Cruelty is the point

 

Are American Presidents above the law?

 

Even hands-free, phones and their apps cause dangerously distracted driving

Stay alive when you drive

Shannon Roberts, UMass Amherst

Car infotainment systems are getting ever more
sophisticated. AP Photo/Ryan Sun

Do you ever use your cellphone while driving? Don’t feel too guilty about saying yes – nearly 60% of drivers admit to using their phone in hands-free mode while driving.

But don’t become complacent either. Using your cellphone in hands-free mode while driving is not a perfectly safe activity, despite the impression you might be getting from laws, marketing messages and the behavior of people around you.

Fatal crashes caused by driver distraction have not gone down significantly over time: Distraction caused 14% of fatal crashes in 2017 and 13% of fatal crashes in 2021. 

Given that these numbers are calculated based on police-reported crashes, many experts believe the actual number of crashes caused by driver distraction is much higher. For example, real-world crash data from teens indicates that 58% of their crashes are due to driver distraction.

I am a human factors engineer who studies how drivers interact with technology. I see a gap between what people are told and what people should do when it comes to using your cellphone behind the wheel.

Unlocking Brain Health Through the Science of Nutrition

Med diet still among the best

By THE GERONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 

“Insights & Implications in Gerontology: The Vital Role of Nutrition in Brain Health,” a new publication from the Gerontological Society of America, explores nutritional choices that have been shown to improve cognition and decrease the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults.

Consumption of a healthful diet is a behavioral strategy that can help to prevent the development of dementia as people age, the publication says. It also reports on the roles of vitamins and minerals in nutrition and brain function and focuses on how to implement person-centered conversations about the impact of diet and nutrition on overall wellness, including brain health.

College administrators are falling into a tried and true trap laid by the right

Deja vu all over again

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, University of New Orleans

A student is arrested during a pro-Palestinian demonstration
at the University of Texas at Austin on April 24, 2024.
 Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.

We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.

They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.

Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.

The case against Bobby Junior

 

Hot guy

If you say so,,,,

 

Clearing the air: wind farms more land efficient than previously thought

Wind power is a source of energy that is both affordable and renewable.

McGill University

However, decision-makers have been reluctant to invest in wind energy due to a perception that wind farms require a lot of land compared to electric power plants driven by fossil fuels. Research led by McGill University and based on the assessment of the land-use of close to 320 wind farms in the U.S. (the largest study of its kind) paints a very different picture.

Misplaced preconceptions about the land use of gas-fueled electricity

The study, which was published recently in Environmental Science and Technology, shows that, when calculations are made, the entire wind farm area is usually considered as land given over to wind development. 

However, the wind power infrastructure (such as the turbines and roads) typically only uses 5 per cent of the entire farmland – the rest is often used for other purposes, such as agriculture.

The research also shows that if wind turbines are sited in areas with existing roads and infrastructure, such as on agricultural land, they can be approximately seven times more efficient, in terms of energy produced per square metre of land directly impacted by the infrastructure, than projects that are developed from scratch.

“The land use of wind farms has often been viewed as among the predominant challenges to wind development,” explains Sarah Jordaan, an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at McGill and the senior author on the study. 

“But, by quantifying the land area used by nearly 16,000 wind turbines in the western U.S., we found that gas-fired generation offers no real benefits in terms of lesser land use when the infrastructures, including all the wells, pipelines, and roads associated with the natural gas supply chain, are considered.”

DEM Announces Start of the 2024 RI Grown Farmer's Market Season

Get Fresh, Buy Local

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) is announcing the start of the weekly 2024 RI Grown Farmer’s Market Season this weekend, running through early autumn. 

Starting this weekend, consumers can shop the RI Grown Farmers Market at Goddard Memorial State Park, held every Friday from 9 AM – 1 PM, or the RI Grown Farmers Market at Fishermen’s Memorial State Park, held every Sunday from 8:30 AM to 12 PM, for locally grown and fresh food. 

The hours for Fishermen’s Memorial have changed, so consumers and vendors should plan accordingly. Markets at Goddard Park remain the same as previous years. 

For the first few weeks, the RI Grown Farmer’s Markets will primarily offer bedding plants, hanging plants, cut flowers, RI Seafood, early vegetable crops, honey, and maple syrup. As traditional local summer crops become available, additional vendors will be attending. Consumers should keep a lookout for the RI Grown label, which certifies that a product was grown right here in the Ocean State. 

Noncompete Clauses Cost Workers $300 Billion a Year

Can the Biden Administration really curb them?

By DEAN BAKER

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on April 23 voted to finalize a ban on most noncompeteclauses. 

These clauses are part of tens of millions of employment contracts and limit workers’ ability to quit their current employer and find jobs elsewhere. That, in turn, suppresses wages.

Since announcing its plan to adopt rules on noncompete clauses last year the FTC has received more than 26,000 comments.

Noncompete clauses were originally only included in contracts for highly paid workers. For example, lawyers at a large firm might be limited in their ability to leave and take their clients with them. But noncompete contracts have become much more widespread in recent decades. 

They often prevent lower-paid workers, such as barbers or beauticians, from starting their own business or working for a competitor. In one famous case, a fast-food chain actually limited the ability of their employees to get jobs elsewhere.

The effect of noncompete clauses is to reduce the wages of workers affected by them.

The direct impact on workers subject to clauses could be as much as 15 percent, and the impact on all workers’ pay could be over 8.0 percent. In short, they are a big deal in determining wages and the distribution of income.

The Lasting Impact of Exposure to Gun Violence

Forever changed

By Rod McCullom

On the evening of June 1, 2023, 14-year-old Pierre Johnson was shot and killed while sitting on a porch opposite his home in the Fuller Park community on Chicago’s South Side. 

According to police reports, four gunmen drove to the alley behind the building and went through the adjoining vacant lot, killing Johnson and injuring four others. The mass shooting happened just across the street from where Pierre had seen his older brother Paris Johnson shot and left paralyzed in 2017. Paris died three years later.

Since 2020, gun violence has overtaken motor vehicle crashes to become the leading cause of death for children and adolescents aged 1 to 19 in the United States — a change mainly driven by homicides. 

Young Black men and teenagers like the Johnsons, who live in urban areas that experience high rates of poverty, unemployment, and violent crime are the hardest hit demographic. In fact, the CDC reports that gun homicides are the leading cause of death for African American boys and young men aged 15 to 24.

According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence — a nonprofit public interest law and advocacy organization co-founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords — more Black males aged 15- to 24-years-old “died in gun homicides than from unintentional injuries, suicide, heart disease, Covid-19, cancer, non-firearm homicides, diabetes, congenital abnormalities, and chronic respiratory diseases, police shootings, cerebrovascular diseases, anemias, sepsis, influenza and pneumonia, and HIV combined.”

Despite the staggering numbers of injuries and deaths, the long-term effects of exposure to firearm violence — whether witnessing a shooting, living near the scene of gun violence, or having a friend or relative become a shooting victim — has long been understudied, researchers say. 

One of the reasons is that a federal rule prevented the CDC from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” effectively halting research on gun violence for more than 20 years, from 1996 to 2019. With that funding now turned back on, there is an emerging research pipeline that focuses on the long-term effects of exposure to gun violence on adolescents, young adults, and adults.

So unfair!

Whose debt?

Are tomorrow’s engineers ready to face AI’s ethical challenges?

More complicated than most think

Elana Goldenkoff, University of Michigan and Erin A. Cech, University of Michigan

Finding ethics’ place in the engineering curriculum.
 PeopleImages/iStock via Getty Images Plus

A chatbot turns hostile. A test version of a Roomba vacuum collects images of users in private situations. A Black woman is falsely identified as a suspect on the basis of facial recognition software, which tends to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color.

These incidents are not just glitches, but examples of more fundamental problems. As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become more integrated into daily life, ethical considerations are growing, from privacy issues and race and gender biases in coding to the spread of misinformation.

The general public depends on software engineers and computer scientists to ensure these technologies are created in a safe and ethical manner. As a sociologist and doctoral candidate interested in science, technology, engineering and math education, we are currently researching how engineers in many different fields learn and understand their responsibilities to the public.

Yet our recent research, as well as that of other scholars, points to a troubling reality: The next generation of engineers often seem unprepared to grapple with the social implications of their work. What’s more, some appear apathetic about the moral dilemmas their careers may bring – just as advances in AI intensify such dilemmas.