Rape on tribal land

This was a story I caught while listening to NPR this summer, and it really disturbed me: Part 1, Part 2.

Did you know that sexual assault occurs every 2.5 minutes in this country? And if you are a Native American woman, your chances of being sexually assaulted are two and a half times higher than other women. The legal system is useless to capture and convict these felons because of complicated legal rules and bureaucratic inertia concerning tribal land and who has jurisdiction. So Native American women who are raped by white men are basically ignored.

One day recently at the Chickasaw police headquarters, a call came in from a Native American woman who said she had been raped and didn’t know where she was….

If the woman is Indian on Indian land with an Indian attacker, he can help her. If not, there’s often little he can do – and he says that’s usually the case. According to a Justice Department report, 80 percent of Indian victims describe their attackers at non-native.

“Many of the criminals know Indian lands are almost a lawless community, where they can do whatever they want,” O’Neal said.

In this case on this day, the woman turns up outside of tribal land, which means he cannot intervene and won’t know what happened to her.

What’s the deal? Can’t we do better?

3:10 to Yuma

I redeemed some radio station points for tickets to an advance screening of 3:10 to Yuma on Wednesday. As far as I was concerned, it has Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, and great reviews so far, so I couldn’t go wrong.

It turns out that the movie is very good! The story is very character-driven, and both Russell Crowe and Christian Bale (fantastic actors) were up to the task of putting on their characters’ many layers, and portraying their changes over the course of the movie. I love movies like this, where the focus is on real people and real decisions they have to make in life, rather than stereotyped people and “decisions” that are obvious.

Besides the psychological drama, this movie also has some of the most exciting fight scenes I’ve seen in a western. The fights are messy and guns don’t always hit anything on their first shot, just like a real gunfight (or, maybe I should say, just like a gunfight in a multiplayer first-person shooter). I appreciate that.

I won’t give away the ending, except to say that I may have to watch it again to fully understand it. I think I enjoyed that part of the movie the least, but maybe someone will explain it properly to me one day.

Must-read piece on heritability and genetics

Gene Expression (one of the ScienceBlogs), has a great piece on the meaning of “heritability.”

When someone tells you that height is 80% heritable, does that mean:

a) 80% of the reason you are the height you are is due to genes
b) 80% of the variation within the population on the trait of height is due to variation of the genes

The answer is of course b. Unfortunately in the 5 years I’ve been blogging the conception of heritability has been rather difficult to get across, and I regularly have to browbeat readers who conflate the term with a.

If you think about it, the second definition has a clear statistical model — linear (or other) regression — and a statistical test — ANOVA. The first (and wrong) definition has no mathematical correlate.

There are a lot of other interesting points, such as that heritability can change with changing environmental factors, and that there are certain assumptions made when talking about heritability.

Of course, this becomes really important when you’re looking at studies about the heritability of sexual orientation. It’s not as simple as “genes vs environment,” or even “half genes and half environment.” But of course the level of discourse in some places is such that you’d have a hard time convincing people that genes had anything to do with it at all.

Which is why it is sometimes frustrating to hear debates about gay issues. They force both sides to boil down their positions to pithy sound bites, because any piece of nuance that you might introduce (”Perhaps sometimes sexual orientations shift during a person’s lifetime.”) might be grossly misinterpreted (”Aha! So it *is* a choice!”).

It’s amazing what you can do with statistics. It’s also scary the mistakes you can fall into if you don’t take the time to understand these things properly.

Climb that stairway! Higher! Higher!!

Some of you may remember this lovely young lady that I wrote about before. It looks like she’s inspired some more youngsters to reach for their dreams, as is evident in this tribute video:

As my friend Jordi tells me: “ur stairway to stardom obsession needs to stop.”

Bad news

We previously thought my mom was out of the woods when she had surgery to remove the cyst in her neck. But after a biopsy it looks like the cyst contains some cancerous cells, and (from what my dad tried to explain to me in Chinese) I think they are metastatic.

They are going to do radioiodine treatment. So I did a search on UpToDate:

A retrospective analysis of 444 patients treated with radioiodine for metastatic disease between 1953 and 1994 was limited to the results of whole body iodine scans and conventional radiographs [7]:

* 43 percent of the 295 patients with radioiodine uptake achieved negative studies (iodine scans and conventional radiographs)
* Negative studies were more likely in younger patients with differentiated tumors
* 96 percent of the patients achieving negative studies were given cumulative doses of 100 to 600 mCi (3.7 to 22 GBq)
* 7 percent of those achieving negative studies had a recurrence
* 10-year survival was 92 percent in patients achieving negative studies and 19 percent in those who did not.

So if my math is correct, my mom currently has a 10-year survival probability of about 50%.

That’s my report for tonight. I might write more on this later.

So many candidates, so little time to research them all

I’ve come to follow the 2008 presidential candidates based on a few issues only:

• health care (some form of expanded health care with coverage for the uninsured — and NOT a free market system, Rudy Giuliani)
• global warming (the tougher the better. And denialism won’t help the planet, Ron Paul.)
• gay rights (this is more like icing on the cake for me. But you gotta have some icing, Mitt Romney. And of course Bill Richardson lost my vote with his homosexuality-is-a-choice faux pas.)
• science (Brownback, Tancredo, and Huckabee don’t believe in evolution. Doesn’t that alarm you?)

Iraq should be up there but I’m as clueless as the next person on what we should do there.

So far the Democrats all look okay on the issues, but I can’t tell who’s the real deal and who’s just toeing the party line.

Musician crush

I think I’ve got a gay-man-crush on Marie Digby.

If you’re out here in Southern California and you listen to Star 98.7, you’ve probably heard her version of Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” It’s amazing: not only did she turn a horrid little song into something I’d listen to, she’s got a great voice and is gorgeous.

By the way, it’s pronounced “MAR-ee-ay.” ‘Cause she’s suffissticated like that.

Be sure to click through and listen to some of her other covers and original songs.

Taking care of my parents’ house

My folks are out of town still, and so I’m coming home more often to clean, water the lawn, make sure the dog is fed, etc. The grass is in a sorry state, and I’m not sure how to revive it. Perhaps this calls for a trip down to the Home Depot.

What should I do?

Everywhere I go, there are decisions among unpleasant choices, and important people and relationships at stake.

Ever since my mom got sick in Taiwan and I had to make certain decisions about what to do with her care, whose opinions to follow, whether she should cancel her plane ticket and see a doctor or go back to the States and cancel her doctor’s appointment. When I got back I had to deal with business at home and also decide whether to try to schedule in or cancel a trip (planned long in advance) with friends to Las Vegas.

Today I just read an email from my lab PI where he was basically going off on a fellow student for sending him data that doesn’t make sense. I just got back this past week, but on Friday when I saw the data, I did agree that the student made a lot of sketchy choices in working on the data — omitting subjects, resetting values to arbitrary ones so the graph made more sense.

Two other incidents are on my mind:
1) On Friday most of the lab had left early, and I was about to go, too, when our PI called and asked for one of the undergrads. I told him she had left, and he wasn’t pleased. We really have been slacking off. And rather than go on vacation this week, I suspect he might be inclined to stop by the lab and check in on each of us. And I basically have nothing to show.

2) On Thursday I shadowed him at the hospital, and he made a comment about disliking the competition and backstabbing among residents at other hospitals. I’ve been working on the same project as this colleague, and I do often feel in competition with this guy for credit or for our boss’s good favors. But I don’t want to be seen as someone who kisses ass and lets the other guy take the fall, especially at the expense of publishing these data.

So what should I do?

I know that 95% of this is driven by my (continued) need for everybody to like me. I need my colleague to like me; therefore, I need him to do well and get back in our boss’s good favors (but without sounding patronizing or condescending when I offer help).

I need my boss to like me, especially if I want that recommendation for residency applications, so I need to resolve this issue but not appear to be capitalizing on a colleague’s demise.

I need this research to move forward so that I could have at least a passing mention in the acknowledgements when this gets published. And the clock is ticking.

Arggh. Nothing is simple anymore!

Click. Click click.

Another blogger has written a fascinating analysis of the psychology behind Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). Thinking about the conservative people I have seen (either that or the target audience of the movie 300), her ideas make a lot of sense. It’s like the missing center piece of the puzzle, and the satisfaction of watching it click into place perfectly, making sense out of the whole thing.

Of course, as a man, this piece is also highly unsettling:

It takes a sexually mature and capable man to find and woo a partner, father children, sustain the relationships that make a home, and take his place among the valuable men of the community. When you’re a kid, Dad’s sexual competence is the very heart of what makes him the alpha male in your family pack. At five or six, the physical attributes that make him a man are magical stuff — and not only do you not have those attributes, your childish sense of time is such that it’s easy to fear that you never will. The whole issue, as Freud knew, is fraught and uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s just me, but does that scared little kid sound a lot like myself? I certainly don’t feel like I am or ever will be sexually mature and capable enough to live up to this masculine standard. Perhaps blogger Sara is simply writing this because she isn’t familiar with what it’s like to be male (just like I would never understand the female experience). It does sound nice, though, to have this male power.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for great big explanations that sweep up a lot of separate thoughts and behaviors into one framework.

Thanks Pharyngula for the link.