http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Children born to older fathers might have an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, Swedish researchers report in the September Archives of General Psychiatry.
The finding is a statistical association drawn from a large population survey. But it falls in line with earlier studies suggesting that children sired by older men face a greater-than-average risk of being stillborn, miscarried or having schizophrenia, cancer or autism.
The theory linking paternal age with an offspring’s health rests on the genetics of aging sperm. Spontaneous mutations can accumulate in the genes of a man’s sperm cells as he ages. These cells divide as many as 660 times by the time a man reaches 40, by some estimates. Each division increases the risk of acquiring a harmful mutation from erroneous gene copying, the theory holds.
Women don’t face this risk since the number of eggs a woman carries is set at birth, each having divided 23 times at that point and no more. But older women do face a higher risk of having a child with Down syndrome.
In the new study, epidemiologist Emma Frans of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues used a national registry to identify 13,428 people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during at least two hospital admissions. For comparison purposes, each of these individuals was matched with five randomly selected people of the same gender and year of birth.
People fathered by men 55 or older had a 37 percent greater risk of being bipolar than those sired by men age 20 through 24. If the father was age 30 through 54, he imparted only a modestly increased risk. Being sired by a father age 25 through 29 did not add a risk. The researchers accounted for education level, age of the mother, family history of psychotic disorders and the number of children the mother had.
For people diagnosed with bipolar disorder before age 20, the late paternity effect was even more pronounced. Researchers found that people born to men over age 40 seemed to incur double the risk of being bipolar in youth as those fathered by men in their early 20s. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Other studies have suggested that having a close, personal relative with bipolar disorder increases a person’s risk of developing the condition. That association’s increase is much greater than any risk from merely having an older father, Frans says.
Bipolar disorder appears to have a clear genetic component, particularly when the condition shows up in youth, says epidemiologist Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But this study may not catch all men with bipolar disorder, and many bipolar men go through multiple marriages and often father children as they go along, he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
“I wonder whether men who have more severe bipolar disorder are just more likely to have kids at 40 or 50?” he asks. If so, that would exaggerate any risk seemingly imparted by aging itself, he says. The explanation “may be a psychosocial one,” he says.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
salt 6.sal.004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
When you look at your food, some ingredients are easy to see. For example, there is obviously milk in your cereal, cheese on your pizza and peanut butter on your toast.
But your meals are also filled with ingredients you can’t see. And you might be surprised to learn just how much those hidden items affect your health.
Salt is a perfect example of an ingredient that you might not notice, even when you eat a lot of it.
Sometimes, salt is obvious. You can see it on pretzels. You can taste it on french fries. And you can sprinkle it on green beans, straight from the shaker.
But it’s the salt we can’t see that concerns scientists most. For decades, doctors have warned patients that too much salt can be bad for their hearts. Still, most Americans continue to eat way too much salt, even when they try to avoid the salt shaker.
That’s because more than 75 percent of the salt we eat is hidden in restaurant meals, fast food and processed foods, such as spaghetti sauce from a jar, canned soup and frozen pizza. Often, you can’t even taste that the salt is there.
Heart trouble has long been considered a grown-up problem, and parents haven’t worried too much about the salt their kids eat. But new research suggests that salt is starting to affect kids — in their hearts, kidneys and waistlines.
Loading up on salt-filled potato chips, hot dogs and canned tuna today could also set young people up for even more health problems down the road.
“Most national heads of policy-making bodies in the United States and Canada and Great Britain are reaching the same conclusion,” says Lawrence Appel, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Reduce your salt intake.”
Straight to the heart
Salt is made up of two elements, or basic components: sodium and chlorine. When put in food or liquid, salt, also called sodium chloride, or NaCl, breaks into its two elements.
The chlorine part of salt isn’t that important. It’s the sodium that can stir up trouble.
We need a small amount of sodium to keep our muscles working and our nerves sending messages throughout the body. But the amount of sodium we actually need is really tiny: about 500 milligrams, or less than a quarter teaspoon of salt. A little bit goes a long way.
access
Enlargemagnify
Want salt with that?Some foods just cry out for extra salt, like these fries. That can make them a bad meal choice.Burke/Triolo
Dietary guidelines in the United States and elsewhere recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. That’s about a teaspoonful of salt.
Kids ages 9 to 13 should eat no more than 1,500 to 2,200 mg of sodium a day. Younger kids should get even less.
But the average American eats about twice the recommended daily amount. This worries doctors because too much sodium can cause the body to produce more blood. To pump the extra blood, the heart has to work extra hard. This leads to a rise in blood pressure — a measurement of how stressed out the heart is. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, often leads to heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to ailments like heart attacks.
“Ninety percent of adult Americans develop hypertension in their lifetimes,” Appel says. It’s a big problem.
You are what you eat
Salt isn’t the only cause of hypertension. Eating lots of junk food, weighing too much and exercising too little also contribute to high blood pressure. But a large number of studies suggest that salt is a major player.
Some of the most powerful strikes against salt come from a pair of studies that took place in the 1990s. The goal of the research was to figure out if what we eat affects blood pressure, and if so, how much.
As part of the studies, hundreds of adults ate exactly what researchers told them to. Called DASH, these studies lasted for months at a time.
The results showed a sizeable drop in blood pressure in people who ate extra fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and only small amounts of red meat, sweet treats and fatty foods like fast food and donuts. Eating well, the researchers concluded, is good for your heart.
But blood pressure levels dropped even more when participants who followed the diet described above also lessened their salt intake. In the first DASH study, participants ate a relatively high level of salt — 3,300 mg a day. In the second DASH study, participants’ salt intake dropped to as low as 1,500 mg a day. The low-salt, healthy eating program became known as the DASH diet, and doctors now recommend it to both adults and kids.
“The DASH diet reduces blood pressure in the whole population,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietician and research nutritionist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Better yet, she says, the diet works “as much as any [blood-pressure] drug would.”
What’s more, studies from around the world show that hypertension and heart disease rates are lowest in places where people eat the least amount of salt. (In fact, the Yanomami Indians of South America eat very little sodium and have lower blood pressure readings than American 10-year-olds.)
And in a 2007 study, scientists turned up the first direct link between salt and heart disease. They found that cutting down on salt now can lower a person’s risk of heart disease 10 to 15 years in the future.
access
Enlargemagnify
Well dressed?Although most salad offerings, with the exception of olives and other pickled foods, tend to be low in salt, salad dressings can have plenty. Check out the sodium content on the label before splashing plenty on your veggies.Burke/Triolo
“The bottom line is that high sodium levels are definitely bad for you,” Obarzanek says. “It affects everybody. And it’s important even if you don’t have high blood pressure [now], because you’re likely to get it as you get older.”
Start thinking about salt now
Like most kids, you probably don’t spend much time worrying about heart disease. After all, hypertension tends to become more common as people reach middle age and older.
But doctors say it’s never too early to start thinking about your heart — or about salt.
Blood pressure has been going up over the past decade in children and teenagers in the United States and many European countries. And a kid with high blood pressure is more likely to become a grown-up with hypertension.
“It’s better to not have a lifelong exposure to high blood pressure,” Obarzanek says.
Cutting down on salt might help stop the cycle. In one recent study, researchers from the United Kingdom analyzed 10 trials involving nearly 1,000 kids. The trial results showed that lowering sodium intake by 40 to 50 percent led to a significant decrease in blood pressure, even in infants.
Reducing salt might also help combat childhood obesity, a growing public health problem. British researchers recently found that kids who eat less salt also drink fewer sugary soft drinks. Drinking less soda makes kids less likely to gain weight, become obese and develop high blood pressure.
And salt can affect more than just your heart and weight. A study published in October found that a growing number of kids in the U.S are suffering from an ailment called kidney stones. This painful condition used to mostly affect people in their 40s and older. Now, kids as young as 5 are getting it.
The kidneys are responsible for filtering salt out of the bloodstream. So researchers think that kids eating too much salt and not drinking enough water are partly to blame for the trend.
How to lick salt
If you’re like most people, cutting down on salt can be tough, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
His research shows that when given larger and larger amounts of sodium, people want more and more of it. Even babies drink more formula when it’s saltier. That preference starts as early as 4 months old.
Getting used to eating less salt, on the other hand, can take months. And low-sodium food might taste gross at first when you’re used to highly salted versions.
The good news is that you can retrain your taste buds to prefer less salty food. And now is a good time to do it: Research shows that what you eat as a kid strongly influences what you’ll like as an adult. So, the more salt (or sugar, or even spices, such as hot chili powder) you eat now, the more likely you are to crave those ingredients later. And later, your heart might be weaker and less able to handle a heavy salt load.
“It’s an easy change to make at virtually no cost,” says Darwin Labarthe, director of the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “And it has an immense health impact.”
The best way to reduce the amount of sodium you consume, researchers say, is to make changes gradually. Start by sprinkling half as much salt on your dinner as you normally do. Switch to fresh foods instead of canned and bottled versions. And go easy on the condiments. Things like ketchup, soy sauce and salad dressing can carry far more sodium than you might expect.
You might also want to start reading nutrition labels. You may be surprised to find out that a serving of tomato sauce has more than 500 mg of sodium. And that there are 1,150 mg of sodium in a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, and more than 2,000 mg in many frozen meals.
“Kids today need to give salt the shake,” says David Grotto, a dietician and author in Chicago, “For overall health’s sake.”
When you look at your food, some ingredients are easy to see. For example, there is obviously milk in your cereal, cheese on your pizza and peanut butter on your toast.
But your meals are also filled with ingredients you can’t see. And you might be surprised to learn just how much those hidden items affect your health.
Salt is a perfect example of an ingredient that you might not notice, even when you eat a lot of it.
Sometimes, salt is obvious. You can see it on pretzels. You can taste it on french fries. And you can sprinkle it on green beans, straight from the shaker.
But it’s the salt we can’t see that concerns scientists most. For decades, doctors have warned patients that too much salt can be bad for their hearts. Still, most Americans continue to eat way too much salt, even when they try to avoid the salt shaker.
That’s because more than 75 percent of the salt we eat is hidden in restaurant meals, fast food and processed foods, such as spaghetti sauce from a jar, canned soup and frozen pizza. Often, you can’t even taste that the salt is there.
Heart trouble has long been considered a grown-up problem, and parents haven’t worried too much about the salt their kids eat. But new research suggests that salt is starting to affect kids — in their hearts, kidneys and waistlines.
Loading up on salt-filled potato chips, hot dogs and canned tuna today could also set young people up for even more health problems down the road.
“Most national heads of policy-making bodies in the United States and Canada and Great Britain are reaching the same conclusion,” says Lawrence Appel, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Reduce your salt intake.”
Straight to the heart
Salt is made up of two elements, or basic components: sodium and chlorine. When put in food or liquid, salt, also called sodium chloride, or NaCl, breaks into its two elements.
The chlorine part of salt isn’t that important. It’s the sodium that can stir up trouble.
We need a small amount of sodium to keep our muscles working and our nerves sending messages throughout the body. But the amount of sodium we actually need is really tiny: about 500 milligrams, or less than a quarter teaspoon of salt. A little bit goes a long way.
access
Enlargemagnify
Want salt with that?Some foods just cry out for extra salt, like these fries. That can make them a bad meal choice.Burke/Triolo
Dietary guidelines in the United States and elsewhere recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium a day. That’s about a teaspoonful of salt.
Kids ages 9 to 13 should eat no more than 1,500 to 2,200 mg of sodium a day. Younger kids should get even less.
But the average American eats about twice the recommended daily amount. This worries doctors because too much sodium can cause the body to produce more blood. To pump the extra blood, the heart has to work extra hard. This leads to a rise in blood pressure — a measurement of how stressed out the heart is. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, often leads to heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to ailments like heart attacks.
“Ninety percent of adult Americans develop hypertension in their lifetimes,” Appel says. It’s a big problem.
You are what you eat
Salt isn’t the only cause of hypertension. Eating lots of junk food, weighing too much and exercising too little also contribute to high blood pressure. But a large number of studies suggest that salt is a major player.
Some of the most powerful strikes against salt come from a pair of studies that took place in the 1990s. The goal of the research was to figure out if what we eat affects blood pressure, and if so, how much.
As part of the studies, hundreds of adults ate exactly what researchers told them to. Called DASH, these studies lasted for months at a time.
The results showed a sizeable drop in blood pressure in people who ate extra fruits and vegetables, lots of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and only small amounts of red meat, sweet treats and fatty foods like fast food and donuts. Eating well, the researchers concluded, is good for your heart.
But blood pressure levels dropped even more when participants who followed the diet described above also lessened their salt intake. In the first DASH study, participants ate a relatively high level of salt — 3,300 mg a day. In the second DASH study, participants’ salt intake dropped to as low as 1,500 mg a day. The low-salt, healthy eating program became known as the DASH diet, and doctors now recommend it to both adults and kids.
“The DASH diet reduces blood pressure in the whole population,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietician and research nutritionist with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Better yet, she says, the diet works “as much as any [blood-pressure] drug would.”
What’s more, studies from around the world show that hypertension and heart disease rates are lowest in places where people eat the least amount of salt. (In fact, the Yanomami Indians of South America eat very little sodium and have lower blood pressure readings than American 10-year-olds.)
And in a 2007 study, scientists turned up the first direct link between salt and heart disease. They found that cutting down on salt now can lower a person’s risk of heart disease 10 to 15 years in the future.
access
Enlargemagnify
Well dressed?Although most salad offerings, with the exception of olives and other pickled foods, tend to be low in salt, salad dressings can have plenty. Check out the sodium content on the label before splashing plenty on your veggies.Burke/Triolo
“The bottom line is that high sodium levels are definitely bad for you,” Obarzanek says. “It affects everybody. And it’s important even if you don’t have high blood pressure [now], because you’re likely to get it as you get older.”
Start thinking about salt now
Like most kids, you probably don’t spend much time worrying about heart disease. After all, hypertension tends to become more common as people reach middle age and older.
But doctors say it’s never too early to start thinking about your heart — or about salt.
Blood pressure has been going up over the past decade in children and teenagers in the United States and many European countries. And a kid with high blood pressure is more likely to become a grown-up with hypertension.
“It’s better to not have a lifelong exposure to high blood pressure,” Obarzanek says.
Cutting down on salt might help stop the cycle. In one recent study, researchers from the United Kingdom analyzed 10 trials involving nearly 1,000 kids. The trial results showed that lowering sodium intake by 40 to 50 percent led to a significant decrease in blood pressure, even in infants.
Reducing salt might also help combat childhood obesity, a growing public health problem. British researchers recently found that kids who eat less salt also drink fewer sugary soft drinks. Drinking less soda makes kids less likely to gain weight, become obese and develop high blood pressure.
And salt can affect more than just your heart and weight. A study published in October found that a growing number of kids in the U.S are suffering from an ailment called kidney stones. This painful condition used to mostly affect people in their 40s and older. Now, kids as young as 5 are getting it.
The kidneys are responsible for filtering salt out of the bloodstream. So researchers think that kids eating too much salt and not drinking enough water are partly to blame for the trend.
How to lick salt
If you’re like most people, cutting down on salt can be tough, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
His research shows that when given larger and larger amounts of sodium, people want more and more of it. Even babies drink more formula when it’s saltier. That preference starts as early as 4 months old.
Getting used to eating less salt, on the other hand, can take months. And low-sodium food might taste gross at first when you’re used to highly salted versions.
The good news is that you can retrain your taste buds to prefer less salty food. And now is a good time to do it: Research shows that what you eat as a kid strongly influences what you’ll like as an adult. So, the more salt (or sugar, or even spices, such as hot chili powder) you eat now, the more likely you are to crave those ingredients later. And later, your heart might be weaker and less able to handle a heavy salt load.
“It’s an easy change to make at virtually no cost,” says Darwin Labarthe, director of the Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “And it has an immense health impact.”
The best way to reduce the amount of sodium you consume, researchers say, is to make changes gradually. Start by sprinkling half as much salt on your dinner as you normally do. Switch to fresh foods instead of canned and bottled versions. And go easy on the condiments. Things like ketchup, soy sauce and salad dressing can carry far more sodium than you might expect.
You might also want to start reading nutrition labels. You may be surprised to find out that a serving of tomato sauce has more than 500 mg of sodium. And that there are 1,150 mg of sodium in a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, and more than 2,000 mg in many frozen meals.
“Kids today need to give salt the shake,” says David Grotto, a dietician and author in Chicago, “For overall health’s sake.”
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Oops! western 4.oop.223 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
It takes years for children to master the ins and outs of arithmetic. New research indicates that this learning process triggers a large-scale reorganization of brain processes involved in understanding written symbols for various quantities.
The findings support the idea that humans' ability to match specific quantities with number symbols, a skill required for doing arithmetic, builds on a brain system that is used for estimating approximate quantities. That brain system is seen in many nonhuman animals.
When performing operations with Arabic numerals, young adults, but not school-age children, show pronounced activity in a piece of brain tissue called the left superior temporal gyrus, says Daniel Ansari of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Earlier studies have linked this region to the ability to associate speech sounds with written letters, and musical sounds with written notes. The left superior temporal gyrus is located near the brain’s midpoint, not far from areas linked to speech production and understanding.
In contrast, children solving a numerical task display heightened activity in a frontal-brain area that, in adults, primarily serves other functions.
Ansari presented his findings November 19 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
“Left superior temporal regions may also be responsible for mapping numerical symbols onto quantities,” remarks Filip van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, who studies adults’ neural responses to number tasks.
In addition, Ansari and his colleagues find that nearby parts of the brain, in the parietal cortex, contribute far more to both number understanding and the ability to estimate quantities in adults than they do in children. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire At the same time, both types of numerical knowledge recruit the prefrontal cortex far more in youngsters than in adults, according to the scientists.
“Our results demonstrate that the brain basis of number processing changes as a function of development and experience,” Ansari says.
The new findings support the idea that symbolic number use unique to people builds on an evolutionarily ancient brain system many animals share for estimating approximate quantities. In the past five years, studies of adult people and monkeys have suggested that parts of both the parietal and prefrontal cortex foster quantity estimates and symbolic number knowledge, with a specific parietal region looming especially large in adult humans. But little is known about quantity-related neural activity in kids.
Ansari’s new study consisted of 19 children, ages 6 to 9, and 19 adults, ages 18 to 24. Participants first viewed pairs of Arabic numerals, ranging from 1 to 10, and indicated which number was larger. Volunteers then viewed pairs of images showing arrays of one to 10 squares and indicated which array contained more squares. During these tasks, a functional MRI scanner measured where blood flow changed in the volunteers’ brains, providing a glimpse of rises and falls in neural activity.
Young adults performed the tasks more accurately than children did. But like kids, these adults took increasingly longer to discriminate between two numbers or two arrays as quantities got closer. So, it took longer to tell 2 apart from 1 than 9 apart from 1.
Correspondingly, one part of the parietal cortex in young adults, but not in children, grew increasingly active as pairs of numerals or quantities got closer. This area aids in initial efforts to translate knowledge about approximate quantities into comprehension of symbolic numerals, Ansari hypothesizes. With increasing math experience, the left superior temporal gyrus assumes major responsibility for symbolic number knowledge, he suspects.
Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
In related research presented at the neuroscience meeting, Ilka Diester of Stanford University reported that monkeys trained to associate Arabic numerals with corresponding quantities in dot arrays show robust prefrontal cortex activity but little parietal activity. Monkeys, like children, may achieve a budding grasp of numerals with the help of the prefrontal cortex, Diester proposes.
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Comments 4
* The Origin of Consciousness.
================
Descartes said: "I think , therefore I am"
Buddhist monk says "I think not, therefore I am"
==========================
Consciousness is real but nonphyslcal.
Consciousness is connected to physical reality .
================
There are many theories explaining the origin of consciousness.
Here some of them.
1)
"God" "blowing" "consciousness" "into man"
"whom he created from clay"
2)
20 billions years ago all matter (all elementary particles,
all quarks and their girlfriend antiquarks, all kinds of waves:
electromagnetic, gravitational, muons….) –
all was assembled in “singular point”.
Then there was a Big Bang .
Question: when was there consciousness?
a) Before explosion,
b) At the moment of explosion,
c) After the explosion.
It is more probable, that it existed after the explosion.
Then there is a question: what particles (or waves)
were carriers of consciousness?
Mesons, muons, leptons, bosons (W+, W- , Z) ,
quarks, …gluons field ….. ets …?
On this question the Big Bang theory does not give an answer.
But can it be that consciousness was formed as a result
of the interaction of all elementary particles, all waves, all fields?
Then, on the one hand, the reason for the origin of the Big Bang is clear:
everything was mixed, including consciousness, and when it is mixed
then it is possible to construct all and everything.
But on the other hand, it is not clear:
why farmer John can think simply, clearly and logically.
3) Ancient Indian Veda approve, that origination of consciousness
is connected with the existence of spiritual, conscious particles – purusha .
4) Modern physics affirms that the Quantum of light
is a privileged particle as in one cases,
it behave as a particle, and in other case, acts in a way which causes a wave.
How is a particle capable of creating a wave?
The behaviour of Light quanta (dualism ) is explained simply.
A quantum of light has its own initial consciousness.
This consciousness is not rigid, but develops.
The development of consciousness goes
“from vague wish up to a clear thought”.
#
Consciousness is connected to physical reality.
It is fact that consciousness is itself already dualistic.
This dualism stays on the basis of Quantum Physics.
Therefore “Quantum Theory of Consciousness”
can be understand only with connection to the
“Theory of Light Quanta”.
#
Spirituality Spot Found in Brain.
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
========= . .
Neuroscience has found the EGO assuming group
of neurons in the Brain in the right parietal lobe!
It keeps track of self-centred notions as “my hand”,
“my cocktail”, “my witty intelligence” etc.
The greatest silencing of this ‘Me-Definer’ region
likely happens in deep states of meditation!
Meditation stills and stops the EGO! How wonderful indeed !
LiveScience Details here:
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
=================================== . .
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 26, 2008 at 12:35am http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
* Our computer-brain.
Consciousness and the Quantum Physics.
Dualism of consciousness.
The Problem of Knowledge .
Quantum Theory of Consciousness:
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
Some psychologists compare our consciousness with iceberg.
The small visible part of this iceberg is our consciousness.
And the unseen (underwater) greater part of the iceberg is
our subconsciousness. Therefore they say, the man uses
only 10% of possibility of his brain.
And if it so, why doesn’t anybody teach us how
to develop our subconsciousness.
I think it is because there are few people who understand
that the processes of subconsciousness are connected
with quantum processes. The subconsciousness theory
closely united with quantum theory.
These quantum processes which take place in lifeless
(inanimate) nature also take place in our brain.
Our brain can be the laboratory in which we can
test the truth of quantum theory.
The man acts:
1) usually under logic program,
2) sometimes on intuition (unconsciousnessly).
============================
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
1.
In a usual daily life all we do is done logically,
under an influence of our feelings.
2.
On the other hand, in intuition we act:
a) Without the participation of the sense organs.
b) Without the participation of the logic mental processes.
===== ========
"The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind"
- Chuang Tzu
The conflict between right and wrong can be explain
by the theory of “Quantum dualism of consciousness” .
===========.
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
http://www.socratus.com
http://www.wbabin.net
http://www.wbabin.net/comments/sadovnik.htm
http://www.wbabin.net/physics/sadovnik.pdf
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 12, 2008 at 11:30pm
* Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
Oops! Might want to amend this to add "developmental" disorders rather than limiting it to just kids. It is common for adults with pervasive development disorders to have dyscalculia.
Criticisms dispensed with, this is interesting! I have always had a great deal of trouble writing numbers or transcribing letters if the spelling of them is recited to me. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Very frustrating and http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz confusing because I should be good at this (I'm a writer) but then I have pronounced dyscalculia and diagnosed ASD and altho I suspected a connection, didn't understand where it might be.
Kathleen Fasanella Kathleen Fasanella
Nov. 23, 2008 at 9:26am
* It would be interesting to see whether people who acquire mathematical skills in other cultures, using, say, Chinese numerals, primarily using the abacus to calculate, rely on the same brain areas as Western adults.
It takes years for children to master the ins and outs of arithmetic. New research indicates that this learning process triggers a large-scale reorganization of brain processes involved in understanding written symbols for various quantities.
The findings support the idea that humans' ability to match specific quantities with number symbols, a skill required for doing arithmetic, builds on a brain system that is used for estimating approximate quantities. That brain system is seen in many nonhuman animals.
When performing operations with Arabic numerals, young adults, but not school-age children, show pronounced activity in a piece of brain tissue called the left superior temporal gyrus, says Daniel Ansari of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Earlier studies have linked this region to the ability to associate speech sounds with written letters, and musical sounds with written notes. The left superior temporal gyrus is located near the brain’s midpoint, not far from areas linked to speech production and understanding.
In contrast, children solving a numerical task display heightened activity in a frontal-brain area that, in adults, primarily serves other functions.
Ansari presented his findings November 19 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
“Left superior temporal regions may also be responsible for mapping numerical symbols onto quantities,” remarks Filip van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, who studies adults’ neural responses to number tasks.
In addition, Ansari and his colleagues find that nearby parts of the brain, in the parietal cortex, contribute far more to both number understanding and the ability to estimate quantities in adults than they do in children. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire At the same time, both types of numerical knowledge recruit the prefrontal cortex far more in youngsters than in adults, according to the scientists.
“Our results demonstrate that the brain basis of number processing changes as a function of development and experience,” Ansari says.
The new findings support the idea that symbolic number use unique to people builds on an evolutionarily ancient brain system many animals share for estimating approximate quantities. In the past five years, studies of adult people and monkeys have suggested that parts of both the parietal and prefrontal cortex foster quantity estimates and symbolic number knowledge, with a specific parietal region looming especially large in adult humans. But little is known about quantity-related neural activity in kids.
Ansari’s new study consisted of 19 children, ages 6 to 9, and 19 adults, ages 18 to 24. Participants first viewed pairs of Arabic numerals, ranging from 1 to 10, and indicated which number was larger. Volunteers then viewed pairs of images showing arrays of one to 10 squares and indicated which array contained more squares. During these tasks, a functional MRI scanner measured where blood flow changed in the volunteers’ brains, providing a glimpse of rises and falls in neural activity.
Young adults performed the tasks more accurately than children did. But like kids, these adults took increasingly longer to discriminate between two numbers or two arrays as quantities got closer. So, it took longer to tell 2 apart from 1 than 9 apart from 1.
Correspondingly, one part of the parietal cortex in young adults, but not in children, grew increasingly active as pairs of numerals or quantities got closer. This area aids in initial efforts to translate knowledge about approximate quantities into comprehension of symbolic numerals, Ansari hypothesizes. With increasing math experience, the left superior temporal gyrus assumes major responsibility for symbolic number knowledge, he suspects.
Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
In related research presented at the neuroscience meeting, Ilka Diester of Stanford University reported that monkeys trained to associate Arabic numerals with corresponding quantities in dot arrays show robust prefrontal cortex activity but little parietal activity. Monkeys, like children, may achieve a budding grasp of numerals with the help of the prefrontal cortex, Diester proposes.
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Comments 4
* The Origin of Consciousness.
================
Descartes said: "I think , therefore I am"
Buddhist monk says "I think not, therefore I am"
==========================
Consciousness is real but nonphyslcal.
Consciousness is connected to physical reality .
================
There are many theories explaining the origin of consciousness.
Here some of them.
1)
"God" "blowing" "consciousness" "into man"
"whom he created from clay"
2)
20 billions years ago all matter (all elementary particles,
all quarks and their girlfriend antiquarks, all kinds of waves:
electromagnetic, gravitational, muons….) –
all was assembled in “singular point”.
Then there was a Big Bang .
Question: when was there consciousness?
a) Before explosion,
b) At the moment of explosion,
c) After the explosion.
It is more probable, that it existed after the explosion.
Then there is a question: what particles (or waves)
were carriers of consciousness?
Mesons, muons, leptons, bosons (W+, W- , Z) ,
quarks, …gluons field ….. ets …?
On this question the Big Bang theory does not give an answer.
But can it be that consciousness was formed as a result
of the interaction of all elementary particles, all waves, all fields?
Then, on the one hand, the reason for the origin of the Big Bang is clear:
everything was mixed, including consciousness, and when it is mixed
then it is possible to construct all and everything.
But on the other hand, it is not clear:
why farmer John can think simply, clearly and logically.
3) Ancient Indian Veda approve, that origination of consciousness
is connected with the existence of spiritual, conscious particles – purusha .
4) Modern physics affirms that the Quantum of light
is a privileged particle as in one cases,
it behave as a particle, and in other case, acts in a way which causes a wave.
How is a particle capable of creating a wave?
The behaviour of Light quanta (dualism ) is explained simply.
A quantum of light has its own initial consciousness.
This consciousness is not rigid, but develops.
The development of consciousness goes
“from vague wish up to a clear thought”.
#
Consciousness is connected to physical reality.
It is fact that consciousness is itself already dualistic.
This dualism stays on the basis of Quantum Physics.
Therefore “Quantum Theory of Consciousness”
can be understand only with connection to the
“Theory of Light Quanta”.
#
Spirituality Spot Found in Brain.
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
========= . .
Neuroscience has found the EGO assuming group
of neurons in the Brain in the right parietal lobe!
It keeps track of self-centred notions as “my hand”,
“my cocktail”, “my witty intelligence” etc.
The greatest silencing of this ‘Me-Definer’ region
likely happens in deep states of meditation!
Meditation stills and stops the EGO! How wonderful indeed !
LiveScience Details here:
http://www.livescience.com/health/081224-brain-spirit.html
=================================== . .
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 26, 2008 at 12:35am http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
* Our computer-brain.
Consciousness and the Quantum Physics.
Dualism of consciousness.
The Problem of Knowledge .
Quantum Theory of Consciousness:
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
Some psychologists compare our consciousness with iceberg.
The small visible part of this iceberg is our consciousness.
And the unseen (underwater) greater part of the iceberg is
our subconsciousness. Therefore they say, the man uses
only 10% of possibility of his brain.
And if it so, why doesn’t anybody teach us how
to develop our subconsciousness.
I think it is because there are few people who understand
that the processes of subconsciousness are connected
with quantum processes. The subconsciousness theory
closely united with quantum theory.
These quantum processes which take place in lifeless
(inanimate) nature also take place in our brain.
Our brain can be the laboratory in which we can
test the truth of quantum theory.
The man acts:
1) usually under logic program,
2) sometimes on intuition (unconsciousnessly).
============================
Our computer-brain works on a dualistic basis.
1.
In a usual daily life all we do is done logically,
under an influence of our feelings.
2.
On the other hand, in intuition we act:
a) Without the participation of the sense organs.
b) Without the participation of the logic mental processes.
===== ========
"The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind"
- Chuang Tzu
The conflict between right and wrong can be explain
by the theory of “Quantum dualism of consciousness” .
===========.
Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. / Socratus.
http://www.socratus.com
http://www.wbabin.net
http://www.wbabin.net/comments/sadovnik.htm
http://www.wbabin.net/physics/sadovnik.pdf
israel socratus israel socratus
Dec. 12, 2008 at 11:30pm
* Disturbances in that region and in nearby parietal areas may lie at the root of a dyscalculia, a childhood disorder characterized by an inability to conceptualize numbers and understand arithmetic, Ansari adds.
Oops! Might want to amend this to add "developmental" disorders rather than limiting it to just kids. It is common for adults with pervasive development disorders to have dyscalculia.
Criticisms dispensed with, this is interesting! I have always had a great deal of trouble writing numbers or transcribing letters if the spelling of them is recited to me. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Very frustrating and http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz confusing because I should be good at this (I'm a writer) but then I have pronounced dyscalculia and diagnosed ASD and altho I suspected a connection, didn't understand where it might be.
Kathleen Fasanella Kathleen Fasanella
Nov. 23, 2008 at 9:26am
* It would be interesting to see whether people who acquire mathematical skills in other cultures, using, say, Chinese numerals, primarily using the abacus to calculate, rely on the same brain areas as Western adults.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
positive 5.pos.123 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Combination therapy that adds radiation to a standard medication for localized but aggressive prostate cancer results in longer survival and fewer signs of relapse than treatment with the drugs alone, Scandinavian scientists report online December 16 in The Lancet.
There hasn’t been a clear consensus on how best to treat such malignancies, which comprise roughly 10 to 20 percent of prostate cancer cases. Doctors call these growths locally advanced prostate cancers — tumors that are marked by fast growth and can even be felt by a doctor during a routine prostate examination. And although the cancer hasn’t spread to lymph nodes or organs beyond the prostate, it has often expanded to the outside of the gland and can be lethal.
For such patients, doctors can use radiation treatments to kill cancer cells, or prescribe drug therapy to suppress the testosterone that fuels prostate cancer growth. The benefits of using both hadn’t been ascertained until now.
“These are exciting results,” says radiation oncologist Colleen Lawton of the Medical College of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. “This confirms what we’ve all been thinking. It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used” for such patients, she says.
Researchers at 47 medical centers in Sweden, Denmark and Norway enrolled 875 men with this form of prostate cancer, average age 66, into a trial lasting from 1996 to 2002. Half were randomly assigned to get drugs only, while the others also received radiation treatments, says study coauthor Anders Widmark, a medical and radiation oncologist at Umeå University in Sweden.
After an average follow-up of 7 ½ years, 79 men in the drugs-only group had died of prostate cancer or related causes, compared with 37 in the group that received radiation and drugs. Deaths from other causes were roughly equal between the groups.
What’s more, 285 men assigned to the drugs-only group — but only 77 men getting the combined therapies — experienced warning signs of a return of their prostate cancer as evidenced by an increase in their prostate specific antigen (PSA) score. This measurement, obtained by a blood test, is a proxy for cancer and a jump in the score reveals “a very early relapse stage,” says Widmark.
“[This] is a pivotal trial, and is the first to show an overall survival advantage for radiotherapy in the primary treatment of prostate cancer,” according to Alex Tan of the Noe Valley Clinic in San Francisco and Chris Parker of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, U.K., writing in the same issue of The Lancet. “The results should change current practice, making long-term hormonal therapy plus radical radiotherapy the standard of care for men with locally advanced prostate cancer.”
Lawton agrees. “This says that radiation is playing a very significant role in local control” of the cancer, she says. “It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used.”
Whether dual therapy would help prostate cancer patients who have slower-growing malignancies, the vast majority, remains unclear, these researchers say. A course called “watchful waiting” may be best for elderly, frail men in that situation, Lawton says, whereas young or middle-aged men with slow-growing cancer have other options such as surgery or implantation of highly localized radioactive capsules.
In the new study, some well-known side effects of prostate cancer treatment showed up, and men getting the combined treatment experienced more of them than those on drugs alone. For example, five years into the follow-up period, roughly twice as many men in the combined therapy group than in the drugs-only group —7 percent versus 3 percent — reported urinary incontinence. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And roughly 9 in 10 men receiving the dual therapy reported erectile problems, compared with 8 in 10 men getting drugs alone. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
On a more positive note, Widmark says radiation therapy has advanced since these men were treated and can now deliver more specifically targeted doses that are 10 percent greater than those used in much of this trial. Research has shown an added clinical benefit from the higher doses, he says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“Indeed, it is possible that the trial could underestimate the true benefit of radiotherapy,” Tan and Parker note.
Combination therapy that adds radiation to a standard medication for localized but aggressive prostate cancer results in longer survival and fewer signs of relapse than treatment with the drugs alone, Scandinavian scientists report online December 16 in The Lancet.
There hasn’t been a clear consensus on how best to treat such malignancies, which comprise roughly 10 to 20 percent of prostate cancer cases. Doctors call these growths locally advanced prostate cancers — tumors that are marked by fast growth and can even be felt by a doctor during a routine prostate examination. And although the cancer hasn’t spread to lymph nodes or organs beyond the prostate, it has often expanded to the outside of the gland and can be lethal.
For such patients, doctors can use radiation treatments to kill cancer cells, or prescribe drug therapy to suppress the testosterone that fuels prostate cancer growth. The benefits of using both hadn’t been ascertained until now.
“These are exciting results,” says radiation oncologist Colleen Lawton of the Medical College of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. “This confirms what we’ve all been thinking. It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used” for such patients, she says.
Researchers at 47 medical centers in Sweden, Denmark and Norway enrolled 875 men with this form of prostate cancer, average age 66, into a trial lasting from 1996 to 2002. Half were randomly assigned to get drugs only, while the others also received radiation treatments, says study coauthor Anders Widmark, a medical and radiation oncologist at Umeå University in Sweden.
After an average follow-up of 7 ½ years, 79 men in the drugs-only group had died of prostate cancer or related causes, compared with 37 in the group that received radiation and drugs. Deaths from other causes were roughly equal between the groups.
What’s more, 285 men assigned to the drugs-only group — but only 77 men getting the combined therapies — experienced warning signs of a return of their prostate cancer as evidenced by an increase in their prostate specific antigen (PSA) score. This measurement, obtained by a blood test, is a proxy for cancer and a jump in the score reveals “a very early relapse stage,” says Widmark.
“[This] is a pivotal trial, and is the first to show an overall survival advantage for radiotherapy in the primary treatment of prostate cancer,” according to Alex Tan of the Noe Valley Clinic in San Francisco and Chris Parker of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, U.K., writing in the same issue of The Lancet. “The results should change current practice, making long-term hormonal therapy plus radical radiotherapy the standard of care for men with locally advanced prostate cancer.”
Lawton agrees. “This says that radiation is playing a very significant role in local control” of the cancer, she says. “It’s pretty clear that dual therapy should be used.”
Whether dual therapy would help prostate cancer patients who have slower-growing malignancies, the vast majority, remains unclear, these researchers say. A course called “watchful waiting” may be best for elderly, frail men in that situation, Lawton says, whereas young or middle-aged men with slow-growing cancer have other options such as surgery or implantation of highly localized radioactive capsules.
In the new study, some well-known side effects of prostate cancer treatment showed up, and men getting the combined treatment experienced more of them than those on drugs alone. For example, five years into the follow-up period, roughly twice as many men in the combined therapy group than in the drugs-only group —7 percent versus 3 percent — reported urinary incontinence. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And roughly 9 in 10 men receiving the dual therapy reported erectile problems, compared with 8 in 10 men getting drugs alone. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
On a more positive note, Widmark says radiation therapy has advanced since these men were treated and can now deliver more specifically targeted doses that are 10 percent greater than those used in much of this trial. Research has shown an added clinical benefit from the higher doses, he says.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“Indeed, it is possible that the trial could underestimate the true benefit of radiotherapy,” Tan and Parker note.
Friday, April 10, 2009
data 9.dat.0001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
A provocative story on the front page of today’s Washington Post reports that consuming as little as a single alcoholic beverage a day could raise a woman’s risk of cancer. The size of that increase varies by cancer type. Overall, however, it appears to be about five percent over the seven years that women were followed.
What makes these findings provocative: A host of previous studies have shown that for heart disease — the leading killer of postmenopausal women — quaffing a little alcohol regularly is better than drinking none.
So what should women do? http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
The answer, typical for science, is that it’s all relative.
For people worried about cancer — particularly those who have a genetic predisposition to breast malignancies — no alcohol is probably the best policy.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And earlier studies have argued that line already. In this study, each seven-drinks-per-week increase in alcohol consumption upped a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer by 12 percent.
For people at low risk for heart disease, such as nearly everyone under the age of 35, there’s no health justification for drinking. And a steady diet of three or more drinks — or binging on four or more at a sitting — never ever gets a green light from the medical establishment.
But study after study has offered quantitative evidence that middle-age and older adults who take a regular nip — like that proverbial glass of sherry after dinner or at bedtime — suffer less heart disease and diabetes than teetotalers or people who consume more than two drinks a day.
Ironically, even the study referred to in today’s Post doesn’t clearly contradict that apparent license to drink a bit, even daily. The reason: The new study didn’t assess daily alcohol intake among the 1.28 million ladies in Britain studied as part of the Million Women Study. Participants were asked about weekly consumption, and then the epidemiologists analyzing those data divided the findings by seven. Among women drinking 7 to 14 servings of alcohol each week, the new study shows, risk of developing cancers at several sites beyond the breast does increase.
However . . . if someone averages seven drinks a week, those beverages might have been downed on weekends only — leading to consumption of three or more drinks at a sitting. That would be bad even for the heart. Also, in the long haul, for anyone’s liver.
Unless the servings per day can be teased out, the new study — which appears in the March 4 Journal of the National Cancer Institute — only offers fodder for speculation. And questions to be addressed in follow-up studies that home in on daily intakes.
Another interesting caveat mentioned in the new study, but omitted from today’s Post story: “Nondrinkers had an increased risk for several cancer sites compared with women who drank fewer than or equal to two drinks per week.” Naomi Allen and her colleagues at the University of Oxford note that this apparent protective effect of alcohol was statistically significant for cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus, stomach, liver, lung, cervix and endometrium, and for renal (kidney) cell carcinoma.
Finally, there’s the impact of smoking. The new study was meant to identify cancers — beyond those in the breast — that might be associated with alcohol. It found small risk increases of one to four percent for leukemia, melanoma, and cancers of the lung, brain and colon. Far bigger increased risks — of 10 to 44 percent— were seen for cancers in the rectum, breast and a few other sites. But among those alcohol-linked spikes in cancer risk exceeding 12 percent (esophagus, liver, oral cavity and pharynx, and larynx), risks for all but liver cancer increased SOLELY among women who smoked. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to defend drinking. I’m close to a teetotaler myself. And as the mom of a teen who was injured when a drunk classmate totaled the car she was driving (at 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day), I’m fairly intolerant of drinking irresponsibly.
But let’s not scare people with incomplete data. There will be plenty of time to hammer home a call for temperance if and when stronger data emerge.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
A provocative story on the front page of today’s Washington Post reports that consuming as little as a single alcoholic beverage a day could raise a woman’s risk of cancer. The size of that increase varies by cancer type. Overall, however, it appears to be about five percent over the seven years that women were followed.
What makes these findings provocative: A host of previous studies have shown that for heart disease — the leading killer of postmenopausal women — quaffing a little alcohol regularly is better than drinking none.
So what should women do? http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
The answer, typical for science, is that it’s all relative.
For people worried about cancer — particularly those who have a genetic predisposition to breast malignancies — no alcohol is probably the best policy.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire And earlier studies have argued that line already. In this study, each seven-drinks-per-week increase in alcohol consumption upped a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer by 12 percent.
For people at low risk for heart disease, such as nearly everyone under the age of 35, there’s no health justification for drinking. And a steady diet of three or more drinks — or binging on four or more at a sitting — never ever gets a green light from the medical establishment.
But study after study has offered quantitative evidence that middle-age and older adults who take a regular nip — like that proverbial glass of sherry after dinner or at bedtime — suffer less heart disease and diabetes than teetotalers or people who consume more than two drinks a day.
Ironically, even the study referred to in today’s Post doesn’t clearly contradict that apparent license to drink a bit, even daily. The reason: The new study didn’t assess daily alcohol intake among the 1.28 million ladies in Britain studied as part of the Million Women Study. Participants were asked about weekly consumption, and then the epidemiologists analyzing those data divided the findings by seven. Among women drinking 7 to 14 servings of alcohol each week, the new study shows, risk of developing cancers at several sites beyond the breast does increase.
However . . . if someone averages seven drinks a week, those beverages might have been downed on weekends only — leading to consumption of three or more drinks at a sitting. That would be bad even for the heart. Also, in the long haul, for anyone’s liver.
Unless the servings per day can be teased out, the new study — which appears in the March 4 Journal of the National Cancer Institute — only offers fodder for speculation. And questions to be addressed in follow-up studies that home in on daily intakes.
Another interesting caveat mentioned in the new study, but omitted from today’s Post story: “Nondrinkers had an increased risk for several cancer sites compared with women who drank fewer than or equal to two drinks per week.” Naomi Allen and her colleagues at the University of Oxford note that this apparent protective effect of alcohol was statistically significant for cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus, stomach, liver, lung, cervix and endometrium, and for renal (kidney) cell carcinoma.
Finally, there’s the impact of smoking. The new study was meant to identify cancers — beyond those in the breast — that might be associated with alcohol. It found small risk increases of one to four percent for leukemia, melanoma, and cancers of the lung, brain and colon. Far bigger increased risks — of 10 to 44 percent— were seen for cancers in the rectum, breast and a few other sites. But among those alcohol-linked spikes in cancer risk exceeding 12 percent (esophagus, liver, oral cavity and pharynx, and larynx), risks for all but liver cancer increased SOLELY among women who smoked. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to defend drinking. I’m close to a teetotaler myself. And as the mom of a teen who was injured when a drunk classmate totaled the car she was driving (at 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day), I’m fairly intolerant of drinking irresponsibly.
But let’s not scare people with incomplete data. There will be plenty of time to hammer home a call for temperance if and when stronger data emerge.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, January 10, 2009
tandem 7.tan.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Diversity ruled among the first American settlers. Within a relatively short time span, at least two groups of people trekked across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska and then went their separate ways, one down the Pacific Coast and the other into the heart of North America, a new genetic study suggests.
A team led by geneticist Antonio Torroni of the University of Pavia in Italy estimates that these separate migrations into the New World occurred between 17,000 and 15,000 years ago. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Even more populations with distinct genetic signatures and languages may have crossed a now-submerged strip of land, known as Beringia, that connected northeastern Asia to North America within that relatively narrow window of time, the scientists also contend in a paper published online January 8 and in the Jan. 13 Current Biology.
“Whereas some recent investigators had thought that a single major population expansion explained all mitochondrial DNA variation among Native Americans, this new report revives earlier ideas about multiple expansions into the New World,” comments molecular anthropologist Theodore Schurr of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Torroni’s team analyzed entire genomic sequences of mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material in cells’ energy-generating units that gets passed from mothers to children. Genetic data came from Native American groups in North, Central and South America that had already provided blood samples for study. The researchers focused on the disparate geographic distributions of two rare mitochondrial DNA haplogroups — which are characterized by a distinctive DNA sequence derived from a common maternal ancestor — that still appear in Native Americans.
“Our study presents a novel scenario of two almost concomitant paths of migration, both from Beringia about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, that led to the dispersal of the first Americans,” Torroni says.
If that hypothesis holds up, he adds, it suggests that separate groups of New World migrants founded prehistoric Native American tool traditions independently in eastern and western North America. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US The new findings also raise the possibility that the first Americans spoke languages from more than one language family, in Torroni’s view. Linguists have debated for decades whether late–Stone Age migrants to the Americas spoke tongues from a single language family that would have provided a foundation for many later Native American languages.
Despite the new evidence, scientific consensus on how and when the New World was settled remains elusive. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
“Peopling of the Americas is a hard problem,” remarks geneticist Jody Hey of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. “My guess is that it will be a couple more years before we have a good picture of what happened.”
Hey takes a skeptical view of the new study. Different present-day Native American populations display signature mitochondrial DNA patterns, so it’s not surprising that rare haplogroups would be unique to separate regions, he says. But Torroni’s analysis doesn’t explicitly address whether their genetic data more closely reflect a single migration, a pair of simultaneous migrations or some other pattern of population movements, in Hey’s view.
Some climate reconstructions suggest that an ice-free corridor from Alaska into North America wasn’t passable until around 12,000 years ago, Schurr says. If so, that creates a major roadblock for Torroni’s scenario of an inland migration at least 15,000 years ago.
Investigators also differ on how best to study ancient population movements using genetic data.
Two approaches currently dominate DNA-based attempts to explain the population movements and evolution of people and other animals, Hey notes. Some researchers track today’s geographic distribution of different haplogroups and generate tree diagrams that portray patterns of ancestry, as Torroni’s group did. Other investigators, such as Hey, use statistical methods to test whether genetic data fit simple models of how populations might have been structured.
In 2005, Hey took the model-based approach to examine mitochondrial DNA from northeastern Asians and Native Americans. He concluded that a single group of New World settlers, consisting of perhaps 70 fertile adults, crossed Beringia no more than 14,000 years ago (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339).
In this study, Torroni and his colleagues got different results by searching a large genetic database for mitochondrial DNA. The team found 55 unrelated individuals who displayed either of two rare Native American haplogroups, called D4h3 and X2a, identifying 44 instances of haplogroup D4h3 and 11 instances of haplogroup X2a.
Further analyses indicated that the D4h3 haplogroup spread into the Americas along the Pacific Coast, rapidly reaching the southern tip of South America. Estimated ages of D4h3 sequences from ChiIe are nearly as old as the estimated time of the Beringia crossing.
In contrast, haplogroup X2a crossed Beringia and spread through an ice-free corridor in what’s now western Canada, eventually clustering in the Great Lakes area, the new study suggests.
Examination of an additional 276 mitochondrial DNA sequences, all from unrelated people, representing the six haplogroups common in Native Americans indicated that those genetic types entered the Americas at about the same time as the two rare haplogroups did.
“Within a rather short period of time, there may have been several entries into the Americas from a dynamically changing Beringian source,” Torroni says.
Extensive mitochondrial DNA data have yet to be obtained for many Native American populations, Schurr cautions. Hence, precise age estimates don’t exist yet for the major New World haplogroups and their sub-branches. Such estimates are needed to check the veracity of competing scenarios of ancient migration to the Americas, including Torroni’s.
Such scenarios also include recent mitochondrial DNA studies that argued for a single founding group of New World migrants. One research team concluded that northeastern Asians reached Beringia as early as 40,000 years ago but had to wait for ice sheets to melt before entering the Americas at least 20,000 years later (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102).
A separate investigation, published online September 17 in PLoS ONE, concluded that migrants from northeastern Asia stayed in Beringia only a few thousand years before crossing into the New World about 16,000 years ago.
“The more we learn about this story, the more we realize that there is much more to understand about this segment of human history and migration,” Schurr says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Diversity ruled among the first American settlers. Within a relatively short time span, at least two groups of people trekked across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska and then went their separate ways, one down the Pacific Coast and the other into the heart of North America, a new genetic study suggests.
A team led by geneticist Antonio Torroni of the University of Pavia in Italy estimates that these separate migrations into the New World occurred between 17,000 and 15,000 years ago. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
Even more populations with distinct genetic signatures and languages may have crossed a now-submerged strip of land, known as Beringia, that connected northeastern Asia to North America within that relatively narrow window of time, the scientists also contend in a paper published online January 8 and in the Jan. 13 Current Biology.
“Whereas some recent investigators had thought that a single major population expansion explained all mitochondrial DNA variation among Native Americans, this new report revives earlier ideas about multiple expansions into the New World,” comments molecular anthropologist Theodore Schurr of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Torroni’s team analyzed entire genomic sequences of mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material in cells’ energy-generating units that gets passed from mothers to children. Genetic data came from Native American groups in North, Central and South America that had already provided blood samples for study. The researchers focused on the disparate geographic distributions of two rare mitochondrial DNA haplogroups — which are characterized by a distinctive DNA sequence derived from a common maternal ancestor — that still appear in Native Americans.
“Our study presents a novel scenario of two almost concomitant paths of migration, both from Beringia about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, that led to the dispersal of the first Americans,” Torroni says.
If that hypothesis holds up, he adds, it suggests that separate groups of New World migrants founded prehistoric Native American tool traditions independently in eastern and western North America. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US The new findings also raise the possibility that the first Americans spoke languages from more than one language family, in Torroni’s view. Linguists have debated for decades whether late–Stone Age migrants to the Americas spoke tongues from a single language family that would have provided a foundation for many later Native American languages.
Despite the new evidence, scientific consensus on how and when the New World was settled remains elusive. http://LOUIS2J2SHEEHAN.US
“Peopling of the Americas is a hard problem,” remarks geneticist Jody Hey of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. “My guess is that it will be a couple more years before we have a good picture of what happened.”
Hey takes a skeptical view of the new study. Different present-day Native American populations display signature mitochondrial DNA patterns, so it’s not surprising that rare haplogroups would be unique to separate regions, he says. But Torroni’s analysis doesn’t explicitly address whether their genetic data more closely reflect a single migration, a pair of simultaneous migrations or some other pattern of population movements, in Hey’s view.
Some climate reconstructions suggest that an ice-free corridor from Alaska into North America wasn’t passable until around 12,000 years ago, Schurr says. If so, that creates a major roadblock for Torroni’s scenario of an inland migration at least 15,000 years ago.
Investigators also differ on how best to study ancient population movements using genetic data.
Two approaches currently dominate DNA-based attempts to explain the population movements and evolution of people and other animals, Hey notes. Some researchers track today’s geographic distribution of different haplogroups and generate tree diagrams that portray patterns of ancestry, as Torroni’s group did. Other investigators, such as Hey, use statistical methods to test whether genetic data fit simple models of how populations might have been structured.
In 2005, Hey took the model-based approach to examine mitochondrial DNA from northeastern Asians and Native Americans. He concluded that a single group of New World settlers, consisting of perhaps 70 fertile adults, crossed Beringia no more than 14,000 years ago (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339).
In this study, Torroni and his colleagues got different results by searching a large genetic database for mitochondrial DNA. The team found 55 unrelated individuals who displayed either of two rare Native American haplogroups, called D4h3 and X2a, identifying 44 instances of haplogroup D4h3 and 11 instances of haplogroup X2a.
Further analyses indicated that the D4h3 haplogroup spread into the Americas along the Pacific Coast, rapidly reaching the southern tip of South America. Estimated ages of D4h3 sequences from ChiIe are nearly as old as the estimated time of the Beringia crossing.
In contrast, haplogroup X2a crossed Beringia and spread through an ice-free corridor in what’s now western Canada, eventually clustering in the Great Lakes area, the new study suggests.
Examination of an additional 276 mitochondrial DNA sequences, all from unrelated people, representing the six haplogroups common in Native Americans indicated that those genetic types entered the Americas at about the same time as the two rare haplogroups did.
“Within a rather short period of time, there may have been several entries into the Americas from a dynamically changing Beringian source,” Torroni says.
Extensive mitochondrial DNA data have yet to be obtained for many Native American populations, Schurr cautions. Hence, precise age estimates don’t exist yet for the major New World haplogroups and their sub-branches. Such estimates are needed to check the veracity of competing scenarios of ancient migration to the Americas, including Torroni’s.
Such scenarios also include recent mitochondrial DNA studies that argued for a single founding group of New World migrants. One research team concluded that northeastern Asians reached Beringia as early as 40,000 years ago but had to wait for ice sheets to melt before entering the Americas at least 20,000 years later (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102).
A separate investigation, published online September 17 in PLoS ONE, concluded that migrants from northeastern Asia stayed in Beringia only a few thousand years before crossing into the New World about 16,000 years ago.
“The more we learn about this story, the more we realize that there is much more to understand about this segment of human history and migration,” Schurr says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Monday, January 5, 2009
blass 4.bla.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . IN early December 1999, the mood in the Bill Blass showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue was as gray as the film of dust on a potted plant that sat in the corner and always seemed to be dying. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Blass, arguably the most famous of all the American designers, had shown his farewell collection that September and sold the company a few weeks later. He had been ill for some time, living with throat cancer for years — he was then 77 — and he didn’t seem much inclined to argue with the new owners about who would fill his oversize shoes. They wanted a name. So the future of Blass’s longtime assistants was far from certain. Laura Montalban, one of two top designers, left to work for Oscar de la Renta; Blass called the other, Craig Natiello, who had been with him for a decade, into his office.http://web.mac.com/lousheehan
“You’re not going to like the people who bought the company,” Blass said. He made a phone call, then told Mr. Natiello, who recalled the conversation in a recent interview, that there was a job waiting for him at Halston. “Here is your out. Do you want it?”
Mr. Natiello was reminded of this moment the other day when he bumped into Adolfo Sardina, the famous Adolfo, at a deli near his apartment on the Upper East Side. In 1962, Blass had given Adolfo the $10,000 he needed to start his own millinery collection, so they both remembered what he did for them and for fashion; and they, like the remnants of a generation of society women, couldn’t quite believe the Bill Blass legacy was ending in such an ignoble way. On Friday, the last sewers, patternmakers and assistants were laid off without severance as the company, after years of turmoil and a revolving door of designers, began to dismantle. NexCen Brands, its parent company, was discontinuing the collection, even as it was still trying to sell the brand.
“I want to go in there and throttle their necks!” Mr. Natiello said.
Much as Chanel and Dior and YSL carried on as luxury concerns well after the deaths of their namesakes, no American label seemed better poised to persevere in the absence of its founder than Bill Blass did. Blass, when he bought out his former partners in Maurice Rentner in 1970 to form Bill Blass Ltd., changed things for designers on Seventh Avenue, who used to toil in the relative obscurity of its backrooms. By the sheer force of his talent and wit — upon his death in 2002, he was remembered as the Noël Coward of fashion — he brought glamour to the job. He dressed and drank and dined with Nan Kempner, Pat Buckley and Brooke Astor, and, by the 1990s, he was so famous that his company had more than 40 licenses with annual sales of $500 million of Bill Blass products.
There is no shortage of explanations for the label’s demise. There was an aging clientele, a management that seemed to take a freewheeling approach to the brand and its failure to find a successor who could match the Blass persona. That the problems were endemic became evident last spring, when NexCen said it faced a severe cash shortage. Peter Som, the latest designer, left in October and was not replaced, while the company told retailers it would not be taking orders for a spring collection. Ultimately, NexCen blamed the economic climate.
“It is the passing of a brand that held a lot of meaning for not only me but for many people in the fashion industry,” Mr. Som said last week in an e-mail message. “We have truly lost a legacy.”
THE REAL TROUBLE at Bill Blass started the moment Blass himself walked out the door without an heir apparent.
“It was an enormous question mark that hung over all of us,” said John Lindsey, who was the director of sales at Bill Blass for 12 years.
That fall, Blass had retreated to his home near New Preston, Conn., but he kept a sly eye on what was happening at the company. The new owners, who acquired the business through a bond deal that placed a premium on the future value of the trademark, were Michael Groveman, who had been the chief financial officer at Bill Blass for 10 years, and Haresh T. Tharani, who ran its largest licensee.
They began to look for a successor, interviewing designers like Randolph Duke, James Purcell and Steven Slowik. There was huge interest in the position, and Mr. Groveman seemed to recognize the leverage he had when negotiating with designers.
“For three hours, he said, ‘I’m going to make you the designer here,’ ” Mr. Purcell recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything unless I have a contract.’ He said, ‘Do you want to be famous or don’t you?’ ”
In February 2000, Mr. Slowik, who had worked for Ferragamo and was living in Paris, took the job — without a contract.
Handsome, unassuming, tasteful, Midwestern (from Detroit), he had good credentials. Blass, a Hoosier, liked him right away.
“The first thing he asked me was my sign,” Mr. Slowik said. Like Blass (and his “dear friends” Nancy Reagan and Lynn Wyatt), he is a Cancer. That September, Mr. Slowik had his first big show. The pressure, he said, was tremendous. The clothes were less structured, more sparkly, less Blass. And the reviews were scathing. One critic called it the “My Little Pony” collection, a reference to a finale dress that had a cartoonish rainbow ribbon splashed across one side, as if it were magic.
“That was an absolute disaster,” Mr. Lindsey said. “All I remember was standing there, watching the whole front row — our clientele — with their hands over their ears as Madonna blasted on the speakers, and then they chose to go out a different door to avoid saying anything to me, because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say. That was the longest 11 minutes of my career.”
Sales were dismal, he said. In one season, the collection business, which had sold $25 million in a good year, dropped to about $5 million. Mr. Slowik carried on and designed a fall collection, but in January 2001, just weeks before he was to show it, he was dismissed. Lars Nilsson, his assistant, became the head designer.
“It certainly wasn’t fun,” Mr. Slowik said. “One of the things I learned from this situation: if people aren’t willing to give you a contract, there’s a problem.”
Mr. Groveman, who left the company in July, would not discuss hiring decisions. He said he never had a contract when he worked for Blass, either.
“I don’t have any regrets about what happened,” he said. “It’s never easy replacing the namesake designer.”
THE NIGHT OF FEB. 10, 2003, Mr. Nilsson, a designer from Sweden who had trained at Dior and Lacroix, was preparing the fall collection, his fifth at the house. Mr. Nilsson had the enthusiastic endorsement of the editors of Vogue, but his clothes weren’t selling. André Leon Talley, the magazine’s editor at large, was in the showroom to offer guidance. Tensions had been building between Mr. Nilsson and management, with reports of screaming matches over creative control. Mr. Nilsson knew his job was on the line.
What he did not know was that seven floors below, another collection was being designed simultaneously in the Blass executive offices by Yvonne Miller, who had been a fit model and the public relations director for Blass. She knew the Blass designs better than anyone and always thought she should have been asked to replace him.
Describing the events last week, Ms. Miller said Mr. Groveman had asked her to have a ghost collection ready for the stores in the event Mr. Nilsson’s line failed.
“I didn’t want to get fired,” she said. “And I’m the only one who can design Blass.”
Mr. Nilsson showed his collection on Feb. 11. Its Scandinavian influences were sometimes absolutely beautiful, like a white-on-white embroidered anorak that was breathtaking. But sometimes they were not. On Feb. 12, as the reviews came in, mostly negative, and he and his assistant were about to leave for Paris to buy fabrics for the next season, Mr. Groveman fired him.
It was a scandal that consumed the fashion industry and enraged the Vogue editors. Mr. Talley complained at the time that Mr. Nilsson “couldn’t even do an embroidery unless it was approved.” But Ms. Miller and other Blass executives said Mr. Nilsson had been unreasonable and had refused to rein in his spending on lavish fabrics, causing the company to lose money.
“Management took it on the chin, kind of unfairly,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It looked very heavy-handed, but they didn’t want to turn him loose again.”
The problem was how it was handled, said Michael Vollbracht, who replaced Mr. Nilsson the next month: “When they fired Lars Nilsson, they fired Anna Wintour. And that you do not do.”
MR. VOLLBRACHT, who worked with Blass on a retrospective book that was published in 2002, speaks in the same gravel tone tinged with grouchiness as the late designer. He had been on Seventh Avenue for decades before taking a 15-year hiatus to work as an artist. But no matter how much the critics begged him to design something modern, he was determined to revisit the Blass of old. He brought back Karen Bjornson, Halston’s house model in the 1980s, as his muse.
“Quite honestly, I got the formula of Bill Blass,” he said. “It wasn’t revolutionary design.”
Over the next four years, the press dried up, but the clients came back. Sales of the collection climbed to about $12 million, and new licenses were signed for shoes, fur and a home collection. But the collection was still losing money, about $2 million a year, because of the production costs and runway shows. In December 2006, Mr. Groveman and Mr. Tharani sold the Bill Blass corporation to NexCen, a conglomerate that also owned the Athlete’s Foot and mall stores like Great American Cookies, for $54.6 million, but Mr. Groveman retained the collection business.
Things seemed to calm down. There was even a sense of nostalgic elegance in the collections, with Pat Cleveland vamping on Mr. Vollbracht’s runway. Then, in May 2007, he quit. NexCen, he said, wanted him to serve as a mentor to the younger designers he had hired, which made him feel a bit like Margo Channing.
“I was going to be the coach of this young, effervescent design team that’s going to win back Vogue magazine,” Mr. Vollbracht said. “I had put in place a staff that was becoming more powerful than I was, and I learned long ago to leave before they ask you to leave.”
IN JULY 2007, Mr. Som became the fourth designer to take over the collection. As a design student, he had interned with Blass, and his signature collections were often remarked upon as Blass-like. He was Vogue-approved.
His first collection, shown in February of this year, looked, well, about the same. The big stores were encouraged.
But in a matter of months, everything fell apart. Without warning, NexCen announced in May that there was “substantial doubt” that it would remain in business and that its accounting was in question. At Blass, fabric bills went unpaid, and in July Mr. Groveman told NexCen he would rather shutter the line than sink any more money into it. NexCen, hoping to sell the label, bought the Groveman stake for about $425,000 in net liabilities and persuaded Mr. Som to stay on to entice a buyer. Now, five months later, with no deal in place, NexCen has pulled the plug.
“To see it go down so quickly, I’m saddened,” Mr. Groveman said. “It’s the end of a great American brand.”
For the Bill Blass collection to fail in such an ugly way strikes many of those involved in the company as an especially cruel fate for a designer who made the profession seem so dazzling. If Blass were around to see what has become of his house today, he might think it was the 1950s, when, as Charles Gandee, a onetime editor at Vogue and Talk, wrote, designers “were regarded as slightly tedious, slightly embarrassing necessities.”
When anyone asked Blass what he did, he’d simply say, “I’m in advertising.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . IN early December 1999, the mood in the Bill Blass showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue was as gray as the film of dust on a potted plant that sat in the corner and always seemed to be dying. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Blass, arguably the most famous of all the American designers, had shown his farewell collection that September and sold the company a few weeks later. He had been ill for some time, living with throat cancer for years — he was then 77 — and he didn’t seem much inclined to argue with the new owners about who would fill his oversize shoes. They wanted a name. So the future of Blass’s longtime assistants was far from certain. Laura Montalban, one of two top designers, left to work for Oscar de la Renta; Blass called the other, Craig Natiello, who had been with him for a decade, into his office.http://web.mac.com/lousheehan
“You’re not going to like the people who bought the company,” Blass said. He made a phone call, then told Mr. Natiello, who recalled the conversation in a recent interview, that there was a job waiting for him at Halston. “Here is your out. Do you want it?”
Mr. Natiello was reminded of this moment the other day when he bumped into Adolfo Sardina, the famous Adolfo, at a deli near his apartment on the Upper East Side. In 1962, Blass had given Adolfo the $10,000 he needed to start his own millinery collection, so they both remembered what he did for them and for fashion; and they, like the remnants of a generation of society women, couldn’t quite believe the Bill Blass legacy was ending in such an ignoble way. On Friday, the last sewers, patternmakers and assistants were laid off without severance as the company, after years of turmoil and a revolving door of designers, began to dismantle. NexCen Brands, its parent company, was discontinuing the collection, even as it was still trying to sell the brand.
“I want to go in there and throttle their necks!” Mr. Natiello said.
Much as Chanel and Dior and YSL carried on as luxury concerns well after the deaths of their namesakes, no American label seemed better poised to persevere in the absence of its founder than Bill Blass did. Blass, when he bought out his former partners in Maurice Rentner in 1970 to form Bill Blass Ltd., changed things for designers on Seventh Avenue, who used to toil in the relative obscurity of its backrooms. By the sheer force of his talent and wit — upon his death in 2002, he was remembered as the Noël Coward of fashion — he brought glamour to the job. He dressed and drank and dined with Nan Kempner, Pat Buckley and Brooke Astor, and, by the 1990s, he was so famous that his company had more than 40 licenses with annual sales of $500 million of Bill Blass products.
There is no shortage of explanations for the label’s demise. There was an aging clientele, a management that seemed to take a freewheeling approach to the brand and its failure to find a successor who could match the Blass persona. That the problems were endemic became evident last spring, when NexCen said it faced a severe cash shortage. Peter Som, the latest designer, left in October and was not replaced, while the company told retailers it would not be taking orders for a spring collection. Ultimately, NexCen blamed the economic climate.
“It is the passing of a brand that held a lot of meaning for not only me but for many people in the fashion industry,” Mr. Som said last week in an e-mail message. “We have truly lost a legacy.”
THE REAL TROUBLE at Bill Blass started the moment Blass himself walked out the door without an heir apparent.
“It was an enormous question mark that hung over all of us,” said John Lindsey, who was the director of sales at Bill Blass for 12 years.
That fall, Blass had retreated to his home near New Preston, Conn., but he kept a sly eye on what was happening at the company. The new owners, who acquired the business through a bond deal that placed a premium on the future value of the trademark, were Michael Groveman, who had been the chief financial officer at Bill Blass for 10 years, and Haresh T. Tharani, who ran its largest licensee.
They began to look for a successor, interviewing designers like Randolph Duke, James Purcell and Steven Slowik. There was huge interest in the position, and Mr. Groveman seemed to recognize the leverage he had when negotiating with designers.
“For three hours, he said, ‘I’m going to make you the designer here,’ ” Mr. Purcell recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything unless I have a contract.’ He said, ‘Do you want to be famous or don’t you?’ ”
In February 2000, Mr. Slowik, who had worked for Ferragamo and was living in Paris, took the job — without a contract.
Handsome, unassuming, tasteful, Midwestern (from Detroit), he had good credentials. Blass, a Hoosier, liked him right away.
“The first thing he asked me was my sign,” Mr. Slowik said. Like Blass (and his “dear friends” Nancy Reagan and Lynn Wyatt), he is a Cancer. That September, Mr. Slowik had his first big show. The pressure, he said, was tremendous. The clothes were less structured, more sparkly, less Blass. And the reviews were scathing. One critic called it the “My Little Pony” collection, a reference to a finale dress that had a cartoonish rainbow ribbon splashed across one side, as if it were magic.
“That was an absolute disaster,” Mr. Lindsey said. “All I remember was standing there, watching the whole front row — our clientele — with their hands over their ears as Madonna blasted on the speakers, and then they chose to go out a different door to avoid saying anything to me, because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say. That was the longest 11 minutes of my career.”
Sales were dismal, he said. In one season, the collection business, which had sold $25 million in a good year, dropped to about $5 million. Mr. Slowik carried on and designed a fall collection, but in January 2001, just weeks before he was to show it, he was dismissed. Lars Nilsson, his assistant, became the head designer.
“It certainly wasn’t fun,” Mr. Slowik said. “One of the things I learned from this situation: if people aren’t willing to give you a contract, there’s a problem.”
Mr. Groveman, who left the company in July, would not discuss hiring decisions. He said he never had a contract when he worked for Blass, either.
“I don’t have any regrets about what happened,” he said. “It’s never easy replacing the namesake designer.”
THE NIGHT OF FEB. 10, 2003, Mr. Nilsson, a designer from Sweden who had trained at Dior and Lacroix, was preparing the fall collection, his fifth at the house. Mr. Nilsson had the enthusiastic endorsement of the editors of Vogue, but his clothes weren’t selling. André Leon Talley, the magazine’s editor at large, was in the showroom to offer guidance. Tensions had been building between Mr. Nilsson and management, with reports of screaming matches over creative control. Mr. Nilsson knew his job was on the line.
What he did not know was that seven floors below, another collection was being designed simultaneously in the Blass executive offices by Yvonne Miller, who had been a fit model and the public relations director for Blass. She knew the Blass designs better than anyone and always thought she should have been asked to replace him.
Describing the events last week, Ms. Miller said Mr. Groveman had asked her to have a ghost collection ready for the stores in the event Mr. Nilsson’s line failed.
“I didn’t want to get fired,” she said. “And I’m the only one who can design Blass.”
Mr. Nilsson showed his collection on Feb. 11. Its Scandinavian influences were sometimes absolutely beautiful, like a white-on-white embroidered anorak that was breathtaking. But sometimes they were not. On Feb. 12, as the reviews came in, mostly negative, and he and his assistant were about to leave for Paris to buy fabrics for the next season, Mr. Groveman fired him.
It was a scandal that consumed the fashion industry and enraged the Vogue editors. Mr. Talley complained at the time that Mr. Nilsson “couldn’t even do an embroidery unless it was approved.” But Ms. Miller and other Blass executives said Mr. Nilsson had been unreasonable and had refused to rein in his spending on lavish fabrics, causing the company to lose money.
“Management took it on the chin, kind of unfairly,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It looked very heavy-handed, but they didn’t want to turn him loose again.”
The problem was how it was handled, said Michael Vollbracht, who replaced Mr. Nilsson the next month: “When they fired Lars Nilsson, they fired Anna Wintour. And that you do not do.”
MR. VOLLBRACHT, who worked with Blass on a retrospective book that was published in 2002, speaks in the same gravel tone tinged with grouchiness as the late designer. He had been on Seventh Avenue for decades before taking a 15-year hiatus to work as an artist. But no matter how much the critics begged him to design something modern, he was determined to revisit the Blass of old. He brought back Karen Bjornson, Halston’s house model in the 1980s, as his muse.
“Quite honestly, I got the formula of Bill Blass,” he said. “It wasn’t revolutionary design.”
Over the next four years, the press dried up, but the clients came back. Sales of the collection climbed to about $12 million, and new licenses were signed for shoes, fur and a home collection. But the collection was still losing money, about $2 million a year, because of the production costs and runway shows. In December 2006, Mr. Groveman and Mr. Tharani sold the Bill Blass corporation to NexCen, a conglomerate that also owned the Athlete’s Foot and mall stores like Great American Cookies, for $54.6 million, but Mr. Groveman retained the collection business.
Things seemed to calm down. There was even a sense of nostalgic elegance in the collections, with Pat Cleveland vamping on Mr. Vollbracht’s runway. Then, in May 2007, he quit. NexCen, he said, wanted him to serve as a mentor to the younger designers he had hired, which made him feel a bit like Margo Channing.
“I was going to be the coach of this young, effervescent design team that’s going to win back Vogue magazine,” Mr. Vollbracht said. “I had put in place a staff that was becoming more powerful than I was, and I learned long ago to leave before they ask you to leave.”
IN JULY 2007, Mr. Som became the fourth designer to take over the collection. As a design student, he had interned with Blass, and his signature collections were often remarked upon as Blass-like. He was Vogue-approved.
His first collection, shown in February of this year, looked, well, about the same. The big stores were encouraged.
But in a matter of months, everything fell apart. Without warning, NexCen announced in May that there was “substantial doubt” that it would remain in business and that its accounting was in question. At Blass, fabric bills went unpaid, and in July Mr. Groveman told NexCen he would rather shutter the line than sink any more money into it. NexCen, hoping to sell the label, bought the Groveman stake for about $425,000 in net liabilities and persuaded Mr. Som to stay on to entice a buyer. Now, five months later, with no deal in place, NexCen has pulled the plug.
“To see it go down so quickly, I’m saddened,” Mr. Groveman said. “It’s the end of a great American brand.”
For the Bill Blass collection to fail in such an ugly way strikes many of those involved in the company as an especially cruel fate for a designer who made the profession seem so dazzling. If Blass were around to see what has become of his house today, he might think it was the 1950s, when, as Charles Gandee, a onetime editor at Vogue and Talk, wrote, designers “were regarded as slightly tedious, slightly embarrassing necessities.”
When anyone asked Blass what he did, he’d simply say, “I’m in advertising.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
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