Group items tagged

Alaska became the first state to make vaccinations available to all adults over the age of 16 earlier this month, followed by Mississippi. Several others have since followed suit, including Arizona, Utah, Indiana, Georgia and West Virginia.

Other states are moving to make more groups eligible ahead of schedule, based on age or underlying conditions.

According to a map released by the White House COVID-19 Response Team on Friday, four states have yet to confirm plans to expand eligibility ahead of the May 1 deadline: New York, Wyoming, Arkansas and South Carolina, where officials have said they are not on track to hit that threshold until May 3.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the briefing that the country has seen an uptick in case counts and hospital admissions, with the most recent 7-day averages showing about 57,000 cases and 4,700 hospitalizations per day, and hospitalizations hovering around 1,000.

The U.S. is administering 2.5 million shots a day at its current pace, Zients said, adding that vaccine makers are "setting and hitting targets." Some 27 million doses went to states, tribes and territories this week.

Johnson & Johnson has accelerated production of its single-shot vaccine and is on track to deliver 11 million doses next week.

With Germany set for a four-day-weekend in early April due to the Easter holiday, Spahn said the country isn't ready to relax travel and physical distancing rules. In fact, he said, Germans should be prepared to revert to tighter restrictions.

"Health experts are calling on the German government to order a third lockdown to prevent hospitals from being overrun," NPR's Rob Schmitz reports from Berlin.

As it tries to boost its vaccine campaign, Germany is also moving ahead with talks to acquire Russia's Sputnik V vaccine — with or without the rest of the EU's involvement.

Spahn said Friday that he believes a deal with Russia could be reached quickly once a delivery amount is agreed upon.

But the US also just hit a record 13 straight years without 3% real GDP growth

While the US has had a record period of economic expansion, it's not setting the world on fire. It's been a record 13 straight years without reaching 3% real gross domestic product growth. The US has come close, hitting 2.9% growth in 2018, but America hasn't hit a real GDP growth of 3% since 2005, when it grew 3.5%

The decade-long expansion has generated 20 million jobs

With economic growth stretching the past decade, key figures continue to get better. A 3.4% year-over-year wage growth is the strongest in more than a decade, a good sign as stagnant wages have kept the US middle class at bay

Still, the jobless rate fell to 3.8%

Sleep deprivation costs the US economy billions of dollars

More than a third of the US adult population doesn't get enough sleep, and that costs the US $411 billion through the loss of 1.2 million work days each year.

The lack of sleep can come from a variety of factors, whether it's overworking, poor health habits, or even the horrid blue light from electronics

About $100,000 separates the middle class from the upper class

In 2011, 51% of Americans were considered middle class, and that number grew slightly to 52% in 2016

Generation Z might spend as much as $143 billion next year

Generation Z, the population born between 1997 and 2012, will make up 40% of US consumers by next year.

The average car part crosses into Mexico and Canada eight times in production

Mexico is the top trade partner, with the US exporting $21.9 billion worth of products to its southern neighbor and importing $27.7 billion, making up 14.8% of all US trade. Canada, meanwhile, makes up 13.8% of US trade as it imports $22.6 billion worth of American goods and sends in $23.4 billion

If California were a country, it would have the fifth highest GDP in the world

With a gross domestic product of $2.747 trillion, California would only trail Germany, Japan, China, and the US as a whole.

The US spends more on defense than the next seven nations combined

That $610 billion is good for 15% of all federal spending

The US national debt is at an all-time high

In February, US government debt hit an all-time high of $22 trillion

The sports industry is worth nearly $75 billion

A sports-industry report back in 2015 predicted the market in North America would be worth more than $73.5 billion by this year.

Consumers were assigned the renewable package unless they opted out, a behavioural mechanism known to have success in a range of settings.

Further analysis of customer data in the household sector showed that women were around 6 per cent more likely than men to accept the green default, while women business owners were 8 per cent more likely to stick with the renewable package.

It is sometimes argued that the introduction of green energy defaults leads to an increase in energy use -- because the energy is 'clean' consumers are more relaxed about using it.

Large green default effects can considerably reduce CO2 emissions in countries with high fossil fuel share in their energy mix. Taking Germany as a case study and assuming a default effect of 80% in the household sector, the study calculated a CO2 reduction of about 45 million tonnes and a positive welfare effect of €1,240 million.

While the impact of default effects can be massive, the exact CO2 reduction figures and welfare gains depend on the CO2 emission factor and social cost of carbon.

These cognitive errors, which distract leaders from optimal policy making and citizens from taking steps to promote their own and others’ interests, cannot merely be ascribed to repudiations of science.

The first error that thwarts effective policy making during crises stems from what economists have called the “identifiable victim effect.” Humans respond more aggressively to threats to identifiable lives, ie, those that an individual can easily imagine being their own or belonging to people they care about (such as family members) or care for (such as a clinician’s patients) than to the hidden, “statistical” deaths reported in accounts of the population-level tolls of the crisis

Yet such views represent a second reason for the broad endorsement of policies that prioritize saving visible, immediately jeopardized lives: that humans are imbued with a strong and neurally mediated3 tendency to predict outcomes that are systematically more optimistic than observed outcomes

A third driver of misguided policy responses is that humans are present biased, ie, people tend to prefer immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future.

Even if the tendency to prioritize visibly affected individuals could be resisted, many people would still place greater value on saving a life today than a life tomorrow.

Similar psychology helps explain the reluctance of many nations to limit refrigeration and air conditioning, forgo fuel-inefficient transportation, and take other near-term steps to reduce the future effects of climate change

The fourth contributing factor is that virtually everyone is subject to omission bias, which involves the tendency to prefer that a harm occur by failure to take action rather than as direct consequence of the actions that are taken

Although those who set policies for rationing ventilators and other scarce therapies do not intend the deaths of those who receive insufficient priority for these treatments, such policies nevertheless prevent clinicians from taking all possible steps to save certain lives.

An important goal of governance is to mitigate the effects of these and other biases on public policy and to effectively communicate the reasons for difficult decisions to the public. However, health systems’ routine use of wartime terminology of “standing up” and “standing down” intensive care units illustrate problematic messaging aimed at the need to address immediate danger

Second, had governments, health systems, and clinicians better understood the “identifiable victim effect,” they may have realized that promoting flattening the curve as a way to reduce pressure on hospitals and health care workers would be less effective than promoting early restaurant and retail store closures by saying “The lives you save when you close your doors include your own.”

Third, these leaders’ routine use of terms such as “nonpharmaceutical interventions”9 portrays public health responses negatively by labeling them according to what they are not. Instead, support for heavily funding contact tracing could have been generated by communicating such efforts as “lifesaving.

Fourth, although errors of human cognition are challenging to surmount, policy making, even in a crisis, occurs over a sufficient period to be meaningfully improved by deliberate efforts to counter untoward biases

Talk of paradigms and paradigm shifts has since become commonplace — not only in science, but also in business, social movements and beyond.

He suggested that scientific revolutions are not a matter of incremental advance; they involve "paradigm shifts."

Kuhn posited two kinds of scientific change: incremental developments in the course of what he called "normal science," and scientific revolutions that punctuate these more stable periods.

But what, exactly, is a paradigm shift? Or, for that matter, a paradigm?

Accordingly, a paradigm shift is defined as "an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way."

It turns out this question is hard to answer — not because paradigm has an especially technical or obscure definition, but because it has many. In a paper published in 1970, Margaret Masterson presented a careful reading of Kuhn's 1962 book. She identified 21 distinct senses in which Kuhn used the term paradigm.

First, a paradigm could refer to a special kind of achievement

"Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as 'paradigms.' "

But in other parts of the text, paradigms cover more ground. Paradigms can offer general epistemological viewpoints, like the "philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes," or define a broad sweep of reality, as when "Paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time."

In the end, Masterson distills Kuhn's 21 senses of paradigm into a more respectable three, and she identifies what she sees as both novel and important aspects of Kuhn's "paradigm view" of science. But for our purposes, Masterson's analysis sheds light on two questions that turn out to be related: what Kuhn meant by paradigm in the first place, and how a single word managed to assume such a broad and expansive set of meanings after being unleashed by Kuhn's book.

None of that is true. This week, Facebook rushed to deny a report in Gizmodo that said the team in charge of its “trending” news list routinely suppressed conservative points of view. Last month, Gizmodo also reported that Facebook employees asked Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, if the company had a responsibility to “help prevent President Trump in 2017.” Facebook denied it would ever try to manipulate elections.

Even if you believe that Facebook isn’t monkeying with the trending list or actively trying to swing the vote, the reports serve as timely reminders of the ever-increasing potential dangers of Facebook’s hold on the news.

The question isn’t whether Facebook has outsize power to shape the world — of course it does, and of course you should worry about that power. If it wanted to, Facebook could try to sway elections, favor certain policies, or just make you feel a certain way about the world, as it once proved it could do in an experiment devised to measure how emotions spread online.

There is no evidence Facebook is doing anything so alarming now. The danger is nevertheless real. The biggest worry is that Facebook doesn’t seem to recognize its own power, and doesn’t think of itself as a news organization with a well-developed sense of institutional ethics and responsibility, or even a potential for bias. Neither does its audience, which might believe that Facebook is immune to bias because it is run by computers.

That myth should die. It’s true that beyond the Trending box, most of the stories Facebook presents to you are selected by its algorithms, but those algorithms are as infused with bias as any other human editorial decision.

“With Facebook, humans are never not involved. Humans are in every step of the process — in terms of what we’re clicking on, who’s shifting the algorithms behind the scenes, what kind of user testing is being done, and the initial training data provided by humans.”Everything you see on Facebook is therefore the product of these people’s expertise and considered judgment, as well as their conscious and unconscious biases apart from possible malfeasance or potential corruption. It’s often hard to know which, because Facebook’s editorial sensibilities are secret. So are its personalities: Most of the engineers, designers and others who decide what people see on Facebook will remain forever unknown to its audience.

Facebook also has an unmistakable corporate ethos and point of view. The company is staffed mostly by wealthy coastal Americans who tend to support Democrats, and it is wholly controlled by a young billionaire who has expressed policy preferences that many people find objectionable.

You could argue that none of this is unusual. Many large media outlets are powerful, somewhat opaque, operated for profit, and controlled by wealthy people who aren’t shy about their policy agendas — Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, Fox News and The New York Times, to name a few.But there are some reasons to be even more wary of Facebook’s bias. One is institutional. Many mainstream outlets have a rigorous set of rules and norms about what’s acceptable and what’s not in the news business.

Those algorithms could have profound implications for society. For instance, one persistent worry about algorithmic-selected news is that it might reinforce people’s previously held points of view. If News Feed shows news that we’re each likely to Like, it could trap us into echo chambers and contribute to rising political polarization. In a study last year, Facebook’s scientists asserted the echo chamber effect was muted.

are Facebook’s engineering decisions subject to ethical review? Nobody knows.

The other reason to be wary of Facebook’s bias has to do with sheer size. Ms. Caplan notes that when studying bias in traditional media, scholars try to make comparisons across different news outlets. To determine if The Times is ignoring a certain story unfairly, look at competitors like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. If those outlets are covering a story and The Times isn’t, there could be something amiss about the Times’s news judgment.Such comparative studies are nearly impossible for Facebook. Facebook is personalized, in that what you see on your News Feed is different from what I see on mine, so the only entity in a position to look for systemic bias across all of Facebook is Facebook itself. Even if you could determine the spread of stories across all of Facebook’s readers, what would you compare it to?

Vice President Mike Pence to enact the 25th Amendment on the House floor.

House Democrat introduces resolution calling on Pence to invoke 25th Amendment

“Total waste of time,”

He urged Pelosi and all members of Congress to "lower the temperature and unite our country as we prepare to inaugurate President-elect Joe Biden."

Pence also wrote that invoking the 25th Amendment "in such a manner would set a terrible precedent."

 reject the call to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump.

a pardon could stave off prosecution."

main concern is protecting himself and his family.

The riot at the Capitol raises the potential of new legal exposure for the President

Trump defended his remarks from Jan. 6, saying they were "appropriate

Trump might issue a blanket pardon to cover himself and his children up

he thinks that he and his family have been unfairly targeted

attack on the Capitol creates a new dynamic surrounding the messaging and "public relations"

"There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,"

Another presidential run in 2024 would be a very real possibility.Instead, Trump is on the ropes. He's been silenced from social media, including his beloved Twitter account. Even if he is not prohibited from running for office by a Senate conviction, his power and influence within the Republican Party has been dented.

For five years, Trump has been proving critics and prognosticators who penned his political epitaph wrong. He's survived scandals and controversies that would take down most other politicians.This time, at long last, could be different.

The state population counts that determine each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next decade are not expected to be out until February at the earliest,

Raimondo would take over the position from Wilbur Ross, a Trump appointee who has been found in contempt of Congress by the House for defying a subpoena to turn over documents about the Trump administration's efforts to add a citizenship question to census forms.

"The mission of the Commerce Department is a very simple one — to help spur good-paying jobs, to empower entrepreneurs to innovate and grow, to come together with working families and American businesses to create new opportunities for all of us,"

"Commerce Department employees are getting a terrific new boss who will listen to them, support them, lead from the trenches, and get the very best out of them by holding them to the same high standards she holds herself,"

"And Congress will be getting a partner who is an honest broker of unquestioned integrity."

As of today, 189 economies have signed up or are supported by the facility, but more is needed.

"5-point plan to protect humanity against another pandemic like Covid-19,"

The more vaccine candidates we have, the more likely we are to end the pandemic quickly.

poorer countries will be left behind and all of us will be less safe.

killed over 2 million adults and children in a single year at its peak.

To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”

The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like

It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.

Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly.

Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.”

Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so

Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’”

What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”

It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like

The new like, then, is associated with hesitation.

So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population.

The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker.

It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.

Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself.

The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.”

Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge.

Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’

This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them.

Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.

how can the public trust the right decisions were made

how can the public trust the right decisions were made

How can knowledgeable independent healthcare professionals endorse those decisions when they are not privy to the process?

Pfizer vaccine to have a 90% short term efficacy, and a single dose of the Oxford vaccine to have a 70% short term efficacy.

Would confidence in the vaccine be reduced by multiple reports of vaccine failures among at-risk individuals

Perhaps the UK could consider instead other ways to conserve vaccine supplies that may be safer than the delayed second dose option.

Also, for people who have recovered from Covid-19 a single vaccine dose may indeed be sufficient to boost their antibodies to high levels

those at highest risk for getting sick from Covid-19, either because of their job or their underlying health status, should get first dibs.

These guidelines are supported by bioethical principles about the need to balance "priorities of minimizing societal disruption and preventing morbidity and mortality."

As a result, the system is open to manipulation

A first distribution option is to treat vaccination like a class list.

seniors lined up overnight to get the shot, putting their own health at risk for the chance to avert future infections.

This strategy clearly prioritizes those who are in-the-know, who have time to sit on hold, or who are willing (in the case of camping out overnight) to put their health at risk.

it's the conditions of scarcity that make fairness difficult to achieve.

Whether it's using the National Guard to assist in setting up vaccination centers, deploying mobile vans to access rural and urban populations, or working with community groups to increase uptake among at-risk populations, better is needed.

we must release all the available doses of the Covid-19 vaccines

To protect our communities, we must not be paralyzed by fairness -- or stop pursuing it.

often arguing that as a public official, Trump must be given wide latitude to speak. But the riot at the Capitol led to a ban.

I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation.

These actions were not coordinated, Dorsey said, but present a challenge for the tech industry.

Trump lost access to more than 88 million followers, and the move exposed the company to censorship complaints from Republicans

"This moment in time might call for this dynamic, but over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet.

Right now, even now, we've gone from half a million a day to 750,000 a day.

"If we get about 70% to 85% of the people in the country vaccinated, we likely will get to that umbrella of herd immunity,

His remarks come a day after he outlined a $1.9 trillion emergency legislative package to fund a nationwide vaccination effort and provide direct economic relief to Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic, telling Americans that "the health of our nation is at stake."

100 million vaccine shots in his initial 100 days in office.

Ketamine has been used illegally as a club drug. The medication, which is used in hospitals primarily as an anesthetic, generates an intense high and dissociative effects.

McClain is heard in footage from an officer's body camera telling the officers, "I'm an introvert, please respect the boundaries that I am speaking."

Paramedics arrived and administered ketamine, the letter said. McClain was taken to a hospital but suffered a heart attack on the way, and he was declared brain dead three days later, the letter said.

The report noted McClain's history of asthma and the carotid hold, though the autopsy did not determine whether it contributed to McClain's death.

deep, evolutionarily ancient mechanism that helps us balance overall cost and benefit.

Second, it may be influenced by uncertainty about the outcome (you never know, it might work out, so why not keep trying?)

have shown that both capuchin monkeys and rhesus macaques are susceptible to the same behavior and that it occurs more often when the monkeys are uncertain about the outcome.

That helps when you're foraging for food, hunting prey, waiting for eggs to hatch, seeking a mate, or building a nest or enclosure.

"They're like my second set of kids," she said.

"Most rounds lasted only 1 second. So if you didn't get a reward after that, it was actually better to quit and start a new round. That would likely get you a treat sooner than if you had kept going."

"They persisted 5 to 7 times longer than was optimal," said Brosnan, "and the longer they had already tried, the more likely they were to complete the entire task."

t suggests that this behavior is likely driven by evolution and deeply embedded across species.

"Monkeys have really quick reaction times on these games," said Brosnan, "so one second to them is actually a long time."

it shows that human capacities like rationalization, or human concerns like not giving up on something we have publicly committed to, are probably not the main drivers of the sunk cost phenomenon.

reminds us that there is sometimes a good reason to give up.

“To always think of imagination as a good thing is a danger. A lot of people can’t imagine good, joyful hopeful things because they are not able to or their lives have had so much difficulty that it feels foolhardy to.”