In Defense of My Proposal
At the health seminar, I suggested one possible non-partisan option that could instantly improve the health and lower the cost of healthcare of this country.
My suggestion was a guaranteed free visit to a general practitioner for every patient every year. This would be paid for by the government, but it’d be a net plus, I argued, if only because it would help catch chronic ailments before it was too late.
My original proposal had holes: the deadline was December 31st and people pointed out, rightly so, that most people would wait until the end to attempt to make their appointments. I was also attacked both on the ‘front end’— in that there were not enough doctors in the country— and on the ‘back end’ — in that the administrative issues would be overwhelming. The latter criticism was directly related to the Dec. 31st critique.
Well, here’s my new proposal:
The United States government should immediately enact a program which would allow one (1) free visit to a general practitioner per person per year. This could be regulated in the same way we regulate job hires: a certain combination of IDs would suffice to identify a person, which would be moderated through some central hub. This would not instantly clog up the system for the same reason that the country doesn’t shut down on election day. Not everybody chooses to vote and not everybody will choose to go to the doctor. It would also not clog up the system because the deadline will be tied to each person’s birthday. So I would be able to go to the doctor for free once at 24 then once more as soon as I turned 25. Since the cost would be more than over compensated by the savings in the health system.
What do you guys think?
-Carlos
How does gaming fit into the future of education? Will Wright and E.O. Wilson
Yesterday, I awoke, as usual, to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on my clock radio. Sometimes, I manage to snooze through the stories, but my curiosity was piqued by the interview on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, with Will Wright, creator of “The Sims” and “Spore,” and E.O. Wilson, Harvard biologist and Pulitzer-prize winning author of “On Human Nature” and “The Ants” (with Bert Hölldobler).
Wilson’s interest in bringing together the sciences and the humanities, his development of sociobiology as a new subdiscipline in biology, and his ability to make his research accessible to laypersons should certainly interest University Scholars. Indeed, a discussion of his work would have fit in quite well for our symposium on “Two Cultures: 50 Years Later” in 2009. Which brings me to Will Wright, whose “SimCity” was an installation project at our USP symposium on “Cities in Evolution: Imagination and Reinvention” in 2006.
What really piqued my interest in the Wright-Wilson interview was their conversation on the role of games in education, which made me think about our discussion at the USP retreat on “Educating the University” as a symposium topic this year. Here’s an excerpt from the NPR story:
“So the first question he asked Wilson was if he saw a role for games in the educational process.
“I’ll go to an even more radical position,” Wilson said. “I think games are the future in education. We’re going through a rapid transition now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.”
To listen to the whole interview, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112203095
We have a lot of folks at Duke considering this very proposition, including some of our grad school Unis like Allen Riddell, Whitney Trettien, and faculty like Cathy Davidson, Kate Hayles, and Tim Lenoir, among others. Cathy Davidson is co-founder and director of HASTAC (incidentally, this is Whitney’s 2nd year as a HASTAC scholar) and co-author of “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.” She was also crucial in the creation of the University Scholars Program back when she was Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke. Kate Hayles is a professor in the Literature Program and ISIS and is interested in electronic literature. Here’s a link to a Duke News article on her work. Tim Lenoir is the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair New Technologies in Society and works on history of science. Certainly, they’d provide a rich source of insight for continued discussion on the role of new media in higher education.
~Tori L.
Useful Durham websites
General activity searches:
Citysearch Durham
Yelp.com Durham
Meetup Durham
Life in Durham on Nickipedia
Media:
Independent (Indy) Weekly, which links to pretty much everything here
News & Observer
Food:
Carpe Durham
Durham Farmers Market
Maple View Farm
See Nickipedia, Citysearch and Yelp for a good list of restaurants, ethnic grocery stores, etc.
Entertainment:
Duke Performances
Carolina Theatre
Durham Performing Arts Center
Triangle Rock
Cat’s Cradle
Miscellaneous:
Durham County Government
Freecycle
Durham Bike and Ped
Go Triangle, public transportation info
Triangle Trails, including the American Tobacco Trail
Duke Natural History Society
Feel free to add your favorite links in the comments section!
—Irene L.
dolphins up close
Hi Unis! I hope you’re all having a fantastic summer. My summer has been filled with beach, ocean, and plenty of dolphins – just the way I like it! I started my summer doing field work in Sarasota, FL. An amazing group of researchers based out of Mote Marine Lab there carries out an annual health assessment of their local bottlenose dolphin population, and because my PhD research involves studying the genetic susceptibility of these animals to toxic red tides, I got to help out this year. A dolphin health assessment is no easy task. Our goal is to capture live dolphins, bring them up on a boat, run full vet exams on them and collect as many biological samples as we can, and then successfully release them again. While this may seem nearly impossible if you know anything about how big and fast these animals are, the team at Mote has been conducting this project for many years and has the process perfected so that its safe for all dolphins and humans involved.
This task involves 8 boats and over 40 people out on the water everyday for a week. One boat is responsible for driving a net around the dolphins; several fast motor boats filled with big strong guys are responsible for getting to the net as quickly as possible and getting their people in the water to get the dolphin under control; one boat is set up for the veterinary exams; and lastly, my boat was the sample processing boat which contained all the kits and equipment needed to collect the various biological samples (including vials with Duke-Cammen labels! Small skin samples were taken for my genetics analysis). Lucky for me, our boat tied directly up the vet boat so I got to see the dolphins up close and watch the vets do their work. A couple times I even got to jump over to the vet boat and help hold the dolphins as they did their exams. The dolphins are surprisingly calm throughout the entire procedure.
My week in Florida was unforgettable. I met many new people in the marine mammal field and made great connections with researchers I hope to work with in the future. I also came home with a set of dolphin tissue samples and got in the lab as soon as I could to work on those. Being part of a dolphin health assessment is an amazing experience, and I couldn’t have asked for any better way to start my PhD research. I wish I could show you pictures of all of this, but unfortunately we’re asked not to post our pictures online because of research permit limits. Instead, I’ve attached a picture of a bottlenose dolphin that a student took on a trip out from the Duke Marine Lab with the Marine Mammals class that I’m TA-ing this summer. Enjoy!
-Kristina
Julie Klein, “A Platform for a Shared Discourse of Interdisciplinary Education”
Julie Klein has been working on “interdisciplinarity” for almost 20 years and is author of numerous books. Here’s her latest work from the Journal of Social Science Education, “A Platform for a Shared Discourse of Interdisciplinary Education.”
-Tori L.
Home – a film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
“We 6 billion human beings are not the only inhabitants of this planet. We share it with billions and billions of animals, plants, and single-cell organisms. And it is not merely a case of cohabitation: our very existence depends on our close links with these other organisms. Albert Einstein once predicted that if the honey bee disappeared, the human race could only last four years: without bees to pollinate their flowers, the majority of plants would fail to reproduce and would die out, along with all the animals that depend upon them for food, and that includes mankind.
All living organisms, including humans, are part of a complex web of relationships that connects them with one another and with their environment. This interdependence relates to the food chain, to the balance of populations, and to natural cycles. As a result of these relationships, all the basic elements circulate and are exchanged between living beings and the environment in a process that is constant and universal, occurring through us and all around us.” – An excerpt from Home, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand.
For some, this film may just be a reminder of where we stand today. For others, it may very well be a wakeup call.
It it an inconvenient truth. That our current lifestyle cannot sustained by our mutual Home for long. Yes, we envision a comfortable life ahead of us. Yet, look around you…do you really need all of those things in that room right now? Or was it a sudden impulse spurred by the GRAND RED LETTERS IN BOLD that reads “BUY ONE GET ONE FREE” or “50% OFF OF ALL SUMMER GOODS” ? Our modern society’s consumerist culture has irrevocably formulated our lifestyles and behaviors. Can such behaviors so deeply ingrained in our culture be changed? That is one question that you can only answer for yourself. And once you have found your own answer, may your thoughts and wisdom steer your actions.
You can watch the movie online by clicking here. However, if you can grab a DVD and watch it with some like-minded friends, I think it’ll be a whole another experience 
Best,
- Runbin D.
Wader woes
Waders can be a wonderful thing. To some, they’re key to a good day of hunting and fishing. For others, they complete an award-winning costume (meet your director, new Unis!). And for those of us who insist on centering our Ph.D.s around marsh-breeding species, waders are one of the best inventions ever. Field sites would be impenetrable without a pair of waterproof hip waders to get us through the day. Only while wearing them can we brave the mud, the floating vegetation mats, and those horrible muskrat-made potholes to collect our precious data.
But sometimes, even the pluckiest of waders is defeated by the elements. When the first sound you hear after exiting your car is not the sweet song of sparrows or the burry croak of blackbirds, but rather the steady WHOOSH of water exhaled by drainpipes, you know it will not be a good day for waders. Your waders know this, too. You buckle them on and imagine them peering up at you, asking uncertainly, “Do I matter anymore?”
Turns out, sometimes the answer is a big fat NOPE. Three days of rain and you might as well be wearing pajamas in the field.
Now you hear your waders yelling, “It’s a marsh! It has no drainage! It’s duckweed soup!” But you have nests to check and birds to catch, and so you lumber in anyway, and despite your best efforts to hike up your outrageously high-waisted pants, you soon feel the shock of cold water running down your legs and pooling around your feet and the weight of it all pulling your waders lower and lower until equilibrium is reached and marsh muck gleefully sloshes around both sides of the fabric and your lower half becomes one with the marsh. You’ve officially topped your waders. It’s 7 in the morning.
Elephantiasis? Triple-jointedness? Simultaneous bow-legs and knock-knees?
Nah, just several pounds of water and all the interesting things floating inside it. Which we have been lugging around with us for the entire day.
One little-known benefit of wading in high water is that your clothes receive a dye job! Check out that hipster fringe on this mass-marketed shirt. It’s gone from plain white to dull gray AND taupe. Who says a three-dollar tee has to be boring?
To be fair, flooded waders are not so bad when the weather is nice. By afternoon, the water has usually warmed up enough that heading back to the road is no big deal. Your pants have been soaked for hours, right? (This is a poor way to get yourself out of a dry, toasty car at dawn.)
Note: You can see a few more photos here of what I’m actually doing in the marsh. Hope everyone’s summers have been going well!
—Irene L.
Defining Service {lma}
Approximately 17 days ago, another DukeEngage student and I arrived at our volunteer site in a small village called California in Trinidad and Tobago. We learned that we would be working under the supervision of a retired female individual who, to my knowledge, is not affiliated with a government body, a nonprofit organization or any insitution connected to volunteer or service work. We have been completing the assignments she has assigned us in our homestay. In the span of approximately two weeks, we have finished approximately 8 interviews of community members she has arranged for us to speak with. To my knowledge, these interviews will be complied into a report that myself and another DukeEngage student will submit to her. It is unclear to me at this point who will read this report other than those affiliated with the DukeEngage program.
During our training for this project, in a three-day program known as DukeEngage academy, we were often asked to define “service.” Given the experiences of the past two weeks, if what we have been doing is to be called “service,” then I would define “service” as, “an arrangement by which one individual is utilized as a means to achieve the ends of another individual or individuals.”
To follow the experiences of the six students of this DukeEngage project, please visit http://devilsintrinidad.tumblr.com/. To follow my personal adventures and opinions, please visit http://lengagestrinidad.wordpress.com/.
The allosphere
I wish I had found this before the symposium:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html
Did I mention they’re short?
Two interesting articles on two types of science crossover:
Let’s Not Crowd Me, I’m Only a Scientist (Newsweek)
Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy (NYT)
—Irene L.
