Author: SupremeCmdr

The Great College Loan Swindle

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America as a country has evolved in recent decades into a confederacy of widescale industrial scams. The biggest slices of our economic pie – sectors like health care, military production, banking, even commercial and residential real estate – have become crude income-redistribution schemes, often untethered from the market by subsidies or bailouts, with the richest companies benefiting from gamed or denuded regulatory systems that make profits almost as assured as taxes. Guaranteed-profit scams – that’s the last thing America makes with any level of consistent competence.

Going to college doesn’t guarantee a good job, far from it, but the data show that not going dooms most young people to an increasingly shallow pool of the very crappiest, lowest-paying jobs. There’s a lot of stick, but not much carrot, in the education game.

An interesting point of view and well worth reading.  Click here for the full Rolling Stone article.

 

My Wakelet

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I’m playing with a new social sharing platform called Wakelet.  Click here for a local news article.

So what is Wakelet? It’s a web application that lets people, businesses and academic institutions organise links to online information into neatly-presented collections called ‘wakes’.

In a world of information overload, big data and real-time streams, search engines work hard to index the ever-growing amount of online information. While search algorithms help us find isolated pieces of information faster, they don’t know which ones are most relevant to us as individuals. Wakelet brings a human touch to this process by giving us the ability to easily collect and organise anything we read, view or listen to in a way that’s useful to us and to others.

Check out my diabetes Wakelet.  I’m toying with the idea of cataloguing the online articles I read rather than link one by one on the blog.  I started my wakes in November 2017 and we’ll see how it goes.  At first blush I don’t see this platform replacing my blogs.  But I think it may be useful for my followers to have one stop shopping for the fruits of my research.  Enjoy.

The Fragile Generation – Reason.com

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Must read.  HT naked capitalism.

Source: The Fragile Generation – Reason.com

We’ve had the best of intentions, of course. But efforts to protect our children may be backfiring. When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened. Yet modern child-rearing practices and laws seem all but designed to cultivate this lack of preparedness. There’s the fear that everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them. And there’s a newer belief that has been spreading through higher education that words and ideas themselves can be traumatizing.

How did we come to think a generation of kids can’t handle the basic challenges of growing up?

A few years ago, Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray was invited by the head of counseling services at a major university to a conference on “the decline in resilience among students.” The organizer said that emergency counseling calls had doubled in the last five years. What’s more, callers were seeking help coping with everyday problems, such as arguments with a roommate. Two students had dialed in because they’d found a mouse in their apartment. They also called the police, who came and set a mousetrap. And that’s not to mention the sensitivity around grades. To some students, a B is the end of the world. (To some parents, too.)

Vegetarians may live longer (but not because they are vegetarian) – Spectator Health

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Vegetarians may live longer, but not necessarily because they have given up meat, according to a study in Preventive Medicine. The researchers looked at data from 243,096 adults over the age of 45, with an average age of 62, living in New South Wales in Australia. They found no significant difference in all-cause mortality between omnivores and vegetarians. Six years later 16,836 participants had died, of which 80 were vegetarians. Having adjusted for other contributory factors, no significant difference was found in longevity between meat eaters and those with a mostly plant-based diet. The researchers say that one possible explanation for their finding is recent changes in the average vegetarian’s consumption. As plant-based diets become more popular, more vegetarian junk food has become available, bringing vegetarianism more in line with a ‘normal’ diet. An earlier study suggested that vegetarians and vegans suffer socially. Meat eaters, who make up a significant majority of the population, evaluated vegetarians and vegans more negatively than other common targets of prejudice. ‘Strikingly, only drug addicts were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians and vegans,’ the authors wrote.

Source: Vegetarians may live longer — but not because they are vegetarian | Spectator Health

NCI Study: MRI of the Prostate Misses Cancers

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About 16% of lesions were missed, and approximately 5% of clinically important prostate cancers (>5 mm, Gleason score > 3+3) were underestimated on MP MRI, according to Baris Turkbey, MD, of the Molecular Imaging Program at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues. Overall, prostate cancer size was underestimated by at least 30% in eight (8%) of 100 patients. Their study was published online October 20 in Radiology.

Source: NCI Study: MRI of the Prostate Misses Cancers

Lupus-Related Mortality Has Declined, but Gap Remains

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Looking at mortality patterns by race, SLE deaths did not increase significantly among whites or those in the Asian/American Indian/Alaska Native/Pacific Islander group during the study, but did increase significantly among blacks between 1975 and 1983, followed by a period of stability until 2002, after which they decreased.

Source: Lupus-Related Mortality Has Declined, but Gap Remains

Link to the study is here.

Gastric Cancer Risk Doubled With Long-term PPI Use

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Source: Gastric Cancer Risk Doubled With Long-term PPI Use

The study was published online October 31 in Gut.

The researchers point out, however, that this was an observational study, which can’t prove cause and effect.

A strength of the study is its use of data from a large population-based database with complete information on subsequent diagnoses and drug prescriptions, which minimizes selection, information, and recall biases, the researchers say. Use of strict exclusion criteria as well as propensity score adjustment to control for potential confounders and restricting the sample to patients with successful H pylori eradication are other strengths.

In terms of study weaknesses, the researchers  lacked information on some risk factors, such as diet, family history, and socioeconomic status.  And despite the large sample of more than 63,000 H pylori–infected patients, the small number of gastric cancer cases did not allow for any “meaningful evaluation of the dosage effect and role of different PPIs,” the researchers say.