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Karen Russell's 'Vampires' Deserve The Raves
The author of Swamplandia! has a new collection of short stories called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the stories are daring and devastating, and with them Russell establishes herself as one of the great American writers of our young century.
Related Topics
Other segments from the episode on February 21, 2013
February 21, 2013
Guest Sam Parnia
TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. What happens when we die? Wouldn't we all like to know? We can't bring people back from the dead to tell us, but in some cases we almost can. Resuscitation medicine is now sometimes capable of reviving people after their hearts have stopped beating, and their brains have flat-lined. And some of those people report being conscious during the period after their heart stopped, before they've been restarted.
These experiences are popularly known as near-death experiences, but my guest Dr. Sam Parnia, prefers to call them after-death experiences. He's a critical care doctor who is the director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine. He's conducting research into optimal cardiac arrest care and into the experiences some cardiac arrest patients report they have brought back from the other side of death.
He says whether these experiences are psychological phenomena or actually happen, they've been reported so routinely they warrant further study. Dr. Parnia is the author of the new book "Erasing Death."
Dr. Sam Parnia, welcome to FRESH AIR. As a doctor who specializes in resuscitation research, what is your interest in what people have experienced after they technically died, after cardiac arrest, when their heart has stopped?
SAM PARNIA: Well, I've been interested in this field for many years now, and the reason I got interested, really, was because I had a patient who I had taken care of who - when I was a medical student many years ago now - who I saw essentially die, have a cardiac arrest in front of my eyes, and nothing could be done to save this person. And I remember thinking to myself: What is this person experiencing as they're going through this period of death?
Now, this was more than 15 years ago, and at that time there was very little work carried out in this field, but as I have begun to grow in this field myself, I have come to realize that we have a very strong need to study what happens to the brain after people die, because our remid(ph) - a physician like myself who specializes in resuscitation science - our remid is to bring people back to life after they've died.
And therefore, inadvertently, we have to study what happens to the brain in the minutes to hours after someone's death, but also not forgetting that there's a human being in there and that they have a consciousness, they have a mind, what classically used to be called the psyche or the soul. And what does that person experience, and what's it like for them? And that's why we combine both together.
GROSS: So since we're talking about what people experience after cardiac arrest, after their heart has stopped, and then they are subsequently revived, so what the experienced between the time their heart has stopped and the time that they're resuscitated, how has medicine changed the length of time you can be technically dead after cardiac arrest but still be resuscitated?
PARNIA: Traditionally when somebody died, and that's true of today, when somebody died it was really the point where the heart has stopped beating. And as a consequences of the heart stopping beating, the person would stop breathing immediately and would lose consciousness immediately. And the reason for that was that there was no blood getting to the brain, and the brain would stop functioning.
So today when we define someone being dead, we look at those three criteria: no heartbeat, no respirations, and we check the pupils of the eye for a reflex that when it's absent it tells us that the brain stem and the brain is no longer functioning, and the person is motionless, and they're dead, and we define them as dead.
However, what we've now discovered in the past decade or so, is that actually it's only after a person dies. So in other words, when someone has actually reached that point, and they've become a corpse, that the cells inside the body start to undergo their own process of death and that the period in which the cells die is variable depending on the organs, but it certainly goes on to hours of time.
So for instance, brain cells will die at about eight hours. Again there is some variation, but around eight hours after a person has died. And therefore, our work in resuscitation science is to try to study the processes that are going on in a person after they've died, but before they've reached the point of complete, irreversible and irretrievable cell damage, such that no matter what we do we can't bring them back.
And if we manage to restore oxygen and nutrients back to those cells before they've reached that point, we are able to successfully bring someone back to life. And that's why today, with numerous advances that have taken place in the field of resuscitation science, we have managed to push back that boundary to well beyond the 10-, 20-minute timeframe that had been perceived in the past, into many hours of death.
GROSS: So in resuscitation medicine, one of the goals, as you're saying, is to keep the cells alive while the doctors are trying to restart the heart. And that's why - and I guess I maybe should have known this, but I didn't, in a lot of resuscitation medicine, the person is put on ice, or a technological version of chilling the body, while doctors try to revive the heart.
PARNIA: That's absolutely correct. One of the biggest discoveries in the last 10 years has been that actually, if we cool people down by a number of degrees Celsius, that actually we slow down the rate by which the cells, particularly brain cells, are undergoing their own process of death because we have to remember that cell death takes place through chemical steps.
And so from our, you know, high school chemistry days, we all know that chemical reactions need heat, and if you take away the heat, that slows down the chemical reaction. So actually that is one of the things that's enabled us to prolong that gray zone after death and bring people back many hours after they've died.
GROSS: So let's talk about what most people describe as near-death experiences, which is what you've been studying except you don't think of it that way, you think of it as actual death experiences. And why don't you explain the distinction.
PARNIA: Well, after physicians discovered CPR and were able to push back the boundaries of death for the first time in 1960, interestingly, by the mid-1970s, a book was published in which people's accounts of having had a critical illness and been close to death, including people who've survived cardiac arrest and essentially brought back from death, their experiences and their accounts were documented.
And it was found that people who'd been in that situation had these very unusual but yet interesting experiences where they felt incredibly peaceful, they weren't afraid of death. They often described seeing a bright, warm, welcoming light, going through a tunnel. Sometimes they described a sensation of having a loving, compassionate being with them that would guide them through the experience.
Sometimes they described seeing deceased relatives. Sometimes they described going to a point where, if they'd gone beyond that, they couldn't come back. And some of them described getting to a place that was very beautiful.
Now the most interesting aspect of what these people described was a sensation of detaching from the body and looking down at resuscitation efforts that had been ongoing. And these were termed near-death experience at that time.
Now they led to a lot of interest, but also a lot of skepticism. And one of the biggest problems with the term near-death experience, which is why I don't like to use it anymore, is that from a scientific perspective, it is very vague. There is no definition to what near-death really means, and that's why it's led to a lot of controversy.
And the main reason for that, is because what has happened is different people have lumped together experiences that were taking place under very many different circumstances, where the human body has a completely different physiology, a different biological process that has been going on. And therefore people don't agree, and they've been very emotional about this, and it's created a lot of debate - and in my opinion, not necessary.
Now what we study is not people who are near death, we study people who have objectively died. These people have been dead for tens, sometimes hours - tens of minutes and sometimes hours of time. And therefore what we've understood is that the experience that these people have of going beyond the threshold of death, entering the period after death for the first few minutes, tens of minutes or hours of time, provides us with an indication of what we're all likely to experience when we go through death.
And that's why I call these an actual death experience, because the physiology and the biology of the human brain is very well-studied, it's very well-understood, and it's standardized, which means that we can study it in a scientific fashion.
GROSS: What are some of the questions you're asking?
PARNIA: Well, at one point, we're simply interested in documenting what people have experienced when they've gone beyond that threshold of death. For us it's very much - we tend to like to use an analogy. It's a little bit like if you look back 100 years ago, and if someone had said that one day we'll be able to get into space, go to the moon and come back, it would have seemed completely implausible.
Yet somehow by, you know, 1969 we were able to go to the moon and come back and tell us - tell other people what it was like to look at Earth from space. Now if you look at death, it's very similar. Throughout history, humankind has never perceived it possible to go beyond the threshold of death. And that's why if you look at every discussion that takes place about death, it tends to be philosophical or personal.
So we find that we have a unique set of patients who have actually, by analogy, gone to the moon and come back and were able to document what they've experienced. And that's the first level of what we do is just document that.
The second level, though, it looking to see is there a relationship, is there a reason why people are having these experiences. For instance, could it signify that somehow these people had had better quality resuscitation of the brain? Was it something that was going onto their brain at that time but may be indicative of these? And so on and so forth.
GROSS: So for people who have had these actual death experiences, what are some of the themes that you've heard, experiences that are similar in many patients?
PARNIA: Well, I think that, interestingly, although as I describe the limitation or the problem with the term near-death experience is that it's too vague, that in general, people who have undergone cardiac arrest and a period of death and been brought back to life actually have very similar experiences.
And what I find most fascinating about the experiences, are the cases where people have come back and described to their physicians, with astonishing detail, of what had been going on. And they described watching things and described hearing conversations and recalling them incredibly accurately.
GROSS: When you say what had been going on, you mean going on in the hospital room after the patient's heart had stopped, while doctors were trying to resuscitate them.
PARNIA: Absolutely, so they may describe events that were going on while they were being resuscitated. They may describe events that were going on outside their room: family members' conversations that were going on that were not even in the room they were in, but things that have been verified.
And although a lot of people had traditionally tended to discard these experiences, and possibly for the right reasons, because we didn't have a science to explain it - but if you look at it scientifically, there are now millions and millions of people around the world who have had these experiences, sometimes children less than three years old who have had very accurate descriptions of what was going on that were similar to what adults have described.
And therefore it's important for scientists like ourselves to bring them into the mainstream and study these, objectively. The general trend of what they describe, aside from the sensation of being very peaceful, is seeing a bright light, sometimes a very warm, welcoming, loving being that they describe as being full of compassion that guides them through their lives.
They often describe having a review of their lives, everything that they have done from early childhood to that point. And interestingly, the way they describe their review is very much like they experience, sometimes, everything that they had done. So for instance if they had hurt somebody's feelings, even inadvertently, without purpose, they feel the pain that they had given somebody else. And therefore they judge themselves, in effect, and their actions, and that's why when they come back, many of them are motivated to lead their lives in a completely different way.
I remember one person who said that I particularly wanted to make sure that I don't fail again, and I want to make sure that I at least end up with a C when I get back there again.
GROSS: So I have, like, two opposite reactions to these stories. One is they sound like theatrical cliches, you know, it sounds like the Rogers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel," in which the main character is dead and comes back to Earth with his angel who shows him everything that's happening and reviews his life.
It sounds like a lot of - like a lot of the more simplistic visions of heaven. But the other side of that is maybe some of these things have emerged because people have experienced this, like maybe there's a reason that there are those kinds of themes. And also, how do you argue with people who say that they've experienced this?
PARNIA: Well, I mean, this is a wonderful point that you've brought up, because if you think about it, and we touched on this earlier, one of the big problems that we have is that because we've never had a science, we've never had an objective method to go beyond the threshold of death and study what happens both biologically and from a mental and cognitive perspective, therefore everything that we deal with is basically hearsay and people's own beliefs.
And that's why if you were to poll, I'm sure, 1,000 people, you may get up to 1,000 different opinions, but possibly even - maybe a slight exaggeration, but you may well get many different opinions. Some people have actually suggested that it may be that our perceptions of what it's like to die may be related to people who come close to death and been somehow come back to life and told others.
For instance, there's a very interesting painting by Hieronymus Bosch from the 15th century, where he's actually painted what looks like a classical near-death experience. But in reality people, didn't know about near-death experiences at that time, and it certainly isn't what classical Christianity would have taught of what people would have experienced when they've died.
So what we're doing is really going through and systematically and scientifically studying what people experience, and what we're hoping to do is to enable science to guide our opinions and belief systems, as it's done with other aspects of human knowledge in the past.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dr. Sam Parnia. We're talking about his new book "Erasing Death: The Science that is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death." And he's the, director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine. Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: My guest is critical care doctor Sam Parnia, author of the new book "Erasing Death." We'll get back to the research he's conducting into the so-called near-death experiences some cardiac arrest patients report. But first, some more about state-of-the-art resuscitation medicine.
So what is the most technologically advanced and effective way of restarting the heart?
PARNIA: Well, traditionally what doctors have been doing since the 1960s and '70s is essentially doing chest compressions and providing breaths to a person, that's what we call CPR. But really, we've now advanced beyond that, and therefore there are various other technologies available, which include automated CPR machines that will deliver both breaths and chest compressions at the correct death.
But also more advanced systems are in place, which are particularly prominent and used commonly in Southeast Asia, in Japan, South Korea, where they actually will take a person who's been found dead, effectively, brought to the emergency room and attach them to a type of bypass machine that takes the blood out of the body, provides oxygen into it and then circulates it and pumps it around the body again.
And that way they give the doctors a number of hours of time to try to figure out what caused the person to die and fix the underlying problem before restarting the heart and bringing the person back to life again.
GROSS: So while we're talking about resuscitation medicine, which is your specialty, you've said that death isn't a moment, it's more like a process in which the heart stops, and then slowly the cells die. And you say resuscitation isn't, like, a 10-minute process, it's something that goes on even after - like resuscitation medicine continues even after a person's heart has begun beating again. Tell us a little bit about that process of resuscitation medicine.
PARNIA: Well, after CPR was discovered, there was a lot of excitement because for the first time, physicians could actually bring back someone who died. However, after this was put into practice, and it was spread around the world, it became very clear that even though physicians were getting better at restarting the heart in people who'd died, most of the people whose heart had been started once would die again in the subsequent hours to days - such that the overall ability to have survival and ensure patients go home and remain without brain injury, remained very low.
And the discovery that really has helped us to shift that balance was the understanding that actually the fact that someone has died once and been brought back to life, is a completely unnatural state. And it leads to a number of complications in the brain, in particular, but also other organs where the brain becomes inflamed and swollen and acidic and damaged.
And therefore today, the way that we have tried to function is to also optimize resuscitation for the subsequent 72 hours after we've even restarted the heart to ensure that people end up brain-damaged and can get home safely.
GROSS: And tell us briefly what are some of the things you can do to try to prevent that brain damage.
PARNIA: Well, one of the biggest discoveries has been that if we cool the brain, we slow down the rate by which brain cells require oxygen. Because one of the biggest difficulties is that after you restart the heart, the brain starts to swell up. There is - no matter even if the heart's beating, we can't get quite enough blood and oxygen into the brain. So that while there is a deficit in the amount of oxygen getting into the brain, the brain cells continue to undergo damage and eventually will lead to severe disability.
By cooling the brain down, we essentially slow down the rate of their activity, and therefore they need less oxygen. So we try to match the amount of oxygen to what they need. Furthermore, we also take away the swelling itself by cooling the brain.
And then other things that we have to do, which are very important, is to regulate the correct level of blood pressure, which traditionally has been too low. And we found that actually by making sure the patient has a higher blood pressure, we can get more blood into the brain. We need to regulate the oxygen very closely, the carbon dioxide. And there are a number of other nuances that we have to work on.
But it's by putting together these multiple, intricate links into the chain of resuscitation that we can ensure that things that are potentially toxic are removed. For instance another important point is that we've discovered recently, that actually oxygen itself, if in excess, is toxic to brain cells, and it causes them to die.
And so that's why it's very subtle and very important to manipulate these different parameters.
GROSS: Dr. Sam Parnia will be back in the second half of the show. He's the author of the new book "Erasing Death" and is the director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Dr. Sam Parnia, the director resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and the author of the new book "Erasing Death." He's a critical care doctor who is researching optimal ways of caring for cardiac arrest patients and restarting their hearts. He's also researching the experiences some of these research patients report having in the period after their hearts stop - started, what is popularly known as near death experiences, but which he describes as after death experiences. These patients sometimes report having seen a bright light or a luminance being, or having had a review of their life.
Now although you specialize in resuscitation medicine, you know few people who have actually reported these kinds of experiences - people who have been your patients - and you write in your book that 80 and 90 percent of people who survive cardiac arrest don't have these recollections. So the overwhelming number of people who have these actual death experiences don't tell stories about bright lights and tunnels and out of body experiences and luminous beings and everything. So what do you make of that, that the people who do report that are really in a minority?
PARNIA: Well, you see it's important to remember that people who've died, as I said, even when they're getting CPR, their brain is completely flat-lined. The brain does not function, which is why they are in a complete. That's why if you test their reflexes, their brain reflexes are absent, and therefore, we would expect there to be no memories whatsoever from anybody. Because even if you were to have some sort of experience you don't have the apparatus to carry the experience back and allow you to describe it to other people, because that apparatus is completely nonfunctional. So what we don't understand is why is it that 10 to 20 percent of people do somehow paradoxically, despite a non-functioning brain and going through the process of death, recall these incredibly vivid experiences.
What we do believe, though, is that it may be related to the degree of damage and inflammation that is occurring in the brain afterwards. So, for instance, if I were to resuscitate a patient now after an hour of chest compressions and bring them back to life again, we realize that that's not the end. They still have significant swelling of the brain, inflammation, damage ongoing to the memory circuits as well as other parts of the brain for the subsequent 24, 48, even 72 hours. So now if I were to get this person back to life and they can fully become conversant and try to remember their experiences, it may be that the swelling has actually erased their memory from that time. And I think there's some evidence to support that.
What we've certainly found in our studies is that if we manage to get to patients immediately after waking up - which is not easy at times - and talk to them, they tend to remember more, and if you go back and re-interview them within a couple of days, they tend to have forgotten their experiences, possibly. So we think that probably many more people have these experiences - if perhaps not even everyone - but somehow their memories get wiped in the same way that most of us - if not all of us - dream every night, but somehow there's a disruption to the memory circuits that allow us to recall our dreams the following day. And some people certainly are more vivid dreamers; they can recall more of their dreams than others, and that somehow to do with the circuitry of their memory recall.
GROSS: I'm glad you are a dream's because I'm sure a lot of skeptics say what people are experiencing with the luminous being, and the light in the out of body experience is basically a chemically induced dream, a hallucination of some sort induced by a chemical. What's your answer to that?
PARNIA: Well, essentially, what you're referring to is broadly talked about and considered as the dying brain hypothesis. And that being that essentially, as a person is dying, there are various chemical changes going on in the brain and there may be activation of certain parts of the brain that can lead to hallucinations. For instance, the same parts of the brain that say LSD or other drugs may act upon. The problem with this theory is that one; there is no scientific evidence to support it. There have been numerous studies carried out looking at various oxygen levels, carbon dioxide levels, drugs, etcetera, and there is no relationship that has ever been discovered with any such factor and people having experiences.
But the more important point that we need to highlight is that when we're studying people who've had a cardiac arrest, which is why I like to separate them out from the vague entity of near death experience, is that we understand the physiology of what happens to the brain in very precise detail. After someone dies and the heart stops the brain stops functioning within moments and you have a complete flat-lined state. There is an adequate blood getting into the brain so the brain circuits can no longer function. And therefore, there should be no memories. So in order for someone to even hallucinate, they have to have a normally functioning brain. And so what our discoveries have started to do is to question the way we consider the relationship between the human mind, what is classically been called the psyche or the soul, and the brain itself. And it may be that the human mind, consciousness or soul may be able to function when there is no brain function at all.
GROSS: Well, that leads to the question that so many people have asked and failed to answer - which is where is the seat of consciousness?
PARNIA: Well, obviously that question goes back many centuries and millennia before our time, and certainly, the classical Greeks had addressed this and tried to address this in detail. Plato and many others considered that the human mind, the psyche or the soul, is an entity that is separate from the body. Whereas others, such as Aristotle, considered that it must be produced from the body. Somehow the soul is the product of bodily processes. And if you now fast forward to modern day science, in a sense, we have no answers either. There is not a single shred of scientific evidence that shows us how a brain or a brain cell could generate thoughts, consciousness, feelings emotions, everything that makes us into who we are.
And therefore, scientists have also been broadly divided into two opinions. Some tend to follow Aristotle's belief system - that although we have no idea how consciousness, the psyche, the soul may come to be it must somehow be generated by bodily processes, and particularly in the brain. And there are others who think that perhaps no matter what we do we will never be able to explain the entity of the human mind through activity of electrical and chemical processes in the brain and therefore, that entity that we consider the soul or the psyche or the self, is a separate undiscovered scientific entity that works with the brain but is not manufactured by brain cells.
GROSS: You write in your book that because of what you've learned about people's actual death experiences - and you've learned this from them after they've been resuscitated - you say we can be certain that we humans no longer need to fear death. And granted, a lot of people have been telling these stories, but a lot of people don't have these stories to tell, a lot of people who have been resuscitated, we don't know what they've experienced. Do we know what people experience when they knowingly commit suicide or when they've been the victim of a terrible crash or a bomb blast or a murder or something where there is no hope of, you know, restarting the heart because the body is just so shattered? Like we have no idea what that experience would be like, even if we believed the testimonies by those who say they've seen, you know, a beautiful light or a luminous being.
PARNIA: Well, I think this is a point that is definitely worth, you know, thinking about a little bit more. Obviously as you said, we have certain limitations at any time where there are some people that we cannot bring back. I mean if someone's been a victim of a bomb blast - and horrific as it sounds, you know, because we don't have a body to bring someone back to, then we simply we can't work miracles today. Maybe in the future things will be different. However, what is interesting though, is that generally - and the reason why I think we can draw some conclusions that are applicable to all of us - is that the experiences where people have looked - have described when they've gone through death, the initiating factors have been variable and different amongst the people. And in other words, what I mean, the thing that caused them to die hasn't been the same. It's been very different.
And furthermore, these experiences have been described of all over the world, people with different cultures, different backgrounds, whether they be atheists, whether they have a particular religious faith or somewhere in between, and even children who are sometimes too young to have any concept of what or understanding of, you know, the concepts of an afterlife or what happens when we die, etcetera, yet, the message of the experience is remarkably universal and it tends not to be frightening to people. It tends to be very positive and upbeat, certainly for those who've gone through a natural process of death.
Now where I do like to definitely highlight caution is in the case of people who've tried to commit suicide who somehow we've managed to bring back - and believe me, we get those - those people tended to have had, in my experience, very frightening and disturbing experiences that I would definitely warn people off doing that. But those, at least, who've died from natural causes, they, I don't think they should be afraid of death, we understand what happens when people die, and that's the one conclusion that I think we can make.
GROSS: So you've said that you think that the positive feelings, the luminous beings, the sense of light and peace that some people report having experienced after their heart has stopped during that period of resuscitation, that you don't think that that would be true of people who commit suicide. Why would suicide be different?
PARNIA: I couldn't tell you why suicide should be different. I can simply tell you that, from my experience of talking to people and interviewing people who have gone through suicide, that the experiences have been universally painful and distressing, and certainly they wouldn't want to go through it again. And therefore, I'm simply sharing that observation. I don't know what the processes could be, but I certainly would not suggest someone to try that.
GROSS: My guest is Dr. Sam Parnia, author of the new book "Erasing Death." He's the director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine.
More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dr. Sam Parnia and he is the director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and is the author of the new book "Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death."
So one of the things you're trying to empirically test is, you know, when people say they've had an out of body experience, can you actually prove that? And so you're trying to study that. How are you trying to study that?
PARNIA: The whole sort of experience that people have had has really fascinated many of us for many years. And one of the things we have to remember - and you actually highlighted this in one of the questions you asked me but I didn't address it - is that the experience that people have is very personal and it's very real to them. So, for most people who've gone through these experiences, as far as they're concerned, what they've experienced is absolutely real. They've described and seen something of the other side. Now, for those of us who haven't had the experience, it's impossible to verify that. But in the same way that, for instance, if a patient comes to me and says, I have depression, it would be completely unacceptable for me as a physician to simply discard that experience and say, well, I don't think you know, you may feel that you're depressed, but actually it's an illusion of having depression or you're hallucinating your depression, it's not really real. So we have to remember that to the people who've had the experience, it's real to them.
Now how can we scientifically test these experiences? Well, most of what they described is very subjective. You know, if they described seeing a beam of light or a tunnel, I can't test that. But if they do come back and describe in specific details watching me or my colleagues working on them recalling their conversations, then that is potentially more objectively testable. And so what we have done as part of our work is to try to install images that are only visible from a point above at the ceiling in areas where patients are getting resuscitated in order to see if they also can describe seeing those images that they would not have known about before hand.
And obviously, if we can get, you know, a series of hundreds of people who claim to have been at the ceiling looking down and they do describe the images, then we have to probably accept that what they say is real. If, on the other hand, none of them describe seeing the images, then we have to perhaps question their perception of what they're seeing.
GROSS: Have you tried that yet? And what have the results been?
PARNIA: We have been trying it. We started a very small pilot study at my hospital in England a number of years ago. However, what we've come to realize - and that's ongoing - what we've come to realize is that we have numerous challenges. The first challenge is that most of the patients who get resuscitated unfortunately don't live long enough to talk to us.
So this is one of the big problems we have, is that the standard of care for resuscitation is not universal and people don't all receive the best level of care. So, as a result, we may be lucky if only 10 or 15 percent of people who go through resuscitation actually come back and can then talk to us. And of these people, most of them have had their memories completely wiped out. And only about 10 percent will actually have any memories whatsoever.
But the occurrence of the out-of-body experience is even more rare. So we found that actually only about 1 percent of patients who survive a cardiac arrest actually have any memories that are consistent with an out-of-body experience. So that means if you start out with a thousand cardiac arrest events, you may end up with one person who has - who's lived an out-of-body experience.
And therefore, as the data is now coming through - and I've tried to describe some of these in our book, because people are fascinated by it and we get numerous requests for updates, etc. They don't realize how challenging this is. We've had a number of people who've had out-of-body experiences, but their out-of-body experiences have occurred in areas where they actually did not have images installed.
And they've tended to recall looking at the events from a different angle, to where the images have been installed. So, for instance, we have started out by putting images at the head of the bed, but the patients come back and told us that, you know, I was looking from the foot of the bed, and then goes through and describes all kinds of accurate details.
So we're having to readdress - and as we learned, we're having to adjust the study to incorporate the realities of what's happening on the ground.
GROSS: So if I may ask, what do you ultimately hope to learn before you die?
PARNIA: Well, I'd like to rephrase that and say: What would I like to achieve?
PARNIA: If I may. What I'd like to achieve, and this is what really drives me on - and we haven't talked a lot about that. But it really does drive me on and it really is something that bothers me, is that there is enormous, enormous variation in the quality of care that our patients receive across the country and in different countries. And the reason for that is because there is no - absolutely no regulation on the quality of care that our patients receive.
And therefore, at the same institution, doctors may provide care completely differently. And therefore, your chance of coming back from a cardiac arrest is completely potluck. And more importantly, that means that your chance of ending up with brain damage is also completely potluck. Now, we have to remember that cardiac arrest is the only condition that will affect every single one of us.
I will definitely have a cardiac arrest in my lifetime. You, unfortunately, will definitely have a cardiac arrest. And so will everybody who's listening to your show. And so do we want to have the best level of care provided for us, so that we can be brought back without brain damage? Or are we willing to just take a chance? So that's my overall goal and ambition.
Now, an inadvertent consequence of that work is that we're constantly pushing back the boundaries. And what we're beginning to learn scientifically - which is what I'd like to continue to learn, to address your actual question - is: What does happen to us when we die? What is the relationship between the human mind, the psyche, consciousness, or what people have classically called the soul?
And I use that term on purpose, because I want people to understand what it really means. It's the self. What happens to it and how does that interact with the brain? And what does that tell us, and how can we use that to better our lives while we're on Earth?
Inadvertently, through science, we're starting to answer questions about what is life, what is death, what is the real afterlife that people have talked about? Does it really exist? And I think we'll continue to have more answers in the coming years.
GROSS: So this might be too personal, but are you giving this a religious interpretation?
PARNIA: Not at all. You know, I didn't come from religion. I don't particularly have a religion. So I just want to be clear about that. I came to this, again, for some crazy reason. I was a 19-year-old who was fascinated by what makes us into who we are. And then I started to see people being resuscitated in hospitals, and I began to see that we don't have the right standards of care. There's enormous variation in care, and that really provoked me into getting involved in this field.
And as now, you know, many years have gone by, and I'm still interested in this, and I continue to push forward. I'm beginning to learn things that I'm simply sharing with others, because we have to remember that, you know, until a few hundred years ago, everything that was known - and I say in quotation marks, "known" - was described to us by philosophers or theologians. OK?
But it was only through the advent of the scientific method - which is, in essence, the objective method of learning about the world around ourselves - that gradually, things started to fall out of philosophy or theology and into the realm of science. So, for instance, you know, astronomy, the idea of the stars, was always a religious thing. Now it's science. Well, I believe that death should also be studied by science, and that's what I do.
GROSS: Well, thank you so much for talking with us.
PARNIA: It's been a pleasure, and I've really enjoyed being on the show.
GROSS: Dr. Sam Parnia is the director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine. His new book is called "Erasing Death." You can read an excerpt on our website: freshair.npr.org. This is FRESH AIR.
TERRY GROSS, HOST: Karen Russell first grabbed the attention of readers and critics with her 2007 collection of short stories called "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves." She followed that debut with the novel "Swamplandia," and now she has another collection of short stories called "Vampires in the Lemon Grove." Our book critic Maureen Corrigan is a fan.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: I don't have a good track record when it comes to raving about Karen Russell. Last year, along with my two fellow judges, I nominated Russell's novel "Swamplandia," as well as two other finalists, for the Pulitzer Prize. Result? The Pulitzer Board made headlines by deciding not to give out the award in Fiction.
Nevertheless, I rave on: this time about Russell's new short story collection, "Vampires in the Lemon Grove." Russell is so grand a writer - so otherworldly, yet emotionally devastating, so daffy and daring - that she doesn't need an imprimatur to stake her claim to literary genius.
The title story kicks off this collection by doing the near impossible: making me care about vampires, a breed more overexposed these days than Labrador retrievers. "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" features an undead married couple who have spent centuries trying to slake their thirst with something other than blood. They find some relief at a lemonade stand in Italy. The way Clyde, the husband of the pair, describes his first sip should give you a taste of how Russell's language bursts open.
I took a gulp, Clyde says, and a whole, small lemon lodged in my mouth. It was bracingly sour, with a delicate hint of ocean salt. After an initial prickling - a sort of chemical effervescence along my gums - a soothing blankness traveled from the tip of each fang to my fevered brain. If you have been thirsty for a long time, if you have been suffering, then the absence of those two feelings - however brief - becomes a kind of heaven.
As a short story, "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" also expands in its reach, ultimately surveying the disappointments of a very long marriage, a marriage that Clyde says he conceives of as a commitment to starve together. As evocative as Russell's title story is, there are three others here that are in another league altogether. Call it the League of Wonder.
"Reeling for the Empire" imagines a one-room factory in 19th-century Japan where girls spin exquisite silk. The catch is - and we learn this in the opening pages of the story - that the girls themselves have partly metamorphosed into silkworms, sporting white fur on their faces and spinning thread out of their own bellies.
As always with Russell, the horror of this specific situation ripples out, summoning images of sweatshops, past and present, where workers are reduced to what they repetitively do. Another raw standout is the final story, called "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis." This tale of tough boys and their scarecrow victim should be made required reading for anti-bullying workshops across the land.
The instant anthology keeper, though, is called "Proving Up." Imagine, if you can, Willa Cather crossed with Emily Dickinson in her Gothic mood. Our narrator is named Miles, and he's an 11-year-old boy staking out a claim with his family in 19th-century Nebraska.
Here's his description of their house, a dugout in a grassy hill: It looks, Miles says, like a hiccup in the earth. The floor is sod. The roof is sod, hardened by the red Nebraska sun. My mother covers the cook-stove with her mother's pilled linen tablecloth to keep the lizards and field mice and moles and rattlesnakes and yellow spiders from falling into our supper.
To secure their claim, the homesteaders must show the federal inspector that they have bought a glass window. For reasons I won't get into, Miles is the one who must ride out on his horse, carrying the window, to meet the inspector. Miles tells us he's eager for the crystal risk of riding at full gallop.
But as he sets out, a blizzard whips up, and Miles' horse becomes blinded when his eyelashes freeze together. Alone, Miles staggers through the blizzard, holding the window, until he meets an inspector, of sorts, but one from - shall we say - a higher authority than the federal government.
"Proving Up" is a stark tale about the American frontier and the payment - in sanity and mortality - that the land demanded from the settlers. I love the sweep of these stories, their goofy-to-majestic tone, the authority of Russell's narrators. I loved some of those very same elements in "Swamplandia."
My calendar of literary events tells me that the apparent retirement of Philip Roth comes at the same moment when Russell announces herself as one of the great American writers of our young century. The awards will take care of themselves.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Karen Russell's new short story collection "Vampires in the Lemon Grove." You can read an excerpt on our website freshair.npr.org, where you can also download Podcasts of our show.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.

subset: commoncrawl


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Toasted Quinoa, Snow Peas, Tomatoes, and Mozzarella Salad (Adapted from CL)
1 1/2 cups dry quinoa, rinsed and well drained
1 1/2 cups vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups water
1 cup diagonally cut snow peas
3 ounces small (or diced) fresh mozzarella balls
1/2 cup chopped red onion
1/2 cup chopped seedless cucumber
1/4 cup chopped fresh mint
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 pint grape or cherry tomatoes, halved
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon extravirgin olive oil
1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper sauce
Place a medium saucepan over medium-high heat - add quinoa and cook, stirring often, until toasted - about 5 - 7 minutes. Stir in broth and water. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat and cook until just tender, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and gently fluff with a fork - let cool.
Scoop the cooked quinoa into a large bowl and add the peas, cheese, onion, cucumber, mint, basil and tomatoes - gently toss together.
In a small bowl, whisk together zest, juice, oil, mustard, salt, pepper and cayenne pepper sauce until well combined. Pour this over the quinoa mixture and gently toss again to coat.
Makes about 4 to 6 servings.
Just found the recipe? Click here to see where we talked about it!
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Toasted Quinoa, Snow Peas, Tomatoes, and Mozzarella Salad
2 comments:
Good luck on your move. Minnesota was my neighbor for a long time and I've had some great adventures in Minneapolis.ReplyDelete
Thanks for the recipe with quinoa. I bought some at Whole Foods and had no idea what to do with it. This might just be the route I take with it.
Thanks Scotte - we are excited to get back and check out what has changed!ReplyDelete
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I've just added a page to my blog to advertise the books written by some of my favorite blogging buddies. You can click on it on the tab at the top of the page or you can find it here: Bloggin' Buddy Books.
If you have a book you'd like me to add, please shoot me an email at (firstname.lastname@example.com) and I'll be glad to add yours to my list. I'm only just starting, and these are three that I'm familiar with. I'm guessing that the list will grow!
I don't get any commission or even any glory. Sigh.
But we bloggers should stick together!


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When your 3PM chocolate craving hits, you have two options: take a walk or give in. Both have body benefits.
Let's look at the first one. By taking a 15-minute brisk walk, you could reduce that craving, according to recent research published in the journal Appetite. The benefits: diminished cravings means less calorie intake and you expended some calories. A win-win on the weight loss front.
Now, consider option two. If you give in to that chocolate craving and do so with dark chocolate, it may lower your blood pressure and, in theory, improve your blood flow. That is, if you eat 75 grams (a little more than 2.5 ounces) of the flavanol-rich treat daily, you could reduce risk of death from stroke by 8%, from cardiovascular disease by 5% and overall mortality by 4%, according to a new study in the International Journal of Hypertension. However, you'll also add 379 calories to your daily tally.
Which option will you choose?
More from Prevention: Which Is Healthier: Dark Chocolate v. Milk Chocolate?
Carey Rossi is the Senior News Editor for Prevention and Prevention.com. You can follow her @CareyRossi.


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Courtesy City of Boulder Open Sp
Matthew Jonas
The Times-Call published a reader photo Monday of a blue heron facing off against what was mistakenly identified as an otter. After publication, the newspaper was alerted by a reader that it was not an otter in the picture, but rather a mink, which the Times-Call confirmed with a Boulder County biologist.
Minks are generally smaller than otters, but they are in the same family. Yet it is still possible to find otters in the area. According to David Hoerath, a wildlife biologist for Boulder County, river otters were introduced near Beaver Reservoir in the 1970s. He said that they are fairly rare, but they still live in the area and can possibly be sighted near Boulder Creek.
Another animal that is rarely seen is the lynx, mainly because they reside at high altitudes, outside the range of most homes. Still, the lynx and its distinctive pointed ears can be spotted on rare occasion near Longmont, said Hoerath.
American white pelicans can also be seen in the area. Hoerath said their numbers are somewhat sparse because of a lack of places to nest, but they are noticeable because of their large size. They are seasonal in the area and returned as recently as two weeks ago. They are sometimes spotted near the waters of Lake John, Union Reservoir and McIntosh Lake, as well as other bodies of water.
Two aerial species — owls and bats — are rarely seen in the area, not necessarily because their numbers are sparse, but rather because they are nocturnal..
Other seldom-seen animals that live around or venture into Longmont include badgers, moose, elk and beavers.
Trevor Cardiff can be reached at email@example.com.


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What do you think of when you imagine going to the beach on a hot summer day? Sunblock, towels, bikinis maybe? Not me. I think about Galaga.
Less than 150 feet from any shoreline near a beach boardwalk, there's probably a video game arcade. Beach arcades have been around even before there were video games – in the late 1880s and early 1900s, you could pay a nickel to have your palms shocked by an electric current or your grip tested by a challenge to squeeze metal handles at Venice Beach, California or Coney Island, New York. And then, since the advent of Pong in the 1970s and through the phenomenon of Dance Dance Revolution, video game arcades and beaches have been closely linked.
Your average trip to the seaside can be a trip back to childhood. We undervalue trips like this, especially since the bum economy has many people taking "stay-cations" to local beaches instead of vacations to tropical resorts. Even worse, we undervalue some of the last dedicated video game arcades in the country, which you can find at Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts, Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, Redondo Beach, California or Virginia Beach in Virginia. With a good listing of local arcades featuring classic video games, you're all set for a summer of time travel.
Santa Cruz, main arcade.
For me, my beach arcade nostalgia trip began with a visit last week to the arcades at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. I walked up and down the boardwalk, watching kids try to drag their parents into the smaller arcades where redemption machines were visible from the walkway. I saw a group of preteen girls gather around MTV Drumscape, unsure of how to work the controls and apparently unwilling to read the instructions. I doubled back toward the Casino arcade and noted how the sand that people tracked in from the seaside gathered in little piles by the line of Mario Kart arcade machines. Turns out, people were sitting down on the plastic kart seat to empty out their shoes. And I saw a sunburned little girl who could have been me 15 years ago head toward the Galaga machine with a handful of tokens.
I'd never been to Santa Cruz as a kid, but I was overwhelmed with nostalgia as I walked between arcade machines and squinted against the flashing neon lights coming from their screens. It took me back in time 15 years to a noisy, air-conditioned cacophony of flashing neon lights and blaring 8-bit music in an arcade somewhere near Monterey Bay, California. On that fateful day 15 years ago, I was converted from a budding beach bunny into a total arcade animal when I got a high score on Galaga after two hours and $10 in quarters.
Santa Cruz, the Classic Corner.
That arcade in Monterey is gone, now. Like so many arcades across the country, it probably closed when Nolan Bushnell's Atari and Chuck E. Cheese empire declined and arcade machines across the country lost the 3D technology battle to Nintendo and Sega's home consoles. By 1997, there were maybe two arcades in my hometown where I could find Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Ms. Pac-Man, but by and large, those "arcades" threw out their video games and replaced them with kiddy gambling machines that spat tickets. The thrill I got from those kinds of arcades faded like a sunburn – it was nothing like the burning passion Galaga instilled.
The feelings and experiences of that long-gone arcade all came back to me within minutes of finding the Galaga machine at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk – tucked into the Classic Corner of the Casino arcade building along with a dozen other old-timers, even a Sea Wolf machine, circa 1976. There were actually several Galaga machines throughout the boardwalk, since there's more than one video game arcade. In the last few years or so, the management team at the boardwalk decided to merge their video game arcades with their kiddy gambling centers (a.k.a. "redemption centers") and now you cannot go twenty feet along the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk without spotting Street Fighter, DDR, or Ms. Pac-Man right next to ski ball and UFO catcher machines.
Santa Cruz.
The arcades at Santa Cruz have a reputation among hardcore arcade gamers for having one of the largest selections of classic arcade games of any beach arcade. There's only one other place where you can find more than the 50-odd functioning classic arcade games of the 70s and early 80s; and Funspot in Laconia, New Hampshire doesn't count because it's a museum, not a beach arcade.
What does count as a beach arcade but doesn't quite top Santa Cruz's collection is Half Moon Arcade at Weirs Beach, New Hampshire – about two miles away from Funspot. Like Santa Cruz, it's a tourist location with a lot of local traffic, but unlike Santa Cruz, it's only open in the summer. Arcade manager Robert Ames says that no matter what, there will always been an arcade at that beach.
Weirs Beach — Image Cred.
"I grew up with this business," he says. "At one time or another, we've had just about everything in this arcade." Between the arcade's two locations along the shoreline of Lake Winnipesaukee, there are more than 200 machines (redemption and video game) for people to play. Ames says the arcades see a mixed crowd of families and teenagers as well as hardcore gamers who compete at DDR.
The crowds who gather at Santa Cruz's Casino arcade include hardcore gamers, first-time teenagers and a ton of families. Arcade manager Barb Phillips and chief technician Brian Gustavson say that the Santa Cruz crowd shifts from mostly families and 15-year-olds without driver's licenses in the summer, to hardcore Capcom vs. SNK and DDR crowds and students from nearby UC Santa Cruz during the off-season in the winter.
Even with the recent downturn in the economy, the boardwalk hasn't taken a hit. "We're seen as a local destination, so people think of it as an inexpensive vacation," says Phillips. "We've had consistent [tourism] numbers this year and even in the off-season we do okay." I can see how they would. The Classic Corner may not have gotten as much foot traffic as the rest of the arcade – it's tucked into an awkward location next to laser tag and a row of pinball machines and can only fit about 15 comfortably. But tight clusters of teens formed around light gun games like Time Crisis 3 and around fighting games like Virtua Fighter 4, feeding token after token into the machines with the same fervor I remember from my 15-year-old affair with Galaga.
Santa Cruz.
Fuller would not disclose just how much money the arcade games pull in for the boardwalk total – but of the 176 arcade machines that don't spit tickets, every single one pulls its weight enough for Gustavson to justify the expense of ordering custom parts to fix them when they break.
Maintaining old arcade machines is definitely a challenge for beach arcades in a strapped economy. Gustavson talked about how sand gets where isn't supposed to go, overzealous gamers break joysticks and about how machines left in storage near salty sea air tend not to do so well when you try to switch them back on. Replacement parts for machines from the 70s can cost as much as $200 on auction sites; and many arcade technicians have to improvise.
Flipper McCoy's arcade in Virginia Beach does pretty well on its own repairs. Most coin-operated machines in the South are run by the Southern Amusement Corporation – and according to arcade manager Jay, the chief technician at the arcade is the husband of one of the corporation's owners. "He never has trouble finding parts," says Jay, who declined to give his last name because he's joining the Navy. "We've got a ton of machines here and they run off quarters, so there's enough money to keep 'em all running."
Jay says Flipper McCoy's hasn't had a hard time with the drop off in summer travel, either – mostly because their tourist crowd is made up of foreigners from Russia or Morocco. "We do get a lot of local hardcore gamers who want to play Marvel vs. Capcom, but there are a lot of [tourists] who are all like, 'Hey, there's Spider-Man in a game, I want to play that.'" Arcade games and classics like the original Super Mario Bros. are a big draw for the Flipper McCoy's crowd, he says, but there are still way more redemption machines than classic arcade games.
Back in Santa Cruz, Gustavson observes that any game where you can show off or at least ride a plastic motorcycle is enormously popular with older kids and adults – while the ticket-spitters are mostly the domain of young children. "People like to compete with each other," he says. "And the games where you can sit down and pull a curtain shut – they're pretty popular with the teenagers out on dates."
Santa Cruz, Casino Arcade.
That made me blush. Jurassic Park, first French kiss, Chuck E. Cheese, 1994. See what I mean about time travel?
Beach arcades may not be that different from other arcades that survived the downfall of the Golden Age. A few arcade gaming experts I interviewed said as much.
Ken Chaney, co-conspirator and operator of classic video game arcade showcase California Extreme says that after the Golden Age ended, "Arcade games were relegated to niche markets, tourist traps." And what are beach boardwalks besides very large tourist traps?
Chaney's co-organizer, East Coast-based arcade tournament director Bowen Kerins, agrees and adds that the redemption machines are just as ubiquitous at beach arcades as they are in the Chuck E. Cheeses they conquered. "These games are not providing the kind of experience people will want to come back to," he says.
But there's something to be said for the nostalgia the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk brought me. Chaney and Kerins trade on that same feeling for their annual showcase – but with the right arcade nearby, anyone can take that trip back in time almost at any time of the year.
I take comfort in knowing both that there's a place where I can get my Galaga fix and in knowing that there will be other generations of kids after me that will one day grow up, go to the beach for a vacation, and find that arcade game and all of the memories attached to it somewhere nearby.


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Statistics Netherlands calculates the monthly Input index of building costs for new dwellings to monitor developments in the price level of new dwellings in the Netherlands. Starting with the figures on January 2005, the Input index is published with 2000 as new base year. This paper deals with the changes made in the rebasing and the differences between the index series based on 1995=100 and the index series with base year 2000.
Custodian: Statistics Netherlands


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Interview with a high school principal on the math Common Core
In my third effort to understand the Common Core State Standards (CC) for math, I interviewed an old college friend Kiri Soares, who is the principal and co-founder of the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. Here's a transcript of the interview which took place earlier this month. My words are in italics below.
How are high school math teachers in New York City currently evaluated?
Teachers are now evaluated on 2 things:
- First, measures of teacher practice, which are based on observations, in turn based on some rubric. Right now it's the Danielson Rubric. This is a qualitative measure. In fact it is essentially an old method with a new name.
- Second, measures of student learning, that is supposed to be "objective". Overall it is worth 40% of the teacher's score but it is separated into two 20% parts, where teachers choose the methodology of one part and principals choose the other. Some stuff is chosen for principals by the city. Any time there is a state test we have to choose it. In terms of the teachers' choices, there are two ways to get evaluated: goals or growth. Goals are based on a given kid, and the teachers can guess they will get a certain slightly lower score or higher score for whatever reason. Otherwise, it's a growth-based score. Teachers can also choose from an array of assessments (state tests, performance tests, and third party exams). They can also choose the cohort (their own kids/ the grade/the school). The city also chose performance tasks in some instances.
Can you give me a concrete example of what a teacher would choose as a goal?
At the beginning of year you give diagnostic tests to students in your subject. Based on what a given kid scored in September, you extrapolate a guess for their performance in the June test. So if a kid has a disrupted homelife you might guess lower. Teacher's goal setting is based on these teachers' guesses.
So in other words, this is really just a measurement of how well teachers guess?
Well they are given a baseline and teachers set goals relative to that, but yes. And they are expected to make those guesses in November, possibly well before homelife is disrupted. It definitely makes things more complicated. And things are pretty complicated. Let me say a bit more.
The first three weeks of school are all testing. We test math, social studies, science, and English in every grade, and overall it depending on teacher/principal selections it can take up to 6 weeks, although not in a given subject. Foreign language and gym teachers also getting measured, by the way, based on those other tests. These early tests are diagnostic tests.
Moreover, they are new types of tests, which are called performance-based assessments, and they are based on writing samples with prompts. They are theoretically better quality because they go deeper, the aren't just bubble standardized tests, but of course they had no pre-existing baseline (like the state tests) and thus had to be administered as diagnostic. Even so, we are still trying to predict growth based on them, which is confusing since we don't know how to predict performance on new tests. Also don't even know how we can consistently grade such essay-based tests- despite "norming protocols", which is yet another source of uncertainty.
How many weeks per year is there testing of students?
The last half of June is gone, a week in January, and 2-3 weeks in the high school in the beginning per subject. That's a minimum of 5 weeks per subject per year, out of a total of 40 weeks. So one eighth of teacher time is spent administering tests. But if you think about it, for the teachers, it's even more. They have to grade these tests too.
I've been studying the rhetoric around the CC. So far I've listened to Diane Ravitch stuff, and to Bill McCallum, the lead writer of the math CC. They have very different views. McCallum distinguished three things, which when they are separated like that, Ravitch doesn't make sense.
Namely, he separates standards, curriculum, and testing. People complain about testing and say that CC standards make testing easier, and we already have too much testing, so CC is a bad thing. But McCallum makes this point: good standards also make good testing easier.
What do you think? Do teachers see those as three different things? Or is it a package deal, where all three things rolled into one in terms of how they're presented?
It's much easier to think of those three things as vertices of a triangle. We cannot make them completely isolated, because they are interrelated.
So, we cannot make the CC good without curriculum and assessment, since there's a feedback loop. Similarly, we cannot have aligned curriculum without good standards and assessment, and we cannot have good tests without good standards and curriculum. The standards have existed forever. The common core is an attempt to create a set of nationwide standards. For example, without a coherent national curriculum it might seem OK to teach creationism in place of evolution in some states. Should that be OK?
CC is attempting to address this, in our global economy, but it hasn't even approached science for clear political reasons. Math and English are the least political subjects so they started with those. This is a long time coming, and people often think CC refers to everything but so far it's really only 40% of a kid's day. Social studies CC standards are actually out right now, but they are very new.
Next, the massive machine of curriculum starts getting into play, as does the testing. I have CC standards and the CC-aligned test, but not curriculum.
Next, you're throwing into the picture teacher evaluation aligned to CC tests. Teachers are freaking out now – they're thinking, my curriculum hasn't been CC-aligned for many years, what do I do now? By the way, importantly, none of the high school curriculum in NY State is actually CC-aligned now. DOE recommendations for the middle school happened last year, and DOE people will probably recommend this year for high school, since they went into talks with publication houses last year to negotiate CC curriculum materials.
The real problem is this: we've created these new standards to make things more difficult and more challenging without recognizing where kids are in the present moment. If I'm a former 5th grader, and the old standards were expecting something from me that I got used to, and it wasn't very much, and now I'm in 6th grade, and there are all these raised expectations, and there's no gap attention.
Bottomline, everybody is freaking out – teachers, students, and parents.
Last year was the first CC-aligned ELA and math tests. Everybody failed. They rolled out the test before any CC curriculum.
From the point of view of NYC teachers, this seems like a terrorizing regime, doesn't it?
Yes, because the CC roll-out is rigidly tied to the tests, which are in turn rigidly tied to evaluations of teachers. So the teachers are worried they are automatically going to get a "failure" on that vector.
Another way of saying this is that, if teacher evaluations were taken out of the mix, we'd have a very different roll-out environment. But as it is, teachers are hugely anxious about the possibility that their kids might fail both the city and state tests, and that would give the teacher an automatic "failure" no matter how good their teacher observations are.
So if I'm a special ed teacher of a bunch of kids reading at 4th and 5th grade level even through they're in 7th grade, I'm particularly worried with the introduction of the new and unknown CC-aligned tests.
So is that really what will happen? Will all these teachers get failing evaluation scores?
That's the big question mark. I doubt it there will be massive failure though. I think given that the scores were so clustered in the middle/low muddle last year, they are going to add a curve and not allow so many students to fail.
So what you're pointing out is that they can just redefine failure?
Exactly. It doesn't actually make sense to fail everyone. Probably 75% of the kids got 2's or 1's out of a 4 point scale. What does failure mean when everyone fails? It just means the test was too hard, or that what the kids were being taught was not relevant to the test.
Let's dig down to the the three topics. As far as you've heard from the teachers, what's good and bad about CC?
My teachers are used to the CC. We've rolled out standards-based grading three years ago, so our math and ELA teachers were well adjusted, and our other subject teachers were familiar. The biggest change is what used to be 9th grade math is now expected of the 8th grade. And the biggest complaint I've heard is that it's too much stuff – nobody can teach all that. But that's always been true about every set of standards.
Did they get rid of anything?
Not sure, because I don't know what the elementary level CC standards did. There was lots of shuffling in the middle school, and lots of emphasis on algebra and algebraic thinking. Maybe they moved data and stats to earlier grades.
So I believe that my teachers in particular were more prepared. In other schools, where teachers weren't explicitly being asked to align themselves to standards, it was a huge shock. For them, it used to be solely about Regents, and also Regents exams are very predictable and consistent, so it was pretty smooth sailing.
Let's move on to curriculum. You mentioned there is no CC-aligned curriculum in NY. I also heard NY state has recently come out against the CC, did you hear that?
Well what I heard is that they previously said they this year's 9th graders (class of 2017) would be held accountable but now the class of 2022 will be. So they've shifted accountability to the future.
What does accountability mean in this context?
It means graduation requirements. You need to pass 5 Regents exams to graduate, and right now there are two versions of some of those exams: one CC-aligned, one old-school. The question is who has to pass the CC-aligned versions to graduate. Now the current 9th grade could take either the CC-aligned or "regular" Regents in math.
I'm going to ask my 9th grade students to take both so we can gather information, even though it means giving them 3 extra hours of tests. Most of my kids pass 2 Regents in 9th grade, 2 in 10th, and 3 in 11th, and then they're supposed to be done. They only take those Regents tests in senior year that they didn't pass earlier.
What are the good and bad things about testing?
What's bad is how much time is lost, as we've already said. And also, it's incredibly stressful. You and I went to school and we had one big college test that was stressful, namely the SAT. In terms of us finishing high school, that was it. For these kids it's test, test, test, test. I don't think it's actually improved the quality of college students across the country. 20 years ago NY was the only one that had extra tests except California achievement tests, which I guess we sometimes took as well.
Another way to say it is that we did take some tests but it didn't take 5 weeks.
And it wasn't high stakes for the teacher!
Let's go straight there: what are the good/bad things for the teachers with all these tests?
Well it definitely makes the teachers more accountable. Even teachers think this: there is a cadre of protected teachers in the city, and the principals didn't want to take the time to get rid of them, so they'd excess them out of the schools, and they would stay in the system.
Now with testing it has become much more the principal's responsibility to get rid of bad teachers. The number of floating teachers is going down.
How did they get rid of the floaters?
A lot of different ways. They made them go into the schools, take interviews, they made their quality of life not great, and a lot if them left or retired or found jobs. Principals took up the mantle as well, and they started to do due diligence.
Sounds like the incentive system for over-worked principals was wrong.
Yes, although the reason it became easier for the principals is because now we have data. So if you're coming in as ineffective and I also have attendance data and observation data, I can add my observational data (subjective albeit rubric based) and do something.
If I may be more skeptical, it sounds like this data gathering was used as a weapon against teachers. There were probably lots of good teachers that have bad numbers attached to them that could get fired if someone wanted them to be fired.
Correct, except those good teachers generally have principals who protect them.
You could give everyone a bad number and then fire the people you want, right?
Is that the goal?
Under Bloomberg it was.
Is there anything else you want to mention?
I think testing needs to be dialed down but not disappear. Education is a bi-polar pendulum and it never stops in the middle. We're on an extreme but let's not get rid of everything. There is a place for testing.
Let's get our CC standards, curriculum, and testing reasonable and college-aligned and let's keep it reasonable. Let's do it with standards across states and let's make sure it makes sense.
Also, there are some new tests coming out, called PARCC assessments, that are adaptive tests aligned to the CC. They are supposed to replace Regents down the line and be national.
Here's what bothers me about that. It's even harder to investigate the experience of the student with adaptive tests.
I'm not sure there's enough technology to actually do this anyway very soon. For example, we were given $10,000 for 500 student. That's not going to go far unless it takes 2 weeks to administer the test. But we are investing in our technology this year. For example, I'm looking forward to buying textbooks and get my updates pushed instead of having to buy new books every year.
Last question. They are redoing the SAT because rich kids are doing so much better. Are they just trying to get in on the test prep game? Because, here's the thing, there's no test that can't be gamed that's also easy to grade. It's gotta depend on the letters and grades. We keep trying to shortcut that.
Listen, this is what I tell the kids. What's going to matter to you is the letter of recommendation, so don't be an jerk to your fellow students or to the teachers. Next, are you going to be able to meet the minimum requirements? That's what the SAT is good for. It defines a lower bound.
Is it a good lower bound though?
Well, I define the lower bound as 1000 in total. My kids can target that. It's a reasonable low bar.
To what extent do your students – mostly inner-city, black girls interested in math and science – suffer under the wholly gamed SAT system?
It serves to give them a point of self-reference with the rest of the country. You have to understand, they, like most kids in the nation, don't have a conception of themselves outside of their own experience. The SAT serves that purpose. My kids, like many others, have the dream of Ivy League minus the understanding of where they actually stand.
So you're saying their estimates of their chances are too high?
Yes, oftentimes. They are the big fish in a well-defined pond. At the very least, The SAT helps give them perspective.
Thanks so much for your time Kiri.
March 28, 2014 at 7:45 am
Great interview — this really clarifies some of the issues that confused me about the response to CC (there have been protests at school board meetings here on Long Island).
March 28, 2014 at 9:12 am
No mention of test delivery method — is this all on computer? or just machine scored pencil and paper tests? What is the status of Item Response theory in all this? Or are they using raw scores instead? What a mess.
March 28, 2014 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the interview, it was nice to hear these viewpoints!
March 28, 2014 at 11:32 am
I'm puzzled by Kiri Soares statement, "The biggest change is what used to be 9th grade math is now expected of the 8th grade.". In California, the pre-CC standard was Algebra I in 8th grade; under CC it has been pushed to 9th grade (perhaps not surprisingly since negative numbers are not introduced in the CC standards until 6th grade). Does that mean California standards in math were previously 2 years more advanced than New York's?
March 31, 2014 at 9:00 am
April 23, 2014 at 8:31 am


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December 2017 Open Commission Meeting
10:30 am – 12:30 pm EST
Room TW-C305, 445 12th Street S.W., Washington, DC
Jump to navigation
The FCC held an Open Meeting on the subjects listed below:
Public Drafts of Meeting Items – The FCC is publicly releasing the draft text of each item expected to be considered at this Open Commission Meeting. One-page cover sheets are included in the public drafts to help summarize each item. Links to these materials are provided below.


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The price of "free" two-day shipping is about to go up. That was the message from Amazon executives last week, who said that shipping costs would probably force them to raise the price of the company's popular Amazon Prime program. Now $79 per year, the cost could go up $20 to $40 more.
Judging from Amazon's balance sheet -- and Wall Street's negative reaction to those balances after its most recent earnings report -- the company really has no choice. The irony is that Amazon Prime has worked out just like Amazon wanted it to.
>Judging from Amazon's balance sheet -- and Wall Street's negative reaction to those balances -- the company really has no choice.
Amazon Prime launched in 2005 as a premium variation on its "Super Saver Shipping" program, which until a few months ago offered free but slower shipping in exchange for a $25 minimum order (the minimum rose to $35 in October). Super Saver stoked sales in two ways. The minimum order requirement meant that customers might buy more than they planned just to hit the free-shipping mark. Cutting shipping from the final price of an order also eliminated one of the main reasons people still prefer shopping in physical stores.
As recounted in Brad Stone's The Everything Store, if Super Saver was coach, Prime was first class. For $79 per year, Prime members savored the service's speed and reliability, and, Stone writes, they were inclined to spend more based on the "faintly irrational human impulse to maximize the benefits of a membership club one has already joined." Though Amazon does not say how many Prime members it has beyond a general figure of "tens of millions", the company did claim more than one million new Prime sign-ups during the third week of December alone.
Researchers have come up with various methods for gauging Prime's influence, and they estimate the average Prime member spends more than twice as much on Amazon annually than non-Prime members. All of this feeds what Stone calls Amazon's "virtuous cycle" masterminded by founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. "When customers spent more, Amazon's volumes increased, so it could lower shipping costs and negotiate new deals with vendors." Stone writes. "That saved the company money, which would help pay for Prime and lead back to lower prices."
Amazon's Growth Engine Needs a Tune-Up
But now that cycle appears to be breaking down.
The first sign may have been the Christmas 2013 shipping debacle that led Amazon to offer $20 gift cards to customers whose orders came late. Amazon itself denied culpability, blaming the carriers. But it's hard not to see the specter of overpromising in those million pre-Christmas Prime sign-ups. Shipping rates can't get any lower once the system is maxed out.
Even though there's no other indication that Prime's fabled reliability has otherwise been compromised, the price of keeping its two-day promise has apparently become too much for Amazon to bear. On last week's earnings call, Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak said that Prime's popularity has risen dramatically during the nine years of its existence and that Prime members are ordering more per customer than ever before. And yet, he said, "even as fuel and transportation cost have increased, the $79 price has remained the same."
Even if Amazon does raise Prime's price to cover those increased costs, it may still lose money. Shipping losses are growing by a rate of nearly one-quarter year-over-year, and Amazon is spending almost twice as much on shipping as it charges, writes Colin W. Gillis, director of research at BGC Financial. The proposed Prime price hike won't cover that deficit, Gillis predicts. "While raising Prime pricing and pitching 'drone delivery' solutions make good headlines, shipping losses remain a burden on profits."
Profits Aren't Even the Problem
Unlike most companies, Amazon hasn't had to worry much about its near-total absence of profits. While Apple's share price wavers despite pocketing tens of billions annually, Amazon's stock jumped by nearly two-thirds last year after ending its fiscal 2012 in the red.
What investors do care about, however, are sales. As long as Amazon keeps growing into the world-dominating retail giant that Bezos aspires to become, Wall Street has seemed content. But its $25.6 billion in fourth-quarter sales reported last week missed analyst expectations by about $400 million. Worse, sales aren't growing as fast as shareholders would like. After reporting its results Thursday, investors finally spanked Amazon shares with an 11 percent loss.
>'Amazon Prime members who joined in the past year represent a different risk to Amazon.'
Mike Levin
As late as June 2011, Amazon sales were doubling compared to the same time a year earlier. Compared to that kind of growth, any losses related to the too-good-to-be true Prime were easy to justify. Now sales growth stands at around 20 percent, and Prime has started to look like it's not holding up its end of the deal.
Last year, we speculated that Amazon might even consider cutting the price of Prime because it was such an invaluable source of sales for Amazon. If that momentum is flagging, however, Amazon will have a much harder time justifying the shipping losses Prime inflicts.
Along with bringing in more money to cut those losses, perhaps a Prime price increase would serve as a kind of litmus test. According to one survey, customers in the first year of their Prime memberships are much less likely to renew than those who have been members for more than a year.
"Amazon Prime members who joined in the past year represent a different risk to Amazon," says Mike Levin, co-founder of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which tracks the costs and benefits of Prime to Amazon.
For those loyal customers who have gotten addicted to two-day shipping, an additional $20 is a small price to pay in order to feed that need. On the other hand, a spike in the Prime rate might have newbies shaking their heads. "Too good to be true," they'll say. "We knew it all along."


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Many social observers believe summer jobs for young people have a huge benefit for the community as well as the teenagers. Not only do teens learn some key lessons about life in the working world before they graduate and go forth to make a living, but they learn skills such as time management, financial responsibility, teamwork, job experience and how to network. They also get a paycheck.
For society, jobs also keep teens busy, and out of trouble. According to the American Working Teens Fact Sheet, about 70 to 80 percent of teens will work for pay sometime during their youth, and about half of the young people who are employed work more than 15 hours during a school week.
Teens who work summer jobs before they leave high school, experts claim, develop more confidence for job seeking later. They learn how to land a job, and more importantly, how to do the job, so they leave high school with real life experience on their resumes.
"We will match them with another equally good job experience if we can't give them what they want." – Deputy Mayor Vivian Brady-Phillips
After nearly six months of working with local schools, colleges, county government, and businesses, Jersey City is launching a new summer youth program called the Jersey City Summer Works Initiative ("JC Summer Works").
The program will offer summer job opportunities, and professional development mentorship and enrichment activities to Jersey City kids ages 15 to 21, and – according to Deputy Mayor Vivian Brady-Phillips – will give these kids opportunities to pursue certification for career skills needed in the future.
And unlike many of the summer job programs offered in the past, many of these jobs won't be subsidized by taxpayers.
Some of the job opportunities, according to Sarah Golfarb, Ph.D, a research assistant for the city, are within local corporations that will allow students to get legitimate business experience, to interact with professionals in specific fields, and to network for future opportunities.
Brady-Phillips said city officials started to meet with business leaders, school officials, and others late last year to develop a meaningful program that would provide jobs to a greater number of Jersey City teens.
Learn as they earn
Students involved with the six-week summer program will work four days in various jobs throughout the city. On Fridays they will come together in various workshops where they will cover basic skills such as applying for jobs and other related points of interest.
The workshops will feature peer group work to review the week's workplace challenges, a cumulative career guidance curriculum approved by the Jersey City Board of Education, and presentations by industry leaders.
The program also has the support of NJ Needs You, which is an organization that helps students who are the first in their families to go to college. Program supporters have committed more than $225,000 toward the initiative.
Brady-Phillips said the program was developed in collaboration with the Board of Education, the city's institutes of higher education, and nonprofits and community-based organizations.
"Our young adults must be prepared with the job experience and skills necessary to succeed in
today's competitive workforce," said Mayor Steven Fulop. "Summer Works will provide our city's youth with access to career readiness through a wide variety of employment opportunities. Through crucial enrichment and mentorship in every program, Summer Works will also ensure that Jersey City's young residents have the opportunity to flourish throughout the summer and beyond."
Wider range of job opportunities
The summer internship experience is a competitive program that connects high-achieving high school juniors and seniors to paid internships with prominent companies and institutions and allows them to earn academic credit.
"We will pair these teens off with employers," Brady-Phillips said.
Businesses and other entities providing jobs include Fidelity, PricewaterhouseCooper, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Hyatt Regency Jersey City on the Hudson, Jersey City Medical Center, Eastern Millwork, Inc., United Water, Tropicana, Hudson County Community College, and New Jersey City University.
Even jobs offered through various city departments and agencies will be expanded to offer skill-based training and career guidance led by the Jersey City Employment and Training Program (JCETP) and in collaboration with organizations including the Hudson County Building and Construction Trades Council.
A select group of youths will also have the opportunity to assist local artists in the Summer Works Arts Program as part of Jersey City's Keep America Beautiful campaign. Jersey City residents between the ages of 16 and 21 can apply for the Summer Works Arts Program
at http://jerseycitysummerworks.org/summer-works-arts-program.
Must apply like any other job
In the past, most of the jobs the city provided were through the Recreation Department, said Golfarb. The new program provides a much broader range of job experience opportunities.
Current public school juniors and seniors who are residents of Jersey City can apply for the Jersey City Summer Internship Program.
A panel will review their applications and match them with employers. Sometimes students may get matched up with some choice of career path – provided this is possible, Brady-Phillips said.
"We will match them with another equally good job experience if we can't give them what they want," she said.
In some ways, applying for the program is a job education event in itself, since students will have to go through many of the steps they would if they were seeking jobs on their own, such as filling out an application and undergoing a job interview.
Youth who are employed through JC Summer Works programs' City Youth Jobs, Pathways to
Trades, and Summer Works Arts Program will be invited to prepare for their professional futures through Saturday Jump Start workshops that cover a range of subjects such as career guidance, financial literacy, college readiness programming, and educational opportunities. These will be held at various locations throughout the city.
To provide additional career opportunities for the city's youth, the mayor's office is establishing a Summer Youth Job Bank that will help connect Jersey City's small businesses who are offering summer youth jobs with potential job candidates.
Information and application sessions will be held on May 10 and 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the council chambers in City Hall, 280 Grove St., Sunday, and May 11 at Mary McLeod Bethune Life Center, 140 MLK Drive.
All applications will be open through May 30. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, and teens are encouraged to apply early. For more information, please see www.jerseycitysummerworks.org.
Al Sullivan may be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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HTC's One X and EVO 4G LTE are both held up in customs right now. Patent trouble. But according to updates folks who preordered the Sprint phone, the EVO 4G LTE has a tentative date of May 23.
That could change, of course, if the problems at the docks persist, but for now it's the clearest indication we've seen. For its part, HTC was not forthcoming about any dates in an official statement to the Verge:
HTC is working closely with U.S. Customs to secure approval for shipments of the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE. We have not made any announcements about a new launch date and will provide an update on availability as soon as we can do so confidently.
So this could all come down to some goon at Best Buy seeing the phones wouldn't be ready by tomorrow, and saying, "Ah, hell, middle of next week?" But hey, maybe not. [Verge]