Showing posts with label study. Show all posts
Showing posts with label study. Show all posts

Friday, 4 May 2018

Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds – ThinkProgress

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Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds.


Remarkably, this ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress U.S. economic growth by up to a third.”


As the Wall Street Journal summed up the findings: “Climate Change May Deeply Wound Long-Term U.S. Growth.”


The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers.


The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.



In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.


Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”


The estimated summer impact “for the ten warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those ten states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.



The study ranks the states by average summer temperature. The top ten, in order, are: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. Besides all being in the south, they all also voted for Trump.


We’ve long known the southern U.S. would be hit the hardest by climate change. Back in 2011, the nation’s top climate scientist, James Hansen (then at NASA), warned “If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”


And earlier studies have found that rising temperatures would hit worker productivity hard in peak summer months globally. For instance, a study done in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.”


NOAA found that business-as-usual policies cut labor capacity in half during peak months by century’s end.



Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA

Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA

But the Richmond Fed study is the first to focus specifically on this country: It’s “the first in the literature to systematically document the pervasive effect of summer temperatures on the cross-section of industries in the U.S.”


So it’s the first study to document that Trump’s climate policies will hit the states that voted for him the hardest.












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Trump climate policies will slam red states’ economic growth, major study finds – ThinkProgress

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Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds.


Remarkably, this ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress U.S. economic growth by up to a third.”


As the Wall Street Journal summed up the findings: “Climate Change May Deeply Wound Long-Term U.S. Growth.”


The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers.


The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.



In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.


Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”


The estimated summer impact “for the ten warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those ten states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.



The study ranks the states by average summer temperature. The top ten, in order, are: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. Besides all being in the south, they all also voted for Trump.


We’ve long known the southern U.S. would be hit the hardest by climate change. Back in 2011, the nation’s top climate scientist, James Hansen (then at NASA), warned “If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”


And earlier studies have found that rising temperatures would hit worker productivity hard in peak summer months globally. For instance, a study done in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.”


NOAA found that business-as-usual policies cut labor capacity in half during peak months by century’s end.



Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA

Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA

But the Richmond Fed study is the first to focus specifically on this country: It’s “the first in the literature to systematically document the pervasive effect of summer temperatures on the cross-section of industries in the U.S.”


So it’s the first study to document that Trump’s climate policies will hit the states that voted for him the hardest.












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Wednesday, 2 May 2018

Facebook ‘bias’ study will be run by right-wing corporate lobbyist, exclude all liberals – ThinkProgress

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Conservatives have alleged — thus far without evidence — that Facebook has shown a bias against conservative groups or censored their content.


To address this, Facebook announced Wednesday that it was bringing in two major conservative players to evaluate whether Facebook displays a liberal bias.


The oversight effort, dubbed a “conservative bias advising partnership” by Axios, which first reported the arrangement on Wednesday, will involve former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who was minority whip, as well as the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank. Kyl, along with the lobbying firm he joined after leaving the Senate, Covington and Burling, will look at claims of liberal bias internally and on Facebook’s services, get feedback from conservative groups, and advise Facebook on how to work with these groups. Kyl will “will examine concerns about alleged liberal bias on Facebook, internally and on our services. He will get feedback directly from conservative groups and advise us on the best path forward,” according to a statement from Facebook. The Heritage Foundation “will convene meetings on these issues with Facebook executives,” Axios reported.


Facebook’s bias study, according to Facebook, will not include any liberals. A Facebook spokesperson did not answer a question about whether there would be any visibility into conduct of the bias study for publications or groups that are not conservative.


Claims of anti-conservative bias, despite the constant attacks from conservatives, are unfounded. In 2016, conservatives accused the company of deliberately suppressing conservative articles from the site’s “trending” section. Though the group was poorly managed, claims of bias were not supported by the facts.


More recently, the conservative duo Diamond and Silk became a right-wing cause célèbre after they accused Facebook of censoring their videos. They dominated a hearing where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and then received their own hearing where they testified that Facebook had deliberately censored them. The problem is that there is no evidence this is true. As ThinkProgress reported last month, “total interactions on Diamond and Silk’s Facebook page were steady” over the period when they were supposedly being censored. Liberal pages with similar video posting practices, in fact, saw a sharper decline in total interactions than Diamond and Silk’s did.



The duo’s congressional appearance was packed with falsehoods, where they not only repeated the Facebook censorship claims, but also disputed FEC reports from the Trump campaign showing that the campaign paid them during the 2016 election. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) defended their claims and the hearing by citing the conservative conspiracy theory site Gateway Pundit as a source to prove that Diamond and Silk’s page was censored.


Facebook will also conduct a study of “civil rights and Facebook’s impact on underrepresented communities and communities of color.” This effort will be led by Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, the law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax, and Vanita Gupta, President of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. A Facebook spokesperson said this would be separate and distinct from the bias study.


The people and groups recruited by Facebook to conduct the audit raise additional concerns.


Jon Kyl, who is running the probe, was ranked as one of the Senate’s most conservative members, and lobbies for large corporations in his role at Covington and Burling.


Kyl himself has had a difficult relationship with the truth. In 2011, shortly before he retired from the Senate to be a lobbyist, he falsely claimed that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services were for abortion.


In fact, one of the independent fact-checking websites that rated Kyl’s 2011 Planned Parenthood claim as false, Politifact, was criticized by a conservative site that took issue with the rating, “politifactbias.com” which bills itself as a conservative balance to Politifact.



Conservatives like those from the Heritage Foundation see liberal bias everywhere, especially in the media.


To combat “fake news” after the 2016 election, Facebook announced it would partner with third-party fact-checkers to identify false stories and rank them lower in users’ newsfeeds. However, last year the company revealed that one of the official fact-checkers would be conservative opinion magazine the Weekly Standard, against the advice from an independent report from the Poynter Institute.


While the inclusion of the Weekly Standard may have alarmed some, the real problem with Facebook’s fact-checking strategy was including liberal media outlets, according to the Daily Signal, the Heritage Foundation’s blog. Heritage claimed ABC News, Politifact, the Washington Post and other non-ideological sources were “liberal fact-checkers” their involvement will “result in crackdowns on conservative outlets than liberal outlets.”


“Getting outside feedback will help us improve over time — ensuring that we can more effectively serve the people on Facebook,” said Joel Kaplan, vice president of Global Policy at Facebook, in an emailed statement to ThinkProgress.


Facebook did not answer questions from ThinkProgress about why liberal were excluded from the process or whether this incentivizes conservatives to continue to make false charges of bias.












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Tuesday, 1 May 2018

study । सफेद पास्ता के अधिक सेवन से समयपूर्व रजोनिवृत्ति (Menopause) का जोखिम : अध्ययन

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समयपूर्व रजोनिवृत्ति (Menopause) से हड्डी का घनत्व कम होने , ऑस्टियोपरोसिस होने और दिल की बीमारियां होने का खतरा अधिक होता है जबकि रजोनिवृत्ति देर से होने से स्तन कैंसर , अंडाशय कैंसर और अंतर्गर्भाशयकला का कैंसर होने का जोखिम अधिक होता है. 





सफेद पास्ता के अधिक सेवन से समयपूर्व रजोनिवृत्ति (Menopause)  का जोखिम : अध्ययन

प्रतीकात्मक तस्वीर







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