Stroke rate has fallen by 40% since 1995, study finds

London: Incidence of strokes plummets between 1995 and 2010 - but not for black patients or for those under 45

Increases in healthy living and improvements in prevention have resulted in a substantial drop in the rate of strokes, according to a new study.

The incidence of strokes in a large area of south London fell by almost 40% between 1995 and 2010, according to researchers from King's College in London.

Rates fell in men, women, white patients and those aged more than 45 - but not in those aged 15 to 44, or black patients, said the team, after investigating data in the South London Stroke Register, which covers an area with a population of more than 350,000.

The researchers, whose findings are published in the medical journal Stroke, say the ethnic disparities - there were rises in black patients - may be because of different cardiovascular risk factors.

"We observed a higher prevalence of hypertension and diabetes mellitus in black patients compared with white patients in each of the four time periods in all age groups," they say.

"Other possible explanations for ethnic disparities include cultural differences in perceptions of health and the health care system, environmental exposures, genetic factors, socioeconomic status, and educational attainment."

The increased risk for younger people could be because of a rise in classical cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes mellitus, obesity, and high cholesterol level, said the team.

Music graduates are more employable than you might think

With unique skills and a broad range of graduate jobs on offer, music students have better prospects than people imagine

If you study medicine at university, chances are you'll become a doctor. For music students, it's less obvious what job you'll end up with… but it could be really fulfilling. The perception that options are narrow and jobs are few for music graduates needs to change.

It's wrongly assumed that when it comes to jobs, music students are confined to their field of study. In reality, music graduates go on to do a wide range of jobs in a variety of different industries.

Alumni surveys from the University of Nottingham show that music graduates are employed across a varied range of fields. As you might expect, a large proportion (50%) work in the creative industry, but the roles performed by graduates vary greatly.

Music grads work in publishing, editing, media production, broadcasting, and marketing. A number work with professional ensembles, but not all are performing as musicians – many work in management roles.

Less anticipated but no less common is the employment of music graduates in finance and banking, legal and consultancy.

Dr Robert Adlington, an associate professor of music at the University of Nottingham, credits these successful and varied outcomes to the highly desirable skills developed by music students during their studies.

In 2011, the Confederate of British Industry outlined the seven skills that define employability: self-management, team work, business and customer awareness, problem solving, communication, numeracy, and IT skills. Adlington says that music students develop all seven of these. By this measure, music graduates are among the most employable of all.

While some of these skills are acquired students of all subject – for example, team work, good communication, self-management – Adlington points out that music students have an edge. The experience of organising, hosting, and performing in events that are open to the public provides them with skills beyond those on other degree programmes. Few degrees require knowledge of customer awareness, or interaction with the public, for example.

James Lister studied music at the University of Nottingham but is now an associate with legal firm Charles Russell. His degree "taught a whole load of things you can't find elsewhere", such as public speaking and self-expression. He says that these skills, in addition to the "highly analytical aspects of a music degree", which enable graduates to read, digest and form an opinion on a huge amount of information, greatly aided his transition into law.

The employability of music graduates appears to be in for a further boost. In addition to covering the traditional elements of a music degree (composition, performance, theory, history and so on), new modules that are focused specifically on employability are set to be introduced.

"Students don't want to leave their future to chance anymore," says Adlington, adding that employability is "part of our core model".

Equally promising prospects can be achieved with less traditional, more hands-on degrees. The SAE Institute (previously known as the School of Audio Engineering) offers music courses that emphasise production values and teach students to a professional standard.

Jordan O'Shea, who graduated from SAE with a first in audio production, says the institute fast-tracked his career, allowing him to go it alone. He says:
"Without SAE, I wouldn't have been able to record my own album. It allows you to go from being a bedroom producer to being a contender." He adds: "Of course, there's no guarantee you'll be the next guy producing Adele."

Students are taught not to depend on having access to a studio, or support or funding from a record label. Since leaving SAE, O'Shea has set up a self-built studio. From it, he co-founded Bear on a Bicycle, an award-winning Oxford-based music and art collective that cracked the city's scene in under a year.

The collective's success is a reflection of how changes in the music industry allow artists to produce and publicise themselves. The internet means artists can publish, distribute, and promote their own work. These methods are nothing new, but if combined with professional knowledge and experience, it can be a winning, name-making recipe.

- theguardian.com

Headline, October13, 2013

''' PAYING KIDS FOR GOOD GRADES '''

Roland Fryers's Big Ideas are as far reaching as you can imagine> Let's hear what the genius economist from Harvard says:

'''Many attempts have been made to reduce the racial test score gap. HeadStart, perhaps the largest of these initiatives , is effective at increasing school readiness, but test-score gaps quickly emerge once kids enter school.

Evaluation of project STAR (the Tennessee class-size experiment) provides little evidence that reducing ''class size'' will substantially decrease the achievement gap.

There have also been many attempts at busing kids to better schools. Yet racial achievement gaps have remained essentially unchanged even in school districts where busing has been the most successful at producing desegregated schools.

Indeed, the Moving To opportunity initiative, which offered residents of high=poverty neighborhood the opportunity to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods, showed no improvement in achievement for girls and a decline in achievement for boys.

The ''I Have A Dream'' program in New York City Offers first-grade students a free College education if they graduate from High School but has not been shown to increase academic performance.

Complicating matters is the fact that many of the students in the neighborhoods that are being targeted rarely observe their older peers being successful in the specific channels into which they are being pushed.

Thus we have a situation in which our intervention programs are asking young children to be forward-looking and brave enough to trek down an uncertain path with no previous examples to help guide the way.

Assuming that students are innately capable of high achievement, they simply need the proper incentives to perform well. Educators have been using these techniques for centuries. ^^^ The program I propose offers schools cash incentives and scientifically tests their effect on myriad assumptions^^^.

First, do monetary incentives improve academic performance? Second, do monetary incentives for academic performance curb other risky behavior or increase motivation>? Third, do group-reward systems improve performance more than individual-reward systems? Fourth, what student demographics gain most from individual and group incentive programs? Fifth, what are the long term effects of incentive programs?

The details of the incentive program are simple and intuitive. My first program was at the school in Bronx in which we instituted noncash social rewards for good academic performance, such as ice-cream socials and pizza parties. Currently, I am engaged in which we are paying kids in thirty Dallas schools two-dollars per book read.

And next year, in coordination with KIPP schools program, we will start paying according to test scores in forty-five schools around the country, For four tests per semester, a child will earn his or her score divided by four. That is, if you make a perfect 100  you'll earn twenty-five dollars.

We'll see, but I suspect that'll be a powerful incentive to a third grader. In the group-reward-system, students are randomly assigned to groups and earn the group average divided by four, irrespective how any individual student performs.

The latter fosters an environment where achievement is celebrated and provides the correct incentives for students to tutor one another. The results will be fascinating?!!''

With respectful dedication to the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' !!! The Power To Do Great !!! '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Prof Peter Higgs did not know he had won Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Prof Peter Higgs has revealed he did not know he had won the award until a woman congratulated him in the street.

Prof Higgs, who does not own a mobile phone, said a former neighbour had pulled up in her car as he was returning from lunch in Edinburgh.

He added: "She congratulated me on the news and I said 'oh, what news?'"

The woman had been alerted by her daughter in London that Prof Higgs had won the award, he revealed.

He added: "I heard more about it obviously when I got home and started reading the messages."

The 84-year-old emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh was recognised by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his work on the theory of the particle which shares his name, the Higgs boson.

He shares this year's physics prize with Francois Englert of Belgium, and joins the ranks of past Nobel winners including Marie Curie and Albert Einstein.

The existence of the so-called "God particle", said to give matter its substance, or mass, was proved almost 50 years later by a team from the European nuclear research facility (Cern) and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Speaking for the first time about the award at a media conference at the University of Edinburgh, he said: "How do I feel? Well, obviously I'm delighted and rather relieved in a sense that it's all over. It has been a long time coming."

New ideas for how Earth core formed

Liquid iron can percolate through rocks deep beneath our feet

Experiments on samples of iron and rock held at immense pressures have led to new ideas of how Earth's core formed.

Scientists from Stanford University have shown that iron metal will flow through rocks 1,000km beneath our feet.

Using sophisticated X-ray imaging, they watched molten metal moving through rocks, squeezed to huge pressures between the tips of pairs of diamonds.

Their results suggest that Earth's core did not form in a single step, but grew in a complicated sequence over time.

The depths of Earth are complex and multi-layered.

At the surface, the rocks forming the foundations of our cities, the stones that we build our lives upon, also provide the raw materials for society - metals, fuel, water and nutrients.

These are no more than a thin geological veneer on the planet. In many respects, the deep Earth remains as much of a mystery as Jupiter or Mars.

But new research in the journal Nature Geosciences gives new clues about how Earth may have taken shape and built its core.

A group of scientists, led by Stanford's Prof Wendy Mao, have shown how metallic iron may be squeezed out of rocky silicates more than 1,000km beneath the surface to form a metallic core.

Ceramic mantle
If you were to follow Jules Verne on a journey to the centre of the Earth, you would find a chemistry dominated by just three elements, until you got almost half the way to the centre - that's the first 3,000km of your journey.

Oxygen, silicon and magnesium (plus a little bit of iron) make up more than 90% of Earth's blanketing "ceramic" mantle.

Electrically and thermally insulating, the mantle is like a rock-wool blanket around the core. The minerals of the mantle are the stony part of the planet. But as you delve deeper on this "thought field trip", things suddenly and drastically change.

With more than half your journey ahead of you, you cross a boundary from the stony mantle into the metallic core. It is initially liquid in its upper stretches, and then solid right the way to the centre of the Earth.

The chemistry changes too, with iron forming almost all of the core, segregated into Earth's dense inner sphere.

The boundary between the metallic core and rocky mantle is a place of extremes. Physically, Earth's metallic liquid outer core is as different to the rocky mantle that overlies it as the seas are from the ocean floor here near Earth's surface.

One might (just about) imagine an inverted world of storms and currents of flowing red-hot metal in the molten outer core, pulsing through channels and inverted "ocean" floors at the base of the mantle.

The flowing of metal in the outer part of the core gives Earth its magnetic field, protects us from bombarding solar storms, and allows life to thrive.

How Earth's core came about has puzzled Earth Scientists for many years. Experiments on mixtures of silicate minerals and iron, cooked up in the laboratory, show that iron sits in tiny isolated lumps within the rock, remaining trapped and pinned at the junctions between the mineral grains.

- BBC.co.uk

Researchers identify protein linking exercise to brain health

U.S. researchers said Friday that a protein that is increased during endurance exercise may help boost brain health.

Researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School found that the protein, called FNDC5, turned on genes that promote brain health and encourage the growth of new nerves involved in learning and memory, when given to non- exercising mice.