Ginger, Pepper Treat Difficult Cancer
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Ask Marilyn From Parade Magazine
Why do our high school experiences occupy
such a prominent place in our memories?
During the summer, which way should you face
your window fan to take advantage of the cool night air? Should the fan face
indoors to blow cool air inside, or should it face outdoors to suck hot air
outside? To make the window fan do
double duty, try this: Open a couple of windows in rooms far from the fan,
close all windows near the fan, and face the fan outdoors. The fan will suck
cool outside air in through the open windows and blow hot household air
outside. This works best when the open windows are on the windy side of the
house.
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Cultural values, food safety collide over rice cakes
By Edwin Garcia
- Some of the more
popular items at Ken Trieu's San Jose sandwich shop are traditional Vietnamese
rice cakes that his family has been selling for two decades.
STROKE IDENTIFICATION:
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May 14, 2006
The Model Students
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Why are Asian-Americans so good
at school? Or, to put
it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect? Trang
came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old
Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents,
neither having more than a high school education,
settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.
The youngest of eight children,
Trang learned English
well enough that when she graduated from high school,
she was valedictorian. Now she is a senior at Nebraska
Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA
Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes
Scholar.
Increasingly in America, stellar academic achievement
has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans averaged a
combined math-verbal SAT of 1091, compared with 1068
for whites, 982 for American Indians, 922 for
Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent of
Asian-American students take calculus in high school,
compared with 28 percent of all students.
Among whites, 2 percent score 750 or better in either
the math or verbal SAT. Among Asian-Americans, 3
percent beat 750 in verbal, and 8 percent in math.
Frankly, you sometimes feel at an intellectual
disadvantage if your great-grandparents weren't
peasants in an Asian village.
So I asked Trang why Asian-Americans do so well in
school.
"I can't speak for all Asian-Americans," Trang told
me, "but for me and my friends, it was because of the
sacrifices that our parents made. ... It's so
difficult to see my parents get up at 5 each morning
to go to factories to earn $6.30 an hour. I see that
there is so much that I can do in America that my
parents couldn't."
Of course, not all Asian-Americans are so painfully
perfect — Filipinos are among the largest groups of
Asian-Americans and they do very well without being
stellar. Success goes particularly to those whose
ancestors came from the Confucian belt from Japan
through Korea and China to Vietnam.
It's not just the immigrant mentality, for
Japanese-American students are mostly fourth- and
fifth- generation now, and they're still excelling.
Nor is it just about family background, for
Chinese-Americans who trace their origins to peasant
villages also graduate summa.
One theory percolating among some geneticists is that
in societies that were among the first with
occupations that depended on brains, genetic selection
may have raised I.Q.'s slightly — a theory
suggesting that maybe Asians are just smarter. But I'm
skeptical, partly because so much depends on context.
In the U.S., for example, ethnic Koreans are academic
stars. But in Japan, ethnic Koreans languish in an
underclass, often doing poorly in schools and becoming
involved in the yakuza mafia. One lesson may be that
if you discriminate against a minority and repeatedly
shove its members off the social escalator, then you
create pathologies of self-doubt that can become
self-sustaining.
So then why do Asian-Americans really succeed in
school? Aside from immigrant optimism, I see two and a
half reasons:
First, as Trang suggests, is the filial piety nurtured
by Confucianism for 2,500 years. Teenagers rebel all
over the world, but somehow Asian-American kids often
manage both to exasperate and to finish their
homework. And Asian-American families may not always
be warm and fuzzy, but they tend to be intact and
focused on their children's getting ahead.
Second, Confucianism encourages a reverence for
education. In Chinese villages, you still sometimes
see a monument to a young man who centuries ago passed
the jinshi exam — the Ming dynasty equivalent of
getting a perfect SAT. In a Confucian culture, it is
intuitive that the way to achieve glory and success is
by working hard and getting A's.
Then there's the half-reason: American kids typically
say in polls that the students who succeed in school
are the "brains." Asian kids typically say that the A
students are those who work hard. That means no
Asian-American ever has an excuse for not becoming
valedictorian.
"Anybody can be smart, can do great on standardized
tests," Trang explains. "But unless you work hard,
you're not going to do well."
If I'm right, the success of Asian-Americans is mostly
about culture, and there's no way to transplant a
culture. But there are lessons we can absorb, and
maybe the easiest is that respect for education pays
dividends. That can come, for example, in the form of
higher teacher salaries, or greater public efforts to
honor star students. While there are no magic bullets,
we would be fools not to try to learn some Asian
lessons.
8 common investing mistakes
By Selena Maranjian (TMF Selena)
May 5, 2006
None of us are perfect as investors. Even the most respected investors out there
have admitted that they've made errors. As Warren Buffett has told his
shareholders in various annual letters: "You'd have been better off if I had
gone to the movies [this year]" and: "I have erred [by] not making repurchases
[of shares]." In 2004, when asked at the Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRKa, BRKb)
annual meeting what his worst investing mistake was, he explained: "I set out to
buy $100 million shares of Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) at a [pre-split price of]
$23.... We bought a little and it moved up a little and I thought maybe it will
come back a bit. That thumbsucking has cost us in the current area of $10
billion."
Here are some other common mistakes we make. See how many apply to you, and try
to avoid them -- doing so can boost your ultimate performance considerably.
Accumulating credit card debt. It feels like free money, but it isn't. High
interest rates increase your debt, making it harder and harder to pay off.
That's reverse investing! (Learn how to be smart about credit in our Credit
Center.) If you're mired in debt, you'll hardly be in a position to invest -- so
you won't even have a chance to make many of these other mistakes!
Not investing soon enough. You're rarely too young
(or even too old) to invest. Kids have the most to gain from many decades of
stock appreciation. But even retirees can benefit from leaving whatever money
they won't need for five or 10 years in stocks. Folks of all ages can benefit
mightily from test-driving -- for free -- our Rule Your Retirement newsletter
service, which can help you set yourself up for a very happy second half of your
life.
Investing too conservatively. Long-term
investments, in general, will do better in the stock market. The long-term
annual average return for the stock market over the past century is around 10%.
You may, of course, do better or worse than that in the years that you invest.
But if you save for your retirement just with bonds or CDs or even real estate,
you may find that you've underperformed needlessly in the long run.
Having unrealistic expectations. What do you expect
from your stocks? 50% per year? Well, snap out of it. Even Microsoft (Nasdaq:
MSFT) has averaged about 30% per year over its history, and it's head and
shoulders above most other companies. Then there's Wal-Mart, which would have
increased your investment more than 900-fold over the past 30 years -- which is
about 26% annually, on average. Expect an average of 10% annually from the stock
market over long periods. More realistically, expect anywhere from 8% to 12%, on
average, during your personal long-term investing period.
Over- or under-diversifying. If all your eggs are
in two or three baskets, you're exposed to too much risk. (Just imagine if you'd
had much of your moola in Enron -- or even struggling stalwarts such as Eastman
Kodak (NYSE: EK) or Lucent (NYSE: LU), both down some 50% from their 1996
perches.) If you have too many baskets to count, then you probably aren't able
to keep up with each company. Between eight and 15 stocks is a manageable number
for most people, although some do well with a few more or less.
Holding on too long. Why did you buy a given stock?
Are the reasons still valid? Has anything important changed? Have you gained as
much as you expected to in it? These are the sorts of questions you should mull
over regularly. Be prepared to sell under certain circumstances, whether you've
made or lost money so far. Read Rich Smith on when to sell a winner and Shannon
Zimmerman on when to sell a mutual fund.
Paying too much in commissions. Aim to pay no more
than 2% per trade in commissions. So if you're buying $500 of stock, you'll want
to pay $10, tops, for the trade. Fortunately, there are plenty of brokerages
with modest commission fees -- learn more in our Broker Center, which features
some of them.
Letting emotions rule your investing. Don't be led
by fear, which can have you jumping out of the market just when stocks have
fallen, or greed, which can have you hanging on to an overpriced winner, hoping
to eke out a few more dollars of gain. Similarly, don't stubbornly hang on to a
loser, hoping to make back your lost dollars, when you could be selling and
buying shares of a company you have a lot more confidence in, and make your
dollars back more reliably on that stock. I made the mistake of acting on greed
and fear when I invested in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE: MSO
Ginger, pepper treat difficult cancers
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent Tue Apr 4, 5:18 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ginger can kill ovarian cancer cells while the compound that makes peppers hot can shrink pancreatic tumors, researchers told a conference on Tuesday.
Their studies add to a growing body of evidence that at least some popular spices might slow or prevent the growth of cancer.
The study on ginger was done using cells in a lab dish, which is a long way from finding that it works in actual cancer patients, but it is the first step to testing the idea.
Dr. Rebecca Liu, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, and colleagues tested ginger powder dissolved in solution by putting it on ovarian cancer cell cultures.
It killed the ovarian cancer cells in two different ways -- through a self-destruction process called apoptosis and through autophagy in which cells digest themselves, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
"Most ovarian cancer patients develop recurrent disease that eventually becomes resistant to standard chemotherapy, which is associated with resistance to apoptosis," Liu said in a statement.
"If ginger can cause autophagic cell death in addition to apoptosis, it may circumvent resistance to conventional chemotherapy."
Ovarian cancer kills 16,000 out of the 22,000 U.S. women who are diagnosed with it every year, according to the
American Cancer Society.
Ginger has been shown to help control inflammation, which can contribute to the development of ovarian cancer cells.
"In multiple ovarian cancer cell lines, we found that ginger-induced cell death at a similar or better rate than the platinum-based chemotherapy drugs typically used to treat ovarian cancer," said Dr. Jennifer Rhode, who helped work on the study.
A second study found that capsaicin, which makes chili peppers hot, fed to mice caused apoptosis death in pancreatic cancer cells, said Sanjay Srivastava of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
"Capsaicin triggered the cancerous cells to die off and significantly reduced the size of the tumors," he said.
The spicy compound killed pancreatic tumor cells but did not affect normal, healthy pancreas cells, researchers told the AACR meeting.
Last year the same team reported similar results with pancreatic cells in lab dishes. Pancreatic cancer is highly deadly, killing 31,000 of the 32,000 it will be diagnosed in this year.
Last month researchers in Los Angeles reported that capsaicin killed prostate tumor cells. Other studies have shown that turmeric, a yellow spice used widely in Indian cooking, may help stop the spread of lung cancer and breast cancer in mice.
Experts point out that many compounds shown to stop cancer in mice are not nearly as effective in human cancer patients.