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Do you think criminals should die for their crimes?

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As a former law enforcement officer, former prosecutor, criminal lawyer, and continuing real-world "student" of criminology, I've seen up close the evidence suggesting that the United States should not be having this conversation anymore, because it may be time to put an end to capital punishment completely.

This is not because I have any moral objection to executing the worst of the worst -- those who murder innocent victims, sometimes in the most horrific ways imaginable. It is hard to see capital punishment as particularly "cruel" or "unusual" when the victims will often have died much worse deaths than the killer will be subjected to. But the fact is that there are several practical reasons why the death penalty just doesn't make sense any longer, if it ever really did in the first place.

1. Executions are actually less punitive than life without parole. I've never been to prison, but having dealt regularly with prisoners, it's clear that prison life is hard -- very hard. And you don't have to take my word for it. Recently executed murderer David Zink had this to say about it just before his death by lethal injection in Missouri:

"For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die. ... Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I encourage you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society figures it out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a lingering death."

This point of view is not surprising when you look at the Supermax prison in Colorado, which some have described as a fate worse than death. There, inmates typically spend 23 hours a day locked inside a cell, with little communication with other inmates or the outside world. There are also state versions of these facilities, which the New York City Bar Association has labeled as cruel and unusual punishment, likening imprisonment in one as torture under international law.

2. Death penalty litigation makes no financial sense. Numerous studies have found that death penalty criminal litigation costs taxpayers far more than prosecutions seeking life without parole. For example, in Colorado, where the Holmes jury now has to spend the next several weeks hearing evidence, the state will shell out approximately $3.5 million, as opposed to an average of $150,000 if the state had not sought the death penalty, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Why? Because the average length of the initial prosecution for a death penalty case -- not including lengthy appeals -- means more than a thousand extra days of courtroom resources are being used. Judges, prosecutors, public defenders, court reporters, jurors, bailiffs and other courtroom staff are all needed just to conduct a trial, and that means spending a lot of money from state coffers that could have been used elsewhere. In Colorado's case specifically, the state has executed exactly one person since 1976, when the Supreme Court of the United States lifted the moratorium on capital punishment in the landmark ruling of Gregg v. Georgia. So is this punishment phase of the Holmes trial really necessary? Only time will tell, but the fact remains that Colorado has historically been hesitant, to say the least, to execute murderers.

3. Death penalty litigation is harder on families of murder victims. Death penalty cases on average take 25 years or so to reach ultimate resolution, whether it be the imposition of the death sentence, a reversal or otherwise. As such, family members and loved ones of murder victims often find themselves entangled in the justice system for a very long time. In fact, in Colorado, the trial portion of the process alone is six times longer than if the state were seeking life without parole.

4. The death penalty is not evenly applied. For starters, only 31 of the 50 U.S. states employ capital punishment. And even in states where it is an option, prosecutors can decide against pursuing a death sentence. This is the case in the "hot car death" in Cobb County, Georgia, involving Justin Ross Harris, who is accused of murdering his young son by leaving him strapped in a car seat to bake to death. With the death penalty off the table, any conviction and appeals process would be much shorter than in a capital case.

Wise use of prosecutorial discretion should therefore be welcomed, not least because prosecutors know their cases better than anyone. Also, prosecutorial discretion can mean that a case costs much less, eliminates many appellate issues, shortens the trial and ultimately brings the matter to a conclusion much sooner than if it were a death penalty trial.

5. Despite safeguards, innocent people do wind up on death row. The fact is that innocent people are convicted and sometimes end up on death row. I have plenty of heartbreaking stories of clients who, in my opinion, were convicted of crimes they did not commit. And I am far from alone -- there have been 154 verified cases of death row exonerations since 1973.

Meanwhile, a study last year found that, at a conservative estimate, "more than 4 percent of inmates sentenced to death in the United States are probably innocent." Indeed, there have been 330 exonerations based on DNA alone, with 20 of those defendants having served time on death row since the advent of DNA technology. A case from North Carolina underscores this point. There, Henry McCollum was released last year after spending some 30 years on death row for the murder of an 11-year-old girl that DNA evidence suggested he did not commit. With cases such as this, it defies all reason to believe that no innocent person has been executed in the United States.

The bottom line is this: While the death penalty is neither "cruel," when taking into account the cruelty so often inflicted on the victim, nor "unusual," in that it has been around for millennia, there are simply too many practical reasons for states to curtail or abandon their use of the death penalty. Our criminal justice system -- and those caught up in it, including the families of victims -- would be the biggest beneficiaries should we choose to end capital punishment in the United States.

Of course, the debate over capital punishment is a longstanding one, and there is no end to it in sight. But it is hard not to question the rationality -- indeed the sanity -- of continuing to follow a system that does not deter violent crime for determined individuals.

One example of such a determined individual is admitted cop killer, Jamie Hood, who was recently convicted of the murder of Athens, Georgia Police officer Buddy Christian. Bizarrely, Hood represented himself and beat almost half of the 70 count indictment and also "won" the sentencing phase of the trial when a jury, after deliberating only about an hour and a half, returned a verdict of life without parole -- a sentence which Hood offered to accept on a guilty plea. This further illustrates that capital punishment does not deter individuals who are intent on murder.

Just ask Chattanooga or Charleston.

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death penalty: why america needs a rethink - cnn

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Death penalty: Why America needs a rethink - CNN

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As a former law enforcement officer, former prosecutor, criminal lawyer, and continuing real-world "student" of criminology, I've seen up close the evidence suggesting that the United States should not be having this conversation anymore, because it may be time to put an end to capital punishment completely.

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Is excessive police militarization better or worse for America? This video demonstrates some of the pros and cons of this steady process.

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What role does religion play in drug recovery?

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When a debilitating substance habit consumes someone's life, they often look to a Higher Power to help give them the strength to get better. Although it's not for everyone, a spiritually-inclined treatment process helps thousands of addicts each year find the motivation necessary for recovery.

Faith and Religion in Drug and Alcohol Recovery

Alcoholics Anonymous, perhaps the most well-known recovery support group, puts faith at the foreground of its philosophy. Since being founded in the early 1900s, the group proposes that alcoholism reflects a disease of body, mind and soul. Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W. said men and women who abuse substances "have not only been mentally and physically ill, (they) have been spiritually sick."

Nearly 80 years later, substance abuse in America has yet to slow. Over the past century we've seen myriad medications, therapy modules and self-help routines developed to battle the problem. Faith and spirituality remain among the most time-tested supplements in the world of addiction treatment and provide a core value for many rehab facilities and community support groups that yield success stories.

Ceasing substance use does not guarantee a full recovery for the chemically-dependant; a dramatic change in how one feels, thinks and views the world plays a major role as well. This change can occur in a number of ways, but a renewed sense of purpose can often be credited to an individual's improved spiritual health and a relationship with God or a higher power.

Methods of Treatment

The role of faith in substance abuse treatment ranges from minimal to pervasive. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration supports more than 800 faith-based community organizations that span the spectrum of treatment methods.

For some, underlying religious principles provide a backdrop for traditional psychological approaches to treatment, such as behavior management and other therapies. In these cases, spiritual principles come to the foreground sporadically.

Other organizations weave faith and religion into every piece of the treatment process. These groups may reject the involvement of doctors or any kind of medication, believing that the power of prayer, spiritual strengthening and an intimate relationship with God can cure the illness of addiction and send addicts back into the world as healthy, rejuvenated individuals.

Does Faith Work?

No two people are the same. Each person struggling with substance abuse will respond differently to any given philosophy of treatment.

That said, recovering individuals who report higher levels of spirituality display a number of promising qualities:

Lower anxiety

Higher resilience to stress

More optimistic life orientation

Greater perceived social support

People with a prior history of religious beliefs respond better to faith-based treatments than agnostics and atheists. This is especially true for people of color.

In general, people who identify with being spiritual and those who attend regular church services are less likely to drink or take drugs. Adults who skip out on religious services are five times more likely to experiment with hard drugs and seven times more likely to binge drink.

Spirituality works as a protective factor against chemical dependency, according to one study, by promoting values of leading a substance-free life, occupying a person's free time, and encouraging abstinence.

Popular Faith-Based Groups

The most prominent addiction recovery group, Alcoholics Anonymous, carries the torch of a faith-based recovery model. Through thousands locally based groups, more than 1 million members take part in its recovery program at any given time. The Big Book - the handbook basically known at the "AA Bible," mentions a "Higher Power" more than 300 times, and several steps of the group's famous 12-step program mention God, including beginning meetings with an adapted Serenity Prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Several other 12-step groups, such as Cocaine Anonymous, make references to a Higher Power in their core principles. According to this group, though, the Higher Power should be one of each individual member's creating. While the group posits faith as a crucial element of recovery, they strive not to alienate any specific religion.

"It is easy enough to confuse the word spirituality with religion," it says on the Cocaine Anonymous website. "As it relates to God, Cocaine Anonymous is a spiritual program, not a religious one."

In fact, groups push for members at least to believe in a God "of their understanding," or a god, "however they see god."

Some recent branches of Alcoholics Anonymous reworded the 12 steps to similarly be less overbearing about the religious foundation of the group, and make people of all backgrounds feel welcome.

Still, a number of support groups and treatment facilities alike take pride in their religious values and the role these play in the recovery process.

Secular Alternatives

When choosing a treatment plan for yourself or a loved one suffering from addiction, you have the choice between a faith-based or secular organization. We are fortunate to live in a world with options to match our many diverse belief systems. And if one method of treatment doesn't do the trick, you may decide to try an alternative path.

You can learn more about the core principles of a particular rehab facility or support group by browsing their website or speaking to a representative.

View Sources

Cocaine Anonymous. (2003). A Higher Power. Retrieved from https://ca.org/literature/higher-power/

Hendrickson, M. E. (2013, May 13). Incorporating Clients' Underlying Religious and Spiritual Beliefs in Therapy May Improve Substance Abuse Treatment Practices, Especially for Persons of Color. University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=edissertations_sp2

Pardini, D. A. et al. (2000, December). Religious faith and spirituality in substance abuse recovery: determining the mental health benefits. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11166499

Sneed, K. J. (2008, February). Divine Intervention: Integrating Spirituality into Addiction Services. North American Association of Christians in Social Work. Retrieved from http://www.nacsw.org/Publications/Proceedings2008/SneedKDivineIntervention.pdf

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014, November 25). About Faith-based and Community Initiatives. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/faith-based-initiatives/about

Van der meer Sanchez, Z. & Nappo, S. A. (2008, April). Religious intervention and recovery from drug addiction. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18372977

Wells, J. (2012, February 23). Religion can be powerful ally in fight against substance abuse. Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved from http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-02-23/opinion/os-ed-whitney-houston-abuse-lessons-022112-20120222_1_substance-abuse-drug-and-alcohol-abuse-illicit-drugs

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When a debilitating substance habit consumes someone's life, they often look to a Higher Power to help give them the strength to get better. Although it's not for everyone, a spiritually-inclined treatment process helps thousands of addicts each year find the motivation necessary for recovery.

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An interesting little read about how Science is being used to revolutionize the way that doctors diagnose and treat drug addiction.

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What does the future of healthcare and surgery look like in the future? Will there be more robots or lawsuits against them?

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"I would probably need for my child's heart to stop to show me that she was dead. Her heart is still beating, so there's still life there."

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Two young females, both brain dead without warning, remain on ventilators while their devastated families challenge the judgments of their hospitals.

In one situation, the family believes a miracle is possible, and wants to prolong the patient's biological functioning. In the other case, the family wants to disconnect the patient to honor her wishes. But both families are facing obstacles.

The way we talk about neurological death has created a misperception, ethicists say: that "brain death" is somehow not as final as cardiac death, even though, by definition, it is.

The term "life support" exacerbates the problem, too, because those who are brain dead do not have a life to sustain, said Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. This seems to be a fundamental problem in both cases that have entered the national spotlight, he said.

"I think these cases have been botched, horribly," he said. "They're giving the impression that dead people can come back to life."

Brain dead, but kept alive

Here's a quick overview of the two situations:

Doctors in Oakland, California, declared Jahi McMath, 13, to be brain dead on December 12, three days after she underwent surgery to remove her tonsils, adenoids and extra sinus tissue, which doctors thought were causing sleep apnea.

She suffered complications from the procedure, which experts have told CNN is commonly done, but not routine.

A judge concluded Tuesday that Jahi is brain dead, but ruled that Jahi will remain on life support at least until December 30. The family of the teen is seeking to move her to another facility for treatment, the girl's uncle, Omari Sealy, told reporters Thursday.

Moving her would require the insertion of tracheostomy and gastrostomy tubes, family attorney Christopher Dolan said.

However, hospital Chief of Pediatrics David Durand said the judge didn't authorize a transfer to another facility.

"Children's Hospital Oakland does not believe that performing surgical procedures on the body of a deceased person is an appropriate medical practice. Children's Hospital Oakland continues to extend its wishes for peace and closure to Jahi McMath's family," Durand said.

But Jahi's mother, Nailah Winkfield, said on Friday, "I would probably need for my child's heart to stop to show me that she was dead. Her heart is still beating, so there's still life there."

In Texas, a hospital and family of a brain dead patient also clash over continuing life support, but the situation is further complicated because the woman is pregnant.

Marlise Munoz, 33, has been unresponsive since November 26, when her husband, Erick Munoz, discovered her on the kitchen floor at their home, said her mother, Lynne Machado. The family says she is being kept alive on a ventilator at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas.

Her family says she would not want her life prolonged by a machine, but Texas state law says "life-sustaining treatment" cannot be withheld from a pregnant patient, regardless of her wishes or the age of the fetus.

"At all times, we will follow the law as it is applicable to health care in the state of Texas," said J.R. Labbe, vice president of communications and community affairs for JPS Health Network, which oversees the hospital.

These cases may make you think of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman who died in 2005 after living on a feeding tube for more than a decade. Schiavo was the subject of a lengthy legal battle between her parents and her husband, Michael Schiavo, who maintained she wouldn't have wanted to live in a "persistent vegetative state."

But "persistent vegatative state" means the brain still has some activity, even though the patient is in a deep state of unconsciousness. "Coma" is another word for this, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Both these situations are distinct from brain death -- according to the Uniform Determination of Death Act, an individual is dead when he or she "has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem."

"It seems like there seems to continue to be confusion about what it means to die using neurologic criteria," said Cynda Hylton Rushton, professor of clinical ethics at Johns Hopkins University.

Rushton suggests, in fact, that this phrase "die using neurological criteria" be used instead of "brain death," to emphasize what it means.

Terms such as "mechanical support" or "artificial machine support" could be used to refer to sustaining the functioning of a brain dead person, Caplan said.

"No one wants to take away 'life support,' " Caplan said.

In Caplan's view, it doesn't do any families any good if hospitals ask them about mechanically continuing biological function in a brain dead patient. He says doctors should be more transparent about the finality of brain death.

"It just creates the possibility of a terrible scenario like the one that's unfolded (in Jahi's case), where the parents don't really understand and then start to resist any removal of machines because they just want to hope that the worst possible thing did not happen," he said. "I don't think it's kind to not be clear when death happens."

In the Texas case, Caplan noted, where it's the family against a law, if Munoz is indeed brain dead, she is not, by definition, receiving "life-sustaining treatment."

It seems to Caplan that the law's intention was not to continue treating the dead.

"That the heart can continue beating in a body like this is unnerving to people," said Kenneth Goodman, director of the Bioethics Program at the University of Miami.

One might argue that the fetus is alive, and is the one on "life support." But that opens up a lot of other issues: Will the fetus be viable? Was it damaged by the mother's lack of oxygen when she lost consciousness? Right now it is 18 weeks old; Machado said doctors will know more about its health at 22 to 24 weeks.

The Texas law in this case "imposes the view of the state on the adult pregnant woman, as to whether or not the fetus counts as a human being," Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, said.

The misunderstanding surrounding cases such as Jahi's and Munoz's signals a need for a national conversation about brain death and levels of brain functioning, Caplan said.

Although there are scientific criteria for "brain death," the concept contains a moral judgment, Singer said. When viewed in connection to organ transplantation, there seems to be a value assessment that, for instance, the organs of a brain-dead person should be used to save someone else's life.

Organ transplantation and the idea of brain death have different origins, researchers argue in a 2007 paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, but they became linked in 1963, when the first kidney transplant with a brain dead donor was performed.

Had these procedures with brain dead patients not emerged until more recent decades, in a cultural climate rife with right-to-life debates, perhaps there would have been more public discussion and controversy about the definition of "brain death," Singer said.

The public might have taken a closer look at what matters: Is it the "person," which exists by virtue of a functioning brain, or the organism?

"If you think that somehow what is precious, or what has a right to life, is simply an organism, then I suppose you might say, 'Well, this is not dead,'" he said. "This organism is still able to function. It needs medical support, but of course there's a lot of people who need medical support."

Jahi's family has said they are hoping for a miracle. Such cases also bring up the question of what is society's responsibility to accommodate requests based on faith, Rushton said.

"We really need to engage in a new dialogue that takes us out of the debate of faith into science, into a conversation about what are the limits of our human knowledge and technology, and how do we accept the fact that all of us will eventually die?" Rushton said. "These are the kinds of situations where there are no easy answers."

Medicine can't cure everything, but we act as though death is optional, she said.

We may have technology called "life support," but even that can't last forever.

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when 'life support' is really 'death support' - cnn

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When 'life support' is really 'death support'

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Two young females, both brain dead without warning, remain on ventilators while their devastated families challenge the judgments of their hospitals. In one situation, the family believes a miracle is possible, and wants to prolong the patient's biological functioning. In the other case, the family wants to disconnect the patient to honor her wishes.

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If you use Instagram you would know what a rinsta and finsta is.

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Image

Credit Credit Getty Images

Earlier this week, Harvard University revealed that it had rescinded admissions offers to at least 10 students who shared offensive images within what they thought was a private Facebook group chat. The students posted memes and images that mocked minority groups, child abuse, sexual assault and the Holocaust, among other things.

It is easy for parents to be left wondering, "What were they thinking?"

Over the past few years, memes - usually images or videos with text often meant to be funny or sarcastic in nature - have become one of the most popular ways, along with photos and videos, that youth communicate on social media. While some of that communication can be positive, allowing teenagers to explore their own identity development and find a sense of belonging, it can also get teens in trouble.

Sharing videos, images and memes creates the opportunity for an instantaneous positive feedback loop that can perpetuate poor decision making. In an environment where teens spend around nine hours using some form of online media every day, it doesn't take long for them to be influenced by an "all-about-the-likes" sense of values that can potentially lead to life-altering decisions.

I've spent nearly two decades working with teens on organization and time-management in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and many teen girls tell me they have a real Instagram account ("rinsta") for a wider audience and then keep a "finsta" (friends-only or "fake" Instagram) for their closest friends.

Many teens use shortened versions of their names or aliases for finsta accounts, which they often see as an opportunity to share a less edited, less filtered version of their lives. They might spend a lot of time trying to capture the perfect Instagram photo for the "rinsta," which reaches a wider general audience, while a finsta might reveal, as one high school sophomore girl declared, "my innermost thoughts." Like the teens in the Harvard Facebook group chat, those using finsta accounts can have a false sense of confidence to say and do things they might not want a wider audience to see.

And because so much of today's teen social media use is rooted in a fear of getting caught, many teens have detoured their online activity to different ways of cloaked communication. Closed and secret Facebook groups are one way teens (and adults!) privatize communication to a select group - a closed group feels more private because it allows an administrator to approve new users and monitor content. Secret Facebook groups remain unsearchable, and members can only be added or invited by another member. Another trick is to use hidden apps like Calculator% and Calculator+ that look like regular calculators, but require users to enter their passcodes to reveal a back storage area containing private photos.

Also popular with secretive teens are storage apps like Vaulty, which allows users to hide photos and videos, and also has a "mug shot" feature, which takes a photo of anyone who tries to access the app using an incorrect password. Vaulty's most clever trick? Users can create two passwords for one vault, with each password tied to specific levels of access. So, a parent who insists that a teen hand over the password still might be getting limited access. Some teens just hide apps within folders on their phones. Parents wondering if their children are hiding something might look for a cleared search history and an unexplainable spike in data usage as potential red flags.

The ready availability of tools to hide teen social media use can be problematic, leading teens to overshare images, videos and commentary. But that privacy has long been proven to be unreliable, because information shared within a private group can be easily captured in a screenshot and shared with a wider audience. The notion of privacy online is only as reliable as teens' relationships with other users, and that combined with general privacy concerns provides little guarantee that online information will ever be kept secret. In the case of the Harvard students, administrators found out about images and messages shared within a private group chat, highlighting how easily information shared behind digital walls can quickly become more public.

What would motivate such seemingly intelligent teens to behave so recklessly online? Many people - adults and kids alike - view likes, loves, comments and followers as a barometer for popularity, even within a smaller, closed group. Teens can quickly get caught up in the feedback loop, posting and sharing images and videos that they believe will gain the largest reaction. Over time, teens' own values may become convoluted within an online world of instantaneous feedback, and their behavior online can become based on their "all about the likes" values rather than their real-life values.

There is a very real biological basis for this behavior. The combination of social media pressure and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that helps us rationalize decisions, control impulsivity and make judgments, can contribute to offensive online posts.

In a recent study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the areas of teens' brains focused on reward processing and social cognition are similarly activated when they think about money and sex - and when they view a photo receiving lots of likes on social media. When teens viewed photos deemed risky, researchers found the brain regions focused on cognitive control were not activated as much, suggesting that it could be harder for them to make good decisions when viewing images or videos that are graphic in nature. Teens seeking external validation become intoxicated by sensationalist engagement, sometimes sending compromising photos or comments. Of course, some adults have fallen into the same trap.

Even though 86 percent of teens say they've received general advice around online use from their parents, researchers at Common Sense Media found that 30 percent of teens who are online believe their parents know "a little" or "nothing" about what social media apps and sites they use. And yet, teens still say that their parents have the biggest influence on determining what is appropriate and inappropriate online.

Adults need to shift the conversation around teens' social media use away from a fear of getting caught and more toward healthy socialization, effective self-regulation and overall safety. This would be all the more important if a bill that was just overwhelmingly passed in the House becomes law. The bill could make it a felony - punishable by 15 years in jail - if teens send consensual nude photos of themselves.

Some parents try to monitor their teen's social media use with apps of their own. Bark, an app that monitors accounts on 20 different social media platforms, along with iOS and Android texting and email accounts, alerts parents to potentially risky behavior. TeenSafe links teens' phones directly to their parents' phones, and allows full-fledged supervision of phone calls, emails, texts, social media use and geolocation. But such high-level monitoring runs the risk of breaching trust with teens at a crucial developmental time.

Another option is to help young social media users realize that their online and real-life experiences are more intertwined than they may think. Parents might, for example, cite current events, like the Harvard episode, to remind them that nothing online is ever completely private and talk to them about the ways private information can become public. Using open-ended questions will help encourage children to identify and develop their own values and standards around appropriate online behavior. Helping them think through how they might react or behave in certain scenarios can give them the confidence to make better decisions under pressure. Because in the end, teens' online life choices can have real-world outcomes - as those students whose admittance at Harvard was rescinded learned the hard way.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: 'Closed.' 'Fake.' 'Private': The Secret Social Media Lives of Teenagers. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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The Secret Social Media Lives of Teenagers

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Earlier this week, Harvard University revealed that it had rescinded admissions offers to at least 10 students who shared offensive images within what they thought was a private Facebook group chat. The students posted memes and images that mocked minority groups, child abuse, sexual assault and the Holocaust, among other things.

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Social Media kills

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Teen suicide is on the rise, leading some to question if social media is to blame

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Suicide rates for teenage girls are at a 40-year high, according to new CDC data. In a provocative article for The Atlantic, a psychologist makes a correlation between smartphone and social media use and increased rates of suicide and depression in young people. Jericka Duncan reports.

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"If a kid breaks in school, and no one around chooses to hear, do they make a sound?"

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Shane Koyczan: To This Day ... for the bullied and beautiful

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By turn hilarious and haunting, poet Shane Koyczan puts his finger on the pulse of what it's like to be young and ... different. "To This Day," his spoken-word poem about bullying, captivated millions as a viral video (created, crowd-source style, by 80 animators).

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"People are so afraid of variety that they try and fit everything into tiny little boxes with really specific labels."

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How autism freed me to be myself | Rosie King

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How rapidly is Artificial Intelligence advancing?

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Robots may soon rule our everyday life.

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Robin Hanson: What would happen if we upload our brains to computers?

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Meet the "ems" -- machines that emulate human brains and can think, feel and work just like the brains they're copied from. Futurist and social scientist Robin Hanson describes a possible future when ems take over the global economy, running on superfast computers and copying themselves to multitask, leaving humans with only one choice: to retire, forever.

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Does evidence show economic status affects your mental health?

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Does the standard of a person's education influence their mental health? Researchers from the University of Warwick have been exploring whether or not this is the case.

Previous investigations have led to the belief that individuals with a poor standard of education are more likely to experience mental health problems. This has been attributed to the fact that people from poorer backgrounds often do not have access to the best standard of teaching.

Therefore, the scientists took into account factors such as wealth when conducting their study.

They also noted that a low standard of mental wellbeing did not necessarily indicate mental illness, but was closely linked.

Doctors analysed the mental wellbeing of 17,030 participants using data from the Health Survey For England from 2010 and 2011. The individuals were ranked with regard to a scale of 'feeling good and functioning well', as they believed this indicated a good state of mental health.

They found that individuals with a stronger sense of psychological wellbeing were significantly more likely to be happy and contented throughout their lives.

However, when this was measured alongside the standard of people's education, it was found that this played no marked role in influencing a person's mental health.

Study author Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown commented: 'These findings are quite controversial because we expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental wellbeing.

'So if low educational attainment was strongly associated with mental illness, high educational attainment would be strongly connected to mental wellbeing. But that is not the case.'

She added that the planning of mental health programmes may have to change in light of this research, as local authorities and health boards will not necessarily need to consider education as a factor in treating patients.

What's more, the investigation also looked at the mental wellbeing of people of different ethnicities, finding that Afro-Caribbean males in particular were largely happy and contented with their lives.

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Does the standard of a person's education influence their mental health? Researchers from the University of Warwick have been exploring whether or not this is the case. Previous investigations have led to the belief that individuals with a poor standard of education are more likely to experience mental health problems. This has been attributed to the fact that people from poorer backgrounds often do not have access to the best standard of teaching.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Does the standard of a person's education influence their mental health? Researchers from the University of Warwick have been exploring whether or not this is the case.

Previous investigations have led to the belief that individuals with a poor standard of education are more likely to experience mental health problems. This has been attributed to the fact that people from poorer backgrounds often do not have access to the best standard of teaching.

Therefore, the scientists took into account factors such as wealth when conducting their study.

They also noted that a low standard of mental wellbeing did not necessarily indicate mental illness, but was closely linked.

Doctors analysed the mental wellbeing of 17,030 participants using data from the Health Survey For England from 2010 and 2011. The individuals were ranked with regard to a scale of 'feeling good and functioning well', as they believed this indicated a good state of mental health.

They found that individuals with a stronger sense of psychological wellbeing were significantly more likely to be happy and contented throughout their lives.

However, when this was measured alongside the standard of people's education, it was found that this played no marked role in influencing a person's mental health.

Study author Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown commented: 'These findings are quite controversial because we expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental wellbeing.

'So if low educational attainment was strongly associated with mental illness, high educational attainment would be strongly connected to mental wellbeing. But that is not the case.'

She added that the planning of mental health programmes may have to change in light of this research, as local authorities and health boards will not necessarily need to consider education as a factor in treating patients.

What's more, the investigation also looked at the mental wellbeing of people of different ethnicities, finding that Afro-Caribbean males in particular were largely happy and contented with their lives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Does the standard of a person's education influence their mental health? Researchers from the University of Warwick have been exploring whether or not this is the case. Previous investigations have led to the belief that individuals with a poor standard of education are more likely to experience mental health problems. This has been attributed to the fact that people from poorer backgrounds often do not have access to the best standard of teaching.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Does the standard of a person's education influence their mental health? Researchers from the University of Warwick have been exploring whether or not this is the case.

Previous investigations have led to the belief that individuals with a poor standard of education are more likely to experience mental health problems. This has been attributed to the fact that people from poorer backgrounds often do not have access to the best standard of teaching.

Therefore, the scientists took into account factors such as wealth when conducting their study.

They also noted that a low standard of mental wellbeing did not necessarily indicate mental illness, but was closely linked.

Doctors analysed the mental wellbeing of 17,030 participants using data from the Health Survey For England from 2010 and 2011. The individuals were ranked with regard to a scale of 'feeling good and functioning well', as they believed this indicated a good state of mental health.

They found that individuals with a stronger sense of psychological wellbeing were significantly more likely to be happy and contented throughout their lives.

However, when this was measured alongside the standard of people's education, it was found that this played no marked role in influencing a person's mental health.

Study author Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown commented: 'These findings are quite controversial because we expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental wellbeing.

'So if low educational attainment was strongly associated with mental illness, high educational attainment would be strongly connected to mental wellbeing. But that is not the case.'

She added that the planning of mental health programmes may have to change in light of this research, as local authorities and health boards will not necessarily need to consider education as a factor in treating patients.

What's more, the investigation also looked at the mental wellbeing of people of different ethnicities, finding that Afro-Caribbean males in particular were largely happy and contented with their lives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Does the standard of a person's education influence their mental health? Researchers from the University of Warwick have been exploring whether or not this is the case. Previous investigations have led to the belief that individuals with a poor standard of education are more likely to experience mental health problems. This has been attributed to the fact that people from poorer backgrounds often do not have access to the best standard of teaching.

# data[].attributes.body
Could rapid advancement in Artificial Intelligence pose a threat to humans?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Bill Gates is a passionate technology advocate (big surprise), but his predictions about the future of computing aren't uniformly positive.

During a wide-ranging Reddit "Ask me Anything" session -- one that touched upon everything from his biggest regrets to his favorite spread to lather on bread -- the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist outlined a future that is equal parts promising and ominous.

Midway through the discussion on Wednesday, Gates was asked what personal computing will look like in 2045. Gates responded by asserting that the next 30 years will be a time of rapid progress.

"Even in the next 10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good," he wrote. "Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively."

He went on to highlight a Microsoft project known as the "Personal Agent," which is being designed to help people manage their memory, attention and focus. "The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model - the agent will help solve this," he said. "It will work across all your devices."

The response from Reddit users was mixed, with some making light of Gates's revelation ("Clippy 2.0?," wrote one user) -- and others sounding the alarm.

"This technology you are developing sounds at its essence like the centralization of knowledge intake," a Redditor wrote. "Ergo, whomever controls this will control what information people make their own. Even today, we see the daily consequences of people who live in an environment that essentially tunnel-visions their knowledge."

Shortly after, Gates was asked how much of an existential threat superintelligent machines pose to humans.

The question has been at the forefront of several recent discussions among prominent futurists. Last month, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said artificial intelligence "could spell the end of the human race."

[Why the world's most intelligent people shouldn't be so afraid of artificial intelligence]

Speaking at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department's Centennial Symposium in October, Tesla boss Elon Musk referred to artificial intelligence as "summoning the demon."

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out.

British inventor Clive Sinclair has said he thinks artificial intelligence will doom mankind.

"Once you start to make machines that are rivaling and surpassing humans with intelligence, it's going to be very difficult for us to survive," he told the BBC. "It's just an inevitability."

After gushing about the immediate future of technology in his Reddit AMA, Gates aligned himself with the AI alarm-sounders.

"I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," Gates wrote. "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."

Once he finished addressing the potential demise of humankind, Gates got back to answering more immediate, less serious questions, like revealing his favorite spread to put on bread.

"Butter? Peanut butter? Cheese spread?" he wrote. "Any of these."

The Microsoft co-founder's comments on AI came shortly after the managing director of Microsoft Research's Redmond Lab said the doomsday declarations about the threat to human life are overblown.

"There have been concerns about the long-term prospect that we lose control of certain kinds of intelligences," Eric Horvitz said, according to the BBC. "I fundamentally don't think that's going to happen. I think that we will be very proactive in terms of how we field AI systems, and that in the end we'll be able to get incredible benefits from machine intelligence in all realms of life, from science to education to economics to daily life."

Horvitz noted that "over a quarter of all attention and resources" at Microsoft Research are focused on artificial intelligence.
[This story, originally posted on Wednesday, has been updated.]
RELATED: Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Google researchers join forces to avoid 'pitfalls' of artificial intelligence
Stephen Hawking just got an artificial intelligence upgrade, but still thinks AI could bring an end to mankind Elon Musk: 'With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: 'I don't understand why some people are not concerned'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bill Gates is a passionate technology advocate (big surprise), but his predictions about the future of computing aren't uniformly positive. During a wide-ranging Reddit "Ask me Anything" session -- one that touched upon everything from his biggest regrets to his favorite spread to lather on bread -- the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist outlined a future that is equal parts promising and ominous.

# data[].attributes.body
How are school systems missing the diagnosis of most mental health  students in school?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Part One in an NPR Ed series on mental health in schools.
You might call it a silent epidemic.

Up to one in five kids living in the U.S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year.

So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse.

And yet most children - nearly 80 percent - who need mental health services won't get them.

Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out.

Experts say schools could play a role in identifying students with problems and helping them succeed. Yet it's a role many schools are not prepared for.

Educators face the simple fact that, often because of a lack of resources, there just aren't enough people to tackle the job. And the ones who are working on it are often drowning in huge caseloads. Kids in need can fall through the cracks.
"No one ever asked me"
Katie is one of those kids.

She's 18 now. Back when she was 8, she had to transfer to a different school in Prince George's County, Md., in the middle of the year.

"At recess, I didn't have friends to play with," she recalls. "I would make an excuse to stay inside with the teachers and finish extra work or do extra credit."

We're not using Katie's last name to protect her privacy. She's been diagnosed with bulimia and depression.

She says that in the span of a few months, she went from honor roll to failing. She put on weight; other kids called her "fat." She began cutting herself with a razor every day. And she missed a ton of school.

"I felt like every single day was a bad day," she says. "I felt like nobody wanted to help me."

Katie says teachers acted like she didn't care about her schoolwork. "I was so invisible to them."

Every year of high school, she says, was "horrible." She told her therapist she wanted to die and was admitted into the hospital.

During all this time, she says, not a single principal or teacher or counselor ever asked her one simple question: "What's wrong?"

If someone had asked, she says, she would have told them.
Who should have asked?
We talked to educators, advocates, teachers and parents across the country. Here's what they say a comprehensive approach to mental health and education would look like.
The family
The role: The first place to spot trouble is in the home, whether that trouble is substance abuse, slipping grades or a child who sleeps too much. Adults at home - parents, siblings, other relatives - are often the first to notice something going on.

The reality: Many families do not know what to look for. Sometimes a serious problem can be overlooked as "just a phase." But it's those sudden changes - angry outbursts, declining grades, changes in sleeping or eating - that can signal problems. When something unusual crops up, families can keep in close touch with the school.
The teacher
The role: During the week, many students see their teachers even more than their own families. Teachers are in a prime spot to notice changes in behavior. They read essays, see how students relate with other kids and notice when they aren't paying attention.

The reality: Teachers already have a ton on their plates. They're pressured to get test scores up, on top of preparing lessons and grading assignments. Plus, many teachers receive minimal training in mental health issues. But when they do see something concerning, they can raise a flag.
The social worker
The role: Social workers act like a bridge. If teachers come to them with a concern - maybe a child is acting withdrawn - one of the first things they'll do is call home. They see each child through the lens of their family, school and community. They might learn that a family is going through a divorce or homelessness.

The reality: There aren't enough of them. According to one model, every school should have one social worker for every 250 students. The reality is that in some schools, social workers are responsible for many more.
The counselor
The role: In some schools, counselors focus solely on academics: helping students pick classes and apply to college. But in others, they also act a lot like social workers, serving as a link to families and working with students who need support.

The reality: Like school social workers, there just aren't enough counselors. On average nationwide, each counselor is responsible for nearly 500 students. The American School Counselor Association recommends a caseload nearly half that size.
The special education teacher
The Role: Special education teachers may start working with students when a mental health problem affects the ability to do school work. They are primarily responsible for working on academic skills.

The reality: Again, there aren't enough of them. Nearly every state has reported a shortage of special education teachers. Half of all school districts say they have trouble recruiting highly qualified candidates.
The school psychologist
The Role: Here's one job that, on paper, is truly dedicated to student mental health. School psychologists are key players when it comes to crisis intervention and can refer students to outside help, such as a psychiatrist.

The reality: If you sense a pattern here, you're right. In the U.S., there is just one school psychologist for every 1,400 students, according to the most recent data available from the National Association of School Psychologists.
The school nurse
The role: Most any school nurse will tell you, physical and mental health are tough to separate. That puts nurses in a prime spot to catch problems early. For example: A kid who comes into the nurse's office a lot, complaining of headaches or stomach problems? That could be a sign of anxiety, a strategy to avoid a bully, or a sign of troubles at home.

The reality: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends at least one nurse for every 750 students, but the actual ratio across the country can be much higher.
The principal
The role: As the top dogs in schools, principals make the big decisions about priorities. They can bring in social-emotional, anti-bullying and suicide-prevention programs.

The reality: Principals also have a lot on their plates: the day-to-day management of student behavior, school culture and teacher support.
Getting help, and "excited for life"
Katie says things started to turn around for her when she met a nurse at the Children's National Health System in Washington, D.C., who finally showed interest in what was wrong.

Now, she's begun college and wants to be a pediatric nurse.

"I'm doing a lot better now" she says. " Obviously, I mean, I'm a lot happier. I'm excited for school. I'm excited to graduate. I'm excited for life."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mental Health In Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions Of Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An estimated 20 percent of children show signs or symptoms of a mental health problem. It's a destructive force in schools, but most educators don't have the training or resources to help.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Part One in an NPR Ed series on mental health in schools.
You might call it a silent epidemic.

Up to one in five kids living in the U.S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year.

So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse.

And yet most children - nearly 80 percent - who need mental health services won't get them.

Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out.

Experts say schools could play a role in identifying students with problems and helping them succeed. Yet it's a role many schools are not prepared for.

Educators face the simple fact that, often because of a lack of resources, there just aren't enough people to tackle the job. And the ones who are working on it are often drowning in huge caseloads. Kids in need can fall through the cracks.
"No one ever asked me"
Katie is one of those kids.

She's 18 now. Back when she was 8, she had to transfer to a different school in Prince George's County, Md., in the middle of the year.

"At recess, I didn't have friends to play with," she recalls. "I would make an excuse to stay inside with the teachers and finish extra work or do extra credit."

We're not using Katie's last name to protect her privacy. She's been diagnosed with bulimia and depression.

She says that in the span of a few months, she went from honor roll to failing. She put on weight; other kids called her "fat." She began cutting herself with a razor every day. And she missed a ton of school.

"I felt like every single day was a bad day," she says. "I felt like nobody wanted to help me."

Katie says teachers acted like she didn't care about her schoolwork. "I was so invisible to them."

Every year of high school, she says, was "horrible." She told her therapist she wanted to die and was admitted into the hospital.

During all this time, she says, not a single principal or teacher or counselor ever asked her one simple question: "What's wrong?"

If someone had asked, she says, she would have told them.
Who should have asked?
We talked to educators, advocates, teachers and parents across the country. Here's what they say a comprehensive approach to mental health and education would look like.
The family
The role: The first place to spot trouble is in the home, whether that trouble is substance abuse, slipping grades or a child who sleeps too much. Adults at home - parents, siblings, other relatives - are often the first to notice something going on.

The reality: Many families do not know what to look for. Sometimes a serious problem can be overlooked as "just a phase." But it's those sudden changes - angry outbursts, declining grades, changes in sleeping or eating - that can signal problems. When something unusual crops up, families can keep in close touch with the school.
The teacher
The role: During the week, many students see their teachers even more than their own families. Teachers are in a prime spot to notice changes in behavior. They read essays, see how students relate with other kids and notice when they aren't paying attention.

The reality: Teachers already have a ton on their plates. They're pressured to get test scores up, on top of preparing lessons and grading assignments. Plus, many teachers receive minimal training in mental health issues. But when they do see something concerning, they can raise a flag.
The social worker
The role: Social workers act like a bridge. If teachers come to them with a concern - maybe a child is acting withdrawn - one of the first things they'll do is call home. They see each child through the lens of their family, school and community. They might learn that a family is going through a divorce or homelessness.

The reality: There aren't enough of them. According to one model, every school should have one social worker for every 250 students. The reality is that in some schools, social workers are responsible for many more.
The counselor
The role: In some schools, counselors focus solely on academics: helping students pick classes and apply to college. But in others, they also act a lot like social workers, serving as a link to families and working with students who need support.

The reality: Like school social workers, there just aren't enough counselors. On average nationwide, each counselor is responsible for nearly 500 students. The American School Counselor Association recommends a caseload nearly half that size.
The special education teacher
The Role: Special education teachers may start working with students when a mental health problem affects the ability to do school work. They are primarily responsible for working on academic skills.

The reality: Again, there aren't enough of them. Nearly every state has reported a shortage of special education teachers. Half of all school districts say they have trouble recruiting highly qualified candidates.
The school psychologist
The Role: Here's one job that, on paper, is truly dedicated to student mental health. School psychologists are key players when it comes to crisis intervention and can refer students to outside help, such as a psychiatrist.

The reality: If you sense a pattern here, you're right. In the U.S., there is just one school psychologist for every 1,400 students, according to the most recent data available from the National Association of School Psychologists.
The school nurse
The role: Most any school nurse will tell you, physical and mental health are tough to separate. That puts nurses in a prime spot to catch problems early. For example: A kid who comes into the nurse's office a lot, complaining of headaches or stomach problems? That could be a sign of anxiety, a strategy to avoid a bully, or a sign of troubles at home.

The reality: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends at least one nurse for every 750 students, but the actual ratio across the country can be much higher.
The principal
The role: As the top dogs in schools, principals make the big decisions about priorities. They can bring in social-emotional, anti-bullying and suicide-prevention programs.

The reality: Principals also have a lot on their plates: the day-to-day management of student behavior, school culture and teacher support.
Getting help, and "excited for life"
Katie says things started to turn around for her when she met a nurse at the Children's National Health System in Washington, D.C., who finally showed interest in what was wrong.

Now, she's begun college and wants to be a pediatric nurse.

"I'm doing a lot better now" she says. " Obviously, I mean, I'm a lot happier. I'm excited for school. I'm excited to graduate. I'm excited for life."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mental Health In Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions Of Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An estimated 20 percent of children show signs or symptoms of a mental health problem. It's a destructive force in schools, but most educators don't have the training or resources to help.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Part One in an NPR Ed series on mental health in schools.
You might call it a silent epidemic.

Up to one in five kids living in the U.S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year.

So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse.

And yet most children - nearly 80 percent - who need mental health services won't get them.

Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out.

Experts say schools could play a role in identifying students with problems and helping them succeed. Yet it's a role many schools are not prepared for.

Educators face the simple fact that, often because of a lack of resources, there just aren't enough people to tackle the job. And the ones who are working on it are often drowning in huge caseloads. Kids in need can fall through the cracks.
"No one ever asked me"
Katie is one of those kids.

She's 18 now. Back when she was 8, she had to transfer to a different school in Prince George's County, Md., in the middle of the year.

"At recess, I didn't have friends to play with," she recalls. "I would make an excuse to stay inside with the teachers and finish extra work or do extra credit."

We're not using Katie's last name to protect her privacy. She's been diagnosed with bulimia and depression.

She says that in the span of a few months, she went from honor roll to failing. She put on weight; other kids called her "fat." She began cutting herself with a razor every day. And she missed a ton of school.

"I felt like every single day was a bad day," she says. "I felt like nobody wanted to help me."

Katie says teachers acted like she didn't care about her schoolwork. "I was so invisible to them."

Every year of high school, she says, was "horrible." She told her therapist she wanted to die and was admitted into the hospital.

During all this time, she says, not a single principal or teacher or counselor ever asked her one simple question: "What's wrong?"

If someone had asked, she says, she would have told them.
Who should have asked?
We talked to educators, advocates, teachers and parents across the country. Here's what they say a comprehensive approach to mental health and education would look like.
The family
The role: The first place to spot trouble is in the home, whether that trouble is substance abuse, slipping grades or a child who sleeps too much. Adults at home - parents, siblings, other relatives - are often the first to notice something going on.

The reality: Many families do not know what to look for. Sometimes a serious problem can be overlooked as "just a phase." But it's those sudden changes - angry outbursts, declining grades, changes in sleeping or eating - that can signal problems. When something unusual crops up, families can keep in close touch with the school.
The teacher
The role: During the week, many students see their teachers even more than their own families. Teachers are in a prime spot to notice changes in behavior. They read essays, see how students relate with other kids and notice when they aren't paying attention.

The reality: Teachers already have a ton on their plates. They're pressured to get test scores up, on top of preparing lessons and grading assignments. Plus, many teachers receive minimal training in mental health issues. But when they do see something concerning, they can raise a flag.
The social worker
The role: Social workers act like a bridge. If teachers come to them with a concern - maybe a child is acting withdrawn - one of the first things they'll do is call home. They see each child through the lens of their family, school and community. They might learn that a family is going through a divorce or homelessness.

The reality: There aren't enough of them. According to one model, every school should have one social worker for every 250 students. The reality is that in some schools, social workers are responsible for many more.
The counselor
The role: In some schools, counselors focus solely on academics: helping students pick classes and apply to college. But in others, they also act a lot like social workers, serving as a link to families and working with students who need support.

The reality: Like school social workers, there just aren't enough counselors. On average nationwide, each counselor is responsible for nearly 500 students. The American School Counselor Association recommends a caseload nearly half that size.
The special education teacher
The Role: Special education teachers may start working with students when a mental health problem affects the ability to do school work. They are primarily responsible for working on academic skills.

The reality: Again, there aren't enough of them. Nearly every state has reported a shortage of special education teachers. Half of all school districts say they have trouble recruiting highly qualified candidates.
The school psychologist
The Role: Here's one job that, on paper, is truly dedicated to student mental health. School psychologists are key players when it comes to crisis intervention and can refer students to outside help, such as a psychiatrist.

The reality: If you sense a pattern here, you're right. In the U.S., there is just one school psychologist for every 1,400 students, according to the most recent data available from the National Association of School Psychologists.
The school nurse
The role: Most any school nurse will tell you, physical and mental health are tough to separate. That puts nurses in a prime spot to catch problems early. For example: A kid who comes into the nurse's office a lot, complaining of headaches or stomach problems? That could be a sign of anxiety, a strategy to avoid a bully, or a sign of troubles at home.

The reality: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends at least one nurse for every 750 students, but the actual ratio across the country can be much higher.
The principal
The role: As the top dogs in schools, principals make the big decisions about priorities. They can bring in social-emotional, anti-bullying and suicide-prevention programs.

The reality: Principals also have a lot on their plates: the day-to-day management of student behavior, school culture and teacher support.
Getting help, and "excited for life"
Katie says things started to turn around for her when she met a nurse at the Children's National Health System in Washington, D.C., who finally showed interest in what was wrong.

Now, she's begun college and wants to be a pediatric nurse.

"I'm doing a lot better now" she says. " Obviously, I mean, I'm a lot happier. I'm excited for school. I'm excited to graduate. I'm excited for life."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mental Health In Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions Of Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An estimated 20 percent of children show signs or symptoms of a mental health problem. It's a destructive force in schools, but most educators don't have the training or resources to help.

# data[].attributes.body
"The fighting is officially over, but it is still not safe in the city."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"My husband is buried over there!" says Ishar, pointing towards a pile of rubble where her house once stood.

Draped in a dark blue shawl and a long black abaya, the 32-year-old mother-of-four stumbles through the ruins of the Old City in the west of Mosul, which was recaptured by Iraqi government forces in July after an almost nine-month battle with so-called Islamic State.

She grips tightly on to her children; they're all she has now.

"Every day and night we could hear the bombs and heavy fighting. We moved in with our neighbours because we felt safer together," she recalls.

"One day the neighbours said to us: 'We should leave before we are killed.' My husband was reluctant, worried that if we were caught IS would kill us. But our neighbours said many people had made similar journeys out of the city and that we'd be fine if we left in the dead of night."

Holding back tears, Ishar says their greatest fear was for the 16 children, including her own, for whom they were caring.

"Finally one night, carrying whatever little clothing we could, we decided to leave. We walked about 200m before one of the IS fighters stopped us."

"He asked where we were going. We said we had sick children with us and were just going out to see a doctor, and that we'd be back".

The IS fighter accused them of lying and attempting to flee to an area controlled by the Iraqi military.

Is anything left of Mosul?

Mosul defeat a blow to IS, but not the end

"They separated the men from the women and children. We screamed and cried for our husbands, begging IS not to take them away. I knew they would kill my husband. I begged the IS fighters to allow us to spend just one last night with him."

Ishar told me her husband and children held each other all night and wept, knowing this would be the last time they would be together. The next day, an IS fighter shot her husband dead. The sickening screams and the gunshot could be heard from the next room.

"My city might be liberated, but it means nothing to me without my husband. Life has become even more difficult."

There are constant reminders of the fierce battle for control of Mosul.

Next to a massive crater where a bomb was dropped is the city's only functioning hospital.

At the entrance there is chaos. Iraqi troops have arrived in an attempt to create some sort of order.

With no security checks at the doors, there are fears that suicide bombers could sneak in. The fighting is officially over, but it is still not safe in the city.

The army says buildings have been rigged with booby-traps. Sadly, returning home now for families could mean death. Many of the injuries in the hospital have been caused by improvised explosive devices.

Dr Amjad Hazim has been working at the hospital since the beginning of the war, treating patients with shrapnel wounds, trauma and other illnesses.

Still in his 20s, he looks more like a student than one of the senior doctors at the hospital.

Three years ago, when IS took over the city, he was in his final year of medical school.

The jihadist group closed the university and employed him to treat the men of the "caliphate".

The young doctor says he has saved the lives of many IS fighters and that is what ultimately kept him and his family alive.

"They'd see me in the street and wave hello. IS treated me very well."

Dr Hazim now spends 15 days a month living at the doctors' residence at the hospital and the other 15 back home with his family in East Mosul.

Food is again flowing into the markets in the east, which government forces declared "liberated" at the end of January.

Women who when they went outside during IS rule had to wear black and cover every inch of their bodies, including their hands and face, are now wearing colour again, high heels and make-up.

Cafes are playing Arabic pop tunes that were popular in 2014, just before the city fell. It is as if time stopped and Mosul residents have just picked up where they left off.

And while the level of destruction in East Mosul is nowhere near that in the West, significant landmarks have been destroyed, like the University of Mosul.

Find out more

You can see Yalda Hakim's Our World film, Life Under The Caliphate, this weekend on BBC World News and on the News Channel in the UK.

Its doors closed in June 2014 and the main faculty was turned into an IS headquarters, with the chemicals in the science labs used to make weapons and bombs.

The university was built in the 1960s and was considered one of the most respected places of learning in the Middle East. Its library was once home to more than a million books on philosophy, law, literature, international affairs and the arts, 650,000 of them in Arabic.

Among its prized possessions were rare maps, ancient manuscripts and a 9th Century Koran.

None of that survives today. For IS, the library represented everything they were against.

Ali Alhadidy, a professor of law in his 40s, says he was heartbroken when he heard what had happened to the library and its collection.

"I had pain in my heart. How can we ever get any of it back? It's all gone."

He remembers the moment IS arrived in Mosul.

"I was so frightened, I went into hiding. I am well known in the city, so if they figured out who I was they would have executed me immediately. I grew a long beard and tried to disguise my identity."

For 22 months he spent his time trying to home-school his five young children.

"I knew one day they would finally be gone," he says. "I prayed night and day for this."

"I have hope inside me because I feel that from this dust education and light will grow and life will come back to Mosul University," he adds.

Rebuilding the university is one thing, but the task of rebuilding this city is monumental.

Real reconciliation will also be a very difficult task.

Families no longer trust one another. Neighbours are suspicious about who worked with IS and who did not.

This is a community and a city that is fractured and will stay so for the foreseeable future.

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Mosul faces struggles with reconstruction and reconciliation

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"My husband is buried over there!" says Ishar, pointing towards a pile of rubble where her house once stood. Draped in a dark blue shawl and a long black abaya, the 32-year-old mother-of-four stumbles through the ruins of the Old City in the west of Mosul, which was recaptured by Iraqi government forces in July after an almost nine-month battle with so-called Islamic State.

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Where is the government spending our money? The truth about how the government is wasting millions.

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October 6, 2009 9 min read Download Report

Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

Summary

It is evident that Washington loses hundreds of billions of dollars annually on spending that most Americans would certainly consider wasteful. Lawmakers seeking to rein in spending and budget deficits should begin by eliminating this least justifiable spending while also addressing long-term entitlement costs.

Key Takeaways

Soaring government spending and trillion-dollar budget deficits have brought fiscal responsibility -- and reducing government waste -- back onto the national agenda.

Lawmakers must also rein in spending by reforming Social Security and Medicare and by eliminating government activities that are no longer affordable.

Washington loses hundreds of billions of dollars annually on spending that most Americans would certainly consider wasteful.

Soaring government spending and trillion-dollar budget deficits have brought fiscal responsibility -- and reducing government waste -- back onto the national agenda. President Obama recently identified 0.004 of 1 percent of the federal budget as wasteful and proposed eliminating this $140 million from his $3.6 trillion fiscal year 2010 budget request. Aiming higher, the President recently proposed partially offsetting a costly new government health entitlement by reducing $622 billion in Medicare and Medicaid "waste and inefficiencies" over the next decade. Taxpayers may wonder why reducing such waste is now merely a bargaining chip for new spending rather than an end in itself.

It is possible to reduce spending and balance the budget. In the 1980s and 1990s, Washington consistently spent $21,000 per household (adjusted for inflation). Simply returning to that level would balance the budget by 2012 without any tax hikes. Alternatively, merely returning to the 2008 (pre-recession) spending level of $25,000 per household (adjusted for inflation) would likely balance the budget by 2019 without any tax hikes.
Not Easy, but Necessary
Reducing wasteful spending is not easy. Even the most useless programs are passionately supported by the armies of recipients, administrators, and lobbyists that benefit from their existence. Identifying inefficiencies and abuses is much easier than devising a system to fix them. Many lawmakers focus more on bringing home earmarks than on performing the less exciting task of government oversight. Exasperated taxpayers see the cost of government rise with no end in sight.

Of course, eliminating waste cannot balance the budget. Lawmakers must also rein in spending by reforming Social Security and Medicare and by eliminating government activities that are no longer affordable. Yet government waste is the low-hanging fruit that lawmakers must clean up in order to build credibility with the public for larger reforms.

Congress has allowed government employees to spend tax dollars on iPods, jewelry, gambling, exotic dance clubs, and $13,500 steak dinners. If lawmakers cannot even reduce this kind of waste, fraud, and abuse, taxpayers will be less likely to trust them to reform Social Security and Medicare.
Six Categories of Waste
The six categories of wasteful and unnecessary spending are:

1. Programs that should be devolved to state and local governments;

2. Programs that could be better performed by the private sector;

3. Mistargeted programs whose recipients should not be entitled to government benefits;

4. Outdated and unnecessary programs;

5. Duplicative programs; and

6. Inefficiency, mismanagement, and fraud.

The first four categories are generally subjective, and reasonable people can disagree on whether a given federal program falls under their purview. Yet the final two categories -- duplication and inefficiency, mismanagement, and fraud -- are comparatively easy to identify and oppose. Thus, they are heavily represented in the examples of government waste below:

1. The federal government made at least $72 billion in improper payments in 2008.[1]

2. Washington spends $92 billion on corporate welfare (excluding TARP) versus $71 billion on homeland security.[2]

3. Washington spends $25 billion annually maintaining unused or vacant federal properties.[3]

4. Government auditors spent the past five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them -- costing taxpayers a total of $123 billion annually -- fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve.[4]

5. The Congressional Budget Office published a "Budget Options" series identifying more than $100 billion in potential spending cuts.[5]

6. Examples from multiple Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports of wasteful duplication include 342 economic development programs; 130 programs serving the disabled; 130 programs serving at-risk youth; 90 early childhood development programs; 75 programs funding international education, cultural, and training exchange activities; and 72 safe water programs.[6]

7. Washington will spend $2.6 million training Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job.[7]

8. A GAO audit classified nearly half of all purchases on government credit cards as improper, fraudulent, or embezzled. Examples of taxpayer-funded purchases include gambling, mortgage payments, liquor, lingerie, iPods, Xboxes, jewelry, Internet dating services, and Hawaiian vacations. In one extraordinary example, the Postal Service spent $13,500 on one dinner at a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, including "over 200 appetizers and over $3,000 of alcohol, including more than 40 bottles of wine costing more than $50 each and brand-name liquor such as Courvoisier, Belvedere and Johnny Walker Gold." The 81 guests consumed an average of $167 worth of food and drink apiece.[8]

9. Federal agencies are delinquent on nearly 20 percent of employee travel charge cards, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually.[9]

10. The Securities and Exchange Commission spent $3.9 million rearranging desks and offices at its Washington, D.C., headquarters.[10]

11. The Pentagon recently spent $998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida.[11]

12. Over half of all farm subsidies go to commercial farms, which report average household incomes of $200,000.[12]

13. Health care fraud is estimated to cost taxpayers more than $60 billion annually.[13]

14. A GAO audit found that 95 Pentagon weapons systems suffered from a combined $295 billion in cost overruns.[14]

15. The refusal of many federal employees to fly coach costs taxpayers $146 million annually in flight upgrades.[15]

16. Washington will spend $126 million in 2009 to enhance the Kennedy family legacy in Massachusetts. Additionally, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) diverted $20 million from the 2010 defense budget to subsidize a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute.[16]

17. Federal investigators have launched more than 20 criminal fraud investigations related to the TARP financial bailout.[17]

18. Despite trillion-dollar deficits, last year's 10,160 earmarks included $200,000 for a tattoo removal program in Mission Hills, California; $190,000 for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming; and $75,000 for the Totally Teen Zone in Albany, Georgia.[18]

19. The federal government owns more than 50,000 vacant homes.[19]

20. The Federal Communications Commission spent $350,000 to sponsor NASCAR driver David Gilliland.[20]

21. Members of Congress have spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars supplying their offices with popcorn machines, plasma televisions, DVD equipment, ionic air fresheners, camcorders, and signature machines -- plus $24,730 leasing a Lexus, $1,434 on a digital camera, and $84,000 on personalized calendars.[21]

22. More than $13 billion in Iraq aid has been classified as wasted or stolen. Another $7.8 billion cannot be accounted for.[22]

23. Fraud related to Hurricane Katrina spending is estimated to top $2 billion. In addition, debit cards provided to hurricane victims were used to pay for Caribbean vacations, NFL tickets, Dom Perignon champagne, "Girls Gone Wild" videos, and at least one sex change operation.[23]

24. Auditors discovered that 900,000 of the 2.5 million recipients of emergency Katrina assistance provided false names, addresses, or Social Security numbers or submitted multiple applications.[24]

25. Congress recently gave Alaska Airlines $500,000 to paint a Chinook salmon on a Boeing 737.[25]

26. The Transportation Department will subsidize up to $2,000 per flight for direct flights between Washington, D.C., and the small hometown of Congressman Hal Rogers (R-KY) -- but only on Monday mornings and Friday evenings, when lawmakers, staff, and lobbyists usually fly. Rogers is a member of the Appropriations Committee, which writes the Transportation Department's budget.[26]

27. Washington has spent $3 billion re-sanding beaches -- even as this new sand washes back into the ocean.[27]

28. A Department of Agriculture report concedes that much of the $2.5 billion in "stimulus" funding for broadband Internet will be wasted.[28]

29. The Defense Department wasted $100 million on unused flight tickets and never bothered to collect refunds even though the tickets were refundable.[29]

30. Washington spends $60,000 per hour shooting Air Force One photo-ops in front of national landmarks.[30]

31. Over one recent 18-month period, Air Force and Navy personnel used government-funded credit cards to charge at least $102,400 on admission to entertainment events, $48,250 on gambling, $69,300 on cruises, and $73,950 on exotic dance clubs and prostitutes.[31]

32. Members of Congress are set to pay themselves $90 million to increase their franked mailings for the 2010 election year.[32]

33. Congress has ignored efficiency recommendations from the Department of Health and Human Services that would save $9 billion annually.[33]

34. Taxpayers are funding paintings of high-ranking government officials at a cost of up to $50,000 apiece.[34]

35. The state of Washington sent $1 food stamp checks to 250,000 households in order to raise state caseload figures and trigger $43 million in additional federal funds.[35]

36. Suburban families are receiving large farm subsidies for the grass in their backyards -- subsidies that many of these families never requested and do not want. [36]

37. Congress appropriated $20 million for "commemoration of success" celebrations related to Iraq and Afghanistan.[37]

38. Homeland Security employee purchases include 63-inch plasma TVs, iPods, and $230 for a beer brewing kit.[38]

39. Two drafting errors in the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act resulted in a $2 billion taxpayer cost.[39]

40. North Ridgeville, Ohio, received $800,000 in "stimulus" funds for a project that its mayor described as "a long way from the top priority."[40]

41. The National Institutes of Health spends $1.3 million per month to rent a lab that it cannot use.[41]

42. Congress recently spent $2.4 billion on 10 new jets that the Pentagon insists it does not need and will not use.[42]

43. Lawmakers diverted $13 million from Hurricane Katrina relief spending to build a museum celebrating the Army Corps of Engineers -- the agency partially responsible for the failed levees that flooded New Orleans.[43]

44. Medicare officials recently mailed $50 million in erroneous refunds to 230,000 Medicare recipients.[44]

45. Audits showed $34 billion worth of Department of Homeland Security contracts contained significant waste, fraud, and abuse.[45]

46. Washington recently spent $1.8 million to help build a private golf course in Atlanta, Georgia.[46]

47. The Advanced Technology Program spends $150 million annually subsidizing private businesses; 40 percent of this funding goes to Fortune 500 companies.[47]

48. Congressional investigators were able to receive $55,000 in federal student loan funding for a fictional college they created to test the Department of Education.[48]

49. The Conservation Reserve program pays farmers $2 billion annually not to farm their land.[49]

50. The Commerce Department has lost 1,137 computers since 2001, many containing Americans' personal data.[50]

Pick the Low-Hanging Fruit
Because many of these examples of waste overlap, it is not possible to determine their exact total cost. Yet it is evident that Washington loses hundreds of billions of dollars annually on spending that most Americans would certainly consider wasteful. Lawmakers seeking to rein in spending and budget deficits should begin by eliminating this least justifiable spending while also addressing long-term entitlement costs.
Brian M. Riedl is Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Show References

[2]The Cato Institute estimates that corporate welfare costs $92 billion annually (not even counting the $700 billion TARP legislation). SeeStephen Slivinski, "The Corporate Welfare State: How the Federal Government Subsidizes U.S. Businesses," Cato Institute, May 14, 2007, at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8230 (October 5, 2009). The White House has requested $71 billion for fiscal year 2010 homeland security spending. See Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the U.S. Government, FY 2010: Analytic Perspectives (Supplemental Materials), May 2009, at /static/reportimages/1FA58FAE61C1A1EBAB37BE76B88C824D.pdf (October 5, 2009).

[4]Figures include all federal programs rated "ineffective" or "results not demonstrated" by the George W. Bush Administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) assessment of all federal programs. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/expectmore/ and http://www.whitehouse
.gov/omb/expectmore/part.xls.

[5]Congressional Budget Office, "Budget Options, Volume 1: Health Care," December 2008, athttp://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9925/12-18-Health
Options (October 5, 2009); "Budget Options, Volume 2," August 2009, at /static/reportimages/B6358B2C50828DC2865F4C220C0720C5.pdf (October 5, 2009).

[6]Examples are drawn from Committee on Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate, "Government at the Brink," Vols. I and II, June 2001; U.S. General Accounting Office, "Managing for Results: Using the Results Act to Address Mission Fragmentation and Program Overlap," August 1997, at /static/reportimages/80B40B0A5C314F2221EE8FF7B22D39CB.pdf (October 5, 2009).

[7]Edwin Mora, "U.S. Will Pay $2.6 Million to Train Chinese Prostitutes to Drink Responsibly on the Job," CNS News, May 12, 2009, at http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=47976 (October 5, 2009).

[8]Government Accountability Office, Government-wide Purchase Cards: Actions Needed to Strengthen Internal Controls to Reduce Fraudulent, Improper, and Abusive Purchases, GAO-08-333, March 2008, at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08333.pdf
new.items/d08333.pdf (October 5, 2009); Marc Stewart, "Federal Gov't Questions TVA Spending," WBIR.com, February 27, 2009, at http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=79461 (October 5, 2009); Dan Eggen, "Federal Credit Cards Misused," The Washington Post, April 9, 2008, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04
/08/AR2008040802718.html (October 5, 2009).

[12]Ted Covey et al., "Agriculture Income and Finance Outlook," U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, November 2006, pp. 40 and 48.

[16]Steve LeBlanc, "Feds Spending Millions on Kennedy Legacy," Associated Press, May 11, 2009, at http://wbztv.com/politics/tedkennedy/ted.kennedy
.legacy.2.956809.html (October 5, 2009); Bryan Bender, "Kerry Asks $20m for Kennedy Institute," The Boston Globe, September 25, 2009, at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/09/25/
watchdog_groups_rap_20m_earmark_for_kennedy_institute/ (October 5, 2009).

[18]These and more examples of recent earmarks are at Brian Riedl, "Omnibus Spending Bill: Huge Spending and 9,000 Earmarks Represent Business as Usual," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2318, March 2, 2009, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/wm2318.cfm.

[19] Brad Heath, "Gov't Losses Big in Home Market," USA Today, May 15, 2009, at http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-05-14
-govtown_N.htm (October 5, 2009).

[20] Ira Teinowitz, "FCC Goes NASCAR Racing to Publicize DTV," TV Week, October 2008, at http://www.tvweek.com/news/2008/10/fcc_goes_nascar
_racing_to_publ.php (October 5, 2009).

[21] Louise Radnofsky and T. W. Farnam, "Lawmakers Bill Taxpayers for TVs, Cameras, Lexus," The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2009, at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124364352135868189.html (October 5, 2009); Jonathan E. Kaplan and Mandy Kozar, "Lawmakers Spend on Big Screens, Popcorn," The Hill, November 8, 2005.

[22]Dana Hedgpeth, "$13 Billion in Iraq Aid Wasted or Stolen, Ex-Investigator Says," The Washington Post, September 23, 2008, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/22/
AR2008092202053.html (October 5, 2009);Dan Friedman, "Report: Defense Department Cannot Fully Account for $7.8B Spent in Iraq," CongressDaily,May 22, 2008, at http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0508/052208cdpm2.htm (October 5, 2009).

[23]Associated Press, "Katrina Fraud Could Top $2 Billion," December 25, 2006, at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15587326/ (October 5, 2009); "FEMA Funds Spent on Divorce, Sex Change," June 14, 2006, at http://cbs4denver.com/national/FEMA.Divorce.Sex.2.268906.html (October 5, 2009).

[25]Wesley Loy, "Alaska Airlines Takes Flying Fish to a Whole New Level: $500,000 Grant from Federal Funding Pays for Custom Paint Job on Company's Passenger Jet," Anchorage Daily News, October 2, 2005.

[28] Michael Grabell, "Rural Broadband Stimulus Program Slammed in Gov't Report," ProPublica, April 14, 2009, at http://www.propublica.org/ion/
stimulus/item/rural-broadband-stimulus-program-slammed-in-govt-report
-414/ (October 5, 2009).

[30]CBS News, "FAA Memo: Feds Knew NYC Flyover Would Cause Panic," April 29, 2009, at http://wcbstv.com/topstories/air.force.one.2.996457.html (October 5, 2009); Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, "The Cost of Presidential and Vice Presidential Political Travel," March 2006, p. 3, at http://oversight.house.gov/documents/
20060316113550-47530.pdf (October 5, 2009).

[31]Government Accountability Office, Travel Cards: Air Force Management Focus Has Reduced Delinquencies, but Improvements in Controls Are Needed, GAO-03-298, December 20, 2002, p. 4, at http://www.gao.gov/new.
items/d03298.pdf (October 6, 2009); Travel Cards: Control Weaknesses Leave Navy Vulnerable to Fraud and Abuse, GAO-03-148T, October 8, 2002, p. 8, at /static/reportimages/40C1D6AB36A6C16873C3BF78605117B8.pdf (October 6, 2009).

[32] Emily Yehle, "House May Get Big Boost for Election-Year Mailings," Roll Call, May 4, 2009.

[36]Dan Morgan, Gilbert Gaul, and Sarah Cohen, "Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm," The Washington Post, July 2, 2006, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/01/
AR2006070100962.html (October 6, 2009).

[39] Jonathan Nicholson, "Congress Seems Unlikely to Correct Gaffes in Budget Bill Costing $2 Billion," BNA Daily Report for Executives, September 25, 2006.

[40]Steve Fogarty, " Stimulus Grant Funds a Quieter North Ridgeville," Chronicle-Telegram, May 22, 2009, at http://www.chroniclet.com/2009/05/
stimulus-grant-funds-a-quieter-north-ridgeville/ (October 6, 2009).

[41]Jonathan Rockoff, "NIH Paying $1.3 Million Monthly for Unused Lab," Baltimore Sun, December 2, 2007.

[46]Kevin Duffy, "Why Did the Federal Government Help This Golf Course?," Atlanta-Journal-Constitution, November 13, 2006.

Authors

Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

Read Full Report

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Soaring government spending and trillion-dollar budget deficits have brought fiscal responsibility -- and reducing government waste -- back onto the national agenda. President Obama recently identified 0.004 of 1 percent of the federal budget as wasteful and proposed eliminating this $140 million from his $3.6 trillion fiscal year 2010 budget request.

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It's well known that the Islamic State is imploding, but how do they adapt after losing their territory?

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Exactly three years after it was declared, the Islamic State is now near defeat. The Iraqi Army has liberated Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control, while a Syrian militia has penetrated the Old City section of Raqqa, the capital of the pseudo-caliphate. U.S. air strikes-at a cost of more than thirteen million dollars a day-plus Army advisers and teams of Special Forces were pivotal in both campaigns, launched late last fall. But it is far too soon to celebrate. Since the rise of jihadi extremism four decades ago, its most enduring trait, through ever-evolving manifestations, is its ability to reinvent and revive movements that appeared beaten.

Osama bin Laden slunk out of Afghanistan in disgrace, in 1989, after his miscalculations contributed to the deaths of thousands of Arab fighters. He was expelled from Sudan and lost his Saudi citizenship in the nineteen-nineties. He reëmerged to carry out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but then was forced to flee Afghanistan. He abandoned his own fighters at Tora Bora, to go into hiding. A decade later, he was killed in a lightning raid by Navy SEAL s. His body was dumped at sea.

"Each time, Al Qaeda has seemed doomed to fail but has actually recovered and come back stronger," Ali Soufan recounts in his exceptional new book, " The Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State." Today, Soufan argues, Al Qaeda is more dangerous than ever. "This new model has not only survived its founder's death; it has expanded its membership exponentially."

ISIS has followed a similar pattern. In its first iteration in Iraq, the group was "on the brink of collapse in 2007 and 2008-its senior leadership either dead, in hiding, or in prison," Soufan notes. Tens of thousands of Iraqi tribesmen, backed by the United States, had turned on it. Its jihadi ranks were decimated to a few dozen men forced into the underground. Within seven years, however, its new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had reorganized and rebranded his group. By 2015, it had attracted more than thirty thousand fighters, from a hundred countries, to fight for the first modern caliphate. Despite an appalling death rate on the battlefield, of roughly ten thousand fighters a year, thousands more kept coming.

To mark the ouster of ISIS from Mosul, Iraq has announced a week of celebrations. Baghdadi long ago fled Mosul, where he first declared the caliphate; the Russians claimed to have killed him during an air strike in Syria. His fate is unclear, but the ISIS experiment in governance-over an area the size of Indiana or of the country of Jordan-has definitively failed. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is visiting Mosul today in a show of restored sovereignty. In a statement, Abadi "congratulated the heroic fighters and Iraqi people for the great victory." The U.S.-led coalition is scheduled to meet in Washington this week to discuss stabilization in liberated areas of Iraq and Syria.

Yet, Soufan warns, "the growing strength of its 'provinces,' particularly in Libya, suggests that, like Al Qaeda before it, the Islamic State may be poised to evolve into a multinational umbrella group with a number of franchises." At its height, ISIS spawned eight branches, with thirty-seven wilayats, or "provinces"-from Algeria to the Caucasus, Afghanistan to Yemen-though some are weak, dormant, or have been crushed. The conditions that originally spawned militant jihadism still plague Iraq, Syria, and much of the world's most volatile region.

Militant jihadism is a subject that Soufan, a Lebanese-American, knows well. A former F.B.I. special agent, he has been tracking Al Qaeda since bin Laden's first declaration of war on the United States, two decades ago. He assembled evidence that linked Al Qaeda's first attacks against the United States, in 1998, when it hit two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, to bin Laden. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was among only a handful of Arabic speakers in the F.B.I., and he subsequently interrogated Al Qaeda prisoners. (Lawrence Wright profiled him for The New Yorker in 2006.)

One of the most intriguing themes of Soufan's second book-his first, " The Black Banners," was a Times best-seller-is the discord, feuding, and even deadly infighting among the jihadis themselves. It has been a subplot for decades. The biggest schism today is between Al Qaeda and ISIS, the world's two deadliest terrorist groups. It erupted in February, 2014, after ISIS started seizing territory. Baghdadi claimed supremacy in the jihadi world; he believed ISIS was "a real governing entity and therefore superior to any mere jihadi organization, including its parent group, Al Qaeda," Soufan recounts. Baghdadi began to defy Al Qaeda's orders, including the order to stop murdering fellow-Muslims and to coöperate with other franchises. He grew more murderous in the name of his emerging caliphate.

In a message posted online, Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri unleashed his fury, publicly denouncing Baghdadi and disclaiming responsibility for ISIS actions. Zawahiri, who had succeeded Osama bin Laden, later explained that it was better to have ten decent followers than "scores of thousands making the umma [Muslim community] hate them, their deeds and their behaviors."

Once parent and child, the two groups began to loathe each other almost as much as they hated their common enemy in the West. Three years later, it is still one of the least understood-or exploited-aspects of the global jihad.

The split is important in understanding what may happen after the caliphate's collapse. Al Qaeda and ISIS were not simply competing for power and position in the world of jihadism; they differed profoundly over strategy. Al Qaeda counselled patience on the road to establishing a caliphate. Its three-pronged strategy was outlined in the treatise " The Management of Savagery," which was published in its magazine Sawt al-Jihad. The first phase is fomenting chaos and exploiting the power vacuums that follow. The second phase is mobilizing popular support for fundamentalist Salafi rule, based on the ways of life and governance when the faith was founded, by the Prophet Mohammed, in the seventh century. For Al Qaeda, an Islamic state "could never be sustainable until a majority of its citizens could be convinced that it was the right way to govern," Soufan explains. Only in the final phase can jihadi groups create a caliphate. Bin Laden repeatedly denied permission for Al Qaeda branches to declare an Islamic emirate or try to govern. He even opined that the return of the caliphate might not happen in his lifetime.

ISIS had a different blueprint. It plotted to seize land and then forcibly compel Muslims to join its ranks-on pain of death. Baghdadi "could not care less about consensus building," Soufan writes. The ISIS Emir grew bolder in his claims, in mid-2014, when his fighters seized more land than the Prophet Mohammed initially ruled at the time of Islam's founding.

The two movements, "with their competing absolutist positions, had reached an impasse; it was increasingly clear that . . . this jihad was not big enough for both of them," Soufan says. "Today, with the split between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, we are witnessing a clash within the Salafi-jihadi strain itself, a division not about the end goal-both sides believe in a restored caliphate-but how quickly to get there."

Jihadism has long been riddled with rifts not only between groups but also within them-even inside Al Qaeda. Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian and one of bin Laden's top-three aides, assembled the cell that attacked two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Yet he-like most of the Shura Council that advised bin Laden-opposed the September 11th attacks, in 2001, warning that the repercussions were too dangerous. Within the Taliban, some supported bin Laden, but others opposed him; today, it has factions for and against negotiating with the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. ISIS has experienced splits as well. Documents captured in raids on ISIS safe houses or left behind have included letters-some with complaints, others questioning merciless tactics.

The internal divides-strategic, tactical, political, and personal-challenge the political scientist Samuel Huntington's notion of a "clash of civilizations," Soufan contends. "One glance at the complicated lattice of strife enmeshing the contemporary Middle East is enough to suggest that, if anything, the world has reverted to the norm of intra civilizational conflict," Soufan writes. "Sunnis fight Shia, Persians battle Arabs, Turks struggle with Kurds, and on down to the tribal, communal and even neighborhood level. All of the major combatants are Muslim; for all their military might, outside powers like the United States and the Russian Federation can at best only marginally affect the outcome."

After the caliphate's final demise, ISIS and Al Qaeda face existential decisions. The biggest, Soufan says, is whether to end the schism and reunite. He believes they may under the emerging star power of bin Laden's favored son, Hamza, who was detained with his mother in Iran for several years. The younger bin Laden appeared in his first Al Qaeda audiotape in 2015; Zawahiri introduced him as "a lion from the den of Al Qaeda." ISIS will certainly no longer be able to claim superiority in the world of militant jihad.

Soufan speculates, "If the Islamic State were once again stateless, and a bin Laden were once again at the head of Al Qaeda, ISIS jihadists might return to the fold-and to the global form of jihad originally advocated by Hamza's revered father." In other words, a military rout of ISIS may only pave the way for the comeback of a more powerful Al Qaeda.

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Exactly three years after it was declared, the Islamic State is now near defeat. The Iraqi Army has liberated Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control, while a Syrian militia has penetrated the Old City section of Raqqa, the capital of the pseudo-caliphate. U.S.

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Building VS. Buying a PC

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So you've saved up for months but still can't decide which kind of gaming rig is best for you? Do you need something that can stay with you wherever you go, or just want to get the most punch possible regardless of cost or portability?

If this conundrum has had you scratching your head for too long, check out our guide on the three main options available on the market today, and make the pick that's right for you.

Building a Custom PC: The Best Bang for Your Buck

First, there's custom PCs built from parts you picked yourself. At their face, it's undeniable that self-built PCs offer better value, better performance, and upgradeability throughout the years and various product cycles.

It can be a daunting process, however, figuring out which components fit in which slot, whether this motherboard is compatible with that processor, or whether you need one graphics card or two.

At the most basic of levels, all of these different factors will boil down to what you plan to use your rig for in the day to day. If you're just looking for something that will hold strong during a match of League of Legends, a sub-$600 machine will be plenty to get the job done. If you want to run Crysis 3 at 4K resolution on ultra settings, however, the price tag will jump considerably.

Not only that, but there are also different kinds of processors and graphics cards split between workhorse machines and those made strictly to game. If you're doing design work or 3D modeling in the medical field, you're much better off investing in a Titan Z than a GTX 980, as one is made to handle lots of processing data, while the other is built strictly to push out as many polygons in a firefight as possible.

Luckily, there are resources available to people who want to build their own PC, but don't even know where to get started. Communities like Reddit's r/BuildMeaPC are a place where anyone can post their budget and what they plan to use the rig for, and the forum will respond with every part you'll need neatly laid out in a list at the best possible price.

Gaming Laptops, and the Argument for Portability

If scouring NewEgg for the best priced part doesn't sound like your favorite idea of system shopping, another category of machine - gaming laptops - can offer that "all-in-one, flip-it-on-and-you're-done" experience that consumers are flocking to these days.

Outside of an external mouse (I have yet to meet a person who can game effectively on a trackpad), everything you need to boot up and start blasting baddies is included in the laptop itself, and that sort of no-frills approach is valuable to anyone who can't be bothered with putting together a gaming rig on their own.

Plus, if you're always on the road and need to get your fix outside of the home office, a gaming laptop is perfect for squeezing in a couple matches while making the monthly visit to grandma's place. It might get a little hot around the collar (gaming laptops are notorious for their problems with proper heat dissipation), but when it comes down to it, it will still get the job done.

The caveat with this choice, however, is that when compared to full-tower computers, you'll never be able to achieve the same amount of power for the cost. More often than not, laptop-based graphics cards will carry an "M" badge at the end of their name ( the GTX 980M, for example), which denote that while the core architecture is in the same family as their full-sized brethren, many of the chips inside have been clipped and hemmed at the seams in order to make something that will fit squarely into your saddlebag.

Also, despite their best efforts, we haven't met a laptop yet that has enough battery to keep a hardcore gaming session going for more than a few hours at a time. This means that even though you might be portable for a little while, if you plan on doing some serious fragging, expect to stay close to a power outlet because it will only be a matter of time before a power indicator starts pestering you to plug in.

So maybe the decision between getting a gaming rig or laptop isn't so much about price as it is portability. Gaming laptops can still hold their own against most major titles these days (save for something like Battlefield 4 in ultra 4K), but that capability will come at a significantly higher cost by comparison.

Prebuilt Custom Desktops: The Compromise

But maybe you don't have to choose?

One of the main reasons why people prefer the experience of a gaming laptop to a custom-built desktop isn't as much because of the portability as it is convenience. When you get a gaming laptop, you know everything is going to work the way it's supposed to straight out of the box.

No hassles of installing Windows, configuring this setting or changing that menu - it's all right there, and it's ready to go. Well, now there are a range of companies who are willing to do the heavy lifting for you, and don't charge too much on top for the effort. The leader of the pack has got to be CyberPower PC, a custom PC manufacturer with the widest range of available options when it comes to picking the parts and processor that's best suited to your budget.

When building identical machines on CyberPower's site vs. NewEgg, we found there was only a mere $65 difference between what the company would make for you, and what you'd have to build yourself. This is a far cry from the Alienware-esque premiums of yesteryear, and just goes to show that as long as you've got a little extra to spend on top, having your very own customized computer doesn't have to cost you a day in the shop or the potential of troubleshooting for weeks after.

CyberPower is far from the only game in town providing high quality gaming rigs either. Other players in the space include the likes of Digital Storm, iBuyPower, and Velocity Micro, all of which offer desktops in every area of the price spectrum. Even the cheapest of their respective lineups can still put out enough horsepower to handle current popular titles, save for all but the most demanding like Crysis 3 or CD ProjektRed's recently released resource-hog, The Witcher III.

Similarly, if the perfect match of portability, power, and reliability is what you're after, popular options like Northwest Falcon's Tiki and Orgin's Chronos are cute, compact computers that manage to pack in all the punch you'd expect out of their heftier competition. Though they may not quite hit the level of portability a laptop can offer (an external display, keyboard, and mouse are still required), between bulky gaming monsters and limited laptops, these boxes strike a nice balance in the middleground of both.

They might be a bit on the pricier side, but when you consider that you're paying for a customized case as well as their warranty/guarantee of reliability, a bump in the bottom line is well worth the hit.

In case you aren't sure if the model you want will handle the games you plan to play, you can check out our article which will help you find out just how much you should drop on a processor, graphics card, or motherboard to fit.

No matter which route you eventually choose, the fact can't be denied that pound for pound, self-built PCs are the best value for your money. That said, pound for pound they're also the least portable of the three options we have listed.

Laptops can give gamers on the move all they need to play most of the biggest AAA-titles wherever they might be in the world, but their compact nature will inherently come at the cost of raw graphical output. And lastly, custom PC makers like CyberPower PC offer boxes which are slightly pricier, but powerful alternatives which don't take up a lot of legroom while still offering all the benefits you'd get out of a tower rig.

PC gaming is in its second-renaissance, and the options available to consumers have never been as numerous or plentiful as they are today. Whichever machine you decide to drop your hard-earned money on, now you can make sure it's the right one just for you.

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Choosing Your Next Gaming PC: Should You Build, Buy, or Get a Laptop?

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So you've saved up for months but still can't decide which kind of gaming rig is best for you? Do you need something that can stay with you wherever you go, or just want to get the most punch possible regardless of cost or portability?

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"We need journalists who are prepared, at any given moment, to set neutrality aside."

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Jorge Ramos: Why journalists have an obligation to challenge power

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You can kick Jorge Ramos out of your press conference (as Donald Trump infamously did in 2015), but you can never silence him. A reporter for more than 30 years, Ramos believes that a journalist's responsibility is to question and challenge those in power.

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"For all of human history, illness has been universal and access to care has not."

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

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Raj Panjabi: No one should die because they live too far from a doctor

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Illness is universal -- but access to care is not. Physician Raj Panjabi has a bold vision to bring health care to everyone, everywhere. With the 2017 TED Prize, Panjabi is building the Community Health Academy, a global platform that aims to modernize how community health workers learn vital skills, creating jobs along the way.

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This letter to President Trump written by an undocumented person gives you a firsthand look at the emotion brought out of those affected by the removal of the DACA. Can you relate to their struggle?

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After living here for 20 years, I have helped build this country and have become a part of its fabric. There's no removing me.

Dear President Trump:

My name is Karlita and I'm an undocumented immigrant, or so people say.

Because of this, it might surprise you to hear that you've actually inspired me.

Before your campaign, I tried to ignore my status, or lack thereof. "Blend in, pretend it doesn't exist," I would tell myself. I know it's shocking for some to realize, but being undocumented has its downsides, including the constant fear that one day I'll be taken from everyone I love and all that I've worked for. Even though I wasn't born in the United States, I've lived in Knoxville for as long as I can remember. My memories are here. Everything I love is here. If I could fix my status, I would. But I can't. So instead of living in fear I tried to ignore my status, distract myself, pretend I'm not who I am, take hiatuses from being illegal. But that never really worked.

More: Remember teachings of Mr. Rogers and the Good Samaritan in Harvey relief efforts

More: On immigration, let the states decide for themselves

Now, since your election, I've realized that I can no longer be quiet. You've inspired me to get involved in immigrant rights, which has had a domino effect on my life. I've said and done things that I never imagined: I've spoken about my status in front of hundreds of people; I've lobbied the Tennessee legislature for tuition equality; I've gotten involved. I've grown as a person.

I'm stronger now. I'm not scared. But I am angry. I've been angry since the day you announced your candidacy by scapegoating people like me and my family. I'm even angrier now that DACA - Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals - is in trouble and the futures of people like me are uncertain. (An executive action by President Barack Obama in 2012 created DACA as a special consideration for people who came here as children and are living in the country unauthorized, offering them temporary safety from deportation and a work permit.)

I've spent my entire life doing things the right way, believing in this country, its people, the system. I've spent my entire life believing that, no matter what, this country always does the right thing.

But I can't be quiet any more, and so I have something to tell you:

I am not leaving. I have paid taxes and contributed to this country for years. I am part of the fabric of this country. I am helping to build this country. I persevere despite the burden of being undocumented. I keep going despite the stigma and misinformation about undocumented people.

More: Sens. Cotton and Perdue: Our immigration plan is pro-worker and pro-growth
POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media
Sometimes, though, it's difficult to shake the stigma. In these times, my dad reminds me that we aren't illegal. What's illegal when we all come from the stars? We are all stardust. I think of all of the undocumented people in my life and around the country. We soar.

We are America and we are the future. We are your neighbors, friends, and coworkers, and we are here. We love this country.

I'm not writing this letter to make you like me, to convince you that I deserve to stay, or to tell you how much I pay in taxes (and I do pay a lot in taxes). I am writing to tell you that I am a Knoxvillian, a Tennessean and an American. I am part of what makes America great.

I'm sorry you don't like that, but I'm not here to coddle you. I will not be your political scapegoat.

If I've learned anything from American history, I've learned that no good American has had it easy. If I've learned anything from this country, it's to not give up. When things get tough, Americans get angry enough to make a change.

I'm not going away, and I'm not giving up.
Karlita Cruz has lived in Knoxville for nearly 20 years. You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
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DACA: I'm undocumented and I am part of what makes America great.

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CLOSE After living here for 20 years, I have helped build this country and have become a part of its fabric. There's no removing me. Dear President Trump: My name is Karlita and I'm an undocumented immigrant, or so people say. Because of this, it might surprise you to hear that you've actually inspired me.

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The most horrific storm to hit the East coast in years. Are you prepared for what's expected to happen?

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Hurricane Irma strengthened to a Category 5 storm with winds up to 185 mph as it approaches the Leeward Islands of the northeast Caribbean, the U.S. National Hurricane Center announced Tuesday, making it the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.

Four other storms have had winds that strong in the overall Atlantic region, but they have been in the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, where the usually warmer waters fuel tropical cyclones.

Hurricane Allen hit 190 mph in 1980, while 2005's , 1988's Gilbert and a 1935 great Florida Key storm all had 185 mph winds.

Experts say Irma's strength is a result of unusually warm water for that part of the Atlantic.

If it stays on the forecast track and reaches the Florida Straits, the water there is warm enough that the already "intense" storm could become much worse with wind speeds potentially reaching 225 mph, warned Kerry Emanuel, an MIT meteorology professor.

"People who are living there (the Florida Keys) or have property there are very scared, and they should be," Emanuel said.

U.S. National Hurricane Center

Meanwhile, officials in the Florida Keys have issued evacuations ahead of Irma.

Monroe County spokeswoman Cammy Clark said that a mandatory evacuation for tourists will begin at sunrise Wednesday and an evacuation plan for residents will begin later that evening.

"For the Florida Keys, if you were to create the worst case scenario that is what we are looking at," Monroe County Emergency Operations Center Director Martin Senterfitt told CBS Miami. "We're emphatically telling people you must evacuate; you can not afford to stay on an island with a Category 5 hurricane coming at you."

Clark said government offices, parks and schools will close and there will be no shelters in Monroe County. The county's three hospitals are also beginning evacuation plans.

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Hurricane Irma becomes most powerful storm ever recorded in Atlantic Ocean

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Hurricane Irma strengthened to a Category 5 storm with winds up to 185 mph as it approaches the Leeward Islands of the northeast Caribbean, the U.S. National Hurricane Center announced Tuesday, making it the most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.

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How do you "create" a psychopath?

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Exploring the mind of a killer | Jim Fallon

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The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protects nearly 800,000 people for deportation. How is this legal? why is Trump getting rid of it?

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The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA) currently protects nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Here's what you need to know about the program:

What is DACA?

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The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, known as DACA, allows two-year stays for certain undocumented immigrants who entered the country before their 16th birthday who have attended school or joined the military and have not committed any serious crimes.

They receive a renewable two-year period of deportation protections and eligibility for a work permit. Some enrollees are currently on their third term.

When was DACA created?

DACA was created in 2012 by the Obama administration after several failed attempts in Congress to pass a law to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.

While announcing the program during a speech in the Rose Garden, Obama said those DREAMers - undocumented immigrants brought to America as children - didn't make the decision to enter the U.S. illegally and shouldn't be punished as a result.

Are all DREAMers part of DACA?

Not all DREAMers became DACA recipients. There are a total of 1.9 million undocumented immigrants eligible to apply for the program, but many have not, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The federal government has approved 787,580 people for the program.

To apply for DACA, immigrants must have come to the United States before 2007. The immigrants were required to have been 15 or younger when they arrived and younger than 31 when DACA was created in 2012. They had to have a clean criminal record and be enrolled in high school or have a high school diploma or equivalent.

Why can DACA be taken away by the executive branch?

The program was created through a memorandum from the Department of Homeland Security, which means it could be rescinded at any time without any input from Congress. That was always a concern of applicants, who knew their protections could be taken away by a future president and the personal information they provided could be used to arrest and deport them.

Who is fighting for and against DACA?

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Republican leaders from 10 states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, gave President Trump a deadline of Sept. 5 to end DACA or they'd sue. They believe the program is an abuse of executive power, and feel that only Congress can provide such a broad "amnesty" to any group of undocumented immigrants.

As rumors of DACA's demise floated in recent weeks, a variety of groups pleaded with the Trump administration to maintain the program. On Aug. 14, more than 100 law professors signed a letter to Trump insisting that DACA is perfectly legal. On Wednesday, a group of more than 1,850 governors, state attorneys general, faith leaders, police chiefs, sheriffs and civic leaders signed a statement urging Trump to keep the program. And on Thursday, hundreds of tech and business leaders from Amazon's Jeff Bezos to Google's Sundar Pichai sent a similar letter to Trump.

More: 1,850 U.S. leaders to Trump: Don't kill DREAMer protection program

More: Here's why Arizona 'dreamers' say Trump should keep DACA

More: GOP lawmakers urge Trump to leave DACA alone

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2gpzPAV

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CLOSE The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA) currently protects nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation. Here's what you need to know about the program: CLOSE The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, known as DACA, allows two-year stays for certain undocumented immigrants who entered the country before their 16th birthday who have attended school or joined the military and have not committed any serious crimes.

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"Hackers are like artists." The idea that "independent" Russians could be linked to the hacking done to gain access to sensitive U.S. data.

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MOSCOW - Shifting from his previous blanket denials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia suggested on Thursday that "patriotically minded" private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks last year that meddled in the United States presidential election.

While Mr. Putin continued to deny any state role in the hacking, his comments, made to reporters in St. Petersburg, Russia, departed from the Kremlin's previous position: that Russia had played no role whatsoever in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that, after Donald J. Trump's victory, the United States had become the victim of anti-Russia hysteria among crestfallen Democrats.

Asked about suspicions that Russia might try to interfere in the coming elections in Germany, Mr. Putin raised the possibility of attacks on foreign votes by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots. Hackers, he said, "are like artists" who choose their targets depending how they feel "when they wake up in the morning." Any such attacks, he added, could not alter the result of elections in Europe, America or elsewhere.

Artists, he said, paint if they wake up feeling in good spirits while hackers respond if "they wake up and read that something is going on in interstate relations" that prompts them to take action. "If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions - which are right, from their point of view - to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia," Mr. Putin added, apparently referring to Hillary Clinton.

The Kremlin took a dim view of Mrs. Clinton, considering her far less friendly toward Russia than a President Trump would be because of her blunt criticism of Mr. Putin and his policies in Syria and elsewhere.

Mr. Putin's remarks stopped far short of accepting the conclusions of American intelligence agencies that the Kremlin was behind the election campaign cyberattacks. But they opened room for verbal maneuvering by Moscow - and also by Mr. Trump - amid multiple investigations in the United States into Russian meddling, including one by the F.B.I. about the firing of its director, James B. Comey.

Perhaps worried that, as the investigations make headway, evidence will come to light that the Russian state or at least Russians were clearly involved in the hacking, Mr. Putin appeared to be setting up a pre-emptive line of defense, as the Kremlin did when it became difficult to simply deny initially secret Russian deployments to Ukraine in 2014, and to Syria in late 2015.

Swamped by evidence of Russian military involvement in Ukraine and then Syria, the Kremlin retreated from categorical denials to claims that Russians fighting in eastern Ukraine were Russian "vacationers" and that burly Russians who appeared in Syria were humanitarian aid workers. It later acknowledged that the supposed aid workers were Russian soldiers.

The questions of Russian hacking, and interaction between Russian officials and members of Mr. Trump's inner circle, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have been a huge thorn in the side of the new administration. The furor has led to the dismissal of Michael T. Flynn as Mr. Trump's national security adviser, forced his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to recuse himself from any Russia-tied election investigation and hampered the administration in fulfilling Mr. Trump's agenda to "make America great again."

Mr. Putin's comments on Thursday about Russian hacking echoed those of Mr. Trump, who has dismissed accusations of Russian meddling in the election and said the person responsible for the attack on the Democratic National Committee " could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."

Mr. Putin stuck firmly to earlier denials that Russian state bodies or employees had been involved, an accusation leveled by United States intelligence agencies. They concluded in January that Mr. Putin himself had directed a Russian "influence campaign" involving cyberattacks and disinformation intended to tilt the November election in Mr. Trump's favor.

"We're not doing this on the state level," Mr. Putin said on Thursday.

The boundary between state and private action, however, is often blurry in Russia, particularly in matters relating to the projection of Russian influence abroad. This provides a measure of plausible deniability for actions that the Kremlin does not want to be linked to publicly.

Nominally private Russian citizens have fought alongside Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine and taken part in various campaigns to advance Moscow's agenda in Eastern and Central Europe.

While much about Russia 's cyberwarfare program is shrouded in secrecy, there is growing evidence that it, too, has drawn on the skills and enthusiasm of nominally private individuals, including college students, who face mandatory military service, and even criminals.

In 2013, Sergei K. Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, told university rectors at a meeting in Moscow that he was on a "head hunt in the positive meaning of the word" for coders.

The Obama administration signaled it was worried about Russia's intermingling of state and private hacking when it struck back at Moscow over interference in the 2016 election. In December, it expelled 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and included among sanctioned Russian companies a private firm set up by a young Russian woman who called herself "mishacker."

American intelligence agencies say a team of Russian hackers affiliated with Russia's military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., stole emails and other data from the Democratic National Committee and then leaked the cache through WikiLeaks.

An expert at muddying the waters and creating confusion, Mr. Putin advanced a number of alternative theories that could help Moscow address any firm evidence that might emerge as a trail leading to Russia.

Stating that modern technology can easily be manipulated to create a false trail, he said, "I can imagine that someone is doing this purposefully - building the chain of attacks so that the territory of the Russian Federation appears to be the source of that attack." He added, "Modern technologies allow to do that kind of thing; it's rather easy to do."

Mr. Putin appeared to be repeating an argument he first made earlier in the week in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.

"I think that he was totally right when he said it could have been someone sitting on their bed or somebody intentionally inserted a flash drive with the name of a Russian national, or something like that," Mr. Putin told the French newspaper, referring to Mr. Trump. "Anything is possible in this virtual world. Russia never engages in activities of this kind, and we do not need it. It makes no sense for us to do such things. What for?"

The evolution of Russia's position on possible meddling in the American election is similar to the way Mr. Putin repeatedly shifted his account of Russia's role in the 2014 annexation of Crimea and in armed rebellions in eastern Ukraine. He began by denying that Russian troops had taken part before acknowledging, months later, that the Russian military was "of course" involved.

Moscow has been disappointed by Mr. Trump's failure so far to deliver on his election promises to "get along" with Russia.

But Mr. Putin told Le Figaro this week that he was "cautiously optimistic" that Mr. Trump would be able to break free of people he described as intent on blocking his path toward better relations with Moscow.

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Maybe Private Russian Hackers Meddled in Election, Putin Says. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Maybe Private Russian Hackers Meddled in Election, Putin Says

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MOSCOW - Shifting from his previous blanket denials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia suggested on Thursday that "patriotically minded" private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks last year that meddled in the United States presidential election. While Mr. Putin continued to deny any state role in the hacking, his comments, made to reporters in St.

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"Let's say you despise Western democracy." This Ted Talk covers thoughts about how/why Russia has hacked U.S. sensitive data.

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Laura Galante: How (and why) Russia hacked the US election

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Hacking, fake news, information bubbles ... all these and more have become part of the vernacular in recent years. But as cyberspace analyst Laura Galante describes in this alarming talk, the real target of anyone looking to influence geopolitics is dastardly simple: it's you.

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Why is pollution changing our ocean's chemistry?

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Triona McGrath: How pollution is changing the ocean's chemistry

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As we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more of it is dissolving in the oceans, leading to drastic changes in the water's chemistry. Triona McGrath researches this process, known as ocean acidification, and in this talk she takes us for a dive into an oceanographer's world.

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Were we meant to eat meat? "meat isn't necessary to keep us healthy"

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I encounter claims that humans were designed to eat meat - that it's in our genes, that we have teeth made for eating meat, that we need meat to get all the right nutrients - all the time in casual conversation and in media in stronger and weaker versions.

In Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat, science writer Marta Zaraska does a great job of exposing these claims as myths.

Vegetarian animals ranging from gorillas to water deer, she reports, have bigger, sharper canines than we do; our canines aren't specially meant for processing meat. What we lack dentally is more important, in fact, than what we have. Gently open a (calm) dog's jaw, and there at the back will be the carnassial teeth, "blade-like and sharp and perfect for slicing meat." Lions and tigers, racoons and house cats - all carnivores - have them too. We don't.

All the high-quality amino acid proteins we require are readily available in plants, Zaraska says, listing soy, buckwheat, quinoa and potatoes as examples.

Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine even notes that when people switch from meat-eating to plant-eating, their intake of vitamins and other nutrients improves.

True, vitamin B-12 is an exception: It's found only in meat, eggs and dairy. Vegetarians, then, still do fine (because of the eggs and dairy); vegans need to eat foods fortified with B-12 or take a supplement.

Meat isn't necessary to keep us healthy.

Zaraska wrote Meathooked primarily to discover why humans across the world crave meat. Factors of biology, including certain genetic predispositions and culture, ranging from family habits and cultural traditions to the sexual politics of meat as explained by Carol J. Adams, all play a role, she says.

I think the meat-myth-busting, too, is a central contribution of the book - and I'd like to take it even further.

Zaraska raves about the fake meat she samples in the Netherlands ("succulent ... rich in flavors") and recommends that we all eat vegetables, legumes, fruits and grains rather than meat from animals. But a set of statistics laid out right at the start of the book frames her entire discussion in a grim way:

"According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in 2011 we ate an average of sixty-one pounds more of meat than we did in 1951-that's about 122 average eight-ounce steaks a year more, despite all the accumulating warnings about cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. ... Across the world, the appetite for animal protein is on the rise. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that by 2020 the demand for meat in North America will increase by 8 percent (as compared to 2011), in Europe by 7 percent, and in Asia by a whopping 56 percent. In China, meat consumption has quadrupled since 1980."

How are vegetarians, vegans and all the rest of us cutting down on meat for reasons of individual health, global health and animal suffering supposed to feel any hope for the world in the face of that news?

I emailed Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute (GFI), to ask what he thought about that meat-saturated future. Here's what he said:

"GFI uses markets and food technology to transform global diets away from animal-based meat, dairy, and eggs, and toward plant-based and 'clean,' cultured alternatives. We are incredibly optimistic that in 25 years, more than half of all meat will either be plant-based or clean. By 2050, we'll be at 100 percent.

"We are very close to having plant-based meat that tastes exactly the same as animal-based meat, and we are also growing 'clean' meat in cultures, no animals required. So while it is true that demand for meat is going up in the developing world especially, as food technologies do a better job of replicating animal-based meat with plants, you'll see a huge shift away from animal meat and toward plant meat, which is far more efficient, healthier, and causes a tiny fraction of the climate change created by animal-based meat.

"We expect that in 10 years, clean meat will be cost-competitive with animal-based meat, and at that point, you'll see animal-based meat go the way of the horse and buggy."

A cross-cultural perspective (including an understanding of food and poverty) is going to be important here. Yet any worries that we're universally stuck with a meat-laden future may well be just another myth.

Polls show that as people start dropping foods from their diets, they tend to continue: " ... first goes red meat, then chicken, then fish, then milk and eggs," Zaraska writes. The full linear progression won't happen for everyone, for a variety of reasons (I still eat fish, myself), but the trend offers another reason for optimism. "Giving more kudos" to folks who take any steps to consume less meat, Zaraska suggests, may be the best way to go.

( The Washington Post even reported this week that some vegan restaurants avoid the V-word for fear of coming across too zealously.)

In describing people's cravings for meat, Zaraska asks: "After all, what would Thanksgiving look like without a turkey or a summer grill without a burger?"

She's just pointing out what many people feel - I know she doesn't mean literally that turkeys and burgers are required. Still, I posed Zaraska's question by email to Mary Lawrence, vegan chef and executive director of Ahisma Health and Harmony. She said:

"We come together to share our love for each other, and in that spirit animals would be guests at the table, not on our plates. While this notion may seem absurd in a society where eating meat is perceived as normal or even a status symbol, we need only shift our point of view as Shel Silverstein did in his poem of the same name ('Point of View') to elicit our inherent empathy for all beings:

" 'Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless/Christmas dinner's dark and blue/When you stop and try to see it/From the turkey's point of view.'

"Fortunately today, we can celebrate with faux meats like Tofurky Vegetarian Feast, Field Roast's Celebration Roast, and Beyond Meat's Beastburger. No one gets hurt, and we can still have a pretty awesome time."

That's no myth: We can eat well - maintaining our health and enjoying delicious flavor - without meat.

Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about human evolution, primate behavior and the cognition and emotion of animals. Barbara's most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape.

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Humans Are 'Meathooked' But Not Designed For Meat-Eating

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I encounter claims that humans were designed to eat meat - that it's in our genes, that we have teeth made for eating meat, that we need meat to get all the right nutrients - all the time in casual conversation and in media in stronger and weaker versions.

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The hidden influence of social networks.
"Studies show that if your friend is fat. That must mean that you're fat as well."

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Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks | TED Talk

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We’re all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.

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Why is Gender Equality Good for Everyone?
"Making gender visible to men is the first step to engaging men to support gender equality."

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

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Michael Kimmel: Why gender equality is good for everyone - men included

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Yes, we all know it's the right thing to do. But Michael Kimmel makes the surprising, funny, practical case for treating men and women equally in the workplace and at home. It's not a zero-sum game, but a win-win that will result in more opportunity and more happiness for everybody.

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How to Pets Aid Mental Illness? "when he comes up and sits beside me at night, it'd different, you know. It's just, like, he needs me as much as I need him."

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Any pet owner will tell you that their animal companions comfort and sustain them when life gets rough. This may be especially true for people with serious mental illness, a study finds. When people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were asked who or what helped them manage the condition, many said it was pets that helped the most.

"When I'm feeling really low they are wonderful because they won't leave my side for two days," one study participant with two dogs and two cats, "They just stay with me until I am ready to come out of it."

Another person said of their pet birds: "If I didn't have my pets I think I would be on my own. You know what I mean, so it's - it's nice to come home and, you know, listen to the birds singing and that, you know."

Many people with serious mental illness live at home and have limited contact with the health care system, says Helen Brooks, a mental health researcher at University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and the lead author on the study, which was published Friday in the journal BMC Psychiatry. So they're doing a lot of the work of managing their conditions.

Brooks says, "Many felt deep emotional connections with their pet that weren't available from friends and family."

Brooks and her colleagues interviewed 54 people with serious long-term mental illnesses. Twenty-five of them considered their pets to be a part of their social network. The scientists asked who they went to when they needed help or advice, where they gained emotional support and encouragement and how they spent their days.

The participants were then given a diagram with three consecutive circles radiating out from a square representing the participant. They were asked to write the people, places and things that gave them support into the circles, with the circles closest to the center being the most important.

Sixty percent of the people who considered pets to be a part of their social networks placed them in the central, most important circle - the same place many people put close family and social workers. 20 percent placed pets in the second circle.

The interviews with participants are poignant, and reveal the struggle and isolation that can come with mental illness.

"I think it's really hard when you haven't had a mental illness to know what the actual experience is [like]," said one participant. "There's like a chasm, deep chasm between us ... [Other people are] on one side of it, and we're on the other side of it. We're sending smoke signals to each other to try and understand each other but we don't always - we don't always understand."

People with mental illnesses often see their social groups shrink and find themselves alienated from their friends. For many of these people, says Brooks, animals can break through the isolation. They give affection without needing to understand the disorder.

"[Pets] don't look at the scars on your arms," one participant said. "They don't question where you've been."

The pets provided more than just emotional support and companionship, participants said. The animals also could distract them from their illness, even from severe psychosis.

One study participant placed birds in his closest social circle. When he was hearing voices, he said that they "help me in the sense, you know, I'm not thinking about the voices, I'm just thinking of when I hear the birds singing."

Another participant said that merely seeing a hamster climbing the bars on the cage and acting cute helped with some difficult situations.

And having to take care of pets keeps people from withdrawing from the world. "They force me, the cats force me to sort of still be involved," said one participant.

Another said that walking the dog helped them get out of the house and with people. "That surprised me, you know, the amount of people that stop and talk to him, and that, yeah, it cheers me up with him. I haven't got much in my life, but he's quite good, yeah."

"The routine these pets provide is really important for people," says Brooks. "Getting up in the morning to feed them and groom them and walk them, giving them structure and a sense of purpose that they won't otherwise have."

Many of the study participants are unemployed because of their illness, she notes. Having a pet that was well taken care of was a source of pride for them.

Mark Longsjo, the program director of adult services at McLean Southeast, an inpatient mental facility in Middleborough, Mass., says that the interviews in the study reflect his professional experiences. "We have so many patients come through, and we always ask them about their support system. Sometimes its family members, sometimes its friends, but it's very common to hear about pets."

When he does patient intake surveys, Longsjo says that he includes pets in their risk assessments. Patients with pets often say the animals help keep them from following through on suicidal thinking, because they know their pets depend on them.

The social workers at McLean also incorporate pets into their aftercare planning, encouraging patients to make walking and grooming their pets a part of their routine. "I think there's significant value in considering the common everyday pet to be as important as the relationships one has with one's family in the course of their treatment," says Longsjo. He feels this study is important because, although there's a lot of work looking at the benefits of trained therapy animals, they can be expensive and out of the reach of many patients.

Brooks hopes that more health workers will consider incorporating pets into care plans for people with mental illness. Many of her participants said that sometimes it felt like their pets could sense when they needed help the most, and were able to provide it - just like the owners took care of them.

As one person in the study said, "When he comes up and sits beside you on a night, it's different, you know. It's just, like, he needs me as much as I need him."

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Pets Help People Manage The Pain Of Serious Mental Illness

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Any pet owner will tell you that their animal companions comfort and sustain them when life gets rough. This may be especially true for people with serious mental illness, a study finds. When people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were asked who or what helped them manage the condition, many said it was pets that helped the most.

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As resources get depleted, and population increases, can humans evolve to live in the harsh conditions of space?

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Lisa Nip: How humans could evolve to survive in space

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If we hope to one day leave Earth and explore the universe, our bodies are going to have to get a lot better at surviving the harsh conditions of space. Using synthetic biology, Lisa Nip hopes to harness special powers from microbes on Earth -- such as the ability to withstand radiation -- to make humans more fit for exploring space.

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Why every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter.

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Tom Gruber: How AI can enhance our memory, work and social lives

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How smart can our machines make us? Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, wants to make "humanistic AI" that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with (or replacing) us.

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"Like many of you, I've lost too many friends and family to this disease. I've heard too many heartbreaking stories of people who've lost loved ones to addiction"

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

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Michael Botticelli: Addiction is a disease. We should treat it like one

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Only one in nine people in the United States gets the care and treatment they need for addiction and substance abuse. A former Director of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli is working to end this epidemic and treat people with addictions with kindness, compassion and fairness.

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Can our pets also suffer from depression, disorders, and other mental illnesses?

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Laurel Braitman: Depressed dogs, cats with OCD - what animal madness means for us humans

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Behind those funny animal videos, sometimes, are oddly human-like problems. Laurel Braitman studies non-human animals who exhibit signs of mental health issues -- from compulsive bears to self-destructive rats to monkeys with unlikely friends.

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North Korea successfully launched a nuclear missile. How will this affect the United States options?

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I recollect doing so a long time in another universe around 1994. We concluded a deal with North Korea that ended what we knew of as their nuclear weapons program.

It was based on plutonium as the fissile material to drive that weapons program. And the facilities that would produce the plutonium and separate it were shut down, closed down for eight years while the deal was in place. And that was their nuclear weapons program.

Now, they, from our perspective at least, cheated on that deal by having secret arrangements with the Pakistanis to bring them another technology for another type of material.

But I would submit to you at this point that the negotiation produced an outcome in which North Korea was without nuclear weapons, when they could have been with nuclear weapons. And the estimate from the intelligence community of the early '90s was the North could enter the 21st century with roughly 100 nuclear weapons if that deal hadn't been concluded.

OK, it ultimately fell apart. Agreed. The question is now, can you have another deal? Can you have a deal that sticks? Can we get the transparency we need?

I actually may disagree with my colleague a bit here about whether it is possible to get a deal that denuclearizes the peninsula. I don't think you can get it in one step. I think you would have a freeze, you would have a cap.

But I think if we don't have as a declared objective to have a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, then we really undercut the status of our ally South Korea.

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How does North Korea's latest nuclear breakthrough affect U.S. options?

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North Korea appears to have taken a quantum leap in its missile and nuclear programs, setting off a new test over the weekend that could be capable of threatening the U.S. mainland. The blast also set off a diplomatic fury and more South Korean military exercises.

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“Electronic circuits function about 1 million times faster than biochemical ones. So if a super intelligent machine was produced right now that wasn’t any smarter than the average MIT student and you ran it for a week it would perform 20,000 years of human level intellectual work.”

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Sam Harris: Can we build AI without losing control over it?

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Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven't yet grappled with the problems associated with creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants.

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Denial is a big factor for why many don't admit to an addiction. But the addiction is always about drugs

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6 Min Video on Understand Addiction and the Brain

A drug or alcohol addiction has two basic qualities. 1) You sometimes use more than you would like to use. 2) You continue to use despite negative consequences.

People use drugs or alcohol to escape, relax, or to reward themselves. But over time, drugs and alcohol make you believe that you can't cope without them, or that you can't enjoy life without using. The greatest damage is to your self-esteem.

What is the Medical Definition of Addiction?

An addiction must meet at least 3 of the following criteria. This is based on the criteria of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV) and World Health Organization (ICD-10).(1)

1. Tolerance. Do you use more alcohol or drugs over time?
2. Withdrawal. Have you experienced physical or emotional withdrawal when you have stopped using? Have you experienced anxiety, irritability, shakes, sweats, nausea, or vomiting? Emotional withdrawal is just as significant as physical withdrawal.
3. Limited control. Do you sometimes drink or use drugs more than you would like? Do you sometimes drink to get drunk? Does one drink lead to more drinks sometimes? Do you ever regret how much you used the day before?
4. Negative consequences. Have you continued to use even though there have been negative consequences to your mood, self-esteem, health, job, or family?
5. Neglected or postponed activities. Have you ever put off or reduced social, recreational, work, or household activities because of your use?
6. Significant time or energy spent. Have you spent a significant amount of time obtaining, using, concealing, planning, or recovering from your use? Have you spend a lot of time thinking about using? Have you ever concealed or minimized your use? Have you ever thought of schemes to avoid getting caught?
7. Desire to cut down. Have you sometimes thought about cutting down or controlling your use? Have you ever made unsuccessful attempts to cut down or control your use?

How Common is Drug or Alcohol Addiction?

Approximately 10% of any population is addicted to drugs or alcohol. Addiction is more common than diabetes, which occurs in approximately 7% of the population.

Addiction crosses all socio-economic boundaries. 10% of teachers, 10% of plumbers, and 10% of CEOs have an addiction.

The terms alcohol addiction, alcoholism, and alcohol dependence are all equivalent. The same is true for the terms drug addiction and drug dependence. (Reference: www.AddictionsAndRecovery.org.)

How Does Addiction Feel?

An addictive substance feels good because it stimulates the pleasure center of the brain through neurotransmitters such as dopamine and GABA. If you have a genetic predisposition, addictive substances don't just feel good. They feel so good that you will want to chase after them.

This is where addiction comes in. If you have a genetic predisposition, addictive substances feel so good that you are willing to suffer negative consequences in order to get more and to continue to feel the high.

Addictive substances feel different inside an addict's brain than they do to a non-addict. This is why the two sides have difficulty understanding each other. In someone who is not addicted, drugs and alcohol only produce a mild high. Therefore a non-addict cannot understand why the addict would go to such lengths, when it is clearly destroying their life.

Denial is a big part of addiction. Because addictive substances feel good, an addict will initially deny that they have a problem. In the long-run addiction isolates you from the people and activities and that mean the most to you.

The Cost of Addiction

The dollars and cents cost of addiction is mind boggling. At least twice as many people die from alcoholism in the US every year as die from motor vehicle accidents.(2)

Alcohol intoxication is associated with 40-50% of traffic fatalities, 25-35% of nonfatal motor vehicle injuries, and 64% of fires. Alcohol is present in nearly 50% of homicides, either in the victim or the perpetrator.(3)

Alcohol intoxication is involved in 31% of fatal injuries, and 23% of completed suicides.(4)

One study found that 86 % of homicide offenders, 37 % of assault offenders, and 57 % of men and 27 % of women involved in marital violence were drinking at the time of their offense.(5)

The Consequences of Addiction

People only stop using drugs and alcohol when they have suffered enough negative consequences. When you've suffered enough pain and enough regret you are ready to stop.

You are ready to stop when the two sides of addiction collide. On the one hand, addiction feels so good that you want to use more. On the other hand, addiction leads to negative consequences. After a while, something has got to give.

You don't have to hit rock bottom. The purpose of websites like this is to show you the potential negative consequences of addiction so that you will be ready to quit before you've lost everything. You can imagine what it would be like to hit rock bottom. And that can help motivate you.

The most important consequences of addiction are social, emotional, and psychological. People usually think of the physical and economic consequences of addiction. "I don't have a serious addiction because my health is fine, and I haven't lost my job." But those are very late stage consequences.

As far as work is concerned that's usually the last thing to suffer. You need your work in order to pay your bills, so that you can continue your addiction. When your work begins to suffer, you've slipped from being a functioning addict to a non-functioning addict.

The damage addiction does to your relationships and self-esteem is far deeper and takes longer to repair. You've hurt friends and family. You've disappointed yourself. You've traded important things in your life so that you could make more time to use. You've lived a double life. You've seen the hurt in your family's eyes, and the disappointment in your children's faces. Those are the consequences that can motivate you to begin recovery.

References

1) DSM stands for The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. ICD stands for The International Classification of Disease, published by the World Health Organization.
2) Mokdad, A. H., Marks, J. S., Stroup, D. F., & Gerberding, J. L., Actual causes of death in the United States, 2000. JAMA, 2004. 291(10): p. 1238-45.
3) Lowenfels, A. B., & Miller, T. T., Alcohol and trauma. Ann Emerg Med, 1984. 13(11): p. 1056-60.
4) Smith, G. S., Branas, C. C., & Miller, T. R., Fatal nontraffic injuries involving alcohol: A metaanalysis. Ann Emerg Med, 1999. 33(6): p. 659-68.
5) Roizen, J., Epidemiological issues in alcohol-related violence. Recent Dev Alcohol, 1997. 13: p. 7-40.

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what is addiction. definition of addiction

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Dr. Steven Melemis, I Want to Change My Life

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What is Addiction? Understanding Addiction

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A drug or alcohol addiction has two basic qualities. 1) You sometimes use more than you would like to use. 2) You continue to use despite negative consequences. People use drugs or alcohol to escape, relax, or to reward themselves.

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Addiction can be caused in many ways. But addiction isn't always caused by your genetics.

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Confirmation that there is a gene that may effect your intelligence. Does this mean not anyone can become a genius

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A team of scientists, led by psychiatric geneticists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has gathered the most extensive evidence to date that a gene that activates signaling pathways in the brain influences one kind of intelligence. They have confirmed a link between the gene, CHRM2, and performance IQ, which involves a person's ability to organize things logically.

"This is not a gene for intelligence," says Danielle M. Dick, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author on the study. "It's a gene that's involved in some kinds of brain processing, and specific alterations in the gene appear to influence IQ. But this single gene isn't going to be the difference between whether a person is a genius or has below-average intelligence."

Dick's team comprehensively studied the DNA along the gene and found that several variations within the CHRM2 gene could be correlated with slight differences in performance IQ scores, which measure a person's visual-motor coordination, logical and sequential reasoning, spatial perception and abstract problem solving skills. When people had more than one positive variation in the gene, the improvements in performance IQ were cumulative. The study's findings are available online in Behavioral Genetics and will appear in an upcoming print issue of that journal.

IQ tests also measure verbal skills and typically include many subtests. For this study, subjects took five verbal subtests and four performance subtests, but the genetic variations influenced only performance IQ scores.

"One way to measure performance IQ may be to ask people to order pictures correctly to tell a story," Dick explains. "A simple example might be pictures of a child holding a vase, the vase broken to bits on the floor and the child crying. The person taking the test would have to put those pictures into an order that tells the story of how the child dropped the vase and broke it and then cried."

The researchers studied DNA gathered as part of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA). In this multi-center study, people who have been treated for alcohol dependence and members of their families provide DNA samples to researchers, who isolated DNA regions related to alcohol abuse and dependence, as well as a variety of other outcomes.

Some of the participants in the study also took the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised, a traditional IQ test. In all, members of 200 families, including more than 2,150 individuals, took the Wechsler test, and those results were matched to differences in individuals' DNA.

By comparing individual differences embedded in DNA, the team zeroed in on CHRM2, the neuronal receptor gene on chromosome 7. The CHRM2 gene activates a multitude of signaling pathways in the brain involved in learning, memory and other higher brain functions. The research team doesn't yet understand how the gene exerts its effects on intelligence.

Intelligence was one of the first traits that attracted the attention of people interested in the interplay of genes and environmental influences. Early studies of adopted children, for example, showed that when children grow up away from their biological parents, their IQs are more closely correlated to biological parents, with whom they share genes, than adoptive parents, with whom they share an environment.

But in spite of the association between genes and intelligence, it has been difficult to find specific variations that influence intelligence. The genes identified in the past were those that had profoundly negative effects on intelligence - genes that cause mental retardation, for example. Those that contribute to less dramatic differences have been much harder to isolate.

Dick's team is not the first to notice a link between intelligence and the CHRM2 gene. In 2003, a group in Minnesota looked at a single marker in the gene and noted that the variation was related to an increase in IQ. A more recent Dutch study looked at three regions of DNA along the gene and also noticed influences on intelligence. In this new study, however, researchers tested multiple genetic markers throughout the gene.

"If we look at a single marker, a DNA variation might influence IQ scores between two and four points, depending on which variant a person carries," Dick explains. "We did that all up and down the gene and found that the variations had cumulative effects, so that if one person had all of the 'good' variations and another all of the 'bad' variations, the difference in IQ might be 15 to 20 points. Unfortunately, the numbers of people at those extremes were so small that the finding isn't statistically significant, but the point is we saw fairly substantial differences in our sample when we combined information across multiple regions of the gene."

Dick says the next step is to look at the gene and its numerous variants to learn what is going on biologically that might affect cognitive performance. Presently, she says it's too early to predict how small changes in the gene might be influencing communication in the brain to affect intelligence, and she says it's nearly certain CHRM2 is not the only gene involved.

"Perhaps as many as 100 genes or more could influence intelligence," she says. "I think all of the genes involved probably have small, cumulative effects on increasing or decreasing I.Q., and I expect overall intelligence is a function of the accumulation of all of these genetic variants, not to mention environmental influences ranging from socio-economic status to the value that's placed on learning when children are growing up."

Dick DM, et al. Association of CHRM2 with IQ: Converging Evidence for a Gene Influencing Intelligence. Behavioral Genetics, DOI 10.1007/s10519-006-9131-2

This work was funded by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and that National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health.

Washington University School of Medicine's full-time and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked fourth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

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Genes and genius: Researchers confirm association between gene and intelligence | The Source | Washington University in St. Louis

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If you're particularly good with puzzles or chess, the reason may be in your genes. A team of scientists, led by psychiatric geneticists at the School of Medicine, has gathered the most extensive evidence to date that a gene that activates signaling pathways in the brain influences one kind of intelligence.

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“Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you're doing something, when you laugh with people, that's actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better.”

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Did you know that you’re 30 times more likely to laugh if you’re with somebody else than if you’re alone? Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott shares this and other surprising facts about laughter in this fast-paced, action-packed and, yes, hilarious dash through the science of cracking up.

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Don't make excuses but find what you are best at apply it to the world and hold the key to being a genius.

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Derek Paravicini and Adam Ockelford: In the key of genius

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Born three and a half months prematurely, Derek Paravicini is blind and has severe autism. But with perfect pitch, innate talent and a lot of practice, he became a concert pianist by the age of 10. Here, his longtime piano teacher, Adam Ockelford, explains his student's unique relationship to music, while Paravicini shows how he has ripped up the "Chopsticks" rulebook.

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Instead of spoiling human intimacy, the internet enables it.

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Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet enables intimacy

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We worry that IM, texting, Facebook are spoiling human intimacy, but Stefana Broadbent's research shows how communication tech is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules.

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"The quality of the time spent with your child may be more important than the quantity.

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Since women began entering the workforce in increasing numbers in the late 20th century, psychologists and child development experts have questioned the effects of working parents on a child's overall development. Many families must rely on financial support from both parents, thus necessitating the dual-income family, but healthy social and emotional development depends on more than just the amount of time spent with children.

Importance of Bonding

Many factors, such as parenting styles, parental availability, the presence or lack of siblings, socioeconomic status and the child's individual temperament, influence a child's social and emotional development. One of the most important factors in normal social and emotional development, however, is the ability of a child to bond with her parents, starting from the moment she leaves the womb. Parental bonding helps a child feel safe, secure, nurtured and loved. According to HelpGuide.org, the parent-child bond is one of the strongest predictors of mental, social, physical and emotional health.

Quality Vs. Quantity

The quality of the time spent with your child may be more important than the quantity. Parents who provide round-the-clock child care and try to follow all of the conventional rules of parenting may still be unable to form a secure bond with their children, according to a pivotal study published in 2000 by the The Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development. Working parents who make family time a priority and are committed to their child's development are just as capable of establishing a healthy bond with their child as non-working parents. Creating a secure, healthy attachment with your child requires more than a certain amount of time spent together -- it requires love, nurturing, commitment, attending to your child's physical needs and developing a sense of connection to your child.

Potential Negative Effects

Certain factors may negatively impact a child's social and emotional development and affect his ability to bond with working parents. According to a clinical review published in 2009 in the "Michigan Family Review," factors such as nonstandard work schedules and financial stress may have a negative impact on a child's social, emotional and behavioral development, resulting in issues like behavioral problems and poor academic performance. The quality and quantity of time spent in child-care settings may also impact development. A longitudinal study published in the May/June issue of the journal "Child Development" found that teens who spent the most time in child-care settings as young children were more likely to exhibit impulsiveness and risk-taking behaviors than peers who had spent less time in child care.

Possible Benefits

Despite the possible negative effects of having working parents, children may also experience certain benefits if they have working parents who responsibly attend to their needs. According to HealthyChildren.org, children with working parents may view the world as a less threatening place. They may feel a sense of pride knowing that their parents have careers -- girls in particular may feel motivated and sense that they have more career options if they have a mother who works -- and participation in quality day care or after-school child-care settings has been linked to positive developmental traits in children in the areas of cognitive, social and emotional development, according to Cornell University's Cooperative Extension.

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Social & Emotional Development of Children with Working Parents

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Since women began entering the workforce in increasing numbers in the late 20th century, psychologists and child development experts have questioned the effects of working parents on a child's overall development. Many families must rely on financial support from both parents, thus necessitating the dual-income family, but healthy social and emotional development depends on more than just the amount of time spent with children.

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Are you born a genius or can you work to become one?

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Corbis

Is it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts — or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes?

How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. In the modern era, Immanuel Kant and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton wrote extensively about how genius occurs. Last year, pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell addressed the subject in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.

The latest, and possibly most comprehensive, entry into this genre is Dean Keith Simonton's new book Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies (Springer Publishing Co., 227 pages). Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, is one of the world's leading authorities on the intellectually eminent, whom he has studied since his Harvard grad-school days in the 1970s. ( See pictures of Albert Einstein.)

For most of its history, the debate over what leads to genius has been dominated by a bitter, binary argument: is it nature or is it nurture — is genius genetically inherited, or are geniuses the products of stimulating and supportive homes? Simonton takes the reasonable position that geniuses are the result of both good genes and good surroundings. His middle-of-the-road stance sets him apart from more ideological proponents like Galton (the founder of eugenics) as well as revisionists like Gladwell who argue that dedication and practice, as opposed to raw intelligence, are the most crucial determinants of success.

Too often, writers don't nail down exactly what they mean by genius. Simonton tries, with this thorough, slightly ponderous, definition: Geniuses are those who "have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement" and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both "original and highly exemplary." ( Read TIME's 2007 cover story, "Are We Failing Our Geniuses?")

Fine, now how do you determine whether artistic or scientific creations are original and exemplary? One method Simonton and others use is to add up the number of times an individual's publications are cited in professional literature — or, say, the number of times a composer's work is performed and recorded. Other investigators count encyclopedia references instead. Such methods may not be terribly sophisticated, but the answer they yield is at least a hard quantity.

Still, there's an echo-chamber quality to this technique: genius is what we all say it is. Is there a more objective method? There are IQ tests, of course, but not all IQ tests are the same, which leads to picking a minimum IQ and calling it genius-level. Also, estimates of the IQs of dead geniuses tend to be fun, but they are based on biographical information that can be highly uneven. ( Read TIME's 1999 cover story about the "I.Q. Gene.")

So Simonton falls back on his "intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance" formulation. But what about accidental discoveries? Simonton mentions the case of biologist Alexander Fleming, who, in 1928, "noticed quite by chance that a culture of Staphylococcus had been contaminated by a blue-green mold. Around the mold was a halo." Bingo: penicillin. But what if you had been in Fleming's lab that day and noticed the halo first? Would you be the genius?

Recently, the endurance and hard work part of the achievement equation has gotten a lot of attention, and the role of raw talent and intelligence has faded a bit. The main reason for this shift in emphasis is the work of Anders Ericsson, a friendly rival of Simonton's who teaches psychology at Florida State University. Gladwell featured Ericsson's work prominently in Outliers. ( See the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008.)

Ericsson has become famous for the 10-year rule: the notion that it takes at least 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of dedicated practice for people to master most complex endeavors. Ericsson didn't invent the 10-year rule (it was suggested as early as 1899), but he has conducted many studies confirming it. Gladwell is a believer. "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good," he writes. "It's the thing you do that makes you good."

Simonton rather dismissively calls this the "drudge theory." He thinks the real story is more complicated: deliberate practice, he says, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something. In a 2002 study, Simonton showed that the average IQ of 64 eminent scientists was around 150, fully 50 points higher than the average IQ for the general population. And most of the variation in IQs (about 80%, according to Simonton) is explained by genetics. ( See pictures of Bobby Fischer, chess prodigy.)

Personality traits also matter. Simonton writes that geniuses tend to be "open to experience, introverted, hostile, driven, and ambitious." These traits too are inherited — but only partly. They're also shaped by environment.

So what does this mean for people who want to encourage genius? Gladwell concludes his book by saying the 10,000-hour rule shows that kids just need a chance to show how hard they can work; we need "a society that provides opportunities for all," he says. Well, sure. But he dismisses the idea that kids need higher IQs to achieve success, and that's just wishful thinking. As I argued here, we need to do more to recognize and not alienate high-IQ kids. Too often, principals hold them back with age-mates rather than letting them skip grades.

Still, genius can be very hard to discern, and not just among the young. Simonton tells the story of a woman who was able to get fewer than a dozen of her poems published during her brief life. Her hard work availed her little — but the raw power of her imagery and metaphor lives on. Her name? Emily Dickinson.

See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.

See pictures of the college dorm's evolution.

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Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

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Is it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts - or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes? How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity.

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As early as 3 years old, a child slowly learns to adapt to their parents’ marital status. According to Barbara Schneider, author of the article, “three- and four-year-old children growing up with their own married parents (or in an "intact" family) are three times less likely than those in any other family structure to experience emotional or behavioral problems such as attention deficit disorder” (Schneider).

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IAV | Brief: Family Structure and Children's Educational Outcomes

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Family structure - whether a child's parents are married, divorced, single, remarried, or cohabiting - is a significant influence on children's educational performance.

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Mothers worldwide do not understand the importance of vegetable consumption in childhood. They choose to feed their children fast food instead, which is a quick eating habit that leads to obesity in children.

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American toddlers are more likely to eat french fries than green vegetables on any given day, according to a new national survey on children's eating habits.

Many young kids also go without any vegetables at all, the survey found.

One in four 6- to 11-month-olds and one in five 1-year-olds had no reported vegetable consumption at all on days they were surveyed, the researchers reported.

"The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends vegetable consumption with every meal and snack," said lead researcher Gandarvaka Miles, a doctoral candidate with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health. "On two random days, parents didn't report any vegetable consumption for these children."

The survey also found that nearly three out of every five infants aren't getting any breast milk at all.

These numbers are concerning because kids' eating patterns develop at a young age, Miles said. Poor eating habits when young can put infants and toddlers on a road to continued poor nutrition into adulthood, she added.

"As we learn more about how dietary habits are established, we are seeing that even as early as infancy, breast milk consumption and consumption of fruits and vegetables can help lay the foundation for healthy eating habits," Miles said.

She and her colleagues used data from 2005 to 2012 taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track health and diet trends among Americans.

In the survey, mothers were asked to provide a detailed description of what their children ate on two randomly chosen days, Miles said.

About 26 percent of 1-year-olds ate french fries the day before the survey, compared with 7.5 percent who ate dark green vegetables and about 17 percent who ate deep yellow vegetables, according to the results.

The survey also revealed a decline in consumption of healthy fruits and vegetables among 1-year-olds.

The percentage of 1-year-olds eating canned or frozen fruit decreased by more than 10 percent between 2005 and 2012, and consumption of dark green vegetables decreased by more than 50 percent.

Most other vegetable categories also saw a decline in consumption among 1-year-olds - even french fries, which fell from about 32 percent to 26 percent.

The researchers found that nearly 60 percent of infants younger than 6 months did not consume any breast milk. However, they did find that more families are exclusively breast-feeding during the first six months of life, in alignment with AAP recommendations.

It can be difficult to find fresh fruits and vegetables in many parts of the country, said Dr. Annemarie Stroustrup, an associate professor with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She was not involved with the study.

"In the wealthier parts of town, you can walk a block and you find a grocery that has a wide variety of fruits and vegetables," Stroustrup said. "When you go to some of the lower-income neighborhoods, it's often quite a distance to travel to get somewhere that has a greater variety of fresh foods."

Toddlers also don't make it easy on parents, she added.

"Toddlers are not necessarily going to be developmentally ready to try new foods. Toddlers are newness-averse," Stroustrup said. "You often have to offer a new food to a toddler up to 10 times before that toddler will accept it as something they will eat."

But it's important to be diligent and keep trying, both Stroustrup and Miles said.

"Food preferences that we develop begin to be established as early as transition to solid foods, and that usually happens around 6 months for U.S. children," Miles said.

Stroustrup agreed. "Although your toddler may say they don't like fruits or vegetables, if you keep offering it, as they enter childhood, they will end up with better eating habits and eventually they will likely accept it," she said.

Local governments can also take steps to help people improve their children's eating habits, Stroustrup said.

For example, in New York City the mayor's office has promoted the institution of farmer's markets across the city, and supported the acceptance of food stamps at those markets, Stroustrup said. That gives lower-income people a chance to buy healthier foods for their families.

The new study was published online May 1 and appears in the June issue of Pediatrics.

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Many U.S. children go days without eating any vegetables, survey finds

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American toddlers are more likely to eat french fries than green vegetables on any given day, according to a new national survey on children's eating habits. Many young kids also go without any vegetables at all, the survey found.

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"After seeing the plastic gyres in the ocean, I'm more worried about the plastic gyres in the grocery store.”

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Dianna Cohen: Tough truths about plastic pollution

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Artist Dianna Cohen shares some tough truths about plastic pollution in the ocean and in our lives -- and some thoughts on how to free ourselves from the plastic gyre.

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“The (plastic) levels are increasing, the amount of packaging is increasing, the throw-away concept of living is proliferating, and it’s showing up in the ocean. … We must stop the plastic on land, before it reaches the water.”

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Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he's drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.

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Illegal immigrants' children pay for being brought into the country

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President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm - and fulfill one of the president's core campaign promises.

The administration's deliberations on the issue have been fluid and fast moving, and the president has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program.

Story Continued Below

Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. But conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress - rather than the executive branch - is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program and kick the issue to Congress, the two sources said.

In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president's decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, "thinks Congress should've gotten its act together a lot longer ago."

White House aides caution that - as with everything in the Trump White House - nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made.

Trump is expected to formally make that announcement on Tuesday, and the White House informed House Speaker Paul Ryan of the president's decision on Sunday morning, according to a source close to the administration. Ryan had said during a radio interview on Friday that he didn't think the president should terminate DACA, and that Congress should act on the issue.

A spokesman for Ryan did not immediately respond to a request for comment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement, "A decision is not finalized. We will make an announcement on Tuesday."

The president's expected decision is likely to shore up his base, which rallied behind his broader campaign message about the importance of enforcing the country's immigration laws and securing the border. At the same time, the president's decision is likely to be one of the most contentious of his early administration, opposed by leaders of both parties and by the political establishment more broadly.

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The White House and Congress have tried to pass the issue off on each other - with each arguing that the other is responsible for determining the fate of the approximately 800,000 undocumented immigrants who are benefiting from DACA. Though most Republicans believe that rolling back DACA is a solid legal decision, they are conscious of the difficult emotional terrain. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch joined Ryan in cautioning Trump against rolling back the program.

The president is likely to couch his decision in legalese. Many on the right, even those who support protections for children brought into the country illegally through no fault of their own, argue that DACA is unconstitutional because former President Barack Obama carried it out unilaterally instead of working through Congress.

Some Republican lawmakers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have said that Congress needs to pass a law to protect the so-called Dreamers.

"My hope is that as part of this process we can work on a way to deal with this issue and solve it through legislation, which is the right way to do it and the constitutional way to do it," Rubio told CNN in June.

Trump's expected decision to scrap DACA within six months represents another challenge for Ryan and fellow congressional Republicans, who are facing an end-of-September deadline to avert a government shutdown and government debt default, while also tackling a Hurricane Harvey relief package and a major tax reform push.

It's not clear that Congress will be able to come to an agreement on the future of DACA.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who previously said he was very disappointed by Trump's lack of action on DACA, expressed fresh frustration on Sunday night with the idea of a delayed implementation.

"Ending DACA now gives chance 2 restore Rule of Law. Delaying so R Leadership can push Amnesty is Republican suicide," King tweeted.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who has called on Trump to stand up for the Dreamers, tweeted out her displeasure with Trump's expected announcement.

"After teasing #Dreamers for months with talk of his 'great heart,' @POTUS slams door on them. Some 'heart'..." she wrote.

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Trump has decided to end DACA, with 6-month delay

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President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm - and fulfill one of the president's core campaign promises.

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"While more than half of employed parents guess that their children want more time with them, in fact, most children did not put this on top of their list."

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Disabled people are being very belittled.

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Susan Robinson: How I fail at being disabled

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Born with a genetic visual impairment that has no correction or cure, Susan Robinson is legally blind (or partially sighted, as she prefers it) and entitled to a label she hates: "disabled." In this funny and personal talk, she digs at our hidden biases by explaining five ways she flips expectations of disability upside down.

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Criminals are asking for redemption of their crimes and wanting to be thought of as a human like others.

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Marlon Peterson: Am I not human? A call for criminal justice reform

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For a crime he committed in his early twenties, the courts sentenced Marlon Peterson to 10 years in prison -- and, as he says, a lifetime of irrelevance. While behind bars, Peterson found redemption through a penpal mentorship program with students from Brooklyn.

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"There is an expression that goes, 'If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.'" Christine Ferraro, writer

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There are not many shows on television that deserve to be called true American institutions but one of them is surely "Sesame Street." It's been on the air now for almost 50 years. When "Sesame Street" began in 1969, it was considered an experiment. The question: Could television be used to educate young children? Well, research proved the answer to be yes, and the nonprofit children's television workshop -- now called Sesame Workshop -- that created the show, has been refining and expanding that mission ever since -- everything from abc's and 123's, to race, and even death.

When we first broadcast our story this past spring, "Sesame Street" -- which now airs on HBO as well as its longtime home on PBS -- was getting ready to take on its latest challenge introducing a new kid on the street -- a Muppet named Julia, who has autism.

For many of us, these opening notes are a trip down memory lane.
First episode of "Sesame Street": Sally, you've never seen a street like Sesame Street. Everything happens here!
To a street we watched as kids, with our kids, or both.
Bert: Hey Ernie, do you know that you, uh, have a banana in your ear? Ernie: What was that, Bert?
With Muppet characters as known and beloved as any human TV star.
Bert: Will you just take that banana out of your ear?! Ernie: I'm sorry you'll have to speak a little louder, Bert. I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear!
Today, almost half a century later, "Sesame Street" is shot on a soundstage in Astoria, Queens, with one of the cameramen who filmed the first episode still on the job. The "Sesame Street" set is a vibrant, upbeat place, with puppeteers on rolling stools down below, and the furry and feathery creatures they bring to life in the sometimes crowded space above.
Abby: It was a little awkward. Whaaaaaa! [gets knocked over by Big Bird's tail] Big Bird: I'm sorry!
The puppeteers figure out how to position their Muppet by watching the scene on monitors.

The day we visited, they were filming the debut of the new Muppet character, Julia, who has autism. The story begins with Julia's friends, Muppets Elmo and Abby Cadabby, introducing her to Big Bird.
Big Bird: Oh, hi Julia. I'm Big Bird. Nice to meet you. Oh. Julia?
But Big Bird is confused when Julia doesn't respond.

"I would love her to be not Julia, the kid on 'Sesame Street' who has autism. I would like her to be just Julia." Christine Ferraro, writer

Christine Ferraro: I think the big discussion right at the start was, "How do we do this? How do we talk about autism?"

Christine Ferraro has been a writer at Sesame Street for 25 years, during which time the frequency of autism diagnoses has multiplied.

Lesley Stahl: The chances of a little kid two, three, four years old having some kind of a relationship with another kid with autism is pretty high.

Christine Ferraro: Exactly. Especially once they hit school age, because they'll be in their classrooms.
Abby: Julia, you're so creative! Julia: [laughs and flaps]
But how to portray autism?

Christine Ferraro: It's tricky because autism is not one thing, because it is different for every single person who has autism. There is an expression that goes, "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism."

"Sesame Street" has always based its characters and content on extensive research. They regularly bring in educators and child psychologists. In the case of Julia, they also worked with autism organizations to decide which characteristics she should have and how best to normalize autism for all children.

"There is an expression that goes, 'If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.'" Christine Ferraro, writer

Christine Ferraro: So that when they encounter them in their real life it's familiar. And they see that these-- these can be their friends too.

Abby: Hi, Miss Lesley, you look very shiny and beautiful today.

Lesley Stahl: Well so do you.

During a break in the filming, Julia and her friends did for us what they're hoping to do for millions with this episode...

Lesley Stahl: And hi, Julia.

...help the audience understand when a child with autism doesn't react the way one might expect.

Lesley Stahl: Big Bird, when you first met Julia-

Big Bird: Uh-huh.

Lesley Stahl: --she didn't answer you either.

Big Bird: Yeah that's right. And I thought that maybe she didn't like me.

Elmo: Yeah, but you know, we had to explain to Big Bird that Julia likes Big Bird. It's just that Julia has autism. So sometimes it takes her a little longer to do things.

Lesley Stahl: You're explaining her, 'cause you've come to understand her so well.

Elmo: Well-- we're pretty good at understanding people. We live with a grouch.
Oscar: What do you want?
"Sesame Street" has been around so long now that it's hard to remember a time before children's television waseducational. But Sesame Street's creator Joan Ganz Cooney remembers it well.

Joan Ganz Cooney: It was just nutty cartoons with no purpose at all. I mean, I would watch them and just be appalled.

Lesley Stahl: As you're talking, I'm seeing a cat slam against a wall, be reduced to nothing, slide down, and come back to life.

Joan Ganz Cooney: Yes, that was commercial television.

Ganz cooney, then a public television producer, was asked by the Carnegie Corporation to study whether television could be something different.

Joan Ganz Cooney: The question being, "Do you think television could teach children?"

Ironically, she says the answer was right in front of her and everyone else, in beer.
Beer ad song: You can't beat the fresh creamy taste of Piel's...
Joan Ganz Cooney: They were singing beer commercials, children were. Well, so obviously, they had learned-

Lesley Stahl: They'd learned the jingle?

Joan Ganz Cooney: So if a commercial could teach beer, couldn't it teach one-- one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10?

Joan Ganz Cooney: And we did. We created little commercials.
Sesame Street: "Boys and girls, have you met, the 26 letters called the alphabet.... A, B, C,"
The new show had a particular target: low-income children who were arriving at school less prepared than their middle-class peers. So Ganz Cooney deliberately made the set a gritty New York street urban kids could relate to, with an interracial cast that got the show banned early on in Mississippi. Nationwide, though, it was a hit. Kids -- and parents -- loved Jim Henson's Muppets.
Girl: 8, 9, 9, 10, 11. You got pretty eyes. Kermit: So do you.
And testing showed kids who watched were learning. Sometimes the lessons were about real life, as when the actor who played beloved shopkeeper Mr. Hooper passed away, and the show decided to address the subject of death head on.
Big Bird: Tada! Adults: Oh, look at that. Big Bird: I can't wait 'til he sees it. Say, where is he?
Lesley Stahl: You could have changed actors.

Joan Ganz Cooney: Yes. But we decided " Sesame Street" had always dealt with the real. And it was real, and so we decided not to just replace him and call the man Mr. Hooper and hope they didn't notice.
Maria: Uh, don't you remember we told you Mr. Hooper died. He's dead. Big Bird: Oh yeah, I remember. I'll give it to him when he comes back. Susan: Big Bird, when, when people die, they don't come back. Big Bird: Ever?
Over the years, "Sesame Street" did segments about other challenging subjects, like skin color, disabilities, and prejudice.
Gulliver: In my neighborhood, birds only play with birds, so I'm not playing with a Snuffleupagus. Snuffy: Ohhh, that hurts my feelings.
Less well known is a branch of Sesame, separate from the TV show, that creates online videos like this and other materials. They're called social impact initiatives and they're targeted at specific communities of kids.
Abby holding up drawings of houses: This one is where I live with my Mommy, and this one is where I live with my Daddy.
Like children of divorce, kids from military families..
Elmo (w/ kid and dad with prosthetic hand): It's like a robot hand.
And the nearly three million kids with a parent incarcerated.
Muppet: My dad's in jail.
The focus on autism began as one of these social impact projects -- with videos.

Boy w/ bubbles, mom v/o: My son Louie is 6, and he has autism.

"It means that our kids are important enough to be seen in society. Having Julia on the show and seeing all of the characters treat her with compassion...it's huge." Stacey Gordon, puppeteer

And an online animated storybook about a little girl named Julia. The initiative was so well-received, sesame decided to bring Julia to the broadcast, which meant designing a new Muppet.

Rollie Krewson: This is our eye drawer.

Lesley Stahl: Look at that, my goodness.

This is where Muppets are born, at the Jim Henson workshop, at the work station of master puppet creator Rollie Krewson.

Rollie Krewson: The male eyes have no eyelashes. And the female eye have eyelashes.

Lesley Stahl: Because Julia has autism, were there special challenges in building her?

Rollie Krewson: Yes actually, because when she gets upset, she flaps her hands. So she has two separate sets of arms. She has a set of arms that does this. ( ARMS FLAP) And then she has a set of arms when she's fine and OK. So they would switch on set.

And of course every Muppet needs a puppeteer. But not every puppeteer has the connection Stacey Gordon does to the role. Gordon is the mother of a son with autism. She traveled all the way from Phoenix to audition for the part.

Lesley Stahl: The idea that there will be a child with autism on Sesame Street -

Stacey Gordon: Yeah.

Lesley Stahl: Tell me what that means to you.

Stacey Gordon: It means that our kids are important enough to be seen in society. Having Julia on the show and seeing all of the characters treat her with compassion-

Lesley Stahl: And like her.

Stacey Gordon: And like her.

Lesley Stahl: That's big.

Stacey Gordon: Yeah, it's huge.

Gordon told us she channeled her own son's experiences for a tough scene where Julia's heightened sensitivity to noise triggers a meltdown.
Julia: Noise noise. Alan: The sirens are bothering you?
Stacey Gordon: It's important for kids without autism to see what autism can look like.
Julia: Break break.
Stacey Gordon: Had my son's friends been exposed to his behaviors through something that they had seen on TV before they experienced them in the classroom, they might not have been frightened. They might not have been worried when he cried. They would have known that he plays in a different way and that that's OK.

Lesley Stahl: He didn't have that.

Stacey Gordon: He didn't-

Lesley Stahl: But maybe-

Stacey Gordon: --have that.

Lesley Stahl: --kids from now on will.

Stacey Gordon: And that's a beautiful thing.
Abby: You want to play now, Julia? Julia: Play, play, play.
Also beautiful to Gordon, the message of inclusion at the heart of one of the episode's most memorable scenes.

Christine Ferraro: They decide to play tag together. But Julia's so excited that she's jumping up and down. That's a thing that can be typical of some kids with autism.
Abby: Oh Julia, you're bouncing like a rubber ball. Boing, boing, boing. Elmo: Boing, boing. Julia: Boing.
Christine Ferraro: And then it turns into a game where they're all jumping like her. So it was a very easy way to show that with a very slight accommodation they can meet her where she is.

And get something out of it themselves.
Elmo: This is fun, Julia. Abby: Hey, it's a whole new game! It's boing tag! Julia: [tags her] Boing! Abby: [screams] Ah! Now I'm it! Big Bird: You know, I think I'd like to be a friend of Julia too.
Lesley Stahl: She is going to be a recurring character?

Christine Ferraro: That's the hope.

Lesley Stahl: And will she become a major character?

Christine Ferraro: We'll see.

Lesley Stahl: You'd like to have her become a major character, I can see.

Christine Ferraro: I would-- I would love her to be. I would love her to be not Julia, the kid on "Sesame Street" who has autism. I would like her to be just Julia.

Elmo: Yeah, we really like Julia. She's really special to us, Miss Lesley.

Lesley Stahl: Julia, are you having fun with your new friends?

Julia: Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.

Elmo: That's a yes.

Since our story first aired, "Sesame Street" has shot a new episode featuring Julia, to be part of the show's upcoming season.
Produced by Shari Finkelstein. Nieves Zuberbuhler, associate producer.

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Newest "Sesame Street" Muppet has autism: Meet Julia

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There are not many shows on television that deserve to be called true American institutions but one of them is surely "Sesame Street." It's been on the air now for almost 50 years. When "Sesame Street" began in 1969, it was considered an experiment. The question: Could television be used to educate young children?

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Confederate Generals are not the only ones guilty of protecting slavery.

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"African elephants could be gone from the wild within one generation."

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A British helicopter pilot was shot and killed while trying to stop elephant poachers in Tanzania, a conservation group said.

The pilot, Roger Gower, was killed Friday while working with the Texas-based Friedkin Conservation Fund, in a joint effort with Tanzanian wildlife authorities, to "track down and arrest active elephant poachers," according to a statement on the group's website. "In the course of this action, the poachers fired upon the helicopter and Roger was fatally wounded."

"We are committed to honoring Roger and his work," Dan Friedkin, chairman of the group, said in the statement. "We are also committed to ensuring that those responsible for this attack are found and brought to justice. We believe that Roger can best be honored by redoubling our commitment to protect elephants and our priceless wildlife heritage. This tragic event again highlights the appalling risk and cost of protecting Tanzania¹s wildlife."

Gower was flying in the Maswa Game Reserve, near Serengeti National Park, trying to track down poachers who had killed an elephant, according to tweets from Lazaro Nyalandu, Tanzania's former minister for natural resources and tourism. Gower managed to land the helicopter after being hit by fire from an AK-47. Gower "sadly died before his rescue," Nyalandu wrote. "You loved our country and I knew you on many flights we took together in defence of our wildlife heritage."

Britain's Foreign Office confirmed the death of a Briton in Tanzania and said it was "providing assistance to the family at this difficult time," the Associated Press reported.

An estimated 40,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2011, according to a 2014 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to Save the Elephants, which is primarily based in Kenya and uses radio collars to track elephants, African elephants could be gone from the wild within one generation.

Poaching is fueled by a demand for ivory from Asia, according to the World Wildlife Federation. Yet demand for ivory in China appears to be falling, according to a December report from Save the Elephants, which notes that the price for ivory has fallen by nearly half since 2014.

A Maasai boy and his dog stand near the skeleton of an elephant killed by poachers outside of Arusha, Tanzania, on Feb. 13, 2013. (Photo: Jason Straziuso, AP)

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1WUB9K2

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Group says British pilot killed by poachers in Tanzania

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A British helicopter pilot was shot and killed while trying to stop elephant poachers in Tanzania, a conservation group said. The pilot, Roger Gower, was killed Friday while working with the Texas-based Friedkin Conservation Fund, in a joint effort with Tanzanian wildlife authorities, to "track down and arrest active elephant poachers," according to a statement on the group's website.

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"Today, of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, Alzheimer's is the only one  we cannot prevent, cure or even slow down."

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Samuel Cohen: Alzheimer's is not normal aging - and we can cure it

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More than 40 million people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer's disease, and that number is expected to increase drastically in the coming years. But no real progress has been made in the fight against the disease since its classification more than 100 years ago.

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"Ivory isn’t just about dead elephants and dead rhinos anymore, it’s about villages and raped women and dead soldiers.”

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CLOSE

Novel technology used in a National Geographic investigation into illegal poaching of elephants' tusks has found that the criminals seeking the valuable ivory aren't just jewelry traders. They're terrorists, as well.

"Tracking Ivory," the investigation newly revealed by National Geographic magazine and in a show airing Sunday on National Geographic Channel, relied on fake tusks with GPS implants to track the trade in ivory in areas too dangerous for travel by the reporting team.

National Geographic fellow Bryan Christy, documentary filmmaker J.J. Kelley and photographer Brent Stirton traveled to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to track the illegal poaching and ivory trade. About 30,000 of the world's remaining 440,000 elephants are killed annually, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

The investigative team gave the fake tusks to couriers known to deal in the ivory trade. Through the tracking devices, the team discovered that the couriers delivered the tusks to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a terrorist group. Christy said he believes the group trades the ivory to the government of neighboring South Sudan for weapons.

"The militia (LRA) is backed by the Sudanese government poaching all across the continent," Christy told USA TODAY. "The only people battling these people on the ground are park rangers. They are manning this line."

The park rangers in the central African park protect their elephants with AK-47 guns, he said.

The investigation also found that the terrorists force young African children to help transport the tusks. And it unveiled exactly who the poachers are for the first time and what they do with the ivory.

"The traditional narrative is an animal is shown in the wild in its glory. Then it's dead, poached, in the marketplace," Christy said. "There is this faceless villain in the background that's not identified. We would never stand for that in any other form of criminal exploitation."

Susan Goldberg, editor in chief of National Geographic magazine and news, said she shares Christy's opinion on the hole in wildlife journalism, so they created a special investigations unit.

"There is all kinds of wildlife crimes, and there really isn't anybody who does a good job of covering that," Goldberg told USA TODAY.

Wildlife crime investigations need to go deeper than following the consumer, she said. They need to find the traders and suppliers. "It helps you really understand that ivory isn't just about dead elephants and dead rhinos," she said. "It's about villages and raped women and dead soldiers."

Christy started his investigation of ivory in 2009. "We knew elephants were being killed at extraordinary rates across Africa," he said. "Almost every story I read at the end would say, 'and it goes to China.'"

The former lawyer used his understanding of law to research the politics and policies involved in illegal trade. He plans to change the narrative style of wildlife crime reporting.

Governments in other countries often regulate the stories journalists can cover, Christy said. He learned about the power of foreign journalism from a previous illegal animal trade investigation for the magazine Kingpin.

"We identified government officials," Christy said. "(Police) raided the facilities, seized the animals, made arrests and law changed."

He uses his freedom as an American journalist to report the facts. Foreign media then can cite National Geographic in their own reports. He said he writes stories that go beyond telling tragic stories of exploited animals.

"That has its place, but that doesn't inspire anyone to act or commit to taking down criminal enterprises," Christy said. "It inspires them to give a few dollars and feel bad. I want people to feel, if anything angry, not sad."

Kelley, the filmmaker for National Geographic Channel's Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, said the visual impact of the violence in central Africa juxtaposed with peace throughout much of the land complements the narrative.

The team saw human remains, park rangers protecting their animals with a few AK-47s and limited ammo, and ravaged children. But the shocking imagery pushed them to continue their reporting, he said.

At one point, Kelley remembered spending the night on a cold floor of a Tanzanian prison cell. Authorities had stopped Christy at the airport with the fake tusks and forced them to wait a night for an expert to examine the ivory for authenticity.

The hope of pushing the story forward outweighed the fear of legal battles, he said.

"What (Bryan) is doing is innovative and what needs to be done," Kelley said. "Wildlife crime reporting needs to be flipped on its head and approached from a criminal perspective."

Christy's article, "Tracking Ivory" is the cover story of National Geographic magazine's September 2015 issue. The investigation is also the subject of the film Explorer: Warlords of Ivory premiering Sunday at 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT on National Geographic Channel.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Ei71ni

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GPS in fake tusks tracks ivory poaching to terrorists

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CLOSE Novel technology used in a National Geographic investigation into illegal poaching of elephants' tusks has found that the criminals seeking the valuable ivory aren't just jewelry traders. They're terrorists, as well.

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Should the Minimum Wage be raised?

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Cooks and cashiers from McDonald's, Burger King and other restaurants walked off the job to call for a $15 an hour minimum wage.

The protesters are also pushing for union rights for fast food workers and for a paid medical leave bill currently before Massachusetts lawmakers.

The Labor Day protest began at the Tremont Street McDonald's at 6 a.m. Monday and will be followed by a rally.

If lawmakers fail to act on the bills, the protesters are also backing two proposed ballot questions which would raise the minimum wage from $11 an hour to $15 an hour and guarantee workers have access to paid family and medical leave from their employers.

"It's very important because of the fact I'm doing it for them," Barbara Fisher said of her two children. "They know I'm out here trying to make a better living wage for them and also a better future for them. That's why today is very important."

The protest is part of a nationwide demonstration.
Click here for more from Boston 25.

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Fast food workers strike for $15 minimum wage

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Cooks and cashiers from McDonald's, Burger King and other restaurants walked off the job to call for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The protesters are also pushing for union rights for fast food workers and for a paid medical leave bill currently before Massachusetts lawmakers.

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Can women's hormones effect their risk of Alzheimer's and Dementia?

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By Pauline M. Maki, PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago, Society for Women's Health Research Interdisciplinary Network on Alzheimer's Disease Member
When women think about menopause, they typically think about hot flashes. New research shows that memory problems are a common but under-recognized menopausal symptom.

Memory problems emerge during perimenopause, the time around the final menstrual period, before many women even realize that they are "going through the change." Early research studies have documented an increase in memory complaints, such as forgetting names, as a woman enters the menopausal transition, while more recent studies have revealed measurable changes in verbal memory as a woman transitions through menopause [1, 2].

Although decreases in memory are a normal part of aging, age does not account for the changes in memory that occur when a woman transitions through menopause. Similarly, although sleep disturbances and mood symptoms are common and can affect memory, they do not account for memory problems during this transition. Preliminary research links memory problems to hot flashes, (when hot flashes are measured objectively ― using ambulatory monitors) but further research on this issue is needed [3,4]. The good news is that the memory problems that can emerge during perimenopause seem to improve during the postmenopausal years [2].

Hormonal factors appear to play a role in memory changes during the menopausal transition. The ovaries are the primary source of estrogen in premenopausal women. In women who have not yet reached their final menstrual period, having their ovaries surgically removed leads to a decline in verbal memory, which is reversed when they take estrogen therapy [5]. Similarly, removing ovaries before age 48 has been associated with a 70 percent increased risk of cognitive impairment or dementia [6], but use of estrogen therapy until the typical age of menopause negates that risk.

When women are in their 50s and have transitioned through menopause, taking hormones does not seem to affect memory performance. For example, memory does not change when women begin hormone therapy within five years after their final menstrual period [6,7]. Meanwhile, initiating hormone therapy later in life - after age 65 - can actually increase the risk of memory problems and dementia [8,9]. It might be that women with hot flashes particularly benefit from hormone therapy. Initial evidence indicates that hormone therapy can improve memory and brain function in women with moderate to severe hot flashes [10], but more extensive studies are needed. Similarly, it is unknown how taking birth control pills containing estrogen can influence memory in perimenopausal women.

Women show a lifelong advantage in verbal memory compared to men. Interestingly, this advantage might make it more difficult for clinicians to detect a memory problem in women who are in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Before developing AD, patients transition though a stage called amnestic mild cognitive impairment, or aMCI. At this stage, memory problems exceed what is expected for age but do not reach the level of severity seen in AD. The female advantage in verbal memory persists in the aMCI stage. Consequently, women perform better than men despite showing the same level of AD disease on brain scans [11-13]. Although this could be seen as an advantage, women may be diagnosed with aMCI or AD at a later and more severe stage of the disease than men. Researchers are now exploring whether it might be useful for clinicians to use different cut-offs for memory tests in women and men, so that AD can be detected earlier in women.

Together, these studies demonstrate the important need to address how brain aging differs between women and men. By examining how menopause, estrogen, and other factors contribute to those differences, we can improve efforts to prevent, detect, and treat memory problems and memory disorders such as AD. This is especially relevant for women, who make-up 3.2 million out of the approximately 5 million individuals in the U.S. living with AD. It is estimated that the prevalence of AD will triple by 2050 [14], and the associated costs will exceed $20 trillion U.S. dollars. For this reason, it is imperative that we continue to work together to fund AD research and support studies that recognize and address the ways in which this deadly disease can affect women and men differently.

There is still more to be done in investigating new AD risk factors and discerning how established risk factors vary by sex and gender. The Society for Women's Health Research's Interdisciplinary Network on Alzheimer's Disease is committed to advocating for these goals in order to inform prevention and treatment, providing guidance for research, clinical trials, and policy. Click here to learn more about SWHR's work in Alzheimer's disease.

1. Epperson CN, Sammel MD, Freeman EW. Menopause effects on verbal memory: findings from a longitudinal community cohort. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2013;98(9):3829-38.

2. Greendale GA, Wight RG, Huang MH, Avis N, Gold EB, Joffe H, et al. Menopause-associated symptoms and cognitive performance: results from the study of women's health across the nation. Am J Epidemiol. 2010;171(11):1214-24.

3. Drogos LL, Rubin LH, Geller SE, Banuvar S, Shulman LP, Maki PM. Objective cognitive performance is related to subjective memory complaints in midlife women with moderate to severe vasomotor symptoms. Menopause. 2013;20(12):1236-42.

4. Maki PM, Rubin LH, Savarese A, Drogos L, Shulman LP, Banuvar S, et al. Stellate ganglion blockade and verbal memory in midlife women: Evidence from a randomized trial. Maturitas. 2016;92:123-9.

5. Sherwin BB. Estrogen and/or androgen replacement therapy and cognitive functioning in surgically menopausal women. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 1988;13(4):345-57.

6. Henderson VW, St John JA, Hodis HN, McCleary CA, Stanczyk FZ, Shoupe D, et al. Cognitive effects of estradiol after menopause: A randomized trial of the timing hypothesis. Neurology. 2016;87(7):699-708.

7. Gleason CE, Dowling NM, Wharton W, Manson JE, Miller VM, Atwood CS, et al. Effects of Hormone Therapy on Cognition and Mood in Recently Postmenopausal Women: Findings from the Randomized, Controlled KEEPS-Cognitive and Affective Study. PLoS medicine. 2015;12(6):e1001833; discussion e.

8. Resnick SM, Maki PM, Rapp SR, Espeland MA, Brunner R, Coker LH, et al. Effects of combination estrogen plus progestin hormone treatment on cognition and affect. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2006;91(5):1802-10.

9. Shumaker SA, Legault C, Rapp SR, Thal L, Wallace RB, Ockene JK, et al. Estrogen plus progestin and the incidence of dementia and mild cognitive impairment in postmenopausal women: the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2003;289(20):2651-62.

10. Joffe H, Hall JE, Gruber S, Sarmiento IA, Cohen LS, Yurgelun-Todd D, et al. Estrogen therapy selectively enhances prefrontal cognitive processes: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study with functional magnetic resonance imaging in perimenopausal and recently postmenopausal women. Menopause. 2006;13(3):411-22.

11. Sundermann EE, Biegon A, Rubin LH, Lipton RB, Mowrey W, Landau S, et al. Better verbal memory in women than men in MCI despite similar levels of hippocampal atrophy. Neurology. 2016.

12. Sundermann EE, Biegon A, Rubin LH, Lipton RB, Landau S, Maki PM, et al. Does the Female Advantage in Verbal Memory Contribute to Underestimating Alzheimer's Disease Pathology in Women versus Men? J Alzheimers Dis. 2017;56(3):947-57.

13. Sundermann EE, Maki PM, Rubin LH, Lipton RB, Landau S, Biegon A, et al. Female advantage in verbal memory: Evidence of sex-specific cognitive reserve. Neurology. 2016;87(18):1916-24.

14. Hebert LE, Scherr PA, Bienias JL, Bennett DA, Evans DA. Alzheimer disease in the US population: prevalence estimates using the 2000 census. Archives of Neurology. 2003;60(8):1119-22.

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Menopause, Memory And Alzheimer's Disease

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By Pauline M. Maki, PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago, Society for Women's Health Research Interdisciplinary Network on Alzheimer's Disease Member When women think about menopause, they typically think about hot flashes. New research shows that memory problems are a common but under-recognized menopausal symptom.

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Should Confederate history be removed?

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Although a few communities are removing a few statues, the nation's Confederate memorial infrastructure - estates, plantations, battlefields, graveyards, birthplaces, shrines and at least two huge obelisks - is too vast and diverse to be moved, hidden or destroyed.

The sites range from small, privately owned house museums honoring obscure soldiers to the massive bas-reliefs carved in the side of Stone Mountain, Ga., that historian Fitzhugh Brundage calls "a billboard to white nationalism.''

These places are an almost inexhaustible source of potential flash points for battles between those who want to preserve or to remove Confederate symbols.

They're an issue that President Trump raised Thursday on Twitter: "Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson?''

"It's a sticky wicket,'' Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum, said in an interview earlier this week. "I'm a public educator, and, like 'em or not, these things have a story to tell.''

Erasing Confederate sites from the American landscape would be difficult or impossible.

There are a lot of them - more than 700 statues and monuments in 31 states. That does not include things like homesteads and museums, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center. There are more than 40 in Kentucky, even though two-thirds of Kentuckians who fought in the Civil War did so for the Union.

And many of these sites not especially portable.

Beauvoir, the Mississippi homestead of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, is controlled by the state chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate group. The only thing that's going to move the 1852 mansion, one of only 2,600 National Historic Landmarks and a top Gulf Coast tourist attraction, is a hurricane.

But Beauvoir is a mere paperweight compared to the 35-story concrete obelisk (one of the nation's largest) in a state park in Fairview, Ky., to mark Davis's birthplace. .

Similarly, in Asheville, N.C., the most notable downtown landmark is a 75-foot high granite obelisk that sits in a public square. it honors a Reconstruction-era governor who'd owned slaves and opposed the freed slaves' right to vote.

Read more: Swastika competes with other symbols of hate

Future of pro-Confederate rallies in doubt

There's also the question Trump cites: Which sites should be condemned? Where do you draw the line?

Take Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general venerated by generations of white Southerners (as well as many in the North). He came to personify the now-discredited "Lost Cause" argument that South rebelled in 1861 not over slavery but states' rights.

Although Lee's statue was hauled away this May in New Orleans and is under siege in Charlottesville, his former home in Arlington - built by slaves - is administered by the National Park Service as a memorial to him.

Arlington House, where Lee lived before the Civil War, is in Arlington National Cemetery, overlooking the National Mall. In the past decade it received a multimillion-dollar renovation from the park service that included restoration of slave quarters. After it was damaged in an earthquake in 2011, financier David Rubenstein contributed $12.4 million to a private fund for further work.

Why should Lee's memory be banished from a New Orleans traffic circle and lovingly preserved on sacred ground at Arlington?

Brundage, chairman of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill history department, is an expert on Confederate history. He said this week that he thinks the contrasting treatment of Lee has to do with intent and context.

Lee had no real connection to the New Orleans. The statue was erected decades after the Civil War primarily as a symbol of white resistance to, and triumph over, federal efforts to empower and enfranchise former slaves.

And Brundage said it's one thing to preserve Lee's house as a museum, to which a visit is optional. It's another to put his statue outside a courthouse, which some citizens may be obliged to enter.

In a museum, even an open air one like the Gettysburg battlefield, a memorial's meaning can be explained. But, he says, "you can't do that if it's sitting in a traffic circle.''

A mountain and a boulevard

Some Confederate sites enjoy more public support, or at least acceptance, than others. The two best examples are Stone Mountain, in Georgia, and Monument Avenue, in the old Confederate capital of Richmond.

"If you want to erase the Confederate legacy, those are two of the hardest nuts to crack,'' Brundage said.

Between 1916 and 1972 sculptors created three huge bas-relief images of Lee, Davis and Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson on the side of Stone Mountain, an 80-story-high rock outcropping in Atlanta's eastern suburbs.

The site was a gathering point for the Ku Klux Klan, which was revived there in 1915 after a post-Reconstruction hiatus. The state bought the mountain in 1958 and today operates it as a state park. It remains a symbol of oppression for many blacks, a popular recreational destination for many whites, and an unmistakable landmark for all.

This week, when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called for the sculpture's removal, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said that would require two things.

The first would be a change in state law, which orders the Stone Mountain sculpture "preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause."

The second requirement? "A monster of a sandblaster.''

Change may be more feasible in the case of Monument Avenue, which is probably the greatest expression of the South's recovery from the Civil War and triumph over Reconstruction.

The long boulevard's broad grass median has larger-than-life statues of Davis, Lee, Jackson and Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart - the last three on horseback, facing south. They were erected between 1890 and 1919, an era when the South rolled back civil rights for blacks in the face of federal indifference.

But that's not the whole story, noted Coleman, who co-chairs a city commission that was charged in June by Mayor Levar Stoney with "adding context" to the avenue's Confederate ethos.

Monument Avenue is also an aesthetic triumph, a masterpiece of urban planning and a successful real estate development scheme. It's been named one of the nation's "10 Great Streets'' by the American Planning Association.

"It's all part of a combined history,'' she said.

But on Wednesday, Stoney - reacting to the violence around Charlottesville's Lee statue - expanded his charge to the commission to include study of the monuments' removal or relocation.

"I personally believe they are offensive and need to be removed," Stoney said. "But I believe more in the importance of dialogue and transparency by pursuing a responsible process to consider the full weight of this decision."

Currency for the Confederacy

Stone Mountain and Monument Avenue are merely the most conspicuous examples of public control of Confederate sites. Even as some governmental bodies try to eradicate them, others spend generously to preserve and operate them.

The state of Alabama, for instance, pays a $100,000 annual subsidy to the the United Daughters of the Confederacy's First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery, which offers school groups an explanation of the Civil War that downplays slavery.

In 2008, the $3.9 million renovation of Davis' Beauvoir homestead after it was damaged by Hurricane Katrina was largely covered by state and federal funds, including a National Park Service "Save America's Treasures'' grant.

Many other Confederate sites are in private hands and thus outside public control.

One example is the Oakley Hall Museum in Edgefield, S.C. It's also owned by the UDC, which at the beginning of the last century planted Confederate memorials across the nation.

The museum, housed in a white ante-bellum Greek Revival-style plantation house, offers an unapologetic, Confederate view of the Civil War (to which it refers as "The War Between the States'').

Oakley Hall particularly celebrates a group of Confederate military veterans known as the Red Shirts who in the 1870s drove Republicans out of the county, curbed black civil rights and returned power to whites.

No less than Stone Mountain, Oakley Hall shows that erasing the nation's Confederate heritage would be harder than lowering a flag or changing a school name. Harder, even, than moving a 25-ton statue.

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Confederate memorials: Too many and sometimes too heavy to pull down

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Although a few communities are removing a few statues, the nation's Confederate memorial infrastructure - estates, plantations, battlefields, graveyards, birthplaces, shrines and at least two huge obelisks - is too vast and diverse to be moved, hidden or destroyed.

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What are the top sources of energy for the future?

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Hydrogen! could it change the way we produce energy in the future?

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Hydrogen - Fuelling our Future? | Clean Energy (HD 1080p)

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How will we get around in the future? What could succeed crude oil and natural gas? One option already exists; it has 3 times the energy density of petrol, it is available in huge quantities and there are even 7 kilos in each of us. Plus, it has a low environmental impact.

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Are You For or Against School Uniforms?

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There's nothing quite like the discussion of school uniforms to get HuffPost Style editors all riled up. The need -- or lack there of -- sparked a major debate on our team. Below, two fashion editors sound-off on whether or not they think uniforms are a good idea.

Wearing a uniform to school is why I have a good relationship with my mother. Okay, that might not be the only reason, but it certainly makes the top ten. When I was 14 and insufferable, my mom and I fought about a lot of things -- whether or not it was a good idea to get a dolphin tattooed on my stomach, if Michael Bublé constituted good road trip music (for the record, NO), why it wasn't okay for her to say "funky" etc. But not once did we ever argue about clothing. And thank God for that, because I know there would have been battles.

From the ages of 9 to 17, I wore a tie, kilt and blouse to school every single day, and it was bloody fantastic. If I could get away with wearing the same thing to the office all week and not be judged, I would. Even though I work in fashion, having my outfit predetermined would free up my brain to focus on more important tasks like taking Buzzfeed quizzes entitled "Which Original Beanie Baby Speaks Directly To Your Soul?" (For the record, I got Patti The Platypus).

There are tons of arguments against uniforms, like they limit self-expression, yada, yada, yada... but you know what I was forced to do in high school? Express myself using words. Something I've found somewhat helpful in my career as a writer. And if you're still not buying into the whole knee-socks-and-blazer-thing, let me appeal to your sense of reason. It's a huge time-saver. To illustrate my point, I have compared my morning routine in high school (with uniform), to my routine now (sans uniform):

High school: Hit the snooze button. Hit the snooze button again. Hit the snooze button a third time. Eventually get up because my parents are screaming at me. With half-shut eyes, find my kilt on the floor, a clean blouse and hopefully my tie -- though I always lost my tie. Brush my teeth. Grab a banana. Endure a sarcastic comment from my dad because I didn't brush my hair. Get in the car.

Now: Hit the snooze button. Hit the snooze button again. Hit the snooze button a third time. Eventually get out of bed for fear of being fired from work. With half-shut eyes, try and figure out what to wear. Give up and instead go brush my teeth. Go back to my closet. Give up again. Grab a banana. Start stressing because I have no clothes. Consider the weather. Try on an outfit. Laugh that I even considered wearing skinny jeans and move onto something with an elastic waist. Eventually just put on what I was wearing yesterday because, let's be honest, who's going to notice? Freak out because now I'm actually really late. Still don't brush my hair. Walk to work.

In summary, having a uniform not only caused me way less stress in the morning, but it also ensured that I was always on time. (Okay, I was actually late a lot, but never because I couldn't decide what to wear). And hey, I can look back at school photos and not cringe at what I was wearing. (Okay, I still cringe, but that was because there was a long period of time when thought hair gel and "The Rachel" were a good idea).

Like so many others, the time right before high school was a pretty interesting time for me. I got my nose pierced, went on a no-shower kick and swore by socks and sandals (a trend I had no idea would resurface so many years later). My new attitude toward style (and apparently hygiene) was largely a result of the fact that I had been accepted into a performing arts school, a lifelong dream come true.

When I walked through the doors on that very first day freshman year, one thing struck me immediately -- the unique way everyone expressed themselves through their own personal style. Whether it was green hair, huge platforms or in my case, a shiny stud in my nose, no one gave anyone else a second glance over what they were wearing. I felt instantly at home. It seemed that for the first time, I was in a place where I could truly express myself.

Of course, coming into my own personal style took some trial and error. There was a period of time where I would match my T-shirts to my stockings. And even though I consider those times to be pretty dark fashion-wise, they still played a part in the evolution of my style (not to mention gave me some embarrassing photos to look back on today). My formative years would have been totally different had I not been given the chance to evolve through my attire each day.

Let's also not forget what teenagers are like. Specifically, teenagers who are also artists and were raised in New York City. Uniforms would have not only never worked in my school, I'm going to go ahead and guess that they would have created more problems than solutions. Clothing allowed us to be inspired by one another, to understand and even admire each other.

I understand the benefits of uniforms in schools. But teenagers are angst-y enough without having to also be restricted in their clothing choices, and I will be forever grateful that I got to make so many sartorial mistakes throughout those years.

Now you've been given both sides of the argument, you can decide for yourself. Are you pro a stress-free morning and saving your relationship with your mother? Or do you too think you should have the right to match your T-shirts to your stockings if you so choose? Sound off in the comments below.

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Are You For Or Against School Uniforms? Two Fashion Editors Debate

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There's nothing quite like the discussion of school uniforms to get HuffPost Style editors all riled up. The need -- or lack there of -- sparked a major debate on our team. Below, two fashion editors sound-off on whether or not they think uniforms are a good idea.

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Be careful of the this you post .

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Growing up, most of us have made an error in judgement at some point. The difference between most current parent's teenage years and youth today is a digitized footprint. Mistakes aren't as easy to erase as they used to be because so much of our lives are shared online.

Most teens utilize some form of social media tool that enables them to effectively document their life. However, as we know life is full of mistakes. While social media has many positive attributes, teens and their parents are often not fully aware of the potential danger. This extends from maintaining a positive online reputation to protecting your child's identity from being stolen.

Parents now have the burden of providing guidance to their teenaged children in educating them on how to properly manage their digital footprint as well as driving home the serious potential harmful implications it could have on their future in terms of college admissions, employment, overall reputation, and safety.

5 Potential Harmful Digital Footprint Impacts For Teens

1.) College Admissions & the Military: College admissions officers can and do read your teen's online profile. If your son or daughter is applying to college and is on the bubble against another applicant, the difference between them gaining acceptance, and receiving a rejection letter could be something immature that was posted on social media. This extends to moral aptitude requirements in the military if your child is planning on enlisting.

2.) Scholarships: Scholarships often ask applicants to share their social media profiles as part of the process in applying online. Any immature posts, cyber bullying, or generally distasteful material found on your child's profile could prevent prohibit them from gaining a scholarship.

3.) Sports: Is your son or daughter planning on playing sports in college? Recruiters and coaches surely will want to know about your teen's conduct on social media.

4.) Employers & Internships: Employers will Google your kids. Even if it's just a job they are applying for to make some extra money while going to college. Additionally college internships are now becoming a prerequisite for gaining employment post-college. Internships are competitive enough. The difference between your son or daughter and another applicant could be their digital footprint.

5.) Identity Theft: Your teen's identity is at risk. Any photo that is publicly shared is fair game for identity thieves. Posting personal information is a serious liability. Identity theft is on the rise and is a serious problem with very damaging consequences.

The good news is, there are resources available to help you. Use our Clean Your Digital Footprint Checklist as a starting point.

Not sure how to get the conversation started? Watch our video: Digital Reputation

In addition to the great advice on Good Digital Parenting, you can find resources such as Cornerstone Reputation to help you work with your child on maintaining positive online presence. Remember, it is best to be proactive. Think not just about what NOT to do online, but also about ways to create a positive online profile.

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FOSI | Harmful Digital Footprint Impacts That Parents Should Know About

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Growing up, most of us have made an error in judgement at some point. The difference between most current parent's teenage years and youth today is a digitized footprint. Mistakes aren't as easy to erase as they used to be because so much of our lives are shared online.

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How is society changing our sleep patterns?

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Weirdly enough though, the way we sleep has changed drastically in the past two hundred years. In fact, our ancestors didn't sleep through the night at all. Some scholars think they instead slept in two distinct shifts.

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Why is intersectionality important within identity groups and how is violence against women shaped by other dimensions of their identities?

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Journal Information

Founded in 1948, the Stanford Law Review is a general-interest academic legal journal. Each year the Law Review publishes one volume, which appears in six separate issues between November and May. Each issue contains material written by student members of the Law Review, other Stanford law students, and outside contributors, such as law professors, judges, and practicing lawyers. Approximately 2,600 libraries, attorneys, judges, law firms, government agencies, and others subscribe to the Law Review. The Law Review also hosts lectures and an annual live symposium at Stanford Law School.

Publisher Information

The Stanford Law Review is operated entirely by Stanford Law School students and is fully independent of faculty and administration review or supervision. The principal missions of the Law Review are to contribute to legal scholarship by addressing important legal and social issues, and to educate and foster intellectual discourse at Stanford Law School. In addition to producing a publication, the Law Review also hosts lectures and an annual live symposium.

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Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color on JSTOR

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Journal Information Founded in 1948, the Stanford Law Review is a general-interest academic legal journal. Each year the Law Review publishes one volume, which appears in six separate issues between November and May. Each issue contains material written by student members of the Law Review, other Stanford law students, and outside contributors, such as law professors, judges, and practicing lawyers.

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Would the government save money if they included mental illness in universal health coverage packages?

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Rick Wilking/Reuters

Increased spending on improving the mental health of the world's population could result in a "substantial" return on investment from both economic and well-being standpoints, according to a new study from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank.

The study, published in The Lancet on Tuesday, looked at the predicted costs and outcomes of treatment in 36 low-, middle- and high-income countries between 2016 and 2030. Currently, investment in mental health is "far lower than what is needed," the study argues, with governments spending just 1 to 5 percent of health budgets on mental health.

The estimated number of people suffering from depression and/or anxiety jumped by about 50 percent between 1990 and 2013, going from 416 million to 615 million people, or nearly 1 out of every 10 people in the world. In the U.S., nearly 16 million adults suffered from depression in 2014, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. But the problem is particularly prevalent in poorer parts of the globe: Of the world's population who are likely to experience mental illness, 80 percent come from low- and middle-income countries.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

In order to adequately address mental health issues, countries at all income levels need to scale up their spending on treatment for depression and anxiety by $147 billion in the next 15 years, write the study authors; psychosocial counseling and antidepressant medication should be the primary forms of treatment to spend on. Scaled-up treatment of depression and anxiety would lead to "43 million extra years of healthy life over the scale-up period," the study says, and those additional years are worth $310 billion in projected overall productivity increases.

The estimated economic gains from increased productivity are $230 billion for scaled-up depression treatment and $169 billion for anxiety disorders, according to the study. Essentially, for every $1 invested in depression and anxiety treatment, there's a $4 return in better health outcomes and ability to work.

In addition to leading to lost productivity and missed work days, depression and anxiety can also contribute to unhealthy behaviors such as poor diet and lack of exercise, according to the study. "These, in turn, are contributing factors to cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes, and a range of other costly and potentially conditions," the study says. "Mental disorders also increase the likelihood of drug and alcohol abuse, which can lead to risky sexual behaviors that increase the risk of HIV infections and other injuries. Finally, and most tragically, they are a significant factor in suicides."

"We know that treatment of depression and anxiety makes good sense for health and wellbeing; this new study confirms that it makes sound economic sense too," Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of WHO, said in a statement on Tuesday. "We must now find ways to make sure that access to mental health services becomes a reality for all men, women and children, wherever they live."

"Tackling this problem will require ambitious and strategic financing policies, which will need to take into account not only how resources are mobilized and pooled but also how they are channeled, allocated, and implemented," the study says, suggesting that instead of being viewed as separate entities, mental health coverage should be included in universal health coverage packages.

The paper also recommends wide-scale investment into campaigns that tackle the discrimination those with mental illness often face, which can lead to social isolation and low self-esteem. Awareness campaigns, the study authors write, "can be powerful tools in confronting mental disorders."

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Investing in depression and anxiety treatments could save up to $310 billion, says study

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Increased spending on improving the mental health of the world's population could result in a "substantial" return on investment from both economic and well-being standpoints, according to a new study from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank.

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"The Urgency of Intersectionality"

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality

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Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both.

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Why do we sit in front of screens if they make us unhappy?

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Adam Alter: Why our screens make us less happy

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What are our screens and devices doing to us? Psychologist Adam Alter studies how much time screens steal from us and how they're getting away with it. He shares why all those hours you spend staring at your smartphone, tablet or computer might be making you miserable -- and what you can do about it.

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Is addiction a disease or a choice?

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Michael Botticelli: Addiction is a disease. We should treat it like one

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Only one in nine people in the United States gets the care and treatment they need for addiction and substance abuse. A former Director of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli is working to end this epidemic and treat people with addictions with kindness, compassion and fairness.

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How does social media affect teenagers?

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Many parents worry about how exposure to technology might affect toddlers developmentally. We know our preschoolers are picking up new social and cognitive skills at a stunning pace, and we don't want hours spent glued to an iPad to impede that. But adolescence is an equally important period of rapid development, and too few of us are paying attention to how our teenagers' use of technology-much more intense and intimate than a 3-year-old playing with dad's iPhone-is affecting them. In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

Young people report that there might be good reason to worry. A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health asked 14-24 year olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and loneliness.

Indirect communication

Teens are masters at keeping themselves occupied in the hours after school until way past bedtime. When they're not doing their homework (and when they are) they're online and on their phones, texting, sharing, trolling, scrolling, you name it. Of course before everyone had an Instagram account teens kept themselves busy, too, but they were more likely to do their chatting on the phone, or in person when hanging out at the mall. It may have looked like a lot of aimless hanging around, but what they were doing was experimenting, trying out skills, and succeeding and failing in tons of tiny real-time interactions that kids today are missing out on. For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.

"As a species we are very highly attuned to reading social cues," says Catherine Steiner-Adair, EdD, a clinical psychologist and author of The Big Disconnect. "There's no question kids are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting and online communicating-it's not like it creates a nonverbal learning disability, but it puts everybody in a nonverbal disabled context, where body language, facial expression, and even the smallest kinds of vocal reactions are rendered invisible."

Lowering the risks

Certainly speaking indirectly creates a barrier to clear communication, but that's not all. Learning how to make friends is a major part of growing up, and friendship requires a certain amount of risk-taking. This is true for making a new friend, but it's also true for maintaining friendships. When there are problems that need to be faced-big ones or small ones-it takes courage to be honest about your feelings and then hear what the other person has to say. Learning to effectively cross these bridges is part of what makes friendship fun and exciting, and also scary. "Part of healthy self-esteem is knowing how to say what you think and feel even when you're in disagreement with other people or it feels emotionally risky," notes Dr. Steiner-Adair.

But when friendship is conducted online and through texts, kids are doing this in a context stripped of many of the most personal-and sometimes intimidating-aspects of communication. It's easier to keep your guard up when you're texting, so less is at stake. You aren't hearing or seeing the effect that your words are having on the other person. Because the conversation isn't happening in real time, each party can take more time to consider a response. No wonder kids say calling someone on the phone is "too intense"-it requires more direct communication, and if you aren't used to that it may well feel scary.

If kids aren't getting enough practice relating to people and getting their needs met in person and in real time, many of them will grow up to be adults who are anxious about our species' primary means of communication-talking. And of course social negotiations only get riskier as people get older and begin navigating romantic relationships and employment.

Cyberbullying and the imposter syndrome

The other big danger that comes from kids communicating more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. "Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone's face," says Donna Wick, EdD, a clinical and developmental psychologist. She notes that this seems to be especially true of girls, who typically don't like to disagree with each other in "real life."

"You hope to teach them that they can disagree without jeopardizing the relationship, but what social media is teaching them to do is disagree in ways that are more extreme and do jeopardize the relationship. It's exactly what you don't want to have happen," she says.

Dr. Steiner-Adair agrees that girls are particularly at risk. "Girls are socialized more to compare themselves to other people, girls in particular, to develop their identities, so it makes them more vulnerable to the downside of all this." She warns that a lack of solid self-esteem is often to blame. "We forget that relational aggression comes from insecurity and feeling awful about yourself, and wanting to put other people down so you feel better."

Peer acceptance is a big thing for adolescents, and many of them care about their image as much as a politician running for office, and to them it can feel as serious. Add to that the fact that kids today are getting actual polling data on how much people like them or their appearance via things like "likes." It's enough to turn anyone's head. Who wouldn't want to make herself look cooler if she can? So kids can spend hours pruning their online identities, trying to project an idealized image. Teenage girls sort through hundreds of photos, agonizing over which ones to post online. Boys compete for attention by trying to out-gross one other, pushing the envelope as much as they can in the already disinhibited atmosphere online. Kids gang up on each other.

Adolescents have always been doing this, but with the advent of social media they are faced with more opportunities-and more traps-than ever before. When kids scroll through their feeds and see how great everyone seems, it only adds to the pressure. We're used to worrying about the impractical ideals that photoshopped magazine models give to our kids, but what happens with the kid next door is photoshopped, too? Even more confusing, what about when your own profile doesn't really represent the person that you feel like you are on the inside?

"Adolescence and the early twenties in particular are the years in which you are acutely aware of the contrasts between who you appear to be and who you think you are," says Dr. Wick. "It's similar to the 'imposter syndrome' in psychology. As you get older and acquire more mastery, you begin to realize that you actually are good at some things, and then you feel that gap hopefully narrow. But imagine having your deepest darkest fear be that you aren't as good as you look, and then imagine needing to look that good all the time! It's exhausting."

As Dr. Steiner-Adair explains, "Self-esteem comes from consolidating who you are." The more identities you have, and the more time you spend pretending to be someone you aren't, the harder it's going to be to feel good about yourself.

Stalking (and being ignored)

Another big change that has come with new technology and especially smart phones is that we are never really alone. Kids update their status, share what they're watching, listening to, and reading, and have apps that let their friends know their specific location on a map at all times. Even if a person isn't trying to keep his friends updated, he's still never out of reach of a text message. The result is that kids feel hyperconnected with each other. The conversation never needs to stop, and it feels like there's always something new happening.

"Whatever we think of the 'relationships' maintained and in some cases initiated on social media, kids never get a break from them," notes Dr. Wick. "And that, in and of itself, can produce anxiety. Everyone needs a respite from the demands of intimacy and connection; time alone to regroup, replenish and just chill out. When you don't have that, it's easy to become emotionally depleted, fertile ground for anxiety to breed."

It's also surprisingly easy to feel lonely in the middle of all that hyperconnection. For one thing, kids now know with depressing certainty when they're being ignored. We all have phones and we all respond to things pretty quickly, so when you're waiting for a response that doesn't come, the silence can be deafening. The silent treatment might be a strategic insult or just the unfortunate side effect of an online adolescent relationship that starts out intensely but then fades away.

"In the old days when a boy was going to break up with you, he had to have a conversation with you. Or at least he had to call," says Dr. Wick. "These days he might just disappear from your screen, and you never get to have the 'What did I do?' conversation." Kids are often left imagining the worst about themselves.

But even when the conversation doesn't end, being in a constant state of waiting can still provoke anxiety. We can feel ourselves being put on the back burner, we put others back there, and our very human need to communicate is effectively delegated there, too.

What should parents do?

Both experts interviewed for this article agreed that the best thing parents can do to minimize the risks associated with technology is to curtail their own consumption first. It's up to parents to set a good example of what healthy computer usage looks like. Most of us check our phones or our email too much, out of either real interest or nervous habit. Kids should be used to seeing our faces, not our heads bent over a screen. Establish technology-free zones in the house and technology-free hours when no one uses the phone, including mom and dad. "Don't walk in the door after work in the middle of a conversation," Dr. Steiner-Adair advises. "Don't walk in the door after work, say 'hi' quickly, and then 'just check your email.' In the morning, get up a half hour earlier than your kids and check your email then. Give them your full attention until they're out the door. And neither of you should be using phones in the car to or from school because that's an important time to talk."

Not only does limiting the amount of time you spend plugged in to computers provide a healthy counterpoint to the tech-obsessed world, it also strengthens the parent-child bond and makes kids feel more secure. Kids need to know that you are available to help them with their problems, talk about their day, or give them a reality check.

"It is the mini-moments of disconnection, when parents are too focused on their own devices and screens, that dilute the parent-child relationship," Dr. Steiner-Adair warns. And when kids start turning to the Internet for help or to process whatever happened during the day, you might not like what happens. "Tech can give your children more information that you can, and it doesn't have your values," notes Dr. Steiner-Adair. "It won't be sensitive to your child's personality, and it won't answer his question in a developmentally appropriate way."

In addition Dr. Wick advises delaying the age of first use as much as possible. "I use the same advice here that I use when talking about kids and alcohol-try to get as far as you can without anything at all." If your child is on Facebook, Dr. Wick says that you should be your child's friend and monitor her page. But she advises against going through text messages unless there is cause for concern. "If you have a reason to be worried then okay, but it better be a good reason. I see parents who are just plain old spying on their kids. Parents should begin by trusting their children. To not even give your kid the benefit of the doubt is incredibly damaging to the relationship. You have to feel like your parents think you're a good kid."

Offline, the gold standard advice for helping kids build healthy self-esteem is to get them involved in something that they're interested in. It could be sports or music or taking apart computers or volunteering-anything that sparks an interest and gives them confidence. When kids learn to feel good about what they can do instead of how they look and what they own, they're happier and better prepared for success in real life. That most of these activities also involve spending time interacting with peers face-to-face is just the icing on the cake.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does social media affect behavior negatively?

How does social media affect social skills?

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Is social media harmful?

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How Using Social Media Affects Teenagers - Child Mind Institute

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How does social media affect teens? Experts say kids are growing up with more anxiety and less self-esteem due to social media. Read advice for parents from specialists in our article.

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'Turn It Off!' or 'Turn It Up!'

This video is from a podcast called The Listening Service hosted by Tom Service. One could say music is noise and sounds put together in a specific order. Noise can be music and music can be noise. This depends on who is listening. Music is a diverse and subjective topic that can be interpreted by anyone who listens to it. In this short audio clip, David Hendy makes you think about what others consider music and what others do not simply by comparing it to soil. Music is in the eye of the beholder.

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What is noise?, The Listening Service - BBC Radio 3

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Is noise just sound in the wrong place? Tom Service finds out.

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"Where is best to adopt a dog?"

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Being a dog trainer has many pluses and only a drawbacks. On the plus side I'm never short ice breakers and I am surrounded by dogs and dog lovers.

On the down side, I can't seem to get through a cocktail party without being approached by a tipsy acquaintance, proclaiming the possible pitfalls of their puppy's potty schedule. I stare on, mouth usually agape, while I swirl my Chardonnay and wait for their diatribe to end. It's actually pretty humorous. I hand them my card and tell them to call me in the morning.

There is, however, one question I welcome -- one I am happy to weigh in on anywhere, anytime. It's the question of breeder versus rescue adoption. As there are truths and warnings that circulate from both camps, it's often hard for the lay person, who knows little about dogs beyond their adoring eyes and wagging tail, to understand the implications of adopting either.

I myself have four rescues that run the gamut. Two are purebred rescues, while the other two are mix breed dogs; three of my dogs are large, one is very small; I have two males and two females. In the course of my lifetime, however, I've loved my share of finely bred puppies too. When you're a dog, it really makes no difference where you come from as long as you have someone to love.

The question I'm asked most frequently goes something like this: "What's the difference between adopting a rescue versus adopting a purebred dog? Is there a best bet? A sure fire guarantee for adopting the perfect pet?"

Unfortunately, no. Adopting a dog is a very personal quest. The answer depends on who you are, and what you can tolerate. Before addressing the question, I'll layout the options: breeder vs. rescue dog, and the realities of both.
A Mindfully Bred Puppy or Dog
First a word about breeds. Dotted across the globe are over 450 different breeds of dogs, many that can trace their lineage back decades, sometimes centuries, to a time when their ancestors aided man in sport or survival. There are dog breeds created to guard estates or livestock, others bred to herd or pull loads, and others still that were developed to serve as companions for their people. In a parallel turn of evolution, people across the world simultaneously recognized the dogs could be selectively bred to enhance our every desire. We needed dogs to find the birds we killed, to haul produce, dogs to protect the fields we harvested. Of course, fast-forward to today and few of us need our dogs to work for a living, but don't tell the dog.

When you select a purebred companion you're adopting more than fur and bone, you're bringing in a new and vibrant family member whose passions can be predicted long before their arrival.

If your heart is set on a purebred dog and you've found a breed with passions that dovetail into your lifestyle, you have another decision in front of you. Should you buy your puppy or dog from a reputable breeder, go to a pet store, locate a possible candidate online, or investigate purebred rescue groups? It's only slightly more challenging than ordering a cup-a-Joe at Starbucks.
What does a dog breeder do?
There are individuals whose respect for a specific breed of dog goes far beyond a fanciful whim. These people-known as breeders, are individuals who devote themselves to their dogs, mindfully choosing breeding pairs and traveling to weekend events to showcase their dogs in confirmation or intelligence categories. When these breeders breed a litter of puppies, they are selective about who takes them and firm about their convictions concerning their puppy's care. If you do not respect their astute supervision, and choose to look elsewhere for a dog, perhaps from a less demanding breeder or pet store or online, you may pay the price. Poorly bred purebreed dogs are more prone to ailments and/or congenital disease that will cost you in expense and heartache.
Which is healthier -- purebred or mix breed dogs?
There are a lot of similarities between purebreds whether you're discussing dogs or humans! Do you know anyone whose descendants are from one country? We often use well-refined stereotypes when talking about human heritage. Italians are said to be romantic, English reserved, and Germans disciplined. There are also congenital diseases that run in accessorial lines. The same holds true about dogs. Breeds can have very consistent personality traits -- Chows are suspicious of strangers, Border Collies are obsessive, Golden Retrievers eternally cheerful. Similarly there are genetic abnormalities that can run in breed lines, such as cancer in Boxers, heart murmurs in Caviler King Charles Spaniels, and hip dysplasia issues in German Shepherd Dogs. When one purebred dog mates with a different breed, however, their genes intermingle, and what generally results is know as hybrid vigor -- the healthy genes pass onto the progeny and a more durable generation survives.

Rescue-Shelter Puppy/Dog

There is a tremendous rescue movement for people considering a dog or puppy. There are over six million dogs euthanized in the United States yearly, which is about 100 times the amount of attendees at the Super Bowl. It is a crushing reality, especially for the dogs who want little more than someone to love. I've devoted my life to rescuing dogs, often settling for ones who are otherwise un-placable or abandoned. Rehabilitating my dogs is a long but satisfying road that I am happy to travel knowing their emotional capacities once they learn to trust again.

There are some people who think that they will surpass the initial cost of pet ownership and adopt a kid friendly, problem free pet when they choose to rescue an adult dog. Though that can happen, the reality can prove otherwise. It is best, I advise my clients, to consider that any pet you adopt will need time, loving reinforcement, and patience to fit into your lifestyle and schedule.

Many of the shelters here in the Northeast United States are transporting their dogs and puppies in from others areas of the country where the dog may never have set foot in a home or experience the entrapment of a fence or leash. While nearly every dog comes programmed for a human connection, if these dogs have not been socialized to a given lifestyle, it will take a few weeks for them to feel comfortable with new routines.

And while many adoptables are mix-breed dogs whose lineage can be guessed with varying accuracy, you'll see many purebred dog rescues as well. Before you choose your dog, consider what breed, or mix there of, aligns most closely with your personality and habits.

A rescue puppy is another matter. It is ideal to search out a puppy who has been kept with his mother and littermates until eight weeks of age or longer. Dogs, like children, need the reflective nurturing of their mother to feel secure. When selecting a puppy, consider the breed possibilities, for while you'll see little drive in an eight-week-old puppy, his life patterns will emerge within months.

In my follow-up articles, I will explore the rescue process, from how to choose a dog or puppy from a shelter line up, to common rescue behavior problems. Please upload your experiences, thoughts, and questions. There is much we can learn from each other's experiences!

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Searching for a Dog... Rescue? Breeder? What's the Best Option?

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Being a dog trainer has many pluses and only a drawbacks. On the plus side I'm never short ice breakers and I am surrounded by dogs and dog lovers. On the down side, I can't seem to get through a cocktail party without being approached by a tipsy acquaintance, proclaiming the possible pitfalls of their puppy's potty schedule.

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India's air pollution rivals China's as world's deadliest

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NEW DELHI - India's rapidly worsening air pollution is causing about 1.1 million people to die prematurely each year and is now surpassing China's as the deadliest in the world, a new study of global air pollution shows.

The number of premature deaths in China caused by dangerous air particles, known as PM2.5, has stabilized globally in recent years but has risen sharply in India, according to the report, issued jointly on Tuesday by the Health Effects Institute, a Boston research institute focused on the health impacts of air pollution, and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, a population health research center in Seattle.

India has registered an alarming increase of nearly 50 percent in premature deaths from particulate matter between 1990 and 2015, the report says.

"You can almost think of this as the perfect storm for India," said Michael Brauer, a professor of environment and health relationships at the University of British Columbia and an author of the study, in a telephone interview. He cited the confluence of rapid industrialization, population growth and an aging populace in India that is more susceptible to air pollution.

Pollution levels are worsening in India as it tries to industrialize, but "the idea that policy making should be led by government is lacking," Bhargav Krishna, manager for environmental health at the Public Health Foundation of India, a health policy research center in New Delhi, said in an interview.

As air pollution worsened in parts of the world, including South Asia, it improved in the United States and Europe, the report said, crediting policies to curb emissions, among other things. The report's website that provides country-by-country data on pollution levels and the health and mortality effects.

Environmental regulations in the United States and actions by the European Commission have led to substantial progress in reducing fine particulate pollution since 1990, the report said. The United States has experienced a reduction of about 27 percent in the average annual exposure to fine particulate matter, with smaller declines in Europe. Yet, some 88,000 Americans and 258,000 Europeans still face increased risks of premature death because of particulate levels today, the report said.

A fraction of the width of a human hair, these particles can be released from vehicles, particularly those with diesel engines, and by industry, as well as from natural sources like dust. They enter the bloodstream through the lungs, worsening cardiac disease and increasing the risk of stroke and heart failure, in addition to causing severe respiratory problems, like asthma and pneumonia.

The report offers good news globally, in some ways.

Although deaths caused by air pollution grew to 4.2 million in 2015 from 3.5 million in 1990, the rate of increase of about 20 percent was slower than the rate of the population rise during that time. That's because of improved health care in many parts of the world, as well as public policy initiatives undertaken in the United States, Europe and other regions that reduced emissions from industrialization, the authors of the study said in telephone interviews.

China also offers an encouraging sign. Premature deaths from particulate matter each year have stabilized at around 1.1 million since 2005, the report said. Still, that is an increase of 17 percent since 1990, when it was a little more than 945,000.

The health effects of the ultrafine particles are still being studied and the full effects are only beginning to be understood, said Majid Ezzati, a global environmental health professor at the Imperial College, London.

"These studies are hard to do, and isolating the effects of air pollution is hard," Dr. Ezzati said. "The numbers are still dynamic and nobody should claim an exact number of deaths is known."

But if he were an Indian citizen, he said, "I'd say, 'Let's not sit there and do nothing about it. Let's not be exposed to it today as more research is being done.'"

Although few studies of the health problems brought by air pollution are based in India, Dr. Ezzati said, "it's hard to imagine air pollution that is bad for people in London is not bad for people in India."

Neither India's environment minister nor its environment secretary could be reached for comment Monday evening.

Robert O'Keefe, vice president at the Health Effects Institute, said China's trajectory on deaths from air pollution had stabilized as a result of the country's efforts to reduce air pollution.

India, on the other hand, had yet to undertake sustained public policy initiatives to reduce pollution, said Gopal Sankaranarayanan, an advocate at the Supreme Court of India who successfully petitioned it to ban licenses to sell fireworks in the New Delhi metropolitan area last year. Fireworks during the festival of Diwali contributed to hazardous levels of air pollution late last year.

Weak environmental regulation in India, he said, leaves India's citizens with few alternatives other than to petition the courts to take action to protect the public's health.

But the courts often lack the power or mechanisms to enforce their actions, he said. India's environmental court, the National Green Tribunal, ordered farmers to stop burning their crops in the region around New Delhi in 2015, but the practice still continued last year. Smoke from the farm fires contributed about one quarter of the levels of the most dangerous air pollution in the Indian capital, environmental experts said.

"If you can't enforce the directives of the courts - it becomes a problem," Mr. Sankaranarayanan said. "We need practical solutions to save lives here in India."

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India's Air Pollution Rivals China's as World's Deadliest

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NEW DELHI - India's rapidly worsening air pollution is causing about 1.1 million people to die prematurely each year and is now surpassing China's as the deadliest in the world, a new study of global air pollution shows.

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Why should we welcome refugees? why they are important

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Luma Mufleh: Don't feel sorry for refugees -- believe in them

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"We have seen advances in every aspect of our lives -- except our humanity," says Luma Mufleh, a Jordanian immigrant and Muslim of Syrian descent who founded the first accredited school for refugees in the United States. Mufleh shares stories of hope and resilience, explaining how she's helping young people from war-torn countries navigate the difficult process of building new homes.

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would your fears and problem lead you to sucide? Is it better to define our fears rather than goals

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Why you should define your fears instead of your goals

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The hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls “fear-setting.” Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot.

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The Physical Impact of Technology on Children

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Anne Reynolds

Anne Reynolds is a writer who has worked for the U.S. government, the public school system and as a public library specialist. She began writing in 1990 and has contributed articles to various online publications.

Advances in technology allow children to have Internet access through computers and cell phones. Even if a parent is diligent in limiting a child's time on those devices, TV, iPods, MP3s, DVD players and video games are waiting in the wings, vying for your child's attention. Parents, teachers and health workers are questioning the physical effects that technology has on children's lives.

Video of the Day

Even though children might be engaging their mind on a computer, the active participation of their body is limited. Some kids are prone toward obesity because of a combination of technology activity and physical inactivity. According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 10.4 percent of preschool children and 19.6 percent of children ages 6 through 11 are obese. Some kids act out inappropriately physically, especially when watching violent games on TV. According to Craig Anderson of the American Psychological Association, "High levels of violent video game exposure have been linked to delinquency, fighting at school and during free play periods, and violent criminal behavior."

Not only does technology have the potential to turn children into couch potatoes, it can inhibit developing social skills, too. According to a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2010, multitasking has enabled today's youth to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into the average 7 1/2 hours spent engaging with media devices. While kids growing up before the 1950s were encouraged to get outside and play with friends, children spending 7 1/2 hours a day on media-driven devices lack outside contact with peers, especially if they are already shy. Occupational therapist Cris Rowan states in the article, "The Impact of Technology on Child Sensory and Motor Development," that "As little children develop and form their identity, they often are incapable of discerning whether they are the 'killing machine' seen on TV and in video games, or just a shy and lonely little kid in need of a friend."

Developing a balance between technology use and physical exercise is an important habit from the time a child starts walking. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics in the article, "Media Education: What Parents Can Do," the best role model you can provide your child is yourself. Make a habit of turning the TV off when eating dinner, eliminating computer use after a certain time each day, limiting the daily time spent video gaming and engage in some form of physical exercise together. Many parents find that signing up their child for a gymnastics class or recreational soccer team helps him take a break from the media devices available at his fingertips and also develop friendships with other kids. Show your child it's OK to disengage from technology.

Technology is here to stay unless you want to move your family to a cave. A healthy balance of technology with physical activity can be a bonus. Online videos provide instructions for just about any sport a child would want to participate in. Kids can watch the fundamentals of basketball and then go out and shoot hoops. Wii offers active video game participation in sports such as bowling, soccer and dance. Perhaps there's no problem getting your child to exercise, but he won't bike down the block without his favorite tunes playing. Maybe his passion is running and Google Maps offers him treadmill routes through exotic locations. Discover ways to match the best of both worlds.

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The Physical Impact of Technology on Children

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Advances in technology allow children to have Internet access through computers and cell phones. Even if a parent is diligent in limiting a child's time on those devices, TV, iPods, MP3s, DVD players and video games are waiting in the wings, vying for your child's attention.

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How Technology is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus

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Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It's what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting.

There is also little doubt that all of the new technologies, led by the Internet, are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental The uncertain reality is that, with this new technological frontier in its infancy and developments emerging at a rapid pace, we have neither the benefit of historical hindsight nor the time to ponder or examine the value and cost of these advancements in terms of how it influences our children's ability to think.

There is, however, a growing body of research that technology can be both beneficial and harmful to different ways in which children think. Moreover, this influence isn't just affecting children on the surface of their thinking. Rather, because their brains are still developing and malleable, frequent exposure by so-called digital natives to technology is actually wiring the brain in ways very different than in previous generations. What is clear is that, as with advances throughout history, the technology that is available determines how our brains develop. For example, as the technology writer Nicholas Carr has observed, the emergence of reading encouraged our brains to be focused and imaginative. In contrast, the rise of the Internet is strengthening our ability to scan information rapidly and efficiently.

The effects of technology on children are complicated, with both benefits and costs. Whether technology helps or hurts in the development of your children's thinking depends on what specific technology is used and how and what frequency it is used. At least early in their lives, the power to dictate your children's relationship with technology and, as a result, its influence on them, from synaptic activity to conscious thought.

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to focus on the areas in which the latest thinking and research has shown technology to have the greatest influence on how children think: attention, information overload, decision making, and memory/learning. Importantly, all of these areas are ones in which you can have a counteracting influence on how technology affects your children.
Attention
You can think of attention as the gateway to thinking. Without it, other aspects of thinking, namely, perception, memory, language, learning, creativity, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision making are greatly diminished or can't occur at all. The ability of your children to learn to focus effectively and consistently lays the foundation for almost all aspects of their growth and is fundamental to their development into successful and happy people.

Attention has been found to be a highly malleable quality and most directly influenced by the environment in which it is used. This selective attention can be found in the animal kingdom in which different species develop attentional skills that help them function and survive. For example, wolves, lions, tigers, and other predators have highly tuned visual attention that enables them to spot and track their prey. In contrast, their prey, including deer and antelope, have well-developed auditory attention that allows them to hear approaching predators. In both cases, animals' attentional abilities have developed based on the environment in which they live.

The same holds true for human development. Whether infant recognition of their parents' faces or students paying attention in class, children's immediate environment determines the kind of attention that they develop. In generations past, for example, children directed considerable amounts of their time to reading, an activity that offered few distractions and required intense and sustained attention, imagination, and memory. The advent of television altered that attention by offering children visual stimuli, fragmented attention, and little need for imagination. Then the Internet was invented and children were thrust into a vastly different environment in which, because distraction is the norm, consistent attention is impossible, imagination is unnecessary, and memory is inhibited.

Technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. The metaphor that Nicholas Carr uses is the difference between scuba diving and jet skiing. Book reading is like scuba diving in which the diver is submerged in a quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them. In contrast, using the Internet is like jet skiing, in which the jet skier is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing.

In fact, studies have shown that reading uninterrupted text results in faster completion and better understanding, recall, and learning than those who read text filled with hyperlinks and ads. Those who read a text-only version of a presentation, as compared to one that included video, found the presentation to be more engaging, informative, and entertaining, a finding contrary to conventional wisdom, to be sure. Additionally, contrary to conventional educational wisdom, students who were allowed Internet access during class didn't recall the lecture nor did they perform as well on a test of the material as those who weren't "wired" during class. Finally, reading develops reflection, critical thinking, problem-solving, and vocabulary better than visual media.

Exposure to technology isn't all bad. Research shows that, for example, video games and other screen media improve visual-spatial capabilities, increase attentional ability, reaction times, and the capacity to identify details among clutter. Also, rather than making children stupid, it may just be making them different. For example, the ubiquitous use of Internet search engines is causing children to become less adept at remembering things and more skilled at remembering where to find things. Given the ease with which information can be found these days, it only stands to reason that knowing where to look is becoming more important for children than actually knowing something. Not having to retain information in our brain may allow it to engage in more "higher-order" processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

What does all this mean for raising your children? The bottom line is that too much screen time and not enough other activities, such as reading, playing games, and good old unstructured and imaginative play, will result in your children having their brains wired in ways that may make them less, not more, prepared to thrive in this crazy new world of technology.

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How Technology Is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus

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Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It's what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting.

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Improving healthcare in rural communities

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Raj Panjabi: No one should die because they live too far from a doctor

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Illness is universal -- but access to care is not. Physician Raj Panjabi has a bold vision to bring health care to everyone, everywhere. With the 2017 TED Prize, Panjabi is building the Community Health Academy, a global platform that aims to modernize how community health workers learn vital skills, creating jobs along the way.

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Over-innovating in healthcare and why we should simplify technology.

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Jan Denecker: How to do more with less in healthcare

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Watch Jan Denecker's talk from TED@UPS, a TED-curated event featuring a diverse group of speakers from across the UPS community.

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"Skin and society"

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Before her TEDTalk went up on Friday, anthropologist and skin expert Nina Jablonski took some time out of writing her new book to talk to the the TEDBlog. Nina had a lot to say about how our skin affects how we are perceived, sometimes in ways we want it to and sometimes in much more pernicious ways.
Are you excited that your TEDTalk is being posted?
I'm very excited, very happy. I greatly enjoyed being at TED and the atmosphere of the gathering. Also, I think the spread of TEDTalks via the Internet is even more important than being there. It's all over the world. I know people all over the world who watch TEDTalks. It's important to get these ideas out to more and more people. One can never predict where one's idea might go.
So, of all the things you could study, why skin?
It started as an accident more than 15 years ago. I was asked by a colleague to give a lecture in his class, on skin. This lecture was being give to an introductory class of human biology. I read up on the relevant materials, but then realized that I also wanted to tell the students about the evolution of skin. As I started looking for information, I discovered that the research on that topic was scarce. My interest was piqued by this deficiency of information on the evolution of our largest organ.
Then, I went to a seminar where I saw a lecture by a colleague on skin that gave me incredible insight. The insight was sufficiently important that I decided it was time to run with it, despite my lack of experience in this research area. The next step was that I wrote a paper to propose my new hypothesis. That was 17 years ago, in 1992. I just put it out there, and I thought if anything ever arises, at least I've written it. In the meantime, I kept my antennae twitching for new research.

Then, in 1995 to '96, new data on UV radiation at the Earth's surface was released from NASA. This allowed me to investigate my hypothesis rigorously. With my husband's help, he's a geographer and statistician, that's when the project really started. We began developing data on why UV levels and skin color correlated. Then, in 2003, the University of California press said, "You really should write a book on skin in general." So, I said, "OK." One thing led to another. It was the prompting of my editor that got me to think about including the evolution of skin, not just skin and the sun. It's a very broad topic.
Speaking of which, in your book you talk about skin decoration and how humans are unique in decorating our skin by tattoos, make-up and more. What do you think this means?
We do have an awareness of ourselves that allows us to engage in willful decoration that other animals do not engage in. These dramatically change our appearance and how we are perceived. You can put on a particular set of clothes and make-up or body paint and have a completely different perception.

We can make ourselves appear more sexually appealing to members of a particular group, or more threatening. At football games, people wear all sorts of face paint because they want to look fierce and war-like. These are very specific visual signals that are meant to get particular responses. These things have real evolutionary value. There's an advantage to being good at putting on make-up and sending the correct signal. You don't have to look very far. Open up any women's magazine and you'll see tips on applying make-up. But all those tips are geared to creating a particular appearance that we know from evolutionary biology makes one appear more sexually attractive.

All the ways of decorating skin make statements that impact how people treat you. Knowing how to decorate can even make one more successful at attracting certain groups of friends.
One of the most obvious factors in our skin's appearance is its color, and you talk about the origins of color in your talk. But, what about how skin color has historically affected our behavior towards each other?
Skin color is the story of pigment in the skin, having been determined by UV radiation. If your ancestors were closer to the equator, you are dark and if further away, you are lighter. The biology is very straightforward. But, history is much more complicated and hard to comprehend.

People have placed values in skin color based on who interacted with who. The most insidious of these interactions is the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 1500s. A lightly-pigmented people in a position of power and mobility went by ship to a different part of the world where they found a darkly-pigmented people. As we know, they created slaves of these people on the African continent, in the equatorial area. Many of the problems with color we face today came to be because of interactions started by the slave trade.

The easiest way to establish the dominance needed for the system of slavery to function is to establish visual mechanisms, which in this case was the color of these slaves. What you then see is the literary development of black as bad, negative, as mentally and spiritually inefficient. This is the toxin that created created much of the race debate.

People are color-coded in very visible ways. We are very visually-oriented as primates and color makes a big difference to us. We notice subtle differences in color and these can be perceived as social value if given the right narrative. These values exist in India, Japan, China and elsewhere. In most places where you find a gradation of color, you get this phenomenon of colorism. There's a general prejudice against darkly pigmented skin and a bias toward lightly pigmented skin.

Even within African-American, Caribbean and Latin American communities you can find this prejudice and it's a derivative of the slave trade. Light brown versus dark brown. And it can be very subtle, this color difference, but it's just enough for us to distinguish. And this really concerns me, because - what happens to that dark-colored child? They feel that they have limited prospects or possibilities. This to me is the most poisonous aspect. This is one of the most injurious things we can do to a child. Stopping this is part of my life's work now. I'll tell you more about that a little later on.
READ MORE: Nina discusses how our skin color will change in the future, her new book and how she takes care of her skin. Do you think that after living in different climates for some time, that our skin colors will ever re-adapt?
Firstly, we already see in major urban centers a tremendous amount of intermarriage between people of diverse backgrounds. Especially in large urban centers, there are many people of different colors now sharing a common culture. These factors can lead to a homogenization of skin tones.

This will not happen everywhere as in more rural and isolated areas we continue to see cultural and color distinction. For example, in North Scandinavia we find very isolated lightly pigmented communities and in equatorial Africa we still find very isolated darkly pigmented communities. So there will continue to be isolated areas with people at the extremes, but in major urban environments there will be much more mixing and eventually matching of color.
But we won't have any evolutionary adaptions to climate because now we have clothes, shelter, chemical sunscreen and other cultural ribbons used to protect ourselves against excess sun, very much unlike the early days of our species. Biological evolutions on our skin has stopped because we are so good at protecting ourselves against the sun.
You mentioned that you were writing a new book, also to do with skin. Can you tell us a little bit more about your new project?
However, I must mention that although we are clever, we are not as clever as we think we are. We don't protect ourselves enough. Lightly-pigmented people are tanning, laying on beaches in Mexico for hours. Darkly-pigmented people have jobs where they spend most of the day out of the sun and have vitamin D deficiencies. There are also very few days during the year in temperate climates that can provide vitamin D to darkly-pigmented people in the right amounts.

The new book is about skin color. It's actually going to address many of the things that we've talked about - how skin color evolved, health concerns and issues of perspective and race. The book title is Living Color. I'm trying desperately to finish it this summer and I'm hoping that get it to the publisher and then publicly released by fall, 2010.
One last, quick, question. The video editor responsible for fine-tuning your talk mentioned to me that she couldn't help noticing how great your skin was all the while you were talking about skin. Here at TED headquarters, we want to know - what's your secret?
I would like to be able to expunge the word race from our vocabulary, but I don't have the power to do that. It has no biological basis, lots of scientists have shown that. As a social concept it continues to be invented and reinvented. People seem to want to keep it going. I am just trying to shed light on the fallacy of the biological concept and the idiocy of social concept. We can change the world if we can change these definitions and expunge these concepts from our interactions.

(Laughter) Well, thank you, but I really don't have any secrets. I use all over-the-counter skin products, no prescriptions. I live a healthy life, exercise, eat well, stay hydrated. I guess I also have good genes. Oh, and I avoid overexposure to the sun.

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Q&A with Nina Jablonski: Society and skin

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Before her TEDTalk went up on Friday, anthropologist and skin expert Nina Jablonski took some time out of writing her new book to talk to the the TEDBlog. Nina had a lot to say about how our skin affects how we are perceived, sometimes in ways we want it to and sometimes in much more pernicious ways.

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"Colorism: Discrimination by those within the same race"

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"It is estimated that more than 115 million animals worldwide are used in laboratory experiments every year."

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Humane Society International

What is animal testing? What animals are used? What's wrong with animal testing? What's the alternative? If animal testing is so unreliable, why does it continue? Are animal experiments needed for medical progress? Read HSI's other FAQs about animal testing
What is animal testing?

The term "animal testing" refers to procedures performed on living animals for purposes of research into basic biology and diseases, assessing the effectiveness of new medicinal products, and testing the human health and/or environmental safety of consumer and industry products such as cosmetics, household cleaners, food additives, pharmaceuticals and industrial/agro-chemicals. All procedures, even those classified as "mild," have the potential to cause the animals physical as well as psychological distress and suffering. Often the procedures can cause a great deal of suffering. Most animals are killed at the end of an experiment, but some may be re-used in subsequent experiments. Here is a selection of common animal procedures:

Forced chemical exposure in toxicity testing, which can include oral force-feeding, forced inhalation, skin or injection into the abdomen, muscle, etc.

Exposure to drugs, chemicals or infectious disease at levels that cause illness, pain and distress, or death

Genetic manipulation, e.g., addition or "knocking out" of one or more genes

Ear-notching and tail-clipping for identification

Short periods of physical restraint for observation or examination

Prolonged periods of physical restraint

Food and water deprivation

Surgical procedures followed by recovery

Infliction of wounds, burns and other injuries to study healing

Infliction of pain to study its physiology and treatment

Behavioural experiments designed to cause distress, e.g., electric shock or forced swimming

Other manipulations to create "animal models" of human diseases ranging from cancer to stroke to depression

Killing by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, neck-breaking, decapitation, or other means

What types of animals are used?

Many different species are used around the world, but the most common include mice, fish, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, farm animals, birds, cats, dogs, mini-pigs, and non-human primates (monkeys, and in some countries, chimpanzees).

Video: Watch what scientists have to say about alternatives to animal testing.

It is estimated that more than 115 million animals worldwide are used in laboratory experiments every year. But because only a small proportion of countries collect and publish data concerning animal use for testing and research, the precise number is unknown. For example, in the United States, up to 90 percent of the animals used in laboratories (purpose-bred rats, mice and birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and invertebrates) are excluded from the official statistics, meaning that figures published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture are no doubt a substantial underestimate.

Within the European Union, more than 12 million animals are used each year, with France, Germany and the United Kingdom being the top three animal using countries. British statistics reflect the use of more than 3 million animals each year, but this number does not include animals bred for research but killed as "surplus" without being used for specific experimental procedures. Although these animals still endure the stresses and deprivation of life in the sterile laboratory environment, their lives are not recorded in official statistics. HSI believes that complete transparency about animal use is vital and that all animals bred, used or killed for the research industry should be included in official figures.

What's wrong with animal testing?

For nearly a century, drug and chemical safety assessments have been based on laboratory testing involving rodents, rabbits, dogs, and other animals. Aside from the ethical issues they pose-inflicting both physical pain as well as psychological distress and suffering on large numbers of sentient creatures-animal tests are time- and resource-intensive, restrictive in the number of substances that can be tested, provide little understanding of how chemicals behave in the body, and in many cases do not correctly predict real-world human reactions. Similarly, health scientists are increasingly questioning the relevance of research aimed at "modelling" human diseases in the laboratory by artificially creating symptoms in other animal species.

Trying to mirror human diseases or toxicity by artificially creating symptoms in mice, dogs or monkeys has major scientific limitations that cannot be overcome. Very often the symptoms and responses to potential treatments seen in other species are dissimilar to those of human patients. As a consequence, nine out of every 10 candidate medicines that appear safe and effective in animal studies fail when given to humans. Drug failures and research that never delivers because of irrelevant animal models not only delay medical progress, but also waste resources and risk the health and safety of volunteers in clinical trials.

What's the alternative?

If lack of human relevance is the fatal flaw of "animal models," then a switch to human-relevant research tools is the logical solution. The National Research Council in the United States has expressed its vision of "a not-so-distant future in which virtually all routine toxicity testing would be conducted in human cells or cell lines", and science leaders around the world have echoed this view.

The sequencing of the human genome and birth of functional genomics, the explosive growth of computer power and computational biology, and high-speed robot automation of cell-based (in vitro) screening systems, to name a few, has sparked a quiet revolution in biology. Together, these innovations have produced new tools and ways of thinking that can help uncover exactly how chemicals and drugs disrupt normal processes in the human body at the level of cells and molecules. From there, scientists can use computers to interpret and integrate this information with data from human and population-level studies. The resulting predictions regarding human safety and risk are potentially more relevant to people in the real world than animal tests.

But that's just the beginning. The wider field of human health research could benefit from a similar shift in paradigm. Many disease areas have seen little or no progress despite decades of animal research. Some 300 million people currently suffer from asthma, yet only two types of treatment have become available in the last 50 years. More than a thousand potential drugs for stroke have been tested in animals, but only one of these has proved effective in patients. And it's the same story with many other major human illnesses. A large-scale re-investment in human-based (not mouse or dog or monkey) research aimed at understanding how disruptions of normal human biological functions at the levels of genes, proteins and cell and tissue interactions lead to illness in our species could advance the effective treatment or prevention of many key health-related societal challenges of our time.

Modern non-animal techniques are already reducing and superseding experiments on animals, and in European Union, the "3Rs" principle of replacement, reduction and refinement of animal experiments is a legal requirement. In most other parts of the world there is currently no such legal imperative, leaving scientists free to use animals even where non-animal approaches are available.

If animal testing is so unreliable, why does it continue?

Despite this growing evidence that it is time for a change, effecting that change within a scientific community that has relied for decades on animal models as the "default method" for testing and research takes time and perseverance. Old habits die hard, and globally there is still a lack of knowledge of and expertise in cutting-edge non-animal techniques.

But with HSI's help, change is happening. We are leading efforts globally to encourage scientists, companies and policy-makers to transition away from animal use in favour of 21st century methods. Our work brings together experts from around the globe to share knowledge and best practice, improving the quality of research by replacing animals in the laboratory.

Are animal experiments needed for medical progress?

It is often argued that because animal experiments have been used for centuries, and medical progress has been made in that time, animal experiments must be necessary. But this is missing the point. History is full of examples of flawed or basic practices and ideas that were once considered state-of-the-art, only to be superseded years later by something far more sophisticated and successful. In the early 1900s the Wright brothers' invention of the airplane was truly innovative for its time, but more than a century later, technology has advanced so much that when compared to the modern jumbo jet those early flying machines seem quaint and even absurd. Those early ideas are part of aviation history, but no-one would seriously argue that they represent the cutting-edge of design or human achievement. So it is with laboratory research. Animal experiments are part of medical history, but history is where they belong. Compared to today's potential to understand the basis of human disease at cellular and molecular levels, experimenting on live animals seems positively primitive. So if we want better quality medical research, safer more effective pharmaceuticals and cures to human diseases, we need to turn the page in the history books and embrace the new chapter-21st century science.

Independent scientific reviews demonstrate that research using animals correlates very poorly to real human patients. In fact, the data show that animal studies fail to predict real human outcomes in 50 to 99.7 percent of cases. This is mainly because other species seldom naturally suffer from the same diseases as found in humans. Animal experiments rely on often uniquely human conditions being artificially induced in non-human species. While on a superficial level they may share similar symptoms, fundamental differences in genetics, physiology and biochemistry can result in wildly different reactions to both the illness and potential treatments. For some areas of disease research, overreliance on animal models may well have delayed medical progress rather than advanced it. By contrast, many non-animal replacement methods such as cell-based studies, silicon chip biosensors, and computational systems biology models, can provide faster and more human-relevant answers to medical and chemical safety questions that animal experiments cannot match.

"The claim that animal experimentation is essential to medical development is not supported by proper, scientific evidence but by opinion and anecdote. Systematic reviews of its effectiveness don't support the claims made on its behalf" (Pandora Pound et al. British Medical Journal 328, 514-7, 2004).

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Humane Society International What is animal testing? What animals are used? What's wrong with animal testing? What's the alternative? If animal testing is so unreliable, why does it continue? Are animal experiments needed for medical progress?

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"A growing body of evidence connects GMOs with health problems, environmental damage, and violation of farmers’ and consumers’ rights. "

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What is a GMO? Under the Non-GMO Project Standard, a genetically modified organism (GMO) is an organism to which biotechnology has been applied. This creates combinations of plant, animal, bacteria and virus genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods. Are GMOs safe?

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My second and final article involves genetically altering pigs so that their organs are suitable for human use. Thus, eliminating the ever growing list of people waiting for transplants from suitable donors.

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"KEEP death off the road", a Ministry of Transport slogan once enjoined the people of Britain. And it worked. Both driving and being a pedestrian have become far safer over the past few decades in Britain and many other countries. One consequence, though, is a shortage of human organs available for transplant. Waiting lists for such transplants have thus grown. In July, more than 117,000 people were awaiting suitable donors in the United States alone. An alternative source of supply is needed. And a paper published in Science this week, by Luhan Yang and her colleagues at eGenesis, an American biotechnology company, may help pave the way to providing it.

Dr Yang and her team are working on pigs. The idea of using pig organs as substitutes for human ones has been around for a while. Pigs are well studied and easy to breed. They are also about the same size as people, meaning that their internal bits and pieces are, too. Though there is an obvious "yuck" factor to the idea of transplanting, say, pigs' kidneys into people now hooked up to dialysis machines, those facing death from kidney failure might not be so squeamish.

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Beyond the yuck factor, however, there are real, physiological objections to such "xenotransplantation". One is that a human immune system will rapidly reject the xenograft. Another is that the graft may bring with it novel infections, caused by what are known as endogenous retroviruses. It is this second problem that Dr Yang's work may be able to deal with.

An endogenous retrovirus is a sequence of viral DNA that has been incorporated into an animal's genome and is then passed down the generations along with the rest of its DNA. Crucially, such viruses retain the power to break out and become independent, infective agents once again. Moreover, experiments using cell cultures show endogenous retroviruses can spread in this way from the cells of one species to those of another, infecting them with disease. In particular, those experiments suggest that porcine endogenous retroviruses (abbreviated, perhaps unfortunately, to "PERVs") can spread to human cells. Whether PERVs can leap from a transplanted organ to the cells of that organ's host, rather than just making the journey in a Petri dish, has not yet been established. But even a minute risk of this happening is something no medical-licensing authority is likely to overlook.

To eliminate the possibility of such a leap taking place, Dr Yang and her team turned to CRISPR-Cas9, a gene-editing technique currently in the news for its potential use in modifying the DNA of human embryos to replace faulty genes. Dr Yang sought to use it to remove PERVs, and thus to clean up pigs' DNA to make it safe for xenotransplantation.

First, the team had to seek out every PERV hiding in the 2.7bn base pairs of the genomes of their pigs. That meant sequencing those genomes accurately and then searching them for places that looked like viral genes. They found 25 PERVs in this way. They then used CRISPR-Cas9, the nuts and bolts of which are a complex of molecules able to track down a particular arrangement of base pairs and cut the DNA in that place, to try to inactivate all the PERVs in some cultured pig-body cells-specifically, cells of a type called fibroblasts.

Their first attempts to do this failed. They found they were able to disable a maximum of 90% of the PERVs in a given fibroblast. After a while, they realised that the damage inflicted by more edits than this was triggering a cellular self-destruct mechanism called apoptosis. By applying a mixture of chemicals known to stop apoptosis along with the molecular editors, they overcame the problem and were able to inactivate every PERV in the nuclei of some of the fibroblasts. Then, by transplanting these purged nuclei into egg cells extracted from sows' ovaries, and implanting the results into other sows' uteruses, they created eight litters of PERV-free piglets-30 animals in all.

Half of those piglets are still alive, four and a half months after their birth-which would be the ideal age to harvest their organs for transplantation. That will not be the fate of these particular pigs, though. They will be studied carefully over the whole of their lives for any signs of abnormality. Moreover they, or others like them, will be used as the foundation of a new strain of pigs, PERV-free, on which further research can be done. Having used gene editing to eliminate PERVs, the next phase is to apply it to the question of organ rejection. If porcine genes for the proteins that most provoke the human immune system could be eliminated in the way that PERVs have just been, then an important further step towards xenotransplantation would have been taken. It might even be possible to add genes that made pig organs seem, to human immune systems, more humanlike. At that point, the possibility of growing acceptable substitutes for human organs in specialised pig farms would be just around the corner.

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Gene editing may make pigs into organ donors for people

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"KEEP death off the road", a Ministry of Transport slogan once enjoined the people of Britain. And it worked. Both driving and being a pedestrian have become far safer over the past few decades in Britain and many other countries. One consequence, though, is a shortage of human organs available for transplant.

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"what if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?"

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Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong

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What really causes addiction -- to everything from cocaine to smart-phones? And how can we overcome it? Johann Hari has seen our current methods fail firsthand, as he has watched loved ones struggle to manage their addictions. He started to wonder why we treat addicts the way we do -- and if there might be a better way. As he shares in this deeply personal talk, his questions took him around the world, and unearthed some surprising and hopeful ways of thinking about an age-old problem.

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The world is not correctly depicted based on what the media shows. This article explains the lack of global issues in the media and focus on trivial pop sensations instead. "Today's college graduates and as well as less educated Americans know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago." A lot of this is due to economic reasons, it is cheaper to recycle news stories. This interested me because I am constantly wondering how biased news reports really are and if I'm getting accurate stories when watching or reading the media.

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Alisa Miller: How the news distorts our worldview

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Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the media is actually showing us less. Eye-opening stats and graphs.

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This article contains information on an ancient Babylonian tablet that with it's discoveries could possibly alter the way Arithmetic and Geometry are practiced today. This caught my eye because I am currently enrolled in math classes at UNCC and Trigonometry is going to be a substantial part of earning my college degree.

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Ancient Babylonian tablet - world's first trig table

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"Why Try in High School if the Colleges are only Going to Choose Athletes anyway?"

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This is a guest post by Jack Turnage, who will begin his senior year at Kent Denver School, in Denver, this fall.
Watching the London Olympic Games, I am particularly focused on the 17 Olympians from Princeton University. I am rooting wholeheartedly for them and all the other collegiate athletes on the U.S. squad. But as an incoming high school senior and an overoptimistically hopeful, athletically unexceptional Princeton applicant, I know that like athletes across the nation, Princeton's Olympians were probably given preferential access to their university. The recruitment of elite athletes from grade school onward is degrading our entire educational system, and it bodes ill not only for me and other academically oriented high schoolers but, more important, for America's children and our nation's future.

Most of us are taught that we need only perform well academically to get into college, but the uncomfortable reality is that America's institutions of higher education give athletes special access at the expense of gifted students. That is true even of top schools and those that are not allowed to offer scholarships. In Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values, former Princeton President William Bowen and his co-authors describe how at 33 of America's most academically selective colleges, recruited athletes are nearly four times more likely to be admitted than other applicants of similar academic caliber. And such recruits are significantly more likely to be in the bottom third of their class.

Kids are not stupid. High schoolers and younger students and their parents see the commonplace success that athletes enjoy in college admissions, and kids understand that athletic prowess makes them far more likely to be admitted to a top school than does academic excellence alone. In fact, it is understood in high school that recruited athletes of even modest scholastic achievement regularly do better getting into select schools than their peers with much higher academic credentials.

What does this mean? It doesn't encourage students to excel academically. Rather, America's universities have brazenly created a perverse incentive for kids to focus on athletics from a very young age. After it becomes clear to a child that athletic skill maximizes his chance of being admitted to the college of his choice, that child will understandably focus on getting better at a sport. Not surprisingly, both students and parents are willing to sacrifice academic achievement and growth to get into a good college.

Take one of my sister's friends, who last year as a 12-year-old made the cut for a highly selective club lacrosse team. Since then she has practiced intensively every day and traveled extensively for national tournaments. Her place on the team is continually reassessed, subjecting her to relentless pressure years before even beginning high school. She loves lacrosse, but she also knows that if she works hard enough she will have a college commitment by the end of the tenth grade-before taking a single standardized test and with less than two years of high school grades.

The giant American sports funnel results in upwards of 110,000 high schoolers per year receiving athletic scholarships to Division I and II schools, according to the NCAA. But how many millions of kids are steered toward sports early on in the hope of attaining admission to top colleges only to find that they aren't good enough, that their parents can't afford to pay for year-round travel and training, and that in the pursuit of athletic excellence they've neglected their academic goals and aspirations, perhaps irrevocably? How many wannabe recruits enter college acutely deficient in the skills critical to success there and later? And why, in the first place, should a rower or a football player be valued four times higher and singled out years earlier than an academically comparable piccolo player or aspiring physicist or debater?

Some will argue that athletics offers disadvantaged students a chance at a college education. But apart from a few sports like basketball and football, the vast majority of sports at the high school level are funded by parents through athletic clubs and require substantial financial resources. That is true for nearly all of the winter sports, like skiing and skating, as well as for ones like field hockey, swimming, and tennis. Far from leveling the playing field, college sports recruiting offers the moneyed a substantial advantage over less wealthy families.

After 40 months with unemployment above 8%, and with U.S. workers continuing to lose ground to global competitors, can America really afford to have its students rank 25 th among industrialized nations in math and sciences? Instead of focusing on gold, shouldn't American universities be trying to out-compete China and India in producing science, technology, engineering, and math graduates?

This week I am cheering for all collegiate Olympians. But when London 2012 ends, I'll go back to hoping that Princeton admitted their competitors for their academic merit more than for their athletic prowess-for my own sake and for America's.

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When Colleges Recruit Athletes, Everyone Loses

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This is a guest post by Jack Turnage, who will begin his senior year at Kent Denver School, in Denver, this fall. Watching the London Olympic Games, I am particularly focused on the 17 Olympians from Princeton University. I am rooting wholeheartedly for them and all the other collegiate athletes on [...]

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This final source fully supports the idea that mothers should stay-at-home. This is the common theme from before WWII changed what the traditional U.S. household resembled.

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You're wondering if you should become a stay-at-home mom. But you're on the fence about making the transition from working mom to stay-at-home mom. Weigh the pros and cons to decide which role is right for your family. Start with these 10 reasons why you should stay home with the kids.

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10 Great Reasons to Be a Stay-at-Home Mom

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You're wondering if you should become a stay-at-home mom. But you're on the fence about making the transition from working mom to stay-at-home mom. Weigh the pros and cons to decide which role is right for your family. Start with these 10 reasons why you should stay home with the kids.

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This article explains why the author feels that U.S. households should not keep evolving into what they are. The article supports the idea that they should be either more traditional and what they once were, or that no parent should stay home.

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Don't Let Your Husband Be a Stay-At-Home Dad

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Quitting your job to be a full-time parent is an equal-opportunity risk, though fathers opting out can sometimes be worse for families.

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http://www.newsweek.com/why-multiple-generations-families-choosing-live-together-324614
This article explains why today more and more people have several generations of families in the same household.  It explains the several benefits and how this has become more common in recent years.

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A video explaining the history of Rosie the Riveter, which is a part of the foundation for the issue that I would like to discuss.

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Web Originals : Ask History: Rosie the Riveter | History

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Academics in Student Athletes: A Lack of Skill, or a Lack of Effort?

This article discusses whether college athletes perform poorly in school because they simply don't have the ability or the knowledge, or because they choose to do so. I was surprised to hear how highly how many college athletes ranked their concern for their academics, especially in relation to their grades and scores. A lot of the reason for this, as discussed in the article, is due to media, teammates, and other peers giving the impression that school isn't as important when you're a part of a sports team in college.

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The problem's not the NCAA. It's players' expectations of their peers.