What is your check list to follow before starting research?

There isn't one common checklist. Though many elements may overlap, each project requires its own checklist. Research process is also enormously different between academia and industry, an individual plodding from A to Z being quite common in the former, especially during Ph.D. and often during post-doc as well, while overlapping team-work is the norm in the latter. Starting with a broad-brush breakdown of basic immunology research into either mouse model or in vitro human cell studies,

Mouse model studies

Carefully research pertinent literature and draft an Animal Study Proposal (ASP). Submit ASP to the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and wait for their approval. Experiments involving animal models require prior approval by IACUCs. Typically, IACUCs meet once a month so already we see how planning is integral to basic biomedical research, especially if it involves animal models. The IACUC process ensures ethical animal use and is mandated by law.

ASPs need to detail how many animals are needed for a year, how many experiments, how many animals per year, age- and gender-matched or not, plus clear scientific rationale for each choice. ASPs also need to account for situations involving unrelieved pain and distress. Would any animal be exposed to such? If yes, then need to explain why this is scientifically necessary and also need to scientifically justify the numbers of such animals. ASPs typically undergo annual renewal, at which point changes in experiment designs, numbers, especially for increases in those likely to be subjected to unrelieved pain and distress need to be rigorously scientifically justified.

Special Knockout mouse, Genetically modified mouse require more extensive time outlays in creation and breeding. If procured commercially, need to factor cost and availability as well.

Human cell studies

Carefully research pertinent literature and draft a human research study protocol and submit to the Institutional review board (IRB). Typically, if the human cells are just blood cells, i.e., requiring collection of blood samples, then the process is considered minimal risk and merits expedited review (http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/policy/e...). The IRB review process ensures that research involving human subjects is conducted ethically. Again, process requires advance planning since research can only proceed after IRB approval.

Questions can then be broken down into:

Sufficient supply of animals/human cell needed to do the entire study or not? If not, what's the plan? Proceed or wait?

How many experiments? Per week? Per month? Etc.

How many animals/human cell vials needed/experiment? Gender- and age-matched.

Need specialized media bottles or supplements or not? If yes, are they readily available or tend to be on back-order? If the latter, how long is the back-order? Also, if the latter, need to stockpile such materials prior to starting such an experiment series. In that case, how long such reagents are good for also becomes a critical issue. Some reagents may be good for a year or more, others only for a few months. If the latter, then need to decide if entire experimental series could be done with one stockpile or not. If not, then multiple lots of a specific reagent would be needed and the need to control for this variable needs to be incorporated into the experiment design.

Need Fetal Calf Serum (FCS*) as growth supplement or not? If yes, then need to order enough bottles of one lot of FCS from one particular vendor for an entire experimental series. Typically labs do or should screen for various FCS lots using their most common lab assays as the readouts and choose to purchase one FCS lot necessary to sustain their lab activities for several years. There is enormous lot-to-lot variation in FCS so biomedical experiments using it have to control for this.

Antibodies, assay kits, enzymes, recombinant proteins, other reagents, lab consumables: Need to prepare a checklist of the foreseeable reagents needed for the planned experiments and check their availability from vendors. Experiments should commence only once all the necessary reagents and equipment are available to hand. For e.g., a particular experimental series might require unusual, specialized lab consumables such as moulded 96- or 48-well transwells that may need to be ordered ahead of time and stockpiled for an entire experimental series or may need a standing order delivery of specific number of units periodically.

Protocols and Standard operating procedure (SOPs): Each slated experimental procedure should be clearly and succinctly written down, and shared with all team members who would be performing the experiments. In industry, SOPs may often need to go through a formal review process as well. Pilot experiments involving all team members are very useful to work out the kinks in new protocols and help minimize 'loss in translation' ahead of primetime. Once an experiment series is underway, it's also helpful to have a shared calendar charting all the steps. Different experiments can be color-coded. Shared calendars help work out schedules ahead of time, which in turn helps outline if staff need to come in on week-ends or holidays or not. Shared calendars also help distribute tasks among team members, and generally help keep the experimental pipeline running smoothly. Again, to minimize loss in translation, experiments should use standardized experiment templates, designed ahead of time as much as possible. In research teams therefore, daily conversations and discussions are the norm and necessity.

Data collection, storage and analysis, ontologies, etc.: If some repetitive procedures require complicated calculations or estimations, excel macros and the like, these should be written ahead of time and saved in a common folder accessible to all team members.  

Electronic notebooks are more optimal compared to paper for data capture. Data can be uploaded to a central server as recorded with no scope for post-experiment modifications, only additions. Minimizes scope for fraud, data selection and other unscrupulous or dubious research practices. Team members should use common data analysis macros or cheat-sheets to ensure uniform and comparable data analysis.

Basic theme? Research teams creating and adhering to a common experimental language, i.e., protocols, calendars, templates, calculations, data analysis approaches and ontologies, helps minimize experimental errors, misunderstandings and miscommunications. Each experiment series reveals scope for improvement such as greater granularity of detail required for successful reproducible experimentation. Electronic notebooks help here as well since date- and time-stamped notes can be recorded in real-time and saved at a central location, enabling ease of retrieval at future dates for post-study critique to tweak and improve the research process.

Some aspects explained in greater detail here: Tirumalai Kamala's answer to What are your hearty suggestions to the students new to research?

* FCS is used inter-changeably with FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum).

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-check-list-to-follow-before-starting-research/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

If you have contributed to a paper that is already published, can you use the same title, abstract, and images for a poster presentation?

'If you have contributed to a paper that is already published, can you use the same title, abstract, and images for a poster presentation?'
Yes, provided you have permission from the other authors of that paper and provided the meeting abstract submission policies allow submission of a published paper. For example, having clarified these two issues, I have presented posters of papers that were under review or already accepted for publication.

'Does it depend on whether I wrote it in the first place?'
No, but the poster that you plan to present should retain the list of authors from the published paper as is, of course, with those authors' permission. On the poster, you could put an asterisk after your name with the explanation of the asterisk noting you as the poster presenter. Under no circumstances should the poster list only your name as the author.

'Do people rewrite this info or just use the info from the paper? … I'm guessing it's frowned upon to literally copy/paste the abstract, but I really doubt I could write a better version that says the exact same thing'.
Tending to stricter word limits, usually poster abstracts are shorter compared to those of journal papers so you may not be able to use the exact same abstract anyway. Remember though that if you end up re-writing some phrases or sentences to conform to a strict word limit, you should get approval of the re-worded abstract from all the other authors. Your poster should also indicate that it's based on a published paper by clearly referencing it, i.e., title, list of authors, journal (year, volume, issue, page numbers), on the poster itself.

https://www.quora.com/If-you-have-contributed-to-a-paper-that-is-already-published-can-you-use-the-same-title-abstract-and-images-for-a-poster-presentation/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

In 2010-2011, David Koch was asked to leave the National Cancer Institute at NIH for obfuscating the role of formaldehyde in causing cancer. Which scientists did he rely on most for generating doubt?

The question is slightly inaccurate. David Koch sat on the advisory board of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the largest (by size and budget) permanent institute at the NIH. The NCI has the mandate for identifying and researching human carcinogens.

In the August 30, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, the award-winning journalist Jane Mayer published an investigative piece on the Koch family where, among other things, she reported, 'Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a ‘known carcinogen’ in humans' (Covert Operations - The New Yorker).

As Jane Meyer reports further in her piece, 'Scientists have long known that formaldehyde causes cancer in rats, and several major scientific studies have concluded that formaldehyde causes cancer in human beings—including one published last year by the National Cancer Institute, on whose advisory board Koch sits. The study tracked twenty-five thousand patients for an average of forty years; subjects exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had significantly higher rates of leukemia. These results helped lead an expert panel within the National Institutes of Health to conclude that formaldehyde should be categorized as a known carcinogen, and be strictly controlled by the government. Corporations have resisted regulations on formaldehyde for decades, however, and Koch Industries has been a large funder of members of Congress who have stymied the E.P.A., requiring it to defer new regulations until more studies are completed'.

Also, 'James Huff, an associate director at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, a division of the N.I.H., told me that it was “disgusting” for Koch to be serving on the National Cancer Advisory Board: “It’s just not good for public health. Vested interests should not be on the board.” He went on, “Those boards are very important. They’re very influential as to whether N.C.I. goes into formaldehyde or not. Billions of dollars are involved in formaldehyde'.

And, 'Harold Varmus, the director of the National Cancer Institute, knows David Koch from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which he used to run. He said that, at Sloan-Kettering, “a lot of people who gave to us had large business interests. The one thing we wouldn’t tolerate in our board members is tobacco.” When told of Koch Industries’ stance on formaldehyde, Varmus said that he was “surprised'.

Predictably, this piece created a media and activist firestorm around the clear conflict of interest in Koch, whose Koch Industries is the owner of one of the largest manufacturers of formaldehyde, sitting on an advisory board  of such import on public health policy. It was after this piece appeared in print that David Koch left his advisory board position at the NCI, as the New York Times reported on October 27, 2010  (Koch Leaves Federal Cancer Panel as Groups Urge Ethics Probe).

And it was after this piece appeared in print that the US government announced on June 9, 2011, that it was adding formaldehyde to a list of known human carcinogens (U.S. (finally) Labels Formaldehyde "Known Human Carcinogen").

Read Jane Meyer's New Yorker piece to understand how lobbying relevant government agencies such as the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) was the approach to prevent or delay classifying formaldehyde as a known carcinogen in humans, not relying on specific scientists to create doubt.

https://www.quora.com/In-2010-2011-David-Koch-was-asked-to-leave-the-National-Cancer-Institute-at-NIH-for-obfuscating-the-role-of-formaldehyde-in-causing-cancer-Which-scientists-did-he-rely-on-most-for-generating-doubt/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

Is it true that Bill Gates faced trial in India for illegally testing tribal children with vaccines? Source http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-08-31/news/53413161_1_hpv-vaccine-cervarix-human-papilloma-virus

No, that isn't completely accurate.

Who: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_%28global_health_organization%29 (PATH) and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)
The BMGF funds PATH, a Seattle-based NGO and main recipient of BMGF grant money for global public health initiatives. Since 1998, BMGF has funded PATH to the tune of ~$2 billion. The ICMR is the Indian Government's primary agency tasked with conducting biomedical research.

What: A Phase V human papilloma virus (HPV) Phase V vaccine trial in Andhra Pradesh & Gujarat, India
PATH carried out a large  HPV Phase V vaccine trial in India. Phase V means using approved, not test, vaccines. Certain forms of HPV are associated with cervical cancer. The vaccines in question, Gardasil from Merck and Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline, were granted marketing approval in India in 2008 while the PATH-sponsored trial began in 2009 as a joint project with the ICMR, using donated vaccines.

• The purpose of the trial was to generate data to support the inclusion of the HPV vaccine in India's Universal Immunization Programme (UIP).
• Specifically recruiting from low-income rural, largely tribal, households, the trial was conducted on girls aged 10 to 14 using Gardasil in Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh (AP) state (n=13000), and using Cervarix in Vadodara in Gujarat state (n=10000).

The Problems
Public recognition of problems with this trial started with the reported death of 7 girls. This led to immediate suspension of the trial in 2010 even though it was supposed to run until 2011. Investigations showed these deaths weren't directly connected to the vaccines (see table from the initial official investigation report, 1).

However, investigations triggered by these deaths instead uncovered serious violations of the process of informed consent (see official investigation reports below from 1, see also 2). Aged 10 to 15, girls in this trial were obviously below the age of  consent meaning their participation in the trial required the consent of  parents/guardians. In the course of Government of India (GOI)  investigations, the trial investigators 'were asked to submit 100 consent forms, chosen randomly, for both AP and Gujarat for independent verification' (1). These consent forms turned out to have several problems (see reports below from 1).

Investigations (1) revealed that

• In Andhra Pradesh, 'Signatures of one parent were obtained on 9543 forms, thumb impression of one parent on 1948 forms and signatures of Hostel Warden/Head Master as Guardian in 2763 forms' 
• The investigators noted, 'The legality of the signing by the Hostel Warden/Head Master in Andhra Pradesh needs to be examined by an appropriate authority'. 
• In Gujarat, 'In Gujarat one parent has signed on 6217 forms, has provided thumb impression on 3944 forms and Legal guardian has signed or put thumb impression on 545 forms'.
• As a newspaper report summarized, signature of ~2800 consent forms had instead been signed by school teachers, principals or hostel wardens, even in cases where the girls had parents (2).

The Indian Parliament's Standing Committee on Health began its investigation in April 2010 and concluded that 'safety and rights of children were highly compromised and violated' (3).

The Committee's report (3) found

• The girls' consent was not fully informed.
• Post-vaccination adverse events weren't adequately monitored or reported.
• PATH and ICMR hadn't sought mandatory permission from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) or the Indian National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI).
• PATH wasn't even a registered legal entity when it began working with the ICMR.
• DGAI culpable for dereliction of duty.

The Committee's report stated, 'PATH resorted to an element of subterfuge by calling the clinical trial as 'observational studies' or 'demonstration project' and recommended legal action against PATH (3). However, the Union Government of India  decided legal action couldn't proceed based on the its assessment of the country's prevailing laws. Instead in 2014, it issued a warning letter to PATH (4).

PATH's dubious and unconvincing defense was that this wasn't a clinical trial, only an observational study of an already approved vaccine. As such, it argued that neither provision, i.e., informed consent and monitoring/reporting of post-vaccination adverse events, was necessary (5). This is patently incorrect.

Bibliography

1. http://icmr.nic.in/final/HPV%20P...
2. The Hindu, May 25, 2011. Editorial. A shockingly unethical trial
3. Page on preventdisease.com
4. The Hindu, August 25, 2012. Aarti Dhar. Government warns PATH
5. LaMontagne, D. Scott, and Jacqueline D. Sherris. "Addressing questions about the HPV vaccine project in India." Lancet Oncology 12.14 (2013): e492; Statement from PATH: cervical cancer demonstration project in India

Further Reading

1. Kumar, S., and D. Butler. "Calls in India for legal action against US charity. Nature News [Internet]. 2013 Sep 9 [cited 2013 Oct 22]." Calls in India for legal action against US charity
2. sSharma, Dinesh C. "Rights violation found in HPV vaccine studies in India." The Lancet Oncology 14.11 (2013): e443.

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Bill-Gates-faced-trial-in-India-for-illegally-testing-tribal-children-with-vaccines/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

What are the best ways to write a literature review?

I don't think best way is an appropriate or helpful way of putting it. Rather, literature reviews should be comprehensive, covering the topic’s history, key concepts, influential figures and notable developments. As well, they shouldn't shy away from contentious material. Rather they should attempt to persuasively present data and arguments for or against certain interpretations. This broad umbrella accommodates a variety of writing styles and analytical approaches.

Some examples may help explain the process. For e.g., a while back I wrote an answer about possible human- Mycobacterium tuberculosis co-evolution, Tirumalai Kamala's answer to What if Mycobacterium tuberculosis evolved as a cohabitating organism within the human body?. Like many of my Quora answers, this too took the form of a review so it may be a relevant example.

How to start? Start with what I call a hook. As simple as searching for Human Mycobacterium tuberculosis co-evolution in Home - PubMed - NCBI. In this particular example, I got 24 search results (see screenshot below). Several good leads (outlined in blue), i.e. hooks to get into the subject.

Got those papers, read them, looked up their references, looked up the papers that cited them. Read the abstracts to decide whether to download or not. Doing this builds up a database on the topic rather fast. Once done screening and collating this database, I can sort them into different bins according to subject matter (see screenshots below). In this particular example, I ended up with a database consisting of 9 papers I catalogued as General, 2 as Bottleneck, 15 as Canetti, 4 as Co-evolution, 2 as Deletions, 3 as M. africanum, 7 as M. bovis, 4 as Methods, 15 as Paleopathology, and 3 as Virulence Definitions, for a total of 64 papers. Not a thorough up and down, front and back dredging of source material by any stretch of the imagination. Answer intended only for a general, not specialist, audience after all but this is an example of the basic skeleton required for assembling the database needed for a literature review. As I go through this bunch, the answer starts to shape itself into existence and I start whittling the pile. What's useful? In this particular example, my shorthand for papers I cited have a green dot while ones I found useful for references have a blue dot (see screenshots below).

A similar process attends just about any kind of research I undertake. Cataloging and sorting plus a common file-naming system helps tremendously in gaining control over the reading material, and brings order to what starts out as utter chaos.

Another invaluable helper? Keyword search through a database using Command+F. Helps both with the binning process as well in mining the database for the portion of the answer dealing with a particular keyword.

Process is simple and straightforward in theory. In practice, it requires genuine unflagging interest, and tremendous focus and discipline. Certainly not for the faint-hearted. Especially the citation search. Often papers are cited 100s, even 1000s of times. Trawling though such citations requires a hardy stomach and a spine of steel. Of course, checking each and every citation isn't mandatory nor required for each review. Time and practice helps develop judgment regarding when to pause to pick up another reference or to move on. As well, I tend to read very fast so I can consume relatively vast amounts of information fairly quickly. Plus years of experience doing this. However, reading fast has its perils as well so experience has taught me to go over papers more than once. A gap in time helps plug gaps as fresh eyes bring more value to the task.

I find this general approach very versatile so much so that I use it both for work and elsewhere. For e.g., my hometown of Chennai recently suffered unprecedented floods that marooned the city and relegated it to the medieval age in one stroke. Since I have family there, I spent many waking hours tracking the situation on the ground the best I could on the internet. The material I found doing this formed the basis of my blog post cataloging what happened, why and what it says about the body politic, The 2015 South Indian Floods: The Front Page News Story that Global News Media Wantonly Neglected by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk.

Using a similar approach to catalog, collate and bin my starting material (see screenshot below), the post started to shape itself into existence. Again, Command+F is an irreplaceable help. Using it to find keywords such as 'drain', 'police', 'military', 'NDRF', etc., helped me quickly shape a narrative that made sense to my understanding of the situation. Quickly scan, copy-paste the relevant passages, move on. Soon, my post was done. 

So there you have it, a broad brush overview of my approach to review writing. How the review/answer starts to shape itself is the most mysterious aspect of this process. This is where the individual's unique Masala (or alchemy) makes all the difference. A feeling for narrative, bolstering arguments with tangible, verifiable, sometimes testable data, one part of the narrative flowing to the next, these are some of the essential elements. Often arguments in one section will stoke into existence logical questions. These can then serve as bridges connecting one section to the next, or even one para to the next. In this manner, hopefully a cogent narrative emerges, akin to a building, the original database the foundation and the review sections the above-ground structure the foundation makes possible. More comprehensive the database (foundation) that went into researching the review topic, better the review (building) and greater its value.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-ways-to-write-a-literature-review/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

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

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