Hasta La Gadget!

When it was first announced that actor Luke Grimes had left the cast of “True Blood,” it was allegedly over creative differences. Now, a new report claims those “differences” stemmed from a gay plotline.

Buzzfeed reports that Grimes — who previously played James, the vampire boyfriend of Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) — quit because the Season 7 script of the vampire-centric HBO show included a romance between his character and the openly gay Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis). A source told Buzzfeed that Grimes was willing to play the role so long as “Lafayette [was] attracted to him, but not if the attraction was mutual.” He also supposedly objected to any same-sex kissing or sex scenes, but the writers wouldn’t change the script.

Grimes’ publicist, Craig Schneider, told Buzzfeed the 30-year-old dropped the show over scheduling and chose to pursue other opportunities, including “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “American Sniper.”

Schneider was not immediately available for further comment when contacted by The Huffington Post.

TVLine was the first to report Grimes’ “True Blood” exit last December. HBO told TVLine it was due to “creative direction.” The website dubbed the move “unexpected.”

“He initially joined the show because he wanted to work with [his “Forever” co-star] Deborah Ann Woll,” a source said. “But when he started reading the scripts for Season 7, he was disappointed to learn that they were going in a completely different direction with James.”

Grimes was cast as Christian Grey’s brother, Elliot, in the film adaptation of E.L. James’ erotic novel last October. The film began shooting in Vancouver in December.

Since retiring from active university leadership I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the future of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and advocating on their behalf. Over the past eighteen months, I’ve crisscrossed the country making speeches, appearing on radio talk shows, conducting workshops, participating in think-tank discussions and facilitating an array of conversations between higher education leaders and potential collaborators.

If anyone had told me five years ago that I, a baby boomer, would embrace and utilize social media as fully as I r have recently, I would not have believed them! From Twitter and LinkedIn to Facebook and blogging, I use every tool at my disposal to advocate for HBCUs on the one hand and to challenge them on the other to focus more intentionally on student success. Achieving significant and sustainable gains in student success requires distributed leadership; strategic investments, focus and follow through, among others.

June 19-21, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, APLU, under the auspices of the APLU Council of 1890 Universities, hosted the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Student Success Summit in Atlanta, GA. The summit brought together more than 200 participants including presidents, chief academic officers, faculty members, enrollment management personnel, retention program managers, foundation representatives and community partners, among others.

There were also participants from Predominately White Institutions, PWIs, on hand to share what they are doing to enhance student success and to learn about what works at HBCUs. The summit organizer, Dr. John Michael Lee, Jr., APLU’s Vice President for Access and Success, encouraged participants to C.A.S.E. the event, Copy and Steal Everything! Throughout the three day event, the presentations were relevant and the conversation between presenters and session participants was robust.

As a long time university leader and ardent advocate for HBCUs, the Summit reinforced several key issues for me:

1. It’s not enough to simply retain and graduate more students; HBCUs must ensure that students graduate with a high quality education which has value in the global marketplace;

2. HBCUs can’t keep doing what they have always done and expect different outcomes;

3. Inter-institutional collaboration is essential for enhancing student success. At the same time, numerous unexploited opportunities exist for intra-institutional collaboration;

4. The population served by HBCUs is not monolithic and adjustments must be made to ensure that the needs of all students are met;

5. GLBT students constitute a major segment of the HBCU student population and deserve the respect and responsiveness of college presidents and other members of the university community;

6. HBCUs cannot achieve the student success levels to which they aspire without the full engagement of all members of the university community;

7. There are no magic bullets and one size does not fit all;

8. HBCUs must use data, not their emotions, to drive decisions about how best to respond to student needs;

9. To achieve the results to which we aspire deserves student ownership and full engagement,

10. African American males face a unique set of challenges that HBCUs must acknowledge and confronted.
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Were there new discoveries revealed during the Summit? No, not really. What was evident was the high level of energy and enthusiasm exhibited by those in attendance. I was impressed by the resolve of the young professionals there who could work virtually anywhere, but who choose to work at an HBCU. They exuded an extraordinary level of passion and commitment to a cause much greater than themselves.

Student academic success is not a spectator activity. It is requires an “all hands” approach to fulfill the promise of American higher education.

U.S. Health care is undergoing a transformation with a magnitude that may only be realized with the advantage of history. Our health care investment has skyrocketed at the same time our system is rapidly evolving to extend care and to meet the shifting needs of our population. Lost amidst this flurry is a pervasive health care policy issue that significantly affects all of our health outcomes as well as our health care dollar: gender inequity in medical research.

As a cardiologist, a woman, and a professor of medicine, I have a unique view of just how significant this problem is, which is not to say I thoroughly understand how underreported the issue remains within the medical science community and the general public. When I ask even highly informed people if they are aware that medical research is conducted predominantly on male lab animals, the response is consistently shock and disbelief. Sadly, it is true, as are these dynamics:

Women and men are biologically different far beyond their reproductive organs. Indeed, every cell has a sex, making the impact of sex differences critical in detecting and treating disease. Yet acknowledging sex differences is still not the norm in medical science which means that women are receiving recommendations from their doctors for prevention strategies, diagnostic tests and medical treatments based on research that has not adequately included or reported results on women.

This occurs at the early stages of research, when females are excluded from animal and human studies or the sex of the animals isn’t stated in the published results, making the entire process — ending in translation into practice and measurement of outcomes — inequitable because sex and gender differences are so often not embedded within it.

What these findings tell us is that even as we spend trillions on health care, and on the world’s most advanced technology, we are still leaving women’s health to chance. In addition, we are tolerating a poor return on our health care investment when we don’t demand accuracy in science.

A new report, entitled, “Sex-Specific Medical Research: Why Women’s Health Can’t Wait,” (link to report) co-authored by The Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and The Jacobs Institute at George Washington University, provides the public with specific evidence of these practices and recommends a number of strategies going forward. Recommendations include: holding federal agencies accountable; promoting transparency and disclosure regarding the absence of sex- and gender-based evidence; and expanding sex-based research requirements. These regulatory efforts are gaining traction but as the health care system continues on its seismic shift, the most important voice in all this is you, the patient, regardless of your sex.

Consider Linda’s story. Linda is a middle-aged woman who had a stent placed in one of the arteries to her heart. When her symptoms returned, she went back to her doctor who performed the gold standard test, a cardiac catheterization. It showed no blockages.

That’s when Linda came to see me. We performed another cardiac catheterization, which gave us clues; but we needed another test to make the diagnosis. We then did an intracoronary ultrasound, a test that gives us pictures of the artery from the inside out. That’s when we discovered her heart disease looked different from what you might see in a man.

In a typical man, you see a clear blockage like this. In Linda, as with many women, the plaque is laid down more diffusely along the entire artery and is harder to see. For Linda, as for so many women, the so-called Gold Standard Test wasn’t “gold.” Linda received the right treatment, she returned to her life, and she’s doing well.

But Linda was lucky. She found us and we found her heart disease. For many women, that is not the case. They accept the treatment they receive because they have no reason to think it would not have been accurately researched. Women (and men) need to think again.

Part of the reason Health care reform now dominates the American policy stage is because consumers questioned the product — be it the coverage and/or the cost. Consumers need to do the same with the science. As a consumer, demand that drug and medical device companies disclose, through warning labels, whether their products were adequately tested on females. Ask your doctor if the recommended prevention strategies, diagnostic tests and medical treatments he or she is giving you are based on research that included women. If you don’t like the answers, join a growing movement of men and women who are doing something about it.

History will judge how well we navigated the opportunity to change the American health care system. Let’s make correcting the science on which health care is based a good part of that story.

Has technology become such an integral part of what it means to be human that we are now actually cyborgs, part organic and apparently part digital? The U.S. Supreme Court seems to think so.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in the crucial cell phone privacy decision observed that your cell phone could be considered “an important feature of human anatomy.”

Cyborg is short for “cybernetic organism,” that is, a being with both organic and bio-integrated electronic parts. It is a term that was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline. Cyborgs have long been a science fiction staple, but recently have become literal reality with medical innovations, for example, to help those with spinal cord injuries.

One startling aspect of this new ruling, however, is to suggest that your smartphone is not merely a part of your practical life, but also of your spiritual life.

To counter the state of California’s argument that any digital data should be searchable, one of the young lawyers who worked on the case found a confession app used to tally up sins. In his ruling for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts noted there are apps “for sharing prayer requests.” “The average smartphone user has installed 33 apps, which together can form a revealing montage of the user’s life,” Roberts wrote.

This raises the question: If I can store sins and prayers, how much has my smartphone become a part of my spiritual life, even of my soul?

This Supreme Court ruling has far reaching implications for protecting privacy in the age of super snooping by government agencies. But it also has profound implications for contemplating the future of human nature and its development not merely in a technological age, but as integrated into the technology itself.

We all know the horror scenarios of violent, militarized cyborgs that up until now have been the stuff of science fiction. This is likely to be the literal future of war, however, where technology becomes more and more integrated into not only the battlefield, but literally into the warrior. The vast development of drone technology suggests that the future of war will be robotic and it truly suggests a horror show.

Yet, this Supreme Court decision may be pointing out how this kind of technology can also extend and enhance human connectivity and even spirituality in a way that must be protected from intrusion.

Perhaps the future of smart technology is not all super soldiers, but could also be enhanced capacity for spiritual development.

It is an intriguing thought.

I’ve been showing friends something I picked up at Google’s developers conference yesterday, and it’s been inspiring ooohs, and wows, and squeals of joy and delight. No, it isn’t a smartwatch. It isn’t even a gadget. It’s a cheap piece of cardboard , and it’s getting even the tech-jaded people here excited.

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