by Rupe | Nov 15, 2005 | Mad Musings
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Sorry, couch potatoes — the verdict is in: People who exercise regularly really do live longer.
In fact, people who get a good workout almost daily can add nearly four years to their life spans, according to the first study to quantify the impact of physical activity this way.
The researchers looked at records of more than 5,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans and found that those who had moderate to high levels of activity lived 1.3 to 3.7 years longer than those who got little exercise, largely because they put off developing heart disease — the nation’s leading killer. Men and women benefited about equally.
“This shows that physical activity really does make a difference — not only for how long you live but for how long you live a healthy life,” said Oscar H. Franco of the Erasmus M.C. University Medical Center in Rotterdam, who led the study, published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. “Being more physically active can give you more time.”
Previous studies have found that being physically active has a host of health benefits. It reduces the risk of being overweight and of developing many illnesses, improves overall quality of life, and lowers the mortality rate. But the new study is the first to directly calculate the effect on how long people live.
“This should encourage people to be more active — to take a more active role in their own health and not just sit and wait for a pill to prevent this or that or save your life,” Franco said.
Franco and his colleagues analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study, a well-known research project that has followed 5,209 residents of a Massachusetts town for more than 40 years, collecting detailed information about their lifestyles and health.
The researchers calculated the effects of low, moderate or high levels of physical activity on life span, accounting for the possible effects of factors such as age, sex, education, and whether they smoked or had serious health problems.
People who engaged in moderate activity — the equivalent of walking for 30 minutes a day for five days a week — lived about 1.3 to 1.5 years longer than those who were less active. Those who took on more intense exercise — the equivalent of running half an hour a day five days every week — extended their lives by about 3.5 to 3.7 years, the researchers found.
The findings show that even for people who are already middle-aged, exercising more can add years to their lives, Franco said.
“This shows it’s never too late to start following a healthy lifestyle. It’s never too late to start exercising,” Franco said. “For example, instead of taking your car to your office, why don’t you take your bike or walk? Physical activity is very important for a healthy lifestyle.”
Other experts said the study was consistent with the growing evidence that exercising on a regular basis is one of the most important things people can do for their health.
“At the end of the day, this is more evidence that the sedentary lifestyle is the most devastating to health, longevity and chronic disease development,” said James O. Hill of the University of Colorado at Denver, adding that he hoped it might motivate more people to exercise. “Putting it in terms of life expectancy is something that’s relevant to people.”
While adding one to four years may not sound like a lot to some people, Franco, Hill and others said exercising regularly also enables people to live healthier lives, free from a host of chronic illnesses that can make it hard for people to enjoy their later years.
In addition, recent studies have also found that exercise has payoffs for the mind, too. It has been shown to improve overall well-being, reduce stress and depression, and cut the risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, several experts said.
“The benefits of physical activity extend well beyond the effects on longevity,” said JoAnn E. Manson of Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The trouble is, many people seem to ignore the evidence, government recommendations and public health campaigns to be physically active.
Most Americans still fail to exercise regularly, and the number who exercise in their leisure time has been dropping, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Franco and others noted that this and other studies show that people do not have to be exercise fanatics to reap the benefits. Adding just a little activity to the daily routine can have major benefits.
“What we’re talking about is small changes,” Hill said. “We’re telling people to get out and walk more. Fifteen, 20 or 30 minutes of walking each day is probably enough.”
by Rupe | Nov 15, 2005 | Mad Musings
Start Air University Graduate Course today. It is an 18 month program, hope to finish it in 8-12. Will make a schedule tomorrow on start compiling notes.
by Rupe | Nov 13, 2005 | Mad Musings
Washington Post Editorial
EDUCATORS ARE still mulling over the results of national standardized test scores released last month, which showed an unusually clear national trend: While there have been some slight improvements in elementary and middle school math scores, the rate of gain is slowing. Meanwhile, reading scores are stagnant. These results contrast sharply with the scores of many states’ own standardized tests, which purport to show clear gains. Already, some have pointed to this gap as evidence that the No Child Left Behind law, the president’s plan to make states set standards and show annual academic improvement, isn’t working.
In a narrow sense, the critics are right: The gap is indeed evidence that many states are still using tests that are too easy, and they have not faced up to the genuinely difficult challenge of improving their schools. But the gap does not negate the value of using standards and high-stakes testing to improve student performance. On the contrary, many of the states that have shown the most improvement are precisely the ones that have been using statewide standards for the longest period. One is Massachusetts, which has long used testing to measure achievement and is now at the top of the country in both reading and math. Another is Virginia, which, thanks to its Standards of Learning tests, has also made gains on national tests over the past five years. States that have not been using standards for quite so long have not done so well: In Maryland, for example, some scores have dropped since last year.
The gap has also set off a discussion of what, if anything, can be done at the national level to help states raise their students’ achievement levels. Some are advocating the setting of national standards, a proposition that sounds nice in theory but seems politically impossible in practice. For the first time, there is a national discussion of teacher quality, too: what it means, how to define it, how to improve it. The administration has launched teacher mentoring and teacher “e-learning” programs. Several states have reexamined their teacher training requirements. Others are arguing that states need to rethink their pay scales: The Education Trust recently surveyed teachers within a single California school district and discovered that the most experienced teachers, and therefore the best paid teachers, were all in wealthier schools. Inequality persists not only between districts, in other words, but within them.
The scores should also cause educators to think about the deeper causes of low student achievement. Teach for America, the charity that sends high-achieving college graduates to teach in low-income schools, recently published a survey of its alumni, who overwhelmingly believe that schools underrate children, fail to challenge them and resist imposing higher standards because they simply don’t believe the students will meet them. Higher expectations, Teach for America argues, can actually lead to higher test scores.
Standardized math and reading tests are, by themselves, not sufficient to improve American education. But without a recognition that higher standards are needed, improvement isn’t even possible.
by Rupe | Nov 8, 2005 | Mad Musings
The White House announced last week that it would reinstate the Davis-Bacon Act, the law that guarantees that construction workers on federally financed projects be paid at least the minimum prevailing wage. In an executive proclamation shortly after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush had revoked the law’s wage protections for workers in storm-struck parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Let’s hope this reversal is the start of a trend because more wrongs need righting.
The Labor Department has not yet restored the rule – also suspended shortly after Katrina – requiring federal contractors on hurricane-related projects to have a plan for hiring women, minorities, Vietnam veterans and the disabled. And Congress has not yet provided adequate unemployment benefits for some 400,000 people who lost their jobs to Katrina. Even a recent $400 million grant to help Louisiana with unemployment claims is less than half of the projected need for the coming year.
Unemployment pay from the states averages $270 a week nationwide. But in Louisiana, it’s $192, and in Mississippi it’s $169, the lowest in the country. Federal unemployment aid, generally for the self-employed, is no better. It all adds up to peanuts for the unemployed, who, in many cases, have lost everything and who are scattered around the country in places where costs are higher than in their home states.
The federal government must increase both state and federal unemployment benefits to a level that’s closer to the national average, and increase their duration, which is now 26 weeks. Widespread unemployment from Katrina is as much a national disaster as the destruction of infrastructure. The afflicted states simply can’t afford to foot the whole bill – and shouldn’t have to.
In the months since Katrina, plans to increase unemployment aid have flitted across Congress’s legislative radar screen, only to vanish as Republican lawmakers prepare to push a $70 billion tax cut package, much of it to benefit millionaire investors. As they did with the Davis-Bacon law, government leaders have to turn back from their wrongheaded pursuits and do the right things instead – and, preferably, soon.
Credit: New York Times Article
My Thoughts: These f#@!ers will face their judgement. What evil lurks in the house of white.
by Rupe | Nov 4, 2005 | Mad Musings
Indonesian police continue to search for suspects involved in the gruesome deaths of three schoolgirls whose beheaded bodies were found near the town of Poso in Sulawesi province Oct. 29. The attackers, armed with machetes, descended on the girls from nearby hills as they walked through a cocoa plantation on their way to a private Christian school. In a particularly brazen move, the perpetrators left two of the bodies near a local police station and one of the girls’ heads outside a church.
Central Sulawesi is the scene of sporadic violence between the island’s Muslim majority and Christian minority populations, and the area around Poso is known to be particularly violent. The sectarian strife began in late 1998, but reached its height between 2000 and 2001, when more than 1,000 people lost their lives in sectarian conflicts. Despite a government-brokered peace deal in December 2001, tensions have remained high and isolated attacks against Christians continue. Beheadings, however, are uncommon, as most sectarian violence takes the form of bombings or shootings.
This attack, then, could indicate an escalation in anti-Christian violence in Poso. Whether this was a one-off incident is too soon to say, but the beheadings do indicate that the attackers either adopted a tactic used by militants in other parts of the world or are, in fact, militant or criminal elements from elsewhere, possibly Malaysia or the Philippines, were Abu Sayyaf operates. Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim separatist group-turned criminal gang, has strong ties to the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group Jemmah Islamiyah (JI), and it is possible that Abu Sayyaf members linked up with JI elements in Indonesia. It also is possible that the beheadings were the work of a small cell of local militants out to gain quick notoriety or establish a reputation for ruthlessness within a larger group.
In any case, the killings are testament to the spread of beheadings as a modern-day militant tactic. The latest wave appears to have begun in the late 1980s, when some of the death threats against British writer Salman Rushdie, author of the controversial book The Satanic Verses, specifically mentioned beheading. In the 1990s, foreign jihadists fighting in Bosnia were known to behead Serbian and Croatian prisoners. In June 2001, Abu Sayyaf beheaded two hostages in Indonesia’s southern island of Mindanao.
In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraqi, videotaped beheadings by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s jihadist network al Qaeda in Iraq shocked the world. Among the most infamous of these were the beheadings of U.S. contractor Nicholas Berg in April 2004 and a Japanese traveler in October 2004. Since late 2004, al-Zarqawi has refrained from beheading foreign hostages, but beheadings still occur frequently in Iraq as part of sectarian or inter-tribal feuds between Iraqis. In June 2004, jihadists beheaded U.S. contractor Paul Johnson, Jr., that time in Saudi Arabia. In southern Thailand, ethnic violence involving beheadings occurs frequently between Muslims and Buddhists. In the Netherlands, Mohammed Bouyeri, the confessed killer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, attempted to behead his victim after shooting and stabbing him.
The phenomenon of beheading as an element of sectarian violence continues to spread, as indicated by the recent attack in Indonesia. Unless the perpetrators of the Oct. 29 attack are identified and arrested, there is no reason not to expect more beheadings in Sulawesi.
by Rupe | Nov 4, 2005 | Mad Musings
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday made his second attempt to fill four Cabinet positions, after some of his initial nominations were overwhelmingly rejected by the Majlis for lacking relevant experience. Intriguingly, he seems set on treading the same path once again: He has appointed Sadeq Mahsuli, who like himself is a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to head up the crucial oil ministry — although Mahsuli has no experience in the oil sector. The nomination is subject to a vote of confidence in the Majlis.
The nomination is adding to a growing perception, even within Iran, that Ahmadinejad is, in addition to being a political novice, possibly a loose cannon as well. His provocative statements, such as the recent and widely reported “Israel should be wiped off the map” remark, drew powerful condemnation from the international community (though only a mild response by Washington) — including calls by Israel for Iran to be ousted from the United Nations. As previously noted, his statement was hardly out of the ordinary, considering that it was delivered in an appearance at a student conference titled “The World Without Zionism,” but it certainly was an invitation for a media frenzy. And the timing was such that the controversy could undermine Iran’s confidence at the Nov. 25 IAEA meeting to discuss its nuclear program and in backchannel talks with Washington.
Despite misgivings about his qualifications for his role, Ahmadinejad does have certain uses within the Iranian regime, one of which is making inflammatory statements when Tehran needs a delaying tactic. One of Iran’s goals at this stage in the negotiations over the nuclear issue is simply to buy time: The longer talks continue, whether in the public sphere or behind the scenes, the longer it can stave off military action or some other type of unacceptable (from its standpoint) conclusion. It long has been our view that Iran has used talks with the EU-3 strategically, putting up a public show, while more substantive discussions with Washington over Iraq and the nuclear issue were taking place in private. By drawing attention to its nuclear ambitions, Iran sought to elevate its status as a global player and gain economic concessions along the way.
The question at this point is, if Iran is trying to buy time, to what end?
It is becoming more apparent that the hard-line power brokers in Tehran are unhappy with the pace and direction of talks with the United States. Iran certainly has an interest in sustaining the current level of talks with Washington in its bid to increase influence across the border in Iran, but there also is a desire to keep things from getting too close at this juncture. Although contacts are now at a level not seen since the 1979 revolution, Tehran has dealt warily with the Bush administration, and the unelected clerical establishment wants to remain reasonably conference that improving ties with Washington will not eventually cost them power. In other words, the goal is to make sure that as relations warm, the United States does not use the opportunity to back the more moderate elements within the regime.
Thus, a political figure like Ahmadinejad has utility — and when a reckless statement slows down talks, the establishment can plausibly claim deniability for his actions. But there are some worrying signs even here.
Reports have emerged that the regime has decided to purge as many as 40 ambassadors and senior diplomats from their posts when their terms expire in March. Many of the diplomats belong to the reformist camp of Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. Flushing out moderates from Tehran’s diplomatic circles, including those that have been engaged in nuclear talks with the United Kingdom, France and Germany would signal Tehran’s goal of consolidating hard-line control over the government and applying the brakes to backchannel talks. But there is a problem looming, hinted at with news — also on Wednesday — that Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Javid Zarif, had been reinstated to his role.
Zarif resigned in early October from the nuclear negotiating team, and there has been speculation that he would be among the diplomats Ahmadinejad is now seeking to purge. However, it appears his time in office is being extended — either because the hard-liners need his services as they proceed with nuclear negotiations, or because they have not yet identified anyone capable of filling the void.
All of which leads to a question: If Ahmadinejad, who is coming to be viewed as a bull in the political china shop, embodies the next generation of hard-liners, will it be possible for Iran to carry the ideals of the 1979 revolution forward and still progress with foreign policy goals?
