The Iron Ring

I have been reading (online) the Philadelphia Inquirer's three part
series on homelessness in Philadelphia. It can be found here.


Homeless people used to just feel like part of the fabric of our city. In the last mayoral election, someone named Jesus White turned in his signatures to run and listed his address as St John's hospice.

But I feel lately that the problem has gotten out of hand. Homeless people can be found sleeping in the baggage claim at the airport (while the police try to control traffic outside). Just yesterday morning I found two(presumably) homeless people sleeping in an engineering building on campus. I called security but by the time they came the two had left. I got the feeling from the security people that this was a common occurrence.

According to today's peice, there are approximately 1200 homeless in Philadelphia, costing us roughly $20,000 each per year. And at that rate, we could have them all in programs to find homes and jobs. I will add this to my list of items to talk to Mayor Nutter about soon.

I attended a town hall meeting last night to discuss issues of ethics related to the engineering school. Everyone was pretty preoccupied with cheating. I was a little surprised because I thought ‘ethics’ would cover a lot of other topics. Anyway, at least one or two undergrads present thought that the best way to deter cheating was to make the cheaters and their punishments really public. I believe one of them said that shame was the best deterrent for anything. I was really shocked and unhappy about this. Don’t these students study history? Do they really believe in developing a culture of fear? Can’t they see how that would compromise openness and freedom in academia? Imagine the effect on young professors if instances of cheating in their courses were made public. I don’t know if the average undergraduate realizes that some of these professors need positive student evaluations in order to be seen favorably by tenure committees. Who would take a class if each semester multiple students were publicly reprimanded for cheating in it?

On a related note, it seems that plagiarism is the #1 way in which students cheat at Penn and yet the school does not subscribe to any programs to help professors scan papers for lifted words. Apparently such programs require that papers are entered into their database and that would be a privacy issue. The panelists suggested that we (as teachers) use google. Literally. Google is the best tool they had. That is a disappointment to me, especially when they can so quickly claim plagiarism as their #1. Doesn’t it seem easy then to do something about it?

And finally, someone commented last night was that there is too much emphasis on grades and not enough emphasis on learning and this fuels cheating. I agree completely. I had the good fortune of being an undergraduate in a small department that emphasized learning over grades and it is the reason I chose to pursue a doctorate.

I was at a fantastic conference this past weekend in Boston. I attended both for my science career and for my writing career. And I found a few more careers worth pursuing while I was there as well. In any case, an exhibitor from the National Library of Medicine directed me to this website where you can look up household products to see how safe they are!

So of course, I went directly to facial moisturizers and found mine (Neutrogena SPF 15). For “Health Rating” it gets an ‘N’ which means the manufacturer did not provide information. So I decided to look up something potentially more harmful but often used in my home; lysol. I grew up in a lysol home so I have likely had higher than average exposure. The database covers many lysol products, but I picked the Basin Tub and Tile Cleaner. Good news; no known carcinogens in there. Health Rating: 1.

Might take a few days to look up my favorite products but I’ll let you know what I uncover.

Although I intend to do more research to determine what kinds of chemicals I put on my face daily, I wanted to take the opportunity to post on a more news-y less science-y topic.

My former adviser was sentenced to prison yesterday.

Read this and this and this.

Read the comments posted on the Daily Pennsylvanian website today; they are more sympathetic than I would have expected.

I don't really understand how it is that he could be sentenced twice for the same crime. It seems wrong to me that he was sentenced, and he served his sentence only to be told that he would be sentenced again. How often does this happen? And is there some statute of time? It has been almost 5 years. His career literally ended. He served his house arrest. Does any of that 'count'???

It also is a shock to me how quickly discussion of a crime like this becomes about race and class. I've heard over and over that if he was a poor black man he would have been sent to prison right away. Perhaps. But perhaps that is a flaw of our legal system. Perhaps exacting harsh punishment on this man is not the way to rectify what is a much larger problem.

I'm no legal expert but he did not plead 'guilty' he plead 'no contest'. And as this never went to trial we don't really know what the 'evidence' was (sorry for all the quotes today). How can we just condemn?? More than one person I know has told me some variation on the phrase 'good, he deserved it' and I can't say I agree. Too many shades of gray.

I saw a piece recently about the large number of chemicals women expose themselves to just in their daily cosmetic routine. I’m a pretty loyal Neutrogena customer and I was not so pleased to read the labels on my favorite shampoos and creams. I wasn’t expecting my tinted moisturizer to be ‘green’, it does change the color of my skin after all, but I had hoped the workhorse daily SPF one might be a bit more natural. We hear so much about saving the animals from cosmetic testing, I say screw the animals, save our own skin— a quick google unearthed a piece about a research group in the UK that claimed to find chemicals from deodorant in breast tumors.

Ever heard of Burts Bees? The cosmetics made from beeswax and packaged all cutesy and homespun? Turns out Clorox bought Burts Bees—and clorox is ‘going green’. Pictured at right is the CEO of Burts Bees eating some avocado hair care product.

I don’t know about you but I’m sold. Ever eat your shampoo before?

More on this tomorrow………….

I can’t believe this piece of news eluded me for over a week! Man grows his own new jaw in his abdomen. Reminded me of a piece I wrote in The Scientist about some research being done at Vanderbilt. Researchers there grew bone inside the body of rabbits. This makes me wonder if bone is the only type of tissue that can be grown this way. Bladders can be grown from human cells but those cells must be removed and the bladders grown in the lab.

But which way is easier? For the body itself to act as an incubator there must be room for whatever type of tissue or organ you are trying to grow. But it would mean no titrating of media or reagents to determine the best concoction for growing tissue. A lab must be extremely sterile and delicate tissue would require careful observation. Might be easier to just implant a scaffold and let nature do the work. But it would also mean an extra procedure to harvest out the tissue/organ.

I saw this in the NYTimes today; once I was able to navigate past all the election news. It caught my eye because a friend and I recently discovered this weekend that we are on the same antidepressant and neither of us was perscribed it for depression. In fact, we have two drastically different medical problems. Lets say his is of the kind described in this article. And mine is more like……. this. And his dose is about two and half times my dose!

As the article points out, people with low back pain are likely to be depressed so it is a bit of a gray area whether the antidepressants are prescribed for the pain or to stave off the depression. In the case of my medical issue, this article explains the brain-digestive system connection.

But why the large differences in doses?

Fish is good for us, right???

Once and for all, how do we make sense of these guidelines......