The College of St. Scholastica announces students named to the spring 2020 Dean’s List – Pine and Lakes Echo Journal

Spring 2020 Dean's List recipients include the following local students (listed alphabetically):

Laura Anderson of Longville. Anderson is majoring in Organizational Behavior.

Diana Banks of Emily. Banks is majoring in Social Work.

Elizabeth Becker of Little Falls. Becker is majoring in Nursing.

Katelyn Becker of Pierz. Becker is majoring in Music Education.

Taryn Becker of Brainerd. Becker is majoring in Exercise Physiology.

Alexandra Benning of Browerville. Benning is majoring in Social Work.

Izabella Bishop of Hill City. Bishop is majoring in Elementary Education.

Jenna Butler of Bowlus. Butler is majoring in Nursing.

Grace Carlson of Isle. Carlson is majoring in Biochemistry - Intended.

Jonathan Carlson of Motley. Carlson is majoring in Nursing.

Seth Crocker of Little Falls. Crocker is majoring in Psychology.

Kara Crowther of Aitkin. Crowther is majoring in Health Information Management.

Lisa Dailey of Verndale. Dailey is majoring in Nursing.

Jennifer Dolezal of Staples. Dolezal is majoring in Organizational Leadership.

Macy Dotty of Pequot Lakes. Dotty is majoring in Health Information Management.

Ashley Etter of Sebeka. Etter is majoring in Philosophy - Intended.

Josie Fourre of Albany. Fourre is majoring in Nursing.

Melissa Geisenhof of Little Falls. Geisenhof is majoring in Nursing.

Mariah Haukos of Ironton. Haukos is majoring in Nursing.

Kendal Hendrickson of Little Falls. Hendrickson is majoring in Psychology.

Janna Heurung of Little Falls. Heurung is majoring in Nursing.

Nathaniel Hilton of Hill City. Hilton is majoring in Art - Intended.

Sydney Holt of Crosslake. Holt is majoring in Nursing.

Kalie Jeremiason of Pine River. Jeremiason is majoring in Undeclared.

Jaren Johnson of Aitkin. Johnson is majoring in Health Humanities Intended.

Bethany Kinzer of Aitkin. Kinzer is majoring in Educational Studies.

Thomas Kunkel of Little Falls. Kunkel is majoring in Exercise Physiology - Intended.

Addison Lintner of Little Falls. Lintner is majoring in Nursing - Intended.

Bailey Lochner of Pierz. Lochner is majoring in Exercise Physiology - Intended.

Morgan Lohmiller of Crosslake. Lohmiller is majoring in Nursing.

Sannah Lohmiller of Crosslake. Lohmiller is majoring in Psychology.

Sophia Magnuson of Aitkin. Magnuson is majoring in Elementary Education.

Kate Miller of Randall. Miller is majoring in English.

Maria Moe of Royalton. Moe is majoring in Biology - Intended.

Ramsey Moe of Aitkin. Moe is majoring in Business Management.

Abigail Mokhtary of Flensburg. Mokhtary is majoring in Nursing.

Nicole Nelson of Akeley. Nelson is majoring in Nursing - Intended.

Oscar Norgren of Little Falls. Norgren is majoring in Nursing - Intended.

Elizabeth Olmscheid of Breezy Point. Olmscheid is majoring in Nursing - Intended.

Rainy Orazem of Isle. Orazem is majoring in Nursing - Intended.

Danielle Overman of Albany. Overman is majoring in Exercise Physiology - Intended.

Amy Pasket of Nisswa. Pasket is majoring in Psychology.

Carson Passer of McGregor. Passer is majoring in Finance.

Abby Pohlkamp of Baxter. Pohlkamp is majoring in Accounting.

Gabriel Raguse of Brainerd. Raguse is majoring in Exercise Physiology.

Benjamin Renner of Brainerd. Renner is majoring in Exercise Physiology - Intended.

Dan Roach of Merrifield. Roach is majoring in Business Management.

Mara Roberts of Brainerd. Roberts is majoring in Elementary Education.

Morgan Rohloff of Brainerd. Rohloff is majoring in Psychology.

Brock Ronnebaum of Baxter. Ronnebaum is majoring in Social Science Secondary Edu.

Noah Ross of Wadena. Ross is majoring in Biology - Intended.

Christina Sabrowsky of Albany. Sabrowsky is majoring in Nursing.

Patricia Samuelson of Baxter. Samuelson is majoring in Social Work.

Nancy Schroeder of Pequot Lakes. Schroeder is majoring in Social Work.

Alyvia Seibert of Deer River. Seibert is majoring in Biology - Intended.

Jack Silgen of Deerwood. Silgen is majoring in Business Management.

Zachary Sjoblad of Nisswa. Sjoblad is majoring in Health Information Management.

Connor Skeesick of Little Falls. Skeesick is majoring in Biology - Intended.

Karli Skog of Crosslake. Skog is majoring in Accounting.

Madison Slette of Aitkin. Slette is majoring in Nursing - Intended.

Grace Stockard of Fort Ripley. Stockard is majoring in Nursing - Intended.

Evan Storbakken of Brainerd. Storbakken is majoring in Psychology.

Nicholas Trelstad of Mc Grath. Trelstad is majoring in English Sec. Ed.

Tyler Weiss of Browerville. Weiss is majoring in Nursing.

Samantha Welle of Royalton. Welle is majoring in Nursing.

Hannah Wiedewitsch of Jenkins. Wiedewitsch is majoring in Biology.

Claudina Williams of Pequot Lakes. Williams is majoring in Psychology.

Evan Wohlert of Baxter. Wohlert is majoring in Exercise Physiology.

Cheryl Zimmerman of Bowlus. Zimmerman is majoring in Hlth Info Mgt - Intended.

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The College of St. Scholastica announces students named to the spring 2020 Dean's List - Pine and Lakes Echo Journal

The Whoop fitness band transformed me from sleepy boy to fit boy in two months – The Next Web

Welcome to Riding Nerdy, TNWs fortnightly dive into bicycle-based tech, where we go into too much detail and geek out on all things related to pedal-powered gadgets.

With all the cycling tech on the market like power meters, heart rate monitors, Zwift, smart trainers its easy to think that you just need to ride more and ride harder to get fitter. But thats not necessarily the best approach. With all this tech we should actually be training, and recovering, smarter.

I say recovering, because thats specifically what the latest tech Ive been using for the past few months the WHOOP band does. In short, its subtly augmented the way I approach rest and recovery after exercise, and made me appreciate sleep way more than I did previously.

Its helped me recover so well, in fact, that during the first full month of using it, I did more cycling (in terms of time) than Ive ever done in my life. I managed to squeeze out some 52 hours of two-wheeled fun in May, normally Id do about 30 to 35 hours per month. Off to a good start, Id say.

But before getting all nerdy, lets start by looking at what Whoop actually is, and what you get in the box.

There are two components to the Whoop experience, the wristband and the app.

The wristband is a pretty simple affair. Its a fabric strap that contours securely to your wrist. It has a waterproof housing that contains sensors that measure five key performance metrics based on heart rate and skin conductivity. The wristband is also Bluetooth-enabled, which lets it broadcast this data wirelessly to other fitness devices. I actually paired it with my MacBook to use in Zwift and it worked flawlessly.

Compared to other sleep trackers and fitness watches, its a delightfully lightweight, subtle, and stylish alternative. Sleeping in this thing has been no problem at all as its also incredibly comfortable. Which is also good, given that youre supposed to wear the strap 24/7.

In fact, Whoops secret is to gather tonnes of data around the clock.

But for that data to be useful it has to be accurate, otherwise the insights into your physiology and recovery will be useless. Ive always been a bit suspicious of how accurate wrist-based heart rate monitors are. My preferred choice, chest strap heart rate monitors, have been the gold standard of laboratory accuracy for over a decade, whereas the accuracy of wrist-based systems can vary widely.

I did some validation testing myself to see how the Whoop band compares to a Garmin chest-strap. I wore the Whoop on my wrist and paired it with Zwift, I also wore my Garmin chest strap at the same time and gathered the data from that device using my bike computer.

I did an 80-minute ride on Zwift with some threshold intervals to make sure my heart rate was going up and down throughout the ride. Post ride analysis on Strava showed that Whoop is as good as the highly-accurate Garmin chest-strap. As it turns out, the Whoop is way more accurate than I was expecting. Another point to Whoop.

After wearing the Whoop band for every second of the day for at least a week, it starts to get a pretty good idea of your physiology and heres where the other component of the Whoop experience comes into play, the app.

Theres no screen on the Whoop band so that means the main experience of the device is on your phone. In the Whoop app, you can keep a journal of how youre feeling, and dissect all the data that its been gathering to develop an understanding of how well youre training and, more importantly, how well youre recovering.

The app is built around three main screens to help you understand and track different aspects of your training and rest: strain, recovery, and sleep. Theres also an overview screen where you can see a snapshot of your past weeks performance.

Each of these screens has an upper and lower section. The upper section gives a quick snapshot of that specific metrics daily score, the lower goes into a bit more detail and shows your seven-day history. Its very intuitive, and takes just a few minutes to figure out.

The only annoying thing is that it takes at least a week for Whoop to gather and analyze enough data about you until it starts becoming useful. But the more you wear it, the better it becomes. With time, it learns more about your body and what normal is for you. The more understanding that Whoop can gain of your own cardiovascular physiology, the more accurate it becomes when giving you your strain and recovery scores. After about a week, youll clearly see when youre training above or below normal levels.

I found myself spending most of my time on the main overview and recovery screens, checking them every morning after the app processed my sleep for the previous night and computed my recovery score.

There are a few key metrics when it comes to computing your recovery score: resting heart rate, heart rate variance, sleep quality, and day strain.

The day strain is a measure of how hard you trained, Whoop also captures activity data when it senses youre out doing something like running, cycling, or whatever else. So when you get back, it will compute a strain score for that specific activity, you can also drill down into that activitys data if you want.

Resting heart rate is also self-explanatory, but heart rate variance (HRV) is the one that is perhaps most interesting. Ten years ago, not much was actually known about HRV, but its fast becoming one of the most important fitness metrics used by professional athletes.

As its name suggest, HRV is a measure of the tiny changes in time between individual heartbeats. HRV is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. When under a lot of physical and emotional stress, HRV drops to prepare the body for fight or flight mode, but when well rested, a persons HRV will increase.

While lower resting heart rates are indicative of being well-trained and well-rested, the inverse is true of HRV. Resting heart rates vary from person to person, the average is around 70 beats per minute. HRV also varies from person to person, more so than RHR in fact.

While high HRVs are indicative of fitness, that rule only applies on an individual level. A person who has a HRV of 140 isnt necessarily twice as fit as someone with a HRV of 70. However, if a person who has a HRV of 70 when well-rested, wakes up with a HRV of 40, its indicative that they could do with a bit more rest or to take it easy for the day.

Interestingly, HRV and RHR arent always in sync. There have been many days when my resting heart rate returned to normal levels, and my recovery score was in the yellow (red is bad, green is very good, yellow is in the middle). However, my HRV was still suppressed, and Whoops advice is to not train too hard on that day.

Ordinarily, I would have thought: I feel fine, and my RHR is normal, lets go for it. But on a deeper level, I still needed to rest and address other causes of stress.

Following Whoops guidance, and performing restorative exercise on these days, proved a sure fire way to get my recovery score back in the green. In other words, letting Whoop take the lead with how hard I train has helped me promote recovery, and make more gains to fitness than I would have otherwise. Its like having a coach in your pocket.

While most fitness bands are focussed on keeping you active, it should be clear by now that Whoop is the opposite. Its not going to tell you to stop working out, but rather, it helps you understand how much emphasis you should be placing on recovery after exercise. If you train hard, you should rest hard too thats when the gains are made.

You wont find any arbitrary step-counters on the WHOOP band or its associated app. Instead, its main features and interface is focussed on helping you understand your bodys response to varying cardiovascular loads and recovery strategies so that you can learn how to recover better.

For average folk like myself, it will help make what little training and recovery we do more effective; for pro athletes, it can help prevent over-training.

Knowing on an objective level how well rested you are can help you identify days when you should train hard, and days when you should focus on active recovery and restorative exercise. Thats the basic principle.

I, like many other cyclists, am guilty of riding lots of junk miles, where I gamble about at a decent intensity with no real focus. For seasoned cyclists, doing this does little more than build up a substantial amount of fatigue. Fitness plateaus because training isnt at a high or varied enough intensity, and perhaps more importantly, all that time riding prevents adequate recovery.

The real benefit of Whoop for me was learning how to personalize and polarize training. In other words, using Whoop I now know with some accuracy when I should make hard training days hard, and easy days easy. Its made me see that going on feel for me is about 80% accurate, and that my training generally does lack focus.

Over the two months using the Whoop band, Ive increased my functional power on the bike by about 6%. That might not sound like much, but some riders can struggle to make performance gains like that over the course of an entire season. Ive also taken a bunch of Strava KOMs of that period too.

(Speaking of Strava, just last night, Whoop announced that it now integrates with the fitness tracking platform, so you can upload activity data directly to the fitness social network.)

I havent made dramatic changes to what Im doing when Im training, either. Instead, Whoop is making me disciplined to go easy on days when I need rest, and to push harder in confidence on days when Im well rested.

Whoop places a big emphasis on sleep because thats where most recovery is done. It bundles this into what it calls its sleep coach. The sleep coach learns how much sleep you need to get by, perform, or peak and then tells you when to go to bed so you wake up the right amount of rested.

The folks at Whoop told me the most common piece of feedback after the first month or two of using the band is how much more sleep users get and I can testify to that. Im getting way more sleep, and clearly the benefits are showing. Just do what it recommends, and you wont go too far wrong if youre wearing it all the time.

But there is a fly in the ointment: the price.

Whoop is taking an unconventional approach with its pricing strategy. Users dont buy the band or app outright, but instead, subscribe to Whoop like a gym membership. Or like Strava is now asking you to do.

There are three membership options available at the moment, with varying levels of commitment and upfront cost. The shortest commitmetn is for six months an works out at 25 per month, after which you can cancel or carry on with the standard monthly fee of 25 per month.

If youre willing to part with a bit more cash upfront you can commit to an 18-month membership which effectively costs 16 per month, or 288 upfront. Then 25 per month afterwards.

This seems expensive, to me. Especially given that without the membership the device is useless. It can be gifted to someone else, and they can start a membership, though.

The Whoop band itself isnt too advanced, theres no screen or GPS, and its sensors arent exactly bleeding edge. And users dont actually pay for it, its all covered as part of the membership. So that takes the edge off, a little.

Strava recently pivoted to a subscription model and all hell broke loose users really didnt like being asked to pay $5 per month for a fully featured service that used to be mostly free. The free version is still well-equipped, though. But there is no free or entry level option with Whoop.

Whoop is a new company, and I think its always better to lower prices over the course of time, rather than raise them and introduce fees for historically free services. So this might be a good move to start off with, but I would like to see Whoop segment its product for different budgets.

Perhaps it could offer different feature levels for different monthly fees. Or perhaps it could sell the hardware for an upfront cost, and reduce the monthlies a little. I think theres a world of opportunity for Whoop, and it should explore its pricing strategy continually.

Hopefully as the company develops and more people buy into it, its prices will come down and value will go up. As I mentioned, Whoop has just added Strava integration which adds a boon if you also use that platform.

All in all, my experience with Whoop has been great and has become part of my daily routine. Its got me sleeping more, respecting recovery as I should have been, and my performance and overall well-being has improved. Its helped me figure out how to wake up every morning feeling as refreshed as possible its hard to put a price on it when I put it this way.

For more gear, gadget, and hardware news and reviews, follow Plugged on Twitter and Flipboard.

Published July 2, 2020 18:07 UTC

Original post:
The Whoop fitness band transformed me from sleepy boy to fit boy in two months - The Next Web

Meditations in an Emergency: Talking Through Pandemic Anxiety With a Pioneer of Mind-Body Medicine – Medscape

Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Andrew N. Wilner, MD: Welcome to Medscape. I'm Dr Andrew Wilner. Today I have a special guest, Dr James Gordon, founder and executive director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine. Welcome, Dr Gordon.

James S. Gordon, MD: Thank you very much. It's good to be with you.

Wilner: Thanks for joining us. We are recording this in late May 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of people have been infected. Hundreds of thousands have died. Millions have lost their jobs. I think it's fair to say that people are under a greater degree of stress than to which they're normally accustomed. Would you agree with that?

Gordon: I think it's more than fair to say that everybody in the United States, and actually pretty much everyone in the world, is under extreme stress. And that compounds any stresses that they've experienced before in their lives. Everyone is affected.

Wilner: The mind-body medicine concept is one that that you've pursued for decades. Tell us a little bit about the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and how that's led to the program that you have to help us deal with the coronavirus.

Gordon: I started the Center for Mind-Body Medicine about 30 years ago. I'd been a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health for a number of years, in private practice, and a professor at Georgetown Medical School. But I wanted to really focus on how to change and enrich medicine by making self-care, self-awareness, and group support central to all healthcare.

Western medicine is enormously powerful in certain situations, such as physical trauma, high levels of infection, congenital anomalies. But we're not so good at working with chronic physical or psychological problems. Those are much more complex.

We've been discovering that what is going to make the long-term difference in conditions like type 2 diabetes, pain syndromes, hypertension, depression, and anxiety are those approaches that we can learn to do for ourselves. These are changes we can make in how we deal with stress, eat, exercise, relate to other people, and whether we find meaning and purpose in our lives.

For the past 25 years, the major part of our focus has been on whole populations that have been psychologically traumatized by wars, climate-related disasters, the opioid epidemic, chronic poverty, historical trauma. We do a lot of work with indigenous people here in North America. We've worked in a number of communities where school shootings have traumatized everyone.

What we've learned over these past 25 years, and what interested me professionally as well as personally over the past 50 years, is what we're now bringing out on an even larger scale. The kind of approaches that we've developed, studied, and published research on are exactly what everyone needs to include and incorporate in their daily life, as well as in their medical and healthcare, from now on.

Wilner: Do you have a program that's specifically for healthcare providers?

Gordon: Yes. The Center for Mind-Body Medicine is primarily an educational organization rather than a service organization. Since the beginning, I've been focused on training health professionals. My first passion was for training physicians I'm a physician, so there's a feeling of fellowship there but also healthcare workers and mental health professionals of every kind.

We teach health professionals a whole system, a comprehensive program of techniques of self-awareness and self-care. We teach them so that they can practice on themselves and study the underlying science, so they can then teach what they've learned to the patients or clients they work with. They integrate it into what they're already doing, regardless of their specialty. At times we also offer some of the same kinds of mind-body skills groups that are the fundamental part of our training as a stand-alone intervention. You can't really teach other people how to take care of themselves unless you're also doing it yourself. Otherwise, it's just a theory.

Wilner: As a neurologist, I'm interested in the mind-body system. You are a psychiatrist and understand that it's a lot more difficult to objectify certain things. What is stress? What is happiness? What is sadness? It's very hard to measure. You can have scales, but it requires insight on the part of the individual. So I think it's certainly an ambitious project.

Gordon: You're absolutely right. It requires insight. And one of the shortcomings of our medical education is that it doesn't encourage us to look inside ourselves enough. There's so much focus on objectivity and on data, that we've lost some of the subjective art of medicine.

My experience with myself, as well as with the thousands of people we've trained here in the United States and around the world, and the many hundreds of thousands with whom they've worked, is that all of us have a greater capacity to understand and help ourselves than we ordinarily think, or than most of us learn about in our medical education.

This work is saying to people to take a little bit of time and relax a little, in order to allow yourself to come into a meditative state. And I don't mean anything fancy by that. Meditation is just being relaxed. Moment-to-moment awareness doesn't have to do with any particular religion or spiritual practice. It's part of all of them. If you can get into that state, then you can begin to say, "Oh, that's what's going on with me. That's why my pain is worse."

For example, you often wonder in people with peripheral neuropathy why it becomes worse or better at certain points. I would encourage neurologists and other physicians to ask your patients, "Why do you think it's worse?" They may say, "I don't know, doc; that's why I'm here." But I would ask them to take a couple of minutes to let me know. They could think it has something to do with the fact that they had a big fight with their wife that morning, they don't want to go to work, or whatever it is. This is part of the lost art that we need to bring back into medicine for ourselves and especially for our patients.

Wilner: Can you give me an example of some of the exercises you'd do in a class?

Gordon: All of the exercises and our entire program that we teach at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine is in this new book of mine, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma. It's really the distillation of not just the past 25 or 30 years, but really 50 years of work.

The techniques are all pretty simple and, as we say, evidence based. There is evidence that shows how they work on us physiologically as well as psychologically. And they're all pretty easy to teach to anyone.

Myself and about 60 or 70 of our faculty at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine are currently leading online groups. Then several hundred of the other people we've trained are also leading these groups. We're still counting it up, but we probably have between 700 and 1000 groups going around the world, led by our faculty and by people we've trained.

We teach a different technique every week in these online groups. Last week, after getting people energized and focused, we did a written dialogue with an emotion. You put down the initial of your name in my case, "J" for Jim and create a dialogue with an emotion, such as sadness. I would write it as fast as I can.

I would say, "OK, Sadness. Why are you here? What are you doing? I don't enjoy having you around." And Sadness writes back to me, "But you need me." And J says, "What do you mean I need you?" And Sadness says, "Well, your brother died 7 weeks ago, didn't he?" And I say, "Yes, he did." And Sadness says, "Aren't you sad?" I say, "Yes. I'm terribly sad and grieving all the time. But I wasn't thinking about him at this moment." And Sadness says, "But he's there with you all the time and that sadness is in you." And I say, "You mean it's in me even here, now, as I'm talking with Andrew in this interview?" And Sadness says, "Yes. You can talk about your work. But in between the words, as you take a breath, don't you feel it in your chest?" That's the way the dialogue goes.

Wilner: What about specifically with the coronavirus? Fear is certainly an emotion. Nobody wants to get sick and die. Nobody wants to bring this disease home to their family. People are reluctant to even go outside and you can't shake someone's hand. Are there precedents for this?

Gordon: There are precedents, but only relatively small groups were affected before by, for example, severe acute respiratory syndrome or H1N1, at least in the United States. But we haven't seen a global pandemic like this since 1918. None of us was around then or I certainly wasn't around. So for most everyone, not only has it not happened before, but we've never been so globally aware of everything that's going on and how different groups are reacting.

I've been reading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. It's really very interesting. It's about the bubonic plague in 1665 London, although he wrote it in the 1720s. Some of the same things were going on then: the enormous fear, the isolation; rich people being able to escape, poor people having nowhere to go; conspiracy theories of one kind or another, about where the plague came from or blaming a group of people for it; magical thinking that it's just going to go away. All of those things that happened several hundred years ago are going on now.

And we're all simultaneously aware of all those things. There's not only the fear, which should be universal because it's a reasonable response to this situation, but also the terrible confusion about what to do. The President is saying one thing, governors something else; Anthony Fauci is saying something else, and Deborah Birx is saying something a little bit different. There's this tremendous confusion that overlays the fear, and I think everybody is more or less feeling these things.

So, yes, a dialogue with fear is a good thing to do because it can be clarifying. What we need here is a sense of, what is it that makes sense for me to do? What precautions should I take? What precautions shouldn't I take?

I have a 17-year-old son who lives with his mom in California. He and I were on the phone the other day. He's a basketball player and very serious about it. He said, "I don't want to put my life on hold." And my response was, "If you go outside too soon, your life may be on hold for a hell of a lot longer than if you stay inside, because if you get sick, it's serious. But you also need to start looking at the evidence and asking yourself the right questions, because I can't be there all the time and neither can your mom."

Everybody really needs to use these kinds of tools to help themselves. The tools we teach are extremely good at bringing us back into a state of psychological and physiological balance slow, deep breathing being a very basic one. Because it's only in that state that we're going to be able to make the most intelligent decisions about what to do. It's only in that state that we're going to be able to really look our fear in the face and find out what we should be afraid of and what we shouldn't be afraid of.

It's a process that's very much integrated. We're talking now about how to deal with the emotions. But the first part of what we do in our groups and our online trainings and webinars is teach people to just take a few deep breaths. That's advice I'd also give to those who are watching this video: Just take a few deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth, with your belly soft and relaxed. You can keep breathing this way while talking. That's the antidote to the fight-or-flight response. We all learn about fight-or-flight in first-year physiology. We need to deal with it. We need to bring ourselves into balance. That's the way we're going to make the wisest decisions for ourselves and be best able to help our patients.

Wilner: As you mentioned, part of modern culture is that we now have access to all of this information worldwide. There's a continual stream of newsfeeds, people flipping on their phones, receiving constant updates, 24/7. That's a new phenomenon. Does that steal from us the time we had before for just breathing and synthesizing data as opposed to just acquiring it all the time?

Gordon: You're absolutely right. It does and it's a challenge. It can't steal from us unless we're letting our emotional, psychological, and physiological pockets be picked!

What we need to do is to make it our priority to come into balance. I don't watch news all day long a little tiny bit in the morning and in the evening, just to get a sense of what's happening. That's enough. And I think everybody needs to take a step back, ask if this is really what they want to be doing, and to come into balance.

The other thing that's really important is physical activity, especially during this time. In addition to using slow, deep breathing to come into balance, physical exercise and movement of any kind is extremely good as an antidote to fight-or-flight and that shut-down, freeze-up response that we get into when we feel completely overwhelmed.

We've got to take it into our own hands. The media just want to sell us things. Let's face it: They're not here for our good. Our job as physicians and healthcare professionals is to really reinforce for people not only what we can do for them, but what they can do for themselves.

Wilner: I'm certainly interested in learning more about mind-body medicine. For those watching this video who feel the same, where do you recommend they go to learn more?

Gordon: We have a website, cmbm.org, which features a number of webinars. I do a free webinar there every week. We have mind-body skills groups that meet once a week for 8 weeks. There are six physicians in my group and all kinds of health professionals in other groups. We have a training program, which we're bringing online. We've trained well over 6000 people around the world and would love to train more. You can read about that on the website.

We're starting to do more and more consulting with healthcare organizations. We're working with the largest division of Veterans Affairs, which is in Florida, as well as in south Georgia and the Caribbean. We're working with a large health system in Indiana and others elsewhere. In addition, we're working with groups of physicians and mental health professionals, helping them to integrate what we have to offer into what they're already doing.

That's our job to help you do your job.

Wilner: Dr Gordon, I feel more relaxed just speaking with you. Thank you for talking with me and sharing your experiences with Medscape. I look forward to learning more.

Gordon: Thank you. My pleasure.

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Meditations in an Emergency: Talking Through Pandemic Anxiety With a Pioneer of Mind-Body Medicine - Medscape

In the Future, Lab Mice Will Live in Computer Chips, Not Cages – Undark Magazine

Animal models, especially mice, have given scientists valuable insights into the mechanisms behind countless human diseases. They have been instrumental to the discovery of drug targets, metabolic pathways, and gene function. Theyve helped to lay bare the basic biochemistry of metabolism, hunger, cognition, and aging. Because mice are, to a certain extent, miniature facsimiles of human anatomy and genetics, science has an array of tools at its disposal to manipulate and visualize their bodily processes in real time, in highly controlled settings.

But, as the recent Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, science doesnt always have the tools to minimize loss of animal life. As the pandemic took hold and academic research labs across the U.S. shuttered indefinitely, scientists were faced with an unprecedented animal care dilemma. Without the teams of veterinary nurses and technicians who usually attend to the animals daily, many labs were forced to resort to wholesale euthanasia. Some labs sacrificed hundreds of animals, and were criticized harshly for their management of their experimental colonies. Many started to consider more durable, long-term plans for preserving and storing their mouse lines.

In the lab where I work at the University of California, San Francisco, and where for the past two years Ive been the designated rodent surgeon, we were asked to euthanize all but our most irreplaceable mice. As new animal researchers, we are trained to sacrifice our mice humanely to give them a dignified death. Returning to lab after the shutdown to find rows of empty racks that once held cages of mice we had worked with for months was a shock, and it was hard to conjure dignity in that moment.

That experience led me to reflect on how we as a research community use animal models in biomedical research, and how we might better use them in the future. And Ive become increasingly convinced that the animal model of the future will live not in a cage but in a computer chip: By simulating biological systems rather than experimenting with them, we can make drug development and biomedical research safer, more efficient, and more effective.

This is not to say that researchers treatment of animals has been haphazard. Research in animal models is highly regulated. These regulations vary in austerity from country to country and institution to institution, but they revolve around a common set of principles known as the three Rs: Replace the use of animals when possible, reduce the number of animals used per experiment, and refine methods to minimize suffering and improve welfare.

As the recent Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, science doesnt always have the tools to minimize loss of animal life.

A few years ago, when I was a new mouse surgeon, the three Rs were the guiding tenets of a week-long course I took at the Ren Remie Surgical Skills Center in Almere, Netherlands. The centers founder, Ren Remie, advocated for meticulous surgical technique, held to the same standards of sterility and post-operative care as any human surgical procedure. But he was also a proponent of the thinking that longer-term strategies can hasten recovery time from infection and surgical procedures. For instance, Remie and other researchers advocate whats called environmental enrichment, a method that helps animals cope with the inherent stress of being isolated after a surgical procedure or during an experiment. The researchers place toys, nesting material, or other inanimate objects in the cage that allow the mouse to engage with its surroundings, similar to the way it would in the wild. Studies suggest that environmental enrichment may even promote wound healing in rats.

But the success of strategies like environmental enrichment highlights an inherent weakness of the animal research model: An animals behavior is often extremely sensitive to its environment, in ways that are difficult if not impossible to control. This raises a perennial issue in biomedical research of just how reliably conclusions drawn based on studies in mice can be faithfully applied to human disease treatment. For instance, rodents are housed in groups as a rule, but certain kinds of experiments and treatments require them to be isolated, triggering a stress response that could significantly affect their immune activation. Studies have shown that mice and rats who live with companions fare better against injury, stroke, and even tumor growth than their lonely counterparts. As a result, when mice studies ask questions about human diseases, the housing status of the mouse is often a confounding factor. Even slight variation in the ambient temperature of a mouses housing room can cause stress responses that affect experimental outcomes. This variability is one reason that treatments that seem promising in mice often produce underwhelming outcomes in human clinical trials.

One attractive complement to animal studies that may address some of these shortcomings is in silico, or on a chip medicine. In silico models apply computational modeling strategies to genomic data to predict physiological responses to drugs or other stimuli. Although they are far from being able to replicate the full complexity of a living, sentient being, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has begun consider computer modeling-based strategies to update the cumbersome and costly clinical trial pipeline. Research with in vitro models, which attempt to replicate animal physiology in test-tube style experiments, have also shown promise. These efforts have given birth to projects like the Comprehensive in Vitro Proarrhythmia Assay initiative, which integrates modeling and in vitro strategies to evaluate the potential for new drugs to cause heart rate abnormalities

Likewise, in 2013, the European Commission assembled a consortium of research groups known as the Avicenna Alliance to unify academia and industry around a set of standards for computer modeling in medicine. Based in Belgium but comprised of independent organizations around the world, the goal of the Alliance is to enable virtual clinical trials whose results can be validated by the same kinds of rigorous standards that are applied to traditional clinical trials.

As the Avicenna Alliance envisions them, virtual clinical trials would be based on unique genetic models derived from individual patients, rather than on large, genetically variable sample groups. Conceivably, this could allow a researcher to simulate a patients unique response to a treatment strategy, capturing the effects of subtle variations in baseline metabolism, bodyweight, or underlying health conditions that might influence the patients treatment outcomes. It might also significantly reduce the time and expense traditionally required to usher a new drug or medical device from the lab bench to the clinic potentially lowering the barrier to care for large swaths of the population who cant afford the often-astronomical costs of life-saving medications.

In silico clinical trials, if and when they are realized, could also address the long-standing problem of sample bias in drug development. Demographically, clinical trials tend to be disproportionately White and, until recently, overwhelmingly male. They therefore dont fully capture the therapeutic value and potential risks that drugs present to the patients who eventually rely on them. If in silico strategies become widely adopted, theyll hold potential to both increase the efficacy of new drugs and expand access to treatment.

The ethical debate around the use of animals in research has roiled for hundreds of years and will likely continue to do so. But what the Covid-19 outbreak has made clear is that there are severe weaknesses in the current animal model paradigm. As experiments have come to a halt during the coronavirus lockdowns, researchers have been given time to consider new, more sustainable approaches to discovery. Hopefully, we will look beyond the short-term technical challenges that will inevitably accompany the resumption of business as usual and gaze further afield, toward more humane, more modernized approaches to doing science.

Lindsay Gray is a lab manager at the University of California, San Francisco.

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In the Future, Lab Mice Will Live in Computer Chips, Not Cages - Undark Magazine

How to rid East Africa of locusts? Serve them in a kebab or drive them to cannibalism – WTVB News

Thursday, July 02, 2020 3:04 a.m. EDT by Thomson Reuters

By Ayenat Mersie

NAIROBI, (Reuters) - Eat them, poison them, and use scent to drive them to cannibalism - as a second wave of locusts threatens to devour East Africa's crops, scientists in a Nairobi lab are experimenting with novel ways to kill them.

Swarms are the worst for three generations, encouraged by unseasonably wet weather and dispersed by a record number of cyclones. The destructive pests could cost East Africa and Yemen $8.5 billion this year, the World Bank has said.

Locusts are usually controlled by spraying them with pesticides before they can fly, but the chemicals can damage other insects and the environment.

So scientists at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) are experimenting with biopesticides and the use of locusts as human and animal food as they look for environmentally-friendly extermination methods.

ICIPE researchers were a part of a group that discovered an isolate from a fungus, Metharizium acridum, could kill locusts without harming other creatures. The isolate is now being used across East Africa.

Now researchers are pouring through 500 other fungi and microbes in their bio bank in the hope of discovering another locust poison.

ICIPE scientist Baldwyn Torto's research has mostly focused on locust smells and pheromones.

Before locusts can fly they have a certain chemistry and therefore a unique smell that allows them to remain in a group, he said. That smell changes as locusts mature.

Disseminating the scent of an adult among the young can help destroy swarms.

"They get disoriented, the group breaks into pieces, they cannibalize each other and they become even more susceptible to biopesticides," he said.

A lower-tech, but still environmentally-friendly way of combating locusts is eating them.

ICIPE is developing nets and backpack-vacuums to capture large numbers of locusts. The protein-rich insects can then be cooked or crushed into meal or oil suitable for animal feed or human consumption. ICIPE organizes regular events to normalize the consumption of insects.

Researcher Chrysantus Tanga eats the insects himself. In the ICIPE cafe, the heads, legs and wings have been removed.

"They have to make it presentable for a first-timer," Tanga said motioning towards colourful plates of locust-based meals prepared by ICIPE chefs, ranging from deep fried with tartar sauce, to skewered among vegetables in a kebab.

"For me, I'll eat 100% of it... whatever is crunchy."

(Editing by Katharine Houreld and Alexandra Hudson)

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How to rid East Africa of locusts? Serve them in a kebab or drive them to cannibalism - WTVB News

United Against COVID-19 – The UCSB Current

The coronavirus pandemic demands innovative and creating thinking, and UC Santa Barbaras Graduate Division is answering the call with the Multidisciplinary Research on COVID-19 and its Impacts (MRCI) Program.

Launched in May by Graduate Dean Carol Genetti, the program has made 44 new grants to 55 grad students to support their summer research and creative projects on the pandemic. The program provides a $2,000 mini-grant to an individual or team project that explores, analyzes and responds to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the 44 funded proposals, six were collaborative team proposals. The awards, running from June 22 through Sept. 22, may also include funding for direct project research costs (up to $500).

The coronavirus pandemic has changed nearly every aspect of human life, from family relationships to schooling, communication, the economy, politics and the arts, Genetti said. This is a dramatic, historic event and todays scholars have a remarkable opportunity to bring wide-ranging perspectives and methods of 21st- century scholarship to study it in real time.

In addition, she continued, some graduate students have had to delay their research due to the pandemic, and some have been impacted financially. MRCI addresses all of these at once, in generating research related to the pandemic, developing new opportunities and partnerships, and providing small stipends. Its a win all around.

Mary Hegarty, who serves as Graduate Division associate dean and leads the MRCI program, says this is a unique opportunity for graduate students to redirect their research.

Students have already received important guidance on proposal writing and will participate in collaborative groups throughout the summer to explore the perspectives of different disciplines on the current pandemic, she said. For some students, MRCI will lead to a new publication; for others, their MRCI project will be included as a chapter in their dissertation or will contribute pilot data for a grant proposal to a federal agency. In general, the projects speak to the resilience of our students in adapting their research and creative activities to provide new insights into the challenges of COVID-19.

Topics that received funding ranged from projects that will use seismic data to analyze the degree of compliance with shut-down orders to an examination of COVID-19 related policies and rhetoric in a variety of contexts.

Suyi Leong, a Ph.D. student in psychological and brain sciences, will be focusing on understanding how different cultural values affect the use of digital contact tracing (DCT).

I hope this project informs policy makers and app developers about peoples concerns for using the tool, and address them so that DCT can be effectively implemented, she said.

In this new world of remote engagement and research, graduate students will also explore the impact and efficacy of telehealth in the context of its greatly expanded use, and how different communities, such as religious institutions, have moved their face-to-face activities into online settings to serve their members.

Anthropology Ph.D. student Lauren Smyth is researching Southern Californian religious communities and their shift to digital and mixed digital/physical ritual sites in response to the pandemics stay-at-home orders and social distancing.

With the MRCI, Im most excited about the diverse range of incredible projects from across the university that I otherwise wouldnt get the chance to learn directly from, and sharing our different expertise to better understand pandemic-related research.

Statistics and applied probability doctoral student Mingzhao Hu will research the effects of COVID-19 on dialysis patients.

My research investigates effects of COVID-19 on dialysis patients via smoothing of longitudinal patient physiology variables and analyzes deviations during the pandemic with mixed effect state-space model based on first-hand recordings from treatment clinics, Hu said. I look forward to the cross-discipline collaboration opportunities offered by MCRI, and the generous funding is essential for me to carry out the research and perform the analysis to the best of my abilities.

Social justice themes also figure widely in the summer research projects, such as the analysis of the pandemics impact on vulnerable populations, indigenous peoples, undocumented, and economically marginalized populations.

Sarah Alami, another Ph.D. student in anthropology, will be modeling the spread of the coronavirus among the Tsimane, an indigenous population living in the Bolivian Amazon, using secondary data collected by the Tsimane Health and Life History Project (THLHP).

I am hoping this project will help assist in ongoing management of COVID-19 among Tsimane by detecting at-risk individuals and hotspots, or areas of elevated disease risk, she said.

Holly Carpenter, who joined the Graduate Division team as Crossroads Program Coordinator right before the March shelter-in-place order, hailed the diversity of topics and research approaches in the proposals was incredible.

It was a wonderful reminder of the passion and creativity that UCSB graduate students bring to their work and the many ways that graduate student research contributes to understanding complex problems and finding solutions.

Carpenter now works with Hegarty and Robby Nadler, the Graduate Divisions academic, professional and technical graduate writing development director, to facilitate multidisciplinary intellectual discourse among program participants.

I was touched by the generous spirit of our students projects, Nadler said. They embraced this opportunity as a way to help others through their expertise, not as a mechanism to pursue their own research agendas. At the end of the day, that is what a UC Santa Barbara education is about.

In addition to working on their research over the summer, students will also participate in the MRCI Research Collaborative, which will include presentations, small and large group discussions, and networking. To foster this community, the MRCI program in collaboration with the Graduate Student Resource Center staff and peers will hold a series of webinars as part of the proposal and research funding process.

Awardees will also participate in discussions and will share their final research findings with the community with a fall symposium where students will present short overviews of their work and outcomes. The programs organizers also hope the mini-grants will help seed the creation of future grant proposals, articles, works of art, or other scholarly products by graduate students.

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United Against COVID-19 - The UCSB Current

Neuroscience reveals the mental blindspots that can become deadly in a pandemic – AlterNet

As the vast majority of companies rush to reopen and people rush back to public life, theyre falling into the trap of getting back to normal. Theyre not realizing were heading into a period of waves of restrictions once again, due to many states reopening too soon.

Indeed, some of the states to open early onward have alreadyreimposed some restrictions. This shows that as I predictedin a newspaper editorialway back at the start of the pandemic on March 10, 2020, we will greatly underestimate the pandemic and need to prepare to face rolling waves of restrictions and shutdowns until a vaccine. To avoid the trap of normalcy, we need to understand the parallels between whats going on now, and what happened at the start of the pandemic.

Very many prominentbusinessandpoliticalleaders downplayed the pandemic in its early stages. As a result, most business owners and plenty of ordinary citizens initially perceived the pandemic as little worse than the common cold.

This initial impression anchored their opinions toward minimizing the threat posed by COVID-19. In neuroscience and behavioral economics research, we call such initial impressions an anchor. Our minds tend to fall into a dangerous judgment error called theanchoring bias or focalism, where we give too much credit to the initial piece of information we received on a topic and perceive the rest of the information through the filter of that initial impression.

Yes, first impressions really matter, too much for our own good! That means as new information became available about the danger of COVID-19, people stuck to their initial impressions. They feel very reluctant to change their minds based on new evidence. Nowhere is this more evidence than in guidance on wearing masks.

Initially, the CDC indicated that theres no need to wear masks to protect yourself or others from COVID-19. Over time, as research evidence accumulated on the benefits of wearing masks, the CDCchanged its guidelines, highlighting the importance of masking in public.

Thats how science works: changing evidence results in changing guidelines. But thats not how our brains work, at least for those without training in critical evaluation of evidence.

The result? Many disregarded the new guidance, especially if those they consider authority figures did not reinforce it. Due to a mental blindspot calledemotional contagion, we tend to adopt the perspectives of those we see as authority figures. With their guidance, we can overcome initial anchoring; without it, we will stick to our initial perspective.

Just as dangerous is another dangerous judgment error that cognitive neuroscientists call thenormalcy bias. This mental blindspot refers to the fact that our gut reactions drive us to feel that the future, at least in the short and medium term of the next couple of years, will function in roughly the same way as the past: normally.As a result, we tend to vastly underestimate both the possibility and impact of a disaster striking us. Moreover, we will rush to get back to normal even when we should be preparing for the aftershocks or continuation of the disaster.

The normalcy bias, anchoring bias, and emotional contagion are three of over one hundred mental blindspots that cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists like myself callcognitive biases. Fortunately,recent research by myself and other scholarshas shown us how we can effectively defeat such dangerous judgment errors.

First you need to understand and evaluate where you yourself and your organization have fallen into each of these biases, and evaluate the damage caused by doing so. Then, you need to consider realistically the long-term outcomes and plan for a realistic scenario that addresses the likelihood of major disruptions.

Prepare to deal with waves of restrictions and loosenings for the long haul, especially as its likely that the coronavirus will get worse in the Fall, as weather gets colder. Remember, even if you made some bad decisions in the past, you always have the opportunity to make better decisions going forward tosurvive and thrive through the pandemic.

then let us make a small request. AlterNets journalists work tirelessly to counter the traditional corporate media narrative. Were here seven days a week, 365 days a year. And were proud to say that weve been bringing you the real, unfiltered news for 20 yearslonger than any other progressive news site on the Internet.

Its through the generosity of our supporters that were able to share with you all the underreported news you need to know. Independent journalism is increasingly imperiled; ads alone cant pay our bills. AlterNet counts on readers like you to support our coverage. Did you enjoy content from David Cay Johnston, Common Dreams, Raw Story and Robert Reich? Opinion from Salon and Jim Hightower? Analysis by The Conversation? Then join the hundreds of readers who have supported AlterNet this year.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure AlterNet remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to AlterNet, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

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Neuroscience reveals the mental blindspots that can become deadly in a pandemic - AlterNet

Fall 2020: How to Achieve Continuity in Teaching and Learning – Bowdoin News

Broene is a professor of chemistry and chair of the Continuity in Teaching and Learning Group (CTLG), a collection of twenty-three faculty, students, and staff charged by President Clayton Rose with developing an online teaching and learning model that will approach the challenge from a fresh perspective while building on the lessons learned during the spring 2020 semester. The group spent the better part of ten weeks coming up with a comprehensive plan for Bowdoin College in the falla plan that guides faculty in creating an online learning environment that delivers the defining aspects of a Bowdoin education.

About half of the group was made up of faculty members, the rest being technology, education, and communications specialists from the Bowdoin staff, as well as several students. Extensive surveys were conducted to assess what worked and what didnt in the second half of the 2020 spring semester, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the College to pivot quickly to remote teaching. In issuing its findings and recommendations, the group also drew on the latest pedagogical research regarding online instruction and interviews with external consultants in the field.

After consulting with experts in the fields of science, medicine, and public health, President Rose recently unveiled Bowdoins plan for the upcoming academic year. Its designed to ensure the health and safety of the College community amid the uncertainty of the ongoing pandemic, while providing an excellent Bowdoin education to all students.

According to the plan, all first-year students will be on campus for the fall semester, along with transfer students, student residential life staff, students who for personal reasons are unable to pursue an online education at home, and a small number of senior honors students who require access to physical spaces on campus for their projects and can do so under health and safety protocols. All classes will be taught online, with the exception of most first-year seminars. As for the spring 2021 semester, Rose says: Assuming we are able to make it through the fall successfully in protecting the health and safety of our community, it is my intention and expectation to have sophomores, juniors, and seniors back on campus in the springwith priority given to seniors.

In planning for the fall, Broene says the group gave a lot of thought to the kinds of classes faculty have to deliver online. We have discussion-based classes; we have lecture-based classes. And then, he adds, there are lab-based classes, as well as performance, arts, and language-based learning. We asked faculty who taught in all of these modes to talk about what went well, what didnt, and what ideas they had.

The group has developed recommendations for all types of courses, suggesting what can best make them Bowdoin courses. One of the biggest takeaways from the spring experience concerned content delivery and the need for clear separation of synchronous learning, which is live and collaborative, involving all the students, and asynchronous content, which is prerecorded and on-demand. In a normal face-to-face classroom, we can improvise, says Crystal Hall. Students can ask questions of faculty right in the moment. It's harder to do that in an online setting.

Hall is associate professor of digital humanities and director of the digital and computational studies program. The recommendation, she says, is to break up larger classes into small groups (around twelve or fewer) for the discussion portion of the lesson. The feedback we had said that smaller groups are more enjoyable: there's more contact, theres time for everyone to participate, for people to ask questions and to really get their hands on the material. While professors continue to teach the class, they will benefit from an expanded use of student teaching assistants (TAs) to help with larger classes, as TAs are employed to facilitate and organize these smaller discussion groups.

The lectures, meanwhile, are to be delivered asynchronously and distilled into digestible chunks of fifteen or twenty minutes each that can be easily downloaded and listened to on-demand. This actually has some advantages over a classroom situation, says Broene. In a classroom you're watching somebody lecture while writing something. You're listening and you're trying to think about it all at the same time. Whereas online, he explains, you can review the content until you understand it.

Professor of Neuroscience and Biology Manuel Daz-Ros chaired the subcommittee that studied the issue of laboratory-based learning and how that will work. In their search for creative solutions, he and his colleagues have recommended a number of initiatives. Daz-Ros cited one example from his own work: Were going to ship equipment to students so they can conduct experiments on their own. That equipment includes an outreach effort called Backyard Brains, designed to introduce students to neuroscience. Among the pieces of the kit coming their way are headbands made to amplify, measure, and record brain activity. Its quite exciting, he says. Students can perform experiments on themselves!

There are many portions of our lab work that we can do well in an online environment, says Broene. For example, he points out, students can do fieldwork, collect data and interpret it, learning on the way how to use new types of instrumentation.

Some lab work, though, cannot be done remotely, he continues. I cant, for example, send a bottle of ether to my organic chemistry students. That would be dangerous and probably illegal.

This is where flexibility is required. Flexibility is key, he stresses, and that might include the flexibility to postpone a lab-based course that has to be done on campus until the spring semesterwhen a more regular routine will have hopefully returnedand use the fall semester to pursue labs that lend themselves more to online learning.

Carrie Scanga, associate professor of art, chair of the department of art, and director of the visual arts division, worked on performance-based classestheater and dance, music, language, visual artsto figure out best practices for online learning. Performance-based classes in general, says Scanga, will be influenced by what is going on in the outside world and the highly unusual circumstances under which students are learning. We know from our spring experience that the most impactful courses for students are ones that address contemporary issues. These classes give students a chance to interact with their feelings about these times, she adds.

As the report states, performance-based courses have the opportunity to directly address how the arts function to heal, maintain community, or disrupt societal systems in this era. Examples cited include courses on film acting, Dance in the TikTok Era, and improvised musical communities (balcony singing) as ways of interacting with the wider world. All of these courses, says Scanga, are reliant on creating a space where students can feel comfortable, whether they are singing, dancing, acting, or practicing a foreign language.

As with all classes, there is a heavy reliance on technology to achieve these goals and a great deal of the CTLG report is dedicated to this issue.

A number of lessons were learned in the spring about what technology best suits an online learning model, says Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Michael Cato. We were reacting to an emergency so we encouraged faculty to work with the tools they knew, and they used a lot of approaches and platforms. Now, as we plan for the fall, he says, we will emphasize consistency.

Decreasing the cognitive load for students is key, says Cato, so that the way in which they are learning does not distract from the learning itself. The new experience will be centered around two or three learning platforms with everything going through Blackboard. Classes may employ technologies like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but the gateway to them, the starting point, will be the familiar Blackboard platform, he explains, where all student assignments and material for the week will be posted.

Then theres the issue of connectivity and how to ensure that all students, off campus and on, will be technically able to have the same learning experience. In addition to shipping equipment like tablets and laptops to students who need them, the College is also partnering with institutions that might be local to off-campus students and able to provide them with wireless internet connections. Theres also the eduroam initiative, says Cato. Its a global partnership of higher education institutionsincluding Bowdointhat offers shared free access to high-speed wireless networks. If a student lives near a college or a university, they may be able to access the institutions WiFi network using eduroam.

There is, explains Kathyrn Byrnes, an inherent paradox in the new teaching model, and its a welcome one. Shes director of the Baldwin Center for Learning and Teaching. As a student, while youre doing more on your own and working independently, there are also many opportunities to build community through one-on-one connections with your professors and fellow students.

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Elizabeth Pritchard says it was also really important to involve students in the process and to learn from them. One of the things students are really good at is creating community online, she says. Five students served on the CTLG and helped address a number of issues, including that of time zones. We decided to change the time-block format, says Caroline Poole 22, to accommodate students across all time zones. To solve this problem, courses are being offered at different times for different days of the week.

Gavin Shilling 21 worked on a subcommittee looking at lecture-based classes. Our balance was trying to create a structure that everyone could work within but also allow for some flexibility for the professors to improvise and be creative in the moment.

Peyton Tran 23 says shes really optimistic going into the next semester because I know that Bowdoin professors are going to still be high-quality professorsjust through a different medium.

The terms remote instruction and online instruction are often used interchangeably. The difference is that the first entails temporarily transitioning content designed for face-to-face instruction to the internet, whereas the second is the purposeful design and implementation of a course for delivery online. Thus, Bowdoins spring semester was an instance of remote instruction, whereas planning for the fall entails the development of online teaching and learning.Page 5, CTLG final report.

The CTLG report lays out a detailed timeline for faculty, to help them prepare all the components and materials they need for the upcoming semester. Putting together an online course requires a lot of support from academic technology staff, and after extensive discussions with several companies, Bowdoin has hired a firm of outside experts to complement the internal team, selected because of their deep understanding of online education and that they get what is special about a liberal arts education.

With classes due to start on September 2, 2020, work is underway in earnest to ensure students this fall will experience the full benefits of a Bowdoin education, even if it is one that will look different from anything thats gone before.

While we dont have all the answers yet, says Broene, I learned enough in this work to be sure of two things: that the Bowdoin faculty is fully committed to their students education and that they are determined to get this right.

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Fall 2020: How to Achieve Continuity in Teaching and Learning - Bowdoin News

Immunology expert says Ireland needs to be ready for Covid-19 travel spikes – Irish Examiner

A 'green list' of countries with unrestricted travel access to Ireland could be published next Thursday.

A final decision on air bridges is being made by a Cabinet sub-committee tomorrow, before being approved by Ministers on Monday.

People could travel to countries on this list, without a 14-day quarantine on their return, but the National Public Health Emergency Team's concerned it could lead to more Covid-19 cases being re-imported.

Professor Luke ONeill from the school of Immunology at Trinity College Dublin says we need to be prepared for spikes in travel-related cases.

Professor O'Neill says: "Even the famous 'green' countries, that's a good idea of course,

"And we have sympathy for the airlines with the airlines of course we do, but this 'green' country [Ireland] is a good one, but we have got to be ready for that [Covid-19 clusters],

"The timing has to be right for these things to happen or otherwise,

There will definitely be spikes coming into Ireland with all kinds of consequences.

Earlier, Tnaiste Leo Varadkar said a green list of countries for travel - to be published on July 9 - may only allow people fly at a later date.

The Government continues to advise against all non-essential travel.

Speaking at a launch of 6.5m in online support grants for 183 businesses, Mr Varadkar said: That is still the plan [to publish on July 9] to publish a greenest or shortlist of countries, which you can travel to without the 14-day quarantine.

But we do have a new government. And in fairness to the new government and to the new Taoiseach, the new minister of health, they're going to want to study matters and bring proposals to a Cabinet sub-committee this week.

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Immunology expert says Ireland needs to be ready for Covid-19 travel spikes - Irish Examiner

Iowa-developed mice used to test coronavirus therapies – The Gazette

IOWA CITY As medical researchers worldwide began to study COVID-19 to try and develop a vaccine or other therapies to blunt the deadly disease, they soon realized common lab mice werent useful.

Normal mice could not be infected with the virus, said Dr. Stanley Perlman, a University of Iowa professor of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology as well as the Mark Stinsky Chair in Virology.

Perlman and Dr. Paul McCray, also a UI professor of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology, realized they had something in their labs that might help: Decade-old frozen mouse sperm.

The researchers, along with Jincun Zhao, now at Medical University in Guangzhou, China, in 2005 developed a transgenic mouse that could be infected with SARS-CoV, a viral respiratory illness that spread to more than 8,000 people worldwide in 2003.

By the time the UI came up with the mice, the epidemic was over, Perlman said. They kept the mice around for a few years, but then decided it was easier just to preserve the sperm.

When SARS-CoV-2 hit the population, we didnt have live mice, Perlman said, referring to the new coronavirus that has infected more than 9 million people worldwide and killed more than 490,000 since last year. We had to rederive the mice, then we could study them.

The UI has made information about how they developed the transgenic mice available for free to any other researchers who want it.

The way they did it was using an adenovirus gene therapy vector that is inhaled by the mice to deliver the human ACE2 protein into mouse airway cells. Once the airway cells have the protein, the mice become able to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and can develop COVID-19-like lung symptoms.

Although the disease is not fatal in the mice, they do get sick, losing weight and developing lung damage.

But research on mice may be critical to ending the pandemic.

What it allows you to do is test vaccines, test anti-viral therapies, learn how the virus is causing the disease things you do not want to learn for the first time on people, Perlman said.

The researchers, reporting in the journal Cell, showed these transgenic mice could be used to evaluate a vaccine and several potential COVID-19 therapies, including a preventive strategy known as poly I: C, which boosts the natural immune response, convalescent plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients, and the anti-viral drug Remdesivir.

Therapies tested on the mice so far have prevented weight loss, reduced lung disease and increased the speed of virus clearance in the mice, the UI reported.

The Iowa mouse model isnt the only one available for coronavirus research, Perlman said.

It turns out, because COVID-19 is so important, lots of people are developing mouse models. There are several others that are similar or in some ways better or worse, he said. But the Iowa model is widely used and a lot of people are interested in using it.

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Iowa-developed mice used to test coronavirus therapies - The Gazette