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New plant-based synthetic meat (like the ‘Impossible Burger’) should replace genuine meat as the dominant protein in the American diet.

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Impossible Burger is made from simple, plant-based ingredients. For the health of people and the planet.

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The ATP Tennis Tour should adopt a ‘bubble’ model for its 2021 tournaments not only for public health, but also player safety.

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The chairman of the ATP Tour said Wednesday the organization will work with players, event organizers and local governments to "keep the Tour operating" and ensure "health and safety remains a priority" amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Andrea Gaudenzi told ESPN the tour will look at all options as, like many other sports leagues, it continues to evaluate the logistical hurdles that have come with COVID-19 since play resumed this past August after an initial shutdown.

"The players have made unprecedented sacrifices in order to compete in Melbourne and they deserve huge credit for that," Gaudenzi told ESPN via an emailed statement. "As we look ahead, we are working in close collaboration with tournament organizers and local governments to secure travel exemptions for our athletes so they can continue to compete.

"Our sport has looked at many different solutions in its response to the global pandemic over the past 12 months. The nature of our Tour is truly global -- a move away from that structure would present significant challenges compared to many other sports or leagues."

The comments come less than a day after world No. 1 Novak Djokovic questioned whether there might be a correlation between injuries and quarantine -- which players were forced to do after arriving in Australia.

"I don't want to sit here, complain about what we have been through, but we have to be honest and realistic that it has an effect on the physical well-being of players," he said. "Of course also mental, emotional, but physically, I mean, this is not normal."

Australia has some of the lowest COVID-19 numbers in the world yet still banned fans from the Australian Open for five days last week after a small outbreak. Fans will be allowed back in Thursday in a limited capacity, but Djokovic wondered how countries with higher COVID-19 rates would handle tournaments.

"We have to find a way, you know, whether it's something like an NBA bubble, because I heard some players talk about that, and I don't mind to discuss about that kind of idea," he said. "Select one place and we play all the tournaments on that surface and that place. You know, three, four weeks in, three, four, two, three weeks' rest, then back again. Something like that. I don't know. On the top level.

"But we just have to discuss options, because I don't know honestly if this is going to work."

The ATP, WTA and International Tennis Federation (ITF) were all forced to cancel over 40 events through July of last year due to the ongoing pandemic. Wimbledon was canceled for the first time since World War II, while the French Open was pushed back to a late-September start, just two weeks after the conclusion of the US Open. The New York event, usually the final Grand Slam of the calendar year, was held in a bubble with no spectators. The French Tennis Federation allowed a small number of fans at Roland Garros, as players competed through much colder temperatures compared to the event's usual June window.

When asked about Djokovic's comments, No. 2 Rafael Nadal said Wednesday that while it is difficult for players to compete in a bubble and be separated from their families, they would not be the only ones affected by a shutdown of the tour -- jobs and events could be lost. But his choice would be to find a way to play, safely.

"[Djokovic is] completely right that, for our sport, things are difficult because governments are changing the rules constantly, so it's difficult to make predictions about how the things are going to happen," Nadal said after losing a tough five-set match against Stefanos Tsitsipas in Wednesday's quarterfinals at the Australian Open.

"If we stop our sport again, a lot of people are going to suffer, no? ... Of course we need to protect players, find a way to protect [their ranking], to not force them to keep playing, because the situation is very tough for a lot of players depending on the countries. ... We need to find solutions and we need to adapt to these very tough times we are facing -- not only us, but the world. We need to be grateful to life that we can keep doing what we are doing."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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ATP eyeing all options to play during pandemic

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The chairman of the ATP Tour said Wednesday the organization will work with players, event organizers and local governments to "keep the Tour operating" and ensure "health and safety remains a priority" amid the coronavirus pandemic.

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Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin should replace standard money for most transactions.

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Free Book Preview Entrepreneur Kids: All About Money

Submit your email to get a sneak peek of some of the fun, educational worksheets included in our NEW book for the little entrepreneur in your life.

3 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

The latest buzz word, in the world of digital currency, is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is nothing but a virtual currency or a medium of conducting digital transactions, just like any other digital currency. So what make it better than our conventional currency?

Lately, the global interest in bitcoins has grown. So, it becomes extremely important to understand the base of this and all other forms of virtual currencies. Bitcoin, and its alternatives are all based on cryptographic algorithms which are encrypted. This makes the currency decentralized giving ownership to the user.These can be purchased through an online exchange or a Bitcoin ATM. Landmark feature of a bitcoin is that it can curb the chances of fraud and identity thefts, and hence is considered a safe mode of holding money.Bitcoins allow buying of goods and services online, as well as transferring money.

Below are a few benefits of using bitcoins which make it better than any conventional currency:

Bitcoin is digital and decentralized - With Bitcoin people get the liberty to exchange value without intermediaries which translate to greater control of funds and lower fees. It's faster, cheaper, more secure and immutable. Cash is controlled by banks while bitcoin has owners.

Ease of online shopping: As we already know, Bitcoin can help us do online shopping. It's like an e-wallet which can be created blockchain technology to store, track and spend digital money.

Less volatile than cash: Bitcoin has a global acceptance and is less volatile than cash / local currency. Due to this feature, it becomes easier to conduct transactions across boundaries and online.

No real way of keeping a track of conventional currency- The underlying technology behind bitcoin, which is, blockchain is what makes or breaks it. Thousands of computers in a distributed network use cryptographic techniques to create a permanent, public record of every single Bitcoin transaction that has ever occurred. This record will be very valuable for various things besides tracking payment. While there is no real way of tracking cash.

Great tool for investment- Bitcoin can be used all over the world without going through a conversion process. It is considered at par with Gold and combines the best of cash and gold while providing an open market and no restrictions imposed by banks or governments.

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer and open, yet secure and nearly frictionless - Bitcoin allows exchanging value over the internet without any intermediary and gives its users access to their balance through a password known as a private key. So it's private, secure and at the same time,open.

Duplication impossible - There is no way of duplicating a bitcoin, unlike cash.

Great way of maintaining records for tax purposes: Once transferred, a bitcoins' ownership also gets transferred. This means that two people cannot be transacting on the same value and this will help keep records healthy and simpler, especially for tax purposes.

Transnational digital currency - There are no boundaries to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. No exchange values and no third party interventions. Bitcoin allows seamless transactions across nations with a ledger getting maintained at the backend.

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#8 Reasons Why Bitcoin is Better than Conventional Currency

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Submit your email to get a sneak peek of some of the fun, educational worksheets included in our NEW book for the little entrepreneur in your life. 3 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

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Facial Recognition technology should never be used in domestic surveillance tech

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In September 2019, four researchers wrote to the publisher Wiley to "respectfully ask" that it immediately retract a scientific paper. The study, published in 2018, had trained algorithms to distinguish faces of Uyghur people, a predominantly Muslim minority ethnic group in China, from those of Korean and Tibetan ethnicity.

China had already been internationally condemned for its heavy surveillance and mass detentions of Uyghurs in camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang - which the government says are re-education centres aimed at quelling a terrorist movement. According to media reports, authorities in Xinjiang have used surveillance cameras equipped with software attuned to Uyghur faces.

As a result, many researchers found it disturbing that academics had tried to build such algorithms - and that a US journal had published a research paper on the topic. And the 2018 study wasn't the only one: journals from publishers including Springer Nature, Elsevier and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) had also published peer-reviewed papers that describe using facial recognition to identify Uyghurs and members of other Chinese minority groups. ( Nature 's news team is editorially independent from its publisher, Springer Nature.)

The complaint, which launched an ongoing investigation, was one foray in a growing push by some scientists and human-rights activists to get the scientific community to take a firmer stance against unethical facial-recognition research. It's important to denounce controversial uses of the technology, but that's not enough, ethicists say. Scientists should also acknowledge the morally dubious foundations of much of the academic work in the field - including studies that have collected enormous data sets of images of people's faces without consent, many of which helped hone commercial or military surveillance algorithms. ( A linked feature explores concerns over algorithmic bias in facial-recognition systems.)

An increasing number of scientists are urging researchers to avoid working with firms or universities linked to unethical projects, to re-evaluate how they collect and distribute facial-recognition data sets and to rethink the ethics of their own studies. Some institutions are already taking steps in this direction. In the past year, several journals and an academic conference have announced extra ethics checks on studies.

"A lot of people are now questioning why the computer-vision community dedicates so much energy to facial-recognition work when it's so difficult to do it ethically," says Deborah Raji, a researcher in Ottawa who works at the non-profit Internet foundation Mozilla. "I'm seeing a growing coalition that is just against this entire enterprise."

This year, Nature asked 480 researchers around the world who work in facial recognition, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) for their views on thorny ethical questions about facial-recognition research. The results of this first-of-a-kind survey suggest that some scientists are concerned about the ethics of work in this field - but others still don't see academic studies as problematic.

Data without consent

For facial-recognition algorithms to work well, they must be trained and tested on large data sets of images, ideally captured many times under different lighting conditions and at different angles. In the 1990s and 2000s, scientists generally got volunteers to pose for these photos - but most now collect facial images without asking permission.

For instance, in 2015, scientists at Stanford University in California published a set of 12,000 images from a webcam in a San Francisco café that had been live-streamed online. The following year, researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, released more than 2 million video frames (85 minutes) of footage of students walking on the university campus.

The biggest collections have been gathered online. In 2016, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle posted a database, called MegaFace, of 3.3 million photos from the image-sharing site Flickr ⁴. And scientists at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, issued the world's largest data set, MSCeleb, consisting of 10 million images of nearly 100,000 individuals, including journalists, musicians and academics, scraped from the Internet.

In 2019, Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey created a website called MegaPixels that flagged these and other data sets. He and another Berlin-based technologist and programmer, Jules LaPlace, showed that many had been shared openly and used to evaluate and improve commercial surveillance products. Some were cited, for instance, by companies that worked on military projects in China. "I wanted to uncover the uncomfortable truth that many of the photos people posted online have an afterlife as training data," Harvey says. In total, he says he has charted 29 data sets, used in around 900 research projects. Researchers often use public Flickr images that were uploaded under copyright licences that allow liberal reuse.

After The Financial Times published an article on Harvey's work in 2019, Microsoft and several universities took their data sets down. Most said at the time - and reiterated to Nature this month - that their projects had been completed or that researchers had requested that the data set be removed. Computer scientist Carlo Tomasi at Duke University was the sole researcher to apologize for a mistake. In a statement two months after the data set had been taken down, he said he had got institutional review board (IRB) approval for his recordings - which his team made to analyse the motion of objects in video, not for facial recognition. But the IRB guidance said he shouldn't have recorded outdoors and shouldn't have made the data available without password protection. Tomasi told Nature that he did make efforts to alert students by putting up posters to describe the project.

The removal of the data sets seems to have dampened their usage a little, Harvey says. But big online image collections such as MSCeleb are still distributed among researchers, who continue to cite them, and in some cases have re-uploaded them or data sets derived from them. Scientists sometimes stipulate that data sets should be used only for non-commercial research - but once they have been widely shared, it is impossible to stop companies from obtaining and using them.

In October, computer scientists at Princeton University in New Jersey reported identifying 135 papers that had been published after the Duke data set had come down and which had used it or data derived from it (see go.nature.com/3nlkjre). The authors urged researchers to set more restrictions on the use of data sets and asked journals to stop accepting papers that use data sets that had been taken down.

Legally, it is unclear whether scientists in Europe can collect photos of individuals' faces for biometric research without their consent. The European Union's vaunted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) does not provide an obvious legal basis for researchers to do this, reported Catherine Jasserand, a biometrics and privacy-law researcher at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, in 2018. But there has been no official guidance on how to interpret the GDPR on this point, and it hasn't been tested in the courts. In the United States, some states say it is illegal for commercial firms to use a person's biometric data without their consent; Illinois is unique in allowing individuals to sue over this. As a result, several firms have been hit with class-action lawsuits.

The US social-media firm Facebook, for instance, agreed this year to pay US$650 million to resolve an Illinois class-action lawsuit over a collection of photos that was not publicly available, which it used for facial recognition (it now allows users to opt out of facial-recognition tagging). The controversial New York City-based technology company Clearview AI - which says it scraped three billion online photos for a facial-recognition system - has also been sued for violating this law in pending cases. And the US tech firms IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and FaceFirst were also sued in Illinois for using a data set of nearly one million online photos that IBM released in January 2019; IBM removed it at around the time of the lawsuit, which followed a report by NBC News detailing photographers' disquiet that their pictures were in the data set.

Microsoft told Nature that it has filed to dismiss the case, and Clearview says it "searches only publicly available information, like Google or any other search engine". Other firms did not respond to requests for comment.

Vulnerable populations

In the study on Uyghur faces published by Wiley, the researchers didn't gather photos from online, but said they took pictures of more than 300 Uyghur, Korean and Tibetan 18-22-year-old students at Dalian Minzu University in northeast China, where some of the scientists worked. Months after the study was published, the authors added a note to say that the students had consented to this. But the researchers' assertions don't assuage ethical concerns, says Yves Moreau, a computational biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven. He sent Wiley a request to retract the work last year, together with the Toronto-based advocacy group Tech Inquiry.

It's unlikely that the students were told enough about the purpose of the research to have given truly informed consent, says Moreau. But even if they did freely consent, he argues, human-rights abuses in Xinjiang mean that Wiley ought to retract the study to avoid giving the work academic credence.

Moreau has catalogued dozens of papers on Uyghur populations, including facial-recognition work and studies that gathered Uyghur people's DNA. In December, he wrote an opinion article in Nature calling for all unethical work in biometric research to be retracted.

His campaign has had some impact, but not quite to the extent he'd hoped. Publishers say the key issue is checking whether participants in studies gave informed consent. Springer Nature, for instance, said in December 2019 that it would investigate papers of concern on vulnerable groups along these lines, and that it had updated its guidance to editors and authors about the need to gain explicit and informed consent in studies that involve clinical, biomedical or biometric data from people. This year, the publisher retracted two papers on DNA sequencing, because the authors conceded that they hadn't asked Uyghur people for their consent, and it has placed expressions of concern on 28 others.

Wiley has also focused on informed consent. Last November, the publisher told Moreau and Tech Inquiry that it was satisfied that consent forms and university approval for the Dalian study were available, and so it stood by the research, which it felt could be firmly separated from the actions in Xinjiang. "We are aware of the persecution of the Uyghur communities," Wiley said. "However, this article is about a specific technology and not an application of that technology."

In December, however, the publisher opened a formal investigation, after Curtin University in Perth, Australia, where one of the authors is based, also asked for a retraction, saying it agreed that the work was ethically indefensible. This year, Wiley added a publisher's note saying that the article "does appear to be in compliance with acceptable standards for conducting human subject research". In September, after Moreau dug into the authors' previous studies of facial recognition on Uyghurs and pointed out apparent inconsistencies in the year that the data sets had been gathered, Wiley placed an expression of concern on the study, saying that it was not clear when the data collection had taken place.

The publisher told Nature that it now considers the matter closed after thorough investigation - but not everyone involved is content. "Curtin University maintains that the paper should be retracted," deputy vice-chancellor Chris Moran told Nature. He said the university was still investigating the work.

Wiley says that after its conversations with Moreau, it updated its integrity guidelines to make sure that expected standards for informed consent are met and described in articles. Other publishers say that they have made adjustments, too. The IEEE says that this September, it approved a policy under which authors of articles on research involving human subjects or animals should confirm whether they had approval from an IRB or equivalent local review; editors determine whether research (on biometrics or other areas) involves human subjects.

But Moreau says that publishers' focus on the details of consent is too narrow, and that they should also take a stand on the wider ethics of research. "We are talking about massive human-rights abuses," he says. "At some point, Western publishers should say that there are some baselines above which they don't go." He suggests that publishers should set up independent ethics boards that can give opinions when questions such as these arise. (No publishers asked by Nature said that they had taken this step.) Universities and researchers who disapprove of human-rights abuses could also do more to express this by dropping their associations with questionable technology firms, says Kate Crawford, co-director of the AI Now Institute at New York University.

In the past year, there has been growing scrutiny of universities' partnerships with companies or research programmes linked to mass surveillance in Xinjiang. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, for example, said it would review its relationship with the Hong Kong-based tech firm SenseTime after the US government - in the middle of a trade war with China - blacklisted the firm and other Chinese AI companies, such as Megvii in Beijing, over their alleged contributions to human-rights violations in Xinjiang. In 2018, SenseTime and MIT announced they had formed an "alliance on artificial intelligence"; MIT says that SenseTime had provided an undisclosed sum to the university without any restrictions on how it would be used, and that the university will not give it back.

Both Megvii and SenseTime contest the US blacklisting. SenseTime says its technology has "never been applied for any unethical purposes", and Megvii says it requires its clients "not to weaponize our technology or solutions or use them for illegal purposes".

Academic conferences have been contentious, too. The Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (CCBR) was held in Xinjiang's capital, Ürümqi, in 2018. Anil Jain, a computer scientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, sat on the conference's advisory board and travelled there to give a speech. Some AI researchers, including Toby Walsh at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, later criticized Jain for this in stories r eported by the New York City-based Coda magazine.

Coda magazine also noted that Springer Nature sponsored the conference; the company said its role was limited to publishing CCBR proceedings and that it had strengthened its requirements for conference organizers to comply with the publisher's editorial policies after concerns were raised about past content. And Jain challenged the critique, telling Nature that attending conferences in China "does not mean that ... international conference participants, like me, condone these atrocities against minorities". Growth in surveillance there shouldn't be a reason to "curtail scientific exchange", he said.

Jain remains on the advisory board for CCBR 2020-21; Springer Nature is still publishing the conference abstracts. And major international computer-vision conferences have continued to accept sponsorship from Chinese firms. Just after the blacklisting, SenseTime and Megvii sponsored the 2019 International Conference on Computer Vision, and Megvii sponsored the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, although its logo was removed from the conference's website after the meeting occurred. "Conferences should avoid sponsors who are accused of enabling abuses of human rights," reiterates Walsh. However, he notes that last year, the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch in New York City withdrew initial allegations that Megvii facial-recognition technology was involved in an app used in Xinjiang. Conference organizers did not respond to a request for comment.

Ethical checkpoints

Questionable research projects have popped up in the United States, too. On 5 May, Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania posted a press release declaring that researchers there had developed facial-recognition software "capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal", with "80 percent accuracy and no racial bias". The announcement triggered a wave of criticism, as had previous studies that hark back to the discredited work of nineteenth-century physiognomists. One notorious 2016 study reported that a machine-learning algorithm could spot the difference between images of non-criminals and those of convicted criminals that were supplied by a Chinese police department.

Harrisburg University removed its press release on 6 May following the outcry, but left a dangling question: the press release had said that the work was to be published by Springer Nature in a book series (which the publisher later denied). On 22 June, more than 2,400 academics signed a letter from a group called the Coalition for Critical Technology (CCT), asking Springer Nature not to publish the work and calling on all publishers to refrain from publishing similar studies.

The letter pointed out that such studies are based on unsound science. It also noted that algorithmic tools that tell police where or who to target tend to provide a scientific veneer for automated methods that only exacerbate existing biases in the criminal justice system. Three days earlier, more than 1,400 US mathematicians had written a letter asking their colleagues to stop collaborating with police on algorithms that claim to help reduce crime, because of concerns about systemic racism in US law-enforcement agencies.

Springer Nature said the work was never accepted for publication: it had been submitted to a conference and rejected after peer review. (The authors, and Harrisburg University, declined to comment.)

Springer Nature was already under fire for a different paper, published in January in the Journal of Big Data, on detecting 'criminal tendency' in photos of criminals and non-criminals. After researchers from the IEEE got in touch with ethical concerns, Margeret Hall, the paper's co-author at the University of Nebraska Omaha, asked in June for the paper to be withdrawn. Hall says the now-retracted paper was "indefensible". Springer Nature says the journal reviewed its processes and now requires authors to include statements on ethics approvals and consent when submitting manuscripts.

Nature survey

To get a wider sense of academic views on facial-recognition ethics, Nature this year surveyed 480 researchers who have published papers on facial recognition, AI and computer science. On some questions, respondents showed a clear preference. When asked for their opinions on studies that apply facial-recognition methods to recognize or predict personal characteristics (such as gender, sexual identity, age or ethnicity) from appearance, around two-thirds said that such studies should be done only with the informed consent of those whose faces were used, or after discussion with representatives of groups that might be affected (see 'Facial recognition: a survey on ethics').

But on other issues, academics were split. Around 40% of the scientists in the survey felt that researchers should get informed consent from individuals before using their faces in a facial-recognition data set, but more than half felt that this wasn't necessary. The researchers' dilemma is that it's hard to see how they can train accurate facial-recognition algorithms without vast data sets of photos, says Sébastien Marcel, who leads a biometrics group at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland. He thinks that researchers should get informed consent - but in practice, they don't. His own group doesn't crawl the web for images, but it does use online image data sets that others have compiled. "A lot of researchers don't want to hear about this: they consider it not their problem," he says.

Ed Gerstner, director of journal policy at Springer Nature, said the publisher was considering what it could do to discourage the "continued use" of image databases that don't have explicit consent for their use in research from the people in the images.

Nature 's survey also asked researchers whether they felt that facial-recognition research on vulnerable populations - such as refugees or minority groups that were under heavy surveillance - could be ethically questionable, even if scientists had gained informed consent. Overall, 71% agreed; some noted it might be impossible to determine whether consent from vulnerable populations was informed, making it potentially valueless.

Some of those who disagreed, however, tried to draw a distinction between academic research and how facial recognition is used. The focus should be on condemning and restricting unethical applications of facial recognition, not on restricting research, they said.

Ethicists regard that distinction as naive. "That's the 'I'm just an engineer' mentality - and we're well past that now," says Karen Levy, a sociologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who works on technology ethics.

Some of the respondents in China said that they were offended by the question. "You should not say that in Xinjiang some groups are detained in camps," wrote one. Just under half of the 47 Chinese respondents felt that studies on vulnerable groups could be ethically questionable even if scientists had gained consent, a lower proportion than respondents from the United States and Europe (both above 73%).

One Chinese American AI researcher who didn't want to be named said that a problem was a cultural split in the field. "The number of Chinese researchers at top conferences who actively support censorship and Xinjiang concentration camp[s] concerns me greatly. These groups have minimal contact with uncensored media and tend to avoid contact with those who don't speak Mandarin, especially about social issues like this. I believe we need to find ways to actively engage with this community," they wrote.

Nature asked researchers what the scientific community should do about ethically questionable studies. The most popular answer was that during peer review, authors of facial-recognition papers should be asked explicitly about the ethics of their studies. The survey also asked whether research that uses facial-recognition software should require prior approval from ethics bodies, such as IRBs, that consider research with human subjects. Almost half felt it should, and another quarter said it depended on the research.

Ethical reflection

Researchers who work on technology that recognizes or analyses faces point out that it has many uses, such as to find lost children, track criminals, access smartphones and cash machines more conveniently, help robots to interact with humans by recognizing their identities and emotions and, in some medical studies, to help diagnose or remotely track consenting participants. "There are a number of lawful and legitimate applications of face and biometric recognition which we need in our society," says Jain.

But researchers must also recognize that a technology that can remotely identify or classify people without their knowledge is fundamentally dangerous - and should try to resist it being used to control or criminalize people, say some scientists. "The AI community suffers from not seeing how its work fits into a long history of science being used to legitimize violence against marginalized people, and to stratify and separate people," says Chelsea Barabas, who studies algorithmic decision-making at MIT and helped to form the CCT this year. "If you design a facial-recognition algorithm for medical research without thinking about how it could be used by law enforcement, for instance, you're being negligent," she says.

Some organizations are starting to demand that researchers be more careful. One of the AI field's premier meetings, the NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference, is requiring such ethical considerations for the first time this year. Scientists submitting papers must add a statement addressing ethical concerns and potential negative outcomes of their work. "It won't solve the problem, but it's a step in the right direction," says David Ha, an AI researcher at Google in Tokyo. The journal Nature Machine Intelligence is also trialling an approach in which it asks the authors of some machine-learning papers to include a statement considering broader societal impacts and ethical concerns, Gerstner says.

Levy is hopeful that academics in facial recognition are waking up to the implications of what they work on - and what it might mean for their reputation if they don't root out ethical issues in the field. "It feels like a time of real awakening in the science community," she says. "People are more acutely aware of the ways in which technologies that they work on might be put to use politically - and they feel this viscerally."
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03187-3

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The ethical questions that haunt facial-recognition research

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Journals and researchers are under fire for controversial studies using this technology. And a Nature survey reveals that many researchers in this field think there is a problem. Journals and researchers are under fire for controversial studies using this technology. And a Nature survey reveals that many researchers in this field think there is a problem.

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ATP and WTA should stop using the frozen rankings

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ATP and WTA should stop using the frozen rankings

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Despite the reluctancy for players to travel for COVID 19 issues, the frozen rankings do not accurately represent a player's current level and gives little opportunity for younger players and higher ranked players more chances to keep their ranking.

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Tennis fans have been left befuddled after the ATP announced they would extend the freeze to the ranking points system, which was introduced last year.

The coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the sports world last year and in March 2020, the ATP and WTA announced it would introduce a new rankings system when the tennis schedule came to a grinding halt.
'HARD TO FATHOM': 'NO PLANS': Rafa Nadal's massive career call after Australian Open Tennis world in disbelief over 'shocking' scenes
Player rankings were frozen and a 'best-of' system was introduced.

A player would keep their points from past tournaments going back as far as March 2019 if they were unable or unwilling to compete due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This benefited players such as World No.1 Ash Barty.

Barty opted not to take part in the French Open and US Open because of concerns over travelling during the coronavirus pandemic.

But because of her strong results over the past year, which included a French Open crown, she was able to hold onto her points and the World No.1 ranking.

While the 2021 season brings with it new challenges, players appear to be more willing to travel to tournaments as host nations work out better ways to accomodate stars and keep them and locals safe during the pandemic.

But on Thursday, the ATP announced that the ranking freeze will now be extended till the Toronto Masters, on August 9, and players can keep their points as far back as 2019 weighted at 50 per cent.

The system does not include Grand Slams.

Tennis world fumes at tennis rankings decision

This extension of the system has prompted a stunned reaction from the tennis world.

Tennis reporter labelled the system as a 'slow unfreezing' and said it could have major implications for players looking to boost their rankings ahead of the Tokyo Olympics this year.

Others labelled the move 'ridiculous' as it benefits players such as Roger Federer who hasn't played a match since the 2020 Australian Open, but will most likely remain as World No.5.

This is madness - continued fiddling with the system now that the tennis is back full time is counterproductive.
2019 points should be dropped this year - everyone knows that holding rankings points from distant past reflects a fake ranking in the real current world.

- Tony (@aussietony8888) March 3, 2021

ATP is helping @rogerfederer like they always and always do. I love Roger, but this is awful TBH. A punch in the face to the active players who are playing in the pandemic only to keep Roger's ranking intact. https://t.co/iOZ7xTDiJT

- Indronil Anik (@SeriousHoax) March 3, 2021

Officials said the traditional ranking system, incorporating only results from the previous 52 weeks, will apply again on August 15, 2022, if there are no further changes.
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The ATP also announced prize money for ATP 250 and 500 events will be increased after an year of cancellations and limited participation.

The minimum prize money for ATP 250 and 500 events will be raised to 80 per cent and 60 per cent respectively.

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'This is madness': Uproar over 'ridiculous' tennis controversy

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Tennis fans have been left befuddled after the ATP announced they would extend the freeze to the ranking points system, which was introduced last year. The coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the sports world last year and in March 2020, the ATP and WTA announced it would introduce a new rankings system when the tennis schedule came to a grinding halt.

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Japan should continue to host and let foreigners come to the 2021 Olympics

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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan has decided to stage this summer's Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics without overseas spectators due to public concern about COVID-19, two government sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

The Olympics, postponed by a year because of the pandemic, are scheduled for July 23 to Aug. 8 and the Paralympics from Aug. 24 to Sept. 5. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has said a decision on spectators would be made by the end of March.

The government has concluded that welcoming fans from abroad would not be possible given public concern about the coronavirus and the detection of more contagious variants in many countries, the people said, declining to be identified because the information is not public.

Kyodo News, which reported the decision on Tuesday, said the opening ceremony of the torch relay on March 25 would also take place without spectators.

"The organising committee has decided it is essential to hold the ceremony in the northeastern prefecture of Fukushima behind closed doors, only permitting participants and invitees to take part in the event, to avoid large crowds forming amid the pandemic," Kyodo said, quoting the officials.

The Tokyo organising committee said a decision would be made based on "factors including the state of infections in Japan and other countries, possible epidemic-prevention measures, and expert scientific advice."

Tokyo 2020 President Seiko Hashimoto has said she wants a decision made on before the start of the torch relay on whether to allow overseas spectators.

'TRADE-OFF'

Sebastian Coe, the man behind the 2012 London Olympics which enjoyed sell-out crowds, and now President of World Athletics, said the goal has always been to ensure "the best possible games for the athletes and having full stadiums of passionate people", preferably with a "good global presence".

"With all the work being done around vaccinations and the huge sacrifices large parts of the world have made over the last year, I would hope that fans (international and domestic) will be able to attend (the Tokyo Olympics), of course it would be better," he told Reuters.

"However, if local communities are concerned, then athletes will accept that and it is a trade-off they are prepared for."

Figures released in December had projected ticket sales would contribute $800 million for the Tokyo organising committee, or about 12% of its budget. Local ticket sales have typically accounted for 70-80% of ticket sales at past Olympics.

In the last Olympic Games, the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, local fans accounted for 80% of all ticket sales, with international fans buying 20%.

Most Japanese people do not want international visitors to attend the Games amid fears that a large influx could spark a resurgence of coronavirus infections, a Yomiuri newspaper poll showed this week.

The survey showed 77% of respondents were against allowing foreign fans to attend, versus 18% in favour.

Some 48% said they were against allowing any spectators into venues and 45% were in favour.

While coronavirus infection numbers have been relatively low in Japan compared with the United States and many European countries, the country has been hit hard by the third wave of the pandemic and Tokyo remains under a state of emergency.

Japan has recorded more than 441,200 COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic and more than 8,300 deaths.

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Japan to keep foreign spectators away from Tokyo Olympics, sources say

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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan has decided to stage this summer's Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics without overseas spectators due to public concern about COVID-19, two government sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday. The Olympics, postponed by a year because of the pandemic, are scheduled for July 23 to Aug.

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Whether covid 19 is coming to an end or not. 

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Whether covid 19 is coming to an end or not. 

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The virus that has taken over the world might be coming to an end if the vaccine reaches herd immunity.

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The nation's top infectious disease doctor offered a timeline for ending the COVID-19 pandemic this week, saying that if the coming vaccination campaign goes well, we could approach herd immunity by summer's end and "normality that is close to where we were before" by the end of 2021.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Wednesday that that estimate is dependent on significant numbers of Americans being willing to be inoculated with one of several vaccines in various stages of development. If 75 percent to 80 percent of Americans are vaccinated in broad-based campaigns likely to start in the second quarter of next year, then the U.S. should reach the herd immunity threshold months later. If vaccination levels are significantly lower, 40 percent to 50 percent, Fauci said, it could take a very long time to reach that level of protection.

"Let's say we get 75 percent, 80 percent of the population vaccinated," Fauci said. "If we do that, if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer, i.e., the third quarter, we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we can approach very much some degree of normality that is close to where we were before."

Fauci spoke at an online "When Public Health Means Business" event sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine. He addressed an array of topics from how he handles frustration over people who refuse basic, life-saving, public health measures, to why masks will continue to be needed even after vaccination starts (the vaccines haven't yet been shown to stop transmission).

"As a public health official ... it would be unconscionable to walk away from this or to throw up your hands in frustration," Fauci said. "It's not about me and how I feel; it's about what the problem is. And the problem is enormous. ... You just have to suck it up and keep going."

Fauci was introduced by Chan School Dean Michelle Williams, who said the level of noncompliance with basic and straightforward public health measures makes her think the nation has become numb to COVID-related illness and death. That could be a dangerous thing, she said, if it translates into an unwillingness to take a vaccine. Recent Pew surveys, she said, indicate that Americans who say they would take the vaccine rose to 60 percent in November from 51 percent in September, a figure that's nonetheless dangerously low if the goal is to reach levels high enough to virtually stop the transmission and end the pandemic.

"Saving lives is now a race against the clock. Let each of us ... do the right thing," Williams said, "because we simply cannot afford to go numb."

The afternoon event was the second at Harvard on Wednesday focused on COVID vaccines. The first, hosted by the Harvard Medical School-led Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, or MassCPR, featured several experts on various aspects of the pandemic discussing vaccine trials and distribution efforts, as well as health disparities and ways to reach minority communities and encourage vaccine acceptance.

"As a public health official ... it would be unconscionable to walk away from this or to throw up your hands in frustration. ... You just have to suck it up and keep going."

HMS Dean George Daley, who hosted the MassCPR event, said that successful development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines show "science, medicine, and public health at its best" but warned that overconfidence about a preventative treatment can be as dangerous as mistrust.

"Vaccine mistrust is dangerous, but so is overconfidence," Daley said. "We need to be wary of the dangers of magical thinking, of seeing vaccines as a silver bullet. Vaccines will not offer an overnight solution. We have to temper our optimism with a dose of reality and brace ourselves for many more months of infection prevention and distancing measures as the vaccines are rolled out."

Experts discussed the news of adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine that had been thought to be overwhelmingly safe. British authorities on Wednesday recommended that people prone to severe allergic reactions avoid the treatment, which this week became the first approved for distribution after the conclusion of clinical trials in a Western nation. Two British health care workers who were inoculated early developed severe allergic reactions. Also on Wednesday, Canada approved the vaccine for distribution, while on Thursday, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel endorsed the Pfizer vaccine for U.S. distribution, with final approval expected soon.

Both Fauci and experts at the MassCPR event said that rare, serious side effects like the allergic reactions sometimes occur once a vaccine is widely distributed because it reaches many more people than a clinical trial, including some with health issues or genetic profiles that make them susceptible to severe reactions. That's why vaccines are monitored even after they go out to the general population. That's also partly why the U.S. is backing multiple vaccine efforts, in hopes that rare side effects observed with one vaccine will be absent with another, Fauci said.

"These are the kinds of things that happen when you implement large vaccine programs," Fauci said. "You're talking about millions of individuals getting vaccinated, so you may start seeing effects in some that might not have been picked up when you were dealing with thousands."

The allergic reactions did not prompt a recommendation to halt vaccinations, but rather to heighten vigilance so that people prone to severe allergic reactions not take the vaccine or take it only with medical help nearby in case a severe reaction occurs.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, who appeared at the MassCPR event, said a key ethical question emerging as the U.S. moves toward vaccine approval will be whether to offer the vaccine to those enrolled in the clinical trials' placebo group. On one hand, she said, early trial results have shown the vaccine to be more effective than hoped for and vaccination - particularly of those at high risk - might be desired. But on the other hand, important questions about the duration of the vaccine's protection and about late-emerging side effects might be answered if the trial runs its planned two years. Inoculating those in the placebo arm of the trial would eliminate an unvaccinated population against which to compare the vaccinated participants' results.

Another unanswered question is whether the vaccines, whose trials have shown that they prevent people from getting seriously ill and dying of COVID-19, also prevent people from becoming infected in the first place and, importantly, from passing the virus on to others. It could be the case, Fauci said, that even if the vaccines don't prevent infection, they keep virus levels so low that they do prevent transmission. Those outstanding questions, however, are why masking, distancing, and other public health measures will be needed even by people who have been vaccinated until we know the answers.

"We're going to find out from follow-up studies," Fauci said. "We should not say that vaccines are a substitution for public health measures; [they're] a complement to public health measures."

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Anthony Fauci offers a timeline for ending COVID-19 pandemic

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The nation's top infectious disease doctor offered a timeline for ending the COVID-19 pandemic this week, saying that if the coming vaccination campaign goes well, we could approach herd immunity by summer's end and "normality that is close to where we were before" by the end of 2021.

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The NCAA should put some sort of restrictions on the eligibility of transfers because there are too many people in the transfer portal.

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The NCAA should put some sort of restrictions on the eligibility of transfers because there are too many people in the transfer portal.

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2021 Players in the NCAA College Basketball Transfer Portal

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Film studios such as Hollywood should continue to allow movie theatres to show their movies.

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Film studios such as Hollywood should continue to allow movie theatres to show their movies.

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A lot of cinema owners are being left with limited content with which to entice moviegoers out of their homes as film studios are pulling blockbusters from the calendar.

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In late March, like many businesses, the film industry entered a period of forced hibernation as the U.S. went into lockdown to stem the coronavirus pandemic.

With indoor cinemas closed, drive-in theaters were a lone bright spot until May, when some state governments began to loosen guidelines and permit indoor theaters to reopen to the public with limited capacity. It wasn't until August that major chains AMC, Cinemark and Regal unlocked their doors.

The hope was that once new Hollywood features arrived, so too would the audiences. That never happened.

Six months after the pandemic restrictions began, the number of deaths related to Covid-19 has surpassed 1 million globally.

As the world races to find a vaccine, the economy continues to struggle. Movie theaters are among a host of sectors that do not have a clear path to recovery. The threat of a resurgence of cases in the cooler autumn and winter months makes the future of the industry even more uncertain.

The theater industry is "not going to recover fully until consumers are confident that they won't die if they go to the movies," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush. "That means no return to normal until there is a vaccine widely available, likely not until April to July 2021."

The lackluster domestic box office has led Hollywood studios to pull blockbusters from the calendar, leaving cinema owners with limited content with which to entice moviegoers out of their homes.

Warner Bros.' "Wonder Woman 1984" moved from October to December, and "Black Widow," one of Disney's Marvel films, shifted its November release to May 2021.

There are fears that MGM's new James Bond film, "No Time to Die," and Pixar's "Soul," which both debut on Nov. 20, could be the next films whose debuts are altered. But for now, these films offer hope for Hollywood studios and movie theaters.

"Right now, given that there is virtually nothing likely to produce significant revenue until late November, there is a likelihood that theaters may again shut down and that layoffs may recur," said Doug Stone, president of Box Office Analyst. "There is also concern that a significant number of less well-capitalized theaters will just give it up by year's end."

Movie theater stocks have taken a massive hit over the last nine months. As of Monday's market close, AMC's stock is down 32% since the start of the year, Cinemark has stumbled around 70%, Marcus Theaters is down 75% and IMAX has slumped 40%. On a combined basis, the sell-off has wiped out nearly $2.7 billion in market value for these stocks since January.

Major movie theater chains have been able to secure enough capital to remain solvent through the rest of the year and into 2021. AMC, in particular, warned it was in danger of bankruptcy before securing a new debt deal. Smaller, independent theaters may not have the same resources.

"Over the next 12 to 24 months there is going to be a lot of bankruptcies," said Brent Turman, president of the Texas Association of Motion Media Professionals and an attorney at Bell Nunnally. "A lot of companies have weathered the storm so far, but I think we all know the storm isn't over."

Warner Bros.' "Tenet" was expected to drive people back to cinemas, but it failed to lure U.S. and Canadian moviegoers off their couches. The Christopher Nolan film garnered less than $10 million during its opening weekend in North America and has totaled$41.2 million since it opened Sept. 4. For comparison, the film has thrived internationally, tallying $242 million in those markets since its debut in August.

Since major movie theaters began to reopen on Aug. 21, the North American box office has garnered just $123.6 million in ticket sales, according to data from Comscore.

"2020 is basically a disaster," Stone said. "If the release slate stays stable, of which there is certainly no guarantee, I expect that Q4 will produce no more than about $1 billion in revenue, and perhaps less. This of course is a horrible number for a period that usually promises much much more than that."

In 2019, the domestic box office garnered $11.4 billion in ticket sales, the second-highest haul in industry history. So far in 2020, the U.S. and Canada have only tallied $2.05 billion.

At the same point last year, the domestic box office had generated more than $8.4 billion.

"I am not optimistic about the current state of the theatrical experience," said John Sloss, founder of Cinetic Media, a film financing and distribution company. "I think that when the pandemic starts to recede or goes away, it's going to take a real committed, coordinated effort from everyone in the industry to get the theaters running again and get people into theaters again."

Right now, audiences aren't returning to cinemas in droves. According to a weekly survey conducted by Morning Consult, a global data intelligence company, only around 22% of consumers feel comfortable returning to theaters.

Theaters have tried to make guests feel more comfortable by increasing sanitation practices, adding new air filtration systems in some locations and requiring masks. Still, one of the biggest reasons that potential moviegoers have said they are hesitant to return to cinemas is they feel they cannot trust other people to follow mask policies or to stay home if they are sick.

At many theaters, moviegoers are permitted to remove their masks when eating, but there is no way to ensure they replace their masks when they finish their popcorn.

Audience hesitancy to return to theaters, especially without fresh content, and studio hesitancy to release films with limited audience attendance is a "chicken-and-egg" scenario, Wedbush's Pachter said.

"If audiences are running 20% of capacity, it's hard to justify releasing a film," he said. "The closer we get to a vaccine, the easier the decision to delay into early next year, or at least later this year. If no new films are released, audience will run at lower than 20% of capacity. So, it's a vicious cycle."

There is some hope that the displacement of films into next year will bode well for 2021. The movie slate was already packed with high-profile titles.

Next year, in addition to "Black Widow," Marvel's "Shang-Chi and Legend of the Ten Rings" and "Eternals" will debut; the delayed "F9," "Minions: Rise of Gru" and upcoming "Jurassic World: Dominion" will arrive from Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. releases "The Batman," "The Suicide Squad" and "Space Jam: A New Legacy."

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a third "Spider-Man" film, a third "Sherlock Holmes" adventure and sequels to "Venom" and "A Quiet Place." Disney's "Jungle Cruise" starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt is slated, and Tom Cruise films "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Mission Impossible 7" will hit theaters.

But even a stellar lineup is no guarantee that audiences will be drawn back to theaters.

"Even with an effective vaccine, there is doubt that more than half the country will avail itself of it, leading to continued concern about crowd events," Stone said.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of Universal Studios and CNBC.

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Movie theaters in jeopardy as studios move blockbusters to 2021, audiences stay home

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In late March, like many businesses, the film industry entered a period of forced hibernation as the U.S. went into lockdown to stem the coronavirus pandemic. With indoor cinemas closed, drive-in theaters were a lone bright spot until May, when some state governments began to loosen guidelines and permit indoor theaters to reopen to the public with limited capacity.

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People should be required to be vaccinated

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People should be required to be vaccinated

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In order to be allowed to enter certain enclosed areas like restaurants, sports stadiums, and grocery stores, people should be required to be vaccinated in order to ensure safety for them and those around them.

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'The Great Debate: experts explore the balance between freedom of choice and community responsibility'

Most of us have the vaccines our doctors recommend, helping to reduce the risk that we - and those around us - will suffer vaccine-preventable diseases.

But what happens when people opt out?

If you decide not to visit your dentist, choose to eat badly or refuse to wear a helmet while cycling, you put yourself at risk. The direct impact on other people's health is (pretty much) zero.

With vaccines, the health of your community could be affected. You might catch - and spread - infectious diseases at school, in the workplace or in public places.

If enough people in a community are vaccinated, 'herd immunity' can be achieved. This makes it very difficult for infectious diseases to spread because a significant majority of people are protected.

Given that we have a stake in our neighbours' vaccination status, is it reasonable to insist that everyone have their vaccines? Should it be a condition of accessing education, employment or social payments?

To help understand the issues at play, we sat down with some leading experts and asked whether mandatory vaccination is the answer to minimising the impact of diseases such as measles, diphtheria and pertussis.

Dr Julie Leask of the University of Sydney, says regulation is useful but that absolute mandates go too far. "We need requirements that encourage parents to get their children fully vaccinated," she says. "But there need to be exemptions for people that don't vaccinate. It should be harder to get an exemption than to get a vaccine."

Regulations work, she notes, and help to push the vaccination rates up. However, hard-to-get exemptions are an important component of 'firm but fair' policies. Removing other barriers to vaccination, educating health providers and providing strong information systems are also vital pieces of the puzzle.

It's not all about childhood vaccination. Dr Leask also points to the risk of disease outbreaks resulting from low vaccination rates in adolescents and adults. This, she says, should be part of a multi-part approach to improving public health rather than expecting mandates alone to solve the problem.

Professor Saad Omer, Emory University, takes a similar view. Mandates should, he believes, be used as 'nudges'. There should be exceptions for those with strong objections but these must be more difficult to secure than the vaccine itself.

"We have shown that there is a reduction in vaccine refusal - and increase in vaccine coverage - if you change the balance of convenience of obtaining exemptions," he says.

From an ethical perspective, this is the most defendable option, according to Professor Omer: "That strikes the balance between individual autonomy and the community benefit of vaccines."

Not everyone is so sure that this approach goes far enough. Will appealing to people's sense of community, and nudging those who are a little hesitant, be sufficient to reach herd immunity (or 'community immunity' as it is something known).

Dr Katie Attwell, Murdoch University in Australia, explains why the concept of 'community immunity' lacks meaning for people in an individualistic culture.

"The concept of doing things for others has started to break down with the advent of neoliberal ideology, the cult of the individual, and with the idea that if we make decisions about our lives to benefit ourselves we are rewarded," she says. "It's very hard to then make claims that when it comes to vaccination you should be looking after other people."

In addition to this "community deficit", Dr Attwell says that for some who refuse vaccines, the very idea of herd immunity is open to question. They may not hold a scientific view but, unfortunately, some people remain unconvinced by research.

"Some parents would not see themselves as free-riders benefitting from other people's decisions to vaccinate," she explains. "They don't see that vaccines work, and that what others are doing impacts on their health and wellbeing."

In light of this, health policymakers have a serious problem: they are pitching the concept of community immunity to individuals whose faith in 'community' and 'immunity' are strained.

Now what?

Dr Attwell says it's time to look at all "tools in the toolbox". These include persuasion, appealing to people's values, and ensuring vaccines are accessible.

If all of this is in place and vaccination rates are too low, it may become necessary to consider more "coercive" options. The alternative would be to facilitate outbreaks of disease.

Does this mean we should reluctantly embrace vaccine mandates in Europe or would it do more harm than good?

Watch the videos to get the full story and share your thoughts below.

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Should vaccines be mandatory? - VaccinesToday

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The Great Debate: experts explore the balance between freedom of choice and community responsibility

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even if you have taken a COVID-19 vaccine, you should not take off your mask, just to be safe for others .

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As more and more people become fully vaccinated, many are wondering when life will return to normal. But before you ceremoniously throw away your face masks, experts warn that we'll need to continue wearing them a while longer, especially in public settings.

"Face masks and physical distancing will need to continue into the foreseeable future," explains infectious disease specialist Kristin Englund, MD. "Unfortunately, getting vaccinated does not instantly mean we can go back to how life was before. Until we have some level of herd immunity, the vaccine is now just another layer of protection against COVID-19."

For us to reach herd immunity, 50% to 80% of the population will need to be vaccinated. And since it will take time to ramp up production and distribution of the vaccines, Dr. Englund urges folks to manage their expectations about a quick return to normal.

There is, however, some good news for those who are already fully vaccinated, but there are stipulations. The CDC says fully vaccinated people can now safely gather indoors, in small gatherings with other people who are fully vaccinated - no mask required. But it's important to note that fully vaccinated people should continue to wear face masks and maintain physical distance while in public spaces. Those who are fully vaccinated should also continue to avoid medium and large gatherings and those who are not vaccinated and considered high-risk.

"The vaccines are certainly a step in the right direction - and a reason to celebrate - but we're not out of the woods yet," she says.

5 reasons to still wear a face mask after you've been vaccinated

Here, Dr. Englund explains why it's important for those who have already been vaccinated to continue wearing a mask:

It takes time for the vaccine to kick in

You won't reach the nearly 95% effectiveness rate until two weeks after your second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. After the first dose, you do get a partial immune response, which is good news, but it doesn't mean you're immediately protected the minute the needle goes in your arm. For the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, you're considered fully vaccinated two weeks after your single dose.

The vaccines do not provide 100% protection

Although the vaccines are incredibly effective (and were nothing short of amazing in terms of turnaround), they only offer 94% to 95% protection. There's no way to tell who the 5% will be who don't respond to the vaccine and will still be at risk for COVID-19. In comparison, the measles vaccine is 97% effective after two doses. The vaccination program began in the U.S. in 1963, but the disease wasn't considered eliminated until 2000!

Those who have been vaccinated might be asymptomatic spreaders

The vaccines prevent illness, but more research is needed to determine if the vaccines also prevent transmission. Experts are concerned that vaccinated people can still become infected without symptoms and then spread it to others who have not been vaccinated yet. Since the pandemic unfolded nearly a year ago, experts have worried about silent spreaders, aka those who are infected but don't show symptoms. If vaccinated people don't continue to wear a face mask until more people are considered fully vaccinated, they could cause the virus to keep circulating. Getting vaccinated means you're much less likely to get sick and develop symptoms yourself, so it's critical that we protect others while they wait for their turn to receive the vaccine.

Protecting those with compromised immune systems and those who can't be vaccinated

We know that people with chronic medical conditions (like heart disease and cancer) are at risk for developing a severe case of COVID-19. And since this population wasn't involved in clinical trials, we can't assume that they'll have the same effectiveness rate. It's also recommended that if you've had an allergic reaction to any of the ingredients in the vaccine, you shouldn't get it. If you had an allergic reaction to the first dose, the CDC doesn't recommend getting the second dose either. Some pregnant women (who are also considered high risk and weren't included in clinical trials) are opting out of getting vaccinated or choosing to be vaccinated after they give birth. If you're fully vaccinated, it's recommended to steer clear of those considered high-risk who are not vaccinated.

Protecting those that need a booster

While research is ongoing, certain people who received the Pfizer vaccine - those over 65 years of age, adults with underlying medical conditions and those working in high-risk environments - have been cleared to receive a booster shot of the vaccine. Currently, data suggests there might be some waning in the protection after a certain amount of time and the hope is to give the immune systems of eligible patients a boost to help protect against breakthrough cases.

How long should you wear a mask?

Early in the summer, as vaccines got wide distribution across the country, there was a time when many mask mandates were rolled back as COVID-19 cases dropped. But the country as a whole failed to hit the necessary vaccination rate to reach herd immunity and many regions saw vaccination rates well below even the national average. That allowed the virus to continue circulating and to mutate, leading to this summer's delta variant spike which caused confusion with mask guidelines.

Since many people in the country still aren't fully vaccinated and the risk of breakthrough cases remains, it's best to keep wearing a mask, even after getting the vaccine, particularly in high-risk situations. Unfortunately, pandemics don't come with an expiration date so this could stretch on longer than we'd hoped, even with the development of the vaccines. For now, continue to follow your local mask guidelines and, if necessary, continue to do what makes you feel safest.

The vaccine is not an automatic off switch for the pandemic

As much as we'd all like to hope that the vaccine means an instant return to normal - it's not. But we are on the right track.

Instead, it's now one tool in our kit of resources to fight the pandemic. We'll need to continue universal masking when in public, hand washing, avoiding large crowds and keep physical distance when we're around others who are not fully vaccinated.

"We may see mask guidelines start to change after enough people have been vaccinated and cases and deaths have dropped," says Dr. Englund. "But until then, we must remain vigilant in our fight to control COVID-19."

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Why to Keep Wearing a Mask After the COVID-19 Vaccine

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If you've already been vaccinated, it might be tempting to ditch your face mask and return to normal life. But infectious disease experts say the vaccine isn't an automatic off switch to the pandemic. Here's why we still need to stay vigilant about safety precautions, including wearing a face mask.

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Vaccines are important for kids to get if they are able. 

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Vaccines are important for kids to get if they are able. 

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Third world war should be prevented by Russian and US Governments 

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Third world war should be prevented by Russian and US Governments 

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Iran and the US, as well as Russia and India have experienced growing tensions

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World War 3, also known as the Third World War, refers to the next possible worldwide military conflict. Iran and the US, plus Russia and India have experienced growing tensions. All the latest news, World War 3 predictions and whether World War 3 is coming in 2016 can be found below. The term world war is used to describe two previous major global conflicts in the 20th Century. If World War 3 starts who will be allies and will battle lines be drawn East and West.

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World War 3 news, predictions, date, coming, events | Express.co.uk

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World War 3, also known as the Third World War, refers to the next possible worldwide military conflict. Iran and the US, plus Russia and India have experienced growing tensions. All the latest news, World War 3 predictions and whether World War 3 is coming in 2016 can be found below.

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Will technology take over our lives completely?

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Will technology take over our lives completely?

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From smart homes to ultrafast wireless speeds, here's what to watch.

Credit... Glenn Harvey

The 2010s made one thing clear: Tech is everywhere in life.

Tech is in our homes with thermostats that heat up our residences before we walk through the door. It's in our cars with safety features that warn us about vehicles in adjacent lanes. It's on our television sets, where many of us are streaming shows and movies through apps. We even wear it on ourselves in the form of wristwatches that monitor our health.

In 2020 and the coming decade, these trends are likely to gather momentum. They will also be on display next week at CES, an enormous consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas that typically serves as a window into the year's hottest tech developments.

At the show, next-generation cellular technology known as 5G, which delivers data at mind-boggling speeds, is expected to take center stage as one of the most important topics. We are also likely to see the evolution of smart homes, with internet-connected appliances such as refrigerators, televisions and vacuum cleaners working more seamlessly together - and with less human interaction required.

"The biggest thing is connected everything," said Carolina Milanesi, a technology analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. "Anything in the home - we'll have more cameras, more mics, more sensors."

If some of this sounds the same as last year, it is - but that's because new technologies often take time to mature.

Here's what to watch in tech this year.

In the last few years, Amazon, Apple and Google have battled to become the center of our homes.

Their virtual assistants - Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri - respond to voice commands to play music from speakers, control light bulbs and activate robot vacuums. Smart home products work well, but they are complicated to set up, so most people use virtual assistants just for basic tasks like setting a kitchen timer and checking the weather.

Then in December, Amazon, Apple and Google came to what appeared to be a truce: They announced that they were working together on a standard to help make smart home products compatible with one another.

In other words, when you buy an internet-connected light bulb down the line that works with Alexa, it should also work with Siri and Google Assistant. This should help reduce confusion when shopping for home products and improve the ease with which connected gadgets work with one another.

Ms. Milanesi said that eliminating complexity was a necessary step for the tech giants to achieve their ultimate goal: seamless home automation without the need for people to tell the assistants what to do.

"You want the devices to talk to each other instead of me being the translator between these device interactions," she said. "If I open my door, then the door can say to the lights that the door is open and therefore the lights need to turn on."

If and when that happens, your home will truly - and finally - be smart.

In 2019, the wireless industry began shifting to 5G, a technology that can deliver data at such incredibly fast speeds that people will be able to download entire movies in a few seconds.

Yet the rollout of 5G was anticlimactic and uneven. Across the United States, carriers deployed 5G in just a few dozen cities. And only a handful of new smartphones last year worked with the new cellular technology.

In 2020, 5G will gain some momentum. Verizon said it expected half the nation to have access to 5G this year. AT&T, which offers two types of 5G - 5G Evolution, which is incrementally faster than 4G, and 5G Plus, which is the ultrafast version - said it expected 5G Plus to reach parts of 30 cities by early 2020.

Another sign that 5G is really taking hold? A broader set of devices will support the new wireless standard.

Samsung, for one, has begun including 5G support on some of its newer Galaxy devices. Apple, which declined to comment, is also expected to release its first 5G-compatible iPhones this year.

And 5G will be going to work behind the scenes, in ways that will emerge over time. One important benefit of the technology is its ability to greatly reduce latency, or the time it takes for devices to communicate with one another. That will be important for the compatibility of next-generation devices like robots, self-driving cars and drones.

For example, if your car has 5G and another car has 5G, the two cars can talk to each other, signaling to each other when they are braking and changing lanes. The elimination of the communications delay is crucial for cars to become autonomous.

It's a time of intense competition in wearable computers, which is set to lead to more creativity and innovation.

For a long while, Apple has dominated wearables. In 2015, it released Apple Watch, a smart watch with a focus on health monitoring. In 2016, the company introduced AirPods, wireless earbuds that can be controlled with Siri.

Since then, many others have jumped in, including Xiaomi, Samsung and Huawei. Google recently acquired Fitbit, the fitness gadget maker, for $2.1 billion, in the hope of playing catch-up with Apple.

Computer chips are making their way into other electronic products like earphones, which means that companies are likely to introduce innovations in wearable accessories, said Frank Gillett, a technology analyst for Forrester. Two possibilities: earphones that monitor your health by pulling pulses from your ears, or earbuds that double as inexpensive hearing aids.

"That whole area of improving our hearing and hearing the way other people hear us is really interesting," he said.

We have rushed headlong into the streaming era, and that will only continue.

In 2019, Netflix was the most-watched video service in the United States, with people spending an average of 23 minutes a day streaming its content, according to eMarketer, the research firm. In all, digital video made up about a quarter of the daily time spent on digital devices last year, which included time spent on apps and web browsers.

Netflix's share of the overall time we spend watching video on devices will probably decline in 2020, according to eMarketer, because of the arrival of competing streaming services like Disney Plus, HBO Max and Apple TV Plus.

"Even though Americans are spending more time watching Netflix, people's attention will become more divided as new streamers emerge," Ross Benes, an analyst at eMarketer, said in a blog post.

So if you don't like " The Mandalorian," " The Morning Show" or " Watchmen," you won't change the channel. You will just switch to a different app.

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The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2020

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From smart homes to ultrafast wireless speeds, here's what to watch. The 2010s made one thing clear: Tech is everywhere in life. Tech is in our homes with thermostats that heat up our residences before we walk through the door. It's in our cars with safety features that warn us about vehicles in adjacent lanes.

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LGBTQ+ Discrimination in the workplace/daily life - Finley 

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LGBTQ+ Discrimination in the workplace/daily life - Finley 

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Businesses, Jobs, and Restaurants SHOULD NOT be able to turn people away based upon their gender and sexual identities.

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WASHINGTON-The Supreme Court ruled that bedrock federal civil-rights law prohibits employers from discriminating against workers on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, a decision that for the first time extends federal workplace protections to LGBT employees nationwide.

The high court, in a landmark 6-3 decision, said the broad language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws workplace discrimination on the basis of sex, should be read to cover sexual orientation as well. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts in addition to the four more liberal members of the court, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. "An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law," the opinion said.

The case extends a quarter-century of momentous advances for gay-rights advocates at the Supreme Court, even as the court has grown more conservative with the 2018 retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the court's previous LGBT rights rulings, including the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage.

For all its cultural and political controversy, Monday's case was simple, Justice Gorsuch found. He focused on the text of the statute Congress passed in 1964, whose Title VII forbids workplace discrimination against an individual "because of...sex."

There was no getting around it, he said: "An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it wouldn't have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids."

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Supreme Court Rules for Gay and Transgender Rights in the Workplace

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WASHINGTON-The Supreme Court ruled that bedrock federal civil-rights law prohibits employers from discriminating against workers on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, a decision that for the first time extends federal workplace protections to LGBT employees nationwide.

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Schools should try their best to get all of their students in person. 

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Schools should try their best to get all of their students in person. 

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Students nationwide are falling behind and teachers are stressed as schools go online. This is why schools across the country should devise plans to try and get the students out of their homes and back into school.

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MILWAUKEE-Ruby Rodriguez remembers the days when English class meant walking to her desk, talking to friends and checking the board.

Now class begins when her classmates' names appear online. She sits alone at the dining room table, barefoot and petting the family dog. It's her freshman year at St. Anthony High School, a private Catholic school in Milwaukee. She doesn't know what her classmates look like, because nobody ever turns on their cameras.

After schools in Milwaukee went remote last March, Ruby and her friends in eighth grade at St. Anthony's middle school missed their graduation ceremonies and parties. Her close friends attended different high schools, mostly other private schools that offered in-person instruction. St. Anthony, like many schools in urban areas, including Milwaukee Public Schools, started the fall semester online amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Virtual learning might be keeping Ruby, 14, and her family safer during a public health crisis. But it has made it exponentially harder for her to stay motivated and learn. Her online classes are lecture-heavy, repetitive and devoid of student conversation. Her grades have dropped from A's and B's to D's and F's. She stays up too late. She sleeps a lot. She misses her friends.

Like millions of students attending school virtually this year, Ruby is floundering academically, socially and emotionally. And as the pandemic heaves into a winter surge, a slew of new reports show alarming numbers of kids falling behind, failing classes or not showing up at all.

For months, experts hoped a return to classrooms would allow teachers to address the lapses in children's academic and social needs. For many students, that hasn't happened.

The goalposts are constantly shifting on a return to in-person learning, and about half of U.S. students are attending virtual-only schools. It's becoming increasingly clear that districts and states need to improve remote instruction and find a way to give individual kids special help online.

At the moment, plans to help students catch up are largely evolving, thin or nonexistent.

The consequences are most dire for low-income and minority children, who are more likely to be learning remotely and less likely to have appropriate technology and home environments for independent study compared with their wealthier peers. Children with disabilities and those learning English have particularly struggled in the absence of in-class instruction. Many of those students were already lagging academically before the pandemic. Now, they're even further behind - with time running out to meet key academic benchmarks.

In high-poverty schools, 1 in 3 teachers report their students are significantly less prepared for grade-level work this year compared with last year, according to a report by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institution. Class failure rates have skyrocketed in school systems from Fairfax County, Virginia, to Greenville, South Carolina. Fewer kindergarteners met early literacy targets in Washington, D.C., this fall. And math achievement has dropped nationwide, according to a report that examined scores from 4.4 million elementary and middle school students.

"This is not going to be a problem that goes away as soon as the pandemic is over," said Jimmy Sarakatsannis, leader of education practice at consulting firm McKinsey and Company. He co-wrote a report that estimated the average student could lose five to nine months of learning by June, with students of color losing more than that.

Beyond that, tens of thousands of children are unaccounted for altogether. Hillsborough County, Florida, started the year missing more than 7,000 students. Los Angeles saw kindergarten enrollment drop by about 6,000. There's scant data about missing students'progress, of course, but few presume they're charging ahead academically.

"We almost need a disaster plan for education," said Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, a community group that works with many Black parents in Tennessee.

The Nashville school system offered some in-person learning in October and November before reverting to all-virtual instruction after Thanksgiving, as COVID-19 cases surged. Some parents say their children are failing every single subject, Thomas said.

Others say they still don't have digital devices or high-speed internet, or that their children's special-education learning plans aren't being followed. One father said his middle school child struggles so much online that he walks out of the house and doesn't come back until nighttime, Thomas said.

"Our parents are afraid their kids are falling behind, and they don't know what the solution is," Thomas said. "They're looking for leadership. They're looking for help."

How much has learning slowed this year?

Nine months after COVID-19 shuttered schools and prompted the country's largest experiment with virtual learning, the extent of academic regression is still a guessing game. And it looks different from student to student.

Johnny Murphy, 15, struggled for a month this fall to learn how to unmute himself during live video lessons with his class at Vaughn High School in Chicago. Murphy has autism and an intellectual disability.

His mother, Barbara Murphy, knows her son likely will never read beyond a third-grade level. But he's backtracking on educational goals such as engaging with his peers and on life goals like leaving the house safely and using money, she said.

"It's been like summer break all year."

For Lily McCollum, 15, classes move more slowly online than they did in person. She's a sophomore at Southridge High School in Kennewick, Washington, where she has been learning remotely all year.

"We're probably the farthest behind in English and math," she said. "It's really hard to stay focused, especially if I don't have my camera on."

LaTricea Adams, founder of Black Millennials 4 Flint in Michigan, figures local children are at least a year behind in their studies, based on what she has heard from families and educators. Even before the pandemic, less than 30% of Flint's third-grade students were proficient in English, according to the latest state test scores.

"Some of these kids really need one-on-one sessions, but that's almost impossible for them to get in a virtual setting," Adams said.

Quantifying the extent of learning loss is difficult.

American students in third through eighth grade have held steady in reading but have fallen behind in math since last fall, according to a report this month by nonprofit testing organization NWEA. The group examined academic progress in reading and math for 4.4 million students at 8,000 schools, with a big caveat: The students most likely to be tested were those attending classes in person, or attending schools with enough resources to test their remote learners.

In other words, the study makes the state of American education look better than it actually is, disproportionately reflecting the progress of students at higher-income schools who tend to score better on tests anyway.

'Kids are going feral'

A team of researchers at Stanford University crunched NWEA test scores for students in 17 states and the District of Columbia and reached a more dire conclusion this fall. The average student had lost a third of a year to a full year's worth of learning in reading, and about three-quarters of a year to more than a year in math since schools closed in March, the report estimated.

"Kids are going feral," said Macke Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. "Thousands of them are unaccounted for, with no contact since schools have closed."

The predictions are only estimates, and they're built on the assumption that students didn't learn much at all between March and the start of this school year.

In any case, despite detailed findings for each school, some leaders in participating states have all but ignored the report.

Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley said the report confirms what his department already suspected about learning loss. He said he has asked Louisiana school leaders to do their own diagnostic testing, but it's not mandatory.

Brumley supports additional tutoring for students, but he's wary of adopting flashy new programs. Teachers, he said, will do what they've always done to help students learn: deliver high-quality instruction with a high-quality curriculum.

In Arizona, one of the other participating states, education department officials said they were not familiar with the report.

Tennessee posted the largest learning losses in reading, according to the report's estimates.

Results varied within each state. For example, students at Tennessee's wealthier schools didn't lose much in reading achievement, or they pulled ahead of where researchers estimated they'd be. But students at the most impoverished schools fell behind - way behind, according to the estimates.

Penny Schwinn, Tennessee's commissioner of education, said her team is concerned about those estimates.

Some children are doing fine, Schwinn said. But teachers tell her that low-income students and English learners are tracking behind where they would normally be this time of year.

Tennessee has aimed to jump-start a recovery by creating an online parent platform with additional resources and by expanding online tutoring.

But in Memphis and Nashville, where many schools have been operating online all year, several parents said their kids need more than that to catch up.

During a Zoom call in October hosted by Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group, only four out of 11 parents said they had heard directly from their child's teacher this year.

Now the group is pushing state lawmakers to back the idea of personalized academic recovery plans for children who are falling behind.

Dionne Howell, a parent of a seventh-grader and ninth-grader in Memphis, Tennessee, supports the idea. From March until this fall, instructionwas pretty much nonexistent, she said.

"I know my children have not progressed as much as they should have."

Boring lessons, disengaged students

It's 12 minutes into Ruby Rodriguez' hour-long English class, and the teacher is still welcoming students online and urging them to complete a "do now." That's a quick warm-up exercise to signal who's present and thinking.

Students have read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech as well as his essay "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The warm-up is to explain which they prefer.

Ruby hasn't written anything. She says shedoesn't even know her teacher's name.

"We've been working on these same things for a week," she shrugged.

The teacher coaxes the class to consider why King wrote each piece the way he did, what rhetorical devices he used to make his argument. There's no student conversation. Those who do respond send their messages privately to the teacher, rather than putting them in the group chat for all to see.

The teacher uses those private responses to type out some sentences for the class, and Ruby copies and pastes them into her own document. She'll have to write an essay comparing these two literary works. At that point, she figures, it's just a matter of weaving in her own sentences around what the teacher has written.

Ruby's parents, Lauro and Alma, are worried. Lauro, who works at a local manufacturing plant, has contacted the assistant principal with his concerns. Alma, a certified nursing assistant who works second shift, has a hard time helping her daughter.

"This is the first time I've felt helpless," Lauro said.

Huge losses for some students, not others

Some motivated learners haven't slipped at all in this new era. Some prefer online learning. Others have progressed by attending classes in person.

Gabriella Staykova, a senior at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Lexington, Kentucky, learns remotely on a four-day schedule through a magnet program within her school. Five of her nine classes require her to engage online with her peers, and the other four are "self-guided," she said.

Virtual learning actually gives her more time to work on side projects like Student Voice, a national youth-led nonprofit.

"Online education is not a big barrier to my academic success, but that's not the case for the vast majority of students," she said.

A fast internet connection, a comfortable and quiet place to study, a stable home life and a history of high grades helped her to adapt this year.

The digital equity gap has long been a stumbling block in American education, but the pandemic has exacerbated the divide.

In one recent study of low-income families in Los Angeles, 1 out of 5 parents of elementary school students said their child was using a device other than a computer to access their remote studies - likely a phone, said Stephen Aguilar, the study's lead author and an education professor at the University of Southern California.

Further, 1 out of 3 families reported they never or only sometimes had a place in the home free of distractions for a child to learn and study.Half of low-income parents surveyed said they rarely used a computer themselves.

"Many are not using technology every day, and yet we're asking them to set up a remote schoolhouse for their children," Aguilar said.

Those divides are determining how quickly children can resume academic progress.

In the RAND Corp. survey of teachers, their students' preparedness was heavily tied to income.

"When we push and say, 'Those students really need to be in person,' we think about the fact that many students in high-poverty households are at higher risk for COVID-19 transmission," said Julia Kaufman, a senior policy researcher at RAND who led the study. "There's tension between those two things."

Remote learning can be better

Leaders of several Black parent advocacy groups say most of their families don't want to return to schools yet because of safety concerns. Many don't see education going back to the way it was, so they're pressuring schools to strengthen their virtual programs.

"Our Black children have long been failed by in-person learning, so we don't want a return to the status quo," said Lakisha Young, founder of The Oakland REACH, a parent advocacy group in Oakland, California.

"How would we design instruction differently now if we accepted we're not going to return to schools until next fall?" she said.

Since the school shutdowns in spring, Oakland REACH hired family liaisons to help parents navigate financial challenges and their children's education, Young said. It signed up children for the National Summer School Initiative, a series of recordings taught by skilled mentor teachers, who then supported local educators working with participating children.

"Parents told us their kids were getting up in the morning and wanted to get online," Young said. "They literally wanted more summer school."

The group also created a five-week online summer literacy program for children in kindergarten through second grade, which increased scores by an average of two levels on the district's reading assessment, Young said. The virtual program included small group lessons with teachers, recorded lessons, family literacy workshops, read-alouds of books featuring the experiences of Black children, and weekly community celebrations.

Creating community through screens

For younger and older learners alike, online classes can and should be restructured to focus on community and peer-to-peer connections, said Mimi Ito, who studies youth media practices at the University of California-Irvine.

At the moment, a lot of virtual classes feel like "a second-rate version of what's done in a physical classroom," she said, which is why they're not very engaging.

Teachers can incorporate online gaming or social media into their classes, where children pursue goals or share content as part of a team or community, Ito said. She suggested games such as Minecraft and Roblox, or video platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

Steve Isaacs, a middle and high school gaming design teacher in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, addressed science and current events this fall by having students build models of the COVID-19 virus in Minecraft.

The game also allows students to build virtual museums or libraries, where they can show their knowledge of English and history standards, Isaacs said.

"I try to give kids choice in their learning pathways and activities," he said. "On Zoom, I lecture less and split kids into a lot of breakout rooms, and then I randomly pop into them."

Connections between students and teachers are easier to build when students' cameras are on, but many districts have not required that for privacy reasons.

About a dozen high school students interviewed by USA TODAY said that even with cameras off, they felt they learned more in virtual classes that featured an active group chat. Still, many could not say why the chat messages flowed readily in some classes and were silent in others.

'If we can't see the problem ...'

At John Harris High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, teachers recently compiled the grades of all students still learning to speak and write in English. Until that point, no one had noticed that every English learner was failing at least one class. Spurred to action, they reached out to a local nonprofit focused on immigrants and refugees, which rounded up community tutors to work with students once a week. Teachers carved out extra time on Fridays for one-on-one sessions.

A month later, the percentage of English learners failing courses had dropped to 75%.

The pivot demonstrates the importance of assessing and surveying students - about their academic performance, their technical needs, or even for their thoughts on how to improve remote instruction, said Angela Jerabek, the executive director of BARR Center, a school improvement nonprofit working with John Harris High School.

"We should be surging resources to the areas with the greatest need," Jerabek said. "But if we can't see the problem, we can't solve the problem."

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Students are falling behind in online school. Where's the COVID-19 'disaster plan' to catch them up?

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Students nationwide are falling behind and teachers are stressed as schools go online. But there's still no grand plan to improve virtual learning.

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Bundesliga- Fans Protested Against the DFB

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Bundesliga- Fans Protested Against the DFB

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Fans and especially ultras protested by throwing items on the pitch, unfurling banners, and not attending games, as well as causing games to be stopped. The ultras went too far and the DFB should have acted more to restrict the protests and actions.

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German fans protest anything that they feel threatens soccer as they know it. But do the people who have fought the battles for years really speak for everyone?

Eintracht Frankfurt's ultras skipped a recent home game to protest Monday matches. Credit... Alex Grimm/Bongarts, via Getty Images

FRANKFURT - There is a single black flag where the heart of the Commerzbank Arena should be. All around it, in the stadium's Kurve, the terraces that are ordinarily home to Eintracht Frankfurt's most ardent and raucous fans are empty. Exposed, they are just concrete: desolate, silent and gray.

The flag, a couple dozen rows high, looms behind the goal posts in the middle of the space. Just a black flag, inscribed with one word - Montag - scored out by a red circle and a slash.

No Mondays.

The campaign has now been running for nearly three years. It has been taken up not only by Eintracht's ultras, but by their counterparts at clubs across Germany. The fans do not believe Bundesliga games should be held on Monday nights - a sign, they say, of broadcasting schedules being given priority over match-going fans - and so they have done all they can to show their displeasure.

The protests have taken various forms: volleys of tennis balls being thrown onto the field; pointed, pregnant silences; and - as in this case - banners and walkouts. It is a message that has been heard. In 2018, the Bundesliga confirmed that when it signs its next round of television agreements there will be no more Monday night games. The protests, though, have continued. "There is no trust in the governing bodies," said Michael Gabriel, the head of Germany's Fan Project Coordination Center.

The battle had been won, but for the fans, that is not the end of it. "There is a sense that they have to keep fighting, or they might lose everything," Gabriel said. The banner left by Frankfurt's absent ultras had another purpose: It was a chance to remind the authorities exactly where the power lies in German soccer.

While Eintracht and Union Berlin played through the fans' protest on a Monday last month, at least four Bundesliga matches in the last two weeks have been halted because of a different kind of banner in the stands.

The first, unveiled during a game between Borussia Mönchengladbach and TSG Hoffenheim, showed an image of Dietmar Hopp - a billionaire software magnate and Hoffenheim's benefactor - with his face within a set of cross hairs. Mönchengladbach's captain, Lars Stindl, and its sporting director, Max Eberl, pleaded with the club's fans to remove it, so the game could continue.

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At Borussia Mönchengladbach, banners took aim at collective punishments of fan groups and at another frequent target of supporters, the Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp. Credit... Roland Weihrauch/DPA, via Associated Press

On Saturday, Bayern Munich traveled to Sinsheim - the town where Hoffenheim plays its home games - and, with the visitors winning 6-0, its fans unfurled another banner directed toward Hopp.

Again, the game was paused. Again, various dignitaries, including Bayern's coach and sporting director, urged their fans to remove the banner. When the final few minutes of the game were played, the players refused to engage: They passed the ball to each other, going through the motions, whiling away time.

Afterward, Fritz Keller, the president of the German soccer federation, known as the D.F.B., decried the incident as a "disaster." The ultras had gone too far, he said. Germany had "reached its lowest point."

And yet that is not how the fans displaying the flags saw it. To them, this was a cause worth a fight. Bayern and Mönchengladbach fans were not, particularly, protesting Hopp.

Hopp is not a popular figure among many of Germany's more engaged fans. He has bankrolled Hoffenheim, a village team, all the way to the Champions League, by running contrary to the ownership model - the so-called 50+1 rule, in which clubs cannot be majority owned by an individual - that many in Germany hold dear.

But he has also been around for a while; there is no reason for Bayern's Südkurve ultras, for example, to take particular exception to him now.

No, the protests were directed at the D.F.B. Last month, the organization confirmed that fans of Borussia Dortmund would be banned from seeing their team at Hoffenheim for the next two years because of their persistent abuse of Hopp. They had been given a suspended sentence for the same offense in 2018. They had violated it earlier this season. This was their punishment.

But, as Gabriel explained, the D.F.B. had previously said it "would try to move away from collective punishments for fans. But what happened to Dortmund, he said, "is a collective punishment."

Bayern and the others - last weekend, there were similar banners and interruptions to games at Cologne and Union Berlin - were acting in "solidarity" with their fellow fans, as a statement from the Südkurve put it. Banning Dortmund, it said, "crossed a line."

"There is a common understanding that the fans play a part in the game," Gabriel said. "They expect to play an active role. And they know that the only way to win battles is to unite."

Furious at what they called a personal attack on Hopp, center, by their own fans, Bayern players and executives stood with him in a show of support after their win at Hoffenheim on Saturday. Credit... Daniel Roland/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The origins of Germany's modern, empowered fan culture can be traced to Bremen, almost 30 years ago. In the early 1990s, when the club announced plans to remodel its stadium to eliminate standing terraces - to meet the requirements for modern arenas set by European soccer's governing body - the proposals were met with a furious backlash from the club's fans.

Eventually, the protests paid off: Bremen agreed to design a stadium in consultation with fans, and the D.F.B. signed off. Since 1994, German stadiums have been permitted to incorporate so-called safe standing sections. "It was a major success," said Gabriel, who was involved in the birth of the organized fan scene in Germany. "It gave the fans participation in the decisions that affect them."

Now, fans are represented by several umbrella organizations that help them to act in unison - including the Fan Projects, of which Gabriel is a part, and Unsere Kurve (Our Curves) - and they use that voice on any and all issues that they feel threaten the culture they have worked to foster: kickoff times are set to accommodate television, how fans - regardless of club colors - are treated, how games are policed.

Perhaps the subject that brings them together most, though - and the one that makes people like Hopp, or clubs like Red Bull-financed RB Leipzig, so broadly unpopular - is the 50+1 rule itself. It is the defining characteristic of German soccer, and the mechanism that gives fans in the country their power.

"This is something we already have, and people want to protect it," said Robin Krakau, a fan of Hannover and one of the leaders of the club's ProVerein1896 movement. It was formed to ensure Hannover did not become one of the few permitted exceptions to the 50+1 rule (both Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are, officially, "works" teams, and with their longtime corporate benefactors have different ownership structures).

For years, Hannover's longstanding president, Martin Kind, had been lobbying to be allowed to take full control of the club, even going so far as to threaten to test the legality of the 50+1 rule in the European Court. Krakau and others set up their group to ensure that did not happen, and that fans remained in control. They protested in the stadium. They demonstrated on the city's streets. And they lobbied the D.F.B.

It did not matter to them if Kind's intentions were pure, or if he might have been the best owner the club could have wanted. "We were against the idea of him," Krakau said. "We were against the system.

"If you give away a club to a private owner, you do not know what happens in the future. If regulations change, maybe they sell it. Who do they sell it to? For active fans, that is not worth the risk. Money can be a reason for success, but there is not a 100 percent correlation. And if you are dependent on one person, one company, and they leave, what happens then?"

Not all of Hannover's fans appreciated the protests - "after a while, a lot of people just want to watch football," Krakau said. But in March 2018, a petition expressing support for 50+1, signed by some 3,000 fan groups, was handed to the D.F.B.

A couple months later, Kind's final bid to take control of Hannover was rejected, in part because of evidence provided by ProVerein1896. Last year, Kind and his supporters were largely ousted from the club's board. Krakau is confident that Kind will not pursue his takeover attempts any further. But he fears "the system of Martin Kind," as he called it, the threat to 50+1 as a whole, remains.

At Eintracht Frankfurt and other clubs, fans have used their collective voice to force the Bundesliga to bend to their will. Credit... Ralph Orlowski/Reuters

Outside the Commerzbank Arena, a small stage has been set up. This is the Waldtribüne - the Forest Tribune - organized by Eintracht Frankfurt's museum. It is a place where Eintracht fans, and a representative of the team's opponent that day, can meet to discuss various issues affecting German soccer.

Previous guests have included players, coaches and even Axel Hellmann, once a founder of an Eintracht supporters club, and now the team's chief executive. On this night, though, the guest is a member of Union Berlin's fan group.

The visitor is given a warm reception, and chats with two hosts about a number of topics - the Dortmund ban, how promotion to the Bundesliga has changed Union Berlin fans' relationship with their club - before he is applauded off and replaced by a man who has produced an Eintracht Frankfurt sticker album.

It is admirable, and sincere, and appreciated by the hundred or so fans, clutching beers, who have stopped to listen. But it is intriguing to note that a majority of the audience, like the people onstage, are of Gabriel's generation - he once played on Eintracht's youth teams with Liverpool Manager Jürgen Klopp - and are, generally, men.

That is not to say this is the only demographic represented by the active fan movement in Germany - the ultras, in particular, skew much younger - and it is not to play down their achievements. "It is the fan groups who often highlight issues around fighting extremism, racism, sexism and homophobia," Gabriel said. "It is a positive fan culture."

It is pressure from these organizations that has meant every German club has, in order to get its license to compete, to employ three people specifically to maintain a dialogue with the fan groups.

But whether the priorities of the groups that make most use of their voice are always the priorities of the majority is harder to gauge. That the fans have power, and that it works, is clear; the vast black flag and the empty Kurve in Frankfurt stand as testament to that. After next season, there will be no more games on Monday nights in Germany. That was, Gabriel said, a line in the sand.

But the question lingers: What about people who like watching soccer on a Monday night?

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In Germany's Bundesliga, a Power Struggle Plays Out on Banners (Published 2020)

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German fans protest anything that they feel threatens soccer as they know it. But do the people who have fought the battles for years really speak for everyone? FRANKFURT - There is a single black flag where the heart of the Commerzbank Arena should be.

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people should be allowed to take part in commercial space flight, to expand our range of knowlage of the universe.

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Schools should reconsider the decision to get rid of awarding the valedictorians of senior classes. 

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Schools should reconsider the decision to get rid of awarding the valedictorians of senior classes. 

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High school is a minefield of chaos, making it a difficult path to cross. Those who do successfully navigate it experience sleepless nights full of homework, nights spent at home instead of with friends, and, of course, all of the stress that comes suit. Two specific students accept these challenges and put in all the work necessary to get the highest grade point average. These fearless pioneers must be rewarded; valedictorians and salutatorians deserve to be recognized at graduation.

These students expend themselves night and day to complete their work and assignments, all while keeping the highest grade point averages in the class. That is a pretty amazing feat that very few can say they have accomplished. Yet, this year, WHS has chosen not to recognize the valedictorian and salutatorian in favor of a class speaker. Now, students can write a speech and apply to be salutatorian-the welcome speaker-and the valedictorian-the send off speaker. The egos of other students are saved by this recent change. Some people in the school feel as though all other students will be hurt when their names are not called to give speeches. Many students, however, understand the immense amount of work and effort that comes with having the highest grade point average and accept that they have not met those standards. Few to no students have complained about their lack of recognition because they know they do not deserve it. There has not been a huge push for this change, so why is it necessary? In a survey sent out to students by The Rebellion, 92.5 percent of students and 77.1 percent of faculty felt that WHS should name a valedictorian and salutatorian.

" I feel that it is important to recognize people for their hard work and give them the opportunity to both gain public speaking experience and maintain the traditional high school graduation procedure," an anonymous WHS student said. "Allowing other people to give speeches is robbing intellectuals of the opportunity to showcase their hard work."

The most important thing to note is the difference between academic honors and athletic honors. Walpole athletes are praised throughout town for their accomplishments, with their names on newspapers and hung up in school hallways, while the potential valedictorian remains nameless. Intellects put in the same, if not more, time and effort to be successful, yet their success goes unnoticed and unmentioned, overshadowed by the athletes.

"Athletes have trophies and banners to acknowledge and celebrate their athletic accomplishments and these are openly displayed in the school for all to see. Academic achievers should also be openly acknowledged and celebrated," an anonymous WHS faculty member said. "Academics is their sport. If you take the academic recognition away, you should take down all the trophies and banners. Recognizing success is not discouraging, but a motivating force."

Eradicating the valedictorian and salutatorian titles may boost self-esteem, but it comes at the expense of their hard work. Naming the valedictorian and salutatorian does not minimize the achievement of other students, but rather recognizes high achieving students. If one is willing to put in the work to achieve such high grades, then they should be receiving recognition. Competition is human nature, and to abolish the opportunity to use that instinct deters people from putting in effort. All students are not equal, so they should be stopped being treated as such.

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WHS Valedictorian and Salutatorian Deserve Recognition at Graduation

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High school is a minefield of chaos, making it a difficult path to cross. Those who do successfully navigate it experience sleepless nights full of homework, nights spent at home instead of with friends, and, of course, all of the stress that comes suit. Two specific students accept these challenges and put in all the...

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the wage gaps between men and women are unfair

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the wage gaps between men and women are unfair

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Kids and teens should be able to decide for themselves if they want to be vaccinated.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Parents often have questions about the vaccines recommended for their children. Your child's doctor can answer any questions you might have. Most families decide to follow the recommended vaccination schedule.

Vaccines protect against diseases

Different vaccines work in different ways, but every vaccine helps the body's immune system learn how to fight germs. It typically takes a few weeks for protection to develop after vaccination, but that protection can last a lifetime. A few vaccines, such as those for tetanus or seasonal flu, require occasional booster doses to maintain the body's defenses.

Strengthening your baby's immune system

Immunity is the body's way of preventing disease. Because a baby's immune system is not fully developed at birth, babies face a greater risk of becoming infected and getting seriously ill. Vaccines help teach the immune system learn how to defend against germs. Vaccination protects your baby by helping build up their natural defenses.

Children are exposed to thousands of germs every day. This happens through the food they eat, the air they breathe, and the things they put in their mouth.

Babies are born with immune systems that can fight most germs, but some germs cause serious or even deadly diseases a baby can't handle. For those, babies need the help of vaccines.

Vaccines use very small amounts of antigens to help your child's immune system recognize and learn to fight serious diseases. Antigens are the parts of a germ that cause the body's immune system to go to work.

Vaccine ingredients

Today's vaccines use only the ingredients they need to be as safe and effective as possible. A vaccine could include any of these kinds of ingredients:

Adjuvants such as aluminum salts help boost the body's response to a vaccination. (Also found in antacids, antiperspirants, etc.)

Stabilizers such as sugars or gelatin help keep a vaccine effective after it is manufactured. (Naturally present in the body and found in foods such as Jell-O®.)

Formaldehyde helps prevent bacterial contamination during manufacturing. Formaldehyde is naturally present in the body at levels higher than vaccines. (Also found in the environment, preservatives, and household products.)

Thimerosal is a preservative used in the vaccine manufacturing process. It is no longer used to make any vaccine except multi-dose vials of the flu vaccine. Single dose vials of the flu vaccine are available as an alternative.

Vaccines are safe

Before a new vaccine is ever given to people, extensive lab testing is done. Once testing in people begins, it can still take years before clinical studies are complete and the vaccine is licensed.

After a vaccine is licensed, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), CDC, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other federal agencies continue routine monitoring and investigate any potential safety concerns.

CDC and the FDA take great care to make sure that a vaccine is safe both before it is licensed and after the public begins using it. Making sure that all vaccines are safe is a top priority for CDC.

Mild side effects are expected

Vaccines, like medicine, can have some side effects. But most people who get vaccinated have only mild side effects or none at all. The most common side effects include fever, tiredness, body aches, and redness, swelling, and tenderness where the shot was given. Mild reactions usually go away on their own within a few days. Serious, long-lasting side effects are extremely rare. We know they are rare because CDC tracks and investigates reports of serious side effects.

If you have questions or concerns about a vaccine, talk with your child's doctor. Learn about the safety of each recommended vaccine.

Why your child should get vaccinated

Vaccines can prevent common diseases that used to seriously harm or even kill infants, children, and adults. Without vaccines, your child is at risk of becoming seriously ill or even dying from childhood diseases such as measles and whooping cough.

MEASLES: The United States had more than 1,200 cases of measles in 2019. This was the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000.

It is always better to prevent a disease than to treat one after it occurs.

Vaccination is a safe, highly effective, and easy way to help keep your family healthy.

The recommended vaccination schedule balances when a child is likely to be exposed to a disease and when a vaccine will be most effective.

Vaccines are tested to ensure they can be given safely and effectively at the recommended ages.

CDC vaccine information statements (VISs) explain both the benefits and risks of a vaccine. Your health care provider can give you the VIS for any vaccine.

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Learning the facts can help you address concerns about vaccinating your child. Here's information to help you make the vaccine decision.

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The LGBTQ+ community should have more rights and should be treated as equals.

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LGBTQ Rights | American Civil Liberties Union

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The ACLU works to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people can live openly without discrimination and enjoy equal rights, personal autonomy, and freedom of expression and association.

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Should kids have the option to decide big decisions for themselves while still being under age.

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Should kids have the option to decide big decisions for themselves while still being under age.

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Are you someone who loves to hang with your friends and go to parties, but you can't because your parents don't allow you to do so? Well, if this sounds like you, then you know what it is like to live with your parents making decisions for you.

When parents make decisions for their children, they will never tell them to do wrong. No parent ever wants their child to go in the wrong direction and be hurt later, which is why they show so much caution. Parents are their children's caretakers; they have all the right to make decisions for their children and their children, should also always obey them.

Children - especially teens in high school- often feel as if they have no freedom whatsoever. Children who feel like they have no freedom can make bad decisions in their lives when their parents allow them to do so. This is why children need their parents to make decisions for them.

Jim Taylor, a professor of psychology states,"The fact is it's part of your children's 'job' to do stupid things. Bad decision making is an essential part of their road to maturity. A problem arises, however, if their poor decision making continues. This usually occurs when parents don't hold them responsible for their poor decisions, instead, bailing their children out of the trouble their children get into. These children learn that they aren't responsible for their decisions and can continue to do stupid things without of consequences."

Taylor's point here is to show that, without parents making decisions for their child, the child will most likely make the wrong decisions. Sure, a parent should let their child make decisions for themselves, but only when it is the right time Decision making is an important skill and allowing young people to make their own decisions is part of the maturity process. However, bad decisions affect this maturity, so parents must be diligent in what and when they allow kids to make their own decisions. Good decision making skills means having a healthier lifestyle and living in a world where you are responsible enough to make your own decisions the proper way.

Parents should make decisions for their children because children should have boundaries set for them, and be guided in the right direction by their parents. A child develops into what his or her parents have taught them, and they continue to grow based on how their parents have taught them and the decisions they have made for them. Frankly speaking: should parents make decisions for their child states, " Those kids have become so dependent on their parents that they need them always to do everything for them.This does not mean that parents should let their kids do anything they want. Teens should have boundaries, and be guided by their parents. However, having a bit of 'wiggle room' will go a long way later when it matters." This quote emphasizes that children usually follow the same path as their parents and need them to guide them because they know that, without their parents making decisions for them, they might do something wrong.

On the other hand, it is important for kids to learn to make decisions, which means that parents should let their children make decisions for themselves, but only when they are ready and only for things that are not too important. Frankly speaking: should parents allow their child to make decisions states," Parents should allow their children to make decisions on their own so they learn how to make them. If parents never let their children make their own decisions, then the children will never be able to make decisions later in life due to lack of practise. If they do not develop skills in decision making while young children will greatly suffer." As a teen, parents should let their children make decisions for themselves to see what the world is like in their own hands, and for them to experience what is really out there in the world by letting them make their own decisions.

Ultimately, when parents make decisions for their children it helps the child grow in a healthy lifestyle, go on the right path, and not make wrong decisions in life which would lead to bad consequences for the child. Parents making decisions for their children will only set their child in a better direction and the child will slowly and more naturally develop into the person whom their parent has taught them to be in terms of what is right and what is wrong. If parents give their children too much freedom they may take advantage of that freedom in a bad way, which is not good. In that case, anyone's parent will always teach their child the right thing and that is why parents should make decisions for their children.

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Parents should make all decisions for their kids: Pro

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Are you someone who loves to hang with your friends and go to parties, but you can't because your parents don't allow you to do so? Well, if this sounds like you, then you know what it is like to live with your parents making decisions for you.

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Even-though it has depiction of slavery, half of its purpose is to show the horrible things we did back then and why life is better now for all people.

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To the editor: I support Black Lives Matter and acknowledge the need to go from non-racist to anti-racist. No doubt I have a lot of personal growth potential in that regard (" I don't like 'Gone With the Wind,' but I hate to see Hattie McDaniel canceled," Opinion, June 12).

But with all due respect to critics of "Gone With the Wind," I believe that censorship is the wrong approach.

Films, plays, books and other works of historical significance should be readily available and studied, for all their brilliance and failings, not shut away and censored. Don't we yet understand the slippery slope of censorship?

Should Margaret Mitchell's book also be banned? Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn? Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" because of its depiction of Jews? The film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" because of Mickey Rooney's character? All of these works have serious racist elements.

Plants grow in the sunlight - so do we.
Ward Bukofsky, Encino
..

To the editor: As a Black American, I can tell you that "Gone With the Wind" is so very painful to watch. It's just as bigoted as "The Birth of A Nation." I will never allow my grandchildren to watch that blasphemous movie.

I still can't understand how those in power in Hollywood could ever produce something so offensive to minorities.
Paulette Mashaka, Carson
..

To the editor: As someone who has seen "Gone With the Wind" not merely once, but at least 30 times, I take issue with some of the opinions expressed by Pamela K. Johnson in her piece on the film and actress Hattie McDaniel.

Although it is certainly true that the film's depiction of slaves was most certainly offensive - most blatantly the portrayal of Prissy by the actress Butterfly McQueen, who later deeply regretted playing the role - I believe that Mammy as portrayed by McDaniel was the most fully developed character in the film.

It is to its credit that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences realized as much in 1939 and voted her best supporting actress. McDaniel's Oscar, a historic achievement, was well deserved.
Kristine Kazie Keenan, Pasadena
..

To the editor: Worrying about McDaniel's acting legacy - however brilliant - in the wake of "Gone With the Wind" being dropped from the HBO Max streaming service is like bemoaning the demise of the Marlboro Man's career when cigarette ads were banned on television.

The greater good takes precedence.
Eileen Flaxman, Claremont

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Letters to the Editor: Canceling 'Gone With the Wind' puts us on a censorship slippery slope

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To the editor: I support Black Lives Matter and acknowledge the need to go from non-racist to anti-racist. No doubt I have a lot of personal growth potential in that regard (" I don't like 'Gone With the Wind,' but I hate to see Hattie McDaniel canceled," Opinion, June 12).

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Computers are causing eye vision to worsen

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Computers are causing eye vision to worsen

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People are beginning to be very dependent on their phone/ internet and they may not be realizing how much time they are actually spending on their electronics and how it is effecting their eye sight.
-Mckenzie

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You spend most of the day staring at a computer, and your tablet or smartphone lull you to sleep at night. What does all that digital screen time do to your eyes?

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In education, it is being more common to be on the screen, but writing helps kids learn and grow easier with better development effects. 

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In education, it is being more common to be on the screen, but writing helps kids learn and grow easier with better development effects. 

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Children who write by hand learn and remember more than those that use computers, with pen and paper sparking activity in part of the brain responsible for attention, experts say

A study finds children learn and remember more when the write things down

This is compared to using a computer or other devices to jot things down

Researchers found when children use handwriting, the part of the brain responsible for processing, attention and language increases with activity

The team also notes that handwriting can have the same benefits for adults

Approximately 45 US states do not require schools to teach students handwriting, but a new study suggests the skill is vital to a child's development.

Following an examination of brain activity, researchers found using a pen and paper helps children learn more and remember better than if they record information on a computer.

The data showed an increase of activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain, which is involved with processing, attention and language.

Scientist also found that the act is beneficial for adults, suggesting they will remember contents better after writing them down.

The research was conducted by a team at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), who now suggest national guidelines need to ensure children are receiving some handwriting lessons.

Professor Audrey van der Meer and her team have investigated the benefits of handwriting for years.

In 2017, she examined the brain activity of 20 students and the recent study examined brain activity in twelve young adults and twelve children - the first time the team analyzed children.

EEG was used to track and record brain wave activity using a hood fitted with more than 250 electrodes attached to the outer lining.

The electrodes are designed to pick up electrical pulses produced by the brain.

Each examination took 45 minutes per person, and the researchers received 500 data points per second.

The results showed that the brain in both young adults and children is much more active when writing by hand than when typing on a keyboard.

'The use of pen and paper gives the brain more 'hooks' to hang your memories on,' Van der Meer said.

'Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain.'

'A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write and hearing the sound you make while writing.'

'These sense experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning. We both learn better and remember better.'

Computers and smartphones have become the go-to for all generations, but the younger group has spent all their lives with the digital devices.

According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescence Psychiatry, children ages eight through 12 in the US spend four to six hours with devices, while teens spend up to nine hours.

Most of the nation's schools are conducting learning online, children may be spending even more time than the average.

Since 2010, 45 states have adopted the Common Core standards, which leaves teaching handwriting up to individual states and districts.

As a result, many teachers have moved away from pen and paper and towards the buttons on a keyboard.

Several states have made efforts to resurrect writing in schools, with California, Georgia and Massachusetts passing laws mandating cursive instruction, and legislators in Idaho passed a bill instructing the state Board of Education to include cursive in the curriculum.

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Handwriting found to help children learn more, study reveals

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A study finds children learn and remember more when the write things down This is compared to using a computer or other devices to jot things down Researchers found when children use handwriting, the part of the brain responsible for processing, attention and language increases with activity The team also notes that handwriting can have the same benefits for adults Approximately 45 US states do not require schools to teach students handwriting, but a new study suggests the skill is vital to a child's development.

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Arkansas should not be allowed to pass the law against LGBTQ community

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Arkansas should not be allowed to pass the law against LGBTQ community

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Arkansas passed a law saying that doctors in the state have the right to deny service to any member of the LGBTQ community which should not be allowed as they should not feel shunned just based off of their sexual orientation.

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Friday signed into law legislation allowing doctors to refuse to treat someone because of religious or moral objections, a move opponents have said will give providers broad powers to turn away LGBTQ patients and others.

The measure says health care workers and institutions have the right to not participate in non-emergency treatments that violate their conscience. The new law won't take effect until late this summer.
READ MORE: For transgender people, finding housing has become even harder during the pandemic
Opponents of the law, including the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union, have said it will allow doctors to refuse to offer a host of services for LGBTQ patients. The state Chamber of Commerce also opposed the measure, saying it sends the wrong message about the state.

Hutchinson opposed a similar measure in 2017 that failed before a House committee. But he said the law he signed was narrower and limits the objections to particular health care services, not treating specific types of people.

"I support this right of conscience so long as emergency care is exempted and conscience objection cannot be used to deny general health service to any class of people," Hutchinson said in a statement released by his office. "Most importantly, the federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, and national origin continue to apply to the delivery of health care services."

Opponents have said types of health care that could be cut off include maintaining hormone treatments for transgender patients needing in-patient care for an infection, or grief counseling for a same-sex couple. They've also said it could also be used to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control, or by physicians assistants to override patient directives on end of life care

"There is no sugarcoating this: this bill is another brazen attempt to make it easier to discriminate against people and deny Arkansans the health care services they need," ACLU of Arkansas Executive Director Holly Dickson said in a statement. The ACLU did not say whether it planned any legal action to try and block the law before it takes effect.

The law is among several measures targeting transgender people that have easily advanced through the majority-Republican Legislature this year. Hutchinson on Thursday signed a law that will prohibit transgender women and girls from playing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

A final vote is scheduled Monday on another proposal that would prohibit gender confirming treatments and surgery for minors.

The Human Rights Campaign announced Friday that it would air a television ad in Arkansas during the Arkansas-Oral Roberts game in the NCAA Tournament on Saturday night denouncing measures such as the transgender athlete restrictions in Arkansas and other states.
READ MORE: Puberty blockers may improve the mental health of transgender adolescents
"Trans kids are kids. They don't deserve this cruelty," the 30-second spot says.

The bills are advancing as a hate crimes measure backed by Hutchinson has stalled in the Legislature after facing resistance from conservatives. The bill would impose additional penalties for committing a crime against someone because of their characteristics, including their sexual orientation or gender identity.

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Arkansas governor signs bill allowing medical workers to refuse treatment to LGBTQ people

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Friday signed into law legislation allowing doctors to refuse to treat someone because of religious or moral objections, a move opponents have said will give providers broad powers to turn away LGBTQ patients and others.

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is technology making us smarter or dumber?

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is technology making us smarter or dumber?

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Is Technology Making People Smarter or Dumber?

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The effects of technology make a popular topic for writing an argumentative essay. What is more, when it concerns an argumentative essay on the effects of technology, Nicolas Carr's article "Is Google Making us Stupid" is a must-read source.

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Education should become available (free) for everyone 

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Education should become available (free) for everyone 

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People who get an education live a better and happier life than those who remain uneducated throughout life

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Education is indeed one of the basic needs a person requires along with food, clothes, and shelter. People who get education live a better and happier life than those who remain uneducated throughout their life. Moreover, education guides you how to live a perfect life, making use of opportunities and resources in your surroundings.

Since education is a basic need for all, shouldn't it be free? This is one of the most important questions in all kinds of educational entities and forums across the world. A dissertation writing services states that there are many countries where people aren't able to get even basic education just because of poverty. Moreover, education can precisely remove poverty but how come a person get the desired education when he is poor?

What the World Says about Free Education

According to a survey by Statista, more than 90% people in Russia, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, China, France, and most of the other countries agree with this idea that education should be free for all. Moreover, there are many NGOs that have been constantly working against the expensive college education in most of the countries.

In today's world, more people believe that education shouldn't have any border, barrier, or business. It should be completely free for all without any discrimination. Education shouldn't also be the luxury that only rich could afford it. Rather, a poor kid should also be able to access it in order to learn in a proper environment.

If you take a look around the world, you won't stop yourself saying that it is the hard work of some great people that education is not anymore the luxury that only rich or royal could afford. Today, there are various free educational programs and campaigns that remain active all the time and make it possible for a needy kid to learn in a better school, college, or university.

Free Education Will Benefit the Whole World.

The advocates of free education say that this concept is not just for a particular group or nation. Rather, it'll benefit the whole world and will play an active part in removing poverty and discontent in various regions.

According to Student Debt Relief, colleges should be free because rather focusing on the education of people, their focus remains on generating more and more business. As a result, students have to take loans to pay their huge fees and the loan happens to be a harsh truth especially for students.

The focus of students then remains on their increasing credits rather on their educational projects or class assignments. In fact, many students also leave their studies just because not being able to pay the high fees of colleges.

A blog published in Nexus by Columbia University states that there have been consistent opportunities for needy students to get scholarships and complete their degrees without any fees. This has been done through so many campaigns and marches in support of free education. The blog further describes that with more consistent campaigns and discussions, the idea can actually come into existence.

Afterall, you can understand how valuable free education is. By preparing for a future profession, students can learn not only such a basis as how to write an essay or calculate equations but also how to be a reliable specialist in their field.

Free Education for Disability, Conflicts, and Disasters

Disability, conflicts, and disasters are the ultimate reality of this world and these three directly affect education. There should be a right for every disabled person to get free education across the world since it's impossible for him to earn money and learn in a college or university.

According to the World Bank, education should be completely free for all kinds of disabled people. Moreover, the world has set a particular international day on 3rd of December every year to commemorate about the rights of disables.

For disable kids and the kids who have gone through any conflict or disaster, it's not just about providing free education. Rather, it's about special education that they need. Only in China, more than 35% disabled kids leave school at the initial stages just because they are not given the special education they need.

Education should not be Free for Rich or Elites

Despite the topic is about free education for all, it's important to discuss another point of view that is about rich people. There was an article published in Bloomberg back in 2017 in which the writer states that the concept of free education will help rich people more than poor or needy.

The article further stated that rather making education free all, the rich and the governments should help needy and poor students to get a proper education.

Consequently, whether education is set free for all or expensive for only rich, the poor and needy kids have to be provided every opportunity to make use of education and become better people. Though it looks mere a dream, if all kids across the world are provided quality education, there will be maximum chances to remove poverty and discontent from the world!

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Education is indeed one of the basic needs a person requires along with food, clothes, and shelter. People who get education live a better and happier life than those who remain uneducated throughout their life. Moreover, education guides you how to live a perfect life, making use of opportunities and resources in your surroundings.

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Reducing the amount of carbon emissions.

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Reducing the amount of carbon emissions.

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Carbo emissions affect the planet significantly and can cause global warming and ultimately, climate change. This is why the amount of carbon emissions needs to be reduced.

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Climate change is altering our planet, causing extreme weather events like tropical storms, wildfires, severe droughts and heat waves, negatively affecting crop production, causing disruption to animals' natural habitats, and more. Because the emission of greenhouse gases is the main perpetrator that causes global warming (and therefore climate change), it's important to understand how carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions affect the environment. After all, if we don't understand the impact of carbon emissions, then how can we change what we're doing and save the planet?
Read on for all the basics you need to know about how carbon emissions affect the environment and what we can do to reduce our carbon footprint and ultimately, carbon emissions.

What Are Carbon Emissions and What Causes Them?

Maybe you remember the greenhouse effect from school. Let's start there: The greenhouse effect is the natural process of how the sun warms the Earth's surface. When greenhouse gases release into the atmosphere - these include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and water vapor - and trap the sun's heat, they warm the average global temperature, causing it to rise. This is known as global warming.

What should happen is that infrared radiation escapes into space, but instead, it gets trapped in our atmosphere and warms the planet.

Carbon emissions are one type of greenhouse gas emission that happens when carbon dioxide enters the air after a human activity or process. They are crucial to this conversation because they are the most significant type of emission in terms of quantity. As of 2017, carbon emissions comprised 82 percent of all total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

Source: iStock

Agriculture is a significant source of emissions in our atmospere.

What causes carbon emissions are humans. Carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere after everyday human processes like driving a vehicle, the agricultural industry, and more. The Environmental Protection Agency lists the six main sources of greenhouse gases as transportation, electricity production, industry, commercial and residential, agriculture, and land use and forestry. According to the Inventory of the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, a report by the EPA, transportation accounted for 28.9 percent of all 2017 greenhouse gas emissions, the biggest culprit of all the categories.

Are Carbon Emissions Pollution?

As children - though it depends which decade you grew up in - we often heard more about "pollution," than we did "carbon emissions" or "greenhouse gases." But essentially, yes, carbon emissions are a form of pollution.

According to National Geographic, carbon dioxide is considered a pollutant, though we may more readily associate "pollution" with things like smoke or plastic floating in a lake. But pollutants are anything that falls under the umbrella of a mix of particles and gases that have the capacity to reach harmful concentrations, according to National Geographic. Things like soot, smoke, mold, and pollen are considered pollutants, but greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide are, too.

How Do Carbon Emissions Affect the Planet?

Carbon emissions affect the planet significantly, as they are the greenhouse gas with the highest levels of emissions in the atmosphere. This, of course, causes global warming and ultimately, climate change.

Carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels - coal, natural gas, and oil - are burned. But burning other biological materials also releases carbon dioxide: solid waste, trees, etc. Anytime that carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere in large quantities - especially if it's staying in the atmosphere for thousands of years - it is affecting the planet.

How do carbon emissions affect the planet? For starters, NASA says that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will both hurt and help crops. While increased carbon dioxide levels can "increase water-use efficiency in crops" and also "mitigate yield losses due to climate change," these levels can also create imbalances in nitrogen and carbon, minimizing crops' necessary nutrients like iron, zinc, and protein.

Perhaps the most important way that carbon emissions affect the planet is by causing climate change. As the average global temperature warms, our climate inherently changes - it warms. This warming causes extreme weather events like tropical storms, wildfires, severe droughts and heat waves. And while an increase in carbon in the air can, in some ways, positively affect plants and crops, if the climate changes the lands and causes drought or other weather events that crops and plants are unable to survive in, it can be detrimental to crop yields. The same problem holds for animals, as well; as climate change alters our environment and natural habitats, different indigenous species take a hit. Some species may disappear altogether, while others might thrive and overtake others.

Carbon emissions directly affect humans, too, causing more respiratory disease from an increase of smog and air pollution. Not to mention that if carbon emissions eradicate certain animal species, destroy crop yields and lands, humans will also see the repercussions of those effects as well.

Where Do Most Carbon Emissions Come From?

Greenhouse gas emissions come from six main categories. However, the bulk of carbon emissions comes from the biggest category of all: transportation.

Transportation accounted for 28.9 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 in the U.S. and constitutes everything from burning fossil fuels for cars, trucks, ships, trains, and even airplanes.

In the U.S., most carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels for energy production, not just for transportation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In fact, half of carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 came from burning petroleum fuels. Petroleum fuels are used for electricity and industry use, but transportation actually emits more carbon dioxide because it solely relies on petroleum.

Most carbon emissions originate from processes in the U.S. and Europe.

Are Carbon Emissions Increasing or Decreasing?

According to NPR, carbon emissions are still increasing around the world. The data comes from a United Nations report that states global fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation and industry grew by 2 percent in 2018.

The releasing of greenhouse gases has steadily increased over the past decade and the average global temperature has also steadily increased as a result. In fact, the Earth is 1 degree warmer than it was before the age of industrialization. While 1 degree might not seem significant, it is; the 2018 National Climate Assessment warned that if global emissions do not start to decrease, and decrease rapidly, it could mean economic and environmental crisis. Of course, this has prompted some politicians to focus on switching to renewable energy and generating the Green New Deal.

Are Carbon Emissions Dangerous?

Carbon emissions are dangerous in that they threaten the livelihood of our planet, animals, humans, and ultimately, life as we know it. The amount of carbon emissions trapped in our atmosphere causes global warming, which causes climate change, symptoms of which include melting of the polar ice caps, the rising of sea levels, the disturbance of animals' natural habitats, extreme weather events, and so many more negative side effects that are dangerous to the planet, to human and animal life, and to our future.

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How Do Carbon Emissions Affect the Environment?

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Climate change is altering our planet , causing extreme weather events like tropical storms, wildfires, severe droughts and heat waves, negatively affecting crop production, causing disruption to animals' natural habitats, and more. Because the emission of greenhouse gases is the main perpetrator that causes global warming (and therefore climate change), it's important to understand how carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions affect the environment.

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Global Warning is a problem that needs to be dealt with now.

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In just the past few decades:

What's causing this climate crisis?

It's mainly us.

Humans are the main cause of climate change - we burn fossil fuels and chop down forests, causing average temperatures to rise worldwide. That global warming trend is increasingly disrupting our climate - the average weather over many years.

Earth has already warmed by about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, before industry started to boom.

While we experience the effects, we're on our way toward 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F) by as early as 2030.
7 facts about climate change
Why a half-degree more is such a big deal

Climate change is breeding storms with heavier rainfall, flooding farms - such as this one, which grows cotton.

A warmer world - even by a half-degree Celsius - has more evaporation, leading to more water in the atmosphere. Such changing conditions put our agriculture, health, water supply and more at risk.

Picture a North Carolina cotton farm that's been around since 1960, with global average temperatures rising by roughly half a degree since it grew its first crop.

The increased evaporation and additional moisture to the atmosphere has led to 30% more intense rain during heavy downpours in that part of the U.S.

Then a hurricane like 2018's Florence - already strengthened by warmer oceans and higher seas - dumps this excess rainfall on the farm. The crops get more flooded and damaged than they did half a century ago.

It's how you go from half-degree of warming to economic hardship.
Are record-breaking hurricanes our new normal?
There's still time to act

Whether it's a shift of 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees, these warming levels aren't magic thresholds. Every rise in warming is worse for the planet than the last.

But they're not inevitable.

It's not too late to slow the pace of climate change and avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis - as long as we act today. With your help, we can attack this challenge.

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This is why fighting climate change is so urgent

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In the past few decades, rising temperatures, melting ice and wildfires have worsened; here's EDF's take on why tackling the climate crisis is so important.

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Is Georgia's new voting law that requires voters to show identification racist?

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Is Georgia's new voting law that requires voters to show identification racist?

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast

SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:

A new voting law in Georgia is the subject of outrage from Democrats across the state and the country. President Biden called it Jim Crow in the 21st century. It expands in-person voting, but adds new limitations on mail-in ballots, among other restrictions. It also allows Georgia's state election board to temporarily take over local election offices. That board is currently dominated by Republicans. Voting rights activists are concerned for what all of this might mean for voters in heavily Black and Democratic areas, like Atlanta's Fulton County. That's a place where Republicans repeatedly criticized local election officials after their losses in the 2020 election. Butch Miller is a Republican state senator and one of the co-sponsors of the new law. I spoke with him yesterday.

Isn't there a risk here that a politicized group will step in and infringe on the rights of minorities to vote in Georgia?

BUTCH MILLER: Well, I would say that may be characterized that way, but you could also say that, for instance, Fulton County - it's one of the largest counties in our state - how can the state of Florida, population of 20 million people - how can they count all their votes before Fulton County can count one county's votes? Now, if you're having to wait more than an hour, the polling places are instructed to open up additional booths. So we want there to be a shorter line, more access, more availability, and more secure votes.

MCCAMMON: You mentioned Fulton County. Do you think that the results in Fulton County were legitimate?

MILLER: I think that the results in Fulton County were counted and recounted, and there was no large discrepancy. Of course, it took them five days to do that.

MCCAMMON: Why is speed necessary? I mean, arguably, shouldn't you take your time to make sure that the election results are correct?

MILLER: I think it's ludicrous when you have counties that can't validate their votes for nearly a week after the election.

MCCAMMON: If this legislation had been in place in 2020, do you think the state board of elections should have stepped in in Fulton County?

MILLER: Clearly.

MCCAMMON: Why?

MILLER: Clearly. And I'm not singling out Fulton County. There are other counties. But clearly, there have been habitual offenders, habitual tardiness, habitually poor performing - underperforming voting districts, and Fulton County just happens to have been one.

MCCAMMON: Again, your Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, reviewed the entire vote count three times, including Fulton County's, and said it was legitimate.

MILLER: I was not a party to that process, but wouldn't you agree that we need to have an accurate account and promptness?

MCCAMMON: To what end, though? I mean, you're talking about a scenario in which a Republican-controlled board would be stepping into a predominantly Democratic county. Can't you see how that looks?

MILLER: I can see how that looks. Let me ask you, when do you think would be an accurate number of days? Would it be five days? Fifty days? Would it be months? We have to have a process that has a definitive date and time.

MCCAMMON: And you do in Georgia, which is why the vote is certified at a specific time. And it was recounted and certified again. I mean, you do have a definitive date.

MILLER: But you should have a definitive date prior to five days and you should have a definitive date where the entire state can function within.

MCCAMMON: Senator, you're from a Southern state. You are well aware of the ugly racist history of voting rules designed to target people of color, particularly in the South. And voting rights activists, many of them activists of color, are saying that these measures - things like limiting the placement of ballot drop boxes, which are designed to make it easier for people to vote, especially people who have limited resources.

MILLER: Ballot drop boxes can be used for - one for every 100,000 people. Rather than being put in certain neighborhoods or certain areas. They're done by precinct. They're done by population density. And there's one ballot drop box for every 100,000 people. I'm not sure what the argument is there.

MCCAMMON: Do you have evidence that those drop boxes have resulted in voter fraud?

MILLER: I did not say that. Did I indicate there was? I said there would be one for every 100,000 people. There'll be some consistency, some continuity. Wouldn't you think that would be appropriate? Why would you have 20 drop boxes in a county of 50,000 people? Would that make any sense to you?

MCCAMMON: Well, I used to live in Georgia, sir, and I know that in many of these rural counties, people are spread out quite a bit, and not everybody has a car. I think it's quite possible that there are people that would find multiple drop boxes in their community to be very helpful. And I guess the fundamental question is, why wouldn't you want to make it easier for people to vote?

MILLER: I think we are making it easier for people to vote. We're making it easier for people to vote with consistency and accountability.

MCCAMMON: I have to ask about the provision that's gotten a lot of attention, and this is making it a misdemeanor to hand out food and drink to people waiting in line to vote. We know that some of the longest lines are in places like the Atlanta area, often places that are dominated by voters of color. Why is it necessary to make that a misdemeanor?

MILLER: Your description is a complete and total misrepresentation of the facts.

MCCAMMON: How so?

MILLER: The facts are these. You can have refreshment stations. You can have water stations. You can have food stations. But what you can't do is go from person to person and say, here's a chicken sandwich. By the way, who are you voting for?

MCCAMMON: You already have rules against electioneering. That's a pretty common rule. But why is banning food and drink - bringing it to a person - why is that necessary? What does that accomplish?

MILLER: Well, firstly, you've got it available. I don't know why you're - how you say you're banning it. What you can't do is electioneering. Those are your words. You have to ban electioneering. And that's what we're - what is focused on.

MCCAMMON: If you could speak to some of your colleagues - African American colleagues, Black activists in Georgia, maybe your constituents who feel pain when they see a law like this passed - it reminds them of this ugly history, and they say that this will keep members of the community from voting. How do you address that?

MILLER: Well, the history in the United States is difficult to understand and to accept at times. There have been groups that have been discriminated against. There will be groups that, sadly, will be discriminated against in the future. But we need to set a higher bar than that. We need to do our very best to make sure every single person of whatever color, whatever background has access to the ballot box. And they shouldn't have to wait in line for five hours. What this bill does in many instances is alleviate many of those problems.

MCCAMMON: If it has unintended consequences, will you be willing to come back and change it?

MILLER: Certainly. If this bill or any other bill has unintended consequences, we should always be willing to readdress the issue.

MCCAMMON: That's state Senator Butch Miller of Georgia. Thanks so much.

MILLER: Thank you, Sarah.

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Georgia State Senator Butch Miller Discusses Controversial Voting Bill

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST: A new voting law in Georgia is the subject of outrage from Democrats across the state and the country. President Biden called it Jim Crow in the 21st century. It expands in-person voting, but adds new limitations on mail-in ballots, among other restrictions.

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People must have a choice to enlist in the military 

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People must have a choice to enlist in the military 

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Places like Africa, India, Palestine, etc. still force citizens to enlist in the military.

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Since its inception, the United States military has recruited teenagers to enlist.

During the Revolutionary War, when the military was formally established, young men were encouraged to fight for their country voluntarily. During the Civil War, conscription - essentially mandatory military enrollment for men of a certain age - was implemented, initially targeting men age 21 to 30. The draft was later expanded to include men as young as 18, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and continued over centuries as a way to maintain a base of military servicepeople. In a statement to Teen Vogue, Lisa M. Ferguson, media relations chief for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said, "The Army seeks qualified individuals 17 [to] 34 years old."

Since the draft ended in 1973, the military has relied on an all-volunteer service and has targeted young people, using strategies that include placing recruiters in schools. This is allowed because the No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires military recruiters be granted the same access in schools as college recruiters.

The military markets to teenagers, particularly those in poorer school districts, because the armed services need a large population, and the sooner young people join, the more likely they are to stay and build a career. (According to the government, "184,000 personnel must be recruited into the Armed Forces each year to replace those who complete their commitment or retire.") Modern-day recruiters sell the idea of an experience that often resonates more with poorer students because, for many, service with an honorable discharge can mean a free ride to college, or potentially a path to citizenship. (Only the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Dept. can grant citizenship, but the military can only accelerate the process. If a person doesn't qualify for citizenship, they would still have to complete their service years in the military.)

The majority of today's teenagers, however, aren't interested in joining the military: According to a 2017 poll conducted by the Department of Defense, only 14% of respondents age 16 to 24 said it was likely they'd serve in the military in the next few years.

As enrollment drops, recruiters are finding new ways to market the military favorably to teenagers. For example, the Army recently began recruiting through video game tournaments in hopes of connecting with young people, according to Stars and Stripes. This strategy was announced after the Army failed to meet its recruiting goal for the first time in 13 years - during which time the Iraq War was underway - according to The New York Times.

Kate Connell, a coordinator for Truth in Recruitment, tells Teen Vogue that for an October visit to California's Santa Maria High School, the Army brought a military truck equipped with a virtual reality helicopter game. She said a recruiter was on site to input students' personal information into an iPad, "including their citizenship status, their GPA, what grade, their email." (When asked whether the Army asks potential recruits about their citizenship, an Army spokesperson provided a list of questions the Army does ask its recruits; citizenship was not on the list.) The same recruiter, Connell adds, asked students about their career interests and mentioned college scholarships that the military provides to some enlistees.

"[Students are] participating in something that's about the military, that glamorizes the military, [that] makes it sort of a game," Connell says. She believes that the military's collection of students' personal information is the "main purpose" of their campus visits: to get leads. These recruiters also rely on programs for teenagers, such as the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) and U.S. Army Partnership for Youth Success.

The JROTC is a federally sponsored program that operates in public and private high schools, described by the government as " character development and citizenship programs " where retired servicepeople offer information and skill training to student participants, which can lead to scholarships for its participants. Connell says programs like JROTC and the Future Soldiers program (formerly the Delayed Entry program) make the military attractive to poor students, whose college options may otherwise be limited.

For kids who join the military, there's often a signing bonus: an enlistee can accrue up to $6,000 through the Army's Future Soldiers program, Connell says. "You don't collect it, luckily, until you go to boot camp, but it's that kind of incentive that, for someone who is low income, makes [the military] look like a path out of poverty."

The term "poverty draft" came about in the early 1980s to describe "the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities," Sojourners reports. Rocio Cordova, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and Non-military Opportunities, describes this phenomenon as a "draft-like system that pushes nonprivileged people into enlisting because they lack access to jobs, income, and educational alternatives in their communities."

This persists today, with many of those interested in the military saying they are motivated by the chance to attend college. A 2017 Department of Defense poll of young people shows 49% of survey respondents indicated that if they were to join the military, one reason for doing so would be to pay for future education.

Jesus Palafox, a regional administrative associate at the American Friends Service Committee, attended one of the most diverse high schools on the South Side of Chicago during the height of the Iraq War. The school had a JROTC program and was located a block away from military recruiting stations, he says.

"As students were coming out of classrooms, [recruiters] would be by the door waiting for them," he tells Teen Vogue. "A lot of the times, they already had someone they were going to talk to. One of the things JROTC has served as is a liaison between recruiters and the instructors, so recruiters would ask instructors who was a good candidate."

Citizenship is another reason marginalized youth may turn to the military. Palafox cites the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act - the first of many versions introduced in 2001 but never passed - as an effort supported by the military, which the Department of Defense included it in its 2010-2012 strategic plan. According to the National Immigration Law Center, numerous versions of this legislation would have given undocumented immigrants who immigrated as children a path to citizenship if they were to attend college or serve in the military.

Many currently serving in the military will eventually have the opportunity to receive financial benefits for college after their service, as many do not graduate college prior to enlisting. A 2017 military demographics report indicates that nearly 66.4% of the total force has earned a high school diploma, GED, or some college as their highest form of education. Although the Department of Defense doesn't collect information about recruits' household or family income, it does measure "neighborhood affluence" to determine "how well-off recruits' neighborhoods were," which is the closest measure, aside from education level, available on recruits' class data, according to the fiscal year 2017 Population Representation in the Military Services report. The report indicates that nearly 20% of military members come from neighborhoods with median household incomes of $40,115 or less. (In 2017, the median U.S. household income was $60,336, reports the United States Census Bureau.)

When the draft was active, wealthier teenagers sometimes had the advantage of deferment, too. According to the Selective Service System, some of the most common reasons for draft deferment were college enrollment, being a minister, or an elected official. Even with the mandatory draft abolished, the Selective Service System is still in place and requires everyone who was male-assigned at birth to register within 30 days of their 18th birthday. The DOJ hasn't prosecuted anyone since 1986, but failure to report could result in up to five years in prison and/or up to $250,000 in fines. If the draft were to be reinstated, students with access to higher education could still be able to defer for similar reasons, while many poorer students would not be.

"[Privileged people] have sufficient resources to meet their needs," stresses Cordova. "They don't require joining the military to travel or learn a profession. They have connections to help them get into jobs that pay well and provide benefits. They don't need the military's medical insurance coverage that sometimes motivates low-income people to enlist." During the Civil War, it was common for wealthy men to hire substitutes to take their place in the draft, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

It's important to note that the military isn't the only option for poor students who want to continue their education. For instance, Palafox, through his job, helps teens fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, an application for federal financial aid for higher education. This is why Palafox urges young people, especially poor students, "to consider all their options before signing a military contract and to really get informed of what they are getting into."

Get the Teen Vogue Take. Sign up for the Teen Vogue weekly email.

Related: How Family Separation at the Border Impacts Children
Check this out:

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Why Poor Youth Are Targeted for Military Recruitment

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Since its inception, the United States military has recruited teenagers to enlist. During the Revolutionary War, when the military was formally established, young men were encouraged to fight for their country voluntarily. During the Civil War, conscription - essentially mandatory military enrollment for men of a certain age - was implemented, initially targeting men age 21 to 30.

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Should every person be able to decide for themselves if they want to take the vaccine or should it be required.

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It was recently announced that all parents in France will be legally obliged to have their children vaccinated from 2018.

Mandatory vaccination is something that's long been debated.

On the 'pro' side are those who say that legislation has had a dramatic effect in other areas of public health and safety (such as the indoor smoking ban, and use of seatbelts) so why not do the same with immunisation

Others are more reserved however, expressing concerns that there is a lack of evidence that mandatory vaccination actually helps to increase uptake.

Why should vaccines be mandatory?

Vaccination is one of the most effective public health interventions in the world for saving lives and promoting good health. Only clean water, which is considered to be a basic human right, performs better.

Despite this, uptake of vaccines has reduced in some countries and this is thought to be partly caused by misguided concerns over vaccine safety.

When vaccines control disease, parents are less likely to witness the devastating effects of vaccine preventable infectious diseases first hand. It is then easy for misplaced anxiety or suspicion about vaccines to override concerns about the disease itself.

When vaccination rates decline, we start to see a resurgence of infectious diseases.

That's why some countries are choosing to make vaccination mandatory. However, the effectiveness of this approach varies in countries which have already implemented it.

What do we know about mandatory vaccination so far?

In all 50 US states it is mandatory for children over five to receive vaccinations prior to enrolment in state licensed public schools, and often private schools or day care facilities. All states have exemptions on medical grounds, almost all states grant religious exemptions and only a few states allow philosophical exemptions for those who object to immunisations because of personal, moral or other beliefs.

Rates of exemptions have increased in recent years and studies have shown that vaccine exemptions tend to cluster geographically, leaving some communities at greater risk for disease outbreaks.

Additionally it seems that some parents delay vaccinating their children until they start school. This is not ideal because babies are much more vulnerable to the diseases for which vaccines are scheduled in the first year of life. They need that protection early.

There has also been an increase in rates of home schooling which is speculated could be an unintended consequence of the legislation.

In US states with the strictest laws, the rates of whooping cough and measles are significantly lower, which suggests that if exemptions are harder to come by then mandatory vaccination may be more effective.

In Australia a requirement for children to meet immunisation schedules has for a long time been attached to childcare payments. In an attempt to further improve vaccination rates, exemptions were removed as of January 2016. Six months later it was reported that more than 148,000 children who had not been up to date with their immunisations met their requirements as a result.

Is there a better way?

Making vaccination compulsory is not the only way to obtain high vaccination rates. The UK has held an enviably high uptake rate for many years with the vast majority of parents choosing to vaccinate their children.

Research into how to further improve uptake rates amongst vaccine hesitant parents suggests that talking concerns through with a trusted health professional is beneficial. Additionally, practical issues such as making sure that vaccines and health care are easy to access is essential. Many families who don't vaccinate are not averse to it but simply have difficulty getting convenient appointments or don't get reminders when their children are due vaccines.

Perhaps making vaccination a core part of the educational curriculum could help future generations be less hesitant to vaccinate.

One thing we know for sure is that meningitis and septicaemia are deadly diseases that strike without warning, and vaccination has proved to be the only way to prevent it.

Whether mandatory vaccination is the best way to achieve high uptake of vaccines remains under debate. The impact this has in France will be of great interest.

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We look at the pros and cons of mandating vaccines. Is this the best way to improve health and welbeing?

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The amount of pressure that schools put on students to perform so well is a problem.

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Many parents want to help their children be the best they can be. However, some, parents put their children under too much pressure to perform. Being under such intense pressure can have serious consequences for kids.

A 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 64% of Americans say parents do not put enough pressure on children to do well in school.﻿﻿ Children might be less likely to perform at their best if they don't get enough pressure from their parents.

However, some kids might be under too much pressure. Adults have also expressed concerns that kids today "can't be kids anymore" because they are pressured and expected to constantly perform well-such as getting into the most prestigious schools or getting the best scholarships.

Parents have different opinions and approaches to encouraging their kids. While high expectations can be healthy, placing constant pressure on children can be harmful. When kids feel like each homework assignment is going to make or break their future or that each soccer game could determine if they get a college scholarship, that pressure can have negative consequences.

When It's Harmful

Kids who feel that they are under enormous pressure to do well from parents and adults can experience consequences in multiple areas of their life, from their mental health to their sleep. Here are just a few of the consequences of putting kids under too much pressure to perform.

Higher rates of mental illness. Kids who feel like they're under constant pressure can experience constant anxiety. High amounts of stress can also place children at a greater risk of developing depression or other mental health conditions.

Higher risk of injuries. Athletes who feel a lot of pressure might continue to participate in sports despite injuries. Ignoring pain or returning to a sport before an injury has healed could lead to permanent damage.

Increased likelihood of cheating. When the focus is on achievement rather than learning, kids are more likely to cheat. Whether it's a young child catching a glimpse of a classmate's answer on a test, or a college student paying someone to write a term paper, cheating is common among kids who feel pressure to perform well.

Refusing to participate. When kids feel the goal is to always "be the best," they're not likely to participate when they aren't likely to shine. A child who isn't the fastest runner might quit playing soccer and a child who isn't the best singer in the group might stop performing with the choir. Unfortunately, that means kids won't take opportunities to sharpen their skills.

Self-esteem problems. Pushing kids to excel can damage their self-esteem. The constant stress to perform interferes with children's identity formation and causes them to feel like they're not good enough-or even that they will never be good enough.

Sleep deprivation. Kids who feel constant pressure to do well in school might stay up late studying and struggle to get enough sleep.

What You Can Do

There are some things that you can do as a parent to help your child without placing too much pressure on them.

Encourage your child to do their best. Focus on the process, rather than the end result.

If you find yourself placing too much pressure on your child, ask yourself why their performance, test score, or success matters to you.

Talk to your child about the sport/assignment/performance they are working on. Set aside your feelings to make room for your child to express theirs. Giving your child the space to be seen and heard will encourage them rather than make them feel they have disappointed you.

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Consequences Kids May Experience If You're a High-Pressure Parent

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Many parents want to help their children be the best they can be. However, some, parents put their children under too much pressure to perform. Being under such intense pressure can have serious consequences for kids.

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Public schools should not require every student to be vaccinated, but at least 90% should

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With the Food and Drug Administration poised to approve the first coronavirus vaccine for use in the U.S. - the start of a major national effort to blunt the spread of a pandemic that's taken the lives of nearly 300,000 Americans, paralyzed the economy and shuttered schools for millions of children - pediatricians and school and public health officials are bracing themselves for and bristling against the onslaught of questioners asking the one thing they don't want to talk about. At least not yet, anyway.

Will children be required to get vaccinated against COVID-19 to return to school?

"You hear the questions about whether vaccines should be mandatory or not," says Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. "That's not the question to be asking right now."

"The questions to be asking right now are, 'Is it effective? Is it going to be free? Is it widely accessible?'" she says. "What we're not doing right now - regardless of what I personally think - we're not weighing in on whether a vaccine should be mandatory or not right now because that's not an appropriate question right now."

The caveats of "right now," "yet" and "at this moment" do a lot of heavy lifting in conversations about immunization requirements, and that's because the answer is complicated and not as straightforward as parents would probably like. Not only does it depend on where families live, as different states have different vaccination requirements for schools, but it also depends on drug companies enrolling more children in their trials in order to amass enough data to show - as most pediatricians and public health experts fully expect - that it's efficacious and safe in children.

"We can't get ahead of ourselves and start asking about whether we're going to require it," agrees Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. "We don't know that yet. So let's not say that yet."

So while few are publicly advocating for the forthcoming vaccines to be mandatory for school - at least not yet, anyway - most agree that a majority of states probably will require children to be immunized against COVID-19 at some point. Some states may adopt the requirement as early as the 2021-22 academic year, but many more will punt to the following year.

World Braces For Another Wave of Coronavirus

"What is often the focus of making a requirement is: Do we think this vaccine will make schools a safer, healthier learning environment for our children?" says Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director for immunization education at the Immunization Action Coalition.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is responsible for adding vaccines to the recommended schedule of childhood immunizations, individual state legislatures mandate which vaccinations are required for school.

Most states mandate vaccinations for diseases easily transmitted in school settings, like polio and measles, while others may not require vaccinations for things like Hepatitis B or HPV, which are most often transmitted through intimate contact - even though such diseases are no less serious and the CDC recommends them for all children.

"One of the misunderstandings people have is that if it's not required for school then it must not be important. And that couldn't be further from the truth," Moore says. "There may be a lot of societal reasons why a vaccine is recommended but not required. People need to remember, the CDC doesn't make requirements. They only ever recommend it. The choice to require something is done at the state level between school officials and public health officials."

Complicating the landscape further, states allow for various exemptions from mandatory school immunizations. According to the Immunization Action Coalition, 45 states and Washington, D.C., allow parents to exempt their children from vaccination if it contradicts their religious beliefs, and 15 of those states also allow for personal or philosophical exemptions. Only five states - California, Maine, Mississippi, New York and West Virginia - do not allow either exemption.

Each state establishes its own thresholds for what it considers to be a genuine religious exemption And in states that offer a personal or philosophical exemption, almost any reason provided is acceptable - though some states make parents get an official sign-off from a doctor and fill out additional paperwork.

In recent years, as the anti-vaccination movement expanded and general vaccination hesitancy grew, causing schools in some communities to experience dangerously low levels of important immunizations among elementary school students, state legislatures have been modifying existing exemptions. Since 2015, at least 13 states have altered the language for exemptions to make them more difficult to obtain or to eliminate them altogether, as was the case in Maine in 2019.

What many pediatricians and school and public health officials worry about with the forthcoming coronavirus vaccines is that the warranted rush to approve them for emergency use to curb a deadly pandemic - a shortened timeline that doesn't allow for the thorough education campaigns that typically accompany the rollout of important vaccines - may spook some parents, and going a step further to require the vaccination may backfire.

For those very reasons, Moore, who spent 14 years directing Tennessee's state immunization program, has written immunization requirements for school children and oversaw a modernization and overhaul of Tennessee's immunization requirements in 2009, cautions that moving to require the vaccine now is premature - though perhaps not far off.

"We are going ahead and authorizing its use before we have gone ahead and checked all the boxes we normally would," she says of the forthcoming Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. "In a situation like that, you don't want to all of a sudden require a vaccine. From a public health and public policy standpoint, we are saying, 'We are willing to move forward with more uncertainty than usual because we are in the midst of a terrible crisis.' And in the middle of an emergency you don't ask as many questions. You can't wait for all the answers. You have to go right now because 3,000 people died yesterday."

She continues: "When we have ample supply, the public is familiar with it and understands it and understands its benefits. Then we can talk about whether this is something we should require. We do understand instinctively that preventing COVID-19 in a school setting through vaccination is really important. The idea is that we want schools to be safe and healthy learning environments or we want colleges to be safe and healthy learning and living environments. It only makes sense that vaccination could play a really important role - just not yet."

But the timeline for when states begin mulling the vaccine requirement for schools is closer than many probably think, Moore and others agree.

As it stands, the Pfizer vaccine that's set to gain clearance from the FDA as early as Friday will be authorized for use in people 16 years old and up, while the Moderna vaccine, also days away from FDA clearance, will be authorized for use in individuals 18 and older. Pfizer currently has children as young as 12 years old enrolled in its trials, and public health officials expect younger children to gain authorization to be administered the vaccines as early as March.

"I do think if we are able to vaccinate kids by mid to late spring that it will become a mandated vaccine for school in the fall," says Dr. Jesse Hackell, a practicing pediatrician in Rockland County, New York, vice president of a state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and one of the authors of the academy's policy statement on medical versus non-medical vaccination exemptions.

"I think it would be the wise thing to do to mandate it because we have to get kids back to school," says Hackell, predicting New York and California would be among the first to require it for enrollment in schools.

"We have a silent disease that is transmitted in children and we are not including them in vaccine trials yet. We need to include children in these trials and do so urgently."

"None of them are going to want to go through these shutdowns again, and it would be an important way to get everything back to as normal as we can get it as quickly as we can get it," he says. "You're talking about kids' education and socialization and psychological stress. You're also talking about the economy."

For parents who are hesitant about getting their children vaccinated and cite concerns about how quickly the vaccinations were developed and subsequently approved, Hackell says two things in particular should boost their confidence: For starters, the technology used to develop the vaccine isn't new. For the most part, it's the same technology used to develop the SARS vaccine two years ago. And second, some vaccine trials take a long time to complete because the incidence of the disease the vaccine is being tested to protect against is low, and if there isn't much disease around then it takes a long time to see the difference between a vaccinated group of individuals and the placebo group.

"The fact that these studies were completed quickly is not a reflection of rushing them," he says. "It's a reflection of the fact that, with so much disease, the difference between the two groups jumps out at you really fast."

For Moore, one of the biggest unknowns of the forthcoming COVID-19 vaccines - the answer to which could play an enormous role in whether and how quickly states require the immunization for enrollment in school - is whether the vaccines prevent asymptomatic transmission. And while some of the trials are monitoring for asymptomatic infections, not all of them are.

"We know that this virus is capable of being transmitted by people who don't know they are infected," she says. "So will these vaccines eliminate transmission because you can't even get infected by the virus? Or will it only eliminate illness, but you could still get infected?"

"The likelihood that we would require a vaccine sooner rather than later for children would be based on the answer to that question," she says. "If we find that the vaccine can prevent you from getting infected and spreading it to someone else unknowingly, then that makes it even more important for children."

For now, the American Academy of Pediatrics and school and health officials are urging drug companies to enroll more children in trials, underscoring the importance of collecting efficacy and safety data in younger populations as they are increasingly being infected by COVID-19.

As it stands, more than 1 million children in the U.S. have been infected with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association. And while it's rare for children to become severely ill - though they can and do - the bigger concern is that they are more likely to be silent spreaders who may not know they are infected because they are asymptomatic.

That's a big hurdle to overcome when trying to reopen schools, especially considering many school districts are attempting to reopen without the proper personal protective and sanitizing equipment and in buildings with poor ventilation. Moreover, while school staff are hoping to secure priority for the vaccination, nearly a third of the educator workforce is over the age of 55 and a quarter of the workforce has medical issues, like heart disease or diabetes, placing them at higher risk for a more serious infection if they were to contract the coronavirus.

"This disease is so unique in the fact that it is a silent disease," says Dr. Laura Blaisdell, a practicing pediatrician in Portland, Maine, and a vaccine policy advocate and researcher. "Measles was never silent. Polio was never silent. Here we have a silent disease that is transmitted in children and we are not including them in vaccine trials yet. We need to include children in these trials and do so urgently so we can consider sending children to school, vaccinated."

Blaisdell, who helped lead the effort to eliminate Maine's exemptions for school immunizations in 2019, says it's imperative for pediatricians and public health and school officials to be as proactive as possible about educating parents and patients on the benefits of the vaccine, just as it's important for state legislators to understand they have the ability to mandate the immunization for schools should they need to.

"As a physician, I am pro-vaccine and I will be sticking my arm out and getting myself vaccinated. And at the same time, by working in vaccine hesitancy, I know we need to continue to be nuanced in how we approach everything," she says. "We can't be either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine."

Still, it's unclear how the public will respond to the forthcoming vaccinations - especially their use and potential requirement in children.

Most pediatricians, school and public health officials report feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place: They worry about the searing backlash that requiring the vaccine may prompt, yet they also worry that misinformation and disinformation campaigns, including the rise of conspiracy theory groups like QAnon that have latched on to the anti-vaccination movement, may drive down vaccination rates and stymie efforts to reopen schools safely.

"I think that there is a dialogue to be had about the social contract we have with one another in America," Blaisdell says. "There is no way to get back to normal unless we take care of one another by becoming vaccinated ourselves, and that is not without personal sacrifice and risk. But that common goal of getting back to an open society is something I hear mentioned and it is implied, but I don't think we are hitting it head on."

"I don't want to get to a point of mandate," she says. "I would love for my neighbor to look at me and say, 'I will protect you,' and I look at them and say, 'I will protect you as well.'"
Horus Alas contributed a graphic to this article.

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With the Food and Drug Administration poised to approve the first coronavirus vaccine for use in the U.S. - the start of a major national effort to blunt the spread of a pandemic that's taken the lives of nearly 300,000 Americans, paralyzed the economy and shuttered schools for millions of children - pediatricians and school and public health officials are bracing themselves for and bristling against the onslaught of questioners asking the one thing they don't want to talk about.

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BETTER GRADES
For starters, high school students who participate in sports are far less likely to drop out of school. ⁷¹ In fact, participation in high school sports actually has been shown to deliver consistently higher grades. ⁷⁹

HIGHER LIKELIHOOD OF COLLEGE

In addition to improved concentration and classroom behavior ³¹, those who participate in high school sports are more likely to attend college. ³²

MORE LIKELY TO ATTEND COLLEGE IF THEY PARTICIPATED IN HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS
A 2007 study revealed that women who played sports in high school were more likely to earn a college degree within six years of graduating high school. ⁶⁸ This was even true for women from disadvantaged backgrounds.

BETTER LIFE SKILLS
People who played competitive sports in high school demonstrate more confidence, leadership, and self-respect. ⁷⁴ They are better at setting goals and managing their time. ⁸⁵ They have a better appreciation for diversity and a more developed sense of morality. ⁸⁵ High school sports participation can also make a difference in earning power. People who played competitive sports in their youth tend to earn significantly higher incomes than those who did not. ⁷³ of female executives played organized sports after elementary school and of these women execs agreed with the statement that sports participation gave them "a competitive edge in the business world." ⁷⁰

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At Your Own Risk | Benefits of High School Sports

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BETTER GRADES For starters, high school students who participate in sports are far less likely to drop out of school. 71 In fact, participation in high school sports actually has been shown to deliver consistently higher grades.

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do cartoons have a positive or negative effect on children?

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do cartoons have a positive or negative effect on children?