Being a good father is hard enough when you live with your kids and see them every day. Take away that physical proximity, and many men feel afloat, untethered from their children and unsure how to maintain an emotional connection with them – especially in the wake of a messy divorce.
Liberia may be winning its war against Ebola, but ongoing construction on new patient treatment centers has left some discontented.
“It just makes no sense,” Laurence Sailly told The Washington Post.
Sailly, the head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Liberia, is part of a pool of officials claiming the new centers are and will be inconsequential — merely reflecting the international community’s belated reaction to an epidemic that is now under control. Liberia only detected eight cases of the disease last week — dramatically down from more than 300 a week in September — according to the World Health Organization.
The critique hasn’t sat well with UNICEF, the humanitarian organization largely responsible for ongoing construction efforts.
“Halting construction now would cause much bigger problems for the community,” Sheldon Yett of UNICEF told The Washington Post. “They’ve agreed to them, they’ve supported them, and they’re employed there.”
UNICEF isn’t planning on abandoning its long-term strategy because of one fading epidemic, as it aims to prepare the region for future health emergencies. In December, the organization announced expanded efforts in West Africa, costing $500 million, to continue fighting Ebola and strengthen health infrastructures.
Funding for the initiative would help build 300 community care, transit and observation centers, as well as rapid isolation facilities in rural areas, throughout West Africa. It also will provide child protection services for up to 10,000 children whose caregivers have died in the outbreak, among other initiatives.
“It is no coincidence that Ebola has emerged in three countries with fragile health systems,” Dr. Peter Salama, UNICEF’s global Ebola coordinator, said in a press release. “Public health services in Ebola-affected countries could emerge much stronger if we make the right investments now, in the right places –- above all at the doorstep of the communities where people most need those critical services.”
Toward the end of last year, the world scrambled to help West Africa. In September, President Obama announced that nearly 4,000 military personnel would be sent to the hardest-hit regions, the Associated Press reported. The U.S. has allocated about $750 million to combat and contain the epidemic.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) predicted that 1.4 million people could be affected by Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia by the end of January. Now, the disease has infected 21,724 people and killed 8,641, according to the World Health Organization — far lower than worse-case scenario estimates.
Those figures could have been much lower, however, if the centers “had been built when we needed them,” Moses Massaquoi, the Liberian government’s chairman for Ebola case management, told The Washington Post.
And that’s why UNICEF says its there to stay — to better prepare for the next time West Africa is in crisis.
“As we take the fight against Ebola into communities,” Salama explained. “We can also seize an opportunity to help build robust primary health care and other social services that will provide long-term benefits for children and families, after Ebola has been defeated.”
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More than 350 million people globally suffer from depression, and 1 in 13 people around the world have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Overall, the World Health Organization estimates that roughly 450 million people suffer from some form of mental or neurological disorder — and that roughly one in four people will be affected at some point in their lives.
These numbers are staggering. With the rise of mental illness and the increasingly pressing need for effective treatments, there’s never been a more important moment for mindfulness — the ability to cultivate a focused, non-judgmental awareness on the present moment. Research has shown mindfulness and meditation-based programs to hold promise for treating a number of psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
As research has mounted in recent years, mindfulness has migrated from spiritual retreat centers to medical facilities. Now, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) — the largest scientific organization in the world dedicated to research on the understanding and treatment of mental illness — is getting serious about investigating mindfulness as a complementary treatment for a range of mental health conditions.
On Friday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson and NIMH director Tom Insel joined a conversation hosted by NPR science correspondent Joe Palca about how mindfulness affects the brain and might lead to improved clinical applications for the treatment of a range of mental health conditions.
Check out the video above to watch the full conversation.
So what exactly is mindfulness, and how can it improve psychological well-being?
“Mindfulness is about being fully aware in the present moment,” said Davidson. “It’s about bringing out attention back to the present moment and not getting carried away by our thoughts.”
Attention is highly trainable through various mindfulness practices like meditation, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), according to Davidson. “We can actually educate our attention,” he said.
Mindfulness helps to train individuals in bringing back the attention time and time again when it has wandered. And it is precisely through helping individuals to not get carried away by their thoughts that mindfulness has been shown to be so effective for conditions like anxiety and depression. In fact, a landmark recent study from researchers at Lund University showed a group mindfulness treatment to be as effective as traditional talk therapy for treating anxiety and depression.
Evidence of the efficacy of these mindfulness-based treatments continues to grow. According to Insel, there are now nearly 500 scientific studies on mindfulness/meditation and the brain in the National Institute of Health’s PubMed database.
Mindfulness makes a whole lot of sense as a therapeutic intervention for these conditions.
“When they’re depressed, people are locked in the past. They’re ruminating about something that happened that they can’t let go of,” said Insel. “When they’re anxious, they’re ruminating about the future — it’s that anticipation of what they can’t control.”
In contrast, when we are mindful, we are focused on the here and now. Mindfulness trains individuals to turn their attention to what is happening in the present moment.
On a neurological level, we’re beginning to have a better understanding of the brain changes that underlie the improvements in psychological well-being and reduction of mental health symptoms that have been documented with mindfulness trainings.
Importantly, research has shown mindfulness to increase activity in brain areas associated with attention and emotion regulation. Mindfulness also facilitates neuroplasticity — the creation of new connections and neural pathways in the brain.
“What we call meta-cognitive learning — learning to watch your own mind and to be introspective in that sense — does have an impact on brain pathways long-term,” said Insel.
This knowledge about the neurology of mindfulness could one day lead to improved clinical treatments.
But it’s important to note that the beneficial effects of mindfulness also extend to non-clinical populations. Anyone can stand to benefit from learning to cultivate a focused, non-judgmental awareness on the present moment — particularly in our busy modern lifestyles that are often characterized by stress, sleep deprivation, multitasking and digital distractions.
Mindfulness research pioneer and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was in the audience at Davos, stood up at the end of the conversation to share his thoughts on the mindful revolution in mental healthcare, which he noted has been well underway for several decades. As Kabat-Zinn explained, research and testimonials from patients and clinicians suggest that we can turn “the medication down and the meditation up.”
“We’ve seen this in the clinical domain for many years. People, in concert with their physicians… actually going off their medications for pain, for anxiety, for depression, as they begin to learn the self-regulatory elements of mindfulness,” said Kabat-Zinn. “They discover that the things that used to be symptomatically problematic for them are no longer arising at the same level.”
As New Yorkers we know we live in a diverse city where immigrants and their children comprise close to 60 percent of the population. We ride the subway and hear a mix of the 176 languages estimated to be spoken by New York City students’ families. We gaze at streetscapes filled with mosques, churches, synagogues and temples, some majestic and some low-slung storefronts. We savor the wealth of our boroughs’ cuisines. Yet most of the time we have little knowledge of the real human stories behind the respective religions, foodways and languages that make our city great and give it its cosmopolitan identity.
“Your Story, Our Stories,” a new program at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, invites New York City students and teachers to explore their own family’s origins as part of their immigration units. We use our mission — connecting past to present — to link the curriculum’s focus on turn-of-the-20th century immigration to turn-of-the-21st century immigration. We apply the museum’s core principle — that ordinary people shape history — to make the students feel that their stories are important, and to empower them to become historians to find out why.
First, students visit the Tenement, delving into the past as they explore recreated early 20th century apartments and learn the immigrant family stories through objects: a Greek Jewish girl’s manta, or blanket; an Italian mother’s rosary, a Polish Jew’s sewing shears. After the visit, museum educators prepare the students to become family historians, and travel deep into their own homes to find and photograph objects, interview family and write essays explaining how the object sheds light on their families’ immigration or migration story.
We piloted the program last spring with PS 130, in Brooklyn, and we saw how the research and writing encouraged the students to weave their family story into the broader immigration narrative. When Ipaj’s mother emigrated from Bangladesh to the United States in 1999, his grandfather gave her the family’s Janamaz, or prayer mat. Ipaj wrote:
When my mother uses the Janamaz, she remembers the memories she had with my grandfather and sometimes smells him. I have many questions for him like: Where did you get it? How much was it? Why did you buy this specific one? This is why the prayer mat is priceless in my family.
Ipaj’s reflections on his prayer mat show both the continuities and ruptures of immigration. A tangible, tactile link to family in Bangladesh, the Janamaz motivates Ipaj, born in Brooklyn, to continue the Muslim traditions, and Ipaj emphasizes that he, his father, mother and siblings all pray on the mat. That very connection sparks questions about the mat’s origins, and the family left behind.
Taken on its own, it’s a powerful story. Yet when we place the Janamaz alongside an Israeli Hanukkah menorah, a Polish Easter basket, an Ecuadorian chicken whistle, a Puerto Rican keychain, an Italian teacup, a Mexican guacamole dish, a Trinidadian roti pan and dozens of objects and documents from the entire fifth grade class, the collective story increases in power and complexity. As a culminating activity, we invited the students, teachers, parents and siblings to the Museum for an exhibit of objects.
One by one, students rose to present their stories. Massimo shared a black-and-white photo of Silvia, a teenager who left Italy in 1958 because, as he explained, “My grandmother’s family was poor” and they came to America “for a better life.” Josh held on to Jamaican money in tribute to his beloved grandmother, who sold vegetables to earn the funds to send Josh’s mother to the United States. Miah shared her Palestinian great grandmother’s recipe for a treasured date pastry that sweetens family birthdays and holidays even after her passing; her classmate Tony also featured a recipe of a sweet potato pie.
Together, the two recipes — one the result of immigration from another continent, the other the product of African American migration from the South to the North — show how New York families transmit heritage through foods that punctuate life cycles and holidays generations later. While Miah and Tony are several generations removed from immigration and migration, their classmate Jubyaid is much closer to it, but she also discovered connections. Initially she wrote that the samosa “reminds [her] of Bengali people gathered together talking and laughing,” but then she “learned from [her] classmates samosas are called by other names in different cultures” and many cultures value “the idea of having a pocket to hold a treasure of yummy food.”
The parents in the audience beamed when their own children rose, but also paid close attention to the stories of their classmates. For some — the Irish, Italians, East European Jews — the experience of migration was three or four generations behind them, and it was only this assignment that had catalyzed them to pass on and explain the scant information and the few objects — cameos, jewelry, photographs — still remaining. For many others, immigration was their personal story, and virtually any object in the home could serve as a lens on the still unfolding dynamic. Yet seeing the object in the context of an American school curriculum in an American museum lent a new frame to that familiar story: the family Janamaz, yerba mate, guacamole bowl, Easter basket was part of the American story.
Suzanne O’Donnell, a parent, explained,
“Of course we know PS 130 is a diverse school but it was really eye-opening to stop and realize that while our ancestors immigrated over 100 years ago (to this very neighborhood as a matter of fact), so many of Nora’s classmates immigrated within the last 10-20 years. Regardless of when they came to New York or where they came from, these immigrants each brought something with them from their country of origin to remember “home” or family.”
Overall, despite the variations in time of arrival (spanning almost a century), and the points of origin (spanning the globe), what resonated was the universal dynamics in immigration and migration: the striving and sacrifice for a better life and the immigrants’ and migrants’ desire to at once bequeath new opportunities to themselves and their children yet also retain and transmit their own cultures. The students’ diverse objects provide intimate windows on these cultures, and in the process, show how understanding the very substance of diversity actually reveals a more concrete sense of our shared New York and American identity.
This spring, the Museum is expanding this program, returning to PS 130’s fifth grade, and also working with over a dozen additional elementary schools and colleges and universities across the boroughs. We’re reaching out to community centers, and our own museum visitors from across the country to collect more object stories. We are exhibiting them on a website, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Trust for Historic Places, which will publicly launch later in the year. In the meantime, we invite you to share a photo of your own family object and its immigration/migration story. The more stories and objects we exhibit, the more opportunities we have to showcase the particularities of the various cultures that comprise our cities, as well as the universal dynamics that shape our nation.
Bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel made waves earlier this month with his New York Times op-ed about how annual physical exams — arguably the cornerstone of preventive medicine — are a waste of time and money.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Emanuel continued to make his case against the preventive health measure in an interview with HuffPost Live’s Jonathan Cohn, saying that overwhelming data from studies involving tens of thousands of people show that the annual exam makes no difference when it comes to improving health outcomes or extending lives.
Of course, Emanuel clarified, his position is only that healthy people with no existing conditions, complaints or symptoms should skip their annual.
“I’m not saying don’t go to the doctor when you have a complaint, or if you have an ongoing health problem, like you’ve got diabetes or high cholesterol or high blood pressure or cardiac risk factors,” he said. Emanuel also emphasized the importance of certain screening exams, like the mammogram, colonoscopy and the pap smear, to overall health. But an annual physical exam isn’t needed in addition to those regularly scheduled tests, he explained.
“Everyone’s talking about doctor shortage and all these other things — well, if we’re spending time with healthy people who don’t really need to be seen, that takes time away from sick people who really do need the time,” Emanuel continued.
Eventually, Emanuel predicts that annual physical exams will become obsolete once national health store chains like CVS and Walgreens install an infrastructure to collect blood samples and send them to your doctor — especially crucial for things like high cholesterol, which can creep up over time with no symptoms. After getting the results, said Emanuel, your doctor will email you to either congratulate you on your health or work with you to create some lifestyle changes. And it’ll be all over email, and without the need for an annual physical exam.
“That’s the wave of the future,” said Emanuel. “The idea that you have to go in to see your doctor for 15 or 30 minutes to get a blood test is ludicrous!”
Yale University President Peter Salovey told HuffPost Live on Friday that issues of communication failure or alcohol use “can’t be used to blame victims” of sexual violence.
Speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Salovey said he considers sexual violence a challenge on every campus, one “we have to take seriously” and one “that’s very real.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to talk about these issues because they’re very personal,” Salovey said.
However, he continued, it’s something he thinks universities need to step up and work to prevent.
“People have a right to expect that they are not going to be subject to unwelcome sexual advances, let alone rape,” Salovey told HuffPost. “That is a fair and appropriate thing to say, ‘I should be able to come to a campus and it doesn’t happen.'”
Watch more of the conversation in the video above.
There’s a good chance you have at least one universal remote in your home. While it may be able to work across a few different devices, we don’t really bother with figuring out what codes to enter to make everything work together. This usually results in 4 or more remotes hanging out on the living room table. Invariably, one of them goes missing and it’s always the one that changes the channel.
Instead of wishing you had entered the codes (which even when you do find the remote you know you’ll never actually do it), wouldn’t it be better to get a universal remote that actually does its job? The NEEO is a true to term universal remote that can connect to tens of thousands of devices as soon as you take it out of the box. There are two aspects to this remote, one being the brain and the other being an actual remote. The brain is what controls all of your gadgets and gizmos, while the remote is your interface.
The remote has a 291 ppi display, a few standard buttons for general media, and hand recognition that will be able to tell if it’s your palm holding it and immediately bring up your favorite playlists, movies, and more. The remote runs off of rechargeable batteries that won’t need to be plugged in for months at a time, and should you happen to lose this in the couch cushions you can activate an alarm through your phone which will make it chirp until located. This will cost you anywhere from $219-249, and plays nicely with iOS and Android phones. If you’d rather only have the brain you can use your smartphone as the remote and the cost will be reduced to $148.
Available for crowdfunding on Kickstarter
[ Neeo is what a universal remote should be copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
Amiibo has become quite a hit for Nintendo, and the company seems keen to roll out as many characters as it can as soon as possible. YouTuber Mema Haxx – who created the Wii U GamePad hack libdrc –seems to have uncovered at least two Amiibo that have yet to be released or announced. Either that or he created these from scratch, which would be even more impressive.
Mema Haxx recently showed Amiibos of Mr. Game & Watch and the dog and duck from Duck Hunt being used in Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U. Here’s Mr. Game & Watch:
Here’s the Duck Hunt duo:
It’s more logical to assume that these two characters are already stored in the game or at least had their data leaked rather than created from scratch. But if it’s the latter then Nintendo is screwed. Keep an eye on Mema Haxx’s YouTube page for updates.
[via Kotaku]
The infamous Silk Road resurrected itself like a junkie phoenix this month, leaving its long-time residence on Tor for a new anonymizing service called the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P. News of the high-profile dark market’s new address nudged the little-known I2P into the spotlight. Now, after a decade in the dark, the project is emerging as an alternative destination for cybercrime, and a strong complement or even alternative to its older sibling Tor.
Instead of a more traditional push-button on/off switch, this five-inch pocketable flashlight from Foursevens uses a bolt-action mechanism to turn on and off, or toggle between one of four different output modes including an emergency SOS signal.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
