"The Stuff That Costs More When You're Poor"

"In other words, as the study’s title points out, Frugality is Hard to Afford. We’ve discussed this phenomenon in detail, too. It’s not just toilet paper. When you’re poor, it’s not easy to buy stuff in bulk or buy high-quality items that will last. There are a lot of hidden, systematic ways poor people pay more for stuff, and there are some expenses that aren’t so subtle...  

many colleges, especially private ones, use a method called “gapping” to squeeze more money out of poorer students—or discourage them from attending altogether. Basically, those colleges offer prospective low income students tuition packages that don’t really meet their financial needs. They underfund those students and save the aid for wealthier students who can afford to pay full tuition rates...

Bank fees make it expensive just to maintain your money in an account, which is ridiculous. They’re easy enough to get around, though—if you have the money."

http://twocents.lifehacker.com/the-stuff-that-costs-more-when-youre-poor-1783148870?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

"We Can Finally Stop Demonizing Butter"

"A new study published in PLOS ONE is now bolstering this changing tide of opinion, showing there’s no link between butter and chronic disease. This gigantic analysis—a meta-study that included a total of 636,151 individuals across 15 countries, and involving 6.5 million person-years of follow-up—showed no association between the consumption of butter and cardiovascular disease... 

butter is healthier than sugar or starches like bread, which have been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. On the other hand, butter is worse than many margarines and cooking oils, such as those rich in healthy fats, like soybean, canola, flaxseed, and extra virgin olive oils. Importantly, margarine made from trans fats should be avoided like the plague."

http://gizmodo.com/we-can-finally-stop-demonizing-butter-1782887412?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Butter is very important. 

"Why TV Shows Are Darker Than They’ve Ever Been"

"HBO has made a cottage industry of dimly-lit hourlong dramas—True Detective, Boardwalk Empire. And where HBO goes, other networks have followed, from basic cable (Better Call Saul) to streaming (Jessica Jones) to even networks: No show was as inky as Hannibal. So why, exactly, has this happened?...

Over the ensuing years, as The Sopranos succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, that very specific visual callback to a thematically similar film sometimes got conflated with the relatively new idea of “prestige television” in much the same way as the show’s antihero did. “I kept hearing, you know, make it darker, make it darker, make it darker,” said cinematographer Manuel Billeter about his work on Jonathan Nolan’s Person of Interest, which premiered in 2011. (Billeter also shot the very dark Jessica Jones.) “They wanted it to look more noir, to look more stylized. I started playing a lot of scenes in silhouette, with no light at all on the actors and just light in the backgrounds.”... 

But one problem with the wave of technological change that has made dark lighting easy and cheap for filmmakers is that it doesn’t translate to all television sets. Old televisions did a better job of rendering dark colors than modern ones. Detail that’s visible on an expensive television disappears on a cheap one, and suddenly Game of Thrones is indecipherable. The same is true when a television is viewed in a brightly-lit room or from an angle"

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2016/06/cinematographers_from_game_of_thrones_jessica_jones_and_better_call_saul.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%206/29/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Related: TV hair all looks the same

"‘A Million Questions’ From Descendants of Slaves Sold to Aid Georgetown"

"Orlando Ward, 55

Great-great-great-grandson of Bill and Mary Ann Hill... 

Let’s jump ahead and talk about reparations. How do you really value the damage that was done in a way that’s straightforward and fair? Everybody should have scholarships, yes. But not everybody wants to go to Georgetown. The more important thing to me is to memorialize the 272 and, at the same time, the people who sold them and the people who brought the slaves to Louisiana. What do their descendants have to say about it? I don’t know all the emotions they would go through; I can’t fully get into their shoes. But I think it’s important for both sides to be pointed out and memorialized, not villainized, to begin to build a model for healthy dialogue.

I have a 12-year-old son, and we live in a fairly diverse community where African-Americans are in the minority. He had a history project not too long ago where kids were asked to trace their families. Many of his European-American classmates could go all the way back to Ireland, England and Spain. I could take him to Louisiana, and that’s as far as I could go. As African-Americans, we’ve grown to accept that. But we’ve also known there’s another door there that we didn’t have a key to."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/20/us/-descendants-of-slaves-sold-to-aid-georgetown.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1

"A bug in fMRI software could invalidate 15 years of brain research"

"To test how good this software actually is, Eklund and his team gathered resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy people sourced from databases around the world, split them up into groups of 20, and measured them against each other to get 3 million random comparisons.

They tested the three most popular fMRI software packages for fMRI analysis - SPM, FSL, and AFNI - and while they shouldn't have found much difference across the groups, the software resulted in false-positive rates of up to 70 percent... 

The bad news here is that one of the bugs the team identified has been in the system for the past 15 years, which explains why so many papers could now be affected.

The bug was corrected in May 2015, at the time the researchers started writing up their paper, but the fact that it remained undetected for over a decade shows just how easy it was for something like this to happen, because researchers just haven't had reliable methods for validating fMRI results."

http://www.sciencealert.com/a-bug-in-fmri-software-could-invalidate-decades-of-brain-research-scientists-discover

"Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens"

"Lilly’s work on interspecies communication has since gone in and out of vogue several times within the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) community. Today, it’s back in fashion, thanks to new applications of information theory and to technological advancements, such as theCetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) device, a submersible computer interface that establishes basic communication with dolphins. The return to dolphins as a model for alien intelligence came in 1999, when SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle proposed using information theory to analyze animal communication systems, particularly the whistle repertoire of bottlenose dolphins... 

What Doyle and his colleagues demonstrated is that communication exists on a complexity spectrum. This mathematical tool could be the first step toward a SETI intelligence filter, helping astronomers determine whether intercepted cosmic noise bears linguistic hallmarks."

http://m.nautil.us/blog/dolphins-are-helping-us-hunt-for-aliens

There is some super interesting linguistics in here. 

"What It's Like to Have 'High-Functioning' Anxiety"

"High-functioning anxiety feels like… 

A snake slithering up my back, clamping its jaws shut where my shoulders meet my neck. Punch-in-the-gut stomach aches, like my body is confusing answering an email with being attacked by a lion. 

High-functioning anxiety sounds like…

You’re not good enough. You’re a bad friend. You’re not good at your job. You’re wasting time. You’re a waste of time. Your boyfriend doesn’t love you. You’re so needy. What are you doing with yourself? Why would you say that? What if they hate it? Why can’t you have your shit together? You’re going to get anxious and because you’re going to get anxious, you’re going to mess everything up. You’re a fraud. Just good at faking it. You’re letting everybody down. No one here likes you.

All the while, it appears perfectly calm."

http://themighty.com/2016/06/living-with-high-functioning-and-hidden-anxiety/

Related: Mental health problem in academia

FB: "It’s when answering a text impulsively and thoughtlessly is an act of bravery.

It’s fighting against your own need to constantly prove your right to exist in this world.

It’s learning how to validate your own feelings. That even though you don’t feel like you’re enough, and you’ll never be enough, it’s knowing you’re at least anxious enough to benefit from help. That admitting you need it doesn’t confirm voices’ lies. That taking a break doesn’t mean you’re a failure."