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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Duncan H

Duncan H

'We the People' Loses Appeal With People Around the World - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Constitution has seen better days.
  • Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning.
  • Our Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.
Duncan H

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
  • what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
  • Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest. The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google. However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.
Duncan H

The Fat Trap - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team detected something new. A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.
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    A very interesting article about weight loss, and why it is hard for people to lose weight.
Duncan H

The Joy of Quiet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.
Duncan H

The Dwindling Power of a College Degree - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Do you think this ight be why people feel so much pressure all of the time?
Duncan H

Online Schools Score Better on Wall Street Than in Classrooms - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    An interesting article about online schooling.
Duncan H

To Fix Health Care, Help the Poor - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Wahat do you think of the claims this rticle makes?
Duncan H

A Treaty to Save Euro May Split Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • European leaders, meeting until the early hours of Friday, agreed to sign an intergovernmental treaty that would require them to enforce stricter fiscal and financial discipline in their future budgets. But efforts to get unanimity among the 27 members of the European Union, as desired by Germany, failed as Britain refused to go along.
  • all 17 members of the European Union that use the euro agreed to the new treaty, along with six other countries that wish to join the currency union eventually.
  • Twenty years after the Maastricht Treaty, which was designed not just to integrate Europe but to contain the might of a united Germany, Berlin had effectively united Europe under its control, with Britain all but shut out.
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  • the leaders agreed to provide an additional 200 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund to help increase a “firewall” of money in European bailout funds to help cover Italy and Spain. He also said a permanent 500 billion euro European Stability Mechanism would be put into effect a year early, by July 2012, and for a year, would run alongside the existing and temporary 440 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility, thus also increasing funds for the firewall. The leaders also agreed that private-sector lenders to euro zone nations would not automatically face losses, as had been the plan in the event of another future bailout. When Greece’s debt was finally restructured, the private sector suffered, making investors more anxious about other vulnerable economies.
Duncan H

Lawmakers Trade Blame as Congressional Deficit Talks Crumble - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Barring an unexpected turnaround before Monday’s deadline, the failure of the special Congressional deficit committee will be the third high-profile effort to fall short of a deal in the last 12 months, including a bipartisan deficit commission and talks last summer between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner.
  • By law, the special Congressional committee’s inability to reach an agreement will trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years to the military and domestic programs, to start in 2013.
  • the leaders of the committee planned to issue a statement on Monday acknowledging that they had failed to reach an agreement. And lawmakers on the panel, which is evenly divided between the two parties, blamed one another for the failure.
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  • Democrats blamed the Republicans for their unwillingness to yield on a no-new-taxes pact they signed at the request of a conservative antitax group, arguing that the American public realizes that no grand deal could be reached without a combination of spending cuts and new tax revenue.
  • ut Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, the co-chairman, said it was the Democrats’ inflexibility that had caused the impasse, particularly when it came to agreeing to major money-saving changes in social programs like Medicare and Social Security.
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    It is really appalling that our political climate is so polarized that the two sides cannot ever agree on anything.
Duncan H

How About Better Parents? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
  • “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”
  • “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”
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    What do you think of the points Friedman makes? Do you think this PISA test is a good evaluator of student performance?
Duncan H

Fixing Medicare - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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    Will we ever have the political will to fix the problem in the long term?
Duncan H

Stop the Great Firewall of America - 0 views

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    What side of this issue are people on? I understand that people want to stop piracy and provide the incentive for people to invent new things they can patent, but I worry that if the rules become too draconian, they could suffucate the very creativity they should be protecting.
Duncan H

The Inequality Map - 1 views

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    What do you think about Brooks's take on inequality?
Duncan H

Study Weakens Case for Preventive Mastectomy - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • Stanford University researchers affirmed that women with mothers and sisters who carry one of the BRCA gene mutations but who aren't carriers themselves don't have an especially heightened risk of breast cancer.
  • The findings run counter to an influential 2007 study, which found that such women could have as much as a five-fold higher risk of developing the disease as the general population, even if they tested negative for the two genetic mutations known as BRCA1 and BRCA2.
  • a negative BRCA test didn't necessarily mean women had escaped the risk associated with the mutations, which significantly raise a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Some women who test positive opt for prophylactic surgery to remove their breasts or ovaries.
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    How do you think these findings will change what people believe and do, if at all?
Duncan H

Raising the Chance of Some Cancers With Two Drinks a Day - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • Regularly drinking, even in moderation, raises the long-term risk of many kinds of cancer. A burgeoning body of research links alcohol to cancers of the breast, liver, colon, pancreas, mouth, throat, larynx and esophagus. A large new study last week added lung cancer to the list—even for people who have never smoked cigarettes.
  • For some of these cancers, such as lung, larynx and colorectal, the cancer risk only sets in when people drink heavily—three or four drinks a day on a regular basis. But just one drink a day raises the risk for cancers of the mouth and esophagus, several studies show.
  • "It's the repeated exposure to alcohol over a long period of time that will cause damage and it has a cumulative effect."
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  • One study found that men who consumed eight to 14 drinks a week had a 59% lower risk of heart failure compared with those who didn't drink.
  • But experts warn that regularly drinking more than that can cause cardiovascular damage instead, raising blood pressure, increasing the risk of hemorrhagic stroke and leading to cardiomyopathy, a dangerous enlargement of the heart.
  • Benefits of moderate drinking, defined as one drink a day for women, two for men. •Reduces the risk of coronary heart disease by 30% to 35%. Increases HDL 'good' cholesterol. •Prevents platelets from sticking together, reducing blood clots, and lowers the risk of congestive heart failure. •Cuts the risk of heart attack by 40% to 50% in healthy men. •Reduces the risk of stroke and dementia.
  • Cancer risks linked to drinking. (Risks vary with the amount of alcohol consumed.)•Raises the risk of oral and pharyngeal cancer by 20% and risk of breast cancer by 8% among people who have one or fewer drinks a day. •Raises risk of oral cancers 73%, risk of liver cancer 20% and risk of breast cancer 31% among people who have two to three drinks per day. •Associated with a fivefold increase in risk of oral, pharyngeal and esophageal cancers in people who have four or more drinks per day. •Raises the risk of colorectal cancer by 52%, pancreatic cancer by 22%, breast cancer by 46%.
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    Should adults drink in moderation then? How should the risks and benefits be balanced.
Duncan H

Study Suggests Way to Delay Age-Related Changes - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • Article Video Comments (54) more in Health & Wellness | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ »
  • Scientists may have found a way to put off some conditions of aging, according to a study in which they postponed or even prevented such afflictions as cataracts and wrinkle-inducing fat loss in mice by removing cells that had stopped dividing.
  • Most young, healthy cells divide continuously in order to keep body tissues and organs functioning properly, but eventually stop splitting—a state called senescence—and are replaced by others. Senescence occurs throughout life, but people's ability to clear such cells from their bodies decreases with age, leading to a buildup.
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  • "If you could clear senescent cells, you perhaps could treat age-related diseases as a group rather than individually," said Jan van Deursen, senior author of the paper and a professor in the departments of biochemistry and pediatric and adolescent medicine at Mayo.
  • When cells become senescent, they produce harmful compounds such as those that cause inflammation. Chronic tissue inflammation with aging is thought to underlie dementia, atherosclerosis and diabetes, among other ills,
  • Because senescence is believed to have developed as a defense against cancer, in which cells divide uncontrollably, simply halting the process could be dangerous. But scientists have wondered for decades if the damage inflicted by senescent cells could be stopped if they were removed from the body altogether, or if the harmful substances they produced were neutralized.
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    This seems like a question of a lesser of two evils, but it will be interesting to see where the research goes from here.
Duncan H

Matt Ridley on How the Population Explosion Never Happened | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • According to demographers, nobody knows the exact population of the world to within 100 million.
  • the occasion will provide an excuse for yet another round of Malthusian gnashing of teeth about overpopulation. But we shouldn't let it obscure the real story of the past 50 years, which is not how much faster than expected, but how much slower, population has been growing.
  • The growth rate of world population has halved since the '60s and is now expected to hit zero around 2070, with population around 10 billion, though some news outlets prefer to focus on the U.N.'s "high" estimate that it "could" reach 15 billion. The truth is, nobody can know, but if it's below 10 billion in 2100, we will have only increased in numbers by 1.5 times in the 21st century, compared with a fourfold increase in the 20th.
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  • This "demographic transition" to lower birth rates began in Western Europe in the 19th century and later spread to North America, then Latin America, Asia and now Africa. In 1955, the birth rates per woman in Yemen, Iran, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Brazil and China were, respectively, 8.3, 7.0, 6.8, 6.5, 6.1 and 5.6. Today they are 5.1, 1.7, 2.7, 5.2, 1.8 and 1.7. Notice: The poorer a country has remained, the slower the fall.
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    Even if the population does not grow as much as we feared, can the earth still support the billions of us that live here as we continue to consume more and more? Will we have to collectively sacrifice consumption, or are some people simply going to be denied the opportunity to live a first-world life?
Duncan H

Why Our Candidates Disappoint Us - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    What do you guys think about the generalizations made about liberals and conservatives?
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