Links - 25th July 2019 (2)

Racial and gender biases plague postdoc hiring - "Faculty members in biology viewed male and female applicants to be similarly competent and likely to be hired—a result that Eaton “was happily surprised to see.” But in physics, it was a different story: Faculty members preferred male applicants, giving them a one-point higher competence rating—on a nine-point scale—and a two-point higher hireability rating than female applicants.Faculty members in both disciplines exhibited racial bias. In physics, Asian and White applicants were given higher competence and hireability ratings than Black and Latino applicants. In biology, Asian and White applicants were viewed as more competent than Black applicants. Asian applicants were also viewed as more hirable than Black and Latino applicants. (The ratings they gave other groups didn’t statistically differ.)"
Of course they can frame this as 'white supremacy' by claiming Asians have 'whiteness' rather than consider why Asians and Whites might be preferred

iPadOS first look: how Apple’s new tablet OS will boost iPad user experience - "the photos illustrating this piece are from Apple’s official media site, but I couldn’t directly download the original zipped files to my iPad Pro because the device lacks a download manager and the ability to store files locally. Instead, I had to send the photos to my Android smartphone, which has a download and storage system akin to computers, and unzipped them there."
To bad for iPhone users

She Put Our Dogs Down When We Divorced – The Narrative - "Six months later, when our divorce was final, I asked my daughter how her mom was doing. She looked down at the floor, cleared her throat, and scuffed her feet. “Mom’s doing OK,” she said without looking at me, “She had the dogs put to sleep.”My mouth fell open to the floor. I was livid.Burn the butcher block clock I’d made as a gift for our fifth wedding anniversary? Sure.Pawn all the jewelry I’d bought over the years? You bet.Kill living creatures who loved you as a parent? Karma’s going to be waiting for you.I’ve discovered since then; this is not an uncommon thing in a divorce"
Meanwhile there're women who fight for custody of dogs just to put them to sleep

Man jailed for hitting autistic 5-year-old boy at Yishun indoor playground - "The boy tried to take the shovel again and when he could not, he became frustrated and hit Soo’s back. Soo then kicked the victim on his abdomen, causing the boy to stagger backwards. Soo also threw the shovel to the side so that the boy would stop approaching him, the court heard.When the child tried to hug him from behind a short while later, Soo pushed him again.The boy hit Soo on the back in response. Soo then stood up, swung his right arm backwards and hit the boy’s upper body. This caused the boy to fall backwards and onto a slide."
Self-defence against persistent attacks is a crime

How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "There are a lot of reasons why it may be easier to change your mind when you’re younger. It could be the fact that your brain is simply more plastic then — something scientists assumed for a long time but now are starting to question. Or it could be that your positions are less entrenched, so it’s less costly to change them. Or it could be that the stakes are lower: the fate of the world doesn’t hinge on whether you are pro-broccoli or anti-broccoli... most people were not able to explain climate-change policies in much detail. But here’s what’s interesting. The level of confidence in their understanding of issues, which participants were asked to report at the start of the experiment, was drastically reduced after they tried, and failed, to demonstrate their understanding...
SLOMAN: If instead of saying, “Explain how the policy works,” if what we said to them was, “Give us all the reasons you have for your view on this policy,” then we didn’t get that effect at all. That didn’t reduce people’s sense of understanding; it didn’t reduce their hubris."

Algeria shuts southern borders to Syrians over security fears - "Algeria has barred all Syrians from entering the country via its southern border with Mali and Niger to keep out members of defeated rebel groups from Syria deemed to pose a security risk"
Islamophobia!

Morocco slams Algeria over expelling Syrian refugees to its borders - "“It is immoral and unethical to manipulate the moral and physical distress of these people, (and) to sow trouble in the Morocco-Algerian border.”"

Pluralist - Twitter Slams Parents of 10-Year-Old Drag Queen for ‘Child Abuse’ - "“Desmond Is Amazing” introduces himself in the video as a “drag kid” who lives in New York City.”... “If you don’t see that this child is being exploited then ideology has possessed you to the core.”... “If this were a little girl, @HuffPost would be calling it sexist & the fault of the patriarchy.”

It's time to start calling this what it is: Pedophilia - "VICE Canada is celebrating the next generation of drag queens with a video promoting a new documentary about preteen drag kids.The documentary follows four young boys dressed as sexualised women parading about on stage for the entertainment of adults... "In what moral universe is it acceptable to encourage a 10-year-old boy to dress like an adult male mimicking a sexualized adult female, use that as a ticket to fame and then claim it as virtue?""

Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "Kids can handle the kink at Pride parades, families say"
"“Children” and “kink” are two works that don’t belong together but this is the far left and what they want."
"Don’t forget “drag kids” and “drag queen story hour”. They’re using the LGBT community as a shield because they think people won’t speak up against these things in the fear of being labelled a homophobe or transphobe. I think they’re wrong. Sexualisation of children is a step too far. I reckon most people would gladly die on that hill."

Keith Douglas - Photos from Toronto Pride 2019. All the yellow... - "Photos from Toronto Pride 2019. All the yellow dots are covering private areas that are actually exposed in the original photos. I covered them just so the image remains FB friendly.This is taking place in a public space. You'll notice cops in one photo (doing nothing about the public indecency) and a child in another photo. There are many other photos out there, these are just some that I came across online.Now I am all for the LBGTQ having equal rights (not special rights). I am even all for them having pride events where they celebrate it. I simply have a problem with the events involving nudity and kink in public spaces where children are involved.By all means, do whatever you want at a private, 18+ only event. Go all out. Be as sexually free as you could possibly want to be. No shame! Have fun!Just leave the kids and public spaces out of it."

The Truth About Waiting to See a Doctor in Canada - "On average, Canadians pay 30 percent of their total health costs where the provincial plans cover 70 percent. So in that bucket would be medications, if you weren’t in a program — durable medical equipment, other health disciplines like psychotherapy, physiotherapy, social work outside of the hospital, skilled nursing, or nursing care in your home. It’s not that none of that is covered, but a lot of that is not covered... the one that people will talk about [for long wait times] is cataracts, hip surgeries, non — not cancer type surgeries, where there — things will get worse if you don’t get treated. And so you can wait months for those surgeries."

8 facts that explain what’s wrong with American health care - "If the health-care system were to break off from the United States and become its own economy, it would be the fifth-largest in the world... The US, which has a mostly private health-care system, manages to spend more on its public health-care system than countries where the health-care system is almost entirely public. America's government spends more, as a percentage of the economy, on public health care than Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, or Australia. It spends even more than that on private health care... we have much higher administrative costs than most other countries... American hospitals tend to throw more technology at health problems — a heart attack, for example, is treated with more scans and tests in America than elsewhere, and that also drives up the price of going to the doctor in the United States... we've created a tax system where the people with good jobs are getting their health care subsidized by the people with worse jobs or even no jobs... here's one fact about insurers that often gets lost in the debate over health care: Their profit margins tend to be relatively small... As to who makes the most money, it's mostly drug companies and device manufacturers — the people who make the things that insurance companies buy. They typically run profit margins around 20 percent. One reason the cost of American health care is so high is that insurers are so weak. Having hundreds of different carriers, for example, means no one insurer has lots of negotiating power — hence those high prices drug and device makers can charge."

The U.S. Leads the World in Health-Care Spending (The Worst Patients in the World) - "One hint that patient behavior matters a lot is the tremendous variation in health outcomes among American states and even counties, despite the fact that they are all part of the same health-care system. A 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that 74 percent of the variation in life expectancy across counties is explained by health-related lifestyle factors such as inactivity and smoking, and by conditions associated with them, such as obesity and diabetes—which is to say, by patients themselves... healthy community norms are particularly evident in certain places with strong outcome-to-cost ratios, like Sweden. Americans, with our relatively weak sense of community, are harder to influence... Saha fostered health-boosting relationships within patient communities. She notes that patients in groups like these have been shown to have significantly better outcomes for an array of conditions, including diabetes and depression, than similar patients not in groups... we must consider Americans’ fairly unusual belief that, when it comes to medical care, money is no object. A recent survey of 10,000 patients found that only 31 percent consider cost very important when making a health-care decision—versus 85 percent who feel this way about a doctor’s “compassion.” That’s one big reason the push for “value-based care,” which rewards providers who keep costs down while achieving good outcomes, is not going well: Attempts to cut back on expensive treatments are met with patient indignation... Lopes has also practiced in Singapore, where his very first patient shocked him by refusing the moderately expensive but effective treatment he prescribed for her cancer—a choice that turns out to be common among patients in Singapore, who like to pass the money in their government-mandated health-care savings accounts on to their children. Most experts agree that American patients are frequently overtreated, especially with regard to expensive tests that aren’t strictly needed. The standard explanation for this is that doctors and hospitals promote these tests to keep their income high. This notion likely contains some truth. But another big factor is patient preference. A study out of Johns Hopkins’s medical school found doctors’ two most common explanations for overtreatment to be patient demand and fear of malpractice suits—another particularly American concern... some of his patients used to come in demanding laparoscopic surgery to investigate abdominal pain that would almost certainly have gone away on its own. “I told them about the risks of the surgery, but I couldn’t talk them out of it, and if I refused, my liability was huge”... In most of the world, what the doctor says still goes... American patients’ flagrant disregard for routine care is another problem. Take the failure to stick to prescribed drugs, one more bad behavior in which American patients lead the world. The estimated per capita cost of drug noncompliance is up to three times as high in the U.S. as in the European Union. And when Americans go to the doctor, they are more likely than people in other countries to head to expensive specialists. A British Medical Journal study found that U.S. patients end up with specialty referrals at more than twice the rate of U.K. patients. They also end up in the ER more often, at enormous cost. According to another study, this one of chronic migraine sufferers, 42 percent of U.S. respondents had visited an emergency department for their headaches, versus 14 percent of U.K. respondents. Finally, the U.S. stands out as a place where death, even for the very aged, tends to be fought tooth and nail, and not cheaply"

Do I really need a primary-care doctor? - "the commonly held belief that we all need a yearly physical is false. An annual physical is not currently recommended for the healthy adults by the governing health bodies in the US, Canada, or the UK... America’s physician workforce is composed of roughly 33% primary-care doctors and 67% specialists. Other high-performing health care systems, like Canada or Australia, have more balanced ratios... the lifestyle of a specialist is far better, involving less punishing hours while making millions of dollars more over their careers... Kids need a consistent pediatrician. The elderly need a consistent internist. The chronically ill, no matter their age, need a consistent team and place to receive care. But for the rest of us—around 75% of the population—the old-fashioned “doctor-patient relationship” is unrealistic and largely unnecessary in our society. Rather than spend time and energy trying to pin down a primary-care doctor, it could well make more sense to simply stick with an urgent-care clinic when you come down with the flu."

We Have Too Many Specialists and Too Few General Practitioners - "Wherever I travel around the world, I find the same problem -- too few GP's, too many specialists... Medical mistakes are far too common because each specialist is treating (or more likely over treating) her own pet organ. No one is considering the whole patient to organize a global, integrated, safe, and effective treatment plan. The less time doctors talk to patients, the more unneeded, costly, and often harmful are the tests and treatments they order."

America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care - "Virtually every family in the country, the research indicates, has been subject to overtesting and overtreatment in one form or another. The costs appear to take thousands of dollars out of the paychecks of every household each year. Researchers have come to refer to financial as well as physical “toxicities” of inappropriate care—including reduced spending on food, clothing, education, and shelter. Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm... The United States is a country of three hundred million people who annually undergo around fifteen million nuclear medicine scans, a hundred million CT and MRI scans, and almost ten billion laboratory tests. Often, these are fishing expeditions, and since no one is perfectly normal you tend to find a lot of fish. If you look closely and often enough, almost everyone will have a little nodule that can’t be completely explained, a lab result that is a bit off, a heart tracing that doesn’t look quite right.Excessive testing is a problem for a number of reasons. For one thing, some diagnostic studies are harmful in themselves—we’re doing so many CT scans and other forms of imaging that rely on radiation that they are believed to be increasing the population’s cancer rates. These direct risks are often greater than we account for.What’s more, the value of any test depends on how likely you are to be having a significant problem in the first place. If you have crushing chest pain and shortness of breath, you start with a high likelihood of having a serious heart condition, and an electrocardiogram has significant value. A heart tracing that doesn’t look quite right usually means trouble. But, if you have no signs or symptoms of heart trouble, an electrocardiogram adds no useful information; a heart tracing that doesn’t look quite right is mostly noise. Experts recommend against doing electrocardiograms on healthy people, but millions are done each year, anyway... we’ve added thousands of dollars in costs and, sometimes, physical risks, not to mention worry and days of missed work. Overtesting has also created a new, unanticipated problem: overdiagnosis. This isn’t misdiagnosis—the erroneous diagnosis of a disease. This is the correct diagnosis of a disease that is never going to bother you in your lifetime... the number of people with permanent complications from thyroid surgery has skyrocketed... unnecessary care often crowds out necessary care, particularly when the necessary care is less remunerative... unnecessary care could crowd out necessary care—but enough that dedicated primary care could cut death rates in half?"