Is the Easter Egg an Environmental Hazard?

It's getting hard to find anything that isn't a flat-out unintended environmental disaster.  Now Easter Eggs.  Next, Santa's reindeer will be busted for a particularly disgusting aerial discharge - without the proper waste disposal permits.

When will it end?

Here' the story.  I'm going out to drown my sorrow in chocolate schnapps.

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Is your Easter egg bad for the environment?

A recent study by researchers at The University of Manchester and published in the journal Food Research International has looked at the carbon footprint of chocolate and its other environmental impacts. It has done this by assessing the impacts of ingredients, manufacturing processes, packaging and waste.

The study estimates that the UK chocolate industry produces about 2.1m tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) a year. This is equivalent to the annual emissions of the whole population of a city as large as Belfast. It also found that it takes around 1000 litres of water to produce just one chocolate bar.

Chocolate is the UK's favourite confectionary product, with the nation preferring milk over dark chocolate. The industry was worth around £4 billion in the UK in 2014 and is set to grow by a further 9 percent by 2019. On a global scale, the UK is the sixth highest chocolate-consuming country in the world. On average each person individually gets through approximately 8 kg per year, which is equivalent to around 157 Mars bars.

Sharing bags.

The study focused on the three most popular types of chocolate products in the UK, which occupy 90% of the UK market. These are milk chocolate bars, sharing bags and snack chocolates. The team found the worst for the environment were the sharing bags due to their ingredients and bigger packaging.

The researchers found the raw materials used to produce chocolate are the major environmental hotspot as well as the packaging. The impacts from the ingredients are mainly due to milk powder, cocoa derivatives, sugar and palm oil.

Professor Adisa Azapagic, Head of Sustainable Industrial Systems at the University, says: "Most of us love chocolate, but don't often think of what it takes to get from cocoa beans to the chocolate products we buy in the shop.

"Cocoa is cultivated around the equator in humid climate conditions, mainly in West Africa and Central and South America so it has to travel some distance before it makes it into the chocolate products we produce and consume in the UK."

According to the International Cocoa Organization the annual production of cocoa beans in 2016 was 4.25 million tonnes. The worldwide sales of chocolate are estimated to be worth more than US$101 billion, with Europe accounting for 45% of the global consumption.

However, it's not only the cocoa -- it's also the milk powder used to make milk chocolates. Its production is very energy intensive, plus dairy cows produce significant GHG emissions per litre of milk produced. This all adds to the environmental impacts of chocolate.

Professor Azapagic added: 'It is true that our love of chocolate has environmental consequences for the planet. But let's be clear, we aren't saying people should stop eating it.

"The point of this study is to raise consumers' awareness and enable more informed choices. Also, we hope this work will help the chocolates industry to target the environmental hotspots in the supply chains and make chocolate products as sustainable as possible."

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Manchester.   Antonios Konstantas, Harish K. Jeswani, Laurence Stamford, Adisa Azapagic. Environmental impacts of chocolate production and consumption in the UK. Food Research International, 2018.

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As English Spreads It Gains Vocabulary But Becomes Grammatically Simpler

2013_Freedom_House_world_map.svg

The idea that English is becoming grammatically simpler as it spreads makes sense; as does English gaining in vocabulary as it borrows words and meanings from the many other languages with which it mingles.

So here's the story on this research.

*  *  *  *  *

What happens to language as populations grow?

It simplifies, say researchers

Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have fewer words but complex grammars.

Why does the size of a population of speakers have opposite effects on vocabulary and grammar?

Through computer simulations, a Cornell University cognitive scientist and his colleagues have shown that ease of learning may explain the paradox. Their work suggests that language, and other aspects of culture, may become simpler as our world becomes more interconnected.

Their study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

"We were able to show that whether something is easy to learn -- like words -- or hard to learn -- like complex grammar -- can explain these opposing tendencies," said co-author Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology at Cornell University and co-director of the Cognitive Science Program.

The researchers hypothesized that words are easier to learn than aspects of morphology or grammar. "You only need a few exposures to a word to learn it, so it's easier for words to propagate," he said.

But learning a new grammatical innovation requires a lengthier learning process. And that's going to happen more readily in a smaller speech community, because each person is likely to interact with a large proportion of the community, he said. "If you have to have multiple exposures to, say, a complex syntactic rule, in smaller communities it's easier for it to spread and be maintained in the population."

Conversely, in a large community, like a big city, one person will talk only to a small proportion the population. This means that only a few people might be exposed to that complex grammar rule, making it harder for it to survive, he said.

This mechanism can explain why all sorts of complex cultural conventions emerge in small communities. For example, bebop developed in the intimate jazz world of 1940s New York City, and the Lindy Hop came out of the close-knit community of 1930s Harlem.

The simulations suggest that language, and possibly other aspects of culture, may become simpler as our world becomes increasingly interconnected, Christiansen said. "This doesn't necessarily mean that all culture will become overly simple. But perhaps the mainstream parts will become simpler over time."

Not all hope is lost for those who want to maintain complex cultural traditions, he said: "People can self-organize into smaller communities to counteract that drive toward simplification."

Story Source:  Materials provided by Cornell University.  Florencia Reali, Nick Chater, Morten H. Christiansen. Simpler grammar, larger vocabulary: How population size affects language. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2018.

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Good Grades Help You Get the Job? Not if You're a Woman.

Credit: © fizkes / Fotolia

Stellar grades in college could hurt -- rather than help -- women new

to the job market, according to a new study that suggests employers

place more value on the perceived "likability" of female applicants

than on their academic success.

Given all they must fight. who'd be a woman?  According to this study, you bust your ass getting good grades, even graduating with honors. . . and academic success is held against you in the job and career market.

This despite the facts.  Research clearly shows that businesses with women in leadership positions are less likely to fail or to be lead aimlessly into bankruptcy.  Businesses with women in leadership positions are more profitable with fewer problems.  That businesses with women in leadership positions live longer.

Yet despite this, a woman can't win, no matter what she does.

It's not just a glass ceiling, it's a glass box, trapping you on all sides.

Personally, I'd be more than a little annoyed.

Me, I'd be absolutely cross-eyed angry.

Ladies, it's time you took over this silly sexist society.  (Excuse the alliteration.  Poor form, but so fulfilling to write. Like all men, I'm totally into cheap thrills.)

Yes, men are pigs, and as a pig, I mean man, I recognize that it's time for a new cultural reality.  I freely admit that us guys have pretty thoroughly screwed everything up.  Please, for the sake of future generations of men and women, take over.

Starting now.

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High GPA works against young women job hunters

Men who excel in college twice as likely to get callback as female peers

Stellar grades in college could hurt -- rather than help -- women new to the job market, according to a new study that suggests employers place more value on the perceived 'likability' of female applicants than on their academic success.
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Male applicants with high grade point averages were twice as likely to be contacted by employers as women with the same grades and comparable experience and educational background in a study from The Ohio State University.

The picture was even worse for women who majored in math. Male math majors who excelled in school were called back by employers three times as often as their women counterparts.

Furthermore, a survey of 261 hiring managers found that while employers value competence and commitment among men applicants, they are prone to gravitate toward women applicants who are perceived as likable -- those who did fine, but did not excel, academically. This helps women who are moderate achievers and are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high-achieving women, who are met with more skepticism, the study found.

"We like to think that we've progressed past gender inequality, but it's still there. The study suggests that women who didn't spend a lot of time on academics but are 'intelligent enough' have an advantage over women who excel in school," said researcher Natasha Quadlin, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State. Her study will appear in the April edition of the journal American Sociological Review.

"There's a particularly strong bias against female math majors -- women who flourish in male-dominated fields -- perhaps because they're violating gender norms in terms of what they're supposed to be good at."

The 2,106 job seekers in the study weren't actual people -- they were invented for purposes of the research, but the employers advertising for entry-level positions didn't know that. Each "applicant" had a corresponding email address and phone number.

Quadlin created resumes for freshly graduated job seekers of both genders, using names common to the regions where she sent their applications. Some majored in math, an area traditionally thought of as male dominated; some in English, which skews female; and some in business, which is considered gender-neutral according to a survey she conducted prior to distributing the applications.

Quadlin used an online employment database to find entry-level jobs that weren't specific to the applicants' majors. For each job posting she selected, she sent two applications -- one from a man and one from a woman. Both applications included similar cover letters, academic history and participation in gender-neutral extracurricular activities.

When she looked at callbacks based on gender alone, Quadlin didn't find a significant difference. But disparities emerged when she compared men and women with GPAs in the A/A-minus range. Men were called back at approximately the same rate regardless of their GPA, but the callback rate dropped for women with higher GPAs.

On the high-achievement end, discrepancies were seen for math majors, but not for business or English majors.

In the second part of her study, the survey of hiring managers, Quadlin found clear evidence of discrepancies in how they perceived male applicants and female applicants when gender was the only thing that set them apart from each other.

The employers gave feedback on how likely they would be to hire an individual based on a resume alone. They also shared perceptions about individuals' personal traits based on the contents of the resumes, including GPAs.

"Men were more likely to get a call back if they were seen as having more competence and commitment, but only 'likability' seemed to benefit women," Quadlin said. And likability, she added, is associated with moderate academic achievement.

The study didn't target high-paying, more-prestigious jobs, and that could change the outcomes, Quadlin said.

Employers should consider biases they may not even realize they have when sorting through applications, Quadlin said.

"Most people probably aren't aware that they're making these kinds of gender-based decisions," she said.

As for women in college or just beyond, Quadlin doesn't advise aiming for mediocrity in the interest of employment. Instead, she said, high-achieving women should value the types of employers who value them.

"These are the people who will be advocates for you throughout your career -- those who support you early on and appreciate your intelligence and hard work."

Story Source:  Materials provided by Ohio State University, original by Misti Crane.   Natasha Quadlin. The Mark of a Woman’s Record: Gender and Academic Performance in Hiring. American Sociological Review, 2018.

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Music Makes Kids Smarter. So Does Art.

Source: Chicago Music

I've always liked the simple headline.  Music makes kids smarter.  So does art.

Straight forward, easy to grasp.

And true.

A reason why there must be art and music taught in our schools.

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Music lessons improve children's

cognitive skills and academic performance

Cognitive skills developed from music lessons appear to transfer

to unrelated subjects, leading to improved academic performance

The first large-scale, longitudinal study adapted into the regular school curriculum finds that structured music lessons significantly enhance children's cognitive abilities -- including language-based reasoning, short-term memory, planning and inhibition -- leading to improved academic performance. Visual arts lessons were also found to significantly improve children's visual and spatial memory.

Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the research is the first large-scale, longitudinal study to be adapted into the regular school curriculum. Visual arts lessons were also found to significantly improve children's visual and spatial memory.

Music education has been decimated in schools around the globe, due to competition with academic subjects and an increasing lack of funding. These days, the opportunity to learn an instrument is seen as more of a luxury than a necessary part of education.

"Despite indications that music has beneficial effects on cognition, music is disappearing from general education curricula," says Dr Artur Jaschke, from VU University of Amsterdam, who led the study with Dr Henkjan Honing and Dr Erik Scherder. "This inspired us to initiate a long-term study on the possible effects of music education on cognitive skills that may underlie academic achievement."

The researchers conducted the study with 147 children across multiple Dutch schools, using a structured musical method developed by the Ministry of Research and Education in the Netherlands together with an expert centre for arts education. All schools followed the regular primary school curriculum, with some providing supplementary music or visual arts classes. In these, the children were given both theoretical and practical lessons.

After 2.5 years, the children's academic performance was assessed, as well as various cognitive skills including planning, inhibition and memory skills.

The researchers found that children who received music lessons had significant cognitive improvements compared to all other children in the study. Visual arts classes also showed a benefit: children in these classes had significantly improved visual and spatial short-term memory compared to students who had not received any supplementary lessons.

"Children who received music lessons showed improved language-based reasoning and the ability to plan, organize and complete tasks, as well as improved academic achievement," says Dr Jaschke. "This suggests that the cognitive skills developed during music lessons can influence children's cognitive abilities in completely unrelated subjects, leading to overall improved academic performance.

The researchers hope their work will contribute to highlighting the importance of the music and arts in human culture and cognitive development.

"Both music and arts classes are supposed to be applied throughout all Dutch primary schools by the year 2020," says Dr Jaschke. "But considering our results, we hope that this study will support political developments to reintegrate music and arts education into schools around the world."

Story Source:  Materials provided by Frontiers.  Artur C. Jaschke, Henkjan Honing, Erik J. A. Scherder. Longitudinal Analysis of Music Education on Executive Functions in Primary School Children. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2018

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All human language skews to happy words.: The Pollyanna Hypothesis

F-bombs notwithstanding, 

all languages skew toward happiness:

Universal human bias for positive words

"Vermont currently has the happiest signal, while Louisiana has the saddest.

And the latest data puts Boulder, CO, in the number one spot for happiness,

while Racine, WI, is at the bottom."

In 1969, two psychologists at the University of Illinois proposed what they called the Pollyanna Hypothesis -- the idea that there is a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently than negative ones. "Put even more simply," they wrote, "humans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of life." It was a speculation that has provoked debate ever since.

Now a team of scientists at the University of Vermont and The MITRE Corporation have applied a Big Data approach -- using a massive data set of many billions of words, based on actual usage, rather than "expert" opinion -- to confirm the 1960s guess.

Movie subtitles in Arabic, Twitter feeds in Korean, the famously dark literature of Russia, websites in Chinese, music lyrics in English, and even the war-torn pages of the New York Times -- the researchers found that these, and probably all human language¬, skews toward the use of happy words.

"We looked at ten languages," says UVM mathematician Peter Dodds who co-led the study, "and in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones."

But doesn't our global torrent of cursing on Twitter, horror movies, and endless media stories on the disaster du jour mean this can't be true? No. This huge study of the "atoms of language -- individual words," Dodds says, indicates that language itself -- perhaps humanity's greatest technology -- has a positive outlook. And, therefore, "it seems that positive social interaction," Dodds says, is built into its fundamental structure.

The new study, "Human Language Reveals a Universal Positivity Bias," appeared in the February 9 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Above average happiness
To deeply explore this Pollyanna possibility, the team of scientists at UVM's Computational Story Lab -- with support from the National Science Foundation and The MITRE Corporation -- gathered billions of words from around the world using twenty-four types of sources including books, news outlets, social media, websites, television and movie subtitles, and music lyrics. For example, "we collected roughly one hundred billion words written in tweets," says UVM mathematician Chris Danforth who co-led the new research.

From these sources, the team then identified about ten thousand of the most frequently used words in each of ten languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Russian, Indonesian and Arabic. Next, they paid native speakers to rate all these frequently-used words on a nine-point scale from a deeply frowning face to a broadly smiling one. From these native speakers, they gathered five million individual human scores of the words. Averaging these, in English for example, "laughter" rated 8.50, "food" 7.44, "truck" 5.48, "the" 4.98, "greed" 3.06 and "terrorist" 1.30.

A Google web crawl of Spanish-language sites had the highest average word happiness, and a search of Chinese books had the lowest, but -- and here's the point -- all twenty-four sources of words that they analyzed skewed above the neutral score of five on their one-to-nine scale -- regardless of the language. In every language, neutral words like "the" scored just where you would expect: in the middle, near five. And when the team translated words between languages and then back again they found that "the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages."

In all cases, the scientists found "a usage-invariant positivity bias," as they write in the study. In other words, by looking at the words people actually use most often they found that, on average, we -- humanity -- "use more happy words than sad words," Danforth says.

Moby Dick vs. the Count of Monte Cristo
This new research study also describes a larger project that the team of fourteen scientists has developed to create "physical-like instruments" for both real-time and offline measurements of the happiness in large-scale texts -- "basically, huge bags of words," Danforth explains.

They call this instrument a "hedonometer" -- a happiness meter. It can now trace the global happiness signal from English-language Twitter posts on a near-real-time basis, and show differing happiness signals between days. For example, a big drop was noted on the day of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, but rebounded over the following three days. The hedonometer can also discern different happiness signals in US states and cities: Vermont currently has the happiest signal, while Louisiana has the saddest. And the latest data puts Boulder, CO, in the number one spot for happiness, while Racine, WI, is at the bottom.

Kurt Vonnegut's "shapes of stories" idea
But, as the new paper describes, the team is working to apply the hedonometer to explore happiness signals in many other languages and from many sources beyond Twitter. For example, the team has applied their technique to over ten thousand books, inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's "shapes of stories" idea. Visualizations of the emotional ups and downs of these books can been seen on the hedonometer website; they rise and a fall like a stock-market ticker. The new study shows that Moby Dick's 170,914 words has four or five major valleys that correspond to low points in the story and the hedonometer signal drops off dramatically at the end, revealing this classic novel's darkly enigmatic conclusion. In contrast, Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo -- 100,081 words in French -- ends on a jubilant note, shown by a strong upward spike on the meter.

The new research "in no way asserts that all natural texts will skew positive," the researchers write, as these various books reveal. But at a more elemental level, the study brings evidence from Big Data to a long-standing debate about human evolution: our social nature appears to be encoded in the building blocks of language.

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Vermont, original by Joshua E. Brown.  Peter Sheridan Dodds et al. Human language reveals a universal positivity bias. PNAS, 2015 

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Turning Failure to Success by Writing. It Works.

Source:  Positive Writer

This is one of the cooler bits of research published this year, with implications for the writer.

One, you can turn failure to success by writing about the experience of failure.

Two, you can turn down your stress level by writing about the experience of failure.

Three, having a character write about the experience of his or her failure as a device to turn it around also teaches your reader a useful technique.

And how cool is this?

Here's the research:

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Analyzing past failures may boost

future performance by reducing stress

Study shows for first time that writing critically about past setbacks leads to lower

stress responses, better choices and better performance on a new stressful task

Insights from past failures can help boost performance on a new task -- and a new study is the first to explain why. US researchers report that writing critically about past setbacks leads to lower levels of the "stress" hormone, cortisol, and more careful choices when faced with a new stressful task, resulting in improved performance.  The study is the first demonstration that writing and thinking deeply about a past failure improves the body's response to stress and enhances performance on a new task. This technique may be useful in improving performance in many areas, including therapeutic settings, education and sports.

People are often advised to "stay positive" when faced with a challenging task. However, a vast body of research suggests that paying close attention to negative events or feelings -- by either meditating or writing about them -- can actually lead to positive outcomes.

But why does this counter-intuitive approach lead to benefits? To investigate this question, Brynne DiMenichi, a doctoral candidate from Rutgers University-Newark, together with other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, examined the effect of writing about past failures on future task performance in two groups of volunteers.

A test group wrote about their past failures while a control group wrote about a topic not related to themselves. The researchers used salivary cortisol levels to provide a physiological readout of the stress experienced by the people in both groups. These levels were comparable across the test and control groups at the start of the study.

DiMenichi and colleagues then measured the performance of the volunteers on a new stressful task and continued to monitor their cortisol levels. They found that the test group had lower cortisol levels compared to the control group when performing the new challenge.

"We didn't find that writing itself had a direct relationship on the body's stress responses," says DiMenichi. "Instead, our results suggest that, in a future stressful situation, having previously written about a past failure causes the body's stress response to look more similar to someone who isn't exposed to stress at all."

The researchers also found that volunteers who wrote about a past failure made more careful choices on a new task, and overall performed better than the control group.

"Together, these findings indicate that writing and thinking critically about a past failure can prepare an individual both physiologically and cognitively for new challenges," observes DiMenichi.

While everyone experiences setbacks and stress at some point in their lives, this study may provide insight about how one can use these experiences to better perform in future challenges.

"It provides anyone who wants to utilize this technique in an educational, sports, or even therapeutic setting with clear-cut evidence of expressive writing's effectiveness," says DiMenichi. "However, it is difficult to compare laboratory measures of cognitive performance to performance on say, the Olympic track. Future research can examine the effect of writing manipulation on actual athletic performance."

Story Source:  Materials provided by Frontiers.  Brynne C. DiMenichi, Karolina M. Lempert, Christina Bejjani, Elizabeth Tricomi. Writing About Past Failures Attenuates Cortisol Responses and Sustained Attention Deficits Following Psychosocial Stress. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2018.

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The Problems with Functioning Labels

Photo © City Year | Flickr/Creative Commons
[image: Photo of a Black young man with short hair, close-cut beard, and
glasses, holding hands out to sides while on stage during a talent show.]

Finn Gardiner

expectedly.org

Many professionals talk about autistic people’s “functioning labels.” Functioning labels are a way to describe how well people learn, take care of themselves, and live in the community. People will often talk about “high-functioning” and “low-functioning” autistic people when they are describing them. Even though people who talk about high-functioning and low-functioning autistic people often mean well, these labels are not accurate for many people. Functioning labels do not always relate to people’s real skills and can be based on hurtful stereotypes about autistic people. They also assume that people’s skills cannot change over time. 

Many people use people’s intelligence to determine whether they are high-functioning or low-functioning, but many autistic people’s daily living skills are not affected by how intelligent they are. Someone can learn quickly and have a hard time with daily living skills, while someone else who learns more slowly can find the same skills easy most of the time. Using these labels can make it hard for people to get services. If you do not have an intellectual disability, agencies may tell you that you are high-functioning and do not need help, even if you’re struggling to stay fed, clothed, and clean. If you do have an intellectual disability, you may be told you are low-functioning even if you don’t need as much help with daily living skills. 

Sometimes people can call the same person “high-functioning” and “low-functioning” at different times in their life. People have said I was “high-functioning” for most of my life, but when I was very young and was non-speaking, they would have said I was “low-functioning” because they thought I had an intellectual disability. Saying that people are “low-functioning” is especially hurtful, because it means that some people will have low expectations of you and will not expect you to learn, grow, and pick up new skills. 

When some doctors thought I had an intellectual disability, one of them said I would never learn anything. I do not have an intellectual disability, but even if I did, I would still be able to learn things. Everyone can learn and pick up new skills over time, whether or not they have an intellectual disability. This is part of why saying “low-functioning” is hurtful. 

Also, people’s functioning can change over time. People can need more or less support with daily living skills for several different reasons. Sometimes they can be having a bad day, or be depressed, or be going through major life changes that cause them stress, or it could be the opposite. Feeling good about yourself may make it easier to do tasks that would usually be hard for you. A “high-functioning” person may be having a bad day and have a hard time with self-care tasks like bathing, cooking, shopping, and dressing. A “low-functioning” person can have a good day, week, or month and do relatively well with the same tasks. 

Instead of talking about functioning labels, we should talk about the specific kinds of support people need. Professionals should treat autistic people and other people with disabilities as individuals that have their own needs instead of just saying that they are high- or low-functioning. Everyone is different and deserves help that will make sure they live the best life they can.

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Women Introduce New Pottery to Baltic Region 5,000 Years Ago

Credit: Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipilä

Map of neolithic pottery exchange network in the Baltic Sea region.

It seems that it is mostly men who receive credit for innovation.  Scientists assume the first stone tools were made by men.  The first farmers were men.  The first fishers were men.  Women were gatherers and caretakers in the ancient hunter gatherer societies.  Were they?

Seriously, were they?

How does anyone know?

Was testosterone found rubbed into the surface of a 500,000 year old hand ax indicating it was made by a man?

It could have been a woman watching the kids take a nap in camp while the men were out scavenging dead meat who invented the first hand ax or spear point.  It could have been a woman who wove the first basket.  It could have been a woman who painted the first bison on the wall of a cave.  (You know how men are about decorating the home.  It's a struggle.)

We simply don't know.  And there is no way of knowing, either.

This is why this bit of research is refreshing.

Women are being given credit for a major cultural innovation.  Please note that the lead researcher listed below happens to be a woman, and that several of the researchers are women.

Far flaming out, ladies.

*  *  *  *  *

Skilled female potters traveled around

the Baltic nearly 5,000 years ago

During the Corded Ware Culture period, Finland, Estonia and Sweden received skillful female artisans, who had learned to create fashionable and innovative pottery in the eastern region of the Gulf of Finland. The Baltic Sea countries also had a close network for trade in pottery.

Was it the fine pottery itself, or the artisans who made it, that moved around the Baltic Sea region during the Corded Ware Culture of late Neolithic period? Are the archaeological artifacts found in Finland imported goods or were they made out of Finnish clay by artisans who had mastered the new technology? These are the questions researchers are trying to answer in the most extensive original study of archaeological ceramics ever undertaken in the Nordic countries.

Researchers mapped the arrival routes of pottery and people representing the Corded Ware Culture complex (c. 2900-2300 BCE) into the Nordic countries by identifying the areas where the pottery was made.

Corded Ware pottery was very different from earlier Stone Age pottery. It represented a new technology and style, and as a new innovation, used crushed ceramics -- or broken pottery -- mixed in with the clay.

Eastern influences fashionable in Sweden
Finland, Estonia and Sweden had at least five different manufacturing areas for Corded Ware pottery which engaged in active pottery trade across the Baltic Sea approximately 5000 years ago. Häme in Southern Finland had a manufacturing hub of Corded Ware pottery which can be described as quasi-industrial in Neolithic terms, and spread its products along the Finnish coast and into Estonia.

Traditionally, Swedish archaeologists have assumed that Corded Ware pottery arrived in Sweden from the south. However, it now seems clear that that eastern influences were particularly fashionable during the Neolithic, and both pottery and people belonging to this culture arrived first in Eastern Sweden from Finland and Estonia. This was not a one-way one-time event: There were many active contacts in all directions across the Baltic Sea during the period, shown by the fact that pottery that was manufactured in Sweden over time turn up in Finland and Estonia.

Skilled female artisans
In traditional societies it is usually women who are in charge of the pottery craft and it is also common for women to relocate upon marriage. Corded Ware burials show that females were more likely to receive pottery as burial gifts, and analyses from European cemeteries show that the women were more likely to relocate during their lifetime.

archasa.se 

Examples of Finnish Corded Ware pottery at the National Museum.

In the back is a beaker of typical continental shape and decoration. 

The smaller rounder beakers are the common type in Sweden, but

quite rare outside Sweden and Finland. (Photo: Åsa M Larsson)

It is likely that the first Corded Ware Culture artisans to arrive at the Fenno-Baltic and Swedish coasts were women who had learned their craft at their place of birth. They would have begun to use the clay available at their new home, but they mixed it with crushed pieces of pottery they had brought with them. Perhaps this was a way to preserve the older pottery which had been made in their previous homelands, thus maintaining a symbolic connection to their families and the members of their former communities in their everyday lives.

The study posits that skilled female artisans arrived in Sweden particularly from Estonia and Finland, as both the geochemical origin and cultural links of the imported pottery indicates a connection to the region. Cultural similarities in turn link the first Corded Ware communities in Finland and Estonia to the eastern part of the Bay of Finland, present day Russia.

The exchange network also suggests that even during the Stone Age, the Baltic Sea was less an obstacle and more a connection between communities, attaching Finland to a broader European culture.

International Stone Age phenomena are inscribed in pottery
The study examined clay pottery from 24 archaeological sites in Finland, Estonia and Sweden. The goal was to determine the geochemical composition and geological origin of Corded Ware pottery, i.e., where the clay came from.

The project involved international and cross-disciplinary cooperation between the group of archaeologists from Finland, Sweden and Estonia and material physicists. Funded by the Academy of Finland, the research project was headed by Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipilä, who works at the University of Helsinki's archaeology laboratory.

"International prehistoric phenomena may be apparent in everyday objects, such as dishware and the old pottery fragments crushed into the clay they were made with," says Holmqvist-Sipilä.

"Pottery was so important to its owner that it would be carried along on long journeys. Now, thousands of years later, when most things have turned into dust, it is these objects that tell the story of the routes taken by people and their belongings."

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Helsinki.  Elisabeth Holmqvist, Åsa M. Larsson, Aivar Kriiska, Vesa Palonen, Petro Pesonen, Kenichiro Mizohata, Paula Kouki, Jyrki Räisänen. Tracing grog and pots to reveal neolithic Corded Ware Culture contacts in the Baltic Sea region (SEM-EDS, PIXE). Journal of Archaeological Science, 2018.

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Suffer Back Pain? You're Not Alone.

Source:  medicinenet

Pain in the low back can be a result of conditions affecting the

bony lumbar spine, discs between the vertebrae, ligaments

around the spine and discs, spinal cord and nerves, muscles

of the low back, internal organs of the pelvis and abdomen,

and the skin covering the lumbar area.

Yes, this research focuses on the effects of back pain in Britain, but the problem is certainly global.  I've had more than a few back issues (resolved with physical therapy fortunately) and nearly everyone I know or am related to has had disabling episodes.  My aunt, who was quite the athlete, has suffered a lifetime of back pain. 

We're not alone in back pain.

Now imagine a protagonist with recurring back pain, say, that impedes the efforts of that man or woman from stopping a crime or preventing a war or simply accomplishing a goal.  A story we could all relate to?

Here's the story.

*  *  *  *  *

Global burden of low back pain

"Our current treatment approaches are failing to reduce the burden of back pain disability. . ."

Low back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting an estimated 540 million people at any one time. Yet, a new Series of papers to be published in The Lancet highlights the extent to which the condition is mistreated, often against best practice treatment guidelines.

Low Back Pain (LBP) is extremely common, and is the largest single cause of years lived with disability in England (Global Burden of Disease 2013)

UK specific data shows that LBP was the top cause of years lived with disability in both 1990 and 2010, with a 12% increase over this time -- so the problem is getting worse.  LBP accounts for 11% of the entire disability burden from all diseases in the UK.

The cost of LBP to the NHS was estimated in 2008 to be £2.1 billion (and costs overall to UK society when we factor in work loss and informal care in region of £10.7 billion).

In the UK in 2006, one in seven of all recorded consultations with general practitioners were for musculoskeletal problems with complaints of back pain being the most common (417 consultations per year for low back pain per 10,000 registered persons)

Burden of back pain disability in UK has increased from 1510 disability adjusted life years /100,000 to 1634 DAlYs /100,000 -- an 8% increase in spite of massive investments in back pain research and treatment.

UK author additional quotes
Professor Nadine Foster, Keele University -- lead author of one of the papers, comments:

• "Funders should pay only for high-value care, stop funding ineffective or harmful tests and treatments, and importantly intensify research into prevention."
• "The gap between best evidence and practice in low back pain must be reduced. We need to redirect funding away from ineffective or harmful tests and treatments and towards approaches that promote physical activity and function. We also need to intensify further research of promising new approaches such as redesigning patient pathways of care and interventions that support people to function and stay at work."
• "There are examples of promising new solutions around the world but they need to be more rigorously researched to work out if they should be implemented."

Professor Martin Underwood, University of Warwick -- co-author on the papers comments: "Our current treatment approaches are failing to reduce the burden of back pain disability; we need to change the way we approach back pain treatment in the UK and help low and middle income countries to avoid developing high cost services of limited effectiveness."

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Warwick.  Jonathan C Hill, David GT Whitehurst, Martyn Lewis, Stirling Bryan, Kate M Dunn, Nadine E Foster, Kika Konstantinou, Chris J Main, Elizabeth Mason, Simon Somerville, Gail Sowden, Kanchan Vohora, Elaine M Hay. Comparison of stratified primary care management for low back pain with current best practice (STarT Back): a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 2011

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Sixty is the New Fifty: Age-shaming in America.

Credit: © freefly / Fotolia

Americans may be aging more slowly than they were two decades ago.

The original title of this research study issued by the University of Southern California was:  Is 60 the New 50? Examining Changes in Biological Age Over the Past Two Decades.  It was changed by someone to a more accurate form.

Well, at the risk of being a wet blanket, seventy is seventy, twenty is twenty, and there is no way for them to be anything other than what they are.

A "sixty is the new fifty" headline is an advertising slogan designed to make people feel guilty about acting their age in an effort to sell them products, services, foods or medicines they really don't need or want.  Shame on the researchers at USC for mislabeling their research.

Saying sixty is the new fifty implies that I must live a certain way when I'm sixty or something is wrong with me.  Right, and I should exhibit a certain body composition with the right hair cut, wearing the right clothes and drive the right car or something is wrong with me.  Get real.  Who's business is it how old I choose to act?  Or dress.  Or comport myself?  A bunch of marcomm managers who get paid for herding a target demographic groups into selected pens prior to fleecing?  Or a group of scientists whose research is funding by XYZ Corporation?  Sorry, too old to fall for that again.

To put it in a simple, declarative sentence: implying someone at sixty should be acting like someone at the age fifty is, to adapt the a current phrase, age-shaming. 

What an honest headline on this topic would point out is people are healthier throughout our population and a few are choosing to live a more active life than others of their same age. Some people always have.  And others always haven't.  What is newsworthy is that a somewhat larger proportion of people at a certain age are more active than researchers projected, so the best headline would be, "Researchers Wrong Again on How People Choose to Behave." 

What I object to is the age shaming.

Great, now go away so I can enjoy my grandkids and write in peace.  Sheesh, what a bunch of schmucks!

Here's the press release on this research.

*  *  *  *  *

Americans slow down the clock of age

Humans may not be able to turn back time, but a

new study finds that Americans are slowing it down.

A close examination of national health data indicate that the rate of biological aging appears to be more delayed for all Americans, but particularly for men, which may extend their lives. Researchers cite advancements in medicine as one possible reason for the deceleration.

A new study by University of Southern California and Yale University researchers suggests that at least part of the gains in life expectancy over recent decades may be due to a change in the rate of biological aging, rather than simply keeping ailing people alive.

"This is the first evidence we have of delayed 'aging' among a national sample of Americans," said senior author Eileen M. Crimmins, University Professor and AARP Professor of Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

As noted in the study by Crimmins and lead author Morgan E. Levine, assistant professor at the Yale Center for Research on Aging: "A deceleration of the human aging process, whether accomplished through environment or biomedical intervention, would push the timing of aging-related disease and disability incidence closer to the end of life."

Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) III (1988-19994) and NHANES IV (2007-2010), the researchers examined how biological age, relative to chronological age, changed in the U.S. while considering the contributions of health behaviors. Biological age was calculated using several indicators for metabolism, inflammation, and organ function, including levels of hemoglobin, total cholesterol, creatinine, alkaline phosphatase, albumin, and C-reactive protein in blood as well as blood pressure and breath capacity data.

While all age groups experienced some decrease in biological age, the results suggest that not all people may be faring the same. Older adults experienced the greatest decreases in biological age, and men experienced greater declines in biological age than females; these differences were partially explained by changes in smoking, obesity, and medication use, Crimmins and Levine explained.

"While improvements may take time to manifest, and thus are more apparent at older ages, this could also signal problems for younger cohorts, particularly females, who -- if their improvements are more minimal -- may not see the same gains in life expectancy as experienced by the generations that came before them," said Levine, who received both her PhD in Gerontology in 2015 and her BA in Psychology in 2008 from USC.

Slowing the pace of aging, along with increasing life expectancy, has important social and economic implications. The study suggests that modifying health behaviors and using prescription medications does indeed have significant impact on the health of the population.

"Life extension without changing the aging rate will have detrimental implications. Medical care costs will rise, as people spend a higher proportion of their lives with disease and disability," Levine said. "However, lifespan extension accomplished through a deceleration of the aging process will lead to lower healthcare expenditures, higher productivity, and greater well-being."

The study first appeared in the journal Demography on March 6, 2018. This research was supported by the National Institute on Aging grants P30 AG17265 (Crimmins), T32-AG00037 (Crimmins), and 4R00AG052604-02 (Levine).

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Southern California.  Morgan E. Levine, Eileen M. Crimmins. Is 60 the New 50? Examining Changes in Biological Age Over the Past Two Decades. Demography, 2018.

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Autism Uncensored: A Dangerous and Spirit-Crushing Book

Photo © Charley Lhasa | Flickr/Creative Commons
[image: Plush red Elmo doll lying on asphalt.
A yellow chalk speech bubble has Elmo appear to be yelling "Help!"]

Maxfield Sparrow
unstrangemind.com

[Content note: Extensive discussion of restraints. Discussions of gaslighting, denying Autistic autonomy and competence, child abuse, autism profiteering, and similar goblins. Discussion of the 1960s medical view of autism as it continues to occur today.]

You may have seen the recent Washington Post article titled “Bystanders were horrified. But my son has autism and I was desperate,” an excerpt from Whitney Ellenby’s new book, Autism Uncensored: Pulling Back the Curtain. True to the exposé tone of the title, Ellenby describes in livid detail the day she wrestled her panicked son, Zack, by clamping his 50 pound frame tightly between her thighs and locking her feet together. The two spent over half an hour in combat as Ellenby dragged him inch by inch toward the red curtain beyond which the Sesame Street puppet Elmo was performing. Zack’s piercing shrieks alarmed onlookers who screamed at Ellenby to stop, threw an iced drink on her, and spat on her.

When the venue attempted to kick Ellenby and Zack out for causing a disturbance, she told them the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) gave Zack the right to reasonable accommodations to access public venues, and she was Zack’s accommodation.

I learned from reading her forthcoming book that Ellenby began her career as an ADA lawyer. She had a dream of fighting the huge battles. I’m picturing her mind set on something like a cross between Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, and Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. She went into ADA law starry-eyed about all the great work she would do, but became frustrated when the bulk of her work turned out to be things like getting down on all fours to measure doorways and stalls to see if they were up to code. That didn’t feel important enough to her, so she switched to a boutique adoption firm. Then she became pregnant with Zack, and thought she would take a little time off to give birth but soon be right back in the thick of things at work.

The first half of Autism Uncensored is a brutal description of how angry and bitter Ellenby became at her son, Zack, when he turned out to be autistic. Ellenby feels like giving birth to Zack was some kind of punishment for her sins, and expresses that belief through declarations like, “After weeks of being entombed by numbness, my heart is finally giving way to the realization that I’m being justly punished.”  “Zack’s autism is collateral damage for a life poorly lived. I just never imagined the punishment for my bad deeds would be inflicted on my innocent child, or be so brutal, so permanent.” “I’m chained to this denigrating, unpaid forced labor with no tangible reward for all my sacrifice.” “I will be incarcerated and tied to him for the rest of my life, a prison sentence” “I can’t pretend this is anything but punishment. At its very worst, autism feels like a living, walking, breathing nightmare.”

The book could use a thorough editing for typos and word usage—writing “synchronicity” for “synchrony,” or “bespectacled” for “bespangled,” for example—but I don’t think the last quote of my previous paragraph was a typo. I believe the author fully intended to say “autism feels like…” because she believes that autism is not a word to describe the structure and function of her son’s brain, but rather a punishment inflicted on her. Like many martyr parents, she has co-opted her son’s identity and cast herself in the role of victim. Autism is not a neurotype; autism is what was done to her. And in between sessions with her hair shirt, she makes it clear that she thinks she is better than this: “I am a well-educated woman. I am an accomplished civil rights attorney. I am a woman who spends hours every night on her hands and knees scraping feces off walls.”

Sometimes her concept of autism is as a separate beast, something outside and inhuman: “Autism is angry. The infuriated beast of defiance is rearing its head, snarling, writhing, biting, only I’m not trying to defeat the beast or even subdue it. I need its passion and power. It’s this very passion that fuels the resistance with which I must align myself, harnessing and channeling that live energy.”

I have heard people defend the phrase “combat autism” by saying that they love their child and hate autism. When the average person says they’re fighting autism, it feels bad to me but I try not to say too much because I’d rather win hearts and minds, than be too direct and alienate anyone I might otherwise have influenced. But when Whitney Ellenby was fighting autism, it was very much not a case of “love the child; hate the autism.” When Ellenby writes about fighting autism, she is talking about fighting Zack. 

Ellenby wrote very clearly about hating Zack, and she used the kind of language I’m not used to seeing outside medical books from 40 and 50 years ago. “He’s not even a boy really, but the shell of a boy, an exquisite cutout of a child with no actual stuffing. He is damaged ... deformed ... disgraced. And his disgrace is my own. This is what my glorious womb has produced, a profoundly dysfunctional child.”

The author tells us that she has intentionally chosen to use the present tense when writing her history with Zack as if everything were happening in the moment in order to achieve maximum emotional impact. She succeeded in that aim; her book is harrowing. I felt clobbered reading the first half of Autism Uncensored. After enough clobbering, I just felt numb and empty.

The second half of the book starts when Ellenby’s daughter Cassie is born. Cassie is not autistic, and at first Ellenby loves her more than Zack because she is typical. “Cassie exhibits everything Zack did not, and more. I feel truly appreciated, indispensable, valued. I’m not just smitten but truly grateful to my daughter for allowing me finally to know true reciprocal joy and interdependence. So this is why so many parents describe newborns as transformative, revolutionary and all-encompassing. Now I get it. Now I can’t pretend that I don’t.” Zack clearly sees the overwhelming favoritism going on and in a panic about his own survival he does things to hurt the baby.

Ellenby complains about all the extra work of policing Zack while taking care of Cassie. She wishes she could get rid of Zack and start fresh with Cassie and forget she ever had a child who wasn’t normal. “I cannot see a way out or how will it [sic] ever subside in the face of such obvious, lasting discrepancies between my two children. I’ve never been one to repress my fantasies, the theme of which are now overwhelmingly versions of 'starting over.'” “What if Keith and I could start over with just her and then have just one more typical child? Now that we know it’s reproductively possible, the notion is intoxicating, the vision of Cassie as the older sibling to another adorable healthy baby, rounding out the family to the four I’d originally envisioned, before all hell broke loose.”

Ellenby realizes she’s sharing a horrifying thought and tells the reader “no one who hasn’t walked in my shoes gets to judge me.” She reasons that it’s natural for her to feel this way after everything she has endured from Zack. But around 60% into the book, Ellenby’s affections for her children suffers a sea-change. The catalyst? Cassie starts talking. Now Cassie uses logic to resist doing what Ellenby wants her to do. Cassie treats her mother to streams of insults: “From now until forever, I’m going to be friends with everyone except you!” “And I don’t even like the way you dress! And you try, but you are not even funny!” “And you know what? Daddy is SO much more funner than you! And he’s a better cook, and he’s better at video games, and he looks better in his clothes than you do in yours.”

Ellenby can’t stand it and begins to hate her daughter, opening up room to love her son as she uses the ambiguity of his silence to layer dehumanizing mystical interpretations of autism onto him. “Unbelievably, the scales of enjoyment between my two children are tipping in a direction I had not thought possible.” She begins to really appreciate Zack’s silence. “Zack’s own economy of words works to our mutual advantage—I talk too much, he too little. Somewhere between us lies a normal amount of speech.” From this point on, she always writes about Zack with a stereotypical new age-y praise of his innocence and higher spiritual nature.

Around the same time, she starts noticing that people will be overwhelmingly supportive and helpful when she makes a public announcement about Zack’s autism. People on the train provide an endless supply of tissues and plastic bags when Zack soils himself unexpectedly and Ellenby announces it’s due to autism. Gang members at a water park band up to protect and assist Zack on the giant water slide after she gives an impromptu speech about Zack’s autism on the steps of the water slide. Ellenby wrote in the first half of the book that she was Zack’s accommodation and he “rides” her. By the second half of the book it is becoming clear that she is riding Zack, using his autism for a social payout to herself.

Ellenby describes a turning point at which I sense she first began to realize she could commodify Zack’s autism for money, social status, or both. Ellenby stages another wrestling match with Zack, this one to get him inside a movie theater to see Happy Feet. This time, instead of springing the performance on an unsuspecting and captive audience, Ellenby goes into the theater alone first to announce that she will be dragging Zack in during the previews and that he’s got autism and this is part of his exposure therapy.

The theater-goers silently watched Ellenby drag her son into the theater—kicking, clawing, biting, shrieking—and then, “A few members actually kneel to give me strong hugs; others pointedly ask me for my business card so I can work with their disabled children, cousins, grandchildren. Once again history has been made in the life of my child. Savor it.”

Ellenby ends her book by telling us about her business and all the good it is doing in the world of autism. The book reads like a business card. It’s the kind of book meant to drum up more business and I think it will be highly successful in that regard. And I think that’s a horrible state of affairs.

Ellenby began dragging her son places after she felt Zack was not making enough progress on ABA therapy. She decided mother knows best and began her own program of forcibly dragging him places he didn’t want to go so he could see for himself that it wasn’t so bad once he got there. The author spends a few pages of her book enumerating the flaws of ABA and, for a moment, I agree with her:

“A flat prohibition against certain behaviors wipes out a panoply of ritualistic comforts for an entire population, some of whom may very well depend on them to function at all. And if we suffocate those adaptive behaviors, even when the child is learning, are we not teaching the child to be ashamed of his own natural impulses, telling him his are disfavored or deviant? And would we do the same to typically developing children, or to ourselves as adults?”

“But something even more sinister is going on here: we are undermining Zack’s autonomy and sense of self-worth. ABA protocol is literally robbing Zack of independence and bodily choices, because we are making them for him.” Yet what is Ellenby’s Tackle and Drag Therapy but a super-intense experience for Zack of completely losing his autonomy and bodily choice?

Ellenby felt like a small fish in a big pond as an attorney; making her life about autism makes her feel like a much bigger fish. Again, she co-opts Zack’s identity to fill her ego needs: “I am autism and it is me; I live and breathe it, fully intoxicated: it’s in my marrow. And most unexpectedly, it gives me profound joy and sense of purpose to acknowledge it. It doesn’t matter that I was trained to be an attorney. I’m meant to be something more feral, more hands-on, more intimate and immediate. After a decade spent wandering the wilderness as a little attorney lost, possessing raging zeal with no clearly identifiable group to ignite it, I have come home.”

Ellenby admits she’s not even got the proper training to safely restrain a child. With her attorney instinct, she makes sure to tell people not to do what she did. Yet she uses such scientific phrasing when she describes her “experiments” and writes about her perception of the success in such glowing terms many vulnerable parents will do exactly what she describes, as closely as possible to the way Ellenby did with Zack in search of some magic outcome.

And for all Ellenby’s criticism of ABA in her book, when I Googled her business I found that it’s based on an ABA model. And in her Washington Post article, Ellenby admits that what she is doing with her Tackle and Drag therapy is exactly what ABA therapists do if the 40-hour work week of ABA therapy isn’t making a dent in a child’s behavior. She told Zack’s doctor about the Elmo show, after the fact, and he explained that: “as a last resort, in a controlled way and only after years of therapy, a licensed behavioral clinician might have physically restrained Zack to force him to confront his fears, had he not responded to more gradual methods.”

As Sid Ziff once quipped, this is not a book to be lightly thrown aside; it should be thrown with great force. But it is in the midst of being published and the publisher has defended the author, using some particularly nasty rhetoric against Autistic people who don’t like the book. It will be published.

Ellenby has said no one should speak badly about her book unless they’d read every word. Well, I’ve done that now and I feel soiled and deflated. Demanding that Autistics who are upset by one bite of her book must go on to consume the whole thing before being permitted to have an opinion is the demand of a bully who knows they are requiring vulnerable people to traumatize themselves with her words.

While Ellenby has, perhaps unwittingly, exposed a lot of the ugliness and unsuitability of ABA, she embraces the behavioral paradigm still and enacts the very worst versions of it. Autism Uncensored is a traumatic read and should be resisted as much as possible. I’ve read it for you and saved you the trouble and trauma. Instead of this revolting mess, I suggest you read the following:

Respectfully Connected

Blog: respectfullyconnected.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/RespectfullyConnected

"Authors of this blog come from a wide range of backgrounds and between them have an enormous amount of parenting experience. They all share a desire to parent in a way that both models and facilitates respect and connection, and that values all kinds of diversity. The authors of this blog also share the experience of being part of neurodivergent families."

"This blog exists to share the authors stories, with the hope they will empower and encourage other parents on their journey with the knowledge that there is a gentler, more compassionate way of raising autistic children than much of society tells us, and that close attached relationships are very possible."

We Are Like Your Child

Blog: wearelikeyourchild.blogspot.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WeAreLikeYourChild

“We Are Like Your Child [is] a collaboration of Autistic (& occasionally, other disabled) adults. We discuss our difficulties & how we work with or around them from a neurodiversity & social model of disability perspective.”

WALYC was organized in response to the many parents who refuse to listen to what Autistic adults have to say about the lived experience of autism, telling us that we can’t possibly have any useful insight or advice because we’re “not like their child.” But you can’t compare an adult to a child and the members of WALYC often discuss challenges many people’s children of all ages face, along with strategies for circumventing or overcoming those challenges.

The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism

Oh, wait, that’s where you are right now, reading this. Well keep reading TPGA! There is so much collected wisdom here from Autistics, parents, therapists, and more that it would take a shelf of textbooks to hold it all (and the valuable content continues to grow.)

These three sites alone will keep you very busy reading and learning things that will actually help you and your child. Reject Ellenby’s Tackle and Drag therapy and anything that comes from Dr. Lovaas and his ABA practices. Boycott Autism Uncensored and tell everyone why Autistics deserve better.

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How Male/Female Stereotypes Are Changing - And They Are

Source:  Northwestern University CNET

A drawing from a Draw-A-Scientist study.

It is important for any writer to stay current with how our society and culture is changing, and how we perceive those changes.

*  *  *  *  *

US children now draw female

scientists more than ever

Change suggests children's stereotypes linking

science with men have weakened over time

When drawing scientists, US children now depict female scientists more often than ever, according to new research, which analyzed five decades of 'Draw-A-Scientist' studies conducted since the 1960s. This change suggests that children's stereotypes linking science with men have weakened over time, said the researchers, consistent with more women becoming scientists and children's media depicting more female scientists on television shows, magazines and other media.

"Given this change in stereotypes, girls in recent years might now develop interests in science more freely than before," said study lead author David Miller, a psychology Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern. "Prior studies have suggested that these gender-science stereotypes could shape girls' interests in science-related activities and careers."

The study is the first systematic, quantitative review of the "Draw-A-Scientist" literature and combined results from 78 U.S. studies, including more than 20,000 children in kindergarten through 12th grade.

In the first landmark study, conducted between 1966 and 1977, less than one percent of nearly 5,000 children drew an image resembling a woman when asked to draw a scientist. Their artwork almost exclusively depicted men working inside with laboratory equipment, often with lab coats, glasses and facial hair.

But in later studies (1985 to 2016), 28 percent of children drew a female scientist, on average. In addition, both girls and boys drew female scientists more often over time, though girls overall drew female scientists much more often than boys.

"Our results suggest that children's stereotypes change as women's and men's roles change in society," said study co-author Alice Eagly, professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and a faculty fellow with the University's Institute for Policy Research. "Children still draw more male than female scientists in recent studies, but that is expected because women remain a minority in several science fields."

The researchers also studied how children form stereotypes about scientists across child development. The results suggested children did not associate science with men until grade school; around age 5, they drew roughly equal percentages of male and female scientists.

During elementary and middle school, the tendency to draw male scientists increased strongly with age. Older children were also more likely to draw scientists with lab coats and glasses, suggesting that children learn other stereotypes as they mature.

"These changes across children's age likely reflect that children's exposure to male scientists accumulates during development, even in recent years," said David Uttal, a co-author of the study and a professor of education and psychology in Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

"To build on cultural changes, teachers and parents should present children with multiple examples of female and male scientists across many contexts such as science courses, television shows and informal conversations," Uttal said.

Story Source:  Materials provided by Northwestern University.  David I. Miller, Kyle M. Nolla, Alice H. Eagly, David H. Uttal. The Development of Children's Gender-Science Stereotypes: A Meta-analysis of 5 Decades of U.S. Draw-A-Scientist Studies. Child Development, 2018

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