Genetics and education (part 2)

It’s Wednesday morning and time for my weekly contributor, Rambler5319, to take over with his guest post.

This week we’re looking at the second part of the subject I started last week (13.11.13).

If you didn’t catch it here’s the intro again and then I’ll go on to the second two speakers and the subjects they covered.

The results of a study (in the UK) and a recent book (G For Genes) about the academic achievements of 10,000 sets of identical twins have caused something of an uproar. Why? Firstly because the report was leaked to a newspaper when it was meant for internal use only and secondly because of its potential implications. The senior policy advisor to the UK Government’s Education Secretary reckons that genetics are the largest factor in educational achievement.

Let me explain. The identical twins were born 1994-96 and the results of their GCSE exams (at 16 yrs old) have been analysed. A recent radio programme (The Moral Maze, Radio 4) tackled the subject and one of the authors of the book quoted a figure saying that 52% of the variance in the results was down to genetics. Their suggestion was that we should consider the idea of “genetically sensitive schools”. Wow! Does that make you think (like me): “I wonder where this is going?”

If you fancy a listen to the discussion programme here’s the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03fdjsp

Ok so the next speaker (the third in the prog) was asked if he thought that using genetics for human enhancement is immoral. His answer was that it was immoral “not to use it”. He believes humans don’t want sickness and ultimately death so if there is a way to get round these by using genetic information he thinks we should. However the panel made a good point on this by saying that surely our humanity (and its limited lifespan) is what gives us the ability to display certain characteristics. The example was given of say a normal person who walks through a minefield is showing great courage but if that person is immortal they cannot demonstrate courage because they cannot be killed by stepping onto a mine. I think you can see the point – as humans with a certain lifespan we can demonstrate things that an immortal person cannot. The panel believed that imperfections in everyone are what make us what we are as humans and the idea of getting rid of these takes us into a very difficult area. His response was that certain characteristics (not all) should be got rid of.

He then took the discussion into the area of cruelty. He believes everyone would like to get rid of cruelty. If they could discover what makes people cruel then they could change something in the genetic make up to stop it. One of the panel’s responses was quite simply – the idea is mad. The research seems to be going into the area of altering what is a human being. Who is going to do the deciding of what (and who?) is changed? You? Me? The scientist? The Government?

The last speaker felt that this whole area is just a short step away from eugenics. History demonstrates that genetic research has definitely gone down the wrong road he said. However he did agree that if the genetic information seemed to suggest that a person may have a pre-disposition to a particular medical problem, say heart disease or something else it should be made available and used to hopefully treat that person. This sounds ok but what do you do if you find evidence of something which may have serious implications about the life expectancy of a person? Do you tell the person? There is certainly a moral issue there. Is it right to let them know or will they be happier not knowing? And once again who is going to make that decision? And who is going to have the conversation with the affected person?

The more I listened to the various points of view on this the more I thought that the implications are too far reaching for us to know the answers. It’s a bit like asking the early travellers on a railway train which ran at say 15 mph whether they could imagine a world in which trains would travel at over 100mph and even 200mph. (Incidentally, in June this year, it was reported that Japan is trialling a new series of magnetic trains which will be able to travel at over 300mph cutting the Bullet train times – between Tokyo & Nagoya – by just over 50%. However you have another 14 years before they’re due to come into service!)

Who could have imagined those first ships that were built to carry just a few containers would end up the monsters we have today. Ships launched this year are just short of 400 metres in length and capable of carrying the equivalent of up to 18,000 containers. If all the containers were laid end to end they would stretch for 110kms – wow just read that again 110kms of containers on one ship!

Imagine a conversation say 40 years ago when many people had to look for a phone box to make a call with someone and telling them that in the future nearly everyone will be able to be contacted at any time of the day or night because they’ll all have a device which they can carry around with them; it will track their exact position anywhere on the globe and enable many other things to be done. Of course it would have sounded fanciful but aren’t we facing a similar conversation now about genetic information?

And so it is with this whole area of genetics. How can we possibly imagine what will be in 50 or 100 years time? Will those people look back on us as short-sighted & resistant to change. They probably will. By then any moral issues will have been passed by in some way and that new world will be functioning very differently to the one we know today. We may or may not be part of it (well the 50 year one for younger folks) but would we want to be?

Three-word days

Good morning everyone. Today my guest blogger has an interesting new spin on diary-keeping. Enjoy!

I wonder if you’ve ever tried to keep a diary. Perhaps you have or maybe you still do. If you can make it a habit it’s a great source of reflections on your life and what happened in it at a particular time. Many years ago I did keep a diary for a couple of years and then more recently did it for just one year. It’s hard to keep it going though. Perhaps you’ve done a holiday diary for say a week or 2 weeks. Again I’ve done that where you not only write but stick in the pages all sorts of bits like tickets or leaflets about the things you did or visited. However I wonder if you’ve ever thought of maybe recording just one event for the day, one thing which stood out. There is a radio prog here in the UK on national radio in which people are invited to write/text/email in with their day summaries but it can only be 3 words. Yes that’s right only 3 words. Now of course it’s well nigh impossible to write a summary of your day in three words so people pick one thing which for them made the day special or different or just one thing they want to remember for that particular day. It might even be an opinion on something in the news.

Here are just 3 examples of the many which are read out. You can see the kinds of things people send in, for each day. These were sent in to the programmes from last week. Each one is from a different person and they read them out at various times during the 2 hour prog:

——————————————————————————————————————

Mon – 1. No snow here 2. Single yet again 3. Panic bought chocolate

Tue – 1. Freezing fingers off 2. Ready for bed 3. Scandinavia is laughing

Wed – 1. Four large cookies 2. Still in pyjamas 3. Cruciate ligament snapped

Thu – 1. Hernia op success 2. Good riddance snow 3. Regretting yesterday’s curry

——————————————————————————————————————

I think you get the idea.

Here are my recent 3-word days:

Mon 21.1.13 – Off work today

Tue 22.1.13 – Thirteen hour shift

Wed 23.1.13 – Slept in late

Thu 24.1.13 – Saw Les Miserables

Fri 25.1.13 – Changed bed linen

Sat 26.1.13 – Helen Shapiro concert

Sun 27.1.13 – Snow almost gone

Mon 28.1.13 – Projector fault investigated

Also I have some from a couple of years ago:

Wed 10.11.10 Contact Buchter News

Thu 11.11.10 Windy night Blackpool

Thu 18.11.10 Hospital, needle, arm

Mon 22.11.10 Donation, anonymity, accepted

Tue 23.11.10 Happy faces Luderitz

Wed 24.11.10    Cheques in post

 

Why don’t you give it a try? You might be surprised as you look back on those brief words for each day. It’s much easier & quicker than the full diary thing and keeps just a thought for the day for you to remember. It can be a challenge but I think you might enjoy doing it so have a go and see how you get on. Then why don’t you do a reply sending your 3-word summary for the day you are reading this or maybe do it for a week and send the whole seven days in a reply next week – (that would still only be 21 words).

Songs that remind me of stuff 2

Be Prepared from the Lion King soundtrack
My friend, Fiona, and I were travelling around Namibia in an old battered truck which was pretty low on gadgets. It didn’t have air con, a radio or even a tape deck. We’d get to our destination and peel ourselves off the seat, sweaty and disgusting and hope no-one noticed as we shuffled into the reception of wherever we’d stopped over. Due to the lack of music, we spent hours singing to each other. We returned to the Lion King soundtrack again and again. Be Prepared was a firm favourite and got an airing at least five times every day.

I Just Can’t Wait To Be King from the Lion King soundtrack
Lion King soundtrack again but a different situation. I’m in the last year of school and I’ve got a theatre studies class. We’re all sitting waiting for the teacher and somehow… A frenzy takes hold of us. A few girls start singing I Just Can’t Wait To Be King. A few more join in. Soon we’re all singing. Then we’re bordering on shouting. We’ve started bashing on the desks and our chairs in time to the tune. “O, I JUST CAAAAN’T WAIT!……”

The door opens. Our teacher is standing there. We stop, mid-desk-whack, and wonder if there’s any chance at all in the entire world, that she didn’t hear us…. “What on earth is going on? I could hear you all the way down the corridor!”

We had nothing to offer in our defence. We looked into our laps, 18 year old girls having been caught acting like 8 year olds. The lesson got underway but we were all pretty red faced for the entire time.

I popped in to see this teacher a few years ago when I was in Liverpool and we laughed about this day. I still felt kind of embarrassed though.

Jenny From The Block by Jennifer Lopez
Another secondary school story. I had a friend called Cilla who used to ‘perform’ this song every breaktime. She had slightly adjusted the words though. It was hilarious. J.Lo’s version goes:
“I used to have a little, now I have a lot.
No matter where I go, I know where I came from.
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got.
I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block.”

Cilla’s version went:
“Used to have a little, now I still have a little.
No matter where I go, I’m still where I came from.
Don’t be fooled by the rocks I haven’t got.
I’m still. I’m still Cilla from the block.”

Mr Cellophane from the Chicago soundtrack
This reminds me of walking through a park in London, I think Hyde Park, but I didn’t know London at the time so I’m not sure. I had met all the people who were going with the same gap year organisation as me and we were all leaving for our adventures in about a month. We met in London for some fun before leaving and two of my favourite friends and I were walking together and singing this song. I hasn’t seen Chicago so I didn’t know it but I just kind of mumbled along with them while they sang. I thought they were best people I had ever known.

The French teacher

When I was about fifteen, we got a new French teacher at school. I went to a girls’ school so anything male was an object of interest. Boys were accepted in the sixth form (the final two years of school) so there were groups of girls dedicated to spotting their boy of choice and reporting back on his activities. Brushing past one’s favourite boy in the corridor was sublime in our fifteen year old minds. Talking to them was a dream come true.

The teachers were slightly different. You couldn’t fantasise about potentially falling in love with them in the same way. Instead of being a few years older, they were twice or three times our age and in charge. There was the Maths teacher who a few girls fancied but it was generally accepted that he was not up there with the best. There was the Music teacher who was lovely and friendly and a great teacher but not fanciable. But then there was his son who came in a few times to help him with something, who looked like Seth Green and had quite a following. The rest of the male teachers made for slim pickings. All great and liked a lot by the students, but not attractive to 15 year olds.

Then along came the French teacher. Cue some atmospheric French music (Joe Le Taxi by Vanessa Paradis, for example) and in strolls Monsieur Perais through a haze of clouds and fuzziness, to the cheers of adoring schoolgirls.

Monsieur Perais was perfect for our cause, ideal for someone predisposed to fixating on things for long periods of time. He divided the girls into those who ridiculed him for his body shape and those who wanted his children.

His body shape. Let me explain. He was a bit short and obviously had worked out a lot in the gym or been a rower or something because he had very muscular shoulders and his upper arms were quite big. From his shoulders down, he got slimmer and slimmer. His waist was quite small and his legs and feet even smaller. There were unfortunate comparisons to Johnny Bravo and quite a few of us took to calling him The Dairylea Triangle.

The crescendo of this Dairylea Triangle love came one evening when I was listening to the radio. It was Sunday and I was waiting for a regular feature with a local Liverpool presenter called Pete Price. One of my claims to fame is that I once called into the Pete Price Show and offered an opinion about whatever he was talking about that day.

Anyway, back to this Sunday evening when I was waiting for Pete Price to come on. It was the section of the show where people can request songs. As I listened the presenter said, “And this next one is a request for Nelly Furtado, I’m Like A Bird, and it’s dedicated to Monsieur Perais.”

One of the girls from school had called in to dedicate a song to the French teacher! I remember thinking, if you’re hoping he’s listening and you’re telling him how you feel, you’ve chosen the wrong song to do so. How does ‘I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away, I don’t know where my home is, I don’t know where my soul is,’ let the French teacher at school know how you feel about him? If he was listening to it, he must have thought, ‘Ok, well there’s someone out there who telling me she won’t be around for long… Ok. Wierd.’

We all talked about it in school the next day and giggled. Someone had dedicated a song to the Dairylea Triangle! Teehee! I’m going to take a guess that that ‘relationship’ didn’t come to fruition as hoped following the song dedication….

D is for…

DEFINITION!

Today, a guest blogger is going have a little look at some words he feels need closer examination…

CAN I HAVE A WORD? (Part 3)

“Nothing to breathe but air,
Quick as a flash ‘tis gone;
Nowhere to fall but off,
Nowhere to stand but on.” (Benjamin Franklin King, 1857-94)

Can I have a word? – Again? Yes it’s part 3. We’ve done authors using words we don’t know; we’ve done us trying to beef up our vocabularies; now we’re going to look at a difficult, some may say impossible, couple of words to define properly: nowhere & everywhere.

Have you heard people (often children or teenagers) answer the question, “Where do you think you’re going?” with that innocent sounding, “Nowhere”; someone asks you where you are and you say, for example, “in the middle of nowhere”. That’s a rather longer answer than a simple “I don’t know” which, it seems to me, does the same job. You could shorten it to ‘ITMON’ if you wanted to invent a new word (for something that doesn’t exist anyway?). Not sure that’ll catch on.

First, let’s investigate “Nowhere” and the whole concept of it. Let’s start by checking the dictionary: it means either ‘in or to no place, not anywhere’ or ‘out of the running’. It’s an adverb so you can’t actually go to nowhere or come from nowhere. It’s not a noun like a place name would be. What I want to know is how can you be ‘not anywhere’? In other words how can we define a place that doesn’t exist by using a concept that also doesn’t exist with words that actually don’t make sense? Now there’s the problem. Perhaps we are moving into the realms of philosophy here. However, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913) pulls the rug from under our feet by giving us this quote: “Philosophy: a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing”. Not a great deal of help there then. Hmm…. Ok, so maybe philosophy isn’t the way to go.

Remember, though, it’s physically impossible to be nowhere because, when you think about it, there is always a latitude & longitude for wherever on the Earth’s surface you stand; if you’re underground (or under the sea) there is still a location simply with an added dimension of “X” no. of metres under the surface. The same is true if you’re above the ground even right to the top of Mount Everest except you don’t need the extra dimension because the latitude & longitude cross at the particular height where you are.

Therefore you must be somewhere! You might not be in an actual place that’s named on a map or even known locally by a particular name but you just can’t be nowhere. Also it’s important to remember nowhere is an adverb. That means Talking Heads got it wrong when they sang about being on the Road to nowhere (1985); Dusty Springfield got it wrong when she sang about being In the middle of nowhere (1965); and the Beatles got it wrong when they sang about a Nowhere man sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans, for nobody (1966); and perhaps the most confusing lines on the subject come from Jeff Beck in the opening lines of his song Hi-ho silver lining: “You’re everywhere and nowhere baby…” (1972). Now, just in case you were totally confused as to where that might be, Mr Beck helps us out by explaining that you’re (probably), “…..going down a bumpy hillside in a hippy hat.” Ah well, that’s a lot clearer then, eh?

So why do we use it? Is it to sound cool? Or to convey the idea that we are some kind of free spirit? Is it to emphasise the fact that you’re in a desolate place? – The middle of nowhere. Or is it because, really, we don’t understand what we’re saying? So why not stop using it or say it a different way. Go on you know you could. In the song Cotton Avenue, Joni Mitchell said it this way: “If you got no place special, well then you just go no place special”. Not nowhere just a “not special” other place.

I’ve tried looking for Erewhon but there’s nowhere so mixed up as that place!
However, I know what you’re thinking: will he be joining in after he’s heard those distinctive, foot-tapping, opening bars of the Jeff Beck song on the radio by singing along with “You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby, that’s where you’re at……….”? Course I will!
But hang on a minute…… I’ve just had a thought – where’s everywhere? How can anything, let alone a person, be everywhere? Is it all places……. except nowhere (or including nowhere)? And what about ITMON? Einstein gave us E=mc2; the Rambler has come up with E=E-N, (where E=everywhere, N=nowhere). Will it catch on? I doubt it but have a serious think about it!