Healthy, Balanced Perspective On Money Investments

Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in old paradigms, old ways of doing things with thinking that is not current with the times.  Sometimes it is easy to miss the critical and important things that are right in front of us because of those old voices or traditional voices.  Too often, it is simply just hard to change doing what we normally have been doing or what we are familiar with.   Additionally, sometimes we do not take the time to carefully look at the necessary facts and realities to get the complete picture and truth about how things work.Not being current or not being well informed can cause us to miss the opportunities available to us; therefore, causing problems and issues we do not desire. We simply do not seize the day.  We may not take the time to focus adequately, to have the healthy and balanced perspective that is in the best interest of our needs for safety, security, growth, tax savings and income

‘Accelerated aging’: a primrose path to insight?

Organism envy afflicts most researchers who work on aging in mice; how frustrating it is to see the worm and fly biologists nail down milestone after milestone, citation after citation! Surely genetic trickery can produce mice that age in a comparable jiffy? Alas, our near-total ignorance of what times the aging process makes it hard to guess what genes to tweak, if indeed aging can be mimicked a presto . Building a case that a given short-lived mutant ages quickly is a steep and thorny path, requiring more than just plucking a symptom here and there from a list of things that sometimes go wrong in old people or old mice. The hallmark of aging is that a lot goes wrong more or less at the same time, in 2-year-old mice, 10-year-old dogs and 70-year-old people. Finding ways to damage one or two systems in a 6-week or 6-month-old mouse is not too hard to do, but the implications of such studies for improved understanding of aging per se are at best indirect and at worst imaginary and distracting.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73065/1/j.1474-9728.2004.00081.x.pd

Life on two continents: understanding different roles of Chinese grandparents who have grandchildren born in the U.S.

Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2014The present research explored the roles Chinese grandparents play regarding their grandchildren born in the United States. Due to the differences in language, cultures and family values in China and the U.S., these Chinese grandparents balance their lives between two continents and experience possible disconnect in communication with their U.S.-born grandchildren. In order to understand the lived experiences of these Chinese grandparents and to develop co-constructed meaning of their intercultural interactions, this research employs qualitative narrative analysis as the primary method. Eight conversational interviews were conducted and four emergent themes were discussed. This research shows that Chinese grandparents do encounter difficulties, cultural conflicts and disconnect with their grandchildren because they split their time between living in China and the U.S. There are insights provided to mitigate these problems

The Challenges of Pluralism: Locating Religion in a World of Diversity

This is a postprint (author's final draft) version of an article published in the journal Social Compass in 2010. The final version of this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0037768610362406 (login may be required). The version made available in OpenBU was supplied by the author.The author argues that religious pluralism is the normal state of affairs. Religion itself is multi-dimensional, and the several dimensions of religious and spiritual experience can be combined in myriad ways across individual lives. Preliminary findings from new research are presented, detailing modes of spiritual discourse that include mystery, majesty, meaning, moral compassion, and social connection. These dimensions find expression across multiple social institutions. In addition, religion is multi-traditional and organized by plural producers of the goods and services and events that embody and transform religious tradition. Finally, it is argued that religious pluralism must be studied in terms of the structures of power and privilege that allow some religious ideas to be given free voice, but limit the practice of other religious rituals or the gathering of dissident religious communities

Theoretical virtues and theological construction

Theist and critic alike typically assume rather traditional, Medieval, understandings of God, thereby masking certain complexities in their disputes. Drawing on the practices of both scientific and theological theory construction, it is argued that traditional theologies should be seen as negotiable in certain ways. In the light of this, standard attempts at refutations of Christianity have significantly less force than is usually appreciated. Some pitfalls of both strong and weak commitments to any particular theological framework are discussed

Between the ideal and the reality: The human body through the eyes of European artists

The human body has always been one of the most important subjects for European artists. But the way it is displayed in art has varied in different epochs. In ancient Greece, a canon was constituted that proclaimed an ideal vision of the body, derived from the rules governing the universe. This idealization of the human body, neglected in the Middle Ages, was re‑established in Renaissance and Classicist art. However, Renaissance artists also created another image of the human body by borrowing from patterns mainly found in nature, and started to depict their models not in an ideal but rather in a more natural shape. The new non‑ideal forms of art that appeared in Mannerist art made the artists develop a much wider artistic language, which brought into being a variety of individually interpreted artistic representations of the human body. It preceded similar phenomena which became widespread in the twentieth century. Thus, the human body was not always displayed in art as strong, healthy and beautiful. On the contrary, the martyred bodies of Christ and the saints, as well as the depictions of aged, tired or ill people, also carried enormous artistic expression. A distinct problem has occurred with the ways in which corpses have been presented in art. The review concludes with a reference to the contemporary trend called Body‑Art that involves various artistic activities, such as happenings and performances, where the human body is itself used as a significant work of art

Engaged learning in MOOCs: a study using the UK Engagement Survey

This study sets out to answer the question: how can we know what learning is taking place in MOOCs? From this starting point, the study then looks to identify MOOCs’ potential for future use in HE? Using a specially-adapted version of the HEA’s UK Engagement Survey (UKES) 2014, the research team at the University of Southampton asked participants who had completed one of two MOOCs delivered through the FutureLearn platform and designed and run at the university about their experiences as learners and their engagement with their respective MOOC. The results also show that both of the MOOCs were successful in enabling many participants to feel engaged in intellectual endeavours such as forming new understandings, making connections with previous knowledge and experience, and exploring knowledge actively, creatively and critically. In response to the open access approach – in which no one taking part in a MOOC is required to have a minimum level of previous educational achievement - the report shows that persistent learners engaged, regardless of prior educational attainment

How necessary are randomized controlled trials?

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are often deemed the gold standard for testing new treatments. This belief in turn justifies recruiting patients into such trials even when it is suspected that a new treatment is superior – although patients in the control group are thereby denied what might be the better treatment, we cannot know that the treatment actually is better, the thought runs, without conducting an RCT. But Robert Northcott argues that RCTs are not always the best choice after all. Rather, like any other method, they can go wrong sometimes, in several different ways. The main alternative to them is historical studies, which try to assess a treatment’s effectiveness from data not drawn from trials. These too can go wrong in several ways, and in the past have acquired a bad reputation. However, that prejudice has become outdated. The truer picture, Northcott argues, is that sometimes one method is preferable, sometimes the other. Things must be decided case by case. It follows that the ethical ramifications of conducting an RCT also must be examined case by case; there is no one-size-fits-all answer. An especially striking and emotional example concerns ECMO, a treatment for newborn babies with life-threatening lung problems. Historical studies indicated that ECMO was a major breakthrough, offering hugely increased survival rates. But it was still insisted that it also be tested in RCTs, in the course of which many babies receiving the conventional treatment died. A properly nuanced view of RCTs suggests that these deaths were tragically unnecessary