Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching "damage" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
oliviaodon

One In Seven Children Breathes Air So Filthy It Can Damage Their Brain | Huffington Post - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ns_us_58176467e4b0990edc324275

damage brain

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Almost one in seven children worldwide live in areas with high levels of outdoor air pollution, mostly in South Asia, and their growing bodies are most vulnerable to damage
  • air pollution was a “major contributing factor in the deaths of around 600,000 children under five every year”, causing illnesses such as pneumonia.
  • “Pollutants don’t only harm children’s developing lungs - they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    I found this article interesting as it just goes to show you how complex our brain really is. 
ilanaprincilus06

How COVID-19 Attacks The Brain And May, In Severe Cases, Cause Lasting Damage : Shots - Health News : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...n-and-may-cause-lasting-damage

Covid-19 brain

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Early in the pandemic, people with COVID-19 began reporting an odd symptom: the loss of smell and taste.
  • Their fears proved well-founded — though the damage may come from the body and brain's response to the virus rather than the virus itself.
  • Many patients who are hospitalized for COVID-19 are discharged with symptoms such as those associated with a brain injury. These include "forgetfulness that impairs their ability to function,"
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • For many affected patients, brain function improves as they recover. But some are likely to face long-term disability,
  • The injuries resembled those from a series of tiny strokes occurring in many different areas of the brain,
  • Some patients also suffer brain damage when their lungs can no longer provide enough oxygen.
  • "What we found was that the very small blood vessels in the brain were leaking,"
  • To understand other, less obvious mechanisms, though, scientists needed brain tissue from patients with COVID-19 who died.
  • What's more, the inflammation and leaky blood vessels associated with all these symptoms may make a person's brain more vulnerable to another type of damage."We know that those are important in Alzheimer's disease and we're seeing them play a key role here in COVID-19,"
  • Researchers will assess patients' "behavior, their memory, their overall function" at six-month intervals, she says.
anonymous

U.S. Disaster Costs Doubled in 2020, Reflecting Costs of Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...2020-disaster-costs.html

shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data, almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest losses since 2010.
  • Those losses occurred during a year that was one of the warmest on record
  • “Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • continued building in high-risk areas had also contributed to the growing losses.Image
  • Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August.
  • The storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year.
  • In addition to the number of storms, the 2020 hurricane season was unusually devastating because climate change is making storms more likely to stall once they hit land
  • The next costliest category of natural disasters was convective storms, which includes thunderstorms, tornadoes, hailstorms and derechos, and caused $40 billion in losses last year.
  • Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Last year’s wildfires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed
  • Homeowners and governments around the United States need to do a better job of making buildings and communities more resilient to natural disasters
  • “We can’t, as an industry, continue to just collect more and more money, and rebuild and rebuild and rebuild in the same way,” Mr. Griffin said in an interview. “We’ve got to place an emphasis on preventing and reducing loss.”
  • The single costliest disaster of 2020 was a series of floods that hit China last summer, which according to Munich Re caused $17 billion worth of damage.
  • Of the $67 billion in losses from natural disasters across Asia last year, only $3 billion, or 4.5 percent, was covered by insurance.
Javier E

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939

concept creep psychology liberalism harmful trauma torture

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
Javier E

What Does Coronavirus Do to the Body? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-body-symptoms.html

Covid-19 symptom process

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the virus appears to start in peripheral areas on both sides of the lung and can take a while to reach the upper respiratory tract, the trachea and other central airways.
  • that pattern helps explain why in Wuhan, where the outbreak began, many of the earliest cases were not identified immediately.
  • The initial testing regimen in many Chinese hospitals did not always detect infection in the peripheral lungs, so some people with symptoms were sent home without treatment.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • it’s unclear whether infectious virus can persist in blood or stool
  • the infection can spread through the mucous membranes, from the nose down to the rectum.
  • while the virus appears to zero in on the lungs, it may also be able to infect cells in the gastrointestinal system, experts say. This may be why some patients have symptoms like diarrhea or indigestion
  • “The virus will actually land on organs like the heart, the kidney, the liver, and may cause some direct damage to those organs,
  • some patients in China recovered but got sick again, apparently because they had damaged and vulnerable lung tissue that was subsequently attacked by bacteria in their body.
  • As the body’s immune system shifts into high gear to battle the infection, the resulting inflammation may cause those organs to malfunction, he said.
  • About 80 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus have relatively mild symptoms. But about 20 percent of people become more seriously ill and in about 2 percent of patients in China, which has had the most cases, the disease has been fatal.
  • the effects appear to depend on how robust or weakened a person’s immune system is. Older people or those with underlying health issues, like diabetes or another chronic illness, are more likely to develop severe symptoms
  • the course a patient’s coronavirus will take is not yet fully understood.
  • Some patients can remain stable for over a week and then suddenly develop pneumonia, Dr. Diaz said. Some patients seem to recover but then develop symptoms again.
  • more than half of 121 patients in China had normal CT scans early in their disease.
  • Coronavirus particles have spiked proteins sticking out from their surfaces, and these spikes hook onto cell membranes, allowing the virus’s genetic material to enter the human cell.
  • That genetic material proceeds to “hijack the metabolism of the cell and say, in effect, ‘Don’t do your usual job. Your job now is to help me multiply and make the virus,’
  • As copies of the virus multiply, they burst out and infect neighboring cells. The symptoms often start in the back of the throat with a sore throat and a dry cough.
  • The virus then “crawls progressively down the bronchial tubes,”
  • That can damage the alveoli or lung sacs and they have to work harder to carry out their function of supplying oxygen to the blood
  • The swelling and the impaired flow of oxygen can cause those areas in the lungs to fill with fluid, pus and dead cells. Pneumonia, an infection in the lung, can occur
  • Some people have so much trouble breathing they need to be put on a ventilator
cvanderloo

Damaged roads, lack of gear hinder Indonesia quake rescue - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...ndonesia-quake-rescue-75289308

earthquake indonesia mamuju

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Damaged roads and bridges, power blackouts and lack of heavy equipment on Saturday hampered rescuers after a strong earthquake left at least 49 people dead and hundreds injured on Indonesia's Sulawesi island.
  • ollowing the magnitude 6.2 quake that struck early Friday,
  • Mamuju late Saturday, raising the death toll to 49. A total of 40 people were killed in Mamuju, while nine bodies were retrieved in neighboring Majene district.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • He said more than 200 people were receiving treatment at the Bhayangkara police hospital and several others in Mamuju alone. Another 630 were injured in Majene.
  • The quake set off landslides in three locations and blocked a main road connecting Mamuju to Majene. Power and phone lines were down in many areas.
  • A governor office building was almost flattened by the quake and a shopping mall was reduced to a crumpled hulk.
  • Two ships headed to the devastated areas from the nearby cities of Makassar and Balikpapan with rescuers and equipment, including excavators.
  • The pope was praying for “the repose of the deceased, the healing of the injured and the consolation of all who grieve.” Francis also offered encouragement to those continuing search and rescue effects, and he invoked “the divine blessings of strength and hope.”
  • Indonesia, home to more than 260 million people, is frequently hit by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
adonahue011

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21cnd-brain.html

brain science psychology research technology education brain new york times study

shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting how much our body is interconnected
  • for hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that likely evolved before the brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.
  • hypothetical;
  • ...29 more annotations...
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting how they started their study with a complete hypothetical idea of these moral decisions.
  • confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      We also learned about the importance of the prefrontal cortex, as it controls our social emotions and can have a great effect on our decision making.
  • The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline.
  • people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.
  • at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      TOK topic we discussed
  • There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain
  • system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses
  • Jurors have reduced sentences based on brain-imaging results, and experts say that any evidence of damage to this ventromedial area could sway judgments of moral competency in some cases.
  • The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The study format
  • can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward.
  • They strongly favored flipping the switch, just as group of people without injuries did.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting collection of data,
  • the ventromedial cortex
  • All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      They were presenting the correct moral choices
  • some of the same moral instincts
  • a large difference in the participants’ decisions emerged when there was no switch to flip
  • taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The difference: when there was no switch to flip
  • were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option)
  • The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions
  • The area has connections to deeper, unconscious regions like the brain stem,
  • The ventromedial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.
  • This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain’s continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area first took shape
  • transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting today.
  • this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives.
tongoscar

'SARS-like damage' seen in dead coronavirus patient in China, report says | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...s-patient-in-china-report-says

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A lung biopsy found that a man who died in China from the new coronavirus last month had lung damage reminiscent of two prior coronavirus-related outbreaks, SARS and MERS.
  • “The pathological features of COVID-19 greatly resemble those seen in SARS and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus infection. In addition, the liver biopsy specimens of the patient with COVID-19 showed moderate microvascular steatosis and mild lobular and portal activity (figure 2C), indicating the injury could have been caused by either SARS-CoV-2 infection or drug-induced liver injury,” the new report published in The Lancet concluded.
  • The new coronavirus, COVID-19, has infected more than 72,000 people and killed over 1,868, far larger numbers than those who suffered from the SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, or MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, two other coronavirus epidemics of the past two decades.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In late 2002, a coronavirus nicknamed SARS broke out in Southern China, causing severe pneumonia and rapidly spreading to other countries. SARS infected more than 8,000 and killed 774, before disappearing altogether after a number of public health measures. In 2012, a similar outbreak known as MERS began infecting people in Saudi Arabia. It still causes infections in a small number of people each year, and in total has caused around 2,500 infections and more than 850 deaths.
  • The SARS disease appeared to be more deadly, however, killing around 10 percent of those infected.
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.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 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.
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lity-gap-childhood-11672401345

social media psychology research education crisis culture Gen Z mental health defense creativity

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
  • He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
  • Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”
  • Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)
  • Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”
  • He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
  • That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
  • Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
  • Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
  • The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”
  • Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
  • Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”
  • “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”
  • To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”
  • He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education
  • I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”
  • University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”
  • 56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.
  • This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
  • Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”
  • The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”
  • something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
  • “this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”
  • Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse
  • Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
  • Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”
  • By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”
  • Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur
Emily Horwitz

UK, Japan scientists win Nobel for stem cell breakthroughs | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...medicine-idUSBRE8970AB20121008

science reuters ethics stem cells research nobel

shared by Emily Horwitz on 08 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.
  • discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.
  • "These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells," the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • big hope for stem cells is that they can be used to replace damaged tissue in everything from spinal cord injuries to Parkinson's disease.
  • Scientists once thought it was impossible to turn adult tissue back into stem cells, which meant that new stem cells could only be created by harvesting embryos - a practice that raised ethical qualms in some countries and also means that implanted cells might be rejected by the body.
  • The new stem cells are known as "induced pluripotency stem cells", or iPS cells.
  • "We would like to be able to find a way of obtaining spare heart or brain cells from skin or blood cells. The important point is that the replacement cells need to be from the same individual, to avoid problems of rejection and hence of the need for immunosuppression."
  • Thomas Perlmann, Nobel Committee member and professor of Molecular Development Biology at the Karolinska Institute said: "Thanks to these two scientists, we know now that development is not strictly a one-way street."
  • "You can't take out a large part of the heart or the brain or so to study this, but now you can take a cell from for example the skin of the patient, reprogram it, return it to a pluripotent state, and then grow it in a laboratory," he said.
Emily Horwitz

Scientists Make Progress in Tailor-Made Organs - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ess-in-tailor-made-organs.html

science biomedical engineering nytimes bioethics stem cells

shared by Emily Horwitz on 14 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 14 Nov 12
     
    An intriguing article about a more bioethically non-controversial way of reconstructing damaged organs in the body.
Javier E

Why Some Evangelicals Are Trying to Stop Obsessing Over Pre-Marital Sex - Abigail Rine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...276185

purity morality sex evangelicalism

shared by Javier E on 24 May 13 - No Cached
  • Unclean, taking particular issue with the words and metaphors Christians use to frame sexual sin, especially for women. Beck argues that using the metaphor of purity imports a "psychology of contamination into our moral and spiritual lives," and this contamination is viewed as a permanent state, one beyond restoration.
  • Moreover, while women are subjected to the language of purity and seen as irreparably contaminated after having sex, the same is not true for men. According to Beck, a boy losing his virginity is seen as a "mistake, a stumbling," a mode of behavior that can be changed and rehabilitated. This, he argues, exposes a double standard at work in the language of sexual purity: women who have sex are seen as "damaged goods," but men who have sex are not.
  • Broadway proposes emphasizing an overarching ideal of "self-giving love" rather than abstinence, which would put a positive spin on premarital chastity, as well as cultivate deeper awareness of "unhealthy sexual dynamics within marriage," from sexual selfishness to "outright abuse."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • For Beck, moving past purity involves less emphasis "on the physical act of sex and how that physical act is 'defiling' and more upon issues related to covenant faithfulness, care, and harm. ... God's interest in sex, then, is less puritanical than a concern about how we hurt and damage each other, physically and emotionally, in ways that often leave lifelong scars."
  • Although each of these post-purity perspectives diverges from the current evangelical narrative to varying degrees, the common thread among them seems to be a desire for a more holistic sexual ethic, one that remains thoroughly Christian while shifting away from the metaphor of purity to concepts of sexual health and wholeness
markfrankel18

Erasing History in the Internet Era - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...keller-erasing-history.html

TOK history internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 May 13 - Cached
  • Lorraine Martin, a nurse in Greenwich, was arrested in 2010 with her two grown sons when police raided her home and found a small stash of marijuana, scales and plastic bags. The case against her was tossed out when she agreed to take some drug classes, and the official record was automatically purged. It was, the law seemed to assure her, as if it had never happened.
  • Defamation is the publication of information that is both damaging and false. The arrest story was obviously true when it was first published. But Connecticut’s erasure law has already established that truth can be fungible. Martin, her suit says, was “deemed never to have been arrested.” And therefore the news story had metamorphosed into a falsehood.
  • They debate the difference between “historical fact” and “legal fact.” They dispute whether something that was true when it happened can become not just private but actually untrue, so untrue you can swear an oath that it never happened and, in the eyes of the law, you’ll be telling the truth.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Google’s latest transparency report shows a sharp rise in requests from governments and courts to take down potentially damaging material.
  • In Europe, where press freedoms are less sacred and the right to privacy is more ensconced, the idea has taken hold that individuals have a “right to be forgotten,” and those who want their online particulars expunged tend to have the government on their side. In Germany or Spain, Lorraine Martin might have a winning case.
  • The Connecticut case is just one manifestation of an anxious backlash against the invasive power of the Internet, a world of Big Data and ever more powerful search engines, in which it seems almost everything is permanently recorded and accessible to almost anyone — potential employers, landlords, dates, predators
  • The Times’s policy is not to censor history, because it’s history. The paper will update an arrest story if presented with evidence of an acquittal or dismissal, completing the story but not deleting the story.
  • Owen Tripp, a co-founder of Reputation.com, which has made a business out of helping clients manage their digital profile, advocated a “right to be forgotten” in a YouTube video. Tripp said everyone is entitled to a bit of space to grow up, to experiment, to make mistakes.
  • “This is not just a privacy problem,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, and author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” “If we are continually reminded about people’s mistakes, we are not able to judge them for who they are in the present. We need some way to put a speed-brake on the omnipresence of the past.”
  • would like to see search engine companies — the parties that benefit the most financially from amassing our information — offer the kind of reputation-protecting tools that are now available only to those who can afford paid services like those of Reputation.com. Google, he points out, already takes down five million items a week because of claims that they violate copyrights. Why shouldn’t we expect Google to give users an option — and a simple process — to have news stories about them down-ranked or omitted from future search results? Good question. What’s so sacred about a search algorithm, anyway?
simoneveale

Why We Remember So Many Things Wrong - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...a-happened-memory-recollection

memory psychology brain EMOTIONAL-MEMORY hippocampus

shared by simoneveale on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.
  • Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind.
  • Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • two and a half years later, the questionnaire was given a second time to the same students.
  • It was then that R. T. recalled, with absolute confidence, her dorm-room experience.
  • She didn’t know any details of what had happened,
  • We don’t really remember an uneventful day the way that we remember a fight or a first kiss.
  • Her hope is to understand how, exactly, emotional memories behave at all stages of the remembering process: how we encode them, how we consolidate and store them, how we retrieve them.
  • When it comes to the central details of the event, like that the Challenger exploded, they are clearer and more accurate. But when it comes to peripheral details, they are worse. And our confidence in them, while almost always strong, is often misplaced.
  • Within the brain, memories are formed and consolidated largely due to the help of a small seahorse-like structure called the hippocampus; damage the hippocampus, and you damage the ability to form lasting recollections.
  • A key element of emotional-memory formation is the direct line of communication between the amygdala and the visual cortex.
  • Phelps has combined Neisser’s experiential approach with the neuroscience of emotional memory to explore how such memories work, and why they work the way they do.
  • Memory for the emotional scenes was significantly higher, and the vividness of the recollection was significantly greater.
  • hat is, if you were shocked when you saw animals, your memory of the earlier animals was also enhanced. And, more important, the effect only emerged after six or twenty-four hours: the memory needed time to consolidate.
  • o, if memory for events is strengthened at emotional times, why does everyone forget what they were doing when the Challenger exploded?
  • The strength of the central memory seems to make us confident of all of the details when we should only be confident of a few.
  • Our misplaced confidence in recalling dramatic events is troubling when we need to rely on a memory for something important—evidence in court, for instance
  • After reviewing the evidence, the committee made several concrete suggestions to changes in current procedures, including “blinded” eyewitness identification
  • standardized instructions to witnesses, along with extensive police training in vision and memory research as it relates to eyewitness testimony, videotaped identification, expert testimony early on in trials about the issues surrounding eyewitness reliability, and early and clear jury instruction on any prior identifications
Javier E

Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...st-bastion-for-dissenters.html

global warming science methods research clouds

shared by Javier E on 02 May 12 - Cached
  • For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.
  • They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.
  • At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • His idea has drawn withering criticism from other scientists, who cite errors in his papers and say proof is lacking. Enough evidence is already in hand, they say, to rule out the powerful cooling effect from clouds that would be needed to offset the increase of greenhouse gases.
  • “If you listen to the credible climate skeptics, they’ve really pushed all their chips onto clouds.”
  • Dr. Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science,” said Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington. “I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”
  • With climate policy nearly paralyzed in the United States, many other governments have also declined to take action, and worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases are soaring.
  • The most elaborate computer programs have agreed on a broad conclusion: clouds are not likely to change enough to offset the bulk of the human-caused warming. Some of the analyses predict that clouds could actually amplify the warming trend sharply through several mechanisms, including a reduction of some of the low clouds that reflect a lot of sunlight back to space. Other computer analyses foresee a largely neutral effect. The result is a big spread in forecasts of future temperature, one that scientists have not been able to narrow much in 30 years of effort.
  • The earth’s surface has already warmed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, most of that in the last 40 years. Modest as it sounds, it is an average for the whole planet, representing an enormous addition of heat. An even larger amount is being absorbed by the oceans. The increase has caused some of the world’s land ice to melt and the oceans to rise.
  • Even in the low projection, many scientists say, the damage could be substantial. In the high projection, some polar regions could heat up by 20 or 25 degrees Fahrenheit — more than enough, over centuries or longer, to melt the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea level by a catastrophic 20 feet or more. Vast changes in  rainfall, heat waves and other weather patterns would most likely accompany such a large warming. “The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. “Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.”
  • But the problem of how clouds will behave in a future climate is not yet solved — making the unheralded field of cloud research one of the most important pursuits of modern science.
  • for more than a decade, Dr. Lindzen has said that when surface temperature increases, the columns of moist air rising in the tropics will rain out more of their moisture, leaving less available to be thrown off as ice, which forms the thin, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, these cirrus clouds act to reduce the cooling of the earth, and a decrease of them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases. Dr. Lindzen calls his mechanism the iris effect, after the iris of the eye, which opens at night to let in more light. In this case, the earth’s “iris” of high clouds would be opening to let more heat escape.
  • Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained “some stupid mistakes” in his handling of the satellite data. “It was just embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.” Last year, he tried offering more evidence for his case, but after reviewers for a prestigious American journal criticized the paper, Dr. Lindzen published it in a little-known Korean journal. Dr. Lindzen blames groupthink among climate scientists for his publication difficulties, saying the majority is determined to suppress any dissenting views. They, in turn, contend that he routinely misrepresents the work of other researchers.
  • Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late. By then, they say, the atmosphere would contain so much carbon dioxide as to make a substantial warming inevitable, and the gas would not return to a normal level for thousands of years.
  • In his Congressional appearances, speeches and popular writings, Dr. Lindzen offers little hint of how thin the published science supporting his position is. Instead, starting from his disputed iris mechanism, he makes what many of his colleagues see as an unwarranted leap of logic, professing near-certainty that climate change is not a problem society needs to worry about.
  • “Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, ‘We’re sure it’s not a problem,’ ” said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. “It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.”
Duncan H

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

online.wsj.com/...4528204577009741133297800.html

alcohol health benefits risks

shared by Duncan H on 03 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • 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."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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%.
  • Duncan H on 03 Nov 11
     
    Should adults drink in moderation then? How should the risks and benefits be balanced.
Duncan H

G.O.P. Greek Tragedy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dowd-gop-greek-tragedy.html

shared by Duncan H on 29 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Rick should scat. Mitt Romney needs to be left alone to limp across the finish line, so he can devote his full time and attention to losing to President Obama.
  • Robo-Romney, who pulled out victories in his home state and in Arizona, and Sanctorum are still in a race to the bottom.
  • In the old days, the Republican ego had control of the party’s id. The id, sometimes described as a galloping horse or crying baby, “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality ... chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud called it, was whipped up obliquely by candidates. Nixon had his Southern strategy of using race as a wedge, Bush Senior and Lee Atwater used the Willie Horton attack, and W. and Karl Rove conjured the gay marriage bogyman.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • John McCain has Aeschylated it to “a Greek tragedy.” And he should know from Greek tragedy. “It’s the negative campaigning and the increasingly personal attacks,” he told The Boston Herald, adding, “the likes of which we have never seen.” When a man who was accused of having an illegitimate black child in the 2000 South Carolina primary thinks this is the worst ever, the G.O.P. is really in trouble. The Arizona senator, who’s supporting Romney, grimly noted: “I know he’s going to be the nominee, but I also worry about how much damage has been done.”
  • The apogee of apathy for Romney was on Friday, when the man who says he’s an expert manager spoke to a mostly empty football stadium in Detroit.
  • Asked in Michigan why he couldn’t excite the base, Romney said he is not willing to make “incendiary comments” or “light my hair on fire.”
  • moderate Republicans feel passé, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine shockingly announced her retirement, decrying “ ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies” and a vanishing political center.
  • Once elected, those presidents curbed the id with the ego, common sense and reason. But now the G.O.P.’s id is unbridled. The horse has thrown the rider; the dark forces are bubbling. Moderates, women, gays, Hispanics and blacks — even the president — are being hunted in this most dangerous game.
  • he cited his wife’s two Caddies and his Nascar team-owner pals, and awkwardly mocked the plastic ponchos of Daytona racing fans: “I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.”
  • Mitt was damaged as a contender against Obama when he was forced to admit that he had a 15-percent tax rate (given, as The Huffington Post points out, that Romney averaged $6,400 an hour at Bain Capital while creating lots of jobs with paltry wages).
  • Now Santorum should forfeit his chance after making a far dumber remark: Kids should beware of college because they’ll get brainwashed.
  • Pandering to Tea Partiers, Santorum, who has a B.A., M.B.A. and J.D., and who supported higher education in his 2006 senatorial campaign, absurdly turned the American dream inside-out and into sauerkraut.
  • He called the president “a snob” for encouraging people to get more educated and asserted that Obama only wants Americans to go to college so they can be remade in his image, while being indoctrinated by liberal college professors.
  • Does he think that defining ambition down and asking kids to give up hope is a good mantra? Even Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who was trying to mandate that women seeking abortions be shamed with vaginal ultrasounds that Democrats dubbed “legal rape,” thought Santorum went too far.
  • In an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Santorum offended the Catholics he’s courting by saying that the J.F.K. speech ratifying the separation of church and state made him want “to throw up” because Kennedy had thrown “his faith under the bus.” “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute,” Sanctorum said.
  • Duncan H on 29 Feb 12
     
    Looks like a fine mess in the Republican Party
Ryan Beneck

Soft Touch: Squishy Robots Could Lead to Cheaper, Safer Medical Devices: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

robots science technology medical

shared by Ryan Beneck on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Hard robots require a sophisticated feedback mechanism to help them determine how much force to apply during surgery so they do not damage our delicate tissues and organs. Soft robots could take advantage of their rubbery appendages to reduce the likelihood of surgical damage
  • Soft robots can be 3-D printed in a day or two from silicone and other materials that cost about $20.
Javier E

How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...nequality-hollows-out-the-soul

inequality psychology mental dominance behavioral system status subordination illness superiority

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Now that we can compare robust data for different countries, we can see not only what we knew intuitively — that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive — but that it also damages the individual psyche.
  • Our tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth invokes deep psychological responses, feelings of dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority. This affects the way we see and treat one another.
  • To compare mental illness rates internationally, the World Health Organization asked people in each country about their mood, tiredness, agitation, concentration, sleeping patterns and self-confidence. These have been found to be good indicators of mental illness.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • in developed countries, major and minor mental illnesses were three times as common in societies where there were bigger income differences between rich and poor. In other words, an American is likely to know three times as many people with depression or anxiety problems as someone in Japan or Germany.
  • One, looking at the 50 American states, discovered that after taking account of age, income and educational differences, depression was more common in states with greater income inequality
  • schizophrenia was about three times as common in more unequal societies as it was in more equal ones.
  • a wide range of mental disorders might originate in a “dominance behavioral system.” This part of our evolved psychological makeup, almost universal in mammals, enables us to recognize and respond to social ranking systems based on hierarchy and power. One brain-imaging study discovered that there were particular areas of the brain and neural mechanisms dedicated to processing social rank.
  • psychiatric conditions like mania and narcissism are related to our striving for status and dominance, while disorders such as anxiety and depression may involve responses to the experience of subordination
  • how does increasing inequality factor in? One of the important effects of wider income differences between rich and poor is to intensify the issues of dominance and subordination, and feelings of superiority and inferiority.
  • A new study by Dublin-based researchers of 34,000 people in 31 countries found that in countries with bigger income differences, status anxiety was more common at all levels in the social hierarchy
  • self-enhancement or self-aggrandizement — the tendency to present an inflated view of oneself — occurred much more frequently in more unequal societies.
  • In the United States, research psychologists have shown that narcissism rates, as measured by a standard academic tool known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, rose rapidly from the later 1980s, which would appear to track the increases in inequality
  • as larger differences in material circumstances create greater social distances, feelings of superiority and inferiority increase. In short, growing inequality makes us all more neurotic about “image management” and how we are seen by others.
  • Humans instinctively know how to cooperate and create social ties, but we also know how to engage in status competition — how to be snobs and how to talk ourselves up. We use these alternative social strategies almost every day of our lives, but crucially, inequality shifts the balance between them.
  • we become less nice people in more unequal societies. But we are less nice and less happy: Greater inequality redoubles status anxiety, damaging our mental health and distorting our personalities — wherever we are on the social spectrum.
1 - 20 of 165 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page