Meanderings, 6 November 2021
Not sure about you but we have had some beautiful fall days this week. The deciduous trees are full of color, the sky blue and the air fresh and crisp with only hints of winter. This weather makes the Midwest what it is.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Speaking of the fall, do you know how much Halloween candy parents swipe?
NEW YORK (Studyfinds.org) — There are few days on the calendar as magical for young children as Halloween. It’s the one day each year we all get to celebrate everything spooky, scary, and macabre.
All Hallows’ Eve is especially fun for kids, as they get to dress up as their favorite characters and patrol the neighborhood collecting something far more valuable than money — candy! It seems kids aren’t the only ones with a sweet tooth every Oct. 31, though. According to a new survey of 2,000 U.S. parents with children between the ages of 3-15, two-thirds of respondents have stolen candy that their kids collected while trick or treating.
It usually isn’t just one or two pieces of candy, either. Among parents who admitted to stealing candy, the average respondent ate a full third of their child’s Halloween candy haul. The 2019 survey, put together by Spinbrush, also reveals that a shocking 59% of parents have even hidden Halloween candy from their kids!
University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth earned more than 23 million views as a TED speaker and glowing headlines (including here on Inc.com) by touting grit. This concept, she insisted, helped predict who would get ahead in life and can be cultivated if you want to increase your odds of success.
No wonder the media went wild. There are few things the public wants to hear about more than shortcuts to success (take it from someone whose job it is to get people to click on headlines). But according to writer Jesse Singal, there's a big problem with Duckworth's ideas about grit -- they don't actually appear to be true.
Singal is the author of a new book, The Quick Fix, which delves into fad psychology and why the hype often gets way out in front of the evidence. As part of his promotional effort, he recently shared an excerpt concerning grit on Nautilus. It's a fascinating read for anyone who's felt the lure of Duckworth's ideas.
Three reasons to be skeptical of grit.
"Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success but Duckworth is the one who found it," raved Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's in his blurb for Duckworth's book, Grit. With hype like that, how could Singal resist investigating? But as he spoke to experts and dug into the research, Singal realized the evidence for grit doesn't match the enthusiasm.
In fact, he uncovers three major problems with Duckworth's claims. First, grit seems to overlap significantly with conscientiousness, one of the "Big Five" personality traits that measures how likely people are to do the things they commit to doing. Duckworth says that grit differs subtly from conscientiousness, but research hasn't backed that up. Which makes grit look a lot like a shiny new name for a well-known idea.
Second, even if you accept grit is somehow distinct from conscientiousness, it doesn't seem to be all that powerful a predictor of success. A 2020 study out of Israel found that "intelligence contributes 48-90 times more than grit to educational success and 13 times more to job-market success," Singal quotes.
And finally, even if grit were a real thing and it did matter a lot for success, there is basically no evidence that we know how to intervene to change how much a person has. (Though conscientiousness does tend to gradually increase as we get older, a fact that will not shock anyone who has ever known a teenager). Unsexy standbys like teaching study skills appear to have a much bigger impact.
Back in the 1980s, scientists in the U.K. performed an experiment that — at first glance — sounds unethical. "Volunteers came into the lab, and someone squirted virus up their nose," says computational biologist Jennie Lavine.
The researchers took a liquid packed with coronavirus particles and intentionally tried to make 15 volunteers sick.
Ten people got infected. The other five fought off the virus, says Lavine, who's now at the biotechnology company Karius but was at Emory University when she spoke to NPR.
Then the researchers waited a year and repeated the experiment. They wondered: Did getting sick from the coronavirus the first time protect people from the second exposure a year later? Or could people get reinfected a year later?
Now, this coronavirus injected up the volunteers' noses wasn't SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, Lavine is quick to point out. "No. No. Nobody got very sick. I think they measured disease severity by how many tissue boxes a person used. The experiment was performed with all of the proper ethical considerations."
The researchers were studying another coronavirus, called 229E, that causes only a mild cold in humans. But the results of that experiment offer some intriguing insights into the possible endgame of the COVID-19 pandemic. After this delta-variant surge wanes this winter, as scientists forecast, what's next? Will the virus come back next year? And the year after that? …
But Karan doesn't believe that will be the case. Although he predicts that SARS-CoV-2 will circulate in the U.S. indefinitely, he says that COVID-19, the dreadful disease, as we now know it, will likely go away.
"When you're fully vaccinated [or been exposed several times], you're dealing with a very, very different disease and a very different process," Karan says. In fact, you're likely dealing with a disease that many of us have already had, perhaps dozens of times, in our lifetimes. …
Some scientists are starting to think that eventually COVID-19 could turn into a disease that looks more similar to those from these other coronaviruses — in other words, a mild flu-like illness.
"That's what our computer models predict," says Lavine, the computational biologist at Karius. For the past year and half, she and her colleagues have combined what's known about the four other seasonal coronaviruses to try to forecast what SARS-CoV-2 will do two, five and even 10 years from now. They published their findings in the journal Science this past February.
For the new virus to turn into a mild cold, she says, two conditions need to be met. First, immune protection against severe disease has to persist. "Being infected a few times or having a few doses of the vaccine needs to provide really long-lasting immunity against severe disease," she says. It doesn't have to prevent transmission or a mild disease. But it has to keep you from being hospitalized.
With the vaccine, so far immunity looks like it's holding up for at least six months or so for healthy adults, says Rustom Antia, a colleague of Lavine's at Emory. But right now it's unclear how long that critical immunity will last for people more at risk for severe disease.
"We don't know how it will hold up for older individuals, above 60 or so. We don't know how many doses of the vaccine will be needed to build up our immunity so that when we do get infected naturally, it's not severe."
But if the vaccine — and/or natural exposure — does provide long-lasting immunity for everyone, then over time the vast majority of the population will eventually be protected against severe COVID-19. That would leave only one population unexposed and vulnerable: brand-new people — newborns.
And that brings us to the second condition required for SARS-CoV-2 to become a seasonal cold: The virus has to continue to be relatively mild in kids.
Like many PhD students, Aimée Lê needed her hourly paid job – as an English lecturer – to stay afloat. But what her students never guessed was that for two years while she taught them she was living in a tent.
Lê decided to live outside as a last resort when she was faced with a steep rent increase in the third year of her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, and realised she would not be able to afford a flat and cover all her costs on her research and teaching income.
She recalls: “It was cold. It was a small one-person tent, which meant after a bit it did get warmer. But there were days when I remember waking up and my tent was in a circle of snow. When I wasn’t doing my PhD or other work I was learning how to chop wood or start a fire.”
She stored her books in the postgraduate office so they wouldn’t be damaged, and showered at university. She “didn’t quite tell” her parents, saying to them that she was staying on an ecological farm so as not to worry them.
Nor did she tell her university, which insisted this week that the welfare of all its students was paramount and that it encouraged anyone struggling to reach out for support. Lê says she led a double life, fearful that it might damage her professional reputation if people knew she was homeless.
“I got good reviews from students. I marked 300 GCSEs in a hotel lobby. I even organised an international conference. I was working to a very high standard and I was incredibly focused,” she says.
The University and College Union says the plight of young academics who are desperate to get a firm footing on the career ladder is getting worse. Staff at 146 higher education institutions have until Thursday to vote on whether to strike once again – potentially before Christmas – over unfair pay, “untenable” workloads and casualised contracts.
Not a “we” but an “I” — so says Shaq:
Shaquille O’Neal believes in working hard for your money — even when it comes to his six kids.
The Basketball Hall of Famer, during an appearance on the “Earn Your Leisure” podcast, said his kids don’t get a free pass just because their dad is rich and famous.
“My kids are older now. They kinda upset with me. Not really upset, but they don’t understand,” said O’Neal, who recently retired his celebrity status in an interview with The Post. “I tell them all the time. We ain’t rich. I’m rich.”
O’Neal is estimated to have a net worth of $400 million. His playing days over, he’s an analyst on TNT’s “Inside the NBA” and has a reported 50 different endorsement deals including Gold Bond, Reebok, Pepsi and The General. There’s also multiple dining ventures like Papa John’s, Big Chicken and Shaquille’s.
The four-time NBA champion went on to reveal the standards his kids must uphold if they want a piece of the O’Neal money pie.
“You gotta have bachelor’s or master’s [degrees] and then if you want me to invest in one of your companies, you’re going to have to present it, boom boom boom, bring it to me,” he said. “I’ll let you know, I’m not giving you nothing.”
While O’Neal admittedly sees an entrepreneurial spirit in his children, he wants them to “figure it out” on their own.
The FBI and other federal authorities are assisting after Antioch police arrested an identity theft crew overnight that has stolen at least hundreds of pieces of mail in Lake County and other areas.
The Antioch Police Department said they received a report on Friday from a resident in the 400 block of North Avenue in Antioch.
The resident reported they placed a check in the mail for a donation to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.
The check was manipulated and deposited into a mobile app account, police said.
The check was believed to have been stolen from the mailbox and forged by the suspect.
Later in the evening, a resident in the Heron Harbor subdivision in Antioch reported seeing an older Dodge Caravan driving around the subdivision and entering residents’ mailboxes, police said.
Around 4 a.m. Saturday, another resident reported seeing the same suspicious vehicle in the 900 block of Woodland Drive.
Responding officers located the vehicle, a blue 2007 Dodge Caravan, and took two suspects into custody, officials said.
Officers located hundreds of pieces of mail and multiple ledgers that contained personal information of residents from Lake County and Rock County, Illinois and Kenosha County, Wisconsin.
Officers also recovered multiple electronic devices.
Because peach cobbler, esp as my mother made it, is so much better!
(NEXSTAR) – A new study of the nation’s most-searched recipes has revealed that banana bread, while still a favorite among America’s amateur bakers, is getting some serious competition from a couple of crumbly, creamy desserts.
The study, conducted by a food-sensitivity testing company called YorkTest, utilized data from millions of Google searches conducted in the United States, both in September 2020 and September 2021. The analysts then determined the top-searched recipes for baked goods and “calculated the difference in monthly searches” to find which recipes were surging in popularity — and which were getting stale.
Banana bread, according to the study, remains the most popular recipe. But searches for “banana bread recipe” on Google — while high in terms of total volume — have stayed stagnant since Sept. 2020.
Searches for “peach cobbler recipe,” however, have more than quadrupled, rising 306.06% since Sept. 2020.
“Like banana bread, a standard peach cobbler also requires ingredients that many people have in their pantry – sugar, flour, cinnamon, kosher salt, and you can even use canned peaches,” posits Kerri Ferraioli, a nutritionist with YorkTest, in a statement included at the website’s blog.
Other popular searches included “pumpkin cheesecake recipe” (which saw 123.97% more interest over Sept. 2020), “apple crumble recipe” (123.76% more interest),“monkey bread recipe” (82.43% more interest) and “strawberry shortcake recipe” (48.72% more interest). Cherry pie, blueberry muffins, lemon cake, biscotti and shortbread cookies also saw modest increases in interest over 2020.