Group items tagged

many of the new salaried arrangements have evolved from hospitals looking for new revenues, and could have the opposite effect. For example, when doctors’ practices are bought by a hospital, a colonoscopy or stress test performed in the office can suddenly cost far more because a hospital “facility fee” is tacked on. Likewise, Mr. Smith said, many doctors on salary are offered bonuses tied to how much billing they generate, which could encourage physicians to order more X-rays and tests.

“From the hospital end there’s a big feeding frenzy, a lot of bidding going on to bring in doctors,” Mr. Mechanic said. “And physicians are going in so they don’t have to worry

The base salaries of physicians who become employees are still related to the income they can generate, ranging from under $200,000 for primary care doctors to $575,000 in cardiology to $663,000 in neurosurgery,

Dr. Jacowitz said that the economics drove the choice and that the only other option would have been to bring in more revenue by practicing bad medicine — ordering more heart tests on patients who did not need them

“The question now is how to shift the compensation from a focus on volume to a focus on quality,” said Mr. Smith of Merritt Hawkins. He said that 35 percent of the jobs he recruits for currently have such incentives, “but it’s pennies, not enough to really influence behavior.”

How did we get here? The problem is surely not poor teaching. Rather, it is the stuff that teachers are expected to do, which is the product of an unholy alliance between well-meaning politicians and educationalists, not forgetting over-mighty examination boards.

Such initiatives from above provided the proponents of a so-called new history with a golden opportunity to reshape historical education. Historical "skills" such as source analysis, they argued, should be elevated above mere factual knowledge. And "discovery" by children should count for more than dusty old pedagogy.The result was a national curriculum designed to instil in schoolchildren all kinds of "key concepts" like "chronological understanding", "cultural, ethnic and religious diversity", "change and continuity", "cause and consequence", "significance" and "interpretation".And these were to be taught with reference to an impressively wide range of subject matter.

The trouble is not so much with the theory as with the practice that has evolved in too many schools. As Ofsted admits in a damning passage on primary pupils, "some … found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had studied within any coherent, long-term narrative. They knew about particular events, characters and periods, but did not have an overview. Their chronological understanding was often underdeveloped and so they found it difficult to link developments together."

In fact, as the inspectors concede elsewhere, in 28 of the 58 secondary schools they visited, "students' chronological understanding was not sufficiently well developed: they had … a poor sense of the historical narrative". This is hardly a minor deficiency. It's a bit like saying that maths is a successful subject in British schools, apart from the fact that pupils in half of schools can't count.

Commenting on a not untypical primary curriculum, the authors of History for All say that "its principal weaknesses are the disconnected topics and the potential for the pupils to be left with a fragmented overview". You can say that again. Consider this list of topics spread in this order over four years:

The word smorgasbord doesn't really do justice to this random assortment. Lost, as Simon Schama has justly lamented, is the "long arc of time", to be replaced by odds and sods.

The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver’s licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.

Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.

In a statement on Monday night, Mr. Daleiden said: “The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”

The release of the videos last summer created a furor and gave new strength to the conservative drive to defund Planned Parenthood. The organization was forced to apologize for the casual tone that one of its officials had used to discuss a possible transfer of fetal tissue to what she believed was a legitimate medical company. But Planned Parenthood said the fees being discussed were to cover costs and were legal. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story

In the centuries that followed, Buddhism in Japan developed robustly. During the 7th through 9th centuries, Buddhism in China enjoyed a "golden age" and Chinese monks brought the newest developments in practice and scholarship to Japan.

Six schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan in the 7th and 8th centuries and all but two of which have disappeared. These schools flourished mostly during the Nara Period of Japanese history (709 to 795 CE). Today, they are sometimes lumped together into one category known as Nara Buddhism.

After the Nara period, five other schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan that remain prominent today. These are Tendai, Shingon, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.

Tendai is best known for two distinctive features. One, it considers the Lotus Sutra to be the supreme sutra and the perfect expression of the Buddha's teachings. Second, it synthesizes the teachings of other schools, resolving contradictions and finding a middle way between extremes.

Shingon is the only non-Tibetan school of Vajrayana. Many of the teachings and rituals of Shingon are esoteric, passed orally from teacher to student, and not made public. Shingon remains one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan.

Very simply, Pure Land emphasizes faith the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Butsu in Japanese) through which one may be reborn in the Pure Land and be nearer to Nirvana. Pure Land is sometimes called Amidism.

After some years of study at Mount Hiei and other monasteries, Nichiren believed that the Lotus Sutra contained the complete teachings of the Buddha.

Nichiren also believed fervently that all of Japan must be guided by the Lotus Sutra or lose the protection and favor of the Buddha. He condemned other schools of Buddhism, particularly Pure Land.

The Buddhist establishment became annoyed with Nichiren and sent him into a series of exiles that lasted most of the rest of his life. Even so, he gained followers, and by the time of his death, Nichiren Buddhism was firmly established in Japan.

In time, this favoritism led to a partisan rivalry, which sometimes became violent.

 Japanese Buddhist culture flourished in the 14th century and Buddhist influence was reflected in art, poetry, architecture, gardening, and the tea ceremony.

After Nichiren, no new major schools of Buddhism developed in Japan. However, the existing schools grew, evolved, split, fused, and otherwise developed in many ways.

The influence of Buddhism declined, however. Buddhism faced competition from Shinto -- the Japanese indigenous religion -- as well as Confucianism. To keep the three rivals separated, the government decreed that Buddhism would have first place in matters of religion, Confucianism would have first place in matters of morality, and Shinto would have first place in matters of state.

The Meiji Restoration in 1868 restored the power of the Emperor. In the state religion, Shinto, the emperor was worshiped as a living god.

The Emperor was not a god in Buddhism, however. This may be why the Meiji government ordered Buddhism banished

Temples were burned or destroyed, and priests and monks were forced to return to lay life.

Buddhism was too deeply ingrained in Japan's culture and history to disappear, however. Eventually, the banishment was lifted. But the Meiji government was not done with Buddhism yet.

In 1872, the Meiji government decreed that Buddhist monks and priests (but not nuns) should be free to marry if they chose to do so. Soon "temple families" became commonplace and the administration of temples and monasteries became family businesses, handed down from fathers to sons.

Today, the government of Japan recognizes more than 150 schools of Buddhism, but the major schools are still Nara (mostly Kegon), Shingon, Tendai, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.

In more recent years, several news stories have reported that Buddhism is dying in Japan, especially in rural areas.

For generations, the many small "family owned" temples had a monopoly on the funeral business and funerals became their chief source of income. Sons took over temples from their fathers out of duty more than vocation. When combined, these two factors made much of Japanese Buddhism into "funeral Buddhism." Many temples offer little else but funeral and memorial services.

Japanese living in urban centers are losing interest in Buddhism.

  It is also known for its doctrine of the Three Truths; its classification of Buddhist doctrines into Five Periods and Eight Teachings; and its particular form of meditation.

Tiantai Buddhism in Japan as Tendai, which for a time was the dominant school of Buddhism in Japan.

In 845 the Tang Dynasty Emperor Wuzong ordered all "foreign" religions in China, which included Buddhism, to be eliminated.

However, Tiantai did not become extinct in China. In time, with the help of Korean disciples, Guoqing was rebuilt and copies of essential texts were returned to the mountain.

Tiantai had regained some of its footing by the year 1000, when a doctrinal dispute split the school in half and generated a few centuries' worth of treatises and commentaries.

The Three Truths proposes a "middle" acting as an interface of sorts between the absolute and the conventional.

This "middle" is the omniscient mind of Buddha, which takes in all phenomenal reality, both pure and impure.

These were (1) the period in the Buddha's life in which a sutra was preached; (2) the audience that first heard the sutra; (3) the teaching method the Buddha used to make his point.

Zhiyi identified five distinct periods of the Buddha's life, and sorted texts accordingly into the Five Periods.

He identified three kinds of audiences and five kinds of methods, and these became the Eight Teachings.

Although the Five Periods are not historically accurate, and scholars of other schools might differ with the Eight Teachings, Zhiyi's classification system was internally logical and gave Tiantai a solid foundation.

In different ways, much of Zhiyi's teaching lives on in Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhism, as well as Zen.

no one branch would reign supreme

making the federal laws

executing, enforcing, and administering the laws

interpret and apply US laws through cases

the government itself is limited to the power given to it by them.

no one branch has all the power. Each branch has its own purpose: to make the laws, execute the laws, and interpret the laws.

each branch of government has a certain number of checks it can use to ensure the other branches do not become too powerful

power lies with the people

central government does not control all the power in the nation

The two major parties in America are the Democratic and Republican parties

local, state, and federal.

However, an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban. It grants presidents the emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore law and order when they believe a situation warrants it. Those federal troops could either be regular active-duty military or state National Guard soldiers the federal government has assumed control over.

But parts of the Insurrection Act also allow presidents to send in troops without requiring the consent of a governor. Presidents last invoked the act to deploy troops without the consent of state authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the civil rights movement, when some governors in the South resisted court-ordered school desegregation.

Mr. Trump has boasted that, if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch forces without any request for intervention by local authorities. At a campaign rally in Iowa last year, for example, he vowed to unilaterally use federal forces to “get crime out of our cities,” specifically naming New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco as “crime dens” he pointedly noted were run by Democrats.

“You look at what is happening to our country — we cannot let it happen any longer,” Mr. Trump said. “And one of the other things I’ll do — because you are not supposed to be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I am not waiting.”

Mr. Trump has long been attracted to the strongman move of using military force to impose and maintain domestic political control. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he spoke admiringly about the Chinese Communist Party for displaying the “power of strength” a year earlier when it used troops and tanks to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The next day, on June 3, Mr. Esper contradicted Mr. Trump from the Pentagon podium, saying: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Mr. Trump was outraged, seeing this as an act of defiance. He fired Mr. Esper that November.

Mr. Trump has broken with his former subordinates who raised objections to his desire to use federal troops that summer. Those who have stuck with Mr. Trump are working to ensure that a second administration would not contain politically appointed officials or lawyers who would be inclined to see it as their duty to constrain his impulses and desires — one of several reasons a second Trump presidency is likely to shatter even more norms and precedents than the first.

Indeed, even by the standards of various norm-busting plans Mr. Trump and his advisers have developed, the idea of using American troops against Americans on domestic soil stands apart. It has engendered quiet discomfort even among some of his allies on other issues.

In an interview with The New York Times last fall, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, said Mr. Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration included invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops as immigration agents.

An early 2023 email from a member of the center’s staff listed 10 agenda topics for papers that the center planned to write on legal and policy frameworks. An introduction to the email said the goal was to “help us build the case and achieve consensus leading into 2025.” The email went on to circulate more broadly, and The Times reviewed a copy.

The email placed each topic into one of three categories. One set involved Congress. A second involved “broader legal” issues — including “Christian nationalism” and “nullification,” the pre-Civil War idea that states should be able to negate federal laws they don’t like. The third category was “day one” ideas, meaning those whose legal frameworks were already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally.No. 4 on the list: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

“George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he said. “We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.”

Compared with a sedentary lifestyle of video games and TV, an obsession with working out may not quite qualify as a health hazard. And instructors like Mr. Rivera say most boys are eager for advice on the healthiest, drug-free ways to get in shape.

The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a “cohort”: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the cold war cleared some ideological ground, inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questions — like, why didn’t socialism take root in America? — that animated previous generations of labor historians.

the crisis hit, and people started asking, ‘Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?’ ”

While most scholars in the field reject the purely oppositional stance of earlier Marxist history, they also take a distinctly critical view of neoclassical economics, with its tidy mathematical models and crisp axioms about rational actors.

The history of capitalism has also benefited from a surge of new, economically minded scholarship on slavery, with scholars increasingly arguing that Northern factories and Southern plantations were not opposing economic systems, as the old narrative has it, but deeply entwined.

In a paper called “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery,” Edward Baptist, a historian at Cornell, looked at the way small investors across America and Europe snapped up exotic financial instruments based on slave holdings, much as people over the past decade went wild for mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations — with a similarly disastrous outcome.

Meanwhile, partly by necessity, working-class families often take a more hands-off attitude to child-raising.

some of the most cost-effective antipoverty programs are aimed at the earliest years. For example, the Nurse-Family Partnership has a home-visitation program that encourages new parents of at-risk children to amp up the hugging, talking and reading. It ends at age 2, yet randomized trials show that those children are less likely to be arrested as teenagers and the families require much less government assistance.

Or take Head Start. Critics have noted that the advantage its preschoolers gain in test scores fades by third grade, but scholars also have found that Head Start has important impacts on graduates, including lessening the chance that they will be convicted of a crime years later.

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, argues that the most crucial investments we as a country can make are in the first five years of life, and that they pay for themselves. Yet these kinds of initiatives are underfinanced and serve only a tiny fraction of children in need.

After a year of training, Mr. Burkhart was able to pick up a bottle and pour the contents into a jar, and to pick up a straw and stir. The doctors, though delighted, said that more advances would be necessary to make the bypass system practical, affordable and less invasive, most likely through wireless technology

At 2:37 a.m., shortly after entering Egyptian airspace, the plane made a 90-degree turn to the left and then a full circle to the right, first plunging to 15,000 feet from 37,000 feet and then to 9,000 feet

30 were from Egypt, 15 from France, two from Iraq and one each from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chad, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

American and European officials have expressed concerns about security gaps in North African airports. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Intelligence analysts who monitor jihadist websites and social media said there had been no claims of responsibility by terrorist groups.

At 4:26 a.m. — nearly two hours after the last radar contact — the plane emitted a signal, although it was not clear whether that was an emergency distress signal sent by a crew member or an automated signal from the plane’s onboard computers.

Egypt has come under criticism in the past for its lack of transparency in aviation accidents. In 1999, an EgyptAir flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, killing all 217 on board.

Lind compared Trudeau’s statement to President Bill Clinton’s apology for America’s failure to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide. Clinton was saying sorry for inaction rather than action, she said, and there was no American constituency to be offended by his expression of regret.

Germany’s various apologies for the crimes of the Nazis, Lind added, are the shining exception in international affairs, not the rule: “The world we live in is one in which countries routinely whitewash their past violence. They routinely even lie about their past violence. They sometimes glorify their past violence.”

ut Lind has found that apologies and reparations for those wrongs can be damaging as well, since such actions are likely to polarize people within those countries. The best approach, she says, is recognizing and remembering wrongs in ways that unify rather than divide—that emphasize shared suffering, not perpetrators and victims.

“Liberals have this idea that the way to be a strong nation is to be transparent about the past, and to be self-critical, and to constantly question your leaders, and constantly ask, ‘Are we living up to our own values?’ And so this kind of historical reckoning with the past [that Obama is undertaking in Hiroshima]—they love that

“For most Japanese, Obama’s visit actually fits with the Japanese story about the bomb—that the atomic bomb gave Japan its postwar mission for peace,”

Politics. Everyone has their own story.

The vast majority of Japanese don’t think the atomic bombings were justified, and that belief has only become more widespread over time. But Japanese leaders have not demanded that the U.S. government apologize for the attacks, in part because they don’t want to jeopardize the flourishing U.S.-Japanese alliance or encourage calls for Japan to apologize for its own wartime aggression.

This lack of a demand from the Japanese, Lind argues, has created the friendly space in which a visit like Obama’s can take place—and in which the two countries can adopt a common narrative about the atomic bombings.

Lind compared the situation to the way in which American and European leaders, including German leaders, now gather in Normandy to commemorate the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France

Conservatives, meanwhile, “say that national strength comes from national unity, and national unity is best served by instilling pride in people, and pride comes from remembering the really great things that we’ve done, and remembering what’s different and great about America. … And so they would say, ‘What are you doing talking about all the people we killed? Why aren’t you celebrating that we brought democracy to Japan?

that the atomic bomb ended the war and saved American lives. So the Japanese bomb story begins in 1945 and goes forward in the mission for peace. The American bomb story ends in ’45. Those are two separate stories. They will not cross. And the president’s position that the lesson of the past is for a non-nuclear future, it’s almost like a third story.”

The Republican coalition of 2016, in fact, will look increasingly like the Democratic Party of the 1930s.

A Trump versus Clinton contest will deepen the partisan divisions that for the past five decades have set those who support the social and cultural revolutions of the past five decades on race, immigration, women’s rights, gender equality and gay rights — as well as the broader right to sexual privacy — against those who remain in opposition.

Tesler’s findings are illustrated in the accompanying chart. There was a dose effect: the higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump.

Tesler and Sides ranked white respondents by their level of “white racial identity” — determined by asking white respondents questions like “How Important is being white to your identity?”; “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?”; and “How likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead?”

In each case, Trump’s level of support in the survey rose in direct proportion to your level of agreement with each of these statements.

“The Second Demographic Transition: A concise overview of its development,” by Lesthaeghe, summarizes this concept:The SDT starts in the 1960s with a series of multifaceted revolutions. First, there was the contraceptive revolution, with the introduction of hormonal contraception and far more efficient IUDs; second, there was the sexual revolution, with declining ages at first sexual intercourse; and third, there was the gender revolution, questioning the sole breadwinner household model and the gendered division of labor that accompanied it.

These revolutions have reordered much of society. Lesthaeghe continues:These three "revolutions” fit within the framework of an overall rejection of authority, the assertion of individual freedom of choice (autonomy), and an overhaul of the normative structure. The overall outcome of these shifts with respect to fertility was the postponement of childbearing: mean ages at first parenthood rise again, opportunities for childbearing are lost due to higher divorce rates, the share of childless ever-partnered women increases, and higher parity births (four or more) become rare.

Measured by these criteria, the top-ranked counties were cosmopolitan centers, with a larger percentage of affluent, highly educated residents: New York City, the District of Columbia, Pitkin County, Colo. (where Aspen is), San Francisco and Marin County, Calif

The counties at the bottom tended to be small, white, rural, poor and less educated and they were located in the South and the mountain West:

the lower the S.D.T. ranking, the higher Trump’s votes compared to his statewide average; the higher the S.D.T. level, the lower Trump’s vote

The nomination of Donald Trump will sharpen and deepen the Republican Party’s core problems. Trump gains the party ground among declining segments of the population — less well educated, less well off whites — and loses ground with the growing constituencies: single women, well-educated men and women, minorities, the affluent and professionals.

Not only are more and more Americans adopting the practices and values described by Lesthaeghe and Neidert — self-expressiveness, gender equality, cohabitation, same-sex couples, postponed marriage and childbearing — but so too is much of the developed world.

This transition has effectively become the norm in much of Europe, and, as Lesthaeghe points out, it is gaining ground in regions as diverse as East Asia and Latin America.

For decades now, the Republican Party has been conducting a racial and cultural counterrevolution. It proved a successful strategy from 1966 to 1992.

Since then, as the percentage of Americans on the liberal side of the culture wars has grown steadily, the counterrevolutionary approach has become more and more divisive.

In this respect, Trump is not, as many charge, violating core Republican tenets. Instead, he represents the culmination of the rear-guard action that has characterized the party for decades

There is a chance that Trump will bring new blood into a revitalized Republican coalition. It’s also possible that he will accelerate the Republican Party’s downward spiral into irrelevance.

Dr. Church looks forward to the day when current research becomes a routine clinical procedure that combines inherited genomic information with analyses of RNA, proteins, metabolites and microbes in our bodies.

the cost to collect molecular data from each blood sample was about $2,500 — which did not include the cost of analysis. But the price for tests similar to Dr. Snyder’s will also decline in the future

Dr. Snyder is a co-founder of a company, Personalis, in Palo Alto, Calif., that is developing software and other tools to interpret genomes after sequencing