★★

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

In days gone by, people made names for themselves by doing something useful for society. Mara Irene Forns wrote plays that broke old rules, broke barriers and taught something, whether to other playwrights or to audiences.

Though she was a leader of the off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, the Southland knows her better from her establishing role in the also legendary Padua Hills Playwrights group and festival.

Now, her 1985 play, The Conduct of Life, is getting an airing at Inner-City Arts in downtown Los Angeles. In part because of her importance to theater but also for what the play still says about humanity, this highly stylized, challenging, disturbing work is well worth viewing.

It consists of a plotless series of scenes, many of them soliloquies or duologues, telling and not showing. It pulls from mismatched theatrical styles, the most easily recognizable of which is absurdism. It has no protagonist, no ones journey we wish to join in on. It ends in gunfire.

And yet, as a whole, it effectively and efficiently makes its points in a mere 60-minute running time, with a theatrical depth and richness not always achieved by plays with plots and standard exposition.

In what can be gleaned of story, we learn that military officer Orlando (Nick Caballero) interrogates and tortures captives in an unnamed, presumably Latin American, nation. His goal is maximum power.

He seeks that, too, in his relationships at home. His wife, Leticia (Adriana Sevahn Nichols), knows shes in a loveless marriage. But uneducated, though bright and articulate, she needs marriage to survive.

In a presumably secret room in Leticia and Orlandos home, he repeatedly rapes a child, formerly homeless and orphaned, now imprisoned there, though the play keeps us guessing, until the end, whether this is real or his fantasy.

Visiting the home, Alejo (Jonathan Medina), symbolizing passivity, cant stop himself from admiring Orlando. The sometimes-stuttering maid Olimpia (Elisa Bocanegra) disdains her employers. But she, too, cant walk away from her job (the time frame of this work seems ambiguous, though the dial telephone gives us an approximate era).

The child, Nena (Antonia Cruz-Kent), is last to speak, revealing her horrific childhood and her coping mechanisms. Likewise, the visual focus ultimately turns to Nena. Its director Jos Luis Valenzuelas statement that our actions leave the next generation to cope with the results.

Forns themes are status, gender, class, education and, in particular, how we blame others for what ails us and how our deepest misery shows up as violence, which becomes contagious.

Valenzuela makes visual and even more visceral the potent script. His actors, even working in various styles throughout the play, make their every moment believable, a pure reflection of human behavior.

Advertisement

Symbolically, Franois-Pierre Coutures pristine all-white set design belies the messiness of the characters lives. It also serves as a canvas for Johnny Garofalos highly saturated lighting design that changes with the intensity of the scene.

John Zalewskis superb sound design underscores the scripts brutality, notably in the sounds almost cruel intrusions on our hearing and heartbeats, but also in the juxtaposition of classical music to the inhumaneness of words and actions here.

Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles-based writer.

Rating: 4 stars

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

The rest is here:
'Conduct of Life,' at LA's Rosenthal Theater, shrewdly examines human cruelty - LA Daily News

The grasslands of the Great Plains have seen one of the sharpest increases in large and dangerous wildfires in the past three decades, with their numbers more than tripling between 1985 and 2014, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the average number of large Great Plains wildfires each year grew from 33 to 117 over that time period, even as the area of land burned in these wildfires increased by 400 percent.

This is undocumented and unexpected for this region, said Victoria Donovan, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Most studies do document these shifts in large wildfires in forested areas, and this is one of the first that documents a shift, at this scale, in an area characterized as a grassland.

Donovan published the study with two university colleagues. The research looked at large wildfires, defined as fires about 1,000 acres or more in size.

In other parts of the globe, such as Africas savannas, grassland fires are extremely common and that used to be true for the Great Plains as well. But in the past century or more, Donovan said, wildfire suppression techniques such as rapidly catching fires and putting them out had largely eradicated them from the region.

However, theyve begun to come back, a trend that has been consistent not only with climate change but also an incursion of more invasive plant species that could be providing additional fuel, Donovan said. However, the study merely documented the trend toward increased large wildfires without formally attributing its cause.

The year 2011 saw a particularly large surge of Great Plains wildfires, which accounted for half of the total acreage burned in the United States that year.

By specific region, some of the largest wildfire increases occurred in the Cross Timbers region of Texas and Oklahoma (which saw a 2,200 percent increase in the total area burned), the Edwards Plateau of Texas (a 3,300 percent increase), and the Central Irregular Plains, encompassing parts of Iowa and northern Missouri, as well as parts of Kansas and Oklahoma (1,400 percent increase).

Guido van der Werf, a scientist at VU Amsterdam who studies global forest fires and was not involved with the current study, said it was difficult to attribute causes behind the recent uptick in burning.

These grassland fires are somewhat different than the forest fires we are probably more used to, and follow-up research is needed to better understand what the drivers of the upward trends were, he said by email. Agricultural abandonment could be one, wetter conditions later in the record another one (leading to higher and more continuous fuel beds), climate change leading to warmer temperatures, etc.

Max Moritz, a wildfire researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who also was not involved in the study, said the new results are consistent with other work. But he added that he suspects they reflect not so much human-caused climate change but rather changing human behavior.

In particular, he cited a study from earlier this year led by Jennifer Balch of the University of Colorado at Boulder that found that humans were overwhelmingly responsible for lighting U.S. wildfires over the past 20 years (presumably, mostly by accident).

That study shows the Great Plains to have increasing patterns of both lightning- and human-caused fires over this period; yet the vast majority here are caused by humans, he wrote in an email. This suggests that the trends in question may largely be due to shifts in the amount, type, and timing of human activities.

For some time, wildfire researchers have worried about the growth of what they call the wildland-urban interface, in which more and more people are living in proximity to areas conducive to burning.

Here is the original post:
UNL researchers find 400 percent spike in wildfire destruction in Great Plains - Omaha World-Herald

Every year, over2 million people take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which assigns each test taker a 4-letter personality type basedon a combination of fourbinary choices: extraversion/introversion, intuition/sensing, thinking/feeling, and perceiving/judging.

For many of those people, MBTI is more than a personality test: it's a way of understanding themselves. And the influence of the test has even spread to the workplace, with80% of Fortune 100 companies claiming to rely upon the test for hiring and team building.But whilesuchtests arewildly popular, they aren'texactly clinical.

Most personality tests are novelties. Even the gold standard MBTIcreatedby a housewife and her daughter in 1943is largely ignored by the field of psychology.

Personality testing is an industry the way astrology or dream analysis is an industry: slippery, often underground, hard to monitor or measure, Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Cult of Personality, wrote for NPR. Human beings are far too complex, too mysterious and too interesting to be defined by the banal categories of personality tests. And in addition to dismissing human nuance, personality tests dont take into account scientific studies about human behavior. As industrial psychologist Tom Skibatold ATTN:,In the last 50 years, there has been a bevy of research in personality psychology, behavioral genetics, and neuroscience that have enabled psychologists to create accurate, insightful, and useful tools to assess personality." He added,The problem is that Myers-Briggs and other tools do not leverage this research."

Relying on these non-scientific tests can be problematic, particularlyin the workplace.Making personnel decisions solely based on labeling a persons psychological type is unfair,"Skiba said.Personality tests can be very blunt instruments, more like a cleaver than a paring knife. The shorter the test, the blunter the results have to be, placing people into broad either/or categories. Where is the nuance?"

AsIlina E. Strauss told The Atlantic, Stereotyping people using the test seems risky at best and harmful at worst. In particular, screening potential employees through the MBTIis probably a mistake, since theres no proof that you can link MBTI to how effective people will be at their jobs.

In addition to limiting employee success and creating unfair measures in the hiring process, putting too much weighton personality tests can also cause interpersonal issues. Psychologist Joel Mindentold ATTN: thatrelying too much on personality test resultscan negatively impact relationshipswhen a person rigidly refuses to adapt to situations because "that's just their personality."

"For example, someone with a high score of introversion mightput up a fight if a relationship partner wants to go to a party, and someone with a high scoreon a measure of conscientiousness might plan excessively and resist a partner's effortsto be spontaneous," he said.

So while they're not inherently harmful, issues arise when personality test results are seen as a sort of destiny.

"Can a right-handed boxer learn how to be a southpaw? Can an introvert deliver a political speech?" Skibaasked, and added,"One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that broad personality traits mean that someone is incapable of learning something outside of their comfort zone."

Read the rest here:
How Personality Tests Get It Wrong - ATTN:

Greenberg a treasure

Many years ago, when Paul Greenberg was with Pine Bluff's then-daily newspaper, I received a handwritten note from him stating that he enjoyed my letter to the editor that had recently been published. It doesn't get any better than that, a note from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author saying that he enjoyed something that I had written.

Prior to Mr. Greenberg's semi-retirement at the Democrat-Gazette, he wrote about items of interest that needed to be written. Now he writes about subjects that he just enjoys writing about. Now that I think about it, he is still writing articles that need to be written. Long live Paul Greenberg!

Now if I could just remember where I stashed that note for safekeeping.

FLOYD FRY

Star City

Our behavior up to us

Re Al Case's letter: First, I had to locate Onia. A beautiful part of Arkansas indeed, but I did not see his glass house on Google Maps.

I would like to suggest that he plow a couple of rows with the rest of us. When I was about 20 years old, I announced to my father that organized religion was the cause of the worst tragedies in human history. I remember he opened his mouth, the paused to look at me, and seeing a closed mind, closed his mouth and walked away. I smiled and nodded my head, confident that I had won. What we both knew as we continued the conversation 20 years later was that God does not necessarily do or condone everything done in his name. I had come to know that human behavior is (barring medical reasons) up to each human.

I do not propose to try to convince Case of God's existence. That is his decision and it does not affect mine. However, please do not use a sweeping generalization as I did at 20. The Ten Commandments, regardless of whether you believe they came from God, extraterrestrials, or were just a grain from Moses' cultivated mind, are the basis of living peacefully with your fellow human beings. They do not make you complacent or dull. Quite the contrary. They demand that you hold yourself to very high standards of respect for yourself and for others, and that you be a kind, generous and respectful good citizen.

Neither do I say he is entirely wrong. Swindlers and greed of all kinds are rife among us, and common courtesy seems to have been abandoned for screaming or shooting at those with whom we disagree. But I beg that he keep seeking good people with which to associate. They are out there, and as he grows in understanding, he might just find that most of them admit to belonging to an organized religion.

CAROL MOSELEY

Mabelvale

Different life and day

Glen Campbell could not have paid a higher tribute to Arkansas farm families than the song "Arkansas Farmboy" on his latest album. As he sings, you can feel his memory of growing up on a Pike County farm. And you, the listener, cannot help but remember your days on the farm.

Thanks, Glen Campbell, for reminding us of a different life and a different day.

JAMES B. DAVIS

Hot Springs

Amazing statement

In the High Profile story about Chad Hunter Griffin, Griffin made this statement about homosexuals: "They're second-class citizens, and they're judged and they're attacked because of who they are, because of how God made them."

This statement is amazing in light of the fact that three of the major religions in the world (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) believe that homosexuality is an "abomination" to God as a perversion of his image. I am aware there are some among these groups that want to reform their traditional views and accept homosexuality as inborn rather than learned behavior. Yet all three of the named religions base their beliefs on what they consider divine revelation, which is not subject to human alteration.

There are many changes taking place in the world that lie within the permissive will of God, but not his purposive will. Yet God has not changed nor does he compromise his eternal word. I am a Christian who has no desire to see homosexuals persecuted or mistreated in any way, and will defend them from such abuse. I believe that God loves the sinner, but abhors sin. I have served as the pastor for homosexuals as well as for others whose lifestyle was condemned in the Bible. I loved these whom I served in behalf of God as I loved all in my congregations.

Hate and oppression have no place in the heart of a person who truly knows God. But God, who is the very essence of love, never refrained from condemning what he deemed to be sinful, but acted in that love to forgive the sinner and make him to again reflect his own image in which he created him. I regard myself as a sinner who has been saved by God's grace! This is sincerely shared without ill will.

DENNIS M. DODSON

Monticello

On promoting causes

Your statement of core values doesn't mention promoting particular social causes. However, in the last two years you have printed many articles that appear to be promoting lifestyles that were once identified as alternate lifestyles, LGBT. The feature on Mr. Chad Griffin was filled with references to his advocacy of those suffering because of their lifestyles. This is a polarizing subject. Why would you choose to alienate those who disagree with those embracing LGBT?

I'd like to make a suggestion. Please find other areas of advocacy to promote. Can you find people feeding thousands of hungry children in Arkansas? Or maybe there are people that are helping wounded warriors with visible and hidden disabilities due to their military service. Perhaps firemen, policemen, teachers, or medical personnel are giving extraordinary service in seriously adverse conditions.

Please give LGBT a rest. Readers have many choices of sources for news and other stories of interest. Continuing to subscribe to your publication is in question for those disagreeing with continued promotion of the LGBT lifestyle. The Bible has specific teachings about LGBT. I choose to follow those guidelines.

KAY HICKS

Little Rock

Editorial on 06/17/2017

Read the original:
Letters - Arkansas Online

A calcium-dependent molecular mechanism discovered in the brain cells of mice by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators may underlie the impaired social interactions and anxiety found in neuropsychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and autism.

The study, published June 6 in Molecular Psychiatry, reports that reduced function of a calcium channel at synapses, the site of contact essential for communication between neurons, impairs social behavior and heightens anxiety. The findings also illuminate how this occurs: over-activation of a molecule within protrusions in neurons, called spines, which receive communicating signals from adjacent neurons. Blocking the action of this molecule in adult mice repaired the abnormal social interactions and elevated anxiety, a finding that may lead to the development of new treatments for patients with certain neuropsychiatric and anxiety disorders.

Our study suggests that if we can repair malfunctioning synapses in humans, we can reverse behavioral abnormalities and potentially treat specific symptoms, such as social impairment and anxiety, in patients with these neuropsychiatric disorders, said senior study author Dr. Anjali Rajadhyaksha, an associate professor of neuroscience in pediatrics and of neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, and director of the Weill Cornell Autism Research Program at Weill Cornell Medicine. We believe that targeting this molecule and its pathway may provide us with a molecular framework for future exploration of treatment of patients.

The top image shows the movement of a mouse in a behavioral test that measures social interaction. The blue to green color represents least to most time spent interacting with another mouse. The bottom set of images measures anxiety-like behavior exhibited by a mouse. The amount of filling in the vertical bars represents levels of anxiety. Dr. Anjali Rajadhyaksha and her team utilized rodent tests that are commonly used to study human disease symptoms, demonstrating that mice that were missing the CACNA1C gene in the brain showed less preference for interactions with another mouse and developed high anxiety. Treatment with the small molecule ISRIB corrected these symptoms. Photo credit: Dr. Zeeba Kabir

Dr. Rajadhyaksha and her colleagues focused on a calcium channel gene called CACNA1C that has emerged as a significant risk gene across major forms of neuropsychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Impaired social behavior and elevated anxiety are common symptoms observed in patients with these disorders.

Studies using mice lacking CACNA1C production in neurons in a part of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for cognition, personality and decision-making, made mice less social and more anxious. This finding seemingly confirms those of human studies, which suggests that defects in protein production may underlie the symptoms of patients with neuropsychiatric disorders and autism.

The investigators then identified the culprit for the social impairments and elevated anxiety: increased activity of a molecule called eIF2alpha that has been linked to cognitive deficits in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers disease.

Dr. Zeeba Kabir, the studys first author and a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Rajadhyakshas lab, tested a small molecule called ISRIB, which had previously been shown to block the action of eIF2alpha and improve learning and memory in mice, in rodents missing the CACNA1C gene. ISRIB reversed the aberrant behavior found in these mice, improving their social interactions and reducing anxiety.

Dr. Anjali Rajadhyaksha. Photo by John Abbott

Some studies have revealed that ISRIB has side effects that may be harmful to human cells, Dr. Rajadhyaksha said, but research shows that there are two alternative small molecule inhibitors of eIF2alpha that may be safer for use in humans. A next step is to study these ISRIB alternatives in mice to determine whether they have a similar effect.

Neuropsychiatric disorders are complex and treatments remain suboptimal, Dr. Rajadhyaksha said. To be able to treat specific symptoms that are common across multiple disorders is an exciting possibility. We would also like to determine whether alterations in the eIF2alpha pathway are held in common among other rodent models displaying social deficits and anxiety that result from risk genes other than CACNA1C. If so, molecules like ISRIB could be widely applicable for treating these symptoms, in general.

The research team also included Weill Cornell Medicine researchers Dr. Natalia DeMarco Garcia, an assistant professor of neuroscience, and Dr. Michael Glass, an associate professor of research in neuroscience, both in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute.

Original post:
New Molecular Pathway Underlies Impaired Social Behavior and Anxiety in Neuropsychiatric Disorders - Cornell Chronicle