'Fat people and bombs':HPA axis cognition, structured stress, and the US obesity epidemic

We examine the accelerating 'obesity epidemic' in the US from the perspective of recently developed theory relating a cognitive hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis to an embedding 'language' of structured psychosocial stress. Using a Rate Distortion argument, the obesity epidemic is found to represent the literal writing of an image of a ratcheting pathological social hierarchy onto the bodies of American adults and children. This process, while stratified by the usual divisions of class and ethnicity, is nonetheless relentlessly engulfing even affluent majority populations. Our perspective places the common explanation that 'obesity occurs when people eat too much and get too little exercise' in the same category as the remark by US President Calvin Coolidge on the eve of the Great Depression that 'unemployment occurs when large numbers of people are out of work'. Both statements ignore profound structural determinants of great population suffering which must be addressed by collective actions of equally great reform

Complicated Adaptive Systems as a Way to Improve Higher Education

The aspiration to constant economic wellbeing and intensive transformation of the scientific world detects a problem of adaptation in high professional education (HPE). The HPE system built in the socio-economic structure reacts with a delay to changes in the environment. In the article we claim that HPE systems have features of bio-systems: self-preservation and adequate response to external stimuli. It is supposed that this delay can be overcome if we insert into the system the elements which can improve its adaptability. As the quantitative evaluation of the system gives no grounds to the model construction, our study offers a new concept of high professional education model building. To make a diagnostics of the HPE system and to create a model of HPE adaptation to the environmental challenges we use the method of fuzzy logics, comprising a base of rules and membership functions. The proposed algorithm of fuzzy output is based on the expert assessment data of the Russian Association of Engineering Universities received during the accreditation of engineering specialties in 10 universities of Russia

Complicated Adaptive Systems as a Way to Improve Higher Education

The aspiration to constant economic wellbeing and intensive transformation of the scientific world detects a problem of adaptation in high professional education (HPE). The HPE system built in the socio-economic structure reacts with a delay to changes in the environment. In the article we claim that HPE systems have features of bio-systems: self-preservation and adequate response to external stimuli. It is supposed that this delay can be overcome if we insert into the system the elements which can improve its adaptability. As the quantitative evaluation of the system gives no grounds to the model construction, our study offers a new concept of high professional education model building. To make a diagnostics of the HPE system and to create a model of HPE adaptation to the environmental challenges we use the method of fuzzy logics, comprising a base of rules and membership functions. The proposed algorithm of fuzzy output is based on the expert assessment data of the Russian Association of Engineering Universities received during the accreditation of engineering specialties in 10 universities of Russia