Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged homes

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
katherineharron

The world sacrificed its elderly in the race to protect hospitals. The result was a cat... - 0 views

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

crisis

shared by katherineharron on 26 May 20 - No Cached
  • Three months ago, as the novel coronavirus began to gain a foothold in countries across Europe, officials in the UK said they were still confident that the risk to the British public remained low.
  • but at the time there were just 13 confirmed cases and no deaths in the UK. While the government ordered hospitals to prepare for an influx of patients, its advice to some of the country's most vulnerable people -- elderly residents of care or nursing homes -- was that they were "very unlikely" to be infected.
  • By May 1, of the 33,365 total confirmed deaths in England and Wales, at least 12,526 -- or 38% -- were care home residents, according to the latest estimates from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The UK is not alone. Many other nations were slow to respond to the threat at care home facilities, and the consequences have been devastating.
  • Comparing death tolls can be difficult: some countries have separate data covering elderly care homes, while others include facilities for those with disabilities. Some countries do not include in their data those residents who die in hospitals, some have regional variation​, and some have no data at all.
  • There had been 1,661 coronavirus deaths among care home residents out of 3,395 total coronavirus deaths in Sweden by May 14, or 49%, according to LTCcovid's report.
  • 19 residents out of 110 had died in the past two months, but only five were confirmed Covid-19 deaths -- the rest were "undetermined," he said. He said he thought there had been "slight under-reporting" of deaths in the UK because of a lack of testing, and said the situation had been "harrowing."
  • A similar story played out in France, where coronavirus fatalities among care home residents in all settings make up more than half of all coronavirus deaths recorded as of May 18, according to health ministry data used in the LTCcovid report.
  • Elderly care sector professionals and care home workers published a letter to Health Minister Olivier Véran on March 20 expressing alarm and requesting 500,000 masks per week in affected areas, to which he agreed.
  • By March 24, the Spanish army was drafted in to help and found "abandoned" ​care home residents dead in their beds, according to Defense Minister Margarita Robles. The government said at its briefing the next day that the information had been passed to the public prosecutor, who was investigating. New care home guidelines called for extended isolation measures, but some homes said they would now have to send all staff home to comply.
  • She said the DHSC was prioritizing testing in care homes and had provided £3.2 billion ($3.9 billion) to local authorities to ease pressure on services including care homes, as well as an additional £600 million ($730 million) for homes last week. "Since the start of this pandemic we have worked to ensure our care homes and frontline care workforce get the support they need. Almost two thirds of care homes have not had an outbreak and deaths in all settings, including care homes, are falling."
  • Raffaele Antonelli Incalzi, head of the Italian geriatric society SIGG, said in a statement in early April that care homes were "biological time bombs," in part because overcrowded hospitals were moving elderly patients to unprepared homes.
  • The UK initially did not record care home deaths. While the latest official ONS data for England and Wales shows that 38% of coronavirus deaths occurred in care homes, LTCcovid said the figure could be far higher.
  • LTCcovid's report found that 3,890 of Canada's 4,740 coronavirus-linked deaths took place among care home residents as of May 8, or 82%, and Health Canada told CNN the percentage was nearly 80% on May 19. Canada's largest province, Ontario, has announced an independent inquiry.
  • Of the 247 total Covid-19 deaths in South Korea that had been confirmed as of April 30, 84 were care home residents -- a share of 34%. No large care home outbreaks have occurred since the measures were implemented.
Javier E

Repatriation Blues: Expats Struggle With the Dark Side of Coming Home - Expat - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...h-the-dark-side-of-coming-home

expatriate travel cultural dislocation psychology foreign

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • the deep, dark secret of the expat experience is that coming home – repatriation – can be even harder than leaving. “When you go abroad, you expect everything to be new and different,” says Tina Quick, author of “The Global Nomad’s Guide to University Transition.”  And when you return home, you expect life to be basically the same. “But you have changed, and things back home have changed since you’ve been gone,” she says.
  • Many expats coming home go through a period of grief, says Ms. Quick, until they “give in to the homesickness” for their host country.
  • a Facebook group, also called “I Am a Triangle,” so that people going through similar experiences could connect. A “triangle,” she says in her original post, is a person who might be from a “circle country” but move to a “square society,” that is totally different. Eventually that person evolves into a triangle, with elements of both cultures. Moving home doesn’t change that, she says.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Other expats find that their alienation – sometimes called reverse culture shock – can take a more serious turn
  • Ms. Okona stopped leaving the house and cut herself off from friends. Finally, her father asked her if she wanted to see a therapist. When she did, she was diagnosed with “situational depression,” or a depression caused in her case by her inability to adjust to the transition of her new life.
  • it’s easy for returning expats to feel isolated. “Nobody gets it. It’s like having somebody dying and there’s no funeral and you’re not supposed to talk about it. You feel guilty talking about it.”
  • many companies limit the amount of time employees can spend in a particular posting. “They may say you have to go home or go somewhere else. But you might say, I actually like living here,” he says.
  • Children, who may appear to be excited to return home and reunite with old friends, sometimes hide their identities as Third Culture Kids. Ms. Foley, who had lived for years in France with her family, says that her children were fluent in French. But when one daughter took a French class back in Canada, she spoke French with a strong Anglo accent.
  • Many repatriated expats find it hard to connect to friends again at home. Ms. Hattaway says that expat life draws people together: “You’re in a circle or tribe with other expats. But back home, you’re only one in a sea of people. Some of them have never left, some don’t have passports. And you look like everyone els
  • Tina Quick, who lives outside of Boston, says that although she’s been back in the States for 10 years, she still doesn’t have a best friend, someone she could call in an emergency.  She didn’t understand why she never heard from the other soccer parents she met after the season ended
  • The Rev. Ken MacHarg, who served as a pastor in six countries around the world, says that he tells people that moving overseas will “mess you up for the rest of your life. You’re constantly torn between those places, and you’re a changed person.”
  • Expats need to know that the toughest assignment of all might be coming home. “Send me home?” asks Ms. Pascoe. “It’s easier to go to Bangkok than to repatriate in Vancouver.”
sissij

Home Inspectors on Their Weirdest Discoveries - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...heir-weirdest-discoveries.html

new york times social media knowledge

shared by sissij on 25 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • When a home is sold, its many secrets can come out of the closet. Brokers, potential buyers and home inspectors step inside properties that may have been completely private for years.
  • Sometimes, owners hide flaws in the hopes a buyer will miss an expensive problem. Other times, homeowners are caught completely unaware that, say, a family of raccoons has taken up residence in the chimney.
  • The buyer, who was supposed to put down a large deposit that afternoon, was livid. The seller’s broker tried to assure her that the problem could be easily fixed.
  • sissij on 25 Mar 17
     
    I found this article very interesting as it talks about the job of home inspectors. Home inspectors are the middle man between seller and buyer to make sure that all the issues of the home and pricing of the rent is transparent and clear for both sides. It reminded me of the rating companies we talked about in economics. In the film "Inside Job", the rating company is supposed to give good guidance and create transparency between sellers and buyers. However, some rating companies failed to give honest advice to clients and this lack of information is one of the reason that causes the collapse of the economics. Every market need a responsible middleman to operate efficiently. --Sissi (3/24/2017)
anonymous

Weight Gain and Stress Eating Are Downside of Pandemic Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pandemic-weight-gain.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Yes, Many of Us Are Stress-Eating and Gaining Weight in the Pandemic
  • A global study confirms that during the pandemic, many of us ate more junk food, exercised less, were more anxious and got less sleep.
  • Not long ago, Stephen Loy had a lot of healthy habits. He went to exercise classes three or four times a week, cooked nutritious dinners for his family, and snacked on healthy foods like hummus and bell peppers.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • But that all changed when the pandemic struck. During the lockdowns, when he was stuck at home, his anxiety levels went up. He stopped exercising and started stress eating. Gone were the hummus and vegetables; instead, he snacked on cookies, sweets and Lay’s potato chips. He ate more fried foods and ordered takeout from local restaurants.
  • “We were feeding the soul more than feeding the stomach,”
  • “We were making sure to eat things that made us feel better — not just nutritional items.
  • Now a global survey conducted earlier this year confirms what Mr. Loy and many others experienced firsthand: The coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns led to dramatic changes in health behaviors, prompting people around the world to cut back on physical activity and eat more junk foods.
  • While they tended to experience improvements in some aspects of their diets, such as cooking at home more and eating out less, they were also the most likely to report struggling with their weight and mental health.
  • With months to go before a vaccine becomes widely available and we can safely resume our pre-pandemic routines, now might be a good time to assess the healthy habits we may have let slip and to find new ways to be proactive about our physical and mental health.
  • The researchers found that the decline in healthy behaviors during the pandemic and widespread lockdowns was fairly common regardless of geography.
  • Alone
  • “Individuals with obesity were impacted the most — and that’s what we were afraid of,”
  • “They not only started off with higher anxiety levels before the pandemic, but they also had the largest increase in anxiety levels throughout the pandemic.”
  • The pandemic disrupted everyday life, isolated people from friends and family, and spawned an economic crisis, with tens of millions of people losing jobs or finding their incomes sharply reduced.
  • despite snacking on more junk foods, many people showed an increase in their “healthy eating scores,” a measure of their overall diet quality, which includes things like eating more fruits and fewer fried foods.
  • The researchers said that the overall improvements in diet appeared to be driven by the fact that the lockdowns prompted people to cook, bake and prepare more food at home.
  • Other recent surveys have also shown a sharp rise in home cooking and baking this year, with many people saying they are discovering new ingredients and looking for ways to make healthier foods.
  • But social isolation can take a toll on mental wellness, and that was evident in the findings.
  • About 20 percent said that their symptoms, such as experiencing dread and not being able to control or stop their worrying, were severe enough to interfere with their daily activities.
  • Dr. Flanagan said it was perhaps not surprising that people tended to engage in less healthful habits during the pandemic, as so many aspects of health are intertwined.
  • Stress can lead to poor sleep, which can cause people to exercise less, consume more junk foods, and then gain weight, and so on.
  • But she said she hoped that the findings might inspire people to take steps to be more proactive about their health, such as seeking out mental health specialists, prioritizing sleep and finding ways to exercise at home and cook more, in the event of future lockdowns.
  • “Being aware is really the No. 1 thing here.”
ilanaprincilus06

Supreme Court Mulls Whether Police Can Enter Home Without Warrant To Save A Life : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...without-warrant-to-save-a-life

Supreme Court police warrants

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Just what sort of emergency allows police to enter your home without a warrant? That was the question before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday.
  • Later that day, doctors concluded he was not a threat to himself or others and released him. In the meantime, police had confiscated his guns and ammunition. So he sued, alleging an illegal seizure and search of his home.
  • she isn't answering her phone, and her back door is open, so the neighbors call the police. "Would that be enough" for the police to enter the house without a warrant to check up on the missing neighbor?"No" answered Dvoretzky, "I think that alone would not be enough."
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The lower courts ruled that police could enter the home and under the so-called the community care-taking exception to the Constitution's warrant requirement.
  • "No," replied lawyer Dvoretzky. Police can only enter if there were a genuine emergency going on at that very moment.
  • Dvoretzky contended that a warrantless entry could only occur in a true emergency, but his definition was so narrow it didn't seem to satisfy many of the justices.
  • "Every single day, on average, there are 65 suicides by gunshot in the United States," he said, noting that "police officers are critical...as in this instance" to suicide prevention.
  • The Supreme Court has never explicitly recognized that police may enter the home without a warrant as part of their "community care-taking" duties.
  • There are some long-standing exceptions to the warrant requirement in "exigent circumstances, " such as hot pursuit of a suspect.
  • Can the police enter their locked fence around the yard to get the the cat down. "Is that community care-taking?" Roberts asked.Yes, replied DeSisto. "To me, climbing a tree and getting a cat doesn't interfere with the privacy rights."
  • "the key principle is if someone is at risk of serious harm and it's reasonable for officials to intervene now, that is enough. The officials don't need to show that the harm is mere moments away."
johnsonel7

67.3 Million in the United States Spoke a Foreign Language at Home in 2018 | Center for... - 0 views

cis.org/...oke-Foreign-Language-Home-2018

language united states

shared by johnsonel7 on 29 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Based on analysis of newly released Census Bureau data for 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies finds that 67.3 million residents in the United States now speak a language other than English at home, a number equal to the entire population of France
  • In America's five largest cities, just under half (48 percent) of residents now speak a language other than English at home.
  • As a share of the population, 21.9 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home — more than double the 11 percent in 1980.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Languages with more than a million people who speak it at home in 2018 were Spanish (41.5 million), Chinese (3.5 million), Tagalog (1.8 million), Vietnamese (1.5 million), Arabic (1.3 million), French (1.2 million), and Korean (1.1 million)
tongoscar

LA's high housing costs pose 'grave concern' to economy - Curbed LA - 0 views

la.curbed.com/...sing-costs-los-angeles-economy

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • “The fact that the median Californian household must pay more than seven times its income to afford a home should be grounds for grave concern regarding sustainable economic growth,”
  • It’s the first time the report—which predicts a slowdown in LA’s economy—has considered housing affordability. In the past, it focused largely on areas like developing the local workforce and attracting new businesses.
  • Without “significant policy action” to spur the construction of more homes, the costs of buying and renting will only continue to rise, the report concludes. That could make an already dire situation even worse.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “It’s very easy for people when they encounter someone who is homeless to say, ‘Oh, that’s not me. I have a job. I own a home.’ But what our research shows is that this is impacting you too,”
  • One particular statistic cited in the report illuminates how unaffordable home prices are already. In 2018, California’s median home price was 7.3 times the median household income. The median home price in the U.S., however, was 3.7 times the median household income.
grayton downing

The Hospital Is No Place for the Elderly - Jonathan Rauch - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354680

hospital place elderly

shared by grayton downing on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The patient is feeble and near death, his bone marrow eviscerated by cancer. The supervising oncologist has ordered a course of chemotherapy using a very toxic investigational drug. Stuart knows enough to feel certain that the treatment will kill the patient, and he does not believe the patient understands this.
  • “I walked out of that room and said, ‘There has got to be a better way than this,’ ” he told me recently. “I was appalled by how we care for—or, more accurately, fail to care about—people who are near the end of life. We literally treat them to death.”
  • advocating home-based primary care, which represents a fundamental change in the way we care for people who are chronically very ill. The idea is simple: rather than wait until people get sick and need hospitalization, you build a multidisciplinary team that visits them at home,
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • late-life care for the chronically sick is not only expensive but also, much too often, ineffective and inhumane. For years, the system seemed impervious to change.
  • Thanks to modern treatment, people commonly live into their 70s and 80s and even 90s, many of them with multiple chronic ailments.
  • five or more chronic conditions account for less than a fourth of Medicare’s beneficiaries but more than two-thirds of its spending—and they are the fastest-growing segment of the Medicare population. What to do with this burgeoning population of the frail elderly?
  • “On average, Medicare spends $20,870 per beneficiary who dies while in the hospital.”
  • Home-based primary care comes in many varieties, but they share a treatment model and a business model. The treatment model begins from the counterintuitive premise that health care should not always be medical care.
  • by keeping patients out of the hospital whenever possible, saves Medicare upwards of $2,000 a month on each patient, maybe more
  • program collects whatever payment it can from Medicare and private insurance, it operates at a loss, and is run as a community service and a form of R&D.
  • Under the new health-care law, Medicare has begun using its financial clout to penalize hospitals that frequently readmit patients. Suddenly, hospitals are not so eager to see Grandma return for the third, fourth, or fifth time.
  • home-based model of primary care will be a challenge.
  • That would be like spiritual suicide right now,” he told me, “because there is so much going on. I’m more hopeful all the time. We’ve rolled the rock all the way to the top of the hill, and now we have to run to keep up as it rolls down the other side.”
Javier E

How YouTube Drives People to the Internet's Darkest Corners - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ets-darkest-corners-1518020478

youtube social media advertising google partisan extremism research bias

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • YouTube is the new television, with more than 1.5 billion users, and videos the site recommends have the power to influence viewpoints around the world.
  • Those recommendations often present divisive, misleading or false content despite changes the site has recently made to highlight more-neutral fare, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.
  • Behind that growth is an algorithm that creates personalized playlists. YouTube says these recommendations drive more than 70% of its viewing time, making the algorithm among the single biggest deciders of what people watch.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • People cumulatively watch more than a billion YouTube hours daily world-wide, a 10-fold increase from 2012
  • After the Journal this week provided examples of how the site still promotes deceptive and divisive videos, YouTube executives said the recommendations were a problem.
  • When users show a political bias in what they choose to view, YouTube typically recommends videos that echo those biases, often with more-extreme viewpoints.
  • Such recommendations play into concerns about how social-media sites can amplify extremist voices, sow misinformation and isolate users in “filter bubbles”
  • Unlike Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. sites, where users see content from accounts they choose to follow, YouTube takes an active role in pushing information to users they likely wouldn’t have otherwise seen.
  • “The editorial policy of these new platforms is to essentially not have one,”
  • “That sounded great when it was all about free speech and ‘in the marketplace of ideas, only the best ones win.’ But we’re seeing again and again that that’s not what happens. What’s happening instead is the systems are being gamed and people are being gamed.”
  • YouTube has been tweaking its algorithm since last autumn to surface what its executives call “more authoritative” news source
  • YouTube last week said it is considering a design change to promote relevant information from credible news sources alongside videos that push conspiracy theories.
  • The Journal investigation found YouTube’s recommendations often lead users to channels that feature conspiracy theories, partisan viewpoints and misleading videos, even when those users haven’t shown interest in such content.
  • YouTube engineered its algorithm several years ago to make the site “sticky”—to recommend videos that keep users staying to watch still more, said current and former YouTube engineers who helped build it. The site earns money selling ads that run before and during videos.
  • YouTube’s algorithm tweaks don’t appear to have changed how YouTube recommends videos on its home page. On the home page, the algorithm provides a personalized feed for each logged-in user largely based on what the user has watched.
  • There is another way to calculate recommendations, demonstrated by YouTube’s parent, Alphabet Inc.’s Google. It has designed its search-engine algorithms to recommend sources that are authoritative, not just popular.
  • Google spokeswoman Crystal Dahlen said that Google improved its algorithm last year “to surface more authoritative content, to help prevent the spread of blatantly misleading, low-quality, offensive or downright false information,” adding that it is “working with the YouTube team to help share learnings.”
  • In recent weeks, it has expanded that change to other news-related queries. Since then, the Journal’s tests show, news searches in YouTube return fewer videos from highly partisan channels.
  • YouTube’s recommendations became even more effective at keeping people on the site in 2016, when the company began employing an artificial-intelligence technique called a deep neural network that makes connections between videos that humans wouldn’t. The algorithm uses hundreds of signals, YouTube says, but the most important remains what a given user has watched.
  • Using a deep neural network makes the recommendations more of a black box to engineers than previous techniques,
  • “We don’t have to think as much,” he said. “We’ll just give it some raw data and let it figure it out.”
  • To better understand the algorithm, the Journal enlisted former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, who worked on its recommendation engine, to analyze thousands of YouTube’s recommendations on the most popular news-related queries
  • Mr. Chaslot created a computer program that simulates the “rabbit hole” users often descend into when surfing the site. In the Journal study, the program collected the top five results to a given search. Next, it gathered the top three recommendations that YouTube promoted once the program clicked on each of those results. Then it gathered the top three recommendations for each of those promoted videos, continuing four clicks from the original search.
  • The first analysis, of November’s top search terms, showed YouTube frequently led users to divisive and misleading videos. On the 21 news-related searches left after eliminating queries about entertainment, sports and gaming—such as “Trump,” “North Korea” and “bitcoin”—YouTube most frequently recommended these videos:
  • The algorithm doesn’t seek out extreme videos, they said, but looks for clips that data show are already drawing high traffic and keeping people on the site. Those videos often tend to be sensationalist and on the extreme fringe, the engineers said.
  • Repeated tests by the Journal as recently as this week showed the home page often fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC.
  • Searching some topics and then returning to the home page without doing a new search can produce recommendations that push users toward conspiracy theories even if they seek out just mainstream sources.
  • After searching for “9/11” last month, then clicking on a single CNN clip about the attacks, and then returning to the home page, the fifth and sixth recommended videos were about claims the U.S. government carried out the attacks. One, titled “Footage Shows Military Plane hitting WTC Tower on 9/11—13 Witnesses React”—had 5.3 million views.
sanderk

A High-Tech System to Make Homes More Healthy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tem-to-make-homes-healthy.html

homes science psychology Technology

shared by sanderk on 13 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Darwin is operated through a Wi-Fi-enabled tablet that resembles an iPad and displays metrics on conditions across the home. Properties with the system are constructed with air quality sensors and filters that detect and remove impurities like pollution and smoke. They also have water purifiers that get rid of chlorine, heavy metals and other particles from tap water.
  • “We’re indoors for most of our lives, and while we may not be able to change that, Darwin gives you the ability to change your environment,” he said.
  • Not many are equipped with such high-tech systems as Darwin, but these communities offer wellness in other ways: growing produce for residents, for example, or providing outdoor space and fitness classes.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • With their high ceilings, tall windows, herringbone floors and granite stone bathrooms, these homes, like the Simonds properties, feel contemporary; the residences on the ground floors have 645-square-foot outdoor courtyards.
katherineharron

Domestic violence victims, stuck at home, are at risk during coronavirus pandemic - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Home is the safest place to be while a pandemic rages outside. Health officials have said as much for weeks now.
  • Self-isolation forces victims of domestic violence and their children into uncomfortable and dangerous circumstances: Riding out the Covid-19 crisis, shut in with their abusers.
  • And the deluge of stress and fear -- of unemployment, of sickness, of death -- is only intensifying the abuse they face.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The frequency and severity of domestic abuse will likely increase while Americans stay home for weeks or months during the pandemic, said Katie Ray-Jones, president and CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a service that connects victims of domestic violence with local resources.
  • The calls National Hotline staff have received since the start of state shutdowns are startling, Ray-Jones said: One woman said when she tried to go to work at an essential business, her abusive partner began to load his firearm to scare her into staying. Another said that her partner threatened to expose her to the virus on purpose and swore he wouldn't pay for treatment if she fell ill.
  • Domestic violence cases spike in times of prolonged stress and disruption, like financial crises and natural disasters.
  • "Many of the options that battered women and their children use as safety valves to get away from violence are no longer available," he told CNN.
  • And once the stay-at-home orders are lifted, Ray-Jones said she expects victims to flood hotlines. They may not know how many victims there are until the coronavirus pandemic is over.
Javier E

Holly the Cat's Incredible Journey - NYTimes.com - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...one-cats-incredible-journey

sense perception animal

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • “I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.
  • Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,”
  • Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.
  • “We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”
  • Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.
Javier E

Going Home Again - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-going-home-again.html

history memory Creativity paradox psychology

shared by Javier E on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Most TED talks are about the future, but Sting’s was about going into the past. The difference between the two modes of thinking stood in stark contrast. In the first place, it was clear how much richer historical consciousness is than future vision.
  • Historical consciousness has a fullness of paradox that future imagination cannot match. When we think of the past, we think about the things that seemed bad at the time but turned out to be good in the long run. We think about the little things that seemed inconsequential in the moment but made all the difference.
  • Then it was obvious how regenerating going home again can be
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Going back is a creative process. The events of childhood are like the Hebrew alphabet; the vowels are missing, and the older self has to make sense of them
  • The person going back home has to invent a coherent tradition out of discrete moments and tease out future implications.
caelengrubb

Student loan debt: Here are 7 ways the $1.6 trillion toll affects the U.S. economy - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-loan-debt-is-doing-us-economy

shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • American families are carrying about $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, a massive burden that amounts to nearly 8 percent of national income. That share has roughly doubled since the mid-2000s.
  • Years of research show that such post-college debt compels people to put off marriage and home ownership. It also stifles entrepreneurship and career paths.
  • Student loan debt is taking a bite out of the housing market
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • A $1,000 increase in student loan debt, researchers found, lowered the odds of marriage by 2 percent a month among female bachelor’s degree recipients in the first four years after graduation. That finding has been bolstered by more recent research showing a similar trend.
  • Student loan debt is hampering the growth of small businesses
  • a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation” between rising student loan debt and falling small-business formation. The mechanism isn’t hard to grasp: If you’re paying off a student loan, you’re less able to pull together the cash needed to start a business.
  • The authors note that small businesses are responsible for “approximately 60 percent of net employment activity in the U.S.”
  • Student loan debt is delaying marriage and family formation
  • This year, the Federal Reserve issued a report showing that student loan debt prevented about 400,000 young families from purchasing homes, accounting for about a quarter of the drop in home-ownership rates in this demographic from 2005 to 2014
  • Student loan debt makes it harder to weather financial crises
  • From 2007 to 2009, households with student loans saw 12.4 percent of their total net worth evaporate, while the net worth of those without such loans fell by 9.3 percent
  • Student loan debt is preventing young people from saving for retirement
  • Student loan debt can cause graduates to give up on their dreams
  • The returns on higher education aren’t what they once were
anonymous

The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...caregiving-burnout.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care
  • Health care in the U.S. relies on an “invisible army” of caregivers — mostly women. For many, stunted careers, lost earnings and exhaustion are part of the fallout.
  • “If society wants us to keep caring for others, it’s going to have to show a little more care for us.”
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Her husband, Brad Buchanan, was late for family dinner. She found him in the bathroom, coughing up blood — a lot of it.
  • Doctors found that a tumor had ruptured in one of his lungs and he urgently needed chemo. As her husband became critically ill, Ms. Washington, a freelance writer, was thrust into the role of nurse.
  • “My hands were shaking,” she said as she remembered apprehensively pushing in the drugs for the first time and feeling the weight of keeping her husband alive.
  • Mr. Buchanan had a stem cell transplant that left him with graft-versus-host disease
  • Depending on the analysis, between 61 and 75 percent of caregivers are women
  • When she explained that she had two children who also had needs, he said, “Well, usually family steps in, and it works out fine.”
  • Ms. Washington felt the burden of responsibility, but also the sting
  • The U.S. health care system relies on and takes for granted the “invisible army” of people — mostly women — who keep the system functioning by performing home care for the many people who are “too well for the hospital” but “too sick for home,” as well as for those on end-of-life care.
  • In 2017, AARP found that about 41 million family caregivers in America perform roughly $470 billion worth of unpaid labor a year.
  • they tend to do more personal care tasks like helping patients bathe and use the toilet than their male counterparts, who are more likely to oversee finances and arrangement of care.
  • The historical roots are complex, but as Evelyn Glenn puts it in “Forced to Care,”
  • emale caregivers put in more hours — 22 to men’s 17
  • they are also more likely to stand by their partner through a serious illness
  • Many people who take on caregiving roles experience negative health impacts, but women are especially at risk of the fallout from caregiver stress.
  • Female caregivers are also 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty as non-caregiver
  • A 2011 study found that women who left their jobs to care for a parent lost an average of $324,000 in wages and benefits over their lifetimes.
  • Ms. Washington was able to dip into savings and a recent inheritance to help pay for supplemental in-home care, but it was still a struggle, causing stress, resentment and lost income.
  • It was hard to have my life put on hold. Everything kind of slipped away.
  • I lost a sense of who I was. I was going to pick up a prescription for myself, the only prescription I had when my husband was sick, and the pharmacist asked for my date of birth, and I gave his date of birth
  • People talk about how it’s the most important job in the world, taking care of our children or taking care of our vulnerable elders, and yet those are some of the worst paid jobs.
  • How much is a quarterback paid versus someone who is doing care for a vulnerable elderly person?
  • How did care work become so undervalued?
  • A doctor told Ms. Washington that her husband would need 24-hour care and “could not be left alone for even a moment.”
  • Western culture has long framed care work done by women as a moral duty or obligation, rather than an economic activity.
  • If your earnings are lower than they would normally be because you’re busy caring for a family member, and you can’t save and pay into social security, it can lock whole families into a cycle of lower wealth and economic instability.
  • And what should someone not do
  • Don’t tell someone to stay positive. For me, there was no staying about it, because I didn’t feel positive to start with. It brought up this feeling
  • My time isn’t my own, but surely my emotions can be
anonymous

Pandemic Social Life, One Year In - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-19-one-year-anniversary.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • One Year Together, Apart
  • The pandemic redefined relationships and self-reliance.
  • In the year since the pandemic began, people learned to be together while apart and navigated the pain of feeling apart while together
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Screens, small and large, became crucial links to the rest of the world.
  • In doing so, they rediscovered each other, and experienced the joys of bonding and the suffocation of constant proximity.
  • In some instances, these revelations were not happy ones: lawyers and mediators saw a spike in clients looking to divorce as soon as courts reopened.
  • Engagements and pregnancy announcements seemed to pop up constantly on social media. And there were plenty of weddings.
  • Couples in quarantine learned a lot about their significant others.
  • Inside nursing homes, Covid-19 outbreaks became all too regular, with more than 163,000 residents and workers dying of the virus.
  • In one study, almost one-third of the teens interviewed said they had felt unhappy or depressed.
  • Parents, especially mothers, left the work force quickly and in large numbers in the spring.
  • Those who continued working had to balance the demands of their jobs with domestic chores, child care and online schooling, putting strain on their mental health.
  • Retirees put off plans that had been years in the making, like travel and volunteer work.
  • Young people around the world, cut off from their usual social lives, faced a “mental health pandemic.”
  • Delivery drivers dealt with health risks, theft and assault.
  • Airline workers who weren’t furloughed had to confront passengers who refused to wear masks.
  • hospital staff around the country dealt with the gut-wrenching horrors of a steep surge in cases.
  • Doctors and nurses agonized over putting their families at risk, and dealt with intense burnout and pay cuts.
  • Some said that being characterized as heroes by the public left them little room to express vulnerability.
  • a toll higher than in any other country.
  • The world’s struggle to contain the coronavirus was often compared to a war
  • in this case, the enemy claimed more Americans than World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined
  • Grief and loss defined the last year
  • Funerals and final goodbyes took place over video calls, if at all.
  • a sign that people will soon be finding their way back to each other.
  • If you’re wondering what comes after, we are, too.Are you anxious that things will never be the same? Or are you fearful that we’ll return to “the same” much too quickly? Or maybe there is something seemingly small that you will cherish being able to do?
anonymous

VHS Tapes Are Worth Money - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vhs-tapes.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Who Is Still Buying VHS Tapes?
  • Despite the rise of streaming, there is still a vast library of moving images that are categorically unavailable anywhere else. Also a big nostalgia factor.
  • The last VCR, according to Dave Rodriguez, 33, a digital repository librarian at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla., was produced in 2016
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • But the VHS tape itself may be immortal.
  • Today, a robust marketplace exists, both virtually and in real life, for this ephemera.
  • “Hold steady. Price seems fair. It is a Classic.”
  • Driving the passionate collection of this form of media is the belief that VHS offers something that other types of media cannot.
  • “The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,”
  • “promised as a giant video store on the internet, where a customer was only one click away from the exact film they were looking for.”
  • “Anything that you can think of is on VHS tape, because, you’ve got to think, it was a revolutionary piece of the media,”
  • “It was a way for everyone to capture something and then put it out there.”
  • preservation
  • “just so much culture packed into VHS,”
  • a movie studio, an independent filmmaker, a parent shooting their kid’s first steps, etc.
  • finds the medium inspirational
  • “some weird, obscure movie on VHS I would have seen at my friend’s house, late at night, after his parents were asleep.
  • “The quality feels raw but warm and full of flavor,” he said of VHS.
  • views them as a byway connecting her with the past
  • from reels depicting family gatherings to movies that just never made the jump to DVD
  • “I think we were the last to grow up without the internet, cellphones or social media,” and clinging to the “old analog ways,” she said, feels “very natural.”
  • “I think that people are nostalgic for the aura of the VHS era,”
  • “So many cultural touch points are rooted there,” Mr. Harris said of the 1980s.
  • It was, he believes, “a time when, in some ways, Americans knew who we were.”
  • Not only could film connoisseurs peruse the aisles of video stores on Friday nights, but they could also compose home movies, from the artful to the inane
  • “In its heyday, it was mass-produced and widely adopted,”
  • She inherited some of them from her grandmother, a children’s librarian with a vast collection.
  • Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
  • the first technology that allowed mass, large-scale home media access to films.”
  • Mr. Arrow said that home videos captured on VHS, or taped television programs that contain old commercials and snippets from the news, are particularly insightful in diving into cultural history.
  • “There’ll be a news break, and you’ll see, like: Oh my god, O.J.’s still in the Bronco, and it’s on the news, and then it’ll cut back to ‘Mission Impossible’ or something.”
  • Marginalized communities, Mr. Harris said, who were not well represented in media in the 1980s, benefited from VHS technology, which allowed them to create an archival system that now brings to life people and communities that were otherwise absent from the screen.
  • The nature of VHS, Mr. Harris said, made self-documentation “readily available,
  • people who lacked representation could “begin to build a library, an archive, to affirm their existence and that of their community.”
  • VHS enthusiasts agree that these tapes occupy an irreplaceable place in culture.
  • “It’s like a time capsule,”
  • “The medium is like no other.”
Javier E

How our brains numb us to covid-19's risks - and what we can do about it - The Washingt... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-bc6a-6841b28d9093_story.html

psychology science research bias pandemic risk signaling

shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Social scientists have long known that we perceive risks that are acute, such as an impending tsunami, differently than chronic, ever-present threats like car accidents
  • Part of what’s happening is that covid-19 — which we initially saw as a terrifying acute threat — is morphing into more of a chronic one in our minds. That shift likely dulls our perception of the danger,
  • Now, when they think about covid-19, “most people have a reduced emotional reaction. They see it as less salient.”
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • This habituation stems from a principle well-known in psychological therapy: The more we’re exposed to a given threat, the less intimidating it seems.
  • As the pandemic drags on, people are unknowingly performing a kind of exposure therapy on themselves, said University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic, author of “The Perception of Risk” — and the results can be deadly.
  • “You have an experience and the experience is benign. It feels okay and comfortable. It’s familiar. Then you do it again,” Slovic said. “If you don’t see anything immediately bad happening, your concerns get deconditioned.”
  • The end result of all this desensitizing is a kind of overriding heedlessness decoupled from evidence — the anti-mask movements, the beach gatherings, the overflowing dance parties
  • One of the best ways to reinforce a certain behavior is to make sure that behavior is rewarded and that deviations from it are punished (or ignored).
  • But when it comes to lifesaving behaviors such as mask-wearing or staying home from parties, this reward-punishment calculus gets turned on its head.
  • With parties, when you do the right thing and stay home, “you feel an immediate cost: You’re not able to be with your friends,
  • while there is an upside to this decision — helping to stop the spread of the virus — it feels distant. “The benefit is invisible, but the costs are very tangible.”
  • By contrast, Slovic said, when you flout guidelines about wearing masks or avoiding gatherings, you get an immediate reward: You rejoice at not having to breathe through fabric, or you enjoy celebrating a close friend’s birthday in person.
  • Because risk perception fails as we learn to live with covid-19, Griffin and other researchers are calling for the renewal of tough government mandates to curb virus spread. They see measures such as strict social distancing, enforced masking outside the home and stay-at-home orders as perhaps the only things that can protect us from our own faulty judgment.
  • But these kinds of measures aren’t enough on their own, Griffin said. It’s also important for authorities to supply in-your-face reminders of those mandates, especially visual cues, so people won’t draw their own erroneous conclusions about what’s safe.
  • “A few parks have drawn circles [on their lawns]: ‘Don’t go out of the circle,’ ” Griffin said. “We need to take those kinds of metaphors and put them throughout the entire day.”
  • “The first step is awareness that sometimes you can’t trust your feelings.”
  • For people considering how to assess covid-19 risks, Slovic advised pivoting from emotionally driven gut reactions to what psychologist Daniel Kahneman — winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his integration of psychological research into economic science — calls “slow thinking.” That means making decisions based on careful analysis of the evidence. “You need to either do the slow thinking yourself,” Slovic said, “or trust experts who do the slow thinking and understand the situation.”
  • Thousands of us are less afraid than we were at the pandemic’s outset, even though in many parts of the country mounting case counts have increased the danger of getting the virus. We’re swarming the beaches and boardwalks, often without masks.
runlai_jiang

The Big Tech Trends to Follow at CES 2018 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ces-2018.html

technology science

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • magine this: When you leave the house, your air conditioner and lights turn off automatically. Then when a motion sensor detects a person in the house, like your house cleaner, it sends an alert to your phone. When you arrive home, a camera recognizes who you are and the door automatically unlocks.
  • Automated technologies like these will be at the forefront of CES, one of the world’s largest tech conventions, next week in Las Vegas. They underline one major trend: Increasingly, the innovations that are making their way into your personal technology aren’t physical electronics or gadgets at all.
  • he culmination of software, algorithms and sensors working together to make your everyday appliances smarter and more automated. It is
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Alexa and Her CounterpartsAlexa, Amazon’s intelligent assistant that listens to your voice commands to play music, order diapers and place a phone call, will be everywhere at CES.
  • Smart CitiesNowadays, it’s easy to shop for high-quality internet-connected home accessories, like light bulbs, thermostats and security cameras. At CES, Samsung is even planning to introduce a smart refrigerator at the electronics show that can listen to voice commands to control other home accessories.
  • Smarter CarsSelf-driving-car enthusiasts like Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, dream of a future where driverless cars eliminate traffic accidents while letting people do work on their commutes.They can keep dreaming: Autonomous vehicles still have a long way to go before they become safe and properly regulated.
  • Next-Generation Wireless TechnologyAs a growing number of devices rely on artificial intelligence, they will require faster bandwidth speeds. At CES, wireless companies like AT&T and Verizon are expected to give progress reports on so-called 5G, the fifth-generation network technology.With 5G, wireless carriers envision an era of incredibly fast speeds that let smartphone users download a movie in less than five seconds — roughly 100 times faster than the current network technology, 4G. Even more important, 5G is expected to greatly reduce latency to let devices communicate with each other with extremely fast response times.
sissij

U.S. Will Ban Smoking in Public Housing Nationwide - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...public-housing-nationwide.html

new york times knowledge Language social media

shared by sissij on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The final rule followed a period of public comment during which some opponents took exception to the government’s telling people what to do in the privacy of their own homes.
  • In New York, there was also concern about whether police officers would be involved in enforcing the rule; that will not be the case, Housing Authority officials said.
  • “Public housing will go smoke-free and remain smoke-free, and, because of that,” he said, “so many folks are going to live healthier lives and have a better shot at reaching their dreams because they have good health.”
  • sissij on 02 Dec 16
     
    Banning smoking in public housing is still a controversial issue because it touch on whether we have the freedom to decide what we do at home. I think this issue shows that how our freedom is limited in this society. To what extent can we have our own privacy is still a debatable question because we all have a different understanding on how we are related to other people in this society. Or even do we really have privacy? As social animals, we are meant to stay in groups. Also, the last statement of this article sound like a logical fallacy because having a good health and having a better shot at reaching dreams don't really have that much direct relation. I think it is just a small factor. --Sissi (12/1/2016)
1 - 20 of 459 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page