Tag: Teach

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Politics

Robert Mueller to assist educate regulation college class on Trump-Russia probe

Robert Mueller to help teach law school class on Trump-Russia probe

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller makes a statement on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election at the Justice Department in Washington, U.S., May 29, 2019.

Jim Bourg | Reuters

The notoriously tight-lipped former special counsel Robert Mueller will be opening up about his Russia probe to law school students in Virginia this fall.

The University of Virginia School of Law said Wednesday that Mueller will participate in a class on his investigation, which examined alleged ties between former President Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and the Kremlin. The class will be taught by three other prosecutors who were on Mueller’s high-profile team.

The class, “The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel,” will be taught in person in Charlottesville over six sessions. Mueller himself will lead at least one class, according to the school.

In a short statement provided by the law school, Mueller said he was fortunate to be returning to the school where he earned his law degree in 1973.

“I look forward to engaging with the students this fall,” Mueller said. Mueller returned to private practice after his investigation and is a partner at the law firm WilmerHale.

The class will be taught by Aaron Zebley, the former deputy special counsel; Jim Quarles, Mueller’s former senior counsel; and Andrew Goldstein, the former senior assistant special counsel.

According to a news release provide by the law school, the class will “focus on a key set of decisions made during the special counsel’s investigation.”

“The course will start chronologically with the launch of the investigation, including Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Other sessions will focus on navigating the relationship with the Justice Department and Congress, investigative actions relating to the White House and the importance of the Roger Stone prosecution,” the school said.

“The final sessions will focus on obstruction of justice, presidential accountability and the role of special counsel in that accountability,” the release added.

Mueller’s investigation began in 2017 and wrapped up in 2019, with the release of “The Mueller Report,” which became a bestseller.

In the report, the longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation director concluded that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian government.

Mueller also outlined ten episodes that raised the possibility that Trump had obstructed justice, but declined to say definitively whether Trump had committed a crime, citing longstanding Justice Department policy against charging sitting presidents.

According to UVA, Zebley said the course will “use the extensive public record to explore why some paths were taken and not others.”

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Categories
Health

What Bears Can Educate Us About Our Train Habits

What Bears Can Teach Us About Our Exercise Habits

Grizzly bears move through landscapes the same way most people do, preferring flat trails over slopes and gentle speeds over sprints. This emerges from a notable new study of grizzly bears and shows how their outdoor life compares to ours.

The study, which included wild and captive bears, a special treadmill, apple slices, and GPS trackers, expands our understanding of how a natural drive to conserve energy affects the behavior of animals, including ours, and effects on health and that Weight Management Might Have. The results also help explain why bears and humans cross paths so often in the wild, and provide useful reminders of wilderness planning and everyone’s safety.

In recent years, biologists and other scientists have become increasingly interested in how we and other creatures find our way through our environment. And while some preliminary answers crop up about why we move and navigate this way, the results, on the whole, aren’t particularly flattering.

The accumulated research suggests that we humans as a species tend to be physically lazy, with a hardwired propensity to avoid activity. For example, in a meaningful neurological study from 2018, brain scans showed that volunteers were drawn far more to images of people in chairs and hammocks than people in motion.

This seemingly innate preference not to move made sense to us long ago, when hunting and gathering required hard exertion and copious amounts of calories and resting under a tree didn’t. Being inactive is more of a problem now, with food everywhere.

To what extent we share this preference for physical lightness with other species and whether these preferences affect how we and they traverse the world has remained unclear.

Cue grizzlies, especially those who live in Washington State University’s Bear Center, the country’s premier grizzly bear sanctuary and research center. University biologists affiliated with the center study how animals live, eat and interact with people.

For the new study, which was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, they now decided to examine exactly how much energy grizzlies consume when they move in different ways, and how these and comparable numbers do not only affect real behavior Bears could affect us and other animals.

In the beginning, they built a stable enclosure around a treadmill that was originally built for horses. With modifications, it could tip up or down as much as 20 percent while handling the size and weight of a grizzly. At the front of the enclosure, the scientists added a feed box with a built-in rubber glove.

Then they taught the center’s nine male and female grizzly bears – most of whom have been resident at the center since birth and with names like John, Peeka, and Frank – to climb and walk on the treadmill while slicing hot dogs as a reward and accept apples.

“Grizzlies are very food-centric,” says Anthony Carnahan, a doctoral student at Washington State University who led the new study.

By measuring changes in the composition of the air in the enclosure, the researchers were able to track each bear’s energy consumption at different speeds as it walked uphill and downhill. (The bears never ran on the treadmills for safety reasons.) Using this data, the researchers determined that the most efficient pace for the bears, physiologically – the one at which they consumed the least oxygen – was about 2.6 mph.

Finally, the scientists gathered available information about wild bear movements using GPS statistics from grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park, as well as map data and comparable numbers from previous studies of humans and other animals migrating through natural landscapes.

When comparing the data, the scientists found that wild grizzlies, like us, seem born to be idle. The researchers expected the wild bears to move at their most efficient speed whenever possible, says Carnahan. In reality, their average pace driving through Yellowstone was a tricky and physiologically inefficient value of 1.4 mph.

They also almost always took the least steep route to get anywhere, even if it required extra time. “They did a lot of side-hilling,” says Carnahan.

Interestingly, these speeds and routes were similar to those used by humans when choosing routes through wild areas, the researchers found.

Overall, the results suggest that the innate urge to avoid exertion plays a bigger role in how all creatures, large and small, normally behave and navigate than we can imagine.

However, the study doesn’t rule out that grizzly bears, like other bears, can move with sudden, breathtaking speed and ferocity if they choose to, Carnahan points out. “I saw a bear walking across a mountain meadow in six or seven minutes than it took me all afternoon,” he says.

The results also do not tell us that we humans are destined to always walk slowly and stick to the apartments, but only that it can require both mental and physical exertion and goal setting to avoid the easiest routes are not adhered to.

Finally, the study is an invigorating reminder that we share nature with large predators, which of course choose the same paths as we do. You can find useful information on safety in grizzly land on the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee website.

Categories
Health

What the Historical past of Pandemics Can Educate Us About Resilience

What the History of Pandemics Can Teach Us About Resilience

And now the United States is facing a pandemic that has disproportionately sickened and killed many Americans of color who are over-represented in the essential workforce and yet less likely to have access to medical care. As the federal and state governments manage the introduction of vaccines, access to tests and treatments, and economic aid packages, it is crucial to learn from the past and take targeted measures, in particular to reduce the racial and economic inequalities that the pandemic is so devastating in the first place have made.

“If the effects of racism and xenophobia were less systemic in our society, we would likely see fewer deaths as a result of Covid-19,” White said. “Bigotry is inherently bad for public health.”

While pandemics have often re-anchored old prejudices and forms of marginalization, they have often spawned something new, especially in terms of art, culture and entertainment.

Ancient Rome, for example, was plagued by epidemics, one every 15 to 20 years for parts of the fourth, third, and second centuries BC. Appeared, said Caroline Wazer, a writer and editor who was completing a dissertation on Roman public health. At the time, the primary public health response was a religious one, with the Romans experimenting with new rites and even new gods to stop the spread of disease. In one case, Ms. Wazer said, with a three year epidemic and increasing public excitement, the Senate adopted a strange new ritual from northern Italy: “You bring actors with you to appear on the stage.” According to the Roman historian Livy, ” this is how the Romans get theater, ”said Ms. Wazer, although this fact was discussed.

A spiritual response to disease also brought about a cultural change in 14th century England. The British remembered the mass graves of the Black Death and feared they would die without a Christian burial and spend eternity in purgatory, Bailey said. So they formed guilds, small religious groups that essentially acted as “funeral insurance clubs” that raised money to provide proper treatment for members after death.

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Health

What Can Covid-19 Educate Us In regards to the Mysteries of Scent?

What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?

Meyer felt he knew the people personally – those who described smells in terms of tea and fruit, or meat and gasoline, or blue powerade and lollipops. The way they described their senses felt so intimate that he would later say, “You could almost see what kind of person they are.” He believed that people believed they could smell bad describe just because so often in laboratories they are asked to sniff single, isolated molecules (when the more familiar smell of coffee is a mix of many hundreds of them) away from the context of their real life and the smells that actually mattered to them . On the right occasion he said, “People get very, very verbal.”

This was exciting news for Meyer, an IBM researcher who specializes in using algorithms to analyze biological data and who insisted that the GCCR surveys contain open text boxes. For years, scientists studying odors have only worked on a few extremely flawed sets of data relating different chemicals and the way people perceive them. For example, there was a record made by a single perfumer in the late 1960s describing thousands of smells, and study after study was based on a single “Atlas of Odor Character Profiles” published in 1985. It relied on the observations of volunteers who had been asked to smell various single molecules and chemical mixtures, to rate and name them according to a list of descriptors provided, which many scientists believed to be flawed and dated.

More recently, Meyer and many others had used a new data set carefully compiled by scientists at Rockefeller University in New York and published in 2016. (I visited the lab in 2014 while Leslie Vosshall and her colleagues were compiling their data.) And was surprised to see that I could “smell” one of the vials, even though it probably only triggered my trigeminal system. When I told Vosshall that it seemed minty, she replied, “Really? Most people say ‘dirty socks’. Although the new dataset was a significant improvement, 55 people smelled 480 different molecules and rated them for intensity, comfort, familiarity, and how well they matched a list of 20 descriptions, including “garlic”, “spice”, “flower”. “Bakery,” “musk,” “urine” and so on – it was still a sign of how limited the field was.

For this reason, Meyer and his colleague Guillermo Cecchi pushed for these open text fields in the GCCR survey. They were interested in the possibilities of natural language processing, a branch of machine learning that uses algorithms to analyze patterns of human expression. Cecchi was already using the technology to predict the early onset of Alzheimer’s when it was most treatable by analyzing details of the way people speak. Many researchers had written about the possibilities of using artificial intelligence to finally create a predictive odor map and study relationships between changes in odor formation and any diseases that these changes are associated with, but adequate data was never available.

Now Covid had provided the researchers with a large, complicated data set that linked the olfactory experience and the progression of a particular disease. It wasn’t constrained by numerical rankings, monomolecules, or some adjectives on offer, but instead allowed people to speak freely about real smells in the real world in all their complex and subjective glory.

When Meyer and Cecchi’s colleague Raquel Norel had finished analyzing the open-ended responses from the English-speaking respondents, they were surprised and delighted to find that their text analysis predicted a Covid diagnosis as well as the numerical ratings of odor losses. The algorithms worked because people with Covid used very different words to talk about odor than those without Covid. Even those who had not completely lost their smell tended to describe their sensations in the same way and use words like “metallic,” “decayed,” “chemical,” “sour,” “sour,” “burned” and ” Urine ”to repeat. “It was encouraging finding to examine a proof of concept that they couldn’t wait to look further into – first in the GCCR responses in other languages, and then in the future in other datasets related to other diseases. Meyer was excited when he talked about it. “Anything where the smell changes,” he told me. “Depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, neurodegeneration, cognitive and neuropsychiatric diseases. The whole enchilada, as they say. “

I had a hard time Imagine the olfactory “map” that scientists have dreamed of for so long. I asked Mainland, would it look something like a periodic table? He suggested I think instead of the maps that scientists have made out of “color space” and arrange the colors to show their mathematical relationships and mixtures. “We didn’t know how useful color space was until people started inventing things like color TV and Photoshop,” he explained, adding that the map itself isn’t the goal, but the ability to use it to understand why we are what do we smell. What will be really interesting after that are the applications that we cannot yet imagine. “It’s hard to understand how useful the card is,” he said, “until you have the card.”