Month: March 2014

Brian Palmer contends that “Yoga is the new prayer: the risk-free, cost-free solution to all of your medical problems”:

In 2006, a well-constructed study finally proved that praying to God confers no medical benefit. … God’s medical career was over. But he left a void in the public discussion of medicine, and yoga has filled it. Studies come out on a near weekly basis trumpeting the benefits of yoga for any problem. Yoga for diabetes. Yoga for high blood pressure. Yoga for heart disease. Yoga for cancer. Yoga for slow reactions. Yoga for bad grades. The quasi-miraculous healing powers of yoga are, I concede, more credible than the truly miraculous healing power of a divine being. At least there is a nexus between health and yoga—the human body—which is something you can’t say for therapeutic prayer.

The yoga studies, however, contain myriad methodological problems, some of which are similar to those that plagued prayer research.

Joshua Eaton highlights how Buddhism has also been co-opted:

Interaction among Buddhism, neuropsychology and the self-help movement has also launched a constellation of publications, gurus, life coaches and conferences that make up the mindfulness movement. Its proponents tout yoga, mindfulness and meditation as panaceas, good for everything from managing stress and increasing longevity to turning around poor urban schools and establishing world peace, all one breath at a time.

Corporate America has embraced mindfulness as a way to raise bottom lines without raising blood pressure — much to the chagrin of people like [Amanda] Ream, who feel that Buddhism’s message is much more radical.

Sheryl Sandberg and Anna Maria Chávez have launched a campaign against “bossy”:

Most dictionary entries for “bossy” provide a sentence showing its proper use, and nearly all focus on women. Examples range from the Oxford Dictionaries’ “bossy, meddling woman” to Urban Dictionary’s “She is bossy, and probably has a pair down there to produce all the testosterone.” Ngram shows that in 2008 (the most recent year available), the word appeared in books four times more often to refer to females than to males.

Behind the negative connotations lie deep-rooted stereotypes about gender. Boys are expected to be assertive, confident and opinionated, while girls should be kind, nurturing and compassionate. … How are we supposed to level the playing field for girls and women if we discourage the very traits that get them there?

Deborah Tannen supports the idea:

I once had high-ranking women and men record everything they said for a week, then shadowed them and interviewed them and their co-workers.

I found that women in authority, more often than men in similar positions, used language in ways that sounded a lot like what researchers observed among girls at play. Instead of “Do this,” women managers would say “Let’s …” or “What you could do,” or soften the impact by making their statements sound like questions.

In short, women at work are in a double bind: If they talk in these ways, which are associated with and expected of women, they seem to lack confidence, or even competence. But if they talk in ways expected of someone in authority, they are seen as too aggressive. That’s why “bossy” is not just a word but a frame of mind. Let’s agree to stop sending girls and women the message that they’ll be disliked – or worse – if they exercise authority.

But Danielle Henderson urges women to embrace their bossiness:

We should be telling girls to own the living shit out of bossiness. Instead of casting it as a pejorative, we should be reifying the idea that being bossy directly relates to confidence, and teaching girls how to harness that confidence in productive and powerful ways. This isn’t a problem of language – the problem is our backwards system that rewards women for silence and compliance, and encouraging them to be less fierce is a supremely fucked up way to counter that. What is this wilting flower, let’s-not-say-bad-words approach to empowerment?

Meanwhile, Olga Khazan warns that efforts to make girls more willing to be “bossy” may inadvertently target the introverted:

Of course it’s good to encourage girls to be leaders. But not all leaders have extroverted personalities. In fact, some of the best ones are quiet, shy loners who were likely never called “bossy” in their lives.

The anti-bossy movement aims to encourage girls to speak up “even if you aren’t sure about the answer,” but introverts prefer to process their thoughts and form solid ideas before expressing them. Studies on introverted leaders have shown that they are not any less effective than their more gregarious counterparts, and some studies have even shown that humbler leaders can inspire better-functioning management teams. Charismatic CEOs get paid more, but their firms don’t perform any better on average than those of more reserved principals.

She adds that efforts should be made to push workplaces and schools “to better recognize the talents of introverts – not to pressure girls or boys or anyone to simply act in a more extroverted way.”

Political science graduate students Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, in collaboration with the liberal organization CREDO Action, ran an experiment to see whether donors really get preferential access to members of Congress:

In the experiment, CREDO Action requested meetings with 191 Congressional members to talk about a pending bill. Though all of the requests were on behalf of CREDO members who had made political donations, the organization randomly selected whether to tell the elected official that they were meeting with donors or ordinary constituents.

A total of 86 congressional offices agreed to meetings. Senior staffers, such as chiefs of staff or deputy chiefs of staff, showed up to meet identified donors at 19% of those meetings, with actual members of Congress attending 8%. But only 5% of the meetings with ordinary constituents were with senior staffers, including a mere 2% with actual members. The majority of meetings, whether with donors or constituents, were with Washington D.C.-based legislative assistants or local district directors.

John Sides interviews Kalla and Broockman about their findings:

Q: What does your research tell us about the quality of American democracy?  Should it make us more concerned?

A: The results are clearly concerning. Most Americans can’t afford to contribute to campaigns in meaningful amounts, while those who can have very different priorities than the broader public. Concern that campaign donations facilitate the wealthy’s well-documented greater influence with legislators has long inspired reformers to make changes to the system of campaign finance. Our results support their concerns. If legislators are surrounding themselves with individuals who can afford to donate, they’re going to receive a distorted portrait of the public’s priorities and hear a distorted set of arguments about what is best for the country.

Jennifer Victor is skeptical of the results:

[T]his experiment has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed outlet and its findings contradict those of published research. Chin, Bond, and Geva (JOP 2000) also used an experimental design to determine whether contributing groups received more access than constituents, and they did not.  Again, Chin 2005 finds that staffers grant meetings based on contextual attributes about groups and constituents, rather than contribution history. The fact that the recently reported research depends on variation within a single group, rather than the more advantageous across-group design of the published works in this area, hinders its ability to offer a generalizable finding.

Relatively few millennials identify as environmentalists:

The word “environmentalist” typically conjures up images of earnest young idealists gathering petition signatures and chaining themselves to old-growth trees. But [last week’]s study finds that older Americans are more likely to call themselves environmentalists than younger ones.

Environmentalist PR guru David Fenton suggests ways to change this:

I tell clients, “Don’t use the word ‘planet,’ and don’t use the word ‘earth.’ One of the problems we have is that too much of the public thinks that environmentalists are people who care about the environment and not about people. So the environment has become a thing apart. I think that’s why millennials don’t care for the term.

Now in the case of climate — the climate will be fine. The planet will recover. We just won’t be on it. And so this language and these images — “polar bear,” “Planet Earth,” “environment” — they signal the wrong thing to most people, which is that they’re struggling and we don’t care. We have to make the environment and climate be about them and their lives and the economy and justice and all the things that people do care about. And in fact that’s what it’s about, because if we don’t solve climate change, there is going to be a lot of suffering, by average people.

Meanwhile, Scott Clement argues that talking more about climate change would do Democrats some good:

In one study, Stanford’s Bo MacInnis, Jon Krosnick and Ana Villar compared what candidates said (and didn’t say) on climate change in every 2010 congressional and Senate election to  how much Democrats won or lost by. In short, they found Democrats who took pro-green stances such as “global warming has been happening” increased their vote margin over Republicans by 3 percent compared with those who didn’t. The impact was much larger — a 9 percent vote-margin swing — when a Republican took a position doubting global warming’s existence or opposing action to address the issue. The analysis controlled for the district or state’s partisan lean in the 2008 election, as well as for whether the candidate was an incumbent.

Josh Keating takes in the effects of the March 2011 meltdown:

About 100,000 people are still living in temporary housing, and Japan has so far built only 3.5 percent of the new houses promised to people in heavily affected prefectures. CBS reports that in Koriyama, a town about 40 miles from the nuclear plant, many parents are still afraid to let their children play outside. There’s also an ongoing debate about whether higher-than-normal rates of thyroid cancer in children are connected to nuclear radiation or simply more rigorous testing.

Then there’s the psychological impact. A Brigham Young University study released last week found that a year after disaster, more than half of the citizens of Hirono, a heavily affected town near the plant, showed “clinically concerning” symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Two-thirds showed symptoms of depression.

Ken Silverstein explains why Japan seems ready to jump back on the nuclear horse while, 35 years after Three Mile Island, the US still won’t:

One factor that’s helped Japan is a new nuclear watchdog. Created in September 2012, the Nuclear Regulation Authority has eliminated the cozy relationships that allowed utility employees to become nuclear regulators and it has stood up to political pressure to turn a blind eye to operational shortcuts. The agency has shown its willingness to exert its influence: It routinely gives updates on the disabled Fukushima nuclear facility, cautioning that it has been leaking contaminated, or radiated, water into the Pacific Ocean. Tokyo Electric Power Co., which had operated the Fukushima facility, is now fully cooperating.

Then there are the economic costs.  In May 2012, Japan turned off the last of its 54 nuclear reactors. Altogether, Japan has increased its reliance on imported liquefied natural gas to meet much of its electricity needs at a cost of more than $65 billion, says Deloitte Touch Tohmatsu. And the price of importing fossil fuels is getting even more expensive because of a weak yen.

Dish coverage of Fukushima and related topics here.

(Photo: A woman touches a memorial engraved with the names of the victims at Okawa Elementary School on the three year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, Japan on March 11, 2014. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami claimed more than 18,000 lives and triggered the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. By Yuriko Nakao/Getty Images)