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How technology effects our health

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The Real Effects of Technology on Your Health

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All you laptop-using, touchpad-checking, two-thumb-texting, smart phone-listening grown-ups and kids beware: Those devices subtly change your back, eyes, ears...

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The effects of rap music on today's teens

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Rap music features lyrics filled with slang and often peppered with profanity, which has caused concern among parents, educators and activists alike. Rap videos can also illustrate glamorous and dangerous fantasies. But rap music is a diverse genre, used to express a wide variety of realities and aspirations. Even if your teenager imitates the fashions and language used by rap artists, this may not always indicate a significant change in your teen's values or goals.

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What Influence and Effects Does Rap Music Have on Teens Today? | Livestrong.com

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Rap music features lyrics filled with slang and often peppered with profanity, which has caused concern among parents, educators and activists alike. Rap videos can also illustrate glamorous and dangerous fantasies. But rap music is a diverse genre, used to express a wide variety of realities and aspirations.

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Why do professional athletes and entertainers get paid more than firefighters, police officers, and military?

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LeBron James, Taylor Swift, Adele and Cam Newton all make well over double the most paid doctor, Salomon Melgen makes a year. Kylie Jenner makes 175 times more than the most paid police officers make. And NFL rookies, who make the lowest salary professional football players make, make ten times as much firefighters. What do all these people do to make so much more money? They are essentially entertainers, promoters for products, and they make their own products such as shoes, cosmetics, clothing, and more. So this means people who are essentially in jobs that are just for our entertainment are making that much more than people who are in careers that save people's lives. The average college football coach makes ten times more than the average college professor. College professors are the one's teaching us everything and leading us to our degree, yet they make that much less than coaches. Why are coaches held so much higher than professors? Professors are basically the reason we are in college, we want to end up with a degree, sports are supposed to come second but we're basically telling people that sports are more important than classes.

But that's not even the worst part. The people who are going to school to be doctors, social workers, teachers, nurses, are paying all this money to go to school to get a job that is paid extremely less than these athletes who are going to school for nothing. The people that are paying thousands and thousands of dollars, make well under ten times the amount of money professional athletes, who went to school for free make. How does that make sense? We're basically telling people that you can spend all this money on a good education, to get a good job, that pays a decent amount of money, to be paid less than those who are going to school for free. Many people might say well you don't know if these athletes are going to school for free. First off, if you're playing a professional sport you were probably good enough in college to get a free ride. And even if they didn't, their first year salary will be well enough to pay back those college loans.

Most people will never make the amount of money that the lowest paid professional athletes are paid. New York Giants wide receiver, Victor Cruz was making $43 million in 2014 but said it was tough because he should make more. I'm sorry but whose life did he save? Does he do surgery on people? Does he teach our youth Math, Science, English or anything for their future? No, he plays football and makes 1000 times as much as the average teacher makes. Ariana Grande made $29 million in 2016 and claims to be the "hardest working 23-year-old on Earth". Most people becoming doctors enter medical school at about 23 which costs around $100,000, 4% of the United States population is in the military at 23 fighting for us, and Pichamon Yeophantong had her bachelor, master, and doctorate degree, could speak seven languages and was a Global Leaders Fellow at the age of 23, but Ariana Grande sings songs and works so much harder that she makes well over 25 times the amount of money these people will make in their lifetime.

So why exactly do we hold these people whose jobs are there to entertain us so much higher than the people that save lives and teach our youth? It honestly makes no sense. We praise these people and are inspired by people who play sports, sing songs, and prance around on a stage. What about the people who can barely put food on the table for their families even though they spent all day teaching children? What about the people who spend hours trying to save someone's life? What about the people who are helping people with mental illness? They should be the ones we are praising. They should be the ones making 100 times more than athletes. They should be the ones saying they are the hardest working people in the world because they are. We need to step back and think, do we want our youth's aspiration's to be to grow up and help people? Or grow up and throw a ball for entertainment?

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Entertainers/Athletes Are Getting Paid More Than Real Heroes

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LeBron James, Taylor Swift, Adele and Cam Newton all make well over double the most paid doctor, Salomon Melgen makes a year. Kylie Jenner makes 175 times more than the most paid police officers make. And NFL rookies, who make the lowest salary professional football players make, make ten times as much firefighters.

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Is it possible to cure inequality?

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It may not be the cure-all to inequity, but we need a starting point.

Image

Credit Credit Lilli Carré

Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter! Every Monday, we email readers with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Here's what we know about salary transparency: Workers are more motivated when salaries are transparent. They work harder, they're more productive, and they're better at collaborating with colleagues. Across the board, pay transparency seems to be a good thing.

Transparency isn't just about business bottom line, however. Researchers say transparency is important because keeping salaries secret reinforces discrimination.

"From a worker's perspective, without accurate information about peer compensation, they may not know when they're being underpaid," said Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, an economist at U.C.L.A. who ran a study in 2013 that found workers are more productive when salary is transparent. Without knowing what other workers' salaries look like, "it naturally becomes harder to make the case that one is suffering a form of pay discrimination," Dr. Huet-Vaughn said.

For example, in 2017, the Department of Labor filed a lawsuit and investigation against Google. Their regional director Janette Wipper told the Guardian, "discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry." The suit claimed that Google refused to disclose data on employee salary history, as required by equal opportunity laws.

Which brings us to the wage gap. Rather than a deliberate, methodical attempt to sabotage women's earnings, often the wage gap takes on more subtle, but no less detrimental forms. For example, women are viewed as less likable when they negotiate. They're also less likely than men to get what they want when they ask for a raise, according to Harvard Business Review.

"By keeping compensation secret, we might obscure structural inequalities and enable inequalities to persist," said Morela Hernandez, a researcher and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. In the big picture, it's easy to see how these biases might contribute to a wage gap, but it's harder to prove wage discrimination on an individual level. Employers can hide "structural inequalities" (even from themselves) with a myriad explanations. When wages are transparent, it's harder to hide.

It's not just women. Pay secrecy reinforces racial biases as well, and the pay gap is wider for black and Hispanic men and women, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a study with her colleague Derek R. Avery of the Wake Forest University School of Business, Dr. Hernandez found that when black job applicants negotiated their starting salaries, evaluators viewed them as more pushy than white job applicants who also negotiated. Evaluators also mistakenly thought black job applicants negotiated more than white applicants, even when they negotiated the same amount. Worse still, the black job applicants received lower starting salaries as a result of this.

Dr. Hernandez said that because evaluators expected black job seekers to ask for less, they perceived the black applicants as pushy when they negotiated and penalized them accordingly. In the real world, employers probably aren't even aware of this dynamic; that's how unconscious biases work. When numbers are out in the open, however, it's easier to see potential blind spots.

"In my opinion, transparency in pay can be one way to help us calibrate our own views of fairness and appropriate compensation," Dr. Hernandez said.

Katharine Bolin, a marketing professional in Minneapolis, said she once discovered a male colleague earned more than her by accident.

"In my mid-twenties, I was a D.J. at a downtown bar in Minneapolis," she said. "I was asked to let a new male D.J. shadow me in the booth for part of his interview. Everything was going great until he said, 'This is a pretty good gig for $15 an hour.' I was livid."

Earlier that week, Ms. Bolin had asked for a raise for that same amount, but she was offered less. She confronted her manager about the situation.

"I said that I was very upset as a woman and a longtime employee to hear that a potential new male hire was getting offered more than me," she said. Her manager relented, offering her the same amount. "It's one of my proudest moments standing up for myself." Ms. Bolin closed her own gap, but it wouldn't have happened without transparency.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, you may want to approach the conversation more cautiously, without calling out another co-worker.

"I caution clients against basing their salary negotiation requests on, 'So-and-so is earning X dollars, so I should, too,'" said Devon Smiley, a negotiation consultant. Ms. Smiley suggested "approaching an employer with something like, 'Based on my market research and discussions with people within my network who are in similar roles, an uplift of X percent would reflect my contributions.' "

President Barack Obama signed an executive order "prohibiting federal contractors from retaliating against employees who choose to discuss their compensation" in 2014. But before that, some states had already passed laws to outlaw pay secrecy. Many of these laws kept employers from enacting any kind of rules to keep workers from talking about salaries openly. Workers fared better in these states, according to research from Marlene Kim at the University of Massachusetts. In an article published in Industrial Relations, Ms. Kim found that "women with higher education levels who live in states that have outlawed pay secrecy have higher earnings, and that the wage gap is consequently reduced."

Dr. Huet-Vaughn said that government policies that require pay transparency are necessary, but they won't fix the problem entirely.

"Information alone is not enough. Remedying such discrimination will require institutions - governments, unions, courts, political and advocacy organizations - with a willingness to make use of that information," he said. Transparency may not be the cure-all to inequity, but we need a starting point.

This week I've invited writer Kara Godfrey to tell us all why we should send out a real, I.R.L. card to a loved one.
We use our phones to offer "congratulations" or a simple "how are things going," so it can be easy to think we are better connected than ever. But when was the last time you sent out a physical, written card to someone?

One of my favorite ways to spend a spare hour of the weekend is to peruse a stationery store for different cards and postcards. Part of the joy is making that perfect choice: the awful gin pun for your best friend, a pretty floral design for your auntie or a simple thank you for your dad.

The beauty of writing a card results in more meaning and thought being put into what you're trying to say. Not unlike that first page of your new notebook where the neatest handwriting is usually found, a card makes every word count.

Receiving an unexpected card in the mail is pure joy - it's a lovely surprise to break up the usual habit of sifting through bills, junk mail and fliers. Sometimes a simple note that says you're thinking of someone can mean the world. The no reason at all cards my mom sent me every month at university are some of my most treasured possessions.

Give a rest to the mistake-ridden texts, the long-winded WhatsApps messages and the sporadic group chat conversations, and try to send a note the old-fashioned way for a change.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Want to Close the Pay Gap? Try Transparency.. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Want to Close the Pay Gap? Pay Transparency Will Help

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It may not be the cure-all to inequity, but we need a starting point. Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter! Every Monday, we email readers with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

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Do teachers need to be paid better?

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CLOSE

Search New Jersey teacher salaries in your area through Data Universe.

New Jersey teacher salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, even as the state's teachers remain among the highest-paid in the country, according to an Asbury Park Press analysis of state Department of Education data.

Teacher and supervisor salaries grew just 1.6 percent in New Jersey between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years, according to new state data. Prices of goods and services rose more than 2 percent last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The erosion in wages also comes as educators have been compelled to pick up a greater share of their health care costs and other benefits.

Rapidly rising health insurance premiums are leaving public school staff with shrinking take-home pay year after year, said Steve Baker, spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union.

In addition, pension contributions have grown to consume 7.5 percent of employee salaries, he said.

Teachers picket in front of John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, Jan. 14, 2019. Teachers from the country's second-biggest school district have gone on strike after weeks of negotiations for more pay and smaller class sizes went nowhere. (Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY)

"Public school employees are struggling financially," said Baker. "It's unfortunately beginning to drive people out of the profession. It's driving people to get second and third jobs, which makes it very difficult to focus on the most important job."

The number of educator positions in New Jersey grew 4.5 percent between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years, to 144,985, according to the state data.

Over the same period:

The number of bilingual educators employed across the state rose 18 percent, to 1,542.

Administrator and supervisor salaries rose $2,235 on average, to $120,824.

Salaries for special education teachers rose 1.3 percent, to $69,019.

Low teacher salaries have spurred protests and strikes across the nation over the past 12 months. On Monday, Los Angeles teachers picketed outside of a school in the nation's second-largest school district, where they demanded higher pay and smaller class sizes, among other changes.

Nonetheless, New Jersey teachers remain some of the highest-compensated in the country, ranking seventh in the nation, according to an October report by financial news website 24/7 Wall Street.

Degrees can make a big difference in pay for New Jersey educators.

Teachers and school supervisors across the state with doctoral degrees earned the highest-average salary, at $106,403, according to state salary data. Those with a master's earned on average $82,207. Those with a bachelor's on average earned $67,074.

In recent years, Trenton politicians have worked to reign in rising school taxes by capping school tax levy increases at 2 percent. The state has also limited superintendent pay and tied it to student enrollment in school districts.

Across New Jersey, Hudson County educators were the highest-paid, earning on average $81,395 in the 2017-18 school year, according to state salary data. The lowest-paid teachers worked in charter schools and earned, on average, $59,948.

Low pay for Ocean County teachers

Ocean County educators are some of the lowest-paid teachers and administrators in New Jersey, according to the Department of Education.

While public school employees and supervisors earned on average $75,166 in the 2017-18 school year, Ocean County educators earned just $68,838 on average, or $6,328 less than their peers across the state. This pay gap goes back to at least 2015. Teachers and supervisors who work in charter schools and Salem County are the only groups paid less, on average, according to the data.

In contrast, teachers and administrators who work in Monmouth County earn $5,366 more on average - $74,204 in the 2017-18 school year - than those in Ocean County.

The schools in Monmouth and Ocean counties with the highest average educator salaries were:

Howell High School - $89,938

Colts Neck High School - $89,012

Manalapan High School - $87,472

The schools that paid the lowest average salaries were:

Lakewood Early Childhood Center - $18,500

Beach Haven School - $48,924

The Meadowbrook School in Eatontown - $50,801

Rising incomes

Teacher and supervisor salaries in both Monmouth and Ocean county counties rose slightly between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years, up 1.2 percent in Monmouth County and up 1.8 percent in Ocean County, according to state salary data.

Salaries for bilingual teacher increased more quickly in both counties. In the 2016-17 school year, there were more than 72,000 New Jersey students who were learning English as a second language, according to the Department of Education.

In Monmouth County, where the number of bilingual educators jumped nearly 16 percent to 66 in the 2017-18 school year, salaries rose 4.6 percent.

Opinion: New Jersey must suspend high school exit testing

Ocean County had one less bilingual educator last year - down from 52 in the 2016-17 school year - yet salaries for these staffers rose 3.1 percent, on average. Bilingual educators earn about $5,000 less annually than general educators in Ocean County, according to Department of Education statistics.

For special education teachers, salaries failed to keep pace with the state average, despite a 4 percent increase in the number of special education jobs in Ocean County, up 1,366 from 1,308.

Teachers and supporters picket in front of John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, Jan. 14, 2019. (Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY)

Salaries rose just 0.6 percent for special education teachers in Monmouth County ($68,263) and 1 percent in Ocean County ($65,601).

Because New Jersey has some of the highest property taxes in the country, rising teacher salaries need to be coupled with educational reforms, said George Kneisser, executive director of NJ Citizens for Property Tax Reform.

Kneisser is calling for the elimination of teachers' lifetime health insurance coverage and replacing lifetime pensions with 401(k) retirement programs. Kneisser said teachers' "Cadillac" healthcare insurance plans also need to be reduced and reflect the more modest insurance plans offered in the private marketplace.

"That's the only way that's going to save us (taxpayers) from going bankrupt," he said. "We know they (teachers) are dedicated... they're great, but they're not any better than the private sector (school) teachers."

See what teachers are earning in your town at Data Universe.

Teacher salaries: These states paid the most in 2017
Amanda Oglesby: @OglesbyAPP; 732-557-5701; aoglesby@gannettnj.com
Read or Share this story: https://www.app.com/story/news/education/2019/01/15/teachers-pay-how-much-teachers-your-town-paid/2539296002/

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Teachers pay: How much are teachers in your town paid?

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CLOSE Search New Jersey teacher salaries in your area through Data Universe. New Jersey teacher salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, even as the state's teachers remain among the highest-paid in the country, according to an Asbury Park Press analysis of state Department of Education data.

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Is college a better financial decision than not attending?

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If you could only choose one which would make you healthier: a healthy diet or lots of exercise?

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(HealthDay)-There's no doubt that an unhealthy diet and couch potato lifestyle put your health at risk, but when considering improvements, should you change one at a time or both at once?

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The pros and cons of intermittent fasting on the body

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Each of the trillions of cells in our bodies has a tiny internal clock. When all of those clocks are synchronized, they tell us when to wake up, burn calories, and go to sleep. But when they lose their beat, we become vulnerable to all sorts of aging-related diseases. Fortunately, the author of a recent paper in Cell Reports thinks that there's a simple way to reset those clocks if they get off rhythm: fasting.

The circadian rhythm - that 24-hour clock that controls sleep-wake cycles - is the internal "master" clock, controlled by a big group of neurons in the brain, that most of us are familiar with. But Paolo Sassone-Corsi, Ph.D., the director of UC Irvine's Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism and a co-author on the new paper, previously showed that the circadian clock isn't the only clock but rather the main clock in a whole network of internal clocks in the body.

The internal clock within every cell expresses certain genes according to the master clock's instructions. The proteins that help the cells keep those rhythms of gene expression are called "core clock proteins." In his paper, Sassone-Corsi shows how fasting could get core clock proteins get back on track if they ever lose time.

"The core clock genes and proteins are really crucial for health, as they control a large number of genes," he tells Inverse. "These are proteins that are present in every cell of everyone's body. They're present in every tissue and in every single organ. They control thousands and thousands of genes. We've been undertaking an effort to understand how nutrition will change our circadian biology in various tissues."

Sassone-Corsi says that it's crucial that each and every one of the clocks in every cell in the body stay somewhat in time with one another. If the clocks become "misaligned," it can cause a number of metabolic disorders or inflammatory responses, many of which are actually associated with aging. There are some factors that can throw a clock out of balance: For instance, high-fat and high-calorie diets have been shown to do so in turtles and mice. A well-aligned clock, explains Sassone-Corsi, is "really a signature for a healthy organism."
The core clock genes and proteins are really crucial for health as they control a large number of genes. They're present in every tissue and in every single organ.
In his recent study on mice, Sassone-Corsi showed that 24 hours of fasting had some strange effects on the clock genes in liver and muscle cells of his otherwise healthy mice. When the mice fasted, he noticed that the "rhythmicity" of their core clock genes was blunted, far more so in the muscle than the liver cells. Those genes seemed to be adhering to different rhythms, expressing different genes than they normally would during a normal feeding schedule. But when he re-fed his mice, the clocks in those two tissues synced back up again.

"What fasting seems to do, at least in liver and muscle, which we studied in this particular paper, was that it was able to make [the clocks] more coordinated between the two," he says.

This study isn't an excuse to food-deprive yourself in order to beat your internal clock into submission. Instead, the researchers believe that strategically timed fasts might be a good way to look at treating age-related diseases that come from misaligned cellular clocks. Sassone-Corsi and his co-authors say that fasting can reorganize the way genes are expressed in each cell and "prime the genome" so when feeding starts again, the clocks in each tissue are back in sync. In short, it could hit a hard reset on an internal clock that might have gone rogue.

"Therefore, optimal fasting in a timed manner would be strategic to confer robust circadian oscillation that ultimately benefits health and protects against aging-associated diseases," they write.

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Fasting Appears to Reset "Crucial" Clock on Aging-Related Diseases

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Each one of the trillion cells in our body has its own clock that ticks in sync with the circadian rhythm. When those clocks get misaligned it can cause certain diseases. The authors of a recent Cell Reports paper believe there is a way to reset them

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Which of these choices is better for the body?

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Adam's journal
Now that the confetti's been swept up and Ryan Seacrest is back in the studio alongside Kelly Ripa, it's time for me to make my New Year's resolutions. (Not exactly timely, I know, but better late than never.)

Various "helpful" commentators in my life have suggested that my several Diet Cokes a day habit begs for intervention. What do you think?
Dr. Prescott prescribes
Over the years, numerous researchers have looked at artificial sweeteners and their effects on people's health. Recently, a group of scientists performed a comprehensive review of those studies to determine what, if anything, they showed.

Their verdict? A big shoulder shrug.

After looking at 35 observational studies and 21 controlled trials of artificial sweeteners, the researchers found that in most cases, the use of artificial sweeteners had no effect on health outcomes. Of the few studies that showed any link, most had few participants, were of short duration and didn't possess a great deal of scientific rigor, so their results were of limited value at best.

Specifically, the scientists didn't see any convincing evidence that sugar substitutes had any effect on eating behavior, cancer or heart or kidney disease. The study actually observed a slight benefit in promoting weight loss and improving blood glucose levels, but only in small studies and over short periods of time.

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Adam's journal Now that the confetti's been swept up and Ryan Seacrest is back in the studio alongside Kelly Ripa, it's time for me to make my New Year's resolutions. (Not exactly timely, I know, but better late than never.) Various "helpful" commentators in my life have suggested that my several Diet Cokes a day habit begs for intervention.