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kingofattolia · 1 year
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*makes a pointless throwaway post*
tumblr: 25k notes. this post will never die. 5 years from now you will still be cursing the fact that you made this post 
*posts an objectively incredible masterwork, the fruit of weeks of labor*
tumblr: 3 likes, 1 pity reblog from your ride or die
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globalinsightblog · 3 months
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Glow Up Your Diagnostics: Navigating the Fluorescent Immunoassay Market 💡🔬
Hey there, science enthusiasts and health warriors! Today, let's shine a spotlight on the captivating world of fluorescent immunoassays – the dazzling stars of modern diagnostics. ✨🌈
So, what exactly are fluorescent immunoassays? Picture this: a cutting-edge technique that harnesses the power of fluorescence to detect and quantify a wide range of biomolecules with unparalleled sensitivity and precision. It's like giving your diagnostic tests a high-definition upgrade! 🌟💉
Now, let's dive into the market trends. The fluorescent immunoassay market is ablaze with innovation and opportunity. With the global demand for rapid and accurate diagnostic solutions on the rise, fluorescent immunoassays have emerged as frontrunners in the race to combat infectious diseases, monitor chronic conditions, and drive advancements in personalized medicine. Talk about a glow-up! 💫💊
But what sets fluorescent immunoassays apart from traditional methods? Strap in, because we're about to take a deep dive into the science! By tagging specific antibodies or antigens with fluorescent molecules, these assays illuminate target molecules like never before. This not only enhances detection sensitivity but also allows for multiplexing – the simultaneous detection of multiple analytes in a single sample. It's like having a whole rainbow of information at your fingertips! 🌈🔍
And let's not forget the versatility of fluorescent immunoassays. From point-of-care diagnostics to high-throughput screening, these assays can be tailored to meet the diverse needs of researchers, clinicians, and industry professionals alike. Whether you're tracking viral outbreaks, monitoring therapeutic drug levels, or unraveling the mysteries of the human immune system, fluorescent immunoassays have got you covered. Talk about a glowing recommendation! 💡🔬
But amidst the brilliance, let's not overlook the challenges. Standardization, assay optimization, and data interpretation remain critical areas for improvement in the fluorescent immunoassay landscape. As the market continues to evolve, collaboration between scientists, clinicians, and industry leaders will be essential to address these challenges and unlock the full potential of fluorescent immunoassays. Together, we can illuminate the path to better diagnostics and improved patient care. 🤝🔆
So there you have it, folks – a luminescent journey through the dynamic and ever-expanding fluorescent immunoassay market. From its inception to its transformative impact on healthcare, fluorescent immunoassays are lighting the way to a brighter, healthier future. Here's to the brilliant minds driving innovation in diagnostics and paving the path for progress. Keep shining bright, stay curious, and let's continue illuminating the world of science together! ✨🔬🌟
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flauntpage · 7 years
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Girls' High School Football Title IX Suit Misses The Point
Should high schools offer girls' tackle football? That's the question at the heart of a Title IX lawsuit filed last week by a group of female youth players in Utah who want their local school districts to offer the sport.
Given what we know about football's effects on the human brain, however, I'm not sure that's the question schools should be asking.
First, the suit. According to Eric Adelson of Yahoo! Sports, it's largely the brainchild of Sam Gordon—whose ball-carrying exploits as a nine-year-old in a boys' tackle football league became a viral video sensation—and her father, Brent, a lawyer who subsequently helped start a four-team girls' recreational tackle league for fifth and sixth-graders in 2015.
Sam is now 14. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she still wants to play. So do many of her teammates. Brent told Yahoo! Sports that when he reached out to the Utah High School Activities Association to ask about creating school-sponsored teams for girls, he was advised to keep building the rec league.
Hence the lawsuit. "I don't want to wait 10-15 years," Brent told Yahoo! Sports. "My daughter would be 30 years old by then. These girls want to play now."
As Adelson reports, the suit's outcome will depend on a number of factors, including whether Gordon and her fellow plaintiffs can show that there's significant community interest in girls' tackle football. And from the standpoint of gender equality, it's hard not to see this case as a potentially positive development. Equal opportunity is a worthy social goal; anything that produces more opportunities for more girls to play sports is hard to argue against, particularly as America's youth seemingly become less active and more overweight with every passing year.
And yet: we're not just talking about generic sports. We're talking, specifically, about tackle football. A sport that carries a significant—albeit fuzzily quantified—risk of producing brain damage, both acute and chronic.
Adelson writes that many sports can cause concussions. This is true. But other sports generally do not involve getting hit in the head over and over and over the way tackle football does; medical and scientific research increasingly suggests that repetitive sub-concussive blows also are bad for the brain, producing a cumulative and compounding negative effect. Moreover, football's head-banging violence isn't accidental, nor something that can be eliminated with rules changes and tackling technique tweaks. It's inherent to the sport, which is less akin to hockey or soccer than boxing.
Last year, I wrote about Russell Davis, a Las Vegas resident who was believed to be the first school board candidate in the U.S. to run on a platform of banning high school football. Davis lost in the Clark County, Nevada primaries. That didn't come as a shock. His idea undoubtedly would strike many people—probably the vast majority of people who care about prep sports in the first place—as, well, crazy.
But is it? The more I listened to Davis—and the more I dug into the topic, talking to brain trauma researchers, bioethicists, and others—the more it sounded reasonable. Even preferable. One discussion in particular, with Purdue University researcher Tom Talavage, stuck with me:
In 2009, Purdue University researchers studying an Indiana prep football team found that over the course of a ten-week season, players absorbed as many as 1,855 head hits of magnitudes up to 289 Gs—that is, 289 times the force of gravity, or nearly three times as forcefully as a dummy hits the windshield in a 25-mile-per-hour car crash. They also discovered that while athletes diagnosed with concussions performed poorly on cognitive tests and showed signs of dysfunction on functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brains—which was expected—a number of athletes who had not been diagnosed showed similar signs of impairment. "They looked just as bad or worse as the concussed kids," says Tom Talavage, a biomedical engineering professor at Purdue. "At that point, [one of my colleagues] asked if we were ready for the fact that we might have to kill football." Subsequent studies by Talavage's group and others have produced similar findings.
Davis never suggested to me that youth tackle football should be banned. He's a football fan, someone who was genuinely excited about the prospect of the Oakland Raiders moving to Las Vegas. (By now, I'm guessing he has season tickets). Davis coaches his children's soccer teams; he wasn't trying to ensconce America's kids in bubble wrap. He simply looked at the available data, weighed tackle football's risks and rewards, and concluded that the sport doesn't have a place in public schools. Not when the mission of those schools is to protect and nurture young minds—as opposed to harming them—and not when taxpayer dollars are being spent to underwrite a potential public health problem.
Maybe you agree. Maybe you don't. Most likely, you probably haven't thought about it, nor learned enough to have a truly informed opinion. That's understandable. Public debate over the brain danger of tackle football largely has been confined to the National Football League and pee-wee levels; the high school game (and college, too) has more or less flown under our collective radar. But as more studies are published and the brain becomes less of a scientific mystery, that figures to change. The risks will become less fuzzy. Sooner or later, we're all going to be grappling with the same ethical, financial, and medical concerns that prompted Davis to run for office.
And that brings me back to Gordon's suit. Again, equality is terrific. And sports are a valuable part of what public high schools offer to their students. But at what cost? And to whom? Should schools offer tackle football to girls? I'm not sure they should offer it to anyone.
Girls' High School Football Title IX Suit Misses The Point published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
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myupdatestudio-blog · 7 years
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New Post has been published on Myupdatestudio
New Post has been published on https://myupdatestudio.com/whilst-beauty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-robobeholder/
Whilst beauty is in the eye of the (robo)beholder
For over a year, I worked as a beauty editor, writing and getting to know about the goods, tendencies, and people that make us need to appearance a sure manner. And as studies for the various tales I wrote, I consulted with dermatologists, plastic surgeons, makeup artists, aestheticians, and greater looking to answer a simple query—how am I able to make myself extra conventionally attractive?
                                         Whilst Beauty
Makeup Amazon
“Beauty is confidence,” they’d usually say, prefacing the actual answer. Inevitably, these professionals could eventually tell me that you’re feeling more assured, and hence more beautiful, when you appearance blemish- and wrinkle-free. (Pending at the product they had been promoting, this can also incorporate being tanner, or greater contoured, or thinner, or paper, or much less made up, or curvier, and many others.) Regardless of respondents’ distinct aesthetic tastes, everyone appeared to agree—younger is extra lovely. beauty become approximately anti-growing older.
Naturally, the trouble right here is the premise. What is splendor past a person else defining it? For as long as humanity’s obsession with the term has existed, we’ve similarly regarded about its subjective nature. In spite of everything, “splendor is in the attention of the beholder” is simply a cliché that posits that specific subjectivity of attractiveness.
But what if the beholder can remove subjectivity—what if the beholder wasn’t someone, However a set of rules? The usage of the system getting to know to define beauty may want to, theoretically, make beauty pageants and scores like Humans annual Most lovely within the International list more goal and less vulnerable to human blunders. Of path, teaching an algorithm to do something may involve a few bias from whoever does the programming, However that hasn’t stopped this computerized technique from defining equally subjective such things as listening options or news feed (we see you, Fb et al).
“We don’t want a human opinion,” says biotechnologist Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, one of the founders in the back of a festival-preserving, beauty-quantifying initiative called beauty.AI. “At the end of the day, there are plenty of disagreements. We’re searching for ways to assess beauty, and a few methods may be extra applicable or much less applicable to human belief. But the complete cause of splendor.AI is to do away with a human opinion, to go beyond it.”
splendor.AI changed into merely one of the state-of-the-art tries to have generation objectively evaluate beauty. However as an online opposition that crowdsourced headshots and allowed bot-driven algorithms to decide ratings, perhaps it represents the fever point of this workout. If so, the initiative’s final results made one thing definitively clear: artificial intelligence will in no way decide a widespread face of splendor. Even these days, it only highlights how exactly slim one’s definition of splendor can be. Long before everybody knew what an algorithm changed into, humanity has tried to quantify and degree splendor. Leonardo da Vinci’s pen-and-ink drawing of the Vitruvian Guy, whose head become one-8th of its body, changed into based totally on Roman architect Vitruvius’ writing on the difficulty from his treatise, De Architectura. Plato believed that splendor resided in components that harmoniously fit into the complete. St. Augustine believed that the more geometrically same something became, the greater lovely it becomes. The theories went on and on.
And for as long as People have made these landmark statements on splendor, they’ve additionally found out apparent cultural bias approximately their requirements of splendor. Northern Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer used his own arms, acknowledged for being longer than common, to assemble a canon of the human body. Or, for the latest instance, morning show Good Day DC anchors Know-how Martin and Maureen Umeh went viral final 12 months for giving the side eye to a 2014 cosmetic surgical procedure have a look at stating that Kate Middleton had the “Maximum suited face.” Evidently, the look at becoming based totally on a check group of “normal-performing white girls aged 18 to twenty-five years.”
in the beyond few a long time, students have at the least come to simply accept that regular splendor is a complex, perhaps not possible aspect. one of the greater famous works furthering that concept comes from creator Naomi Wolf and her 1991 bestselling book, The splendor Delusion. “beauty is a forex device like the gold fashionable,” she wrote. “Like any financial system, it’s far decided through politics, and inside the present day age within the West, it is the closing, exceptional perception machine that continues male dominance intact.” Wolf believed that beauty is a production of capitalism meant to keep the repute quo in the ever-increasing West—basically arguing that present day, extra numerous supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks still had to suit into a rigid definition of splendor that involves such things as “tall,” “skinny,” and “younger.”
those cultural complications haven’t stopped cutting-edge researchers from trying to teach for a better solution, but. Working example: University of California, Irvine researchers Natalie A. Popenko and Dr. Brian J. Wong. (Wong, a plastic health care professional and professor, become one of the professionals in the back of that controversial, Kate Middleton-face have a look at.) In their Maximum well-known paper—2008’s “Evolving attractive Faces The use of Morphing era and a Genetic algorithm: A brand new method to Figuring out Perfect Facial Aesthetics”—the duo hired virtual morphing software program to “evolve” and “breed” extra appealing faces over the years primarily based on statistics collected from varied, human assets which include Fb surveys, plastic surgeons, scholar examine contributors, and professionals from an eyebrow cosmetics organisation preferred through Kylie Jenner. in the Most simple experience, their paintings attempted to installation predictive computing in a similar manner to how scientists generate weather models… except they had been hoping to peer whether a mean advanced through the years into an ideal face.
Ultimately, Wong and Popenko decided that a “common” face didn’t make for a lovely face. In fact, nasal width, eyebrow arch top, and lip fullness correlated substantially with the take a look at’s scores of splendor. In different phrases, Jenner turned into onto something with her Kylie Lip Package (designed to present you complete, pouty lips) and heavily arched eyebrows (delivered to you with the aid of Anastasia Brows). It turns out splendor, at least the kind that makes you need to keep at Sephora, isn’t determined by evolution—it’s determined through celebrity idols.
As this kind of research has persisted, corporations have sought to get in on the premise of technologically-described beauty. The project-sponsored Naked three-D Health Tracker is a $400 clever replicate (available for pre-order) that scans your frame in 3-d and makes use of a heat map to tell you where you’re growing muscle or gaining fat, and it claims effects within 2.five percent accuracy. It comes with a reflect that “appears” to you—a literal “reflect, mirror, on the Wall” state of affairs—and encourages you to stand the records: Are you absolutely dropping weight? This scale claims it received will let you cheat.
Or, released closing April, an app referred to as Map My beauty claims to apply facial zone recognition algorithms to objectively check beauty. Customers add selfies, and the app spits out how and wherein to position on make-up. To this point in its short life, the app has tested especially useful for advanced techniques like contouring, the vintage college approach made viral through Instagram and the Kardashians. (Contouring requires a strong knowledge of your very own facial structure with a purpose to manage appearance The use of light and shading.)
“The usage of this lively appearance model and making use of it to selfies we’ve got never visible before, we will extract a handful of parameters which also—amongst others—describe implicitly facial beauty,” says Dr. Kristina Scherbaum, the laptop scientist at the back of the app. What the one’s parameters are, but, stays a mystery. Map My beauty has business aspirations past helping at-domestic make-up artists. The crew has formerly labored with international beauty retailer Sephora, and now Map My beauty has its very own crew of expert makeup artists. those professionals act as a focal point institution for labeling and categorizing the database, and Map My beauty says its judgment criteria is proprietary.
This means an app may also spit out the answers, However, a group of human beings is again backstage making selections (with varying levels of subjectivity and objectivity). So from DaVinci to Wong and Popenko to this, that undeniable human detail, In the long run, permeates outcomes irrespective of how many layers of the era are brought.
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pressography-blog1 · 7 years
Text
While beauty is in the attention of the (robo)behold
New Post has been published on https://pressography.org/while-beauty-is-in-the-attention-of-the-robobehold/
While beauty is in the attention of the (robo)behold
For over a year, I worked as a beauty editor, writing and learning about the products, traits, and those that make us need to look a certain manner. And as studies for the various stories I wrote, I consulted with dermatologists, plastic surgeons, make-up artists, estheticians, and greater trying to answer a simple query—how can I make myself more conventionally attractive?
                                            While Beauty 
Beauty Synonyms
“beauty is a self belief,” they’d continually say, prefacing the actual solution. Necessarily, these professionals could subsequently tell me that you are feeling more confident, and thus extra beautiful, when you look blemish- and wrinkle-loose. (Pending at the product they have been promoting, this may also include being tanner, or more contoured, or thinner, or paler, or much less made up, or curvier, and so forth.) Regardless of respondents’ extraordinary aesthetic tastes, everyone appeared to agree—younger is greater beautiful. splendor became approximately anti-getting older Certainly, the trouble right here is the idea. What is beauty beyond someone else defining it? For so long as humanity’s obsession with the time period has existed, we’ve similarly known about its subjective nature. In the end, “splendor is in the attention of the beholder” is simply a cliché that posits that precise subjectivity of elegance.
However what if the beholder can dispose of subjectivity—what if the beholder wasn’t a person, However a set of rules? Using system learning to outline beauty may want to, theoretically, make beauty pageants and ratings
like Humans’s annual Most lovely inside the International list extra objective and less prone to human error. Of direction, teaching an algorithm to do something might also contain a few bias from whoever does the programming, But that hasn’t stopped this automatic technique from defining equally subjective things like listening options or information fee (we see you, Facebook et al).We don’t need a human opinion,” says biotechnologist Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, one of the founders at the back of a festival-keeping, beauty-quantifying initiative called splendor.AI. “On the cease of the day, there are masses of disagreements. We’re searching for approaches to assess splendor, and a few approaches may be extra relevant or less applicable to human belief. However, the whole cause of beauty.AI is to remove human opinion, to transcend it.”
splendor.AI became simply one of the ultra-modern tries to have technology objectively compare splendor. But as a web opposition that crowdsourced headshots and allowed bot-pushed algorithms to decide rankings, possibly it represents the fever factor of this exercising. If so, the initiative’s final results made one element definitively clean: synthetic intelligence will by no means decide a well-known face of splendor. Even today, it only highlights how precisely slim one’s definition of beauty can be.Before Warm Or No longer: A brief records of quantifying beauty
Long Earlier than anybody knew what an algorithm turned into, humanity has tried to quantify and measure beauty. Leonardo da Vinci’s pen-and-ink drawing of the Vitruvian Man, whose head was one-eighth of its frame, was based on Roman architect Vitruvius’ writing on the situation from his treatise, De Architectura. Plato believed that splendor resided in components that harmoniously fit into the complete. St. Augustine believed that the extra geometrically equal something turned into, the extra stunning it was. The theories went on and on.
And for so long as Human beings have made these landmark statements on beauty, they’ve additionally found out obvious cultural bias approximately their requirements of splendor. Northern Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer used his own hands, known for being longer than common, to assemble a canon of the human frame. Or, for the latest example, morning show Top Day DC anchors Knowledge Martin and Maureen Umeh went viral last 12 months for giving the aspect eye to a 2014 cosmetic surgical procedure study declaring that Kate Middleton had the “Most ideal face.” Naturally, the observe became based on a take a look at a group of “everyday-performing white ladies aged 18 to twenty-five years.”
Robo ETF
in the past few many years, scholars have as a minimum come to just accept that ordinary splendor is a complex, perhaps impossible thing. one of the greater popular works furthering that idea comes from creator Naomi Wolf and her 1991 bestselling e-book, The splendor Delusion. “beauty is a forex device just like the gold preferred,” she wrote. “Like every economy, it’s far determined by using politics, and within the contemporary age inside the West it’s miles the last, quality motion machine that keeps male dominance intact.” Wolf believed that splendor is a construction of capitalism intended to preserve the fame quo in the ever-expanding West—essentially arguing that modern, extra various supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks nevertheless had to suit right into an inflexible definition of beauty that involves such things as “tall,” “thin,” and “younger.”
those cultural complications haven’t stopped cutting-edge researchers from trying to teach for a better answer, however. Case in point: University of California, Irvine researchers Natalie A. Popenko and Dr. Brian J. Wong. (Wong, a plastic healthcare professional and professor, turned into one of the specialists in the back of that arguably, Kate Middleton-face examine.) In their Maximum well-known paper—2008’s “Evolving attractive Faces The usage of Morphing era and a Genetic algorithm: A new technique to Figuring out Ideal Facial Aesthetics”—the duo hired digital morphing software program to “evolve” and “breed” greater attractive faces through the years primarily based on records accrued from varied, human resources which include Fb surveys, plastic surgeons, scholar examine individuals, and professionals from an eyebrow cosmetics corporation preferred through Kylie Jenner. within the Maximum basic sense, their paintings attempted to installation predictive computing in a comparable manner to how scientists generate weather models… besides they had been hoping to see whether an average evolved over the years into a perfect face.
Ultimately, Wong and Popenko determined that an “average” face didn’t make for a stunning face. In fact, nasal width, eyebrow arch peak, and lip fullness correlated significantly with the take a look at’s ratings of elegance. In other words, Jenner turned into onto something together with her Kylie Lip Kit (designed to present you full, pouty lips) and heavily arched eyebrows (added to you by using Anastasia Brows). It seems beauty, as a minimum the sort that makes you want to save at Sephora, isn’t determined by evolution—it’s determined by using celeb idols.
As this sort of studies has persevered, agencies have sought to get in on the premise of technologically-described beauty. The task-sponsored Bare three-D Fitness Tracker is a $four hundred clever mirror (available for pre-order) that scans your frame in 3-d and makes use of a heat map to tell you wherein you’re growing muscle or gaining fat, and it claims effects inside 2.five percent accuracy. It comes with a mirror that “seems” to you—a literal “replicate, mirror, on the Wall” situation—and encourages you to stand the information: Are you honestly losing weight? This scale claims it won’t permit you to cheat.
Or, launched last April, an app called Map My splendor claims to use facial sector reputation algorithms to objectively determine beauty. Customers upload selfies, and the app spits out how and where to put on make-up. Up to now in its brief existence, the app has proven in particular useful for advanced techniques like contouring, the antique college technique made viral by way of Instagram and the Kardashians. (Contouring calls for a strong understanding of your personal facial shape so one can manipulate look The use of light and shading.)
“The usage of this lively look version and applying it to selfies we have never seen Before, we are able to extract a handful of parameters which also—amongst others—describe implicitly facial beauty,” says Dr. Kristina Scherbaum, the laptop scientist behind the app. What the one’s parameters are, but, remains a mystery. Map My splendor has commercial enterprise aspirations past aiding at-home makeup artists. The team has formerly worked with global splendor retailer Sephora, and now Map My beauty has its personal team of expert makeup artists. these experts act as a focus organization for labeling and categorizing the database, and Map My splendor says its judgment criteria is proprietary.
Behold Song
This means an app might also spit out the solutions, But a team of human beings is once more backstage making selections (with varying stages of subjectivity and objectivity). So from DaVinci to Wong and Popenko to this, that plain human detail, In the end, permeates consequences regardless of how many layers of the era are brought.
0 notes
flauntpage · 7 years
Text
Girls' High School Football Title IX Suit Misses The Point
Should high schools offer girls' tackle football? That's the question at the heart of a Title IX lawsuit filed last week by a group of female youth players in Utah who want their local school districts to offer the sport.
Given what we know about football's effects on the human brain, however, I'm not sure that's the question schools should be asking.
First, the suit. According to Eric Adelson of Yahoo! Sports, it's largely the brainchild of Sam Gordon—whose ball-carrying exploits as a nine-year-old in a boys' tackle football league became a viral video sensation—and her father, Brent, a lawyer who subsequently helped start a four-team girls' recreational tackle league for fifth and sixth-graders in 2015.
Sam is now 14. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she still wants to play. So do many of her teammates. Brent told Yahoo! Sports that when he reached out to the Utah High School Activities Association to ask about creating school-sponsored teams for girls, he was advised to keep building the rec league.
Hence the lawsuit. "I don't want to wait 10-15 years," Brent told Yahoo! Sports. "My daughter would be 30 years old by then. These girls want to play now."
As Adelson reports, the suit's outcome will depend on a number of factors, including whether Gordon and her fellow plaintiffs can show that there's significant community interest in girls' tackle football. And from the standpoint of gender equality, it's hard not to see this case as a potentially positive development. Equal opportunity is a worthy social goal; anything that produces more opportunities for more girls to play sports is hard to argue against, particularly as America's youth seemingly become less active and more overweight with every passing year.
And yet: we're not just talking about generic sports. We're talking, specifically, about tackle football. A sport that carries a significant—albeit fuzzily quantified—risk of producing brain damage, both acute and chronic.
Adelson writes that many sports can cause concussions. This is true. But other sports generally do not involve getting hit in the head over and over and over the way tackle football does; medical and scientific research increasingly suggests that repetitive sub-concussive blows also are bad for the brain, producing a cumulative and compounding negative effect. Moreover, football's head-banging violence isn't accidental, nor something that can be eliminated with rules changes and tackling technique tweaks. It's inherent to the sport, which is less akin to hockey or soccer than boxing.
Last year, I wrote about Russell Davis, a Las Vegas resident who was believed to be the first school board candidate in the U.S. to run on a platform of banning high school football. Davis lost in the Clark County, Nevada primaries. That didn't come as a shock. His idea undoubtedly would strike many people—probably the vast majority of people who care about prep sports in the first place—as, well, crazy.
But is it? The more I listened to Davis—and the more I dug into the topic, talking to brain trauma researchers, bioethicists, and others—the more it sounded reasonable. Even preferable. One discussion in particular, with Purdue University researcher Tom Talavage, stuck with me:
In 2009, Purdue University researchers studying an Indiana prep football team found that over the course of a ten-week season, players absorbed as many as 1,855 head hits of magnitudes up to 289 Gs—that is, 289 times the force of gravity, or nearly three times as forcefully as a dummy hits the windshield in a 25-mile-per-hour car crash. They also discovered that while athletes diagnosed with concussions performed poorly on cognitive tests and showed signs of dysfunction on functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brains—which was expected—a number of athletes who had not been diagnosed showed similar signs of impairment. "They looked just as bad or worse as the concussed kids," says Tom Talavage, a biomedical engineering professor at Purdue. "At that point, [one of my colleagues] asked if we were ready for the fact that we might have to kill football." Subsequent studies by Talavage's group and others have produced similar findings.
Davis never suggested to me that youth tackle football should be banned. He's a football fan, someone who was genuinely excited about the prospect of the Oakland Raiders moving to Las Vegas. (By now, I'm guessing he has season tickets). Davis coaches his children's soccer teams; he wasn't trying to ensconce America's kids in bubble wrap. He simply looked at the available data, weighed tackle football's risks and rewards, and concluded that the sport doesn't have a place in public schools. Not when the mission of those schools is to protect and nurture young minds—as opposed to harming them—and not when taxpayer dollars are being spent to underwrite a potential public health problem.
Maybe you agree. Maybe you don't. Most likely, you probably haven't thought about it, nor learned enough to have a truly informed opinion. That's understandable. Public debate over the brain danger of tackle football largely has been confined to the National Football League and pee-wee levels; the high school game (and college, too) has more or less flown under our collective radar. But as more studies are published and the brain becomes less of a scientific mystery, that figures to change. The risks will become less fuzzy. Sooner or later, we're all going to be grappling with the same ethical, financial, and medical concerns that prompted Davis to run for office.
And that brings me back to Gordon's suit. Again, equality is terrific. And sports are a valuable part of what public high schools offer to their students. But at what cost? And to whom? Should schools offer tackle football to girls? I'm not sure they should offer it to anyone.
Girls' High School Football Title IX Suit Misses The Point published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
0 notes