Stephan: If you read SR you know that I find the student debt situation in the United States, which is unique in the developed world, as a national shame, particularly when you bear in mind the recent report I published showing that many college graduates in the U.S. can't do work routinely done by highschool graduates in other developed nations. As quoted in this report, "Warren charges that the federal government is projected to earn $110 billion in profits from student loans over the next decade due in part to the department's 'failure to implement congressional directives or utilize its discretionary authority to protect our most vulnerable borrowers.'" Does this seem like sound policy to you?
Senator Elizabeth Warren
Credit: Susan Walsh/AP
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) isn’t just a thorn in the side of Wall Street banks. She’s also happy to go head-to-head with the Obama administration when she feels the president’s team is part of the problem.
Right now, the issue fueling a dispute between Warren and the White House is student loan debt. Last week, Warren sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan alleging that his department is not using many of the tools at its disposal to help Americans who are struggling to pay back student loans. In particular, the department has authority to help students duped by predatory for-profit colleges, and Warren says they’re not using it.
Since her election to the Senate in 2012, Warren has devoted a lot of energy to tackling Americans’ $1.2 trillion in student loan debt. The first bill she introduced upon her arrival in the Senate in 2013 proposed allowing students to obtain loans at the same low rate […]
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2015
Ted Greenwald, - MIT Technology Review
Stephan: With very little public awareness neuroscience and behavioral psychology are quieting changing our politics and our marketing with the goal of manipulating you to perform or produce a particular outcome. And the corporations and politicians who are paying for this, don't want you to know you are being programmed.
Illustration of Nir Eyal’s habit-forming book
Credit: Nir Eyal
A middle-aged woman sits before a computer screen on the 11th floor of Expedia’s glass-clad headquarters in Seattle. Two electrodes are taped to her brow just above her left eye, two more on her left cheek. A one-way mirror reflects her face as she responds to requests issuing from a speaker mounted in the ceiling.
Behind the glass, a researcher directs the test subject as a half-dozen designers, engineers, and executives look on in rapt silence. “Okay, Shannon,” the researcher says. “Go to Expedia and start shopping for your trip to Hawaii.” The audience gazes intently at a large video display. A running graph of the electrodes’ output trails across the screen. The electrodes on the brow measure contraction of the muscles that activate frowning—a sign, according to the theory of facial electromyography, of concentration, tension, or irritation. Those on the cheek track the play of muscles involved in smiling, evidence of the warm glow of delight that […]
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Alexis C. Madrigal, - Fusion
Stephan: Here is the latest in genetic medicine. This vector of medicine is developing with astonishing speed, and holds profound and positive implications for humanity. Note that this is government funded research.
Colonel Dan Wattendorf, MD
Credit: Fusion
Saving the world from Ebola suddenly sounds so simple, as the solution spills from Colonel Dan Wattendorf’s mouth, up on the stage in the windowless banquet hall of this Marriott hotel south of San Francisco.
“We’re going to take the genetic code and put it into a format where you go to your drug store or doctor and get a shot in the arm,” Wattendorf told a room full of medical researchers and technologists. “There’s a low-cost of goods, no cold chain, and we would produce the correct antibody in [any] individual directly.”
Wattendorf, a clean-cut, angular triathlete, is a program manager for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the military’s far-out research wing. On this day, he’s speaking at a DARPA-sponsored conference called Biology Is Technology. And he’s telling the assembled group what he will reiterate in a one-on-one interview with me later: that the agency is on the verge of a revolutionary way of preventing mass outbreaks of diseases like […]
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Ismat Sarah Mangla, - International Business Times
Stephan: If you still have Roundup anywhere on your property please take it to a safe disposal site. For goodness sake don't just pour it down the drain or throw it in the trash. This is the latest report on Roundup, confirming yet again how dangerous to your health this herbicide is. I chose a conservative business publication's write up to show how even conservative media is beginning to understand this is the modern DDT.
A summary of the agency's findings discussed in this report was published Friday in the British journal
Lancet Oncology.
The active ingredient in Roundup, one of the world’s most popular weed killers — and the most commonly used one in the United States — has been declared a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the WHO, released the results of its review of five herbicides and pesticides on Friday.
The French-based agency ranks cancer-causing agents on four levels: known carcinogens, probably or possible carcinogens, not classifiable and probably not carcinogenic. The herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, was classified by IARC as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
But the classification is not binding, said the IARC. “It remains the responsibility of individual governments and other international organizations to recommend regulations, legislation or public health intervention,” the agency said in a statement. According to the Associated Press, the United States Environmental Protection Agency said it would consider the IARC’s evaluation.
The IARC did clarify that the new ruling is mostly directed at the industrial use of the herbicide, and that use by home gardeners does not fall under the same classification. Glyphosate is employed in more than 750 herbicide products and has been detected in the air, during spraying […]
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