Although marijuana use among blacks and whites is about the same, according to a 2013 report by the ACLU, blacks are almost four times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession.
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Democratic drinkers are more likely to sip Absolut and Grey Goose vodkas, while Republican tipplers are more likely to savor Jim Beam, Canadian Club and Crown Royal. That research comes from consumer data supplied by GFK MRI, and analyzed by Jennifer Dube of National Media Research Planning and Placement, an Alexandria-based Republican consulting firm.
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Doctors do “Google” their patients. In fact, the vast majority of physicians I know have done so. To my generation, using a search engine like Google comes as naturally as sharing pictures of our children or a recent vacation on a social networking site like Facebook. But it surprises me that more physicians don’t pause and think about what it means for the patient-doctor relationship.
What if one finds something that is not warm and fuzzy? I recently read about a case in which a 26-year-old woman went to a surgeon wanting to have a prophylactic double mastectomy, citing an extensive history of cancer in her family. However, she was not willing to undergo any work-up, and her medical team noted several inconsistencies in her story. When they searched online, it turned out she had set up multiple Facebook accounts soliciting donations for malignancies she never had. One page showed her with her head shaved, as if she had already undergone chemotherapy. The surgeons immediately decided to halt her care.
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– http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/when-doctors-google-their-patients-2/?ref=todayspaper
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Which leads nicely to Lanier’s final big point: that the value of these new companies comes from us. “Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those 13 employees are extraordinary,” he writes. “Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” He adds, “Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.” Thus, in Lanier’s view, is income inequality also partly a consequence of the digital economy.
It is Lanier’s radical idea that people should get paid whenever their information is used. He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used. A digital economy that appears to give things away for free — in return for being able to invade the privacy of its customers for commercial gain — isn’t free at all, he argues.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/opinion/nocera-will-digital-networks-ruin-us.html?ref=todayspaper
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It’s difficult to say definitively whether significant injuries over all are on the rise, and it doesn’t matter. They’re too prevalent, period. And the N.F.L. needs to go far beyond its efforts thus far to assess and reconsider anything that might be affecting player safety: what kind of equipment, head to toe, they wear; the give of the turf on which they play; the way they train in the off-season. Maybe there should be weight limits. There should certainly be more rest between games and there should probably be fewer of them, though there’s been talk of the league’s moving in the opposite direction.
The status quo won’t do. It’s untenable. It’s arguably unconscionable. On Saturday, the sight of a crumpled Chief with distraught teammates hovering over him became so common that the announcer remarked, in a voice too glib, on the “injury bug” that was “contagious for Kansas City at the wrong time now.”
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/opinion/bruni-footballs-devastating-harvest.html?ref=todayspaper
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“This might not be the ideal way to approach it, and Dennis Rodman would never be anybody’s first choice of diplomat,” said Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean studies at Columbia University. “But if you pardon the expression, this is the only game in town.”
The 12-member team, which includes such former N.B.A. players as Kenny Anderson, Vin Baker, Craig Hodges and Charles D. Smith, was hastily assembled by Rodman despite the misgivings of human rights activists, American officials and the league itself.
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Rising expectations aren’t a sign of immature “entitlement.” They’re a sign of progress — and the wellspring of future advances. The same ridiculous discontent that says Starbucks ought to offer vegan pumpkin lattes created Starbucks in the first place. Two centuries of refusing to be satisfied produced the long series of innovations that turned hunger from a near-universal human condition into a “third world problem.”
Complaining about small annoyances can be demoralizing and obnoxious, but demanding complacency is worse. The trick is to simultaneously remember how much life has improved while acknowledging how it could be better. In the new year, then, may all your worries be first world problems.
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– http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-02/two-cheers-for-first-world-problems-.html
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But sports, perhaps better than any endeavor except politics, has become adept at a type of cleansing more commonly associated with authoritarian governments. With surprising regularity and ease, once-popular figures who have run afoul of the rules or the law have been erased like disgraced leaders from an old Soviet photo album, whitewashed from history to preserve an institution’s image or to abide by a governing body’s sanctions.
Awards are returned. Banners are pulled down. Names are stripped from buildings. Wins, individual feats, even entire seasons can be eradicated as if they never happened.
Didn’t Reggie Bush win the Heisman Trophy? Didn’t Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France seven times? Didn’t that stadium used to have a statue out front?
“No one says Nixon didn’t go to China or sign Title IX into law because he was forced to resign because of Watergate,” said Bob Costas, an NBC commentator. “It seems to me you can’t strike from the historical record what occurred. The Fab Five played in the N.C.A.A. tournament, and Reggie Bush was a great and impactful player who won the Heisman Trophy.”
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“TO read a novel is a difficult and complex art,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1925 essay, “How to Read a Book.” Today, with our powers of concentration atrophied by the staccato communication of the Internet and attention easily diverted to addictive entertainment on our phones and tablets, book-length reading is harder still.
It’s not just more difficult to find the time and focus that a book demands. Longstanding allies of the reader, professionals who have traditionally provided guidance for those picking up a book, are disappearing fast. The broad, inclusive conversation around interesting titles that such experts helped facilitate is likewise dissipating. Reading, always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one.
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This online ad customization technique is known as behavioral targeting, but Pandora adds a music layer. Pandora has collected song preference and other details about more than 200 million registered users, and those people have expressed their song likes and dislikes by pressing the site’s thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons more than 35 billion times. Because Pandora needs to understand the type of device a listener is using in order to deliver songs in a playable format, its system also knows whether people are tuning in from their cars, from iPhones or Android phones or from desktops.
So it seems only logical for the company to start seeking correlations between users’ listening habits and the kinds of ads they might be most receptive to.
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shaun james bockert 