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.

All this talk about choice makes me want to clobber certain blurb writers

Why Girls Sleep Around: The Evolutionary Case for Female Promiscuity

In a study of mouse-like marsupials, “survival of babies with promiscuous mothers was almost three times as high as those in the monogamous group.” Key reasons: 1) “The sperm of some males were far more successful than others.” 2) “Babies fathered by these males were twice as likely to survive.”

Takeaway for women: “Polyandry improves female lifetime fitness.” Takeaway for men: “Males with more competitive ejaculates sire more viable offspring.” Fine print: “Males usually died after a short and intense single mating season due to exhaustion and aggressive encounters with other males.

====================

Let’s think about the biological reasons why it’s inaccurate to imply this finding can be extrapolated across species (and thus suggest all females have somehow selected to be more promiscuous). Most of my rationale has to do with the idea there are…well, ridiculously huge differences in the life history traits and mating strategies employed by humans and small marsupials, to name just two animals.  Polyandry, the mating with multiple males by females, improves female lifetime fitness for semelparous species—organisms with high adult mortality that blast the world with offspring shortly before they die, like cicadas, salmon and the antechinuses mentioned here. That’s the only chance at reproductive success they get, and more importantly there’s no parental care involved. In contrast, humans are iteroparous and invest much more energy in the survival of a few periodic offspring. So popping out 3 times as many kids at once would actually decrease lifetime fitness, because it’s likely to kill off or otherwise take an energetic toll on the mother on which the young depend. You have your zillion offspring, but they won’t survive. The relationship between increased mating and healthier babies doesn’t hold.

On the bright side, the fine print doesn’t apply to humans either, because sperm competition in iteroparous species is comparatively less fierce. In other words, guys don’t spend so much energy in their one mating session that they die right after it. (Because, we hope, they get more than a single try.) Not so the case for these marsupials: “Male antechinuses copulate for 5–14 consecutive hours with each female, and ejaculate around 3 h after mating starts. This extraordinary male reproductive biology could subject sperm to extreme physiological and epigenetic stress, resulting in the marked relationship between male sperm competitive ability and offspring viability” (Fisher et al. 2006, yes I actually went and found the article and am citing it in a USP blog post).

So HA, Slate! You and your sensationalist, insinuating headlines can take a backseat to breeding biology!

Although antechinuses are still really cute.

—Irene L.

Summer with Narcissism

Hi all and welcome new Unis!

For those who don’t know me, my name is Yeney Hernandez and I am a rising senior Uni from the Trinity School of Arts and Sciences. I am majoring in Psychology and English. For my Psychology graduation with distinction thesis, I am working in the Leary Lab within the Social Psychology department on a very interesting and (slightly self-centered) topic dealing with Narcissism and romantic relationships.

For the past 8 weeks, I have been attending seminars and working one-on-one with my graduate adviser, Marie-Joelle Estrada (a brilliant Doctorate candidate whose relationship psychology book collection would give even Lily library a run for its money!) to develop an instrument to assess relationship interactions and maintenance mechanisms, as well as individual “degrees of narcissism.” Since we are not working with a clinical sample of people suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (a very small portion of the population are ever diagnosed with this truly debilitating psychopathology, less than 1 per cent!) we will be able to see how people with “normal” levels of self-absorption view relationships and, most importantly, how their relationships affect their partner’s conception of the relationship. If this sounds a bit complicated to you–and trust me, you are not alone in this!–just think of a situation in which maintaining a romantic relationship with someone has caused you to have to “humble” yourself or put the interests of the relationship before your own ego. Imagine how difficult it was for you (or, perhaps you are imagining a close friend who has told you about their trials in love) to put these feelings aside. Now imagine how difficult it would be for someone who’s entire world revolves around an inflated self concept, people who are not only higher than normal on vengeance, self-promotion and relationship-switching (alternating partners and often cheating on individual partners).

So yes, that is what I have been working on for the past 8 weeks (well…maybe a bit longer). Its a lot of reading, a lot of math (a real treat for statistics-loving me! Not really…) but, like L’Oreal…Its SO worth it!

–Updates to come,

Yeney Hernandez

Recycled Money

After the seminar on Thursday, I realized that my current research focuses on a unique recyclable that never came up during our discussion: money! Beyond the normal circulation of currency that we engage in any time we make a purchase, investment in capital is a particularly striking form of recycling, although it’s rarely made so salient (after that one lecture in intro econ).

To make it more clear, consider the loans you can make at a site like www.kiva.org. Here, you can make a loan (in full or in part) to an entrepreneur in the developing world who will use the loan to invest in capital; perhaps the loan will enable the purchase of a sewing machine which will help the entrepreneur to make a better living. When he or she is able (after using the sewing machine to increase output), the loan is paid back. After the loan is paid back, the lender has the same amount of money he or she started with (excluding interest, although you could easily incorporate interest into this system as it is in most others), and the borrower now has a sewing machine… It really does have a bit of a magical feeling about it.

At a meta-level, I received a gift certificate to the site from my brother after he had a loan that was paid back from a gift certificate he had received, and so on and so on. Unlike the other kinds of recycling we discussed, there doesn’t seem to be any loss here, other than the value of having money today rather than tomorrow. Of course, it may not quite satisfy the definition with respect to being decomposed into its component pieces through violence…

Stephen

Some pertinent websites

Here is the link to “Recycling is Garbage” by John Tierney, and here’s another story that pretty much states his views on sustainability (i.e., human ingenuity is one resource we won’t soon run out of).

And if anyone wants more background literature on economics and the environment, this website is chock full of stories.

Enjoy!
Irene L.

In memoriam – psychology

Last night, the University Scholars Program had our first seminar of the semester. Mari, Roxanne, Sarah H. and Jacob led the discussion on the topic of “memory,” inspired by an NPR Radio Lab broadcast on the subject on WNYC. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the broadcast yet, I highly recommend it. It’s a fascinating program, although I do have some small quibbles with the style of presentation, especially early on in the show. Nevertheless, folks should definitely check it out.

At our seminar last night, Roxanne began by explaining how psychologists discuss memory. I draw upon my notes, which others should feel free to correct in commenting on this post, should my recap prove erroneous at points. As Roxanne explained, in psychology, memory is the internal representation of things that have happened and is “selective,” “constructive,” “reconstructive,” and “dynamic.” The selective function of memory results from the situational nature of memory, that we remember in accordance with certain values, etc. to create or maintain consistency in our interpretation of the world around us, including our memories.

The constructive or reconstructive aspect of memory results when we fill in gaps. For example, the way a lawyer asks a question can influence the answer. In another example, psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus‘ research revealed how memories can even be constructed based on zero experience. For example, in the 1980’s, there were hundreds of reported cases of Satanic sexual abuse which proliferated due to news reports and a cultural fascination with the phenomenon.

We can talk about how memory is dynamic when we consider an event that we may remember one way today and differently five years from now. People take for granted the fidelity of memory, and our legal system is based on it, but this is deeply problematic, as Elizabeth Loftus’ has also demonstrated.

Roxanne also discussed the how memory works in incidences of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For example, when a natural disaster such as a tsunami occurs, in a child who witnesses the event, adrenaline solidifies memory in the hippocampus and creates strong links with the emotional realm of the brain in the amygdala, which leads to the development of super strong memories. These may re-emerge unwillingly through re-experiencing the event in dreams, flashbacks, in physiological responses, etc. Therapy will help break these memories down, help the patient find the accuracy in them, and thereby disempower the trauma of certain memories, reconstructing memory to be more useful.

- Tori