Late Bloomer Research Articles

Exceptional exercise capacity in a late bloomer octogenarian triathlete.

Maximal oxygen uptake (V̇O<inf>2max</inf>) gradually declines across the lifespan. However, little is known about the octogenarians. This is a knowledge gap given that individuals living >80 years old is the fastest expanding age-group world-wide. The increase in the elderly population has generated greater awareness in healthy ageing including psychosocial, physical, and cognitive domains, all of which benefit from engagement in physical activity or sport. In the present article are reported characteristics of an octogenarian man (GM), starting training for triathlon when he was 75 years old. GM performed an incremental Cardiopulmonary Treadmill-Running Exercise Test (CPX). A competitive 5-day consecutive triathlon event (sprint distance on days 1, 3, 4, 5 and Olympic distance on day 2) was monitored using an advanced smartwatch. Between 2021 and 2022, he trained for 10-to-12 hours/week, and participated in 59 and 39 competitions, respectively. The CPX showed a V̇O<inf>2max</inf> of 39.8 mL·min-1·kg-1, the 3rd highest value ever described in the literature among octogenarians and corresponding to the ≈60th percentile of 40-to-49-year-old men. During the 5-day triathlon (overall 12:15 h:min), 88% of time was spent at 77-95% of maximum heart rate (i.e., vigorous exercise intensity). In addition, GM was the 2022 Triathlon Olympic distance World Champion. The remarkably high V̇O<inf>2max</inf> and performance described herein were associated with exceptionally high exercise volume and intensity during training and competition, up to more than four times the recommended physical activity by current guidelines. These results further support the benefits of endurance exercise among octogenarians.

Five worlds of social reproduction after the new millennium: placing transitional China in a three-dimensional model of social reproduction

Since the late 2000s, China has accelerated reconstruction of the welfare state against the backdrop of the second transition. Following a typological approach, this study proposes an analytical framework for assessing varieties of social reproduction before delving into a comparative look at China’s national institutional framework, in which China is regarded as a transitional economy and a late bloomer. As represented in three dimensions, countries have production regimes that diverge in the degree of coordination, welfare regimes that differ in the degree of decommodification, and labor reproduction regimes that vary in the degree of depatriarchalization. We investigate the convergence and divergence of advanced economies, transitional economies, and the emerging economies of East Asian countries. Hierarchical cluster analysis and a three-dimensional map illustrate the varieties of regimes at the intersections of production, welfare, and reproduction. With the help of institutional complementarities, five worlds of social reproduction are distinguished: the late blooming, the liberal, the catch-up/transitional, the conservative, and the social democratic. China’s production regime converges with that of continental Europe and Post-Socialist societies based on institutional arrangements of nonmarket coordination; however, limited income maintenance and redistribution policies, the absence of family-friendly policies, and the regendering of the division of labor make China’s institutional mix appear more compatible with East Asian societies than Western ones. The institutional complementarities between the welfare and labor reproduction regimes reveal a social reproduction scenario that is less than purely late blooming.

V.R. Khanolkar's initial years as pathologist and researcher in India: 1924-1941.

Vasant Ramji Khanolkar was the first Indian pathologist and a pioneering researcher who was at the forefront of the diverse fields of cancer research, blood group genetics, epidemiology and leprosy research, etc. in the mid-twentieth century. All his cutting-edge research took place after he joined Tata Memorial Hospital, Bombay (now Mumbai), as Director of Laboratories. There is little evidence of his research in the first 17 years of his career in India, at J.J. Hospital and K.E.M. Hospital, Bombay. We tried to address this gap by attempting to obtain information on Khanolkar's papers from PubMed, prior to his having joined Tata Memorial Hospital. We evaluated the abstracts of the presentations that he made at the meetings of the Teaching Pathologists Association, Bombay. Finally, we extracted from the autopsy registers at the two hospitals, any useful information about the autopsies that he had performed. Khanolkar performed preliminary laboratory research in anaemia as well as some experimental pathology in his stint at K.E.M. Hospital. Further, surprisingly, histology was not performed on most autopsies at J.J. Hospital for the period that he was Professor, but was done at K.E.M. Hospital. Why Khanolkar was a late bloomer and did not perform much research or publish in the first two institutions that he was Professor at, remains a mystery.

Clinical challenge: When is delayed puberty more than a “late bloomer”?

Clinical challenge: When is delayed puberty more than a “late bloomer”?

Personal reflective diaries with group-friendly criticism: empowering pre-service teachers

ABSTRACT The study examined the effect of the use of ‘personal reflective diaries’ and ‘group-friendly criticism’ to assess professional development and self-empowerment among 47 Israeli final-year pre-service teachers in a seminar course, and later on, perceptions and insights during their practicum and their internship year. Content analysis of holistic summations, a questionnaire, and interviews yielded two participant types: ‘purposeful’ and ‘late bloomer.’ For both, four main themes emerged: (1) ability to face difficulties; (2) teaching and class management strategies; (3) beliefs and insights about the teacher’s role; and (4) sense of efficacy. Participants stated that fear and uncertainty had turned into satisfaction and empowerment, with growing empathy towards their students. Overall results showed that in-depth focus on one difficulty while using reflective diaries together with group-friendly criticism helped both types of participants deal with their difficulties successfully, while developing strategies and insights for their future as teachers.

The Poetic Beauty of Wang Zengqi's Novels through the Perspective of Receiving the Precepts

Wang Zengqi is a writer living in both the modern and contemporary eras. He was a premature and late bloomer, having been published in the 1940s but not becoming famous until the early 1980s. He published his novel Receiving The Precepts, sparking a literary sensation and providing a breath of fresh air to the befuddled literary scene of the time. Receiving The Precepts is a relatively short novel in which a vast amount of folk traditions components are presented. Using the novel Receiving The Precepts as its point of focus, this work concentrates on the lyrical elegance present in Wang Zengqi's literary works. It is addressed from three different angles. The novel's fundamentally poetic characters are highlighted by its versification and prose-cultural dramatic structure, to name the first. The second is the emphasis on how characters are portrayed and how their prose-cultural writing style is produced. The article also conducts a textual analysis while focusing on the way the novel employs folk vernacular. To properly appreciate Receiving The Precepts' pure folkloric beauty, it is necessary to examine its three key aspects, structure, character development, and language features. Through his construction of the world of vernacular customs and the secularization of rural folklore, Wang Zengqi creates a world of vernacular folklore with multiple aesthetic values. By re-examining the relations between the urban and the rural, he regards rural folklore from the perspective of folk culture and writes about the spontaneous life of folk characters, constructing a rural world with multiple aesthetic values.

A Craft Essay on Trauma

A Craft Essay on Trauma

Trade Secrets in Biologic Medicine

Can something be both open and secret? That is the conundrum facing society as trade secret rights chafe against patent rights in cutting-edge, biologic medicine. The conflict is unsurprising. Trade secret has emerged as a relatively late bloomer among the family of intellectual property rights and only recently has begun to establish the boundaries of its own space, a process in which it will inevitably knock against other intellectual property doctrines already occupying their own domains. Nor is it surprising that the clash would arise in a fast-moving area of medical science. From insulin products, to cancer treatments, to mRNA vaccines, companies are staking the health of their companies on biologics. There is a dearth of legal literature on the topic of trade secrets in the biologic space and almost nothing regarding how trade secrets interact with the patent system in that domain. These scientific and legal areas are sufficiently complex that even the most intrepid scholars fear to tread. This article explains in detailed and accessible language how the systems are working together to the detriment of society. To address the problem, this article argues that a company receiving a patent on a drug product should be required to disclose the full range of trade secrets necessary to make that drug. As the descriptions below will explain, patent applicants are able to satisfy the patent requirement of providing sufficient disclosure that “one skilled in the art can make and use” the invention, without actually providing the information to do so. The surrounding regulatory systems intended to facilitate sharing of clinical trial data suffer the same problem. As is frequently said in biologics, “the process is the product.” In other words, the only way to define something derived from elements of living organisms is by describing the process of producing it. Thus, lack of process information is particularly problematic with biologics. Being faithful to the theoretical underpinnings of the intellectual property regimes requires a resolution of this problem and the establishment of a more effective boundary line between trade secrets and patents for biologic medicine.

Late Bloomer Offending Patterns: Towards a Harder Empirical Definition—Commentary on Matsuda et al. (2022)

Matsuda et al. (2022) show that late bloomers also exist in self-report data. They use a “dynamic” definition of late bloomer offending pattern as they have concerns with definitions based on arbitrary age cutoff points. But the approach does not make the groups less arbitrary than hard definitions. In this commentary, I argue that a hard definition has important advantages and demonstrates an alternative using a hard definition while exploring heterogeneity within the late onset group.

Late bloomer or language disorder? Differences in toddler vocabulary composition associated with long-term language outcomes.

Children with delays in expressive language (late talkers) have heterogeneous developmental trajectories. Some are late bloomers who eventually "catch-up," but others have persisting delays or are later diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD). Early in development it is unclear which children will belong to which group. We compare the toddler vocabulary composition of late talkers with different long-term outcomes. The literature suggests most children with typical development (TD) have vocabularies dominated by names for categories organized by similarity in shape (e.g., cup), which supports a bias to attend to shape when generalizing names of novel nouns-a bias associated with accelerated vocabulary development. Previous work has shown that as a group, late talkers tend to say fewer names for categories organized by shape and are less likely to show a "shape bias" than TD children. Here, in a retrospective analysis of 850 children, we compared the vocabulary composition of groups of toddlers who were late bloomers or persisting late talkers. At Time 1 (13-27 months), the persisting late talkers said a smaller proportion of shape-based nouns than both TD children and late bloomers who "caught up" to typically sized vocabularies months later (18-38-months). Additionally, children who received a DLD diagnosis between 4 and 7 years said a significantly smaller proportion of shape-based nouns in year two than TD children and children with other diagnoses (e.g., dyslexia). These findings bring new insight into sources of heterogeneity amongst late talkers and offer a new metric for assessing risk. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Toddler vocabulary composition, including the proportion of names for categories organized by shape, like spoon, was used to retrospectively compare outcomes of late talking children Persisting Late Talkers said a smaller proportion of shape-based nouns during toddlerhood relative to Late Bloomers (late talkers who later caught up to have typically-sized vocabularies) Children with later DLD diagnoses said a smaller proportion of shape-based nouns during toddlerhood relative to children without a DLD diagnosis The data illustrate the cascading effects of vocabulary composition on subsequent language development and suggest vocabulary composition may be one important marker of persisting delays.

A Vocation of Palliation.

I consider myself a "late bloomer," since I never encountered the practice of palliative care during medical school in the Philippines, nor during my internal medicine residency in the USA. It was 3years into my first job after finishing residency, working both as a hospitalist and an urgent care physician, when I came to an early morning session on end-of-life care at a large medical society meeting. That talk changed my life. I now see palliative care as being more than a "profession" or a "medical specialty." It is my vocation, as serendipitous events called me into this line of work. For more than 5years now, I have been practicing palliative care, both in the inpatient and outpatient settings, at our institution's cancer center. In this article, I reflect on my experiences during fellowship, and how I continue to derive satisfaction and joy from teaching palliative care to different levels of learners and through the meaningful connections I form with patients and their loved ones.

Jumping Out of a Perfectly Good Airplane

I’m a late bloomer. I married at 37 and had children at 39 and 41. I completed campaign school at 52 and won my first election 18 months later. At 60, I defeated an incumbent 20 years my junior in a tight race for the state House of Representative. I was 3 weeks shy of 61 when I was sworn in as the first advanced practice registered nurse elected to the North Carolina legislature.

Who is Entrepreneurial? Evidence from Late Bloomer Firms with M&amp;A strategies

The literature considers firms seeking finance through an initial public offering (IPO) as entrepreneurial. But are they? We hypothesize that firms in the latter stage of industry life-cycle, or late bloomer firms as less innovative, proactive, and risk-taking, signal entrepreneurial orientation with competitively aggressive M&A strategies. They strategically time an IPO to mitigate adverse selection. Analyzing U.S. data, we find that late bloomer firms are 37.5% more likely to engage in M&As four years following an IPO and acquire 38% faster following the IPO. This M&A pattern is more pronounced at the time of, and among firms with, capital constraints.

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

The Listener’s Gallery

The Listener's Gallery Gregory Berg Click for larger view View full resolution Gregory Berg ________ Bold Beauty: Songs by Juliana Hall. Molly Fillmore, soprano; Elvia Puccinelli, piano. (Blue Griffin Recordings BGR 559; 61:00) Letters from Edna: "To Mr. Ficke and Mr. Bynner," "To Arthur Davison Ficke—1913," "To Anne Gardner Lynch," "To Harriet Monroe," "To Norma Millay," "To Arthur Davison Ficke—1943," "To Arthur Davison Ficke—1930," "To Mother." Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush: "To Eudocia C. Flynt," "To T.W. Higginson," "To Emily Fowler (Ford)," "To Samuel Bowles the Younger," "To Eugenia Hall," "To Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) I," "To Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) II." Theme in Yellow: "Song," "Ripe Corn," "November," "Theme in Yellow," "Splinter," "Haze Gold." Cameos: "Sarah Albritton," "Kay WalkingStick," "Nellie Mae Rowe," "Alice Dalton Brown," "Agnes Pelton," "Corita Kent." There is more than one pathway to greatness. It is sometimes achieved through unstinting focus on a specific goal from the moment one begins harboring professional or vocational aspirations of any kind. But greatness can also be achieved once someone has relinquished one goal in favor of another. That change in course can be disconcerting, to say the least, but any success that follows is exceptionally sweet. Juliana Hall has scored incredible success in the realm of art song, despite being something of a late bloomer as a composer. The daughter of a gifted pianist, Hall devoted many years to piano study and achieved a high degree of excellence. It was only while pursuing a graduate degree in piano at Yale School of Music that she found herself drawn toward and directed into composition. She had dabbled in composition from time to time, as so many gifted musicians do, and had always had interest in poetry and theater, but this was the point in her life when composition became the primary focus of her considerable talents and energy. As if to confirm the wisdom of her bold choice, Hall earned a master's degree in composition and within months was hard at work on her first commission—a song cycle for soprano Dawn Upshaw. From that auspicious start, Hall has gone on to craft highly regarded works for some of the world's most esteemed singers, including Stephanie Blythe, Anthony Dean Griffey, and Brian Asawa. She remains one of the world's most prolific and lauded art song composers, with her creative energies burning as brightly as ever. The release Bold Beauty is a marvelous collection that combines three early song sets (from 1989, 1990, and 1993) with a more recent one composed in 2018. Every measure of music recorded here is a clear demonstration of Hall's exceptional abilities for taking almost any kind of text and giving it new life through music. Two of these four song collections are actually settings of letters rather than poems, but Hall does not seem the least troubled by the challenge of setting nonpoetic texts to music. On the contrary, she seems to relish the challenge, because it seems to draw especially vivid music from her pen. Of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson are not exactly typical letter writers, and one can certainly sense their poetic voice lurking just beneath the surface. Letters from Edna consists of songs that are every bit as colorful and vivid as the poet herself. There is an almost jaunty joy in these letters, no matter what the circumstances under which they were written; one can sense Millay's intense love of language in the way she puts words together. There is a very different mood at play in Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, which are settings of letters by the fascinating and enigmatic Emily Dickinson. Although there are certainly dashes of humor and irreverence, there is also more an atmosphere of mystery overhanging these songs. Hall turns to more conventional texts for her beautifully crafted Theme in Yellow, which draws upon poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg, among others. She tells us in the liner notes that, earlier in her career, her typical practice was to choose a theme for a given song cycle or set and then search for poems that would align...

Are Late Bloomers Real? Identification and Comparison of Late-Onset Offending Patterns from Ages 14-40.

Numerous studies have identified a late-onset pattern of offending, yet debate remains over whether this pattern is real or attributable to measurement error. The goal of the present study is to identify whether this late-onset trajectory exists. We used prospective longitudinal data from the Rochester Youth Development Study and group-based trajectory modeling to identify distinct developmental patterns in self-reported incidence of general delinquency from approximately ages 14 to age 31. We then examined and compared the means of general, violent, street, and property offending for individuals belonging to late bloomer, chronic, and low-level offending trajectories across three periods: 1) pre-onset (ages 14-17), 2) post-onset (ages 29-31), and, 3) for a subset of participants participating in a follow-up study, post-trajectory (ages 32-40). Results confirmed the existence of a distinct late bloomers offending trajectory characterized by low rates of delinquency throughout adolescence and high levels throughout adulthood. Furthermore, late bloomers had similar mean levels of delinquency as low-level offenders and that were considerably lower than chronic offenders in the pre-onset period and similar means of offending as chronic offenders that were considerably higher than low-level offenders in the post-onset and post-trajectory periods. Comparisons of these three groups on adolescent risk and protective factors indicated that late bloomers were more similar to individuals in the low-level trajectory and had fewer risk and more protective factors than individuals following a chronic trajectory. Contrary to prior work which attributes late-onset offending to reliance on official data which fails to detect adolescent offending, late bloomer offending appears to be a genuine phenomenon. These results lend greater support to dynamic theories of crime.

The Picturebooks of Ryoji Arai: A World Shared with Children

The Picturebooks of Ryoji Arai: A World Shared with Children Yukiko Hiromatsu (bio) Translated by Deborah Iwabuchi In 2005, Ryoji Arai was the first Japanese to win the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA). Following Maurice Sendak, he was the second illustrator in the world to be so honored. This is what the judges had to say about him: [A]n illustrator with a style all of his own: bold, mischievous, and unpredictable. His picture books glow with warmth, playful good humor, and an audacious spontaneity that appeals to children and adults alike. In adventure after adventure, color flows through his hands in an almost musical way. As a medium for conveying stories to children, his art is at once genuine and truly poetic, encouraging children to paint and to tell their own stories. ("Ryôji Arai") Ryoji Arai was born in 1956 in Japan’s Yamagata Prefecture. As a child, his brothers got him interested in manga and illustrations, and he loved Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. He majored in design at Nihon University College of Art. As a student, he was introduced to the world of picturebooks when his girlfriend gave him one of the Miffy books by Dick Bruna. It was not until much later, though, that he actually began creating and publishing his own. Indeed, he was somewhat of a late bloomer in the field, with his first picturebook published in 1990. The title was Melody, and it was a simply bound book in a limited edition of 500 copies. Since then, he has published more than sixty picturebooks of his own and illustrated more than two hundred other children’s books. The ALMA in 2005 came at just about midpoint in his career. Click for larger view View full resolution He is not the type of artist whose work goes through transformations, and he can be defined as one who “continues singing the same song.” Today, thirty years after his publication debut, he is still consistent in his attitude toward both his theme and his readers. His expression, however, is like a spiral staircase that looks at ideas from different angles, changes its approach, and further evolves. He has clearly done his best work in the fifteen years since the ALMA. Innovation Perched on the Classics Long before his first book was published in 1990, Arai was a popular [End Page 72] illustrator among young people, appearing in a variety of printed media. As early as the 1970s, when he was a teenage art student, Arai was drawn to picturebooks. That particular decade saw a boom in the genre in Japan, and Arai went to bookstores to find good picturebooks from all over the world. The work that got him started on his path was Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown (1910–1952). He felt that Brown’s work embodied the essence of picturebooks. For a full decade before he was published, Arai operated under the radar, passionately absorbing the work of prominent Japanese book illustrators, including Shinta Cho (1927–2005) and Seizo Tashima (1940–), the latter of whom was short-listed for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2020. Click for larger view View full resolution Arai finally appeared on the scene in 1990, just as the Japanese picturebook boom began to wane and needed a breath of fresh air. For the first ten years following, however, there were some adults in the Japanese reading movement who claimed that Ryoji Arai’s picture books were not for children. When grown-ups declare anything as inappropriate for young readers, it is usually because they can’t explain it to children. The truth was that, as the ALMA critique said, Arai’s illustrations were “bold, mischievous, and unpredictable.” They were, and still are, as free and unconstrained as children, full of extemporaneity. The stories, however, originate in text that is intellectually conceived. As a youth, Arai studied the classics, and the plots of his stories do not follow a typical path, with the joy of unfolding plot and continuity kept to a minimum. Each book has the standard thirty-two pages, but in each one he pursues new possibilities in expression and makes new discoveries. One...

Factors Affecting the Takers of the Qualifying Examinations as Part of the Accountancy Program Retention Policy: The Case of a University in Central Luzon Philippines

This research was carried out to assess the qualifying examinations being administered by a school’s department for a of university in Central Luzon, Philippines for the Incoming Second Year, Third Year and Fifth Year BS Accountancy Students. Using the physical and administrative factors are from Aiken et al. (2008), and the Psychological Testing and Assessment, and University of Waterloo’s Center for Excellence (2016), when Preparing Tests and Exams are the guidelines for qualitative factors of exams revealed that the quality of exams had the lowest mean rating compared to physical environment and administrative responsibilities as the factors when assessing the qualifying examinations. The participants were two hundred ninety four (294) students who took the qualifying examinations. The analysis of variance findings confirmed that there is a significant difference on the assessment of the qualifying exams if grouped according to incoming year level and status. The return of the two strike policy to replace the one strike policy, is the most preferred recommendation by the examinees followed by the special remediation program for deserving ‘late bloomer’ students and the special review classes in preparation of the examination.

The shaping of a molecular linguist: How a career studying DNA energetics revealed the language of molecular communication

My personal and professional journeys have been far from predictable based on my early childhood. Owing to a range of serendipitous influences, I miraculously transitioned from a rebellious, apathetic teenage street urchin who did poorly in school to a highly motivated, disciplined, and ambitious academic honors student. I was the proverbial “late bloomer.” Ultimately, I earned my PhD in biophysical chemistry at Yale, followed by a postdoc fellowship at Berkeley. These two meccas of thermodynamics, coupled with my deep fascination with biology, instilled in me a passion to pursue an academic career focused on mapping the energy landscapes of biological systems. I viewed differential energetics as the language of molecular communication that would dictate and control biological structures, as well as modulate the modes of action associated with biological functions. I wanted to be a “molecular linguist.” For the next 50 years, my group and I used a combination of spectroscopic and calorimetric techniques to characterize the energy profiles of the polymorphic conformational space of DNA molecules, their differential ligand-binding properties, and the energy landscapes associated with mutagenic DNA damage recognition, repair, and replication. As elaborated below, the resultant energy databases have enabled the development of quantitative molecular biology through the rational design of primers, probes, and arrays for diagnostic, therapeutic, and molecular-profiling protocols, which collectively have contributed to a myriad of biomedical assays. Such profiling is further justified by yielding unique energy-based insights that complement and expand elegant, structure-based understandings of biological processes.

Biogeochemical Approaches to Bioarchaeological Research in Turkey: A Review

AbstractBone chemical composition (particularly utilizing isotopes) analysis was a relatively late bloomer, beginning in the early 2000s and only gathering pace in the last five to ten years. Trace element analysis had actually commenced in the 1980s, however, with a hiatus until its resurgence in the last decade. Currently, research into dietary habits, subsistence practices, and mobility has focused on early proto-sedentary and sedentary agricultural populations in Anatolia. This is starting to change now in conjunction with the realization of the importance of bioarchaeology as an encompassing field, providing a holistic approach to examining prehistoric populations. This article will discuss the valuable contribution of stable isotope and trace element analyses for better understanding past environmental adaptations by humans (dietary habits, subsistence practices, and mobility). It will also provide an overview of past and current bioarchaeology-focused biogeochemical research in Turkish archaeology, and how this field can be developed moving forward.