Relationships: The value of Friendship



“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.”

Henri Nouwen

     Before my mother passed away eleven years ago, I spent every weekend with her up at her home in Connecticut, about a half-an-hour from my apartment in a suburb of New York. I went up early Saturday morning and left after dinner Sunday evening. We would typically go to her office (she owned her own computer software development company) for a half-day Saturday morning where I would read while she would work and then we would go to lunch. The rest of the weekend was spent doing girly, mother-and-daughter stuff like shopping, manicures, movies and just spending time together. She was my best friend and I was hers.

     Sometimes her boyfriend joined us but my mother’s and his relationship was complicated by the fact that he was married. He also worked on Saturday — he owned a retail business ─ and often spent Sundays with his wife and children.

     I thought this was an ideal arrangement; during the week I was occupied with a day program and then avoided being alone by staying with my mother on the weekends. It didn’t occur to me that I had virtually no friends. At my graduation party when I got my master’s in social work, most of the guest were professionals — people I had paid at some point in my life to listen to me complain about how badly everything was going. My current therapist was there, along with my mentor who also the director of a prior day program. My counselor from my old halfway house was in attendance and my one good friend.

     I saw nothing amiss — until I entered therapy with Dr. Adena.* She was the one that pointed out how spending every weekend with my mother had kept me from making friends my own age, and now that she was gone I was spending every weekend alone in my apartment. Dr. Adena was the one who pointed out that nearly all the guests at my graduation party had been paid professionals and didn’t that strike me as sad?

     I try to impart to my patients how important it is to have a social life and good friends that they can count on. Even if they are in a relationship, many of my patients are dependent on their partner and have built their life around that person. If the relationship breaks down, even becomes abusive, they are afraid to leave because then they will be alone.

     I tell my patients that they can feel alone and lonely in a relationship and that is an illuminating thought; something that has never occurred to them. But that is exactly how many of them feel and it as though by verbalizing it, I have given them permission to acknowledge these feelings.

The next step is to encourage my patients to begin to make new friends and the expected response is “how?” I tell them that they have to put themselves out there and that no one is going to come knocking at their door. We identify several interests then try to find an activity that matches an interest. If it is reading, perhaps a book club and/or going to a reading at a bookstore.

     We might role play how to initiate a conversation and sustain one. “It’s difficult,” I tell them “and be prepared for rejection but don’t take it personally. Just move on.” The patients verbalize how frightening is will be to make this change in their lifestyle and be among strangers and I normalize that. “Many people have anxiety about walking into a room full of strangers and starting conversations,” I say. “It’s really a universal fear.”

     Some of my patients go on to reach out and meet a few people that they do eventually build a friendship with. They then they tell me how much the relationship means to them. Unfortunately, others remain paralyzed by their fear and are still isolated.

     My brother threw me a beautiful 50th birthday party at a lovely restaurant overlooking a river. About 20 of my closest friends and family came to help me celebrate and I was overwhelmed by the love in that room. It was almost eleven years after my graduation party and not one professional was in attendance.

History and religion: Jesus wife?

Jesus cites wife in fourth-century script, says US scholar Ancient text contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to 'my wife', says expert in the history of Christianity at Harvard .

 

A Harvard University professor has unveiled a fourth-century fragment of papyrus she said is the only existing ancient text quoting Jesus explicitly referring to having a wife. Karen King, an expert in the history of Christianity, said the text contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to "my wife," whom he identifies as Mary. King says the fragment of Coptic script is a copy of a gospel, probably written in Greek in the second century. King helped translate and unveiled the tiny fragment at a conference of Coptic experts in Rome. She said it doesn't prove Jesus was married but speaks to issues of family and marriage that faced Christians. Four words in the 1.5 x 3in (3.8 x 7.6cm) fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, King said. Those words, written in a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, translate to "Jesus said to them, my wife," King said in a statement. He added that in the dialogue the disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy and Jesus says: "She can be my disciple." Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was unmarried even though there was no reliable historical evidence to support that, King said. The new gospel, she said, "tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage". "From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry," she said, "but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began appealing to Jesus's marital status to support their positions." King presented the document at a six-day conference being held at Rome's La Sapienza University and at the Augustinianum institute of the Pontifical Lateran University. While the Vatican newspaper and Vatican Radio frequently cover such academic conferences, there was no mention of King's discovery in any Vatican media on Tuesday. That said, her paper was one of nearly 60 delivered on Tuesday at the vast conference, which drew 300 academics from around the globe. The fragment belongs to an anonymous private collector who contacted King to help translate and analyse it. Nothing is known about the circumstances of its discovery, but it had to have come from Egypt, where the dry climate allows ancient writings to survive and because it was written in a script used in ancient times there, King said. The unclear origins of the document should encourage people to be cautious, said Bible scholar Ben Witherington III, a professor and author who teaches at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He said the document follows the pattern of Gnostic texts of the second, third and fourth centuries, using "the language of intimacy to talk about spiritual relationships". "What we hear from the Gnostic is this practice called the sister-wife texts, where they carried around a female believer with them who cooks for them and cleans for them and does the usual domestic chores, but they have no sexual relationship whatsoever," during the strong monastic periods of the third and fourth centuries, Witherington said. "In other words, this is no confirmation of the Da Vinci Code or even of the idea that the Gnostics thought Jesus was married in the normal sense of the word." Thes doubts, King said, should not stop scholars from continuing to examine the document. Those who conducted an initial examination of the fragment include Roger Bagnall, a papyrologist who is director of the New York-based Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and AnneMarie Luijendijk, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity from Princeton University. They said their study of the papyrus, the handwriting and how the ink was chemically absorbed shows it is highly probable it is an ancient text, King said. Another scholar, Ariel Shisha-Halevy, professor of linguistics at Hebrew University and a leading expert on Coptic language, reviewed the text's language and concluded it offered no evidence of forgery. King and Luijendijk said they believe the fragment was part of a newly discovered gospel they named "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" for reference purposes. King said she dated the time it was written to the second half of the second century because the fragment shows close connections to other newly discovered gospels written at that time, especially the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip.

Science: The birth of an island

Audio exercise

Why is it important to learn English?

Here you have to videos to motivate you. As you can see, the learning of English nowadays is very important for you to have a better future. Not only will you be able to communicate with people from different countries (as English works as a lingua franca), but also to study and work abroad. These students here could be you! So, listen to their reasons and tell me what you think!

An very good introduction into language and Linguistics. Very very interesting!

Here you have a lecture by psychologist Steven Pinker. Do you know who he is?

 

 

 

Science and ...Brain drain!

Nuria Martí, who was recently made redundant in a Spanish research centre, becomes co-author of one of the most important discoveries in science: the clonation of stem cells for therapeutic purposes.

 

     It’s been 17 years since Dolly the sheep was cloned from a mammary cell. And now scientists applied the same technique to make the first embryonic-stem-cell lines from human skin cells.

     Ever since Ian Wilmut, an unassuming embryologist working at the Roslin Institute just outside Edinburgh stunned the world by cloning the first mammal, Dolly, scientists have been asking: Could humans be cloned in the same way? Putting aside the ethical challenges the question raised, the query turned out to involve more wishful thinking than scientific success. Despite the fact that dozens of other species have been cloned using the technique, called nuclear transfer, human cells have remained stubbornly resistant to the process.

Until now. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University, and his colleagues report in the journal Cell that they have successfully reprogrammed human skin cells back to their embryonic state. The purpose of the study, however, was not to generate human clones but to produce lines of embryonic stem cells. These can develop into muscle, nerve or other cells that make up the body’s tissues. The process, he says, took only a few months, a surprisingly short period to reach such an important milestone.

     Nuclear transfer involves inserting a fully developed cell — in Mitalipov’s study, the cells came from the skin of fetuses — into the nucleus of an egg, and then manipulating the egg to start dividing, a process that normally only occurs after it has been fertilized by sperm. After several days, the ball of cells that results contains a blanket of embryonic stem cells endowed with the genetic material of the donor skin cell, which have the ability to generate every cell type from that donor. In Dolly’s case, those cells were allowed to continue developing into an embryo that was then transferred to a ewe to produce a cloned sheep. But Mitalipov says his process with the human cells isn’t designed to generate a human clone, but rather just to create the embryonic stem cells. These could then be manipulated to create heart, nerve or other cells that can repair or treat disease.

     “I think this is a really important advance,” says Dieter Egli, an investigator at the New York Stem Cell Foundation. “I have a very high confidence that versions of this technique will work very well; it’s something that the field has been waiting for.” Egli is among the handful of scientists who have been working to perfect the technique with human cells and, in 2011, succeeded in producing human stem cells, but with double the number of chromosomes. In 2004, Hwang Woo-suk, a veterinary scientist at Seoul National University, had claimed to have succeeded in achieving the feat, but later admitted to faking the data. Instead of generating embryonic-stem-cell lines via nuclear transfer, Hwang’s group produced the stem cells from days-old embryos, a technique that had already been established by James Thomson at University of Wisconsin in 1998.

That scandal, as well as ethical concerns about the dangers of encouraging work that could lead to human cloning, dried up interest in getting the process to work with human cells. Then came a breakthrough in 2007, when Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University succeeded in reprogramming adult skin cells back to their embryonic state simply by dousing them in a concoction of four genetic factors and some growth media. That technique for generating embryonic-like stem cells (called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells) bypassed the need for transferring the cells into eggs, as Wilmut had done, and also averted the ethical issues attached to extracting stem cells from embryos as Thomson had done. Plus, the iPS cells had the advantage that patients could generate their own stem cells and potentially grow new cells they might need to treat or avert diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s or heart problems.

Except that researchers still couldn’t prove that the heart, nerve, muscle and other cells they made from the iPS cells were exactly like the ones generated from the embryonic stem cells. The gold standard embryonic stem cells still came from embryos themselves, including ones that were made through nuclear transfer.

     He estimates that about 50% of the success can be attributed to the quality of the eggs while the remaining 50% is related to the optimization of the process. So far, the technique appears to be pretty efficient; from eight eggs, the group generated four embryonic stem-cell lines. In the future, Mitalipov anticipates it will be possible to produce a stem-cell line from each donated egg. “We knew the history of failure, that several legitimate labs had tried but couldn’t make it work,” he says. “I thought we would need about 500 to 1000 eggs to optimize the process and anticipated it would be a long study that would take several years. But in the first experiment we got a blastocyst, and within a couple of months we already had [an embryonic] stem-cell line. We couldn’t believe it.”

     Egli and other stem-cell scientists are eager to replicate the process, to test how reliable and robust it is, and hurdles still remain before the technique is standardized. It’s not clear yet, for example, whether the process will work as efficiently with adult — older — cells, and healthy egg donors may not be as available in some parts of the country as they were in Oregon, where the state allows scientists to compensate donors for their eggs, just as IVF clinics do. But the achievement could establish another important source of stem cells that patients can generate to ultimately treat themselves.

Chomsky on education 2

Assaulting Solidarity - Privatizing Education

      There has been a general assault in the last 25 years on solidarity, democracy, social welfare, anything that interferes with private power, and there are many targets. One of the targets is undoubtedly the educational system. In fact, a couple of years ago already, the big investment firms, like Lehman Brothers, and so on, were sending around brochures to their clients saying, "Look, we've taken over the health system; we've taken over the prison system; the next big target is the educational system. So we can privatize the educational system, make a lot of money out of it."

      Also, notice that privatizing it undermines the danger, it's kind of an ethic that has to be undermined, namely the idea that you care about somebody else. A public education system is based on the principle that you care whether the kid down the street gets an education. And that's got to be stopped. This is very much like what the workers in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts were worrying about 150 years ago. They were trying to stop what they called the new spirit of the age: "Gain wealth, forgetting all but self." We want to stop that. That's not what we're like. We're human beings. We care about other people. We want to do things together. We care about whether the kid down the street gets an education. We care about whether somebody else has a road, even if I don't use it. We care about whether there is child slave labor in Thailand. We care about whether some elderly person gets food. That's social security. We care whether somebody else gets food. There's a huge effort to try to undermine all of that--to try to privatize aspirations so then you're totally controlled. Privatize aspirations, you're completely controlled. Private power goes its own way, everyone else has to subordinate themselves to it.

      Well that's part of the basis for the attack on the public education system, and it goes right up to the universities. In the universities there's a move toward corporatization and that has very clear effects. You see it at MIT where I teach, you see it everywhere. It means that you want to create, just like industry, you want to create a more flexible work force. That means undermine security. It means have cheap temporary labor, like graduate students, who don't have to be paid much and who can be thrown out--they're temps. OK, they're going to be around for a couple of years, then you toss them out and have some more temps.

      It affects research, strikingly. I'm sure you see it here, but at a research institution like where I am, MIT, you see it pretty clearly. As funding shifts from public entities, including, incidentally, the Pentagon, in fact, primarily the Pentagon, which has long understood that its domestic role is to be a cover for transferring public funds into private profit. When funding goes from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation and others to corporate funding, there's a definite shift. A corporation, say, some pharmaceutical corporation, is not particularly likely to want to fund research which is going to help everybody. There's exceptions, but, by and large, it's not going to want to fund, say basic biology, which may be a public good that anybody can use 10 or 20 years from now. It's going to want to fund things that it can make profit from and, furthermore, do it in the short term. There's a striking tendency, and a perfectly natural one, for corporate funding to institute more secrecy and short-term applied [projects for which the corporation has proprietary control on publication and use. Well you know, technically corporate funding can't demand secrecy, but that' s only technically. In fact they can, like the threat of not re-funding imposes secrecy. There are actually cases like this, some of them so dramatic they've made the Wall Street Journal. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal last summer, you may have seen, about MIT, my place. What had happened was that a student in a computer science class had refused to answer a question on an exam. When he was asked why by the professor, he said that he knew the answer but he was under a secrecy condition from a different professor not to answer it, and the reason was that, in the research he was doing for this other professor, they had sort of worked out the answer to this; but they wanted to keep it secret, because they wanted to make money, or something. Well, you know, this is so scandalous that even the Wall Street Journal was scandalized.

      But that's the kind of thing you can expect as there's a move toward corporatization. After all, corporations are not benevolent societies. As Milton Friedman correctly says, though in slightly different words, the board of directors of a corporation actually has a legal obligation to be a monster, an ethical monster. Their legal obligation is to maximize profits for the shareholders, the stockholders. They're not supposed to do nice things. If they are, it's probably illegal, unless it's intended to mollify people, or improve market share, or something. That's the way it works. You don't expect corporations to be benevolent any more than you expect dictatorships to be benevolent. Maybe you can force them to be benevolent, but it's the tyrannical structure that's the problem, and as the universities move toward corporatization you expect all of these effects.

      And one of the effects, in a way, I think the most important, is the undermining of the conception of solidarity and cooperation. I think that lies at the heart of the attack on the public school system, the attack on social security, the effort to block any form of national health care, which has been going on for years. And, in fact, across the board, and it's understandable. If you want to "regiment the minds of men just as an army regiments their bodies," you've got to undermine these subversive notions of mutual support, solidarity, sympathy, caring for other people, and so on and so forth.

      The attack on public education is one example. I don't know how it's working here, but in Massachusetts, where I see it directly, there's a comparable attack on the state colleges, which are there for working class people, people who come back to college after they're half-way in their career, mothers who come back, people from the urban ghettos, and so on and so forth, that's what the state college system has been, and they're under serious attack by an interesting method. The method has been to raise the entrance standards for the state colleges without improving the schools. So when you don't improve the schools but you raise the entrance standards for the people who are trying to go on, it's kinds of obvious what happens. You get lower enrollments, and when you get lower enrollments, you've got to cut staff because, remember, we have to be efficient, like corporations. So you cut staff, and you cut services, and then you can admit even fewer people, and there's kind of a natural cycle, and you can see where it ends up. It ends up with people either not going to college or figuring out some way to spend $30,000 a year at a private college. And you know what that means. All of these are part of the general effort, I think, to create a socio-economic order which is under the control of private concentrated power. It shows up all over the place.

The VOICE

Try to remember the main structures of the passive sentences we´ve seen!

Verb+ preposition

Another list of verbs + prepositions.

Here you have exercises:

Exercises (1) 

Exercises (2)

Exercises (3)

Exercises (4)

Exercises (5)

Adjective + preposition list

Here you have a list of adjectives + prepositions. Try to revise this aspect, as it might be present in the selectividad test. In fact, you saw it was present in today´s test.

Try to do some of this exercises:

Exercises (1)

Exercises (2)

Exercises (3) 

Exercises (4)

And now the passive!

So, if this is

SUBJECT: Last week's ruling by the federal court of Canada that music fans who download music for personal use via peer-to-peer services, such as Kazaa and Grokster, are not breaking its local copyright law

 

VERB: highlights

 

OBJECT: the risk the music business is taking in deciding to sue music filesharers.

the structure of the sentence....which would its passive be? Come on! It´s very easy!

Reminder

I remind you that you have to use connecting words or linking words or expressions in your compositions.

Next week´s schedule (off regular timetable)

Monday, 6th: Class in the afternoon.
Tuesday, 8th: Listening during the break.
Wednesday, 8th: Class in the afternoon.
Friday, 10th: Class in the afternoon