#johns hopkins university

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jesse Singal

Published: Jun 27, 2024

In April Hilary Cass, a British paediatrician, published her review of gender-identity services for children and young people, commissioned by NHS England. It cast doubt on the evidence base for youth gender medicine. This prompted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organisation for the doctors and practitioners who provide services to trans people, to release a blistering rejoinder. WPATH said that its own guidelines were sturdier, in part because they were “based on far more systematic reviews”.

Systematic reviews should evaluate the evidence for a given medical question in a careful, rigorous manner. Such efforts are particularly important at the moment, given the feverish state of the American debate on youth gender medicine, which is soon to culminate in a Supreme Court case challenging a ban in Tennessee. The case turns, in part, on questions of evidence and expert authority.

Court documents recently released as part of the discovery process in a case involving youth gender medicine in Alabama reveal that WPATH's claim was built on shaky foundations. The documents show that the organisation’s leaders interfered with the production of systematic reviews that it had commissioned from the Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Centre (EPC) in 2018.

From early on in the contract negotiations, WPATH expressed a desire to control the results of the Hopkins team’s work. In December 2017, for example, Donna Kelly, an executive director at PATH, told Karen Robinson, the EPC's director, that the WPATH board felt the EPC researchers “cannot publish their findings independently”. A couple of weeks later, Ms Kelly emphasised that, “the [WPATH] board wants it to be clear that the data cannot be used without WPATH approval”.

Ms Robinson saw this as an attempt to exert undue influence over what was supposed to be an independent process. John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who co-authored guidelines for systematic reviews, says that if sponsors interfere or are allowed to veto results, this can lead to either biased summaries or suppression of unfavourable evidence. Ms Robinson sought to avoid such an outcome. “In general, my understanding is that the university will not sign off on a contract that allows a sponsor to stop an academic publication,” she wrote to Ms Kelly.

Months later, with the issue still apparently unresolved, Ms Robinson adopted a sterner tone. She noted in an email in March 2018 that, “Hopkins as an academic institution, and I as a faculty member therein, will not sign something that limits academic freedom in this manner,” nor “language that goes against current standards in systematic reviews and in guideline development”.

Not to reason XY

Eventually WPATH relented, and in May 2018 Ms Robinson signed a contract granting WPATH power to review and offer feedback on her team’s work, but not to meddle in any substantive way. After WPATH leaders saw two manuscripts submitted for review in July 2020, however, the parties’ disagreements flared up again. In August the WPATH executive committee wrote to Ms Robinson that WPATH had “many concerns” about these papers, and that it was implementing a new policy in which WPATH would have authority to influence the EPC team’s output—including the power to nip papers in the bud on the basis of their conclusions.

Ms Robinson protested that the new policy did not reflect the contract she had signed and violated basic principles of unfettered scientific inquiry she had emphasised repeatedly in her dealings with WPATH. The Hopkins team published only one paper after WPATH implemented its new policy: a 2021 meta-analysis on the effects of hormone therapy on transgender people. Among the recently released court documents is a WPATH checklist confirming that an individual from WPATH was involved “in the design, drafting of the article and final approval of [that] article”. (The article itself explicitly claims the opposite.) Now, more than six years after signing the agreement, the EPC team does not appear to have published anything else, despite having provided WPATH with the material for six systematic reviews, according to the documents.

No one at WPATH or Johns Hopkins has responded to multiple inquiries, so there are still gaps in this timeline. But an email in October 2020 from WPATH figures, including its incoming president at the time, Walter Bouman, to the working group on guidelines, made clear what sort of science WPATH did (and did not) want published. Research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense,” it stated. Mr Bouman and one other coauthor of that email have been named to a World Health Organisation advisory board tasked with developing best practices for transgender medicine.

Another document recently unsealed shows that Rachel Levine, a transwoman who is assistant secretary for health, succeeded in pressing WPATH to remove minimum ages for the treatment of children from its 2022 standards of care. Dr Levine’s office has not commented. Questions remain unanswered, but none of this helps WPATH’s claim to be an organisation that bases its recommendations on science. 

[ Via: https://archive.today/wJCI7 ]

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==

So, there are 6 completed reviews sitting somewhere, that WPATH knows shows undesirable (to them) results. And they know it. And despite - or perhaps, because of - that, they wrote the insane SOC8 anyway. And then, at the behest of Rachel Levine, went back and took out the age limits, making it even more insane.

This isn't how science works, it's how a cult works.

When John Templeton Foundation commissioned a study on the efficacy of intercessory prayer, a study which unsurprisingly found that it's completely ineffective, it was forced to publish the negative results.

So, even the religious are more ethical than gender ideologues when it comes to science. This is outright scientific corruption.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

By tweaking materials, scientists create transistors that remember

A team of Johns Hopkins materials scientists made a surprising discovery that could change the way memory works in electronics. By tweaking the materials used in organic material-based logic switches called transistors, they created a new kind of memristor—devices that can remember past charging states when a current passes through it—suggesting the potential for developing electronic memory systems that mimic the way human brains work. Their results appear in Advanced Functional Materials. "Initially, our goal was to understand what happens during transistor charging," says team member and graduate student Riley Bond. "We wanted to pinpoint where the charge is trapped in these transistors and improve the device's overall charging capabilities, ensuring the transistors didn't short circuit when voltage was added."

Read more.

[ifitcisntsky]

Guys I restarted watching Hannibal (30 minutes ago) and you're TELLING ME HANNIBAL AND HOUSE WENT TO THE SAME GODDAMN MED SCHOOL.

All roads lead to Johns Hopkins medical school

According to my math they barely missed eachother by a few years BUT! I may be wring since I remember hannibal being an early grad or something similar

ANYWAYS GUYS I NEED A HOUSE MD X HANNIBAL CROSSOVER NOW!!!!

[science70]

Student June Bronfenbrenner at an early Xerox machine photocopying a book, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1976.

[kittyoverlord]

LAST DAY TO FILE - 12/17/2024 (today)

DID YOU GO TO A "TOP TIER" UNIVERSITY? DID YOU RECEIVE SOME FINANCIAL AID? FILE TODAY TO RECEIVE COMPENSATION!!!

Closes at 11:59:59 Pacific Time

Got mine in at the last minute as per usual. Sending out anyway in case anyone else wants to scramble to get things together today.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Bayani

This year, the Baltimore Peoples Power Assembly held its annual International Workers’ Day celebration at the newly established Palestine solidarity encampment at Johns Hopkins University. About a hundred already supporting the encampment were joined by hundreds more.

[arctic-hands]

Anyone know where I can get a second hand Johns Hopkins University teddy bear or plushy, like the kind that they sell around graduation and such? My friend had such a miserable time fighting the constant ableism of JHU's staff and inaccessible building infrastructure that I want to get her dog a JHU toy to maul for Christmas (without actually giving money to JH). I can't find anything on ebay but clothing.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Researchers report pathway to stronger alloys for extreme environments

At around 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, steel melts. When aluminum is exposed to moisture and oxygen, it corrodes. While these conventional alloys are well suited to everyday environments, they fold under abnormally excessive exposure to extreme heat, cold, pressure and other conditions. And with the nation conducting more and more operations in extreme environments, such as space and the Arctic, the need for alloys that maintain strength under these conditions is critical. Multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs), which are made up of several elements in roughly equal proportions, can be better suited for extreme environments because their high strength, hardness and toughness over a range of temperatures. In addition, MPEAs often exhibit excellent corrosion resistance and thermal stability, and can display unique functional properties useful for electronic or magnetic devices.

Read more.

[draconaau]

Science, bitches.

I got my first lot only a couple months ago so I'm out. Please help if you can. Any country, any place.

if you have not had covid yet please help out science and complete this survey - https://covid-long.com/

[pwrn51]

Rebel Falls: Uncovering Civil War Secrets

  Today’s guest is Tim Wendel, an award-winning author, sportswriter, and Writer-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University. In this engaging interview, Tim discusses his new book, “Rebel Falls,” where he weaves together fiction and history to tell the story of Rory Chase, a brave Union spy inspired by real women from the Civil War. Betsy and Tim dive into the fascinating history of Confederate…

[geoffwhaley]

Book 1,024: Planes, Trains, and Hurricanes - Eli Easton

I grabbed this one over winter break from Kindle Unlimited, because I wanted to read a MM Holiday Romance and Eli Easton is one of those MM Romance authors who writes good stories, they’re not the best, but I do enjoy them. And growing up in the hurricane belt (Southeastern NC) I was interested in finding out WTF was happening in this novel. Planes, Trains, and Hurricanes is the story of Joe, NYC…

[collegible]

Congratulations Timothy! You are going to to Johns Hopkinis as a freshman next Fall. (This picture of you is from 8th grade). You have been a blessing to witness! You're going to surprise the world with your natural talents and genius instincts! Go get 'em!

[whileiamdying]

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection: Staying Power

By Zakes Mda ESSAYS. — JAN 24, 2023

The story of Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2020) unfolds through poetry. The poetry of images and words—the interplay of light and shadow, and the lyricism of the narration. It ensnares us right from the opening shots, of a horse going through an aesthetically beautiful yet obviously traumatic experience at the hands of blanketed Basotho men and women. The action is made more haunting by the application of a Wong Kar Wai–esque step-printing technique—which blurs and then sharpens and then smears the image over the excitement of the perpetrators and the resistance of the victim.

The film is set and was filmed in Lesotho, a former British protectorate that is now an independent kingdom, which is geographically completely surrounded by South Africa and therefore highly dependent on South African goods and services. A great percentage of Lesotho citizens work in the mines, farms, and homes of South Africa, and Lesotho also relies heavily on their remittances. For its part, however, South Africa needs the water that is piped to it from Lesotho, where huge dams have been constructed. Many Lesotho villages have been displaced to make way for the construction of these dams. At the heart of This Is Not a Burial is just such a displacement. The story focuses on the bereft eighty-year-old widow Mantoa, an accidental hero who finds herself becoming a catalyst for her community’s resilience.

The setting of the film’s opening is bleak. We are in a run-down tavern. The notes of a lone lesiba instrument fill the air—if we can talk of air in this environment, which looks stuffy despite the fact that the space is sparsely populated, its denizens all sitting or standing by themselves, each perhaps contemplating the social pain caused by a lack of connection with others, each body weighed down by loneliness at worst, solitude at best. Perhaps we’ll learn which as the movie proceeds. Loneliness is imposed on one; solitude is a choice. Solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely.

Solitude is also the stuff of magical-realist fiction. And This Is Not a Burial has strong elements of that narrative mode, not because it exudes a sense of the supernatural but because, in it, the strange and the unusual exist in the same context as objective reality, without being disconcerting. For example, in one scene, as Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo, who was seventy-nine years old at the time of shooting) sits among the ashes and debris of her burned-down house, a group of sheep appears, and the animals rally around her, giving her solace.

In the opening, the aloneness of the denizens of the tavern, even in the midst of company, is also haunting: a man stands alone against the wall drinking a quart of beer directly from the bottle and nodding absently to the music; two lovers sit on a bench with their backs to each other; another lone man smokes a cigarette and blows a cloud of smoke; a woman dances alone, languidly flapping her arms like a drunken bird to the music of the lesiba. Indeed, everything is languid and lonesome here, including the music. A lesiba is a mouth-resonated wind instrument played by the Basotho and the Khoikhoi peoples, with a flattened quill attached to a string stretched over a long stick. Its notes are often accompanied by guttural grunts made by the player. In this scene, these sounds enhance the ethereality of the ambience.

The lesiba player here is also the film’s narrator. He is portrayed by the well-known South African actor Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha. He gives a virtuoso performance without moving an inch throughout the movie. Only his face, as seen in the tavern, and his elegiac voice carry the gravitas of the narration. His pace is slow and deliberate. He introduces us to Mantoa’s village: the old people called it Phula ea Meokho, which literally means the Valley of Tears but is translated as Plains of Weeping in the movie for, I think, poetic reasons. When French missionaries came to Lesotho in the 1830s, they renamed the village Nasaretha, after the biblical Nazareth. The narrator tells us, “They say in Nasaretha, if you place your ear to the ground, you can still hear the cries and whispers of those who perished under the flood, their spirits hallowing from the deep.”

From this, it becomes clear that setting is very important in This Is Not a Burial. The landscape itself tells the story. It is a character in its own right, not just a place where the story happens because a story must happen somewhere. It even speaks and cries for what the villagers have lost and what they are about to lose.

When the story begins, after the lesiba player’s long but engaging narration, we learn that the Lesotho government intends to flood the valley and build a large dam as part of a program of “progress” and “development”—or so the villagers are told by the bureaucrats who hold meetings to convince them of the wisdom of the decision. The reality is that South Africa needs the “white gold,” as water is affectionately called, for its thirsty cities and industries. The villagers are going to be moved to Motimposo, on the outskirts of the capital city of Maseru, a place that is already crowded with mostly unemployed people. This means, of course, that the villagers will have to abandon their rural lifestyle: their fields, their horses, their cattle, and, most important, the merino sheep from whose wool they earn a livelihood, after their exciting annual sheep-
shearing competitions. But most painfully, they will have to desert the graves of their forebears. That will be an abomination of the first order. Basotho venerate their ancestors. Ancestors are the intercessors between the living and the Great Creator, Molimo. Imagine what misfortune must befall ungrateful men and women who abandon their ancestors to be drowned in a human-made lake that covers the only home they ever knew! No wonder there is resistance to the forced removal.

That resistance is led by Mantoa, who has lost all her relatives, most recently a son who was expected home for Christmas from the gold mine where he worked but who perished underground with the rest of the miners. Only his corpse arrives home, and we witness a colorful funeral attended by men and women in Basotho blankets, predominantly of a rich blue. Mantoa is concerned about what will happen to the graves if the village is flooded. Politicians tell her, “It’s your call what you do with your graves . . . The ministry will provide assistance to those who choose to move their graves.”

Similar struggles against the negative impacts of large dams, particularly the mass displacement of poor communities and the loss of land, have been waged all over the world. These mammoth constructions are always accompanied by human-rights violations, especially against Indigenous communities, in such far-ranging countries as Brazil, the United States, India, and the Philippines. Mantoa takes a bus to the local administrative center to make an appeal against the dam to a minister, but she is shunned by the bureaucrats there. Her resistance next takes the form of weeping and screaming, to the extent that people from the village come to her home, thinking there has been another death. The village elders decide that she is mad. Mantoa’s resistance is fueled by her wish to be buried in Nasaretha, next to the graves of her kin. She rallies the support of her compatriots, who insist, “We are staying here!”

The village is self-sufficient, though its resources are meager. This is a valley of death, yet it is also a healing valley, where flowers and herbs that cure different ailments grow in abundance. Mantoa yearns to sleep and never wake up again. Yet she continues to help the sick get well with herbs from the mountain and valley, and to engage in life-sustaining activities in communion with the rest of society, winnowing corn and washing clothes in the river even while yearning for death. At one point, she tells the village pastor, “There is no meaning to my husband’s death . . . Yes, that’s grief.” She arranges her own funeral—let the dead bury their own dead, the narrator rejoins—giving instructions on how and when it should be carried out, who should sing Sesotho traditional music there, and what kind of coffin should be used.

She spends her time listening to obituaries on the radio. She warms the batteries of her radio in the sun on the windowsill to prolong their life. It is a telling symbolic act. She shows a flicker of a smile as she waltzes alone in the room, in the arms of an imaginary lover. The narrator admonishes her: “Lament, old widow. Weep. Weep. For death has forgotten you.”

She wears perpetual mourning clothes even as she visits neighbors, giving them life by helping those who are sick; she spends the late afternoons preparing the site at the graveyard for her own grave. When the villagers refuse to dig her grave, she digs it herself.

But for now, we leave her there, digging. We go back to what we started with: how exquisitely this movie has been made, and how effectively it transmits the meaning in a simple story by defying a lot of established conventions of contemporary cinema.

First of all, Lesotho cineaste Mosese—who wrote, directed, and edited the film—gives a unique kind of narration to the poetic and musical narrator, drawing very much from such Sesotho performance modes as tšomo (written in South African Sesotho orthography as tshomo), a classical oral tradition that is still in use, especially among families in rural Lesotho. The expository nature of tšomo lends itself excellently to the filmmaker’s style. He confirmed in an interview on South Africa’s Radio 702 that he sees his film as “almost a folklore narrative.”

This is truly a Lesotho movie, not only because of its setting and the fact that it was created by a Lesotho artist—born and raised in Hlotse, Lesotho, Mosese now lives and works in Berlin—who is drawing from a deeply Sesotho aesthetic. Almost all the actors—including Makhaola Ndebele, who plays the pastor; Mofokeng Wa Makhetha, whom I have already mentioned, as the narrator and player of the lesiba lamentations; and Silas Taunyane Monyatsi, the bureaucrat and politician—have Lesotho roots. This may come as a surprise to followers of the South African film and television industry, as these are familiar faces there. Of the principal cast, only the South African Twala Mhlongo is an import.

The most important convention that Mosese defies here, a choice that could have endangered the reception of his film if he had failed to handle it with panache, is that of beginning one’s film in medias res. The modern reader and viewer expects exciting action from the word go. Yet this movie starts languidly and depends not only on the lesiba and narration but also on an emotional ambience that foreshadows the texture and the tenor of the story. It is fortunate for the director that he was not dependent on South African funders; they would likely have insisted that the first thirty minutes of This Is Not a Burial be chopped off, to accord with the only formula of storytelling they know—which they often refer to as the tried-and-tested Hollywood formula. These film-development mandarins would have been riled up: “What’s exposition doing in this screenplay?”

It would have been a sad loss. It would have messed up this work of art.

Mosese also compellingly uses lingering, evocative shots of darker moments that are dependent on stillness rather than motion for their effect. These work perfectly for Twala Mhlongo’s tour-de-force performance, for her face with its graceful ravines of age, and for her whole persuasive demeanor. Long takes sometimes catch her stillness, her body imprisoned by loneliness, her face a study of pain. Quite often, the film is reminiscent of slow cinema such as that made by Theo Angelopoulos, a genre that emphasizes long, contemplative takes.

The cinematography of This Is Not a Burial is breathtaking—panoramic shots of the mountains, the mist that sometimes covers them, horses and their blanketed riders, and musicians playing another instrument of Sesotho traditional music, the accordion. The film’s long takes and uninterrupted tracking shots not only give the audience a sense of place but also convey feeling.

This movie is a fitting swan song for Twala Mhlongo, who died while it was on the festival circuit, and after its release in South Africa. Though This Is Not a Burial is about the power of grief, it is uplifting and satisfying. It is subtly about resilience. The director approaches his subject with so much compassion. Remember: the title proclaims that the film is about resurrection.

Mosese is an aspiring painter. He has also achieved painterliness through the camera. Each shot can be harvested for a still of utmost beauty. Gentle beauty against the grittiness of the story. Two hours of relentless beauty. This is not just a movie, it’s a narrative art installation.

Zakes Mda is a visiting professor in the English department of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg; a creative-writing adjunct at Johns Hopkins University; and an emeritus professor of English at Ohio University.