“Like people of Middle Eastern and North African origins, millions of other Americans have been funneled into one side of our country’s enduring binary of whiteness or the other. According to today’s census forms, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Slavs (who were systematically excluded for a century), and Jews—who are still the target of white-supremacist violence—are indistinct from people with Mayflower backgrounds. Being an unspecified “white” person has allowed many of us to blend in, when the most unifying thing we might do in this era of identity-driven polarization is acknowledge all the ways we are different. Today’s nationalist identity politics are … Read More
All posts by Anupam
The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour offers an on-the-ground look at the mental health crisis teenagers are facing. “[New York Times’ Ezra Klein] [..] What has always been difficult about being a teenager? [Clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers” and “Under Pressure” Lisa Damour] Well, we have a few cardinal rules in psychology, and one is that change equals stress. And if you look at an 11-year-old, which is typically when we mark the beginning of adolescence, and you look at a, say, 17 or 18-year-old, so someone who’s pretty far down the line of being a … Read More
“In 2023, just under 2 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer. Many will endure multiple CT and MRI studies and intensive medical care, including surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or immunotherapy. Fortunately, advances in treatment and novel therapies have steadily improved survival following a cancer diagnosis. Cancer death rates have declined by 27% over the past 20 years. Unfortunately, many American cancer patients also face an unexpected adverse effect: financial toxicity. The costs of cancer are literally killing patients. But there is a clear solution. Patients diagnosed with cancer should not be responsible for any deductibles, copays, or other cost-sharing. [..] … Read More
“In her newest book, “Saving Time,” Jenny Odell, a visual artist and the author of the best-selling “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” argues that standard ways of thinking about time — particularly regarding work and what time is owed and to whom — can obscure potentially more humane and expansive, less self-centered notions of time, views that go beyond restrictive notions of efficiency or work-life balance. “I’m really trying to work against an instrumental view of time,” says Odell, who is 37, “where it’s either something that is going to help you or hurt you.” [..] [Marchese] … Read More
“Data and Methods Data We used data from the American Hospital Association (AHA) IT [information technology] Supplement Survey fielded between April and September 2021, an annual survey of hospitals on their IT capabilities and experiences. The AHA IT supplement is sent to Chief Information Officers and completed by those individuals or their delegates. [..] We combined this data with information on hospital characteristics from the 2020 AHA Annual Survey, the most recent year available. [..] Perceived information blocking [..] For health IT developers, hospitals were asked if they had experienced information blocking via price; contractual language; artificial technical, process or resource … Read More
From the article abstract: “[Objective] [..] We developed machine-learning models to detect CKD [chronic kidney disease] without blood collection, predicting an eGFR [estimated glomerular filtration rate in ml/min/1.73 m2] less than 60 (eGFR60 model) or 45 (eGFR45 model) using a urine dipstick test. [Materials and Methods] The electronic health record data (n = 220 018) obtained from university hospitals were used for XGBoost-derived model construction. The model variables were age, sex, and 10 measurements from the urine dipstick test. The models were validated using health checkup center data (n = 74 380) and nationwide public data (KNHANES data, n = 62 945) for the general population in Korea. [Results] The … Read More
“In his telling, Medicine 2.0 is oriented toward addressing the four chronic diseases of aging that will probably be the cause of most of our deaths, but only after they become problems. (Those chronic diseases are heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases and Type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction.) Medicine 3.0, though, aims to proactively prevent those things for as long as possible and allow us to maintain better health deeper into old age. How exactly? Not through any techno-fantasies of biohacking or wonder-drug supplements but largely with highly rigorous, detailed and personalized monitoring and treatment of our nutrition, … Read More
“At a 1992 conference on birth control, an official on the F.D.A.’s fertility and maternal health drugs advisory committee, Philip Corfman, noted that the birth control pill is safer than aspirin, which is available over the counter. The F.D.A. subsequently announced plans to convene a hearing to consider moving oral contraceptives over-the-counter. It was believed that this would greatly expand access to birth control by bypassing doctors, to whom millions of Americans then — as still now — had little access. But, as the historian Heather Munro Prescott has recounted, the hearing was canceled at least partly because of criticism from … Read More
Khan Academy is using ChatGPT to bring one-on-one teaching to scale. “Millions of students use Khan Academy’s online videos and problem sets to supplement their schoolwork. Three years ago, Sal Khan and I spoke about developing a tool like the Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” It’s an education tablet, in the author’s words, in which “the pictures moved, and you could ask them questions and get answers.” Adaptive, intuitive, personalized, self-paced—nothing like today’s education. But it’s science-fiction. Last week I spoke with Mr. Khan, who told me, “Now I think a Primer is within … Read More
Breakthroughs are the product of persistence, not magic. Excerpt – About 10 years ago, the management professors Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren encountered a paradox. On the one hand, we recognize that other people are more likely to make creative breakthroughs when they persist. Thomas Edison—for many the personification of creative genius—famously experimented with hundreds of materials before inventing the light bulb. On the other hand, when we feel stuck on a problem, most of us fail to see how successful we’ll be if we just keep trying. We tend to believe that our creativity plummets over time—that if our … Read More