Lack of Education Widens Gap in Life Expectancy

From Columbia Magazine:

OldhandsThe MacArthur Research Network on Aging, chaired by Dr. John W. Rowe, has published its latest research showing a widening gap in life expectancy between Americans with higher education and those without a high school diploma. The gap has increased dramatically among whites, with those who lack a high school diploma suffering dramatic declines in life expectancy. The biggest gap, however, persists between college-educated whites and blacks who don't complete high school. The provocative paper was published in the August issue of the journal Health Affairs and was the lead story in today's The New York Times. Dr. Rowe, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Dr. Linda P. Fried, Mailman School Dean, are co-authors.

The research looked at life expectancy by race, sex, and education and examined trends in disparities from 1990 through 2008. The study cautions that failure to complete high school takes a heavy toll on longevity among all groups, essentially negating the effects of recent healthcare advances and longevity gains. “It's as if Americans with the least education are living in a time warp,” says S. Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “The least educated black men are living in 1954, black women in 1962, white women in 1964, and white men in 1972.”

More here.

Why do people love to say that correlation does not imply causation?

Daniel Engber in Slate:

120926_SCI_karlpear.jpg.CROP.article250-mediumDepressed people send more email. They spend more time on Gchat. Researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology recently assessed some college students for signs of melancholia then tracked their behavior online. “We identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression,” they said. Sad people use IM and file-share. They play video games. They surf the Web in their own, sad way.

Not everyone found the news believable. “Facepalm. Correlation doesn't imply causation,” wrote one unhappy Internet user. “That's pretty much how I read this too… correlation is NOT causation,” agreed a Huffington Post superuser, seemingly distraught. “I was surprised not to find a discussion of correlation vs. causation,” cried someone at Hacker News. “Correlation does not mean causation,” a reader moaned at Slashdot. “There are so many variables here that it isn't funny.”

And thus a deeper correlation was revealed, a link more telling than any that the Missouri team had shown. I mean the affinity between the online commenter and his favorite phrase—the statistical cliché that closes threads and ends debates, the freshman platitude turned final shutdown. “Repeat after me,” a poster types into his window, and then he sighs, and then he types out his sigh, s-i-g-h, into the comment for good measure. Does he have to write it on the blackboard?Correlation does not imply causation. Your hype is busted. Your study debunked. End of conversation. Thank you and good night.

More here.

The deeply disturbing Israel court ruling on Rachel Corrie

Cindy Corrie [Rachel's mother] in The Seattle Times:

The home Rachel and her friends from the International Solidarity Movement defended was eventually demolished with hundreds more in mass-clearing operations to create a buffer along Gaza’s southern border.

Our lawsuit was not a solution, but rather a symptom of a broken system of accountability within Israel and our own U.S. government. Despite a promise from Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for a “thorough, credible, and transparent” investigation and repeated calls from the highest levels of our government for such an investigation to occur, there was no diplomatic resolution. According to the U.S. State Department, its calls “have gone unanswered or ignored.”

Court testimony also confirmed a credible investigation did not occur. Investigators failed to question key military witnesses, including those recording communications; failed to secure the military video, allowing it to be taken for nearly a week by senior commanders with only segments submitted to court; failed to address conflicting soldiers’ testimonies; and ignored damning statements in the military log confirming a “shoot to kill” order and command mentality to continue work in order not to create a precedent with activists.

I had no illusions about the uphill battle we faced in Israeli court, but as I sat with my family in a packed courtroom awaiting the verdict, I held hope that, like so many observing the trial, the judge would see that evidence warranted some criticism of the military’s actions.

The room was filled with human-rights observers, U.S. Embassy officials, family supporters and a throng of media. Judge Oded Gershon surveyed the scene before reading his decision. From the halting tone of my translator and friend, and audible groans around us, I knew it was bad.

He ruled that Rachel was killed as an act of war, which, according to Israeli law, absolves the military of responsibility. He added that she alone was to blame for her own killing and then went on to commend the military police for their professionalism in carrying out such a credible investigation. The courtroom heard the judge parrot the state prosecuting attorneys’ original claims in the case, nearly verbatim.

More here.

The Myths of Muslim Rage

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Satanic-versesThe Rushdie affair is shrouded in a number of myths that have obscured its real meaning. The first myth is that the confrontation over The Satanic Verses was primarily a religious conflict. It wasn’t. It was first and foremost a political tussle. The novel became a weapon in the struggle by Islamists with each other, with secularists and with the West. The campaign began in India where hardline Islamist groups whipped up anger against Rushdie’s supposed blasphemies to win concessions from politicians nervous about an upcoming general election and fearful of alienating any section of the Muslim community. The book subsequently became an issue in Britain, a weapon in faction fights between various Islamic groups.

Most important was the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for supremacy in the Islamic world. From the 1970s onwards Saudi Arabia had used oil money to fund Salafi organisations and mosques worldwide to cement its position as spokesman for the umma. Then came the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah, established an Islamic republic, made Tehran the capital of Muslim radicalism, and Ayatollah Khomeini its spiritual leader, and posed a direct challenge to Riyadh. The battle over Rushdie’s novel became a key part of that conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia made the initial running, funding the campaign against the novel. The fatwa was an attempt by Iran to wrestle back the initiative. The campaign against The Satanic Verses was not a noble attempt to defend the dignity of Muslims, nor even a theological campaign to protect religious values. It was part of a sordid political battle to promote particular sectarian interests.

The second myth is that most Muslims were offended by the novel. They weren’t.

More here.

And see also this article “Muslim Rage is About Politics, Not Religion” by Hussain Haqqani in Newsweek.

indian summer

290px-IndianSummer

Gradually, the term Indian summer has spread beyond its American origins. First to England, replacing a bevy of poetic names—All Halloween Summer, in Shakespeare’s day; St. Luke’s little summer, St. Martin’s Summer—with that single term. Then to France, capturing the popular imagination with the success of Joe Dassin’s classic homage, “L’été indien.” (Now that I think about it, I likely heard the name in French before I ever did in English; Joe Dassin—himself American born—was always popular in Russia, and I’d hummed the tune many a time before its meaning actually sunk in.) And the Indians and old women aren’t alone. Over the years, many others have laid claim to those days of waning heat. In the southern Slavic countries, it’s known as gypsy summer. I’d like to think that has something to do with the colorful vibrancy of the gypsy music and the sound of guitar strings by the open fire. In Italy, it’s a time of year owned by San Martino, or St. Martin.

more from Maria Konnikova at Paris Review here.

slave castle

Article_raboteau

Of the dozens of trade castles and forts dotting Ghana’s three-hundred-mile coastline, I’d chosen to visit the one in Elmina because it was the most notorious. Being the first permanent European settlement in Africa, it was also the oldest. The Portuguese began construction on São Jorge da Mina in 1482 with stones imported from Portugal. It was designed to defend against attacks from the local people and from other Europeans, but in the seventeenth century it was captured by the Dutch. In the nineteenth century it was purchased by the British. Now it is a World Heritage monument. In the castle’s early days, Europeans didn’t think of themselves as European any more than Africans thought of themselves as African. The Dutch weren’t betraying a European bond when they captured the Portuguese castle, just as the Mandinke weren’t betraying an African bond when they captured Ayuba. Nor, in the castle’s early days, was the castle a slave castle.

more from Emily Raboteau at The Believer here.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012)

Eric-Hobsbawm-010

In the foothills of Hampstead Heath, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used to take their afternoon strolls, stands the home of Eric and Marlene Hobsbawm. To enter the Nassington Road drawing room for a conversation with Hobsbawm was to be transported back to the great ideological struggles of the extreme 20th century. Here was where ideas mattered, history had a purpose, and politics was important. And one could have no more generous, humane, rigorous, and involved a guide than the late Eric Hobsbawm. The breadth of his work and the reach of his intellect was always startling. Right to the end of his days, he stayed up to date with scholarship, never failed to flay an opponent, and continued to write. Afternoon tea with Hobsbawm could range from the achievements of President Lula of Brazil to the limitations of Isaiah Berlin as an historian, the unfortunate collapse of the Communist party in West Bengal to what Ralph Miliband would have made of his boys, David and Ed.

more from Tristram Hunt at The Guardian here.

Tuesday Poem

34. Not What Makes Tao Tick

The Tao flows everywhere
so everything is of it

uncreated

Every thing receives Tao’s work
but it claims nothing for itself

It feeds all worlds
but never enslaves them

The Tao and each thing are merged
—the heart of all things
are filled with Tao’s humility

Each thing comes and goes
from it and to it but
Tao endures

Call it great

But being great is not what makes
Tao tick
……………..…..……which
…………………….. makes it
…………………….. great

from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
Adaptations by R.Bob

Cinema has changed us all: The birth of alienation

David Thomson in The Independent:

Alienation_freeIn his autobiography, The Words (1964), Jean-Paul Sartre described his discovery of cinema as a child. He would have been 10 years old in 1915 when The Birth of a Nation opened. But he hardly noticed particular films at first. What he saw or felt was something he called “the frenzy on the wall”. That could have been a reaction to the brilliant battle scenes in Griffith's films, but it also covers the still face of Garbo absorbing romantic loss, or the stoic blankness of Buster Keaton baffled by the physical chaos around him. The frenzy was in the whirl with which projected film ran at 16 or 24 frames a second, a passage of time that seethed on the wall – and, paradoxically, the serenity of another reality. That was the inherent madness and the magic in cinema: that we watch the battle but never risk hurt, and spy on Garbo without having her notice us.

At first, the magic was overwhelming: in 1895, the first audiences for the Lumière brothers' films feared that an approaching steam engine was going to come out of the screen and hit them. That gullibility passed off like morning mist, though observing the shower in Psycho (1960) we still seem to feel the impact of the knife. That scene is very frightening, but we know we're not supposed to get up and rescue Janet Leigh. In a similar way, we can watch the surreal imagery of the devastation at Fukushima, or wherever, and whisper to ourselves that it's terrible and tragic, but not happening to us.

More here.

High Stress Can Make Insulin Cells Regress

From The New York Times:

DiabetesFor years, researchers have investigated how the body loses the ability to produce enough insulin, a hallmark of diabetes. Now an intriguing theory is emerging, and it suggests a potential treatment that few scientists had considered. The hormone insulin helps shuttle glucose, or blood sugar, from the bloodstream into individual cells to be used as energy. But the body can become resistant to insulin, and the beta cells of the pancreas, which produce the hormone, must work harder to compensate. Eventually, the thinking goes, they lose the ability to keep up. “We used to say that the beta cells poop out,” said Alan Saltiel, director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. In reality, he added, this shorthand meant “we have no idea what’s going on.” Some evidence suggested that large numbers of these cells died through a process of programmed cell death called apoptosis. But that was at best a partial explanation. Now, researchers at Columbia University have put forth a surprising alternative. In mice with Type 2 diabetes, the researchers showed that beta cells that had lost function were not dead at all. Most remained alive, but in a changed form. They reverted to an earlier developmental, “progenitor,” state. It’s as if these cells are “stepping back in time to a point where they look like they might have looked during their development,” said Dr. Domenico Accili, director of the Columbia University Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, who led the new work.

…A range of physiological stresses, including obesity, pregnancy and aging, all tend to increase demand on beta cells to produce more insulin, Dr. Accili said. It may be that they are “taking a little rest,” he said, in returning to a less active state. Although it’s not yet clear why this might happen, the finding may lend support to the view that doctors should focus on relieving stress on the beta cells rather than pushing them to produce more insulin, which may speed the progression of diabetes, Dr. Accili said.

More here.

The Smug Technocrats who will rule Tomorrow

by James McGirk

K9294America should be more open than ever. Women and minorities are no longer excluded from high-earning professions and, if you are willing to take on the debt, a university education is more accessible than ever before. But if anything America is less egalitarian than it once was. The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. More worrying than that, a permanent class system seems to be calcifying into place: people born rich are getting richer, while the poor stay poor. America's elite has found a way to protect and perpetuate itself within what should be an inclusive system.

Sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan has a convincing explanation for how they do it. For his new book, “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul's School”, he spent a year doing ethnographic research, living among students as a tutor and conducting interviews at the exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire. “Elite schools exclude,” says Mr Khan “but today they frame themselves as doing so on the basis of talent.” Not necessarily money or good breeding, as many assume.

What defines talent is actually an arbitrary thing. When these students apply to university there is little to distinguish top applicants from one another, yet all want the academic boons such as research opportunities, close relationships with professors necessary for a postgraduate education, or the fast-track to elite employers. Attaining the highest board scores and grade point averages is no guarantee of admission, so decisions are instead made on the basis of narrative. A successful applicant must recommend him or herself through extracurricular achievement and other, squishier categories such as character and public service. All the more reason to be groomed at an elite secondary school that can foster students’ hobbies on top of their academic studies.

Read more »

Monday Song

Tomorrow
.. (listen below)

Often the guard
will just take a rest
his eyelids come down
he drops his chin on his chest
don't blame him tomorrow
don't blame him today
he only does what he can
to let himself get away

Like I choose your eyes
and I choose your hair
and I choose your skin
ah, what a lift to somewhere
don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
say, You can call me today

It's all special concern
and no religion but this
to pray with our hands
and confess with a kiss
don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
say, You can call me today

No harps in the sky
and no voices from the clouds
just the plain, simple truth
that even a fool is allowed
there's nothing to borrow
there's nothing to weigh
except the natural power
you come to gather today

don't call me tomorrow
my name is today
do you want to live losing
try to drive me away

Hey daughter so small
hey daughter of the smile
hey daughter so strong
hey daughter so wild

don't count on tomorrow
and forget yesterday
and if they ask for your name
just say, You can call me today

don't call me tomorrow
my name is today
do you want to live losing
try to drive me away

Do you want to live losing?
try to drive me away

by Jim Culleny, 6/12/71
© Oct, 1993

The Sacred

by Maniza Naqvi

ScreenHunter_03 Oct. 01 19.54On a Saturday, in the crisp air and bright light of the highlands, hundreds of people, a flood of people —made their way to and from the market place, as has been done for centuries, carrying on their backs and shoulders, their precious babies and bundled loads of produce and goods. A miracle, this, how they had walked as far as forty kilometers up and down mountains for as long as five hours in one direction to reach the market with their livestock while carrying on their own backs and on the backs of their donkeys vessels of grains, honey, firewood, baskets, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, green chilies cauliflower, lettuce, live chickens, cabbage, Tef, Tej, sorghum, maize, wheat, rice, baskets and so on. In Lalibela, the sun drenched and bustling Saturday market right outside the walls of the dark, cool, quiet and largely empty inner sanctums of the stone churches reminded me of Jerusalem. The sacred it seems, all over the world must have a market. Or is it that commerce must have temples or that what is of value rings around itself the sacred?

ScreenHunter_04 Oct. 02 09.46In the market there are lemons for sale. And the guide picks one up and takes aim saying that over here if someone throws a lemon at you it’s a declaration of love. I can’t think of something clever so I say, “I bet they say that to all the older women who come through here”. He laughs, rubbing the back of his graying head, “Yes! See that motel there? It belongs to former guides who were helped by a lady tourist who was very happy with their services.” I pick up a lemon and do a mock throw at a kid who has been trailing alongside giggling and testing one liners on me in German, Italian and French.

ScreenHunter_05 Oct. 02 09.52My guide points out things that must be noted by me, “King Lalibela had divine intervention on his side, look what he accomplished, look how he carved this wall, that pillar, this step, that window, that cross and that detail of a divine eye watching over us.” My guide talks of King Lalibela as though he constructed the churches all by himself, single handedly. I point this out. Well that’s the folklore he says. “If there is anything divine,” I say, “Then surely it is the labor of the people who made these churches, no?” The guide agrees. I continue on “The rest is a King’s ego. Perhaps if rulers had focused on works that fed people instead of works that only nourished their own need for immortality then the centuries to follow would have been of plentiful crops. ScreenHunter_06 Oct. 02 09.52 Kings who build such things and the places like the Taj Mahal seem to condemn generations forward to misery. A King who made his people labor for 24 years on carving out these churches with their hands and tools made of stone must have done this at the cost of producing food and security. No wonder the neighboring warlords marched right into these valleys…everyone was busy cutting stone.” The guide leans against an embankment of stone watching me silently. I ask whether there are irrigation channels, water storage cisterns and wells in the area that date from the same time as the churches. “No”, replies the guide, “There was no need at that time because the land was plentiful with water and forests. Now the hills and valleys have neither and depend on the rain. The new road built in the valley recently destroyed the water sources. Besides, the King’s granaries were full. He provided his people food for work.”

Read more »

Poetry in Translation: Agha Shahid Ali and I do two couplets by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

by S. Abbas Raza

Once again, I present my own translation of two lovely couplets by Faiz Ahmed Faiz side by side with a translation of the same by the late Agha Shahid Ali. I do this not to criticize Shahid's translation in any way but actually to pay tribute to him as well as to Faiz and to show how very different translations can both, I hope, work. I have indulged in this sort of exercise before. You may see that previous effort here. This time, my translation is deliberately not as literal as it could be (although more so than Shahid's) and I have tried to retain the rhyme scheme and even, to some extent, the meter of the original Urdu. The original has no title, by the way (it just says “Couplets”), and Shahid and I have both made up our own. (My translation on the left; Shahid's on the right.)

006AS IF

Last night my heart recovered a lost memory of you,
As if a desolate place had impetuously bloomed,

As if a moist breeze had washed over a parched desert,
As if a man, suffering, had a sudden peace assumed.

And here is an informal Urdu transliteration as well as the original:

004ASHAAR

Raat yoon dil mein teree khoee hoee yaad aaee
Jaisay veeranay mein chupkay say bahaar aajaaey

Jaisay sehraaon mein hollay say chalay baad-e-naseem
Jaisay beemar ko bay-wajah qaraar aajaaey

I await suggestions for improvement from my Urdu-speaking (and other) readers!