Roger's View of the World, Love and Seafood Gumbo!
Seize the Day! Put no trust in the morrow! — Horace
Sometimes I do think Laura likes to mess with my head. She sent me a story about ‘X-Men’… or I should be more accurate and say ‘XX-Men.’
So, just when I think I have finally gotten ‘my arms around’ some of the complexities and contradictions of our limited understandnig of genetics… she throws me — excuse the pun — this ‘curve ball’:
A genetic switch that produces testes has been found. —
Hey… where are the ‘cupcake games?’ Well, at least it is a “W” (WIN) as they say!
(3) Southern Cal
28
Arizona State U
21
After the first quarter, it was all-USC… then Arizona came to life late in the 2nd quarter and in the 3rd quarter. USC ended up with the ball… and with the new clock rules… it was all but over.
Obviously, when you are at a game it is important to listen to all the games! We couldn’t resist looking at how Auburn schooled Urban ‘the legend’ Meyer… I am sure our Gator graduate Karen had somewhat mixed feelings…liked the kids…. not the coach. As for me, I can’t help but wonder what Chris Leak would have done under the coach now at South Carolina? He’ll get his chance ni the NFL.
(11) Auburn — 27
(2) Florida — 17
Let’s see… ‘SC beat Arkansas who beat Auburn who beat Florida … fun to think about.
Here’s how others talked about the games:
Well…. the Southern California Trojans have a ‘bye’ this next week… and one can hope that the injuries heal and more players continue to step up !
I can hardly wait to the next game!
Fight On!
Roger Freberg
I don’t always read the local paper the San luis Obispo Tribune very often… I really — as they say — don’t care who turned 100, what shrub is now endangered or how green which politician is… once in a while a story or two pops up that says… IDIOT!
“…when he swerved to miss a dog that wandered onto the road, according to the CHP.The car spun out of control and hit a large tree, impacting the right-front door, the CHP said. Mariano was taken to French Hospital Medical Center, treated for major injuries and released. Viernes was taken to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, where he died, the CHP said.”
So, what was this guy thinking? Save a dog, lose a friend is a good trade? He’s not alone, I have a female relative…. a d-i-s-t-a-n-t relative… who tumbled and totaled her car in a ditch and almost bought the big one in order to miss a ground squirrel. Hmmmm, maybe these two could find each other.
The next story is very cool by Jeff Carlton of the Associated Press entitled: ” In case of a gunman in class, Texas kids taught to fight back”. It’s about time!. It seems like Robin Browne ( a Major in the British Army reserve) is teaching students ‘they can win’ against an armed attacker. This could only happen in Texas!
Remember how the Amish boys ran away and let the girls get wacked? Had they been prepared mentally … maybe, they could have prevented it all from happening.
I remember hearing teachers and others in responsibility preaching that we must cooperate with our rapist, attacker, murderer or even worse thnigs might happen… like what? …. and, yes, we must — while driving — avoid all ground squirrels even if it means taking out a family of four riding in the opposite direction….
In any event, courage — as we should teach our children — is not the absence of fear… but the mastery of fear.
Roger Freberg
It does seem like a lifetime ago that I was a scholarship athlete at UCLA… but I do remember coming home, eating my dinner and then falling asleep. Somehow, I still managed to graduate in 4 years.
Since then, times have really changed for both students and student-athletes. Today, graduating in 4 years is a real challenge for many. It could be that economic times are tougher or maybe students are just dragging their collective heals; however, more often than not it is the university itself that slows the graduation rates. Sometimes, just getting 1) the required classes in majors whose unit requirements have inflated over the years and 2) obtaining the prerequisites in a timely manner slows the process to a crawl.
When I was at UCLA, I almost completed a triple major but opted to graduate ‘on-time.’ It is clear that by today’s hurdles and requirements, I would never have been able to be so adventurous and my graduation date would have been stretched out. With students taking longer and longer to complete their degrees often due to no fault of their own … it seems only logical that we reevaluate the support we offer student athletes with a fifth year of eligibility. Here’s a link and a copy of a letter I wrote to the Daily Trojan:
Unequal standards
A favorite topic – by some – is to pick on athletes who struggle through the academic requirements set by the NCAA (Athlete graduation rate lags, Oct. 6, 2006). I always ask myself, “How many ‘regular’ students make progress to degree completion in the time allotted by the NCAA?” You’d be surprised to know the answer.
In the non-football powerhouse, academic community in which I live (San Luis Obispo), the “average” student graduates in 6.5 years. This is more of a pain to the parents than it is to the university or the NCAA, but it points out the fact that athletes everywhere are held to different and, in my opinion, unfair standards.
The unintended expectation of the NCAA academic progress regulations is that athletes are required to outperform their non-athletic peers, but this is unreasonable given the time, energy and recovery demands of Division I athletics.
Every effort should be made to aid athletes and non-athletes in earning their bachelor’s degrees. A big, positive step for athletes in reaching this goal would be in offering a fifth year of eligibility.
Roger Freberg
San Luis Obispo, Calif.
This is not to criticize the NCAA. The NCAA has made great strides in supporting athletes over the years… in particular , allowing athletes with remaining eligibility to continue through graduate school ( as did my daughter Karen) is a wonderful tweak to the system for the best students in the student-athlete mix. The addition of a fifth year would help everyone else towards earning their bachelor’s degree… which is the point, isn’t it?
As for me, I really did have an unfair advantage… I married my tutor.
Roger Freberg
One of the fun things about marrying young is that you tend to share so much more… sometimes it takes the form of your bride slipping an article under your nose in order to see what shade of red you become.
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Laura tends to ‘bait’ me with juicy stories like the one that appeared in her APS Observer entitled “With the Brain is seeing believing?” , it does stimulate conversation over the breakfast table.
My first reaction was to say,”why doesn’t this woman just stop?” However, she is employing the oldest technique in the book… the ‘distraction.’
So what am I talking about? As I mentioned in a previous blog, many people who have devoted their lives to the notion that everything can be explained by cultural or environmental factors are very uncomfortable with what is being discovered in the area of genetics and brain imaging….. why? The reason is simple, it shakes their very intellectual foundations…. it’s hard being wrong. It’ll be even harder being thought of as ‘quaint.’
Pictured above, Carol Wade is clearly feeling very uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I have read her work. Carol has coauthored an Introductory Psychology Text , which we own along with others. Her text is resplendant with cultural and environmental examples to demonstrate the power of these factors, she pays lip service to the developments in science, but it is clear to me that she just brushes them aside as less significant…. if not insignificant.
Carol is quick to criticize the study of ‘brain scans’… but it is unclear as to whether or not she has ever studied them herself. Data can be such uncomfortable things when they don’t go the way you expect. In fairness, Carol does show a picture in her text of a ‘brain scan’ and does give some play to the fact that some male and female differences may exist… but this is minor.
Many of us have observed that men and women are different at the very core… and outside of the obvious physical differences … we noticed that there must be something more that explains why men and women think differently, have different abilities and often hold very different perspectives. We hypothesized that we are not taught to be boys and girls, so much, as there must be something ‘inborn’ that influences our behavior and outlook from the very start.
Science is beginning to reveal all of this, and science is confirming what many of us thought to be true all along… however, this is making others (non-science folk) very uncomfortable. A “Tsunami’ of data bringing greater understanding of how we work is already here, and more is coming…. and folks like Carol who refuse to rethink their fundamental precepts will be a mere quaint footnote in history.
Sites for Science:
Brain scans that spy on the senses
Genetic influences:
Environment and genetic influences play different roles
in boys’ and girls’ gender-role behavior
The Nature of Genetic Influences on Behavior:
Lessons From “Simpler” Organisms
Roger Freberg