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conuly
Report Questions Need for Supplementing Vitamin D and Calcium
The very high levels of vitamin D that are often recommended by doctors and testing laboratories — and can be achieved only by taking supplements — are unnecessary and could be harmful, an expert committee says. It also concludes that calcium supplements are not needed.
The group said most people have adequate amounts of vitamin D in their blood supplied by their diets and natural sources like sunshine, the committee says in a report that is to be released on Tuesday.
“For most people, taking extra calcium and vitamin D supplements is not indicated,” said Dr. Clifford J. Rosen, a member of the panel and an osteoporosis expert at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute.
Dr. J. Christopher Gallagher, director of the bone metabolism unit at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Neb., agreed, adding, “The onus is on the people who propose extra calcium and vitamin D to show it is safe before they push it on people.”
Over the past few years, the idea that nearly everyone needs extra calcium and vitamin D — especially vitamin D — has swept the nation.
With calcium, adolescent girls may be the only group that is getting too little, the panel found. Older women, on the other hand, may take too much, putting themselves at risk for kidney stones. And there is evidence that excess calcium can increase the risk of heart disease, the group wrote.
As for vitamin D, some prominent doctors have said that most people need supplements or they will be at increased risk for a wide variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer and autoimmune diseases.
And these days more and more people know their vitamin D levels because they are being tested for it as part of routine physical exams.
“The number of vitamin D tests has exploded,” said Dennis Black, a reviewer of the report who is a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.
At the same time, vitamin D sales have soared, growing faster than those of any supplement, according to The Nutrition Business Journal. Sales rose 82 percent from 2008 to 2009, reaching $430 million. “Everyone was hoping vitamin D would be kind of a panacea,” Dr. Black said. The report, he added, might quell the craze.
“I think this will have an impact on a lot of primary care providers,” he said.
The 14-member expert committee was convened by the Institute of Medicine, an independent nonprofit scientific body, at the request of the United States and Canadian governments. It was asked to examine the available data — nearly 1,000 publications — to determine how much vitamin D and calcium people were getting, how much was needed for optimal health and how much was too much.
The two nutrients work together for bone health.
Bone health, though, is only one of the benefits that have been attributed to vitamin D, and there is not enough good evidence to support most other claims, the committee said.
Some labs have started reporting levels of less than 30 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood as a deficiency. With that as a standard, 80 percent of the population would be deemed deficient of vitamin D, Dr. Rosen said. Most people need to take supplements to reach levels above 30 nanograms per milliliter, he added.
But, the committee concluded, a level of 20 to 30 nanograms is all that is needed for bone health, and nearly everyone is in that range.
Vitamin D is being added to more and more foods, said Paul R. Thomas of the Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health. Not only is it in orange juice and milk, but more is being added to breakfast cereals, and it now can be found in very high doses in supplement pills. Most vitamin D pills, he said, used to contain no more than 1,000 international units of it. Now it is easy to find pills, even in places like Wal-Mart, with 5,000 international units. The committee, though, said people need only 600 international units a day.
To assess the amounts of vitamin D and calcium people are getting, the panel looked at national data on diets. Most people, they concluded, get enough calcium from the foods they eat, about 1,000 milligrams a day for most adults (1,200 for women ages 51 to 70).
Vitamin D is more complicated, the group said. In general, most people are not getting enough vitamin D from their diets, but they have enough of the vitamin in their blood, probably because they are also making it naturally after being out in the sun and storing it in their bodies.
The American Society for Bone and Mineral Research and other groups applauded the report. It is “a very balanced set of recommendations,” said Dr. Sundeep Khosla, a Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the society’s president.
But Andrew Shao, an executive vice president at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group, said the panel was being overly cautious, especially in its recommendations about vitamin D. He said there was no convincing evidence that people were being harmed by taking supplements, and he said higher levels of vitamin D, in particular, could be beneficial.
Such claims “are not supported by the available evidence,” the committee wrote. They were based on studies that observed populations and concluded that people with lower levels of the vitamin had more of various diseases. Such studies have been misleading and most scientists agree that they cannot determine cause and effect.
It is not clear how or why the claims for high vitamin D levels started, medical experts say. First there were two studies, which turned out to be incorrect, that said people needed 30 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood, the upper end of what the committee says is a normal range. They were followed by articles and claims and books saying much higher levels — 40 to 50 nanograms or even higher — were needed.
After reviewing the data, the committee concluded that the evidence for the benefits of high levels of vitamin D was “inconsistent and/or conflicting and did not demonstrate causality.”
Evidence also suggests that high levels of vitamin D can increase the risks for fractures and the overall death rate and can raise the risk for other diseases. While those studies are not conclusive, any risk looms large when there is no demonstrable benefit. Those hints of risk are “challenging the concept that ‘more is better,’ ” the committee wrote.
That is what surprised Dr. Black. “We thought that probably higher is better,” he said.
He has changed his mind, and expects others will too: “I think this report will make people more cautious.”
Apparently, Narcisstic Personality Disorder is being removed from the DSM
Narcissists, much to the surprise of many experts, are in the process of becoming an endangered species.
Not that they face imminent extinction — it’s a fate much worse than that. They will still be around, but they will be ignored.
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition.
Narcissistic personality disorder is the most well-known of the five, and its absence has caused the most stir in professional circles.
Most nonprofessionals have a pretty good sense of what narcissism means, but the formal definition is more precise than the dictionary meaning of the term.
Our everyday picture of a narcissist is that of someone who is very self-involved — the conversation is always about them. While this characterization does apply to people with narcissistic personality disorder, it is too broad. There are many people who are completely self-absorbed who would not qualify for a diagnosis of N.P.D.
The central requirement for N.P.D. is a special kind of self-absorption: a grandiose sense of self, a serious miscalculation of one’s abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness. It is the difference between two high school baseball players of moderate ability: one is absolutely convinced he’ll be a major-league player, the other is hoping for a college scholarship.
Of course, it would be premature to call the major-league hopeful a narcissist at such an early age, but imagine that same kind of unstoppable, unrealistic attitude 10 or 20 years later.
The second requirement for N.P.D.: since the narcissist is so convinced of his high station (most are men), he automatically expects that others will recognize his superior qualities and will tell him so. This is often referred to as “mirroring.” It’s not enough that he knows he’s great. Others must confirm it as well, and they must do so in the spirit of “vote early, and vote often.”
Finally, the narcissist, who longs for the approval and admiration of others, is often clueless about how things look from someone else’s perspective. Narcissists are very sensitive to being overlooked or slighted in the smallest fashion, but they often fail to recognize when they are doing it to others.
Most of us would agree that this is an easily recognizable profile, and it is a puzzle why the manual’s committee on personality disorders has decided to throw N.P.D. off the bus. Many experts in the field are not happy about it.
Actually, they aren’t happy about the elimination of the other four disorders either, and they’re not shy about saying so.
One of the sharpest critics of the DSM committee on personality disorders is a Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Gunderson, an old lion in the field of personality disorders and the person who led the personality disorders committee for the current manual.
Asked what he thought about the elimination of narcissistic personality disorder, he said it showed how “unenlightened” the personality disorders committee is.
“They have little appreciation for the damage they could be doing.” He said the diagnosis is important in terms of organizing and planning treatment.
“It’s draconian,” he said of the decision, “and the first of its kind, I think, that half of a group of disorders are eliminated by committee.”
He also blamed a so-called dimensional approach, which is a method of diagnosing personality disorders that is new to the DSM. It consists of making an overall, general diagnosis of personality disorder for a given patient, and then selecting particular traits from a long list in order to best describe that specific patient.
This is in contrast to the prototype approach that has been used for the past 30 years: the narcissistic syndrome is defined by a cluster of related traits, and the clinician matches patients to that profile.
The dimensional approach has the appeal of ordering à la carte — you get what you want, no more and no less. But it is precisely because of this narrow focus that it has never gained much traction with clinicians.
It is one thing to call someone a neat and careful dresser. It is another to call that person a dandy, or a clotheshorse, or a boulevardier. Each of these terms has slightly different meanings and conjures up a type.
And clinicians like types. The idea of replacing the prototypic diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with a dimensional diagnosis like “personality disorder with narcissistic and manipulative traits” just doesn’t cut it.
Jonathan Shedler, a psychologist at the University of Colorado Medical School, said: “Clinicians are accustomed to thinking in terms of syndromes, not deconstructed trait ratings. Researchers think in terms of variables, and there’s just a huge schism.” He said the committee was stacked “with a lot of academic researchers who really don’t do a lot of clinical work. We’re seeing yet another manifestation of what’s called in psychology the science-practice schism.”
Schism is probably not an overstatement. For 30 years the DSM has been the undisputed standard that clinicians consult when diagnosing mental disorders. When a new diagnosis is introduced, or an established diagnosis is substantially modified or deleted, it is not a small deal. As Dr. Gunderson said, it will affect the way professionals think about and treat patients.
Given the stakes, the blow-back from experts in personality disorders should come as no surprise.
Dr. Gunderson has written a letter co-signed by other clinical and research leaders to the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association and the task force that governs DSM-5. And Dr. Shedler and seven colleagues published an editorial in the September issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. In the relatively small world of mental health diagnostics, this is most certainly a battle worth watching.
Right now, this much seems clear: It is way too early for the narcissists to give up their seat on the bus.
For the Dishwasher’s Sake, Go Easy on the Detergent
I’VE been writing on some weighty topics lately — too little money, too many choices, too few jobs. It’s time, I decided, to move on to some questions that haunt me almost every day.
How much soap should I put in my washing machine and dishwasher?
Do I need to do more for my dryer than clean that little pull-out lint catcher?
Should I rinse my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher?
Most of us learned how to use a washing machine or dishwasher in our parents’ house many years ago and haven’t really changed our methods, even though most appliances have evolved radically since then. We rarely, if ever, read the manuals when we buy a new one or glance through the instructions on the box of detergent or bottle of dishwashing liquid.
But because we’re probably using these appliances incorrectly, our dishes and clothes may not be coming out as clean as they could be. And we may also be damaging the machines.
Let me start with soap. The No. 1 sin, according to repair people and appliance experts, seems to be adding too much soap to washing machines or dishwashers.
“Nobody thinks they use too much soap,” said Vernon Schmidt, who has been a repairman for almost 35 years and is the author of a self-published book, “Appliance Handbook for Women: Simple Enough Even a Man Can Understand.” But apparently most of us are in denial.
Washing machines and dishwashers are made to use far less water now than older models and, therefore, need less soap. And detergents have also become increasingly concentrated. So a little goes a long way.
“Most people use 10 to 15 times the amount of soap they need, and they’re pouring money down the drain,” Mr. Schmidt said.
Following the instructions on the soap container is a good first step. Christina Saunders, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, which makes Tide, Cheer, Gain and other laundry detergents, said researchers at the company did thousands of loads of laundry to determine the right amount of soap needed.
She said the caps were changed on liquid detergent containers a few years ago to make the lines specifying amount of soap needed for different size loads easier to see.
Mr. Schmidt, however, argues that depending on how hard or soft your water is, one-eighth to one-half of what is usually recommended should be adequate.
Too much detergent can make your clothes stiff and shorten the life of your machine. An excess of soap can also cause a buildup of mold and mildew, said Jill Notini, a spokeswoman for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, a trade group.
With high-efficiency machines — which includes all front-loading machines and any top loader that specifically states that it’s high efficiency — it’s a good idea to use detergents specifically made for them, she said. The detergents usually have H.E. on the front of the container. But don’t expect to see a lot of soap action.
“If people see suds, they think their clothes are getting clean, but that’s wrong — it means you’re using a lot of extra detergent,” Ms. Notini said.
Here is Mr. Schmidt’s test to determine if you’re oversoaping. Take four to six clean bath towels, put them in your front-loading washing machine (one towel for a top loader). Don’t add any detergent or fabric softener. Switch to the hot water setting and medium wash and run it for about five minutes.
Check for soap suds. If you don’t see any suds right away, turn off the machine and see if there is any soapy residue. If you see suds or residue, it is soap coming out of your clothes from the last wash.
“I’ve had customers that had to run their towels through as many as eight times to get the soap out,” Mr. Schmidt said, who lives in Indiana. He offers other handy advice on his Web site, refrigdoc.com.
Too much soap is also a problem in dishwashers and can cause dishes and glasses to look filmy. Again, check the detergent container for recommended amounts — you definitely don’t have to fill up the entire soap container in the dishwasher.
Also, if your plastic items come out still wet, that doesn’t mean your dishwasher is not doing its job. Most dishwashers today emit less heat than the older models, so plastic doesn’t dry completely.
Loading the dishwasher right will also get your dishes cleaner. When I was growing up, apparently only my mother knew the right way to load. But since my mother can’t get to all your houses, Consumer Reports offers these much-needed tips on its Home and Garden blog. (Please don’t e-mail me if you disagree about these suggestions — like religion and politics, we all have our own views on this matter.)
¶Load large items at the sides and back of the dishwasher so that they don’t block water and detergent from reaching other dishes.
¶Place the dirtier side of the dishes toward the center of the machine for more exposure to spray.
¶Load silverware in the individual silverware slots most dishwashers now include. If you have an open basket, mix forks, spoons and knives to prevent them from sticking together.
Also, remove baked on food and large chunks, but for the most part, everyone I spoke to said prerinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher was not only unnecessary, it wasted thousands of gallons of water and could actually result in dirtier dishes.
“The soap needs something to work against to get the dishes clean,” said Lou Manganiello, who owns Household Appliance Service in Hawthorne, N.Y., and has been doing repairs for 23 years. For full disclosure, he has also ably repaired my appliances from time to time.
Now, on to dryers. I don’t happen to use those fabric softener sheets, but if you do, practice restraint, Mr. Manganiello said.
On the theory that if one is good, five must be better, people throw in a bunch of the sheets. Those liquefy when the dryer gets hot and can gum up the dyer, becoming “almost like tar and feathers,” Mr. Manganiello said.
Also, clean the lint below the removable filter. I bought an item at my local hardware store that looks like a bottle brush, but is longer, denser and has a kind of thin nose. It reaches down and removes lint you can’t get to otherwise.
And think about cleaning lint off the dryer where it vents outdoors.
Of course, the best way to extend the life of your dryer is to use it less often by hanging out your laundry on a clothesline when the sun is shining.
One last bit of advice on an appliance — your oven. Use the self-cleaning mode more than once a year — otherwise, so many food particles have built up that when they burn off, smoke will billow throughout your entire kitchen. But don’t clean right before a big holiday dinner, Mr. Schmidt advised.
That’s because the oven heats so high during cleaning that any weak part will give.
“If it’s ever going to fail, it will then,” he said. “Every holiday we get swamped with calls.”
Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul
Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.
But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.
The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.
That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
In June, it even prompted the Indian government to begin making digital copies of ancient drawings showing the provenance of more than 4,000 yoga poses, to discourage further claims by entrepreneurs like Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor to the stars who is based in Los Angeles. Mr. Choudhury nettled Indian officials in 2007 when he copyrighted his personal style of 26 yoga poses as “Bikram Yoga.”
Organizers of the Take Back Yoga effort point out that the philosophy of yoga was first described in Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet, because the religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith of “castes, cows and curry,” they say, most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless, spiritual “Indian wisdom.”
“In a way,” said Dr. Aseem Shukla, the foundation’s co-founder, “our issue is that yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.”
For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the talk of branding and ownership is bewildering.
“Nobody owns yoga,” she said, sitting cross-legged in her studio, Namaste Yoga, and tilting her head as if the notion sketched an impossible yoga position she had never seen. “Yoga is not a religion. It is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of yoga go back further than Hinduism itself.”
Like Dr. Chopra and some religious historians, Ms. Desmond believes that yoga originated in the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium B.C., long before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been written between the fifth and second centuries B.C.
The effort to “take back” yoga began quietly enough, with a scholarly essay posted in January on the Web site of the Hindu American Foundation, a Minneapolis-based group that promotes human rights for Hindu minorities worldwide. The essay lamented a perceived snub in modern yoga culture, saying that yoga magazines and studios had assiduously decoupled the practice “from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity.”
Dr. Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the On Faith blog of The Washington Post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of “overt intellectual property theft,” made possible by generations of Hindu yoga teachers who had “offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism.”
That drew the attention of Dr. Chopra, an Indian-American who has done much to popularize Indian traditions like alternative medicine and yoga. He posted a reply saying that Hinduism was too “tribal” and “self-enclosed” to claim ownership of yoga.
The fight went viral — or as viral as things can get in a narrow Web corridor frequented by yoga enthusiasts, Hindu Americans and religion scholars.
Loriliai Biernacki, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, said the debate had raised important issues about a spectrum of Hindu concepts permeating American culture, including meditation, belief in karma and reincarnation, and even cremation.
“All these ideas are Hindu in origin, and they are spreading,” she said. “But they are doing it in a way that leaves behind the proper name, the box that classifies them as ‘Hinduism.’ ”
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-eminent voice for the country’s two million Hindus, said Diana L. Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-Americans’ interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as “the first major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity,” she said.
Dr. Shukla said reaction to the yoga campaign had far exceeded his expectations.
“We started this, really, for our kids,” said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation Indian-American. “When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, ‘Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.’ They say, ‘What caste are you?’ Or ‘Do you pray to a monkey god?’ Because that’s all Americans know about Hinduism.”
With its tiny budget, the foundation has pressed its campaign largely by generating buzz through letters and Web postings to academic journals and yoga magazines. The September issue of Yoga Journal, which has the largest circulation in the field, alluded to the campaign, if fleetingly, in an article calling yoga’s “true history a mystery.”
The effort has been received most favorably by Indian-American community leaders like Dr. Uma V. Mysorekar, the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, Queens, which helps groups across the country build temples.
A naturalized immigrant, she said Take Back Yoga represented a coming-of-age for Indians in the United States. “My generation was too busy establishing itself in business and the professions,” she said. “Now, the second and third generation is looking around and finding its voice, saying, ‘Our civilization has made contributions to the world, and these should be acknowledged.’ ”
In the basement of the society’s Ganesha Temple, an hourlong yoga class ended one recent Sunday morning with a long exhalation of the sacred syllable “om.” Via the lung power of 60 students, it sounded as deeply as a blast from the organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
After the session, which began and concluded with Hindu prayers, many students said they were practicing Hindus and in complete sympathy with the yoga campaign.
Not all were, though. Shweta Parmar, 35, a community organizer and project director for a health and meditation group, said she had grown up in a Hindu household. “Yoga is part of the tradition I come from,” she said.
But is yoga specifically Hindu? She paused to ponder. “My parents are Hindu,” she said. But in matters of yoga, “I don’t use that term.”
A’s for Good Behavior
A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.
But after poring over four years of data comparing semester grades with end-of-the-year test scores on state subject exams, the teachers at Ellis began to question whether they really knew who the smartest students were.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A’s and B’s in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C’s, D’s and even F’s — students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school — did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
Some of the discrepancy between grades and test scores could be explained by test anxiety — that some students have trouble showing what they know in a standardized, timed environment. And some teachers simply may have done a poor job teaching what the standardized exam tested. But Austin’s school superintendent, David Krenz, and the principal at Ellis, Katie Berglund, said the disconnect between semester grades and end-of-the-year exams was too large and persistent to be the result of such factors.
“Over time, we began to realize that many teachers had been grading kids for compliance — not for mastering the course material,” Ms. Berglund said. “A portion of our A and B students were not the ones who were gaining the most knowledge but the ones who had learned to do school the best.”
Last fall, over protests from parents of some of the above-average students, the eighth-grade math teachers at Ellis tried a new, standards-based grading system, and this fall the new system is being used by the entire middle school and in high school for ninth graders.
As test scores fast become the single and most powerful measurement by which educational outcomes are being judged, more schools might find themselves engaged in what has become a pivotal debate: Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?
For Sandra Doebert, a superintendent who oversees a high school with 1,500 school students in Lemont, Ill., a middle-class suburb southwest of Chicago, the answer is clear. “In this age of data and with so much information available to us we can no longer confuse how students act with what they know.” She, too, is revamping the grading policy so that grades reflect subject mastery, not compliance.
At the urging of President Obama, more high schools are making “college readiness” a goal. The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared. Federal data shows that fewer than 60 percent of students graduate from four-year colleges in six years. Among students at a community college, only one in three earns a degree. Recently released data from ACT shows that only 24 percent of high school seniors knew enough in four subjects — math, reading, science and English — to do college-level work.
There are no national statistics about the number of schools shifting to standards-based grading. But the idea has been around for a while, and Ken O’Connor, a former Canadian high school teacher turned grading consultant, said that more schools have been adopting the approach. It’s an inevitable extension, he says, of standards-based learning.
“Schools are finally realizing if you don’t have standards-based grading you really do not have a standards-based education,” said Mr. O’Connor, author of “A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades.” “We are focused not on exposure to content and activities for their own sake but on outputs” — what students can show they’ve learned.
When parents of students at Ellis Middle School look over their children’s report cards, they will find a so-called “knowledge grade,” which will be calculated by averaging the scores on end-of-unit tests. (Those tests can be retaken any time during the semester so long as a student has completed all homework; remedial classes that re-teach skills will be offered all year.) Homework is now considered practice for tests. Assignments that are half done, handed in late or missing all together will be noted, but will not hurt a student’s grade. Nor will showing up late for class, forgetting to bring your pencil, failing to raise your hand before shouting out an answer or forgetting to bring in a permission slip for the class trip — infractions that had previously caused Ellis students’ grades to suffer.
(In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship. )
Some parents welcome the change. Nitaya Jandragholica says her son Clyde, an eighth grader at Ellis, finds the new grading plan more equitable. “He saw that teachers had favorites. Kids — even ones that were not that smart — could get good grades if the teacher likes them,” Ms. Jandragholica says. The principal, Ms. Berglund, says that some students’ grades have gone up and some have gone down but that she’s confident — and has the data to prove it — that their grades are more accurately reflecting their knowledge, “not whether or not they brought in a box of Kleenex for the classroom,” a factor that had influenced grades at Ellis in the past.
After a high-performing public school district in Potsdam, N.Y., began changing its grading formula, 175 parents and community members — many of them professors from local universities — signed a petition in protest. Carolyn Stone, an adjunct professor of literacy at SUNY Potsdam and a mother of a Potsdam high school freshman, was one of the protesters. She says the new policy, which makes daily homework, even when it is handed in late, account for only 10 percent of the grade, encourages laziness. “Does the old system reward compliance? Yes,” she said. “Do those who fit in the box of school do better? Yes. But to revamp the policy in a way that could be of detriment to the kids who do well is not the answer.” In the real world, she points out, attitude counts.
But Mr. Krenz, the superintendent in Austin, Minn., said that parents — as well as kids — would be the winners. Conversations between parents and teachers can now focus on what students need to learn, rather than classroom attitude or missing homework. “Before we started this, a teacher could complain to a parent that their child slumps in the back of the classroom and doesn’t bring a pencil,” he said. “Now the conversation is about the fact that the child doesn’t know how to calculate slope, and we can put our heads together — parents and teachers and administrator — to figure out how to help that child obtain that skill.”
The superintendent in Potsdam, Patrick Brady, who has been rolling out a revamped grading system this fall in his 1,450-student district, said it would allow teachers to recognize academic strengths where they often are not discovered — among minority students, or students from poorer families, or boys — subgroups whose members may be unable or unwilling to fit in easily to the culture of school.
“We are getting rid of grade fog,” Mr. Brady said. “We need to stop overlooking kids who can do the work and falsely inflate grades of kids who can’t but who look good. We think this will be good for everyone.”
Junking Junk Food
Earlier this month, Sarah Palin showed up in Bucks County, Pa., with “dozens and dozens” of cookies, suggesting that the state’s schoolchildren risked losing the right to the occasional classroom treat because of a high-minded anti-sugar edict from the board of education. Pretty much everything about the setup was wrong. Pennsylvania wasn’t, as Palin tweeted, in the midst of a “school cookie ban” debate. And the school she turned into a photo op wouldn’t have been subject to such a ban had one existed; it wasn’t a public school but a private Christian academy. And while Palin might have been seizing an opportunity to “intro kids 2 beauty of laissez-faire,” she wasn’t just visiting with schoolchildren but was delivering a paid speech at a fund-raiser.
Still, however shaky its factual foundations, Palin’s highly mediatized cookie showdown was a big rhetorical win. With her unerring feel for the message that travels straight to the American gut, she had come up with new and vivid imagery to make the case that the Obama “nanny state” is, essentially, snatching cookies — i.e., the pursuit of happiness — from the mouths of babes. Suddenly, Pennsylvania’s suggestion that schools encourage alternatives to high-sugar sweets became an assault on the American way of life. On freedom and simple pleasures. On wholesome childhood delights and, of course, the integrity of the family.
Glenn Beck, too, has found a winning formula in mocking government efforts to lead Americans to live less fattening lives. His compendium of outrage on the topic waxes long — it includes reports of government health inspectors shutting down a 7-year-old’s lemonade stand, for example — and his argument, like Palin’s, is clear: the “choice architects” of the Obama administration, he says, believe “you’re incapable of making decisions. . . . Left to your own devices, you’re going to eat too much, you’re going to be a big fat fatty.”
At a time when more than two-thirds of American adults are indeed fat (overweight or obese) and 17 percent of children and adolescents are obese, declaring war on unhealthful eating, as the Obama administration has done to an unprecedented extent, could be fraught with political liability. Yet the administration has essentially tackled the problem as if it were a political no-brainer. Teaching Americans, and children in particular, healthier eating habits seemed so commonsensical a venture, so wholesome and safe, that Michelle Obama chose it for her apolitical personal project as first lady. She has succeeded in enlisting some bipartisan support, and some much-hyped cooperation from the food industry. But now, with antigovernment sentiment resurgent, the cookies are pushing back, like the return of the repressed. And as any homeowner who has ever been advised to bake cookies before showing a house for sale knows, their influence is irrational but real.
For in waging war on fat and sugar, what the administration is doing is taking on central aspects of the American lifestyle. Eating too much, indiscriminately, anywhere, at any time, in response to any and all stimuli, is as central to our freewheeling, mavericky way of being as car cupholders and drive-throughs. You can’t change specific eating behavior without addressing that way of life — without changing our culture of food. You need to present healthful eating as a new, desirable, freely chosen expression of the American way.
Perhaps the most successful government effort to regulate what and how much Americans consume — the food rationing programs of World War II — recognized this political-cultural-emotional scheme. Needing a number of foods, meat in particular, for the boys overseas, the government realized that it could successfully spread its message of “eat differently” only if it fought on two fronts: the nutritional and the psychological. And so it pursued a two-pronged campaign, with the Food and Nutrition Board handling the nutrition, and the psychology tasked to the Committee on Food Habits, led by the anthropologist Margaret Mead and charged by the National Research Council with “mobilizing anthropological and psychological insights as they bear upon the whole problem of changing food habits in order to raise the nutritional status of the people of the United States.” Eating the way the government wanted you to eat — healthfully and with a mind to greater public welfare — was a way of displaying patriotism, adding to the war effort.
After the war, however, the work of the Committee on Food Habits was discontinued. But the government kept disseminating nutritional advice, with the departments of agriculture and health and human services issuing nutritional guidelines that, in recent decades, have been revised every five years to reflect new and evolving scientific developments. There has, however, been no concerted parallel attempt to create more pointed and sophisticated approaches to changing how Americans think and feel about food. So we ended up with a wealth of knowledge about best nutritional practices but no cultural change to back it up.
And cultural change is what offers the best hope for transforming how and what Americans eat. As noted by David Kessler, the former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner and author of the 2009 book “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,” it was a shift in cultural attitudes, not laws or regulations, that led Americans to quit smoking. In the space of a generation, he says, cigarettes stopped being portrayed as “sexy and cool” and started to be seen as “a terribly disgusting, addictive product.” Because of the unique emotional power of food, it’s hard, if not impossible, to similarly stigmatize unhealthful eating. But it’s not inconceivable, Kessler says, that social norms could change: that huge portions, or eating processed foods loaded with sugar, salt and fat, for example, could come to be seen as socially unacceptable.
The task is huge — and not just because of the predictable resistance there would be from the food industry. Largely, it’s a question, Kessler says, of breaking old cycles of association: melt-in-the-mouth baked goods with home-safe happiness, for example, or fries with fulfillment — and replacing them with a new circuitry in which, somehow, eating healthfully is self-reinforcing. Can Michelle Obama make field greens and strawberries as comforting, satisfying, and heartwarmingly American as apple pie? She has her work cut out for her.
Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea
The comments are... interesting, especially the one whining that we shouldn't "have to go to Holland" to find engineers to deal with this problem. Well, sure, we've got great engineers in this country - but over in Holland they've been dealing with this the past thousand years! Duh.
In this section of the Larchmont neighborhood, built in a sharp “u” around a bay off the Lafayette River, residents pay close attention to the lunar calendar, much as other suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of commuter traffic.
If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.
For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.
As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.
But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.
Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.
Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.
When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding was an occasional hazard.
“Last month,” she said recently, “there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive.”
Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem, and last summer it broke ground on a project to raise the street around the “u” by 18 inches and to readjust the angle of the storm drains so that when the river rises, the water does not back up into the street. The city will also turn a park at the edge of the river back into wetlands — it is now too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The cost for the work on this one short stretch is $1.25 million.
The expensive reclamation project is popular in Larchmont, but it is already drawing critics who argue that cities just cannot handle flooding in such a one-off fashion. To William Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local conservation group, the project is well meaning but absurd. Mr. Stiles points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has already spent $144,000 in recent years to raise each of six houses on the block.
At this pace of spending, he argues, there is no way taxpayers will recoup their investment.
“If sea level is a constant, your coastal infrastructure is your most valuable real estate, and it makes sense to invest in it,” Mr. Stiles said, “but with sea level rising, it becomes a money pit.”
Many Norfolk residents hope their problems will serve as a warning.
“We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”
Politics aside, the city of Norfolk is tackling the sea-rise problem head on. In August, the Public Works Department briefed the City Council on the seriousness of the situation, and Mayor Paul D. Fraim has acknowledged that if the sea continues rising, the city might actually have to create “retreat” zones.
Kristen Lentz, the acting director of public works, prefers to think of these contingency plans as new zoning opportunities.
“If we plan land use in a way that understands certain areas are prone to flooding,” Ms. Lentz said, “we can put parks in those areas. It would make the areas adjacent to the coast available to more people. It could be a win-win for the environment and community at large and makes smart use of our coastline.”
Ms. Lentz believes that if Norfolk can manage the flooding well, it will have a first-mover advantage and be able to market its expertise to other communities as they face similar problems.
But she also acknowledges that for the businesses and homes entrenched on the coast, such a step could be costly, and that the city has no money yet to pay them to move.
In the short run, the city’s goal is just to pick its flood-mitigation projects more strategically. “We need to look broadly and not just act piecemeal,” Ms. Lentz said, referring to Larchmont.
To this end, Norfolk has hired the Dutch firm Fugro to evaluate options like inflatable dams and storm-surge floodgates at the entrances to waterways.
But to judge by the strong preference in Larchmont for action at any cost, it may not be easy for the city to choose which neighborhoods might be passed over for projects.
Neighborhood residents lobbied hard for the 18-inch lifting of their roadway, even though they know it will offer not much protection from storms, which are also becoming more frequent and fearsome. Many say that housing values in the neighborhood have plummeted and that this is the only way to stabilize them.
Others like Mr. Schultz support the construction, even though they think the results will be very temporary indeed.
“The fact is that there is not enough engineering to go around to mitigate the rising sea,” he said. “For us, it is the bitter reality of trying to live in a world that is getting warmer and wetter.”
The very high levels of vitamin D that are often recommended by doctors and testing laboratories — and can be achieved only by taking supplements — are unnecessary and could be harmful, an expert committee says. It also concludes that calcium supplements are not needed.
The group said most people have adequate amounts of vitamin D in their blood supplied by their diets and natural sources like sunshine, the committee says in a report that is to be released on Tuesday.
“For most people, taking extra calcium and vitamin D supplements is not indicated,” said Dr. Clifford J. Rosen, a member of the panel and an osteoporosis expert at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute.
Dr. J. Christopher Gallagher, director of the bone metabolism unit at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Neb., agreed, adding, “The onus is on the people who propose extra calcium and vitamin D to show it is safe before they push it on people.”
Over the past few years, the idea that nearly everyone needs extra calcium and vitamin D — especially vitamin D — has swept the nation.
With calcium, adolescent girls may be the only group that is getting too little, the panel found. Older women, on the other hand, may take too much, putting themselves at risk for kidney stones. And there is evidence that excess calcium can increase the risk of heart disease, the group wrote.
As for vitamin D, some prominent doctors have said that most people need supplements or they will be at increased risk for a wide variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer and autoimmune diseases.
And these days more and more people know their vitamin D levels because they are being tested for it as part of routine physical exams.
“The number of vitamin D tests has exploded,” said Dennis Black, a reviewer of the report who is a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.
At the same time, vitamin D sales have soared, growing faster than those of any supplement, according to The Nutrition Business Journal. Sales rose 82 percent from 2008 to 2009, reaching $430 million. “Everyone was hoping vitamin D would be kind of a panacea,” Dr. Black said. The report, he added, might quell the craze.
“I think this will have an impact on a lot of primary care providers,” he said.
The 14-member expert committee was convened by the Institute of Medicine, an independent nonprofit scientific body, at the request of the United States and Canadian governments. It was asked to examine the available data — nearly 1,000 publications — to determine how much vitamin D and calcium people were getting, how much was needed for optimal health and how much was too much.
The two nutrients work together for bone health.
Bone health, though, is only one of the benefits that have been attributed to vitamin D, and there is not enough good evidence to support most other claims, the committee said.
Some labs have started reporting levels of less than 30 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood as a deficiency. With that as a standard, 80 percent of the population would be deemed deficient of vitamin D, Dr. Rosen said. Most people need to take supplements to reach levels above 30 nanograms per milliliter, he added.
But, the committee concluded, a level of 20 to 30 nanograms is all that is needed for bone health, and nearly everyone is in that range.
Vitamin D is being added to more and more foods, said Paul R. Thomas of the Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health. Not only is it in orange juice and milk, but more is being added to breakfast cereals, and it now can be found in very high doses in supplement pills. Most vitamin D pills, he said, used to contain no more than 1,000 international units of it. Now it is easy to find pills, even in places like Wal-Mart, with 5,000 international units. The committee, though, said people need only 600 international units a day.
To assess the amounts of vitamin D and calcium people are getting, the panel looked at national data on diets. Most people, they concluded, get enough calcium from the foods they eat, about 1,000 milligrams a day for most adults (1,200 for women ages 51 to 70).
Vitamin D is more complicated, the group said. In general, most people are not getting enough vitamin D from their diets, but they have enough of the vitamin in their blood, probably because they are also making it naturally after being out in the sun and storing it in their bodies.
The American Society for Bone and Mineral Research and other groups applauded the report. It is “a very balanced set of recommendations,” said Dr. Sundeep Khosla, a Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the society’s president.
But Andrew Shao, an executive vice president at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group, said the panel was being overly cautious, especially in its recommendations about vitamin D. He said there was no convincing evidence that people were being harmed by taking supplements, and he said higher levels of vitamin D, in particular, could be beneficial.
Such claims “are not supported by the available evidence,” the committee wrote. They were based on studies that observed populations and concluded that people with lower levels of the vitamin had more of various diseases. Such studies have been misleading and most scientists agree that they cannot determine cause and effect.
It is not clear how or why the claims for high vitamin D levels started, medical experts say. First there were two studies, which turned out to be incorrect, that said people needed 30 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood, the upper end of what the committee says is a normal range. They were followed by articles and claims and books saying much higher levels — 40 to 50 nanograms or even higher — were needed.
After reviewing the data, the committee concluded that the evidence for the benefits of high levels of vitamin D was “inconsistent and/or conflicting and did not demonstrate causality.”
Evidence also suggests that high levels of vitamin D can increase the risks for fractures and the overall death rate and can raise the risk for other diseases. While those studies are not conclusive, any risk looms large when there is no demonstrable benefit. Those hints of risk are “challenging the concept that ‘more is better,’ ” the committee wrote.
That is what surprised Dr. Black. “We thought that probably higher is better,” he said.
He has changed his mind, and expects others will too: “I think this report will make people more cautious.”
Apparently, Narcisstic Personality Disorder is being removed from the DSM
Narcissists, much to the surprise of many experts, are in the process of becoming an endangered species.
Not that they face imminent extinction — it’s a fate much worse than that. They will still be around, but they will be ignored.
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition.
Narcissistic personality disorder is the most well-known of the five, and its absence has caused the most stir in professional circles.
Most nonprofessionals have a pretty good sense of what narcissism means, but the formal definition is more precise than the dictionary meaning of the term.
Our everyday picture of a narcissist is that of someone who is very self-involved — the conversation is always about them. While this characterization does apply to people with narcissistic personality disorder, it is too broad. There are many people who are completely self-absorbed who would not qualify for a diagnosis of N.P.D.
The central requirement for N.P.D. is a special kind of self-absorption: a grandiose sense of self, a serious miscalculation of one’s abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness. It is the difference between two high school baseball players of moderate ability: one is absolutely convinced he’ll be a major-league player, the other is hoping for a college scholarship.
Of course, it would be premature to call the major-league hopeful a narcissist at such an early age, but imagine that same kind of unstoppable, unrealistic attitude 10 or 20 years later.
The second requirement for N.P.D.: since the narcissist is so convinced of his high station (most are men), he automatically expects that others will recognize his superior qualities and will tell him so. This is often referred to as “mirroring.” It’s not enough that he knows he’s great. Others must confirm it as well, and they must do so in the spirit of “vote early, and vote often.”
Finally, the narcissist, who longs for the approval and admiration of others, is often clueless about how things look from someone else’s perspective. Narcissists are very sensitive to being overlooked or slighted in the smallest fashion, but they often fail to recognize when they are doing it to others.
Most of us would agree that this is an easily recognizable profile, and it is a puzzle why the manual’s committee on personality disorders has decided to throw N.P.D. off the bus. Many experts in the field are not happy about it.
Actually, they aren’t happy about the elimination of the other four disorders either, and they’re not shy about saying so.
One of the sharpest critics of the DSM committee on personality disorders is a Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Gunderson, an old lion in the field of personality disorders and the person who led the personality disorders committee for the current manual.
Asked what he thought about the elimination of narcissistic personality disorder, he said it showed how “unenlightened” the personality disorders committee is.
“They have little appreciation for the damage they could be doing.” He said the diagnosis is important in terms of organizing and planning treatment.
“It’s draconian,” he said of the decision, “and the first of its kind, I think, that half of a group of disorders are eliminated by committee.”
He also blamed a so-called dimensional approach, which is a method of diagnosing personality disorders that is new to the DSM. It consists of making an overall, general diagnosis of personality disorder for a given patient, and then selecting particular traits from a long list in order to best describe that specific patient.
This is in contrast to the prototype approach that has been used for the past 30 years: the narcissistic syndrome is defined by a cluster of related traits, and the clinician matches patients to that profile.
The dimensional approach has the appeal of ordering à la carte — you get what you want, no more and no less. But it is precisely because of this narrow focus that it has never gained much traction with clinicians.
It is one thing to call someone a neat and careful dresser. It is another to call that person a dandy, or a clotheshorse, or a boulevardier. Each of these terms has slightly different meanings and conjures up a type.
And clinicians like types. The idea of replacing the prototypic diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with a dimensional diagnosis like “personality disorder with narcissistic and manipulative traits” just doesn’t cut it.
Jonathan Shedler, a psychologist at the University of Colorado Medical School, said: “Clinicians are accustomed to thinking in terms of syndromes, not deconstructed trait ratings. Researchers think in terms of variables, and there’s just a huge schism.” He said the committee was stacked “with a lot of academic researchers who really don’t do a lot of clinical work. We’re seeing yet another manifestation of what’s called in psychology the science-practice schism.”
Schism is probably not an overstatement. For 30 years the DSM has been the undisputed standard that clinicians consult when diagnosing mental disorders. When a new diagnosis is introduced, or an established diagnosis is substantially modified or deleted, it is not a small deal. As Dr. Gunderson said, it will affect the way professionals think about and treat patients.
Given the stakes, the blow-back from experts in personality disorders should come as no surprise.
Dr. Gunderson has written a letter co-signed by other clinical and research leaders to the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association and the task force that governs DSM-5. And Dr. Shedler and seven colleagues published an editorial in the September issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. In the relatively small world of mental health diagnostics, this is most certainly a battle worth watching.
Right now, this much seems clear: It is way too early for the narcissists to give up their seat on the bus.
For the Dishwasher’s Sake, Go Easy on the Detergent
I’VE been writing on some weighty topics lately — too little money, too many choices, too few jobs. It’s time, I decided, to move on to some questions that haunt me almost every day.
How much soap should I put in my washing machine and dishwasher?
Do I need to do more for my dryer than clean that little pull-out lint catcher?
Should I rinse my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher?
Most of us learned how to use a washing machine or dishwasher in our parents’ house many years ago and haven’t really changed our methods, even though most appliances have evolved radically since then. We rarely, if ever, read the manuals when we buy a new one or glance through the instructions on the box of detergent or bottle of dishwashing liquid.
But because we’re probably using these appliances incorrectly, our dishes and clothes may not be coming out as clean as they could be. And we may also be damaging the machines.
Let me start with soap. The No. 1 sin, according to repair people and appliance experts, seems to be adding too much soap to washing machines or dishwashers.
“Nobody thinks they use too much soap,” said Vernon Schmidt, who has been a repairman for almost 35 years and is the author of a self-published book, “Appliance Handbook for Women: Simple Enough Even a Man Can Understand.” But apparently most of us are in denial.
Washing machines and dishwashers are made to use far less water now than older models and, therefore, need less soap. And detergents have also become increasingly concentrated. So a little goes a long way.
“Most people use 10 to 15 times the amount of soap they need, and they’re pouring money down the drain,” Mr. Schmidt said.
Following the instructions on the soap container is a good first step. Christina Saunders, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, which makes Tide, Cheer, Gain and other laundry detergents, said researchers at the company did thousands of loads of laundry to determine the right amount of soap needed.
She said the caps were changed on liquid detergent containers a few years ago to make the lines specifying amount of soap needed for different size loads easier to see.
Mr. Schmidt, however, argues that depending on how hard or soft your water is, one-eighth to one-half of what is usually recommended should be adequate.
Too much detergent can make your clothes stiff and shorten the life of your machine. An excess of soap can also cause a buildup of mold and mildew, said Jill Notini, a spokeswoman for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, a trade group.
With high-efficiency machines — which includes all front-loading machines and any top loader that specifically states that it’s high efficiency — it’s a good idea to use detergents specifically made for them, she said. The detergents usually have H.E. on the front of the container. But don’t expect to see a lot of soap action.
“If people see suds, they think their clothes are getting clean, but that’s wrong — it means you’re using a lot of extra detergent,” Ms. Notini said.
Here is Mr. Schmidt’s test to determine if you’re oversoaping. Take four to six clean bath towels, put them in your front-loading washing machine (one towel for a top loader). Don’t add any detergent or fabric softener. Switch to the hot water setting and medium wash and run it for about five minutes.
Check for soap suds. If you don’t see any suds right away, turn off the machine and see if there is any soapy residue. If you see suds or residue, it is soap coming out of your clothes from the last wash.
“I’ve had customers that had to run their towels through as many as eight times to get the soap out,” Mr. Schmidt said, who lives in Indiana. He offers other handy advice on his Web site, refrigdoc.com.
Too much soap is also a problem in dishwashers and can cause dishes and glasses to look filmy. Again, check the detergent container for recommended amounts — you definitely don’t have to fill up the entire soap container in the dishwasher.
Also, if your plastic items come out still wet, that doesn’t mean your dishwasher is not doing its job. Most dishwashers today emit less heat than the older models, so plastic doesn’t dry completely.
Loading the dishwasher right will also get your dishes cleaner. When I was growing up, apparently only my mother knew the right way to load. But since my mother can’t get to all your houses, Consumer Reports offers these much-needed tips on its Home and Garden blog. (Please don’t e-mail me if you disagree about these suggestions — like religion and politics, we all have our own views on this matter.)
¶Load large items at the sides and back of the dishwasher so that they don’t block water and detergent from reaching other dishes.
¶Place the dirtier side of the dishes toward the center of the machine for more exposure to spray.
¶Load silverware in the individual silverware slots most dishwashers now include. If you have an open basket, mix forks, spoons and knives to prevent them from sticking together.
Also, remove baked on food and large chunks, but for the most part, everyone I spoke to said prerinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher was not only unnecessary, it wasted thousands of gallons of water and could actually result in dirtier dishes.
“The soap needs something to work against to get the dishes clean,” said Lou Manganiello, who owns Household Appliance Service in Hawthorne, N.Y., and has been doing repairs for 23 years. For full disclosure, he has also ably repaired my appliances from time to time.
Now, on to dryers. I don’t happen to use those fabric softener sheets, but if you do, practice restraint, Mr. Manganiello said.
On the theory that if one is good, five must be better, people throw in a bunch of the sheets. Those liquefy when the dryer gets hot and can gum up the dyer, becoming “almost like tar and feathers,” Mr. Manganiello said.
Also, clean the lint below the removable filter. I bought an item at my local hardware store that looks like a bottle brush, but is longer, denser and has a kind of thin nose. It reaches down and removes lint you can’t get to otherwise.
And think about cleaning lint off the dryer where it vents outdoors.
Of course, the best way to extend the life of your dryer is to use it less often by hanging out your laundry on a clothesline when the sun is shining.
One last bit of advice on an appliance — your oven. Use the self-cleaning mode more than once a year — otherwise, so many food particles have built up that when they burn off, smoke will billow throughout your entire kitchen. But don’t clean right before a big holiday dinner, Mr. Schmidt advised.
That’s because the oven heats so high during cleaning that any weak part will give.
“If it’s ever going to fail, it will then,” he said. “Every holiday we get swamped with calls.”
Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul
Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.
But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.
The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.
That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
In June, it even prompted the Indian government to begin making digital copies of ancient drawings showing the provenance of more than 4,000 yoga poses, to discourage further claims by entrepreneurs like Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor to the stars who is based in Los Angeles. Mr. Choudhury nettled Indian officials in 2007 when he copyrighted his personal style of 26 yoga poses as “Bikram Yoga.”
Organizers of the Take Back Yoga effort point out that the philosophy of yoga was first described in Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet, because the religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith of “castes, cows and curry,” they say, most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless, spiritual “Indian wisdom.”
“In a way,” said Dr. Aseem Shukla, the foundation’s co-founder, “our issue is that yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.”
For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the talk of branding and ownership is bewildering.
“Nobody owns yoga,” she said, sitting cross-legged in her studio, Namaste Yoga, and tilting her head as if the notion sketched an impossible yoga position she had never seen. “Yoga is not a religion. It is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of yoga go back further than Hinduism itself.”
Like Dr. Chopra and some religious historians, Ms. Desmond believes that yoga originated in the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium B.C., long before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been written between the fifth and second centuries B.C.
The effort to “take back” yoga began quietly enough, with a scholarly essay posted in January on the Web site of the Hindu American Foundation, a Minneapolis-based group that promotes human rights for Hindu minorities worldwide. The essay lamented a perceived snub in modern yoga culture, saying that yoga magazines and studios had assiduously decoupled the practice “from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity.”
Dr. Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the On Faith blog of The Washington Post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of “overt intellectual property theft,” made possible by generations of Hindu yoga teachers who had “offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism.”
That drew the attention of Dr. Chopra, an Indian-American who has done much to popularize Indian traditions like alternative medicine and yoga. He posted a reply saying that Hinduism was too “tribal” and “self-enclosed” to claim ownership of yoga.
The fight went viral — or as viral as things can get in a narrow Web corridor frequented by yoga enthusiasts, Hindu Americans and religion scholars.
Loriliai Biernacki, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, said the debate had raised important issues about a spectrum of Hindu concepts permeating American culture, including meditation, belief in karma and reincarnation, and even cremation.
“All these ideas are Hindu in origin, and they are spreading,” she said. “But they are doing it in a way that leaves behind the proper name, the box that classifies them as ‘Hinduism.’ ”
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-eminent voice for the country’s two million Hindus, said Diana L. Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-Americans’ interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as “the first major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity,” she said.
Dr. Shukla said reaction to the yoga campaign had far exceeded his expectations.
“We started this, really, for our kids,” said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation Indian-American. “When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, ‘Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.’ They say, ‘What caste are you?’ Or ‘Do you pray to a monkey god?’ Because that’s all Americans know about Hinduism.”
With its tiny budget, the foundation has pressed its campaign largely by generating buzz through letters and Web postings to academic journals and yoga magazines. The September issue of Yoga Journal, which has the largest circulation in the field, alluded to the campaign, if fleetingly, in an article calling yoga’s “true history a mystery.”
The effort has been received most favorably by Indian-American community leaders like Dr. Uma V. Mysorekar, the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, Queens, which helps groups across the country build temples.
A naturalized immigrant, she said Take Back Yoga represented a coming-of-age for Indians in the United States. “My generation was too busy establishing itself in business and the professions,” she said. “Now, the second and third generation is looking around and finding its voice, saying, ‘Our civilization has made contributions to the world, and these should be acknowledged.’ ”
In the basement of the society’s Ganesha Temple, an hourlong yoga class ended one recent Sunday morning with a long exhalation of the sacred syllable “om.” Via the lung power of 60 students, it sounded as deeply as a blast from the organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
After the session, which began and concluded with Hindu prayers, many students said they were practicing Hindus and in complete sympathy with the yoga campaign.
Not all were, though. Shweta Parmar, 35, a community organizer and project director for a health and meditation group, said she had grown up in a Hindu household. “Yoga is part of the tradition I come from,” she said.
But is yoga specifically Hindu? She paused to ponder. “My parents are Hindu,” she said. But in matters of yoga, “I don’t use that term.”
A’s for Good Behavior
A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.
But after poring over four years of data comparing semester grades with end-of-the-year test scores on state subject exams, the teachers at Ellis began to question whether they really knew who the smartest students were.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A’s and B’s in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C’s, D’s and even F’s — students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school — did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
Some of the discrepancy between grades and test scores could be explained by test anxiety — that some students have trouble showing what they know in a standardized, timed environment. And some teachers simply may have done a poor job teaching what the standardized exam tested. But Austin’s school superintendent, David Krenz, and the principal at Ellis, Katie Berglund, said the disconnect between semester grades and end-of-the-year exams was too large and persistent to be the result of such factors.
“Over time, we began to realize that many teachers had been grading kids for compliance — not for mastering the course material,” Ms. Berglund said. “A portion of our A and B students were not the ones who were gaining the most knowledge but the ones who had learned to do school the best.”
Last fall, over protests from parents of some of the above-average students, the eighth-grade math teachers at Ellis tried a new, standards-based grading system, and this fall the new system is being used by the entire middle school and in high school for ninth graders.
As test scores fast become the single and most powerful measurement by which educational outcomes are being judged, more schools might find themselves engaged in what has become a pivotal debate: Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?
For Sandra Doebert, a superintendent who oversees a high school with 1,500 school students in Lemont, Ill., a middle-class suburb southwest of Chicago, the answer is clear. “In this age of data and with so much information available to us we can no longer confuse how students act with what they know.” She, too, is revamping the grading policy so that grades reflect subject mastery, not compliance.
At the urging of President Obama, more high schools are making “college readiness” a goal. The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared. Federal data shows that fewer than 60 percent of students graduate from four-year colleges in six years. Among students at a community college, only one in three earns a degree. Recently released data from ACT shows that only 24 percent of high school seniors knew enough in four subjects — math, reading, science and English — to do college-level work.
There are no national statistics about the number of schools shifting to standards-based grading. But the idea has been around for a while, and Ken O’Connor, a former Canadian high school teacher turned grading consultant, said that more schools have been adopting the approach. It’s an inevitable extension, he says, of standards-based learning.
“Schools are finally realizing if you don’t have standards-based grading you really do not have a standards-based education,” said Mr. O’Connor, author of “A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades.” “We are focused not on exposure to content and activities for their own sake but on outputs” — what students can show they’ve learned.
When parents of students at Ellis Middle School look over their children’s report cards, they will find a so-called “knowledge grade,” which will be calculated by averaging the scores on end-of-unit tests. (Those tests can be retaken any time during the semester so long as a student has completed all homework; remedial classes that re-teach skills will be offered all year.) Homework is now considered practice for tests. Assignments that are half done, handed in late or missing all together will be noted, but will not hurt a student’s grade. Nor will showing up late for class, forgetting to bring your pencil, failing to raise your hand before shouting out an answer or forgetting to bring in a permission slip for the class trip — infractions that had previously caused Ellis students’ grades to suffer.
(In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship. )
Some parents welcome the change. Nitaya Jandragholica says her son Clyde, an eighth grader at Ellis, finds the new grading plan more equitable. “He saw that teachers had favorites. Kids — even ones that were not that smart — could get good grades if the teacher likes them,” Ms. Jandragholica says. The principal, Ms. Berglund, says that some students’ grades have gone up and some have gone down but that she’s confident — and has the data to prove it — that their grades are more accurately reflecting their knowledge, “not whether or not they brought in a box of Kleenex for the classroom,” a factor that had influenced grades at Ellis in the past.
After a high-performing public school district in Potsdam, N.Y., began changing its grading formula, 175 parents and community members — many of them professors from local universities — signed a petition in protest. Carolyn Stone, an adjunct professor of literacy at SUNY Potsdam and a mother of a Potsdam high school freshman, was one of the protesters. She says the new policy, which makes daily homework, even when it is handed in late, account for only 10 percent of the grade, encourages laziness. “Does the old system reward compliance? Yes,” she said. “Do those who fit in the box of school do better? Yes. But to revamp the policy in a way that could be of detriment to the kids who do well is not the answer.” In the real world, she points out, attitude counts.
But Mr. Krenz, the superintendent in Austin, Minn., said that parents — as well as kids — would be the winners. Conversations between parents and teachers can now focus on what students need to learn, rather than classroom attitude or missing homework. “Before we started this, a teacher could complain to a parent that their child slumps in the back of the classroom and doesn’t bring a pencil,” he said. “Now the conversation is about the fact that the child doesn’t know how to calculate slope, and we can put our heads together — parents and teachers and administrator — to figure out how to help that child obtain that skill.”
The superintendent in Potsdam, Patrick Brady, who has been rolling out a revamped grading system this fall in his 1,450-student district, said it would allow teachers to recognize academic strengths where they often are not discovered — among minority students, or students from poorer families, or boys — subgroups whose members may be unable or unwilling to fit in easily to the culture of school.
“We are getting rid of grade fog,” Mr. Brady said. “We need to stop overlooking kids who can do the work and falsely inflate grades of kids who can’t but who look good. We think this will be good for everyone.”
Junking Junk Food
Earlier this month, Sarah Palin showed up in Bucks County, Pa., with “dozens and dozens” of cookies, suggesting that the state’s schoolchildren risked losing the right to the occasional classroom treat because of a high-minded anti-sugar edict from the board of education. Pretty much everything about the setup was wrong. Pennsylvania wasn’t, as Palin tweeted, in the midst of a “school cookie ban” debate. And the school she turned into a photo op wouldn’t have been subject to such a ban had one existed; it wasn’t a public school but a private Christian academy. And while Palin might have been seizing an opportunity to “intro kids 2 beauty of laissez-faire,” she wasn’t just visiting with schoolchildren but was delivering a paid speech at a fund-raiser.
Still, however shaky its factual foundations, Palin’s highly mediatized cookie showdown was a big rhetorical win. With her unerring feel for the message that travels straight to the American gut, she had come up with new and vivid imagery to make the case that the Obama “nanny state” is, essentially, snatching cookies — i.e., the pursuit of happiness — from the mouths of babes. Suddenly, Pennsylvania’s suggestion that schools encourage alternatives to high-sugar sweets became an assault on the American way of life. On freedom and simple pleasures. On wholesome childhood delights and, of course, the integrity of the family.
Glenn Beck, too, has found a winning formula in mocking government efforts to lead Americans to live less fattening lives. His compendium of outrage on the topic waxes long — it includes reports of government health inspectors shutting down a 7-year-old’s lemonade stand, for example — and his argument, like Palin’s, is clear: the “choice architects” of the Obama administration, he says, believe “you’re incapable of making decisions. . . . Left to your own devices, you’re going to eat too much, you’re going to be a big fat fatty.”
At a time when more than two-thirds of American adults are indeed fat (overweight or obese) and 17 percent of children and adolescents are obese, declaring war on unhealthful eating, as the Obama administration has done to an unprecedented extent, could be fraught with political liability. Yet the administration has essentially tackled the problem as if it were a political no-brainer. Teaching Americans, and children in particular, healthier eating habits seemed so commonsensical a venture, so wholesome and safe, that Michelle Obama chose it for her apolitical personal project as first lady. She has succeeded in enlisting some bipartisan support, and some much-hyped cooperation from the food industry. But now, with antigovernment sentiment resurgent, the cookies are pushing back, like the return of the repressed. And as any homeowner who has ever been advised to bake cookies before showing a house for sale knows, their influence is irrational but real.
For in waging war on fat and sugar, what the administration is doing is taking on central aspects of the American lifestyle. Eating too much, indiscriminately, anywhere, at any time, in response to any and all stimuli, is as central to our freewheeling, mavericky way of being as car cupholders and drive-throughs. You can’t change specific eating behavior without addressing that way of life — without changing our culture of food. You need to present healthful eating as a new, desirable, freely chosen expression of the American way.
Perhaps the most successful government effort to regulate what and how much Americans consume — the food rationing programs of World War II — recognized this political-cultural-emotional scheme. Needing a number of foods, meat in particular, for the boys overseas, the government realized that it could successfully spread its message of “eat differently” only if it fought on two fronts: the nutritional and the psychological. And so it pursued a two-pronged campaign, with the Food and Nutrition Board handling the nutrition, and the psychology tasked to the Committee on Food Habits, led by the anthropologist Margaret Mead and charged by the National Research Council with “mobilizing anthropological and psychological insights as they bear upon the whole problem of changing food habits in order to raise the nutritional status of the people of the United States.” Eating the way the government wanted you to eat — healthfully and with a mind to greater public welfare — was a way of displaying patriotism, adding to the war effort.
After the war, however, the work of the Committee on Food Habits was discontinued. But the government kept disseminating nutritional advice, with the departments of agriculture and health and human services issuing nutritional guidelines that, in recent decades, have been revised every five years to reflect new and evolving scientific developments. There has, however, been no concerted parallel attempt to create more pointed and sophisticated approaches to changing how Americans think and feel about food. So we ended up with a wealth of knowledge about best nutritional practices but no cultural change to back it up.
And cultural change is what offers the best hope for transforming how and what Americans eat. As noted by David Kessler, the former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner and author of the 2009 book “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,” it was a shift in cultural attitudes, not laws or regulations, that led Americans to quit smoking. In the space of a generation, he says, cigarettes stopped being portrayed as “sexy and cool” and started to be seen as “a terribly disgusting, addictive product.” Because of the unique emotional power of food, it’s hard, if not impossible, to similarly stigmatize unhealthful eating. But it’s not inconceivable, Kessler says, that social norms could change: that huge portions, or eating processed foods loaded with sugar, salt and fat, for example, could come to be seen as socially unacceptable.
The task is huge — and not just because of the predictable resistance there would be from the food industry. Largely, it’s a question, Kessler says, of breaking old cycles of association: melt-in-the-mouth baked goods with home-safe happiness, for example, or fries with fulfillment — and replacing them with a new circuitry in which, somehow, eating healthfully is self-reinforcing. Can Michelle Obama make field greens and strawberries as comforting, satisfying, and heartwarmingly American as apple pie? She has her work cut out for her.
Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea
The comments are... interesting, especially the one whining that we shouldn't "have to go to Holland" to find engineers to deal with this problem. Well, sure, we've got great engineers in this country - but over in Holland they've been dealing with this the past thousand years! Duh.
In this section of the Larchmont neighborhood, built in a sharp “u” around a bay off the Lafayette River, residents pay close attention to the lunar calendar, much as other suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of commuter traffic.
If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.
For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.
As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.
But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.
Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.
Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.
When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding was an occasional hazard.
“Last month,” she said recently, “there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive.”
Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem, and last summer it broke ground on a project to raise the street around the “u” by 18 inches and to readjust the angle of the storm drains so that when the river rises, the water does not back up into the street. The city will also turn a park at the edge of the river back into wetlands — it is now too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The cost for the work on this one short stretch is $1.25 million.
The expensive reclamation project is popular in Larchmont, but it is already drawing critics who argue that cities just cannot handle flooding in such a one-off fashion. To William Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local conservation group, the project is well meaning but absurd. Mr. Stiles points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has already spent $144,000 in recent years to raise each of six houses on the block.
At this pace of spending, he argues, there is no way taxpayers will recoup their investment.
“If sea level is a constant, your coastal infrastructure is your most valuable real estate, and it makes sense to invest in it,” Mr. Stiles said, “but with sea level rising, it becomes a money pit.”
Many Norfolk residents hope their problems will serve as a warning.
“We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”
Politics aside, the city of Norfolk is tackling the sea-rise problem head on. In August, the Public Works Department briefed the City Council on the seriousness of the situation, and Mayor Paul D. Fraim has acknowledged that if the sea continues rising, the city might actually have to create “retreat” zones.
Kristen Lentz, the acting director of public works, prefers to think of these contingency plans as new zoning opportunities.
“If we plan land use in a way that understands certain areas are prone to flooding,” Ms. Lentz said, “we can put parks in those areas. It would make the areas adjacent to the coast available to more people. It could be a win-win for the environment and community at large and makes smart use of our coastline.”
Ms. Lentz believes that if Norfolk can manage the flooding well, it will have a first-mover advantage and be able to market its expertise to other communities as they face similar problems.
But she also acknowledges that for the businesses and homes entrenched on the coast, such a step could be costly, and that the city has no money yet to pay them to move.
In the short run, the city’s goal is just to pick its flood-mitigation projects more strategically. “We need to look broadly and not just act piecemeal,” Ms. Lentz said, referring to Larchmont.
To this end, Norfolk has hired the Dutch firm Fugro to evaluate options like inflatable dams and storm-surge floodgates at the entrances to waterways.
But to judge by the strong preference in Larchmont for action at any cost, it may not be easy for the city to choose which neighborhoods might be passed over for projects.
Neighborhood residents lobbied hard for the 18-inch lifting of their roadway, even though they know it will offer not much protection from storms, which are also becoming more frequent and fearsome. Many say that housing values in the neighborhood have plummeted and that this is the only way to stabilize them.
Others like Mr. Schultz support the construction, even though they think the results will be very temporary indeed.
“The fact is that there is not enough engineering to go around to mitigate the rising sea,” he said. “For us, it is the bitter reality of trying to live in a world that is getting warmer and wetter.”
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 08:43 pm (UTC)I feel that if you want to grade kids on other traits, such as effort, diligence, etc. that schools should, but they should add those as labeled aspects to the report card. Colleges probably do want to know which kids are hard working. And a kid who both learns the material and is responsible is pretty much ideal. The diligence or homework grade could even be an average grade from all of the classes the student takes for that semester. That way it is clear what the students strengths and weaknesses are.
I think grades should be informative. A student who gets a high grade in math should be expected to know math. One should not necessarily expect that kid to be nice. A student who has a good class participation grade should be expected to be generally able and comfortable to participate in class discussions (there may be individual cases or situations that make the student uncomfortable, but generally).
Then kids can still get that information factored into their overall reports, but now with bonus clarity.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 10:02 pm (UTC)It also comes in different forms. The form we make from sun exposure is more effective and we can't overdose on it. Our body seems capable of handling vast quantities of that form with no ill effects, plus it will shut off vitamin d production when it has made a certain amount and not start again until it wants more. You have to worry about sun burns and skin cancer, but you will not overdose on vitamin d through sun exposure.
Vitamin d supplements are generally synthetic, and you can overdose on them. It can lead to vitaminosis, which causes fatigue and other harmful effects if you get too much. So, you don't want to just chug vitamin d supplements endlessly "just in case" the way you can safely do with vitamin c, where the only harmful effects will be to your finances and your body will just remove the excess vitamin c.
Vitamin d from natural food sources, such as fish oil, seem to be tolerated better than synthetic vitamin d, and it is extremely rare for anyone to overdose on vitamin d from such sources, even though the dosage can get pretty high (people have been dosing kids with cod liver oil for a while now, and that stuff is full of vitamin d).
Whether or not people tend to get too little vitamin d though probably really depends on where you live and how much time you spend outside, and to an extent, how dark your skin is (the darker your skin, the more sun exposure you need to make vitamin d). There are definitely regions of the world where people tend to be low on vitamin d, at least during the winter. And I worry for myself, because I don't go outside much (too much of an energy cost). But I really think we should be teaching people how much sun exposure is a full dose, how much they are likely getting to compensate for not getting that much sun exposure through diet for those who get less than that, and then help them make intelligent decisions of when to supplement and when not to. Supplements during the winter and not during the summer, for example, might make a lot more sense than a daily supplement year round. But it really depends on where you live and what your life style is.