do no harm:


idit dobb-weinstein: "teaching is action and thinking at once. What I try to guard against most when I teach is not speaking as if my answer were conclusive, so as to avoid (to the extent possible) any kind of dogmatic appropriation. It is understandable why students might wish to imitate their teachers, but there are different modes of imitation. I try very hard to avoid the mimetic appropriation that is immediate, passive, and occludes thinking. One other reason is that if I made clear what my views were, and my views appeared as if they were final, it would preclude the possibility of first, students challenging me and second, learning from my students. The relation between the student and teacher is, to me, a dynamic relationship . . . Teaching and learning is a movement that occurs between. In other words, we are at once both agent and patient, both teacher and learner. If we are not very careful, we can do a great deal of harm. And that, too, I have learned from my teachers, Maimonides especially.

I believe my task is to provoke students to think and to engage them in genuine dialogue and questioning. To paraphrase a rabbinic saying, 'I have learned from my teachers, and I have learned from my peers, but I have learned most from my students.' And that is a continuous process of learning."

Thursday, 6 May 2010


reminding us that eating healthy should be a part of our academic future.
the fact that LACC sponsors a food truck that uses polystyrene containers is so environmentally deplorable and bad for human health.
see
A. REASONS WHY POLYSTYRENE FOAM IS BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN HEALTH.

1. Toxic chemicals leach out of these products into the food that they contain. These chemicals threaten human health and reproductive systems.

2. These products are made with petroleum, a non-sustainable, heavily polluting and disappearing commodity.

3. The product does not biodegrade. It crumbles into fragments that have no expiration date.

3. A certain percentage of product will be dumped in the environment, persisting on land indefinitely as litter and breaking up into pieces that choke and clog animal digestive systems in waterways.

4. The product takes up more space in landfills than does paper and eventually will re-enter the environment when landfills are breached by water or mechanical forces.

5. Foam recycling is a public relations stunt, promoted by the chemical industries that manufacture it. This is done in highly centralized, distant facilities using complex chemical processes and expends far more energy than is ever saved by recycling the material.

unbelievably, even the airborne molecules of heterocyclic amines, which are formed when you cook the creatine in muscle tissue, are carcinogenic when inhaled.
for more on this google heterocyclic amines.
this is so interesting from pubmed:

The purpose of this report is to summarize data on carcinogenic heterocyclic amines mainly from the aspect of environmental medicine. Since 1977, a new series of heterocyclic amines has been isolated as potent mutagens and they have been shown to be carcinogenic to experimental animals. Among these carcinogens, carcinogenic amino-alpha-carbolines and amino-gamma-carbolines are widely distributed in such components of the environment as airborne particles, rain water, cigarette smoke, diesel exhaust particles and cooked foods. Moreover, most carcinogenic heterocyclic amines are reported to be present in cigarette smoke. These facts suggest that carcinogenic heterocyclic amines are likely to be ubiquitous environmental pollutants. These results also support the hypothesis that carcinogenic heterocyclic amines may be formed through combustion of various materials such as food, grass and petroleum.


The mutagenic activity and the mass amount of heterocyclic amines responsible for the mutagenic activity have been measured in some cooked foods. Cooked meats are the predominant source of mutagenic activity in the diet with values ranging from 0 to 10,000 revertants per gram reported in the Ames/Salmonella test with strain TA98. Several heterocyclic amines are present and have been quantified using solid-phase extraction followed by HPLC. Frying at higher temperatures and for longer times produces the greatest mutagenic response, and concomitantly, the largest amounts of heterocyclic amines. Most of the mutagenic activity in fried meat samples can be accounted for by MeIQx(2-amino-3,8-dimethylimidazo[4,5-b]quinoxaline), DiMeIQx (2-amino-3,4,8-dimethylimidazo [4,5-f]quinoxaline) and IQ (2-amino-3-methylimidazo [4,5-f]quinoline), although other heterocyclic amines are present and PhIP (2-amino-3-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine) mutagenic activity becomes significant at higher temperatures. Non-meat products such as baked breads can also form significant mutagenic activity, particularly when overcooked. Commercially prepared hamburgers made from meat substitutes such as tofu, wheat gluten or tempeh and fried at 210 degrees C have up to 10% of the mutagenic activity of a fried beef patty cooked under the same conditions. When detected, amounts of heterocyclic amines in fried beef patties range from a total of 0.35 ng/g for commercial beef hamburgers to 142 ng/g for a beef patty cooked over a barbecue. Dietary intake is expected to have a large range, from less than one microgram per day to over 50 micrograms per day based on current knowledge of known heterocyclic amine chemicals and heterocyclic amine-containing foods.
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