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katherineharron

FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
ilanaprincilus06

Civil Rights Office At HHS Fights Discrimination Of Disabled People In Pandemic : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...mination-of-people-with-disabi

Discrimination Disabilities

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Civil rights officials at the Department of Health and Human Services issued a series of actions to protect people with disabilities from health care discrimination by medical providers during the pandemic.
  • start of a process to write regulations that explicitly prohibit medical workers from denying care to people with disabilities
  • to assure that people with disabilities and older people are not passed over for scarce care, like drug treatments and ventilator
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  • "People will not be subject to age or disability discrimination when the going gets tough."
  • The new OCR action makes clear that doctors cannot issue a blanket DNR and cannot substitute their subjective beliefs about the quality of a disabled person's life over the person's own wishes.
  • "that discrimination against persons with disabilities will be absolutely forbidden and stereotypes about their usefulness should never be part of a discussion when we allocate care."
  • it would become a significant expansion of disability civil rights law.
  • But a final rule exists in draft form, according to a source at HHS, with hopes that new Biden Administration officials will pick it up.
  • include language to guarantee doctors will not pressure patients to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders and not exclude people from treatment based on their disability alone.
  • The steps taken by OCR to stop medical discrimination reflect the findings of a series of papers on bioethics and disability, issued by the National Council on Disability,
  • "Disability discrimination in health care is among the most insidious — with life and death consequences — and it's hard to root out,"
  • "sends an unequivocally clear message that we will not accept health care that relegates people with disabilities to last in line or 'lost cause.'"
tongoscar

Live Updates: Economic Fallout From Coronavirus Grows - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-coronavirus.html

shared by tongoscar on 18 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Reports from manufacturing, banking and other sectors showed the worsening impact of the epidemic, which has brought much of China’s economy to a standstill.
  • Right NowJapan plans to release about 500 cruise ships passengers on Wednesday.
  • Economic fallout from the new coronavirus epidemic continued to spread on Tuesday, with new evidence emerging in manufacturing, financial markets, commodities, banking and other sectors.
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  • U.S. stocks declined on Tuesday, a day after Apple warned that it would miss its sales forecasts due to disruption in China, as concerns about the impact of the outbreak weighed on the outlook for the global economy.
  • Half of China’s population is facing new travel restrictions.Image
  • At least 150 million people in China — over 10 percent of the country’s population — are living under government restrictions on how often they can leave their homes, The New York Times found in examining dozens of local government announcements and reports from state-run news outlets.
  • Japan says 500 people will be released from cruise ship after more cases confirmed.
  • Australia plans to repatriate about 200 of its citizens aboard the ship on Wednesday, and other countries have similar plans, but Japanese officials did not say whether any of those people were among the 500 who would be allowed to disembark.
  • Britain prepares to evacuate citizens from cruise ship.
  • The new virus is deadlier than the one that causes the flu, Chinese figures suggest.Image
  • The director of a hospital in Wuhan has died from the virus.
  • Stigma surrounding virus impacts communities in Europe.
  • Domestic workers from the Philippines will be permitted to return to Hong Kong.Image
  • South Korea’s leader warns of a dire impact on economy.
  • Cruise ship passengers blocked from leaving Cambodia.
tongoscar

Coronavirus Live Updates: China Is Tracking Travelers From Hubei - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-coronavirus.html

shared by tongoscar on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • To combat the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese officials are using a combination of technology and policing to track movements of citizens who may have visited Hubei Province.
  • Mobile phone owners in China get their service from one of three state-run telecommunications firms, which this week introduced a feature for subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited. That has created a new way for the authorities to see where citizens have traveled.At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu on Tuesday, officials in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages and then show their location information to the authorities before being permitted to leave the station. Those who had passed through Hubei were unlikely to be allowed entry.
  • Top officials in Beijing on Thursday expanded their mass roundup of sick or possibly infected people beyond Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, to include other cities in Hubei Province that have been hit hard by the crisis, according to the state-run CCTV broadcaster.
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  • Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases.
  • Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.
  • For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine.Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there.
  • The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15.
  • For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.
  • The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.Image
  • Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.
  • The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.
  • The travel industry in Asia has been upended.Image
  • China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.
  • China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis.
  • A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.
  • A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities.The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic.Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food.Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.
  • South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.
pier-paolo

Computers Already Learn From Us. But Can They Teach Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-supervised-unsupervised.html

shared by pier-paolo on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • We teach computers to see patterns, much as we teach children to read. But the future of A.I. depends on computer systems that learn on their own, without supervision, researchers say.
  • When a mother points to a dog and tells her baby, “Look at the doggy,” the child learns what to call the furry four-legged friends. That is supervised learning. But when that baby stands and stumbles, again and again, until she can walk, that is something else.Computers are the same.
  • ven if a supervised learning system read all the books in the world, he noted, it would still lack human-level intelligence because so much of our knowledge is never written down.
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  • upervised learning depends on annotated data: images, audio or text that is painstakingly labeled by hordes of workers. They circle people or outline bicycles on pictures of street traffic. The labeled data is fed to computer algorithms, teaching the algorithms what to look for. After ingesting millions of labeled images, the algorithms become expert at recognizing what they have been taught to see.
  • There is also reinforcement learning, with very limited supervision that does not rely on training data. Reinforcement learning in computer science,
  • is modeled after reward-driven learning in the brain: Think of a rat learning to push a lever to receive a pellet of food. The strategy has been developed to teach computer systems to take actions.
  • A more inclusive term for the future of A.I., he said, is “predictive learning,” meaning systems that not only recognize patterns but also p
  • redict outcomes and choose a course of action. “Everybody agrees we need predictive learning, but we disagree about how to get there,”
  • My money is on self-supervised learning,” he said, referring to computer systems that ingest huge amounts of unlabeled data and make sense of it all without supervision or reward. He is working on models that learn by observation, accumulating enough background knowledge that some sort of common sense can emerge.
  • A huge fraction of what we do in our day-to-day jobs is constantly refining our mental models of the world and then using those mental models to solve problems,” he said. “That encapsulates an awful lot of what we’d like A.I. to do.”Image
  • Currently, robots can operate only in well-defined environments with little variation.
  • “Our working assumption is that if we build sufficiently general algorithms, then all we really have to do, once that’s done, is to put them in robots that are out there in the real world doing real things,”
johnsonel7

In traditional language, there is no word for disability | Damian Griffis for Indigenou... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...here-is-no-word-for-disability

language

shared by johnsonel7 on 21 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • At FPDN we say we are the thought leaders on inclusion. We know this because in traditional language there was and is no word for disability. This is a wonderful thing in our communities – we have always been “come as you are”
  • This is compelling evidence that shows we have always known that disability is part of the human experience. However, we are continuing to butt up against a system that requires people with disability to accept labels that we say are fundamentally about deficit.
anonymous

U.S. Disaster Costs Doubled in 2020, Reflecting Costs of Climate Change - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...2020-disaster-costs.html

shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data, almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest losses since 2010.
  • Those losses occurred during a year that was one of the warmest on record
  • “Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,”
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  • continued building in high-risk areas had also contributed to the growing losses.Image
  • Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August.
  • The storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year.
  • In addition to the number of storms, the 2020 hurricane season was unusually devastating because climate change is making storms more likely to stall once they hit land
  • The next costliest category of natural disasters was convective storms, which includes thunderstorms, tornadoes, hailstorms and derechos, and caused $40 billion in losses last year.
  • Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Last year’s wildfires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed
  • Homeowners and governments around the United States need to do a better job of making buildings and communities more resilient to natural disasters
  • “We can’t, as an industry, continue to just collect more and more money, and rebuild and rebuild and rebuild in the same way,” Mr. Griffin said in an interview. “We’ve got to place an emphasis on preventing and reducing loss.”
  • The single costliest disaster of 2020 was a series of floods that hit China last summer, which according to Munich Re caused $17 billion worth of damage.
  • Of the $67 billion in losses from natural disasters across Asia last year, only $3 billion, or 4.5 percent, was covered by insurance.
maxwellokolo

It's time for legislators and the DMV to crack down on disabled parking cheats - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...g-placards-20170501-story.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 01 May 17
     
    We've all seen it and silently cursed: Some guy slaps a disabled parking placard on the rearview mirror, leaps out and walks briskly to the store. He may fake a little limp for a few steps before breaking into full stride. Jerk.
kiraagne

Before Kyle Rittenhouse's Murder Trial, a Debate Over Terms Like 'Victim' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rittenhouse-trial-victims.html

law bias language

shared by kiraagne on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.
  • Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.
  • Prosecutors say he was a violent vigilante who illegally possessed the rifle and whose actions resulted in chaos and bloodshed.
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  • This week, as Judge Schroeder ruled on a motion by the prosecution, he also said that he would allow the terms “looters” and “rioters” to be used to refer to the men who were shot
  • The experts said the term “victim” can appear prejudicial in a court of law, heavily influencing a jury by presupposing which people have been wronged.
  • State law in Wisconsin allows a person to fire in self-defense if the shooter “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.”Editors’ PicksTo Save a Swirling Season, Atlanta Turned to Soft ServeThink You Know the 1960s? ‘The Shattering’ Asks You to Think Again.
  • “In a self-defense case, the people who were shot are to some extent on trial,
  • Prosecutors have repeatedly tried to introduce evidence of Mr. Rittenhouse’s associations with the far-right Proud Boys, as well as a cellphone video taken weeks before the shootings in Kenosha in which Mr. Rittenhouse suggested that he wished he had his rifle so he could shoot men leaving a pharmacy. The judge did not allow either as evidence for trial.
  • Thomas Binger, a prosecutor, argued that the judge was creating a “double standard” and said that the words he sought to have prohibited — relating to rioting and other damage — were “as loaded, if not more loaded, than the term ‘victim.’
clairemann

Service dogs can help veterans with PTSD - growing evidence shows they may reduce anxie... - 0 views

theconversation.com/xiety-in-practical-ways-156550

science research knowledge brain science

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • As many as 1 in 5 of the roughly 2.7 million Americans deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • Our lab is studying whether service dogs can help these military veterans, who may also have depression and anxiety – and run an elevated risk of death by suicide – in addition to having PTSD.
  • Unlike emotional support dogs or therapy dogs, service dogs must be trained to do specific tasks – in this case, helping alleviate PTSD symptoms. In keeping with the Americans with Disabilities Act, service dogs are allowed in public places where other dogs are not.
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  • Once veterans got service dogs, they described themselves in surveys as more satisfied with their lives, said they felt a greater sense of well-being and deemed themselves as having better relationships with friends and loved ones.
  • There can also be a new sense of stigma that goes along with making a disability that might otherwise be hidden readily apparent. Someone who has PTSD might not stick out until they get a service dog that is always present.
clairemann

Raising the minimum wage is a health issue, too - 1 views

theconversation.com/e-is-a-health-issue-too-155272

education research knowledge social media

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Congress just missed one of its best shots at improving health when the Senate failed to advance a bill that would have raised the minimum wage to US$15 an hour. Study after study has linked higher income to better health.
  • With that job, you’ll likely make more visits to primary care doctors, dentists and specialists who work in preventive care.
  • An inadequate income does none of these things. Instead, it increases susceptibility to psychological stress, malaise, illness and disease. This is one reason those who move off welfare benefits and gain employment improve their well-being.
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  • Numerous studies show employment is linked to self-esteem, purpose and identity. It provides relationships, social connections, social status and regular productive activity; a job is an integral part of a person’s identity.
  • One study found that people with a disability who were employed were less likely to have frequent mental distress, including anxiety and depression, than those with a disability who were not employed (18% vs. 40%). This finding held up even when accounting for demographics and individual characteristics.
  • The average unemployment benefit is $320 weekly; the amount varies by state. The American Rescue Plan, recently passed to provide economic aid to million of Americans hit hard by the pandemic, adds an additional $300 to unemployment benefits through Sept. 6.
  • Compare that to the current federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour. That’s $290 for a 40-hour week, less than what unemployment benefits pay. That means, for millions of Americans, being employed means less income.
  • Why not increase the minimum wage – at least enough to make it more than unemployment benefits? That way, more people would be motivated to seek jobs.
  • That said, people who are fit to work should be encouraged to seek, not shun, employment. With unemployment benefits more than the basic minimum wage in many states, we are sending the wrong message to millions. There’s more to a higher minimum wage than just more money. It also means more happiness, better health and a longer life.
huffem4

Critical Theory - New Discourses - 1 views

newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-theory

politics psychology knowledge critical theory

shared by huffem4 on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery,” acts as a “liberating … influence,” and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings (Horkheimer 1972, 246).
  • Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies.
  • The Critical Theory of the “Institute for Social Research,” which is better known as the Frankfurt School, focused on power analyses that began from a Marxist (or Marxian) perspective with an aim to understand why Marxism wasn’t proving successful in Western contexts. It rapidly developed a “post-Marxist” position that criticized Marx’s primary focus on economics and expanded his views on power, alienation, and exploitation into all aspects of post-Enlightenment Western culture. These theorists sometimes referred to themselves as “cultural Marxists,” and were referred to that way by others, but the term “cultural Marxism” is now more commonly used to describe (a misconception of) postmodernism (see also, neo-Marxism) or a certain anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
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  • a Traditional Theory is meant to be descriptive of some phenomenon, usually social, and aims to understand how it works and why it works that way, a Critical Theory should proceed from a prescriptive normative moral vision for society, describe how the item being critiqued fails that vision (usually in a systemic sense), and prescribe activism to subvert, dismantle, disrupt, overthrow, or change it—that is, generally, to break and then remake society in accordance with the particular critical theory’s prescribed vision
  • One of the ambitions of the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School was to address cultural power in a way that allowed an awakening of working-class consciousness out of the ideology of capitalism in order to overcome it.
  • Critical theories in a broader sense are largely understood to be the critical study of various types of power relations within myriad aspects of culture, often under a broad rubric referred to in general as “cultural studies.”
  • They are to be found within many disciplines and subdisciplines within the theoretical humanities, including cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, ethnic/race/whiteness/black studies, sexuality/LGBT/trans studies, postcolonial, indigenous, and decolonial studies, disability studies, and fat studies. Critical theories of various kinds are also to be found within (but not necessarily dominant over) other fields of the humanities, social sciences, and arts, including English (literature), sociology, philosophy, art, history and, particularly, pedagogy (theory of education).
  • The focus on identity, experiences, and activism, rather than an attempt to find truth, leads to conflict with empirical scholars and undermines public confidence in the worth of scholarship that uses this approach.
sanderk

This Is Why You're Prone to Crying on Airplanes | Time - 1 views

time.com/...airplane-cry-emotion

science psychology emotions

shared by sanderk on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • For people who get anxious when there is a change in environment, just arriving at an airport can signal a perceived threat to the brain
  • And a mix of psychological factors related to the plane’s altitude and a perceived loss of control can cause a person to break down emotionally once in the air, DeLuca says.
  • “When you’re dehydrated, it’s not just the body that’s lacking in resources,” De Luca says. “Everything is affected”—including behavior and the brain. “Some people have difficulty self-regulating their emotions.”
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  • A 2017 survey of passengers commissioned by London’s Gatwick Airport found that 15% of men and 6% of women are more likely to cry while watching a film on a flight than if they were to watch that movie elsewhere.
  • sanderk on 20 Oct 19
     
    Whenever I fly I always see people getting freaked and I never knew why. For me, I really enjoy flying and it is fun for me. I found it very interesting that even arriving at an airport can be perceived as a threat to the brain. Also, I understand how people might get freaked out by not having control over the outcome of their flight. The article talks about how this lack of control can make people's brains go into overtime. This article helped explain to me how flying can mess with people's emotions which inturn disables their reasoning.
anniina03

A.I. Comes to the Operating Room - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...intelligence-brain-cancer.html

science brain science Technology

shared by anniina03 on 08 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Brain surgeons are bringing artificial intelligence and new imaging techniques into the operating room, to diagnose tumors as accurately as pathologists, and much faster, according to a report in the journal Nature Medicine.
  • The traditional method, which requires sending the tissue to a lab, freezing and staining it, then peering at it through a microscope, takes 20 to 30 minutes or longer. The new technique takes two and a half minutes.
  • In addition to speeding up the process, the new technique can also detect some details that traditional methods may miss, like the spread of a tumor along nerve fibers
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  • The new process may also help in other procedures where doctors need to analyze tissue while they are still operating, such as head and neck, breast, skin and gynecologic surgery, the report said. It also noted that there is a shortage of neuropathologists, and suggested that the new technology might help fill the gap in medical centers that lack the specialty. Video Advertisement LIVE 00:00 1:05
  • Algorithms are also being developed to help detect lung cancers on CT scans, diagnose eye disease in people with diabetes and find cancer on microscope slides.
  • The diagnoses were later judged right or wrong based on whether they agreed with the findings of lengthier and more extensive tests performed after the surgery.The result was a draw: humans, 93.9 percent correct; A.I., 94.6 percent.
  • At some centers, he said, brain surgeons do not even order frozen sections because they do not trust them and prefer to wait for tissue processing after the surgery, which may take weeks to complete.
  • Some types of brain tumor are so rare that there is not enough data on them to train an A.I. system, so the system in the study was designed to essentially toss out samples it could not identify.
  • “It won’t change brain surgery,” he said, “but it’s going to add a significant new tool, more significant than they’ve stated.”
katherineharron

Rich people are living healthy lives for almost a decade more than poor people - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Rich people live healthy, disability-free lives an average of nine years longer than less wealthy people, according to a major study that lays bare the troubling economic inequalities behind lifespans in the US and UK.
  • The biggest socioeconomic factor in predicting when those problems began was wealth, the team discovered, with richer people enjoying almost an extra decade before experiencing difficulties.
  • Research in 2016 found that men in the top financial 1% in the US can expect to live until the age of 87.3, nearly 15 years longer than those in the bottom 1%. The gap for women was 10 years.
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  • "While life expectancy is a useful indicator of health, the quality of life as we get older is also crucial," lead author Paola Zaninotto, a public health specialist at University College London, said in a statement. "By measuring healthy life expectancy we can get an estimate of the number of years of life spent in favorable states of health or without disability."
  • Inequalities in healthy life expectancy exist in both countries and are of similar magnitude," the authors wrote in their conclusion. "In both countries efforts in reducing health inequalities should target people from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups."In general, the global life expectancy at birth in 2016 -- the latest year for which data is available -- was 72 years, according to the World Health Organization. The global average life expectancy rose by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016, the fastest increase since the 1960s, WHO said.
Javier E

Synthetic Thinking | Jerome Groopman | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...hetic-thinking-jerome-groopman

medicine political theory writing synthesis progress adaptation identity

shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Did you hope to combine chemistry and political philosophy in some way in your medical career?
  • Chemistry requires synthetic thinking. You have to bring disparate pieces of knowledge together in order to look for a chemical structure. Political philosophy, to some degree, also involves disparate aspects of knowledge: economics, sociology, history, pure philosophy
  • I found that in medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. You’re looking for clues that are often distributed in different places: family history, as there might be a genetic predisposition; social history, because the person smoked or was exposed to a toxin; the physical examination, where you find that an organ might be disordered. Add to that the blood test, the CAT scan, all of it, but most importantly, the person, the psychology of the person you’re dealing with. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.
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  • Writing, especially the kind of writing that I do, brings together narrative, science, sometimes history, and an appreciation for the person who might be at the center of the narrative.
  • The greatest influence on me was Oliver Sacks, because he could capture people as people, and he always integrated serious science into his pieces.
  • The two subjects that were most prominent for him, as I once wrote for you, were identity and adaptation: Who is this person, despite their illness? How does that illness interface with their behavior and their decisions, how do people perceive them from the outside, and how do they try to find meaning and adapt to what looks like a disability, but sometimes—not always, but sometimes—gives them hidden strength?
  • I’ve gone from witnessing the depths of disability and death, like with AIDS: I saw some of the first people with AIDS in California, in 1982 or so. The average lifespan was six months. They were mostly young gay men, and it was devastating, the infections they got, the cancers they got. Now, with all the new drugs that have been developed, someone who gets HIV is projected to have a normal lifespan. From six months to fifty years: it’s miraculous
  • that’s part of what keeps you going: the belief that things can advance in a meaningful way.
  • Are there any major or interesting medical stories that the public doesn’t know enough about? 
  • The idea of genetic treatments. Often when people hear the words “genetics” or “DNA” or “RNA,” they shut down. The challenge is how to make it accessible.
  • There’s a wonderful line in the Talmud that says, “Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.” There might be only a few hundred people in the whole country who have a particular genetic disorder. I
Javier E

The Atheist's Belief In Medicine « The Dish - 1 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...elief-in-medicine-for-a-to-see

death illness treatment christian mortality costs

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics.
  • I wonder if all that medicine – which was, in fact, a form of poison – was worth it. David got ten more years, and two young children. But he also endured a disfiguring, disabling, brutal physical battering from the surgeries and chemo-sessions that tackling a tough brain tumor allow for. I say “allow for” because “required” is not the right word. What the chemo did to Christopher was beyond description – and what’s left of your body, even if the chemo works, can be extremely vulnerable to infections and diseases that can be worse than the cancer.
  • It seems odder to me for Christians to be as exercized by life-extension as the atheist. Put that down to the strange extremism of Ratzinger’s innovations on the question of “life”.
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  • No one should seek to die or give in to a disease they can legitimately fight. God knows how many pills I take a day to keep the virus – and all its and their side-effects at bay. But I get to live healthily and meaningfully. The way some elaborate and cutting edge treatments all but kill the patient in order to save her troubles me. It’s a loss of perspective as well as immensely expensive for the entire system.
  • our culture’s gradual alienation from the fact of our deaths – our distancing ourselves even from the old and infirm in ways previous cultures didn’t and couldn’t – is not, in my view a healthy thing.
  • these sophisticated treatments are taking healthcare money away from the young, taking up more and more of our collective healthcare resources, and extending lives only be perpetuating continuous agony and nausea and pain for the patient and devastating consequences for families and friends.
  • We will all die. We should not seek it. But we should not flee from it for ever.
  • at some point what seems to me to matter more is not the length of our lives but the content of them and the manner of our deaths.
  • At some point, medicine is a function of a social disease of modernity: the flight from our own mortality. But fleeing it does not defuse it. Only facing it does.
proudsa

An Open Letter to My Friends Who Support Donald Trump - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...er-to-my-frie_2_b_9293694.html

shared by proudsa on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • But I can't understand why you would support someone as hateful, sexist, racist and ignorant as Donald Trump.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 24 Feb 16
       
      Is it logic or instinct that leads people to vote for Trump?
  • It's not okay to marginalize an entire race of people, saying things like all the Mexicans are lazy, that they are all stealing our jobs and bringing drugs into our country.
  • We're all human. Some humans are really bad people. Some are really good. And it doesn't matter what color they are, it makes no difference whatsoever
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 24 Feb 16
       
      Doesn't just have to do with Trump - an important overall less
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  • Trump's supporters are angry, and anger is infectious.
  • We need the kind of leader that seeks to bring us together, not tear us apart.
  • Lucky for us, this isn't Grandma's house, so feel free to punch him in the mouth in the form of getting out and making your vote count.
  • but racism isn't one of them, neither is hate, neither is the belittling of women or the judgment of others based on their appearance or their disability, or their sexual preference.
  • Do you think empowered women will suddenly quit their jobs and go back to the kitchen ? Because electing Trump won't make any of that come true. We're past that as a nation, or at least I thought we were.
  • Whatever led you to believe that racism is okay can be unlearned if you open your mind. I'm sorry that you were raised to believe that you deserve better treatment than the rest of the people on the planet that have different views than yours, worship different gods than you and have skin that isn't white.
  • I implore you to get out and vote against him. Don't let the progress of this great nation be halted. We've come too far.
  • The idea that certain religions are more dangerous than others and the idea that people should be judged based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
  • And then there are just the plainly insane people who finally snap and go on shooting rampages for no discernible reason at all. They just went mad.
  • We're still healing from the damage inflicted by the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq and the War on Terror. And it isn't just ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
Javier E

Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II) » Cybo... - 1 views

thesocietypages.org/...friendship-full-essay-pts-i-ii

friendship devolution social media social culture

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.
  • the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.
  • I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.
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  • Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs. It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.
  • We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.
  • sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about
  • I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.
  • While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor.
  • In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.
  • The second thing worth noting is that devolved friendship is also depersonalized friendship.
  • Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).
  • Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking.
  • When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’
  • It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.
  • We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I discuss together in greater detail here). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.
  • t I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world—and how we feel about being seen in the world—even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.
julia rhodes

Dictators in the Age of Instagram : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...s-in-the-age-of-instagram.html

policy culture US crisis syria news assad instagram internet information spread autonomy internet law technology knowledge language bias

shared by julia rhodes on 02 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “So, you want to be a dictator?”
  • Too bad you’re living in this century. “It is tougher to lead an authoritarian regime in the face of democratic ideals, free speech and globalized media.
  • Snyderwine puts forth complex mathematical formulas that show a dictator how to stay in power with cost-benefit analyses of revolutions that take into account factors like bribes and the number of active revolutionaries killed.
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  • “The Dictator’s Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention,” is a compilation of tips, gleaned from the experiences of leaders in China, Singapore, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and other countries, that illustrate just how brutal the modern, connected world can be for a tyrant.
  • Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently said that “this thing called social media is a curse on societies.”
  • n Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has proved canny online. Blackouts have shut down the Internet at various moments in the past two years
  • The state news agency blamed one blackout, in May, on “a malfunctioning fibre-optic cable,” but it was not lost on many that it was timed near a vote on a U.N. resolution on Syria.
  • Does it matter if this is a kind of misinformation? What does a social-media company do when a user known to be attacking civilians is blasting out feel-good content?
  • But she explained that, generally speaking, if a user created content that promoted violence, Instagram would remove it and possibly disable the user. Schumer stressed the importance of the context of the image in making those calls—a caption might make an image threatening, for instance—but also said that “context” is generally limited to content on the site.
  • And yet, even within that complex framework, what does it mean to follow a man strongly suggested to be a war criminal, to have a virtual shrine to a dictators’ glory that can fit in our pockets?
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