Links - 4th March 2019 (2)

Middle school reduces bad behavior dramatically with 'reverse suspensions' that invite parents to school when students misbehave - "In a reverse suspension, instead of sending a child home, the student's parent is invited to come to school and spend the entire day by his side... the approach has helped the school reduce student suspensions by two thirds and bad behavior incidents by more than half. The school discovered that, for many students, suspensions were seen as a break from school, something they planned for... "Who as a parent wants to sit in class? It's embarrassing," parent Stephanie Howell told WOWK. “It's a good motivator to not have your parents come and sit with them.""

Immigrants have better mental health U.S. natives - "immigrants are less likely to experience anxiety, bipolar, depressive, and trauma-related disorders. One would think that the stress of moving to a new country, setting up a new life, and learning a new culture would be an assault on an immigrant's mental health. There's no doubt that doing so is stressful, but it turns out that the very reasons why immigration is so difficult are the same reasons why those who do immigrate successfully tend to be healthier and mentally tougher than average. This is referred to, appropriately enough, as the healthy migrant hypothesis... The logistical and financial barriers to immigration are likely what prevents unhealthy individuals from making it to the U.S. In fact, when these barriers are removed, the rates of mental disorders in immigrants tends to rise to U.S. levels. Puerto Ricans, for example, can freely travel to the mainland U.S. without going through immigration. As it turns out, they have comparable levels of mental illness as individuals from the mainland... Acculturation theory explains that immigrants who become more immersed in their adoptive culture—more acculturated—experience worse health outcomes than those who are less acculturated. For example, Hispanics in the U.S. who mostly speak Spanish and associate with other Spanish speakers are less likely to use drugs and eat fast food and are more likely to be physically active.In addition, immigrants who quickly become acculturated also report higher rates of discrimination than less-acculturated immigrants"
Maybe acculturation resulting in higher rates of reported discrimination is due to self-fulfilling prophecy

Sweeter than soda? The hidden sugars in bubble tea - "a 500ml cup of brown sugar boba milk can contain about 92g of sugar, about three times more than the amount of sugar in a 320ml can of Coca-Cola."

When Immigrants Come to the U.S., Their Gut Bacteria Americanizes - D-brief - "When immigrants and refugees move to the United States, their gut microbiome rapidly Westernizes and becomes less diverse, according to a new study that analyzed the effects of migration on Hmong and Karen immigrant communities in Minnesota... “We don’t know for sure whether lower microbiome diversity itself is bad for you or whether it is just an indication that something else is going wrong,” said study authors Dan Knights, a computational microbiologist, and Pajau Vangay, a research specialist in Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology, both at the University of Minnesota. “However, it is clear in our study that when people lose certain species of microbes, they also lose the ability to produce the enzymes that those microbes carry, and that is probably affecting the types of foods they can digest.”... our microbiome responds to things like diet and lifestyle, and that an unhealthy microbiome may play a role in metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes, as well as neurological disorders... food logs the study participants kept suggested that eating a more Western diet may be partly to blame for the changes. “Certainly diet is part of the cause but there are other factors like changes in stress, exercise, environment, water supply and medications that we were not able to measure,” the researchers said... They also picked out a correlation between changes to the microbiome and obesity in immigrant communities"

That Viral Video Of Toads Hitchhiking On A Friendly Python Is Actually Pure Filth - "2019 is full of horny toads confusedly sexually assaulting a gigantic python."

Half of people who think they have a food allergy do not – study

The military-industrial complex is now run by women - "The CEOs of four of the five biggest defense contractors are women. Watch Ali Velshi break down who is running Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing’s defense wing, and weapons negotiations for the U.S."
Yay feminism

Stop obsessing over George Soros and the Koch brothers - "The left-wing flapping about the Kochs and their “dark money,” flowing to think tanks, universities, and magazines is a mirror image of the Soros hysteria on the Right... the quest for dark plots and shadowy money is unhealthy because it serves as a substitute for a real debate over ideas and their merits. “Who pays you?” might be an effective debating shortcut but substantively it amounts to an ad hominem fallacy, devaluing democratic deliberation over policy and other important matters."
We can't trust the pro-vaccine lobby because they stand to benefit financially from people getting vaccinated

Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. - "We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain... Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 74% of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person. Facial features employed by the classifier included both fixed (e.g., nose shape) and transient facial features (e.g., grooming style). Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles"

How TV shows use serious archaeology to promote bogus history - The Washington Post - "a new show exploring “mysteries” of the ancient past premiered on Travel Channel: “Legends of the Lost with Megan Fox.” Its four episodes explore questions such as the role of female warriors in Viking society, the peopling of the Americas and the historical underpinnings of the legendary Trojan War. Interspersed with these well-studied topics, the show also makes more-dubious claims, such as proposing the existence of giants and that ancient stones may hold healing properties. In the process, it strands us in a landscape where objective facts are interspersed with myths in ways that threaten to leave the audience uncertain about what really happened in the human past."

Chinese arthouse film breaks box office records after viewers mistake it for romcom - "A Long Day’s Journey Into Night took $38m in China on its opening night on 31 December, beating the likes of Venom. This was thanks to an artful marketing campaign that timed screenings to end on the stroke of midnight, and encouraged audience members to lock lips in the final scene, mirroring the protagonists. As Variety reports, a campaign suggested the film (which has no connection to the classic Eugene O’Neill play) was the perfect first-date film"

'The drought is over': mass expiration of US copyright sees books, film and art enter public domain - "Robert Frost’s haunting little poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, entered the public domain in the US on 1 January alongside thousands of works, by authors from Agatha Christie to Virginia Woolf, in an unprecedented expiration of copyrights. Unprecedented because it has been 21 years since the last major expiration in the US: the passing of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act added a further 20 years to existing copyrights, meaning that the swathe of 1922 works which passed into the public domain in 1998, after a 75-year copyright term, are only now being followed by works first published in the US in 1923."

Civil War: Swedish Citizens Rise Up To Protest Globalism - "France’s "Yellow Vest" movement has also spread to at least three other European countries as citizens in Belgium, Germany, and Holland have also started to protest against the political elite."

Male Feminist Kills Himself After Girl He Loves Falsely Accuses Him of Sexual Abuse at Women's March - "Feminists are on the march in Argentina, both figuratively and literally. Earlier this month, a popular radio host was court-ordered to hold scripted conversations with gender specialists as punishment for making sexist statements on air. That was days after the country's parliament passed a law requiring all officials to undertake gender equality training."

Anxiety About Immigration is a Global Issue - "The percentage of people wanting fewer or no more immigrants coming to their country was higher in South Africa (65 percent), Argentina (61 percent), Kenya (60 percent), Nigeria (50 percent), India (45 percent), and Mexico (44 percent) than it was in Australia (38 percent), the U.K. (37 percent) or the U.S. (29 percent). In all 27 countries surveyed, less than a third of respondents said their country should let in more immigrants... The idea that so-called “nativism” or hostility towards immigration is confined to white Westerners is a fallacy; it is a global phenomenon that is often stronger in non-Western countries. Of course, I wouldn’t hold my breath for a spate of articles in international media on the worrying trend of “nativism” in India or condemnations of Kenyans for wanting fewer immigrants in their country. The moral outrage of many white progressives and most intellectuals of color in the West on this subject is solely reserved for white societies; if black or brown people share exactly the same sentiments that white people are being lambasted for, it will either be greeted with silence or with all sorts of justificatory rationalizations... dozens of African immigrants have been killed in attacks by South African locals who want them to “pack their bags and leave” as they are “stealing” jobs and resources and engaging in “criminal activities.” Sound familiar? Are these black South Africans attacking black African migrants because they hate black people?... the majority are concentrated in the rich West: Europe, North America and Oceania—all regions where international migrants account for at least 10 percent of the populations compared to a less than 2 percent share of the populations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean... Imagine how different the global discussion about immigration would be if there were as many Brits and Swedes migrating to Nigeria and Kenya as the other way round. It would be an infinitely more rational and objective discussion on the pros and cons of immigration in general as no particular race or ethnicity would be able to frame the discussion as an attack on them specifically. It would be easier—much easier—to acknowledge that anxiety about immigration is a global issue, not one confined to the West... In a 2017 survey of six African nations—Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Senegal and Tanzania—43–75 percent of the citizens said they would move elsewhere given the opportunity. This translates to well over 200 million people from these six countries alone who would emigrate if the opportunity arose, presumably to one of the world’s rich countries. This is the reality that Western governments cannot afford to ignore. The fact that so many Kenyans, Nigerians and South Africans would like to emigrate elsewhere but don’t want immigrants coming into their country is a testament to our universal human capacity for expecting from others what we ourselves are not ready to give."

Jazz guitarist Musa Manzini plays through brain surgery - "Musa Manzini was kept awake during the six-hour operation partly to preserve and restore his finger movements."

Cyberattack Disrupts Printing of Major Newspapers - The New York Times - "The Los Angeles Times says an unusual cyberattack that disrupted its printing operations and those at newspapers in San Diego and Florida over the weekend came from outside the United States, but it stopped short of accusing a specific foreign government. Computer malware attacks on infrastructure, while relatively rare, are hardly new: Russia has been credibly accused of shutting down power grids in Ukraine and a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia, Iran crippled a casino in Las Vegas, and the United States and Israel attacked a nuclear enrichment plant in Iran. But this would be the first known attack on major newspaper printing operations, and if politically motivated, it would define new territory in recent attacks on the media."

Happy New Year! May Your City Never Become San Francisco, New York or Seattle - The New York Times - "Seattle does not want to become San Francisco, a fate that has come to refer exclusively to the city’s worst traits: its $5,000-a-month rents, its homeless encampments and the ever-present dissonance between those two."

Population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago on the Downturn - "Even migration is bigger in Texas. Dallas leads all U.S. cities as the largest net gainer with 246 people arriving daily, according to a Bloomberg analysis of 2017 Census data on migration to the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. In 2014, the crown belonged to Houston with 269 migrants per day. After Dallas, Sun Belt beacons Phoenix, Tampa, Atlanta and Orlando round out the top five. Seattle, at number six with a gain of 116 people daily, is the only cold-weather destination in the top 10. The daily influx surpassed 100 people in nine cities, while Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles saw an exodus of more than 100 people every day."
If Blue States are so good, why are people fleeing them?