14 April 2011 posts

Workout notes Ms. Vickie’s yoga class with Lynn in the early morning. I was able to get into head stand easily but then had some vertigo problems during the “laying down” phase; the other stuff was ok.

Then over lunch, I lifted weights (and did rotator cuff PT) and then walked 3 miles easily outside (included some Bradley Park hills; the day was too pretty to stay inside)
Weights:
squats (free, no Smith Machine): 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 10 x 155, 4 x 175 (not great depth), 10 x 135
curls (dumbbell): 3 sets of 10 x 20 lb.
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120
incline presses: 10 x 115, 8 x 130 8 x 125
rows: 2 sets of 10 with 220 (close grip), 1 set of 10 with 180 (wide grip) (Hammer Machine)
sit ups: 4 sets of 25 with various inclines.

Shoulder notes: somewhat sore on one of the rotator cuff exercises (where the elbow is tucked and the arm moves from the chest and is rotated outward. This is day three of NSAIDS.

News of the weird
Well, I now know not to bring in strippers to give me a lap dance in class.

A La Salle University professor, Jack Rappaport, has been suspended for allegedly hiring strippers to give lap dances at an extra-credit seminar on business ethics.
Rappaport was in the front of the classroom and three bikini-clad and miniskirted women were on top of him giving him a lap dance, according to Brad Bernardino, a sophomore at La Salle who attended the March 21 session. At various other times, Bernardino added, the strippers gave willing students lap dances, and a PowerPoint presentation related to business ethics ran in the background.

Oh well…

Can meditation help with pain? Well, there was a study that compared people with no meditation at all, people with fake meditation training (who thought that they were getting the real training) and those who got the real training. It turns out that the “real meditation training” group dealt with pain better; and this was verified by a brain scan! But there are some serious caveats to this study:

Now for the caveats. Every subject had some pain relief by meditating, but there was wide variability among participants — between 11% and 93%. Further, it’s difficult to draw conclusions from 15 people (18 were recruited, but one was excluded for not being sensitive enough to the heat, one was too sensitive and another fell asleep in meditation).

And the pain the researchers inflicted — a burning sensation for a few minutes — doesn’t compare to what many people, such as cancer patients, must endure.

Overall, such studies add to a growing body of research suggesting that even short meditation sessions can have measurable pain-relieving benefits. That’s important to folks who must struggle with the aches and pains of daily life and who don’t want to pop painkillers for every twinge. And for sure, daily meditation has clear medical benefits.

But meditate, for a few seconds, on the thought of undergoing even a small surgery without painkillers.

Still, this is worth thinking about for dealing with, say, the pain of athletic performance.

Science fun
Even if you aren’t a fan of arachnids, this spider is beautiful:

(click the thumbnail to see the photo at Jerry Coyne’s blog along with the article)

Speaking of Coyne’s blog, surf here to see some serious FAIL on the part of apologists for religion. Among the howlers: atheism is diminished because of the lack of martyrs and, well, religious types lead the way for skepticism (you see, if someone doubted one religion, it HAD to be because another religion was true…)

Security Sometimes a change of policy can make cheating more likely and therefore call for increased security. Here Schneier provides an example:

In the U.S., under the No Child Left Behind Act, students have to pass certain tests; otherwise, schools are penalized. In the District of Columbia, things went further. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the public school system from 2007 to 2010, offered teachers $8,000 bonuses — and threatened them with termination — for improving test scores. Scores did increase significantly during the period, and the schools were held up as examples of how incentives affect teaching behavior.

It turns out that a lot of those score increases were faked. In addition to teaching students, teachers cheated on their students’ tests by changing wrong answers to correct ones. That’s how the cheating was discovered; researchers looked at the actual test papers and found more erasures than usual, and many more erasures from wrong answers to correct ones than could be explained by anything other than deliberate manipulation.

Teachers were always able to manipulate their students’ test answers, but before, there wasn’t much incentive to do so. With Rhee’s changes, there was a much greater incentive to cheat.

The point is that whatever security measures were in place to prevent teacher cheating before the financial incentives and threats of firing wasn’t sufficient to prevent teacher cheating afterwards. Because Rhee significantly decreased the costs of cooperation (by threatening to fire teachers of poorly performing students) and increased the benefits of defection ($8,000), she created a security risk. And she should have increased security measures to restore balance to those incentives.

Politics/Economy
Mr. Paul Ryan gets used as a pinata! Of course, many idiots in the media said “ok, so Ryan’s plan isn’t serious; therefore Obama’s can’t be either.” Uh, no. Example: creationism being false doesn’t mean that evolution is also false.

And no, Mr. Limbaugh, Ryan’s plan isn’t being attacked because we can’t get dates.

By the way, here is the President’s speech on the budget.

Fahreed Zakaria’s response was fair and thoughtful but Robert Reich worries that too much of the plan is dependent on the economy recovering…(while noting that long range forecasts are almost always useless anyway)