The Choice: A Longer Life or More Stuff - New York Times

The Choice: A Longer Life or More Stuff - New York Times: "Most families in the 1950’s paid their medical bills with ease, but they also didn’t expect much in return. After a century of basic health improvements like indoor plumbing and penicillin, many experts thought that human beings were approaching the limits of longevity. “Modern medicine has little to offer for the prevention or treatment of chronic and degenerative diseases,” the biologist René Dubos wrote in the 1960’s.

But then doctors figured out that high blood pressure and high cholesterol caused heart attacks, and they developed new treatments. Oncologists learned how to attack leukemia, enabling most children who receive a diagnosis of it today to triumph over a disease that was almost inevitably fatal a half-century ago. In the last few years, orphan drugs that combat rare diseases and medical devices like the implantable defibrillator have extended lives. Human longevity still hasn’t hit the wall that was feared 50 years ago."

High in Algeria’s Mountains, a Kingdom of Couscous - New York Times

High in Algeria’s Mountains, a Kingdom of Couscous - New York Times: "The Maison Lahlou has a network of about 300 women rolling couscous at their homes in the village and surrounding countryside, in addition to those who come to roll at the three-story concrete Maison Lahlou. The Lahlou family delivers the flour and picks up the couscous. The family packages about 50 tons of couscous a month."

Teaching Math, Singapore Style - New York Times

Teaching Math, Singapore Style - New York Times: "One of the most infamous fads took root in the late 1980’s, when many schools moved away from traditional mathematics instruction, which required drills and problem solving. The new system, sometimes derided as “fuzzy math,’’ allowed children to wander through problems in a random way without ever learning basic multiplication or division. As a result, mastery of high-level math and science was unlikely. The new math curriculum was a mile wide and an inch deep, as the saying goes, touching on dozens of topics each year.

Many people trace this unfortunate development to a 1989 report by an influential group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. School districts read its recommendations as a call to reject rote learning. Last week the council reversed itself, laying out new recommendations that will focus on a few basic skills at each grade level.

Under the new (old) plan, students will once again move through the basics — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and so on — building the skills that are meant to prepare them for algebra by seventh grade. This new approach is being seen as an attempt to emulate countries like Singapore, which ranks at the top internationally in math.

All these references to Singapore are encouraging,"

Activism Is in the Eye of the Ideologist - New York Times

Activism Is in the Eye of the Ideologist - New York Times: "Lori Ringhand, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, examined the voting records of the Supreme Court justices from 1994 to 2005. Because judicial activism is a vague concept, she applied a reasonable, objective standard. In the study, which is forthcoming in Constitutional Commentary, justices were considered to have voted in an activist way when they voted to overturn a federal or state law, or one of the court’s own precedents.

The conservative justices were far more willing than the liberals to strike down federal laws — clearly an activist stance, since they were substituting their own judgment for that of the people’s elected representatives in Congress. Justice Thomas voted to overturn federal laws in 34 cases and Justice Scalia in 31, compared with just 15 for Justice Stephen Breyer. When state laws were at issue, the liberals were more activist. Add up the two categories, and the conservatives and liberals turned out to be roughly equal. But Justices Thomas and Scalia, who are often held out as models of nonactivism, voted to strike down laws in more of these cases than Justice Breyer and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court’s two Clinton appointees."

Major U.S. oil discovery in Gulf of Mexico - Business - International Herald Tribune

Major U.S. oil discovery in Gulf of Mexico - Business - International Herald Tribune: "An announcement by three oil companies of a successful production test in the Gulf of Mexico, potentially the largest American oil find in a generation, was seen by experts as ushering in a new era in ultradeep-water offshore drilling.

Chevron, Devon Energy and Statoil, the Norwegian oil giant, said Tuesday that they had found 3 billion to 15 billion barrels in several fields 175 miles, or 282 kilometers, offshore.

They said the oil was 30,000 feet, or 9,144 meters, below the gulf's surface, among formations of rock and salt hundreds of feet thick."

Don’t Keep All Your Data in One Stash - New York Times

Don’t Keep All Your Data in One Stash - New York Times: "There are several online backup services that work with the backup program on Microsoft’s XP operating system. For instance, Xdrive.com offers five gigabytes for $100 a year, and Backup.com offers the same amount for $500 a year.

It is worth shopping around for the best deal or considering a work-around. Google offers 2.7 gigabytes of storage space for anyone with a Gmail account. Although most people use it for archiving their e-mail messages, that is enough space to store 500 songs or 2,500 photos and a few spare Word files. You can do that by sending yourself an e-mail message with the files as attachments.

There’s an even easier way to take advantage of Google’s largess. Users of Internet Explorer can download a program called Gmail Drive. (A Google search for the term will point you to download sites.)

If you are using the Firefox browser, an even better downloadable add-on is Gspace. (You can find it at addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1593 or www.rjonna.com.) It puts a button on the toolbar of the browser that with a few clicks puts the file right into your Gmail account. Rahul Jonna, the Phoenix programmer who created it nine months ago, said the Gspace hack has been downloaded almost 500,000 times."

The Summer Next Time - New York Times

The Summer Next Time - New York Times: "September 4, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
The Summer Next Time
By TOM LUTZ

Palm Desert, Calif.

IN late May, for those of us who teach, the summer stretches out like the great expanse of freedom it was in grammar school. Ah, the days on the beach! The books we will read! The adventures we will have!

But before hunkering down to months of leisurely lolling around a pool slathered in S.P.F. 80, we need to take care of a few things: see what got buried in the e-mail pile over the course of the year, write a few letters of recommendation, and finally get to those book reviews we agreed to do. A few leftover dissertation chapters. The syllabuses and book orders for next year’s classes. Then those scholarly articles we were snookered into writing when the deadlines were far, far in the future — deadlines that now, magically, are receding into the past. My God, did I really tell someone I would write an article called “Teaching Claude McKay”? Before we know it, the summer is eaten up, we’re still behind on our e-mail, and the fall semester looms.

On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a "

A sunshine state surprise Southern Living - Find Articles

A sunshine state surprise Southern Living - Find Articles: "A sunshine state surprise
Southern Living, Spring 2001 by Thompson, Annette

Favorite Small Towns

DeLand may be one of Florida's best-kept secrets. Imagine a college campus classified as a National Historic District. Add to that a downtown brimming with notable shops and eateries. Then place it between the junglelike shores of the St. Johns River and the silvery surf of the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, picture all this only 25 minutes from Orlando or Daytona. DeLand delights visitors with all the possibilities and hospitality a small Southern town can offer."

At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready - New York Times

At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready - New York Times: "Nearly half the 14.7 million undergraduates at two- and four-year institutions never receive degrees. The deficiencies turn up not just in math, science and engineering, areas in which a growing chorus warns of difficulties in the face of global competition, but also in the basics of reading and writing.

According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology."

Wrong War, Wrong Word

Wrong War, Wrong Word: "'Islamo-fascism' looks like an analytic term, but really it's an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim world as a simple matter of Us versus Them, with war to the end the only answer, as with Hitler. If you doubt that every other British Muslim under the age of 30 is ready to blow himself up for Allah, or that shredding the Constitution is the way to protect ourselves from suicide bombers, if you think that Hamas might be less popular if Palestinians were less miserable, you get cast as Neville Chamberlain, while Bush plays FDR. "

On the Job, Nursing Mothers Find a 2-Class System - New York Times

On the Job, Nursing Mothers Find a 2-Class System - New York Times: "It is a particularly literal case of how well-being tends to beget further well-being, and disadvantage tends to create disadvantage — passed down in a mother’s milk, or lack thereof.

“I feel like I had to choose between feeding my baby the best food and earning a living,” said Jennifer Munoz, a former cashier at Resorts Atlantic City Casino who said she faced obstacles that included irregular breaks and a refrigerator behind a locked door. She said she often dumped her milk into the toilet, knowing that if she did not pump every few hours, her milk supply would soon dwindle.

The casino denies discouraging Ms. Munoz from pumping. “We have policies and procedures in place to accommodate the needs of all of our employees,” Brian Cahill, a Resorts spokesman, said."