Tuesday, January 28th, 2014
Michelle Healy, - USA TODAY
Stephan: Maybe someone can explain it to me. Twenty school children a day in the United States are hospitalized for gun injuries. How is it that we tolerate this? I just don't get it.
Almost one child or teen an hour is injured by a firearm seriously enough to require hospitalization, a new analysis finds. Six percent of the 7,391 hospitalizations analyzed in 2009 resulted in a death, says the study in February’s Pediatrics, released Monday.
The damage caused by gun-related injuries rarely gets the same attention as fatalities, “but that every day, 20 of our children are hospitalized for firearms injury, often suffering severe and costly injuries, clearly shows that this is a national public health problem,” says Robert Sege, director of the Division of Family and Child Advocacy at Boston Medical Center and a co-author of the study.
Despite declining rates over the past decade, firearm injuries remain the second leading cause of death, behind motor vehicle crashes, for teens ages 15 to 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Children who survive firearm injuries often require extensive follow-up treatment, including rehabilitation, home health care, hospital readmission from delayed effects of the injury, and mental health or social services, Sege says.
Although a number of studies have used vital statistics data to examine pediatric fatalities related to firearms, this is the first to highlight the burden of non-fatal injuries using hospitalization data, he […]
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Tuesday, January 28th, 2014
, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: This Snowden revelation isn't get as much play as his early reveals but, I suspect, to Europeans and Asians, in some ways this is even more threatening. This is basically the American government engaged in industrial espionage. Something about which the U.S. has complained bitterly when it has been done to us.
BERLIN — The US National Security Agency (NSA) sometimes uses data it collects for economic purposes, intelligence leaker Edward Snowden reveals in an extract of an interview with a German television chain to be broadcast Sunday.
“If there is information, for example on Siemens, which is in the national interest, but has nothing to do with national security, they will still use this information,” said Snowden, according to the German translation of the interview on public television ARD.
The interview was carried out by a journalist for NDR, a regional chain belonging to the broadcaster that has analysed secret documents that Snowden leaked to journalists.
Under top secrecy, the chain this week in Moscow filmed the first interview with Snowden since he left Hong Kong in 2013 to seek refuge in Russia.
The 30-minute interview will be broadcast Sunday at 2200 GMT, with initial extracts to be released during an earlier talk show at 2045 GMT.
On its website, NDR said that Snowden assured he was no longer in possession of any confidential documents, as they had all been handed out to handpicked journalists. The former NSA contractor said he no longer wants to, or is able to, take part in any future revelations.
Other […]
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Monday, January 27th, 2014
JIM SALLINGER, - arstechnica
Stephan: Here is a excellent essay from the inside about what it is like to deal with the climate deniers. There is a large industry that, almost unbelievably, is dedicated to undermining the science that is the only thing that is going to save us from catastrophe. It is financed, if indirectly, by people like the Koch brothers through "think tanks," really political disinformation operations. It is a trend committed to benefit and profit for the few at the expense and well-being of the many. It is, not surprisingly, heavy interlaced with the Theocratic Right and the Republican Party.
A recent headline-“Failed doubters trust leaves taxpayers six-figure loss”-marked the end of a four-year epic saga of secretly funded climate denial, the harassment of scientists, and a tying-up of valuable government resources in New Zealand.
It’s likely to be a familiar story to my scientist colleagues in Australia, the UK, the US, and elsewhere around the world.
But if you’re not a scientist and are genuinely trying to work out who to believe when it comes to climate change, then it’s a story you need to hear, too. Because while the New Zealand fight over climate data appears to finally be over, it’s part of a much larger, ongoing war against evidence-based science.
From number crunching to controversy
In 1981, as part of my PhD work, I produced a seven-station New Zealand temperature series known as 7SS to monitor historic temperature trends and variations from Auckland to as far south as Dunedin in southern New Zealand.
A decade later, while at the NZ Meteorological Service in 1991-92, I revised the 7SS using a new homogenization approach to make New Zealand’s temperature records more accurate, such as adjusting for when temperature gauges were moved to new sites. For example, in 1928, Wellington’s temperature gauge was relocated […]
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Monday, January 27th, 2014
Stephan: Here is a very interesting take on the future of agriculture, and the failings of industrial chemical agriculture.
The era of large-scale monoculture, with all of its toxic pesticides and untested genetically modified organisms (GMOs), could finally be coming to an end. Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) discovered recently that yield expansion rates for most major industrial food crops are plateauing or even declining in many areas of the world, a fact that further supports the case for a return to small-scale, diversified agriculture grown organically.
Published in a recent issue of the journal Nature Communications, these and other findings, including updated projections on future crop yields, help obliterate the myth that modern, industrial methods of food production (e.g., transgenic modification, pesticide use and single-crop cultivation) have led to dramatic advancements in agriculture, when it has actually accomplished quite the opposite.
According to the data, as much as 31 percent of the global supply of rice, wheat and corn has reached a yield plateau. This means that, no matter how much further crop scientists try to tinker with our food plants, the resulting yield will not be any higher than it was prior. Further, a considerable percentage of these same crops are actually producing higher yields at a decreasing rate, which suggests that the system is ultimately failing.
“The […]
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Monday, January 27th, 2014
JONNY SCARAMANGA, - Leaving Fundamentalism
Stephan: I ran a story a while ago about "Christian" fundamentalist education trends. A young reader who had grown up in a Christian fundamentalist family and gone to "Christian" schools using the ACE program, covered in that article, wrote and sent me this one, telling me "every word in this story is true." Later in the day another reader sent it as well. This is how the new Dark Ages Trend is playing out as it involves tens of thousands of Theocratic Right families and their hundreds of thousands of children. A willfully ignorant cohort in our society, at a time when facts have never been more important.
There are ‘facts” in the ACE PACEs that are absolutely untrue. Now, you might be kind and say, ‘Perhaps they are mistakes.” But these errors have remained in the PACEs through successive reprints, and they are things which were known to be untrue long before the PACEs went into print in the first place. Therefore, we can say that the writers didn’t care about factual accuracy. If you’re running an education system, that’s gross negligence and I feel no compunction about calling these things lies.
I called ACE on May 3rd, 2012, and was told that all of these PACEs are still in print and the content has not changed. These lies are still being taught in over fifty British schools today.
5. The Loch Ness Monster Disproves Evolution
This would be at number 1, but since it’s already been substantially covered in the Times Educational Supplement and the Guardian (at my instigation, please note), I don’t want you to feel you’re getting second-hand information. If you haven’t read the stories and can’t be bothered, Science PACE 1099 contains this priceless wisdom:
Some scientists speculate that Noah took small or baby dinosaurs on the Ark…. are dinosaurs still alive today? […]
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