Category: Society

Children whose parents went to prison are at greater risk of poor health, legal, financial and social outcomes when they grow up.
The strongest associations were found with anxiety disorder, felony charges, jail time, not completing high school, becoming a parent under 18, and social isolation.
It’s common for parents to be imprisoned, and it may sustain disadvantage from generation to generation.
These conclusions are based on assessments of 1420 participants through ages 13 to 30, from 1993 to 2015.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on August 25, 2019

Study, conducted around the 2018 abortion referendum in Ireland, shows the dangers of fake news.
3,140 voters were presented several reports, including fake ones, and then asked questions about whether they recognized the stories.
Half of the participants reported a memory for at least one made-up event, many recalled rich details about a fake news story.
A lot of them also didn’t want to consider that their memories were based on fake stories.
This demonstrates the dangerous ease with which stories can be fabricated.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on August 23, 2019

inverse.com

Social media employs ineffective methods to fight online hate, as new study shows with sophisticated mathematical mapping model.
Methods like banning individual users from a single platform, or banning ideologies from platforms, can actually make the problem worse.
The popularisers of hateful ideology easily regroup, switch platforms, and use tactics that render hate speech detection algorithms hopeless.
Study authors advise a different method -- randomly banning a small fraction of individuals across platforms, and sending in anti-hate advocates.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on August 23, 2019

There is not enough data about PM2.5 -- pollution associated with $3 trillion in health costs in 2015.
It can’t be collected because there’s not enough equipment monitoring the air quality -- for example, India has only 1 monitor per 6.8 million people.
Study authors indicate that, because of this, any rankings of most polluted cities are simply not based on enough data to be true.
For accurate measurements, it would take 1 monitor per 1 million people around the world joined in an integrated monitoring framework.
Achieving this goal would enable more precise atmospheric modeling and air quality forecasting.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on August 18, 2019

Study of northern USA shows that the health co-benefits of increasing renewable energy are bigger than the cost of implementing climate policies.
One of such policies is RPS - Renewable Portfolio Standards, requiring electricity suppliers to use a percentage of renewable power.
MIT research team developed a new framework, combining economic and air-pollution models to study the effect of policies on air quality, health and economy.
These results confirm other studies that found health co-benefits of policies to be bigger than the cost of implementing them.
The benefits come from reducing healthcare costs of treating people who have been exposed to too much PM2.5, the main pollutant from burning fossils.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on August 16, 2019

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