SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2006
Monday Edition: A Twins Explosion
The Chicago Tribune reports:
The
twin birth rate, which stood at about 1 in 60 in 1971, has risen
rapidly because of fertility treatments and an increase in the number
of older moms, with almost 1 in 30 American babies now being born as
part of a pair.
That's a figure that is unprecedented anywhere in the world, according to Dr. Louis Keith, an emeritus professor at Northwestern University's medical school.
"The real epidemic of twins didn't begin until the mid-1990s, so we are now in the epidemic," says Keith, president of the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth in Chicago.
Keith
says it's too early to know what that might mean in the long term, but
some experts say that the increase could have an impact on facets of
society ranging from athletics to politics.
Already, the parents
of twins have made their mark in the field of education, where schools
have traditionally separated twins entering kindergarten. Minnesota recently became the first state to pass a law guaranteeing parents a
say in separation decisions, and in December a similar bill was
introduced in the Illinois General Assembly.
Parents of twins
have turned to experts such as Nancy Segal, a psychology professor at
California State University-Fullerton, who says that there is no
scientific evidence to support always separating twins. In fact, says
Segal, there is relevant data, regarding the effect of entering school
with a close friend, which suggest that kids actually adjust faster in
the company of a close companion.
Among the implications for the
general population: If parents of twins can now increasingly request
that their kids enter school together on the grounds that this will
improve their academic performance, what's to stop parents of
singletons from requesting a class placement with a best friend on the
same grounds?
Other potential societal effects could spring from the unique characteristics of the twins themselves.
Twins
tend not to be the very top achievers in their fields, many observers
have informally noted, although no one has actually studied this. We
have had no twin presidents, for example. Bill Gates isn't a twin;
Picasso wasn't a twin, nor was Bach or Marie Curie.
On the other
hand, twins do excel in athletics, perhaps even beyond what their
numbers would indicate, with well-known examples such as gymnast Paul
Hamm, an Olympic gold medalist, and his brother, Morgan.
Additional resources:
Fruits Losing Punch
ABC News reports that
fruits and veggies aren't what they used to be. Of the 13 major
nutrients found in fruits and vegetables, six have significantly declined, ABC reporting, citing a study by Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin. (You can see Dr. Davis' 2004 report on this issue on the UT Web site. The latest study data was released at a professional conference recently.)
ABC says:
Using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Davis
concludes that recently grown crops have shown decreases of up to 38
percent in protein, calcium, vitamin C, phosphorus, iron and riboflavin
when compared with produce from past decades.
What accounts for
this negative trend? Like any other competitive industry, farmers'
attempts to drive up profits have led them to use new techniques to
increase production, Davis said. The faster-grown fruits don't have as much time to develop the nutrients.
Contractors: The Invisible Casualty in Iraq
The Scripps Howard News Service reports that 505 civilian contractors have died in
Iraq
since the beginning of the war. Another 4,744 contractors have been
injured, according to insurance claims by 209 companies on file at the
Department of Labor, the Scripps Howard report said.
To help you localize this story, here is a collection of contractors doing work in Iraq (and Afghanistan).
The Scripps Howard story says:
American-employed
civilian contractors are dying at an average of 14 each month. Nearly
five times more civilians have died than troop losses suffered by Great Britain, the United States' most important military ally in Southwest Asia.
The only official report on civilian deaths and injuries in Iraq
comes from a summary of insurance claims issued by the Department of
Labor, although the report is heavily censored. Of the 209 companies
that reported deaths or injuries in Iraq,
the exact number of casualties was withheld for 197 of these firms.
(The government does report a grand total for the dead and injured,
however.)
It also is not known how many of the civilian dead are Americans.
"Our statistics capture anyone working for a U.S. contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Labor Department spokeswoman Dolline Hatchett. "Our database does not track by nationality."
The Labor Department provides imprecise information about exactly how many civilians work in Iraq
(the current estimate is 20,000), where they've been assigned to work,
their pay, their nationality and even the nature of the work they've
been hired to do.
In June of 2005, PBS's "Frontline" produced a piece on civilian contractors, "
Private Warriors." A
Knight RIdder Newspapers report covered the same topic in November of last year.
You've Got Laundry!
Al's Morning Meeting
reader Jon Musgrave sent me a note about a cool new technology that is
moving into college campuses. It is called "Smart Laundry," and it is
aimed at solving the problem that college students face: waiting endless
hours for washers and dryers to free up or finish their laundry.
Now, a handful of
schools have hooked into an idea that allows a user to monitor washers
and dryers via the Internet. You can have the machine send an e-mail to
your computer when your laundry is done or when a
machine becomes available. Take a look at the program's Web site,
run by the Mac-Gray Corp. The site also shows weekly usage reports so
you can tell when you are most likely to find an open machine.
Campus-Technology.com explains:
As of last spring, laundry life at Columbia
has changed dramatically. Today, with the help of a real-time Web-based
service called LaundryView (from Waltham, Mass. "intelligent" laundry
systems vendor Mac-Gray; www.macgray.com),
students can log on to the system via the LaundryView Web site from a
link off the student information system (SIS) portal, to see which
machines are free -- even before they head to the laundry room.
Students
can use their campus debit cards to pay for the wash, and once they put
a load in, they can monitor its progress from the same Web page, making
sure they get back to catch their load as it finishes. If students
prefer, they can even program the service to e-mail them when their
load is done.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas,
edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites,
as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes
directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be
provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends
upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors
and inaccuracies found will be corrected.Posted at 10:54:59 PM
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