#Term 1 Social Science sample paper

[quantummindclassicalheart]

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I am an educator and have read a lot of cognitive science literature.

First of all, that quote doesn't appear anywhere in the paper (at least in the most recent version linked). I searched for it in the text of the paper itself as well as hunting down the linked Mastodon post, which is here:

The post is also formatted somewhat misleadingly, with the commentary directly after the purported quote-- the statement that these systems are "degrading their users' mental abilities and development" is commentary, not a quote from the paper.

The source is tante (Jürgen Geuter), who describes himself as a "Sociotechnologist, writer and speaker working on tech and its social impact." He is not an educator or neuroscientist by training.

Let's be clear-- this is a 200-page paper and the nuances of their findings cannot and should not be distilled into a single social media post.

The paper provides evidence for an idea already supported by the literature, that repeatedly outsourcing cognitive tasks to technology (and thus avoiding the mental effort involved in performing those tasks) makes us worse at those tasks.

But generative AI only "rots" your brain in the same sense that not exercising "rots" your muscles.

We know the brain is an extremely plastic organ, capable of forming new connections and developing new skills all throughout its lifespan.

Every negative impact of technology that we've discovered so far is not only short-term but entirely reversible if we are willing to put in the effort. [1]

In their paper, the authors openly acknowledge that "This next finding should be considered preliminary, as a larger participant sample is needed to confirm the claim" (p. 141) directing readers to the Limitations section of the paper.

Directly below it (also on p. 141), the authors state that

That is, the authors of the paper do not agree with the linked Mastodon post, arguing for more nuance in the possible role of AI in education, and with a focus on learners doing the work first before we consider any role that generative AI might play in their education.

We should be aware of the dangers of generative AI. AI frequently produces misleading and nonfactual "information" under the guise of helpfulness. Its output is often difficult to distinguish from the truth without subject matter expertise. In its current incarnation, it shows little capacity to analyze or reflect or realistically model what cognitive scientists would describe as higher-level thinking.

And it is true that learners (really, anyone) who consistently outsources their critical thinking to an LLM will get worse at it. However:

There is a significant body of evidence that these impacts are not unique.

See for example Henkel (2014) [2], who showed that even taking photos of an object had the potential to degrade our visual memory of that object-- unless the photographers were deliberate in their attention and actively forming memories of the subjects.

Or Sparrow et al. (2011) [3], who found that having access to a search engine could also impact memory when participants thought they could "just Google it later."

Every technology has impacts on our cognition, and the tasks we choose to outsource. What makes generative AI distinctive is the scope of the tasks that it aims to replace (and also, I might add, how bad it is at them).

For me, as a teacher, I don't think generative AI is currently good enough to support my students' learning, and in many ways its blatant misinformation is more likely to undermine their understanding than it is to enhance it.

However, we should follow the evidence and understand the impacts of generative AI on learning and cognition without giving into knee-jerk reactions or moral panics.

Treating generative AI like an entirely unique threat to cognition only plays into the hype of the companies that invented it.

We don't make genAI go away by ignoring it, or by labeling anyone who uses it as stupid and evil-- we handle it by helping people make more informed decisions about their use of it and addressing the basic needs and issues that lead them to use genAI in the first place.

tl;dr: every technology impacts our cognition, even tech as basic as "writing something down."

GenAI is not unique in this respect, but it is extremely wide-ranging in the tasks (critical thinking chief among them) that it claims to replace.

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience tells us these impacts are reversible, but they require us to actively practice our thinking skills, even when it is effortful.

[1] Miller, Michelle D. Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. 1 ed. West Virginia University Press, 2022. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/97642. (Specifically, Chapter 5.)

[2] L. A. Henkel (2014), Point-and-shoot memories: The influence of taking photos on memory for a museum tour, Psychological Science, 25(2), 396 – 402, https://doi.org /10.1177/0956797613504438.

[3] B. Sparrow, J. Liu, & M. Wegner (2011), Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingerprints, Science, 333, 776 – 778

ChatGTP rotting away your brain

[designaldohas]

What Is Graphic Design? (And Why It’s Literally Everywhere)

So, What Is Graphic Design, Anyway?

At its core, graphic design is the art (and science) of communicating ideas visually. That’s it. Sounds simple, right?

But like a great logo, there’s more beneath the surface.

Graphic design combines images, typography, colors, and layout to convey a specific message or provoke a particular emotion. It’s both functional and aesthetic—think of it as visual storytelling, where every line, curve, and space serves a purpose.

You encounter graphic design every day—on cereal boxes, websites, memes, app interfaces, subway ads, movie posters, and even those warning signs on coffee cups (yes, someone designed that “Caution: Hot” label).

Graphic Design Isn’t Just “Making Things Look Pretty”

That’s a common myth. A graphic designer doesn’t just make stuff look nice—they make stuff work better. Design guides the eye, emphasizes what matters, and makes information digestible. That’s why you can spot a button on a website instantly, or know which way to go at an airport even without speaking the language.

Good design is invisible until it's bad.

Ever looked at a poorly designed website and immediately wanted to flee like it’s on fire? That’s the power of bad design. Good design, on the other hand, helps you stay, engage, and act.

The 5 Pillars of Graphic Design

Let’s break down the foundational elements of design. You’ll hear these terms often, so let’s get cozy with them:

1. Line

Lines can be straight, curved, thick, thin, dashed, or solid. They can divide space, create texture, or lead the eye. In some styles, lines even carry the whole design—ever seen minimalist posters?

2. Shape

A shape is a two-dimensional enclosed area. Shapes can be geometric (squares, triangles), organic (blobs, swirls), or abstract. They build structure and symbolism.

3. Color

Color affects mood, tone, and brand identity. You’ll soon meet our friend the color wheel—yes, it’s real and not just a spinning rainbow. Color theory is a game-changer (and a rabbit hole of delight).

4. Texture

Texture can be actual (in print) or implied (in digital). It gives depth and tactility. Think of that gritty paper feel or the smooth gradient in an app icon.

5. Typography

Fonts are not just pretty letters. They tell you whether a brand is serious or playful, traditional or modern. Typography involves font choice, size, spacing, and hierarchy—basically, how text talks visually.

Bonus Concepts to Keep in Your Back Pocket

White Space (aka negative space): the unsung hero of clarity.

Balance and Contrast: making things look harmonious yet exciting.

Hierarchy: guiding the viewer on what to read first, second, third...

Alignment: because messy layouts = messy communication.

Graphic Design Fields: It’s More Than Just Logos

Graphic design has many niches. Here’s a sample buffet:

Branding & Identity: logos, brand guidelines

Web & App Design: UI/UX, wireframes, interfaces

Print Design: posters, brochures, packaging

Motion Graphics: animations, explainer videos

Advertising: campaigns, billboards, social media

Editorial Design: magazines, book covers, zines

Eventually, you’ll find your favorite flavor. But first—we learn the basics across the board.

What Tools Will You Need?

Here’s the holy trinity of design software:

Adobe Photoshop – Great for photo editing and raster graphics

Adobe Illustrator – King of vector-based design (logos, icons)

Adobe InDesign – Layout magic for print and publications

Free alternatives include:

Photopea (online Photoshop alternative)

Canva (beginner-friendly, template-based)

Figma (especially for UI/UX design)

Don’t worry about mastering tools right away—we’ll get there step by step.

What Makes a Great Designer?

Not just technical skill. It’s curiosity, problem-solving, visual sensitivity, and communication. Designers aren’t just decorators; they’re translators—turning complex ideas into visuals that connect.

Also: get ready to develop your "designer eye"—your ability to spot kerning issues, clashing colors, or the perfectly aligned grid from across the room. (It’s both a gift and a curse.)

🧠 Unique Fact of the Day

The very first graphic design job ever recorded? It dates back to 15,000 BCE—yep, the cave paintings of Lascaux, France. Those aren’t just doodles; they were designed to communicate, teach, and influence. Graphic design might’ve just been humanity’s first form of visual messaging. We’ve basically been creating infographics since the Stone Age.

https://letterhanna.com/what-is-graphic-design-and-why-its-literally-everywhere/

[brainstormhome]

Preparing for Board Exams Made Easy with Home Tuition for Class 9th and 10th

Preparing for Class 9th and 10th board exams can be challenging for students due to the vast syllabus and increasing competition. The pressure to perform well in exams often leads to stress and confusion among students. However, with the right guidance and support, students can simplify their preparation process and improve their performance. This is where home tuition plays a crucial role. Personalized learning through expert tutors can help students strengthen their concepts, improve time management, and boost confidence before exams.

In this blog, we will explore how home tuition for Class 9th and 10th can make board exam preparation easier and more effective.

Why Home Tuition is Important for Class 9th and 10th Board Exams

Home tuition offers a tailored learning experience that focuses on the unique strengths and weaknesses of each student. Unlike traditional classroom learning, home tuition provides one-on-one attention, which helps students understand complex topics more easily. Here’s why home tuition is essential for Class 9th and 10th exam preparation:

1. Personalized Learning Approach

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By focusing on core subjects, students can improve their overall exam performance.

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How Home Tuition Helps in Preparing for Class 9th and 10th Board Exams

1. Strengthening Conceptual Clarity

Board exams are not just about memorizing facts; they require a deep understanding of concepts. Home tutors break down complex topics into simple terms, ensuring that students understand the logic behind each concept. This helps students solve tricky questions with ease.

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Home tutors create a customized study plan based on the student’s strengths and weaknesses. They focus more on difficult topics and ensure that the student is well-prepared for every type of question that may appear in the exam.

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Repetition is key to mastering any subject. Home tuition includes regular practice sessions and revision exercises. Tutors use sample papers and previous years’ question papers to familiarize students with the exam pattern.

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Board exams require structured answers. Home tutors teach students how to present their answers clearly and concisely. They also guide students on how to manage their time effectively during the exam.

Subjects Covered in Home Tuition for Class 9th and 10th

✅ Mathematics

Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus

Problem-solving techniques and shortcut methods

Time-saving strategies for numerical questions

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Biology – Human anatomy, plant physiology, and reproduction

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Grammar, Vocabulary, and Sentence Construction

Reading comprehension and writing skills

Preparing for essay and letter writing tasks

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Civics – Political structure and functioning of government

Benefits of Choosing Brainstorm Home Tuition for Class 9th and 10th

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Tips for Effective Board Exam Preparation with Home Tuition

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Why Home Tuition is Better Than Coaching Classes

Home TuitionCoaching ClassesOne-on-one attentionGroup learningFlexible timingsFixed scheduleFocused learningLimited individual attentionPersonalized study planGeneralized study planImmediate doubt resolutionDelayed doubt resolution

Home tuition provides a more focused and customized learning experience, helping students overcome academic challenges more effectively.

Conclusion

Preparing for Class 9th and 10th board exams doesn’t have to be stressful. With the right guidance and support from Brainstorm Home Tuition, students can simplify their preparation and achieve outstanding results. Personalized learning, expert tutors, and regular assessments ensure that students are well-prepared and confident. If you want to boost your child’s academic performance and secure top scores in board exams, enroll with Brainstorm Home Tuition today!

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[rachnasagargrp]

Buy Now: https://bit.ly/3w4kFrc

[valsuperhandsome]

Unit 1

Academic texts are described as objective, critical literature published in formal language by experts or professionals in a certain topic. The substance of academic text is objective. This indicates that they are founded on solid evidence. The author's emotions cannot be conveyed solely through language and materials. The goal of academic writing is to make complex content as simple and effective as feasible. After all, the purpose of universities is to learn new things, pass on what they've learned, and find new things.

UNIT 2

STRUCTURE according to what I've learnt, the three-part essay format consists of three parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. The body of the text should be shorter than the introduction and conclusion. In shorter articles, on or two paragraphs for each of these elements may suffice.

UNIT 3

Typically, a thesis statement appears at the end of the first paragraph of a document. It presents a brief summary of the essay, research paper, or other material's main point or claim. It's normally stated in a single sentence, although it can be elaborated amd repeated in other places. A thesis statement is a sentence that expresses the core idea of a writing effort and helps organize thoughts throughout the text. It's more than just a topic. It is frequently used to express a writer's reponse to a book or a personal event.

I realize that an Outlining is a loggically structured outline of your essay's essential arguments. Outlining can aid in the definition and organization of your theme and subtopics, allowing the reader to follow a logical path from your thesis to the conclusion. Outlines are extremely important in academic publications since they break down a document into its main concepts and document into its main concepts and supporting arguments or material. An outline of a possible writing assignment will helo you spot problems in your argument.

Unit 4

A summary is a paragraph written in your own words. In a summary, only the most important aspects from the original text are included. Include no personal opinions, interpretations, inferences, or observations in your summary. Write a concluding sentence that “wraps” up your summary; it’s usually just a reiteration of the main point, and an academic summary is a succinct description of an academic work. A summary’s goal is to allow a reader to rapidly determine whether a paper, chapter, or book is worth reading in a small amount of time. The summary should be provided in your own words and should be well-written.

Paraphrasing The act of rewording a passage, whether spoken or written, is known as paraphrasing. As you’ll see in the samples below, writers frequently rephrase words and paragraphs to convey information more succinctly. In other words, you’re writing something in your own words that communicates the original concept.

PARAPHRASING VS QUOTING

Use direct quotations only if there is a compelling reason to do so. You should write the majority of your paper in your own terms. In addition, while writing a humanities paper, it’s typical to quote from sources more extensively, although when writing in the social or scientific sciences, it’s common to summarize from sources,However, there are always exceptions to the rule. For example, in a literary analysis paper, you should quote from the literary text rather than summarize because one of the goals is to evaluate the author’s exact words and phrases. Paraphrase If you’re unsure, summarize or paraphrase. What you desire from the source is the idea represented, not the particular wording used to describe it. A source’s core idea can be expressed in fewer words.

Unit 5

CITING SOURCES OF INFORMATION It’s crucial to cite or document the sources you used in your research, especially because the objective of doing so is threefold: It gives proper credit to the authors of the words or ideas you used in your paper. It allows people who are reading your work to find your references and learn more about the topics you discuss in your article, as well as it allows those who aren’t reading your work to find your references and learn more about the concepts you mention in your article. In the body of your text, citing a source means proving that you used words, ideas, figures, images, and other elements from another source. Citations are a quick and straightforward way to locate a piece of work that has been published (book, article, chapter, web site)

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Jasmine Mithani

Across the U.S., demonstrators have spent the past few weeks protesting against racial disparities in the country’s criminal justice system. There’s plenty of data to back them up: Black and Hispanic people are stopped more frequently, including traffic stops, and are more likely to be arrested. Once stopped, police are more likely to use force against, shoot and kill Black citizens. And then once in jail, Black defendants are more likely to be denied bail, which in turn makes conviction more likely. And when convicted, sentencing is also biased against Black defendants, with Black defendants more likely to be incarcerated.

The data seems to overwhelmingly point to a criminal justice system riven by racial bias. But, remarkably, it could be even more overwhelming than some studies make it seem. That’s because of a statistical quirk called “collider bias,” a kind of selection bias that means that the crime data that shows racial bias is, itself, biased by racist practices. If you thought crime data showed clear evidence of racism before, understanding how collider bias affects these analyses might make it even clearer.

To understand how all this works, we’re going to get mathy. In particular, we’re going to be talking a lot about denominators, which, if you’ll remember your fourth grade math lessons, are the numbers on the bottom of a fraction. For our purposes, though, you can think of them as the universe of people who are being studied.

Police engage with only a small subset of the population they see, so if we look at statistics about those interactions, the stats we get are informed by that smaller sample. And if there’s bias in who the police choose to interact with — if it’s not a random sample — that can change the relationships you see in the data.

There are two main ways that researchers approach this problem — by using a “population denominator” and an “encounter denominator.”

The former, for example, compares the fraction of Black people in the general population who are arrested or harmed to that same statistic for white people. That’s how you get studies that show 96 out of 100,000 Black men and boys will be killed by police over the course of their lifetimes, compared to 39 out of 100,000 white men and boys — a risk that is 2.5 times higher. Seems straightforward enough. But because Black and white people encounter the police at different rates to begin with, using population denominators might not lend itself to an apples-to-apples comparison; being more likely to encounter police means that you’re more likely to encounter police force, too.1

For this reason, many researchers choose to look at the set of people who have encountered the police. This is the “encounter denominator.” The setup is simple: You look at all the people who had recorded encounters with police — data which is not always easy to obtain — and calculate the proportion that involved the use of force. But this approach has a different issue, as a recent paper pointed out — if there’s bias in who gets stopped in the first place, then looking at discrepancies in the resulting interactions won’t give you the full picture. This is because of something called “collider bias.”2

“The vast majority — 99.9 percent of the data — we never get to see,” said Dean Knox, a professor of politics at Princeton and one of the authors of the study. “We just don’t see all the times when police officers are encountering civilians on the street. And that’s a huge problem, because among the data that you do get to see — the stops, and the arrests, and the use of force that officers record — those are already contaminated, because officers have discretion in who they choose to engage.”

The fact that researchers’ data comes from a biased sample — who the police choose to stop — rather than the full sample of possible stops might skew the conclusions we draw from it. “If we’re using administrative data, we always need to be aware of what world those data capture, and what they don’t capture,” said Allison P. Harris, a political science professor at Yale who studies racial disparities in the criminal justice system. “With policing, we just can never know what there’s no record of.”

One example of an encounter denominator approach is a 2019 study by Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard. He found that police shoot white, Black and Hispanic Americans whom they’ve stopped at equal rates.3 At first blush, that would seem like evidence that the police are not racially biased — every demographic is being treated equally, after all.

But we know that police officers are more likely to stop Black and Hispanic people than white ones — and that more of those stops are unfounded. Researchers measure this with something called the “hit rate,” or the rate at which contraband is actually found on the people who were stopped. A lower hit rate implies bias because it means that the decision to search someone was made with less evidence. White people stopped in New York City, for example, were more likely to be carrying a weapon than Black and Hispanic people who were stopped. White drivers stopped by the police were more likely to have contraband than Black and Hispanic drivers nationally.

As political scientists Knox, Will Lowe and Jonathan Mummolo, among others, have pointed out, that complicates Fryer’s findings. All of a sudden, what at first appeared to be equal treatment actually suggests unequal treatment. Because of the initial discrimination in who gets stopped, the sample of stopped people isn’t the same across races. The different hit rate indicates that stopped white people are actually more likely to have contraband, on average, than stopped Black people. In other words, in a world without discrimination in who was stopped — if the Black and white people who were stopped were equally likely to be engaged in criminal activity — you’d see an even bigger disparity in outcomes.

It’s unintuitive, I know, but let’s break it down visually.

“The data we have pick up halfway through the encounter, after officer bias very likely has already exerted an effect,” said Mummolo, a professor at Princeton. And without knowing the racial composition of the people who are sighted by police but aren’t stopped, it’s impossible to fully correct for the bias. The paper provides a suggestion for how to estimate bias in one part of the chain — use of force in encounters — but it doesn’t capture any of the potential disparities that occur beforehand that make the encounter likelier.

So if racial bias in police stops makes it hard to estimate racial disparities in how people are treated while stopped, you might be wondering: well, doesn’t this affect all of the other components of the chain, too?

“We need to think about this as this complex system,” said Knox. There are biases layered on biases — social decisions like how society allocates resources in education versus policing, and individual decisions like who police choose to stop or arrest and who is ultimately charged or convicted. “It just compounds all the way down the line,” Knox said.

The thing about systemic racism is it’s just that: systemic.

Ultimately, the fact that these biased events build on each other should be a reminder that we’re not capturing the entire process surrounding the stats we’re looking at. Essentially, all the discrimination we can actually measure at each specific stage is an underestimate of how much is actually happening.

[zen-garden-gnome]

REALLY investigating the debate over vaccines (from a lay-person’s perspective).

I want to unravel some things about the vaccination debate, following days of research into the matter. It wasn’t enough for me to know how I felt, already. I didn’t think my personal relationships had to suffer maximally in order for me to live honestly. So I decided to dig in and make myself more knowledgeable, and to let myself empathize with more people. There was so much to cipher through and it took so much time that I had to take notes to help keep things connected. The process reminded me that the internet is not as easily traversed for all its users, and that in the end, the “vibe” one picks up decides a lot of what we’re willing to follow any deeper (particularly, whether or not we even notice a “vibe” in the first place). Zooming way out also reminded me of just how many “entry points” there are for this subject, and helped me empathize with a lot of people. It turns out, “anti-vaxxer” is a term applied to people across a pretty wide range of subtly differing perspectives. I think we can all agree that the despair and disgust and distrust the world is experiencing won’t improve if we can’t get our attention back, ‘cause that’s largely what this is about. We are inundated with so much manipulative information that we struggle to steer our attention toward the core values that we mostly share, which takes us further and further away from each other’s realities. We know less and less about each other but think we know so much more because we’re surrounded by manipulative/self-preserving chatter.

I wanted to cut through the noise and show where some things connect, and where some others only appear to. For anyone who knows there’s a lot going on but doesn’t know where to begin approaching it. For anyone who feels on the fence in any way. For anyone who feels isolated by their view of the circumstances. For anyone who struggles to understand why so-and-so would think such-and-such. For anyone who thinks they already know. For anyone with even a passing curiosity. And of course, for myself. I’ve worked to collect and organize this for all and anyone. I do my best to stay objective without pretending I don’t have my own opinions. My research wound up focusing on a few key people and their research, the theories that have arisen, the science used to address them, and the demographics who are the most moved by it all. This is an entire research paper and I had no idea it would go this far when I started.

Judy Mikovits is a former medical researcher and current anti-vaccination advocate. She has some valid criticisms of how the US government handled the release of treatments for HIV and for the poor ways people treat their immune systems. She claims in her book (and in a viral video that recently hit the internet at the kick-off of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US) that Anthony Fauci barred her from continuing her research at the National Institute of Health (he denies this). She refers to the COVID-19 pandemic in quotes ("pandemic"), refuses to wear face masks, and discourages others from doing so because she thinks that taking care of one’s own immune system and cleanliness is all she should need to do, by her own words. Vaccines (and just temporarily breathing in more of one’s own carbon dioxide) aren’t worth the risk, she says. Mikovits has spoken at numerous anti-vaccination events and her retracted papers are frequently referenced in their propaganda (and there’s no denying it’s propaganda).

When she was a virologist and medical researcher, Judy started working to uncover viral causes of diseases when she was hired by a couple whose child had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and wanted to find the cause. The work she published in Science magazine about proposed retro-viral causes of CFS in 2009 was retracted when peers from 9 separate labs failed to get the same results and negated her findings (and when two of her co-authors reported that their patient samples had been contaminated by the virus in the lab, as opposed to the virus already being in the samples). Two years later she was fired from her job over the quality of her work and control of her lab samples, which seems relevant considering the apparent reason why her 2009 results were supposedly wrong. She was arrested and tried for stealing lab equipment and documentation when she left. She returned some of the lab notes and the criminal charges were dismissed.

Judy continues to reference her outdated research to this day (the research about specific retroviruses causing some specific diseases). Now she’s using her debunked data to fire up her main argument: that up to 30% of modern vaccines are “contaminated” with retroviruses and the government is trying to cover up a dangerous problem with its vaccines, putting everyone at risk (especially young children who get a large host of vaccines in a relatively short period of time).

This was where I knew I had to learn more about how viruses and vaccines interact with our bodies. A retrovirus is commonly called an RNA virus, which is a virus that uses a host cell to replicate its viral RNA as DNA. This is the opposite of what DNA viruses do, which is to use the host cell to replicate their DNA as RNA. An RNA/retro-virus also has a type of enzyme that allows it to insert its new DNA into the host cell’s DNA. This altered genetic information can lead to increased erroneous cell production, which increases the likelihood of developing cancer and other diseases depending on where the viral DNA is injected into a host cell’s DNA. Whatever gene is changed may cease to function, leading to disease. For example, HIV is a retrovirus that results in a syndrome that makes one prone to all kinds of diseases.

As it turns out, some vaccines do contain retroviruses! And it also turns out that that’s ok. Sometimes that’s part of the genetic material virologists are working with. Some of our vaccines are only possible with that genetic material. The presence of a retrovirus doesn’t necessary do anything to the vaccine. The vaccinations don’t infect patients with retroviruses because the retroviruses found in the vaccine are non-infectious. It’s an extremely important part of how a good vaccine functions. Viruses can cause diseases, but vaccines don’t contain live infectious material. That’s why there were no reported issues with retroviral infection by our vaccine safety systems (systems that exist because vaccines have never been perfect and always have some potential for side effects, so their risk factors are studied thoroughly). When the technology was available to investigate the retroviruses previously unknown to have existed in the MMR vaccine, they were confirmed to be non-hazardous.

Mikovits is clearly a knowledgeable professional in her field and has some valid opinions/points about health, medicine, and federal failures. But her identity seems to be wrapped up with the debunked research that changed her career, and no professional knows everything, even in their field. The wrongness isn’t my concern. It’s what she’s doing with it, and the fact that she’s ignoring the research negating her old findings.

Kent Heckenlively is the co-author of Judy's new book, and an anti-vaccination activist. The fact that he's also a lawyer really stands out to me. The founders of the Westboro Baptist Church (the "God Hates F*gs" group) are ex-lawyers who use their offensive protests to rile people up and then sue them for "hindering their rights." It's how they make their money. Anyway, Kent is co-founder of a group called Age of Autism, which claims to be dedicated to helping kids and families with autism. But as you can probably tell by the name of the group, they're much more concerned with the fact that they perceive a dangerous uptick in autism statistics (an issue that’s related much more to the evolving access and categorization of statistics and disorders than anything else). Age of Autism doesn’t actually tend to involve people on the autism spectrum in their work (other than to use them as examples), and their focus is not on helping (or even understanding) those with autism, but on getting rid of autism--as if the spectrum of conditions related to autism was a single “disease,” and as if it’s unacceptable that people exist with those conditions (more on that later).

As autism has increasingly become a recognized "condition," it's diagnosis has become more common, and because it's really only diagnosed based on social behavior, it may go unnoticed prior to ~18 months, if it’s noticed at all. Many more people live "on the spectrum" than we ever know (did you know Sir Anthony Hopkins is also on the spectrum?), and before it was more widely recognized, we had all kinds of names (and institutions) for people living with more severe effects. Kent's daughter was diagnosed with autism at around the age that she got some of her vaccines, which led the distraught father to believe it was vaccine related. Sometimes people do have mild reactions to vaccines (nothing’s perfect), and I can understand parents being scared and hurt for their children. I can also understand questioning various authorities. We know good and well that governments use poisons (Agent Orange in Vietnam), diseases (smallpox in the colonies, syphilis at Tuskegee), and vaccines as playing cards in their efforts to control people/power (we saw it again when Trump tried to get exclusive rights to the Coronavirus vaccine being researched in Germany). But lots of people see “Thing 1 Happens, Thing 2 Happens After, Which Must Mean Thing 1 Caused Thing 2.” Unsurprisingly, people can develop identities that revolve around getting rid of the "disease" of autism.

But Autism is not a disease. Autism is an umbrella term for a range of neuro divergences (to be diagnosed you have to hit like... 4 out of a possible 15 some-odd behavioral checkmarks), and issues like those relate to aaaallll sorts of things. Things that people with autism talk about often. If anti-vaccination organizations actually advocated for people with autism, they’d let people with autism advocate for themselves. Because people with autism do self-advocate, and they take umbrage with groups like Autism Speaks and Age of Autism. People on the autism spectrum often have lots to say about the agendas of these groups and the resources that are taken from the those who actually need them. From the Autistic Self Advocacy Network: “While no link exists between autism and vaccines, of greater concern is the willingness of those who promote this theory to suggest that exposing children to deadly diseases would be a better outcome than an autistic child. Vaccinations do not cause autism – but the use of autism as a means of scaring parents from safeguarding their children from life-threatening illness demonstrates the depths of prejudice and fear that still surrounds our disability. Autism is not caused by vaccines – and Autistic Americans deserve better than a political rhetoric that suggests that we would be better off dead than disabled.”

Folks on the spectrum sometimes have lots to say about the toxic living conditions of their childhoods, too. About neglect and abuse and trauma. It’s important to keep in mind that the behavioral issues tied to autism are also the behavioral conditions often tied to things like PTSD and ADHD, both of which relate to life events/patterns. As a teacher, I’ve learned a lot about the links between developmental/behavioral problems and the (dis)ability of parents to respond to their children based on their children’s needs (rather than primarily on the parent’s own traumas). For young children, especially with any kind of special need (a very broad term), simply navigating through a world that’s inflexible with their needs can be traumatic. Our environmental conditions can even effect how our genes are expressed over time (literally, sometimes time IS the trigger for gene expression). Everything is born out of its environment—out of our food, our water, our sense of security, our parents’ genes, everything. 

Which brings me to one of the biggest stories in the vaccination debate: that of Hannah Poling. I bring this up because this is the one I was most familiar with, and the one I empathized with the most--particularly because there was a court case related to it. When she was 19 months old, she received 5 vaccines, and two days later her parents reported new behavior—lethargy, irritation, and fever. Months later, she was diagnosed with mitochondrial enzyme deficit (MED), which means the conditions she displayed were also contained within the autism spectrum. Her parents successfully sued for compensation under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Plan, a program started by the federal government to address public concerns of vaccine safety in light of the noise raised by anti-vaccination groups in the 80s. However, MED is an autosomal recessive disease, which means both of Hannah’s parents had to carry the gene in order for her to get it. She already had it, and either it hadn’t expressed itself yet, or her parents hadn’t noticed (or reported) the symptoms so early in her development. Indeed, the Poling case only claimed that her vaccines exacerbated her symptoms, but this raises 4 important points: 1) There’s no evidence that this is possible, and not because “no one’s looked.” 2) We should really think critically about whether or not we should withhold treatment for diseases like smallbox and whooping cough under the unfounded notion that some vaccines may exacerbate existing conditions, 3) under-reported is the fact that Hannah presented other immunological challenges prior to her vaccinations,  and 4) despite a popular claim made by anti-vaccination groups, there’s actually no evidence that multiple simultaneous vaccines can overwhelm an immune system.

That last one was really important to me, because I had read years ago that a child’s immune system was potentially too underdeveloped to handle so many vaccinations. The notion seemed logical enough, and I felt awful for parents who had these real fears. But it turns out, the immune system of an infant has the potential capacity to respond to thousands of vaccines simultaneously. It has to! Babies are RAW, lol. And it turns out, medical researchers can be pretty damn thorough, so they knew this well before they were delivering grouped vaccines to toddlers. And while the number of vaccines given to children has increased, they contain even fewer antigens than they used to thanks to medical improvements.

But I have another name. Andrew Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in Britain and came to America, where he became a prominent anti-vaccination activist. He published findings in Britain in the mid 90s that claimed that measles (and “therefore” its vaccine) caused Crohn's disease, but peer research failed to repeat his findings and his claims were subsequently debunked. After shifting his focus to the measles vaccine and autism, he wound up leaving the school of medicine where he worked (under “mutual agreement” at the school's request), because he repeatedly refused to re-attempt the research which had formed the basis of his initial claims. Andrew moved to America to continue pushing his theory that measles and its vaccine caused autism, despite already admitting that it was "not proved." He's barred from practicing medicine in the UK and is not licensed in the US.

I bring up Wakefield because the fuss he raised lead scientists and doctors to look into these claims. It makes sense for these potential issues to matter to the medical community, after all. All resulting work refuted any connections between autism and these vaccines. Luckily, this work also looked into some other claims about vaccines, too, such as the concern that mercury in vaccines could cause autism or other conditions. Ethylmercury is used in the preservative thimerosal, which prevents bacterial growth in vaccines. Methylmercury (the mercury found in fish) can be highly toxic to people, while ethylmercury clears more quickly from the body--so quickly that the small quantities used in vaccines don't have time to build up or cause any problems, other than the possibility of a red rash at the injection site (and the fact that, inevitably, some people are allergic to it). However, given the rising concern in the late 90's and gradual improvements in medical science, the use of ethylmercury in vaccines was reduced in 2001, and for childhood vaccines was completely eliminated. Despite this, it remains a popular concern.

There are so many other people and cases and theories, but these seemed to be the big ones.

...But there’s one more variable I need to dissect: The general focus on eradicating autism, as opposed to supporting the autistic. Parents and their supporters are trying to find the right thing to do. It’s their earnest desire to overcome the problems they’ve been led to see, and their energy is being funneled away from them and used against all our best interests. (Perhaps it’s worth considering, too, where everyone else’s energy is being funneled these days…) For me, this is the variable that’s hardest to talk about, because it asks people to look at their own shadows with acceptance and forgiveness.

The development/behaviors of people on the spectrum aren’t necessarily “wrong,” but we’re subtly and explicitly told to see them this way. Many of these behaviors/developments are very natural responses to toxic/inhumane social and environmental conditions and expectations (some of them are even specifically considered evolutionary pros, traits that help people survive these environs), albeit at times difficult to interact with and other times self-destructive. Everything has extremes. And between environments and genetics, parents aren’t always able to recognize the myriad little things that might contribute to developmental and/or behavioral issues. Since so many of these things lie on the autistic spectrum, “autism” becomes a target in and of itself. Parents may see their children as victims of a toxic world, and they may see themselves as strong shoulders under (secretly) unwanted circumstances. Many parents also feel that “no good parent would ever feel that way, so I don’t either.” This kind of inner conflict is incredibly difficult for people to deal with, but the truth is, conflicting thoughts and emotions are perfectly normal. Emotions are valid and thoughts don’t define us. Both are fleeting. Feeling like we’re not “allowed” to feel conflicted makes us feel guilty/bitter/both. (Tested by God” and “blessed by God” have the same ring, sometimes.)

Some parents also experience guilt/bitterness over the possibility of being part of the environmental/genetic (especially genetic) circumstances that contributed to a child’s disorders. Or, guilt over having been unable to bring them into an accepting or supportive society. Plus the guilt over being sometimes unhappy with the resulting circumstances of one’s life. Guilt. Frustration. Bitterness. Sour grapes. Saving someone else from this “burden” and future children from sharing in this “unacceptable” situation becomes a righteous cause. Furthermore, in finding the person/thing to blame, they’d finally be allowed to express all that despair and frustration. The emotional attachment and roiling undercurrent is very attractive to manipulative individuals. I see it happen a lot, and I see people with autism talking about it. My heart truly aches for everyone going through this. But none of this helps the person on the spectrum. Nor does it help the well-meaning parent.

Maybe parents and supporters wouldn’t be so desperate about and fearful of autism (and vaccines) if having a child with special needs wasn’t so isolating. Maybe if our communities, institutions, and organizations focused on empowering and supporting the vulnerable, on creating equity where ever possible, autism wouldn’t be so overwhelming and wouldn’t even be as common. Maybe if we responded to people on the autism spectrum (and everyone else) as they are, instead of how we want/expect them to be, then the whole situation would change entirely.

In my research and personal interactions, the common thread among those who question the overall value and trustworthiness of vaccines is that of a “dark world” full of “bad people.” Things are so dark, apparently, that the global medical and scientific community is less trustworthy than the few who disagree with it on this particular issue. Is it any wonder? Our culture is exploitative and manipulative, and lays out a set of requirements for human value that even the neurotypical struggle to meet. We all hurt! We’re all wary! And of course we are!

But it turns out, much of the darkness we see in the world relates to what we’re looking for (or at the very least, what we’re trained to look for). In an age of endless, algorithmically-driven “information,” it’s very difficult for many folks to navigate, discern, and prioritize--especially when it’s a personal issue, making it easy to exploit our emotions. The machine keeps us fearful and hungry and separate, but perhaps we shouldn’t despair over that. After all, the active effort to keep us fearful and separate reflects our underlying nature to work together, to connect, and to grow.

Researching all this was complicated. Lots dead-ends, seemingly believable stories from once-trusted professionals, self-referential content, emotionally manipulative content, questionable authorities (authority is always questionable), and a shit-ton of complicated medical research. This is the amount of research it took for me to pick through everything. It’s no joke.

And that brings me back to the present. To the stuff happening right now. Areas surrounding anti-vaccination communities are seeing a drastic rise in diseases that had been long gone before the anti-vaccination craze. Not everyone is equally susceptible to pathogens, and our willingness to receive imperfect but well-researched vaccines is about everyone else in all communities, not just ourselves. No matter what anyone chooses to believe about the “source” of COVID-19, it’s disabling and deadly and highly contagious, and just because it may not be highly visible in someone’s community doesn’t mean it’s not ravaging other communities. As for uncertainty over the Coronavirus being “real,” if a person is only willing to believe resources calling for them to be angry and afraid and suspicious of everyone else, it seems to me that one would have to investigate their own worldview, along with one’s view of themselves and their own shadows. If one sees the world as inherently bad and humans as inherently fucked, that relates to how one feels about oneself and an incomplete notion of the lives of other people. That is the perspective of a traumatized person. Self isolation is deadly, so we ought to be wary of things that seek to isolate us. These self-isolating notions are fed back to us by the algorithms guiding our internet activity, keeping our behaviors predictable and controllable. We keep clicking and returning, fed by a sense of tragic righteousness, by the same programs designed to keep people coming back to slot machines. The internet is not a neutral entity because it functions in a capitalist, undemocratic state. It must be used carefully. The book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff highlights the nature of these algorithms and the systems which use them. But more importantly, it also highlights the things about humans that make us lovable and forgivable. The things that make it possible to manipulate us in the first place. There’s a lot of wild shit going on, but it’s not happening because “humans are bad.” It’s happening because we live in an age forcibly ruled by the most self destructive culture/ideology on the planet. It’s the ideas, not the species. That means we have work to do. Inner work.

Sources:

https://speakingofresearch.com/2019/04/24/celebrating-world-vaccination-week-pt-3-the-post-wakefield-fallout/

https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2020/05/who-is-judy-mikovits-and-what-does-she-have-to-do-with-anthony-fauci-and-the-coronavirus.html

https://vaxopedia.org/2018/12/29/are-vaccines-contaminated-with-retroviruses/

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp0802904

https://autisticadvocacy.org/2015/09/asan-statement-on-gop-primary-debate-comments-on-autism-and-vaccination/

https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/First-Hand-Perspectives-on-Behavioral-Interventions-for-Autistic-People-and-People-with-other-Developmental-Disabilities.pdf

https://sciencing.com/differentiating-rna-dna-viruses-4853.html

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/a-fake-pandemic-antivaxxers-are-spreading-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/

https://www.thechildren.com/health-info/conditions-and-illnesses/q-vaccine-safer-getting-real-disease

Also so much Wikipedia.

[wrongfullythinking]

Science and Data and Freedoms

There are millions of these rants around, so you are under no need to read mine.  In fact, what I am about to say here should not be taken as anything more than one person’s opinion.  OPINION.  I have several qualifications (I will get to those in a second), but still, this blog is primarily concerned with, as the title suggest, wrong thought.  And yes, thoughts can be flat-out wrong, but that’s another topic for another time, yes?  I primarily abandoned this blog when tumblr decided to advocate for censorship, and well, if you don’t think that was very bad thinking, then I can’t help you and you certainly should stop reading now.  But mostly, I find myself needing a little bit of a platform to rant, so here it is.  This is not for you.  This is for me.  But maybe, if you read it, and you learn something, then it was a little bit more than that, and that’s entirely unnecessary but I’ll be fine with it.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep it a secret.

My qualifications 1) I have a Ph.D. from a major research institution in America.  What that means, most importantly, is actual training in how to read and understand academic writing. 2) I teach statistics, among other things, and I teach in a public health college at another major research institution in America. 3) I work with epidemiologists, though I don’t claim that title myself (I describe myself a psychometrician with an expertise in educational measurement), and I am currently working on several projects using epidemiological methods. 4) A portion of my work in educational measurement focuses on critical thinking, particularly the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Premises So, let’s organize this in a logical manner.  To do so, we generally start with a series of premises.  Here are some of mine. 1) Most people are afraid of dying. 2) The fear of dying plays some part in how people live their lives. 3) People are willing to make some tradeoffs between Safety and Liberty. 4) There is an inverse relationship between Safety and Liberty.  The more liberty, the less safety.  This is only a unidirectional inverse relationship (as liberty ascends, safety decreases), and NOT true in the opposite direction (as safety ascends, liberty must decrease).  This is VERY IMPORTANT. 5) People are poor estimators of their own odds of death, and especially how certain events (say, getting drunk at a party or smoking a hallucinogenic drug or driving recklessly) contribute to their risk of death. 6) There is much unknown about the “novel coronavirus” or SARS-COV_2 or Covid-19 (use whatever term you are comfortable with, the distinction between all of these is arbitrary and unimportant... the root of communication is exchange of messaging between two parties, and all these terms work fine in most cases, since we’re hardly in a lab where it is very important to separate out disease, virus, symptoms, and classifications). 7) Action has been taken by governments and individuals exceeding their statutory authorities. 8) Some of the actions taken by governments and individuals makes no difference in the ability of people to live disease-free, but does have other impacts. 9) The “other impacts” in Premise 8 can directly cause loss of life, as well as other ramifications (lack of social mobility, inability to secure safe food supplies, increase in spousal/partner/child abuse, lack of ability to achieve an education, etc.) that have social and personal consequences for potentially many years, if not generations.  This is the most controversial premise, because it has a tendency to operate on some slippery-slope type logic, which is exactly what I am going to rant against in a second.  Be wary of this one!  But it is important too.

Statistical Problem #1: Never Believe a Point Estimate If you take (my) Stats101 class, and hopefully anybody else’s similar course, one thing that should be a key takeaway is “NEVER BELIEVE A POINT ESTIMATE.”  That’s huge.  Never.  Believe.  A.  Point.  Estimate.

So, for the people who haven’t had a Stats class recently, what is a point estimate?

When you see something like “an estimated 2.2 million Americans will die from the coronavirus if action is not taken,” that “2.2 million” is a point estimate.  It is a single point.  And point estimates are a hallmark of bad reporting of often bad science.  In statistics, any time we make an estimate, we generate a confidence interval: that is, the range around which we believe that estimate to be actually correct.  This is because we don’t measure everybody; we measure a small sample, and use math to make estimates.  Since we didn’t measure everybody, there is some degree of uncertainty, and so we calculate a range that we think is very likely to contain the actual number.  This is called a confidence interval.  The wider the confidence interval, the LESS confident you are.  The narrower the confidence interval, the more confident you are.

An example.  The New York Yankees hit 306 home runs last year, and had 5561 at-bats over 162 games, meaning they hit a home run about once every 20 at-bats.  Let’s say I believe the season will be cut in half (so, 81 games instead of 162).  So, I want to know how many home runs the Yankees will hit in this shortened season.  Let’s work through several examples.

The worst example (okay, not actually the absolute worst, because I could just guess, but pretty bad). In half the games, the Yankees will hit half the home runs.  So that’s 306/2, so that’s 153.

Here’s another BAD example, but it does look legit, doesn’t it? Half of 162 is 81.  So in half the games, they will have half the at-bats, so that’s 2780.5 at-bats.  They hit a home run previously in 5.5026% of their at-bats, and 5.5062% of 2780.5 is 153.  The Yankees will hit 153 home runs next year.

A much better example The Yankees averaged 1.8888 home runs a game (306 / 162) last season.  If we take the low-end of 1.5 home runs per game (or three home runs every two games), and a high end of 2.25 home runs per game (or 9 home runs every 4 games), we expect the Yankees to hit between 121.5 and 182.25 home runs in the shortened 81 game season.

Is there a perfect example? No.  This is a great question.  Introductory statistics students will start to add all sorts of great considerations to this question: in the shortened season, won’t pitchers have less time to get warmed up, so home runs will go up?  But the same is true for batters, so home runs might go down?  If the shortened season starts later, and is played in more colder weather, are there fewer home runs?  How did the Yankees roster change?  Are they playing against more fly-ball or ground-ball pitchers?  Who changed in the rotations of the teams they will play most?  Will the rule change about facing three batters or the end of an inning increase the amount of home runs?  What about conditioning of athletes who are homebound?  No statistical estimate can take into account all factors.  And we don’t try to.  We just play the games and then call it history. So, what are the problems with the “much better example” besides not adding in all those other things? There is nothing wrong with it, it is just not very precise.  A range between 121.5 and 182.25 is more than 60, which is basically half of the low-end.  We could be like, 50% wrong from our low end and still be in the range!  That’s not very precise!

So, what does this have to do with the current issues? Mostly, I want you to very carefully consider any number you hear without a confidence interval.  If you hear a number like “2.2 million,” realize that without a stated confidence interval, the interval could be ANYTHING.  Something like, oh, I don’t know... 2.199 million.  Yep.  In other words, the only thing you could take away from that number is “anywhere between 1 person and 5 million people.  And how much are you willing to give up for that particular risk?

Statistical Problem #2: Confidence Intervals WITHIN models So, to this point, hopefully I’ve described all the things that can go wrong if you don’t use a confidence interval in your ANSWER.  But what about in the MODEL (or the prediction) itself?  Let’s say that, in the above example, we wanted to know how many home runs the Yankees will hit, and we know that MLB will shorten the season.  But we don’t know by how much.

So, let’s say that I estimate the season will be between 60 and 100 games.  That’s a pretty big margin.  Using my earlier estimates, now my confidence interval expands again: 1.5 x 60 for the low end is only 90 home runs, and 2.25 x 100 is 225 home runs!  Now my range is [60:225].  That is VERY imprecise!

The important part is that this problem compounds each time we don’t know something.  You get a wider and wider range, the less you know.  So, the more you want to put into a formula, the more you need to know... and the less you know, the wider your estimate.

Statistical Problem #3: The Missing Denominator None of the math here is particularly difficult, especially with the aid of computers and a bit of training.  So, if somebody is presenting it to you like it is super complex, think of them like a stage magician: distract, watch the glitter, and you will never notice my hand pulling the pigeon out of my coat pocket and putting it into my hat.

So, what have models been hiding from you?

The big missing piece is the denominator, or in this case, “how many people have the virus.”  That’s a VERY important number.  We need several things to build an epidemiological model, and without even an estimate of “how many people have it,” then all the rest of this is pretty much pointless.  This is because “how many people have it” is needed for at least the following: 1) Transmission Rate 2) Infection Rate 3) Fatality Rate

Luckily... we’re actually getting close to having that number!  Or at least, a confidence interval for that number.

Understanding recent data

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf

Basically, that paper says that in one county with a lot of cases, they estimate there are somewhere between 2.49% and 4.16% of the population infected, and they wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers are between 1.80% and 5.70%.  There are about 1.93 MILLION people in Santa Clara county.  1,930,000, and between 2.49 and 4.16 are ALREADY infected. So, let’s math that out, and I’m using their narrower confidence interval here.

Low End (2.49%): 48057 already infected High End (4.16): 80288 already infected.

So, now we have an actual denominator!  Or at least, RANGES of one.  They’re pretty confident the actual number is somewhere between those.

The date is important here.  The data here is April 1.  That range (48000-80000) the number of infected people as of April 1.  As of April 17th (over two weeks later), Santa Clara had reported 73 deaths.  63 of those had one comorbidity, and only 5 had no comorbidities.  Here’s the source.

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx

So, what’s the fatality rate?

LOW pop prev: No comorbidities: 5 / 48000 = .0001041666. LOW: One or no comorbidities: 68 / 48000 = .00141666 HIGH pop prev: No comorbidities: 5 / 80200 = .000062344 HIGH: One or no comorbidities: 68 / 80200 = .00084788

We’ll go broad here, and assume one comorbidity.  Hey, a lot of us have something that is an issue, right?  But let’s apply those number to the American Population of approximately 330,000,000 people.

LOW (zero or one comorbidity) pop prev: 330mil * .00141666 = 467,497.8 HIGH (zero or one comorbidity) pop prev: 330mil * .00084788 = 279,800.4

There’s your number.  WOW, you say!  Wow!  A QUARTER TO HALF A MILLION PEOPLE MIGHT DIE!  That seems shocking!

It is, super shocking.  Remember, that’s the zero-case scenario.  The scenario where we do nothing.  Worst-case.  No vaccine, no medication, no treatment, no social distancing, nada.

Oh, let’s go ahead and go over some other numbers.  Not scenarios, actual data.

Motor Vehicle Deaths (2018): 36,560 Medical Error Deaths (2011): Between 210,000 and 400,000 https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/09000/A_New,_Evidence_based_Estimate_of_Patient_Harms.2.aspx Accidents (2017): 169,936 Diabetes (2017): 83,564 Influenza/Pneumonia (2017): 55,672 Suicide/Self-harm complications: 47,173 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

((Note, because somebody will inevitably ask: The “Death by Guns” rate is a tough one to count, because the majority of gun deaths are also suicides.  The Gun Homicide+Accident fatality rate is likely between about 10,000 and 13,000 per year (about a third of the car accident fatality rate).  If you’re interested in that number, be sure to look at the data split by category, or if you are interpreting suicides with guns in your gun death count, just be explicit about it, don’t be a pigeon-holding magician.))

Interpretation: Doing nothing at all, we would expect Covid to jump the rates of Influenza/Pneumonia deaths from 7th to 3rd in America, with somewhere between about 340,000 and 530,000 deaths.  I arrive at that number by adding 60,000 to the estimates above, for other non-Covid related Flu/Influenza deaths.  That would put Influenza/Pneumonia above the estimates of death due to medical errors, and well behind the two leading causes of death in the US (CVD and Cancer).  This is provided that there is no emergent medical option.

So, what’s the downside?  Why not do all these drastic things (like shelter-in-place orders and be forced to shut down your business) if it prevents between 1/4 and 1/2 of a million deaths? That’s a good question!  The point here is that orders have consequences, and most of them are unknown at the time of the order.  For example, let’s take a pretty simple policy: requiring every driver to car insurance.  Seems like a fundamental thing, right?  Well, now you’ve also driven the price of car ownership up.  More rural areas (which are often poorer) now have an additional cost burden, that is not shared by people who live in major cities with large public transportation networks.  And you’ve created a secondary market (insurance agents) who now have incentives to raise prices, and huge potential for collusion.  And what about people who defy that order?  Well, that’s tricky-- in some places there are additional policies for covering wrecks involving uninsured drivers, and in those places, car insurance costs more.  So you’re paying more, out of your pocket, because somebody else didn’t follow a policy.  And that means you have less money to go shopping or go out to eat, which means fewer people at stores have jobs.  All of this ties together.

So, what are the unintentional consequences of the shelter-in-place and business-shuttering orders?  The most obvious ones are the losses of income, including jobs, and the 10 million accompanying jobless claims.  But is that such a big problem?  Think about what is happening in homes without jobs... and remember, you are still legally required to pay car insurance.  So that’s the direct one.

But there are multitudes of indirect ones.  For example, this is not an academic article, but...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/03/21/coronavirus-pandemic-could-become-child-abuse-pandemic-experts-warn/2892923001/

And remember, a lot of children who are subject of abuse are from low-income families.  And what did they normally get?  Free and reduced-price lunch at schools.  Now, they aren’t getting those.  Sure, in a few places here and there, some schools are delivering similar meals.  But the vast, vast majority of elementary and high-school aged students on free/reduced lunches are not getting them.  So that leaves parents (or caretakers) to pick up the burden.  Those same parents and caretakers who are filing the 10 million unemployment claims.  Uh-oh.  Sounds stressful.

Guess what stress does to people?  It makes them sick.  And you know what happens when you get an ulcer?  Hopefully not much, but bad ones can end you up in a hospital.  Where there are many procedures, but most of them minor.  Unfortunately, hospitals right now are being forbidden from doing elective surgeries.  And elective surgeries helped pay for other services, like necessary surgeries and emergency care.  So, the ER is literally understaffed, even in regions where there are no COVID patients, because the state has forbidden the tummy tucks that pay the salaries of ER nurses.

You see the tumble here?  This is where I cautioned earlier about the slippery slope argument, and it is an absolutely valid critique of what I’m putting here.  But we’ve gone past speculation territory and are now in data territory.  And (again, work in health care education), I know some people who are starting to see these effects.  One of the faculty at my school (teaches our Law course) is a lawyer for a rural hospital service.  He has watched them lay off or furlough over 60% of workers.  And they have had... wait for it... 0 covid cases.  The few that were suspected, they flew down to a much larger hospital.  At high cost, because they can’t charge for COVID services.

Meanwhile, you’re talking a rural system that was one of the top employers in four different counties.  Laying off or furloughing 60% of workers.  The guy was so upset telling me about this that he almost cried, especially because he knew the families of so many of the people his board had just let go.

Any caveats to add? The big caveat that I place on the interpretation here (basically, that’s we’ve VASTLY oversold the risk of this thing) is that we don’t know about secondary infections.  If you can get infected twice, and that second infection is harmful or make you able to spread the disease to others who are then harmed, then all these numbers are too low. Bottom-line it for me, WT. Fear leads to the dark side, where you have no freedoms.  Don’t give up things because you were scared and because somebody showed you a point of data that you should not believe.

[rebweicht]

Books: 2019

Another year, another reading summary. See previous lists in the Books tag. 

Summary

Total: 42. Down from the two previous years.

Gender ratio: 54% female authors. 

Fiction-non fiction ratio: 52% fiction.

Format: This year for the first time I also counted how I’ve consumed books and I came to 14 audiobooks, 6 reads on my Kindle, and 22 paper-based reads.

Language: I’ve only read books in English (38) and German (4) this year.

What I’ve read: It’s been a year of steady authors. I seem to have done a thing where I read one good book by an author (e.g. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, George Eliot, Elisabeth Gaskell) and then went on to read a lot more of the same author. Not always with success. The notable exception being Amor Towels, whom I didn’t dare read a second book by because A Gentleman in Moscow was absolutely one of the best books this year and I didn’t dare hoping he’d be so good with words a second time round. I’ve tried a sample chapter of Rules of Civility though and it’s also not bad, so that’ll come soon. In terms of non-fiction, Cal Newport’s Deep Work stands out. 

Categories: My ‘1 Russian per year’ is still going strong - in fact, I read a classic (Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons) and a contemporary Russian (Sorokin) this year and I’ll go and read more Sorokin in 2020 too. However, my idea to read one biography of a (science-y) woman didn’t go beyond March in the end. I just didn’t manage to pick up on buying the books. Those that I did read were quite enjoyable though (e.g. Marie Curie - A Life). The philosophy short bios alas also came to an end less than half-way through the year because I was busy and then didn’t have access to the library for the second half of the year anymore. Will continue that in 2020 though - I had the full list of Ancient Greek philosophers lined up.

What I’m reading: I’ve got a backlog of 8 reads including some stories that I’ve been dragging with me for months (Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red warranting a particular shout-out). 

The shortlist

Amor Towels: A Gentleman in Moscow

Cal Newport: Deep Work; Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World 

Kate Evans: Red Rosa

The longlist

Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale

Adam Kay: This is Going to Hurt

Marie Le Conte: Haven’t You Heard…? - A Guide to Westminster Gossip and Why Mischief Gets Things Done

Sally Rooney: Conversations with Friends

Raj Kumar: The Business of Changing the World - How Billionaires, Tech Disrupters, and Social Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Aid Industry 

Mariana Mazzucato: The Entrepreneurial State - Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

Stephen Hawking: Brief Answers to the Big Questions 

Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons

George Eliot: Middlemarch

Françoise Giroud: Marie Curie - A Life

Stephen Fry: Heroes

[rachnasagargrp]

Buy Now: https://bit.ly/3vGSRZW

[parkinsonismblr-blog]

child transing = conversion therapy

The New Conversion Therapy: How Homophobic Quackery Is Targeting Children.

I’m serious: growing up to be homosexual, not transsexual is the most likely outcome in children and adolescents with GID. This study “A follow-up study of girls with gender identity disorder.” found:

““This study provided information on the natural histories of 25 girls with gender identity disorder (GID). Standardized assessment data in childhood (mean age, 8.88 years; range, 3–12 years) and at follow-up (mean age, 23.24 years; range, 15–36 years) were used to evaluate gender identity and sexual orientation. At the assessment in childhood, 60% of the girls met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for GID, and 40% were subthreshold for the diagnosis. At follow-up, 3 participants (12%) were judged to have GID or gender dysphoria. Regarding sexual orientation, 8 participants (32%) were classified as bisexual/homosexual in fantasy, and 6 (24%) were classified as bisexual/homosexual in behavior. The remaining participants were classified as either heterosexual or asexual. The rates of GID persistence and bisexual/homosexual sexual orientation were substantially higher than base rates in the general female population derived from epidemiological or survey studies. There was some evidence of a “dosage” effect, with girls who were more cross-sex typed in their childhood behavior more likely to be gender dysphoric at follow-up and more likely to have been classified as bisexual/homosexual in behavior (but not in fantasy).”

Nearly half of the girls who presented with GID turned out to be homosexual.

Here is some more information on how many of them turned out gay, which included two of the still gender dysphoric patients:

39 participants (60%) were classified as exclusively heterosexual, 8 (32%) were classified as bisexual/homosexual, and the remaining 2 (8%) were classified as having no sexual fantasies. Of the 3 participants classified as gender dysphoric, 2 were exclusively homosexual in fantasy (i.e., sexually attracted to members of their own birth sex). The other gender dysphoric participant reported no sexual fantasies and described herself as being “dead sexually.” (Of the 4 participants with a DSD, 3 were classified as exclusively heterosexual in fantasy, and 1 reported no sexual fantasies; 2 were classified as exclusively heterosexual in behavior, and 2 reported no sexual behavior.)”

I mean, how likely is it that all these young women who had GID would turn out gay?

“ Odds ratios were calculated for bisexual/homosexual sexual orientation in fantasy and behavior using prevalence estimates from several major survey studies of sexual orientation in adolescent girls and young women (Dickson, Paul, & Herbison, 2003; Fergusson, Horwood, Ridder, & Beautrais, 2005; McCabe, Hughes, Bostwick, & Boyd, 2005; Narring, Stronski, & Michaud, 2003; Remafedi, Resnick, Blum, & Harris, 1992; Russell & Seif, 2002). From these studies, base rates for bisexual/homosexual sexual orientation in fantasy and behavior were estimated to range from 2.0% to 5.0% in the female general population. The odds of reporting bisexual/homosexual sexual orientation in fantasy in the present sample was 8.9–23.1 times higher, and the odds of reporting bisexual/homosexual sexual orientation in behavior in the present sample was 6.0–15.5 times higher than it is in women in the general population.”

Well, that’s indicative of a link between childhood gender dysphoria and homosexuality. And the study agrees with me:

To our knowledge, the results of the present study represent the first prospective data set that shows that girlhood cross-gender identification is associated with a relatively high rate of bisexual/ homosexual sexual orientation in adolescence and adulthood. Using survey data on sexual orientation in young women as a comparative metric, we estimated that the odds of reporting a bisexual/ homosexual sexual orientation in fantasy was 8.9–23.1 times higher in the present sample and that the odds of reporting a bisexual/homosexual sexual orientation in behavior was 6.7–15.5 times higher.”

Childhood gender non-conformity is also often predictive of a homosexual or bisexual sexual orientation in adulthood. That’s not just me saying that — that’s decades of science. The 1995 Zucker and Bailey studied mentioned in this paper, “Childhood Sex-Typed Behavior and Sexual Orientation: A Conceptual Analysis and Quantitative Review” ,reviewed forty-one studies on both homosexual and heterosexual recollections of gender-non conforming behavior in childhood. While data on women was somewhat lacking, it found an overwhelming amount of evidence that homosexuals recall substantially more childhood cross-sex typed behavior — gender non-conformity in childhood or even GID isn’t predictive of transsexualism in adulthood, it’s predictive of homosexuality in adulthood — and that doesn’t require a lifelong medication regiment.

“This article reviewed research examining the association between childhood sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation. Prospective studies suggest that childhood cross-sex-typed behavior is strongly predictive of adult homosexual orientation for men; analogous studies for women have not been performed. Though methodologically more problematic, retrospective studies are useful in determining how many homosexual individuals displayed cross-sex behavior in childhood. The relatively large body of retrospective studies comparing childhood sex-typed behavior in homosexual and heterosexual men and women was reviewed quantitatively. Effect sizes were large for both men and women, with men’s significantly larger. Future research should elaborate the causes of the association between childhood sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation and identify correlates of within-orientation differences in childhood sex-typed behavior.”

The evidence all agrees: ‘cross-gender behavior’ is strongly predicative of being a flaming homosexual of either sex. Not transsexualism. Unlike retrospective studies, which rely on adult recall of childhood, prospective studies linking childhood gender non-conformity often used children who met the diagnostic criteria of gender dysphoria — and many of those children grew up to be gay or lesbian. They were ‘truly trans’ — and then they grew out of it and instead became homosexuals.

It even says this in the conclusion:

Homosexual individuals recall substantially more childhood cross-sex-typed behavior than do heterosexuals of the same sex. Prospective studies have supported these retrospective findings for men; analogous studies for women remain to be done. Future research should focus on the causes of this association, as well as the causes and consequence of within-orientation variation in sex-typed behavior”

Research evidence: Gender-atypical tots more likely to become gay or lesbian | 4thWaveNow

Many of the kids labelled ‘transgender’ would—if left alone—grow up to be lesbian or gay. This observation has been made by many parents, and sometimes their children who desisted or detransitioned, whose stories are gathered on this website. It is also supported by a growing body of scientific research. Developmental Psychology published an important article last year (Li, Kung, and Hines 2017), which 4thWaveNow has previously highlighted.

Just as some women are naturally taller than some men, so some girls prefer more ‘masculine’ activities than some boys do. Such girls were far more likely to turn out as lesbian. That was the case, at least, in this survey of children coming of age in a society that was relatively tolerant of homosexuality—and before transgender identities were ascendant in social media and schools. We can only speculate how the cohort born ten years later would identify. But we must realize that the characteristics that now diagnose a ‘transgender child’ are the same characteristics that increase the chances of a teenager becoming gay or lesbian.

Mum told daughter could be taken into CARE after ‘NHS encouraged her to have sex change’

The school, which has not being named, called social services after Lisa banned her daughter from visiting the NHS clinic where she was receiving counselling and tried to find her another therapist. But Lisa, who says her daughter is a lesbian, only claimed to be transgender after being bullied for being gay.

But Lisa claimed her daughter only wanted to be transgender after being bullied for being gay.She told the Mail on Sunday her daughter came out as transgender at 13 after being bullied for being a lesbian

Homosexual Outcome of Discordant Gender Identity/Role in Childhood: Longitudinal Follow-Up

“Nine of 11 boys with prepubertal discordance of gender identity/role have been maintained in follow-up until young adulthood. All are known to be homosexual or predominantly so”

Early effeminate behavior in boys. Outcome and significance for homosexuality.

“This is a long term follow-up of 55 boys with early effeminate behavior. It was possible to determine the outcome in sexual orientation in 38 of the boys, which included homosexuality or variants of it in 35 (63.6 per cent) of the total of 55 and heterosexuality in three (5.5 per cent)”

“but being gender atypical is different from being trans” is it really though?

Diagnostic criteria for Gender Identity Disorder (from the DSM IV)

A. A strong and persistent cross-gender identification (not merely a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex). In children, the disturbance is manifested by four (or more) of the following:

(1) repeatedly stated desire to be, or insistence that he or she is, the other sex (2) in boys, preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire; in girls, insistence on wearing only stereotypical masculine clothing (3) strong and persistent preferences for cross-sex roles in make-believe play or persistent fantasies of being the other sex (4) intense desire to participate in the stereotypical games and pastimes of the other sex (5) strong preference for playmates of the other sex. In adolescents and adults, the disturbance is manifested by symptoms such as a stated desire to be the other sex, frequent passing as the other sex, desire to live or be treated as the other sex, or the conviction that he or she has the typical feelings and reactions of the other sex.

B. Persistent discomfort with his or her sex or sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex. In children, the disturbance is manifested by any of the following: in boys, assertion that his penis or testes are disgusting or will disappear or assertion that it would be better not to have a penis, or aversion toward rough-and-tumble play and rejection of male stereotypical toys, games, and activities; in girls, rejection of urinating in a sitting position, assertion that she has or will grow a penis, or assertion that she does not want to grow breasts or menstruate, or marked aversion toward normative feminine clothing. In adolescents and adults, the disturbance is manifested by symptoms such as preoccupation with getting rid of primary and secondary sex characteristics (e.g., request for hormones, surgery, or other procedures to physically alter sexual characteristics to simulate the other sex) or belief that he or she was born the wrong sex.

C. The disturbance is not concurrent with a physical intersex condition.

D. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

Psychosexual outcome of gender-dysphoric children.

“At follow-up, nearly all male and female participants in the persistence group reported having a homosexual or bisexual sexual orientation.”

Gender Identity Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence

“Multiple longitudinal studies provide evidence that gender-atypical behavior in childhood often leads to a homosexual orientation in adulthood, but only in 2.5% to 20% of cases to a persistent gender identity disorder (3, 6, 22). Even among children who manifest a major degree of discomfort with their own sex, including an aversion to their own genitalia (GID in the strict sense), only a minority go on to an irreversible development of transsexualism (6).”

So we’ve established that a significant proportion of GNC kids, even those officially diagnosed with GID or GD, outgrow their dysphoria and come out as gay. Childhood transition is a convenient way to avoid this outcome, and not only is it increasingly trendy for parents to turn their kids straight by trading in their sissy boy sons and their tomboy daughters for gender conforming daughters and sons, it is increasingly mandated by the state:

NHS staff being advised to ignore parents’ wishes if children self-declare as different gender, guidance shows

[callmemoprah]

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[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

For years, the estimates of nonfatal gunshot injuries published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have grown increasingly unreliable — in 2017, they were more suspect than ever. But researchers have continued to cite the numbers as authoritative. Last year, a CDC spokesperson defended the data, saying the agency’s experts were “confident that the sampling and estimation methods are appropriate.”

Now the CDC is taking measures to curtail the spread of its most unreliable estimates. The 2016 and 2017 gun injury figures have been hidden on the agency’s public data portal, with a footnote stating “Injury estimate is not shown because it is unstable.” The CDC will hide unstable estimates for all injury types within the next six months, according to a spokesperson. Also, the option to include statistical information about how reliable or unreliable the estimates are is now enabled by default. Until recently, it was disabled by default.

The changes follow reporting by FiveThirtyEight and The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering gun violence in America,1 that highlighted the unreliable estimates.

The CDC’s gun injury estimate was vulnerable to unreliability in part because of how few hospitals are surveyed in the data set that feeds it. When one hospital is replaced by another in the database the CDC uses, the changeover can cause the injury estimate to swing drastically. The CDC now says it is exploring the feasibility of collecting data from more hospitals, which would improve the estimate’s reliability.

An analysis by The Trace and FiveThirtyEight shows just how sensitive the current model is to changes in the sample. There’s no national database dedicated to tracking shooting incidents, so the CDC uses a more general injury database managed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The number of gun injuries treated in each hospital in the database is fed into a statistical model that extrapolates a national estimate. The smaller the number of hospitals in the pool, the larger the effect each one has on the estimate. Over time, hospitals leave the sample for a variety of reasons and are replaced.

The trouble is, the departing hospital and its replacement may treat very different numbers of injuries. From at least 2000 to 2010, a hospital labeled Primary Sampling Unit 41 submitted data to the CPSC’s panel. Raw numbers published by the CDC and CPSC show that this hospital treated a very small number of gunshot injuries: fewer than 10 each year from 2005 to 2010, and just 20 total over that six-year span. When this hospital dropped out of the database in 2010, it was replaced halfway through 2012 with a different one that treated a dramatically larger number of gun wounds: 793 during its first full year in the dataset.2

Using methods developed in a 2017 paper that demonstrated the effect of hospital replacements in a larger but similar database, we analyzed data from the CDC and CPSC to measure the impact of this one substitution. The new hospital added over 22,000 nonfatal gun injuries to the 2015 national estimate — more than 100 times greater than the most ever contributed by its predecessor.3 This hospital — one of the 60 or so used in the sample — accounts for over one quarter of the total estimated gunshot injuries that year, which is the most recent data available.

When making a substitution in the database, the CPSC attempts to match the replacement hospital to the original based on some characteristics, such as its geographic location and size. But according to Guohua Li, editor-in-chief of the medical journal Injury Epidemiology and founding director of Columbia University’s Center for Injury Science and Prevention, the CDC’s methodology doesn’t take into account factors like the volume of gun injuries treated, which leaves the estimate vulnerable to dramatic jumps like this one. He says the quickest way to address the problem would be to adjust the methodology to account for the larger volume of gun injuries.

The CDC acknowledges that hospitals that have recently been added to the system have been adding more gunshot injuries to the national estimate than the hospitals they replaced. “The influence of a gradually changing roster of participating hospitals does not translate to poor data quality,” the spokesperson from the CDC said in an email, “but rather reflects the varying characteristics of these hospitals.”

Other gun injury estimates are less susceptible to the distortions that hospital selection can introduce. The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, another database under the Department of Health and Human Services, uses data from more than 950 hospitals to create its own gun injury estimate — far more than the CDC. Among multiple sources of national gun injury data that The Trace and FiveThirtyEight reviewed last year, the CDC’s was the only data set that consistently showed an increase in gunshots from year to year — an indicator that its estimates are out of step with other reliable data sources.

In May, the CDC’s leader acknowledged that the numbers needed to be fixed. Responding to an inquiry by 11 senators, CDC Director Robert Redfield wrote in a letter that the agency intends to “improve the precision and accuracy of [its] non-fatal firearm injury estimates.”

One solution would be to add more hospitals to the sample. “By expanding the roster of participating hospitals,” Redfield wrote, “the influence of any one hospital should be reduced and more stable estimates should be attainable.”

The CDC and CPSC are currently in the process of evaluating the system that is generating the national injury estimate, along with whether it needs to be expanded and how much it would cost to do so.

Sen. Bob Menendez, the New Jersey lawmaker who led the group that wrote the original letter this spring, is continuing to keep pressure on the agency. A new letter signed by him and four other Democratic senators says that “the CDC’s explanation falls short” and pushes Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for clarifications about several of the points in Redfield’s response.

Li is happy the CDC is willing to make a change. “But I wish they had acknowledged the problems identified in a more straightforward way.”

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How to do Revision before CBSE Board Exams 2022?

The CBSE Term 2 Board Exams 2022 for class 10th and 12th will begin on April 26th, 2022. Therefore students are already busy with their revisions and assignments. Revision before exams is an important part of studying because if you are not well prepared for CBSE Board Exams, then obviously you are going to lose a good amount of percentage in your exams.

How to do revision before the CBSE Board exams is a question that a lot of students have. It is challenging for them but it’s not impossible. While revising, our mind becomes a mess of formulas, concepts, and bits of information. The world becomes very fuzzy and it seems like we’re in the battle of our life.

It is not a good idea to revise your subjects the day before the exam. You need a more structured revision system. Revising isn’t easy but there are methods to help make it easier. To help you do some revision before your CBSE Term 2 board exams, we have written this blog.

Here are some tips that can help you revise for the CBSE term 2 board exams:

1. Create a revision timetable and follow it

A timetable is essential for keeping track of what and how much you need to do by the end of the day or week. Working as per a timetable allows you to set clear objectives for each revising session and tick them off as you go. These revision strategies help you stay on track in your study by reducing stress and exam anxiety.

2. Set reasonable study goals

The goal you set in your timetable should be practical so that you can complete it without skipping any other important topics. This way, instead of memorizing the entire syllabus just before the exam, you will be able to revise the entire portion of your studies by the end of the revision. So, plan your preparations in such a manner that you remember the most important points you need to learn.

3. Take shorter breaks

As the board examinations get closer, you'll need to take shorter breaks and concentrate more on studying and practicing for the exams. The breaks are vital, but they must be 'just breaks'– an hour of concentrated revision should be followed by a ten-minute break during which you can walk around, make a phone call, chat with friends, or even catch a look at your favorite show.

4. Take on difficult subjects with a fresh mind

Math, physics, chemistry, and accounting are all subjects that should be studied when the mind is fresh. You can go on to revise the chapters in languages and social sciences when you become tired. Before, returning to the more difficult mathematics topics, a little walk or a cup of coffee will help you freshen up your mind.

5. Prepare notes

Take a little pause every few minutes while studying to make notes of what you've learned. In your notes, you can provide a brief overview of the topic you learned. Preparing notes allows you to assess your memory capacity and determine if what you've learned in the past has been permanently recorded in your mind. It is simpler to recall your notes if you write them down in your own words.

6. Explain the topic to a friend

Explaining a topic as well as its concepts to a friend can make it easier for you to revise. You come across things that are unclear to you or that you are missing when explaining the topic to your friend. Then, at the same time, you can talk to your friend or teacher about those topics and clear up any concerns you have.

7. Practice mock tests

Many students have difficulty knowing everything yet are unable to write on the exam. To tackle this situation, you can start practicing mock tests and sample papers once a week. This also helps you in better time management when taking the actual exam and understanding the format of the board exams.

8. Prepare with confidence

As they progress, students sometimes feel as if they forgot what they learned in previous chapters. Practically, it doesn't happen. Whatever you study thoroughly will be stored in your memory. The question paper will work as a trigger, bringing all of what you've learned back to mind.  So don't be afraid that you'll forget what you've learned. It's a feeling that will pass as your confidence grows.

If you still have any doubts regarding your preparation or how to do revision before board exams, Deepanshi Classes, one of the best Online and Home Tuitions in Munirka, Delhi are here to help you. We provide exam-oriented coaching classes, home tuition, and online classes. We make learning fun, so there's no subject too boring, and no concept too difficult. Join our Crash Course to achieve the academic goals you have set for the upcoming CBSE Board exams. Start your smart and result-oriented preparation with our experienced faculty.

To find out more, visit www.deepanshieducation.com

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Join Best CTET Coaching in Chandigarh- Competition Guru

COMPETITION GURU provide best CTET Coaching in Chandigarh. Competition Guru provide all TET exam coaching such as CTET, HTET, HPTET, HP COMISSION,PSTET,PTET,KVS,NVS,SANIK SCHOOL,MILITARY SCHOOL,ARMY SCHOOL,DSSSB,SSA CHD ,PUNJAB MASTER CADRE,MASTER CADRE,LECTURE CADRE,ETTCADRE COACHING in Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula impart classroom coaching, online live coaching, recorded video batch.

About Competition Guru, Best CTET Coaching in Chandigarh

The syllabus and topics that appear in CTET are as follows: Elementary level – Numeracy and Language skills, Social Studies, Science and Environment, General Knowledge and Child Development & Pedagogy. Middle Level – English, Mathematics, Science & Technology, Social Studies. Senior Secondary Level -Child Development & Pedagogy(Language I), English (Language II), Mathematics (Language III) and Social Studies (Language IV).CTET has a duration of two hours which is divided into two sections: Section A : 100 Questions of one mark each. Last 80 questions carry 50% weightage. Section B : The remaining 20 questions are of one mark each but will be weighted 25%.

Syllabus Structure of CTET Exam

Aspirants need to follow a proper schedule and prepare for all three subjects thoroughly. The syllabus for each subject is as follows: Social Studies: Children should be familiar with fundamental issues related to child development, their rights, duties and responsibilities. They should have an understanding of societal systems and structures such as government, law, economy, political structures and organizations at various levels. Students must have an understanding of India’s history from ancient times to contemporary issues; they must be aware of important historic events like freedom struggle, significant movements such as Quit India Movement. Elementary Mathematics: Teachers should be well-versed with math concepts right from numbers 1-100.

Methodology Used in Teaching at Competition Guru, Best CTET Coaching Institute Chandigarh

The CTET preparation course at Competition Guru is divided into seven modules, each of which contains a section of different topics. Students are provided with a study material for each module which includes updated and relevant information. Students are given assignments that help them become familiar with writing sample tests. A great emphasis is laid on applying skills learned from classroom discussions to solve sample tests and puzzles that are based on real exam papers, thus helping students gain confidence in their ability to perform well on test day. The faculty members at our centre try their best so that every student who enrolls for CTET coaching gets adequate attention and guidance throughout his/her course of preparation. After creating study plans for students and monitoring their progress, teachers update them accordingly and help them fill gaps as needed.

Enroll with Competition Guru for  CTET,HPTET,HP COMISSION,TGT PGT PRT Coaching in Chandigarh, MOHALI and Panchkula. Proud of being the No. 1 CTET Coaching Center in Chandigarh and Mohali, the Competition Guru provides information on the verge of completing the  Central Teacher Eligibility Test. It offers short-term courses with long-term benefits as well as time management and accuracy of hitting 90 plus in the CTET exam. Since its inception the Competition Guru coaching center has given more than 8000 result in CTET entrance. The institute teaches strong concepts and conducts a series of online and offline CTET test , provides free study materials, recorded video lecture. So join Competition Guru for TGT,PGT,PRT Coaching in Chandigarh,Mohali,Panchkula,Ropar,Jalandhar,Moga,Patialia,Amritsar,Shimla,Hamirpur,Solan,Baddi,Pinjore,Kangra,Mandi,Ambala,Pathankot,ludhiana,patialia.

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Get Latest CBSE Sample Paper (MCQ) Social Science for 2021 Term 1 Board Exams- Rachna Sagar

Together with CBSE Sample Paper, Social Science has been designed as per the special scheme of assessment vide CBSE Circular No. 75/2021 for Term 1 ( For 2021 Nov-Dec Examination ) for Class 10 has been prepared as per the latest assessment pattern. 

Together with EAD Social Science Sample Paper (with answers) is a perfect step-by-step approach to ensure one’s readiness for Term 1 board examination. This Sample Paper for Class 10 assists the students with the right practice and approach to the newest MCQ pattern. 

EAD—Easy, Average, Difficult 

The content matter in this EAD 12+1 Social Science Sample Paper Class 10 has been arranged as complete papers with three levels of difficulty—Easy, Average and Difficult (EAD). 

Easy: The first set of papers in this CBSE Sample Paper 2021 is based on 'Easy' concept, thus contains Multiple Choice Questions of simple level, which a student can attempt at the beginning of the preparatory stage. 

Average: The next set based on 'Average' concept (MCQs) is graded to a level of difficulty to test mid-level preparedness for the examination. 

Difficult: The challenging papers allocated to the third set based on 'Difficult' concept are a test of complete preparedness for the examination. 

The EAD sample paper is a self-test drive for the students. 

Key Features 

This Sample Paper includes:

CBSE (2021-2022) Term 1 Sample Paper. 

3 Sample Papers each of Easy, Average & Difficult level. 

2 Pre-Board Papers based on CBSE pattern. 

1 Mock Paper Based On CBSE Pattern with OMR Sheet. 

Includes Assertion Reasoning and Case-Based Objective Type Questions. 

The 4-Step Process 

Step 1 The students are advised to attempt the set of EASY Papers first and obtain at least 80% marks to move onto the next set of papers which is Average. 

Step 2 If the student obtains 75% marks in the AVERAGE category of this EAD 12+1 Social Science Sample Paper Class 10, he/she can switch to the next category, i.e., Difficult. 

Step 3 If 70% marks in DIFFICULT category have been obtained, the students are expected to take the PRE-BOARD PAPERS that are exactly based on the CBSE pattern. 

Step 4 Attempt the MOCK PAPER (given at the end) for a final-go for your board exam preparations. 

Why EAD Latest Sample Papers? 

Learning gets strengthened with practice and its evaluation uplifts the preparation. The answers of the MCQs have been given at the end of each Sample Paper for evaluation purposes. The CBSE Sample Papers for class 10 All Subjects 2021-2022 have been prepared by a panel comprising experienced teachers, tabulators and examiners, who have jointly come up with a student-friendly approach to prepare the students for the forthcoming CBSE Board Examination. Repetitive practice of CBSE Sample Papers for class 10 All Subjects 2021-2022 will surely help the students to make their mark in the CBSE Board Examination. 

Good Luck!