Thursday, July 25, 2013
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
A New Way of Understanding 'Eyes on the Street'
You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the streets voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/07/new-way-understanding-eyes-street/6276/
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/07/new-way-understanding-eyes-street/6276/
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Why We Need to Treat America's Poorest Neighborhoods Like Developing Countries
"It’s no mystery about why life expectancy is low in some areas," Fleming says. "Lots of factors influence health. The striking thing is that most of these factors we’re talking about intensely cluster geographically in the same places. Places with low life expectancy are the same places that have high infant mortality rates, high rates of asthma, high rates of obesity."
They're the same places that have few healthy food options, or no sidewalks to encourage walking, or less safety at night, or even greater rates of environmental pollution. This suggests the real public health challenge, as we've written before, is as much about place as it is about people. And that means the solutions should be about place, too.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Your Sedentary Lifestyle Is Turning You Into a Nervous Wreck
Monday, July 8, 2013
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
The Best Thing We Could Do About Inequality Is Universal Preschool
The latest research, from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by James Heckman and Lakshmi Raut, concludes that a policy of free preschool for all poor children would have a raft of cost-effective benefits for society and the economy: It would increase social mobility, reduce income inequality, raise college graduation rates, improve criminal behavior (saving some of the societal expenses associated with it), and yield higher tax revenue thanks to an increase in lifetime wages.
Keep such a policy in place for years, and its benefits accrue from one generation to the next. Put a child in preschool, in other words, and that improves her chances of graduating college. But it also improves the future education and earnings prospects of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, the quality of a school that a child attends later in life matters, too. And we'd be foolish to invest in preschool without continuing to invest in poor children as they age.
But this mounting evidence suggests that we should be front-loading our investment in the most disadvantaged children during the ages 2-4, when their brains develop at an extremely high rate, and while they're learning social, motivational, cognitive and analytical skills. Preschool is when kids first learn to work together in teams, to resolve problems, to listen and cooperate – all skills that directly come into play in the workforce.
Life cycle skill formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation. Motivation cross-fosters skill, and skill cross-fosters motivation. If a child is not motivated to learn and engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, he or she will fail in social and economic life. The longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle of a disadvantaged child, the more costly it is to remediate disadvantage.
Keep such a policy in place for years, and its benefits accrue from one generation to the next. Put a child in preschool, in other words, and that improves her chances of graduating college. But it also improves the future education and earnings prospects of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, the quality of a school that a child attends later in life matters, too. And we'd be foolish to invest in preschool without continuing to invest in poor children as they age.
But this mounting evidence suggests that we should be front-loading our investment in the most disadvantaged children during the ages 2-4, when their brains develop at an extremely high rate, and while they're learning social, motivational, cognitive and analytical skills. Preschool is when kids first learn to work together in teams, to resolve problems, to listen and cooperate – all skills that directly come into play in the workforce.
Life cycle skill formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation. Motivation cross-fosters skill, and skill cross-fosters motivation. If a child is not motivated to learn and engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, he or she will fail in social and economic life. The longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle of a disadvantaged child, the more costly it is to remediate disadvantage.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
Yoga in the Hood
What inspired the Yoga in Hood Parks movement came out of a longing to spread Yoga to the innercity. I want the people who need Yoga doing Yoga… In this city especially, it’s mostly white college kids and white women, some white guys knocking it out too… But I know it’s power and poor people need Yoga more than anything… Who’s working the fucked up jobs, no healthcare, well Obamacare now right? But really, Low income folks need Yoga more than anything else… You know the adage – - “health is wealth.”
Monday, June 3, 2013
Neighborhoods and health
*I LOVE THIS*
Neighborhoods (or residential areas more broadly) have emerged as potentially relevant contexts because they posses both physical and social attributes which could plausibly affect the health of individuals (125)
Place of residence is strongly patterned by social position and ethnicity (125)
Behavioral and stress processes operating at the level of individuals are also dynamically related: stress can result in the adoption of unhealthy eating behaviors as coping mechanisms, and some behaviors (such as physical activity) can buffer the adverse effects of stress (126)
The impact of neighborhood conditions on health is likely to be modified by individual-level characteristics. For example, some individuals may have characteristics that make them more vulnerable to adverse neighborhood conditions, while others may have the personal and financial resources that allow them to overcome deficiencies or hazards in their neighborhoods (126)
Research on neighborhoods and health is closely connected to work on residential segregation and health and work on housing on health (126)
Could Bookless Libraries Revolutionize Access for the Poor?
For a long time, you could divide the library patrons of San Antonio, Texas, into two categories -- the haves and the have nots.
Inside the city limits, there was a robust library system with 26 locations and a bookmobile. Outside, in the unincorporated suburbs of Bexar County, there was no public library. For many years, there wasn't even a book store.
Blame this on a fluke of funding. The city's library budget could only be spent on projects inside the city. This was fine, until the population of Bexar County exploded. Between 2000 and 2012, the county's population jumped from 1.4 million to 1.8 million people; and a third of those new arrivals ended up in the suburbs.
According to the San Antonio Express News:
In 2000, 10 percent of the county's population lived in unincorporated areas, said Tina Smith-Dean of the county's Planning and Resource Management Department. “Now it's close to 15 percent,” she said, and by 2017, it's expected to be 18 percent.
"Patrons were getting farther and farther away from facilities," says Laura Cole, Bexar County's special projects coordinator. In response, the county pulled together funds for a sleek $1.5 million facility in the unincorporated part of the county. The 4,989-squre-foot library dubbed BiblioTech, slated to open this fall, will feature 150 e-readers (some of which patrons can check out for two weeks), 50 computer stations, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets. The project will run digital literacy courses, partner with local schools, and stay open late to ensure maximum access. Bexar's leaders have compared the project, in look and function, to an Apple store.
It will have everything -- except printed books. Instead, patrons will be able to "check out" material from their computers or smart phones, even if they aren't on the premises. So not only is this facility located closer to where much of the county now lives, but you don't even need to go there to take advantage of it.
For Bexar, a digital library was the most affordable way to address the egregious library access problems. "It seems like a really obvious kind of cost-effective solution," Coles says. "We wanted to create a true technology resource."
Bexar sees their bookless library as a model for other cities and counties, especially those where some neighborhoods have plentiful access to reading material -- and others simply don't.
And more often than not, those neighborhoods are under-served in other ways too. Lower income communities lag way behind when it comes to public library resources. Their libraries tend to stay open for fewer hours and offer fewer services. In Philadelphia, says Susan B. Neuman, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies these issues, libraries in poor neighborhoods had just two computers for every 100 children.
This is particularly unfortunate, because libraries provide vital services. Forty-four percent of Americans living below the poverty level access e-mail and the Web via their local public library, according to a 2009 report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But it's not clear whether digital libraries are the solution. Reading an e-book or using a computer requires a different skill set than reading a book; Neuman wonders if some people won't be able to use BiblioTech's myriad new resources to meet their needs. And American Library Association President Maureen Sullivan says licensing digital books is often more expensive then buything a paper copy.
She also wonders if we don't lose something when we abandon books altogether. "I think there's some value to the ability to hold a book in one's hand," Sullivan says, particularly when it comes to picture books for children. "There's something very special about the tactical experience, a personal connection that happens there."
But digital libraries do come with some advantages -- for one, they require less space. Collections can be put together in a matter of weeks, not months. And Sullivan says more and more readers are seeking out e-books. "People will come into the library and request a book, and they'll also request the format they want it in," she says. "It's really important for us to understand these developments and how people want to use them."
For now, Cole says the county will wait and see whether the community wants more brick-and-mortar technology centers or a deeper collection of digital material that can be accessed from anywhere in the cloud. "This is a pilot," she says. "We could find people are really, really utilizing the digital library more than we anticipated, or vice versa. Once we see how people use these spaces, we'll adapt our plans."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/06/could-bookless-libraries-revolutionize-access-poor/5729/
Inside the city limits, there was a robust library system with 26 locations and a bookmobile. Outside, in the unincorporated suburbs of Bexar County, there was no public library. For many years, there wasn't even a book store.
Blame this on a fluke of funding. The city's library budget could only be spent on projects inside the city. This was fine, until the population of Bexar County exploded. Between 2000 and 2012, the county's population jumped from 1.4 million to 1.8 million people; and a third of those new arrivals ended up in the suburbs.
According to the San Antonio Express News:
In 2000, 10 percent of the county's population lived in unincorporated areas, said Tina Smith-Dean of the county's Planning and Resource Management Department. “Now it's close to 15 percent,” she said, and by 2017, it's expected to be 18 percent.
"Patrons were getting farther and farther away from facilities," says Laura Cole, Bexar County's special projects coordinator. In response, the county pulled together funds for a sleek $1.5 million facility in the unincorporated part of the county. The 4,989-squre-foot library dubbed BiblioTech, slated to open this fall, will feature 150 e-readers (some of which patrons can check out for two weeks), 50 computer stations, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets. The project will run digital literacy courses, partner with local schools, and stay open late to ensure maximum access. Bexar's leaders have compared the project, in look and function, to an Apple store.
It will have everything -- except printed books. Instead, patrons will be able to "check out" material from their computers or smart phones, even if they aren't on the premises. So not only is this facility located closer to where much of the county now lives, but you don't even need to go there to take advantage of it.
For Bexar, a digital library was the most affordable way to address the egregious library access problems. "It seems like a really obvious kind of cost-effective solution," Coles says. "We wanted to create a true technology resource."
Bexar sees their bookless library as a model for other cities and counties, especially those where some neighborhoods have plentiful access to reading material -- and others simply don't.
And more often than not, those neighborhoods are under-served in other ways too. Lower income communities lag way behind when it comes to public library resources. Their libraries tend to stay open for fewer hours and offer fewer services. In Philadelphia, says Susan B. Neuman, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies these issues, libraries in poor neighborhoods had just two computers for every 100 children.
This is particularly unfortunate, because libraries provide vital services. Forty-four percent of Americans living below the poverty level access e-mail and the Web via their local public library, according to a 2009 report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But it's not clear whether digital libraries are the solution. Reading an e-book or using a computer requires a different skill set than reading a book; Neuman wonders if some people won't be able to use BiblioTech's myriad new resources to meet their needs. And American Library Association President Maureen Sullivan says licensing digital books is often more expensive then buything a paper copy.
She also wonders if we don't lose something when we abandon books altogether. "I think there's some value to the ability to hold a book in one's hand," Sullivan says, particularly when it comes to picture books for children. "There's something very special about the tactical experience, a personal connection that happens there."
But digital libraries do come with some advantages -- for one, they require less space. Collections can be put together in a matter of weeks, not months. And Sullivan says more and more readers are seeking out e-books. "People will come into the library and request a book, and they'll also request the format they want it in," she says. "It's really important for us to understand these developments and how people want to use them."
For now, Cole says the county will wait and see whether the community wants more brick-and-mortar technology centers or a deeper collection of digital material that can be accessed from anywhere in the cloud. "This is a pilot," she says. "We could find people are really, really utilizing the digital library more than we anticipated, or vice versa. Once we see how people use these spaces, we'll adapt our plans."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/06/could-bookless-libraries-revolutionize-access-poor/5729/
Social determinants of health
Tackling the wider social determinants of health and
health inequalities: evidence from systematic reviews
C Bambra,1
M Gibson,2
A Sowden,3
K Wright,3
M Whitehead,4
M Petticrew5
health inequalities: evidence from systematic reviews
C Bambra,1
M Gibson,2
A Sowden,3
K Wright,3
M Whitehead,4
M Petticrew5
Sunday, June 2, 2013
The Essential Supports
What are the Five Essential Supports?
School leadership: This support refers to whether principals are strategic, focused
on instruction, and inclusive of others in their leadership work. Elementary schools
with strong school leadership were seven times more likely to improve in math and
nearly four times more likely to improve in reading than schools weak on this
measure.
Parent-community ties: This support refers to whether schools are a welcoming
place for parents and whether there are strong connections between the school and
local institutions. Elementary schools with strong parental involvement were ten times
more likely to improve in math and four times more likely to improve in reading than
schools weak on this measure.
Professional capacity: This support refers to the quality of the faculty and staff
recruited to the school, their base beliefs and values about change, the quality of
ongoing professional development, and the capacity of staff to work together.
Elementary schools where teachers were highly committed to the school and inclined
to embrace innovation were five times more likely to improve in reading and four
times more likely to improve in math than schools weak on this measure.
Student-centered learning climate: This support refers to whether schools have a
safe, welcoming, stimulating and nurturing environment focused on learning for all
students. Elementary schools with strong safety and order were two times more likely
to improve in reading than schools weak on this measure.
Instructional guidance: This support refers to the organization of the curriculum,
the nature of the academic demand or challenges it poses, and the tools teachers have
to advance learning (such as instructional materials). Elementary schools with strong
curriculum alignment were four times more likely to improve in math and reading
than schools weak on this measure.
To summarize, school organization drives improvement, and individual initiatives are
unlikely to work in isolation. This has strong implications for states and districts
focused on any number of reforms that have gained increasing political currency—for
example, improving teacher quality, turning around low performing schools, or
mandating a single curriculum.
School leadership: This support refers to whether principals are strategic, focused
on instruction, and inclusive of others in their leadership work. Elementary schools
with strong school leadership were seven times more likely to improve in math and
nearly four times more likely to improve in reading than schools weak on this
measure.
Parent-community ties: This support refers to whether schools are a welcoming
place for parents and whether there are strong connections between the school and
local institutions. Elementary schools with strong parental involvement were ten times
more likely to improve in math and four times more likely to improve in reading than
schools weak on this measure.
Professional capacity: This support refers to the quality of the faculty and staff
recruited to the school, their base beliefs and values about change, the quality of
ongoing professional development, and the capacity of staff to work together.
Elementary schools where teachers were highly committed to the school and inclined
to embrace innovation were five times more likely to improve in reading and four
times more likely to improve in math than schools weak on this measure.
Student-centered learning climate: This support refers to whether schools have a
safe, welcoming, stimulating and nurturing environment focused on learning for all
students. Elementary schools with strong safety and order were two times more likely
to improve in reading than schools weak on this measure.
Instructional guidance: This support refers to the organization of the curriculum,
the nature of the academic demand or challenges it poses, and the tools teachers have
to advance learning (such as instructional materials). Elementary schools with strong
curriculum alignment were four times more likely to improve in math and reading
than schools weak on this measure.
To summarize, school organization drives improvement, and individual initiatives are
unlikely to work in isolation. This has strong implications for states and districts
focused on any number of reforms that have gained increasing political currency—for
example, improving teacher quality, turning around low performing schools, or
mandating a single curriculum.
Truly Disadvantaged Schools
Clearly, the social context of schools matters. Indeed, the authors found that
community factors accounted for most of the difference in stagnation rates among
schools. For instance, schools in communities with weak religious participation were
twice as likely to stagnate as schools in communities with strong religious
participation. Schools in communities where people did not believe they had the
ability to make a positive change were twice as likely to stagnate as schools in
communities where people believed they could. This pattern held true for social
indicator after social indicator.
Still, despite tremendous obstacles, a handful of “truly disadvantaged” schools did
improve. Over the seven-year period, 15 percent of “truly disadvantaged schools”
showed significant academic improvement. While low, these improvement rates didn’t
differ significantly from those of schools in predominantly minority communities,
which had much lower rates of crime and child abuse and higher median family
incomes.
The small group of truly disadvantaged schools that “beat the odds” and improved
suggests that community context matters, but only so far as it affects the likelihood of
developing certain organizational structures that the authors found were vital for
improvement. Whether in advantaged or disadvantaged communities, very well
organized schools improved and very poorly organized schools stagnated, the authors
found.
In short, in communities where there are few viable institutions, where crime, drug
abuse and gang activity are prevalent, and where palpable human needs walk through
the school doors virtually every day, robust efforts are necessary to ensure schools are
organized for improvement. The hopeful news is that even truly disadvantaged
schools can be organized for improvement.
community factors accounted for most of the difference in stagnation rates among
schools. For instance, schools in communities with weak religious participation were
twice as likely to stagnate as schools in communities with strong religious
participation. Schools in communities where people did not believe they had the
ability to make a positive change were twice as likely to stagnate as schools in
communities where people believed they could. This pattern held true for social
indicator after social indicator.
Still, despite tremendous obstacles, a handful of “truly disadvantaged” schools did
improve. Over the seven-year period, 15 percent of “truly disadvantaged schools”
showed significant academic improvement. While low, these improvement rates didn’t
differ significantly from those of schools in predominantly minority communities,
which had much lower rates of crime and child abuse and higher median family
incomes.
The small group of truly disadvantaged schools that “beat the odds” and improved
suggests that community context matters, but only so far as it affects the likelihood of
developing certain organizational structures that the authors found were vital for
improvement. Whether in advantaged or disadvantaged communities, very well
organized schools improved and very poorly organized schools stagnated, the authors
found.
In short, in communities where there are few viable institutions, where crime, drug
abuse and gang activity are prevalent, and where palpable human needs walk through
the school doors virtually every day, robust efforts are necessary to ensure schools are
organized for improvement. The hopeful news is that even truly disadvantaged
schools can be organized for improvement.
Articles on Chicago
Chicago grapples with gun violence; death toll soars
Since Jan. 1, 2012, Chicago police have recorded 2,364 shooting incidents and 487 homicides, 87 percent of them gun-related. Shootings have increased 12 percent this year and homicides are up 19 percent.
Young people are often targets. In the school year that ended in June, 319 Chicago public school students were shot, 24 of them fatally. The total does not include school-age children who had dropped out or were enrolled elsewhere.
Tio Hardiman, director of CeaseFire Illinois, says gun violence should be seen not just as a crime but as a public health scourge. In addition to doing “a lot more to stop the flow of illegal guns coming into the city,” he said, authorities should pay more attention to mental health and help the most vulnerable young people.
“You have to address the thinking,” Hardiman said.
Since Jan. 1, 2012, Chicago police have recorded 2,364 shooting incidents and 487 homicides, 87 percent of them gun-related. Shootings have increased 12 percent this year and homicides are up 19 percent.
Young people are often targets. In the school year that ended in June, 319 Chicago public school students were shot, 24 of them fatally. The total does not include school-age children who had dropped out or were enrolled elsewhere.
Tio Hardiman, director of CeaseFire Illinois, says gun violence should be seen not just as a crime but as a public health scourge. In addition to doing “a lot more to stop the flow of illegal guns coming into the city,” he said, authorities should pay more attention to mental health and help the most vulnerable young people.
“You have to address the thinking,” Hardiman said.
The Interrupters
Watch The Interrupters (Graphic Language) on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
"Violence is learned behavior." Cure Violence revolutionizes the perception and reduction of violence by promoting a public health and science-based perspective. Not unlike AIDS or tuberculosis, violence is a disease. If such a contagious epidemic is ignored, it is not cured, but rather, it spreads. Cure Violence understands that violence persists despite external punishment or moral judgment. In order to effectively combat peaking societal violence, social norms must be targeted from the source.The people are not to be blamed for this epidemic, but are instead our number one resource in countering the problem. Cure Violence connects with trusted community members committed to both transforming the direction of their lives as well as to cleansing the violence from their hometowns. These individuals have experienced and participated in the violence first hand. They make it possible to anticipate where violence will occur and to intervene before violence has a chance to erupt. These individuals further act as mentors for high-risk individuals, illustrating a path out of violence and an opportunity for a more nourishing life.
Entire communities are enabled to voice a powerful message with the help of Cure Violence. At the site of shootings or common violent attacks, communities gather to protest and insist that violence is devastating, destroying both sides of the conflict, and simply not the answer.
The Cure Violence Model is a public health approach to violence prevention that understands violence as a learned behavior that can be prevented using disease control methods. The model prevents violence through a three-prong approach:
1) Interrupt transmission
2) Identify and change the thinking of highest potential transmitters
3) Change group norms
Interrupt transmission
The Cure Violence model deploys violence interrupters who use a specific method to locate potentially lethal, ongoing conflicts and respond with a variety of conflict mediation techniques both to prevent imminent violence and to change the norms around the need to use violence. Cure Violence hires culturally appropriate workers who live in the community, are known to high-risk people, and have possibly even been gang members or spent time in prison, but have made a change in their lives and turned away from crime. Interrupters receive specific training on a method for detecting potential shooting events, mediating conflicts, and keeping safe in these dangerous situations.
Identify and change the thinking of highest potential transmitters
Cure Violence employs a strong outreach component to change the norms and behavior of high-risk clients. Outreach workers act as mentors to a caseload of participants, seeing each client multiple times per week, conveying a message of rejecting the use of violence, and assisting them to obtain needed services such as job training and drug abuse counseling. Outreach workers are also available to their clients during critical moments – when a client needs someone to help him avoid a relapse into criminal and violent behavior. The participants of the program are of highest risk for being a victim or perpetrator of a shooting in the near future, as determined by a list of risk factors specific to the community. In order to have access and credibility among this population, Cure Violence employs culturally appropriate workers, similar to the indigenous workers used in other public health models.
Change group norms
In order to have lasting change, the norms in the community, which accept and encourage violence, must change. At the heart of Cure Violence’s effort at community norm change is the idea that the norms can be changed if multiple messengers of the same new norms are consistently and abundantly heard. Cure Violence uses a public education campaign, community events, community responses to every shooting, and community mobilization to change group and community norms related to the use of firearms.
Three additional elements are essential for proper implementation. First, with all of these components, data and monitoring are used to measure and provide constant feedback to the system. Second, extensive training of workers is necessary to ensure that they can properly carry out their duties. This includes an initial training before they are sent out on the streets, follow up trainings every few months, and regular meetings in which techniques for effective work are reviewed. Third, the program implements a partnership with local hospitals so that workers are notified immediately of gunshot wound victims admitted to emergency rooms. These notifications enable workers to respond quickly, often at the hospital, to prevent retaliations.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
How Residential Mobility Patterns Perpetuate Segregation
Could young adults at their most experimental phase disrupt the cycle of segregation?
Britton did pull out one promising finding from an otherwise bleak report: Blacks and Hispanics who grew up in integrated neighborhoods later lived as adults in integrated neighborhoods, too, even after moving long-distance. That suggests at least a "bulwark against re-segregation," Britton says. "But," he adds, "it doesn’t point to a lot of reasons for optimism about major declines in residential segregation – particularly between blacks and whites, and even increasingly between Latinos and whites – over the next couple of decades."
There is one other way to interpret these findings: They suggest that fair-housing measures that enable black and Hispanic families to live in more integrated neighborhoods are all the more important because they have such long-term consequences. Those neighborhoods will likely impact not only the minority families living there, but also the types of neighborhoods their children grow up to live in. If there is a bright spot in this research, it is that integration may perpetuate itself in much the same way that segregation does.
Britton did pull out one promising finding from an otherwise bleak report: Blacks and Hispanics who grew up in integrated neighborhoods later lived as adults in integrated neighborhoods, too, even after moving long-distance. That suggests at least a "bulwark against re-segregation," Britton says. "But," he adds, "it doesn’t point to a lot of reasons for optimism about major declines in residential segregation – particularly between blacks and whites, and even increasingly between Latinos and whites – over the next couple of decades."
There is one other way to interpret these findings: They suggest that fair-housing measures that enable black and Hispanic families to live in more integrated neighborhoods are all the more important because they have such long-term consequences. Those neighborhoods will likely impact not only the minority families living there, but also the types of neighborhoods their children grow up to live in. If there is a bright spot in this research, it is that integration may perpetuate itself in much the same way that segregation does.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Selling the Public on Public Housing
Sixty-three percent of those surveyed say they would support public housing in their communities, but 53 percent don’t want to live close to it. Sixty-one percent believe that public housing has some positive impact on its residents, but nearly a third of respondents (31 percent) don’t think public housing residents are hard-working members of society.
Nationally, according to ReThink, 2.2 million people live in public housing. At least 500,000 are on waiting lists, including 70,000 in Washington, D.C., where there are just 8,000 units. The long economic downturn has intensified the demand, while belt-tightening in Washington has meant budgetary pressures on housing authorities. The sequestration alone has meant a loss of $1 million a month for the DCHA, says Todman.
"That is an American success story that does not occur without support."
DCHA’s Todman agrees that addressing the root causes of poverty is essential. "Until we get a grasp on how to generate our youth out of poverty, as a country we’re not going to get any better."
But she argues that public housing remains an essential part of that effort. "It’s something we need to look at as a country,” she says. "[Public housing] is actually an asset that belongs to us all."
Nationally, according to ReThink, 2.2 million people live in public housing. At least 500,000 are on waiting lists, including 70,000 in Washington, D.C., where there are just 8,000 units. The long economic downturn has intensified the demand, while belt-tightening in Washington has meant budgetary pressures on housing authorities. The sequestration alone has meant a loss of $1 million a month for the DCHA, says Todman.
"That is an American success story that does not occur without support."
DCHA’s Todman agrees that addressing the root causes of poverty is essential. "Until we get a grasp on how to generate our youth out of poverty, as a country we’re not going to get any better."
But she argues that public housing remains an essential part of that effort. "It’s something we need to look at as a country,” she says. "[Public housing] is actually an asset that belongs to us all."
Technology Alone Won't Save Poor Kids in Struggling Schools
Our results indicate that computer ownership alone is unlikely to have much of an impact on short-term schooling outcomes for low-income children. Existing and proposed interventions to reduce the remaining digital divide in the United States and other countries, such as large-scale voucher programs, tax breaks for educational purchases of computers, Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), and one-to-one laptop programs, need to be realistic about their potential to reduce the current achievement gap.
The Dependency Paradox
Those who know me best understand that I am a deeply philosophical person. One of my favorite topics in the science of relationships is an existential paradox, or what Dr. Brooke Feeney calls “The Dependency Paradox.”1
As I described in a previous post, humans have a fundamental need for connection to others, or “relatedness.” But we also need “autonomy” (a sense of independence and the feeling that we have personal control over our behavior).2 Intuition tells us that these needs are distinct, and possibly conflicting. But the “paradox hypothesis” suggests the opposite—people who are more dependent on their partners for support actually experience more independence and autonomy, not less. Logically this is a contradiction, but only to the untrained eye.
In a laboratory study, experimenters asked one member of a couple to report how much he/she accepted the other’s dependency (e.g., “I am responsive to my partner’s needs”); higher scores indicated more dependency. The other member of the couple was put in a separate room and given some challenging puzzles to complete. The couples were also given computers to communicate via instant messaging (IM), but this was a ruse. Participants completing the puzzles thought their partners were on the other end of the computer, but really it was an experimenter delivering IMs with direct assistance (hints, advice, or in some cases, solutions to the puzzles).
One might think that the participants with more dependency in their relationships would freely accept this assistance, but instead, the opposite pattern emerged. Those with more dependency actually completed more of the puzzles on their own, independently, and were more likely to reject IMs that contained hints or solutions. Paradoxically, dependence and independence went hand in hand.
In a second study conducted outside the lab, participants listed a personal goal that they would like to achieve on their own in the near future. After 6 months, the experimenters asked participants if they accomplished their goals. Those participants who independently achieved their personal goals (without their partner’s direct assistance) were the ones with more dependency in the relationship.
How can we explain this paradox? One perspective stems from attachment theory, and it works like this: when you are an infant, you are helpless and you have no choice but to depend on others. You need your parents (and sometimes others in your immediate/extended family) to help you learn, grow, and develop into a fully functioning person.3 The same process continues across the lifespan. Babies and children who are confident that their parents are available to support them grow up to function at a higher level emotionally, socially, and academically later in life. That is also why developmental psychologists label “secure” attachment as “autonomous.”4
John Bowlby himself said it best: "Paradoxically, the healthy personality when viewed in this light proves by no means as independent as cultural stereotypes suppose. Essential ingredients are a capacity to rely trustingly on others when occasion demands and to know on whom it is appropriate to rely."5
When I teach relationships research to my students, I especially emphasize this point: if you feel comfortable depending on others (and having others depend on you) that goes hand in hand with independence, motivation, curiosity, achievement, and general mental health.
For more on this topic (and some pop culture references), see this ar
As I described in a previous post, humans have a fundamental need for connection to others, or “relatedness.” But we also need “autonomy” (a sense of independence and the feeling that we have personal control over our behavior).2 Intuition tells us that these needs are distinct, and possibly conflicting. But the “paradox hypothesis” suggests the opposite—people who are more dependent on their partners for support actually experience more independence and autonomy, not less. Logically this is a contradiction, but only to the untrained eye.
In a laboratory study, experimenters asked one member of a couple to report how much he/she accepted the other’s dependency (e.g., “I am responsive to my partner’s needs”); higher scores indicated more dependency. The other member of the couple was put in a separate room and given some challenging puzzles to complete. The couples were also given computers to communicate via instant messaging (IM), but this was a ruse. Participants completing the puzzles thought their partners were on the other end of the computer, but really it was an experimenter delivering IMs with direct assistance (hints, advice, or in some cases, solutions to the puzzles).
One might think that the participants with more dependency in their relationships would freely accept this assistance, but instead, the opposite pattern emerged. Those with more dependency actually completed more of the puzzles on their own, independently, and were more likely to reject IMs that contained hints or solutions. Paradoxically, dependence and independence went hand in hand.
In a second study conducted outside the lab, participants listed a personal goal that they would like to achieve on their own in the near future. After 6 months, the experimenters asked participants if they accomplished their goals. Those participants who independently achieved their personal goals (without their partner’s direct assistance) were the ones with more dependency in the relationship.
How can we explain this paradox? One perspective stems from attachment theory, and it works like this: when you are an infant, you are helpless and you have no choice but to depend on others. You need your parents (and sometimes others in your immediate/extended family) to help you learn, grow, and develop into a fully functioning person.3 The same process continues across the lifespan. Babies and children who are confident that their parents are available to support them grow up to function at a higher level emotionally, socially, and academically later in life. That is also why developmental psychologists label “secure” attachment as “autonomous.”4
John Bowlby himself said it best: "Paradoxically, the healthy personality when viewed in this light proves by no means as independent as cultural stereotypes suppose. Essential ingredients are a capacity to rely trustingly on others when occasion demands and to know on whom it is appropriate to rely."5
When I teach relationships research to my students, I especially emphasize this point: if you feel comfortable depending on others (and having others depend on you) that goes hand in hand with independence, motivation, curiosity, achievement, and general mental health.
For more on this topic (and some pop culture references), see this ar
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
People Getting Dumber? Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.
What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.
But this isn't the first evidence of a possible decline in human intelligence.
"The reduction in human intelligence (if there is any reduction) would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed," Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, told The Huffington Post in an email. "I projected this occurred as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies (cities) and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture, which occurred about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago."
As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants' so-called visual reaction times -- how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.
In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, the analysis showed. In 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds. Even though the machine gauging reaction time in the late 19th Century was less sophisticated than that used in recent years, Dr. te Nijenhuis told The Huffington Post that the old data is directly comparable to modern data.
Other research has suggested an apparent rise in I.Q. scores since the 1940s, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. But Dr. te Nijenhuis suggested the Flynn Effect reflects the influence of environmental factors -- such as better education, hygiene and nutrition -- and may mask the true decline in genetically inherited intelligence in the Western world.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/people-getting-dumber-human-intelligence-victoria-era_n_3293846.html
What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.
But this isn't the first evidence of a possible decline in human intelligence.
"The reduction in human intelligence (if there is any reduction) would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed," Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, told The Huffington Post in an email. "I projected this occurred as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies (cities) and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture, which occurred about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago."
As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants' so-called visual reaction times -- how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.
In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, the analysis showed. In 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds. Even though the machine gauging reaction time in the late 19th Century was less sophisticated than that used in recent years, Dr. te Nijenhuis told The Huffington Post that the old data is directly comparable to modern data.
Other research has suggested an apparent rise in I.Q. scores since the 1940s, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. But Dr. te Nijenhuis suggested the Flynn Effect reflects the influence of environmental factors -- such as better education, hygiene and nutrition -- and may mask the true decline in genetically inherited intelligence in the Western world.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/people-getting-dumber-human-intelligence-victoria-era_n_3293846.html
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Does Living Near Fast Food Restaurants Increase Your Risk of Obesity?
Because fast food is particularly affordable, it might have greater appeal among individuals with limited funds devoted to satisfying dietary needs. For these individuals, a greater number of FFRs around the home might make the consumption of fast food convenient in the context of their daily travels, or might represent ready destinations for socialization with friends who live nearby. Perhaps the greater number of FFRs functioned as a cue for the craving of calorie-dense foods among those who tend to patronize FFRs.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Thursday, May 9, 2013
My Hero
“Denby, three years ago, was a warehouse for children,” said Wilbourn, a Spelman College alumna who is currently working on her PhD in education. “It was plagued by gang activity, a lack of culture, direction, and vision, and had undefined roles for adults and children. It wasn’t safe.”
Her stated goal is to help Denby become one of the city’s top high schools, which is a distinction currently reserved for Renaissance, Cass Technical, and her alma mater Martin Luther King High School, better known in DPS as the “Big Three.” Her hope is that Denby becomes “The Renaissance of the East Side.”
Wilbourn has made waves by being the rare administrator in the Detroit Public Schools to vocally challenge the city on the issue of blight, which surrounds Denby along Kelly Road. The school is located in the 48205 zip code, which the FBI named the deadliest section in the city last September.
“I’ve driven through parts of this city and this neighborhood and, as a former social studies teacher, it reminds me of the days of slavery,” Wilbourn said. “I’m waiting for the North Star and Harriet Tubman. That’s just how desolate it is. How can you drive down a street, and if you didn’t know it was 2012, you could very easily think this is the 1800s?”
In the area surrounding Denby, 37 abandoned properties sit within a two-block radius. These, along with alleyways and very few, if any, working streetlights, lead to the area being compared to a war zone. That analogy often rubs Detroit city leaders and residents the wrong way, but Wilbourn refuses to back down from it.
“It’s worse than a war zone on so many levels,” Wilbourn said. “You have better odds as an African-American male going to Afghanistan than surviving the streets of Detroit. So when these young people show up every day, I get it.
“We’re talking about children that are in poverty, the highest level in the United States right here in Detroit.” On April 22, Wilbourn and her son led a group of Denby High students, along with volunteers from the nonprofit organization Better Detroit Youth Movement, in boarding up and cleaning three abandoned duplexes across the street from the school.
While she respects the hard work the city has done in trying to bring back downtown, she stands by her position that the city’s “comeback” has a lot of work left. “Truthfully speaking, I would say Detroit is coming back, but who is it coming back for?” Wilbourn said.
“Just like we speak of ‘No Child Left Behind’, there are communities and groups of people who are being left behind. Until we have that conversation about what it means to be disenfranchised, what gentrification looks like and who will be displaced, then we’re not ready to have the true conversation about what it means for Detroit to come back.”
Wilbourn is not the only principal who feels this way about the conditions surrounding her school and the city. She is just the most outspoken. The neighborhoods around nearby Osborn High School, along with Cody High School on the city’s west side, have deteriorated as well. She sees the myriad of issues as systemic throughout DPS and the city itself, and feels that the city has not taken enough ownership.
“I think we have begun to give other groups of people too much credit for why we as a people are in this situation,” Wilbourn said. “I think for the city of Detroit in some ways, and I know some folks won’t like to hear what I’m saying, is that we’ve forgotten about the back of the bus. If you remembered the back of the bus, you would fight like hell to have your place in the front of it.”
She also feels that an inordinate amount of blame has been placed on teachers for many schools’ problems: “It takes an entire village to have both hands, both feet, heart, head, and habits of mind on creating a better community.
“The young people who robbed Pastor Winans, those are the same kids who sat in somebody’s classroom in Detroit. If they have the mindset to be so brutal with (Winans), imagine what a teacher has to deal with everyday? The city of Detroit is perfect. It’s the systems and the people in it that gives [sic] it the reputation.”
Her love for her students and the school come through in how emotional she becomes while talking about them. She credits her assistant principal, Tracie McCissick, and the rest of the faculty with much of her success, but knows there is so much more work to be done at Denby, as academic standards have not improved nearly to her or anyone’s liking. The school tested in the bottom five percent in the state in 2010.
“If I have to hold a parent accountable for his or her child and get them to the place where they move beyond their current socioeconomic and academic status, that’s what we’re going to do. We need to have that hard conversation with parents, community, and ourselves to why we are failing.
“Relative to the city of Detroit, it’s going to take new leadership. It’s going to take vision. It’s going to take some of the stuff that Coleman Young was made of. It’s going to take come of the stuff that Mayor Dennis Archer brought to the table.
“Whether people want to hear it or not, it is even going to take some of the stuff that Kwame Kilpatrick brought to the table — the positive elements. This city is not the ‘diamond in the rough,’ it is the actual diamond.”
http://thegrio.com/2012/06/04/detroit-principal-fights-for-troubled-school-in-troubled-city/
Her stated goal is to help Denby become one of the city’s top high schools, which is a distinction currently reserved for Renaissance, Cass Technical, and her alma mater Martin Luther King High School, better known in DPS as the “Big Three.” Her hope is that Denby becomes “The Renaissance of the East Side.”
Wilbourn has made waves by being the rare administrator in the Detroit Public Schools to vocally challenge the city on the issue of blight, which surrounds Denby along Kelly Road. The school is located in the 48205 zip code, which the FBI named the deadliest section in the city last September.
“I’ve driven through parts of this city and this neighborhood and, as a former social studies teacher, it reminds me of the days of slavery,” Wilbourn said. “I’m waiting for the North Star and Harriet Tubman. That’s just how desolate it is. How can you drive down a street, and if you didn’t know it was 2012, you could very easily think this is the 1800s?”
In the area surrounding Denby, 37 abandoned properties sit within a two-block radius. These, along with alleyways and very few, if any, working streetlights, lead to the area being compared to a war zone. That analogy often rubs Detroit city leaders and residents the wrong way, but Wilbourn refuses to back down from it.
“It’s worse than a war zone on so many levels,” Wilbourn said. “You have better odds as an African-American male going to Afghanistan than surviving the streets of Detroit. So when these young people show up every day, I get it.
“We’re talking about children that are in poverty, the highest level in the United States right here in Detroit.” On April 22, Wilbourn and her son led a group of Denby High students, along with volunteers from the nonprofit organization Better Detroit Youth Movement, in boarding up and cleaning three abandoned duplexes across the street from the school.
While she respects the hard work the city has done in trying to bring back downtown, she stands by her position that the city’s “comeback” has a lot of work left. “Truthfully speaking, I would say Detroit is coming back, but who is it coming back for?” Wilbourn said.
“Just like we speak of ‘No Child Left Behind’, there are communities and groups of people who are being left behind. Until we have that conversation about what it means to be disenfranchised, what gentrification looks like and who will be displaced, then we’re not ready to have the true conversation about what it means for Detroit to come back.”
Wilbourn is not the only principal who feels this way about the conditions surrounding her school and the city. She is just the most outspoken. The neighborhoods around nearby Osborn High School, along with Cody High School on the city’s west side, have deteriorated as well. She sees the myriad of issues as systemic throughout DPS and the city itself, and feels that the city has not taken enough ownership.
“I think we have begun to give other groups of people too much credit for why we as a people are in this situation,” Wilbourn said. “I think for the city of Detroit in some ways, and I know some folks won’t like to hear what I’m saying, is that we’ve forgotten about the back of the bus. If you remembered the back of the bus, you would fight like hell to have your place in the front of it.”
She also feels that an inordinate amount of blame has been placed on teachers for many schools’ problems: “It takes an entire village to have both hands, both feet, heart, head, and habits of mind on creating a better community.
“The young people who robbed Pastor Winans, those are the same kids who sat in somebody’s classroom in Detroit. If they have the mindset to be so brutal with (Winans), imagine what a teacher has to deal with everyday? The city of Detroit is perfect. It’s the systems and the people in it that gives [sic] it the reputation.”
Her love for her students and the school come through in how emotional she becomes while talking about them. She credits her assistant principal, Tracie McCissick, and the rest of the faculty with much of her success, but knows there is so much more work to be done at Denby, as academic standards have not improved nearly to her or anyone’s liking. The school tested in the bottom five percent in the state in 2010.
“If I have to hold a parent accountable for his or her child and get them to the place where they move beyond their current socioeconomic and academic status, that’s what we’re going to do. We need to have that hard conversation with parents, community, and ourselves to why we are failing.
“Relative to the city of Detroit, it’s going to take new leadership. It’s going to take vision. It’s going to take some of the stuff that Coleman Young was made of. It’s going to take come of the stuff that Mayor Dennis Archer brought to the table.
“Whether people want to hear it or not, it is even going to take some of the stuff that Kwame Kilpatrick brought to the table — the positive elements. This city is not the ‘diamond in the rough,’ it is the actual diamond.”
http://thegrio.com/2012/06/04/detroit-principal-fights-for-troubled-school-in-troubled-city/
The Link Between High Levels of Homeownership and Unemployment
A majority of Americans also say home ownership has lost its economic allure as an investment for the future. Nearly seven in 10 Americans (69 percent) report that "it is less likely for families to build equity and wealth through homeownership today compared with two or three decades ago." Most of all, three in five adults (61 percent) believe that "renters can be just as successful as homeowners in achieving the American Dream." This sentiment was felt among more than half of home owners (59 percent) and more than two-thirds (67 percent) of renters.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/05/link-betweeen-high-levels-homeownership-and-unemployment/5520/
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/05/link-betweeen-high-levels-homeownership-and-unemployment/5520/
Putting Inner City Students on a Path to High-Paying Jobs, For Real
The regular school day may be over at the Global Technology Preparatory school in New York’s East Harlem, but the students are still hard at work.
In rooms all over the building, kids are learning how to make video games, create and market products, run for political office, and much more, all under the instruction of professionals who are volunteering their time to teach kids real-world skills.
It’s all part of a program called Citizen Schools, which aims to enrich the offerings of urban public schools by extending the school day and bringing in members of the private sector to share their knowledge and expertise.
Citizen Schools apprenticeships weave academic principles into the curriculum and invest them with real-world relevance.
Eighth-graders in the video-game workshop, taught by employees of Intent Media, are riveted to the lines of code on their screens, creating games incorporating images they find online, and in some cases their own original artwork. In an entrepreneurship workshop run by staff from the asset management firm AllianceBernstein, sixth-graders are coming up with hypothetical snack foods and marketing plans. One team has decided to go with individually packaged red velvet cake, calling them Dynamite Cakes. "The slogan is, ''Taste the blast!'" says a boy named Eric.
The Citizen Schools program, founded in 1995 in Boston, brings people from corporations such as Google, Raytheon, Microsoft, Amgen, and many more into 31 middle schools in low-income neighborhoods around the country. There, the professionals teach 10-week apprenticeships that lead up to a final presentation called WOW!, where the students show off the work they have accomplished. In the case of the entrepreneurship group, they’ll be pitching their ideas to a panel of AllianceBernstein staff who will react as potential investors. The kids watched clips from the reality TV show "Shark Tank" to prepare.
The central idea of Citizen Schools is to extend and complement the work that teachers are doing with the kids during the regular school day. Many of the apprenticeships focus on STEM skills – science, technology, engineering, and math. Volunteers from Google have helped kids build computers. Texas Instruments and Apache Corp. have mentored students in building electric cars.
East Harlem’s Global Tech Prep is typical of the schools served by the program. Eighty percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and it is what Citizen Schools defines as a school with high academic need: only 34 percent of its students meet proficiency standards in English, and 49 percent in math. The extended school day keeps middle-schoolers engaged in productive and positive activities during the tough after-school hours, when many kids find themselves at loose ends.
Kids who have gone through Citizen Schools graduate from high school at a rate 20 percent higher than their peers.
Citizen Schools apprenticeships weave academic principles into the curriculum and invest them with real-world relevance. Students learn, for instance, that graphing skills can come in quite handy when you’re trying to work out the logistics of a video game. Maybe the Pythagorean theorem isn’t completely pointless, after all.
Apprenticeships meet twice a week. On the other days, students get academic support and guidance from Citizen Schools staff. The program also helps them make decisions about what high schools to attend. As part of the Citizen Schools "8th Grade Academy" program, students visit college campuses and learn about their options for attending and paying for college.
Citizen Schools now serves about 5,000 middle school students each year across eight participating states, and the program documents lasting effects for its participants. Kids who have gone through Citizen Schools in middle school are less likely to be absent from high school, and graduate from high school at a rate 20 percent higher than their peers.
Michael Andrew says he knows participating in the program had a positive effect on him. When he was a fourth- and fifth-grader in Boston, he was one of the earliest enrollees. Now, he’s a 24-year-old graduate of Syracuse University who works at AllianceBernstein in information technology. And he’s back with Citizen Schools, this time as a volunteer.
"I was a popular kid, one of those kids who thought he was cool," says Andrew, who says he sometimes played the class clown. "In the program, I didn’t have to be that person. I met a whole new group of friends. Nobody was trying to show off." He admits that he did try to win over a girl he liked by demonstrating his ability to sew in a quilting class. "I made sure my skills were tight so that I could impress," says Andrew. "The pillows I made are still in my parents’ house today." He also built an engine in another apprenticeship that impressed in a different way -- when he fired it up at the WOW! demonstration, it was louder than anybody else's.
Andrew says his time as a Citizen Schools student gave him skills that he has used in all the years since, in school and at work. The program improved his once-shaky public speaking, says Andrew, and built up his leadership potential. "The teachers I worked with were awesome," he remembers.
Now he wants to be one of the teachers that the sixth-graders he’s working with today remember when they grow up. "I want to help inspire young black men and men in general," says Andrew, who is black. "It only takes one teacher to inspire you for life. I want to be able to do that. If I can only do that for one student each semester, it’s well worth it."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/putting-inner-city-students-path-high-paying-jobs-real/5526/
In rooms all over the building, kids are learning how to make video games, create and market products, run for political office, and much more, all under the instruction of professionals who are volunteering their time to teach kids real-world skills.
It’s all part of a program called Citizen Schools, which aims to enrich the offerings of urban public schools by extending the school day and bringing in members of the private sector to share their knowledge and expertise.
Citizen Schools apprenticeships weave academic principles into the curriculum and invest them with real-world relevance.
Eighth-graders in the video-game workshop, taught by employees of Intent Media, are riveted to the lines of code on their screens, creating games incorporating images they find online, and in some cases their own original artwork. In an entrepreneurship workshop run by staff from the asset management firm AllianceBernstein, sixth-graders are coming up with hypothetical snack foods and marketing plans. One team has decided to go with individually packaged red velvet cake, calling them Dynamite Cakes. "The slogan is, ''Taste the blast!'" says a boy named Eric.
The Citizen Schools program, founded in 1995 in Boston, brings people from corporations such as Google, Raytheon, Microsoft, Amgen, and many more into 31 middle schools in low-income neighborhoods around the country. There, the professionals teach 10-week apprenticeships that lead up to a final presentation called WOW!, where the students show off the work they have accomplished. In the case of the entrepreneurship group, they’ll be pitching their ideas to a panel of AllianceBernstein staff who will react as potential investors. The kids watched clips from the reality TV show "Shark Tank" to prepare.
The central idea of Citizen Schools is to extend and complement the work that teachers are doing with the kids during the regular school day. Many of the apprenticeships focus on STEM skills – science, technology, engineering, and math. Volunteers from Google have helped kids build computers. Texas Instruments and Apache Corp. have mentored students in building electric cars.
East Harlem’s Global Tech Prep is typical of the schools served by the program. Eighty percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and it is what Citizen Schools defines as a school with high academic need: only 34 percent of its students meet proficiency standards in English, and 49 percent in math. The extended school day keeps middle-schoolers engaged in productive and positive activities during the tough after-school hours, when many kids find themselves at loose ends.
Kids who have gone through Citizen Schools graduate from high school at a rate 20 percent higher than their peers.
Citizen Schools apprenticeships weave academic principles into the curriculum and invest them with real-world relevance. Students learn, for instance, that graphing skills can come in quite handy when you’re trying to work out the logistics of a video game. Maybe the Pythagorean theorem isn’t completely pointless, after all.
Apprenticeships meet twice a week. On the other days, students get academic support and guidance from Citizen Schools staff. The program also helps them make decisions about what high schools to attend. As part of the Citizen Schools "8th Grade Academy" program, students visit college campuses and learn about their options for attending and paying for college.
Citizen Schools now serves about 5,000 middle school students each year across eight participating states, and the program documents lasting effects for its participants. Kids who have gone through Citizen Schools in middle school are less likely to be absent from high school, and graduate from high school at a rate 20 percent higher than their peers.
Michael Andrew says he knows participating in the program had a positive effect on him. When he was a fourth- and fifth-grader in Boston, he was one of the earliest enrollees. Now, he’s a 24-year-old graduate of Syracuse University who works at AllianceBernstein in information technology. And he’s back with Citizen Schools, this time as a volunteer.
"I was a popular kid, one of those kids who thought he was cool," says Andrew, who says he sometimes played the class clown. "In the program, I didn’t have to be that person. I met a whole new group of friends. Nobody was trying to show off." He admits that he did try to win over a girl he liked by demonstrating his ability to sew in a quilting class. "I made sure my skills were tight so that I could impress," says Andrew. "The pillows I made are still in my parents’ house today." He also built an engine in another apprenticeship that impressed in a different way -- when he fired it up at the WOW! demonstration, it was louder than anybody else's.
Andrew says his time as a Citizen Schools student gave him skills that he has used in all the years since, in school and at work. The program improved his once-shaky public speaking, says Andrew, and built up his leadership potential. "The teachers I worked with were awesome," he remembers.
Now he wants to be one of the teachers that the sixth-graders he’s working with today remember when they grow up. "I want to help inspire young black men and men in general," says Andrew, who is black. "It only takes one teacher to inspire you for life. I want to be able to do that. If I can only do that for one student each semester, it’s well worth it."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/putting-inner-city-students-path-high-paying-jobs-real/5526/
Transforming Public Housing, Minus the Wrecking Ball
From Baltimore to Los Angeles, Chicago to New Orleans, public housing authorities have demolished low-income housing projects and replaced them with privately built mixed-income developments, often based on New Urbanism’s principles of low-rise, high density neighborhoods arranged along traditional streets and parks.
The thinking is this: economically segregated housing built on architecturally modernist superblocks doesn’t work, so it’s better to start from scratch. Give tenants rent vouchers to move to private market off-site locations, demolish the projects and erect new buildings where some project tenants can return to live among middle-class neighbors.
In New York City, the potential for an alternative model for redeveloping public housing has only fairly recently emerged. In the face of cuts in federal support for operations, the New York City Housing Authority announced plans to lease 14 sites within eight Manhattan projects for the development of privately built mixed-income housing. The sites, currently parking lots and playgrounds, are usually at the projects’ edges and face streets and avenues, leaving the majority of open spaces in the middle of the projects undisturbed.
Approximately 4,300 apartments will be constructed, 80 percent as market-rate units and 20 percent of them reserved as "low-income affordable" housing (in New York City, open to four-person households with annual incomes slightly above $51,000, more than twice the NYCHA average of $23,000). The idea is that such development would generate revenue that will help address NYCHA’s annual $57 to $67 million operating deficit as well as years of backlogged building repairs.
Perspective shows new buildings in blue inserted among existing Lower East Side public housing projects. With up to 22 million square feet of development potential in the area, there is room for a rich mixture of uses, included college campuses and reserarch centers. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
In a city of giant development deals, NYCHA’s plans for just a few of its properties are relatively modest. On the other hand, their implications are profound. If NYCHA were to execute a comprehensive plan for all of its 343 projects, an arc of new neighborhoods covering 2,500 acres could be built across New York. It’s a chance to go beyond developing the occasional parking lot by re-imagining projects and aligning them with New York’s 21st-century future in technology, the arts, research, health care and higher education – not just for the benefit of NYCHA’s bottom line but for the city as a whole.
Recently groups of architects, urban planners and landscape architects enrolled in my studios at the University of Michigan Master of Urban Design Program focused in on this re-imagining New York City’s public housing. Held before NYCHA’s plans were announced, I organized the studios to 1) address through design and programming the near-universal criticism of public housing’s superblock planning and segregation of low-income people; 2) leverage the projects’ development potential toward the benefit of their residents and surrounding communities; 3) identify development opportunities to help address NYCHA’s well-known annual deficit.
Figure ground of Astoria housing projects illustrates potential development sites (red) that define new streets as well as courtyards that preserve open space. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
The students looked at two different neighborhoods with large concentrations of NYCHA projects – the Lower East Side in Manhattan and Astoria in Queens. Their discovery: the projects offer room not only for new, revenue-producing housing but whole neighborhoods featuring schools, work places, retail space, recreation facilities and cultural venues. And because so many project superblocks leave 80 percent and more of their land open, such development can occur without demolition and displacement, preserving the projects as one of New York’s most important sources of low-income housing. (Public housing currently serves more than 400,000 New Yorkers. That’s a population larger than Cleveland as a whole.)
Here are some of the ways Michigan MUD studios re-imagined New York City’s housing projects:
Identify and capitalize on community economic and demographic trends (e.g., in the Lower East Side the growth of nearby New York University and in Astoria the emergence of arts and technology-related businesses both in the neighborhood and nearby Long Island City).
Mix training and workplaces in new buildings so that project and neighborhood residents can enjoy pathways to economic development.
Include primary, secondary and post-secondary schools to help prepare young people for the future.
Open up project superblocks with new streets and public spaces that make new services and amenities visible and accessible to people inside and outside the projects.
Incentivize services and amenities by allowing developers to build taller and more profitably if they include them, just as zoning does elsewhere in the city in support of public benefits.
To address NYCHA tenants’ likely concerns about development, the studios recommend making them part of the "deal" by assuring them the continuance of low-income housing through new subsidies brought by development, giving them priority for new and/or improved apartments, or offering them equity stakes in new development.
They also propose that tenants be engaged in shaping project plans, not just for their input but to make the process a community-capacity building tool, especially for young people who can be introduced to the fields of architecture, urban planning, engineering, construction and real estate development (perhaps for school and college credit). Here’s a way to help grow the city’s next generation of thinkers and builders that should inspire parents in the projects to support the plans.
If coordinated across NYCHA projects, similar plans could create new neighborhoods extending from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Sound View in the Bronx, intersecting with the ongoing redevelopment of areas such as downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and Harlem as well as with new parks, ferry systems and climate-change projects along the waterfronts to help define 21st-century New York. (Citywide coordination of NYCHA properties also opens options for transferring "air rights" between sites to keep development scale appropriate for different projects and their surrounding neighborhoods.)
View of proposed new housing and work places along streets, bikeways and soil channels inserted between NYCHA buildings in Astoria. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
And with such plans, New York’s public housing will be treated differently from the way it has been in the rest of the country. It will be identified as an asset worthy of investment and revitalization rather than a problem to be demolished, as is appropriate for the city that built the nation’s first public housing in 1935.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/05/transforming-public-housing-minus-wrecking-ball/5532/
The thinking is this: economically segregated housing built on architecturally modernist superblocks doesn’t work, so it’s better to start from scratch. Give tenants rent vouchers to move to private market off-site locations, demolish the projects and erect new buildings where some project tenants can return to live among middle-class neighbors.
In New York City, the potential for an alternative model for redeveloping public housing has only fairly recently emerged. In the face of cuts in federal support for operations, the New York City Housing Authority announced plans to lease 14 sites within eight Manhattan projects for the development of privately built mixed-income housing. The sites, currently parking lots and playgrounds, are usually at the projects’ edges and face streets and avenues, leaving the majority of open spaces in the middle of the projects undisturbed.
Approximately 4,300 apartments will be constructed, 80 percent as market-rate units and 20 percent of them reserved as "low-income affordable" housing (in New York City, open to four-person households with annual incomes slightly above $51,000, more than twice the NYCHA average of $23,000). The idea is that such development would generate revenue that will help address NYCHA’s annual $57 to $67 million operating deficit as well as years of backlogged building repairs.
Perspective shows new buildings in blue inserted among existing Lower East Side public housing projects. With up to 22 million square feet of development potential in the area, there is room for a rich mixture of uses, included college campuses and reserarch centers. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
In a city of giant development deals, NYCHA’s plans for just a few of its properties are relatively modest. On the other hand, their implications are profound. If NYCHA were to execute a comprehensive plan for all of its 343 projects, an arc of new neighborhoods covering 2,500 acres could be built across New York. It’s a chance to go beyond developing the occasional parking lot by re-imagining projects and aligning them with New York’s 21st-century future in technology, the arts, research, health care and higher education – not just for the benefit of NYCHA’s bottom line but for the city as a whole.
Recently groups of architects, urban planners and landscape architects enrolled in my studios at the University of Michigan Master of Urban Design Program focused in on this re-imagining New York City’s public housing. Held before NYCHA’s plans were announced, I organized the studios to 1) address through design and programming the near-universal criticism of public housing’s superblock planning and segregation of low-income people; 2) leverage the projects’ development potential toward the benefit of their residents and surrounding communities; 3) identify development opportunities to help address NYCHA’s well-known annual deficit.
Figure ground of Astoria housing projects illustrates potential development sites (red) that define new streets as well as courtyards that preserve open space. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
The students looked at two different neighborhoods with large concentrations of NYCHA projects – the Lower East Side in Manhattan and Astoria in Queens. Their discovery: the projects offer room not only for new, revenue-producing housing but whole neighborhoods featuring schools, work places, retail space, recreation facilities and cultural venues. And because so many project superblocks leave 80 percent and more of their land open, such development can occur without demolition and displacement, preserving the projects as one of New York’s most important sources of low-income housing. (Public housing currently serves more than 400,000 New Yorkers. That’s a population larger than Cleveland as a whole.)
Here are some of the ways Michigan MUD studios re-imagined New York City’s housing projects:
Identify and capitalize on community economic and demographic trends (e.g., in the Lower East Side the growth of nearby New York University and in Astoria the emergence of arts and technology-related businesses both in the neighborhood and nearby Long Island City).
Mix training and workplaces in new buildings so that project and neighborhood residents can enjoy pathways to economic development.
Include primary, secondary and post-secondary schools to help prepare young people for the future.
Open up project superblocks with new streets and public spaces that make new services and amenities visible and accessible to people inside and outside the projects.
Incentivize services and amenities by allowing developers to build taller and more profitably if they include them, just as zoning does elsewhere in the city in support of public benefits.
To address NYCHA tenants’ likely concerns about development, the studios recommend making them part of the "deal" by assuring them the continuance of low-income housing through new subsidies brought by development, giving them priority for new and/or improved apartments, or offering them equity stakes in new development.
They also propose that tenants be engaged in shaping project plans, not just for their input but to make the process a community-capacity building tool, especially for young people who can be introduced to the fields of architecture, urban planning, engineering, construction and real estate development (perhaps for school and college credit). Here’s a way to help grow the city’s next generation of thinkers and builders that should inspire parents in the projects to support the plans.
If coordinated across NYCHA projects, similar plans could create new neighborhoods extending from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Sound View in the Bronx, intersecting with the ongoing redevelopment of areas such as downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and Harlem as well as with new parks, ferry systems and climate-change projects along the waterfronts to help define 21st-century New York. (Citywide coordination of NYCHA properties also opens options for transferring "air rights" between sites to keep development scale appropriate for different projects and their surrounding neighborhoods.)
View of proposed new housing and work places along streets, bikeways and soil channels inserted between NYCHA buildings in Astoria. Image courtesy of the University of Michigan
And with such plans, New York’s public housing will be treated differently from the way it has been in the rest of the country. It will be identified as an asset worthy of investment and revitalization rather than a problem to be demolished, as is appropriate for the city that built the nation’s first public housing in 1935.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/05/transforming-public-housing-minus-wrecking-ball/5532/
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Why Your 'Green Lifestyle' Choices Don't Really Matter
That's because energy isn't about your personal choices, and it's not even exactly about the sources we use at a regional or local scale. Energy is systems. And all the green lifestyle changes in the world don't alter the fact that fossil fuels are safely embedded at the center of our global energy system.
Like it or not, what Mann's article shows us is that climate change and environmental sustainability aren't grassroots issues.
In fact, that's exactly what economists told me two years ago, when I was researching Before the Lights Go Out, my book on electricity infrastructure in the United States. Energy is a systemic issue. If you want to change it, you have to start at the level of systems -- not with the downstream effects.
That's why economists think carbon taxes are such an important idea. There are multiple benefits. Taxing carbon means accounting for currently ignored costs of fossil fuels -- in 2009, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that Americans spend $120 billion every year dealing with the health effects of air pollution. Carbon taxes also incentivize and simplify sustainable personal decisions -- instead of doing lots of research to buy just the right green product, all you have to do is buy the thing that's cheaper.
Most important, though, is the effect on infrastructure. We're going after unconventional fossil fuels today because of economic incentives that have made once too-expensive sources of energy appealing. We're willing to develop new technologies and set up whole new industries to get at those fuels. There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to the wind, the sun, the waves and other non-fossil fuel based sources of unconventional energy. If we price carbon at what it's really worth, then the forces that Mann shows as working against us can start to work for us.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/05/why-your-green-lifestyle-choices-dont-really-matter/5501/
Like it or not, what Mann's article shows us is that climate change and environmental sustainability aren't grassroots issues.
In fact, that's exactly what economists told me two years ago, when I was researching Before the Lights Go Out, my book on electricity infrastructure in the United States. Energy is a systemic issue. If you want to change it, you have to start at the level of systems -- not with the downstream effects.
That's why economists think carbon taxes are such an important idea. There are multiple benefits. Taxing carbon means accounting for currently ignored costs of fossil fuels -- in 2009, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that Americans spend $120 billion every year dealing with the health effects of air pollution. Carbon taxes also incentivize and simplify sustainable personal decisions -- instead of doing lots of research to buy just the right green product, all you have to do is buy the thing that's cheaper.
Most important, though, is the effect on infrastructure. We're going after unconventional fossil fuels today because of economic incentives that have made once too-expensive sources of energy appealing. We're willing to develop new technologies and set up whole new industries to get at those fuels. There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to the wind, the sun, the waves and other non-fossil fuel based sources of unconventional energy. If we price carbon at what it's really worth, then the forces that Mann shows as working against us can start to work for us.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/05/why-your-green-lifestyle-choices-dont-really-matter/5501/
A Gun Giveaway Program, Coming to a City Near You
No doubt the ACP will face stricter opposition still in some of the other target cities they officially announced this weekend at the NRA convention in Houston. They include Baltimore and Detroit, which have two of the highest big-city homicide rates in the nation, and New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent millions advocating for stricter gun policies in New York and nationwide. Even legal loaded guns lead to accidents, opponents point out, and some counter the presence of a gun may actually encourage break-ins: it's valuable loot.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/gun-giveaways-coming-city-near-you/5504/
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/05/gun-giveaways-coming-city-near-you/5504/
Monday, April 29, 2013
Why We Stay In Relationships Way Too Long
The fact that you’ve spent a lot of time together doesn’t mean that you have to spend your future together.
When broken down into it’s most raw, unfiltered essence: we’re afraid. Fearful of being alone. Because we think “alone” will leave us vulnerable and potentially deemed unlovable. This is not true, of course. But when comfort, as we know it, is threatened, our survival nature can quickly overtake intelligence and irrational behavior reins supreme. And in this case we stall a long overdue separation.
Breaking up can be a crushing experience.
But staying together for the wrong reasons will nonetheless dismantle you.
Just more slowly.
If you’re in a relationship that’s run its course, take a deep breath and give both of you the freedom you deserve.
MindBodyGreen
When broken down into it’s most raw, unfiltered essence: we’re afraid. Fearful of being alone. Because we think “alone” will leave us vulnerable and potentially deemed unlovable. This is not true, of course. But when comfort, as we know it, is threatened, our survival nature can quickly overtake intelligence and irrational behavior reins supreme. And in this case we stall a long overdue separation.
Breaking up can be a crushing experience.
But staying together for the wrong reasons will nonetheless dismantle you.
Just more slowly.
If you’re in a relationship that’s run its course, take a deep breath and give both of you the freedom you deserve.
MindBodyGreen
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Living on right side of county line means more life, better health
-Gladwin County has the highest percentage of smoking adults (31 percent); the lowest rate of smokers is in Ottawa County (11 percent)
-Saginaw County has the highest rate of obesity (40 percent), but even in the skinniest counties (Ottawa and Washtenaw), a quarter of adults are considered obese.
-Lake County has the highest teen birth rate, at 64 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19; that’s more than four times the teen birth rate in Livingston and Washtenaw counties (13 per 1,000).
Despite being the home to five of the state’s top-10-ranked hospitals, Wayne County ranks last in health outcomes such as poor physical and mental health, low birth rate and premature death.
By contrast, Washtenaw, with the state’s top-ranked medical facility (University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers), is ranked fifth. (Leelanau County is tops in health outcomes.)
“This is about changing economic opportunity,” Udow-Phillips said. “Health is about poverty. And the best way to get people out of poverty is education.
“If we invest in early childhood education, health issues (will improve)” eventually, she said, because education is positively correlated with better jobs and better health.
“This is a long-term issue,” Udow-Phillips said. “It’s not going to be solved by hiring more doctors.”
http://bridgemi.com/2013/04/living-on-right-side-of-county-line-means-more-life-better-health/
-Saginaw County has the highest rate of obesity (40 percent), but even in the skinniest counties (Ottawa and Washtenaw), a quarter of adults are considered obese.
-Lake County has the highest teen birth rate, at 64 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19; that’s more than four times the teen birth rate in Livingston and Washtenaw counties (13 per 1,000).
Despite being the home to five of the state’s top-10-ranked hospitals, Wayne County ranks last in health outcomes such as poor physical and mental health, low birth rate and premature death.
By contrast, Washtenaw, with the state’s top-ranked medical facility (University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers), is ranked fifth. (Leelanau County is tops in health outcomes.)
“This is about changing economic opportunity,” Udow-Phillips said. “Health is about poverty. And the best way to get people out of poverty is education.
“If we invest in early childhood education, health issues (will improve)” eventually, she said, because education is positively correlated with better jobs and better health.
“This is a long-term issue,” Udow-Phillips said. “It’s not going to be solved by hiring more doctors.”
http://bridgemi.com/2013/04/living-on-right-side-of-county-line-means-more-life-better-health/
Thursday, April 25, 2013
By the Numbers: Childhood Poverty in the U.S.
Watch Poor Kids on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
The preview above introduces the children featured in tonight’s film, while the figures below underscore many of the challenges facing all of the children living in poverty.
$23,050
The federal poverty guideline for a family of four is $23,050, up from $20,650 before the start of the recession. Today’s poverty guidelines compare with a median household income in the U.S. of $50,054.
Between 13.4 and 16.5 million
Determining the exact number of children living in poverty can depend on what Census calculation you go by. More than 16 million children, or roughly one in five, were living in poverty in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s official poverty measure (pdf). That is higher than any other age group. Among 18- to 64-year-olds, the poverty rate was 13.7 percent, while among seniors the rate was 8.7 percent.
The Census Bureau’s official figures fail to paint a complete picture, though. The formula the government uses to calculate the poverty rate was designed in the 1960s, and does not account for expenses that are necessary to even hold a job — such as transportation costs and child care. Nor does the formula account for government programs for the needy, such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
When the Census Bureau factors in (pdf) those types of variables in a new experimental formula the number of children found to be living in poverty falls to 13.4 million.
- $5 billion
Despite the safety net’s record of lifting children out of poverty, the amount of federal spending on children in 2011 dropped from $450 billion to $445 billion, according to an analysis from The Urban Institute (pdf).
The study accounted for spending on programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and tax expenditures like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. In all, the decline marked the first time that spending on children fell since the 1980s, and came in a year when total federal spending rose to $3.6 trillion from $3.52 trillion.
47.6 percent
The nation’s poorest kids primarily live in households headed by a single female (pdf). Nearly half of all children with a single mother — 47.6 percent — live in poverty. Indeed, the children of single mothers experience poverty at a rate that is more than four times higher than kids in married-couple families.
38.2 percent
Black children are more likely to live in poverty than children of any other race. The poverty rate among black children is 38.2 percent (pdf), more than twice as high as the rate among whites. The poverty rate for Hispanic children is 32.3 percent.
24
Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have poverty rates higher than the national average (pdf) of 15 percent, with the majority of the nation’s poor situated in the south. With a rate of 22.6 percent, Mississippi had the highest proportion of residents below the poverty line. At 8.8 percent, New Hampshire had the lowest. In Iowa and Illinois, where Poor Kids was filmed, the poverty rate is 12.8 percent and 15 percent, respectively.
45 percent
The longer a child lives in poverty, the tougher it can be for them to climb out later in life. According to an analysis (pdf) by Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, 45 percent of people who spent at least half of their childhood in poverty were poor at age 35. Among those who spent less than half of their childhood in poverty, just 8 percent were poor at age 35.
3
Only three other countries in the developed world have a higher child poverty rate (pdf) than the U.S., according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Mexico leads all nations with a rate of 25.79, followed by Chile (23.95), Turkey (23.46), and the U.S. (21.63).
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
The researchers suggest that the novelty of gardening may have been enough to jolt some of the participants out of their doldrums, but some experts have a much more radical explanation for how gardening might ease depression.
Christopher Lowry, Ph.D., an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been injecting mice with Mycobacterium vaccae, a harmless bacteria commonly found in soil, and has found that they increase the release and metabolism of serotonin in parts of the brain that control cognitive function and mood -- much like serotonin-boosting antidepressant drugs do.
Digging in the dirt isn't the same as taking Prozac, of course, but Lowry argues that because humans evolved along with M. vaccae and a host of other friendly bugs, the relative lack of these "old friends" in our current environment has thrown our immune systems out of whack.
This can lead to inflammation, which is implicated in a host of modern ills, from heart disease to diabetes to depression.
"By reintroducing these bacteria in the environment, that may help to alleviate some of these problems," Lowry says.
Christopher Lowry, Ph.D., an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been injecting mice with Mycobacterium vaccae, a harmless bacteria commonly found in soil, and has found that they increase the release and metabolism of serotonin in parts of the brain that control cognitive function and mood -- much like serotonin-boosting antidepressant drugs do.
Digging in the dirt isn't the same as taking Prozac, of course, but Lowry argues that because humans evolved along with M. vaccae and a host of other friendly bugs, the relative lack of these "old friends" in our current environment has thrown our immune systems out of whack.
This can lead to inflammation, which is implicated in a host of modern ills, from heart disease to diabetes to depression.
"By reintroducing these bacteria in the environment, that may help to alleviate some of these problems," Lowry says.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Relationships Are More Important Than Ambition
Kasser, the author of The High Price of Materialism, has shown that the pursuit of materialistic values like money, possessions, and social status-the fruits of career successes-leads to lower well-being and more distress in individuals. It is also damaging to relationships: "My colleagues and I have found," Kasser writes, "that when people believe materialistic values are important, they...have poorer interpersonal relationships [and] contribute less to the community." Such people are also more likely to objectify others, using them as means to achieve their own goals.
So if the pursuit of career success comes at the expense of social bonds, then an individual's well-being could suffer. That's because community is strongly connected to well-being.
In the form of marriage, family, ties to friends and neighbors, civic engagement, workplace ties, and social trust -- "all appear independently and robustly related to happiness and life satisfaction, both directly and through their impact on health."
In Canada and the United States, having frequent contact with neighbors was associated with higher levels of well-being, as was the feeling of truly belonging in a group. "If everyone in a community becomes more connected, the average level of subjective well-being would increase," they wrote.
In another study, Putnam and a colleague found that people who attend religious services regularly are, thanks to the community element, more satisfied with their lives than those who do not. Their well-being was not linked to their religious beliefs or worshipping practices, but to the number of friends they had at church. People with ten or more friends at their religious services were about twice as satisfied with their lives than people who had no friends there.
These outcomes are interesting given that relationships and community pose some challenges to our assumptions about the good life. After all, relationships and community impose constraints on freedom, binding people to something larger than themselves. The assumption in our culture is that limiting freedom is detrimental to well-being. That is true to a point. Barry Schwartz, a psychological researcher based at Swarthmore College, has done extensive research suggesting that too much freedom -- or a lack of constraints -- is detrimental to human happiness.
"Relationships are meant to constrain," Schwartz told me, "but if you're always on the lookout for better, such constraints are experienced with bitterness and resentment."
Dreher has come to see the virtue of constraints. Reflecting on what he went through when Ruthie was sick, he told me that the secret to the good life is "setting limits and being grateful for what you have. That was what Ruthie did, which is why I think she was so happy, even to the end."
Meanwhile, many of his East Coast friends, who chased after money and good jobs, certainly achieved success, but felt otherwise empty and alone. As Dreher was writing his book, one told him, "Everything I've done has been for career advancement ... And we have done well. But we are alone in the world." He added: "Almost everybody we know is like that."
"Community means more than many of us realize," he says. "It certainly means more than your job."
http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/relationships-are-more-important-than-ambition/275025/
So if the pursuit of career success comes at the expense of social bonds, then an individual's well-being could suffer. That's because community is strongly connected to well-being.
In the form of marriage, family, ties to friends and neighbors, civic engagement, workplace ties, and social trust -- "all appear independently and robustly related to happiness and life satisfaction, both directly and through their impact on health."
In Canada and the United States, having frequent contact with neighbors was associated with higher levels of well-being, as was the feeling of truly belonging in a group. "If everyone in a community becomes more connected, the average level of subjective well-being would increase," they wrote.
In another study, Putnam and a colleague found that people who attend religious services regularly are, thanks to the community element, more satisfied with their lives than those who do not. Their well-being was not linked to their religious beliefs or worshipping practices, but to the number of friends they had at church. People with ten or more friends at their religious services were about twice as satisfied with their lives than people who had no friends there.
These outcomes are interesting given that relationships and community pose some challenges to our assumptions about the good life. After all, relationships and community impose constraints on freedom, binding people to something larger than themselves. The assumption in our culture is that limiting freedom is detrimental to well-being. That is true to a point. Barry Schwartz, a psychological researcher based at Swarthmore College, has done extensive research suggesting that too much freedom -- or a lack of constraints -- is detrimental to human happiness.
"Relationships are meant to constrain," Schwartz told me, "but if you're always on the lookout for better, such constraints are experienced with bitterness and resentment."
Dreher has come to see the virtue of constraints. Reflecting on what he went through when Ruthie was sick, he told me that the secret to the good life is "setting limits and being grateful for what you have. That was what Ruthie did, which is why I think she was so happy, even to the end."
Meanwhile, many of his East Coast friends, who chased after money and good jobs, certainly achieved success, but felt otherwise empty and alone. As Dreher was writing his book, one told him, "Everything I've done has been for career advancement ... And we have done well. But we are alone in the world." He added: "Almost everybody we know is like that."
"Community means more than many of us realize," he says. "It certainly means more than your job."
http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/relationships-are-more-important-than-ambition/275025/
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Does the Location of Elite Colleges Hurt the Economy?
Michael Fogarty and Amit Sinha of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have examined the outward flow of patented information from universities and have identified a simple but illuminating pattern: There is a significant flow of intellectual property from universities in older industrial regions such as Detroit and Cleveland to high-technology regions such as the greater Boston, San Francisco, and New York metropolitan areas. Their work suggests that even though new knowledge is generated in many places, it is only those regions that can absorb and apply those ideas that are able to turn them into economic wealth.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/04/does-location-elite-colleges-hurt-economy/5236/
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/04/does-location-elite-colleges-hurt-economy/5236/
Monday, April 15, 2013
Saturday, April 13, 2013
The development of a society, rich or poor, can be judged by the quality of its population’s health, how fairly health is distributed across the social spectrum, and the degree of protection provided from disadvantage as a result of ill-health.
Closing the gap in a generation. Health equity through action on the social determinants of health
Closing the gap in a generation. Health equity through action on the social determinants of health
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Monday, April 8, 2013
Tackling Infant Mortality Rates Among Blacks
Nationally, black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die before the age of 1. Here in Pittsburgh, the rate is five times.
The infant mortality rate in the United States has long been near the bottom of the world’s industrialized countries. The nation’s current mark — 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births — places it 46th in the world, according to a ranking by the Central Intelligence Agency.
African-Americans fare far worse: Their rate of 13.3 deaths per 1,000 is almost double the national average and higher than Sri Lanka’s.
Recent studies have shown that poverty, education, access to prenatal care, smoking and even low birth weight do not alone explain the racial gap in infant mortality, and that even black women with graduate degrees are more likely to lose a child in its first year than are white women who did not finish high school. Research is now focusing on stress as a factor and whether black women have shorter birth canals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/us/efforts-to-combat-high-infant-mortality-rate-among-blacks.html?_r=0
The infant mortality rate in the United States has long been near the bottom of the world’s industrialized countries. The nation’s current mark — 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births — places it 46th in the world, according to a ranking by the Central Intelligence Agency.
African-Americans fare far worse: Their rate of 13.3 deaths per 1,000 is almost double the national average and higher than Sri Lanka’s.
Recent studies have shown that poverty, education, access to prenatal care, smoking and even low birth weight do not alone explain the racial gap in infant mortality, and that even black women with graduate degrees are more likely to lose a child in its first year than are white women who did not finish high school. Research is now focusing on stress as a factor and whether black women have shorter birth canals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/us/efforts-to-combat-high-infant-mortality-rate-among-blacks.html?_r=0
America's Most Post-Industrial Metros
The American economy has long been transitioning from goods-producing to service. But how has this transition occurred across America's cities and metro areas? What does its geography look like?
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/04/americas-most-post-industrial-metros/2815/
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/04/americas-most-post-industrial-metros/2815/
Should We Be Zoning With Crime in Mind?
Our central finding is that blocks that include both residential and commercial zoning exhibit less crime than blocks that are zoned exclusively for commercial use. This result suggests that including some parcels with residential-only zoning on blocks that are otherwise zoned commercially might reduce crime. We also find that crime rates are lowest in residential-only blocks, even in relatively high-crime neighborhoods.
So, Anderson and colleagues conclude, "residential parcels seem to reduce crime in commercial areas." Exactly why that's the case remains an open question, though the researchers did weigh in on some of the more popular theories proposed over the years. Jacobs's "eyes on the street" got little support from the data (for instance, bars attracted eyes but also crime), while Wilson and Kelling's "broken windows" got quite a bit of support (things like litter, glass, and garbage were associated with crime too). The researchers leave that for others to address in time; for now, the idea that zoning might not just influence the nature of a neighborhood but also its safety, is enough food for thought.
REDUCING CRIME BY SHAPING
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT WITH ZONING:
AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LOS ANGELES
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/04/should-we-be-zoning-crime-mind/5217/
So, Anderson and colleagues conclude, "residential parcels seem to reduce crime in commercial areas." Exactly why that's the case remains an open question, though the researchers did weigh in on some of the more popular theories proposed over the years. Jacobs's "eyes on the street" got little support from the data (for instance, bars attracted eyes but also crime), while Wilson and Kelling's "broken windows" got quite a bit of support (things like litter, glass, and garbage were associated with crime too). The researchers leave that for others to address in time; for now, the idea that zoning might not just influence the nature of a neighborhood but also its safety, is enough food for thought.
REDUCING CRIME BY SHAPING
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT WITH ZONING:
AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LOS ANGELES
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/04/should-we-be-zoning-crime-mind/5217/
Friday, April 5, 2013
Pregnant women who have stressful experiences in the year before giving birth are more likely to deliver stillborn babies, a new study reports.
The study, by the National Institutes of Health, asked 2,000 women in five states about specific events, like losing a job, moving or losing a close friend or relative. Stillbirth risk increased with each event. Non-Hispanic black women were most affected. Experiences most correlated with stillbirth included being in a fight, going to jail and hearing a partner express opposition to the pregnancy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/health/link-is-found-between-stressfull-events-and-stillbirths.html?ref=health
The study, by the National Institutes of Health, asked 2,000 women in five states about specific events, like losing a job, moving or losing a close friend or relative. Stillbirth risk increased with each event. Non-Hispanic black women were most affected. Experiences most correlated with stillbirth included being in a fight, going to jail and hearing a partner express opposition to the pregnancy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/health/link-is-found-between-stressfull-events-and-stillbirths.html?ref=health
More green space is linked to less stress in deprived communities: Evidence from salivary cortisol patterns
Abstract
Green space has been associated with a wide range of health benefits, including stress reduction, but much pertinent evidence has relied on self-reported health indicators or experiments in artificially controlled environmental conditions. Little research has been reported using ecologically valid objective measures with participants in their everyday, residential settings. This paper describes the results of an exploratory study (n = 25) to establish whether salivary cortisol can act as a biomarker for variation in stress levels which may be associated with varying levels of exposure to green spaces, and whether recruitment and adherence to the required, unsupervised, salivary cortisol sampling protocol within the domestic setting could be achieved in a highly deprived urban population. Self-reported measures of stress and general wellbeing were also captured, allowing exploration of relationships between cortisol, wellbeing and exposure to green space close to home. Results indicate significant relationships between self-reported stress (P < 0.01), diurnal patterns of cortisol secretion (P < 0.05), and quantity of green space in the living environment. Regression analysis indicates percentage of green space in the living environment is a significant (P < 0.05) and independent predictor of the circadian cortisol cycle, in addition to self-reported physical activity (P < 0.02). Results also show that compliance with the study protocol was good. We conclude that salivary cortisol measurement offers considerable potential for exploring relationships between wellbeing and green space and discuss how this ecologically valid methodology can be developed to confirm and extend findings in deprived city areas to illuminate why provision of green space close to home might enhance health. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204611003665
Green space has been associated with a wide range of health benefits, including stress reduction, but much pertinent evidence has relied on self-reported health indicators or experiments in artificially controlled environmental conditions. Little research has been reported using ecologically valid objective measures with participants in their everyday, residential settings. This paper describes the results of an exploratory study (n = 25) to establish whether salivary cortisol can act as a biomarker for variation in stress levels which may be associated with varying levels of exposure to green spaces, and whether recruitment and adherence to the required, unsupervised, salivary cortisol sampling protocol within the domestic setting could be achieved in a highly deprived urban population. Self-reported measures of stress and general wellbeing were also captured, allowing exploration of relationships between cortisol, wellbeing and exposure to green space close to home. Results indicate significant relationships between self-reported stress (P < 0.01), diurnal patterns of cortisol secretion (P < 0.05), and quantity of green space in the living environment. Regression analysis indicates percentage of green space in the living environment is a significant (P < 0.05) and independent predictor of the circadian cortisol cycle, in addition to self-reported physical activity (P < 0.02). Results also show that compliance with the study protocol was good. We conclude that salivary cortisol measurement offers considerable potential for exploring relationships between wellbeing and green space and discuss how this ecologically valid methodology can be developed to confirm and extend findings in deprived city areas to illuminate why provision of green space close to home might enhance health. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204611003665
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Monday, March 25, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
Wayne Law to host symposium on race relations March 22
Gosh I wish I could go to this but somehow SOME WAY, I will find another way to soak up this knowledge.
http://law.wayne.edu/alumni/news.php?id=11166
http://law.wayne.edu/alumni/news.php?id=11166
Thursday, March 21, 2013
"The basic thing I want you to see is that while this period (the protest phase of the civil rights movement) represented a frontal attack on the doctrine and practice of white supremacy, it did not defeat the monster of racism....The roots of racism are very deep in this country."
~Martin Luther King Jr.
http://www.doi.gov/pmb/eeo/AA-HM.cfm
~Martin Luther King Jr.
http://www.doi.gov/pmb/eeo/AA-HM.cfm
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Kenneth B. Clark
The works of Kenneth B. Clark
Prejudice and Your Child (1955)
King, Malcolm, Baldwin: Three Interviews (1963)
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965)
Social and Economic Implications of Integration in Public Schools (1965)
The Negro American (1966, with Talcott Parsons)
A Relevant War Against Poverty (1969)
Crisis in Urban Education (1971)
A Possible Reality (1972)
Pathos of Power (1975)
Prejudice and Your Child (1955)
King, Malcolm, Baldwin: Three Interviews (1963)
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965)
Social and Economic Implications of Integration in Public Schools (1965)
The Negro American (1966, with Talcott Parsons)
A Relevant War Against Poverty (1969)
Crisis in Urban Education (1971)
A Possible Reality (1972)
Pathos of Power (1975)
Monday, March 18, 2013
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Placemaking is not a new idea
The concepts behind Placemaking originated in the 1960s, when visionaries like Jane Jacobs and William “Holly” Whyte offered groundbreaking ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to cars and shopping centers. Their work focused on the importance of lively neighborhoods and inviting public spaces. Jane Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the now-famous idea of “eyes on the street.” Holly Whyte emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public spaces.
The concepts behind Placemaking originated in the 1960s, when visionaries like Jane Jacobs and William “Holly” Whyte offered groundbreaking ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to cars and shopping centers. Their work focused on the importance of lively neighborhoods and inviting public spaces. Jane Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the now-famous idea of “eyes on the street.” Holly Whyte emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public spaces.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
The Need for More Supermarkets in New York
Special Report
Key Findings
Access to food is not evenly distributed in New York. Many people have to travel excessive
distances to buy food at a supermarket.
The uneven distribution of food in New York disproportionately affects large numbers
of low-income people.
There is a connection between diabetes and lack of supermarket access.
Weekly Sales Volume for Supermarkets
Key Findings
Access to food is not evenly distributed in New York. Many people have to travel excessive
distances to buy food at a supermarket.
The uneven distribution of food in New York disproportionately affects large numbers
of low-income people.
There is a connection between diabetes and lack of supermarket access.
Weekly Sales Volume for Supermarkets
Healthy Food Access Portal
Welcome to the nation’s first comprehensive healthy food access retail portal.
http://www.healthyfoodaccess.org/
http://www.healthyfoodaccess.org/
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