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New top story from Time: Inside the Dangerous Mission to Understand What Makes Extremists Tick—and How to Change Their Minds

On a cool winter’s day in early 2014, the American academic Nafees Hamid was invited for tea at the second-story at the Barcelona apartment of a young Moroccan man. It started well enough; they sat down at the kitchen table, chatting amiably in French while two acquaintances of the host sat nearby in the living room. Halfway through the conversation, though, things took a turn. “He started saying things like, ‘Why should we trust any Westerner?’” Hamid recalls. “‘Why would we not kill every one of them? Why should I even trust you—you are an American—sitting here? Why should I even let you out of my apartment?’” The man briefly left the kitchen and went into the living room to speak to the others in Arabic, a language in which Hamid is not fluent. But he repeatedly heard one word he did know: munafiq—a term that, at best, means hypocrite; at worst, “enemy of Islam.”

“I realized that they were talking about me, and that this was going in the wrong direction,” says Hamid, who had arrived hoping to coax the Moroccan to participate in a study.

As quietly as possible, he opened the second-story window and jumped out, his fall cushioned by the awning of a fruit stand below. Adrenaline spiking, he bolted to the safety of a crowded train station a few blocks away.

Field research on jihad has its hazards. Hamid, now 36, had come to the apartment knowing—from a questionnaire he had already filled out—that the Moroccan man harbored extremist inclinations. The effort was part of a larger project to discover the roots of radicalization and what might cause someone to fight or die—or kill—for their beliefs.

Richard MillingtonNafees Hamid in London on August 19, 2020.

But the work goes on, a part of a larger undertaking by an unusual network of policy experts and international scientists, many of whom have their own harrowing tales of escaping danger or navigating dicey situations in pursuit of groundbreaking research. Recently, the group published the first brain-imaging studies on radicalized men and young adults susceptible to radicalization. The private research firm behind the group’s work, Artis International, is officially headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., but doesn’t truly have a base. Its academics and analysts operate from far-flung places, tapping an array of funding from various governments, the U.S. military and academic institutions. The central goal of the firm is to advance peace by figuring out what motivates people to become violent—and how to reorient them toward conflict resolution, or prevent them from becoming violent in the first place.

Read More: This Researcher Juggled Five Different Identities to Go Undercover With Far-Right and Islamist Extremists. Here’s What She Found

That means getting as close to the perpetrators and their supporters as possible. Much of Artis’ work has been rooted in behavioral sciences and informed by straightforward research methods, like surveys. But Artis researchers have also pushed the boundaries of social science, through everything from experimental surveys on armed forces to psychological tests on imprisoned extremists. Its investigations have led researchers to the front lines of the war against ISIS, restive areas in North Africa, and lately into Eastern Europe and cyberspace.

Even by Artis standards, the recent brain-imaging studies conducted in Barcelona—the work that had Hamid leaping from a window—were remarkable for the level of risk the researchers undertook. The scientists wanted to find hard neurological evidence to support previous social-science findings and widely held assumptions: that extremists could be influenced by their peers, and later, that social exclusion may harden the beliefs of a budding extremist. To gather this sort of information, researchers like Hamid would have to scour the streets of Barcelona for extremists; somehow convince hundreds of them to take surveys; and then, after identifying the most radicalized, coax them to undergo multiple brain scans at a seaside hospital campus. What could possibly go wrong?

Origins: A Research Void

The roots of the Barcelona brain studies go back to 2005, when the U.S. government was still absorbing the 9/11 attacks. Richard Davis, who would go on to co-found Artis International two years later, had recently started working as a policy adviser for the U.S. Homeland Security Council (which reports to the President) and was alarmed by how the government came to its counter-terrorism strategies. “It became clear that many of the decisions that were being made—grand decisions about terrorism—were being made with little to no field-based scientific evidence backing them,” he says.

One key problem is that empirical extremism studies require access to materials that governments might not want to share, like transcripts of intercepted communications or interrogations, explains Liesbeth van der Heide, a research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague. Ideally, the studies also involve access to extremists themselves, who are even harder to come by. “There aren’t many of them,” she says. And the ones that succeed in carrying out violent plans “tend to die in an attack or flee.”

So most terrorism research has tended to draw on secondary sources—reports in the media, for example, or other books or articles already published on the subject, resulting, she says, in “an echo chamber repeating what others have said.” An exhaustive 2006 review of 6,041 peer-reviewed studies on terrorism published from 1971 to 2003 found that only 3% were based on empirical data. “Thought pieces”—articles where authors discussed an issue theoretically or offered an opinion—accounted for 96%.

This alarmed Davis. He believed that any government interested in curbing violence needed not more thought pieces, but a more scientific understanding of the people who commit it based on primary sources. Academics already doing this sort of work were rare exceptions, but both Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer turned forensic and clinical psychiatrist, and Scott Atran, an anthropologist, had spent extensive time with members of militant jihadist groups, from the Afghan mujahedin to al-Qaeda. Davis sought them out in the fall of 2005, and by 2007 had convinced them to help him launch a firm dedicated to on-the-ground research into violence reduction. They named it Artis, Latin for “of art,” “of skill” or, in some usages, “of science.”

That same year, Artis cobbled together funding from a range of institutions—including the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the French National Centre for Scientific Research—to study the underlying causes of political violence. They decided to focus on a social-psychology concept called “sacred values”—a person’s deepest, most nonnegotiable values—which would lay the groundwork for their Barcelona brain scans.

Sacred Values

In the 1990s, social psychologists Jonathan Baron at the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Tetlock at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the concept of “sacred values” to counter economic theories that suggested everything had a price. Certain values (like human life, justice, civil liberties, environmental or religious devotion) could be so sacred to people that they would be unwilling to act against them, no matter the cost or consequence.

Atran, who had been studying values for decades through the lens of anthropology, began applying this concept to the study of violent extremists after 9/11. It occurred to him then that, perhaps, the perpetrators had committed the suicide attacks in defense of deep values the rest of the world had been overlooking. By 2007, Atran had advanced this line of thinking in several articles about jihadist terrorists. His Artis colleagues found evidence that material incentives may backfire when adversaries see the issues at the heart of a dispute (like land and nationhood) as “sacred.”

The Artis team continued to hone the connection between sacred values and violence into 2014, when a comment from President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper Jr., gave them a renewed sense of purpose. In an interview, Clapper said that the U.S. had underestimated ISIS militants because predicting a group’s will to fight was “an imponderable.” In response to that comment, Atran and his colleagues decided to use their knowledge of sacred values to measure militants’ will to fight, which they believed was indeed “ponderable.”

That same year, they did survey-based research on networks in Spain and Morocco responsible for the 2004 Madrid bombings. It found that people were more willing to sacrifice their lives if they were part of a close-knit group that shared their sacred values. They also began laying the groundwork for a separate study, eventually published in 2017, that found that among members of various forces who fought against ISIS, those who expressed the most willingness to fight and die for abstract values like nationhood, heritage and religion tended to prioritize those values over their social groups, like family.

Still, by 2014 most such work had come from what fighters said in interviews or surveys. Atran was convinced that sacred values were so deep and powerful that the brain must process them differently than it processes decisions about more mundane issues. But to truly understand the relationships between neural pathways associated with such values and willingness to sacrifice for them, Atran and his colleagues believed they needed to get a look inside extremists’ heads.

Recruitment

Barcelona’s Raval district is a maze of graffiti-sprayed buildings and narrow streets. In recent years, chic galleries and boutique clothing stores have begun to spring up between halal butchers and Arabic-language bookshops, filling the boarded-up storefronts emptied by the waves of evictions that ravaged the primarily immigrant neighborhood following the 2008 financial crisis.

The locale has also been the epicenter for a number of foiled terrorist plots, and is carefully monitored by both Spanish and international intelligence bodies for jihadist activity. That made it an appealing place for Hamid and his colleagues to recruit radicalized men for their inaugural brain study on extremists. The Artis researchers planned to use a combination of behavioral tests and brain scans in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to see whether a hardened extremist’s “will to fight” for his sacred values was susceptible to peer influence.

In early 2014, the group decided to target a small pocket of extremists in Barcelona’s Pakistani community that authorities had been tracking for years. They set their sights on 20- to 30-something first-generation Pakistani men who openly supported Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaeda affiliate based in South Asia. Initially, Hamid’s recruitment strategy consisted of becoming a regular at neighborhood cafés and conspicuously reading articles or books that he imagined might appeal to a jihadist, in hopes that someone would approach him. “That really didn’t work,” he says. “It was far more effective to be transparent.”

So he started to look for Urdu speakers who seemed like they had time on their hands. When he saw likely candidates chatting with friends on park benches or sipping tea at one of the many outdoor terraces in the Raval district, Hamid would approach them cautiously. “I didn’t want to seem like I was stereotyping an entire population … I think, also, I just didn’t want to get punched in the face.”

He explained that he was a psychologist conducting surveys on people’s strongly held values related to religion, culture and politics. After chatting for a while, he would invite them to take an initial survey designed to assess a person’s level of radicalization, according to three specific criteria: their support of the militant jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba; their approval of violence against civilians; and, lastly, their expressed willingness to aid or participate in armed jihad. The survey took 30 to 60 minutes to complete, and Hamid paid everyone who took it €20 ($22) for their time. For the purposes of the study, a person who fit all three criteria was considered radicalized, in which case, Hamid would call them to ask if their friends might also want to take the survey.

As a Pakistani American, Hamid was acutely sensitive to the fact that the people he was approaching might feel profiled. (And in fact, a number of the nonradicalized people who gleaned the thrust of the survey questions were offended, he said.) However, he also recognized the scientific importance of focusing on this particular population.

“We wanted to study radicalization in the context of violent Sunni jihadism, which at the time we conducted our research was the main international terrorist threat,” he explains. It made sense to focus on recruiting from population (and Moroccan population for a follow-up study on the brains of budding radicals) because they represented the two biggest Sunni Muslim groups in the area. And, “the majority of people pulled into terrorist groups from the Barcelona region came from those two ethnic groups,” he says.

The Artis team also believed that it was scientifically important to study groups that weren’t white college students—a population so overly represented in cognitive-science study that they have their own acronym: people from white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies (WEIRD). “Studying sacred values and willingness to fight and die in two separate ethnic groups with very different cultural backgrounds allowed us to examine the generalizability of our claims,” says Hamid.

To protect both the extremists and the study itself, rather than using names, the researchers assigned each volunteer a number. They also tried to avoid asking any questions in the surveys that might put them in tricky legal terrain. “I would tell [the volunteers], ‘Do not tell me anything about a crime you committed, because that will implicate me,’” says Hamid. Instead, the researchers asked hypothetical questions aimed at assessing participants’ beliefs and values, rather than what a person had already done or intended to do with them.

By the end of 2015, Hamid and his team had convinced 146 people to take the survey. He and his colleagues then followed up with the most radicalized of the group—the 45 men who met all three criteria—offering them an additional €100 ($120) to come to a laboratory for the rest of the study. Thirty men, ages 18 to 36, agreed.

Into the Lab

The Autonomous University of Barcelona’s fMRI lab is located in the basement of a blocky gray building flanked by patches of green lawn where, on sunny days, college students like to picnic and read books. There, a team led by Clara Pretus, a neuroscientist in her mid-20s, put these 30 men through the next stages of the study.

The men came to the lab in groups of three or four. After a brief orientation to ease their nerves, the brain scans would begin. The men would lay prone on the bed of the fMRI machine, which would back them into a tube. They wore goggles affixed to a video screen that would flick on and project a statement written in Urdu: “Prophet Muhammad must never be caricatured” or “The Qur’an should never be abused,” for example. Each statement touched on an issue that mattered to the group, based on previous surveys and interviews. The scientists knew which statements aligned with each man’s sacred and nonsacred values, based on those same previous surveys, and they wanted to know how their brains would respond to each. To figure this out, they asked the men to rate how willing they would be, on a scale of 1 to 7, to fight and die for each declaration.

The machine snapped pictures of their brains as the men used a handheld device to make their ratings. After they had gone through all the prompts, Pretus offered them the opportunity to review the slides again—but this time, they’d be able to see how their own responses compared with those supposedly given by their “peers.” This peer group was presented to the men as “the average opinion of the Pakistani community in Barcelona.” But in reality, the researchers had fabricated the ratings for the sake of the experiment. In some instances, the researchers made them appear to align with the men’s responses. In other cases, their “peers” appeared to be more inclined to fight and die for specific values. In still others, less.

After the men had seen how the ratings of their so-called peer group differed from their own, they were given the opportunity to go through the slides one last time—this time outside of the machine—and rate their willingness to fight and die for each statement once again. The scientists wanted to see if the responses from their “peer group” would make them alter their initial responses. In cases where anyone changed his mind, scientists would go back through the fMRI images to see what was happening in his brain as he reviewed the peer information that ultimately compelled him to reconsider his initial answer.

After they completed the final task, the men, whose names they never learned, were free to take their money and go, disappearing into the streets.

Findings

Over the following weeks, the team analyzed the data. As expected, the men expressed greater willingness to fight and die for their sacred values than for their nonsacred values. More interesting were what parts of the brain appeared involved with each question. When participants rated their willingness to sacrifice for their sacred values (defending the Qur’an, for example), parts of the brain linked to deliberation (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and parietal cortex, which Pretus describes as parts of the fronto-parietal or “executive-control network”) were far less active than when they rated their willingness to kill and die for issues they cared about less (like the availability of halal food in public schools). Dr. Oscar Vilarroya, the lead neuro-scientist on the team, says this indicates that humans don’t deliberate about their sacred values: “We just act on them.”

While this may seem like common sense, the finding was significant, since nearly all sacred-values research to that point had been based on surveys and other tools that assessed what people said—not tied to brain activity. “When you’re taking a social survey, you can lie,” explains Atran. “But brain patterns can’t be faked.” It was the first published study scanning the brains of extremists.

Knowing extremists essentially don’t deliberate when considering the values most important to them confirmed something Atran long believed: that deradicalization programs focused on altering extremists’ beliefs through logic and reasoning, or through trade-offs and material incentives, are doomed to fail. Others had made this argument to explain why programs like France’s civics- and reward-focused deradicalization program, launched in late 2016, had flopped within a year. Here was brain science to support the case.

There was one finding of the study, though, that provided a glimmer of hope for an alternative approach: the areas in the brain linked to deliberation lit up when extremists realized their “peers” weren’t as willing to resort to violence to defend a particular value. And when given the opportunity, post–brain scan, to revise their initial answers to the question “How willing are you to fight and die for this value?” many of them adjusted their rating to better align with their peers. Hamid says this shows that peer groups, like family and friends, play a powerful role in determining whether an extremist will become violent. They will never be able to change the extremist’s core views or values, he says, but they can convince that person that violence is or is not an acceptable way to defend those values. This finding, Atran believes, could have real implications for governments and organizations working in counterterrorism.

“The lesson … is don’t try to undermine their values,” Atran says. “Try to show them there are other ways of committing to their values.”

Critiques and Real-World Applications

The team’s work, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in June 2019, has garnered a flurry of attention, especially from social psychologists and other academics interested in human motivation. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and author of the controversial book The Coddling of the American Mind, commended Atran and his colleagues on their “ecological validity”—how relevant the studies are to real-world problems. “We often use the easiest subjects to obtain, which are college students,” he says. “But Scott, at great expense and with great difficulty has always been committed to ecological validity—to studying people who are truly involved in extreme behavior, including terrorist behavior.”

But academics with a background in neuroscience, including Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and Patricia Churchland, who studies the intersection of brain activity and philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, expressed more caution. Churchland reviewed the study for Royal Society. In her review, she says, she warned that the brain regions and neural networks from which scientists drew their conclusions are still not very well understood and have been associated with a range of functions beyond simply “deliberation.”

Atran points out that he and his colleagues never set out to map the connection between brain parts and behaviors. Instead, they sought to—and did—find brain patterns that lined up with the results of behavioral studies. (He adds the usual science disclaimer: “All results are tentative, and we look for replication.”)

Meanwhile, as the academic world weighs the research, the Artis team has published additional brain studies on radicalization. And the U.S. military and foreign governments are already plotting how they might put the findings to use. Since the Barcelona work first began, Davis and Atran have been fielding calls from security officials around the world seeking advice on how to deal with radicalized populations and how to apply their research to newer problems, like criminal groups spreading disinformation and taking advantage of weak governance amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Davis is adamant that his researchers steer clear of directly advising any military or government—he doesn’t want the fate of suspects or a nation’s security to be pinned on one of them. But he’s happy to send his colleagues around the world to share their research findings and even collaborate on projects.

And, in a twist, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado got in touch in 2016 seeking to collaborate and study how a cadet’s sacred values and identity with varying groups affect their willingness to fight and die. This April, the Academy, with Artis’ assistance, completed a small study that found that cadets who both viewed religion as a sacred value and strongly identified as a member of a religious group took greater risks than their peers in virtual combat situations. One key takeaway, according to Lieut. Colonel Chad C. Tossell, the director of the school’s Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center, is that the “spiritual strength” of soldiers is as important as the weapons and technology they use. An early draft of the study says the simulation designed for the research could be “useful for selection and training.”

Davis is encouraged by the constant interest he gets from governments, from those in the U.S. to Kenya to Kosovo. The U.S. military continues to aid in funding as the firm sets its sights on the next frontiers: figuring out how and why democratic institutions collapse and how cyberspace is being used to divide people and harden their values, turning nonsacred values into sacred ones. Artis’ work is “first and foremost about field-based scientific research,” and giving policymakers the facts they need to responsibly respond to the problems of the day, Davis says. “We can debate what the meaning of the empirical evidence is, but it’s better to have it than not to have it.

—With reporting by Mélissa Godin and Madeline Roache/London

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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zipgrowth · 6 years ago

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Using Neuroscience to Launch a Research-Informed School Schedule

It is 8 p.m. and Sam is sitting down for the first time in hours after a long day at school, which was followed by play practice; she is Liesel in the upcoming performance of “The Sound of Music.” After leaving school at 5 p.m., she had a two-hour soccer practice, a brief dinner with her family and a shower.

Finally settling in at her desk, she checks Schoology, her school’s learning management system, to see what homework she has for the six classes she will attend tomorrow. Because Sam has so many classes each day, she has a heavy homework load. Despite her knowledge of existing research about the cost transaction when switching between her academic assignments and an incoming text or Instagram message, she cannot resist social media breaks, which provide dopamine boosts. After all, she is a high school freshman.

Until recently, this late-night homework stress was a common experience for many of the high school students at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Md. Since 2011, St. Andrew's has been home to the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning (CTTL), a research center that trains public, charter and private school teachers in mind, brain and education science. The CTTL ensures that 100 percent of the faculty and administration serving students in preK-12th grade at St. Andrew’s are trained in educational neuroscience.

Image Credit: Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning

Ironically, even with this innovative research center, our school was operating on an outdated daily schedule. Each class met four times per week for three 40-minute periods and one 80-minute period. A typical student schedule included six classes per day, all of which assigned daily homework. We knew we could make some changes to the schedule that would better support students.

In fall 2018, after 18 months of planning, we rolled out a new schedule, which was designed with a few goals in mind:

Lengthening all class periods to promote creative teaching and deeper learning

Decreasing the number of class periods per day, therefore reducing homework, cognitive overload and cognitive transitions, to promote focus and moderate the rushed tempo of school life.

Increasing time for students to meet with teachers and their peers during the school day for academic enrichment and healthy socialization.

Minimizing conflicts between class time and other school activities, including assemblies, field trips and athletics.

Elevating time for research-informed professional development and student passion and curiosity pursuit.

Bringing this to launch was not easy. In fact, a decade earlier, our school’s first effort to develop a new daily schedule failed. At the time, a dedicated team of teachers and administrators thought they had come up with the next frontier of school scheduling. The goal back then was to improve the school’s use of time for curricular and co-curricular programming, including arts and athletics. Unfortunately, when the time came to implement this new daily schedule, we couldn’t commit. It never launched.

What was different this time around? Our design was rooted in research.

Over the past seven years, as our implementation of educational neuroscience scaled, many of our teaching, learning and measurement practices changed. Teachers started to open and close their class periods with strategies that leveraged what we had learned about how providing students with novel experiences could boost engagement and memory retention. We explored ways to enhance the quality of homework, which included giving teachers the autonomy to not assign it. As we better understood the link between memory and cognition, and the inner workings of the brain’s architecture, we implemented new ways to care for the social-emotional development of our students. And sleep was acknowledged as vital to the health and well-being of our students—it was even starting to be considered a pedagogical strategy.

Since the CTTL launched, we have collectively evolved our understanding of research in the fields of neuro and cognitive science, behavior psychology and educational theory, and we have come to recognize the gaps between what the research suggests and daily life at our school.

Though we had changed many of our pedagogical practices, our schedule was still outdated. We wondered whether we could leverage research in educational neuroscience to transform it.

In 2017, the CTTL’s student research fellows began collecting qualitative and quantitative data by surveying the ultimate end users of our daily schedule, the students. Next, we took a design thinking approach to engage faculty and parents in the conversation and began logistical planning.

Two of the most intriguing pieces of data collected during student surveys related to class period length and homework. When we asked students about an optimal length of class, they came back with 60 to 65 minutes. When students were asked about a realistic amount of homework time that should be expected of them, we expected to receive most answers declaring “none,” but instead, students saw the value of about 90-minutes of quality homework that was assigned for one of three reasons: retrieval practice, to connect or extend prior learning or to be prepared for the next class period.

When we rolled out the new schedule at the start of the 2018-2019 school year, we recognized that even though we had done theoretical research, making actual changes in our school community would be a process, so we planned to iterate the schedule over the next three years based on feedback from the school community. Launching something imperfect when you already have something that is comfortable can be challenging, but it gave us an opportunity to model what we were already messaging to our students about “failing forward.”

Any change in a school’s daily schedule impacts the entire school community including students, teachers and families. For our teachers, it was an especially emotional transition. I had been at St. Andrew’s for 21 years, and like many of my veteran colleagues, I was quite comfortable with the schedule. Changes like longer, but fewer class periods and less homework required revising curriculum.

That’s one of the reasons why giving ourselves 18 months to transition felt important. As a research-informed school and faculty, we also recognized the importance of testing our ideas. One of the most enjoyable parts of our journey was when we piloted the new schedule for a week in February 2018, seven months before our permanent launch date. While this pilot highlighted some of the schedule’s flaws, it also assured those who were not yet on board that this was a good move. In fact, a few colleagues even suggested that we finish the year with the new schedule.

So, what were the big changes we made? In our new daily schedule, all periods are 65-minutes long and classes now meet three times per week. These changes were inspired by research on block scheduling and why longer teaching periods can lead to great teaching. Classes also rotate the time of the day that they meet, which reduces the homework load, and given what we now know about sleep’s role in memory, school never begins before 8:30 A.M.

On designated Wednesdays, classes begin at 9:20am following a curiosity, passion pursuit and well-being hour for students. During that time, teachers participate in professional development programming that so far this year included working with experts, such as Dr. Robert Dillon to envision how we use space at school and Efrat Furst to help us look at memory.

New schedule for the upper school at St. Andrew's, Image Credit: St. Andrew's

After recently passing the halfway point of the 2018-2019 school year, we’ve lived our new daily schedule for just about six months. The qualitative and quantitative data we’re collecting to make our first round of adjustments for next year has revealed some early successes.

St. Andrew's students building robots; Image credit: St. Andrew's

Most students say the homework load is more manageable and some say they’re going to bed earlier. Students are taking advantage of the curiosity, passions pursuit and well-being hour in a number of ways. Some are building robots, learning to code, getting support from peer tutors or doing homework that they otherwise would have stayed up later to complete—some are using the time to catch up on extra sleep. Teachers have reported that longer class periods are elevating the use of multiple modality instruction and allow now students time to go deeper into discussions and projects, or even begin homework during class time.

Launching something as ambitious as a new daily schedule also has its obstacles. Our teachers love their subjects, and some feel a loss of content coverage, especially in advanced placement (AP) courses due to the fact that there are less periods per week. This is something that will require further planning through summer grant work and professional development that St. Andrew’s provides its teachers.

In the last year, I have had the privilege to travel to public, charter and private schools and districts in seven states, two countries and the District of Columbia. I never heard anyone of them say “we love our daily schedule.” For many school leaders, leveraging research in the science of learning to rethink their daily schedule is truly the next frontier.

For St. Andrew’s, while we have launched and lived for a short time our new schedule, there is much work that remains to be done as we continue to collect feedback on what is going well and what needs improvement. It has not been easy. It has been emotional, and it is a process that makes school systems, administrators, teachers, students and parents think deeply about their priorities and what student-centered truly means. But it is worth it because we now know more about how the brain learns, works, thrives and changes, and we can use that understanding to create a daily schedule that allows each student to be more challenged, creative, healthy and engaged.

Using Neuroscience to Launch a Research-Informed School Schedule published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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economicstuition-blog1 · 6 years ago

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Best Economics Tutor Singapore.......

As a young scientist in the 1980s, I used then-new imaging technologies to look at the brains of people with drug addictions and, for comparison, people without drug problems. As we began to track and document these unique pictures of the brain, my colleagues and I realized that these images provided the first evidence in humans that there were changes in the brains of addicted individuals that could explain the compulsive nature of their drug taking. The changes were so stark that in some cases it was even possible to identify which people suffered from addiction just from looking at their brain images.

Alan Leshner, who was the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the time, immediately understood the implications of those findings, and it helped solidify the concept of addiction as a brain disease. Over the past three decades, a scientific consensus has emerged that addiction is a chronic but treatable medical condition involving changes to circuits involved in reward, stress, and self-control; this has helped researchers identify neurobiological abnormalities that can be targeted with therapeutic intervention. It is also leading to the creation of improved ways of delivering addiction treatments in the healthcare system, and it has reduced stigma economics tutor

Informed Americans no longer view addiction as a moral failing, and more and more policymakers are recognizing that punishment is an ineffective and inappropriate tool for addressing a person’s drug problems. Treatment is what is needed.

Fortunately, effective medications are available to help in the treatment of opioid use disorders. Medications cannot take the place of an individual’s willpower, but they aid addicted individuals in resisting the constant challenges to their resolve; they have been shown in study after study to reduce illicit drug use and its consequences. They save lives.

Yet the medical model of addiction as a brain disorder or disease has its vocal critics. Some claim that viewing addiction this way minimizes its important social and environmental causes, as though saying addiction is a disorder of brain circuits means that social stresses like loneliness, poverty, violence, and other psychological and environmental factors do not play an important role. In fact, the dominant theoretical framework in addiction science today is the biopsychosocial framework, which recognizes the complex interactions between biology, behavior, and environment.

There are neurobiological substrates for everything we think, feel, and do; and the structure and function of the brain are shaped by environments and behaviors, as well as by genetics, hormones, age, and other biological factors. It is the complex interactions among these factors that underlie disorders like addiction as well as the ability to recover from them. Understanding the ways social and economic deprivation raise the risks for drug use and its consequences is central to prevention science and is a crucial part of the biopsychosocial framework; so is learning how to foster resilience through prevention interventions that foster more healthy family, school, and community environments.

Critics of the brain disorder model also sometimes argue that it places too much emphasis on reward and self-control circuits in the brain, overlooking the crucial role played by learning. They suggest that addiction is not fundamentally different from other experiences that redirect our basic motivational systems and consequently “change the brain.” The example of falling in love is sometimes cited. Love does have some similarities with addiction. As discussed by Maia Szalavitz in Unbroken Brain, it is in the grip of love—whether romantic love or love for a child—that people may forego other healthy aims, endure hardships, break the law, or otherwise go to the ends of the earth to be with and protect the object of their affection.

Within the brain-disorder model, the neuroplasticity that underlies learning is fundamental. Our reward and self-control circuits evolved precisely to enable us to discover new, important, healthy rewards, remember them, and pursue them single-mindedly; drugs are sometimes said to “hijack” those circuits economics tutor

Metaphors illuminate complexities at the cost of concealing subtleties, but the metaphor of hijacking remains pretty apt: The highly potent drugs currently claiming so many lives, such as heroin and fentanyl, did not exist for most of our evolutionary history. They exert their effects on sensitive brain circuitry that has been fine-tuned over millions of years to reinforce behaviors that are essential for the individual’s survival and the survival of the species. Because they facilitate the same learning processes as natural rewards, drugs easily trick that circuitry into thinking they are more important than natural rewards like food, sex, or parenting.

What the brain disorder model, within the larger biopsychosocial framework, captures better than other models—such as those that focus on addiction as a learned behavior—is the crucial dimension of interindividual biological variability that makes some people more susceptible than others to this hijacking. Many people try drugs but most do not start to use compulsively or develop an addiction. Studies are identifying gene variants that confer resilience or risk for addiction, as well as environmental factors in early life that affect that risk. This knowledge will enable development of precisely targeted prevention and treatment strategies, just as it is making possible the larger domain of personalized medicine.

Some critics also point out, correctly, that a significant percentage of people who do develop addictions eventually recover without medical treatment. It may take years or decades, may arise from simply “aging out” of a disorder that began during youth, or may result from any number of life changes that help a person replace drug use with other priorities. We still do not understand all the factors that make some people better able to recover than others or the neurobiological mechanisms that support recovery—these are important areas for research.

But when people recover from addiction on their own, it is often because effective treatment has not been readily available or affordable, or the individual has not sought it out; and far too many people do not recover without help, or never get the chance to recover. More than 174 people die every day from drug overdoses. To say that because some people recover from addiction unaided we should not think of it as a disease or disorder would be medically irresponsible. Wider access to medical treatment—especially medications for opioid use disorders—as well as encouraging people with substance use disorders to seek treatment are absolutely essential to prevent these still-escalating numbers of deaths, not to mention reduce the larger devastation of lives, careers, and families caused by addiction.

Addiction is indeed many things—a maladaptive response to environmental stressors, a developmental disorder, a disorder caused by dysregulation of brain circuits, and yes, a learned behavior. We will never be able to address addiction without being able to talk about and address the myriad factors that contribute to it—biological, psychological, behavioral, societal, economic, etc. But viewing it as a treatable medical problem from which people can and do recover is crucial for enabling a public-health–focused response that ensures access to effective treatments and lessens the stigma surrounding a condition that afflicts nearly 10 percent of Americans at some point in their lives singapore economics tutor

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an-ephemeral-blog · 7 years ago

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Linkspam #2

Top Links

Public Policy After Utopia by Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center:

It is intellectually corrupt and corrupting to define liberty or equality or you-name-it in terms of an idealized, counter-factual social system that may or may not do especially well in delivering the goods. Commitment to a vision of the perfect society is more likely than not to lead you astray. Consider how unlikely it is for a typical libertarian to correctly predict more than a couple of the top-ten freest countries on the libertarian freedom index. The fact that ideological radicals are pretty unreliable at ranking existing social systems in terms of their favored values ought to make us skeptical of claims that highly counterfactual systems would rank first. And it ought to lead us to suspect that ideal-theoretical political theorizing leads us to see the actual world less clearly than we might, due to cherry-picking and confirmation bias.

What I Don’t Tell My Students About ‘The Husband Stitch’ by Jane Dykema at Electric Lit:

Reliable information about, or even an official definition of, the husband stitch is conspicuously missing from the internet. No entry in Wikipedia, nothing in WebMD. Instead there are pages and pages of message board entries and forum discussions on pregnancy websites, and a pretty good definition on Urban Dictionary. In James Baldwin’s 1979 New York Times piece, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” he writes, “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.” How can a practice like the husband stitch be warned against if there’s no official discussion of it, no record of it, no language around it, nothing to point at, to teach?

[...] But this is not an essay about the husband stitch. It’s an essay about believing and being believed.

The scientists persuading terrorists to spill their secrets by Ian Leslie at the Guardian:

Implicit in Miller and Rollnick’s critique of traditional counselling was the uncomfortable suggestion that counsellors should turn their professional gaze upon themselves and question their own instinct to dominate. Instead of thinking of himself as an expert sitting in judgment, the counsellor needed to adopt the more humble position of co-investigator. As Miller put it to me, “The premise is not ‘I have you what you need, let me give it to you.’ It’s ‘You have what you need and we’ll find it.’ The patient must feel “autonomous” – the author of their own actions.

Emily Alison, who had trained in MI while working as a counsellor for the probation service in Wisconsin, noticed that interrogations failed or succeeded for similar reasons as therapeutic sessions. Interrogators who made an adversary out of their subject left the room empty-handed; those who made them a partner yielded information. The best ones suspended moral judgment and conveyed genuine curiosity. She concluded that the detainee, like the addict, wants to feel free, despite or rather because of their confinement, and that the interviewer should help them do so.

When Trauma Becomes Dominance: An Interview with Sarah Schulman by Adam Fitzgerald at Lit Hub:

A person who was very hurt can do a tremendous amount of damage in somebody else’s life. If you’re on the receiving end of this—whether it’s coming from someone who is a supremacist or someone who hasn’t processed their own trauma—it can be equally damaging to you. There are dramatic cases of transformation. In 1945, Jews were probably the most oppressed people in the world. By 1948 and the founding of the state of Israel, you see a Jewish nation-state subordinating an entire people, the Palestinians. For some individuals or for some entities, you see a transformation from profound trauma and oppression to an unjust dominance.

Certainly with white gay men, who during the AIDS crisis died in enormous numbers and were treated with gross indifference by the state and by their families, today, if they are middle class or above, in many cases enjoy the privilege of the whiteness. And in Europe we’re seeing, for example, more white gay men moving towards the right and voting for right-wing parties. So that’s another example of being transformed into an oppressive entity.

On the Table, the Brain Appeared Normal by John Branch at the New York Times:

The brain arrived in April, delivered to the basement of the hospital without ceremony, like all the others. There were a few differences with this one — not because it was more important, but because it was more notorious.

Third-Party Party-Crashing? The Fate of the Third-Party Doctrine by Michael Bahar, David Cook, Varun Shingari and Curtis Arnold at Lawfare:

This fall may prove a landmark in the ongoing debate between security and privacy. Poised to take action are both the U.S. Supreme Court, in Carpenter v. United States, and the U.S. Congress, with the impending sunset of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Decisions made—or not made—this autumn will have ripple effects in the United States and around the globe.

This post explains the dynamics of the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Carpenter, and how it could impact this and other important surveillance authorities. It then discusses the implications of Carpenter to the emerging global privacy regime, and the conflicts of law that may ensue.

Something is wrong on the internet by James Bridle at Medium:

Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.

Other Favorites

We Warned You About Milo and You’re Still Not Listening by Katherine Cross at the Establishment - on the willingness of centrists to redeem Milo Yiannopoulos

The rules about responding to call outs aren’t working by Ruti Regan at RealSocialSkills.org

Avengers in Wrath: Moral Agency and Trauma Prevention for Remote Warriors by Dave Blair and Karen House at Lawfare - a deep dive into the psychology and morality of drone warfare

Heroku’s Ugly Secret by James Somers at Rap Genius - how a change in routing algorithms blew up in Heroku’s face thanks to poor documentation

The Complexities of Trans Gerudo Town by Laura Dale at Let’s Play Video Games - on gender in Zelda: Breath of the Wild

California Police and Civil Liberties Groups Agreed on a Simple Transparency Measure. Gov. Brown Vetoed It Anyway. by Dave Maass at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

For George Washington, #BringBackOurGirls meant something very different by Fred Clark at Patheos - on George Washington’s attempts to re-enslave Oney Judge

My Path To Becoming A Third Parent by David Jay at the Establishment - building a different kind of family

Christopher Wray and the Myth Created by Parallel Construction by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel - discussion of FISA Section 702, which allows warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and FBI Directory Christopher Wray’s defense of it

The Cost of White Comfort by Chenjerai Kumanyika at HiLoBrow - who gets comforted after racial harms

2 Broke Lab Rats: Human Research Subjects in Film and Television by Marci Cottingham at Sociological Images

In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss Redefined Workflow by Bill Selman and Gemma Petrie at EPIC - how Levi-Strauss’s theory of the bricoleur helped redefine Mozilla’s approach to user experience

It’s a Fact: Supreme Court Errors Aren’t Hard to Find by Ryan Gabrielson at ProPublica

Factory science by Martin Schmidt, Benedikt Fecher and Christian Kobsda at Elephant in the Lab - on the meaning of authorship in the digital age

You Can’t Understand Anti-Queer Violence In Jamaica Until You Understand Colonialism by Shanna Collins at Medium

Was Emily Brontё’s Heathcliff black? by Corinne Fowler at the Conversation

On Minimization as a Patriarchal Reflex by Matthew Remski at their personal website

AI Model Fundamentally Cracks CAPTCHAs, Scientists Say by Merrit Kennedy at NPR

Interpreting Harriet Tubman’s Life on a Silent Landscape by Anne Kyle at the Preservation Leadership Forum - on creating the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway (this was of special interest to me as I visited it this past summer)

Causal inference and random trials by Daniel Little at Understanding Society - how much can we learn from random control trials?

Sorry Facebook, Blasphemy Is Not Apolitical by Sarah McLaughlin at Popehat

UI design as if users actually mattered: backwards compatibility by Dan Luu at their personal website

#linkspam

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Dust Bloom. Can we put a price on the services that urban flowers provide?

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, 2016

Every plant, no matter how humble and small, performs a series of services for us. Some are obvious: plants provide us with food, remedies and raw materials. Other services they offer tend to be overlooked. They help filter water and cool the air, they create buffers against natural disasters, prevent soil erosion, provide shelter for animals. They also perform all sort of ‘cultural services’ for us: they can act as an uplifting background for our sport activities, become tourism destinations or inspire art, mental well-being and spiritual experiences. All of us, human and non-human alike, benefit from the presence of plants around us.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) focuses on “making nature’s values visible” to decision-makers. The aim of the initiative is to demonstrate the values of ecosystems and biodiversity in economic terms but also to lay bare the costs of political inaction.

What might sounds like a cold and utilitarian approach is actually an invaluable concept that could spur us into appreciating, valuing and protecting plants and the ecosystems they are part of.

Artist and urban planner Alexandra Toland worked with experts in environmental microbiology, urban soils, and of course urban ecosystem services to explore the ability of flowers to help filter atmospheric particulate matter (PM.) These ‘dusts’ can come from natural sources such as pollen but also from industrial and vehicular emissions and tire abrasion. Their presence in the environment has been linked to cardiovascular, respiratory and other health problems, especially in cities where there is relatively more pollution and less vegetation to filter it.

The filtering capacity of flowers is a neglected area of research, compared to leaves. However, the complex, three-dimensional structures of flowers make them valuable allies when it comes to regulating air quality by removing pollutants from the atmosphere. Toland’s project Dust Blooms juxtaposes the beauty and function of urban flora using a synthesis of artistic and scientific methods to create awareness about the every-day importance of ecosystem services in cities.

Dust Blooms started as field work, with the artist collecting the dust from wild flowers growing at the edges of heavily trafficked streets in Berlin. She then analyzed the samples to determine the type and amount of dust particles that covered the surface of petals.

The next step of her work consisted in visualizing her research. First, through botanical engravings that “graft” together elements of historical botanical illustrations from over 30 authors. These engravings were made from the very street dust collected on site. She also used all sort of everyday consumer goods (plastic dental brush sticks, microfiber wipes, polycarbonate screws, plastic clay, glitter, and granular resins) to create small sculptures based on the micro-morphological features of the Dandelion family. The synthetic plants are displayed “as glorified bricolage of the Anthropocene” on a flower bed while actual atmospheric dust levels are measured with Arduino-powered instruments.

Dust Blooms received an honorary mention at Ars Electronica this year. I got a chance to talk to Alexandra Regan Toland while she was busy preparing her show in Linz, editing a book about the challenges and creative possibilities of soil protection in the age of the Anthropocene, and tending to her many duties as a beekeeper, vermicomposter, forager, forester, and mother.

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, 2016

Hi Alexandra! While reading the webpage for the project, i was struck by this sentence: “Flowering plants provide a host of ecosystem services in cities, such as climate regulation, the source of nectar and pollen for insects, and the purification of air, water, and soil.” I had no idea that plants were also seen as service providers. Somehow i find it a bit sad to see how we need to instrumentalize nature in order to recognise its value. Could you tell us about the importance of these ‘ecosystem services’ in urban contexts?

I agree with your critique of the Ecosystem Services (ESS) paradigm but I recognize that it can be an effective way of protecting nature compared with other environmental protection strategies, especially in cities where there isn’t much nature to begin with. In our quest to design and build more sustainable cities, there has been a lot of research on urban ESS as a way of establishing indicators and standards. I see it as my job as an artist to visualize the ideas behind ESS but also to point out obvious ironies and contradictions. For instance, the fate of many medicinal herbs growing along roadsides seems to complicate the neat categories of ESS. These medicinal plants could theoretically be used for healing teas and tonics (a health-providing “service”) but are so filthy you would never want to pick them in the first place. So, it is somewhat ironic that age-old healing herbs like Plantain, St. John’s Wort, Yarrow, and Dandelion end up being healthful after all because they minimize atmospheric dust by cleaning the air of tiny noxious particles with their leaves and petals and holding the soil together with their roots. And they’re pretty to look at, poking up between fields of weathered asphalt and concrete, so their presence has a positive psychological effect too.

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, 2016

How important is it for a plant to be recognised as a ‘service provider’? 

We all – humans and non-humans – have roles and identities in the cosmopolitan order of the city. A plant can be my service provider (as in the filtration service I emphasize in DUST BLOOMS), my neighbour (as in the trees that line my street), my friend (as in the potted plant on my desk), my enemy (as in the allergy-causing summer grasses down the street).

I guess I like to think of ESS as more of a form of community work than instrumentalization. If we choose to see and value urban flora for their civic services – for making the world a better place simply by being there doing their filtering/cooling/sheltering/healing thing – then we might do our service to them in return by protecting biodiversity and open green spaces in cities.

Maybe the ESS paradigm is simply a projection of our own social democratic expectations of civil society to provide basic needs – a world in which all members of society are encouraged and expected to participate in some small way for the well-being of the greater community. So, plants and soil and animals and insects provide services to us while we can and should provide services to them. I’m not entirely sure that ESS can provide the right rules on how those services can be fairly valued and implemented, particularly on the human side, but it is an interesting policy strategy to consider.

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, view of the exhibition Lasst Blumen Sprechen – Artificial Nature from 1960, at Museum Schloß Moyland, 2016

 Could you tell us about the way plants are filtering atmospheric particulate matter (PM)? How do they perform this task? How much of a contribution can they really make to the purification of the air? Which types of PM do they manage to clean up effectively? 

The easiest way to think about dust filtration by plants is to imagine millions of living combs and brushes lining the street. The air passes through layers of undulating biomass that captures everything from larger debris such as weathered bits of trash and dead leaves to tiny diesel particles in the PM fraction. The type and source of dust is pretty easy to recognize under a microscope: pollen and fungal spores are geometric; grains of sand are usually smooth and translucent; soot and tire abrasion detritus is opaque black and edgy looking. All of these particles can get caught in the surface features of trees, bushes, and low-growing herbaceous plants. If you look closely at these surfaces you will notice that some are smooth, but many are hairy, scaly, pocked, wrinkled, folded, furrowed, spiky, or sticky, and these features can be densely or widely packed. So, different plants filter in different ways with different levels of filtration effectivity. Depending on the height, habitus, size and surface morphology of leaves and flowering parts, as well as the distance from the pollution source and pollution intensity, AND the position of neighboring buildings, which can act like canyons or wind tunnels, there can be very different filtering scenarios going on. The time of year is also important to consider, as trees in northern cities lose their leaves in winter. This is incidentally the time of highest levels of atmospheric dust. So, there is unfortunately no straight answer to the “how much” question, but it does make sense to plant as many trees and bushes along busy roads and to allow knee-high wild undergrowth to develop as a buffer between streets and sidewalks, where the pollution from exhaust is actually being churned out.

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, 2016

 Beyond its artistic qualities, Dust Bloom seems to have made a valuable contribution to the knowledge related to the function of urban flora. How did you divide or distribute art and science in your project? Was the research process conducted strictly following scientific protocols? 

I learned about the role of plants as atmospheric filters from colleagues in my PhD research program at the TU-Berlin‘s Institute of Ecology back in 2010. I was fascinated by the idea of living dust filters and knew I wanted to collaborate with the lead researcher, Ina Säumel, at some point on an art-science project. When Museum Schloß Moyland invited me to make a new series of botanical sculptures for a show on artificial nature they were preparing, I decided to explore concepts of plant morphology through sculpture and approached Ina with the idea of flower filtration, because up to that point no one had studied the filtration potential of flowers.

I didn’t really divide the “science” and “art” parts of the project because I saw it as an opportunity to delve into the phenomenon using several different methods: sculptural prototyping; historical analysis presented as a series of engravings; microscopic analysis of flower morphology and dust types; cartographic analysis and site survey; direct measurement using Arduino-powered dust sensors; and photographic documentation of different scales of observation.

All parts of the project were trial and error. There were scientific protocols for microscopic analysis, artistic protocols for mixing engraving pigments, and programming protocols for the dust filter. But there were a lot of “mistakes” that led to new discoveries and new questions as well. For example, according to the protocol we developed for the measuring campaign, we weren’t supposed to collect flowers within 72 hours of a rainstorm. In the end, as we were pressed for time and still hadn’t found any flowering St. Johns Wort, we picked some specimens after a rain shower anyway, fully expecting that all the dust had washed away. We were surprised to discover that some particles were still there embedded in the tissue, leading to new questions about how plants physiologically and perhaps genetically change based on their exposure to dust… Then, in the studio, I had been working with a much higher concentration of dust to medium, but after going away for a weekend I realized that the mixture would foul after a few days so ended up completely changing my pigment recipe. (The pigment is stable when it dries on the printed page.) In the end, knowledge creation, whether it’s relegated to the sciences or the arts, is a result of trial and error and methodological triangulation, meaning as social scientist W.L Neuman says, “we take multiple measures of the same phenomena and build on the principle that we learn more by observing from multiple perspectives than by looking from only a single perspective”.

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, 2016

The honorary mention at ars electronica is a sign that the artistic community responds with enthusiasm to your work but did you receive some feedback, opinions and remarks from the scientific community as well? 

Other than a few presentations at the University, we haven’t published any papers for scientific journals yet, but would like to do so. To be accepted as sound science, the methods and measuring procedures must be clear but there must also be enough data to conduct statistical analysis. By the time the exhibition was set up in June, we didn’t have enough data from our measuring campaign and decided to continue the campaign and just exhibit the field and lab protocols so people could follow the process. We presented a research log with the one full data set we did have (dandelion), and detailed “character profiles” for each species. The field data from the dust filters was also incomplete, so we just showed how it worked in the museum. So, the project is most definitely still a work in progress.

In general, though, the resonance from the environmental science community has been very positive and encouraging. I think a lot of scientists are willing to work with artists, it’s just tricky to find funding and figure out ways of integrating artists into already running teaching and research programs. Also, the time and space constraints of an exhibition can limit the kind of work that can be done. It’s important that if a project identifies as art-science it has to work as both. Showing the methods and shortcomings and open questions of any research project is good practice. But those things can easily get obscured by the aesthetics of exhibitions.

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, 2016

Why did you chose the dandelion as the hero of the project? 

The dandelion is a special flower. There is something magical about the achenial seeds with their hairy pappus ‘wings,’ the milky, straw-like hollowness of the stem, and the curly bronze phyllary leaves at the base. The dandelion is a ‘model species,’ widely referenced in ecological research because of its highly adaptive morphological and genetic properties. Dandelions can adjust their size, shape, and metabolic properties to better deal with stress factors such as being grazed in rural locations, or dealing with pollution in urban ones. Its super adaptability makes the dandelion a so-called “super-species” – a complex group of species so closely related that, taxonomically, they are nearly impossible to tell apart. To model the dandelion is to honor 30 million years of subtle shape shifting through sculptural research. For me, the dandelion is also a symbol of graceful diaspora, which I think is comforting for many people around the world, including myself, who find themselves for better or for worse far away from “home.” The idea that the dandelion can spread wide and far and physically adapt to its new settings is inspiring and poignant. I collected the first flower samples with my daughter along the former East-West border in Berlin. Only a generation ago these seeds might have been the only organisms to parachute across the Oberbaum Bridge, where today thousands of cars speed over without a second thought leaving trails of dust behind them.

The research process involved a measuring campaign to examine dust from the flowers of several species at several locations in Berlin. What did you learn during this stage of the research?

Together with urban ecology students at the Technical University of Berlin, under the direction of professors Gerd Wessolek, Ina Säumel, and myself, a measuring campaign was carried out to examine dust from surfaces of flowers at multiple locations in the city from April to June 2016. Based on existing dust filtration data from Ina’s previous work, historical relevance found in old medicinals, a site analysis and knowledge of blooming periods, and of course aesthetic interest, we narrowed down our selection to the following plants: Achillea millefolium (common yarrow), Artemisia vulgaris (mugwort), Chelidonium majus (greater calendine), Geranium robertianum (Red Robin), Hypericum perforatum (St. John’s Wort), Plantago major (broadleaf plantain), Taraxacum officinale (common dandelion). Ten flowers per species were picked from major roadways in Berlin with an average daily traffic rate of more than 50,000 motorized vehicles. Five petals were then examined from each flower. Using light microscopy, it was possible to quantitatively estimate the surface area of a flower and qualitatively describe the morphological characteristics of individual flowers, as well as determine the type and amount of dust particles captured on petal surfaces. Each step of the process was documented in a series of photographs and field and lab reports.

I think the most important thing we learned in this process was the limitations of our own human capacity for work. Ina and I are both moms, juggling work and family life. We didn’t have as many students as we were hoping to attract with the project, so the burden of measurement fell on two people who had their own busy schedules at the university. It was really difficult to locate all target species in the determined 50,000 plus areas at exactly the right distance from the road, and exactly right time of peak flowering. We were also weather dependent. We had to collect our specimens during days with no rainfall, get them to the lab before wilting in the summer heat, and then not damage the delicate petals in the process of arranging them under the microscope. In the end, we had enough materials to exhibit by June, but realized as the exhibition came around that the measuring campaign was far from over.

 I was very intrigued by the ‘representation’ chapter of the work. Your botanical engravings depict the evolution of graphic representation of weedy species over 350 years. How has the representation evolved over the years? Is it a question of the techniques used to draw the plants or is it because the plants themselves have changed their aspect? 

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison wrote a wonderful book called Objectivity (2007, Zone Books) that follows the history of visual representation and the changing relationships between scientists and illustrators over the course of several centuries. They discuss how botanists have relied on the help of artists right up until the present. “As long as botanists insisted on figures that represented the characteristic form of a species or even genus, photographs and other mechanical images of individual plants in all their particularity would have little appeal. Truth-to-nature spoke louder in this case than mechanical objectivity” (p109). However, there is a great deal of difference in the representations of these “true types” over time.

The plants have stayed the same, while our interest in them, as well as our technical means of representation continues to change. While pictures in medicinal herbals once included roots and underground plant parts, which were of great value to physicians and apothecaries, later illustrative works practically excluded the representation of roots to focus on flowering and fruiting parts, as they were thought to be more essential to taxonomic systems from Linnaeus (1707-1778) onwards.

As European colonial explorers ‘discovered’ a seemingly infinite amount of new plant species, it was botanical artists such as Claude Aubriet (1665-1742) and Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770), who were instrumental in establishing their economic value in finely illustrated identification manuals known as Flora – in the documentation of new cash crops in colonial contexts; for the scientific advancement of botanical theory; and for the growing interest in horticulture in the gardens of affluent patrons. Ironically, the chosen species for DUST BLOOMS have appeared as prized medicinal herbs in herbals such as William Woodville’s Medical Botany (1792-1793), as well as appearing as villainous weeds in Emil Korsmo’s Anatomy of Weeds (1954). What was once a benefit to the physician became over time a costly detriment to the agronomist. These changes in representational focus inspired me to do a mash-up of different historical periods. If you look closely, you can see the pixelated rendering of the bit-map needed to make the engraving plates, as well as the inclusion of little insects flying around with brushes and q-tips. So, the historical illusion is broken. In a way, the engravings are a kind of digital grafting, akin to the grafting of economically valuable fruit and nut trees, but for weeds, which are valuable in their own way in the ESS context.

Alexandra Regan Toland, Dust Bloom, 2016

 How important was it for you to use “anthropocene’ materials in the artworks?

There is a lot of critique on the legitimacy of the “Anthropocene” – as a term, a field of research, a moment in time, a social order, and as an epistemology. I don’t want to get into that debate here, but I will say that it was important for me to reflect Anthropocene ideas, such as the ESS paradigm and the problem of air pollution, in the very materials I was using for the artworks. Early on I knew I wanted to use street dust as a pigment in some way. The chemical composition of the street dust is unique to our times and adds a contemporary layer to the historical engravings. The materials used in the botanical models are also sourced from the very world they seek to understand. Characteristic inventions of our present society, like plastic dental brush-sticks, microfiber cleaning wipes, polycarbonate screws, plastic clay, and aquarium tubing, are fused together as material bricolage of the Anthropocene. What in other contexts is used to clean, decorate, or hold things together can be repurposed to represent environmental phenomena. Imagine all the R&D that led to Swiffer wipes to keep our homes dust-free. Well, we can similarly imagine the evolutionary R&D that went into the morphology of flowering plants, and they are out there cleaning for free! There has been a lot of R&D in the fields of biomimicry and geomimicry, looking to natural patterns and processes for solutions to human problems. The classic example is George de Mestral’s invention of Velcro based on the hooked burrs of the Burdock plant. I was trying to echo that process in reverse, by using human inventions to model nature as it appears in a very humanly altered state.

Thanks Alex!

Related story: Eulogy for the weeds. An interview with Ellie Irons.

from We Make Money Not Art http://ift.tt/2x5mDer via IFTTT

#IFTTT #We Make Money Not Art

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liberallifeblog · 8 years ago

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The Snowbird Lifestyle: Healthy Anti-Aging Solution or Horrifying Misadventure?

photo: wikimedia

By Crabby McSlacker So what's a snowbird? (Besides, apparently, a ski resort in Utah?) I'll offer one definition of a snowbird: a species of silver-crested North American, usually of advancing years, that migrates annually for the winter from colder northern climates to warmer southern ones. Best known for upsetting local ecosystems and annoying year-round inhabitants. Regular readers may be aware that my wife (aka "The Lobster") and I are a couple of those dreaded snowbirds. Yet: we are not all that old. Nor, we hope, are we all that annoying. And it's not just us: Snowbirds seem to be getting younger. Maybe it's because more jobs are going virtual and it's not just for retirement anymore? Or it might be because new options that didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago can make it way more affordable and practical than it used to be. (Note: I'm talking about "snowbirding" because that's what people google the most common sort of seasonal migration. But this applies to other extended getaways too, like fleeing a torrid climate during summers, or spending months abroad every year in a country that's cheap and culturally enriching, or whatever.) So if you're curious about the Snowbird lifestyle, either because it sounds vaguely appealing, or alternatively, because it sounds so hideously disruptive that reveling in the details will make you smugly grateful that you live only in one place like a normal person--some thoughts below.

Our Snowbirding experience? We flee wintertime in Provincetown Massachusetts every year, and have had a blast living part time in San Diego for seven years. But now we're selling our condo this spring, because we want to mix it up a little more. We did a trial run last winter, renting out our SD digs and spending it Austin Texas instead. Way fun!

(And hell, since I have some left-over photos from then that I never blogged about, I'm going to go ahead and use 'em to break up the text so I don't have to write a whole ridiculously belated "healthy travels in Austin" post.)

Next winter, we're renting a place in St. Petersburg Florida. And the year after that... hmm. Mexico? Hawaii? New Zealand? Costa Rica? Who knows? Can you see how that sort of decision might be kinda fun to make?

But let's deal with the bad news first.

Hassles and Painful Realities: Not Everyone Can or Should be a Snowbird.

For one thing, plenty of people are quite happy where they are whatever the season! And so why mess with a good thing? Other folks who might enjoy snowbirding eventually can't even think about it now because of work, family obligations or financial constraints. I'm guessing, for example, most second grade teachers wouldn't take kindly to a parental note saying: "please excuse Tiffany's absence during December, January, February and March. She was busy learning to boogie-board in Daytona Beach." Nor for that matter would many bosses. But even those who are ready, willing and able to migrate will have to deal with quite a few costs, chores, and hassles:

Finding a place to rent or buy and Making Arrangements. (Extra difficult if you have pets, peculiarities, or Strong Opinions).

The cost of said place, whether rented or owned.

If it's not an easy driving destination, then transportation to and fro and a means to get around once there.

Enlisting someone to rent (if you're lucky) or housesit or check on your home while you're away.

Winterizing if it freezes where you live.

Packing Angst, plus shipping costs if you send boxes back and forth.

Mail forwarding (which, btw, the post office sucks at) and bill paying and possibly tax season, which becomes more complicated when things keep getting lost in the mail.

Schlepping or rebuying Things You Can Not Live Without.

If you own, then duplicate utilities, taxes, insurance, association fees plus a twin set of "what happens while we're gone" questions.

However, it all gets way easier as you get the hang of it.

So, anyone still game or did I scare y'all off?

Winter? What winter?

Different Approaches to Snowbirding

A "second home" doesn't have to mean a huge new mortgage payment or a boring gated community full of eighty year olds riding around in golf carts. You can choose any sort of neighborhood that appeals!

In our Austin 'hood

Here are a few possibilities to think about, not all mutually exclusive:

Downsize your primary residence to something more economical to extract some extra cash to flee for part of the year.

Rent seasonally through VRBO or AirBnb or similar.

Buy a used RV and find a cheap warm place to park it.

If you live in a desirable urban area or an all-season destination (say, for example, you hail from NYC, San Diego, Boulder, DC, SF etc), consider renting out your own place while you're gone for a few months, or doing a house swap for free rent elsewhere.

Travel to countries where rents or second homes are cheaper.

Get together with friends or relatives and split a second home.

Buy a second place in a year-round rental area and rent it out monthly or weekly when you're not using it.

It helps to start fantasizing about what you might do years ahead of time, and making vacation visits and collecting data about neighborhoods, prices, cost of living, etc. A cross country road trip, if you can squeeze in the vacation time, is a great way to check out a bunch of options all at once.

Prefer a Second Home, or a Seasonal Adventure?

We know many people whose "second homes" are as every bit as integral to their lives as their primary residences. They build friendships and community over the years, and they establish routines and traditions that result in a sense of feeling truly "home" all year long, even as the settings change.

Alternatively, it's a big world! Keeping it flexible and mixing it up every year, exploring different cities or countries, gives an incredible sense of freedom and adventure.

Whether your intention is to settle somewhere for the long haul or not, you may want to consider renting a season before buying. Though hell, if you really know what you want, and see a screaming deal, then a quick decision can work too. But caution is advised.

Is Snowbirding Good for Your Health?

This is at least theoretically a health blog, so let's take a look at the healthy lifestyle angle. Did you know research proves that people who shift their primary residence between two or more places become physically and psychologically healthier as they age, and live much longer lives than their stationary peers? Really? Because I just made that up. I don't think there is any such research. (Though I did find an abstract for one Nordic study on second homes and health that basically seemed to say: we should study this). I don't actually think we should throw precious research money at this one. Not unless you have a ginormous grant that could randomly put people in groups and subsidize half of them, forcing them to move somewhere far away from bad weather whether they want to or not. Otherwise, how would you ever control for the probable fact that people drawn to snowbirding are a different sort of species of human to start with? People who might be more risk-tolerant, adventurous, financially secure, and in better health or they wouldn't consider taking it on? But common sense (and a little research) points to a few very likely health benefits for snowbirds. Physical: It's easier for most people to and get outdoors and exercise in a mild climate. Or, to get outdoors at all for that matter. (But stay tuned, we have a guest post coming up soon on winter exercise!) A research review appears to confirm this: physical activity tends to decline in winter. And the same goes for hot humid summers. An excerpt (citations omitted, boldface mine):

The data show that both men and women are more physically active during leisure time in the summer than in the winter. Moreover, it provides an analysis of the types of activities adopted by season. A 2–3-fold greater volume of walking for pleasure, the most prevalent type of activity for both men and women, was reported in spring-summer-fall seasons, compared with winter. In addition, outdoor activities such as gardening and lawn-mowing tended to replace indoor pastimes such as home exercise and bowling. Data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, Cycle 2.2 of more than 20,000 Canadians collected in 2004 revealed that the number of inactive respondents increased from 49% in summer to 64% in winter. Smaller studies, as well as those from other countries, and those concentrating on adolescents or children, tend to replicate these findings, with some exceptions. In areas of the United States with hot, humid summer weather, physical activity of children was in fact lower in summer than winter; a small study in the United Arab Emirates also suggested that extremely hot weather would decrease physical activity.

Dietary: I'm thinking warmer climates are more likely to have fresher, locally grown produce. At least that's been our experience. Also, it's a chance to get out of any dietary ruts you may have fallen into, shopping in different stores, trying new kinds of foods, exploring new takeout and restaurant options, which could in turn lead to new recipes. Many things I eat routinely now I sampled first Somewhere Else.

Psychological: Here is where I think there are the most benefits, at least for my strange little brain: Growth Mindset: There are a couple different ways to handle the aging process. Have you noticed that some people seem to get more open and adventurous as the decades pass? They become more broad-minded and adaptable, gain confidence, and become more willing to challenge themselves and less stressed when encountering the unexpected. The alternative approach? Retreat more and more to the familiar, the comfortable. Allow your world to keep getting smaller, you habits and opinions more entrenched. Find ways to avoid change whenever possible. I argue that as strategies for happiness, meaning, and life satisfaction the first approach rocks, and the second approach sucks. But "growing" instead of "shrinking" is not necessarily natural, at least for some of us anxious types. We have to actively work to stay in category One rather than get sucked into category Two. There are a multitude of ways to challenge yourself that are far less of a pain in the ass than packing up your life twice a year. Taking classes, volunteering, doing meet-ups, signing up for marathons, etc. But... having different worlds with different neighborhoods, resources, routines, possibilities, and adventures throws a whole lot of novelty in one package. And it's a package wrapped up with a pretty bow of lovely anti-depressing sunny weather! Snowbirding also requires some scheming and troubleshooting, which while not always fun, keeps those brain cells firing and beats the pants off sudoku or solitaire. Simplifying: As discussed above, snowbirding adds some complications to life. Yet counter-intuitively, it can lead to a Zen sort of reckoning about what's truly important to you, and how much less you need in your life than you thought you did. Most people we know who migrate like we do have, just like us, downsized in all sorts of ways. Not only in terms of real estate, but also personal possessions, financial entanglements, even relationships that no longer feel right, and other various commitments that seemed to be "costing" more than they were worth. Fresh eyes, with no need for an optometrist: A lesser known snowbird bonus: When you go back to your old home and neighborhood, one where you may have lived for decades, you see and appreciate all sorts of things you never noticed. It's like falling in love all over again!

And speaking of which: Relationship Enhancer: If you have a cherished spouse or life partner, sharing adventures adds a whole new dimension of bonding. Different settings bring out all kinds of new ways to appreciate their awesomeness!

The always awesome Lobster

On the other hand, if you accidentally married a whiner, a loser, a blowhard, a creep, a psycho, or a dickhead, and divorce isn't practical, you'll appreciate not being trapped in the same house with them during winter months. You can head outside and take up a new sport or simply walk as far, far away from them as you possibly can.

Health Challenges

OK, to be fair, there are some of these as well. Moving is considered a major stressor. And even if you're not starting from scratch every year, or are renting furnished places, there are still tons of little details and things that can go wrong. Along with the excitement of change comes uncertainty and a need for flexibility. Exposing yourself to this can either be a "growth opportunity" or a pain-in-the-ass source of stress, depending on your circumstances and mindset. (But consider: I'm more than a bit of a worrywart, and I cope just fine, and find it well worth the tradeoffs.) I'll repeat too: it gets way easier over time. Another consideration: if you have chronic health conditions that require doctors visits and prescription refills, you have to make sure you are going somewhere you can take care of these things, particularly if you are considering international destinations. Wishful thinking and denial are not good replacements for regular medical care. (But snowbirding, unlike snowboarding, is far less likely to send you to the emergency room.)

photo: yashima

Snowbirding Resources

Perhaps someday, if there is any interest I can get more into the nitty gritty with concrete suggestions for how to make this happen in your future, or if you're already going to make the leap, how to make it far more pleasant and less painful. I'm not sure if any regular visitors are game, but, lurkers? Googlers? If you want to know more, please let me know in the comments and I'll consider a future post. In the meantime, here are some links that are probably more informative than I am anyway: Tips on snowbird lifestyle from U.S. News

Retirement Guide to Achieving Snowbird Lifestyle (Canadian, yay!) Economical Snowbirding (Also Canadian) 30 Things you probably didn't know about snowbirds Joan Lunden on Joys of Snowbirding HuffPo on Life as a Snowbird Best Places for Snowbirds to Retire How about you guys, any of you think you might someday be interested? Or, No Way in Hell? The Snowbird Lifestyle: Healthy Anti-Aging Solution or Horrifying Misadventure? posted first on http://ift.tt/2kDxLY4

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