"Gun research could save lives, but America won't fund it"

"In order to prevent gun injuries and deaths, we need accurate information about how they occur and why. While police reports and FBI data can provide some detail, they don’t include the thousands of cases that go unreported each year. Between 2006 and 2010, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that more than a third of victims of crimes involving a firearm did not report the crime to police. The National Crime Victimization Survey, which collects victimization data from about 90,000 households each year, helps to fill in this gap. However, even this survey has its drawbacks. It doesn’t collect data from youth younger than 12, it doesn’t include murder and it doesn’t help us fully understand the offender’s motivations and beliefs.

Social scientists like me need more research in order to get the level of detail we need about gun crime. There’s just one major roadblock: The federal government won’t fund it... 

According to Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Programat the University of California, Davis Medical Center, fewer than five private organizations are willing to provide gun research funding... 

State funding may be another option. In 2016, California announced its intent to fund the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center. This is the first time a state has stepped forward to fund a research center focused on guns. California remains the only state to take this step."

https://www.popsci.com/gun-research-funding

FB: "The CDC wasn’t the only federal agency affected. In 2011, Congress added a similar clause to legislation that regulated funding for the National Institutes of Health. However, due to a directive from the Obama administration, the NIH continued to provide funding for gun research. That push faded as the Obama administration left office."

"On Minimization as a Patriarchal Reflex"

“It all happens automatically. Changing it can feel like changing the way I breathe. This is part of the reason why, I believe, men can be so insulted by descriptions of this stuff. We’re being asked to deconstruct something that feels essential to the way we are in the world. What would be left if those defences were taken away?

How does that moment feel? Like I’ve been invaded and have to push out or strike back. My neck gets stiff with narcissism: I can’t let the other person have a legitimate problem without making it about me. I have to react instantly. I can’t pause, take it in, nod, reflect, try to differentiate the other’s feelings from my own. I can’t let it be, without fixing it, which really means casting it aside.

What do I do? Never anything that I couldn’t justify according to some arbitrary spectrum of “normal emotional responses”. Maybe a little exasperated sigh, a tiny smirk that no-one but a partner would pick up on (so it’s even worse), an eye-roll. Maybe I change the subject too quickly. I might squint my eyes and shake my head. If I get going a little, my voice becomes irritated or more emphatic. This all happens below the threshold of “conflict”, and within the realm of being able to pretend to be innocent. At least according to me. The net effect of all of these gestures, not to mention the verbal deflections I’m working up to, is to say that the problem my partner is bringing to me is hers alone...

At the microlevel, when my partner suggests I take a cab at 3:30am, my ingrained response is to feel she’s infringing on my space. There are elements of personal and familial psychology at play for me here – some of them reasonable. But misogyny has hardwired me to belittle her concern, so that I can own more space...

I have to climb a mountain, forty years high, to look a little boy in the eye and tell him it’s okay to feel his pain and sorrow. To tell him it’s a good thing, actually. That it will help him learn to listen, and listening will help him let other people have their feelings as well.”

http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/minimization-patriarchal-reflex/

Do this work! Whatever position of oppression you might occupy, Investigate yourself and your failings, even when there is no obvious solution. Condemn yourself to uncertainty and ambiguity for awhile, learn from it.

FB: “The locker-room comments amongst my middle-aged cohort aren’t as sexually objectifying as they are gender-objectifying. When a woman partner is mentioned, there’s a general groan. There’s an expectation that a story of nagging or craziness is about to unfold. I get on edge when I feel this happen, because I know it will be hard to point to anything distinct to call out or in. It’s hard to call out a general feeling, as old as bone. If I’m feeling up for at least pretending to do ally work that day, the most I can say is “Well maybe she feels like x, because of y,” referring to some aspect of patriarchy that wouldn’t otherwise get discussed. This is always awkward, because I’m interrupting not only a discharge, but veering out of a well-worn groove.”

“UCI trio designs educational computer game that immerses players in 18th-century Ghana”

““Sankofa” gets its name from a word in Twi meaning “go back and seek it,” which, according to Seed, is how players of the interactive, three-dimensional game learn the history of the Asante Kingdom, a West African society located in modern-day Ghana.

Gamers follow a young girl as she wanders through the local marketplace; creates a storytelling cloth; and explores Asante folk tales, spirits and legends. The ethnographically authentic landscape allows players to discover aspects of 18th-century Ghanian life that they might not encounter in a classroom.

“It’s a unique game,” says El Zarki, director of UCI’s Institute for Virtual Environments & Computer Games. “The learning goals are different from other games, because this is really about teaching an underrepresented culture.””

https://www.cs.uci.edu/bringing-history-to-life/

"Call of Duty, Wolfenstein, and the Joy of Killing Virtual Nazis"

"Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, deals explicitly with the theme ofresistance. Like Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle,” it imagines an alternative reality in which Hitler has won the war and invaded the United States. Jack-booted German officers and hood-wearing Klansmen patrol the streets of America by day, and the game goes out of its way to portray them not as mere pop-up targets for the trigger-happy but as cruel, morally decrepit deviants who must be stopped because of what they stand for. This gives Wolfenstein II a resonance with the contemporary political landscape that its creators couldn’t have imagined when they began development. The recent rise of nationalism in Europe and North America has emboldened the far right to such an extent that conservative pizza-makers feel the need to publicly demand that Fascists stop buying their products. Thanks to the movement’s successful co-opting of young, disenfranchised men—a big video-game demographic—the use of Nazis as cannon fodder feels, ludicrously, somehow transgressive and confrontational... 

The game’s tagline, “Make America Nazi-Free Again,” makes clear its developers’ feelings on Donald Trump. (Curiously, Trump’s brother Robert serves on the board of directors at ZeniMax, Wolfenstein II’s publisher.) The game itself apparently received some last-minute updates before it was released, including a newspaper interview with a “dapper young KKK leader,” another Spencer reference. Was this a cynical publisher’s attempt to profit from a few memes? Maybe. But if these games manage, even ambiently, to communicate why the Allied forces fought Fascism, as well as how and where they fought it, their status is surely elevated from slick shooting galleries to something morally instructive."

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/call-of-duty-wolfenstein-and-the-joy-of-killing-virtual-nazis?mbid=social_facebook

“Wimpy White Boy Syndrome’: How Racial Bias Creeps Into Neonatal Care"

“Stanford University School of Medicine researchers analyzed more than 18,600 hospital records for California-born babies with a very low birth weight (3.3 pounds or less). Intended to measure performance and care disparity, researchers scored the records on whether the patient received care within standard medical practices and outcomes. The scores indicated that Latino infants and those listed with “other” as an ethnicity were treated the worst. Hospitals with the best patient outcomes treated white patients better, while Blacks received better care in poorer-quality NICUs...

Although statistics back up the belief that prematurely born Black babies will do better than white infants in most cases, it is not a guarantee of positive health outcomes. Yet, the aggressiveness in treatment for surviving premature babies of color is proportional to these assumptions. According to the Stanford study, Black infants received less steroid therapy for lung development; did not have timely exams for retinopathy of prematurity, a disease causing the abnormal growth of blood vessels in the eye; weren’t given human breast milk as often; and developed more infections due to careless hospital handling than whites, Latinos, or Asians...

The study also does not take into consideration anecdotal responses to care such as the unofficial diagnosis of “wimpy white boy syndrome” (WWBS) used in many hospitals throughout the U.S. Dr. David G. Oelberg, a neonatologist with the Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Virginia, defines this condition in his Neonatal Intensive Care editorial as “a neonatal white boy with adjusted gestational age of 35-40 weeks who is failing to achieve the developmental landmarks of weaning to an open crib and/or not taking all of his oral feeds as expected.” Mostly, NICU staff will “diagnose” a baby with WWBS if he is failing to improve in the absence of other obvious medical conditions.”

https://rewire.news/article/2017/10/18/wimpy-white-boy-syndrome-bias-neonatal-care/

"Book Review: The Ordeal of Appalachia"

"Stoll refuses to accept that there is something intrinsically lacking in Appalachians — people who, after all, managed to carve out a life on such challenging, mountainous terrain. Something was done to them, and he is going to figure out who did it. He links their fate to other threatened agrarian communities, from rice growers in the Philippines to English peasants at the time of the Enclosure Acts. “Whenever we see hunger and deprivation among rural people, we need to ask a simple question: What went on just before the crisis that might have caused it?” he writes. “Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.”... 

The confused legal property claims offered the aspiring coal barons a window: They could approach longtime inhabitants and say, essentially, “Look, we all know you don’t have full title to this land, but if you sell us the mineral rights, we’ll let you stay.” With population growth starting to crimp the wide-ranging agrarian existence, some extra cash in hand was hard to reject. Not that it was very much: One farmer turned over his 740 acres for a mere $3.58 per acre — around $80 today. By 1889, a single company, Flat Top Land Trust, had amassed rights to 200,000 acres in McDowell County in southern West Virginia; just 13 years later, McDowell was producing more than five million tons of coal per year... 

Such rapaciousness did not leave much of the commons that had sustained the makeshift agrarian existence. Of course, there was a new life to replace it: mining coal or logging trees. By 1929, 100,000 men, out of a total state population of only 1.7 million, worked in 830 mines across West Virginia alone. But it is in that very shift that Stoll identifies the region’s turn toward immiseration. With the land spoiled and few non-coal jobs available, workers were at the mercy of whichever coal company dominated their corner of the region. They lived in camps and were paid in scrip usable only at the company store; even the small gardens they were allowed in the camps were geared less toward self-reliance than toward cutting the company’s costs to feed them."

FB: things our country lets happen to its own citizens -" “Banks in coal counties couldn’t invest in home construction or other local improvements because the greater share of their deposits belonged to the companies,” Stoll writes. “No sooner did that capital flow in than it flowed out, depriving banks of funds stable enough for community lending.” Not only had the coal industry, along with timber, supplanted an earlier existence, but it was actively stifling other forms of growth and development."

“Geneticists are starting to unravel evolution's role in mental illness”

“Many of schizophrenia's symptoms, such as auditory hallucinations and jumbling sentences, involve brain regions tied to speech, says Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. Over the course of hominid evolution, he says, the ability to speak could have outweighed the small, but unavoidable risk that the genes involved in language could malfunction and result in schizophrenia in a small percentage of the population...

People who live in European regions with relatively lower winter temperatures, they found, were slightly more genetically prone to schizophrenia. Polimanti suggests that if genes that helped people tolerate cold were located close to variants that promote schizophrenia in the genome, then the latter could have been inadvertently carried along during evolution as a “fellow traveller”...

An overactive immune system is thought to be involved in many psychiatric disorders, such as depression2, but a stronger immune system would have made human ancestors more resistant to diseases, says Stranger.“

http://www.nature.com/news/geneticists-are-starting-to-unravel-evolution-s-role-in-mental-illness-1.22914?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews&sf132191802=1