'friends'

Recently a facebook 'friend' went through his entire friend list and wrote something about each person.  This is one of those friends that I never got to know very well but we had some meetings because of a project we were working on together.  Great guy.  Anyways, he did this with his whole list of facebook friends and my first thought was that I was really impressed he was able to do that.  Then my second thought was that it is very sad that I was impressed he could say something about all of his 'friends.'

I hope that the facebook meaning of 'friend' only becomes a term for something specific - a network connection on facebook - and not something more general - real life friends.  Sometimes technology has a tendency to shift our values and perceptions of reality, but I hope that I never am impressed that a friend of mine is able to give a short one sentence description of who I am.

Maps

So one of the classes I am going through this semester is one that focuses on how to do spacial modeling of things.  This is kind of fun because most anything that happens in the 'social world' is also tied to the specific location.  Places have different laws, taxes, different programs with more of less funding, different jobs... you get the idea.  Below is just a quick one I made the other day for class, but is fun because it is a map.  And I made it.

Anyways, this is a map showing the distribution of poverty for people under 18 years old by county.  Children in poverty is tied to a lot of other things and blah blah blah.  Enjoy.  (and you can click on that there map and make it bigger)

Good Day

For Christmas Sara got me a toy to make running a little bit more fun that tracks pace, distance and all that good stuff.  Pretty sweet.  So, naturally I went on a run today.  This is all just a side point because I thought you should know that.

Quite possibly the greatest accomplishment of my day came after the run.  It is warm here today - like 71 or so.  As my Ramen Noodles were making their rounds in the microwave, I am looked through the refrigerator for something else that sounds like a good post-run something.  At first I thought a Dr. Pepper sounded good, but then I thought, no.  A beer sounds better.  It is '5pm somewhere,' after all.  In the end I decided on.... that's right.  An apple.

I felt good enough about that that I thought I needed to write a pointless, rambling blog about it.  Go have an apple.  It won't get those 5 minutes back for you, but it will make you feel better about the loss.  Most likely.

grading

When I was an undergrad, I remember thinking that papers were very helpful.  They force you to sit down and think through a topic in more depth than you would if you only took an exam or something like that.  So now that I am teaching, I think that papers are important for a number of reasons.  I now wish I had different opinions about assigning papers to students.  I really, really don't like reading massive stacks of papers.

Below is me happily holding all of the papers I graded this past semester.  Except for the small stack I found on a different desk (totally thought I lost like 40 or 50 final papers... that would have been unfortunate).  This is also minus the graded papers that students actually came to pick up.  I felt I needed to document this.

Real weekends

Since we had a some-what normal weekend, I thought I'd put a few pictures of it up.  Sara had the whole weekend off, or a two day vacation (she calls any time off - even if counted in hours - a vacation to feel better about it).  She ran the half marathon here in Dallas for the third year this year.  She did pretty good despite it being all cold and rainy out.  Here is is with others from the hospital.  

 They forgot to take a picture of all of them until they were on the train headed back home from the race.

We also we and got a Christmas tree.  Sara was super excited.  I was... well...  Anyways, we decided that it may be easier to just carry the tree home instead of taking the time to awkwardly tie it to the top of our car and drive just a few blocks.  I even almost beat Sara home.

That is about it I think.  Maybe Sara would have had more fun stuff to say.  She is working a lot right now in the little kid ICU and it is finals time of the year for me.  This was an attempt to productively waste time.  Enjoy.

writing

So I don't think I will ever take people's writing for granted anymore - especially more professional or academic writing.  Each sentence has likely been written and re-written many, many times before it ever reaches the reader.  I have a paper that has been through a few reviews by now and I have been writing and re-writing for over a year now.  Each sentence has been read literally like a hundred or more times and most every sentence has been inserted, changed, removed, moved or any other combination so many times by now. It is interesting to think about whether or not the paper is still the same paper as it was when it started or not.

I can now see why people say that papers and books are never really finished, but are abandoned.  There comes a certain point when you just get tired or reading, working on, or changing the thing and you just want to give up on it and move on.  That is the point at which it is considered 'finished.'  I think this one was 'finished' long ago but it still plagues me, ha....

build it. they may come.

People's health is an interesting beast.  We often think of health as between one person and their immune system, or some variation of this.  There has also long been a correlation between lower income individuals and poor health and, often, shorter lifespans.  There are many ideas and studies showing why this latter relationship may exist, but so often it can be oversimplified.  This becomes a real struggle when we try to make structural changes to fix things (think healthcare reform) - we know something is broken, but if we are not sure why how can we really fix it?  (Before I go on, you should keep in mind that there is neither an explicit nor implicit political point/argument in this blog.  Carry on.)

Here are some thoughts from some recent research in the sociology of health and illness.  Policy makers and people in general often place a high degree of emphasis on the individual.  This usually translates over to things such as focusing on health care and insurance coverage, or even the availability of (affordable) health care.  But, even if these problems were fixed, people still may not use the health care available to them because it is not clear that this is the problem (obviously it is a big problem, but it could be subsequent to other issues).

Going back to the 'poor people' and their healthcare.  We assume that poor communities have poor health because there is no insurance or the care is hard to access.  While this may in part be true, recent research shows that within poor communities, it is not the poor people that are most affected by barriers to health, but middle-class and upper-class individuals living in that location.  In other words, the poor health in poor communities is actually not attributed to the poor people within that community, but the middle and upper class individuals within that lower income community.  This is usually because poor individuals have social networks in place that allow them to deal with their issues apart from the structural solutions in place - they talk to their friends and family to get help with health and not a doctor.  The middle and upper class individuals living within those poorer communities, on the other hand, do not have access to these social networks for solutions and 'suffer' the consequences.  Thus, it is possible that if we provided all of these poor people with health care that it may not change community level health outcomes anyways.  After all, they are not even the ones pulling down the average level of health.

Additionally, poorer individuals are less trusting of those in positions of authority like a physician and also expect worse outcomes from their interactions with doctors.  So, if they did have access and insurance as well as actually use that access, they may still have worse health outcomes than others.  This, again, is not so much a structurally caused health problem, but more cultural.  They have other ways to deal with health issues in their community and have different expectations when they do seek formal help.  Neither of these will be fixed by a shift in the structure of our health care system, but may require something else.  Some think a possible road forward is for all doctors to be more engaged with the communities they serve so that when/if people do have access, they will use it and expect something from it.  Others find it hard to differentiate solutions to these problems from political activism, and as such think no requirement for 'health advocacy' should be imposed as the activism would necessarily alter the substance of the medicine itself.  Either way, it is clear that health requires much more than a mere individual focus and that a structural change is needed in the delivery of health care.  It is significantly less clear, however, what that actually means.

Pretty interesting.  Sorry if that was a bore.  Mostly because there will probably be more.

Erroneous and Skewed

We like categories.  Boxes.  Organization.  I get that and it is clearly necessary for social interactions to work because it lays a bedrock of working assumptions upon which a non-dysfunctional society is based. But it is also very hard to avoid dismissing things you do not like by automatically (miss)categorizing.  I have always tried to avoid labeling people/thoughts/ideas quickly without really thinking about the content.  Doesn't always work, but I try.

This is even more true now, I would like to think.  Since people have read about some research I have done, many avoid really thinking about the content of the research or the content of their own assumptions of how things work by quickly putting a 'yes' or 'no' label on both me and the work.  Me and the research have been put in every camp possible it seems.  An article I wrote for Christianity Today came out recently and I really started to think more about this after those comments.  There are probably a few things going on.  Many quickly react to the title and don't even read the article it seems.  Other read it but what they already think literally drives what they read, and read some of what is written in literally opposite of what is written.  This could be a clarity issue on my part, but still.  There are some really good comments, too, but they are less fun to post.  Here are a few comment-morsels for you:

• [this is a partial - the person goes on and on, but I have no idea why this is talked about - maybe they think I am a universalist?]  Jesus' parable of the wheat and the tares entirely contradicts the universalism of the liberals. So does his injunction not to throw pearls before swine, and his description of the Pharisees as 'offspring of vipers', in other words genetically cursed, and his parable of the 'wicked tenants' or 'wicked husbandmen', describing those who were attempting to usurp the kingdom.- the Edomites, descendants of Esau, described as a people God hates (Malachi 1:2,3), who had been converted to become 'Jews' in about 120BC.
• [I like this one, ha]  Wait wait wait... So you're upset that the author uses statistics to form conclusions? What else would you suggest? And nothing is "proven" in science. What the author is doing is using the facts to support her argument, explaining what they INDICATE. Your discernment is clearly hindered. Might I suggest some Bible reading to boost it? :)
• What an erroneous conclusion from what sounds like a skewed poll.
• [maybe my favorit one]  What a load of baloney. Liberalism is simply encouraging the Government to wrongly assume the role of the church. Keep Jesus out of your socialism.
• [again a partial, but even I am not sure what political viewpoint would be 'evident' and I wrote the thing]  Besides the likely problems inherent in the poll and thus the interpretation that others have pointed out, the political orientation of the author is evident. His criticism of Beck is misplaced, for instance....

Pepper Bells

We had pretty much given up on this poor pepper plant. It got huge, but never produced. Right when the heat slowed it has started to kick out tons of pretty big peppers. Persistant little thing... goes to show even non-sentient things do not like this much heat.