blanchard’s son JRei Oliver.

With the new band and the thematic connection to Eric Garner’s death, you’d think the album would be full of raw nerves and anger. But instead, Blanchard has created a suite of instrumentals, songs, and spoken word meditations that invite reflection on finding the strength and peace to heal and move forward. He challenges listeners to be “breathless from exerting your free will, breathless from doing good, breathless from blowing your own sweet solo.”

I spoke with Blanchard at the Jazz Standard in New York, and later on the phone from his home in New Orleans.

Mother Jones: Was your label, Blue Note, supportive about changing directions with this album?

Terence Blanchard: We just lost one of the greatest music executives of my time, Bruce Lundvall. The last time I saw him we were right here, taking a picture together. He was the type of dude that whenever I saw him, he always talked about music. It wasn’t ever, “I can do this for you, blah, blah, blah.” I always thought it would be great to be on a label with a guy like that because not only does he appreciate the music but I could also learn from him. When we finally got the chance to work together, he said, “I want you to be you.”

Now we have Don Was, who is very much like Bruce in that regard. When I first had the conversation with Don about the record he said, “Great, but bring it up to where you are, don’t dumb it down.” It was great to hear that.

MJ: Is composing for film a different process for you than making an album?

TB: When I first started it gave me headaches: I’d be working on a jazz thing then my brain would have to click out of that mode and then go work on the film. Wayne Shorter talks about your life being one continuous song with different variations, moods, textures, and color. That’s the way it is right now for me: Both inform each other in a way that I can see more clearly now. The film side has opened my eyes to story telling, context, and all of those issues. You’d think that working in film is limiting, but it’s actually liberating because it shows you that within the context of the story there are still a million permutations.

MJ: How did the topical side to Breathless evolve?

TB: Breathless didn’t start out to be a statement record, it started out as something we wanted to have fun with just playing music. But it’s hard with my background to turn a blind eye to what’s been happening.

MJ: Given that many of the people who have died in these police incidents have been young people, what did it mean to you to have your son involved in the record?

TB: It wasn’t something I thought about initially, but once it dawned on me, it made more sense. My son had had an incident of mistaken identity. A woman claimed that somebody had broken into her house, and she described the suspect as a black guy with dreads. My son had been walking by that house at that time. Her husband saw my son, followed him all the way to school and called 911. Seven patrol calls pulled up to the school. Seven. They handcuffed my son in class, walked him out and put him and put him in a patrol car. One of the cops there was a guy I grew up with, literally our back yards were connected. He saw my son sitting in the back of a patrol car and said, “I know this kid, he didn’t do this.” When they brought my son back to the woman’s house, her story fell apart. What got me was the seven patrol cars. That says a lot about the mentality going on in law enforcement. The thing I keep saying: It’s not going to stop until those police who are responsible go to jail.

MJ: My guess is that if the police prosecute their own, it undermines their power and control, and they’re afraid.

TB: I believe it to be true. That describes a whole host of problems with insecurity. You see it all the time.

I’ve been boxing for 20 years. When you start boxing and you get in the ring, the first thing you learn is to respect the person in front of you. That carries over into my daily life. I don’t care who it is or what they look like.

I’m going to tell you this, and this is probably going to get me in trouble, but I’ve seen some cops come to the boxing gym and not stay. Some of these dudes, they have an attitude problem; they come to the gym for the wrong reasons. And I think, if you have that problem here, what’s going to happen out on the street with your badge and a gun?

That’s the part we’re not dealing with. They are supposed to be the professionals. I’ve accepted that there are things that come with being a public figure as a musician. What’s crazy is the power they want to exert over everyday people when the side of the car says, “protect and serve.” To serve is something noble, something distinguished and honorable.

I have friends who are good cops but they are not speaking out. It’s creating this atmosphere of distrust that is truly dangerous. These police officers are human beings too, but they are subject to the same faults as everybody else, so they make the same assumptions as everybody else.

MJ: Your song “See Me As I Am” brings up the issue about perception and race.

TB: I hate using the term “as a black man,” but in my experience, I’ve gotten to the point when I meet people I feel that tension, I can see their minds change as I’m talking to them, I can see their thoughts about who I am change as we’re having a conversation. That’s normal in some ways for all interactions, but you call always tell when a first impression is mostly negative. Forget what you see on the news and television. Try to come and experience who I really am.

What gives me hope is when I look at my kids and their friends, I see that as an indication of where we’re going. My daughter was talking to me the other day about a girl friend of hers who is “gender mobile.” And I was like, “What’s that?” She says, “Sometimes she dresses like a boy, sometimes like a girl.” And she was cool with that. Race, ethnicity, sexual orientation— nothing matters to these kids, it’s beautiful.

MJ: Despite the real and justified anger about these incidents, the album seems to focus more on internal feelings and preservation of the self.

TB: At the end of the day that’s all we have: self-preservation. Our history has been to rely on our faith in times of trouble and distress. That’s been the place where we have found our salvation, and our rejuvenation.

MJ: As expressed in the song “Samadhi,” what does the practice of meditation do for you personally and creatively?

TB: It’s done so many things. It’s built up my awareness, it’s allowed me to understand that being selfless doesn’t mean powerless. That’s the reason I have “Confident Selflessness” on the album too, because you need to be confident in your aspirations, but you also need to be selfless in how you serve society and other people. It has allowed me to choose whether to be angry or not. Anger is not necessarily a reaction; it can be something that you choose to allow. When you start to see the bigger picture of things, you can respond accordingly. It’s brought me a lot of peace. It allows your mind to slow down, it allows your thoughts to slow down, and it allows your soul to strengthen itself. One of the things I chant for is peace in this country.

MJ: Is there anything else to staying happy and healthy as a musician?

TB: A lot of it is just peace and solitude. You need that to rejuvenate yourself and rebuild your brain and your spirit. People don’t understand how much energy it takes to do this, not just physically but mentally. I did a gig with Ron Carter and on the way back to the hotel, the driver was playing some music. Ron said, “Excuse me, could you please just turn that off? I’ve been playing music all night and I have to resolve all this shit that I played in my mind.” I get his point.

Actually, do you know what most musicians used to do? They’ll never admit it, but before the Internet—it was soap operas. There were a lot of them, and they would have discussions about this stuff on the road. I wasn’t into them but I would think to myself, “Boy if they could see me now, with these dudes talking about The Young and the Restless!”

MJ: Are you going to name names?

TB: Naww, I can’t do that! For me it used to be Jerry Springer, because when you watch Jerry Springer you immediately forget about whatever you were doing.

This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity.

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Jazz Heavyweight Terence Blanchard Won’t Turn a Blind Eye

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One Disease Hits Mostly People of Color. One Mostly Whites. Which One Gets Billions In Funding?

by ArlenLassiter82 Posted on May 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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February 12, 2009, was supposed to be a big day for Carlton Haywood Jr.: The newly minted Johns Hopkins professor was set to travel from Baltimore to New York City to make a presentation at an important medical meeting. But the night before he left, a searing pain started to surge through his arms and soon spread to his legs. The next morning, when he boarded the train, his whole body felt like it was on fire. By the time he reached Penn Station, he could barely make it to the emergency room.

The pain was caused by Haywood’s sickle-cell disease, a genetic condition in which misshapen red blood cells build up in the blood vessels and cause infections, strokes, and excruciating episodes of pain. Having lived with sickle cell for 39 years and studied it as a bioethicist, Haywood knew the treatment he needed to stop the episode, so he requested a specific combination of medications. The hematologist, however, refused, implying that Haywood didn’t know what he was talking about. Haywood wound up missing the meeting—and was in the hospital for a week.

For the 100,000 Americans with sickle cell—it’s the most common life-shortening genetic disease in the United States—insults like that are routine. “We know what works best for us and what does not work so well for us,” Haywood says. “But doctors often don’t listen.” His research has found that when sickle-cell patients ask for medication—especially opioids to control their pain—they are routinely dismissed as pill seekers, even though they are no more likely to be addicted to painkillers than the general population. Sickle-cell patients in acute pain also face longer ER waits than other patients in acute pain.

So what’s unique about sickle-cell patients? Well, about 90 percent are African American. (The trait is thought to have originated in Africa as an adaptive response to malaria.) Many researchers believe that racial discrimination plays a major role in the care that sickle-cell patients get.

Consider, for comparison, the experience of people with another life-shortening genetic illness, cystic fibrosis, a respiratory and digestive condition. Like sickle cell, it gets worse with age, requires strict daily drug regimens, and often results in hospitalization. And like sickle cell, it dramatically shortens patients’ life spans—to a median of 37 years for cystic fibrosis, compared to 40 to 45 years for sickle-cell disease.

But here’s one key difference: Cystic fibrosis affects mostly Caucasians. And that, suspects John Strouse, a Johns Hopkins hematologist who has compared data about the two diseases, is one reason why funding for cystic fibrosis research, drug development, and patient advocacy dwarfs that for sickle-cell disease. In 2011, the most recent year for which his data is available, spending on cystic fibrosis totaled $254 million—nearly four times the $66 million that was spent on sickle cell, even though the latter affects three times as many people.

In part, that’s because cystic fibrosis’ primary dedicated charity—the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation—is far wealthier than the dozens of sickle-cell organizations combined. In 2011, the foundation spent $176 million on cystic fibrosis—compared to the $1.1 million spent by the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America, the largest of the advocacy groups.

Yet the disparity isn’t limited to these private funds. The National Institutes of Health spends nearly four times as much per patient on cystic fibrosis research as it does on sickle cell. From 2009 to 2011, researchers published twice as many papers on cystic fibrosis as they did on sickle cell.

“You have this kind of feedback loop,” Strouse says. The sickle-cell community has fewer wealthy, powerful advocates, so there’s less interest in research. “In order to draw attention to a disease, you need affluent people promoting it. And then, once the disease gets the attention, more people want to devote money to it”—which then leads to more research.

Case in point: In 2000, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation invested in a pharmaceutical company that ended up developing a breakthrough treatment. When the foundation sold the rights to the drug royalties for $3.3 billion last November, it became the richest rare-disease advocacy group in history. Even though the new drug only works for a handful of patients, the windfall will support further pharmaceutical research that may one day lead to a cure for all. “We will convene the best minds in science and medicine to cure cystic fibrosis at its most fundamental level,” the head of the foundation wrote in a letter to supporters.

The deal, experts say, could set a precedent for other rare diseases. But if patients with big bucks bankroll research for their own conditions, Strouse wonders, then who will support the likes of sickle-cell disease? Poor parents, he notes, have fewer opportunities to be “out there raising awareness and buzz about your kid’s disease. You’re struggling just to get by, just to get your child to the doctor’s office while holding down your job.”

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One Disease Hits Mostly People of Color. One Mostly Whites. Which One Gets Billions In Funding?

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How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

by RozellaMccune Posted on January 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’ve all heard this advice before. We might have even passed it on to encourage a struggling friend or to mentor a younger person: Follow your dreams. Imagine the future that you want, and it will come to pass. And yet, we still struggle to lose that weight, or finish that project, or improve that relationship. When we make resolutions at the start of each new year, it’s easy to feel optimistic that this time it will be different. But deep down we know that if it didn’t work in the past, it’s unlikely to work in the future.

Believe it or not, there’s substantial scientific evidence that fantasizing about a bright future can actually make us less likely to achieve our goals. “We have found that the more positively people daydream about the future, the less well they do over time,” explains Gabriele Oettingen on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg, has been studying the science of motivation for more than 20 years. And her new book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, challenges the conventional wisdom about optimism.

In one early study, for example, Oettingen and her colleagues tracked the progress that a group of obese women made as they attempted to lose weight. The researchers recorded the extent to which these women fantasized about their svelte future selves. The results were surprising: It turned out that women who had frequent positive daydreams about being thin were actually less likely to lose weight.

And in a more recent study, Oettingen and her colleagues asked undergraduates to daydream about a future in which they had positive, negative, or neutral experiences. Once again, the results were striking—positive fantasizing led to poorer achievement outcomes. “And the more positively they fantasized about an easy transition into work life, the less well they did in the future,” says Oettingen. Why was this the case? The study suggested one possible mechanism by which positive daydreams can affect productivity: Using physiological instruments and behavioral indicators, the researchers found that these types of thoughts actually sap a person’s energy. (Exactly why that happens remains a mystery.)

So is the link between positive thinking and achieving one’s goals completely spurious? Can we finally just agree that you can’t dream your way to success? Well, not so fast.

As scientists disentangle the different ways in which we can engage in positive thinking, an interesting distinction between positive expectations and positive fantasies has emerged. Positive expectations based on past experience are generally a good thing. For example, “you expect that you do well in a meeting because, in past meetings, you did well, especially in this specific context,” explains Oettingen. But daydreams about the future, in which we indulge in optimistic fantasizing that isn’t based on solid evidence, can be counterproductive.

Remember the women in Oettingen’s early study who wanted to lose weight? It turns out that if they had a positive expectation of success, but realistic or negative daydreams (perhaps imagining what it would be like to bulge out of a favorite pair of jeans), they were more likely to shed pounds.

What’s more, Oettingen has found that a specific method of positive thinking can lead to better outcomes. She calls it mental contrasting. “It starts with identifying a wish,” she explains. The wish can be big or small—a major life change or just a task that needs to be completed today. “And then,” she says, “you identify the best outcome if you fulfill that wish.” That’s where the daydreaming comes in. You fantasize about what your future will be like if you attain your wish.

But don’t stop there, even though it’s enjoyable. Instead, make a serious effort to think about the obstacles that stand in your way. “Now what is it in me that holds me back?” Oettingen says. “What is it actually that stops me from fulfilling that wish and experiencing that outcome?” This is the “contrasting” portion of mental contrasting. Once you identify the obstacle, you go back to fantasy land and imagine what you need to do to overcome that barrier. The last step is to lay out a plan—either by writing it down or simply by thinking about it—that includes both your desired outcome and the ways in which you can overcome the obstacles that have thwarted you in the past.

“We have plenty of experiments which show that this mental contrasting is effective,” says Oettingen. And not just in one domain—mental contrasting works for problems related to your work, your family life, and even your interpersonal relationships.

But careful! Oettingen says the order of your directed thinking matters. For example, she points to one study in which her participants hoped to become more physically fit. She divided them up into two groups: Both groups fantasized about a future in which they were more fit, and both thought about the obstacles that stood in their way. But one group used mental contrasting—that is, they first imagined their future accomplishments, and then they thought about the obstacles they needed to overcome. The other group reversed the process: They imagined the obstacles first and then fantasized about the future.

After this exercise, Oettingen asked participants to go from the ground floor of the building to the fourth floor, where they would meet to discuss the experiment. Then she counted how many of them rode the elevator to get there. And sure enough, the people who used mental contrasting in the correct order were more likely to take the stairs.

Click below to listen to the full interview with Oettingen:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

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