A scientific approach to doing good

Here's how you can be nudged to eat healthier, recycle and make better decisions every day
José Antonio Rosa, Iowa State University

Were you subtly encouraged to make that menu choice?
Supavadee butradee/Shutterstock.com

Every day, you make important choices – about whether to feast on fries or take a brisk walk, whether to spend or save your paycheck, whether to buy the sustainable option or the disposable plastic one.

Life is made up of countless decisions. 

The idea of nudging people in the right direction, instead of relying on their internal motivation, has gained traction over the last decade.

In general, nudging involves gently coaxing someone into a decision or behavior. 

The perfect nudge is one that results in the desired decision or behavior without the person recognizing any external influence.

Think of employees being automatically enrolled in retirement savings programs. Workers who must opt out, instead of needing to opt in, participate more in retirement savings. 

Or picture those little cards in hotel bathrooms encouraging people to reuse their towels by stating that most hotel guests do, instead of appealing to the guests’ social responsibility.

In these and countless similar situations, people feel in control, but were nudged to prefer one option over the other.

So how does all this nudging work within the mind? As someone who studies consumer decision-making, I can tell you: It’s complicated.

So have a coffee with your jelly donut

Caffeine may offset some health risks of diets high in fat, sugar

BY SHARITA FORREST  

A new study in rats suggests that caffeine may offset some of the negative effects of an obesogenic diet by reducing the storage of lipids in fat cells and limiting weight gain and the production of triglycerides.

Rats that consumed the caffeine extracted from mate tea gained 16% less weight and accumulated 22% less body fat than rats that consumed decaffeinated mate tea, scientists at the University of Illinois found in a new study.

The effects were similar with synthetic caffeine and that extracted from coffee.

Mate tea is an herbal beverage rich in phytochemicals, flavonoids and amino acids that’s consumed as a stimulant by people in southeastern Latin American countries. The amount of caffeine per serving in mate tea ranges from 65-130 milligrams, compared with 30-300 milligrams of caffeine in a cup of brewed coffee, according to the study.

Covering up crime

Like Voldemort, Ransomware Is Too Scary to Be Named
By Renee Dudley for ProPublica

Wikipedia

On Aug. 21, Lumber Liquidators’ corporate and store-level computer systems began to shut down.

Without them, the flooring company’s retail employees couldn’t check product prices or inventories.

They had to send in orders to distribution centers by phone or from their personal email accounts and write down customers’ credit card information on paper. Each transaction took up to half an hour.

Amid the chaos, sales took a hit. So did morale, since sales factored into employee bonuses.

“You couldn’t really sell or haggle anything,” said Trevor Sinner, then a store manager in Los Angeles. “You couldn’t see inventory, you couldn’t see cost, you couldn’t see anything.”

Once most of the computer systems were back online six days later, the Virginia-based retailer reported what it called a “network security incident” showing “symptoms of malware” to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But Sinner got a different explanation from a divisional vice president, who confided that the real culprit was ransomware — malicious software that freezes computer files and demands payment to decrypt them.

“We knew it was ransomware a long time ago,” Sinner said. “I don’t think the company disclosed it was ransomware to anybody, even now.”

Each year, millions of ransomware attacks paralyze computer systems of businesses, medical offices, government agencies and individuals. But they pose a particular dilemma for publicly traded companies, which are regulated by the SEC.

Rhode Island digs into dead war vets’ assets to reduce its budget deficit

State needs to get informed consent before grabbing vets’ estates

By Cynthia Owens in UpRiseRI

Residents at the state veterans’ home in Bristol, Rhode Island could unwittingly have their estate assets pass to the home at their death instead of to their family members.

State laws – including Rhode Island’s – all provide for the passing of decedents’ estates to beneficiaries named in their wills or to their closest relatives if no valid wills exist.

Rhode Island law, however, carves out an exception for estates belonging to its veterans’ home residents who die without wills.

Instead of their estates passing to family members, those assets become the property of the state, which can be used for payment of the home’s high operating expenses.

Label me a stickler for propriety, but I think that such an exception should be explicitly and conspicuously disclosed to all veterans applying for admission to the home, with handwritten confirmation of their understanding and acknowledgment of same.

Grow up

For more cartoons by Mick Luckovich, CLICK HERE.

Video: why we need a wealth tax

To watch this vido on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfx0TBKuuvY&feature=emb_title

Investing in ourselves

Revolutionary Clean Air Act has Saved Lots of Money and Lives

By ROGER WARBURTON/ecoRI News contributor

The costs and benefits of the Clean Air Act, according to EPA data. (Roger Warburton/ecoRI News)

The Clean Air Act of 1963 was one of the United States’ first environmental laws. It was a model for the world.

The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop periodic reports that estimate the benefits and the costs of the law, which include: improvements in human health, welfare, and ecological resources; and the cost impact of the act’s provisions on the U.S. economy.

The costs of investments required by the
Clean Air Act. (EPA)

The EPA has estimated that the annual dollar value of the benefits of air quality improvements will continue to grow over time as emissions control programs take their full effect.

The upfront costs were significant, amounting to $65 billion. The costs were distributed across industries, as shown in the graph to the right. Most of the costs ($28 billion) were invested in vehicles and fuel.

The electricity generation sector invested another $10 billion.

However, the benefits, which in 2020 are estimated to be nearly $2 trillion, are vastly greater than the $65 billion investment costs. 

In fact, the benefits are more than 30 times the investment costs, according to a 2011 EPA report.

The benefits come from the many different impacts of the act, such as the reduction in mortality from lowered particulate matter and lowered ozone concentration. There are additional health benefits, which are summarized in the next two graphs below.

Attention, Nobel committee!

Scientists take big step towards making the perfect head of beer

University of Manchester

Drinkers will soon be cheering all the way to the bar thanks to a team of scientists who have taken a big step forward in solving the puzzle of how to make the perfect head of beer.

Lead researcher Dr Richard Campbell from The University of Manchester says his findings solve a long-standing mystery related to the lifetime of foams.

And that could be useful for the development of a range of products that improve the creamy topping on a flat white coffee, the head on a pint of beer, shampoos we use every day, firefighting foams or even oil absorbent foams used to tackle environmental disasters.

The scientist, whose study is published in the journal Chemical Communications, turned to the Institut Laue-Langevin in France for one of the world's most intense neutron sources.

At the research facility, he fired beams of neutrons at the liquids used to make foams.

He said: "Just like when we see light reflecting off a shiny object and our brains help us identify it from its appearance, when neutrons reflect up off a liquid they are fired at we can use a computer to reveal crucial information about its surface. The difference is that the information is on a molecular level that we cannot see with our eyes."

Trump tries to get cancer judgment against Bayer-Monsanto dismissed

Trump's EPA Goes to Bat for Bayer as Company Fights $25 Million Verdict in Roundup Cancer Case

By Andrea Germanos, staff writer for Common Dreams

President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency—already accused of being "pesticide cheerleader"—threw its weight behind chemical company Bayer AG on Friday when the agency asked a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court's ruling in favor of a man who said the company's Roundup weedkiller was responsible for his cancer.

The case centers on Edwin Hardeman of California, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2015 after using the glyphosate-based pesticide, made by Monsanto, for years on his property. Bayer acquired Monsanto last year.

A federal jury in July ordered the company to pay Hardeman roughly $25 million in damages, a lower amount than the $80 million a federal judge had ordered months earlier.

The EPA maintains—to the outrage of environmental and public health groups—that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. The federal decision notwithstanding, California in 2017 agreed with the World Health Organization's 2015 classification of glyphosate as a "probable carcinogen." 

VIDEO: Why I'm still hopeful

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What's a progressive to do?

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Message from the past for Moscow Mitch

No cure for pig-headedness

Strength of conviction won't help to persuade when people disagree

University College London

If you disagree with someone, it might not make any difference how certain they say they are, as during disagreement your brain's sensitivity to the strength of people's beliefs is reduced, finds a study led by UCL and City, University of London.

The brain scanning study, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveals a new type of confirmation bias that can make it very difficult to alter people's opinions.

"We found that when people disagree, their brains fail to encode the quality of the other person's opinion, giving them less reason to change their mind," said the study's senior author, Professor Tali Sharot (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences).

For the study, the researchers asked 42 participants, split into pairs, to estimate house prices. They each wagered on whether the asking price would be more or less than a set amount, depending on how confident they were. 

Next, each lay in an MRI scanner with the two scanners divided by a glass wall. On their screens they were shown the properties again, reminded of their own judgments, then shown their partner's assessment and wagers, and finally were asked to submit a final wager.

The researchers found that, when both participants agreed, people would increase their final wagers to larger amounts, particularly if their partner had placed a high wager.

Conversely, when the partners disagreed, the opinion of the disagreeing partner had little impact on people's wagers, even if the disagreeing partner had placed a high wager.

Hangovers help keep you alive

Hangovers happen as your body tries to protect itself from alcohol's toxic effects
Daryl Davies, University of Southern California; Joshua Silva, University of Southern California, and Terry David Church, University of Southern California

A night of revelry can mean an uncomfortable day after.
Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com 

Debaucherous evening last night? You’re probably dealing with veisalgia right now.

More commonly known as a hangover, this unpleasant phenomenon has been dogging humanity since our ancestors first happened upon fermentation.

Those nasty vertigo-inducing, cold sweat-promoting and vomit-producing sensations after a raucous night out are all part of your body’s attempt to protect itself from injury after you overindulge in alcoholic beverages. 

Your liver is working to break down the alcohol you consumed so your kidneys can clear it out ASAP. But in the process, your body’s inflammatory and metabolic reactions are going to lay you low with a hangover.

As long as people have suffered from hangovers, they’ve searched in vain for a cure. Revelers have access to a variety of compounds, products and devices that purport to ease the pain. But there’s a lot of purporting and not a lot of proof. Most have not been backed up well by science in terms of usefulness for hangover treatment, and often their effects don’t seem like they’d match up with what scientists know about the biology of the hangover.

Amazon drivers die for you

Inside Documents Show How Amazon Chose Speed Over Safety in Building Its Delivery Network
By James Bandler, Patricia Callahan and Doris Burke, ProPublica, Ken Bensinger and Caroline O’Donovan, BuzzFeed News

WJLA photo

As they prepared for last year’s holiday rush, managers at Amazon unveiled a plan to make the company’s sprawling delivery network the safest in the world.

Amazon, which ships millions of packages a day to homes and businesses across America, had seen a string of fatal crashes involving vans making those deliveries over the previous few years. 

Improving safety, the plan said, was “Amazon’s Greatest Opportunity.”

A key part of the proposal was a five-day course that would put new drivers through on-road assessments overseen by an outside organization with four decades of experience in driver training.
But the defensive-driving course didn’t materialize.

Amid the rush of what would become Amazon’s busiest holiday season ever, the class was vetoed. With more than a billion packages shipping in a span of six weeks, the company needed to put drivers to work almost as soon as they were hired, internal documents show.

“We chose to not have onroad practical training because it was a bottleneck” that would keep new drivers off the road, noted a memo written by a senior manager in the logistics division just after the peak season wrapped up.

In just a few years, Amazon has built a delivery system that has disrupted a decades-old business dominated by FedEx and United Parcel Service. But in its relentless drive to get bigger while keeping costs low, Amazon’s logistics operation has repeatedly emphasized speed and cost over safety, a new investigation by ProPublica and BuzzFeed News has found.

Time after time, internal documents and interviews with company insiders show, Amazon officials have ignored or overlooked signs that the company was overloading its fast-growing delivery network while eschewing the expansive sort of training and oversight provided by a legacy carrier like UPS.