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social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

Whether you are healthy, moribund or traversing the stages of decrepitude in between, every morsel of medical advice you receive is pure conjecture — educated guesswork perhaps, but guesswork nonetheless. Your health care provider and your favorite columnist are both mere croupiers, enablers for your health gambling habit.

Staying well is all about probability and risk. So is the interpretation of medical tests, and so are all treatments for all illnesses, dire and trivial alike. Health has nothing in common with the laws of physics and everything in common with lottery cards, mutual funds and tomorrow’s weather forecast.

Are you impressed with studies showing that people who take Vitamin X or perform Exercise Y live longer? Remember, correlation does not imply causation. Do you obsess over studies claiming to show that various dietary patterns cause cancer? In fact, Mr. Wheelan points out, this kind of research examines not so much how diet affects the likelihood of cancer as how getting cancer affects people’s memory of what they used to eat.

You, me, and even the most calming manatee are nothing but impurities in an otherwise beautifully simple universe.

Your existence wasn’t just predicated on amorousness and luck of your ancestors, but on an almost absurdly finely tuned universe. Had the universe opted to turn up the strength of the electromagnetic force by even a small factor, poof

if the universe were only minutely denser than the one we inhabit, it would have collapsed before it began.

the critical skills of the best surgeons I saw involved the ability to handle complexity and uncertainty. They had developed judgment, mastery of teamwork, and willingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of their choices. In this respect, I realized, surgery turns out to be no different than a life in teaching, public service, business, or almost anything you may decide to pursue. We all face complexity and uncertainty no matter where our path takes us. That means we all face the risk of failure. So along the way, we all are forced to develop these critical capacities—of judgment, teamwork, and acceptance of responsibility.

people admonish us: take risks; be willing to fail. But this has always puzzled me. Do you want a surgeon whose motto is “I like taking risks”? We do in fact want people to take risks, to strive for difficult goals even when the possibility of failure looms. Progress cannot happen otherwise. But how they do it is what seems to matter. The key to reducing death after surgery was the introduction of ways to reduce the risk of things going wrong—through specialization, better planning, and technology.

there continue to be huge differences between hospitals in the outcomes of their care. Some places still have far higher death rates than others. And an interesting line of research has opened up asking why.

Medicare is nothing less than a lifeline for 49 million older and disabled Americans. It helps pay for care in a wide range of settings, including hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient clinics, doctors’ offices, hospices and at home, as well as for prescription drugs. It is also hugely costly. The federal government spent about $477 billion in net Medicare outlays in fiscal year 2011 — 13 percent of its total spending. By 2021, it is projected to spend $864 billion — or 16 percent of the total — according to figures derived by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That rate of growth is not sustainable indefinitely.

There are three key drivers of Medicare spending: the spiraling cost of all health care as new technologies and treatments are developed; much greater use of medical services by the typical beneficiary; and an aging population. By 2020, the number of enrollees will increase to 64 million.

The only way to make Medicare sustainable is to have it grow at the same rate as the economy that provides the tax base to support it. In recent years, Medicare spending has been growing faster than gross domestic product, by roughly 1.7 to 2 percentage points.

the president tellingly didn’t make a single effort to present hard, compelling evidence to prove that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been behind the alleged Sarin Aug. 21 attack on residents of a suburb of Damascus.Not one piece of evidence.Instead, he continued the talking point of the past week, focusing on the admitted horror of seeing young children “writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor.”

“We know the Assad regime was responsible” for the gas attack.Except that we don’t. As I have written (but as the corporate media have blacked out throughout this latest crisis), a group of 12 veteran intelligence officers has written to the president telling him that the intelligence does not point to Assad, but to the rebel forces as the source of the gas attack.

world is decidedly not a better place because of America’s endless, unilateral and criminal wars and depredations, and Syria will fare no better following an American assault.

the medical Web, which is dominated by an enormous and powerful site whose name — oh, what the hay, it’s WebMD — has become a panicky byword among laysurfers for “hypochondria time suck.” In more whistle-blowing quarters, WebMD is synonymous with Big Pharma Shilling.

A February 2010 investigation into WebMD’s relationship with drug maker Eli Lilly by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa confirmed the suspicions of longtime WebMD users. With the site’s (admitted) connections to pharmaceutical and other companies, WebMD has become permeated with pseudomedicine and subtle misinformation.

WebMD is a corporation that started as an ad-supported health-alarmism site with revenues of $504 million in 2010

With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.

On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot.

Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.

SIX years ago I was struck down with a mystery illness.

I was offered a vast range of potential diagnoses.

Faced with all these confusing and conflicting opinions, I had to work out which expert to trust, whom to believe and whose advice to follow. As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions

Doctors at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital have carried out a pioneering bone-marrow transplant technique.

Mohammed Ahmed, who is nearly five years old, was among the first three children in the world to try out the new treatment.

Mohammed's doctors then modified these donated immune cells, called "T-cells", in the lab to engineer a safety switch - a self-destruct message that could be activated if Mohammed's body should start to reject them once transplanted.

nder the umbrella of Shiite solidarity, Iran provides military aid and funds industrial projects, madrasas, mosques and hospitals. And its leaders have become more vocal about their aims, with President Hassan Rouhani proclaiming himself protector of Iraq’s holy cities.

The most extensive patronage efforts, however, were made by the Ottomans. From the reign of Abdul Hamid II in the 19th century, the Ottomans used their self-professed status as the defenders of global Islam to advance their influence into rival empires, from French North Africa to British India.

The politics of religion undermined the Westphalian order, based on the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, these policies subverted states, fueled divisions within them — and often ended in violence.

Majid, who gave only his first name to protect his safety, collected hair and urine samples, clothing, tree leaves, soil and even a dead bird. He shared it with the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group that had been delivering such samples to American intelligence officials, as proof of possible chemical attacks.

United Nations inspectors have taken the first steps to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile.

Many Syrian doctors have fled; those who remain describe dire conditions where even the most basic care is not available.

Some say the research raises ethical and legal questions

“The buying and selling of organs for transplantation is illegal everywhere, and it should remain illegal,” ethicist Arthur Schafer said in an interview with CTV News

And some suggest that moving to a paid donation system would mean the most needy would be the most likely to sell kidneys. “You’re probably going to likely attract the poorest segment of society,” said Dr. Jeff Zaltzman, a scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. “People of more substantial means would not do that for $10,000.”

“We’ve reached a point where patients are increasingly facing five- and six-figure price tags for medications that they will take over the course of their lifetimes,” said Matthew Eyles, an executive vice president for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the national trade association for the insurance industry. “If this is the new normal to treat common and chronic conditions, how can any health system sustain that cost?”

Doctors with patients who maintain they are intolerant to statins say they are confronted with a clash between the art and the science of medicine.

Dr. Peter Libby, a doctor and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that in his role as a physician, “the patient is always right.” But, he added, “as a scientist, I find randomized, large-scale, double-blind studies more persuasive than anecdote.”

Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain.

I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and open hearted, and able to see things from others’ points of view. I thought, maybe it was just the placebo response. But then I did a literature search of the science, and saw evidence that meditation had been associated with decreased stress, decreased depression, anxiety, pain and insomnia, and an increased quality of life.

The first study looked at long term meditators vs a control group. We found long-term meditators have an increased amount of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex. Which makes sense. When you’re mindful, you’re paying attention to your breathing, to sounds, to the present moment experience, and shutting cognition down. It stands to reason your senses would be enhanced.

Is beauty a right, which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and expertise?

For years he has performed charity surgeries for the poor. More radically, some of his students offer free cosmetic operations in the nation’s public health system.

I asked her why she wanted to have the surgery.  “I didn’t put in an implant to exhibit myself, but to feel better. It wasn’t a simple vanity, but a  . . . necessary vanity.  Surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima.”

On Monday October 20, 2014, the Regents, as part of their effort to promote new national Common Core standards and mystically prepare students for non-existing 21st century technological careers, voted unanimously that students did not have to pass both United States and Global History exams in order to graduate from high school and maintained that they were actually raising academic standards.

The Global History exam will also be modified so that students will only be tested on events after 1750, essentially eliminating topics like the early development of civilizations, ancient empires, the rise of universal religions, the Columbian Exchange, and trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from the test.

As a result, social studies is no longer taught in the elementary school grades

But experts on writing do not agree: pens and keyboards bring into play very different cognitive processes. “Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills – feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought,” says Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva. “Children take several years to master this precise motor exercise: you need to hold the scripting tool firmly while moving it in such a way as to leave a different mark for each letter.” Operating a keyboard is not the same at all: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast, but above all the movement is exactly the same whatever the letter. “It’s a big change,” says Roland Jouvent, head of adult psychiatry at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. “Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”