Dr. X's Free Associations

Attending a golf tournament--meh

The Ryder Cup is being held in suburban Chicago this week. Zorn is there and he notes the drawbacks:

To get a good view of the action you need to stake out a prime viewing space -- those bleachers that surround many greens, for example, or a perch right against the ropes by a tee box.  And when you stake out one such spot, you're in for hours of waiting and the knowledge that, all around you on the course, interesting things are happening.

You can try to follow interesting matches or golfers around the course, as I did for Tiger Woods' first seven holes, but you'll be trying to little glimpses here there over the heads of early-arrivers and, again, knowing that you're missing important developments elsewhere.

I haven't played golf in years but, even when I played regularly, the possibility of attending a tournament as a spectator never appealed to me in the least. I'd always assumed all of the problems Zorn describes, but perhaps the underlying problem is that I never loved golf, even when I played.

My problem isn't only with golf. I'm officially not a real American male because I don't enjoy watching or attending professional (American) football games, though I enjoyed attending open practices a long time ago when the Giants held open practices at Fairfield U in CT. You could get right down in there on the sidelines and feel the mind-blowing power and athleticism and, here and there, run for your life as a receiver ran out of bounds.

What sports do I enjoy attending live? Almost anything, but favorites as a spectator are hockey and soccer.

More Evidence Of Increased Risk For Neurodegenerative Disease In NFL Players

American Academy of Neurology:

New research shows that professional football players may be at a higher risk of death from diseases that damage the cells in the brain, such as Alzheimer’s disease and ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), compared to the general U.S. population. The study is published in the September 5, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The study included 3,439 players with an average age of 57 from the National Football League with at least five playing seasons from 1959-1988. Researchers reviewed death certificates for causes of death from Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and ALS. At the time of the analysis, only 10 percent of the participants had passed away.

The research found that professional football players in this study were three times more likely to die as a result of diseases that damage brain cells compared to the general population. A player’s risk of death from Alzheimer’s disease or ALS was almost four times higher than the general population. Of the 334 who died, seven had Alzheimer’s disease and seven had ALS. The risk of dying from Parkinson’s disease was not significantly different than that of the general population.

H/T Karen Merzenich

Suburban Shots

Spotted this morning on the way to meeting friends for breakfast in Wilmette.

Male DNA in Women's Brains

ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2012) — Male DNA is commonly found in the brains of women, most likely derived from prior pregnancy with a male fetus, according to first-of-its-kind research conducted at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. While the medical implications of male DNA and male cells in the brain are unknown, studies of other kinds of microchimerism -- the harboring of genetic material and cells that were exchanged between fetus and mother during pregnancy -- have linked the phenomenon to autoimmune diseases and cancer, sometimes for better and other times for worse.

So fetal cells even cross the blood-brain barrier. If you had asked me earlier, I would have said that I can't imagine that's possible.

Here's a previous post on microchimerism.

Surging this week

Repost of an old one that's drawing visits this week.

Mimicry and Brain-to-Brain Communication

The NY Times ran an interesting article on mimicry and social rapport. The author describes the emerging view among researchers that "social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people."

This is a fascinating subject and the Times piece represents only the tip of the iceberg. Researchers since Daniel Stern, who conducted micro-analyses of mother-infant interactions , have been studying interactional "dances" to glean insights into mutual interpersonal regulation and mind-to-mind influences.

Gender Bias in Academic Sciences

Serena Dai:

A team led by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin asked 127 professors of biology, chemistry, and physics at major research universities to rate the competency, hireability, and their own willingness to mentor of a grad school applicant on a scale of 1 to 7. Every professor got the same application except for one small difference: sometimes the aspiring scientist was named "John" and sometimes "Jennifer." Faculty—both men and women—rated the male student higher for everything. The chart above shows the average rating given to "John" or "Jennifer," whom the professors believed to be a real student who would read their evaluations.

H/T Daily Dish

The toll of childhood trauma and chronic stress

David Brooks:

In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a study on adverse childhood experiences. They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured.

The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking. People with an ACE score of 4 were seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults than people with an ACE score of 0. They were six times more likely to have had sex before age 15, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, four times as likely to suffer emphysema. People with an ACE score above 6 were 30 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Later research suggested that only 3 percent of students with an ACE score of 0 had learning or behavioral problems in school. Among students with an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51 percent had those problems.

New Voter ID laws won't stop illegal voter registration conduct like this

The young woman in this video was attempting to selectively register Romney supporters by falsely claiming that she was conducting a poll. She does not work for the El Paso (Colorado) County Clerk's office, as she claimed. She is or was a volunteer for the Romney campaign.

The County Clerk should scrub any registrations turned in by this woman. To do otherwise, would allow her illegal registration scheme to succeed. And then what? Notify all those individuals scrubbed from the rolls that they must re-register?  That could still have a selective registration effect, but failure to notify them would have a selective effect in the opposite direction.

According to this article, if the the young woman was acting alone, she could be charged with a crime at the state level. If she was part of an organized effort, a federal prosecution would also be possible.

Which news media viewers and listeners are most well-informed and which are least well-informed?

Andrew Beaujon writes:

"People who watch no news at all can answer more questions about international current events than people who watch cable news, a survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds."

NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative news outlets, while exposure to partisan sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC, has a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge.

"People who watch MSNBC and CNN exclusively can answer more questions about domestic events than people who watch no news at all. People who only watch Fox did much worse. NPR listeners answered more questions correctly than people in any other category."

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I don't think they can say definitively that differences in exposure to news outlets account for differences in current-events knowledge. It's also possible that initial differences in levels of knowledge drive media-outlet choices. And it might also be the case that one or more feedback loops are involved.

Eagle owl at 1,000 frames per second

Thanks to Retriever.