Abstinence education makes a difference.

In Dr. Jemmott’s research, only about a third of the students who participated in a weekend abstinence-only class started having sex within the next 24 months, compared with about half who were randomly assigned instead to general health information classes, or classes teaching only safer sex. Among those assigned to comprehensive sex-education classes, covering both abstinence and safer sex, about 42 percent began having sex.

Dr. Jemmott’s research followed 662 African-American students at urban middle schools, who were paid $20 a session to attend the classes, plus follow-up and evaluation sessions. The abstinence-only classes covered HIV, abstinence and ways to resist the pressure to have sex.

transcript of Rick Santelli’s discussion

Market Ticker

Business Week said:

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

And this is why the survivalists are gaining traction.

I have an old friend who is converting his life time savings into gold, silver, ammunition, booze and other non-perishable staples for what he believes is the inevitable “economic crunch.” I hope he is wrong that it is imminent, but at least now he can rest easy knowing that the government can’t get to his nest egg, and based upon the recent price of ammunition and gold/silver it is appreciating nicely.

from the Rofasix

By the way, this was proposed in 2008 in Argentina and is now fact in Argentina.

If we’re going the way of Argentina, we are in a world of hurt.

[O]n March 14, 2008, then Sen. Obama voted in favor of the 2009 budget which authorized $3.1 trillion in federal outlays along with a projected $400 billion deficit. The 51-44 vote that morning was strongly along party lines with only two Republicans saying “Yes.”
When the final conference report was presented to the House on June 5, not one Republican voted for it.
This means the 2009 budget was almost exclusively approved by Democrats, with “Yeas” coming from current President then Sen. Obama, his current Vice President then Sen. Joe Biden, his current Chief of Staff then Rep. Rahm Emanuel, and his current Secretary of State then Sen. Hillary Clinton.
How is this possibly something that happened before Obama “walked in the door” when his Party ramrodded the original budget through Congress with virtually no Republican approval — save Bush’s signature, of course — and the highest members of the current Administration — including the president himself!!! — supported it when they were either in the Senate or the House?
Sadly, Obama-loving media care not to address this inconvenient truth.
But that’s just the beginning…

Read the rest.

I do think he can blame some of it on Bush. Bush, after all, chose to sign the legislation that not a single Republican voted for. That says something about Bush’s shift to the left that I hadn’t thought about before.

Found via the Common Room.

4/9 Paula’s birthday.

I am thoroughly depressed about the truthful and painful talk I got from the chair today. No hiring for lit. Probably won’t hire at all. I am definitely too old. I should think of doing something else.

I feel like my students. I don’t know what to do.

I should, however, have been grading rather than reading.

I am providing my own competition. I told a friend who is looking for work about my SLAC’s open position. Based on what happened with me, I don’t think she will get the job, but she might. She is qualified. However, I also applied for the position… I am less qualified on the topic than she is, but I am also known there.

We’ll see. But I hope one of us gets the job. I guess if she does get it, we might be able to carpool on MWF. That would be very useful for me… Faster traffic. Of course, since we have to cross through town, it’s still time in traffic.

Study Hacks has the story of a student who dropped off Facebook and gained significant educational ground.

I was wondering if the time I was spending on Facebook was keeping me away from my work. So from Monday through today, I have only been on fb to read and reply to my inbox. It has not made an appreciable difference.

So I’m going back on. But the student didn’t. It made a huge difference in his life.

Very interesting map that shows unemployment from 2007 to 2009 can be found here.

You know, Obama said 1 in 10 is unemployed. I was like, really.

Ten grownups in my family.
Mom- not employed, doesn’t want to be
Dad- not employed, doesn’t want to be
baby sister- not employed, doesn’t want to be
BIL- employed
sister- employed
BIL 2b- employed
husband- employed
me- underemployed
brother- unemployed
SIL- unemployed

So my family’s unemployment rate is 25%.

Wow. I didn’t realize how bad it is.

And that’s without taking into account people like my sister’s best friend who work full time and make $12,000/year.

Of course, it is out of China and they’ve had some fake stuff, but this looks real.

The BBC says:

Professor Benton explained that differently shaped melanosomes produced different colours, with blacks or greys produced by “sausage-shaped” melanosomes, and reddish or “russet” shades found in spherical ones.
“A ginger-haired person would have more spherical melanosomes, and a black-haired or grey-haired person would have more of the sausage-shaped structures,” said Professor Benton.
The scientists found both types of melanosome in Confuciusornis and decided to turn their attention to Sinosauropteryx, which is the most primitive feathered dinosaur yet found.

Good stuff.

If I ever teach Dinosaurs and Dragons again…

I won a writing award from my college system!

What’s funny is that I didn’t check my email today until 9 p.m. I read from the most recent on down. So, the first inkling I received is when a friend wrote and said, “Kudos for winning the writing award!”

I am very excited.

Unfortunately I’m also off facebook this week, to cut a budding addiction problem, so I can’t post it there. Too bad.

I was just grading an assignment I graded in a dream four years ago. It’s in my online class in Angel, which my college didn’t have four years ago.

Very strange.

The Math Curmudgeon has a great post on Game-Changing Graphics.

It is well worth looking at.

Want to see how a Russian Winter decimated Napoleon’s army? It’s there.

How cholera was identified as coming from a septic tank? That, too.

Scary view of sex at Jefferson High. (When did that come out and how did I miss it? Answer 2004. I don’t know. That would be a good place to point some of my students. American Journal of Sociology.)

This would definitely be interesting to read about.

It shouldn’t be that hard to clean out a closet. It shouldn’t take hours to decide on categories like: give, keep, throw away.

But it is hard.

Would R want this? Do we need boxes? How many are too many? Should I get rid of this? How do I get rid of that? (Boxes of books and magazines. Where should those go?) I don’t really wear this, should I give it away? I wore this once, maybe I’ll wear it again. Where am I going to put all the suitcases?

And, of course, it doesn’t help that all four trash cans we own are full because someone (not naming any 17 year old son) forgot to take out the trash two times in a row.

Scientists used and re-used this information without ever checking it. I am guessing part of the reason for the lack of checking (especially since it was never published in a peer-reviewed journal which should have checked it) is that it matched what the scientists were expecting to find and so they accepted it.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Doesn’t that tell you more about science being subjective than you wanted to know?

I found this on Watts Up With That. It includes several screen captures of British papers on the topic.

I am not sure what has happened. I assume someone hacked it. But my blog that my students must write to will not open. I’m going to have to get the Computer Programmer Superwhiz on that.

Great. The blog I use for teacher education isn’t working either.

I was looking at an old email for some information and found in it a wealth of information which I had not seen before.

I received the email about two weeks ago and I just totally missed a whole entire section. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was skimming?

I also missed the implication of a different email and caused someone quite a bit of hassle. Unfortunately.

I need to be more careful about reading my emails apparently. Because I can read.

So I guess I would have to say I just don’t.

I dreamed I was riding in a huge van with my mother. My mom was driving. We were going from one place to another, though I don’t remember where now.

She started going down a hill that was at the incline that makes me paranoid because I rolled down one in a car when I was three. So I asked her to slow down and I was looking sideways to not freak out.

Mom knew exactly why I asked her to slow down so she really pressed on the gas and the steering wheel was bucking against her. I told her she didn’t have to slow down that much, but it was too late.

The big van was out of control and we were headed off the road. I couldn’t see where we were going, but I knew it was bad. I told her, “I love you.”

When I woke up I was curled in a ball. It was quiet. I didn’t know if the crash were real and I was in the hospital and just wasn’t feeling the pain yet or if it had been a dream.

I woke up in bed and rolled over to curl up next to R.

I wasn’t upset, but it was a strange dream.

Usually when I have nightmares, which I would count wrecking a car as, I wake up hollering. I don’t know what that was about.

I couldn’t get back to sleep, though, so I got up and worked on school and then I came here to write it down.

I have lots to work on with my online class, but I kept making a mistake that erased what I was doing, so I stopped for a while.

I could not find a lot on this. Even when I tried various different combinations of words it was mostly on winter survival. When I limited my search to not include winter, there was very little available.

Most of what I found is for seniors in a heat wave. Not exactly useful discussion for how to survive five months in the summer without electricity. (Yes, we have 5 months of summer in Houston.)

I did find Maricopa’s Desert Awareness manual. It has some good stuff.

Here’s what they recommended for a personal survival kit:

Essential
Metal signal mirror
Whistle
Pocket knife
Flint and steel
Small candle
Cigarette paper book
Small pencil
Small magnet compass
Waterproof matches
Dental floss (100 yd)
1 qt canteen with water
Desirable
Band-aids
Bright colored balloons
Iodine tablets
Canteen cup
Waterproof match case
Map of area
Duct Tape
Bandanna
Useful
1 sq yd nylon or chiffon, brightly colored
4 Quarters (What the heck? So you can phone home?)
Hard Candy
Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil
Small fish hook
Salt
Tweezers
Razor blade
Heavy plastic bags for use as canteens
necessary, follow these rules: AVOID plants with milky sap. AVOID all
red beans. If possible, boil plants which are questionable. Test a
cooked plant by holding a small quantity in the mouth for a few
moments. If the taste is disagreeable (very bitter, nauseating, burning),
do not eat it.

POISONOUS CREATURES
Poncho or sheets of plastic
Needle with large eye
Cobbler’s linen thread (1 Yd)
Light picture cord (snare wire)
Comb
Snake bite kit
Bar of soap (small)
Woodman’s saw
Knife sharpening device
Survival guide (I am fairly sure this would be VERY useful for most Americans.)

Their suggestions are common sense, but useful.
Avoid stressful activities during the hot season.
Limit activities to cooler times of day. (This is probably where the two hour siesta came from.)
Keep pace slow and carry light loads.
Wear suitable clothing.

Operational Manual from the government
DO NOT eat food without water. (Maricopa mentioned that too.)

The operational manual would probably be useful for Apocalypse Man scenarios. There is also basic useful information in there.

a president who entered office with enormous support and an unprecedented amount of goodwill.

The Commentary is talking about Obama.

He got 53% of the vote. I’m not sure that is enormous support. He did get 8 million more votes than McCain. Of course, in a country of 305 million people, an amazingly high 127 million voted.

That’s over a third of the population, which includes children!

An intriguing article/title from the NYTimes.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.
…
For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

And those are just two of the fascinating sections of the article.