Dr. X's Free Associations

Another Record Low

The previous record low for this date was set in 1884. The Tribune:

National Weather Service officials said Saturday morning the temperatures at O'Hare were at minus 10 degrees, and they stayed below zero until 8 a.m. By noon, the temperature at O'Hare had risen to 17 degrees.

How about that. -10 the day before March begins.  We're expecting about 3 inches of snow tonight and tomorrow. Manageable, but there's still about a foot on the ground in our neighborhood after snow on Wednesday, Thursday and a dusting again overnight.

The Roseto Effect

Wikipedia:

"The Roseto effect is the phenomenon by which a close-knit community experiences a reduced rate of heart disease. The effect is named for Roseto, Pennsylvania. The Roseto effect was first noticed in 1961 when the local Roseto doctor encountered Dr. Stewart Wolf, then head of Medicine of the University of Oklahoma, and they discussed, over a couple of beers, the unusually low rate of myocardial infarction in Roseto compared with other locations.^[1][2][3] Many studies followed, including a 50-year study comparing nearby Bangor and Nazareth. As the original authors had predicted, as the Bangor cohort shed their Italian social structure and became more Americanized in the years following the initial study, heart disease rose.^[4]

"From 1954 to 1961, Roseto had nearly no heart attacks for the elsewhere high-risk group of men 55 to 64, and men over 65 enjoyed a death rate of 1% while the national average was 2%. Widowers outnumbered widows, too.^[1]

"These statistics were at odds with a number of other factors observed in the community. They smoked unfiltered stogies, drank win "with seeming abandon" in lieu of milk and soft drinks, skipped the Mediterranean diet in favor of meatballs and sausages fried in lard with hard and soft cheeses. The men worked in the slate quarries where they contracted illnesses from gases and dust.^[5] Roseto also had no crime, and very few applications for public assistance.^[5]

"Wolf attributed Rosetans' lower heart disease rate to lower stress. "'The community,' Wolf says, 'was very cohesive. There was no keeping up with the Joneses. Houses were very close together, and everyone lived more or less alike.'" Elderly were revered and incorporated into community life. Housewives were respected, and fathers ran the families.^[2][6]"

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I'd never heard of the Roseto effect until I watched the beginning of the recently released John Maggio documentary on Italian immigrants to the US. It's airing on PBS. Part I, is here. The timing is helpful to me given the work I'm doing on my ancestry.

Why Do Americans Pay More For Internet Service

H/T: Retriever.

The recent FCC ruling that will preserve net neutrality for the time being has revived attention to a NY times article that purports to explain why Americans generally pay more for slower internet service than customers in other technologically advanced nations.

Despite all the whining from providers who claim that the only way for us to see faster service is to allow providers to extort bigger fees by selectively choking download speeds, customers in other nations often get faster connections for less money with neutrality protected.

How do they do it? Other governments have introduced what essentially amounts to the same scheme imposed on telephone service providers in the U.S. Owners of the infrastructure are required to lease their lines to competitors. It works well with phones and it works well with internet service to deliver higher speeds at lower prices.

The Times reports that Richard Bennett, a visiting liar fellow at the American Enterprise Institute rejects the idea of such regulation. Bennett has "argued that much of the slowness is caused not by broadband networks but by browsers, websites and high usage."

Riiiiiiiiight. It's not like we can't easily check our connection speed to see that it's obviously the primary determinant of download speed in most cases. Yes there are sites that are overwhelmed with traffic and individual computers that are running badly, but slow connection speeds never deliver fast downloads. And the fact remains: Americans pay more for less.

Titles Of Nobility

In tracing a pair of my mother's ancestral lines back to the 16th century, the records show numerous "titles of nobility." I know some people hope to find this sort of thing in their background when they undertake family research, but I don't think this possibility figured at all into my motivation, not even in a very small way.

My mother's family came to the US because of the impoverishment of Sicily. They either brought or undertook humble occupations in this country. The men were shoemakers and barbers, while the women worked as seamstresses. U.S. Customs' records show arrivals with amounts of money ranging from $5 - $25 and plans to move in with friends or other relatives already here, which is exactly what they did. The early 20th century Brooklyn neighborhood around Hicks and Amity Streets was heavily populated by my family and immigrants from their community.

So I was not expecting to find a couple of hundred years of titles of nobility in my maternal line.

Now just what the specific titles actually meant is another question. I couldn't figure it out by Googling for clues. All it might mean is that they owned scraps of heritable land and had allied themselves with powerful patrons who awarded titles based on vows of loyalty. At most, I imagine, they may have been big shots in the their local community.

I know that some of the "nobles"in Sicily were Normans of lesser standing--it was Sicily, after all--but my DNA results don't indicate even traces of that background, so I'm left to ponder other possible explanations.

American Blogger Hacked To Death In Bangladesh

Julhas Alam:

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — A prominent U.S. blogger, known for his writing against religious fundamentalism, has been hacked to death by unidentified attackers in Bangladesh's capital, police said Friday.

The attack on Avijit Roy, a Bangladesh-born U.S. citizen, took place late Thursday when he and his wife Rafida Ahmed, who was seriously injured in the attack, were returning from a book fair at Dhaka University.

Coincidentally Matching Nose Rings

Little Empirical Support for Teaching To Learning Styles

NY Times

Do you like to learn by seeing, hearing or doing?

According to some education researchers, it may not matter. They say the idea of teaching according to students’ “preferred learning styles” — auditory, visual or kinesthetic — has little to no empirical backing. But although criticism may be denting the idea’s popularity, it still persists — which may say something larger about the way teachers today are trained.

Students do have preferences when it comes to receiving information visually or verbally, said Mark A. McDaniel, a psychology professor at Washington University and a co-author of the book “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.” But to prove that designing lessons to fit students’ preferred learning styles actually helps them learn better, you’d have to randomly assign students to receive, for instance, either a visually or a verbally based approach. If teaching to students’ learning styles works, said Dr. McDaniel, “what you should see is visual learners do better on the visual than the verbal instruction, and verbal learners do better on the verbal than the visual instruction.”

Not many studies have actually done such a random assignment, and of those that Dr. McDaniel and his co-authors examined in a 2009 paper, “none of them showed that kind of interaction.”

I've always found the idea of teaching to individual learning style suspect, and I say that as a psychologist who knows a thing or ten about learning. It's one thing to identify students who have specific learning and processing impairments or other neuro or psychological difficulties. They do benefit from a learning environment tailored to work with their individual difficulties. It's quite another matter to assume that outside of this subset of students, all students benefit from teaching to individualized processing styles. Show me some real evidence and I'll change my mind, but for now I remain skeptical.

I used to work at a university, but not the one that employs me now. I was part of a program for returning adult students. An operating premise behind the program was that older students had, as a group, a different learning style from that of 18-22 year old students.

The program head (a Humanities PhD) developed an educational system that seemed crazy to me. Despite being a clinician who studied plenty of cognitive psychology during my undergrad and graduate education, I could not for the life of me grasp what it was that the administration thought they were doing in this program. Faculty would laugh about the incoherence of the program and students often complained of being confused.

It seemed to me that the program administrators had a romantic attachment to the notion of learning styles. Perhaps they misread some cherry-picked research and then went a little crazy with it.

I'm not saying that all teaching to learning style is like that. I'm just telling the story because it came to mind while writing this post.

Crossing Wabash

Lake Effect Whiteout

Chicagoist Today