Immunology in Neuroscience Affinity Group

Mission and Goals:

The ultimate goal is to more fully understand the role of the immune system in CNS disease and behavior, and how the immune system can be manipulated to improve disease outcomes. The affinity group is intended to provide a venue to expose to other scientist ongoing and new projects at UCLA in this area, to foster collaborations, and to bring in outside speakers. An eventual goal of the group is to develop multi-investigator and training grants, establish cores, and develop a southern California network. A collateral benefit of this group is that it will provide better training in immunology for students, residents, postdoctoral fellows and faculty at UCLA.

Immunology and neuroscience are both highly complex disciplines, with many subspecialties, and have only occasionally been brought closely together, such as in the study of multiple sclerosis. Yet, the importance of the immune system is becoming increasingly realized in nearly all areas of neuroscience, including stroke, CNS trauma, neurodegenerative and white matter diseases, brain tumors, and neural cell transplantation. Moreover, mounting evidence suggests that the immune system plays roles in autism, schizophrenia, cognition, sleep, circadian rhythms, and the reward system. Thus, several investigators at UCLA have expressed interest in gaining the tools to understand how the immune system impacts the particular processes they study. Because the links between the immune system and many problems in neuroscience are only beginning to be explored, it will be beneficial for scientists to come together and exchange ideas, and develop collaborations.

This group will coordinate with other groups at UCLA, including the Cousins Center, Neural Repair Group, Mental Retardation Research Center, and the Multiple Sclerosis Program, and Centers for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Autism. We will also coordinate and interact with interested scientists at Cedars Sinai. Current plans are for the group to meet twice a month, once as a part of the Neural Repair group, and once separately. The "separate" meetings will be very informal, and may include multiple short talks by investigators or full seminars. We plan to hold one half day event, in which all investigators will be encouraged to display posters, and will also include one invited outside speaker.

Affinity Group Participants:

James Waschek, Group Leader

Suraj Bhat

Anthony Campagnoni

Thomas Carmichael

Marie-Francoise Chesselet

Chris Colwell

Jean de Vellis

Chris Evans

David Glanzman

Fernando Gomez-Pinilla

Ron Harper

Shuxin Hu

Michael Irwin

Dan Kaufman

Linda Liau

Emeran Mayer

Charalabos Pothoulakis

Robert Prins

Andre Shaner

Nancy Sicotte

Jerry Siegel

Daniel Silverman

Michael Sofroniew

Catia Sternini

Bruce Teter

Seema Tiwari-Woodruff

Rhonda Voskuhl

How to Join:

James A. Waschek, PhD
345 NRB
Mail Code: 733222
Phone: 310-825-0547


Use These Tips To Get Rid Of Back Pain

Most of the time, people see doctors for their back pain and then the doctor simply prescribes medication and suggests resting. The following paragraphs contain a number of helpful hints that will enable you to cope better with back discomfort.

Choose a mattress that feels firm enough for your back to avoid pain. It’s well known that soft mattresses are hard on the back. Firm mattresses tend to be better on the back; however, if one is too firm it could also add to back pain. Finding the right mattress for your physical needs may require visits to multiple stores and trying out a number of models.

To understand the severity of back discomfort or injury and avoid making it worse, you should rest your back for one to two days after experiencing pain. If your pain goes away during this time period, then it was most likely a small injury. Contrarily, if it doesn’t get better or continues to hurt more, you’ll want to see a licensed professional to figure out why. Trying to rest away the pain may in fact allow it to worsen by causing the support muscles to further weaken from lack of use.

Do you have back discomfort? Try your best to not twist in any of your daily activity. Certain activities, such as cleaning or lifting something heavy, can injure your back. When you are active, be careful of how you move your spine. Take a break if you start hurting.

Lifting items that are far away is often due to time constraints and laziness. This can be a recurring problem for people who are in a hurry. Avoid straining your back by moving closer to objects before lifting them and follow the proper instructions for safe lifting.

Avoid stress if you have back discomfort, since tensing muscles can make it worse. Learning to relax is key, as it will decrease your chances of experiencing muscle spasms. Make sure that you get enough rest, and place heat onto your back in order to soothe any pain you’re experiencing.

If you are 10 pounds or more overweight, you may want to consider a weight-loss plan. Increased weight, especially around the abdomen, tends to alter the gravity point of your body. Your back has to support more weight, and will end up hurting.

Research has stated that around two-thirds of the population will develop some type of back discomfort. Many people believe that back pain occurs as a result of one event that takes place directly before the pain begins. Usually, it’s many events that contribute to back discomfort.

If you want to relax yourself, release the tension you are holding your muscles in and let your arms and legs be limp while you are laying down. Then, slowly flex and release one muscle at a time. This can bring total relaxation and improve the functioning of neglected muscles.

Maintain good posture. Bad posture tends to put unnecessary strain on the back and spine. If you have to sit a long time at work or for anything else, have a supportive, comfortable chair. Another option is to sit on an exercise ball, which builds strength in your back and almost forces you to use proper posture.

Back pains can keep you from going through your day like you normally would. Use the tips here when you’re having a hard time with your back discomfort, and eventually, you can keep it from ruining your life.


Monday, 12 March 2012

A Review of Ethnography Literature concerned with Medical Education and Obstetrics

Working on context and history the following review attempts to discuss what's there and what's missing - in order that I may find a place for myself in the vast space of Anthropology of Pregnancy...
Creative Commons License now applies to my blog (see link on right hand side for blurb). A quick email/comment in regards to correct and respectful referencing of work always appreciated and discussion always welcome :)

 ‘Now for the sense of ‘context’. Most generally it is a name for a whole cluster of events that recur together – including the required conditions as well as whatever we may pick out as cause and effect.’ (Richards 1936)

    This review of ethnographic and theoretical literature relating to the learning of obstetrics and medicine begins with a discussion of context, or more specifically a theory of contexts. I refer here to the practice of Articulation (Grossberg 1992) – where the construction of one set of relations comes out of another. Ethnography of pregnancy in Chiapas should be revealed as montage, interrelating contexts that result from social theory and cultural practice rubbing against one another (as proposed by Taussig 1992). Wanting to find out about the actual experience of pregnant women must include a focus on the knowledge, power and practices that inhabit their world. ‘Articulations are never simple and singular; they cannot be extracted out of the interlocking context in which they are possible’ (Grossberg 1992). In this way I wish to take account of obstetrical medicine as cultural practice, as it is reflected onto a specific society via the pregnant body. It will become clear from my review of ethnography centred around medical education that medicine as an all-encompassing cultural practice outside of a UK/US context, is an aspect that has been somewhat neglected.

    Grossberg advocates that to understand a practice one must historically and theoretically (re)-construct it context (1992). In doing so such (re)-constructing should inevitably lead to the processes of learning (Lave and Wenger 1991). For this reason I have also included literature that analyses the historical construction of medicine and anatomy, without which a present day context would not exist.  In the course of unpicking existing ethnography of medical learning (or any kind of learning to be in the world) one is instantly presented with multilayered dispositions. Evans (2006) explains these dispositions as an embodied understanding of a particular way of being amongst others. Relating her analysis of social learning and violence to the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) and their theory of legitimate peripheral participation Evans argues for the recognition of emotion in the learning process. In doing so she highlights the importance of the varying and tacit things that contribute to the practice of learning. Echoing Lave and Wenger’s sentiment that learning is a cultural context that is best analysed outside of an institutional context Evans’ discussion in this paper is useful for beginning to think about learning as socially constructed practices.

   A substantial amount of ethnographic work exists in regards to traditional midwifery practice and apprenticeship in Mexico (see Jordan 1993; Sesia 1996; DavisFloyd 2001; Tinoco-Ojanguren, Glantz et al. 2008; Mills and Davis-Floyd 2009; Smid, Campero et al. 2010). The learning experience and development of the medical profession in Mexico has come under little scrutiny in existing ethnography. An anthropological approach to medical education should focus on the cultural conditions of practices, what is being learnt and then how this translates into practice. The medical student understood as apprentice in a specific community of learning provides an appropriate space for this to happen. The year of social service that a Mexican student must complete at the end of their degree – where they are often sent to rural or heavily oversubscribed urban clinics demonstrates the ultimate passage of apprenticeship and presents the opportunity of an ethnographic understanding of interrelation between medical/traditional practices [1].

Historical Analysis and ethnography of Medical learning

‘...the body is simultaneously a physical and symbolic artefact,..both naturally and culturally produced, and...securely anchored in a particular historical moment...[Yet] we take scientific discourse about human biology to be not simply a narrative but a universal truth...we assume that it applies anywhere at any time and transcends time and place’ (Lock 1993)

   In medical terms the specific historical anchor of the body that Lock is referring to can be found in the development of anatomical dissection and pathology – the emergence of the medical gaze. The anatomical approach was based on the assumption that the more one knew of structure, the better one understood of function (Sinclair 1997:44). By stripping away the layers of the human body its different functions were exposed and translated into fact by prominent physicians of that time. Social and historical analysis of anatomy practices as knowledge creation tends to be based in the Foucauldian assertion that: ‘The gaze plunges into the space that it has given itself the task of traversing...In anatomo-clinical experience, the medical eye must see the illness spread before is the body itself that has become ill’ (2003:166-167).  This anatomo-clinical experience of the medical gaze is a crucial historical juncture that denotes a shift in relationship between physician and patient, ownership of illness and diagnosis becomes that of the physician. From what they are able to see and feel, which must conform to what already exists in text, the physician is now expert of the body that is somehow detached from the subjectivity of the patient.

Anatomical theatre, University of Leiden 1596 online source: Wikipedia

   The practice in anatomical theatres (16th and 17th Century), for apprentice physicians was one of observation, of master refereeing from text to body (as opposed to creating text from the body present). The transmission of personally acquired experience to publicly available knowledge is further challenged via the classical artistic style of the period that depicted the dissected body parts and the events themselves (excellent analysis of anatomical art history can be found in: Martin 1989; Sinclair 1997; Massey 2005). Depictions of dissected bodies as artist impressions served to transmit tacit knowledge as concrete medical fact as soon as it appeared in print. This is particularly poignant in regards to the historical construction of the female body, reproductive organs and the pathologizing of pregnancy and birth. During the eighteenth century the publication of two highly regarded obstetric atlases contributed substantially to the epistemological reformulation of childbirth as a medical rather than domestic concern. ‘Stark, brutal and fetishistically naturalistic, these eighteen-century obstetric images medicalized and pathologized childbirth in an unprecedented way (Massey 2005). By pathologizing pregnancy and birth the female body was not only affirmed as a passive recipient of diagnosis, the pregnant body took on s similar representation to ill bodies in need of regulating and treatment. The peculiar aesthetic of the medical gaze– ‘the practitioner’s ability to describe the body persuasively and elegantly, in infinitesimal detail from the inside out’ (Massey 2005) -  culminated in a medical recognition of the foetus as a life product, an entity completely separate from the mother.
Jan van Rymsdyk's most famous plate from William Hunter's "Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus".

     A significant aspect of the anatomical approach is the loss of lay meanings for words used in a medical context (Martin 1989; Sinclair 1997; Martin 1999; Kitzinger 2006), and also how under the medical gaze ‘unambiguous words apply unambiguously to unambiguous things’ (Sinclair 1997). What Sinclair means by this is that things are given a name and then measured as normal or abnormal according to that name. In The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Martin (1989) analyses at length the terminology for the female body’s varying life cycle processes such as ‘degenerate’, ‘weakened’, ‘withdrawn’ and ‘lack’. This sentiment in regards to the use of eponyms and body function adjectives is echoed by Kitzinger in her discussion of obstetric language: ‘Gynaecologist’s names are attached to parts of women’s bodies and processes of reproduction as if these men had invented them; Fallopian tubes, Bartholin’s glands...If the baby does not may be because [the woman] has an ‘inadequate’ pelvis. When the cervix is slow to dilate, it is...’incompetent’...’ (2006:22).   This use of language then becomes a way of seeing the world, how students come to categorise bodies in their social world.

      When presenting their theory of situated learning Lave and Wenger state that participation ‘is always based on situated negotiation and re-negotiation of meaning in the world’ (1991).  The process of transformation that a student will experience involves applying such ‘unambiguous’ terms in everyday life and practices, therefore also demonstrating a shift in how those students will begin to see all aspects of their lives through the medical gaze. The anatomical model forms the basis of medical education and alongside this the pathology model– the body as ill, the machine as broken. The primary stages of medical learning involve ‘scientising the self’ and the world around you (Sinclair 1997), the eponyms used in anatomy and pathology medicine reinforce the notion that this scientific basis itself is a masculine episteme – or as Sinclair so directly states in his ethnography, that: ‘Medicine is a man’s world’ (1997:143).

    Understanding the development of biomedical discourse through the detailed writing of thinkers such as Foucault or Martin is an essential starting point for the study of medicine and medical learning. This is however, one aspect of a study and is in no terms complete if one wishes to make sense of cultural context and local practices. Ethnographic study must go beyond what Good and Good (1993) argue to be the portrayal of a monolithic “biomedicine” that is treated itself as a conceptual category. In their preliminary analysis of the learning experiences of preclinical medicine at Harvard University, they remind us of the dangers of the diametrically opposing views in much medical anthropology between “biomedicine” and “traditional healing”. They point out that this is not helpful in anthropological analysis and culminate in a view of traditional medicine as untouched by biomedicine and vice versa. At its extreme, the use of biomedicine as a conceptual category fails to take into account the agency and interpretations of the people being studied and does not deal with the different types of medical discourses at play in an educational institution.

   In depth ethnographic studies of the medical student as apprentice learner, in the educational setting are limited and have come under criticism for paying minimal attention to the external influences, personal meanings and the phenomenology of ‘specialized medical worlds’ (Good and Good 1993; Sinclair 1997; Atkinson and Pugsley 2005).
   The most prominent examples of medical education ethnographies are: Merton and Kendell (eds) The Student Physician (1957); Becker et alBoys in White (1961); Bloom’s Power and Dissent in the Medical School (1973); and Sinclair’s Making Doctors: an institutional apprenticeship  (1997). Although not an exhaustive list, it is clear from these titles that there is a long tradition of ethnographic research in medical education in a UK and US context. Whilst they vary in focus from institutional mechanisms (Merton and Kendall 1957; Bloom 1973); professional socialisation (Merton and Kendall 1957; Becker 1961; Sinclair 1997) and power and authoritative knowledge (Bloom 1973; Good and Good 1993; Sinclair 1997), none pay particular attention to the interlinking social contexts and the influence of outer society inside the medical school or vice versa. ‘To say that a practice is defined by its effects is to locate the practice in its connections to its exterior, to that which is other to it(Grossberg 1992:53 my emphasis). Instead, ethnographies set in medical education environments have tended to isolate the students and the learning activity from the political, economic and social contexts of the outside world. Sinclair does present the argument that previous ethnographies have failed to deal with the influence of medical specialities that they have ‘been passed over in favour of the assumed homogeneity of the teaching institution’ (1997:14), his work does make a decent attempt to break away from this. Sinclair’s ethnography is still limited in some respects due to its use of the biomedical model as a conceptual category somehow frozen in historical context. Preliminary work by Good and Good is by far the most useful text for considering ‘...the phenomenological dimensions of medical knowledge, on how the medical world, including the objects of the medical gaze...are reconstituted in the process...’ (1993:83) of learning to be a doctor.

    Anthropological and sociological literature on medicine and reproductive health in Mexico evidences that medical curriculum and clinical authoritative knowledge have their roots in European and North American practices. Ethnography of midwifery models and practices identifies the use and influences of biomedicine (Jordan 1993; DavisFloyd 2001), though the opposite has not occurred in any study of medical or obstetric practice outside of a historical analysis. This instead tends to fall into the trap already discussed of the untroubled monolith “biomedicine” and/or medical “discourse”, untainted by personal meanings or the world of disease and suffering (Good and Good 1993).

    Existing medical education ethnography is useful for the general theoretical arguments it presents towards cultivating a professional identity and exclusive community of practice. However a deeper understanding of the organisational structure of the Latin American medical school; how authoritative knowledge is culturally absorbed and changed; the more complex interlinking contexts of gender, class and ethnicity; and professional/social status of obstetrics is needed in order to understand its role in pregnancy and childbirth in a local context.

“Iatronic Epidemic” and its links to Authorative knowledge in contemporary cultural education systems

   Links between authoritative knowledge, political economy and relations to the State are well documented themes in medical anthropology and also anthropology of pregnancy (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Szurek 1997; Ivry 2010) and further connection needs to be made to the role of State (in local and global contexts)and how this informs educational curriculum and the things that medical students learn. This is an argument that Bloom (1989) puts forward in his paper on the sources of resistance to change in medical schools. By analysing the evolution of organisational structure of medical school in varying countries and regions he demonstrates how medical education is inextricably linked to the health service system. Bloom provides a useful model of the Latin American medical school which he generalises as:

‘autonomous professional school connected to the central administration of the university but with no connection to other parts of the university, combined with open admission immediately after secondary school and student activism’ (Bloom 1989).

Though not entirely unproblematic in its generalisation (particularly between the public/private institutions), this is a useful definition when thinking about the position of the medical school as straddling the general university space, elite professional status space and with the university hospitals, a direct connection to the public health service in action. Medical learning does not happen in a vacuum away from cultural practice and society and one could assume that the curriculum must reflect the direct practices of the hospital or clinic – which in turn are driven by health and welfare initiatives of that given time. The nature of apprentice learning will also mean that students are learning from physicians who continue to practice, moving between an idealised text book static medicine and a multi-layered, everyday practice of medicine defined by cultural, political and economic contexts.

   The iatronic epidemic is a term used by Castro (2003; 2004; 2004; N.d. ) who has examined violations of reproductive rights in Mexican hospitals including practices of unnecessary caesarean sections, transcaesarean contraception insertion and sterilization without direct consent. By comparing ethnographic data with existing statistical data from the mid 1990s through to 2001, Castro et al (N.d. ) describe how obstetricians can be the driving force behind the rapid rise in caesarean sections, to a point where Mexico is now amongst the highest incidences in the world (Althabe and Belizán ; WHO 2009; Castro, Heimburger et al. N.d. ). An iatrogenic epidemic refers to a practise in relation to its effects, a problem caused by doctors by their own actions. In this case that of gyno-obstetricians in Mexican hospitals (public and private) and interventions in pregnancy and birth. Grossberg establishes that: ‘...a practise is not where it is...but at all of those sites where its existence makes a difference to the world’ (1992:53). Here there is a direct connection to Castro’s work and the theoretical basis’ of learning discussed in the introduction to this literature review. By providing further links to teaching hospitals and cultures of surgical intervention in the learning of obstetrics, Grossberg’s practice of articulation provides a tool for analysing the interlocking cause and effect from educational institution to wider societal context, from community practices to individual lives.

    The work of Castro in Mexico City public hospitals is the closet one becomes in trying to relate obstetrical education knowledge and practice in a Mexican context, and also in relation to political economic realms of health policy. There is a need to re-address some of the major issues brought out by Castro’s detailed ethnographic work, in respect that the context of pregnancy in Chiapas can never a stable subject of study. Since Castro’s data was collected Mexico has changed its President and majority party twice; there has been a global financial crisis; Millennium Development Goals have entered into their final phase; and baseline welfare provision has further developed (Seguro Popular and Oportunidades cash transfer programme) leading to clinical provision in more rural areas and with that further meshing of urban and rural medical practice. How medical and obstetric education has evolved alongside these political and economic stages and the links to economic crisis, structural violence and reproduction have yet to come under any ethnographic analysis.

    In essence there is a good existing base of ethnographic literature from which to build upon. Ethnography of reproductive health and pregnancy in Mexico also tends to reflect that of the wider literature – much analysis begins with the practice of qualified and experienced gyno-obstetricians. Where students and educational structure appear they tend to do so as a background concern. This may be because they are often in an observing, apprentice role and so are described for participation around the main character – the seasoned obstetrician or consultant. In doing so ethnographic understanding of learning medicine and obstetrics is so far absent from the focus on institutional practices – in so much that it could be accused of being taken as a given, as if the training of medical students is a dormant part of the wider context. This is in direct comparison to celebrated ethnographic studies of Mexican midwifery in terms of apprentice learning and meanings of professional that use learning practices as their very focus. I refer here again to Grossberg’s proposition that a practice located in its connections to its exterior and the interrelated effects it has on that exterior, is what opens up the practice and makes it visible to social analysis. In this respect ethnographic analysis of pregnancy and birth in Chiapas must take into account the learning of obstetrics and institutional identity as part of the wider context.

London, Routledge.
London, Oxford University Press.

[1] There have been some pilot programmes of incorporating local midwifery in clinical spaces for example see: Smid, M., L. Campero, et al. (2010). "Bringing Two Worlds Together: Exploring the Integration of Traditional Midwives as Doulas in Mexican Public Hospitals." Health Care for Women International 31(6): 475-498.

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Alfred Hitchcock Biography

Sir Alfred Hitchcock was an English/American film director who pioneered significant developments in the movie industry of the mid 20th century. He is most famous for producing several classic films, especially of the thriller genre. Hitchcock is considered one of the greatest and most influential film producers of the Twentieth Century. Some of his most famous films include 39 Steps (1935), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960).

“In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God: he must create life.”

– Alfred Hitchcock – as quoted in Hitchcock (1984)

Early life of Alfred Hitchcock

alfred-hitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born 13 August 1899 in Leytonstone, Essex, England where he studied at the Roman Catholic Salesian College and later St Ignatius College. His childhood was not particularly happy. He suffered from obesity, a result of a glandular condition, and his parents were strict and somewhat remote. When he was just five, his father sent him to a police station with a note that he should be locked up for 5 minutes, which left him with a life-long fear of authority and the police in particular. During his childhood, the young Alfred would often spend time by himself, inventing games and drawing maps.

When he was 15, he left college to study at the London County Council school of Engineering and Navigation; this qualified him to be a draftsman. He gained his first job with a telegraph company, but it was around this time he developed a burgeoning interest in the cinema, which was a recent innovation. In the evenings after work, he would watch films and study the cinema trade newspapers.

Towards the end of the First World War, he attempted to join the army but was rejected because of his weight, although he did later manage to sign up for a brief time as a cadet in the Royal Engineers.

First Steps in Film

After the war, he began writing short stories, which were published in his company’s in-house magazine. Hitchcock also developed an interest in photography and the new art of film production. He gained employment in 1920 as a title card designer for a company which would later be known as Paramount Pictures. With hard work, Hitchcock progressed through the company and within five years was producing silent films. In later years he said silent films were the ‘purest form of cinema’.

In the mid-1920s, he travelled to Germany where he picked up many of the emerging expressionist techniques used in modern filmmaking. After a few challenging early films, he gained his first commercial and critical success with The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927).

By 1929, he had produced ten films; his 10th film Blackmail was a significant moment for him because it was one of the first ‘talkers’ – films with an audio track.

Success in the 1930s

By the mid-1930s, Hitchcock was establishing his reputation as one of the leading film producers in Britain. Several films proved a great success, such as 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Hitchcock proved a master at creating tension and a fast moving plot line; he didn’t tie down the audience in detail but created scenes of dramatic tension. Hitchcock pioneered the use of famous backdrops, either famous landmarks in a city or the wilderness of the Scottish moors – 39 Steps (1935). Later in his career, he used many famous landmarks such as Mt Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959) and the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942).

Move to America

Hitchcock’s critical success in England led him to be approached by David Selznick from Hollywood. In 1939, the Hitchcock family moved to California, where he began working on a new film. His first film Rebecca (1940) received an Academy Award for Best Picture. Hitchcock was not particularly enamoured of America, but he did enjoy the greater resources available to American studios – it was an improvement on the small budgets of the English film producers.

Towards the end of the Second World War (1943), he returned to England, where he produced two films in French for the Free French forces. In 1945 he also served as film editor for a documentary about the concentration camps that were liberated by British troops (Bergen-Belsen). However, the images were so shocking; it was later shelved until being published in 1985 (Memory of the Camps); the film was also re-released in 2014.

After the war, Hitchcock returned to America, where he resumed his long and successful American film career. In particular, he enjoyed developing his talents in creating psychologically intriguing films.

– Alfred Hitchcock.

The Golden Era

The 1950s was Hitchcock’s golden era, producing classic films such as Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960).

Psycho was Hitchcock’s best known and most profitable film. It broke box office records as viewers flocked to view this pioneering new horror genre film.

Hitchcock, (like Walt Disney) was also early to embrace the new medium of TV. He hosted a TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1955 to 1965; his prominent role of hosting the show helped him become one of the most recognisable film directors and media celebrities of the day.

During the next two decades, his output was less prolific as old age and failing health limited his work rate, but he continued to produce feature films up until his death. Hitchcock died of renal failure on 29 April 1980, while at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles. He had just recently received a knighthood from the Queen.

Features of Hitchcock’s films

Hitchcock’s films often share similar elements. Responding to criticism of repeated ideas, he once retorted, “Self-plagiarism is style.”

Hitchcock often portrayed the guilty party as quite a charming man. Often an innocent man was accused of being guilty in the first instance by authority, before being able to prove his innocence. His leading ladies were often ‘ice cool blondes’, such as Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedron. These women were often reserved and cold in his films, giving little emotion away. Hitchcock stated:

– Alfred Hitchcock, Interview on CBS TV (20 February 1977)

Hitchcock also enjoyed a gallows humour which is not always obvious to spot. Finally, Hitchcock developed a tradition of making short cameos in his films.

Hitchcock had a reputation for being unsympathetic to actors and a hard taskmaster. He was rumoured to have said that actors were ‘like cattle’, and this remark hung around Hitchcock (though he later said he had been misquoted). However, many actors gave memorable performances in his films and won Academy Awards for their performances. Hitchcock was nominated five times for an Academy Award for Best Director, but he never won.

In 1956, he became a U.S. citizen, although he remained a British subject.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. “Biography of Alfred Hitchcock”, Oxford,, 10/01/2014

Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials Collection

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Prigogine, Ilya

(b. Moscow, Russia, 25 January 1917, d. Brussels, Belgium, 28 May 2003), chemistry, irreversible thermodynamics.

Early Development Prigogine, whose childhood years were marked by a spatial odyssey across Europe, occasioned by the Russian Revolution, was to spend most of his adult life probing the nature of motion through time. The son of Roman Prigogine, a chemical engineer, and Julia Wichman Prigogine, a conservatory student, the young Prigogine, accompanied by his parents and his older brother Alexander, arrived in Belgium by way of Lithuania and Berlin at the age of twelve and soon became fascinated by history, literature, archaeology, and particularly music. His skills at the keyboard were to provide a source of satisfaction and relaxation throughout his life. After much hesitation, he finally enrolled as an undergraduate in the chemistry curriculum at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, but his wide-ranging intellectual interests, notably in philosophy, continued to influence his scientific trajectory.

Inspired by his mentor at the university, Théophile de Donder, Prigogine became obsessed with understanding the nature of irreversible processes, or what he was later to refer to as “the arrow of time,” a term apparently coined by Arthur Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World, 1929, p. 68). Classical thermodynamics, from the time of Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius, focused on the properties of systems at, or at least very near to, equilibrium, where the entropy is a maximum and is therefore constant. Prigogine and de Donder characterized this limited view as “thermostatics,” and noted that in order to comprehend real, as opposed to ideal, natural processes, one has to deal with the entropy-producing phenomena that occur far away from equilibrium and that had been shunned by most physicists, chemists, and engineers as “parasitic,” “transitory” phenomena of marginal importance. In any actual process, Prigogine and de Donder argued, what is significant and interesting is what is changing in time and cannot be undone. In 1945, four years after receiving his doctoral degree from the Université Libre, Prigogine formulated the theorem of minimum entropy production, which describes nonequilibrium stationary states, and noted its significance in relation to the most important far-from-equilibrium systems: living organisms.

Dissipative Structures Prigogine recognized the limitations of his theory of minimum entropy production, particularly for chemical kinetics. Minimum entropy production holds only for the linear branch of irreversible phenomena, that is, for systems not too far from equilibrium, where the Onsager reciprocal relations are valid. In many reacting systems of interest this is not the case, because they are so far from equilibrium that only the forward reaction is relevant; the reverse reaction is negligible. To deal with such systems, Prigogine, with the aid of his colleague Paul Glansdorff, formulated the notion of “dissipative structures,” stable ordered states that can emerge from less ordered states when a system is sufficiently far from equilibrium. By virtue of their distance from equilibrium, these states are able to maintain their order by dissipating energy to the environment. Such states typically develop via fluctuations of increasingly larger magnitude, and fluctuations played a major role in Prigogine’s thinking about temporal evolution. In his Nobel Lecture, he characterized the formation of a dissipative structure in the following terms: “A new supermolecular order appears that corresponds basically to a giant fluctuation stabilized by exchanges of energy with the outside world.”

Although Prigogine and Glansdorff first considered dissipative structures in the context of hydrodynamics, the years during which they developed the approach, 1947 to 1967, saw some remarkable developments in the study of reaction-diffusion systems, and these eventually provided the most important applications of the theory. In 1952 Alan Turing wrote a seminal paper titled “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” in which he showed that in an appropriate set of chemical reactions whose components diffuse with the proper rates, stable, stationary, spatially periodic structures can arise spontaneously from an initially homogeneous steady state. These dissipative structures, now known as Turing patterns, spawned a cottage industry of theoretical biologists and others in fields from chemistry to geology to economics, who formulated models for pattern formation of various kinds using Turing’s approach and, implicitly, Prigogine’s dissipative structure idea. The existence of Turing patterns was not demonstrated experimentally until 1990, when Patrick De Kepper and collaborators carried out a study of the reaction of chlorite, iodide, and malonic acid in a gel. Nonetheless, in the intervening four decades, scientists were confident of the scientific basis for Turing structures in large measure because of the power of Prigogine’s theory.

A second instance of the application of dissipative structures involves the discovery of oscillating chemical reactions. While it is obvious that any living system contains chemicals whose concentrations increase and decrease periodically, the accidental discovery in 1921 by William Bray of a reaction between hydrogen peroxide and iodide, in which the concentration of iodine undergoes regular increases and decreases, did little to convince a skeptical chemical community that such behavior could occur in a beaker. The vast majority of chemists, perhaps driven by a kind of vitalism, were convinced that the second law of thermodynamics forbade concentration oscillations in a chemical reaction. In fact, the majority of papers written about the Bray reaction until the 1960s are devoted to attempts to discredit Bray’s result. When Boris Belousov serendipitously found a second chemical oscillator in 1958, he was unable to publish his experimental results in a peer-reviewed journal because the referees insisted that his observations contradicted the second law of thermodynamics. Over the following decade, the combination of further experimental work by Anatol Zhabotinsky and the theoretical underpinning provided by the theories of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and dissipative structures convinced the scientific community that the phenomenon was indeed genuine. In the early twenty-first century, the Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillating reaction serves as the prototype system for a field known as nonlinear chemical kinetics, and the spatiotemporal structures the reaction generates provide insights into a variety of chemical and biological pattern formation phenomena. Prigogine and his student René Lefever also formulated a simple model, now referred to as the Brusselator, which gives rise to a striking wealth of spatial and temporal dissipative structures, including periodic concentration oscillations and Turing patterns.

The Brusselator model consists of four elementary reactions:

A → X

B + X → Y + D

2X + Y → 3X

X → E

where A and B are usually considered to be reactants whose concentrations are maintained constant, and the system is maintained far from equilibrium either by removing D and E as soon as they are produced or by neglecting all reverse reactions. The beauty of this model, whose complexity arises from the trimolecular, autocatalytic third step, is that with the above assumptions it has only two variable concentrations, X and Y, and can therefore be analyzed in great detail using a variety of powerful mathematical tools. The trimolecular step as written is unlikely to arise as a result of simple molecular collisions, but, as Prigogine and his star pupil, Grégoire Nicolis, pointed out, the same kinetics can arise as the result of a sequence of, for example, enzymatic reactions (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977, p. 94).

Prigogine saw the variety of the universe, and particularly of life, as arising from irreversibility and dissipative structures far from equilibrium. Perhaps in the spirit of Lev Tolstoy’s observation that all happy families resemble one another, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, he wrote, “The laws of equilibrium are universal. However, far from equilibrium the behavior may become very specific. This is of course a welcome circumstance, because it permits us to introduce a distinction in the behavior of physical systems which would be incomprehensible in an equilibrium world” (Frängsmyr, 1993, p. 270). The classical view of irreversible processes is that they increase entropy and hence lead to disorder. The concept of dissipative structures reveals that irreversible processes can, in fact, create order. Irreversible processes make life possible.

Further Contributions Prigogine was a prolific author, not only of research papers, but also of books. His early works were written as textbooks or scientific monographs, focused on such subjects as irreversible thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. He addressed traditional problems in physical chemistry, such as developing theoretical models for liquids, although even as early as 1971 he applied his ideas to more complex, human problems in Kinetic Theory of Vehicular Traffic, written with Robert Herman. The two-fluid theory, adapted from the kinetic theory of gases, which Prigogine and Herman proposed, remains one of the three main approaches to modeling traffic flow.

In 1977 Prigogine and Nicolis wrote their chef d’oeuvre, Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems, in which they laid out how systems could spontaneously self-organize without violating the second law of thermodynamics. The work was important primarily because it created an intellectual framework for understanding how temporal and spatial patterns could arise. Ironically, few scientists have employed Prigogine’s approach to nonequilibrium thermodynamics directly in addressing real systems, but his work provided a solid theoretical foundation that made the study of such systems a respectable scientific enterprise.

As is often the case with major figures in science, in his later years Prigogine turned his attention increasingly to more global questions. In 1986 he published a quasi-popular book with Isabelle Stengers called La Nouvelle alliance, which was published in English as Order Out of Chaos. A more technical work, From Being to Becoming, had appeared in 1980. In these volumes Prigogine sought to come to terms with the question that had vexed him all his life—how can we understand the arrow of time? He was fond of saying, “We do not grow young!” But systems, as he had shown, can do more than decay as they approach equilibrium. He once said to one of the authors of this article, “Rome did not just decline—it also rose.” He had demonstrated that increases in order and complexity do not contradict thermodynamics, as many before him had thought.

What bothered him was that the arrow of time was not to be found in classical theories. The fundamental laws of physics—Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s equations of electrodynamics, quantum mechanics—are all time-reversible, meaning that one can substitute –t for t and the equations remain unchanged. If these laws were all that governed nature, the arrow of time would be an illusion, as many scientists, including Einstein, believed. However, consistent with human experience, the phenomenological laws that describe irreversible processes such as heat and mass diffusion do not remain unchanged by a substitution of –t for t. If one puts a drop of red ink into a beaker of water, one ends up with a beaker of pink water; the reverse transition never occurs. In his lectures at the University of Texas at Austin, where he spent three months a year in his Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics, Prigogine would explain how a movie showing a temperature gradient being spontaneously created (without any chemical reactions) would tell the viewer that the movie was being played backwards. An observer can tell which way the video should be played because there is an intrinsic arrow of time. The arrow of time, Prigogine believed, is as fundamental as the existence of time itself, and he sought to reconcile this idea with the underlying laws of physics, even if it meant turning traditional theories on their head and thinking of mechanics as an approximation in a world that is ultimately irreversible.

In his later years, Prigogine became increasingly concerned with the role of time in quantum mechanics and with the related issue of the interplay between dynamics and thermodynamics. He saw a kind of complementarity between dynamics, based on knowledge of individual trajectories, which are reversible, and thermodynamics, where entropy, which can only increase in time, plays the key role. He argued that the key lay in recasting some of the fundamental equations describing mechanical systems in such a way that key operators, in particular the Liouville operator, are no longer represented by unitary transformations. In this way, the time reversal symmetry is broken, and a single trajectory for a system is no longer an observable. Irreversibility and the second law then emerge in a much more fundamental way. Whether Prigogine’s reformulation of some of the most basic laws of physics will ultimately be accepted as successfully reconciling the apparent inconsistencies between dynamics and thermodynamics remains a matter of some controversy, much as the first expositions of his earlier ideas about the importance of irreversible processes were met with considerable skepticism.

Prigogine’s Milieu Prigogine was a true citizen of the world, and his contributions were recognized time and again. He was a member of more than a dozen national academies and received more than forty honorary degrees. In addition to the 1977 Nobel Prize, he received the Solvay Prize in 1955, the Rumford Gold Medal of the Royal Society in 1976, and the Honda Prize in 1983, along with many other international awards. He was a major figure in the development of an integrated approach to scientific research in Europe during the 1980s, stressing the need to encourage unconventional ideas and approaches, which he referred to as “hopeful fluctuations.” He was keenly interested in the phenomenon of globalization, seeing it as an analog of long distance communication in nonliving systems, about which he wrote, “matter in equilibrium is blind, and it communicates over short distances over a short time. Matter out of equilibrium begins to see” (1989, p. 399). In addition to his professorship at the Université Libre in Brussels, he directed the International Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry from 1959 to 2003 and was a professor in the Physics Department at the University of Texas in Austin, where he spent increasing portions of his time at his Ilya Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics, Thermodynamics and Complex Systems after his mandatory retirement from Brussels in 1987. For many years, his department in Brussels attracted those seeking to understand complex behavior in physical and biological systems, and some of the brightest minds in the world were drawn to the department, both as students and as visitors.

Prigogine’s ideas provided a framework for many of the key developments in late-twentieth-century science, from chaos theory to self-organization, but his views were by no means universally accepted. Perhaps because it challenged some of the most revered figures in science, perhaps because he attempted to apply it so widely (another scientist once condescendingly remarked about the work coming out of Brussels, “A theory of everything is a theory of nothing”), Prigogine’s vision often evoked heated controversy, and he knew it. He once told a prospective postdoctoral student to consider working on a safer topic, because “Research is like horse betting, interesting return is with the outsiders, but there is high risk to lose everything.”

Prigogine and his first wife, Helene Jofé, had a son, Yves, in 1945. His second marriage, to Marina Prokopowicz in 1961, produced a son, Pascal, in 1970. In 1981 he was awarded hereditary nobility and the title of viscount by the king of Belgium. What drove Prigogine throughout his extraordinary life and scientific career is perhaps best summed up in these lines from the poet Kahlil Gibran: “Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration” (Gibran, The Vision, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 29).

A complete bibliography can be found in Ilya Prigogine's Is Future Given?, cited below.

Structure, Dissipation and Life. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1969.

With Paul Glansdorff. Thermodynamic Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971.

With Grégoire Nicolis. Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations. New York: Wiley Interscience, 1977.

Autobiographie. Brussels: Florilège des Sciences en Belgique II, 1980.

From Being to Becoming. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980. “The Philosophy of Instability.” Futures 21 (1989): 396–400.

With Isabelle Stengers. The End of Certainty—Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: Free Press, 1997.

With Dilip Kondepudi. Modern Thermodynamics, from Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures. Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, 1998.

Is Future Given? River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Press, 2003.

Castets, Vincent, Etienette Dulos, Jacques Boissonade, et al. “Experimental Evidence of a Sustained Standing Turing-Type Nonequilibrium Chemical-Pattern.” Physical Review Letters 64 (1990): 2953–2956.

Frängsmyr, Tore, ed. Nobel Lectures in Chemistry, 1971–1980. Singapore: World Scientific, 1993.

Kovac, Jeffrey. “Ilya Prigogine, 1977 Nobel Laureate.” In Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 1901–1992, edited by Laylin K. James. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society and Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1993.

Turing, Alan M. “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences 237 (1952): 37–72.

Irving R. Epstein
John A. Pojman

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Climate change causing rainfall in Africa’s Sahel region, says study (Down to Easrth ,Climate Change ,GS paper 3)

A long drought, which started in 1968, led to the virtual extinction of crops and widespread loss of cattle in the region

A recent study has pointed out that due to climate change, rainfall has returned to Africa’s Sahel region, more than 30 years after severe drought killed 100,000 people in the 1980s.
However, the author of the study says that this positive short-term impact is accidental and that by continuing to emit greenhouse gases, “we are seriously upsetting a natural system that we don’t fully understand”.
Sahel is a semi-arid region of western and north-central Africa, extending from Senegal to Sudan. A long drought, which started in 1968, led to the virtual extinction of crops and widespread loss of cattle in the region.
A sensitive climate zone
Research carried out by scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading, United Kingdom, and published in Nature Climate Change, has shown how increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have caused global climate change, have triggered a return of seasonal rains to Sahel.
Scientists say that the findings point out how sensitive the African climate is to climate change. For carrying out the study, researchers used a supercomputer climate simulator to study different kinds of influences on North African rainfall.
When the researchers examined the increased amount of rainfall in the regions since the 1980s, they found that around three-quarters of the additional rainfall were caused by rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“The effects of climate change are complex and there can be beneficial effects for some regions and during some periods of time. Our study suggests that over the last few decades there have been some positive effects for people living in the Sahel region of Africa who have experienced increasing rainfall amounts. However, overall the evidence is compelling that negative impacts of climate change far outweigh any short-term benefits,” Rowan Sutton, the lead author of the study, told Down To Earth.
Previous studies had suggested other factors, pointing out that changes in the temperature of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, would be more influential on the region in the short-term, the press release adds.
Sutton says, “…we are beginning to discover how climate change is influencing rainfall patterns. What we are learning shows that human activity is already having a major impact.”
Caution sounded
The picture is not as rosy as it seems. The United Nations assessment of climate change impacts, produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shows that Africa will face increased risks from climate change. These include heat waves, rise in sea levels, floods and droughts, leading to crop failures, water shortage and diseases.
Most climate models predict that the Sahel region will be drier in the 21st century. Even slight increase in rainfall is unlikely to reverse the situation since a hotter climate means that evapotranspiration will be more intense. Rainfall variability is a major driver of vulnerability in Sahel.
According to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, “The Sahel is highly vulnerable to climate change due its geographical location at the southern edge of the Sahara desert and the strong dependence of its population on rain-fed agriculture and livestock.” Rainfall variability, land degradation and desertification are some of the factors that make life extremely difficult in this part of the world, the UNEP paper adds.
At present, around 200 countries are trying to work out a deal to limit climate change in Bonn, Germany before the Paris conference scheduled in December.
Africa at risk
According to a factsheet, no continent will be struck as severely by the impacts of climate change as Africa. Given its geographical location, the continent will be vulnerable due to its considerably limited adaptive capacity.
Africa’s human existence and development are under threat from the adverse impacts of climate change—its population, ecosystems and biodiversity will all be victims of global climate change.

Best Book For environment and Biodiversity (R.Rajgopalan,Suggested by GS Score)

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The Selection

The Selection - Kiera Cass This review is full of spoilers.

This was another one of those start out rocky books. I almost put it down for a while but then decided to finish it and I am so very glad that I did! I thought, initially, it was going to be another cliche book about a girl who doesn't know how pretty she is, while forcing it down your throat that she is. That, and I'm not a huge fan of America as a name. I am happy to report that it was not one of those books, and the name was not an issue.

This book is set in a dystipian America after world war 4, and a Chinese invasion due to debts. The countries of the world had consolidated into a few large countries rather than so many small ones. Instead of a president, Illea (the country that most of North America has been reformed into) has a royal family. When the heir to the throne comes of age, girls are sold into political alliances, and boys must pick one common girl from the selection, where 34 girls all compete for the prince's favor while navigating eliminations,group and solo dates, and the royal palace. Think fluffy Hunger Games meets The Bachelor.

I really enjoyed the relationship between America and Maxon, as well as hearing about how the society works. The caste system was particularly interesting to me, and was a focal point of this book. I liked that America did not just fall into the role of perspective princess. She always seemed to remember her place as a 5.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, a lot more than I expected to. I would most definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys political dystopian stories, especially those about royal life, and people who enjoy reality shows like the Bachelor or the Bachelorette.


Bridger Pilates mat classes utilize Joseph Pilates’ original exercises in a contemporary and biomechanically sound way to challenge clients in a fitness setting. Classes focus on STOTT Pilates’ 5 basic principals of breathe, pelvic placement, rib cage alignment, shoulder stability, and head/neck placement. Instructors will explore exercises that increase spinal mobility and rotation, deep core strength, and the juxtaposition of mobility vs stability. Classes are tiered for multiple abilities as we strive to meet each client where they are physically, mentally, and emotionally.


Digital simulation using reactive programming

OData support
Wacha Gábor József
Department of Measurement and Information Systems

Nowadays our digital circuits are more complex and their numbers are continuously increasing. In case of hardware systems the error handling and repairing are vital. For hardware verification we use simulators to create the software model of a hardware. The majority of hardware description simulators are written by imperative languages. These programs can’t work properly on multi-core systems, hold no possibility to parallel computing and they always run on a single thread.

The Reactive programming can be a solution to this problem. Reactive programming is a new programming paradigm oriented around data flows. Reactive systems are: responsive, resilient, elastic, and message-driven. The Microsoft has Rx.NET, which is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences.

In this work we create logic gates which input and output like a series of events using Rx.NET library. With logic gates we can create logic circuits, including adder. We compare the simulation speed of a generated adder module with a current hardware description simulator and evaluate the results. Furthermore, we create a D flip-flop, which is fundamental of sequential logic based circuits using Reactive Extensions.

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Monday, April 12, 2010

are psychological traits adaptations?

Jerry Coyne describes the evolution of the human brain as a physiological process that manifested itself as a change in skull and brain size. contemporary Evolutionary psychologists claim that selective pressures have also shaped the development of psychological traits such as memory, perception or language and that "

cognitive structure, like physiological structure, has been designed by natural selection to serve survival and reproduction". Based on what you know about natural selection, how is it that the concept of evolution may be reasonably applied to psychology? What situations may have selected for the development of emotions? Cognitive thinking, problem solving, social cooperation, altruism? How has this impacted our social structure, values, morals, beliefs etc. ? How can evolutionary psychology be applied to "survival of the fittest" in modern day society?

  1. The field of evolutionary psychology studies the influence of social pressures on the development of human behavior. Psychologists believe that selective pressures caused the development of emotion. The evolutionary significance of emotion is proven by the fact that humans across cultures experience similar emotions including surprise, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, and disgust. Humans have the innate ability to show emotions via facial expressions. These are also universal. This is a selective advantage, especially before language, because it allows others to know how one is feeling. For instance, if ancient man was to eat a poisonous berry, there would be a look of disgust on his or her face that would signal to others not to eat that berry. Furthermore, if man was to see a dangerous animal in the wild, he would express a look of fear that tells others to flee. In this way, the face is a prime example of structure dictating function in nature. The face has many muscles that allow for a huge variety of expressions. This allows an array of emotions to be shown in various situations.

    Cognitive thinking is an additional selective advantage according to evolutionary psychologists. It is true that many animals show signs of cognition. For instance, the Max Planck Institute
    for Evolutionary Anthropoloy studies apes ability to use selected tools to gain a reward. However, the ability to problem solve is greatest in humans. Humans far exceed other species in capabilities of accomplishing tasks and planning ahead. These skills increase the likelihood of survival and reproduction because it allows them to have appropriate number of offspring, fight disease, survive natural disasters, and more. Thus, individuals with excellent problem solving skills have been selected to pass along their genes.

    Finally, there is evolutionary significance to the development of morals. Morals increase the likelihood of survival by dictating things such as murder and drugs are wrong. Morals also dictate having monogamous relationships. The evolutionary perspective of psychology proposes that having one mate produces a stable number of offspring. It also increases the likelihood of offspring survival because there is more parental investment. Overall, moral humans are clearly the fittest to survive thus passing along their genes through evolutionary time. This created the highly ethical society known today.

  2. The concept of evolution overlaps into psychology in a multitude of ways. Coyne says that the changes in skull and brain size may have happened because of the development of our cognitive structures. This is because natural selection applies to the development of memory, perception, language and more topics of psychology. Being able to remember things, use language to communicate, and perceive the things around you are all things that can help an organism survive and reproduce so by the theory of natural selection and evolution over time organisms have become better at perceiving, using language, and memory because of natural selection.
    The development of emotions may have been selected out of situations where communicating to others allowed for emotions to be necessary. For example, if someone did something very wrong like killing someone else then the people around them would have benefited in showing anger, disgust, and other negative emotions so that that person would know that what they did was wrong and not to do it again. Without these emotions communicating would be much more difficult so the emotions make life easier so they would be selected for by natural selection in a multitude of situations.
    Cognitive thinking and problem solving are both aspects that natural selection would chose for because they completely coincide with the ability to survive and reproduce. The development of these skills helps to find necessary elements in life like food and shelter as well as figure out how to find a mate and reproduce. In today's society cognitive thinking and problem solving put people ahead in school, in the workplace, and in many other situations in every day life. Also, social cooperation and altruism would be selected for because it is necessary to coexist as peacefully as possible with the people around you in order to help each other when help is needed. Not everything can be done on your own so social cooperation and altruism have rewards, like mutualistically beneficial relationships. Modern day example is a carpool.
    Our social structure has become one that depends on people to do things in order to provide for the rest of the world. This means that each person is not growing their own food, building their own shelter, making their own clothing etc. this is because the values of social cooperation and altruism and cognitive thinking and problem solving have led to this more efficient type of society. As for morals and values and beliefs they have been effected by almost all acknowledging that social cooperation and respect of others is a must.

    Psychology textbook

  3. The concept of evolution most definitely may be applied to psychology. Human culture itself is related to evolutionary theory on the basis of sociobiology; by studying certain behavioral characteristics because of expressions of specific genes, this inarguably ties in the debate between nature v. nurture.
    The psychology behind altruism is also tied to evolution. In Campbell, an entire section explains that on the surface, altruistic behavior may not seem to be of benefit to the individual, but on a larger scope, this led to Hamilton’s idea of inclusive fitness: by proliferating one’s genes through one’s own offspring and by providing aid to relatives that share many of the similar genes. (Campbell 1139)
    Recent research though, has pinpointed evidence that leads to explaining that the evolution of the brain is slowing down. Because of the highly complex nature of the brain (with multiple gene to gene interactions) has brought about this effect. (
    An analogy to describe the evolution of the human brain is to extend the evolution of life itself, existing first in the form of single-celled organisms that through their own chemical processes, gradually evolved into multi-celled beings. But what pressures selected for such adaptations? Improved sensors perhaps forced the neural control of the sensory enhancements to occur and necessitated man’s complex interactions with the environment. Furthermore, complex emotions, studied by Joseph LeDoux in The Emotional Brain, originate in the deep level of the human brain and that our individual responses delve into the brain’s complex circuits and at the same time, we learn through experience. Interestingly, psychological disorders – phobias, stress – may simply be malfunctions in which the brain processes our emotions. (
    Therefore, this seeks to explain kin selection and even reciprocal altruism in other animals; for example, chimpanzees who practice reciprocal altruism expect their equals to repay them but if not, then such a foul is deemed “cheating” (Campbell 1140). Through social learning and the formation of culture, the rise of a pecking order seen in human society exists.

  4. Psychological development is based on evolution and this can be proven through looking at the human cerebral cortex, which is where psychological processes take place. It has evolved substantially from our ancestors' and is much more advanced than our cousins, the apes. Emotions are evolutionary because they provide benefits to the organism. Fear tells an organism to get out of the danger or to avoid it in the future. Love is to find a mate that we are compatible with and will have a good chance of reproducing offspring. Cognitive thinking, problem solving, social cooperation, and altruism all have their own advantages. Problem solving gives the advantage of overcoming small and big obstacles to survive and reproduce. Social cooperation helps the population pass on their traits because together they can get more food and resources. Altruism, when it benefits a family member, is to pass on one's genes, or most of them, so that they live on. This impacts social structure because humans are very community based which presents benefits for all who are involved. Our values and morals reflect our want of surviving and reproducing, even if it is just the survival of mankind and not our individual selves. Evolutionary psychology is applied to survival of the fittest because when the fittest of a species survive, then the offspring are more likely to be fit and strong, and able to survive and reproduce and ensure the survival of the species. When the weakest links die off, their genes are no longer in the gene pool and therefore the future offspring of the species are less likely to be weak. Psychological evolution is just another set of traits that can evolve in any one species to make them stronger and fitter for the environment. It follows the rules of evolution just like any other trait.

  5. Emotions are adaptations that adjust behavior based on circumstance. Happiness is the reward for what is beneficial, and our being drawn toward these things aids survival and reproduction. Fear makes us avoid what is dangerous, which also aids survival and reproduction. Anger is another response to threat: An angry elephant will frighten away predators with a fake charge, or an angry human might get into a fight with someone they disagree with. The former is obviously advantageous to survival and reproduction, and the latter may need explanation: Such a fight will weed out those who are different from us (we are most likely to be angry at someone who is more different from us rather than someone very similar to us), thereby promoting a higher concentration of self DNA. There could also be a fight to display which is the fitter of two individuals of the same sex, having a similar effect. Other emotions like embarrassment or sadness might promote a negative response that lets the individual learn not to do whatever caused that emotion to occur. There is a great host of emotions capable of being formed in the human mind, all of which have specific functions. Environments involving many different potential problems to a species such as predators, occasional drought, food shortage, etc. could explain the need for emotions, or it could simply be because of the fact that, if more than one niche is available, all will be filled after enough time to evolve, causing divergent speciation--in this case, one species might evolve to be bulkier, better fighters, while the other develops the brain to adapt by emphasizing a range of emotions. Another alternative would be a combination of both.

    Similarly, intelligence such as cognitive thinking, problem solving, and social cooperation would evolve due to selective pressure for a species that can overcome predators--relating the "power shift" idea between humans and their previous predators that was mentioned in a different post. This species could use sharp tools or maybe just coordinate a team of specialized individuals, or a combination of these. Of course, we can see many other uses for such intelligence as well.

    Altruism can be attributed to the benefits of cooperation or to those of promoting survival of genes similar to one's own, or a combination.

    After a while, our intelligence caused us to use technology and even medicine to advance the survival rate of human beings faster than could have been caused by just evolution. At first, we did not know what we were doing, and now that the idea of evolution has been accepted, some of us have become aware that the way we have changed since our days in the wild is so great that, as evolution is not changing us at anywhere near the rate we change our environment, we are having problems. Examples would be how people--especially teens--become addicted to looking at electronic screens all the time, and violent movies and video games hurt our sense of altruism, and we are constantly finding new information on the negative effects of certain man-made things such as pesticides, pollution, BPA plastics (, titanium dioxide (, and led paints. We are also facing overpopulation because we tend to continue producing offspring despite the fact that we are having trouble supporting the world's population of humans.

  6. Sorry, this was too long to be only one post, so here is the rest:

    In addition, intelligence has led to a wide variety of different beliefs, many if not all of which were probably made up to explain things that were previously unexplained. With these beliefs came varying morals, but these tended to basically obey instinctive altruism, since we will gravitate toward that as it has evolved in us. Growing numbers also have called for ingenuity in societal structure, and with little hope of unifying a global species, this gave rise to varying social structures, which is why we have different governments instead of everyone having the same government. Different people have different ideas.

    One more thing I'd like to mention is how self-awareness has led to the thought of ending one's own life, which is not a thought that EVOLVED in us; that wouldn't make sense, since it is detrimental to survival and reproduction. It is simply an unfortunate side-effect of having such a large brain with so many different possible things to think about. Somewhere down the line someone suddenly thought about committing suicide, and, sadly, it seems to have caught on. Evolution should weed this out, but again, society is changing us much faster than evolution is.

  7. Evolution has had dramatic impact on the world of Pshycology. The idea of natural selection does not only apply to organisms' physical traits but also affects how our minds and the way we think have evolved.
    Darwin said that certain emotions had selective advantages. Fear, for example "would help an organism avoid danger and thus would aid in survival" (Weiten). Evolutionary theorists in psychology would say that emotions are innate reactions to certain stimuli that provide a selective advantage. And those emotions are passed down from generation to generation.
    When it comes to problem solving, evolutionary theorists say that our minds consist of "cognitive mechanisms that have emerged over the course of evolution to solve specific adaptive problems, such as finding food, shelter, and mates and dealing with allies and enemies"(Weiten). Therefore, problems become easier to handle when they are put in terms relating the problem to similar ones seen by our anscestors.
    In reference to language, evolutionists have found that "the universal nature of language suggests that it is an innate human characteristic...because language is a valuable means of communication that has enormous adaptive value" (Weiten). Language was first used to maintain social coalitions in groups. So it is easy to understandthat more effective communication would have helped in hunting, gathering, fighting, mating, and avoidance of danger.
    Personality is also affected by evolution as natural selection has favored certain traits over the course of human history. Evolutionary theory in personality deals with traits called the big five: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and neuroticism. In the past it was important to put groups together considering questions like, "Who will make a good member of my coalition? Who can I depend on when in need? Who will share their resources?" (Weiten). So with the big five it has proven to be advantageous to be able to bond with others well (extraversion), be willing to cooperate (agreeable), be reliable and ethical (conscientious), be an innovative problem solver (open to experience), and to be able to handle stress (low neuroticism).
    These are all positive traits that have encouraged the development of morals in society. Morals have a selective advantage because they protect us and encourage us to refrain from self-inflicting harm or hurting others. Thus, morals increase our chances of survival.

    Psychology Themes and Variations
    Why Evolution is True

  8. Psychology is the science of mental and behavioral characteristics of an individual or group, and it can be reasonable applied to psychology. Through an animals instincts and experiences, it will learn what to do to ensure its survival. One such instinct is the fight-or-flight response. When there is a dangerous situation, the sympathetic nervous system releases epinephrine and norepinephrine. This short-term stress response results in and increase blood pressure, increased breathing rate, increased heart rate, alertness, more blood glucose for energy, etc. This is evolutionary adaptive because it helps organisms get out of dangerous situations. Therefore, an animal that exhibits this fight-or-flight response in dangerous stressful situations will survive, whereas organisms that do not do this die.

    Emotions may have developed as an aid to our memories and recognition. Take for example fear. When something happens to us, whether we realize it or not, we associate an emotion with it. Let’s say that one time you went camping and you were bit by a snake. The next time you see a snake, you will most likely think back to that incident and associate the fear you felt. You then use this memory to remind you it would be best to go the other way

    Cognitive thinking, problem solving, and altruism are selective advantages. Cognitive thinking is the process knowing by learning and reasoning. This was exhibited by bees in an experiment where they were shown different colors that corresponded to different pathways in a maze. If the bee went a specific direction, away or toward the same color, they were rewarded. This showed that bees could decipher between “same” and “different.”

    Altruism is indirectly a selective advantage for an organism and is only exhibited in animals with strong social bonds. By risking its life for that of another, the organism can promote the survival of similar genes.

    Problem solving is a selective advantage as an organism applies what it learned in the past to help them later in the future. This behavior is highly developed in certain mammals like humans primates and dolphins. Many animals learn to solve problems on their own, but they can also learn by observing the behavior of other individuals. For example, a chimpanzee learning how to use rocks to open nuts. Altruism is indirectly a selective advantage for an organism and is only exhibited in animals with strong social bonds. By risking its life for that of another, the organism can promote the survival of similar genes.

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Next:6.3 To Probe FurtherUp:6.2 Binomial QueuesPrevious:6.2.2 Binomial Amortized Analysis

6.2.3 Lazy Binomial Queues

Binomial queues in which merging is done lazily.

Here, to merge two binomial queues, we simply concatenate the two lists of binomial trees. In the resulting forest, there may be several trees of the same size.

Because of the lazy merge, merge and insert are both worstcase 0(1) time.

Fibonacci Heaps

Fibonacci heap supports all basic heap operations in 0(1) amortized time, with the exception of deletemin and delete which take 0(log n) amortized time.

Fibonacci heaps generalize binomial queues by adding two new concepts:

It can be shown in a Fibonacci heap that any node of rank r$ \geq$ 1 has at least Fr + 1 descendents.


Monthly Archives: November 2015

Dealing with unknowns.

Science is all about dealing with unknowns.

Questions and more questions

Within my direct team I am the only mathematician. The rest of my colleagues have come from biological backgrounds and have spent a lot of their careers in lab generating data.  While they have lots of experience in analysing this data, they have fully embraced the addition of a statistical mind to expand their skill set. One of the benefits of this is that I get to work across the group and am involved in a wide variety of projects.

The level of my involvement varies from getting stuck in and doing some of the analysis, explaining particular methodologies, making suggestions or providing a sounding board for other people’s ideas. Our office is a very open, social environment where we can discuss problems and ask questions as and when they occur.

Having the confidence to ask questions is very important. If you work in academia it is presumed that you are very intelligent and therefore know everything about everything. It can therefore be a daunting environment for a student, as you feel that any question you ask may inadvertently expose your weaknesses. However, not asking for help when you need it is a weakness in itself and will only hold you back.

The breakthrough for me came when biologists started asking me maths questions. It made me realise that we all had different skill sets and most importantly we were here to learn from each other, in return the maths student could ask the biologist biology questions! What you start to realise that everyone has gaps in their knowledge, it just may be hidden behind a good poker face.

I really enjoy sharing my knowledge and the challenge of trying the explain a concept clearly. It also gives me confidence that I do know what I’m doing, if someone goes away understanding something that boggled them previously. However, as the resident statistician, initially I felt a lot of responsibility to answer every question about statistics completely,  correctly and succinctly. What’s more I also felt that I should be able to answer any question posed. But as with asking questions, you shouldn’t be ashamed to admit you don’t know something when answering them too. Many of my answers are prefixed with ‘I am not an expert in this but if it was me I would …’ Sometimes my offering is that I know where to find the answer (using every Bioinformaticians best friend – the internet) and then help explain what it means.

It can be reassuring when someone else acknowledges that they are not 100% sure about something, as it helps remove any unrealistic expectations of perfection. On top of that – and as I have to constantly remind myself – it wouldn’t be science, and we wouldn’t be here doing this job if we knew all the answers…

Bioinfo what?

So I thought I’d spend some time explaining a little more about the field of Bioinformatics.

If you wikipedia it you will discover that it is where statistics, programming and biology meet. You may then be wondering when would this happen? Although the relevance of maths in biology has been present ever since its first outing, the need for mathematicians or programmers is much more recent.

It has mainly arisen as technology has improved to produce ever-increasing amounts of data, and more complex data at that. In 1990 they started sequencing the first genome, finishing in 2003. These days, the data can be generated and analysed in around a day. Whats more we can now generate data on not just the genome, but the epigenome, transcriptome, metabolome and proteome. These are collectively known as the ‘omics. What they all have in common is lots of data points (generally hundreds of thousands) each representing different parts of your DNA or the resulting chemical molecules.

It would be completely implausible to try to analyse each data point one by one with a pen and paper. Therefore, some knowledge of programming is needed to manage the data and implement analyses efficiently.  The role of statistics is to ensure that the data is analysed appropriately and results are not chance findings. While the biologist is needed to run the experiment and do the interpretation. This is a simplication of how these skills come together, but there is huge variety in the type of projects requiring a bioinformatician.

Bioinformatics is now a field in its own right. I am not aware of any undergraduate course in the UK, although many bioscience departments are starting to offer modules in it. Often the first chance you would have to study it is at a masters level. Courses will accept biology, mathematical/statistical or computer science graduates, but my experience is that the vast majority of the intake have studied biology or related disciplines. I mainly put this down to no-one telling mathematics or computer science undergraduates that this is an option, as these course are predominately based in bioscience or medical schools. It may also be that biologists realise that to remain competitive in the jobs market you need to have some of these skills (particularly if you want a career in genetics). I have seen non-biologists initially really struggle on these courses, as it is a steep learning curve from GCSE or A level  with lots of new vocabulary, concepts and mechanisms to get your head around. It can be demoralising and seem like a daunting task, but when it comes to the analysis side you will find the tables flipped and everyone looking at you wishing they could do what you can so it is worth being patient and sticking with it.

So if this appeals you are probably wondering, which of these subjects should you study at undergraduate level? Well, as all of them can lead to the same outcome it has to be a choice based on were you think your strengths lie, what you will enjoy, and remain motivated to study for three or more years. What I would say is look for opportunities to broaden your skill set across the three domains, can you do a computer science module or learn some programming as part of your final year project in your Maths degree. Does you department offer a bioinformatics or mathematically modelling module in your biology degree? Can you develop some software to help a field biologist collect and store their data. My break came when I spent 10 weeks doing a computational biology project in Edinburgh during the summer of my Maths degree. This was my first chance to learn to programme and learn about the data biologists were working with.

The reality is that most bioinformaticians have a particular strength and positions call for different combinations of skills. You may not need to be the whizziest programmer but have a good analytical mind to decide which statistical approaches should be used. You may not know a huge amount about what the data is but you do know how to store data in an efficient and secure manner, or how to set up and manage high-powered computing systems.

Which ever way you approach it you will have many opportunities to work on different projects with different teams all over the world. Almost all industries are increasing reliant on data and informaticians to stay ahead, so if you decide that biology isn’t for you there are many other opportunities out there with these skill sets, so it worth thinking about!

Taking maths beyond the classroom.

In this blog post I want share my thoughts on the differences between Maths taught in the classroom and that used in professional life.What often appeals about Maths is the routine of applying a clear set of instructions. Regardless of the context, this remains a large part of any mathematicians career. The big difference once you have left the classroom, is what comes before and after.

Generally in the classroom who are taught a particular statistical test: its assumptions, how to apply it and how to interpret the output. Then when it comes to the end of year exam, the question specifically asks you to perform said test, often on data generated (by a computer) to give a particular answer.

Now, once you are employed as a statistician (or any role where statistics forms part of the job description), the question no longer guides you in exactly what to do. More likely you will be given a data set, and some premise of what you required to extract out of the data. The level of detail of your task is highly variable and likely dependent on the statistical ability of the person asking. The less they know the more vague or far-fetched the question, whereas a fellow statistician is likely to set out a clear hypothesis having already worked through much of the thought process you would have gone through.

Before you can actually start any number crunching, you need to deduce what the hypothesis is. Then you need to decide whether it is actually testable in the data you have. If you think the data can’t answer the question in hand you may have to adjust the question, and present your superior with what you can establish sometimes leading to a protracted negotiation until you are both happy. Once you have finalised the hypothesis, you can then think about which statistical test to use and how.

What I think is missing in the classroom is this thought process of deciding what procedure to use and when. In my experience, I was always explicitly told what I was going to need to do. As a results of this I remember stressful interactions, when at university, friends on other courses would ask for advice on what statistics to use in their dissertations and I would grapple through what I knew to try to advise them. Since my degree, I have had to learn how to answer these questions for my own work, but also to help colleagues in their projects. It can be challenging to convert their biological question into the underlying hypothesis and the mathematical concept that may be represented by.

Experience is the key, but communication is what is going to get you through. Being able to decompose their question into the relevant parts (if they are asking you for help, they probably have overcomplicated it) allows you start thinking in terms more familiar to you. Keep asking them questions with the aim of getting them to refine their question into a testable hypothesis. While there may be moments of utter confusion or complete miscommunication, these interactions are good for both parties and can lead to some novel ideas neither party would have come to on their own.

The  other main difference I want to discuss, is that the way Maths is taught can be quite limited.  Not only what has been decided should be on the curriculum which is true of all subjects, but also in the structured style of exams. This means you can only do what you are directly asked to, and once you get to the require answer that’s the end. There is no opportunity to show off additional skills or explore further, the way you can with an English or History assignment. Within my role, I am given a lot of freedom to explore datasets beyond the primary purpose. I can generate and test additional hypotheses and try out more advanced or new routines. This creativity really helps improve my skill set and gives me confidence in adopting new areas of statistics I have not encountered before.

The reality is, I have probably learnt more about how Maths really works outside of my initial education and training. You can never discount the value of experience. I would advocate, therefore, that more Maths assignments or assessments take on a more flexible framework. We should give students a chance to follow a project through from design to completion, rewarding the thought process as much as the ability to compute the answer. The skill most employers value from Maths is problem solving, and how can we really teach that if when we set the question we tell them how we want it answered too?