Intervention Show Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Intervention Show. Here they are! All 100 of them:

The painter is not simply someone who looks and who sees. Above all, the artist is someone who exposes a personal vision by rendering it visible. The painter shows or allows the seeing of "something" that without him, without his intervention, would not be seen. He manifests through his work a possibility of seeing that would otherwise remain latent. In other words, painting is an art that reveals or unveils the world from an angle that the world itself does not present to us. Painting creates. It does not limit itself to imitation or reproduction. Any desire to confine painting within the limits of déjà vu would be a gross misunderstanding of the essence of what painting is. Painting allows us to see that which without it would never be seen.
Marcel Paquet (Botero: Philosophy of the creative act)
The real problem is not in losing the weight but in keeping it off for any meaningful length of time. Numerous sources show that almost every lifestyle intervention works for the first three to six months. But then the weight comes rolling back.
Robert H. Lustig (Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease)
It is similar to one brother asking another, “Why did you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is “Because Dad was a drunk.” The second brother then asks, “Why didn’t you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is “Because Dad was a drunk.” Some more complete answers are found in Robert Ressler’s classic book Whoever Fights Monsters. He speaks of the tremendous importance of the early puberty period for boys. Before then, the anger of these boys might have been submerged and without focus, perhaps turned inward in the form of depression, perhaps (as in most cases) just denied, to emerge later. But during puberty, this anger collides with another powerful force, one of the most powerful in nature: sexuality. Even at this point, say Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest. I can say from experience that it doesn’t take much.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Reading ancient myths and fairy tales can be very helpful because these stories came spontaneously from people who had not studied psychology. The stories came straight out of their unconscious and, therefore, show us how the unconscious works unimpeded by conscious intervention. The images are clear and stark. For those of us who are interested in why we do what we do when we want to do the opposite, the stories are gold mines of information.
Marion Woodman (Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness)
Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." ... In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention--not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.
Victor J. Stenger (God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist)
You're so haunted by other people's futures that you forget, the only future you cannot see is your own.
Minority Report (TV show)
In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.
Atul Gawande
Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.
bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
Here’s a simple intervention to show what a little change in your negative narrative can do. First-year college students who receive worse grades than they anticipate are highly likely to drop out. Some conclude they’re just not college material, while others, who have a positive narrative, will absorb the news and decide to work harder.
Richard O'Connor (Rewire: Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Addictions, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior)
Scholars in South Asian Studies departments and liberal think-tanks see India through a secular lens based on Western ideas of human rights. They deploy subaltern studies and postmodern theories to deconstruct the Indian state as a catastrophe constructed artificially by colonialism, and to show its very nature as oppressive, undemocratic, inherently anti-minority, anti-women and anti-Dalit. They export these models to their Indian counterparts, forming a self-sustaining system. They also feed these visions into media and government hearings. Thus, these two supposedly opposing intellectual streams converge to provide an image of India as a frontier necessitating Western intervention.
Rajiv Malhotra (Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines)
Rabbi Moshe Weinberger of Mesivta Beis Shraga related how his father used to say that on Purim, the handle of the gragger (noisemaker) we spin is beneath the gragger itself, while on Chanukah the handle of the dreidel (four-sided top) we spin is on top. Purim, he expounded, represents human initiative, an "awakening from below," while Chanukah represents Divine intervention, an "awakening from above." On Purim, we stir ourselves with drink, joy, a hearty meal and other activities. On Chanukah, we light a candle that we are not allowed to use for any purpose other than to gaze at its flame. We just sit back and look. We let Hashem take over. We remind ourselves that Hashem is running the show.
Yaakov Astor (The Hidden Hand: Uncovering Divine Providence in Major Events of the 20th Century)
Actually, this is an understatement: the public not only expressed strong views, but respondents actually showed enthusiasm for military intervention in Ukraine in direct proportion to their lack of knowledge about Ukraine. Put another way, people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about the use of US military force.2
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 per cent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention; 32 per cent maintain that humans may have evolved from earlier life forms in a process lasting millions of years, but God orchestrated this entire show; 46 per cent believe that God created humans in their current form
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged.
E.M. Forster (A Room with a View and Howards End: (A Modern Library E-Book))
Faced with the numbering logic of neoliberal regimes, literature offers an intervention in order to consider identity and voice, to consider representation in both the political and artistic sense of the term... [Literature and art] cultivate tension between an unresolved past and present, between invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities of face and mask that leave their trace on identitarian struggles today.
Francine Masiello (The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (Latin America Otherwise))
That’s when I realized that, more often than not, the miracle isn’t the absence of struggle, disease, or pain; it is the presence of grace and certainty, the ability to face strife, the unknown, or a slow death, without fear. My obsession with divine intervention had distracted me from the truth that God had already intervened. We desperately want provision to make sense on our terms—bills paid, food on the table, and sickness taken away—but simply waiting on God and being angry when he doesn’t show up the way we want him to is a perverted sense of provision. Make no mistake, I believe that physical healings still happen. But God has made it pretty clear that while he answers prayers, those answers are based on his understanding, not our own; and when it comes to God’s provision for the world, we are the front lines. Or at least we should be.
Patrick Gray (I'll Push You: A Journey of 500 Miles, Two Best Friends, and One Wheelchair)
According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 per cent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention; 32 per cent maintain that humans may have evolved from earlier life forms in a process lasting millions of years, but God orchestrated this entire show; 46 per cent believe that God created humans in their current form sometime during the last 10,000 years, just as the Bible says. Spending three years in college has absolutely no impact on these views. The same survey found that among BA graduates, 46 per cent believe in the biblical creation story, whereas only 14 per cent think that humans evolved without any divine supervision. Even among holders of MA and PhD degrees, 25 per cent believe the Bible, whereas only 29 per cent credit natural selection alone with the creation of our species.1
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
The Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet—or MIND diet, for short—was specially designed to improve brain health. Recent well-done studies have found that sticking to the MIND diet helps people avoid mental decline and remain cognitively healthy. One study even showed that people who stuck to the MIND diet cut their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in half. That’s extraordinary. And since no drug has yet been developed to prevent dementia, it’s your only move.
Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
All that the State need do, and can do, in order to preserve the monetary system undisturbed, is to refrain from such intervention. That is the essence of the monetary theory of the classical economists and their immediate successors, the Currency School. It is possible to refine and amplify this doctrine with the aid of the modern subjective theory; but it is impossible to overthrow it, and impossible to put anything else in its place. Those who are able to forget it only show that they are unable to think as economists.
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
A third positive result even further from the traditional tool kit of financial incentives comes from a recent randomized control trial conducted in the U.K., using the increasingly popular and low-cost method of text reminders. This intervention involved sending texts to half the parents in some school in advance of a major math test to let them know that their child had a test coming up in five days, then in three days, then in one day. The researchers call this approach “pre-informing.” The other half of parents did not receive the texts. The pre-informing texts increased student performance on the math test by the equivalent of one additional month of schooling, and students in the bottom quartile benefited most. These children gained the equivalent of two additional months of schooling, relative to the control group. Afterward, both parents and students said they wanted to stick with the program, showing that they appreciated being nudged. This program also belies the frequent claim, unsupported by any evidence, that nudges must be secret to be effective.
Richard H. Thaler (Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics)
Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes,
George Eliot (Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction])
If the war had a noble purpose, it was this - to end the inhumanity those photographs showed. While India rarely spoke about its imperative as the moral one, and few people steeped in realpolitik can shed their cynicism when a politician speaks in moral terms, and the intervention certainly suited India's strategic interests, the fact remains that in the annals of humanitarian interventions, few were as swift, successful, purpose-driven and with humanitarian goals as the Indian intervention to liberate Bangladesh. India went in when it was attacked, and left before its troops became unpopular.
Salil Tripathi (The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy)
Two decades ago the federal government invited 150,000 men and women to participate in an experiment of screening for cancer in four organs: prostate, lung, colon, and ovary. The volunteers were less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, had higher socioeconomic status, and fewer medical problems than members of the general population. Those are the kinds of people who seek preventive intervention. Of course, they are going to do better. Had the study not been randomized, the investigators might have concluded that screening was the best thing since sliced bread. Regardless of which group they were randomly assigned to, the participants had substantially lower death rates than the general population—for all cancers (even those other than prostate, lung, colon, and ovary), for heart disease, and for injury. In other words, the volunteers were healthier than average. With randomization, the study showed that only one of the four screenings (for colon cancer) was beneficial. Without it, the study might have concluded that prostate cancer screening not only lowered the risk of death from prostate cancer but also deaths from leukemia, heart attack, and car accidents (although you would hope someone would raise the biological plausibility criterion here).
H. Gilbert Welch (Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care)
She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged.
E.M. Forster (The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works)
I asked, “When the Rebellions were at its peak doing nonsense, everyone was trying to keep away from the area, yet you were going in, why were you going into that area? Supt. Strachan answered quite frankly, Because I was not afraid. I felt like they are my people, they are my color. I don’t know of anyone born after me that I should be afraid of, that was how I felt. I knew I could’ve walk through Strachan’s Corner, sit down and felt at home, and their parents also accepted me. I came to the conclusion; these kids just need someone to show them some attention. They just wanted to belong, that was what a lot of them were looking for. So I said to myself, if I could assist them I would, and that was what I did. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
So,twice a week I have my own tutor," he said shortly. "Who,trust me, makes my father look like a marshmellow. And on that note..." He picked up the sheaf of French lessons again. "We'll start with the imperfect, used to express actions that are-" "Incomplete,unfulfilled, or repeated over and over." I slumped back in the weird chair. "That I know." At the end of the very imperfect sessions, Alex gave me a full ten minutes in the downstairs bathroom before showing up.All I'd figured out what that Edward's faceless girl had had wide feet, and the Bainbridge's decorator had a preference for green that might merit an intervention. "I could probably give you the stupid thing"-Alex gestured to the picture when he came in- "and my folks would never notice." I winced inwardly. "I can't advocate theft," I told him, "no matter how noble the intent.
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said good-bye or “It’s okay” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
The data that drives algorithms isn't just a few numbers now. It's monstrous tables of millions of numbers, thousands upon thousands of rows and columns of numbers....Matrices are created and refined by computers endlessly churning through Big Data's records on everyone, and everything they've done. No human can read those matrices, even with computers helping you interpret them they are simply too large and complex to fully comprehend. But the computers can use them, applying the appropriate matrix to show us the appropriate video that will eventually lead us to make an appropriate purchase. We are not living in "The Matrix," but there's still a matrix controlling us. What does this have to do with the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? It has everything to do with it. These algorithms are quickly becoming the primary route down the rabbit hole. To a large extent this has already happened, but it's going to get far, far worse. Tufekci described what happened when she tried watching different types of content on YouTube. She started watching videos of Donald Trump rallies. 'I wanted to write about one of [Donald Trump]'s rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me, and autoplaying to me, white supremacist videos, in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme. If you watch Hilary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays [left-wing] conspiracy videos, and it goes downhill from there." Downhill, into the rabbit hole....Without human intervention the algorithm has evolved to a perfect a method of gently stepping up the intensity of the conspiracy videos that it shows you so that you don't get turned off, and so you continue to watch. They get more intense because the algorithm has found (not in any human sense, but found nonetheless) that the deeper it can guide people down the rabbit hole, the more revenue it can make.
Mick West (Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect)
According to the current view, the maintenance of sound monetary conditions is only possible with a 'credit balance of payments'. The confutation of this and related objections is implicit in the Quantity Theory and in Gresham's Law. The Quantity Theory shows that money can never permanently flow abroad from a country in which only metallic money is used (the 'purely metallic currency' of the Currency Principle). The tightness in the domestic market called forth by the efflux of part of the stock of money reduces the prices of commodities, and so restricts importation and encourages exportation, until there is once more enough money at home. The precious metals which perform the function of money are distributed among individuals, and consequently among separate countries, according to the extent and intensity of the demand of each for money. State intervention to assure to the community the necessary quantity of money by regulating its international nlovements is supererogatory.
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
Critics are also overwhelmingly male—one survey of film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes found only 22 percent of the critics afforded “top critic” status were female.14 More recently, of course, we have become accustomed to a second set of gatekeepers: our friends and family and even random strangers we’ve decided to follow on social media, as well as “peer” reviewers on sites like Goodreads and IMDb. But peer review sites are easily skewed by a motivated minority with a mission (see the Ghostbusters reboot and the handful of manbabies dedicated to its ruination) or by more stubborn and pervasive implicit biases, which most users aren’t even aware they have. (The data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com found that male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, but the reverse isn’t true.)15 As for the social networks we choose? They’re usually plagued by homophily, which is a fancy way to say that it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who make us feel comfortable, and usually those are people who remind us of us. Without active and careful intervention on our part, we can easily be left with an online life that tells us only things we already agree with and recommends media to us that doesn’t challenge our existing worldview.
Jaclyn Friedman (Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All)
Silicon Valley mythology holds that Minitel failed because it was too dirigiste, too state-directed. As Julien Mailland points outs, however, both Minitel and the internet were the products of different quantities of state investment, private capital, and thriving cultures of amateur enthusiasts and experts improving the technology and proselytizing for it. Both Mintel and the internet show that there is no 'free market' without substantial pubic-sector intervention and backing. The internet's history also shows us that when we rely on the private sector and its hallowed bromide of 'innovation,' quite often that will result in technical innovations that are designed for manipulation, surveillance and exploitation. The tax-evading, offshore wealth-hoarding, data-monopolizing, privacy-invading silicon giants benefit from the internet's 'free market' mythology, but the brief flourishing of Minitel shows is that other ways, other worlds, other platforms, are possible. The question is, given that there's no way to reverse history, how can we actualize these possibilities? What sort of power do we have? As users, it turns out, very little. We are not voters on the platforms; we are not even customers. We are the unpaid products of raw material. We could, if we were organized, withdraw our labor power, commit social media suicide: but then what other platforms do we have access to with anything like the same reach?
Richard Seymour (The Twittering Machine)
The impact of second-class treatment on black people’s bodies is devastating. It is manifested not only in the black–white death gap but also in the drastic measures required when chronic disease is left unmanaged. Black patients are less likely than whites to be referred to kidney and liver transplant wait lists and are more likely to die while waiting for a transplant.68 If they are lucky enough to get a donated kidney or liver, blacks are sicker than whites at the time of transplantation and less likely to survive afterward. “Take a look at all the black amputees,” said a caller to a radio show I was speaking on, identifying the remarkable numbers of people with amputated legs you see in poor black communities as a sign of health inequities. According to a 2008 nationwide study of Medicare claims, whites in Louisiana and Mississippi have a higher rate of leg amputation than in other states, but the rate for blacks is five times higher than for whites.69 An earlier study of Medicare services found that physicians were less likely to treat their black patients with aggressive, curative therapies such as hospitalization for heart disease, coronary artery bypass surgery, coronary angioplasty, and hip-fracture repair.70 But there were two surgeries that blacks were far more likely to undergo than whites: amputation of a lower limb and removal of the testicles to treat prostate cancer. Blacks are less likely to get desirable medical interventions and more likely to get undesirable interventions that good medical care would avoid.
Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
Even at this point, say Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest. I can say from experience that it doesn’t take much. Ressler’s theories on the childhoods of the worst killers in America have an unlikely ideological supporter, psychiatrist and child-advocate Alice Miller. Her emotionally evocative books (including The Drama Of The Gifted Child and The Untouched Key) make clear that if a child has some effective human contact at particularly significant periods, some recognition of his worth and value, some “witness” to his experience, this can make an extraordinary difference. I have learned that the kindness of a teacher, a coach, a policeman, a neighbor, the parent of a friend, is never wasted. These moments are likely to pass with neither the child nor the adult fully knowing the significance of the contribution. No ceremony attaches to the moment that a child sees his own worth reflected in the eyes of an encouraging adult. Though nothing apparent marks the occasion, inside that child a new view of self might take hold. He is not just a person deserving of neglect or violence, not just a person who is a burden to the sad adults in his life, not just a child who fails to solve his family’s problems, who fails to rescue them from pain or madness or addiction or poverty or unhappiness. No, this child might be someone else, someone whose appearance before this one adult revealed specialness or lovability, or value. This value might be revealed through appreciation of a child’s artistic talent, physical ability, humor, courage, patience, curiosity, scholarly skills, creativity, resourcefulness, responsibility, energy, or any of the many attributes that children bring us in such abundance.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Punishment is not care, and poverty is not a crime. We need to create safe, supportive pathways for reentry into the community for all people and especially young people who are left out and act out. Interventions like decriminalizing youthful indiscretions for juvenile offenders and providing foster children and their families with targeted services and support would require significant investment and deliberate collaboration at the community, state, and federal levels, as well as a concerted commitment to dismantling our carceral state. These interventions happen automatically and privately for young offenders who are not poor, whose families can access treatment and hire help, and who have the privilege of living and making mistakes in neighborhoods that are not over-policed. We need to provide, not punish, and to foster belonging and self-sufficiency for our neighbors’ kids. More, funded YMCAs and community centers and summer jobs, for example, would help do this. These kinds of interventions would benefit all the Carloses, Wesleys, Haydens, Franks, and Leons, and would benefit our collective well-being. Only if we consider ourselves bound together can we reimagine our obligation to each other as community. When we consider ourselves bound together in community, the radically civil act of redistributing resources from tables with more to tables with less is not charity, it is responsibility; it is the beginning of reparation. Here is where I tell you that we can change this story, now. If we seek to repair systemic inequalities, we cannot do it with hope and prayers; we have to build beyond the systems and begin not with rehabilitation but prevention. We must reimagine our communities, redistribute our wealth, and give our neighbors access to what they need to live healthy, sustainable lives, too. This means more generous social benefits. This means access to affordable housing, well-resourced public schools, affordable healthcare, jobs, and a higher minimum wage, and, of course, plenty of good food. People ask me what educational policy reform I would suggest investing time and money in, if I had to pick only one. I am tempted to talk about curriculum and literacy, or teacher preparation and salary, to challenge whether police belong in schools, to push back on standardized testing, or maybe debate vocational education and reiterate that educational policy is housing policy and that we cannot consider one without the other. Instead, as a place to start, I say free breakfast and lunch. A singular reform that would benefit all students is the provision of good, free food at school. (Data show that this practice yields positive results; but do we need data to know this?) Imagine what would happen if, across our communities, people had enough to feel fed.
Liz Hauck (Home Made: A Story of Grief, Groceries, Showing Up--and What We Make When We Make Dinner)
To their surprise, they found that dopamine actively regulates both the formation and the forgetting of new memories. In the process of creating new memories, the dCA1 receptor was activated. By contrast, forgetting was initiated by the activation of the DAMB receptor. Previously, it was thought that forgetting might be simply the degradation of memories with time, which happens passively by itself. This new study shows that forgetting is an active process, requiring intervention by dopamine. To prove their point, they showed that by interfering with the action of the dCA1 and DAMB receptors, they could, at will, increase or decrease the ability of fruit flies to remember and forget. A mutation in the dCA1 receptor, for example, impaired the ability of the fruit flies to remember. A mutation in the DAMB receptor decreased their ability to forget. The researchers speculate that this effect, in turn, may be partially responsible for savants’ skills. Perhaps there is a deficiency in their ability to forget. One of the graduate students involved in the study, Jacob Berry, says, “Savants have a high capacity for memory. But maybe it isn’t memory that gives them this capacity; maybe they have a bad forgetting mechanism. This might also be the strategy for developing drugs to promote cognition and memory—what about drugs that inhibit forgetting as a cognitive enhancers?” Assuming that this result holds up in human experiments as well, it could encourage scientists to develop new drugs and neurotransmitters that are able to dampen the forgetting process. One might thus be able to selectively turn on photographic memories when needed by neutralizing the forgetting process. In this way, we wouldn’t have the continuous overflow of extraneous, useless information, which hinders the thinking of people with savant syndrome. What is also exciting is the possibility that the BRAIN project, which is being championed by the Obama administration, might be able to identify the specific pathways involved with acquired savant syndrome. Transcranial magnetic fields are still too crude to pin down the handful of neurons that may be involved. But using nanoprobes and the latest in scanning technologies, the BRAIN project might be able to isolate the precise neural pathways that make possible photographic memory and incredible computational, artistic, and musical skills. Billions of research dollars will be channeled into identifying the specific neural pathways involved with mental disease and other afflictions of the brain, and the secret of savant skills may be revealed in the process. Then it might be possible to take normal individuals and make savants out of them. This has happened many times in the past because of random accidents. In the future, this may become a precise medical process.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it. And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it. However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid). Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment. So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions. So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.
Gabor Maté
Douglas Reeves’ research (2009) shows that one of a school’s most effective learning strategies is to have highly trained teachers work with the students most at risk.
Austin Buffum (Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles (What Principals Need to Know))
The first place to fall, after the crossing of the Jordan, was Jericho, one of the most ancient cities in the world. The excavations of Kathleen Kenyon and carbon-dating show that it goes back to the seventh millennium BC. It had enormous walls in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, and the strength of its defences produced one of the most vivid passages in the Bible. Joshua the prophet-general ordered the priests to carry the Ark round the city, with their ram’s-horn trumpeters, on six consecutive days; and on the seventh, ‘when the priests blew with the trumpets’, he commanded to all the people: ‘Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city.’ Then ‘the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.’126 Owing to erosion, the Kenyon researches threw no light on how the walls were destroyed; she thinks it may have been an earthquake which the Israelites attributed to divine intervention. The Bible narrative says: ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword.’ Miss Kenyon established that the city was certainly burnt at this time and that, in addition, it was not reoccupied for a very long time afterwards, which accords with Joshua’s determination that no one should rebuild it, and his threat: ‘Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho.
Paul Johnson (History of the Jews)
If the primary goal of the school is to raise test scores, the bubble-kid approach, although morally bankrupt, makes some sense because the lowest-achieving learners are so far behind that providing them intensive resources will likely not show immediate gains in the school’s state assessment scores. But if the goal is to help all students learn at high levels, this approach will do nothing for the students most in need.
Austin Buffum (Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles (What Principals Need to Know))
But it isn’t the fun of DIY invention, urban exploration, physical danger, and civil disorder that the Z-Boys enjoyed in 1976. It is fun within serious limits, and for all of its thrills it is (by contrast) scripted. And rather obedient. The fact that there are public skateparks and high-performance skateboards signals progress: America has embraced this sport, as it did bicycles in the nineteenth century. Towns want to make skating safe and acceptable. The economy has more opportunity to grow. America is better off for all of this. Yet such government and commercial intervention in a sport that was born of radical liberty means that the fun itself has changed; it has become mediated. For the skaters who take pride in their flashy store-bought equipment have already missed the Z-Boys’ joke: Skating is a guerrilla activity. It’s the fun of beating, not supporting, the system. P. T. Barnum said it himself: all of business is humbug. How else could business turn a profit, if it didn’t trick you with advertising? If it didn’t hook you with its product? This particular brand of humbug was perfected in the late 1960s, when merchandise was developed and marketed and sold to make Americans feel like rebels. Now, as then, customers always pay for this privilege, and purveyors keep it safe (and generally clean) to curb their liability. They can’t afford customers taking real risks. Plus it’s bad for business to encourage real rebellion. And yet, marketers know Americans love fun—they have known this for centuries. And they know that Americans, especially kids, crave autonomy and participation, so they simulate the DIY experience at franchises like the Build-A-Bear “workshops,” where kids construct teddy bears from limited options, or “DIY” restaurants, where customers pay to grill their own steaks, fry their own pancakes, make their own Bloody Marys. These pay-to-play stores and restaurants are, in a sense, more active, more “fun,” than their traditional competition: that’s their big selling point. But in both cases (as Barnum knew) the joke is still on you: the personalized bear is a standardized mishmash, the personalized food is often inedible. As Las Vegas knows, the house always wins. In the history of radical American fun, pleasure comes from resistance, risk, and participation—the same virtues celebrated in the “Port Huron Statement” and the Digger Papers, in the flapper’s slang and the Pinkster Ode. In the history of commercial amusement, most pleasures for sale are by necessity passive. They curtail creativity and they limit participation (as they do, say, in a laser-tag arena) to a narrow range of calculated surprises, often amplified by dazzling technology. To this extent, TV and computer screens, from the tiny to the colossal, have become the scourge of American fun. The ubiquity of TV screens in public spaces (even in taxicabs and elevators) shows that such viewing isn’t amusement at all but rather an aggressive, ubiquitous distraction. Although a punky insurgency of heedless satire has stung the airwaves in recent decades—from equal-opportunity offenders like The Simpsons and South Park to Comedy Central’s rabble-rousing pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—the prevailing “fun” of commercial amusement puts minimal demands on citizens, besides their time and money. TV’s inherent ease seems to be its appeal, but it also sends a sobering, Jumbotron-sized message about the health of the public sphere.
John Beckman (American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt)
I would hear them say on the radio, that we need to hang them once they have been convicted for murder. I don’t think that some of them should have ever reached that stage. If we had prevented them from going on death row, it would not be a discussion about hanging them. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
I would hear them say on the radio, that we need to hang them once they have been convicted for murder. I don’t think that some of them should have ever reached that stage. If we had prevented them from going on death row, it would not be a discussion about hanging them. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force. Hanging, death-row-inmates, crime prevention, gang intervention, talk shows, youth outreach, youth programs, convicted murderers, community policing, law enforcement, gang prevention, community outreach, at-risk-youth, police officers, convicted-for-murder, Rebellion Raiders, I would hear them say on the radio, that we need to hang them once they have been convicted for murder. I don’t think that some of them should have ever reached that stage. If we had prevented them from going on death row, it would not be a discussion about hanging them. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
Angela winced at the outburst, but his temper calmed as suddenly as it had risen. ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on doing that,’ she said pointedly. ‘Doing what?’ ‘Blowing up! One minute you’re all enthusiastic and exploring, the next you’re sulking and pouting and the next you’re screaming at the top of your voice to someone who isn’t even there.’ ‘I am sick of being manipulated! One day the High Council are putting me on trial, the next the Celestial Intervention Agency are forcing me to run missions for them.’ ‘So these mood swings aren’t a regular thing?’ ‘Remind me, why did I choose you as my companion?’ He turned and walked away. She hurried after him. ‘Because you need someone to show off to?’ That seemed to hit a nerve. ‘I’ll have you know, young lady, that I have no such “need” of anyone. I am the cat that walks alone in the darkness, the light that shines in Evil’s heart, the...’ ‘...vagrant who does odd jobs for the Time Lords?’ ‘We’ve been travelling together too long,’ he muttered.
Steve Lyons (Doctor Who: Time of Your Life)
My name is Mike Hickman. I am 34-years-old and dying of AIDS, infected by my wife after she had an affair. Although medical intervention may prolong my life, I wish not to be saved. I don't want to live as a shell of my former self, relying on medication to keep me going. As my final act on this earth, I plan on showing the world a few things about what the world of horror has taught me over the course of my life. When I'm finished playing with the young lady I have bound to the bed, I will kill myself. You will not catch me. You will not prosecute me. For this crime, I am above the law.
Dawn Cano (Bucket List)
Notice that the p value works by assuming there is no difference between your experimental groups. This is a counterintuitive feature of significance testing: if you want to prove that your drug works, you do so by showing the data is inconsistent with the drug not working. Because of this, p values can be extended to any situation where you can mathematically express a hypothesis you want to knock down. But p values have their limitations. Remember, p is a measure of surprise, with a smaller value suggesting that you should be more surprised. It’s not a measure of the size of the effect. You can get a tiny p value by measuring a huge effect — “This medicine makes people live four times longer” — or by measuring a tiny effect with great certainty. And because any medication or intervention usually has some real effect, you can always get a statistically significant result by collecting so much data that you detect extremely tiny but relatively unimportant differences. As Bruce Thompson wrote, Statistical significance testing can involve a tautological logic in which tired researchers, having collected data on hundreds of subjects, then conduct a statistical test to evaluate whether there were a lot of subjects, which the researchers already know, because they collected the data and know they are tired. This tautology has created considerable damage as regards the cumulation of knowledge.1
Alex Reinhart (Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide)
The changes that occur during the prodromal phase have been broadly characterised by Hafner and colleagues (Hafner et al., 1995), though other more intensive studies are reviewed and summarised in Yung et al. (1996). These and other studies (Jones et al., 1993) showed that although diagnostic specificity and ultimately potentially effective treatment comes with the later onset of positive psychotic symptoms, most of the disabling consequences of the underlying disorder emerge and manifest well prior to this phase. In particular, deficits in social functioning occur predominantly during the prodromal phase and prior to treatment. Hafner et al. (1995) demonstrated clearly that the main factor determining social outcome two years after first admission for schizophrenia is acquired social status during the prodromal phase of the disorder. The importance of this phase was previously poorly appreciated because no conceptual
Max Birchwood (Early Intervention in Psychosis: A Guide to Concepts, Evidence and Interventions (Wiley Series in Clinical Psychology Book 70))
The aim of the next nine sections will be to present careful arguments to show that none of the loopholes (a), (b), and (c) can provide a plausible way to evade the contradiction of the robot. Accordingly, it, and we also, are driven to the unpalatable (d), if we are still insistent that mathematical understanding can be reduced to computation. I am sure that those concerned with artificial intelligence would find (d) to be as unpalatable as I find it to be. It provides perhaps a conceivable standpoint-essentially the A/D suggestion, referred to at the end of 1.3, whereby divine intervention is required for the implanting of an unknowable algorithm into each of our computer brains (by 'the best programmer in the business'). In any case, the conclusion 'unknowable'-for the very mechanisms that are ultimately responsible for our intelligence-would not be a very happy conclusion for those hoping actually to construct a genuinely artificially intelligent robot! It would not be a particularly happy conclusion, either, for those of us who hope to understand, in principle and in a scientific way, how human intelligence has actually arisen, in accordance with comprehensible scientific laws, such as those of physics, chemistry, biology, and natural selection-irrespective of any desire to reproduce such intelligence in a robot device. In my own opinion, such a pessimistic conclusion is not warranted, for the very reason that 'scientific comprehensibility' is a very different thing from 'computability'. The conclusion should be not that the underlying laws are incomprehensible, but that they are non-computable.
Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
Rules for the Use and Arrangement of Words The following rules for the use and arrangement of words will be found helpful in securing clearness and force. 1. Use words in their proper sense. 2. Avoid useless circumlocution and "fine writing." 3. Avoid exaggerations. 4. Be careful in the use of not ... and, any, but, only, not ... or, that. 5. Be careful in the use of ambiguous words, e. g., certain. 6. Be careful in the use of he, it, they, these, etc. 7. Report a speech in the first person where necessary to avoid ambiguity. 8. Use the third person where the exact words of the speaker are not intended to be given. 9. When you use a participle implying when, while, though, or that, show clearly by the context what is implied. 10. When using the relative pronoun, use who or which, if the meaning is and he or and it, for he or for it. 11. Do not use and which for which. 12. Repeat the antecedent before the relative where the non-repetition causes any ambiguity. 13. Use particular for general terms. Avoid abstract nouns. 14. Avoid verbal nouns where verbs can be used. 15. Use particular persons instead of a class. 16. Do not confuse metaphor. 17. Do not mix metaphor with literal statement. 18. Do not use poetic metaphor to illustrate a prosaic subject. 19. Emphatic words must stand in emphatic positions; i. e., for the most part, at the beginning or the end of the sentence. 20. Unemphatic words must, as a rule, be kept from the end. 21. The Subject, if unusually emphatic, should often be transferred from the beginning of the sentence. 22. The object is sometimes placed before the verb for emphasis. 23. Where several words are emphatic make it clear which is the most emphatic. Emphasis can sometimes be given by adding an epithet, or an intensifying word. 24. Words should be as near as possible to the words with which they are grammatically connected. 25. Adverbs should be placed next to the words they are intended to qualify. 26. Only; the strict rule is that only should be placed before the word it affects. 27. When not only precedes but also see that each is followed by the same part of speech. 28. At least, always, and other adverbial adjuncts sometimes produce ambiguity. 29. Nouns should be placed near the nouns that they define. 30. Pronouns should follow the nouns to which they refer without the intervention of any other noun. 31. Clauses that are grammatically connected should be kept as close together as possible. Avoid parentheses. 32. In conditional sentences the antecedent or "if-clauses" must be kept distinct from the consequent clauses. 33. Dependent clauses preceded by that should be kept distinct from those that are independent. 34. Where there are several infinitives those that are dependent on the same word must be kept distinct from those that are not. 35. In a sentence with if, when, though, etc. put the "if-clause" first. 36. Repeat the subject where its omission would cause obscurity or ambiguity. 37. Repeat a preposition after an intervening conjunction especially if a verb and an object also intervene. 38. Repeat conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronominal adjectives. 39. Repeat verbs after the conjunctions than, as, etc. 40. Repeat the subject, or some other emphatic word, or a summary of what has been said, if the sentence is so long that it is difficult to keep the thread of meaning unbroken. 41. Clearness is increased when the beginning of the sentence prepares the way for the middle and the middle for the end, the whole forming a kind of ascent. This ascent is called "climax." 42. When the thought is expected to ascend but descends, feebleness, and sometimes confusion, is the result. The descent is called "bathos." 43. A new construction should not be introduced unexpectedly.
Frederick William Hamilton (Word Study and English Grammar A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses)
The intervention of John Millar, prominent exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment, was especially stinging: It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the inalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow-creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right. Fortune perhaps never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a liberal hypothesis, or to show how little the conduct of men is at the bottom directed by any philosophical principles.48 Millar was a disciple of Adam Smith. The master seems to have seen things in the same way. When he declared that to a ‘free government’ controlled by slaveowners, he preferred a ‘despotic government’ capable of erasing the infamy of slavery, he made explicit reference to America. Translated into directly political terms, the great economist’s words signify: the despotism the Crown is criticized for is preferable to the liberty demanded by the slave-owners, from which only a small class of planters and absolute masters benefits.
Domenico Losurdo (Liberalism: A Counter-History)
The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established. One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order. Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete. On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation. After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed...What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government? What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the wellborn and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses." Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two non-national poles: class and international pacifism. One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition,” a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
Rushton (2000) has shown that if we compare the ‘Big 3’ races – blacks, whites and Northeast Asians – there are clear and consistent differences, with East Asians at one end of spectrum and black people at the other. As these differences already show up in childhood, stand robust against environmental interventions, and as personality is at least 50% genetic and intelligence about 80% so, they are genetic differences. Northeast Asians score the highest in intelligence tests (105), blacks score the lowest (85), while whites are intermediate (100) but closer to Northeast Asians. Within these tests, whites have better verbal intelligence than Northeast Asians but much worse mathematical intelligence, meaning that Northeast Asians come out with higher ‘general intelligence’ overall. Real predictions about ‘character’ can be made from this, as intelligence is associated with emotional intelligence, cooperativeness, low self-esteem, a trusting nature, future-orientation, law-abidingness, intellectual curiosity, creativity, leadership ability, having a sense of humour, having a good memory, and even talking speed (see Jensen, 1998).
Edward Dutton (How to Judge People by What They Look Like)
That leaves us with the second way to make sure you finish. A friend. Time and again, when I researched what really helped people finally finish, it was a friend who did the trick. The artist who shredded her work, experienced that firsthand. One day, she mentioned to a friend that she had been destroying the things she made. It wasn’t a big intervention moment; she shared it casually, in passing. The friend’s eyes grew wide and he said to her, “No more shredding!” That was the day she quit. What I love about the story is that the friend didn’t give her some eloquent explanation of why she needed to stop. The friend didn’t show her a framed photo of other artists and tell a Robin Williams–style story about how they are all quietly telling her “carpe diem.” The friend didn’t commit to track her progress over the following months and rearrange his entire life. The friend wasn’t Morgan Freeman. I think that’s what we want sometimes. We expect a wise guru to emerge from the shadows of the day and tell us, “Either get busy living or get busy dying.” Granted, everything sounds better in Freeman’s accent, but the change we need is usually not that elaborate. It’s usually not complicated. It’s usually not that dramatic. It’s a friend who breaks the habit loop and tells you to stop shredding. It’s a friend who tells you the thing you’ve accepted as normal isn’t normal.
Jon Acuff (Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done)
Interventional studies putting around three to six cups’ worth of daily green or oolong tea to the test showed an average metabolic boost of about one hundred calories a day, shaving off three butter pats’ worth of extra fat every day.
Michael Greger (How Not to Diet)
Overall, most sleep improvement interventions tend to show improved weight loss, giving a positive spin to the phrase You snooze, you lose.
Michael Greger (How Not to Diet)
Here is the lid that until a few hours ago had remained fastened over the body. You will notice that its pictographs show a migration between the planet Mars and that of Earth. It speaks of a time in which the inhabitants of that planet came here and were responsible for the evolution of our species. It was also by their direct intervention that the sages and wise men of the past were able to perform such astounding miracles… even raising someone from the dead. But as the lid of the sarcophagus shows us by way
L.A. Marzulli (Roswell (Nephilim Rising))
The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”9 Most of these trends are showing up across social classes, races, and ethnicities.10 Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations. This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts. The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression.11 We created three graphs below using the same data that Twenge reports in iGen.
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure)
When the infants were between 6 and 9 months of age, caregivers in the experimental group were trained in sensitive responding. Then at 1 year of age, Strange Situation assessments were done. The effects of the intervention were dramatic. Compared with the control group, infants in the experimental group were almost three times as likely to show a secure pattern of attachment. Follow-up studies found that the effects of the intervention were enduring and were still evident more than 2 years later not only in child–caregiver relationships but also in child–peer interactions.
Christopher Peterson (Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification)
ZEV walked out of his parents’ house and over to his truck, dropped his head against the door, and took in a deep breath, letting the fresh air cool his lungs. Standing up to his family once again and garnering their support for his future mating was all well and good, but none of it meant a thing if his mate didn’t return and accept his place in the pack beside Zev. If Jonah didn’t come home soon, Zev wasn’t sure whether there’d be a Hassick male available to lead the Etzgadol pack. He looked up at the sky. The stars were beautiful out here. They sparkled above him, showing the spirits of those who came before. Come back to me, Jonah. Our spirits are intertwined, and my body cannot endure without its other half for much longer. He felt the pain deep in his bones, the urge to shift and run. But he pushed it back, grateful that, at least for now, his human could still exert his will. His wolf was tired of waiting for his human to find their mate and the wolf wanted control of their form so he could go find Jonah and claim him. But their mate was long gone, well out of scent distance, and the chance of Zev’s wolf finding him before running into hunters or vehicles was slim. Zev knew that unless he claimed his mate the time was fast approaching when his human would no longer be able to control his wolf. When that happened, the fear driving the intervention his family had staged that night would become a reality: Zev’s human would be forever lost. And without his human’s wisdom to limit him, Zev’s wolf would likely end his life trying to find his mate.
Cardeno C. (Wake Me Up Inside (Mates, #1))
As the US presidential changeover from Clinton to Bush Jr demonstrated, budget surpluses can serve as a pretext for tax cuts that generate new deficits, which then require further spending cuts to restore the surpluses. The interplay between tax and spending cuts shows that the balancing of budgets in the consolidation state is not pursued for its own sake but, as part of a programme of privatization and liberalization, is intended to bring about a general rollback of the state and its intervention in the market.
Wolfgang Streeck (Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism)
A third positive result even further from the traditional tool kit of financial incentives comes from a recent randomized control trial conducted in the U.K., using the increasingly popular and low-cost method of text reminders. This intervention involved sending texts to half the parents in some school in advance of a major math test to let them know that their child had a test coming up in five days, then in three days, then in one day. The researchers call this approach “pre-informing.” The other half of parents did not receive the texts. The pre-informing texts increased student performance on the math test by the equivalent of one additional month of schooling, and students in the bottom quartile benefited most. These children gained the equivalent of two additional months of schooling, relative to the control group. Afterward, both parents and students said they wanted to stick with the program, showing that they appreciated being nudged.
Richard H. Thaler (Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics)
A college student who wants to file a complaint of sexual assault within the campus disciplinary system informs a university employee such as an assistant dean for student life, or perhaps the Title IX coordinator. That person eventually forwards the complaint to a university disciplinary panel that may be composed of, for example, an associate dean with a master's degree in English literature, a professor of chemistry, and a senior majoring in anthropology. Unlike criminal prosecutors, members of the disciplinary panels do not have access to subpoena powers or to crime labs. They often have no experience in fact-finding, arbitration, conflict resolution, or any other relevant skill set. There is, to put it mildly, little reason to expect such panels to have the experience, expertise, and resources necessary to adjudicate a contested claim of sexual assault. Making matters worse, most campus tribunals ban attorneys for the parties (even in an advisory capacity), rules of procedure and evidence are typically ad hoc, and no one can consult precedents because records of previous disputes are sealed due to privacy considerations. Campus "courts" therefore have an inherently kangoorish nature. Even trained police officers and prosecutors too often mishandle sexual assault cases, so it's not surprising that the amateurs running the show at universities tend to have a poor record. And indeed, some victims' advocacy groups, such as the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), oppose having the government further encourage the campus judicial system to primarily handle campus sexual assault claims, because that means not treating rape as a serious crime. A logical solution, if federal intervention is indeed necessary, would be for OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] to mandate that universities encourage students who complain of sexual assault to report the assault immediately to the police, and that universities develop procedures to cooperate with police investigations. Concerns about victims' well-being when prosecutors decline to pursue a case could also be adjudicated in a real court, as a student could seek a civil protective order against her alleged assailant. OCR could have mandated or encouraged universities to cooperate with those civil proceedings, which in some cases might warrant excluding an alleged assailant from campus.
David E. Bernstein (Lawless: The Obama Administration's Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law)
A college degree is not a magic wand. The idea that hard work and educational achievement alone will completely reverse the socioeconomic conditions of young families and communities of color is both damaging and inaccurate. A 2015 study will show that White college graduates have more than seven times the wealth of Black college graduates and four times the wealth of Hispanic and Latinx college graduates. Even the households of White single parent graduates have twice the wealth of Black and Hispanic or Latinx college graduate households with two parents.1 A degree cannot completely disrupt legacies of oppression. This type of intervention will require intentional policy changes across every system—financial, educational, correctional, human services, and so much more—as well as investments to address the gaps. As opposed to calling a degree a magic wand, my team and I will describe it as a “leveler” in the effort to overcome these disparities.
Nicole Lynn Lewis (Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families)
The narrative that BIPOC are inferior and helpless without white intervention is present in white supremacist consciousness whether a person with white privilege flies to Africa or stays in their home country. White saviorism at home can show up as teachers with white privilege wanting to rescue their students who are children of color. It can show up as individuals and businesses hosting fund-raisers and nonprofit projects to rescue BIPOC struggling against issues of lack of access and discrimination. And it can even show up as parents with white privilege wanting to adopt children of color (though this is obviously not always the case, it is something to be aware of). In more subtle ways, white saviorism is the person with white privilege speaking over or for BIPOC in the belief that they know better how to say what needs to be said.
Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
The “best selves” intervention, however, alleviated this problem. By sharing their personal stories at the very start of their relationship, the new hires at Wipro were able to express themselves more fully by showing their colleagues their most valued behaviors and traits. As a consequence, they were viewed by their coworkers in the way they wanted to be seen. To put it another way, they felt like their best selves.
Daniel M. Cable (Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do)
Anna Odell... reconstructed her own psychological breakdown back in 1995 at a central bridge in Stockholm, complete with the intervention of unknowing police and healthcare personnel, filmed it, and showed the resulting film as a work of art... Odell’s purpose was to show how our society handles mental health issues, but the debate was mostly focused on her wasting hospital resources. Odell was fined 2500 SEK, but this got her career off to a great start...
Ludwig Qvarnström (Swedish Art History : A Selection of Introductory Texts)
The kings, who are the most set on destroying the feudal baronies, are also the best friends of the merchants, the bankers and the master manufacturers. A shipowner is not the chieftain of a gang of sailors whom he abstracts from Power's clutch, but rather an employer of labour who on the contrary, makes them available to power when the time comes for it to require them; In this way, it is explained the favour shown by Francis I, to take one instance towards, Ango. A banker is not after political power - he is after wealth. His function is to build a sort of store-house on which, when the when the time is ripe, Power will draw to transmute this wealth into strength. A mercantile aristocracy, then, so far from abstracting anything from the state's resources, makes potential additions to them which will, when circumstances so require, be realized. This is the only aspect under which, for many years, Power saw the money power. But in the end the overthrow of every other social domination of whatever kind left financial domination master of the field. At that stage it was seemed to be the formative source of fresh cells. That showed itself clearly enough in the case of the industrial employers. Not only was the employer the law in his factory, but quite often he would put up nearby a township for his workers in which he had the position of prince. A point was reached at some of the states of the USA, at which the manufacturer, owning as he did the land on which the factory had been built, allowed on it no other police than his own. In its jealousy of any and every command, however small, which was not its own, Power could not tolerate such independence. Moreover, as in every other battle which it had fought with aristocratic formations, it soon found itself appealed to by the underlings. Then it made its way not only into the employer's township but into his workshop as well; there it introduced its own law, its own police and its own factory regulations. If its earlier aggressions against closed aristocratic formations were not our old friends, we might be tempted to see in this one nothing more than a result of the popular character of the modern state, and of socialist ideas. These factors played, no doubt, their part, but no more was needed, than that Power should be itself - a thing naturally tending to shut out the intervention of all other authorities. The financial cell is less visible to the eye than the industrial cell. But its hold on money, and above all by its disposal of vast amounts of private savings, finance has been able to build up a vast structure and impose on the ever growing number of its subjects and authority which is ever plainer on the planer to the view on the empires of finance, also, power made war. The signal for battle was not given by a socialist state, the natural enemy of the barons of capital. It came from Theodore Roosevelt, himself a man of Power, and therefore the enemy of all private authorities. In this way, a new alliance was sealed - an alliance no less natural than that of the Power of early days with the prisoners of the clan-cells, than that of the monarchy with the subjects of the feudal barons - that of the modern state with the men exploited by capitalist industry, with the men dominated by the financial trusts. The state has often waged this particular war half-heartedly, thereby making the extent to which it has turned its back on itself and has renounced its role of Power. And renunciation was in this case favoured by the internal weakness of modern Power; the precariousness of its tenure encouraged its phantom tenants to betray it in favor of the financial aristocracies. But Power has natural charms for those who desire it for its use. It was a certain that anti-capitalists would come to occupy the public offices of the bourgeois state, as it was certain that anti-feudalists would come to occupy those of the monarchial state.
Bertrand de Jouvenel (ON POWER: The Natural History of Its Growth)
I understand you are upset, but the things you are talking about are not your style. I know you are far too reasonable and have too good a future to even consider such things.” This reaction is not intended to convince the threatener that he isn’t angry but rather to convince him that you are not afraid. It is also important to let the threatener know that he has not embarked on a course from which he cannot retreat. A good theme is “We all say things when we react emotionally; I’ve done it myself. Let’s just forget it. I know you’ll feel different tomorrow.” Even in the cases in which the threats are determined to be serious (and thus call for interventions or extensive preparations), we advise clients never to show the threatener a high appraisal of his words and never to show fear.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
MITI, far from being a uniquely brilliant leader of government/industrial partnership, has been wrong so often that the Japanese themselves will concede that much of their growth derives from industry's rejection of MITI’s guidance. MITI, incredibly, opposed the development of the very areas where Japan has been successful: cars, electronics and cameras. MITI has, moreover, poured vast funds into desperately wasteful projects. Thanks to MITI, Japan has a huge overcapacity in steel - no less than three times the national requirement. This, probably the most expensive mistake Japan ever made in peacetime, was a mistake of genius, because Japan has no natural resources: it has to import everything; the iron ore, the coal, the gas, the limestone and the oil to make its unwanted steel. Undaunted, MITI then invested in giant, loss-making (£400 million losses by 1992) 5th generation supercomputers at the precise moment that the market opened for the small personal computer; and MITI' s attempts at dominating the world's pharmaceutical and telecommunications industries have each failed. Nor is this just anecdote. In a meticulous study of MITI’s interventions into the Japanese economy between 1955 and 1990, Richard Beason of Alberta University and David Weinterin of Harvard showed that, across the 13 major sectors of the economy, surveying hundreds of different companies, Japan's bureaucrats almost invariably picked and supported the losers.
Terence Kealey (The Economic Laws of Scientific Research)
I also couldn’t help noticing how often news reports about some modeler’s latest findings would leave out important nuances and caveats. In March 2020, Neil Ferguson, a highly respected epidemiologist at Imperial College, predicted that there could be more than 500,000 COVID deaths in the U.K. and more than 2 million in the U.S. over the course of the pandemic. That caused quite a stir in the press, but few reporters mentioned a key point that Ferguson had been very clear about: The scenario of his that made all the headlines assumed that people wouldn’t change their behavior—that no one would wear masks or shelter in place, for instance—but of course that wouldn’t be the case in reality. He wanted to show how high the stakes were and demonstrate the value of masks and other interventions, not drive everyone into a panic.
Bill Gates (How to Prevent the Next Pandemic)
Even at this point, say Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest. I can say from experience that it doesn’t take much. Ressler’s theories on the childhoods of the worst killers in America have an unlikely ideological supporter, psychiatrist and child-advocate Alice Miller. Her emotionally evocative books (including The Drama Of The Gifted Child and The Untouched Key) make clear that if a child has some effective human contact at particularly significant periods, some recognition of his worth and value, some “witness” to his experience, this can make an extraordinary difference. I have learned that the kindness of a teacher, a coach, a policeman, a neighbor, the parent of a friend, is never wasted. These moments are likely to pass with neither the child nor the adult fully knowing the significance of the contribution. No ceremony attaches to the moment that a child sees his own worth reflected in the eyes of an encouraging adult. Though nothing apparent marks the occasion, inside that child a new view of self might take hold. He is not just a person deserving of neglect or violence, not just a person who is a burden to the sad adults in his life, not just a child who fails to solve his family’s problems, who fails to rescue them from pain or madness or addiction or poverty or unhappiness. No, this child might be someone else, someone whose appearance before this one adult revealed specialness or lovability, or value. This value might be revealed through appreciation of a child’s artistic talent, physical ability, humor, courage, patience, curiosity, scholarly skills, creativity, resourcefulness, responsibility, energy, or any of the many attributes that children bring us in such abundance. I had a fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Conway, who fought monsters in me. He showed kindness and recognized some talent in me at just the period when violence was consuming my family. He gave me some alternative designs for self-image, not just the one children logically deduce from mistreatment (“If this is how I am treated, then this is the treatment I am worthy of”). It might literally be a matter of a few hours with a person whose kindness reconnects the child to an earlier experience of self, a self that was loved and valued and encouraged.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillator or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Atul Gawande)
In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction.
Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction. In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die.
Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
By the 2000s, however, popular culture and market interests wielded a certain control and power of their own. In showing and repeatedly setting examples of a standard Korean beauty ideal, media and marketing pushed an appearance regime that consumers learned to enforce on themselves. These days, consumer beauty culture has a way of convincing us that the reigning look is what we wanted all along. Women can conscript our bodies all on our own, no state intervention required.
Elise Hu (Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital)
effectively comparing nonsmokers only to nonsmokers with similar diet and exercise habits. When that’s done, whole grains still appear to be protective.61 In other words, the evidence seems clear that oatmeal eaters may have lower rates of disease, but that’s not the same as showing that if you start eating more oatmeal, your risk will drop. To prove cause and effect, we need to put it to the test by performing an interventional trial: Change people’s diets and see what happens. Ideally, researchers would randomly split people into two groups and give half of them oatmeal and the other half a placebo—a fake, similar-tasting and -looking oatmeal. Neither the study subjects nor the researchers themselves can know who’s in which group until the end. This robust, double-blind method is easy to use
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Because hyperactive users tended to be more partisan and more inclined to share misinformation, hate speech, and clickbait, the intervention produced integrity gains almost across the board. An analysis of how the intervention would affect the distribution of polarized content in the United States showed it would hit far-right and far-left outlets hard—and slightly boost the distribution of mainstream news publishers.
Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
The sins of the father are visited upon future generations…” EXODUS 34:7 Oh, how I used to hate this verse. I once had a client tell me that she hated it, too. It made her think of an-impossible-to-please, vengeful god. A god she wanted no part of. I completely understood, because for a big part of my life, I agreed with her. But then one day, a different perspective on this controversial verse presented itself to me. One that I shared with my client. It’s one I would like to share with you, too. What if this verse is not some warning of wrath from a vengeful, punitive deity? What if this verse is not talking about something God does to us, but rather something we do to ourselves—and to each other? What if this verse is actually a compassionate, albeit cryptic, warning? Perhaps it is a rallying cry to get us to show up and own our crap; to heal and to grow, and to set future generations up to do the same. What if this verse is a plea from on High to recognize our choices can set off ripple effects that are far beyond our understanding and that our choices influence the future beyond what we are able to recognize in the tangible, relational realms. And what if this ominous, poetic warning is really pointing us toward something much more scientific and even holistic? What if it’s a proof-text that we are incapable of living compartmentalized lives—that every part of us is inextricably connected to the other, not only within our own lives, but in all the lives that lead up to our existence? What if the ripples set in motion by those who have gone before us cast destructive waves upon the present and have potential to reach into future generations, unless there is some intervention?
Gina Birkemeier (Generations Deep: Unmasking Inherited Dysfunction and Trauma to Rewrite Our Stories Through Faith and Therapy)
In Nigeria, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has granted US$74 million so far for HIV, all of it for work with the ‘general population’. Nigeria gets large slabs from PEPFAR, too, US$105 million in 2006 and rising; 90 per cent of the prevention money was going to ‘general population’ interventions.4 ‘Youth’ is an especially popular focus for prevention efforts in Nigeria, even though HIV tests in several thousand recent graduates from technical college showed that just 1.2 per cent were infected–hardly a sign of an epidemic that is out of control among young people in the general population. Meanwhile, Nigeria has a vibrant sex industry. I can’t say how vibrant because the national programme has until now more or less ignored commercial sex. In a national survey in 2003, 3 per cent of men said they visited a prostitute in the last year, so that would be 1.2 million clients right there, and the probable total is a lot higher.5 There are no estimates of how many women sell sex, and there’s no routine HIV surveillance among sex workers. Sporadic studies are not encouraging. In 2003, 21 per cent of sex workers in the western city of Ibadan and 48 per cent in nearby Saki were infected with HIV.6 Of course, we don’t have a clue how much HIV is spread in sex between men in Nigeria, because no one has asked–the first studies got underway only in 2007. Scattered assessments in drug injectors in eight Nigerian cities in the early 2000s showed that they were as yet no more likely to be infected with HIV than non-injectors, which suggests that there’s still a chance to prevent a major epidemic in this group.7 But how much of the millions of dollars sloshing around for HIV prevention in Nigeria is being spent on drug injectors? As of mid-2007, none.
Elizabeth Pisani (The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS)
In many cases, when a man is indeed angry most people walk on eggshells around them so as to not provoke him. One doesn’t want to be the reason why a short-tempered man has lost his cool. Parents, partners, siblings and even friends, tend to deal with this by avoiding provocation, and ignoring anger bursts, waiting for them to pass. Rarely do we pause and wonder if it’s a problem that requires psychological intervention. This is a sign of how we have normalized and accepted that men are angry, when in fact, the anger is a result of years of conditioning young boys to not show any emotion.
Prachi Gangwani (Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India)
Many other industries have their practice patterns measured. In 2009, the utility company Positive Energy (now Opower) was interested in reducing power use in neighborhoods. Their data showed that some households used far more electricity than their neighbors. After all, there are no standardized protocols on turning lights on or off when one vacates a room. Just ask anyone who’s argued with a spouse about this issue. The company decided to mail each household a regular feedback report that compared their electricity and natural gas usage to that of similarly sized households in their neighborhood. Playing on the benchmarking theme, the data feedback intervention resulted in an overall reduction in household energy use. When people saw they were outliers, they modified their habits so their usage fell more into line with that of their peers. In a year, this simple intervention reduced the total carbon emissions of the participating houses by the equivalent of 14.3 million gallons of gasoline, saving consumers more than $20 million.4 Lots of utility companies now take this approach—and it works.
Marty Makary (The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It)
The multiple consequences of early child maltreatment call for early identification and intervention with strategies that are effective to children with poorly developed cognitive and verbal abilities. Symptoms mediated through the regulatory neural networks originating in lower brain regions are far less responsive to treatment interventions using verbal, logical, rational, or even emotionally expressive treatment modalities. This is also true of play therapy strategies utilizing these methodologies. van der Kolk (2004) pointed out that traumatized individuals show little activity in the left hemisphere, particularly in language areas, resulting in decreased capacity for planning and analyzing while displaying excessive activity in the right limbic hemisphere, suggesting excessive emotional experience, but no ability to communicate it or understand it. Not surprisingly, such individuals respond poorly to cognitive, verbal, and multimodal treatment designs due to their self-regulatory deficits and language-based limitations.
Cathy A. Malchiodi (What to Do When Children Clam Up in Psychotherapy: Interventions to Facilitate Communication (Creative Arts and Play Therapy))
Carriers of the ApoE4 gene allele, which is the most common genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, exhibit a reduction in cerebral glucose utilization as early as their third decade in similar regions of the brain as Alzheimer’s patients.18 These young ε4+ subjects show no symptoms of cognitive decline despite PET-FDG measurements demonstrating a 5 to 10 percent reduction in the brain regions associated with memory processing and learning. Brain glucose hypometabolism precedes cognitive decline decades before the first symptoms appear. While we lack definitive proof that this energy deficit causes Alzheimer’s, this chronic, progressive, brain fuel starvation contributes significantly to the onset of Alzheimer’s and offers an opportunity for intervention.
Dale E. Bredesen (The End of Alzheimer's Program: The First Protocol to Enhance Cognition and Reverse Decline at Any Age)
Male bonobos can be highly protective. A striking example occurred at the San Diego Zoo at a time when its enclosure still had a wet moat. The keepers had drained the moat for scrubbing, then went to the kitchen to turn on the water valve to fill it up. Before they could do so, however, they were rudely interrupted by Kakowet, the alpha male. He appeared in front of their kitchen window, screaming and waving his arms. As it turned out, several young bonobos had jumped into the dry moat to play but were unable to get out. If the water flow had not been halted, they would have drowned. Kakowet’s anxious intervention demonstrated his ability to take another’s perspective and recognize their circumstances. But more practically, it also showed that he knew who controlled the water supply. After his alarm, the keepers descended into the moat with a ladder. They got all the bonobos out except for the smallest one, who was pulled up by Kakowet himself.
Frans de Waal (Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist)
Humble Inquiry is an attitude that can and should show up in different kinds of situations. The most important aspect of the attitude is situational awareness, assessing in every conversation what your purpose is and how it aligns to the situation at hand. You may just be exploring, having fun, or trying to convince someone of something; you may be trying to build a relationship or decipher what may really be going on if the situation is ambiguous or full of conflict. Everything you do next will be an intervention, even if you just stay in a silent observer mode, and will convey some aspect of your purpose to the other person in the conversation. It will help to learn to become mindful of the different consequences of what you say.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
The Chicago boys and their mentors had the good sense to maintain the highly efficient, nationalized copper producer Codelco, the world’s largest. That’s, of course, a radical violation of market principles, of neoliberal principles, but worthwhile since the company was the source of much of Chile’s export earnings and the basis of the state’s fiscal revenues. In general, it was close to a perfect experiment. It looked like a great success, if you ignored the human costs. In 1982, Friedman published the second edition of his manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom, celebrating the triumph of the cause. The timing was auspicious. In 1982 the Chilean economy crashed and had to be bailed out by state intervention. The state then controlled more of the economy than it had under Allende. Analysts who had their eyes open called it “the Chicago road to socialism.” The prominent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) economist Javier Santiso described the “paradox [that] able economists committed to laissez-faire showed the world yet another road to a de facto socialized banking system
Noam Chomsky (Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance)
So we look at a state of the brain in response to a trigger, and in my personal work, this area, cingulate 25, becomes the nexus of the problem. How the rest of the brain responds to a trigger, as a function of your early life experience, your genes, and your temperament, indicates that what the brain is showing us is not the illness, but what the brain is trying to do to restore balance. We can enhance that through different teachings or different kinds of treatment. Consider the metaphor of heart disease. We all know that you shouldn’t smoke and that high cholesterol is a bad risk factor. You should exercise; you shouldn’t eat too many cheeseburgers. But at the point when you have the heart attack, it’s really easy to make the diagnosis that your heart muscle has died. At that point, you are no longer dealing with probabilities. Instead, a specialized test is done to determine the nature of your problem and to match it to the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have one heart vessel clogged, you need to have that single heart vessel opened. Somebody else, who has five heart vessels blocked, will need a different kind of treatment. The heart itself is telling us how it should be treated. Of course, you would like to promise to exercise more and eat fewer cheeseburgers—but only after you survive and have had whatever surgery you need. In cardiology, there is no problem with doing a test to identify how to optimize the short-term and longer-term return to health. We have to take the same approach to the brain, since we are reaching a point where knowing the signal in the brain is potentially very helpful. The state of the brain is really the response, not the cause. It is giving us a signal as to how we might optimize its return to normality. That’s a set of experiments that we are now trying to do. Jack Kornfield: A similar diagnostic process is needed both in meditation teaching and in insight therapy. When people come in to see a teacher, they present specific and unique difficulties, traumas, problems with circumstances in their life, or struggles with their mind and personality. Skillful teaching requires a subtle evaluative process to sense what particular intervention out of the many practices will be most helpful to a given individual. For example, for people with powerful self-critical and judgmental thoughts, a necessary part of meditation instruction will be teaching them how to work with these thoughts. If we don’t attend to this problem, they can do all kinds of other practices, but those self-critical patterns will keep repeating, “You’re not doing it right,” and as a consequence, the other practices they are engaging in may be quite ineffective. Jan Chozen Bays: I want to suggest that we study an intervention that I call media fasting. As I said, we’re not designed as an organism to take in the suffering of the whole world.
Jon Kabat-Zinn (The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation)
Natural Ways to Help Anxiety Don’t start something you may not be able to stop. After the pandemic, anxiety disorders more than doubled in children and teenagers.[1] Prescriptions for antianxiety medications, such as benzodiazepines like alprazolam (Xanax) and clonazepam (Klonopin) dramatically increased. The problem is that they are addictive, and once you start them they are often very hard to stop. Here are 11 strategies to consider before going on antianxiety medications. 1. Check for hypoglycemia, anemia, and hyperthyroidism. 2. Try an elimination diet for three weeks. (See day 257 for more detail.) 3. Practice meditation and hypnosis daily (research shows they can both calm stress and anxiety). 4. Try heart rate variability (HRV) training (anxiety is linked to low levels of HRV, but you can hack your way to a healthier HRV with biofeedback apps such as Welltory). See day 202 for more information. 5. Practice diaphragmatic breathing—deep breathing from your belly—when you feel anxious. 6. Eliminate the ANTs (automatic negative thoughts). See days 22, 116–117. 7. Incorporate a calming exercise, such as yoga or qi gong, into your week. 8. Take 200–400 mg of L-Theanine per day. 9. Take 500–1,500 mg of GABA per day. 10. Take 100–500 mg of magnesium glycinate, citrate, or malate with 30 mg of vitamin B6 per day. 11. Schedule neurofeedback to help retrain your brain. Anxiety disorders are very painful, but too often people reach for marijuana, alcohol, or prescribed benzodiazepines, which can be of short-term benefit but cause long-term problems with addiction and memory issues. If the above interventions are ineffective or only partly effective with my patients, I’ll try other nutraceuticals or medications targeted to a specific type of anxiety (take the test at brainhealthassessment.com).
Amen MD Daniel G (Change Your Brain Every Day: Simple Daily Practices to Strengthen Your Mind, Memory, Moods, Focus, Energy, Habits, and Relationships)
TO EXHIBIT THE Fruit of the Spirit The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.—GALATIANS 5: 22–23 Father, how grateful I am that You desire to live Your life through me. Thank You for conforming me to the image of Jesus and helping me be more like You in every way. You change my desires, needs, habits, innermost goals, and even the patterns by which I operate as I walk with You. Thank You that even though it takes time and intentional effort to change the thinking and behaviors that are ingrained within me, You never give up. Lord, when I read about the fruit of Your Spirit and Your commands about how to relate to others, I am aware of how often I fall short. I want to be as loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled as You are. I realize these aren’t response patterns I can change on my own but that require Your supernatural intervention because they are counter to who I am in my flesh. Only You can transform me inside out so that these attributes can flow through me. Therefore, Jesus, I set my heart to cooperate with You. You said, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15: 5). I affirm that, Lord Jesus. Your life pouring into me is what enables me to live the Christian life and bear the hallmarks of character that are the fruit of Your Spirit. So teach me to abide in You so that Your fruit can always be produced through me to Your glory. Show me if there is any ungodliness in me, that I may repent and walk in Your ways. Thank You, Lord Jesus, for giving me Your Holy Spirit to help me. Thank You not only for conferring Your holiness to me through the cross but also for transforming me into a vessel of that holy life and enabling me to live it. I submit myself to You. To You be all honor, glory, power, and praise forever. In Jesus’s name I pray. Amen.
Charles F. Stanley (When You Don't Know What to Pray: 100 Essential Prayers for Enduring Life's Storms)
he embraced only a presumption of laissez-faire. That is, the burden is on the proponent of government to show that the greater happiness requires intervention: "every departure from (laissez-faire), unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.
Todd G. Buchholz (New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought)
Scheffe tests also produce “homogeneous subsets,” that is, groups that have statistically identical means. Both the three largest and the three smallest populations have identical means. The Tukey levels of statistical significance are, respectively, .725 and .165 (both > .05). This is shown in Table 13.3. Figure 13.2 Group Boxplots Table 13.2 ANOVA Table Third, is the increase in means linear? This test is an option on many statistical software packages that produces an additional line of output in the ANOVA table, called the “linear term for unweighted sum of squares,” with the appropriate F-test. Here, that F-test statistic is 7.85, p = .006 < .01, and so we conclude that the apparent linear increase is indeed significant: wetland loss is linearly associated with the increased surrounding population of watersheds.8 Figure 13.2 does not clearly show this, but the enlarged Y-axis in Figure 13.3 does. Fourth, are our findings robust? One concern is that the statistical validity is affected by observations that statistically (although not substantively) are outliers. Removing the seven outliers identified earlier does not affect our conclusions. The resulting variable remains normally distributed, and there are no (new) outliers for any group. The resulting variable has equal variances across the groups (Levene’s test = 1.03, p = .38 > .05). The global F-test is 3.44 (p = .019 < .05), and the Bonferroni post-hoc test similarly finds that only the differences between the “Small” and “Large” group means are significant (p = .031). The increase remains linear (F = 6.74, p = .011 < .05). Thus, we conclude that the presence of observations with large values does not alter our conclusions. Table 13.3 Homogeneous Subsets Figure 13.3 Watershed Loss, by Population We also test the robustness of conclusions for different variable transformations. The extreme skewness of the untransformed variable allows for only a limited range of root transformations that produce normality. Within this range (power 0.222 through 0.275), the preceding conclusions are replicated fully. Natural log and base-10 log transformations also result in normality and replicate these results, except that the post-hoc tests fail to identify that the means of the “Large” and “Small” groups are significantly different. However, the global F-test is (marginally) significant (F = 2.80, p = .043 < .05), which suggests that this difference is too small to detect with this transformation. A single, independent-samples t-test for this difference is significant (t = 2.47, p = .017 < .05), suggesting that this problem may have been exacerbated by the limited number of observations. In sum, we find converging evidence for our conclusions. As this example also shows, when using statistics, analysts frequently must exercise judgment and justify their decisions.9 Finally, what is the practical significance of this analysis? The wetland loss among watersheds with large surrounding populations is [(3.21 – 2.52)/2.52 =] 27.4 percent greater than among those surrounded by small populations. It is up to managers and elected officials to determine whether a difference of this magnitude warrants intervention in watersheds with large surrounding populations.10
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
[It is important] not to mistake risk indicators for risk mechanisms. On the whole, at any one point in time, poverty and social disadvantage are accompanied by an increased risk of psychopathology. The secular trend data, however, are persuasive in showing that it is most unlikely that the risk mechanism lies in either poverty or poor living conditions per se. Rather, the evidence suggests that the effect comes about because poverty is, in turn associated with family disorganization and breakup, which are rather nearer to the relevant risk mechanisms (p. 363). Stress research: Accomplishments and tasks ahead. Pp. 354-385 in Stress, Risk and Resilience in Children and Adolescents: Processes, Mechanisms, and Interventions. (R.J. Haggerty, L.R. Sherrod, N. Garmezy, & M, Rutter, eds)
Michael Rutter
Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward show of security, or—to put it better—the defect compensated itself without the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and at the same time wishing to be innocent.22
David H. Rosen (The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity (Compass))
The natural human instinct in a financial crisis, and especially the political instinct, is to avoid unpopular interventions, to let the market work its will, to show the world you’re punishing the perpetrators. But letting the fire burn out of control is much more economically damaging, and ultimately more politically damaging, than taking the decisive actions necessary to prevent it from spreading beyond the weakest institutions into the core of the system.
Timothy F. Geithner (Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises)
...you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you're succeeding. People do not get scared when you are failing. It calms them. That's why the show Intervention is a hit and everyone loves "worrying about" Amanda Bynes.
Mindy Kaling (Why Not Me?)
Mr. Lipwig, this morning you had no experience at all of being dead, and yet but for my intervention you would nevertheless have turned out to be extremely good at it,” said Lord Vetinari sharply. “It just goes to show: you never know until you try.
Terry Pratchett (Going Postal (Discworld, #33))
Miss Penelope THINKS I need beauty sleep?! Sorry, Brianna, but Miss Penelope CAN’T think. She doesn’t have a BRAIN! She’s a hand puppet!” I shot back. “She does TOO have a brain!” Brianna shouted. “She says she can go to puppet school to get smarter, but YOU need to go on that TV show Ugly Face Intervention!” I was like, Oh. No. She. DIDN’T !!! I could NOT believe Miss Penelope was talking TRASH about me like that. SHE was going to need an intervention!! After I took a pen and drew her a mustache. THEN we’d see whose FACE was the most messed up, MINE or HERS! Anyway,
Rachel Renée Russell (Dork Diaries: Once Upon a Dork)
Which is why you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing. It calms them. That’s why the show Intervention is a hit and everyone loves “worrying about” Amanda Bynes. But when you’re winning, it makes them feel like they’re losing or, worse yet, that maybe they should’ve tried to do something too, but now it’s too late. And since they didn’t, they want to stop you. You can’t let them. WE
Mindy Kaling (Why Not Me?)
by means of evolution by natural selection, which showed how living things can become well adapted to their environments over the course of time under a very wide range of circumstances, so long as the environment is not changing too quickly. Complexity could develop from simplicity without direct Divine intervention.
John D. Barrow (The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe)
Given the well-documented resistance of PTS to treatment, Seppälä was surprised by the results: a month after completing the intervention, veterans who took part in the weeklong yoga program showed reductions on all measures of PTS.
Amy Cuddy (Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges)