SoCal Minds

Strokes: bad byproduct of belly flop for women?

From USC

For women who are ages 35 to 64, there's some worrisome, uh-oh kind of information about that zaftig thing that too many of them have going on -- it may be a big contributor to them suffering strokes at three times the incidence that it occurs for men of the same age, researchers say. In a scrutiny of data on more than 10,000 adults, including almost 2,200 of them in the 35-64 age group, yes, it was only a relative sliver of them, but roughly 5% reported they had suffered a stroke. Women 35-64, however, were three times more likely to have had  stroke, confirming earlier, emerging data that women 45-54 were twice as likely for stroke occurrence as men of the same age. While many other health indicators -- such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels -- registered better for many women in the 35-64 age group, they did show greater issues than did men with abdominal obesity. 

Women 35-64 found three times more likely than men of same age to suffer strokes

How state could dig out of costly prisons mess

From Cal State Fullerton

With the Golden State incarcerating record numbers of bad folks and with the Gubernator finally coming around to the unsustainable and unsavory budget juxtaposition of state spending on prisons versus institutions of higher education, a historian in Fullerton offers an honor-winning glance backward at a policy option that he says needs reconsideration. He hearkens back to a soaking season, in which horrible pounding rains inundated Southern California, wreaked havoc with mudslides and evacuations and prompted some Herculean labors by some surprising heroes of that time -- prison laborers. Why must California warehouse and isolate wrong-doers in giant, costly complexes instead of letting them work in constructive fashion to rehabilitate themselves and pay off their debts to society, instead of taxpayers drowning in indebtedness to support them, the historian asks, noting that the state once had a model prison system replete with convict work on forests, fire-fighting, conservation and disaster relief?

History offers important lessons on putting prisoners to valued work, scholar says 

Exhibit documents 40 years of ethnic studies

From UCLA

As part of the 40th anniversary celebrations surrounding the Bruins' ethnic studies programs, a major exhibition will put on display, starting this weekend, an array of materials that document the tumultuous times that put the lives, history and experiences of Asian, African, and Latino Americans and American Indians in the center of serious academe for research, scholarship and recording. The display will include noteworthy murals, photographs, films, books and journals key to and produced by the ethnic scholarly centers. A festival Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. will open the free, public exhibit, which runs through June 13.

Weekend festival opens display highlighting study centers started in tumultuous times

There's no whiling away this wet weekend

From Claremont McKenna College, the Keck Graduate Institute, UCLA, CSULB, CalArts, the Huntington

Yup, lots more goes on in Southern California than just the capacity to make a right turn on red (see old Woody Allen jibe).

Just a reminder of the variety of intellectual activity occurring in the area: While some scholars from across the country today and Saturday will be considering the influence of Christianity in Modern East Asia, others will be assessing what science knows about 'dark matter' in the universe and how it gets detected, while still others will be learning how to persuade the FDA they have a drug to deal with a rare disease.

And, of course, those who fancy Japanese gardens and kimono could always sneak away for a program combining the two topics or they could join in for either a Bonsai-a-thon or a recounting of a noted, century-old Japanese-inspired garden. Or maybe on a rainy weekend with the kids getting a little crazy and making their parents that way, too, it will be time to slip downtown for an international children's film festival at Redcat? Or quick, this will be the last chance to catch that play that captures the quirky life of a pioneering rocket scientist with a dark, eccentric personal life, um, maybe what could be called a Pasadena Babalon?

Are egality, misery-death hard-wired in humans?

From Caltech & UCLA

Human responses to situations both good and bad may be less tied to our character than the wiring in our brains and genes, according to two different, cross-town studies. In Pasadena, researchers have images that they say shows the brain believes in equality, specifically that the organ responds more strongly when a poor person receives a reward than when a rich person does. While previous work had found an innate human dislike of unequal pay, the brain scans suggest that humans may be more hard-wired than had been believed to react to inequality. Meantime, in Westwood, as part of work that may prove to be of great value in figuring how genes react with the environment, researchers say they have found a biochemical link between misery and death. They also say that some individuals have a gene variant that breaks that link and that may make them more resilient in adverse situations.  

Scans show brain lights up in a reaction to inequality

New understanding on genes,environment shows link between misery, death

Insights on complex aspects of U.S. health care

From UCLA, RAND & USC

Even as President Obama and congressional leaders dominate the day's news with whatever they manage to accomplish with the White House summit, researchers in the Southland offer some reminders on key points on prospective health care and health insurance reform:

• In Westwood, an analysis of pre-recession data on issues affecting some 3 million California women ages 50-64 finds that older females who are divorced, separated or widowed have twice the uninsured rate as their married peers even as they enter a period of life that is particularly health parlous with higher incidences of high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

For older, unmarried women, a midlife crisis in coverage, health

• In Santa Monica, an independent analysis of the president's health care package, which hews closely to proposals by the Senate, would by 2019 reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 30 million; it would keep about the same number of people as the Senate plan does on employer-sponsored insurance but those numbers would be lower than under the House plan.

An assessment of how the president's health care proposals would work out

Click here to see the analysis

Click here to see an earlier analysis of Senate health care proposals

• In Exposition Park, a new study looks to the role of big, affluent hospitals in determining decisions on health care pricing, this, even as health maintenance organizations gained clout in the 1990s in this area. There's new insight into how the larger, better off hospitals could shift costs when the government sought to cut Medicare costs. And because HMOs pricing powers have waned of late, the work suggests not only how big hospitals may react to policy shifts but also how they have even more clout on cost issues.

A scrutiny of how big, affluent hospitals reacted to a cost-cutting policy shift

Wisdom from a British bard with lots o' barbs

From CSULA

Hear, hear in these bloody bad times for not only wit but wisdom, too. Which is why it might be worth popping over to East L.A. this evening at 6:30 for the free, public reading with poet Wendy Cope, a British writer much praised for her clever and satirical works, including her books, 'Two Cures for Love,' and 'Making Cocoa for Kinglsey Amis.'  Men get her frequent barbs. For instance?

'Bloody men are like bloody buses

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches your stop

Two or three others appear.'

Photo: British poet Wendy Cope / Caroline Forbes

Lauded British poet to read, sign her latest book, 'Two Cures for Love'

Who is Wendy Cope? Click here for more information

$6 million in gifts to joint science department

From Claremont McKenna College, Pitzer & Scripps

The largest academic enterprise of the Claremont Colleges, a joint effort that combines biology, chemistry and physics in a single department, has just gotten a total $6 million funding boost from donors, $5 million from the Sidney J. Weinberg, Jr., Foundation and a $1 million matching gift from the Roberts Challenge. The donations will support student and faculty research and engagement, as well as providing support for a new dean for the joint science department, which advocates say offers small class sizes, rigorous teaching and research and the opportunity for students to work across disciplines.  

Boost for Claremont Colleges' combined biology, chemistry, physics enterprise

For women, Hollywood's still a man's world

From USC

For all the gush about its glamor gals, Hollywood's real glitz, gild and glory goes to the guys, new research reaffirms, finding that just a third of the 4,379 speaking roles went to women in a recent year in the 100 top-grossing movies, for which men were 83% of all the directors, writers and producers. The data, based on the 2007 film year, jibes with earlier studies that show just how much the movies are not just dominated by men but also that Hollywood can be a good ol' boys' club, researchers say. And how does it all change? Only if women, as they say, get to helm the show. When a woman was a director or co-director, the number of actresses in a movie, as compared to those directed solely by a man or men, rose from 29.3% to 44.6%; when women were one or more of the screenwriters, the number of actresses, as compared with male-only writing, increased to 34.9% versus 28.1%. When women were producers, versus a men-only situation, the number of actresses increased to 30.8% versus 26.4%.  

Photo: communications prof, study author Stacy L. Smith / Maggie Smith, USC

Actresses struggle to get screen time, while men dominate key off-screen jobs

A big push to count students correctly in Census

From UCLA

It's a topic that, imminently, will demand great public attention, and, it appears, it's something that truly confuses the tens of thousands of young folks scattered across the dozens of campuses in Southern California: They need to fill out the U.S. Census forms and to be counted at their current place of residence. And that's not 'home-home' or the 'rents (mom, dad etc), it's their dorms, apartments, present couch-crashes, whatever. With somewhere around 30,000 folks matriculating as Bruins, the folks in Westwood are gearing up with officials from the Census to ensure a more accurate population count for this decade, as opposed to the last, when authorities, after re-examining their data on 42 different points, believe that their tallies under-counted students. They're a particularly dodgy bunch to count noses on, mostly because they too often believe they should be tallied elsewhere and their living arrangements can be, um, unorthodox. It does matter, though, as the Census data gets tapped for such critical issues as political representation and distribution of federal aid and programs.  

Current residence, not 'home-home,' is where U.S. wants to count scholars