Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, June 16, 2015.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Country House by Blur
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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This power plant slurps up water for Arizona — and burns 15 tons of coal a minute
By Abrahm Lustgarten
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A couple of miles outside the town of Page, three 775-foot-tall caramel-colored smokestacks tower like sentries on the edge of northern Arizona’s sprawling red sandstone wilderness. At their base, the Navajo Generating Station, the West’s largest power-generating facility, thrums ceaselessly, like a beating heart.
Football-field-length conveyors constantly feed it piles of coal, hauled 78 miles by train from where huge shovels and mining equipment scraped it out of the ground shortly before. Then, like a medieval mortar and pestle machine, wheels crush the stone against a large bowl into a smooth powder that is sprayed into tremendous furnaces — some of the largest ever built. Those furnaces are stoked to 2,000 degrees, heating tubes of steam to produce enough pressure to drive an 80-ton rod of steel to spin faster than the speed of sound, converting the heat of the fires into electricity.
Shutterstock
The power generated enables a modern wonder. It drives a set of pumps 325 miles down the Colorado River that heave trillions of gallons of water out of the river and send it shooting over mountains and through canals. That water — lifted 3,000 vertical feet and carried 336 miles — has enabled the cities of Phoenix and Tucson to rapidly expand.
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“You are trying to raise your family in this environment, and you realize this is one of the top 10 dirtiest plants in the nation and it’s been spewing all this stuff for 40 years,” said Nicole Horseherder, a Navajo environmental activist. “Who is going to speak up and say, ‘Look, we are paying a huge cost so that the state of Arizona can have its profits, have its taxes, have its electricity, have its water?’ ”
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Wockner and others say the elaborate projects built along the river amount to expensive distractions. The more permanent solution: Put the Colorado’s limited water to the best purpose, by planting more efficient crops, irrigating with modern equipment, writing laws that incentivize conservation, and reducing energy spent moving water over large distances.
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World invests $200 billion to make countries healthier
By Stephen Feller
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"Even though funding growth has stalled in recent years, it's clear that funding in support of specific Millennium Development Goals grew at an exceptional rate during the first decade the goals were in place," said Dr. Joseph Dieleman, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME, at the University of Washington, in a press release.
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In addition to massive contributions from the international communities, the low- and middle-income nations are kicking in increasing amounts of their own money. Health spending by those countries reached an all-time high of $711.1 billion in 2012, growing 9.7 percent between 2011 and 2012.
"While a great deal of attention is focused on donors' efforts to improve health in developing countries, the countries themselves invest much more money," said Dr. Dieleman. "For every $1 donors spend in global health, developing countries spend nearly $20. However, in some low-income countries, it's one donor dollar for every dollar spent by the country."
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Synthetic Cannabinoid Poisonings Surge in U.S.
By Rebecca Trager and ChemistryWorld
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New synthetic cannabinoids, higher toxicities and an apparent increase in those using such drugs suggest that these drugs may be an emerging public health threat, the CDC suggests. The CDC is troubled by this trend, and says it suggests a need to step up efforts to remove these products from the marketplace.
Synthetic cannabinoids include various psychoactive chemicals or a mixture of such chemicals that are sprayed onto plant material, which is then smoked or ingested to achieve a ‘high’. These products are known by various names like spice and synthetic marijuana, and they are sometimes sold in retail outlets as herbal products. The most commonly reported adverse health effects associated with synthetic cannabinoid use included agitation, tachycardia and vomiting.
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International |
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Viewpoint: Breaking point for the ICC?
By Marc Weller
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Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir has evaded arrest and transfer to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague yet again.
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The US achieved many safeguards against the use of the Court against its own service-members in the Rome negotiations (which established the Court) without ever signing up to the Statute.
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In its criticism of the Court, the African Union has also focused on the fact that the ICC has had no hesitations in indicting serving heads of states.
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In the end, the Court was overruled by the Assembly of States Parties (the management oversight and legislative body of the ICC), who caved in to these demands and changed the applicable court rules, allowing those fulfilling "extraordinary public duties" at a high level to absent themselves from the proceedings.
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The ICC was meant to realise the vision for a universal body that would help deter the worst abuses of human beings by other human beings, wherever they may occur, and establish accountability for such abuses.
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Asia overtakes Europe in private wealth, says BCG
By (BBC)
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Asia has overtaken Europe as the world's second-richest region, according to an annual report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
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Overall, global private financial wealth grew by nearly 12% last year to $164tn, lifted by strong gains in the stock and bond markets.
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"By contrast, growth rates in all 'old world' regions remained in the single digits, led by Western Europe and North America, and with Japan lagging somewhat behind."
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Hong Kong government set to reveal political reforms
By (BBC)
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Hong Kong's government is set to present a controversial political reform package ahead of a much-anticipated vote later this week.
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Last September the city saw weeks of large-scale pro-democracy protests.
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It is unclear what China's response will be if the package is vetoed in the vote, which is expected to take place on Thursday or Friday.
Security has been stepped up across the city, with both pro-democracy and pro-government groups due to rally outside the government headquarters when the debate starts on Wednesday
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Prescription drug benefit did not save Medicare money
By Stephen Feller
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Medicare Part D was implemented in 2006 in an effort to drive down Medicare costs by offering seniors discounted medications but a new study has found that the program has had no effect on the amount of money spent on Medicare.
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Researchers are suggesting the Congressional Budget Office, which tracks government spending and scores legislation for its potential future costs, "re-examine" its policy figuring that medical spending decreases by 0.2 percent for each 1 percent increase in drug prescriptions filled.
The Affordable Care Act, which made alterations to the Medicare program as part of its expansive effort to improve access to health care when it was passed in 2009, includes provisions to decrease over time the costs it shares with Medicare subscribers. Those decreases are based on an assumed $35 billion of savings, mostly through a reduction in hospitalization that researchers say Medicare data does not show is happening.
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US orders ban on 'unsafe' trans-fats
By (BBC)
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The US Food and Drug Administration said partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), the main source of trans-fats, are not "generally recognised as safe".
It said a ban would save lives by preventing fatal heart attacks.
Food suppliers have been required to show trans-fats information on food labels since 2006 but health experts say Americans still consume too much.
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Since the FDA started labelling trans-fats, the agency estimates that consumption of them decreased by 78% in the US.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
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Blur was a pioneer Britpop revival. In England, they are considered pop’s elder statesmen. Suede, Pulp, Bush, Elastica, and yes, Oasis all came after Blur, and unsatisfied with the honor of being the first, they are willing to fight anyone who doesn’t think they’re the best. Their relationships with the British and American music presses have been both hot and cold, and the result is that they are more aware of their image than the most poll-obsessed American politician or the most paranoid Hollywood starlet.
The band started back in the 80s when lead singer Damon Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon met in southeast England. Both ended up in London, Coxon in college and Albarn in drama school. Pretty boy Alex James and drummer nerd Dave Rowntree stepped on the scene and they formed Seymour. A few shows later they were signed to Britain’s Food Records and renamed Blur. Their sound was simple and sort of dreamy. Echoey songs like “She’s So High” and “There’s No Other Way” spoke to Morrissey-lovers and swooning girls, and in England there were plenty of those. The boys looked cute and acted stupid and a pop sensation was born with their first album, Leisure. Famous and well-dressed, the band was seen drunk everywhere in London… and they made no music for almost two years. In fact they sort of disappeared.
Then they tried again. Modern Life Is Rubbish was an angry response to bad press followed by no press. Trying harder and digging deeper into British pop history, Albarn spiritually communed with Julian Cope, Robin Hitchcock, Paul Weller, David Bowie, and most overtly, the Kinks and the Beatles. He crafted his new slightly more evolved sound that would form a foundation for the following two albums: not quite edgy, but not as soft as before. Blur was voted best live act, second best band (after Suede) and Modern Life was voted third best album (after the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Suede’s debut album) in the Melody Maker Reader’s Poll of 1993.
But Parklife was Blur’s real breakthrough album. . . I liked Albarn’s cheeky attitude that I read in his interviews from that time: “Pop is a higher art form than rock,” he would say. “I’d hate to be a rock band. It’s like saying ‘I only drink beer,’ when I like to drink sherry with ice sometimes. Pop is more cosmopolitan. There aren’t many pop bigots.” His views seemed very post-modern, very advanced, and blatantly pretentious, in a double bluff kind of way.
Blur’s post-modern identity is steeped in the past.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Obama commits $4bn to form clean-energy investment clearinghouse
By Brandon Keim
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With $4bn and a new government office, the White House has unveiled its latest clean energy initiative and cast a subtle new role for the federal government: not only is it a funder of new research, of the latest solar converter or biofuel source, but it is also a market builder.
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At the press conference on Monday, Moniz and senior advisor Brian Deese fleshed out the details: $4bn in commitments from pension funds, family foundations and other so-called impact investors, and a newly unveiled office of technology transitions that will serve as an all-purpose informational resource for clean-energy investment.
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These range from solar-panel zoning standards to helping investors understand the clean energy investment space. It can be confusing, said Greene, particularly for investors unfamiliar with both the technology and the sorts of financial arrangements used in impact investments seeking both profit and social good.
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The announcement also comes just more than a year after the Obama administration announced its plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants by 30%, and with Congress having recently found rare bipartisan agreement on energy efficiency.
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What climate deniers get wrong on “politically motivated” science
By Naomi Oreskes
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As unlikely as it might seem today, in the first half of the 20th century the Republicans were the party that most strongly supported scientific work, as they recognized the diverse ways in which it could undergird economic activity and national security. The Democrats were more dubious, tending to see science as elitist and worrying that new federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health would concentrate resources in elite East Coast universities.
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The point of all this, of course, is to confuse Americans and so delay action, which brings us to the crux of the matter when it comes to “politically motivated” science. Yes, science can be biased, particularly when the financial support for that science comes from parties that have a vested interest in a particular outcome. History suggests, however, that such vested interests are far more likely to be a feature of the private sector than the public one.
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Perhaps most important, as is undoubtedly true with many of the funders of climate denial, the industry knew that the research it paid for was biased. By the 1950s, its executives were well aware that tobacco caused cancer; by the 1960s, they knew that it caused a host of other diseases; by the 1970s, they knew that it was addictive; and by the 1980s, they knew that secondhand smoke caused cancer in non-smokers and sudden infant death syndrome. Yet this industry-funded work was significantly less likely to find tobacco use damaging to health than research not funded by the industry. And so, of course, they funded more of it.
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Many Republicans resist accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand big government. Here’s what should give them pause: By delaying action on reducing global carbon emissions for more than two decades, we have already significantly increased the likelihood that disruptive global warming will lead to the kinds of government interventions they most fear and seek to avoid. Climate change is, in fact, already causing an increase in the sorts of extreme weather events — particularly floods, extreme droughts, and heat waves — that almost always result in large-scale government responses. The longer we wait, the more massive the required intervention will be.
In the future, as the devastating effects of climate change unfold here in the United States, natural disasters will result in a greater reliance on government — especially the federal government. (Of course, our grandchildren will not call them “natural” disasters, because they will know all too well who caused them.) What this means is that the work climate deniers are now doing only helps ensure that we will be less ready for the full impact of climate change, which means greater government interventions to come. Put another way, climate deniers are now playing a crucial role in creating the nightmare they most fear. They are guaranteeing the very future they claim to want to avoid.
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Science and Health |
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Black holes are not ruthless killers, but instead benign hologram generators
By (ScienceDaily)
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Are black holes the ruthless killers we've made them out to be? Samir Mathur says no. According to the professor of physics at The Ohio State University, the recently proposed idea that black holes have "firewalls" that destroy all they touch has a loophole.
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The black hole is permanently changed by the new addition. It's as if, metaphorically speaking, a new gene sequence has been spliced into its DNA. That means every black hole is a unique product of the material that happens to come across it.
The information paradox was resolved in part due to Mathur's development of the fuzzball theory in 2003. The idea, which he published in the journal Nuclear Physics B in 2004, was solidified through the work of other scientists including Oleg Lunin of SUNY Albany, Stefano Giusto of the University of Padova, Iosif Bena of CEA-Saclay, and Nick Warner of the University of Southern California. Mathur's co-authors included then-students Borun Chowdhury (now a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University), and Steven Avery (now a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University).
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The implications of the fuzzball-firewall issue are profound. One of the tenets of string theory is that our three-dimensional existence -- four-dimensional if you count time -- might actually be a hologram on a surface that exists in many more dimensions.
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Once Again, The Media Is Overhyping The Health Benefits Of Chocolate
By Robbie Gonzalez
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“There does not appear to be evidence that chocolate should be avoided in terms of impact on cardiovascular risk.” So conclude the authors of a report published Monday in the august medical journal Heart. Their takeaway is decidedly unsexy (takeaways from well-conducted health studies, which the aforementioned investigation appears to be, often are), but this has not prevented the Telegraph (“Two bars of chocolate a day ‘lowers risk of stroke and heart disease’”); Independent (“Two chocolate bars a day ‘reduce risk of heart attack and stroke’”); Mirror (“Two chocolate bars a day can SLASH the risk of heart disease and stroke”); and others from overselling the study’s finding with their headlines. Don’t believe them.
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When John Bohannon lifted the lid on his “Chocolate Sting” here on io9 last month, the list of guilty parties included faulty experimental design, gimmicky statistics, predatory open-access publishers, unreliable peer review, a hyped press release, and the uncritical parroting of that press release by media outlets. These all rank among the biggest problems plaguing the research-media complex, and Bohannon’s hoax hinged on the exploitation of every single one of them. But in the case of the present study, the list of offenders is much shorter.
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As Virginia Hughes wrote last year, on the heels of a recently published resveratrol study (like chocolate, the health media often reports breathlessly on resveratrol, a compound with ambiguous longevity-boosting/disease-fighting properties): “The science of health is so, so confusing, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be better for journalists to stop writing about health altogether. Or at least to dramatically change the way we do it.”
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Technology |
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Dutch startup plans first 3D printed steel bridge to span Amsterdam canal
By (AFP via theguardian.com)
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A Dutch startup has unveiled plans to build the world’s first 3D-printed bridge across an Amsterdam canal, a technique that could become standard on future construction sites.
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The plan involves robotic arm printers ‘walking’ across the canal as it slides along the bridge’s edges, essentially printing its own support structure out of thin air as it moves along.
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So far, the robotic arm has been used to print smaller metal structures, but the bridge will be the first ever large-scale deployment of the technology, MX3D spokeswoman Eva James said.
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The technique also removes the need for scaffolding as the robot arms use the very structure they print as support.
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Corporations Want to Follow Your Every Move, Whether You Like It Or Not
By Kevin Drum
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Last year the Commerce Department put together a group to make recommendations for regulating facial recognition technology. The group included nine privacy advocates, but Dan Froomkin reports that it didn't go well:
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....After a dozen meetings, the most recent of which was last week, all nine privacy advocates who have participated in the entire process concluded that they were totally outgunned. “This should be a wake-up call to Americans: Industry lobbyists are choking off Washington’s ability to protect consumer privacy,” Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, said in a statement.
“People simply do not expect companies they’ve never heard of to secretly track them using this powerful technology. Despite all of this, industry associations have pushed for a world where companies can use facial recognition on you whenever they want — no matter what you say. This position is well outside the mainstream.”
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Cultural |
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When Words Matter: Medical Education and the Care of Transgender Patients
By Colleen Farrell
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I’ve learned that sometimes my own discomfort broaching a potentially sensitive topic is far greater than my patient’s. Each week in our first year of medical school, we learned a new set of interview questions and then practiced them by visiting patients in the hospital. When it came time to practice our questions about alcohol use, I dreaded asking. I was convinced that there was no way of asking a patient how much he drank without sounding judgmental. But then, when I overcame my nerves and finally asked, my patient, an older man with liver failure, openly shared with me his decades-long struggle with alcoholism. It almost seemed like he was glad I had asked.
But these conversations have not always gone so smoothly. In my primary care clinic, I attempted to have a conversation with an overweight 35-year-old man about increasing his exercise, and was promptly told, “I don’t think this conversation is going anywhere.” While I felt badly that my tactic had apparently misfired, I was at least glad he told me. What concerns me is all the times I have tried to ask questions sensitively or respond with understanding but failed without realizing it. I know from my own limited experiences as a patient that in moments of vulnerability, a doctor’s words can become magnified and meaningful, both positively and negatively. The doctor often never learns how her words made her patient feel.
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Medical school isn’t perfect at addressing the challenges of talking with patients about sensitive topics. But over time, I’ve begun to feel much more equipped to tackle certain issues than others. Over the course of my psychiatry rotation, my discomfort asking patients about suicidal thoughts faded, such that I could focus more on the answer to the question rather than my own nervousness. In obstetrics and gynecology, discussing birth control options quickly became normalized. And to prepare us for the difficult task of delivering bad news to a patient, my school required each of us to meet with a patient-actor in a mock exam room and tell her she had metastatic cancer, while a faculty member took notes on how we could improve our communication skills.
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In my encounter with Jamie, I wasn’t lacking a specific learning point on the care of transgender patients. I don’t think there was only one correct thing to say to Jamie. Rather, in order to address the needs of transgender and gender nonconforming patients, we need physician-mentors experienced in transgender patient care who can help us work through our uncertainty. We need opportunities to gain experience and comfort, through elective rotations in specific LGBT health centers or through simulated encounters with patient-actors. And we need an institutional culture that says loudly and clearly: it’s important to do this well.
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Vietnam's 'stunning' rise in school standards
By Andreas Schleicher
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In Vietnamese classrooms there is an impressive level of rigour, with teachers challenging students with demanding questions. The teachers focus on teaching a few things well and with a great sense of coherence that helps students to progress.
Teachers in Vietnam are highly respected, both in society as well as in their classrooms. That may be a cultural trait, but it also reflects the role that teachers are given in the education system, which extends well beyond delivering lessons in school and embraces many dimensions of student well-being and support.
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The government has made it a priority to get all young people into education and so far the education system has been good at absorbing disadvantaged children and giving them equal access to education.
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As the highest-performing countries show, excellence is generally associated with giving individual schools greater autonomy in curriculum and tests, particularly when there are strong accountability measures in place.
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As a recent report suggests, Vietnam stands to gain three times its current GDP by 2095 if all of its children were enrolled in secondary school and they all acquired at least basic skills in mathematics and science by 2030 - and if the country's labour market were able to absorb and use all of that talent.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |