Sunday, May 29, 2016

What will it take to get people to act to stop global warming?

Our, not their, problem
Let's first start by correctly identifying the problem. Habit is, after all, a complacent rut. From its comfort, we tend to launch salvos from the relative safety of our hubris. People, the way they act, the way they choose to not believe in global warming. Let's start by substituting people, they, them with we, us, our. It is our problem, the way we choose to act, and choose to believe or not in global warming. Rather than asking what people can do to stop global warming, let's turn the spotlight on ourselves and ask what each and every one of us can do to stop global warming.

One person? What can one person do? Plenty it turns out. I speak,of course, of Jadav Payeng, the Forest Man of India, who since 1979 has been planting trees on the Majuli island in the Brahmaputra river (1). Doing so, he has converted 551 hectares (1360 acres) of flood-prone, barren land into a vast forest, now home to elephants, rhinos, deers, tigers and vultures. Let's consider for a bit the colossal scale of his single-handed accomplishment. Undiscovered by larger society until 2008, day after day, week after week, decade after decade, this one man, Jadav Payeng, planted tree after tree and created a forest, which at 551 hectares is larger than New York's Central Park, a mere 341 hectare dwarf! By comparison, what have I done in my life to benefit mother Earth? What can I do but hang my head in shame?

Our Food: Where does it come from?
Polemics aside, let's consider first principles. The food we eat. Each and every one of us can be mindful of what the food we eat costs mother Earth. Having done so, each one of us can try to make different choices. For example, why do we eat so much meat, especially in the US? Dubiously simple. Transportation and refrigeration technology helped make it plentifully available all year around. What about out of season produce? Is it fair to expect to eat seasonal produce year round, if it needs to be flown in hundreds or thousands of miles? Cheap food, too deceptively and artificially cheap.

Instead of reflexively eating, using only convenience and our immediate monetary cost as the measure, let's think about the resources, time and effort it takes to get one kilo of meat. Animal feed, temperature controlled barns, antibiotics to accelerate weight gain, vaccines to prevent epidemics among densely populated, closely housed livestock. With everything maximized for short-term profit at the expense of long-term cost to mother Earth, what is our modern industrial livestock agriculture but immeasurably cruel, wasteful and harmful? My hope is that we turn back to the era of seasonal produce, especially seasonal meat (2). An example from my own life? Quinoa, mainstream in the US in just a few years. I could and did question the real price of eating quinoa (3, 4) and stopped consuming it. Of course, I'm far from eliminating my carbon footprint but I try to incorporate this imperative holistically in my daily decision making. Having never understood the concept or need of gyms, I incorporate exercise activities into my daily chores. For example, I eschew chemicals and fancy mops, get down on my hands and knees, and use elbow grease to clean my kitchen and bathroom. Ditto for dishes. Vegetarian by choice, I also recycle maniacally. Small potatoes but I believe every small potato counts.

Certainly, we are starting to make the necessary cultural changes to reverse the immeasurable harm we have caused mother Earth. Disparate, inchoate, uncoordinated, it takes effort to perceive these changes amid the noise of polarized political arguments. I keep my eye out for nuggets suggestive of the large-scale cultural changes necessary to reverse global warming. Cultural not governmental. We needs must move to change ourselves culturally. The rest, including government policies, will follow holistically to cater to the changed demands that we, the populace, make on larger society. The signs of such necessary cultural changes are all around us, like the tiny green shoot that Wall-E and Eva took back to the human space ship in Pixar's WALL-E.

Green Shoots
Enough of us have started to question the origin and true costs of our food for us to have the locavore movement (5), and the backyard chicken movement (6). Surely idealism still exists if we have the the WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) movement (7)? The outstandingly idealistic among us, like Michigan teen Alexandra Reau, converted their backyard into a farm (8). Maybe more among us with backyards will follow suit?

Slowly but surely, we are developing a “New Ethics of Eating” (9). This nascent food culture is serving as impetus for a new generation of farmers to develop more sustainable agricultural practices (10). Speaking of sustainable agricultural practices, maybe when we decide about our charitable donations, we will decide with greater discernment and give to worthy endeavors like Glynwood Farms in upstate New York (11), who are doing yeoman and necessary research?

If none of these incremental changes do the trick, we have a potentially fail-safe fallback, also of our making. We already experience increasing Salmonella-related deaths, the blighted gift of the scourge that is modern agriculture. If that's not enough to trigger change, our recent spate of man-made epidemics suggests that sooner rather than later, we will create through our own misguided agency a new and more deadly epidemic that will lay waste to thousands or even millions of us. Surely, that will be the goad necessary for fundamental cultural and governmental change?

Another hope is that the contagion of ideas will spread the “buy locally grown” concept to other everyday items. We may never quite achieve on a global scale the Gandhian self-sufficient, self-sustaining village utopia but the signs suggest we will evolve a hybrid that incorporates some of its essential elements. After all, behind all the hype and kitsch, isn't this the true ecological hope and promise of the increasingly popular Maker Faire and 3D printing?

Another example? We are starting to recycle our energy expenditure more efficiently and effectively. Some progressive city planners are incorporating initiatives such as Page on wikipedia.org idea of harnessing pedestrian footfalls (12). Maybe we will expand the pedestrian-footfall-energy-harnessing idea to many other urban spaces so they become a broader source of sustainable power?

I encountered yet another encouraging sign at my last trip to the local public library. An advertisement for an upcoming class on learning “All About Modern Cloth Diapering”


Modern Cloth Diapering in Central Florida! If ever somewhere on Earth earned its place on a list for mindless consumerism, surely it would be the home of Disneyland. Yet even here we have apparently internalized the message of the needless harm we have caused mother Earth and are actively seeking to learn to change our needlessly profligate ways.

The Course Ahead
Undoubtedly, we are a vicious, wantonly barbaric species. Yet, our history teaches me that time and again after we unwittingly bring calamity down upon ourselves, our self-interest kicks in to draw us back from the precipice. This is how we overcame some of the urban blight of Industrialization in developed countries, and began reversing the processes that created the ozone hole. The economist Raj Chetty states the obvious, “If you want to encourage more of an activity, reduce the price of that behavior” (13).

Alternative? We will have increasing frequency of minicalypses such as floods (14). Money quote? “The study does not include Miami, arguable [sic] the U.S. city most vulnerable to sea-level rise, because NOAA tide stations there were destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992” (14). Then let's just sit back and let this inevitability happen. Let Miami submerge. Surely, then the massive government-level changes necessary to truly start reversing global warming will begin? Surely one or few of such large-scale calamities combined with the incremental, reassuringly inexorable and necessary cultural changes we are making in our daily life will drive us toward the desired outcome of at least in the aggregate healing rather than harming mother Earth.

As a child, one of the first concepts I remember being taught was the ancient Sanskrit adage, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, loosely translated as “the world is one family”. Rediscovering and internalizing this ancient idea articulated in the Upanishads and other cultural traditions, more recently James Lovelock and Lynn Margulies scientifically re-formulated a similar elegant concept, the Gaia hypothesis. As Eduardo Kohn, an anthropologist at McGill University in Canada, says in his book, How Forests Think (15), we will continue to behave in our wantonly destructive way until we, the global we, break free of the cultural, largely linguistic, constructs we use by rote and instead reach the rightful consensus that we are after all but one small part of the interconnected whole that is our mother Earth.

Bibliography
1. https://youtu.be/og42JC0zYMc
2. Survival Guide: Meat Clubs - Modern Farmer
3. Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa? | Joanna Blythman
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/2...
5. Locavores
6. Raising BackYard Chickens, Build a Chicken Coop, Pictures of Breeds
7. World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms
8. The New York Times
9. The new ethics of eating
10. The New York Times
11. Glynwood Farm " Glynwood
12. Page on nationalgeographic.com
13. Interview with Raj Chetty
14. Most coastal cities will face routine flooding in our lifetimes, NOAA says
15. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human: Eduardo Kohn: 9780520276116: Amazon.com: Books


https://www.quora.com/What-will-it-take-to-get-people-to-act-to-stop-global-warming/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala


Sunday, May 22, 2016

Are there any general differences in the psychology of left handed people and right handed people?

1st, definition of handedness, 2nd, psychological trait differences associated with handedness, 3rd and finally, technical problems associated with studies of handedness.

Definition of handedness
Chirality from the Greek 'cheir' or hand is synonym for handedness. 'Chiral' is the property of any object that cannot be superimposed on its mirror image, such as our hands.

Are psychological trait differences associated with handedness?
This is a rather profound question. Are our abstract thoughts really abstract or more rooted in our physical selves?

  • Language abounds in examples that show our body contributes to our abstract thoughts.
  • Examples such as 'right-hand person', 'given the cold shoulder', 'out in left field', 'two left feet'. 
  • Language also suggests that we ascribe positive virtue to our dominant side.
  • Since more of us are right-handed, our language reflects this bias. 
  • For example, 'left' is associated with inadequacy in French ('gauche'), bad in Latin and Italian ('sinistra'), derived from the word 'lyft' or broken in English (1). 
  • In Russian, 'levja' (maybe misspelled in original; left-handed) implies deceptive or untrustworthy (2). 
  • In the Chichewa language in Malawi, 'left' implies inferior, weaker while the right hand is often called the male hand (3, 4). 
  • In Mandarin Chinese, 'zou', the character for left implies weird, unorthodox, wrong, incorrect, different, contrary or opposite while the Mandarin character for right suggests to eat with the right hand (5).
How we experience and use our body contributes to our mental metaphors. This idea is called Embodied or Grounded Cognition. Our physical experience of the world influences how we think about it and how we remember it (6).

Daniel Casasanto, currently at the University of Chicago, studied whether handedness influences abstract mental constructs such as 'goodness and badness, victory and loss, deceit and honesty' (7).
  • In his 2009 study (7), Casasanto compared responses of left- and right-handed volunteers to Fribbles (alien creatures created by Michael J. Tarr, Brown University, www.tarrlab.org), arranged as binary choices.
  • In each choice, was the one on the left or on the right a better representative of a given quality, say intelligence, happiness, honesty or attractiveness?
  • Of 286 participants, 65% of left-handers 'attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the left of the page, whereas a small majority of right-handers (54%) attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the right of the page'.
According to Casasanto, 'lefties [tend to] think left is good, righties [tend to] think right is good' (8).

Casasanto's fMRI studies suggested body-specific associations underpin our abstract concepts.

Casasanto interprets 'People tend to understand verbs as referring to actions they would perform with their particular bodies— not to a Platonic ideal of the action or to the action as it is performed by the majority of language users. In this sense, people with different bodies understand the same verbs to mean something different' (9).

Calling this the Body-Specificity Hypothesis, Casasanto suggests that we develop certain abstract concepts corresponding to dominant physical traits, i.e. lefties imbue the left side with positive emotional, intellectual and moral attributes while righties do the same with the right side.

Could other researchers show similar differences between left- and right-handers in other tests?

Response to words: Linguistic Stimuli
Two studies from researchers at the University of Tubingen, Germany.
1st, how do left- and right-handers classify positive and negative words (10)?
  • Native German speakers asked to press a key to positive words with the right hand and to negative with the left in the 1st half of the experiment, and the other way around in the 2nd half of the experiment.
  • 20 each left- and right-handers tested.
  • Right-handers responded faster to positive words with their right hand compared to their left hand, and faster to negative words with their left hand compared to their right hand
  • Left-handers responded faster to positive words with their left hand to positive stimuli, and with their right hand to negative words.

Data support Embodied or Grounded Cognition.
  • Side corresponding to the dominant hand represents positive things while the side corresponding to the non-dominant hand represents negative things.
  • This bias happens even with linguistic stimuli.
2nd, does such bias also extend to foot usage (11)?
  • 37 native German speakers tested; all right-footed.
  • Participants were shown positive and negative words. They were asked to respond by pressing a key with their left or right foot.
  • As their title says, 'strong right-footers responded faster with their right foot to positive words, and with their left foot to negative words'.
Remembering and Mapping Positive and Negative Events
Another group at Tuft's University (12) 1st showed participants a map of fictitious positive and negative events, then asked them to recall these locations on the map.
  • Right-handers tended to remember positive events too far to the right (25/36; 69%) and negative events too far to the left (20/36; 56%)
  • Left-handers tended to remember positive events too far to the left (20/36; 56%) and negative events too far to the right (19/36; 53%).

Caveats to these studies
  • Small numbers of participants. Can they be safely extrapolated to entire populations? Open question.
  • Shoddy statistics: many use standard error of the mean to minimize variability within groups and thereby enhance differences between groups.
  • Most of them used Hand Preference tests such as the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI), as opposed to Hand Performance tests. The former self-identifies left- and right-handed people while the latter identifies them based on comparison of performance of certain [uni-]manual tasks using either hand.

Technical problems associated with studies of handedness
Study of handedness is a little mired in confusion, especially between two linked attributes, Hand Preference and Hand Performance.

Hand Preference: Assessed How?
  • Questionnaires such as the EHI (13) assess an individual's subjective preference for 20 different manual tasks such as writing, drawing, throwing, scissors, comb, toothbrush, knife and spoon for eating, hammer, screw-driver, tennis racket, knife with fork, cricket bat, golf club, broom, rake, striking match, opening box, dealing cards, and threading needle.
  • A lateralization quotient (LQ) uses the formula LQ = [(R-L)/(R+L)]*100, where R indicates activities where right hand is preferentially used, and L the left hand. LQ ranges from -100 to +100. 
  • Negative values indicate greater left-hand preferences. 
  • Positive values greater right-hand preferences.

Hand Performance: Assessed How?
  • Usually assessed through motor task such as the peg board task (14, 15, 16).
  • The peg board task assesses the time it takes a person to move a row of 10 pegs from one side of a board to another.
  • Compares reaction times for left and right hands.
  • Other tests include placing dots in a circle (Dot Test) or squares on a sheet of paper as quickly as possible (17, 18).
  • Pick up 20 matches from a table as quickly as possible (17).
Hand Preference and Hand Performance test results are significantly different (19, 20).

Hand Preference: The Data
  • Has a J-shaped distribution, i.e. it's bi-modal.
  • Many strongly right-handed.
  • Fewer strongly left-handed.
  • Still fewer ambidextrous.
  • Considered a dichotomous attribute by many researchers (21).

Hand Performance: The Data
  • Distribution depends on the assessment method used.
  • For example, peg board task more unimodal, with shift towards the right.
  • OTOH, the Dot Test shows a more bi-modal distribution (22).
Thus, Hand Preference and Hand Performance measure different attributes and derive different conclusions.

Bottomline, handedness could be mis-identified depending on the test. In practical terms, this means that left- and right-handed definition is not clear-cut, and their psychological basis may be more flexible than studies suggest.

Science is only as good as the methods used to study it and when the methods are imprecise so are the resulting data. Ergo, interpret these data as suggestive and not typical of left- and right-handers in general, at least until confirmed by many more studies using many more people, and every time comparing equal or similar numbers of left- and right-handed people.

Bibliography
  1. McManus, Chris. Right hand, left hand: The origins of asymmetry in brains, bodies, atoms and cultures. Harvard University Press, 2004.
  2. Coren, Stanley. The left-hander syndrome: The causes and consequences of left-handedness. Simon and Schuster, 2012.
  3. Stapleton, Walter H. "The Terms for" Right Hand" and" Left Hand" in the Bantu Languages." Journal of the Royal African Society 4.16 (1905): 431-433.
  4. Werner, Alice. "Note on the terms used for" right hand" and" left hand" in the Bantu languages." Journal of the Royal African Society 4.13 (1904): 112-116.
  5. Kushner, Howard I. "Why are there (almost) no left-handers in China?." Endeavour 37.2 (2013): 71-81.
  6. Barsalou, Lawrence W. "Grounded cognition." Annu. Rev. Psychol. 59 (2008): 617-645. Page on ucsd.edu
  7. Casasanto, Daniel. "Embodiment of abstract concepts: good and bad in right-and left-handers." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 138.3 (2009): 351. Page on mpdl.mpg.de
  8. Ananthaswamy, Anil. "Bodily minds: how we think outside the brain." New Scientist 205.2753 (2010): 8-9.
  9. Casasanto, Daniel. "Different bodies, different minds the body specificity of language and thought." Current Directions in Psychological Science 20.6 (2011): 378-383. Page on mpdl.mpg.de)
  10. de la Vega, Irmgard, et al. "Emotional valence and physical space: Limits of interaction." Journal of experimental psychology: human perception and performance 38.2 (2012): 375. Page on bibliographie.uni-tuebingen.de
  11. de la Vega, Irmgard, et al. "Starting off on the right foot: strong right-footers respond faster with the right foot to positive words and with the left foot to negative words." Frontiers in psychology 6 (2015). Starting off on the right foot: strong right-footers respond faster with the right foot to positive words and with the left foot to negative words
  12. Brunyé, Tad T., et al. "Body-specific representations of spatial location." Cognition 123.2 (2012): 229-239. Page on tufts.edu
  13. Edinburgh Handedness Inventory) (Oldfield, Richard C. "The assessment and analysis of handedness: the Edinburgh inventory." Neuropsychologia 9.1 (1971): 97-113. Page on psy.ku.dk
  14. Annett, Marian. Left, right, hand and brain: The right shift theory. Psychology Press, 1985.
  15. Annett, Marian. Handedness and brain asymmetry: The right shift theory. Psychology Press, 2013.
  16. Scerri, Thomas S., et al. "PCSK6 is associated with handedness in individuals with dyslexia." Human molecular genetics (2010): ddq475. PCSK6 is associated with handedness in individuals with dyslexia
  17. McManus, I. C. "Right‐and left‐hand skill: Failure of the right shift model." British Journal of Psychology 76.1 (1985): 1-16. Page on ucl.ac.uk
  18. Tapley, S. M., and M. P. Bryden. "A group test for the assessment of performance between the hands." Neuropsychologia 23.2 (1985): 215-221.
  19. Peters, Michael, and Bruce M. Durding. "Handedness measured by finger tapping: a continuous variable." Canadian Journal of Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie 32.4 (1978): 257.
  20. Nicholls, Michael ER, et al. "The relationship between hand preference, hand performance, and general cognitive ability." Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 16.04 (2010): 585-592. Page on squarespace.com
  21. Corballis, Michael C., Gjurgjica Badzakova‐Trajkov, and Isabelle S. Häberling. "Right hand, left brain: genetic and evolutionary bases of cerebral asymmetries for language and manual action." Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 3.1 (2012): 1-17. Page on researchgate.net
  22. Tapley, S. M., and M. P. Bryden. "A group test for the assessment of performance between the hands." Neuropsychologia 23.2 (1985): 215-221.


https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-general-differences-in-the-psychology-of-left-handed-people-and-right-handed-people/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala


Sunday, May 15, 2016

Why do some people like to say that they spend a lot of their time at work, like if it's a good thing?

See the bee buzzing among the flowers
Never found among Nature's disavowers

'Work is life, life is work', says the bee
'Meaningful work is the only way to be'

With fruits of earnest labor a soul merrily basks
'Yet what's a fair wage for such work?', one asks

Ah, therein lies the human's existential rub!
For our work value outweighs our pay stub

Such a fatal fissure between human work and life
'Work-life balance' embodies our ensuing strife

Yet 'Meaningful work is play, the play of life',
Asserts Nature's gleam, with mischief rife


https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-like-to-say-that-they-spend-a-lot-of-their-time-at-work-like-if-its-a-good-thing/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala


Sunday, May 8, 2016

How are cultural institutions created?

A simplistic formula to describe the process? An idea + charismatic and single-minded figures + cultural zeitgeist. The idea is the seed, the charismatic and single-minded figures embody the idea and provide the necessary nutrition, and the cultural zeitgeist the soil that allows the idea seed to germinate, grow and thrive. Do I have any data to back this up? Let's look at a couple of examples.
  1. Henry Dunant, Gustave Moynier, Clara Barton and Mabel Thorp Boardman and the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Geneva Conventions.
  2. Anant Pai and Amar Chitra Katha.
ICRC and the Geneva Conventions.
The idea? How to mitigate the horrors of war and natural disasters.

The charismatic and single-minded figures? Two pairs of yin and yang coming together with single-minded purpose. On the one hand, the charismatic, free-wheeling and opportunistic dreamers, Henri Dunant and Clara Barton. On the other hand, the self-righteous and moralistic dogged do-gooders Gustave Moynier and Mabel Thorp Boardman.

Cultural zeitgeist? A rapidly industrializing world had become increasingly adept at creating ever more dreadful weapons of destruction. It simultaneously created the cultural (daily newspapers and their war correspondents) and technological (telegraph) instruments to widely disseminate this dreadful carnage in real time and also record it for posterity (dageurrotypes, photographs). The horrors of war thus emanated far beyond the soldiers and reached the doorstep of the entire populace. They felt they needed to do something but what?

Henry Dunant's life-changing experience occurred on the evening of 24 June 1859 when he, a young Geneva businessman, arrived at Solferino. It was the evening before the Battle of Solferino. Earlier on 3 May, Napoleon III of France had joined forces with the Italians and declared war on Austria. The Battle of Solferino was particularly horrible because it happened by chance. Neither side planned to fight that day and did so after facing each other by chance.

Chance played its part in Dunant's presence as well. Scion of one of Geneva's prosperous families, by 1859, Dunant headed a troubled business empire. His latest scheme, to turn a stretch of North Africa into a bread basket for Europe, was literally drying up from lack of much needed water. He turned up in Solferino to try and meet Napoleon III and gift him a handsomely printed self-published book called The Empire of Charlemagne Restored, an obvious attempt to ingratiate and seek sponsorship for his failing business venture in French-controlled Algeria. As it turned out, Dunant's overture to Napoleon III was rejected. Disappointed in business and retaining the horror of what he witnessed at Solferino, Dunant turned his experiences into a powerful anti-war polemic, A Memory of Solferino. With its vivid and detailed descriptions of the horrors of war, Dunant's book evoked admiration for the writer and revulsion and condemnation of war across the length and breadth of Europe, from fashionable salons to church pulpits. Acclaim for his book created the right environment for the creation of the ICRC, and in the years to come, with the help of Moynier and other allies, Dunant helped create the ICRC while Clara Barton and Mable Thorp Boardman were decisive in expanding the mandate beyond victims of war to victims of natural disasters in times of peace, thus sowing the seeds of the Geneva Convention.

Anant Pai and wildly improbable success of Amar Chitra Katha.
The idea? Create a belief in a unified cultural identity of India among children born decades after independence.

The charismatic and single-minded figure? India's uncle, Uncle Pai, the late Anant Pai. Combining the charisma of a Dunant or a Barton with the single-minded sense of purpose of a Moynier or a Boardman, Pai's goal was no less lofty than to to eliminate “kula, matha, pranthiya abhimanalu” (loyalties of caste, religion and region) and to promote “bhaava-samaikyatha, desa-samikyatha” (unity of feeling and unity of nation) (Godspeed, Uncle Pai!). “Unless you have continuity with the past, you can’t easily be adjusted with the present,” he said. “The acquaintance with the past is a must. You may not agree with it. You can disagree with it, but be aware of it” (The New York Times).

Cultural zeitgeist? A newly independent yet exceedingly fractious and diverse sub-continent carved out as a country. For those born in the decades immediately prior and post-independence (1947), the freedom struggle against an alien foreign power was a potent unifying memory. What about those born in the subsequent decades? After all, there is no such country as India. Rather there is a United States of India. Different languages, different gods and goddesses, different cultures, different cuisine, everywhere one looks in India, there is a regional difference in kind, not just in degree. How could such a country stay together as the memories of the freedom struggle fast faded? In the years before cable television, the internet and economic liberalization, as the joint family system fast disintegrated, the cultural identity of India remained largely nebulous and inchoate to those born during the country's adolescence and early adulthood.

What did Pai do? Using Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Illustrated Stories) as his vehicle, Pai's genius was in making manifest the invisible glue that binds Indians together, the invisible glue embodied by the common stories passed on through countless generations, told and re-told in a single, unbroken thread stretching back hundreds, even thousands of years. Created in the easily accessible and understood format of brightly colored comics, Amar Chitra Katha almost single-handedly created a belief in India's cultural unity-in-diversity for millions of children. Whether we grew up speaking Hindi or Gujarati, celebrated the birth of Krishna or Ganesha, or grew up eating makki di roti (corn flour flatbread) or idli (fermented steamed rice cakes), we intuitively understood the common cultural threads tying together the stories of Amar Chitra Katha, and doing so, we learned to recognize the underlying similarities in each other beneath all those seemingly insurmountable differences of language, culture, cuisine, caste and religion.

The more interesting question is how do cultural institutions continue to survive and thrive once their founders pass on. I'm not sure there's a simple formula for that.

https://www.quora.com/How-are-cultural-institutions-created/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala


Sunday, May 1, 2016

What careers in science are available to people with disabilities that prevent them from working regular long hours? Is there a place in scientific research for people with conditions like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome who are unable to consistently work long hours (or even short hours sometimes)?

In my opinion, if the person is able to work for a few hours per day on the computer,  scientific research in general and biomedical research in particular offer several opportunities for people with disabilities like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome.

Data analysis and statistical analysis, these are two pursuits for someone whose disabilities preclude working regular hours. These days high throughput assays have become bread-and-butter in biomedical research. An enormous amount of data is generated from a single experiment. Then its hours of data analysis using specialized scientific software and statistical analysis using specialized statistical software. Such types of analyses can be done from anywhere, even home.  In industry especially where projects are done by teams, the work is often organized into an assembly-line type of process, and different parts of the project are performed by different team members. There's certainly a place in such a structure for people with disabilities who could perform such data analysis remotely, even from home.

Scientific literature mining. In industry, another place for a person with disabilities is early in the timeline for a scientific project, in helping amass the scientific justification to help with green-lighting a project. Periodically the R&D divisions of large pharma/biotech companies go through their portfolio to decide which new projects to bring on board. Business and marketing divisions determine the financial worthiness of the projects, i.e., whether the products will make money. The R&D teams work on the science side, i.e., which diseases and whether there are promising lead candidates out there that can be brought on board and developed. This takes a huge amount of scientific analysis examining the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Again, a person with disabilities could do this work remotely, even from home.

Patent examiner/researcher. Again, the work here is to scour the realm of available literature to assess if a proposed idea/invention is original or not. Scope for this job is with the federal government, research organizations and law firms.


https://www.quora.com/What-careers-in-science-are-available-to-people-with-disabilities-that-prevent-them-from-working-regular-long-hours/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala