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caelengrubb

Making green energy the default choice can help tackle climate change, study finds -- S... - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210311123507.htm

shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Researchers studying the Swiss energy market have found that making green energy the default option for consumers leads to an enduring shift to renewables and thus has the potential to cut CO2 emissions by millions of tonnes.
  • Both business and private customers largely accepted the default option, even though it was slightly more expensive, and the switch to green sources proved a lasting one.
  • Both companies restructured their products to offer a choice between conventional power, renewable power and "renewable plus," one company in 2009 and the other in 2016.
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  • 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.
caelengrubb

Study exposes global ripple effects of regional water scarcity -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210326122732.htm

shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Water scarcity is often understood as a problem for regions experiencing drought, but a new study from Cornell and Tufts universities finds that not only can localized water shortages impact the global economy, but changes in global demand send positive and negative ripple effects to water basins across the globe.
  • "Evaluating the economic impact of water scarcity in a changing world," was published March 26 in Nature Communications, and uniquely captures the interdependent effects of global trade consistently with differences in regional climate policies as well as river basin-specific capacity to address water scarcity risks.
  • The researchers coupled physical and economic models to simulate thousands of potential climate futures for 235 major river basins -- a technique known as scenario discovery -- to better understand how water scarcity is a globally-connected phenomenon, with local conditions having reverberations across the globe in industries such as agriculture, energy, transportation and manufacturing.
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  • The study also found that small differences in projections for future climate conditions can yield very large differences in the economic outcomes for water scarcity.
  • A river basin can be considered economically robust if it is able to adapt to drought with alternative sources of water or adjust economic activity to limit usage.
  • The conditions that lead to these tipping points are highly variable from basin to basin, depending on a combination of local factors and global conditions
  • As climate change makes the physical and economic effects of water scarcity more challenging for policy makers to understand, the researchers hope their work will provide the basis for similar analyses and draw attention to the importance of expanded data collection to improve modeling and decision making.
margogramiak

Low-income preschoolers exposed to nurturing care have with higher IQ scores later on -... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201218152721.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Preschoolers living in impoverished communities who have access to a nurturing home environment have significantly higher intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in adolescence compared to those raised without nurturing care.
  • Preschoolers living in impoverished communities who have access to a nurturing home environment have significantly higher intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in adolescence compared to those raised without nurturing care.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we've talked about the effects of economic and emotional states growing up.
  • hey found that prenatal and early life adversities matter throughout life.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Of course they do! How could they not? In Spanish, we learned about the "circle of poverty," which definitely applies here.
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  • They also found that being raised in a nurturing environment could significantly counteract the detrimental effect of early adversities on IQ and help children achieve their full intellectual potential.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think "feeling loved" and "feeling like you are enough" is a hug contributor to success. If you are told you can do something, you are much more confident than if you are told you can't, obviously.
  • A nurturing environment also led to better growth and fewer psycho-social difficulties in adolescence, but it did not mitigate the effects of early adversities on growth and psycho-social difficulties."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Interesting.
  • one in five children are raised in poverty and 15 percent do not complete high school, with higher rates for children in Black and Hispanic families.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      These are very impactful stats.
  • Parents want to provide nurturing environments and we need to help them." She said this includes interacting with young children in a positive way such as reading children's books from the library, singing songs together, and playing games with numbers and letters. Children who engage in age-appropriate chores with adult supervision like picking up toys and clearing the table gain skills and feel good about helping.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is up to the parents though, isn't it? How can the community solve the issue of lack of nurture in a household?
  • "This research highlights the importance of nurturing caregivers, both at home and at school to help children lead more productive lives as adults."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      It seems obvious nurturing has positive effects. I find it hard to believe that anyone who doesn't nurture their children who read this article and change the way they parent. I wish there was a way provided that allowed the community to help out, but I don't think this is a possibility.
margogramiak

Compound from medicinal herb kills brain-eating amoebae in lab studies -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210113132411.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a deadly disease caused by the "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri, is becoming more common in some areas of the world, and it has no effective treatment.
  • Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a deadly disease caused by the "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri, is becoming more common in some areas of the world, and it has no effective treatment.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Wow, that's scary.
  • Inula viscosa or "false yellowhead," kills the amoebae by causing them to commit cell suicide in lab studies, which could lead to new treatments.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Nature based medicine is so interesting to me.
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  • Although the disease, which is usually contracted by swimming in contaminated freshwater, is rare, increasing cases have been reported recently in the U.S., the Philippines, southern Brazil and some Asian countries.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's terrifying. I wonder how something like that spreads effectively.
  • traditional medicine in the Mediterranean region, could effectively treat PAM.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Traditional medicine is trusty!
  • Then, they isolated and tested specific compounds from the extract. The most potent compound, inuloxin A, killed amoebae in the lab by disrupting membranes and causing mitochondrial changes, chromatin condensation and oxidative damage, ultimately forcing the parasites to undergo programmed cell death, or apoptosis.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      We've studied concepts similar to this one in biology. Very interesting stuff!
  • Although inuloxin A was much less potent than amphotericin B in the lab, the structure of the plant-derived compound suggests that it might be better able to cross the blood-brain barrier. More studies are needed to confirm this hypothesis, the researchers say.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      It's pretty cool that this disease is still considered rare, and we're already figuring out how to fix it.
kaylynfreeman

Why Lack of Human Touch Can Be Difficult Amid Coronavirus | Time - 1 views

time.com/...coronavirus-human-touch

psychology brain science

shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • With people around the world practicing social distancing and self-isolation to curb the further spread of coronavirus, some are starting to feel the effects of a lack of human touch.
  • “Touch is the fundamental language of connection,” says Keltner. “When you think about a parent-child bond or two friends or romantic partners, a lot of the ways in which we connect and trust and collaborate are founded in touch.”
  • It’s not just about how we feel emotionally. Keltner adds that “touch deprivation” can impact people on a psychological and even physical level
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  • “Big parts of our brains are devoted to making sense of touch and our skin has billions of cells that process information about it,”
  • “The right type of friendly touch—like hugging your partner or linking arms with a dear friend—calms your stress response down. [Positive] touch activates a big bundle of nerves in your body that improves your immune system, regulates digestion and helps you sleep well. It also activates parts of your brain that help you empathize.”
  • Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cited hugging specifically as a form of touch that can strengthen the immune system in a 2014 study investigating whether receiving hugs—and more broadly, social support that gives the perception that one is cared for—could make people less susceptible to one of the viruses that causes the common cold.
  • Broadly speaking, the participants who had reported having more social support were less likely to get sick—and those who got more hugs were far more likely to report feeling socially supported.
  • Everybody should be open to people being a little more socially distant and not touching as much. Some of it will return and some of it won’t.”
  • Although there’s no exact substitute for human touch, if you’re struggling with this aspect of self-isolating in particular, there are a few alternatives that can offer similar health benefits for people who are social distancing
  • “In-person interactions have a big effect on the brain releasing oxytocin, but interacting via video is actually not that [different],” he explains. “It’s maybe 80% as effective. Video conferencing is a great way to see and be seen.”
  • Keltner adds that dancing, singing or doing yoga with others via an online platform can also be highly effective substitutes for physical contact
  • “Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease; it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country,”
  • Zak says U.S. customs like shaking hands and hugging may be changed forever and suggests that non-tactile greetings like a nod, bow or wave may come to replace them. However, he says it will still be important to find ways to reintroduce the humanity of positive touch into in-person interactions without putting anyone’s physical or mental health in jeopardy.
  • “When we’re touched [in a positive way], a cascade of events happens in the brain and one of the important ones is the release of a neurochemical called oxytocin,”
  • But for those who are quarantining alone or with people with whom they don’t have physical contact, loneliness and social isolation are growing health concerns.
  • this process reduces stress and improves immunity. “That’s super valuable in a time of pandemic.”
  • If you’re using a video chat service for work or school, Zak recommends that you take five minutes at the beginning of the call to focus on interpersonal connection.
  • to illustrate how dance parties like Daybreaker can be beneficial for people’s physical and mental health. “When you create a dance experience driven by music, community and participation, that’s how you’re able to release all four happy brain chemicals,” Agrawal says.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    Touch has a great impact on our brains and our reactions amid coronavirus separation. There are a few substitutes for human touch, like yoga and facetime, that we can all try.
tongoscar

Donald Trump's trade wars have not been 'easy to win'  | Financial Times - 0 views

www.ft.com/...98-36ed-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The phase one trade agreement between the US and China signed on Wednesday is only a truce in the trade war, rather than a major reversal of the tariffs imposed since 2018. Nevertheless, it halts a dangerous political momentum.
  • Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs describes this as a “subtraction of the negatives”. Paradoxically, the worse the effects on US growth rates in the past two years, the greater the scope for a bounceback this year. Mr Trump’s initial confidence about the effects of trade protection was based on a belief that China’s bilateral trade surplus with the US would force President Xi Jinping to make major policy concessions to safeguard his own export sector. The outcome was rather different: China retaliated with similar measures and this damaged American manufacturers. 
  • The damage to financial and business confidence triggered by the trade announcements hurt US growth still further. The tightening in financial conditions caused by the rising dollar and the collapse in equities late in 2018 would probably have been more severe if the Fed had not reduced policy interest rates by 75 basis points since then.
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  • The good news is that part of this overall drag may disappear before the end of 2020, boosting American GDP growthby at least half a percentage point.What about the longer-term benefits of the trade deal?The purchase of $200bn of additional US exports in the energy, agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors, spread over two years, will reduce the bilateral trade deficit with China. But many of these exports will probably be redirected from elsewhere and will not boost US domestic output in those sectors. Longer term, China’s business restrictions, including alleged unfair trading practices, appear to be easing. Given the political boost from the phase one deal, Chinese economic reformers such as vice-premier Liu He may be in the ascendancy in Beijing for a while. 
  • The trade war has significantly damaged US growth in 2018-19Since President Donald Trump became more aggressive in his threats about trade protection early in 2018, US tariffs on Chinese goods have risen markedly, prompting retaliation from China. There have been only a few comprehensive studies on the overall impact of tariffs on the US growth rate. A notable exception is the work of Jan Hatzius’s US economics team at Goldman Sachs. They have estimated the possible impact of rising tariffs on net trade flows, real incomes, financial conditions and business confidence, and have combined these effects to produce the aggregate growth estimates shown in the graph below. As the negative effects of rising tariffs fade in 2020, the US growth rate is expected to be boosted by at least half a percentage point.
blythewallick

Social media has limited effects on teenage life satisfaction: Study of teenage social ... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...190506151834.htm

social media research psychology science brain science Technology

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • This is the first large-scale and in-depth study testing not only whether adolescents who report more social media use have lower life satisfaction but also whether the reverse is true. Before this study scientists had little means of disentangling whether adolescents with lower life satisfaction use more social media or whether social media use leads to lower life satisfaction.
  • Yet there were some bidirectional effects: Lower life satisfaction led to increased social media use and vice versa. These bidirectional effects were more consistent for females than for males, but again, these were modest trends.
  • 'Given the rapid pace of technological advancement in recent years, the question of how our increasing use of technology to interact with each other affects our wellbeing has become increasingly important.
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  • 'Applying transparent and innovative statistical approaches we show that social media effects are not a one-way street, they are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender, and arguably trivial in size'.
  • 'Moving forward access to this kind of data will be key to understanding the many roles that social media plays in the lives of young people', Professor Przybylski added.
Javier E

Boris Johnson's blundering was political genius. But now that moment has passed | Steph... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ris-johnson-brexit-coronavirus

leadership group great theory genius psychology research

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • One of the most potent and enduring myths in our society is that leadership is reducible to the power of the leader. A few special individuals are blessed with special qualities that set them apart from the rest of us and entitle them to rule. As Thomas Carlyle asserted, “Universal history … is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.” If only we could isolate the qualities that make these leaders exceptional.
  • Such ideas launched numerous studies that sought to find personality characteristics that predict leadership success – none of them particularly fruitful.
  • such an approach misses a very obvious point: leaders only achieve anything through their followers, and “great man” theories write the followers out of history.
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  • And leaders are never just leaders, they are always leaders of a particular social group – a nation, a political party, a religion
  • leadership is a group process: and, more specifically, it is the cultivation of a “we” relationship between leaders and followers.
  • Effective leadership, then, is not about what separates the leader from others. It is about what brings the leader together with group members and allows him or her to represent them
  • n effective leader is one who is seen to be one of us, to work for us and to achieve the things we value. That isn’t about being ordinary or typical. It is about being prototypical – of representing the values and the qualities that make our group distinctive.
  • In addition, effective leaders are not passive. They actively craft the group narrative and their own personal narrative to make the two mesh: they are skilled entrepreneurs of identity.
  • Hence, no given set of qualities will guarantee effective leadership, for these will change according to the identity of the group.
  • the performative politics of populism can backfire by making one unrepresentative as the groupings change. In the midst of a pandemic where the widest possible compliance to restrictive measures is necessary, the nation and its communities must be unified and inclusive. The inherently divisive categories of populism are no longer tenable.
  • Moreover, we need competent governance to get us through, rather than insurgent incompetence to get our votes. In this global crisis, our blundering prime minister is no longer of the group, nor for the group, and certainly not achieving what the group needs.
Javier E

Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ian-hacking-dead.html

philosopher knowledge bias language

shared by Javier E on 28 May 23 - No Cached
  • In an academic career that included more than two decades as a professor in the philosophy department of the University of Toronto, following appointments at Cambridge and Stanford, Professor Hacking’s intellectual scope seemed to know no bounds. Because of his ability to span multiple academic fields, he was often described as a bridge builder.
  • “Ian Hacking was a one-person interdisciplinary department all by himself,” Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, said in a phone interview. “Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists, as well as those working on probability theory and physics, took him to have important insights for their disciplines.”
  • Professor Hacking wrote several landmark works on the philosophy and history of probability, including “The Taming of Chance” (1990), which was named one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
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  • “I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People
  • His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.
  • Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”
  • His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.
  • “I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”
  • Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”
  • Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.
  • In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.
  • “I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”
  • In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”
  • Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”
  • In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.
  • Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”
  • His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.
  • “hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave
  • His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”
  • He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”
karenmcgregor

Interview with a Packet Tracer Assignment Writing Help Expert - 0 views

Welcome, everyone! Today, we have the privilege of gaining insights from an expert in the field of Packet Tracer assignments. Our distinguished guest from https://www.computernetworkassignmenthelp....

#professionalpackettracerassignmenthelp #assignmenthelpservice #packettracer #packettracerassignmenthelp

started by karenmcgregor on 29 Dec 23 no follow-up yet
Javier E

If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...covid-lessons-learned-9dd5566f

politics us history crisis culture policy trump pandemic response science psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets
  • A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
  • The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.
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  • “My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”
  • , “Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.
  • Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”
  • We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways.  
  • We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources
  • In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology
  • and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.
  • Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”
  • By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.
  • , the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.
  • “The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”
  • people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.
  • Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.
  • Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.
  • just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.
  • While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.
  • doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.
  • For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying
  • To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.
  • If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.
  • t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.
  • The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.
  • The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.
  • Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place.  
  • The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,
  • If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic
  • If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled
  • It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.
  • With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.
  • Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions
  • t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.
  • it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise
  • In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized
  • respiratory conditions.
  • Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had
  •  A blood test, he says, would tell people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.
  • If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.
Javier E

Colonic electrical stimulation promotes colonic motility through regeneration of myente... - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC6522827

constipation research report intestine

shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Slow transit constipation (STC) is a common disease characterized by markedly delayed colonic transit time as a result of colonic motility dysfunction. It is well established that STC is mostly caused by disorders of relevant nerves, especially the enteric nervous system (ENS).
  • After 5 weeks of treatment, CES could enhance the colonic electromyogram (EMG) signal to promote colonic motility, thereby improving the colonic content emptying of STC beagles. HE staining and transmission electron microscopy confirmed that CES could regenerate ganglia and synaptic vesicles in the myenteric plexus.
  • Taken together, pulse train CES could induce the regeneration of myenteric plexus neurons, thereby promoting the colonic motility in STC beagles.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • onic constipation, a functional bowel disorder, affects approximately 14% of adults worldwide [1]. Slow transit constipation (STC) is the major cause of chronic constipation which is characterized by markedly prolonged colonic transit time as a result of the colonic motility function disorde
  • Usually, patients with STC suffer from a common sense of abdominal pain, nausea, depression and sickness, which seriously influence their social ability and health-related quality of life [4–6
  • Current clinical treatments include cathartics, prokinetics and aggressive surgery which can increase bowel movement frequency to a certain degree.
  • However, pharmacological interventions is prone to drug dependency and relapse after drug withdrawal [3]
  • Surgical treatments such as subtotal colectomy and total colectomy in STC patients may adversely affect the quality of life due to the risk of postoperative diarrhea or incontinence, and result in a heavy healthcare burden
  • The enteric nervous system (ENS), located in the intestinal wall, regulates various functions including contraction of intestine, homeostasis and blood flow [10]. As the ‘second brain’, the ENS contains large amounts of neurons working independently from the central nervous system [11]. Researches have identified that STCs are mostly caused by disorders of the relevant nerves, especially the ENS [12,13].
  • McCallum et al. [35] found that gastric electrical stimulation in combination with pharmacological treatment could also enhance emptying in patients with gastroparesis. Especially, gastric electrical stimulation has been approved as a clinical therapy method for gastroparesis and obesity in European and American countries [36].
  • we employed pulse train stimulation and implanted electrodes at the proximal colon in dogs.
  • After CES treatment, we observed the colonic transit time of the sham treatment group was longer than that of CES treatment and control groups, and electrical stimulation significantly enhanced the colonic electromyogram (EMG) signal.
  • histopathology and TEM analysis showed increased ganglia and synaptic vesicles existing in the colon myenteric plexus of the CES treatment group as compared with that of the sham CES group
  • Our results suggested that CES might reduce the degeneration of the myenteric plexus neurons, thereby contributing to the therapeutic effect on STC beagles.
  • the defecating frequency and the feces characteristics of STC beagles returned to normal after CES treatment. The result indicated that CES could improve the symptoms of STC.
  • The colonic EMG signal was strongly promoted by CES
  • Especially, the colonic EMG signal of the beagles with STC was remarkably enhanced by CES (Figure 3), indicating that CES could not only improve the colonic content emptying, but also enhance the EMG signal to promote colonic motility.
  • Colonic electrical stimulation (CES), a valuable alternative for the treatment of STC, was reported to improve the colon motility by adjusting the bioelectrical activity in animal models or patients with STC [17]. However, little report focuses on the underlying nervous mechanism to normalize the delayed colonic emptying and relieve symptoms. We hypothesized that CES may also repair the disorders of the relevant nerves and then improve the colonic motility.
  • The first study regarding the CES to modulate colonic motility was performed by Hughes et al. [37]. Since then, many researchers employed short-pulse CES in canine descending colon or pig cecum [20,21,38]. Researchers also applied long-pulse CES to stimulate the colon of human or animals [39]
  • Recently, studies showed that the prokinetic effect of pulse train CES is better than that of short-pulse CES or long-pulse CES [25]
  • Our study indicated that CES could enhance the colonic motility, and then accelerate the colonic content emptying. Thereafter, we investigated the underlying mechanism and presumed that CES might improve the STC symptom through the repairment of the ENS.
  • The neuropathy in ENS is considered to be responsible for various kinds of disordered motility including STC and the related pathophysiologic symptoms [40]. In agreement with this view, our study discovered the decreased number of ganglia in the myenteric plexus, as well as the destruction of the enteric nerve axon terminals and synaptic vesicles in the sham CES group beagles
  • The present study proves that CES with pulse trains has curative effects on the colonic motility and content emptying in STC beagles. The up-regulation of intestinal nerve related proteins such as SYP, PGP9.5, CAD and S-100B in the colonic myenteric plexus suggests that CES might reduce the degeneration of the myenteric plexus neurons, thereby producing the therapeutic effect on STC beagles. Further investigation for the underlying mechanism of nerve regeneration is necessary to better understand how CES promotes the recovery of delayed colonic motility induced by STC.
oliviaodon

How Do We Learn Languages? | Brain Blogger - 0 views

brainblogger.com/...how-do-we-learn-languages

knowledge languages brain

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The use of sound is one of the most common methods of communication both in the animal kingdom and between humans.
  • human speech is a very complex process and therefore needs intensive postnatal learning to be used effectively. Furthermore, to be effective the learning phase should happen very early in life and it assumes a normally functioning hearing and brain systems.
  • Nowadays, scientists and doctors are discovering the important brain zones involved in the processing of language information. Those zones are reassembled in a number of a language networks including the Broca, the Wernicke, the middle temporal, the inferior parietal and the angular gyrus. The variety of such brain zones clearly shows that the language processing is a very complex task. On the functional level, decoding a language begins in the ear where the incoming sounds are summed in the auditory nerve as an electrical signal and delivered to the auditory cortex where neurons extract auditory objects from that signal.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The effectiveness of this process is so great that human brain is able to accurately identify words and whole phrases from a noisy background. This power of analysis brings to minds the great similarity between the brain and powerful supercomputers.
  • Functional imaging of the brain revealed that activated brain parts are different between native and non-native speakers. The superior temporal gyrus is an important brain region involved in language learning. For a native speaker this part is responsible for automated processing of lexical retrieval and the build of phrase structure. In native speakers this zone is much more activated than in non-native ones.
  • infants begin their lives with a very flexible brain that allows them to acquire virtually any language they are exposed to. Moreover, they can learn a language words almost equally by listening or by visual coding. This brain plasticity is the motor drive of the children capability of “cracking the speech code” of a language. With time, this ability is dramatically decreased and adults find it harder to acquire a new language.
  • clearly demonstrated that there are anatomical brain differences between fast and slow learners of foreign languages. By analyzing a group of people having a homogenous language background, scientists found that differences in specific brain regions can predict the capacity of a person to learn a second language.
  • Until the last decade few studies compared the language acquisition in adults and children. Thanks to modern imaging and electroencephalography we are now able to address this question.
  • Language acquisition is a long-term process by which information are stored in the brain unconsciously making them appropriate to oral and written usage. In contrast, language learning is a conscious process of knowledge acquisition that needs supervision and control by the person.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    Another cool article about how the brain works and language (inductive reasoning). 
carolinewren

Playing Dumb on Climate Change - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-dumb-on-climate-change.html

nytimes com climate change science global warming

shared by carolinewren on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • SCIENTISTS have often been accused of exaggerating the threat of climate change,
  • The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record,
  • Science is conservative, and new claims of knowledge are greeted with high degrees of skepticism.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim.
  • correlation is not necessarily causation, because we need to rule out the possibility that we are just observing a coincidence.
  • . In the 18th and 19th centuries, this conservatism generally took the form of a demand for a large amount of evidence; in the 20th century, it took on the form of a demand for statistical significance
  • The 95 percent confidence level is generally credited to the British statistician R. A. Fisher, who was interested in the problem of how to be sure an observed effect of an experiment was not just the result of chance.
  • the 95 percent level has no actual basis in nature. It is a convention, a value judgment.
  • scientists place the burden of proof on the person making an affirmative claim.
  • It places the burden of proof on the victim rather than, for example, on the manufacturer of a harmful product.
  • it might be reasonable to accept a lower statistical threshold when examining effects in people, because you already have reason to believe that the observed effect is not just chance.
  • WHY don’t scientists pick the standard that is appropriate to the case at hand, instead of adhering to an absolutist one?
  • the history of science in relation to religion.
  • long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith
  • scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge.
  • they do practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.
  • vigorously denying its relation to religion, modern science retains symbolic vestiges of prophetic tradition, so many scientists bend over backward to avoid these associations.
Javier E

For Teenage Girls, Swimsuit Season Never Ends - The New York Times - 2 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...rls-swimsuit-season-never-ends

swimsuit girls self-image concentration test physical psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • That’s what researchers in a classic study from 1998 found when they put female and male undergraduates in dressing rooms with a mirror and either swimsuits or sweaters in a range of sizes. The students were instructed to try on the assigned clothing and wear it for a while before filling out a sham evaluation of the apparel.
  • To confirm that they were detecting a detrimental effect of wearing a bathing suit, and not anxieties about math, researchers ran a second study. This time, instead of math questions, they used a test of the capacity for focused attention and again found that women wearing swimsuits scored lower than women wearing sweaters
  • In short, when young women are prompted to reflect on their physical appearance, they seem to lose intellectual focus.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Having to take a test in swimwear seems not to distract most young men, but it does distract many young women, almost certainly due to the absurd beauty standards to which they are disproportionately subjected. In the words of the researchers, the swimsuit study effectively demonstrated “the psychological costs of raising girls in a culture that persistently objectifies the female body.”
  • Now, swimsuit season, especially for adolescent girls, no longer ends with summer because girls are using social media to share carefully crafted bikini shots all the time.
  • these are images with which girls become especially engaged. According to Dr. Walsh, “Girls are not comparing themselves to media ideals as much as one would expect, but they are making micro-comparisons to their peers. It’s not me versus Gisele Bündchen in a bikini, it’s me versus my good friend Amy in our bikinis.”
  • A new review of studies looking at the psychological effects of social media found that young people who spend a lot of time appraising their friends’ online photos ultimately feel worse about their own bodies.
  • Online imagery allows adolescents to observe one another in detail and gives unprecedented power to the age-old teenage preoccupation with appearance. We want to help our teenagers minimize the harm that can come from social media use, but the deluge of digital activity can make it hard to know where to start.
lindsayweber1

The Echo-Chamber Effect - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-echo-chamber-effect

shared by lindsayweber1 on 14 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The Echo-Chamber Effect
Megan Flanagan

Fearing Drugs' Rare Side Effects, Millions Take Their Chances With Osteoporosis - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...osteoporosis-drugs-bones.html

drugs science research

shared by Megan Flanagan on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • terrified of exceedingly rare side effects from drugs that can help them.
  • thighbones to snap in two have shaken many osteoporosis patients so much that they say they would rather take their chances with the disease.
  • “Ninety percent of patients, when you talk to them about starting one of these drugs, won’t go on,”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “Ninety percent who are on the drugs want to come off. The fear factor is huge.”
  • A 50-year-old woman has a 50 percent chance of having an osteoporotic fracture in her remaining years. The drugs, meant to be started when bone density falls very low and the chance of a fracture soars, can reduce that risk by half, studies show.
  • “You only need to treat 50 people to prevent a fracture, but you need to treat 40,000 to see an atypical fracture,”
  • hopes were dashed when Amgen announced the same problems in a clinical trial of a drug called romosozumab: a sudden shattering of a thigh bone in one patient and an area of jawbone that inexplicably rotted in two.
  • She worries about another spine fracture or, even worse, a fractured hip. But she resists taking osteoporosis drugs, she said, because she tends to have side effects with almost any drug
  • Many patients with osteoporosis have multiple fractures of their spines.
  • the drugs off patent, there is no longer an aggressive advertising push to make people aware of them.
  • “I hobble around on a cane,” she said. “I am a cripple.” She called the drug she took for osteoporosis “that wretched, dreadful stuff.”
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
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  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
sissij

By Demanding Too Much from Science, We Became a Post-Truth Society | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...dont-trust-the-experts-anymore

society science brain science research

shared by sissij on 10 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The number of people who today openly question reality are not the tin-foil hat-wearing kind. Increasingly they are our friends, and those who hold positions of power.
  • Indeed, the public understanding of what constitutes valid evidence, and a worthy expert opinion, seems to be at an all time low.
  • Well, a new study suggests that this wealth of information might be the problem.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A new study out of Germany has found that people are much more confident in the claims of a popular science article then they are in the claims of an academic article written for experts
  • It was also found that the subjects were more confident in their own judgments after reading a popular article, and that this was tied to a lessened desire to seek out more information from expert sources.
  • "easiness effect”
  • the issue arises from the manner in which popular science is presented; as opposed to how scientists themselves present data to each other and to the public.
  • This emboldens people to reject the ideas of experts who they see as superfluous to their understanding of an idea (which they have already grasped).
  • notably health
  • sissij on 10 Feb 17
     
    Although many people allege themselves being scientific when trying to convince others by using the scientific researches they read on the mass media, does that really make their points more reliable? Not really. The popular science is sometimes not as meticulous as the academic article article written for experts. In popular science articles, the authors often changed their writing style to favor the general population, like having a more certain tone. This appeals to readers' desire for simplicity and this tendency is called the "easiness effect", which I find is really similar to the logic fallacy we talked about in TOK. Science itself has more and more become a table that can make an argument seem more rational. However, science is all about the scientific method used in the research that is an art of systematic simplification. Without these element, the title "science" means nothing. --Sissi (2/10/2017)
dicindioha

What's at Stake in a Health Bill That Slashes the Safety Net - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-slashes-the-safety-net.html

healthcare economy government spending

shared by dicindioha on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • It is startling to realize just how much the social safety net expanded during Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2016, means-tested entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps absorbed 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, almost a full percentage point more than in 2008
  • Public social spending writ large — including health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, poverty alleviation and the like — reached 19.3 percent of G.D.P.
  • Government in the United States still spends less than most of its peers across the industrialized world to support the general welfare of its citizens.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Last week, President Trump’s sketch of a budget underscored how little interest he has in the nation’s social insurance programs — proposing to shift $54 billion next year to the military
  • Republicans in the House plan to vote this week to undo the Affordable Care Act. That law was Mr. Obama’s singular contribution toward an American welfare state, the biggest expansion of the nation’s safety net in half a century.
  • Welfare reform did hurt many poor people by converting antipoverty funds into block grants to the states. But it was accompanied by a big increase in the earned-income tax credit, the nation’s most effective antipoverty tool today.
  • “No other Congress or administration has ever put forward a plan with the intention of having fewer people covered.”
  • Who knows where this retrenchment takes the country? Maybe attaching a work requirement to Medicaid, as conservatives propose, will prod the poor to get a job. Or perhaps it will just cut more people from Medicaid’s rolls. Further up the income ladder, losing a job will become more costly when it means losing health insurance, too.
  • Millions of Americans — poor ones, mainly — will use much less health care. They will make fewer outpatient visits, have fewer mammograms and cholesterol checks.
  • In any event, public health insurance will take a big hit.
  • Under the House Republican plan, 24 million more Americans will lack health insurance by 2026, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
  • Might depression and mental health problems destabilize families, feeding down into the health, education and well-being of the next generation?
  • Yet it is worth remembering that among advanced nations, the United States is a laggard in life expectancy and has one of the highest infant mortality rates.
  • If American history provides any sort of guidance, it is that continuing to shred the social safety net will definitely make things worse.
  • dicindioha on 24 Mar 17
     
    Directing spending away from American people and their access to healthcare is a definite possibility for Trump. It will be interesting to see the effect this has on the healthcare market and the American people. This article says it will probably hurt many poor people and decrease their health.
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