Center ramped knobs for smooth and fast rolling on all types of conditions. Spaced well enough to allow mud clearing and big aggressive side knobs ensures cornering is solid and predictable, further siping on the side knobs to allow extra bite in softer terrain.
Dual Compound balances wear and grip while the Shark Skin protection provides durable puncture protection/
[Originally posted on PopMatters] There’s a story to Risk and Settlers of Catan and Monopoly but not in the games themselves. Sure, there’s an identifiable setting that makes them more than flat pieces of cardboard—the unconquered world, the geological absurdity that is Catan island, Britain street(?)—and the point of these games is to become emotionally engaged … Continue reading Gaming the Dice: How Randomness Contributes to Game Experiences
Absent in our political discussions about creating more jobs is the recognition that computerized technology is changing the structure of our economy and eliminating traditional jobs.
Disappointing job creation numbers have stemmed the tide of economic recovery and have economists scratching their heads. But something entirely new may be lurking beneath the surface of our limping recovery: The Second Economy. This computer-intensive portion of industry is growing by leaps and bounds, creating a new generation of billionaires and shaping how our economy may run in the coming decades. Unfortunately, the Second Economy will not create many jobs. Instead, it is creating a broad network of interconnected machines that manage an increasingly automated consumer economy.
Online retail sales alone, which are controlled entirely by computers, accounted for $200 billion in 2011. Amazon and Google combined for another $88 billion in transactions. But those fortunes are less encouraging than ever: "In the past, every million-dollar increase in economic output generated on the order of ten jobs. In the future, in the productive Second Economy, it may generate only one or two." Absent in political discussions of how to create more jobs is the simple recognition that computerized technology is creating a deep structural change in the 21st century economy.
Ironically, the more women have tried to free themselves from masculine norms of sexuality, the more they have adopted male sexual tendencies under the guise of sexual liberty.
Spanish psychoanalyst Constanza Michelson is arguing, in a provocative piece at the Huffington Post España (Spanish), that women's struggle for sexual equality has actually made them sexual slaves.
After our struggle to escape from the macho norm, we've run into something curious and symptomatic: We've transformed ourselves into a masculine fantasy, that is to say, a free piece of ass.
Of course that is not what women choose to call it, preferring names like free love and multi-orgasmic, but these concepts are rooted in male sexual tendencies and masculine biological phenomenon.
While women fight for parity with men in areas like worker compensation, Michelson argues that women should claim a sexual identity that is separate from men's. In the name of sexual liberation, women have compromised on sexual values such as closeness, caressing, and pillow talk.
Michelson is on guard against appearing nostalgic or a defender of conservative values. Sometimes the freedoms we are promised, she argues, become new forms of slavery.
Referencing the late 20th century French thinker Michel Foucault, Michelson reminds women that to say "yes" to sex doesn't mean saying "no" to power. It's not a matter of defending old institutions, she says, but our "touch and go" approach to sex "trivializes the body, mechanizes sex, and undermines the possibility of an encounter."
Psychologist and sexuality expert Esther Perel discusses the nature of erotic desire. We owe it to ourselves, says Perel, to be happy and search for our own gratification and sexual expressiveness.
Healthy sounding foods aren’t always healthy. A 2014 study titled Truth, Lies, and Packaging: How Food Marketing Creates a False Sense of Health examined the difference between packaging claims of a food’s nutritional value versus its actual nutritional value. Lead study author Temple Northup wrote that “certain buzzwords create a health halo that implies a food is better for you than it actually is.” A “health halo” is a protective barrier cast over foods because of their packaging, often co-opting and misappropriating scientific terms to do so. Worse still, consumers don’t really catch on to the difference: they even eat more health halo products than they ordinarily would because of the healthy misconception. Here are the 6 muddiest science terms that have been co-opted as health halos:
A superfood is a nutritionally dense food with anti-aging properties. Superfoods can be almost any whole foods, including blueberries, kiwi, salmon, turkey, kale, beans, soy, and quinoa. But according to the American Heart Association, there are no set criteria defining a superfood. There’s not even an officially approved list of them. The truth is that most superfoods aren’t really super; they just have large doses of vitamins and minerals. “A lot of people have unrealistic expectations about these foods, thinking they’ll be protected from chronic diseases and health problems,” explains nutrition professor Penny Kris-Etherton, PhD R.D. on the AHA site. “They may eat one or two of these nutrient-dense foods on top of a poor diet... as a registered dietician, I’d like to see people eat more of the superfoods like whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, fish, fatty fish and all fruits and veggies.”
An organic food is grown, produced, or harvested without synthetic pesticides, chemical fertilizers or genetic modification. Organic foods can be meat, eggs, and dairy products, and must be legally certified by the US Department of Agriculture in order to be called organic. Organic farming is nothing new, but since the USDA released its standards in 2002, organic foods exploded in the consumer market. Now, the term organic is applied more frequently as a marketing term than it is to foods that are genuinely certified. That difference is seldom publicized or known, and consumers continue to pay more for organic foods because they expect them to be healthier. The best way to counteract this effect is to look for the USDA certification sticker.
An electrolyte is a solution that conducts electricity and is made of salt ions. The human body has 8 types of electrolytes that it uses to maintain hydration, nerve impulses, muscle function, and waste elimination. They’re important, but your body has plenty of them; it only needs more electrolytes after profuse sweating, diarrhea, vomiting, or excessive urination. That hasn’t stopped marketing companies from applying that word to sports and energy drinks, most of which contain enough caffeine and sugar to offset any benefits from the electrolytes. Scientific studies -- including this 2005 one, this 2005 one, and this 2007 one -- show that the benefits of these drinks are limited at best. More research is needed, but as it stands now there are very few benefits to drinking energy drinks to restore electrolyte balance.
Like electrolytes, your body produces antioxidants on its own. Antioxidants are molecules that inhibit oxidation of other molecules. “Oxidants are free radicals that you find in the environment, but they're also produced naturally in your body,” defines Diane McKay, Ph.D., a professor at Tufts University. Free radicals have at least one unpaired electron, forcing them to tear apart your cells, proteins, and even DNA for stabilizing electrons. Antioxidants neutralize that damage, but “the effectiveness of any given antioxidant in the body depends on which free radical is involved, how and where it is generated, and where the target of damage is,” according to How Stuff Works. So eating a food with added antioxidants may not offer any health benefits. “If you have too many antioxidants, you suppress your body's own ability to turn on its antioxidant defense system," McKay says. Worse still, according to the US Pharmacopeial Convention, “antioxidant supplements also largely have a placebo effect, and some studies have even found they might have a negative impact on certain diseases like lung and skin cancer.”
Probiotics are foods or dietary supplements that contain live bacteria and are intended to supplement healthy bacteria in our microbiome. It was coined in 1965 and comes from the Greek words “for life.” There are many probiotic foods and supplements touting the necessities and benefits of these live bacteria, particularly in relation to improved digestion and bowel movements. Most people believe they need probiotics for those reasons, but the only scientifically-proven benefits for probiotics thus far are in treating diarrhea, particularly after taking antibiotics (which wipes out all gut bacteria, good and bad). Most people don’t need probiotics to be healthy.
Gluten is a mixture of proteins found in wheat and other grains like barley, rye, oat, malt, and spelt. Think of it as a glue that holds foods together and helps them maintain their shape. Unfortunately, more and more people are experiencing sensitivities or intolerance to gluten in the last 10 years. That sensitivity is an autoimmune disorder, and can be as mild as digestive disorders and nausea or as serious as celiac disease. The explosion of gluten sensitivity can most likely be traced to improved diagnostic procedures, according to nutrition and public policy expert Marion Nestle. Nestle also explains the rise of gluten intolerance as, “for reasons of genetics, some people cannot fully digest glutens. The undigested protein fragments induce a toxic immune response.” Most people do not have that response, but they think they do because they show the more mild symptoms of digestive distress. The only way to be certain of a gluten intolerance is with doctor’s test. Still, most people assume they have it rather than get the test. Especially since gluten-free foods have been heavily marketed to the mass public since 2009.
GMOs, or “genetically modified organisms,” are living things whose genetic material has “incorporated new genes from one species into a completely unrelated species through genetic engineering, optimizing agricultural performance or facilitating the production of valuable pharmaceutical substances from two species,” according to Nature. Crop plants, farm animals, and soil bacteria have all benefitted from the genetic engineering process. That may sound like the work of a mad scientist, but in truth it means growing crops more efficiently, without harsh pesticides, and with enough hardiness to resist both drought and famine. It also means scaling up pharmaceutical production, enhancing soil nutrient yields, and removing threats of disease contamination from our food supply. There’s nothing scary about them. Bill Nye even says so:
In short, healthy-sounding scientific buzzwords will grant you health benefits; they just won’t be magical. Now you know.
Sherman Alexie: My name is Sherman Alexie and I’m the bantamweight champion of the world. No, I’m a writer, poet, short story writer, novelist, screenwriter.
Sherman Alexie: You young bastard, I’m doing okay. It is a strange dilemma because in some sense, you know, I was very native, very native identified, and I still am, but that’s almost become secondary. I’ve sort of joined the tribe of highly established literary writers. So, you know, I’m with the Jonathan Franzens of the world. You know, I know him a little bit, but that’s sort of my peer group now, rather than just sort of, you know, Indian world, literary world, I’m now in, you know, this sort of make-believe world of writers who supposedly hang out a lot, although none of us ever do. So I’m in a faux community of writers, highly successful, literary writers now.
Sherman Alexie: Oh, it’s all, I mean, I haven’t changed anything I’ve written based on all that stuff. So the perceptions of me may have changed, or my career, but I’m still writing the same stuff, it’s still pretty much about Spokane Indian males, you know, stumbling through life. So I think it’s because of the combination of skills I have, you know, I work in multi-genres, you know, I do stand-up comedy, I help make movies, I think all of that has contributed to it. I’m not just a novelist or not just a short story writer. So I think in this highly technological world with many diverse and diffuse influences, I think I’m able to hit a lot of aces.
Sherman Alexie: Nobody who’s ever been poor would ever use the phrase “selling out.” You know, my influences in the multi-genre artists come from my Indian writing ancestors, the previous generation. When you’re talking James Welch, Simon Ortiz, Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Leslie Silko, Linda Hogan, Adrian C. Louis, all of these writers were multi-genre. They all wrote poetry and novels and short stories and non-fiction and dabbled in songwriting and filmmaking and documentary making. So my original influences were Native American, multi-genre artists.
Now, these days, the younger Native writers are not multi-genre, so it’s very interesting. I’m not sure what’s happening, why that has changed, but I grew up as a kid writer. Nobody ever told me I was supposed to be one thing, so just because I happened to become successful in a number of those genres, it wasn’t because I was pursuing them economically, it was because I saw the artistic possibilities in all of it. And I was taught those when I was a, you know, 19-year-old undergraduate.
Sherman Alexie: Yeah, I think I’m the least educated Indian writer out there. I’ve taught at the University of Washington, so, but I’m not a good teacher, so I think that probably disqualifies me. Yeah, I’m not in academia at all, in terms of a full-time career. I think it’s interesting, because I think, when you look at Native American literature, you’re going to find that it doesn’t really reflect the diversity of the ways in which the writers actually lived their lives. Nobody’s ever written, for instance, an academic farce, a Native American teacher at college farce, which is a time-honored and wonderful genre. You know, David Lodge made a whole career out of it, writing academic farces and, you know, every writer you can name has written it, but we haven’t done it. You know, where’s that novel about that Indian architect or that Indian lawyer. There’s a distinct lack of white-collar Native American literature, despite the fact that most of its most visible practitioners are white-collar themselves. So I think there’s an effort, somewhat of an insecurity to prove your Indian-ness by focusing almost entirely on a reservation-based identity.
Sherman Alexie: Well, I think it’s old-fashioned actually. You know, I think people think it’s something new, but the idea of being a storyteller, you know, for most of our existence was not related to books, it was about the ability to stand up in front of the fire and, you know, earn your supper. So I think it’s just something old and inspired in me, but I never really was the funny guy growing up. If you’d ask my siblings, they’d tell you I was the depressed guy in the basement, but they’re the funny ones. But it just, I got on stage and started talking and people laughed. At the beginning, I didn’t even necessarily know what was happening, but as the years have gone on, I realized that humor is pretty amazing in its ability to transcend differences, politically, ethnically, racially, geographically, economically. There’s something about it that really opens people up spiritually, I think, and they listen. They pay attention. And it’s also a great way to offend people.
I don’t know, we’ve all been to literary readings, you know, where we got theater, but so bored by the person up in front of us reading their work so dispassionately that it nearly turns us off their books. You know, there are writers who I’ve heard do their work that I can only hear their voice when I’m reading their books and it’s so disinterested in their own stuff and I just never wanted to do that. I wanted to make the mistake the other way, you know, I’m pleased when somebody’s offended, you know, by my large stage presence, because there’s still people who show up who get offended. I get up there and give a show and I’m improvising and, you know, talking about current events and what happened yesterday or what happened an hour ago, what happened five minutes before I walked into the place, you know, and giving people a glimpse of how my, you know, crazy mind works. And then they’ll come up after me and say, “Well, I’m really disappointed you didn’t read the story,” and you look at them and think, “Well, you can read the story, you know, what happened tonight will only happen once! You know, you were here for a one-time thing!” So I guess people are trapped in their perception of what a literary artist is supposed to be.
Sherman Alexie: You know, I write poems naturally. I’m writing them all the time. I think it’s more of a reflex talent than fiction is for me. Seems like I have to work harder to write fiction. That said, poems are much more demanding, you have fewer words, you can make fewer mistakes. You know, if you write a ten-line poem, you really can’t make any mistakes. If you do, the poem is terrible. But when you write a novel, you have all that space to mess up in and people are more forgiving. So I think poetry audiences are far more demanding than fiction audiences are.
Sherman Alexie: Well, you know, writers generally come in two groups, those who love what they do and those who can’t stand what they do. I’m in the second group. I have a really difficult time looking back. Yeah, so I figure out of the thousands of pages I’ve published, there’s probably about 100 great pages. I think I worked on probably about a 2 percent greatness rate. So there’s probably 10 poems, 2 stories that are great and the rest of it is from anywhere from pretty good to, you know, total crap.
Sherman Alexie: You know, the book is not played out. The idea of what a book can be is not played out in its form as it is, with paper and covers. And there are things that can be that digital will never touch, and that’s one of the things I wanted to do with this, and comparing it to a cassette tape, the old-fashioned way of making a mix tape, which, you know, I love burning CD’s, too, but there is something far more passionate and hands-on and hard work about making a mix tape on a cassette. It’s too easy to revise with a CD. And today’s technology makes it too easy to change immediately. You can cover your mistakes quicker. I think it allows you to have the sheen of perfection around yourself and with an old-fashioned book or an old-fashioned cassette tape, you can actually see all the flaws and imperfections and the bad choices. And I think there’s something we lose with technology when you talk about bad choices.
Sherman Alexie: Well, they cost $300, number one. I don’t think anything that costs $300 can be called egalitarian. You know, how much of the world can afford a $300 reading device? 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent, it automatically qualifies for, you know, economically elite status.
But what’s really going on here, the reading public doesn’t really know about, and all they’re concerned about and all they’re defending is their reading convenience, which I completely understand. Whether it’s because of physical disabilities or because of personal preference, or just the newness of it, why they love a digital book. But they don’t understand the economic, corporate pressures going on in the publishing world. And what’s going to happen, and this is going to happen on the Internet, too. We like to pretend that the Internet is free, you know, we like to pretend it’s an open source culture, but as culture changes, as old corporate models of distributing information are changing, you know, I don’t know why people assume that corporations aren’t going to take over this medium as well, because they can.
And so what’s happening in the book world, the digital books, is that these e-book companies, you know, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, others that are rising, they just don’t seek to publish books, they’re going to end up seeking the books to be chosen to be published. So this economic model, the way it’s set up now, is going to favor a certain kind of book and publishers and being economically motivated companies are only going to be publishing those kinds of books. And the divide between pop culture, pop writing, and literary writing is just going to increase and increase and increase and it’s going to make it harder and harder and harder for first-time writers to get published in any form whatsoever where they’ll get attention.
Sherman Alexie: Who can find you? Who’s going to find anybody? Nobody’s really risen out of the Internet to become a major voice. They always end up getting a book published and then the book makes them a major voice, but nobody has. I mean, I’m trying to think, you know, I’m not Internet averse at all, I’m doing this. I mean, I love the Internet. But the fact is, is that it’s a giant, giant, unfiltered library which has its strengths and beauty, but it’s impossible to find people.
And, you know, what we end up doing anyway is I go to about five sites. You know, and I think most people probably do the same thing, you create this little small town inside the Internet and we end up in all these little, tiny separate communities. Joan Jett, an interview with Joan Jett, she said about the music industry, she said the thing that’s missing now is anticipation. She said that nobody gets in a big line outside of Tower Records any more waiting for that new Stones album to drop. And nobody stands in line outside a record store waiting to buy the tickets for The Who concert. There’s a real lack of community, you know, in the Internet experience when it comes to art. And you can’t tell me and it’s not true, that communicating strictly through the Internet forms community in the way that being together does. You’re missing all but one sense. You don’t smell people, you don’t really hear them, you don’t see them, and we’re animals, we’re creatures of senses, and the Internet deprives you of many of those.
And so I know there’s new art coming based on this technology and some if it’s happening and it’s exciting and interesting, but there’s nothing wrong with the old art. And I always worry and you see it with certain Internet folks, the way in which they’re completely willing to jettison their past in the pursuit of something new, and that’s what I’m worried about.
Sherman Alexie: Well, in order to write about the emotional state of a character, I have to get as close as possible to being in that emotional state. So I have to get that sad, I have to get that happy, that crazed, that bizarre, that obsessed. You know, whatever one of my characters are going through, I have to find my way into it. You know, it’s just the way I do it.
Sherman Alexie: Well, there’s a story in this book [“War Dances”] called the “Ballad of Paul Nonetheless,” where he becomes so obsessed with pop music and so obsessed with his iPod, that he, you know, every thought he has becomes directly related to a song. So I went that far into it. I tried to talk only in song lyrics. You know, whenever anybody was talking to me, I drove my friends and family mad, because whenever they would talk to me, you know, I would say, “Well, that reminds me of this, you know, Rolling Stones song,” or whenever anybody said something accidentally that was a lyric or a title of a song, I would then sing the song. So it was crazy. But it got me seeing the way it was completely alienating my friends and family, really got me to a place where I could write that story about this really genial guy who’s actually very much an anti-hero.
Sherman Alexie: Oh, a case of beer a day. You know, I could drink a fifth of tequila a day. You know, it becomes a drinking problem when it affects your relationships with people, when it affects your job or your school, your grade point average. You know, affects your, it’s a drinking problem when you’re sitting on your couch at home drinking the case of beer all by yourself, and then you pass out and grab the fifth of tequila when you wake up. So pretty obvious what my problem was.
Sherman Alexie: Well, I wrote “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” and “The Business of Fancy Dancing” while drunk and drinking. So there’s certainly a lot to be said for my desperate years, my alcoholic years, my active alcoholic years is being the source of some pretty good work, for being the source of the two books that established and made my career. But the thing is, it’s unsustainable. You know, if you are using substances to fuel your creativity, you’re going to have a very, very short artistic life. You’re going to be a sprinter and by and large, I wanted to become a marathon runner. And I can only run the marathon if I’m sober.
You kill your brain. You kill your brain. You know, please try to find me, the successful drug user. You know, try to find me, the high-functioning alcoholic, you know, career person, and you could probably find in their work when they were drinking, when they weren’t. I bet you could look at the downfall of some amazing writers who wrote one or two great books and then just fell apart, I’m pretty sure that’s related to alcohol consumption. So, it’s unsustainable, you know, it’s sort of like the environment, you can only pour so much pollutants into it before the temperature changes dramatically. So I think drug and alcohol abuse is like the greenhouse affect for writers.
Sherman Alexie: Well, I mean, I’m an alcoholic, that’s what, you know, my family is filled with alcoholics. My tribe is filled with alcoholics. The whole race is filled with alcoholics. For those Indians who try to pretend it’s a stereotype, they’re in deep, deep denial. It’s an every day part of my life and as a writer, I use that to write about it. You know, partly for fictional purposes, and narrative purposes, but partly with the social hope that by writing about it, maybe it’ll help people get sober, and it has. I’ve heard from them. You know, the social function of art is very important to me. It’s not just for art’s sake. I have very specific ideas in mind about what it can do. I’ve seen it happen. So it is writing about alcohol that helps me stay sober. And I think reading about alcoholism helps other people stay sober.
Sherman Alexie: I try to meet deadlines. I have, you know, more dependents, so it’s a very, very basic triangle needs. That bottom, you know, part of the triangle. But, well, they’re always surprising me. The kids are always surprising me with their insights into the world and of course because they’re my children, I pay more attention to what they’re saying than pretty much everybody else on the planet. I care more what my kids say on a daily basis than, you know, the smartest people on the planet. You know? And so I listen and their insights are really surprising and the way in which how unfiltered they are and their obsessions and passions, they don’t apologize for any of that. So I learn a lot from them, you know, it’s also aggravating and irritating and exhausting, the sacrifices you make and, you know, sometimes it feels like my whole life is a to-do list. But, you know, I think their passion for life really has re-inspired me.
Sherman Alexie: No. I don’t, I mean, they’re autonomous. I certainly, if they want to read my stuff and talk about it later, that’ll be great. But until then, it was so funny though, I was profiled on the Lehrer News Hour recently and I was watching the rough cut of it and my son came down, my eight year old, and he was watching it on the TV with me and it was a five-minute piece about poetry and I read a couple poems and I read one very emotional one about my father’s death. And it was over and my son looked at me, he’s eight years old, he looked at me and he goes, “Dad, you’re pretty good!” So that was a great moment.
Sherman Alexie: It’s funny, this popped into my head, so I’ll go with it, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was banned from baseball in 1919 for allegedly fixing the World Series. Country boy, ended up being a great baseball player, one of the greatest of all time, I’d like to talk to him about that World Series, about the mysteries of human nature. Because, you know, you’re looking at the stats, I’m pretty sure he didn’t participate in the fix, but he knew about it, so I’d like to have a discussion of morality with Shoeless Joe Jackson.
Sherman Alexie: Well, there are just certain poems and novels and stories that resonate forever and ever. You know, poems I always return to, Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not stop for Death, that kindly stopped for me.” You know, Theodore Roethke: “I know a woman,” you know, “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them.” James Wright: “Suddenly I realized that if I stepped outside my body, I would break into blossom.” And then, you know, the end of “Grapes of Wrath,” when Rose of Sharon breastfeeds, you know, her child has died, but she breastfeeds the starving man, that moment? So it’s always individual works. Even in life, I don’t have heroes. I believe in heroic ideas, because the creators of all those ideas are very human. And if you make heroes out of people, you will invariably be disappointed.
Sherman Alexie: Oh, Ezra Jack Keats, “A Snowy Day,” the book. You know, the idea of multicultural literature is very new and so as a little Indian boy growing up on the reservation, there was nobody like me in the books, so you always had to extrapolate. But when I picked up A Snowy Day with that inner-city black kid, that child, walking through the, you know, snow covered, pretty quiet and lonely city, oh, I mean, when he was making snow angels and, you know, when he was getting in snowball fights and when he got home to his mother and it was cold and she put him in a hot bathtub and put him to sleep, the loneliness and the love in that book, oh, just gorgeous. So that picture resonates with me still.
Dennis Kucinich: First of all it started with love, as all stories do. I met someone years ago, fell in love, and found out she was a vegan. Now I didn’t know what a vegan was. And for those of you who are tuning in and you don’t know what a vegan is, I’ll make it simple. It starts with your approach to what you eat. It means that I don’t eat any meats, poultry, fish. I don’t eat any dairy products. You know there goes Iowa, right? In the book that I mentioned earlier, “Courage to Survive”, I talk about a bout with Crone’s disease that I had since I was a little kid. I didn’t know until years later in life that dairy products had something to do with irritating that condition. And so when I switched diets – this was in 1995 – I started to achieve a level of health that I didn’t have before. I lost a little bit of weight to be sure, and it became an adventure to find out what’s appropriate substitutes – beans, grains, tofu. There’s a lot of different substitutes that you can have in moving towards a vegan diet. But I had a level of health that I hadn’t experienced before. So I’m not gonna tell anyone, “Well this is the way you have to eat.” I can share with people what I’ve discovered by changing my diet. And I have enormous amounts of energy . . . and clarity, by the way. So I don’t feel like I’m dragging. And I have more energy than people half my age. I’m 61 years old, and you know I . . . I have a very young wife. And you know if you’re gonna be in a relationship, you better be in good shape because, you know, you’ve got to be able to have a lot of vitality. And I have enormous vitality because of my diet.
Tony Zador is the Professor of Biology and Program Chair in Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. There he uses a combination of physiological, molecular, behavioral and computational approaches to study the neural mechanisms underlying auditory processing, attention and decision making in rodents. Zador's pedigree includes graduate work with Caltech professor Christof Koch, Yale professor Tom Brown, and postdoctoral work with Chuck Stevens of the Salk Institute. Zador is also the co-founder of the annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) meeting, which now draws over 500 participants.
Tony Zador: There are couple of choices, so ultimately what I’d like to understand is how attention works in a human because I’m a human, but the problem is that for doing experiments humans are sometimes... in many ways not the ideal preparation. They’re not the ideal subjects and the reason of course is that we don’t have access to what is going on inside the human brain at the level of resolution that one might like and furthermore, we don’t have the means of manipulating that activity within a human in a way that we can actually probe what is really going on, so although one preparation that has been and is, remains really useful for studying attention is the human. If we want sort of a finer grain understanding we have to go to so called non-human models of attention, and there are several. The dominant one is the primate monkey... the primate model the monkey and the reason for studying a monkey of course is that monkeys are fairly similar to humans in a lot of ways. Their brains seem similar. They’re evolutionary... evolutionarily quite close. But in practice there are also limitations with monkeys, and so for my research we’ve actually moved to rodents and there are a couple of advantages of studying attention in rodents.
The first advantage is that we can scale up and study dozens and potentially even hundreds of rodents in parallel in a way that you can’t really do in a monkey. In practice, the way that people work with monkeys is they train a monkey for a year or two and then they perform experiments on that monkey for many years—because monkeys are incredibly valuable, so the kinds of information that you can get out from a monkey is really useful, but you can’t really do a sequence of experimental manipulations the way you can in other kinds of preparations. So with rodents what we do is we focus on tasks that we can train the rats and mice to perform. Our training time is typically a few weeks and then what we can do is explore what happens in their brain after they’ve learned to perform an attention task. On top of that what we can do is we can manipulate the neural activity within a rodent’s brain at a level of precision that at this point we really can’t achieve in a monkey and certainly not in a human. With a human we study groups, neural activity in patches that are you know consist of hundreds of thousands of neurons. In monkeys we can study single neurons at a time, but we can’t really manipulate whole parts of the circuit and in rodents we can actually now target subsets of neurons based on how they’re wired up and so that is what we’re able to do now in the rodent preparation.
We’ve designed a special behavioral box so that we can actually train rodents to perform attentional tasks in parallel. The whole thing is computer-controlled. The starting point for all these tasks is a rat that has been trained to stick its nose into the center port of a three-port box, so what you see is looking down on a box, the rat sticks its nose into the center port. That breaks and LED beam that signals to a computer that, ah, the rat has entered the center port and now we can program the computer to deliver whatever kind of stimuli we want, auditory... in fact one of my colleagues uses it to present olfactory stimuli, visual stimuli, but in our case it is auditory stimuli. The rat breaks the center beam. In this example what you see is that that triggers the computer to present either a low frequency sound or a high frequency sound. When it presents a low frequency sound the rat goes to one of the ports and then he gets a reward, a small amount of water. If he breaks the beam and it’s the other sound that is presented he goes to the other port and gets his reward. And as you can see the rat really understands what he is supposed to do. He sticks his nose in, goes in one way, sticks his nose in, goes the other way. He is going as fast as he can to pick up his rewards. Now what you actually hear on this video is that the low frequency and high frequency sounds are both masked by some white noise. That is to make it more challenging for the rat and the other thing is that the hearing range of a rat is shifted from the hearing range of a human, so humans hear from about 20 hertz to about 20 kilohertz. Rats hear from about 1 kilohertz to the ultrasonic, what is for us ultrasonic, 70 kilohertz, so the low frequency sound for the rat is something that is sort of on the upper end of what we hear, a few kilohertz—I think it’s five kilohertz—and the high frequency sound in this case is beyond what we can actually hear and so what you actually hear is either white noise alone or white noise plus a low frequency sound and that is what you see.
So how do we use this to study attention? So this is the starting point for all our tasks. This just demonstrates that the rat can take sound stimuli and use it to guide his behavior left and right. We have more complicated tasks where what we do is we have the rat attend to a particular aspect of the sound stimulus, so one of the studies that we’ve done recently is the ability of a rat to focus in on particular moments in time. in other words, we train the rat to guide his temporal expectation as to when a target occurs, so in the other example what you see is that the rat sticks his nose in and he is presented with a series of distracter tones and then he goes either left or right based on whether a target sound, which is a warble is either high frequency or low frequency and what makes it an attentional task is that we’ve trained the rat to expect the target to be either early in the trial, after one or two of the distracters on late in the trial, after about ten or fifteen of the distracters that is after about a second, second and a half in the center port and in that way we can guide the moment at which he expects the target to occur and the idea is that he kind of ramps up his attention for the target sound and what we’ve found is that when he ramps up his attention in this way his… the speed with which he responds to the target is faster than if the target comes unexpectedly and that is something that we find in humans as well, so that is one of in fact, the hallmarks of attention is an improvement in performance as measured either by his speed or accuracy and the other thing we found is that there are neurons in the auditory cortex whose activity is specially enhanced when he expects the target compared with when that same target is presented, but it comes in an unexpected moment, so we think that that is beginning to be the neural correlates of the enhanced performance that we’ve seen.
Neuroscientist Tony Zador presents his cutting-edge research in auditory attention and explains why rats’ brains can be studied more precisely than those of humans.
My name’s Bianca and I ate my way around California. For three weeks I lived on In-N- Out burgers, chocolate thick shakes, Trader Joe Chocolate Chip Cookies, beer, ranch dressing on everything, Starbucks’ Frappuccinos, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, chicken wings, ribs, burritos and everything else I could fit into my mouth. It was tremendously great fun. I don’t feel guilt at all. That’s what holidays are for. Eating and drinking and lazing around.
I did visit a number of gyms when we were traveling. I worked out in some cool places. I also found myself doing mini circuits in hotel rooms – push up, sit ups, crunches and the like. But overall, I slipped off the Wobbly wagon with a great big thud.
Rocking up to your Santa Barbara hotel to discover a Miss California beauty pageant taking place, was motivation
The past week has also been a complete right off. Jet lag has plagued us. We’ve been waking at 4.30am most mornings and by lunchtime I’ve, on average, eaten five main meals. Nights have been characterised by wine and junk food as I wallow in post-holiday blues.
I have regained at least three kilos of the 10 I’d lost. My skin’s gone to shit. My grey hairs are abundant. And I’m bloated, cranky and tired. I;ve taken a few steps back.
Tomorrow’s another day and I’m jumping back on the Wobbly wagon. Again. I keep falling off, but what’s cool is I keep jumping back on. I have a lot of fab things to keep me motivated. I purchased my first pair of roller skates when in LA from the raddest dudes ever from LA Skate and I can’t wait to do some more outdoor skating.
I also have a trip planned to the Gold Coast later this year to attend the ProBlogger conference so I have my sights set on shifting a bit more weight before then. And to be honest, I’ve started to miss healthy foods and regular exercise. I know right? Who even am I?
Before I left I was feeling a lot less bloated, than I am now, and was so close to fitting into a pair of jeans I’ve had my sights set on for a while. I got my hair done by the gorgeous Bree of Highborn Hair and Beauty (if you live in Adelaide check out her Facebook Page and book in to see her. If you tell her I sent you, I’m sure she’ll make it extra special).
I was feeling awesome. New hair always does that. So too does exercise and good food. Now I’m feeling a little out of sorts. I need to undergo a bit of maintenance – hair refresher, waxing and a reboot of healthiness. Then WHAM I’ll be back on track.
My last post talked about making sure you are trying to lose weight for the right reasons. I know I am. I feel different this time. I’m more aware of myself, my failings, my triggers, my strengths. Time to put my holiday behind me and get to it.
You can do it lovely. Feeling healthy is 100 times better than feeling crappy. Something we’ve both learned on this journey. xx
Oh dear … I know the foods you listed are a novelty for people who visit the States … But they are literally killing millions of Americans. I watched an ABC coco recently called The Men Who Made Us Fat, and I’m no health nut but I really do believe our food industry has a lot to answer for! Good on you for getting back on the horse Bianca; I really admire your determined approach and need to do same! (I highly recommend that documentary too … It would be on iView I think … Fascinating and horrifying!) oh by the way I meant to write ‘doco’ not ‘coco’ but my ipad won’t let me change it 🙂