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Not the third chimp.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the universe runs on narrativium - the element that ensures that things follow the demands of the story. It's narrativium that mandates that the little old lady in the woods is a witch, narrativium that demands that a third son, attempting a task that killed two older brothers, succeed, and narrativium that ensures that the million-to-one chance succeeds 99% of the time. In The Science of Discworld 2, Pratchett and co-authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen point out that storytelling is a key characteristic of humans, and that it has been essential to our…

Philosopher threatened by Islamists

A French philosopher, and his family, have been threatened with death by Islamists for his criticising Islam as a religion of violence and hate, according to Agence France Presse. Details below the fold. TEACHER WHO ATTACKED ISLAM: "ALONE AND ABANDONED," RECEIVING DEATH THREATS, UNDER POLICE PROTECTION Published in: Agence France PresseSeptember 29, 2006 PARIS, Sept 29, 2006 (AFP) - French anti-terrorism authorities Friday opened an inquiry into death threats against a philosophy teacher who has been forced into hiding over a newspaper column attacking Islam, legal officials said. Robert…

Some insight into why it's harder to recognize different-age faces

Last year's movie Changeling tells the story, from the late 1920s, of a mother whose son is kidnapped. Then, six months later, the police say they've found the boy and return him to his mother, who immediately claims that the boy they returned was not her son. She's then coerced into taking this child in, and doctors are brought forward to convince her that this is really her son. People change, she is told, and she's has been through severe mental trauma. Surely the best medical minds in the country know better than a single mother. The film ends up being a scathing indictment of the LAPD,…

Happenings

So, I just found out that I'm teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out some guest lectures or something). The subject is philosophy of the life sciences, but the blurb covers topics I wouldn't have put up myself: This course looks at some of the philosophical issues arising out of the study of the life sciences-primarily biology & ecology. These issues include problems associated with the theory of evolution such as: (i) recent philosophical debate on the unit of selection; (…

Genetics does not play as large a role in longevity as previously thought

I have posted before about how I think that the role of genetics, at least in popular culture, has been overemphasized. Rather, the really interesting and important parts of genetics are the ways in which your genes interact with environmental factors. There is an excellent article in the NY Times today about how longevity has a lot less to do with genes than people think. To wit: The scientific view of what determines a life span or how a person ages has swung back and forth. First, a couple of decades ago, the emphasis was on environment, eating right, exercising, getting good medical…

What is peer review, anyway?

Over at BPR3, a reader brought up an interesting question about the nature of peer-reviewed research, which I thought was relevant to our readers here as well. I'm reposting my entire response below. The system of peer review, the bulwark of academic publishing, has served scholars for centuries. The principle behind the system is simple: If experts in a field find a research report noteworthy, then that report deserves to be published. But who is an "expert"? And who decides who the experts are? Couldn't a group of individuals committed to promoting their own research -- which may or may not…

Is it possible to be too happy?

Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who are less happy, even years after the original happiness assessment. People around the world rate happiness as more important than intelligence, success, and material wealth. But is it possible to be too happy? An extremely happy person might be less motivated to seek a better job, more education, or better health care. Short-term happiness could conceivably be a route to a…

Sneak peek at the BPR3 aggregation system

Have you been following the progress over at BPR3? Here's an update: With the release of the Research Blogging icon, dozens of blogs and hundreds of posts are already showing the world when they are discussing peer-reviewed research. But the next step will be far more dramatic: a site which consolidates all those posts in one place. For now, you can do a Technorati search to find out who's using the icon. I love Technorati, but its results aren't always consistent, and it can take several clicks to locate the specific post you're interested in. BPR3's new system will display the opening of…

The claim: Politically liberal brains are better at handling change

A recent report in Nature Neuroscience has gotten a lot of press. The headlines proclaim that "left-wing" brains are different from "right wing" brains. Are our brains literally hard-wired to be conservative or liberal? The article in the L.A. Times sure seems to suggest it: Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict. Really?…

How concerned should scientists be with "framing"?

The debate about Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet's recent Science article has gotten quite contentious. Nisbet and Mooney contend that if scientists hope to persuade the public to value science, they must take heed of recent research on "framing." In other words, they claim, scientists are failing at presenting their message effectively. So what exactly is this "framing" stuff anyway? Matthew Nisbet might not agree that this is all there is to it, but I thought this article in the APS observer offered a nice summary of what we're talking about: People are more likely to take risks when they…

Dangers of the Middle

I am quoted at length in this recent Boston Globe op-ed column by Cathy Young, entitled "Common sense in the warming debate." (Via Prometheus.) I really appreciate the attention from Young, but without necessarily intending to do so, she appears to have put me in a box that I don't wish to occupy. So allow me to clarify. Young starts off like this: Global warming is the subject of intense debate. But if ideology is getting in the way of science, maybe both sides of the debate are letting that happen. While the evidence of global climate change is overwhelming, there are skeptics who challenge…

These Are So Not Good Criticisms

Well, I've read through the Discovery Institute critique of my work (PDF). I am not impressed. Neither is Carl Zimmer, who has experience with this sort of thing. PZ, meanwhile, has a good refutation of Casey Luskin's attack on my credentials. [To tell you the truth, PZ, Luskin's criticism is actually even weaker than you say, because if we were act like good Kantians and generalize it it into a universal law, that would mean that journalism in this country would cease to exist, save in the few cases where journalists happen to have advanced degrees in the subjects they're reporting on. In…

The Hansen Fallout

House Science Committee chair Sherry Boehlert--who has countered attacks on science before--isn't going to stand for the current games at NASA that are being played to restrict scientists from speaking. In a letter to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, Boehlert writes the following: It ought to go without saying that government scientists must be free to describe their scientific conclusions and the implications of those conclusions to their fellow scientists, policymakers and the general public. Any effort to censor federal scientists biases public discussions of scientific issues,…

Written in Stone - Wrapping up is hard to do

Now that the details about Australopithecus sediba have been published, I am faced with an important question - how am I going to fit the new hominin into Written in Stone? When I started composing Written in Stone I was determined to make it as up-to-date as possible. This was not only out of a concern for accuracy, but also stemmed from a desire to present the public with some discoveries that they may not have heard about before. Given that new paleontological papers are being published every week, however, I have often been faced with the question of how to incorporate interesting new…

Are we more likely to notice arousing things, or just more likely to remember them?

Last week we discussed two experiments in a report by Adam Anderson about how the phenomenon of attentional blink is modified when the task includes arousing words. Perhaps not surprisingly, we're more likely to notice arousing words like "ejaculate" or "foreplay" in a rapidly presented sequence than neutral words like "plane" or "clock." But Anderson wasn't finished—he wanted to explain why this phenomenon occurs. Are we more likely to remember arousing words after the fact? Or are arousing words inherently more able to attract our attention? So, Anderson reversed the attentional blink task…

Video games, adolescents, and development

Much of the research on violent video games, like a vast proportion of all psychological research, has focused on college students. This shouldn't be surprising, since most college psychology departments require students to participate in experiments as a part of the Introduction to Psychology course. It's an easy way for researchers to find human participants, and a great way for students to learn how real research is done. Research results for college students often are equivalent to the population as a whole, and even when they aren't, college students can establish a baseline to compare…

Kids' unreliability as witnesses: Hard-wired into the brain?

Take a look at the following maps of brain activity: The maps were made using ERP recordings of volunteers' brains as they were tested for memory of pictures. The ERP (event-related potential) records electrical potentials using a variety of electrodes (primarily EEGs, or electroencephalograms) placed on the scalp. The white regions of the diagrams represent areas of greater brain activity. What's striking about the diagrams is that while for the most part they are similar, kids' brains show a strikingly different pattern for memory of the context of an item than adults do. To understand…

Is seeing a scene the same as feeling it?

When we look at a scene, it often seems as if we perceive it all at once. Yet in fact, we are physically able to accurately view only a tiny portion of the scene at a time. Take a look at this image of a human retina (the back of your eyeball). The portion of the eye responsible for accurate vision is the miniscule fovea: (source: Webvision) To get a sense of the portion of your visual field you are able to see in clear focus at one time, hold your thumb up at arm's length. The area of the fovea corresponds to the size of your thumbnail at that distance: less than 2 degrees of visual angle!…

The Nanostructure of Noms: Why Edible Fats Are So Tasty

X-ray diffraction patterns reveal the orientation of fat crystals. The distribution and directionality of these crystal nanostructures (parallel to the shear field in C, randomly arranged in D) affects the flavor and texture of foods. From butter in croissants to cocoa solids in chocolate, edible fats pack a flavor punch that delights like no other macronutrient we consume. Fats are the most energy dense macronutrients, providing more than twice as many kilocalories per gram as proteins or carbohydrates, which may be the reason we’ve developed a taste for them. Fats are an efficient method…

Smashing Atoms with Common Words

Particle collisions aren't the easiest thing in the world to explain, but one of our physicists took this challenge to the extreme. In another Ten Hundred Words of Science submission, Brookhaven Lab physicist Paul Sorenson explains his work studying quark-gluon plasma with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Where I work, we slam together small things to break them into even smaller things until we have the smallest things possible. This is how we know what matter is made of. We gave names to the smallest things in matter like “up”, “down”, “strange”, “top”, and “bottom”. Each of those…

Where's My Elephant?

Almost every time I get into a discussion about woolly mammoths with someone the conversation eventually steers towards the topic of cloning a mammoth. "Wouldn't it be fascinating?", they often say. And with a little extra genetic engineering, many of my friends hope, maybe someone could create a breed of domesticated mini-mammoths that would definitely be in the running for the title of "Cutest Pet Ever" (at least until they left a mess on the carpet). The possibility of housebroken mammoths, or at least mammoths in public zoos, seemed within reach in the spring of 1984. It was at that time…

Trudging Through Fossil Hunter

True to my word I have been reading John Olson's creationism-infused novel Fossil Hunter. I am at approximately the halfway point, but I can't say I have been enjoying it very much (though it is much better than Frank Peretti's Monster). This is not so much because of the book's creationist themes, which have yet to fully manifest themselves, but because I do not care for Olson's writing style. Olson is not very good when it comes to description. It takes a lot of effort to imagine where his characters are and what their surroundings look like during any given scene. Even worse, though, are…

How Hillary Would Restore Scientific Integrity to U.S. Policymaking

Disclaimer: This series of posts is not an endorsement of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Rather, we are paying attention to Hillary because she has gone farther than any other candidate thus far in injecting science policy issues into the presidential race--and promising, if elected, to address the kinds of problems highlighted in The Republican War on Science and by The Union of Concerned Scientists and other organizations. We sincerely hope other candidates of both parties will follow Hillary's lead. And we already know, thanks to Bora's intrepid reporting, that John Edwards…

One more way video games might be good for you

When we're in a crowded space, making visual judgments becomes more difficult. But it doesn't take much to trigger a crowding effect. Clicking on the picture below will take you to a quick movie (QuickTime required) that should demonstrate the effect. Focus on the cross to the left, then start the movie (it may start automatically, depending on your browser). In two seconds, a "T" will flash briefly on the right side of the screen. Your job is to determine whether the T is upright or inverted (upside-down). After another two seconds, three Ts will appear. This time, you must judge only the…

Parents' influence on kids' behavior: Not much

How do you raise "good kids"? It's one of the questions that plagues parents even before their kids are born. Although everyone's child can't be above average, we all want our kids to be nice to others, to "get along" in the world. But kids don't necessarily cooperate. Babies scream, pull hair, defecate and urinate where they're not supposed to. Toddlers throw fits in the middle of supermarkets, and older children lie to us and steal from each other. How do we keep them from becoming delinquents, convicts, or worse? Unfortunately a lot of the research suggests that parents don't actually have…

Heroes

The skulls of Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal compared, from Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man. Our species is nothing if not vain. The natural world is saturated with wonders, yet the phenomena of most concern are those directly relating to us. Even in the long public argument over evolution, where the ancestry of whales and birds is often quarreled over, our own ancestry is the real reason for the contention. What makes evolution so threatening to some is that it applies to every organism and does not allow us to draw a line in the sand between us and the rest of life on this planet. We are…

Return to the work of Ussher

On this date, six thousand and eleven years ago (give or take a little due to the vagaries of how calendars are kept), the creation of the universe had just begun. That's according to the 1650 chronology determined by the Anglican Bishop of Armagh James Ussher, anyway, published in his Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti (Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world, which you can read here if you're well-versed in Latin). Today it's easy to heap scorn on Ussher's dates. Scientific tests have confirmed over and over again that the earth itself…

Negotiating "beer with the guys" on a job interview

I got an email from a reader a few days ago posing a doozy of a problem: she's heading to an interview this week at an institution, and part of her interview involves having "beer with the guys". With her permission, I share with you an edited version of her email: Hi ladies,I am a job candidate for a tenure track position in my field interviewing at a university in the south in 2 weeks. These are huntin' fishin' PhD folks (of course 95% white dude phenotype). There's 2 women of around 30 faculty in the department (grad students are 50% female). I have some colleagues (three relatively…

I say tomato, but my student says tomawto...

Before I even arrived at Mystery U, I was contacted by a student already in our PhD program. The student was about to start his third year in the program, and wanted to know whether I would be willing to advise him. The problem, he said, was that there was no faculty member who had his research specialty. When he told me what he was working on, I was aghast. I couldn't possibly advise him! I know nothing about his specialty either! But after meeting with him and learning more specifics about his situation, I agreed to be his advisor. Now I just needed to advise him well enough to for him to…

The turning point

[Introduction|Part 2|Discussion] Tojima et al (2007) find that the growth cone's response to attractive guidance cues requires asymmetrical vesicle transport and exocytosis. They cultured dorsal root ganglion (DRG) cells from embryonic chicks, and produced localized elevations in calcium ion concentration on one side of the growth cone by photolytic release of the caged calcium ion compound DMNT-EDTA. In cells cultured on a substrate of cell adhesion molecule L1, this causes calcium-induced calcium release (CICR), and elicits a turning response in the direction of the calcium signal. In…

Sonnet 59

In the New York Times today there is an interesting article about Helene Hegemann whose debut novel, "Axolotl Roadkill," drew wide praise. You know this story: turns out that the book contains plagiarized passages (plagiarism: check, sales rising: check.) What I find fascinating about the story, however, is not this rehash of a tried and true marketing tactic, but Ms. Hegemann's defense of herself, summarized in this quote: "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke. Why do I love this…

The Real (and Perceived) Cause of the Black Plague: Part 1

This week is plague week at Retrospectacle, and every day I will be posting something about the Black Plague. The Black Plague was responsible for wiping out 1/3 of the population of Europe during the 1300s, and is considered one of the worst (is not THE worst) pandemic in recorded history. The plague was particularly feared due to its high infectiveness, low chance for survival, and ability to wipe out entire villages in a matter of weeks. Once infected, a patient died in a matter of days amidst much agony. The names for the Black Plague (in the 1300s) included the "Great Pestilence," the…

You Don't Need To Kill A Whale To Study It

A Japanese whaling fleet recently set sail amidst much local fanfare, but Greenpeace is yet again determined to interfere with the hunt by placing themselves in between the whales and the Japanese harpoons. Unlike some other whaling protest groups, Greenpeace relies strictly on peaceful non-violent protesting despite the Japanese government labeling them "dangerous animal rights terrorists." A dangerous terrorist act by Greenpeace. Furthermore, the Japanese government states that the hunt is allowable, despite a long-standing moratorium against whaling by the International Whaling…

Antioxidants in Berries Increased by Ethanol (but Are Daiquiris Healthy?)

From the BBC on down, in the past few days the headline "Alchohol Makes Fruit Healthier" has been highlighted in nearly every news venue. The fruit contains compounds [antioxidants] that can protect against cancer, heart disease and arthritis. But having them with alcohol, such as in a daiquiri, boosts these antioxidant properties, the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture says. Nutritionists said the "detrimental effects" of such drinks could cancel out such benefits. As a college student, no one takes this sort of study more seriously than I. Alcohol as health food? Surely you…

Gregg Henriques On a Unified Psychology

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on the unification of psychology, in which I addressed (rather critically) a paper by Gregg Henriques. Dr. Henriques was kind of enough to reply in comments, and because it's a two-week old post, I didn't want his comment to languish in obscurity as a result of the blog world's short attention span. So with his permission, I'm giving his comment a post of its own. Here it is, in its entirety: Hi Chris, You wrote: 'In the 12 years that I've been studying psychology, I've been asked no more than 5 times what psychology is, and each time, I struggled and…

Higher order thinking

The one thing you must read today is David Dobbs' Die, Selfish Gene, Die. It's good to see genetic accommodation getting more attention, but I'm already seeing pushback from people who don't quite get the concept, and think it's some kind of Lamarckian heresy. It's maybe a bit much to ask that the gene-centric view of evolution die; it's still useful. By comparison, for instance, it's a bit like Mendel and modern genetics (I'll avoid the overworked comparison of Newton and Einstein.) You need to understand simple Mendelian genetics — it gives you a foundation in the logic of inheritance, and…

Mormon scientists reveal link between gaming, being a loser

Shares in Sony, Nintendo, and major games companies dropped sharply today after scientists linked playing video games with poor relationships with friends and family and increased drug use. Nintendo, long the face of family-friendly gaming, were said to be aghast and promised to immediately discontinue their wildly popular Wii system. OK, so only one part of the above is true. A press release from Brigham Young University revealed that undergraduate Alex Jensen and his tutor had questioned 813 college students on their gaming habits and other behaviours, concluding that: "As the amount of…

Conservatives are Happier than Liberals Because...

"They only care about themselves," "They're out of touch with reality," "They don't become academics." These are just some of the answers people yelled at me yesterday when I read out loud the title of a paper in the June issue of Psychological Science. My answer was "some of each." Oh, the paper, by Napier and Jost(1), is titled "Why are conservatives happier than liberals?" (duh!), and was inspired by the Pew Research Center study from a couple years ago, which naturally got a bunch of media and blog attention, in which 47% of conservative Republicans said they were "very happy," as…

Where Rampant Scientism Takes You

When science replaces religion, it becomes more and more like religion, and in the minds of its worshipers, can justify the same sorts of inhumanities. Witness Richard Dawkins, todays leading worshiper of science, calling for deposed dictators to be used as guinea pigs, rather than executed (via John Hawks). He writes: But perhaps the most important research in which a living Saddam Hussein could have helped is psychological. Most people can't even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient…

RFIDs and Medical Devices: Fail!

Radio Frequency IDentification tags ( href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_frequency_identification">RFIDs) are little devices that communicate with other devices, sending an identification signal.  You've probably seen them on various items purched in stores.  They commonly are used for inventory control and theft prevention.  They are increasingly used in a wide variety of applications. Now, they have been found to interfere with medical devices.  This includes critical items such as mechanical ventilators and external pacemakers. The study was published in JAMA ($ for full access…

Yet Another Gentoo Defector

It amused me today to see two blog posts, both about users switching from Gentoo to *buntu.   rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: Why I am making the switch from Gentoo to Kubuntu">Why I Am Making The Switch From Gentoo To Kubuntu href="http://fxjr.blogspot.com/2008/03/bye-gentoo-welcome-ubuntu.html"> Bye Gentoo... Welcome Ubuntu Gentoo is the most complicated version of Linux, but also the most customizable.  It enables the user to squeeze the greatest performance out of their machines.   Like the authors of the two posts, I recently switched.  I had been using Sabayon, a…

Mexico City and South Africa to Recognize Civil Unions

Catching up on news from earlier in the week, I came across a couple of items.  One is a breathtaking development in Mexico, a country that is 88% Catholic; the other from South Africa: href="http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4324824.html">Mexican capital legalizes gay unions City lawmakers give OK despite fierce protest by Catholic Church, conservatives By MARION LLOYD Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Nov. 10, 2006, 3:14PM MEXICO CITY — Defying fierce opposition from Roman Catholic leaders and conservative groups, Mexico City lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a…

Update on NRP104: Less Potential For Abuse?

A while back, I wrote about the new treatment for href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADHD" rel="tag">ADHD that is under development, href="http://www.nrpharma.com/products/NRP104.htm" rel="tag">NRP104.  The original post is href="http://trots.blogspot.com/2005_02_27_trots_archive.html">here.  In that post, I reviewed the pharmacology of NRP104.  The basic idea is that the company took an old molecule, href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextroamphetamine" rel="tag">dextroamphetamine, and tacked a molecule of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine">lysine onto it.  …

Protein Expression and 3' Untranslated Regions

Traditionally, gene expression patterns were seen as mostly dependent on transcription ... yes those nasty bits of DNA that seemed to be ignored by most "science journalists". But the picture that is emerging is that transcription is looking more and more sloppy, and this "sloppyness" is built into the system so that the act of transcription tends to influence the organization of that part of the genome, regardless of what is being transcribed. It also appears that processes upstream of transcription, (such as mRNA processing, mRNA export and translation) play a greater role in determining…

Let's talk about facts this election - Part IV - Soft Power

One of America's strengths was that people looked up to the US. In WWII soldiers would give up to the US on purpose, because they knew that they would be treated fairly. How do I know this - my grandfather who fought for the Italians was one of them. Imagine that power. You are so highly regarded that your enemies would rather give up to you than fight you. But we've squandered that. In the name of fighting terror, we torture. In the name of justice, we invade a country without justification. And it's worse then that - we actually bombed a country and then fail to build it back up again.…

ESOF2008: Brain-computer-interfaces

This morning I attended a talk about the research behind, and clinical applications of, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). I've written about BCIs many times in the past; they monitor the electrical activity of the brain, either invasively by means of implanted electrodes, or non-invasively by means an electroencephalogram cap, and this activity is analyzed and used to drive a peripheral device, such as a prosthetic limb, or a computer. Nevertheless, it was an interesting talk, as it featured prominent researchers in the field, and included an application that was hitherto unknown to me. It…

Cold thermosensation

Below is the introduction to my third and final piece of coursework, an essay entitled Multiple roles for Transient Receptor Potential Melastatin 8 (TRPM8) in cold thermosensation. This time, I discuss three recent studies which have contributed significantly to the understanding of the mechanisms by which nerve endings in the skin detect cold stimuli. I'll post the rest of the essay over the next few days, in 3 or 4 parts. The papers I discuss will be listed as references after the discussion section. Summary: Here I discuss three recent studies which have contributed significantly to the…

Lab Stress

OK it's time for a rant. (It's been a while.) Lets have a discussion about competitiveness in the lab-space. Yesterday over lunch, we had a discussion of all the nastiness going on within labs here at the medical campus. You know, people in the same lab competing against each other. This can escalate to overt hostility and even sabotage. These problems are very abundant, especially in a highly competitive environment like Harvard Medical School. The academic science establishment acts like a pyramid scheme where lots of grad students and postdocs work for almost nothing on risky projects…

What's up with the market?

Not the financial market, but the market for highly trained folks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In particular, why do people keep talking about the need for a larger talent pool in STEM when so many Ph.D.s and postdocs are having a rough time finding permanent positions? Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about what demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes of this apparently paradoxical state of affairs: Looking at whether there is a shortage of qualified STEM workers, Teitelbaum argued that such claims reappear roughly…

Finding cash to make learning happen.

The school year just started again for my kids, and it's pretty hard to escape the conclusion that as public school teachers are being asked to do more, their resources are dwindling. During the summer, the school mailed out the (extensive) lists of basic school supplies needed by kids at each grade level -- the basic stuff, like crayons and pencils and paper, that during the last millennium when I was in grade school were included in the classroom funding like desks and electricity. It strikes me that as a society, we need to revisit our funding priorities. But in the meantime, there are…