Etnia, Gênero e padrão de beleza: -"Um estudo de 25 anos com mulheres negras relaciona o uso frequente de relaxantes capilares à base de soda cáustica a um risco maior de câncer de mama", no The Conversation, por Kimberly Bertrand,

"Um estudo de 25 anos com mulheres negras relaciona o uso frequente de relaxantes capilares à base de soda cáustica a um risco maior de câncer de mama", no The Conversation, por Kimberly Bertrand, professora assistente de medicina, Universidade de Boston
...
O Estudo de Saúde da Mulher Negra da Universidade de Boston acompanhou 59.000 mulheres afro-americanas autoidentificadas por mais de 25 anos, enviando questionários a cada dois anos sobre novos diagnósticos e fatores que podem influenciar sua saúde.

Usando esses dados em nosso próprio estudo, minha equipe de epidemiologistas e eu descobrimos que mulheres negras que usaram produtos para cabelo contendo soda cáustica pelo menos sete vezes por ano durante 15 ou mais anos tiveram um risco aumentado de aproximadamente 30% de câncer de mama positivo para receptor de estrogênio em comparação com usuários menos frequentes.

...
https://theconversation.com/25-year-long-study-of-black-women-links-frequent-use-of-lye-based-hair-relaxers-to-a-higher-risk-of-breast-cancer-163563

25-year-long study of Black women links frequent use of lye-based hair relaxers to a higher risk of breast cancer, at The Conversation, by Kimberly Bertrand, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Boston University

he Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

Frequent and long-term use of lye-based hair straightening products, or relaxers, may increase the risk of breast cancer among Black women, compared with more moderate use.

Boston University’s Black Women’s Health Study followed 59,000 self-identified African American women for over 25 years, sending questionnaires every two years on new diagnoses and factors that might influence their health.

Using these data in our own study, my team of epidemiologists and I found that Black women who used hair products containing lye at least seven times a year for 15 or more years had an approximately 30% increased risk of estrogen receptor positive breast cancer compared with more infrequent users.

The Conversation is a news organization dedicated to facts and evidence

The minimal association between hair relaxers (with or without lye) and breast cancer risk for moderate users is generally reassuring. But the elevated risk for the heaviest users of lye-based hair products – which included about 20% of study participants – is concerning.

Why it matters

There is an urgent need to address racial disparities in breast cancer.

Black women diagnosed with breast cancer are 40% more likely to die from the disease than white women. While systemic factors such as delays in diagnosis and poorer health care likely contribute to this disparity, they don’t seem to fully explain the survival gap between Black and white women.

Black and white women have the same lifetime risk for breast cancer, but Black women are often diagnosed with more aggressive forms earlier in life. kali9/E+ via Getty Images

Black women are more likely than white women to develop highly aggressive breast cancers that have higher mortality rates, but researchers don’t really know why. However, scientists do know that chemical hair relaxers, more often used by Black women, contain potentially harmful chemicals, including possible carcinogens and chemicals known as endocrine disrupters, which can interfere with hormone function and could raise breast cancer risk. In the Black Women’s Health Study, 95% of women reported past or current use of these products.

This study fills a knowledge gap on the potential health effects of a consumer product popular among Black women. Given these findings, women may want to be cautious about the types of personal-care products they choose.

What still isn’t known

Because the Black Women’s Health Study did not have information on specific brands of hair relaxers, my team and I could not determine which specific ingredients might be most relevant for breast cancer risk. In addition, because we asked about hair relaxer use before 1997, the results of this study may not apply to products on the market today.

Though our findings suggest a link between the use of certain types of hair relaxers and breast cancer, epidemiologic studies such as this one cannot definitively prove that hair relaxers cause breast cancer. Additional research is needed, especially on currently available products.

What other research is being done

Evidence from animal and other experimental studies support a possible link between chemicals included in hair relaxers and cancer development. Studies on hair relaxer use and breast cancer risk in people, however, have had inconsistent results, possibly because of differences in the types of products used or asked about.

What’s next

Thanks to 59,000 study participants in the Black Women’s Health Study, our research team continues to investigate risk factors for breast cancer and other diseases in Black women. By understanding what causes disease and learning about ways to lower risk, society can move one step closer toward eliminating health disparities.

[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]

Diferença e apropriação cultural - A meditação da mente plena pode tornar alguns americanos mais egoístas e menos generosos, Por Michael J. Poulin,

Envolver-se em um breve exercício de atenção
- tornou as pessoas que identificaram palavras “eu / meu” 33% menos propensas a se voluntariar,
- mas fez com que aqueles que identificaram palavras “nós / nosso” 40% mais propensas a se voluntariar.
Em outras palavras, apenas mudar a forma como as pessoas pensavam sobre si mesmas no momento - filtrando a água dos pensamentos relacionados a si mesmas, se preferir - alterou os efeitos da atenção plena no comportamento de muitas das pessoas que participaram deste estudo (Traduçaõ, VanRes).

Mindfulness meditation can make some Americans more selfish and less generous, By Michael J. Poulin, Associate Professor of Psychology, University at Buffalo. Originally published at The Conversation

July 12, 2021 8.26am EDT

When Japanese chef Yoshihiro Murata travels, he brings water with him from Japan. He says this is the only way to make truly authentic dashi, the flavorful broth essential to Japanese cuisine. There’s science to back him up: water in Japan is notably softer – which means it has fewer dissolved minerals – than in many other parts of the world. So when Americas enjoy Japanese food, they arguably aren’t getting quite the real thing.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to food. Taking something out of its geographic or cultural context often changes the thing itself.

Take the word “namaste.” In modern Hindi, it’s simply a respectful greeting, the equivalent of a formal “hello” appropriate for addressing one’s elders. But in the U.S., its associations with yoga have led many people to believe that it’s an inherently spiritual word.

Another cultural tradition that has changed across time and place is the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a nonjudgmental expansive awareness of one’s experiences, often cultivated through meditation.

A range of studies have found mindfulness to be beneficial for the people who practice it in a number of ways.

However, very little research has examined its effects on societies, workplaces and communities. As a social psychologist at the University at Buffalo, I wondered if the growing enthusiasm for mindfulness might be overlooking something important: the way practicing it might affect others.

A Booming Market

In just the past few years, the mindfulness industry has exploded in the U.S. Current estimates put the U.S. meditation market – which includes meditation classes, studios, and apps – at approximately US$1.2 billion. It’s expected to grow to over $2 billion by 2022.

Hospitals, schools and even prisons are teaching and promoting mindfulness, while over 1 in 5 employers currently offer mindfulness training.

The enthusiasm for mindfulness makes sense: Research shows mindfulness can reduce stress, increase self-esteem and decrease symptoms of mental illness.

Given these findings, it’s easy to assume that mindfulness has few, if any, downsides. The employers and educators who promote it certainly seem to think so. Perhaps they hope that mindfulness won’t just make people feel better, but that it will also make them be better. That is, maybe mindfulness can make people more generous, cooperative or helpful – all traits that tend to be desirable in employees or students.

Mindfulness Migrates

But in reality, there’s good reason to doubt that mindfulness, as practiced in the U.S., would automatically lead to good outcomes.

In fact, it may do the opposite.

That’s because it’s been taken out of its context. Mindfulness developed as a part of Buddhism, where it’s intimately tied up with
- Buddhist 

    spiritual teachings and 

    morality. 

- Mindfulness in the U.S., on the other hand, is often taught and practiced in 

    purely secular terms.  It’s frequently offered simply as a tool for 

    focusing attention and 

    improving well-being, 

            a conception of mindfulness some critics have referred to as “McMindfulness.”

Not only that, mindfulness and Buddhism developed in Asian cultures in which the typical way in which people think about themselves differs from that in the U.S. Specifically, Americans tend to think of themselves most often in independent terms with “I” as their focus: “what I want,” “who I am.” By contrast, people in Asian cultures more often think of themselves in interdependent terms with “we” as their focus: “what we want,” “who we are.”

Cultural differences in how people think about themselves are subtle and easy to overlook – sort of like different kinds of water. But just as those different kinds of water can change flavors when you cook, I wondered if different ways of thinking about the self might alter the effects of mindfulness.

For interdependent-minded people, what if mindful attention to their own experiences might naturally include thinking about other people – and make them more helpful or generous? And if this were the case, would it then be true that, for independent-minded people, mindful attention would spur them to focus more on their individual goals and desires, and therefore cause them to become more selfish?

Testing the Social Effects

I floated these questions to my colleague at the University at Buffalo, Shira Gabriel, because she’s a recognized expert on 

independent versus interdependent 

ways of thinking about the self.

She agreed that this was an interesting question, so we worked with our students Lauren Ministero, Carrie Morrison and Esha Naidu to conduct a study in which we had 366 college students come into the lab – this was before the COVID-19 pandemic – and either engage in

- a brief mindfulness meditation or
- a control exercise that actually involved mind wandering.

We also measured the extent to which people thought of themselves in independent or interdependent terms. (It’s important to note that, although cultural differences in thinking about the self are real, there is variability in this characteristic even within cultures.)

At the end of the study, we asked people if they could help solicit donations for a charity by stuffing envelopes to send to potential donors.

The results – which have been accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science – detail how, among relatively interdependent-minded individuals, the brief mindfulness meditation caused them to become more generous. Specifically, briefly engaging in a mindfulness exercise – as opposed to mind wandering – appeared to increase how many envelopes interdependent-minded people stuffed by 17%. However, among relatively independent-minded individuals, mindfulness appeared to make them less generous with their time. This group of participants stuffed 15% fewer envelopes in the mindful condition than in the mind-wandering condition.

In other words, the effects of mindfulness can be different for people depending on the way they think about themselves. This figurative “water” can really change the recipe of mindfulness.

Of course, water can be filtered, and likewise, how people think about themselves is fluid: We’re all capable of thinking about ourselves in both independent and interdependent ways at different times.

In fact, there’s a relatively simple way to get people to shift their thinking about themselves. As the researchers Marilynn Brewer and Wendi Gardner discovered, all you have to do is have them read a passage that is altered to have either a lot of “I” and “me” statements or a lot of “we” and “us” statements, and ask people to identify all of the pronouns. Past research shows that this simple task reliably shifts people to think of themselves in more independent versus interdependent terms.

Our research team wanted to see if this simple effect could also shift the effects of mindfulness on social behavior.

With this in mind, we conducted one more study. This time, it was online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we used the same exercises.

First, however, we had people complete the pronoun task mentioned above. Afterwards, we asked people if they would volunteer to contact potential donors to a charity.

Our results were striking: Engaging in a brief mindfulness exercise made people who identified “I/me” words 33% less likely to volunteer, but it made those who identified “we/us” words 40% more likely to volunteer. In other words, just shifting how people thought of themselves in the moment – filtering the water of self-related thoughts, if you will – altered the effects of mindfulness on the behavior of many of the people who took part in this study.

Attention as a Tool

The take-home message? Mindfulness could lead to good social outcomes or bad ones, depending on context.

In fact, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard said as much when he wrote that even a sniper embodies a type of mindfulness. “Bare attention,” he added, “as consummate as it might be, is no more than a tool.” Yes, it can cause a great deal of good. But it can also “cause immense suffering.”

If practitioners strive to use mindfulness to reduce suffering, rather than increase it, it’s important to ensure that people are also mindful of themselves as existing in relation with others.

This “water” may be the key ingredient for bringing out the full flavor of mindfulness.

Michael J. Poulin Associate Professor of Psychology, University at Buffalo

Disclosure statement

Michael J. Poulin receives funding from the National Science Foundation. He is affiliated with the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

Ética: "Esconder a verdade pode promover a cooperação"?

 July 9, 2021

Obscuring the truth can promote cooperation, by University of Pennsylvania, at phys.org 

"Typically when we and others have considered how to maintain cooperation, it's been thought that it's important to punish cheaters and to make that public to encourage others to cooperate," Morsky says. "But our study suggests that a side effect of public punishment is that it reveals how much or how little people are cooperating, so conditional cooperators may stop cooperating. You might be better off hiding the cheaters."

Remember Napster? The peer-to-peer file sharing company, popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, depended on users sharing their music files. To promote cooperation, such software "could mislead its users," says Bryce Morsky, a postdoc in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences.

Some file-sharing companies falsely asserted that all of their users were sharing. Or, they displayed the mean number of files shared per user, hiding the fact that some users were sharing a great deal and many others were not. Related online forums promoted the idea that sharing was both ethical and the norm. These tactics were effective in getting users to share because they tapped into innate human social norms of fairness.

That got Morsky thinking. "Commonly in the literature on cooperation, you need reciprocity to get cooperation, and you need to know the reputations of those you're interacting with," he says. "But Napster users were anonymous, and so there should have been widespread 'cheating'—people taking files without sharing—and yet cooperation still occurred. Evidently, obscuring the degree of cheating worked for Napster, but is this true more generally and is it sustainable?"

In a new paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, Morsky and Erol Akçay, an associate professor in the School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Biology, looked at this scenario: Could a cooperative community form and stabilize if the community's behaviors were masked? And would things change if the community members' true behaviors were eventually revealed?

Using a mathematical model to simulate the creation and maintenance of a community, their findings show, as in the example of Napster, that a degree of deceit or obfuscation does not impede and, indeed, can promote the formation of a cooperative community.

The researchers' modeling relied on an assumption that has been upheld time and time again, that humans are conditionally cooperative. "They will cooperate when others cooperate," Akçay says.

But the threshold of when someone will start cooperating differs from individual to individual. Some people will cooperate even when nobody else is, while others require most of the community to cooperate before they will do so too. Depending on the number of people with different cooperation thresholds, a community can wind up with either very high or very low levels of cooperation. "Our goal was to figure out, How can obfuscation act as a catalyst to get us to a highly cooperative community?" says Morsky.

To model this, the researchers envisioned a theoretical community in which individuals would join in a "naïve" state, believing that everyone else in the community is cooperating. As a result, most of them, too, begin cooperating.

At some point, however, the formerly naïve individuals become savvy and learn the true rate of cooperation in the community. Depending on their threshold of conditional cooperation, they may continue to cooperate, cheat, or get discouraged and leave the community.

In the model, when the researchers decreased the learning rate—or kept the true rate of cooperation in the group a secret for longer—they found that cooperation levels grew high, and savvy individuals quickly left the population. "And because those savvy individuals are the ones that don't cooperate as readily, that leaves only the individuals who are cooperating, so the average rate of cooperation gets very high," says Akçay.

Cooperative behavior could also come to dominate provided there was a steady inflow of naïve individuals into the population.

Akçay and Morsky note that their findings stand out from past research on cooperation.

"Typically when we and others have considered how to maintain cooperation, it's been thought that it's important to punish cheaters and to make that public to encourage others to cooperate," Morsky says. "But our study suggests that a side effect of public punishment is that it reveals how much or how little people are cooperating, so conditional cooperators may stop cooperating. You might be better off hiding the cheaters."

To continue exploring conditional cooperation, the researchers hope to follow with experiments with human participants as well as further modeling to reveal the tipping points for moving a group to either cooperate or not and how these tipping points could be changed by interventions. "You can see how conditional cooperation factors into behavior during this pandemic, for example," Akçay says. "If you think a lot of people are being careful (for example, wearing masks and social distancing), you might as well, but if the expectation is that not many people are being careful you may choose not to. Mask wearing is easy to observe, but other behaviors are harder, and that affects how the dynamics of these behaviors might unfold.

"This is a problem that humans have had to solve over and over again," he says. "Some amount of cooperation is required to have a society be worthwhile."

---

Explore further

Designing public institutions that foster cooperation

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More information: Bryce Morsky et al, False beliefs can bootstrap cooperative communities through social norms, Evolutionary Human Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1017/ehs.2021.30

mudança climática e sustentabilidade ambiental - Aquecimento elevado, ozônio têm efeitos prejudiciais nas raízes das plantas, promovem a perda de carbono do solo

 July 9, 2021

Elevated warming, ozone have detrimental effects on plant roots, promote soil carbon loss, by North Carolina State University

[Hu said:] "Ozone and warming make the plants weak.
Plants try to maximize nutrient uptake, so
    their roots become thinner and longer as
        they need to exploit the sufficient volume of soil for resources.
            This weakness results in
                    a reduction of AMF and
                    faster root and fungal hyphal turnovers, which
                        stimulates decomposition and
                        makes carbon sequestration more difficult.
These cascading events may have profound effects underground, although the plant shoots appear normal in some cases."

Two factors that play a key role in climate change—increased climate warming and elevated ozone levels—appear to have 

- detrimental effects on soybean plant roots, their 

- relationship with symbiotic microorganisms in the soil and 

- the ways the plants sequester carbon.

The results, published in the July 9 edition of Science Advances, show few changes to the plant shoots aboveground but some distressing results underground, including 

an increased inability to hold carbon
    that instead gets released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

North Carolina State University researchers examined the interplay of warming and increased ozone levels with certain important underground organisms—arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) - that promote chemical interactions that hold carbon in the ground by preventing the decomposition of soil organic matter, thereby halting the escape of carbon from the decomposing material.

"The ability to sequester carbon is very important to soil productivity—in addition to the detrimental effects of increasing greenhouse gases when this carbon escapes," said Shuijin Hu, professor of plant pathology at NC State and corresponding author of the paper.

Present in the roots of about 80% of plants that grow on land, AMF have a win-win relationship with plants.
AMF
- take carbon from plants and
- provide nitrogen and other useful soil nutrients that plants need in order to grow and develop.

In the study, researchers set up
- plots of soybeans with increased air temperatures of about 3 degrees Celsius,
- plots with higher levels of ozone,
- plots with higher levels of both warming and ozone, and
- control plots with no modifications.
The resulting experiments showed that warming and increased ozone levels make soybean roots thinner as they save resources to get the nutrients they need.

Soybean cultivars are often sensitive to ozone, Hu said. Ozone levels have been somewhat stable or even declining in some parts of the United States over the past decade but have risen dramatically in areas of rapid industrialization, like India and China, for example.

"Ozone and warming have been shown to be very stressful to a lot of crops—not just soybeans—and a lot of grasses and tree species," Hu said. "Ozone and warming make the plants weak. Plants try to maximize nutrient uptake, so their roots become thinner and longer as they need to exploit the sufficient volume of soil for resources. This weakness results in a reduction of AMF and faster root and fungal hyphal turnovers, which stimulates decomposition and makes carbon sequestration more difficult. These cascading events may have profound effects underground, although the plant shoots appear normal in some cases."

Hu said he was surprised that the plant shoots weren't greatly affected by the stresses of warming and ozone; the biomass of plant leaves in both control and experimental plots was about the same.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, Hu said that more warming and ozone changed the type of AMF that colonize soybean plants.

The study showed that levels of an AMF species called Glomus decreased with more warming and ozone, while a species called Paraglomus increased.

"Glomus protects organic carbon from microbial decomposition while Paraglomus is more efficient at absorbing nutrients," Hu said. "We didn't expect these communities to shift in this way."

Hu plans to continue to study the systems surrounding carbon sequestration in soil as well as other greenhouse gas emissions from soil, like nitrous oxide, or N₂O.

---

Ozone pollution has increased in Antarctica

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More information: Y. Qiu el al., "Warming and elevated ozone induce tradeoffs between fine roots and mycorrhizal fungi and stimulate organic carbon decomposition," Science Advances (2021). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup … .1126/sciadv.abe9256

Teoria Racial Crítica - Como não fazer a cobertura jornalística da Teoria Racial Crítica.

 July 10, 2021

How Not to Cover Critical Race Theory, byJulie Hollar, at Fair.Org

 Too many in the media came to realize too late the danger of covering Trump as just another politician (FAIR.org, 12/1/16); it is urgent they don’t make the same mistake again.

After working the right up into a lather over Black Lives Matter (FAIR.org, 5/27/21), Fox News and its conservative media allies have turned white rage onto a more actionable target: critical race theory. Though the theory is a longstanding and specific academic lens for understanding systemic racism, the right has transformed it into a catchall for anything that encourages talking about and addressing racism.

 It’s textbook backlash politics:
- Racist police violence
    sparked a movement [around black lives matter] demanding 

        a re-examination of racism in America and 

        systemic reform that might challenge white privilege, 

- so the right launched its own movement
    to shut down conversations about 

        race and 

        white privilege 

            in any and all institutional arenas, most prominently 

                schools, 

                government offices (including the military) and 

                corporations, 

                        that could possibly make that happen.

It’s unsurprising that the right would turn the focus to white victimhood rather than anti-Black violence and discrimination. But mainstream corporate media have also given far too much space and legitimacy to the tactic. In June, 424 articles could be found in major US newspapers that mentioned “critical race theory,” according to a Nexis search–compared to four articles in August 2020, the month before the right-wing attack on critical race theory was rolled out on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show (9/2/20).

A July 6 USA Today editorial page dedicated to the CRT “debate” exemplified the wrong way to cover the issue. The editorial board’s own opinion was accompanied by not one but two opposing views: For the left, it tapped Kevin Cokley (7/5/21), a professor of African studies at the University of Texas, whose subhead argued, “I Always Challenge My Students and Never Place Racial Guilt on Them.“

 

In USA Today‘s print edition (7/6/21), this op-ed was headlined, “Teaching Critical Race Theory Is Patriotic, Not Anti-American.”

For the right, the paper invited Christopher Rufo (7/5/21), the right-wing provocateur (and Fox News regular) from the Manhattan Institute who invented the CRT-as-anything-conservatives-hate rallying cry. Rufo has explicitly stated that his

goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Rufo’s op-ed, “What I Discovered About Critical Race Theory in Public Schools and Why It Shouldn’t Be Taught,” carried the subhead: “State Legislatures Are Wise to Ban Schools From Promoting Race Essentialism, Collective Guilt and Racial Superiority Theory.”

 

USA Today (7/5/21) provided space to the critic who said he wanted to “recodify” critical race theory to “annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

 Note the emphasis on white guilt in both subheads. 

The debate centers on 

        whether CRT should be taught, but 

            the question is hinged on 

                whether white students might be made to feel any responsibility for 

                    historical and contemporary racism and white privilege

                                —the implicit assumption being that they should not. 

It’s quite a victory for the right, which just a year earlier was uncomfortably forced to debate whether police are killing too many Black people.

The paper’s editorial board (7/5/21), for its part, staked out a “middle” ground: “Critical Race Theory Fear a Mix of the Predictable, the Outlandish and the Justified.” While some criticism is explicitly “justified,” at times critics have gone too far, it suggested: “Responding to all these concerns by policing classroom discussions about race with a state law is like using a shotgun to drive mosquitoes out of a bedroom.”

The mosquito simile suggests that existing culturally responsive curricula in schools aren’t exactly dangerous, but certainly annoying, and worth getting rid of—presumably with a flyswatter rather than a shotgun. The board prefers that “school board members, principals and teachers themselves” make curriculum decisions.

Of course, the right is working that angle, too, trying to take over school boards with activists, which would render USA Today‘s position even more untenable. This isn’t an issue that can be both-sidesed or depoliticized. Media need to treat it as it is: an attempt to shut down speech across institutions when power is being challenged.

Kimberlé Crenshaw (MSNBC, 7/6/21): “When we start dictating what can be taught, what can be said, and what is unsayable, we are well, well down the road towards an authoritarian regime.”

As Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of critical race theory’s earliest exponents, told MSNBC (7/6/21):

Understand what risk we all face if they are allowed to dictate what can be said, what can be taught, what can be learned, who can vote, and who can protest. This is a recurrence of redemption. All of these things are exactly what happened at the end of Reconstruction….

When we start dictating what can be taught, what can be said, and what is unsayable, we are well, well down the road towards an authoritarian regime. People keep asking, “Can it happen here?” If you look at Black history, it has happened here.

Racism will be the vehicle through which authoritarianism rises in this country. That’s what we’re seeing happening right now. And the only question is whether people who believe in this country, if they recognize that they have a dog in this fight. Only if people wake up and see that this implicates all of us can we have hope that this is not going to be a replay of redemption in the 19th century.

Crenshaw may have been talking about the public generally, but major media, with their key role in framing narratives and legitimizing political positions, are certainly implicated as well. Too many in the media came to realize too late the danger of covering Trump as just another politician (FAIR.org, 12/1/16); it is urgent they don’t make the same mistake again.

FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.

gênero - Compreendendo o preconceito nas avaliações de mulheres por liderança

 July 8, 2021

Understanding bias in leadership assessments of women

by Christine Billau, University of Toledo

A new study conducted before COVID-19 busted open the leaky pipeline for women in leadership underscores the bias that men are naturally presumed to have leadership potential and women are not and highlights the increased efforts needed by organizations to address the incorrect stereotype post-pandemic.

The research published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology highlights the continuing bias in leadership assessments of women, explores the contradictions between the perception and the reality of women's leadership, and shows why the slow rate of career advancement for women will likely continue at a snail's pace.

"The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's career progression will likely be felt for years to come as many women stepped away from the workforce," said Dr. Margaret Hopkins, professor of management in The University of Toledo's John B. and Lillian E. Neff College of Business and Innovation and lead author of the study. "This can only exacerbate the slow progress of women moving more fully into senior leadership roles—something that organizations and society must be fully attentive to correcting."

The contemporary view of effective leadership places a strong emphasis on social skills, flexibility and engaging others, behaviors typically associated with women.

But when women exhibit gender role behaviors such as teamwork and empathy, they also pay a price in their leadership performance assessments.

Based on data collected from a sample of 91 senior leaders in one U.S. financial services organization over three years, women were penalized in performance evaluations when they displayed those leadership characteristics.

On the other hand, women also were viewed negatively when exhibiting stereotypical masculine behaviors such as a competitive drive to achieve, task orientation and directing others. Men were positively evaluated for their leadership potential when exhibiting those same behaviors.

"Entrenched archetypes that define leadership as a masculine enterprise remain in spite of data that relates more stereotypical feminine behaviors to effective leadership," said Hopkins, an expert on women in leadership, executive coaching and emotional intelligence. "Our study found no evidence of acknowledging this more contemporary view of leadership when organizations actually assess women's performance and potential for leadership."

The researchers discovered that whether women demonstrated people-oriented, relational skills or whether they exhibited achievement-oriented behaviors, there was a negative effect on their leadership performance assessments and leadership potential appraisals. However, this was not the case for the male leaders in the study.

In order to change the dynamic, Hopkins said there are best-practice strategies that both women and organizations can take.

"My co-authors and I do not support the notion that the onus is on the women to change," Hopkins said. "Rather, organizational structures and systems must change to provide leadership opportunities for both women and men in equal measure."

She said organizational decision-makers can investigate organizational policies and practices to determine how they might be contributing to impediments for women in leadership roles.

Not only should leadership assessment instruments be examined for possible bias, but also the methods by which individuals conduct assessments of women leaders should be reviewed for inherent bias.

"Hiring procedures, training and development opportunities, benefits packages, leave policies, and performance, salary and promotional evaluations can all play a part in contributing to gender stereotypes," Hopkins said. "Organizational systems that rely on a limited framework for essential leadership behaviors will restrict their ability to recruit and develop outstanding leaders."

To help mitigate these inaccurate perceptions and biases of their leadership performance and potential, Hopkins suggests that women find both female and male allies and sponsors, create strategic networks, seek high-profile assignments to highlight their skills and abilities, and develop and communicate their individual definitions of career success.

The financial services organization at the focus of this study is one of the Top 100 U.S. Best Banks named by Forbes magazine. The sample of senior leaders included 26 women and 65 men, representative of the gender composition of the senior leadership team.

The researchers said a comparison of males and females in one organization ensured that any observed gender differences were not due to factors such as differences in industries or management hierarchies across organizations.

Researchers from UToledo, Bowling Green State University, Case Western Reserve University and San Diego Gas and Electric collaborated on the study.

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New study shows that men receive more actionable feedback than women in the workplace

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More information: Margaret M. Hopkins et al, Buried Treasure: Contradictions in the Perception and Reality of Women's Leadership, Frontiers in Psychology (2021). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.684705

Atividade Física e Cognição em adultos mais velhos

 

July 8, 2021 report

Using post-mortem MRI scans to study association between physical activity and cognition in older adults,  by Bob Yirka , Medical Xpress

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A team of researchers working at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago, has found that it is possible to use post-mortem MRI scans to study associations between physical activity and cognition in older adults. They have written a paper describing their work and have uploaded it to the open-access site, PLOS ONE.

Prior research has suggested that physical activity later in life can promote healthier grey matter in the brain. More recently, some research has suggested the same might be true for white matter. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if it might be possible to use MRI scans taken after death to learn more about the benefits of exercise on cognitive skills for older people.

To find out if that might be the case, the researchers looked to the Rush University Memory and Aging Project. Researchers and volunteers with the project (which has been going on since 1997) have been using fitness trackers to compare differences in cognitive abilities between older participants in the project depending on how much they exercise. Volunteers are asked to wear a watch-like device that monitors their physical activity for up to 10 days at a time. That data is then compared with other data obtained by asking the same volunteers to undergo cognitive testing. In comparing data from the two sources, the researchers are hoping to learn more about the impact of exercise on cognitive abilities as people age.

The researchers with this new effort, carried out MRI scans on 318 of the volunteers in the project after they had died (average age at time of death was 91.1 years) to see if they could spot any changes in brain matter that might have resulted from participating in physical exercise.

In comparing data gathered while the volunteers were still alive and in the project with the MRI images taken and also from in vivo testing, the researchers found what they describe as a link between daily activity levels, white brain tissue microstructure and overall cognition levels. More specifically, they found two metrics related to brain structure that they were able to associate with daily physical activity and cognitive abilities—metrics that they suggest might explain the benefits of physical activity on improved cognition.

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Spending time on household chores may improve brain health

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More information: Robert J. Dawe et al, Physical activity, brain tissue microstructure, and cognition in older adults, PLOS ONE (2021). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0253484

Labor Market - “Uber, Lyft created ride-hailing shortage: Gig economy expert” [Yahoo Finance!].

  “Uber, Lyft created ride-hailing shortage: Gig economy expert” [Yahoo Finance!].

“Workers are leaving ride-hailing jobs, creating a severe labor shortage in the gig economy. Many of the problems leading up to this shortage were created by Lyft and Uber themselves, Aquent CEO John Chuang said Tuesday. ‘One, [ride-sharing companies] have very low wages,’ Chuang said. ‘And they are very undesirable jobs. Now that we have 7 million less employed workers in America right now, you know, the first jobs to go are the undesirable jobs. And unfortunately, their jobs are undesirable.’ Chuang identified the jobs’ lack of benefits and low wages as significant drawbacks to ride-hailing employment opportunities. Workers in this market do not have a Social Security net to fall back on, Chuang said, making ride-sharing a much riskier living than traditional jobs. ‘And so workers are voting with their feet,’ he said. ‘And they’re leaving these gig economy jobs.'”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/07/200pm-water-cooler-7-8-2021.html

Mudança Climática - Novos detalhes sobre a mudança climática [em escala regional] para condados alemães

 

July 7, 2021

New, highly-granular details on climate change for German counties, by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Global warming is advancing. The 1-degree mark has long been exceeded. The consequences are evident even in Germany: the number of hot days, for example, is increasing, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. But what does it look like in concrete terms by the end of this century? For this purpose, researchers at the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), an institution of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, have developed information sheets named "Klimaausblick" (climate outlook) for various regions and counties in Germany. In doing so, they provide possible climate changes for the coming decades based on 17 parameters.

The GERICS climate outlooks show climate changes at this regional scale for the first time. Each of the 401 climate outlooks is pooled at the county, district, regional district or city level; and summarizes the results for 17 climate parameters such as temperature, heat days, dry days, wind speed or heavy rain days on several pages. The results show projected development trends in climate parameters over the course of the 21st century: for
- a scenario with sufficient climate protection,
- a scenario with moderate climate protection and
- a scenario without effective climate protection.
The advantage is that the reports are uniformly structured and thus allow clear comparison.

"The data shows how the climate may change in the individual German regions. This provides not only citizens but also decision-makers in business and politics with a factual basis for long-term decisions. For example,
- for urban energy suppliers or
- for the adaptation of infrastructures,"
says Dr. Diana Rechid who is co-author of the reports together with Dr. Susanne Pfeifer and Dr. Sebastian Bathiany.

The data allow direct comparison

The analysis of the data took one year. The results show where climate change could be most severe in Germany. For each of the 401 areas examined, a climate outlook has been created individually. For example, the climate outlook for the county of Nordfriesland shows that that if emissions remain high, various climate and weather phenomena may increase by the end of the century. This applies to
- sultry temperatures,
- tropical nights,
- prolonged periods of heat wave and also
- heavy rain.
In the mountainous regions of the Alps or the Black Forest, particularly strong warming is to be expected under such conditions.

"According to our research, there is not a single county in which everything would remain the same if emissions continued at the same level or even increased. The question is: What can we avoid through effective climate protection; and what changes do we need to prepare for in any case?" asks author Diana Rechid. Thus, the climate outlooks are not only a helpful source of information for experts, politicians and authorities. All citizens can compare the results of their hometown with those of other counties—be it due to a planned change of residence, a decision to acquire property or to protect themselves against climate change in general.

An elaborate methodology

The data analysis methods for the current reports are based on a new evaluation software called CLIMDEX that was specifically developed for this purpose at GERICS. In addition, statistical methods are used to calculate the "robustness" of the model results in order to assess the resilience of the projected climate changes. Since the analyses are standardized and fully automated, they will provide a good basis for quality approved evaluations in the future. The climate outlooks are based on observational data from the HYRAS dataset of the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) and on future projections of regional climate models.

The total of 85 simulations with a resolution of 12.5 kilometers were created by many European research institutions by refining the results of global climate models with different regional climate models. "They allow an assessment of different future scenarios in line with the latest scientific findings," says author Sebastian Bathiany. "Even with a lot of climate protection, we have to adapt to changes. This is precisely why climate projections are so important for the future. This provides a more accurate basis for adaptation to climate change at the local level."

The Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon is part of the Helmholtz-Klima-Initiative, where researchers perform research on climate change at systemic level. A total of 15 Helmholtz Centers combine their climate expertise in 13 research projects. GERICS directs the Cluster Netto-Null—Pfade zur Klimaneutralität 2050.

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More information: Full data (German): www.gerics.de/products_and_pub … dkreise/index.php.de

Meio ambiente e mudança climatica - Árvores: A infraestrutura crítica que falta aos bairros de baixa renda

Trees: The critical infrastructure low-income neighborhoods lack, by Alex Brown

  July 7, 2021

As the Pacific Northwest sweltered through a record-breaking heat wave last week, many residents here in America's least air-conditioned city sought relief under the shade of cedars and maples in city parks. But in some areas of Seattle, that shelter was hard to come by.

"If you look at aerial photographs, north Seattle looks like a forest," said Washington state Rep. Bill Ramos, a suburban Democrat who sponsored a bill the legislature recently passed to help cities improve their tree canopy.

"On the south side, you see nothing but rooftops and asphalt and not a green thing anywhere. It's strictly a matter of socioeconomics and race."

That disparity is not unique to Seattle. American Forests, a Washington, D.C.-based conservation nonprofit, released a nationwide analysis last month showing that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have significantly less tree canopy. Those areas also are more likely to suffer from the urban heat island effect caused by a lack of shade and an abundance of heat-absorbing asphalt. Heat islands can be as much as 10 degrees hotter than surrounding neighborhoods.

"We found that the wealthiest neighborhoods have 65% more tree canopy cover than the highest poverty neighborhoods," said Ian Leahy, the group's vice president of urban forestry. "As cities are beginning to heat up due to climate change, people are realizing that trees are critical infrastructure. I've never seen as much momentum toward urban forestry across the board."

In many cities and states, policymakers and advocates say they're aiming to correct decades of inequities in urban tree canopy. They acknowledge how racist policies such as redlining have had a stark effect on the presence of urban green space, and that trees are important for public health. Some leaders have even pledged to use American Forests' "Tree Equity Score" to target their tree plantings in the neighborhoods that need it most.

"People weren't thinking about trees as these resources that provide a lot of benefits," said Kevin Sayers, urban forestry coordinator with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. "They thought of them as niceties, and trees followed money. There's now a recognition that trees were not equitably distributed and maintained."

Sayers works to help cities and nonprofits manage and improve urban forests. Michigan's 10-year Forest Action Plan, which was drafted last year, calls for a neighborhood-by-neighborhood tree canopy analysis, with the goal of reaching equity. Sayers said he will work to incorporate the new tree equity data into that plan.

In many places, efforts to increase urban tree canopy are still in their early stages. Officials are conducting surveys, setting goals and making plans—while acknowledging the real work is still ahead. They say it will take time to build trust in underserved communities, scale up planting programs and change local laws to protect existing trees. But longtime foresters say political buy-in for such efforts has never been higher.

Trees provide important public health benefits, starting with the cooling shade they provide. A study published last year in the journal Environmental Epidemiology found that heat causes thousands of excess deaths in the United States each year, far above official estimates. City and state leaders expect climate change to worsen the threat.

"Trees are nature's air conditioners, and we're starting to talk about them as a real adaptation investment," said Shaun O'Rourke, a managing director at the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank who also serves as the state's chief resilience officer.

The state has worked with 20 municipalities in its program to fund climate resilience projects, and all of them have sought more resources for urban tree planting, O'Rourke said. Meanwhile, the Rhode Island Department of Health has incorporated tree canopy data into its health equity indicators, putting it alongside categories such as health care access and food insecurity.

"The data shows that Latinos and African Americans have a higher likelihood of dying after five days of extreme heat, and that's an injustice," said Cindy Montañez, CEO of Tree People, a nonprofit that works on planting and education projects near Los Angeles. "Planting trees is not about carbon reduction, it's about saving lives."

Los Angeles has appointed its first city forest officer to coordinate the city's urban forestry efforts across departments. Rachel Malarich, who took the job in 2019, has been tasked with increasing tree canopy in underserved neighborhoods by 50% by 2028.

"Nineteen percent of all the tree canopy cover in Los Angeles exists where 1% of our population lives, concentrated in these affluent areas," Malarich said. "The conversation has changed, and there are more public officials recognizing that tree canopy is not a beautification measure, but a central piece of our infrastructure."

Trees also help to filter pollution from the air and absorb stormwater runoff. Studies also have shown that the presence of trees can have positive effects on mental health and cognitive function.

Earlier this year, the Phoenix city council voted to partner with American Forests to create an equitable tree canopy across all of its neighborhoods by 2030. The city has identified the busiest walking corridors where shade could prove most beneficial, and it's planning to plant 1,800 trees along nine miles of "cool corridors" each year. The city's recently passed budget creates an Office of Heat Response & Mitigation, which includes tree and shade administrators, and will pay for five new forestry staffers to plant and maintain urban forests.

"We have more tree cover in the higher-income areas of our community, and that's something we're trying to be intentional about changing," said Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democrat. "We've always had strong support for tree planting in our city, but we've seen a real focus on equity in the last year and a half."

In Boston, Northeastern University associate professor of law and policy Neenah Estrella-Luna is serving as a consultant to help draft the city's first urban forest plan. Her team is working with city officials and community leaders to develop a pathway to tree equity in 20 years.

"The folks most marginalized—people of color, immigrants and low-income people—have the least access to anything green," she said. "This is clearly an issue of environmental justice."

Some state lawmakers have been active on the issue as well. Ramos, the Washington state legislator, introduced a bill this year that will require the state's Department of Natural Resources to conduct a statewide assessment of urban tree canopy to find where it's lacking. The measure, which was adopted by large, bipartisan majorities and signed into law, will also allow the agency to provide technical assistance to local governments for forest management. Half the money must go to underserved communities.

"We know trees create better health," Ramos said. "How can we say that some people should have trees and other people shouldn't?"

In California, Assembly Member Luz Rivas, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, has sponsored a bill that would create a funding program to help communities adapt to extreme heat. Projects could include urban forestry and green spaces. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the Assembly and is under committee review in the Senate.

Rivas also has fought in recent years to preserve investments in the state Urban Greening Program, which is funded by cap-and-trade revenues.

"My community has been disproportionately affected by pollution and the effects of climate change, including extreme heat," Rivas said. "Our tree canopy isn't as dense as other parts of Los Angeles."

State and local leaders acknowledge that reaching tree equity won't be easy or simple. Many urbanized areas lack suitable places to plant, especially spots that can accommodate the large trees that provide the biggest benefits. Also, most urban trees grow on private land, meaning cities can't rely only on parks and streets to reach their goals.

In many neighborhoods, cities have done a poor job of maintaining existing trees, which can damage houses and cars if unhealthy trees are left to fall. That's made some residents skeptical about new plantings.

"Tree planting is always a very visible thing, but nobody likes to give due recognition to tree maintenance," said Sayers, the Michigan forestry leader.

Even in cities with strong tree planting programs, leaders have found they're still losing canopy cover each year as urban sprawl and development uproots existing trees to make way for housing. Forestry experts say cities need strong tree protection ordinances to have a chance of reaching their goals.

Many cities and states also are reassessing which types of trees to plant, as shifting conditions brought on by climate change upend long-held views about which trees will thrive in a certain region.

"We're now looking at some Southern species," said O'Rourke, the Rhode Island resilience officer. "As we look at climate projections, we're thinking about how we might look more like the mid-Atlantic states."

Foresters say their programs are often understaffed, and they're some of the first to face cuts during difficult economic times. Kesha Braunskill, urban forestry coordinator with the Delaware Forest Service, said tree equity programs need to have a stronger workforce and a consistent presence in the areas they're trying to reach.

"We need more of us, and more of us that look like the communities we serve," she said. "We have to formulate relationships. We can't just walk in, plant a tree and walk away."

Explore further

Low-income blocks in 92% of US urban communities have less tree cover and are hotter

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©2021 The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Preconceito Racial - Porque insistir que você não é racista pode sair pela culatra, por Laura Counts

July 7, 2021

Why insisting you're not racist may backfire, by Laura Counts, from  University of California - Berkeley

When you insist you're not racist, you may unwittingly be sending the opposite message.

That's the conclusion of a new study by three Berkeley Haas researchers who conducted experiments with white participants claiming to hold egalitarian views. After asking them to write statements explaining why they weren't prejudiced against Black people, they found that other white people could nevertheless gauge the writers' underlying prejudice.

"Americans almost universally espouse egalitarianism and wish to see themselves as non-biased, yet racial prejudice persists," says Berkeley Haas Asst. Prof. Drew Jacoby Senghor, one of the authors. "Our results suggest that the explicit goal of appearing egalitarian might blind people to the possibility that they could be communicating, and perpetuating, prejudicial attitudes."

Co-authored by Derek Brown, Ph.D. 24, and Michael Rosenblum, Ph.D. 20—a post-doctoral scholar at NYU Stern School of Business—the study builds on past research finding people's racial prejudice "leaks out" through nonverbal behavior, such as facial expressions or physical distance. In a series of experiments published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the researchers looked at perceptions based solely on written content.

They selected a group of white participants, screening out the small percentage who expressed overt prejudice, and scored subjects' racial attitudes with two widely used assessments. The subjects were then asked: "Do you believe that all people are equal and should have equality of opportunity? Why or why not?," and "Are you prejudiced toward Black people? Why or why not?" A second group of white participants, asked to read the written responses, accurately estimated how the writers had scored on the prejudice scale.

Linguistic cues

In a second experiment to parse out whether people were signaling racial attitudes intentionally or inadvertently, they asked one group to answer as honestly as possible and another group to answer "in the least prejudiced way possible." There was no difference to the readers, who accurately scored both groups' answers.

"That gave us some confidence that people are naturally trying to come across as egalitarian, but something about the language they choose is betraying them," Rosenblum said.

What were those linguistic cues? The most powerful indicator, they found, was language that dehumanized or objectified African Americans—for example, "I have a great relationship with the Blacks." Other characteristics such as
- defensiveness,
- references to personal responsibility, or
- a belief that equal opportunity exists were strongly associated with higher levels of prejudice, and
- cues such as focus on equity or
- an acknowledgement that inequality exists were associated with lower levels of prejudice.
Interestingly, references to being colorblind or mentions of personal contact with Black people weren't indicative of the white participants' attitudes.

"This demonstrates that people's use of the cues are meaningful not only for how prejudice is expressed, but also how egalitarianism is perceived," said Brown.

Contagion effect

A third experiment had a sobering result. The researchers found that white participants reported greater prejudice towards Black people after reading statements from the self-avowed white egalitarians who scored high on underlying prejudice. In other words, the readers mirrored the attitudes of the writers, even when they identified themselves as ideologically dissimilar (conservative vs liberal).

"We don't know
- [if] reading other people's views gave them permission to express more prejudice,
- or whether they thought that this is the norm and their actual prejudice level changed,
but there seemed to be a contagion effect," Rosenblum said. "One of the lessons here is that words carry weight. It does seem that this is one way that prejudice is unwittingly spread."

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More information: Drew S. Jacoby-Senghor et al, Not all egalitarianism is created equal: Claims of nonprejudice inadvertently communicate prejudice between ingroup members, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104104