Chapter II-2 - Edward S. Morse grows up

In which teenage Edward S. Morse of Salem, Massachusetts, begins a life-long love affair with shells, leaves home for Boston, studies with Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, and becomes the world's leading authority on brachiopods (by proving conclusively that these tiny creatures are not mollusks, but worms), and how these same brachiopods lead him, at the age of thirty-nine, to Japan

Implementing Tiny Tusks: Breastfeeding and Infant Support Tent

Tiny Tusks: Breastfeeding and Infant Support Tent provided the first designated clean, private area to nurse, pump or change an infant’s diaper at University of Arkansas home athletic events. Tiny Tusks offered comfortable rocking chairs, changing tables, bottled water, and engaging projects for siblings and young children at a wide variety of University of Arkansas home athletic events, including football games, men’s basketball games, and women’s gymnastics meets. The project was created and designed by two Eleanor Mann School of Nursing professors, Dr. Allison Scott and Dr. Kelly Vowell-Johnson, in collaboration with the University of Arkansas Athletic Department. Women’s Giving Circle was an organization that supported the project with a monetary grant. Along with the guidance of our two mentors, the project was implemented by myself and three other honors students pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Nursing: Brittany Lyons, Lacey Schroeder, and Blair Willheim. We created and distributed educational handouts and pamphlets for anyone utilizing the tent. In collaboration with certified lactation consultants, Eleanor Mann School of Nursing faculty, and senior students pursuing Bachelor of Science in Nursing during their community health clinical, we staffed the Tiny Tusks: Breastfeeding and Infant Support Tent

INFORMATION IMMOBILITY AND THE HOME BIAS PUZZLE

Many explanations for home or local bias rely on information asymmetry: investors know more about their home assets. A criticism of these theories is that asymmetry should disappear when information is tradable. This criticism is flawed. If investors have asymmetric prior beliefs, but choose how to allocate limited learning capacity before investing, they will not necessarily learn foreign information. Investors want to exploit increasing returns to specialization: The bigger the home information advantage, the more desirable are home assets; but the more home assets investors expect to own, the higher the value of additional home information. Even with a tiny home information advantage, and even when foreign information is no harder to learn, many investors will specialize in home assets, remain uninformed about foreign assets, and amplify their initial information asymmetry. The more investors can learn, the more home biased their portfolios become. The model's predictions are consistent with observed patterns of foreign investment, returns, and portfolio flows

Risk Starvation Contributes to Dementias and Depressions: Whiffs of Danger Are the Antidote

This paper’s objective is to use SKAT, the author’s Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory of risk, to shed fresh light on the treatment and prevention of mental disorders. SKAT employs a broad definition of risk that allows for nice – not merely nasty – possibilities. SKAT is here shown to solve eight epidemiological puzzles left unexplained by our current theories and associated treatments for the demented and depressed. SKAT does so by enabling a decision model of mental health that puts centre stage why people (and other soft-wired animals) have brains – to make decisions under risk. To make good decisions (be healthy), brains need exercise. Brains get beneficial exercise from what the paper terms “whiffs of danger”, namely sets of risks with the characteristics that the risks are 1) tiny, 2) varied, and 3) frequent. Brains deteriorate when there are shortfalls in such risk exercise. The paper terms such shortfalls “risk starvation”. Those lacking a history of whiffs find normal mishaps too stressful and frequently become depressed. A lot of time with an inadequate amount of whiffs generates the endemic co-morbidity of becoming demented as well as depressed. Socio-economic cultural changes such as the introduction of unemployment benefits and old age pensions and increasing protection of women and children have had the beneficial effects of removing big challenges and big dangers and thus of prolonging physical longevity. But these changes also removed the tiny challenges and tiny dangers formerly faced by those sub-groups in the population identified as more prone to depressions and dementias. Unintentionally, these sub-groups thus were deprived of whiffs of danger, and suffered from risk starvation. In both drug and psychotherapeutic stress research and treatments of the depressed and demented, there should be injections of whiffs of danger to enhance the likelihood of enduring improvements. It is unkind and dangerous for people’s brains to be treated with drugs while maintaining the modern socioeconomic culture of coddling parents and coddling college / university student counsellors, coddling unemployment benefits and coddling old age pensions. These coddles need to be complemented with whiffs of danger, tiny varied chances and challenges. These whiffs of danger need to be introduced in three forms: eliciting social security recipients’ whiffs of danger in the form of little obligations to help the community; educating the poor and other sub-groups that believe closeting females at home endangers their mental health; and educating parents on the damage from overprotection. Overprotection prevents children from becoming inoculated against depression with sensible hope developed over a childhood in which they were allowed to experience numerous failures, not merely numerous successes from parents too closely engineering their environment. Research is required on the likely role of risk starvation in mental disorders other than dementias and depressions and in some physical illnesses.stress; whiffs of danger; decision; dementia; depression; risk starvation; risk; learning; hope; fear; risk-based emotions

Child\u27s Play: War, Toys and Avoiding the Trivial

This past weekend, I let my two hobbies combine. I spend a good chunk of my spare time doing incessant, weird and wild historical research. If you\u27ve read along on the blog for any appreciable time, you know the odd corners I\u27ve turned finding peculiar and striking stories both here in Gettysburg and beyond. But I have another hobby. I am an Adult Fan of LEGO. [excerpt

Risk starvation contributes to dementias and depressions: Whiffs of danger are the antidote

This paper’s objective is to use SKAT, the author’s Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory of risk, to shed fresh light on the treatment and prevention of mental disorders. SKAT employs a broad definition of risk that allows for nice – not merely nasty – possibilities. SKAT is here shown to solve eight epidemiological puzzles left unexplained by our current theories and associated treatments for the demented and depressed. SKAT does so by enabling a decision model of mental health that puts centre stage why people (and other soft-wired animals) have brains – to make decisions under risk. To make good decisions (be healthy), brains need exercise. Brains get beneficial exercise from what the paper terms “whiffs of danger”, namely sets of risks with the characteristics that the risks are 1) tiny, 2) varied, and 3) frequent. Brains deteriorate when there are shortfalls in such risk exercise. The paper terms such shortfalls “risk starvation”. Those lacking a history of whiffs find normal mishaps too stressful and frequently become depressed. A lot of time with an inadequate amount of whiffs generates the endemic co-morbidity of becoming demented as well as depressed. Socio-economic cultural changes such as the introduction of unemployment benefits and old age pensions and increasing protection of women and children have had the beneficial effects of removing big challenges and big dangers and thus of prolonging physical longevity. But these changes also removed the tiny challenges and tiny dangers formerly faced by those sub-groups in the population identified as more prone to depressions and dementias. Unintentionally, these sub-groups thus were deprived of whiffs of danger, and suffered from risk starvation. In both drug and psychotherapeutic stress research and treatments of the depressed and demented, there should be injections of whiffs of danger to enhance the likelihood of enduring improvements. It is unkind and dangerous for people’s brains to be treated with drugs while maintaining the modern socioeconomic culture of coddling parents and coddling college / university student counsellors, coddling unemployment benefits and coddling old age pensions. These coddles need to be complemented with whiffs of danger, tiny varied chances and challenges. These whiffs of danger need to be introduced in three forms: eliciting social security recipients’ whiffs of danger in the form of little obligations to help the community; alerting the poor and on how closeting females at home endangers their mental health; and educating parents on the damage from overprotecting children. Overprotection prevents children from becoming inoculated against depression with sensible hope developed over a childhood in which they were allowed to experience numerous failures, not merely numerous successes from parents too closely engineering their environment. Research is required on the likely role of risk starvation in mental disorders other than dementias and depressions and in some physical illnesses.Stress, whiffs of danger, decision, dementia, depression, risk starvation, risk, learning, hope, fear, risk-based emotions.

Sixty original plays for primary grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

One Mandarin Benefits the Whole Clan: Hometown Infrastructure and Nepotism in an Autocracy

This paper studies nepotism by government officials in an authoritarian regime. We collect a unique dataset of political promotions of officials in Vietnam and estimate their impact on public infrastructure in their hometowns. We find strong positive effects on several outcomes, some with lags, including roads to villages, marketplaces, clean water access, preschools, irrigation, and local radio broadcasters, as well as the hometown’s propensity to benefit from the State’s “poor commune support program”. Nepotism is not limited to only top-level officials, pervasive even among those without direct authority over hometown budgets, stronger when the hometown chairperson’s and promoted official’s ages are closer, and where provincial leadership has more discretionary power in shaping policies, suggesting that nepotism works through informal channels based on specific political power and environment. Contrary to pork barrel politics in democratic parliaments, members of the Vietnamese legislative body have little influence on infrastructure investments for their hometowns. Given the top-down nature of political promotions, officials arguably do not help their tiny communes in exchange for political support. Consistent with that, officials favor only their home commune and ignore their home district, which could offer larger political support. These findings suggest that nepotism is motivated by officials’ social preferences directed towards their related circles, and signals an additional form of corruption that may prevail in developing countries with low transparency.nepotism, infrastructure construction, official’s hometown, political connection,political promotion, social preference, directed altruism

Mobility based energy efficient and multi-sink algorithms for consumer home networks

With the fast development of the Internet, wireless communications and semiconductor devices, home networking has received significant attention. Consumer products can collect and transmit various types of data in the home environment. Typical consumer sensors are often equipped with tiny, irreplaceable batteries and it therefore of the utmost importance to design energy efficient algorithms to prolong the home network lifetime and reduce devices going to landfill. Sink mobility is an important technique to improve home network performance including energy consumption, lifetime and end-to-end delay. Also, it can largely mitigate the hot spots near the sink node. The selection of optimal moving trajectory for sink node(s) is an NP-hard problem jointly optimizing routing algorithms with the mobile sink moving strategy is a significant and challenging research issue. The influence of multiple static sink nodes on energy consumption under different scale networks is first studied and an Energy-efficient Multi-sink Clustering Algorithm (EMCA) is proposed and tested. Then, the influence of mobile sink velocity, position and number on network performance is studied and a Mobile-sink based Energy-efficient Clustering Algorithm (MECA) is proposed. Simulation results validate the performance of the proposed two algorithms which can be deployed in a consumer home network environment