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Javier E

Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • One theme emerges in much of the research: Our politics tend be more emotional now. Policy preferences are increasingly likely to be entangled with a visceral dislike of the opposition. The newly embraced academic term for this is “affective polarization.”
  • “It’s feelings based,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.” “It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”
  • The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required cooperation — and identifying the rivals, the competitors for those resources.
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  • “The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred. Which is really sad,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale sociologist and author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.”
  • No researcher argues that human nature is the sole, or even the primary, cause of today’s polarization. But savvy political operatives can exploit, leverage and encourage it. And those operatives are learning from their triumphs in divide-and-conquer politics.
  • “We wouldn’t have civilizations if we didn’t create groups. We are designed to form groups, and the only way to define a group is there has to be someone who’s not in it,” Mason said.
  • Experiments have revealed that “children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color,”
  • enmity and derision can arise independently of any rational reason for it.
  • Mason and Christakis point to a famous-among-academics experiment from 1954. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 Boy Scouts and separated them into two groups camping at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Only after a week did they learn that there was another group at the far end of the campground.
  • What they did next fascinated the research team. Each group developed irrational contempt for the other. The boys in the other group were seen not just as rivals, but as fundamentally flawed human beings. Only when the two groups were asked to work together to solve a common problem did they warm up to one another.
  • And because many more districts are now deeply red or blue, rather than a mix of constituencies, House members have fewer reasons to adopt moderate positions.
  • “Homo sapiens is a social species; group affiliation is essential to our sense of self. Individuals instinctively think of themselves as representing broad socioeconomic and cultural categories rather than as distinctive packages of traits,”
  • Here’s where psychology gives way to political science. The American political system may cultivate “out-group” hatred, as academics put it. One of the scarce resources in this country is political power at the highest levels of government. The country has no parliamentary system in which multiple parties form governing coalitions.
  • Add to this fact the redistricting that ensures there are fewer truly competitive congressional races. The two parties have inexorably moved further apart ideologically, and leaders are more likely to be punished — “primaried” — if they reach across the aisle.
  • Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political psychologist who coined the term “affective polarization,” explained in a 2018 paper why people typically identify with a group.
  • Human nature hasn’t changed, but technology has. The fragmentation of the media has made it easier to gather information in an echo chamber, Iyengar said. He calls this “sorting.” Not only do people cluster around specific beliefs or ideas, they physically cluster, moving to neighborhoods where residents are likely to look like them and think like them.
  • Partisan clustering has increased even within households. In 1965, Iyengar said, only about 60 percent of married couples had the same party registration. Today, the figure is greater than 85 percent
  • Asked in the summer of 2022 if they agree or disagree that members of the other party “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals,” about 30 percent in both parties agreed, Mason’s research shows.
  • Research shows that affective polarization is intensifying across the political spectrum. Recent survey data revealed that more than half of Republicans and Democrats view the other party as “a threat,” and nearly as many agree with the description of the other party as “evil,” Mason said.
  • A recent paper published in the journal Science argued that the three core ingredients of political sectarianism are “othering, aversion, and moralization.” Trump has mastered that recipe. He activates emotional responses in his followers by telling them that they are threatened.
Javier E

How to Live Without Irony - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt.
  • The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.
  • It stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst. This kind of defensive living works as a pre-emptive surrender
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  • While we have gained some skill sets (multitasking, technological savvy), other skills have suffered: the art of conversation, the art of looking at people, the art of being seen, the art of being present. Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety, finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades. Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.
  • Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.”
  • As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?
  • This ironic ethos can lead to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche. Historically, vacuums eventually have been filled by something — more often than not, a hazardous something. Fundamentalists are never ironists; dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists.
  • Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime.
  • The most pure nonironic models in life, however, are to be found in nature: animals and plants are exempt from irony, which exists only where the human dwells.
  • Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values.
  • The loosely defined New Sincerity movements in the arts that have sprouted since the 1980s positioned themselves as responses to postmodern cynicism, detachment and meta-referentiality. (New Sincerity has recently been associated with the writing of David Foster Wallace, the films of Wes Anderson and the music of Cat Power.) But these attempts failed to stick, as evidenced by the new age of Deep Irony.
Javier E

"Modern chicken has no flavor" - let's make it in a lab - Salon.com - 0 views

  • “If you take a fresh strawberry after processing, it’s nothing. It tastes like nothing,” said Wright, as a way of explaining why the food industry is so reliant on the $12 billion global flavoring industry.
  • When I asked Dave Adams, the food scientist who founded Savoury Systems, why actual meat is such an inferior source for the chicken flavor that, strangely enough, goes into chicken, he gave me the same answer Wright did. Modern chicken, he grumbled, has no flavor. “They grow them so fast, they don’t have time to develop flavor,” he said. And chicken — even tasteless, scrap stuff — is more expensive than soy.
  • The flavoring game wasn’t always so sophisticated. When it began in Europe in the 19th century, companies imported spices and procured plants such as lemongrass, which yielded citronella oil, ideal for concentrating into lemon flavor. These essential oils went mostly into fragrances, medicines and candies. As the field of chemistry progressed in the latter half of the century, European scientists, particularly Germans, figured out how to synthesize flavors and fragrances from chemicals instead of having to wrench them from natural materials.
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  • World War II forced transformative market changes when supplies from Europe and elsewhere were cut off. Many companies expanded and moved across the Hudson to set up new factories
  • One of the newer breakthroughs to come along in the science of flavor is called taste modulation. About a decade ago, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego named Charles Zuker isolated, for the first time, the receptors on the tongue that are responsible for our perception of taste. He did this using tastebud cells from laboratory mice. What he found was that each cell was incredibly specific, containing receptors for just one taste — either sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory (also called umami
  • Coupled with mass spectrometers, which identify what’s been isolated, this technology opened up a vast world of possibilities, allowing for a much more thorough (though still incomplete) map of nature’s aromas. The number of flavor chemicals known in orange peels, for instance, has gone from nine in 1948 to 207 today. In spearmint leaves, it’s leapt from 6 to 100, and in black peppercorns, from seven to 273.
  • In nature, flavor comes as a sophisticated mix of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals, each with its own unique taste and smell. Using early-20th-century chemistry tools, scientists could hope to identify perhaps a handful of these in any given plant
  • Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.
Javier E

Mega-eruptions Caused Mass Extinction, Study Finds - 0 views

  • In a new study published today in the journal Science, researchers say they have confirmed that eruptions large enough to bury the U.S. under 300 feet (91 meters) of lava occurred at the same time that vast numbers of plant and animal species disappeared from the fossil record. About 201 million years ago, tectonic forces started ripping the supercontinent known as Pangaea apart, said Terrence Blackburn, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and lead author of the study. The underlying mantle rock melted, generating these large eruptions, he added. The rift, which eventually created the Atlantic Ocean basin, happened between sections of Pangaea that would go on to become North America and Africa. (Read about how Pangaea formed.)
  • by using a rare mineral called zircon, found in igneous rocks like basalts, the researchers were able to narrow down their margin of error to 20,000 to 30,000 years—pegging the initial eruptions to just before the mass extinction event. “Zircon is a perfect time capsule for dating those rocks,” said Blackburn. When the mineral crystallizes, it incorporates uranium, which decays over a known time with respect to the element lead. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in our samples, we can determine the age of those crystals, he explained.
  • There is evidence that the initial volcanic eruptions doubled the amount of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which led to increased global temperatures and ocean acidification, he noted. This happened quickly, which probably didn’t give organisms at the time much of a chance to adjust to the changes.
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  • There is one case 65 million years ago, at a point in time known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (K-T boundary), with strong evidence supporting an asteroid impact around the same time the dinosaurs disappeared.
  • “That one instance really guided everybody’s thinking, and the idea that impacts caused mass extinctions was really, really popular,” said Renne, who wasn’t involved in the Blackburn study.
  • enne says that even the asteroid impact at the K-T boundary likely only finished the job that major volcanic eruptions in India started. (Related: “What Killed Dinosaurs: New Ideas About the Wipeout.”)
Javier E

In History Departments, It's Up With Capitalism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. “And to understand capitalism,” said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,” “you’ve got to understand capitalists.”
  • The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses’-eye view with that of the office drones — and consumers — who power the system.
  • I like to call it ‘history from below, all the way to the top,’
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  • 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.
Javier E

The American Scholar: Those Other Ancestors - Priscilla Long - 0 views

  • The human species Homo erectus evolved out of earlier human forms 1.8 million years ago and survived until 143,000 years ago. He and she walked on two feet and used tools and gradually spread over Africa and western and eastern Asia. Out of Homo erectus evolved, it is thought, Homo heidelbergensis. This common ancestor of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens existed from 400,000 to 350,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis used fire and was the first to build shelters as opposed to just finding shelter, although they did that too. The European branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into the Neandertals 300,000 or more years ago. The Neandertals were big-bodied, light-skinned, cold-adapted humans. Some, at least, were redheads. The African branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into Homo sapiens—us—200,000 years ago. We were slighter-bodied. We had narrower hips and darker skin
  • Homo sapiens began moving out of Africa to the Near East 40,000 years ago. There they encountered a southern remnant of Neandertals. Most of that species had long since gone extinct. But we shared the region for 15,000 years, until the Neandertals disappeared.
  • Contrary to previous suppositions and speculations, Neandertals ate a varied diet including not only large mammals like mammoths but also birds, rabbits, and seafood. They possessed the “language gene,” just as we do, and likely communicated in some sort of language. They manufactured tools, although not in as great a variety as we did. They decorated their bodies and wore jewelry—an index of symbolic cognition. They likely adorned themselves with feathers.
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  • Because they had bigger bodies, they required more calories to survive than we do. They may have lacked sewing skills. Neither Neandertals nor Homo sapiens lived long (the rare 30-year-old Neandertal was old), but at some point, for reasons not really understood, the life spans of Homo sapiens began to increase. More longevity provided a grandparent generation to impart knowledge, skills, and more resources to the group.
  • Another discovery bearing on the subject are the extreme climate fluctuations that occurred between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago. The Neandertals had bodies and cultures adapted to ice and snow. This time of fluctuation involved such rapid climate change that in one lifetime “all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna,” writes Wong. The environmental stress may have decimated their ranks to below zero population growth.
Javier E

Adbusters' War Against Too Much of Everything - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • One of Mr. Lasn’s favorite words is “meme,” as in: “Adbusters floated the meme of occupying the iconic heart of global capitalism.” The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term: a meme is a unit of cultural information spread among people like a gene. Spreading radically subversive memes is Mr. Lasn’s avowed mission.
  • He has written a new Adbusters book, “Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics” (Seven Stories Press). It is a lavishly illustrated collection, with photographs, drawings and essays that exhort university students to become “meme warriors” and revolutionize the field of economics.
  • Like the magazine, the book elaborates on an old theme: his belief that core economic values must shift from profit-making and expansion of the gross domestic product toward improvement of human health and protection of the planet.
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  • Accomplishing that requires overturning economic orthodoxy and capitalism as we know it, he says. “We have to do this,” he says. “With climate change, and the exhaustion of the planet’s resources. I believe the alternative is apocalypse.”
  • Advocating a life of material simplicity and spiritual richness, Mr. Enns urges people to “make things for others themselves, not to just go out and buy.” He says he and his wife make gifts like wooden figurines and animal dolls for children, and salsa and relish for adults.
  • Mr. Lasn says his lifestyle isn’t really sustainable. He commutes 30 minutes each way from the magazine to his home on five acres of countryside. He and his wife are occupying too much land, and his little Toyota Echo burns too much fuel for the planet’s health, he says: “What can I do? Living there helps to keep me sane.”
  • Mr. Lasn is an analog man in a digital world. He favors spoken conversations, not e-mail or text messages, and owns only a simple cellphone — no iPhone or iPad for him.
  • Mr. Lasn does the initial design and editing of Adbusters on paper. Digitally savvy colleagues transfer his work online. The magazine’s paid circulation, which Mr. Lasn says is 60,000 to 70,000 worldwide, is overwhelmingly print, not digital. Digital subscriptions and downloads are cumbersome and must be improved, he says, although he doesn’t understand the processes.
  • Such apparent inconsistencies, and the magazine’s incendiary tone, can be maddening and even offensive, yet this rambunctious approach is also deeply appealing, some critics say. As Mr. Haiven, of New York University, puts it: “I’ve certainly been very critical of them but I’m also very glad they exist. I think they do very important work sometimes, in their own way.”
Javier E

Report on U.S. Meat Sounds Alarm on 'Superbugs' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • More than half of samples of ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef collected from supermarkets for testing by the federal government contained a bacteria resistant to antibiotics, according to a new report
  • Many animals grown for meat are fed diets containing antibiotics to promote growth and reduce costs, as well as to prevent and control illness. Public health officials in the United States and in Europe, however, are warning that the consumption of meat containing antibiotics contributes to resistance in humans. A growing public awareness of the problem has led to increased sales of antibiotic-free meat.
  • The federal researchers tested for the enterococcus bacteria, which is an indication of fecal contamination. Enterococcus also easily develops resistance to antibiotics, and it easily can pass that resistance on to other bacteria. Two species of the bacteria, Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium, are the third-leading cause of infections in the intensive care units of United States hospitals.
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  • Some 87 percent of the meat the researchers collected contained either normal or antibiotic-resistant enterococcus, suggesting that most of the meat came in contact with fecal material at some point.
  • More stark was the proportion of microbes identified that were resistant. Of all the salmonella found on raw chicken pieces sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, while less than 50 percent of the salmonella found on chicken tested in 2002 was of a superbug variety.
Javier E

Bhaskar Sunkara, Editor of Jacobin Magazine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.
  • “I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.”
  • Since its debut in September 2010 it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from two New York publishers.
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  • Jacobin’s success, he said, springs from the highly cohesive politics of the four co-editors he has recruited and their shared commitment to advancing a critique of liber
  • alism that is free of obscurantist academic theory or “cheap hooks.”
  • it was a packed Jacobin-organized panel on the Occupy movement, held in a downtown Manhattan bookstore three weeks after the protests began in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, that really put the magazine on the map, drawing attention from Politico and Glenn Beck.
  • the magazine was also attracting attention from more established figures on the left, who saw it as raising fundamental questions that had been off the table since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • Mr. Sunkara, the son of middle-class South Asian immigrants who was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, traces his politics less to experience than to reading. In seventh grade a stray reference in an introduction to “Animal Farm” sent him to Trotsky’s own writings. By his freshman year of college he was editing a blog for Democratic Socialists of America and writing for Dissent.
Javier E

Common Ancestor of Mammals Plucked From Obscurity - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Humankind’s common ancestor with other mammals may have been a roughly rat-size animal that weighed no more than a half a pound, had a long furry tail and lived on insects.
  • In a comprehensive six-year study of the mammalian family tree, scientists have identified and reconstructed what they say is the most likely common ancestor of the many species on the most abundant and diverse branch of that tree — the branch of creatures that nourish their young in utero through a placenta. The work appears to support the view that in the global extinctions some 66 million years ago, all non-avian dinosaurs had to die for mammals to flourish.
  • a combination of genetic and anatomical data established that the ancestor emerged within 200,000 to 400,000 years after the great dying at the end of the Cretaceous period. At the time, the meek were rapidly inheriting the earth from hulking predators like T. rex.
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  • Within another two million to three million years, Dr. O’Leary said, the first members of modern placental orders appeared in such profusion that researchers have started to refer to the explosive model of mammalian evolution
  • Although some small primitive mammals had lived in the shadow of the great Cretaceous reptiles, the scientists could not find evidence supporting an earlier hypothesis that up to 39 placental mammalian lineages survived to enter the post-extinction world. Only the stem lineage to Placentalia, they said, appeared to hang on through the catastrophe, generally associated with climate change after an asteroid crashed into Earth.
  • the “power of 4,500 characters” enabled the scientists to look “at all aspects of mammalian anatomy, from the skull and skeleton, to the teeth, to internal organs, to muscles and even fur patterns” to determine what the common ancestor possibly looked like.
  • this formidable new systematic data-crunching capability might reshape mammal research but that it would probably not immediately resolve the years of dispute between fossil and genetic partisans over when placental mammals arose. Paleontologists looking for answers in skeletons and anatomy have favored a date just before or a little after the Cretaceous extinction. Those who work with genetic data to tell time by “molecular clocks” have arrived at much earlier origins.
  • the post-Cretaceous date for the placentals “will surely be controversial, as this is much younger than estimates based on molecular clocks, and implies the compression of very long molecular branches at the base of the tree.”
Javier E

High Debt and Falling Demand Trap New Veterinarians - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the total population of pets is going down, along with the sums that owners are willing to spend on the health care of their animals, one of the lesser-known casualties of the recession.
  • “We’re calling for more bodies coming through the veterinary educational pipeline at higher and higher cost at the very point in time that we need fewer and fewer,” says Dr. Eden Myers, a vet in Mount Sterling, Ky., who runs the Web site JustVetData, where she crunches numbers about the profession. “And they are going to get paid less and less.”
  • About 36.1 million households owned at least one cat in 2011, down 6 percent from 2006. During that period, the number of cat visits to the vet declined 13.5 percent. In the business, this is known as “the cat problem.”
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  • Not only are there fewer dogs — from 2006 to 2011, the number of dogs in the country dropped for the first time, albeit slightly, to 70 million from 72 million, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association Sourcebook survey — but the amount owners paid to vets fell, too. Owners reported they spent about $20 less a year in inflation-adjusted terms in that five-year span
  • “The estimates are that the horse population is down about 30 percent since 2008,
  • it is hard to talk anyone out of vet school. Many students, like Dr. Schafer, set their hearts on the job at an early age. If you are doing what you have always wanted, and you find it fulfilling, the numbers don’t seem relevant. At least initially.
Javier E

Do We Really Need to Sleep 7 Hours a Night? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • By some estimates, Americans sleep two to three hours fewer today than they did before the industrial revolution.
  • now a new study is challenging that notion. It found that Americans on average sleep as much as people in three different hunter-gatherer societies where there is no electricity and the lifestyles have remained largely the same for thousands of years.
  • Yet the hunter-gatherers included in the new study, which was published in Current Biology, were relatively fit and healthy despite regularly sleeping amounts that are near the low end of those in industrialized societies.
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  • their daily energy expenditure is about the same as most Americans, suggesting physical activity is not the reason for their relative good health.
  • The prevailing notion in sleep medicine is that humans evolved to go to bed when the sun goes down, and that by and large we stay up much later than we should because we are flooded with artificial light
  • Dr. Siegel and his colleagues found no evidence of this. The hunter-gatherer groups they studied, which slept outside or in crude huts, did not go to sleep when the sun went down. Usually they stayed awake three to four hours past sunset, with no light exposure other than the faint glow of a small fire that would keep animals away and provide a bit of warmth in the winter. Most days they would wake up about an hour before sunrise.
  • In a typical night, they slept just six and a half hours — slightly less than the average American
  • “I think this paper is going to transform the field of sleep,” said John Peever, a sleep expert at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the new research. “It’s difficult to envision how we can claim that Western society is highly sleep deprived if these groups that live without all these modern distractions and pressing schedules sleep less or about the same amount
  • in the new study, the hunter-gatherer societies were found to have a sleep period — meaning the time they were actually in bed — of roughly seven to eight and a half hours, which he said was consistent with his group’s recommendations.
  • the question of how much sleep people require was a delicate one. “Really it’s just the amount that allows people to wake up feeling refreshed and alert,
  • Dr. Siegel said he worried that putting a number on the amount of sleep people require could push those who get less to resort to using sleeping pills, which carry severe side effects. About 5 percent of Americans take sleeping pills, a percentage that has doubled in the past two decades.
  • called the new study “excellent and very timely,” and he said it suggests that sleep quality is much more important than quantity.
  • Some historians have also argued that it is not natural for people to sleep straight through the night. They say that before the introduction of artificial light it was normal for people to sleep in two intervals separated by an hour of wakefulness, a phenomenon known as segmented sleep, or “first” and “second” sleep.
  • But Dr. Siegel said he always questioned those assertions because there were no rigorous studies of sleep behaviors back then. He and his colleagues decided that one way to get some insight was to study cultures relatively unaffected by artificial light.
  • Among those they chose to follow were the Hadza people, who spend their days hunting and foraging in northern Tanzania, much as their ancestors have for tens of thousands of years; the San of Namibia, who have lived as hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari for at least 20,000 years; and the Tsimané, a seminomadic group that lives in the Andean foothills of Bolivia, near the farthest reaches of the human migration out of Africa.
  • The researchers found that in addition to sleeping roughly similar amounts each night, the three groups rarely took naps during the day and did not sleep in two separate intervals at night.
  • “The Hadza and the San live in the area where we know humans evolved, and then the Tsimané live in some sense at the end of the human migration,” he said. “The fact that we see very similar sleep times gives me great confidence that this is how all of our ancestors slept.”
  • Their sleep did not seem to be problematic. Chronic insomnia, which affects 20 percent to 30 percent of Americans, occurred in just 2 percent of the hunter-gatherers. The San and the Tsimané did not even have a word for it in their languages.
  • ambient temperature may be a major factor. The groups did not go sleep at sunset and they did not wake up at sunrise, suggesting that light exposure did not have much influence on their sleep patterns. But they almost always fell asleep as temperatures began to fall at night, and they would wake up right as the temperatures were rising again.
  • This suggests that humans may have evolved to sleep during the coldest hours of the day, perhaps as a way to conserve energy
  • “Today we sleep in environments with fixed temperatures, but none of our ancestors did,” Dr. Siegel said. “We evolved to sleep in a natural environment where the temperature falls at night. Whether we can treat insomnia by putting people in an environment where the temperature is modulated in this way is something to be studied in the future.
alexdeltufo

Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump's Takeover - The New York Times - 0 views

  • By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night,
  • Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.
  • They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism,
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  • Yet if keeping the peace means embracing Mr. Trump and his most divisive ideas and utterances, a growing number are loath to do it.
  • “Because Paul Ryan, and I love him to death, but he’s one of those career politicians.
  • “Trump leveraged a perfect storm,” said Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in an email message. “
  • After seething at Washington for so long, hundreds or thousands of miles from the capital, many of these voters now see Mr. Trump as a kind of savior.
  • Many Republican voters trudged along with those earlier nominees, but never became truly animated until Mr. Trump offered them his brand of angry populism: a blend of protectionism at home and a smaller American footprint abroad.
  • “Everything is subject to negotiation, but I can’t and won’t be changing much, because the voters support me because of what I’m saying and how I’m saying it,” Mr. Trump said.
  • . Leaders such as Mr. Romney warned in the direst terms that Mr. Trump’s nomination would stain the party and lead it to ruin. Venerable media outlets on the right,
  • On the left, too, Senator Bernie Sanders has built his own movement with millions of voters, and $210 million in fund-raising, by using online tools as simple as email to seek support.
  • The adhesive that once held Republicans together — a shared commitment to a strong national defense and limited government
  • Alongside the turbulent economy were signs of something more profound plaguing blue-collar white communities, which have increasingly become core Republican constituencies: an increase in children born to single parents, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and shortened average life spans.
  • The party has never been more out of touch with our voters,” Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman, said of the two factions, acknowledging that Republicans could splinter completely after this election. “I don’t know how you reconcile a lot of them.”
Javier E

At Kimberly-Clark, 'Dead Wood' Workers Have Nowhere to Hide - WSJ - 0 views

  • One of the company’s goals now is “managing out dead wood,” aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards. Turnover is now about twice as high it was a decade ago, with approximately 10% of U.S. employees leaving annually, voluntarily or not, the company said.
  • Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. “People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past,” said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm.
  • Coca-Cola Co. KO -0.41 % in June approved pushing its new performance-management process from the pilot stage to a global rollout. The new system encourages managers to conduct a monthly “reflection” on every direct report, answering five questions that include “Given his/her performance, would you assign this associate to increased scale, scope, and responsibilities?” and “Is this associate at risk for low performance?”
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  • The changes mirror what is happening inside many large companies, where “performance management” reflects the conviction that a sharpened focus on creating a high-performing workforce is a vital tool to generate revenue and profit.
  • Performance management shifts companies away from backward-looking, once-a-year reviews framed largely as compliance requirements—a paper trail for potential job cuts and salary decisions—to a process that is real-time, continuous and focused on helping people meet ambitious goals, or move out of the company faster.
  • The last recession led many employers to rethink the nearly automatic merit raises they had been doling out, forcing them to do a better job identifying high and low performers when giving raises and bonuses. Millennial workers, meanwhile, demand more feedback, more coaching and a stronger sense of their career path.
  • systems let managers track workers’ progress via dashboards that display their goals, accomplishments, attendance, peer feedback and other data.
  • Executives’ use of phrases like “performance culture” in conference calls with analysts and investors has doubled in the past five years, according to a review of transcripts in the Factiva news database. Firms that set goals and hold workers accountable “clearly outperform,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University and co-author of a recent paper that used Census data to examine more than 32,000 U.S. manufacturing plants. He said they have faster growth, higher profitability and are less likely to go bankrupt.
  • Some academics say constant monitoring can feel intrusive and threatening to workers, especially those who value stability. But human-resources experts largely agree that the traditional review process is a waste of time and needs an overhaul.
  • Remaining employees are expected to work “smarter” and meet regularly raised targets. “We have to routinely shuffle the resources and say, what’s the most important thing we need to do today, this week, this month, to drive this objective?”
  • Using the Workday tool, Kimberly-Clark’s salaried employees set goals and report their progress, record accomplishments or mistakes, and solicit and send feedback
  • The system collects and archives feedback, which can be seen by employees’ managers. It also holds data on staffers’ strengths and development needs, their performance ratings and the risk they might leave the company.
  • “It’s certainly more challenging” for employees, said Mr. Herbert, the retired sales director. “If you really don’t have the mettle, you’re asked to get on with your life’s work [elsewhere].”
  • In 2015, Kimberly-Clark retained 95% of its top performers. Among the employees whose work was rated “unacceptable” or “inconsistent,” 44% left the company voluntarily or were let go. Ms. Gottung said she is “pretty pleased” that low-performer turnover has been rising.
  • Mr. Falk, the CEO, reviews 100 senior managers’ performance plans every year to make sure their goals are ambitious and reflect company priorities. Managers are instructed to begin every meeting with a story about how someone demonstrated one of the six behaviors the company promotes, such as “build trust” or “think customer.”
  • Regular “culture of accountability” sessions train employees in giving and receiving difficult feedback. When a colleague suggests improvements, “the proper response was ‘thank you for the feedback,’ not defensiveness,” Mr. Luettgen said. Employees also practice reinforcing positive behaviors, such as praising a colleague who had given up a weekend to solve a customer complaint.
  • More than 10,000 of Kimberly-Clark’s workers used the feedback feature in Workday in 2014, and about 25% of the comments were considered “constructive,” while the rest were positive or neutral, said Sandy Allred, a senior director on the talent management team. Staffers can send feedback to peers or workers above or below them
davisem

Italy's referendum: A nightmare scenario in the heart of Europe - Dec. 1, 2016 - 0 views

shared by davisem on 05 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Will Italy deliver the next shock to the political establishment?
  • force the prime minister's resignation, spark a banking crisis and ultimately push Italy out of the eurozone
  • Such a scenario would require a line of political dominoes to fall in just the right way
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  • Italians are being asked to vote on a sweeping series of constitutional reforms championed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. He says the changes are vital to end political gridlock and revive Italy's stagnant economy, and has pledged to resign if voters reject them.
  • immediate risk stems from the country's troubled banks, which are saddled with about €360 billion ($383 billion) in non-performing loans, roughly a third of the eurozone total
  • Its stock has lost 86% so far this year, and other heavyweights such as Unicredit (UNCFF) have fared little better.
  • f Renzi follows through on his pledge to resign, it is possible -- but not a foregone conclusion -- that early elections could be triggered
  • The party, founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, is animated by many of the same forces that Trump leveraged to win the White House.
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    Italians vote on Sunday, and it could force the prime minister's resignation, and this would spark a banking crisis and push Italy out of the Eurozone. If Rezni follows through with his pledge to resign, that the elections could be triggered.
maxwellokolo

Cancer spread cut by 75% in tests - BBC News - 0 views

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    The deadly spread of cancer around the body has been cut by three-quarters in animal experiments, say scientists. Tumours can "seed" themselves elsewhere in the body and this process is behind 90% of cancer deaths. The mouse study, published in Nature, showed altering the immune system slowed the spread of skin cancers to the lungs.
lindsayweber1

Report: Chicago police use excessive force and often treat people "as animals or subhuman" - Vox - 0 views

  • The Chicago Police Department routinely violates civil rights, uses unnecessary force, discriminates against minority residents, and fails to hold officers accountable — creating a climate of distrust, violence, and fear that makes residents and cops unsafe. That’s according to a massive new report that the US Department of Justice released on Friday.
  • The investigation followed the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald, initially claimed that the black 17-year-old lunged at police officers and posed a dangerous threat. But a dashboard camera video released in 2015 showed that McDonald was at least 10 feet away from the officers and didn’t move toward police. The revelation worsened already-tense community relations with the police, leading the Justice Department to get involved in its biggest investigation of a local police department yet.
  • For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts.
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  • The report is likely the Justice Department’s last major investigation before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, the Justice Department has aggressively investigated nearly two dozen police departments and pushed for reform, particularly after high-profile police killings. But Trump and his attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, have voiced skepticism of the investigations, suggesting that the Trump administration will do less to hold local police departments accountable through the Justice Department.
  • We found that officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone — including unarmed individuals.
  • Yet just 1.3 percent of complaints over racist language between 2011 and March 2016 were sustained by internal investigators, the Justice Department found.
  • CPD has not provided officers with adequate guidance to understand how and when they may use force, or how to safely and effectively control and resolve encounters to reduce the need to use force
  • But it’s not just tolerance; at times the police department appears to engage in an active cover-up — particularly through “a code of silence” and by hiding evidence.
  • One particularly striking statistic: More than 30,000 complaints are made against the Chicago Police Department every year. But while the department sustains less than 2 percent of those complaints, most are never investigated at all.
  • Still, it’s worth emphasizing that these findings may not be exclusive to Chicago. Whether it’s Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans, or Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.In that sense, it’s not just Chicago policing that’s flawed, but American policing as a whole.
abbykleman

Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte 'invited to White House' during Donald Trump call - 0 views

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    US President-elect Donald Trump invited Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte to the White House next year during a "very engaging, animated" phone conversation, a Duterte aide said on Friday, amid rocky relations between their two countries. The call lasted just over seven minutes, Duterte's special adviser, Christopher Go, said in a text message to media that gave few details.
maxwellokolo

'They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals' - 0 views

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    You hear a murder scene before you see it: The desperate cries of a new widow. The piercing sirens of approaching police cars. The thud, thud, thud of the rain drumming on the pavement of a Manila alleyway - and on the back of Romeo Torres Fontanilla.
Javier E

The right has its own version of political correctness. It's just as stifling. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”
  • But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
  • Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.
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  • Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.
  • Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”
  • Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage.
  • Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.
  • Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?
  • The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left.
  • There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.”
  • Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.
  • Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.
  • The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals.
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