Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide shined a light on a problem in the prison system: no one is keeping track of suicide deaths on a national basis.

Formerly detained migrants describe what would happen if the Flores settlement were dismantled.

After 28 days, YouTube has agreed to meet with the YouTubers Union to discuss ‘the future of work’ but refuses to negotiate demands.

‘American Factory’ on Netflix is a solid film, but Obama’s message of finding common ground in an uneven labor dispute ignores working people’s realities.

How can a light show be racist, you ask? The “Northern Lights” on Parliament Hill delivers in both official languages.

The observations provided a “missing link” in theories about storms that rage in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

As smart speaker makers such as Amazon improve emotion-detecting AI, researchers are coming up with ways to protect our privacy.

This week alone, artists like Lizzo, Saweetie, and Pop Smoke have released major remixes that extend the shelf life of their songs.

When a member of a polycule gets pregnant, everyone faces new choices about how to adjust their relationships.

Like schools, parks, or otherwise “crowded public sidewalk areas.”

A satellite image taken on August 20, 2019 shows smoke from Amazonian forest fires blowing over the states of Amazonas, Mato Grosso, and Rondônia in Brazil. (Photo: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS)

The world’s attention suddenly turned to Brazil this week as international media reported an unusually high number of fires burning in the Amazon rainforest. As of Thursday, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which monitors fire activity across the entire Amazon, had recorded 76,720 fires this year in Brazil alone, an 85 per cent increase over the 2018 fire season. 

It’s like the universe knew you were coming. AWESOME! Photo from: here — Check out my Youtube channel —

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Read time: 5 mins

Read time: 6 mins

Photo: Suzanne Southon/Can Geo Photo Club

A team of researchers from the University of Rhode Island has found unusually high concentrations of microplastics in thick Canadian Arctic ice, raising concerns that plastic pollution has spread to even the most remote regions on Earth.  

During an 18-day expedition through the Northwest Passage last month, the team sampled ice cores more than two metres thick in Lancaster Sound, a body of water between Devon and Baffin Islands. Initially, they were looking for plankton, but what they found was alarming.

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Scientists have already been conducting research in Nunavut’s Cambridge Bay region around the CHARS facility, often with the help of local Inuit such as Candice Sudlovenick (above), a conservation officer. (Photo: Neil Ever Osborne/Canadian Geographic).

During late spring in Cambridge Bay, in the very early morning, there’s an hour or so of muted light when the town’s 1,800 inhabitants are asleep, the dogs are curled in their plywood houses, and there’s not a snowmobile on the land, nor an aircraft or bird in the sky. The horizon to the east is a slash of rippled blood, and if you happen to be awake and outdoors and in a place with a view across the tundra, you can, in the silence, with a little imagination, see a thousand years into the past.

Suddenly the shuffling crowd parts and you’re at the front of the line. Suddenly your boss quits and nobody else can do her job. Suddenly you’re on deck during a late inning tie game. Suddenly your sister’s finished opening her Christmas present. Suddenly you’re next. AWESOME! Photo from: here — Follow me on Twitter —

The post #433 When you’re next appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

The landscape of Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve is characterized by deep lakes, stark, glacier-carved cliffs, boreal forest and tundra. (Photo: Pat Kane/Canadian Geographic)

It took nearly 50 years of planning and consultation, but Canada’s newest national park reserve has officially been established in the Northwest Territories.

Toppings are tough. The other day I was watching movies with my friend Shiv when our stomachs started rumbling and we decided to dial for dinner. I got up and grabbed a stack of crinkly takeout menus from the junk drawer and we flipped through all the fancy ones before settling on pizza. Of course, […]

The post #434 Finding your pizza soulmate appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Left: A 12-year-old Jill Heinerth in her Girl Guide uniform explores near her cottage on Ontario’s Big East Lake. Right: Heinerth in Florida’s Devil’s Eye Spring cave, where she often dives in the winter. (Photos: Bob Rabjohn; Jill Heinerth)

On Friday, Feb. 5, 1971, the PA system at Munden Park Public School in Mississauga, Ont., reverberated with a special announcement. The school principal requested staff and students assemble in the library — to watch television!

As school had started that day, two men were donning spacesuits for a walk on the moon that lasted more than five hours. At about 4 a.m., Apollo 14 had landed in the moon’s Fra Mauro crater, the intended landing site of the aborted Apollo 13 mission of 1970.

A perception map of Tumaco, Colombia. The map uses wildlife symbols to show points where women can be attacked (wasps) or face danger from criminal gangs that control or fight over particular territory (snakes). (Infographic and Illustration: Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP)/Christian Benito Rebollo)

Colombia’s era of armed conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, officially ended in 2016, but violence of another kind remains a problem in the South American country. Discover how researchers are using on-the-ground consultations and specialized maps to help put an end to the violence Colombian women and LGBTI people face. Part of an ongoing series of stories about innovative projects in the developing world, a partnership between the International Development Research Centre and Canadian Geographic. 

Check out that sexy plastic tray. Welcome to the crowded food court, workplace lunch room, or high school cafeteria. Thin napkins and ketchup smears cover tables as wailing babies and french fry fumes fill the air. It’s time for lunch so your stomach’s grumbling and all you can think about is how hungry you are. […]

The post #435 Food drooling appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 10 mins

Read time: 15 mins

Last week saw the publication of an op-ed authored by Drs. David Ludwig, Cara Ebbeling, and Steven Heymsfield entitled, “Improving the Quality of Dietary Research“. In it they discuss the many limitations of dietary research and chart a way forward that includes the following 9 great suggestions,

1. Recognize that the design features of phase 3 drug studies are not always feasible or appropriate in nutrition research, and clarify the minimum standards necessary for diet studies to be considered successful.
2. Distinguish among study design categories, including mechanistic, pilot (exploratory), efficacy (explanatory), effectiveness (pragmatic), and translational (with implications for public health and policy). Each of these study types is important for generating knowledge about diet and chronic disease, and some overlap may invariably exist; however, the findings from small-scale, short-term, or low-intensity trials should not be conflated with definitive hypothesis testing.
3. Define diets more precisely when feasible (eg, with quantitative nutrient targets and other parameters, rather than qualitative descriptors such as Mediterranean) to allow for rigorous and reproducible comparisons.
4. Improve the methods for addressing common design challenges, such as how to promote adherence to dietary prescriptions (ie, with feeding studies and more intensive behavioral and environmental intervention), and reduce dropout or loss to follow-up.
5. Develop sensitive and specific biomeasures of adherence (eg, metabolomics), and use available methods when feasible (eg, doubly labeled water method for total energy expenditure).
6. Create and adequately fund local (or regional) cores to enhance research infrastructure.
7. Standardize practices to mitigate the risk of bias related to conflicts of interest in nutrition research, including independent oversight of data management and analysis, as has been done for drug trials.
8. Make databases publicly available at time of study publication to facilitate reanalyses and scholarly dialogue.
9. Establish best practices for media relations to help reduce hyperbole surrounding publication of small, preliminary, or inconclusive research with limited generalizability.”

But there was one recommendation that seems at odds with the rest,

Acknowledge that changes to, or discrepancies in, clinical registries of diet trials are commonplace, and update final analysis plans before unmasking random study group assignments and initiating data analysis.

For those who aren’t aware, clinical registries are where researchers document in advance the pre-specified methods and outcomes being studied by way of an observational experiment. The purpose of pre-registration is to reduce the risk of bias, selective reporting, and overt p-hacking that can (and has) occurred in dietary research.

Now to be clear, I’m a clinician, not a researcher, and I’m not sure how commonplace changes to or discrepancies in clinical registries of diet trials are, but I’m also not sure that’s an argument in their favour even if they are. I do know that recently two of the authors claiming registry changes are commonplace were found to have modified one of their pre-specified statistical analysis plans which if it had been adhered to, would have rendered their results non-significant.

But commonplace or not, is it good science?

To answer that question I turned to James Heathers, a researcher and self-described “data thug” whose area of interest is methodology (and who you should definitely follow on Twitter), who described the notion of accepting that changes and discrepancies to clinical registries were commonplace was, “deeply silly“.

He went on to elaborate as to why,

First of all – the whole definition of a theory is something which sets your expectations. the idea that ‘reality is messy’ does not interfere with the idea that you have hypothesis driven expectations which are derived from theories.

Second: there is nothing to prevent you saying “WE DID NOT FIND WHAT WE EXPECTED TO FIND” and then *following it* with your insightful exploratory analysis. In fact, that would almost be a better exposition of the facts by definition as you are presenting your expectations as expectations, and your after-the-fact speculations likewise.

Third: if you have a power analysis which determines there is a correct amount of observations necessary to reliably observe an effect, having the freedom to go ‘never mind that then’ is not a good thing by definition.

Fourth: The fact that changes were made is never ever included in the manuscript. i.e. they are proposing being able to make changes to the protocol in the registry *without* having to say so. it’s a ‘new plan’ rather than a ‘changed plan’.

Fifth: If you can still do the original analysis then no-one will ever believe that you didn’t change the plan after looking at the data. you have to protect yourself, and the best way to do that is to follow your own damned plans and be realistic from the get.

Lastly, Heathers is unimpressed with the argument that registry changes are A-OK because they’re commonplace, and he discussed ancient Aztecan punishments for those citing it.

All this to say, there’s plenty of room to improve the quality of dietary research. Here’s hoping the bulk of these suggestions are taken to heart, but please don’t hold your breath.

       

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Read time: 4 mins

Come on in. When you’re first in the car it’s time for some smoooooth sitting. Yes, you’ve got your pick of the seats before anyone else gets in there. Do you want the chipped orange plastic one in the corner with the Coke spilled on it or the stained yellow one in front smeared with […]

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Olga Khazan, in The Atlantic, discusses people like me – cursed to wake up every day before 5:30am.

Mark Lukach, in The Pacific Standard, discusses love in the face of severe mental illness.

Alice Sueffert, in ScaryMommy, discusses finally showing her mom bod some love.

       

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Read time: 8 mins

Read time: 4 mins

Hello out there. Staring out your airplane window and spotting another plane cruising calmly through the clouds feels a bit mysterious and magical. The open skies are suddenly traffic lanes from The Jetsons and you get to take a brain step back at how far we’ve come… While our ancestors were painting ocean caves, sleeping […]

The post #437 Seeing a plane in the sky from the airplane window appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

She’s dived inside Antarctic icebergs and flooded mine passages, explored shipwrecks and subaquatic caverns. And this year, renowned explorer Jill Heinerth has also been busy with a different kind of adventure: writing a memoir.

It’s what your parents were going to call you but didn’t. Flipping through baby books, chatting at bedtime, you better believe your folks had alternate identities in mind before you borned out. They thought about nicknames, shortforms, and tributes. They thought about spelling, rhyming, and meanings. Basically, they thought and hoped and wished all kinds […]

The post #438 Almost Names appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 8 mins

Sunglasses are a form of comfortable and protective eyewear that help prevent strong sunlight and UV rays from damaging your eyes. They are a popular fashion accessory, too. Try them at a restaurant, in a car, or on the beach. AWESOME!     — Follow me on Instagram —

The post #439 Checking someone out and not getting busted appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

Read time: 6 mins

To be clear, neither Random House, nor Kellogg’s, should be fairly expected to do the right thing when it comes to health.

Kellogg’s job is to see food. Random House’s job is to sell books. Nothing more, nothing less.

So it’s hard to get mad with either company for their “Feeding Reading” initiative which provides parents with permission or excuse to buy their children such health foods as:

• Frosted Flakes
• Pop-Tarts
• Eggos
• Nutrigrain Bars
• Froot Loops
• Rice Krispie Treats
• Apple Jacks
• Frosted Mini-Wheats (note, unfrosted mini-wheats are not eligible)
• Corn Pops
• Raisin Bran
• Krave
• Keebler cookies
• Cheez-its
• Austin crackers
• Pringles

Truly, not a single choice parents or children should be encouraged to make. All ultra-processed, sugary, junk (and some crackers and potato chips).

Again, no reason to expect either Random House or Kellogg’s to be doing the right thing by kids, but in my opinion, their clear partnership in doing the wrong thing here certainly doesn’t reflect well on either of them.

       

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• From The Journal Of If Only It Were That Easy: Walking To School Was Not Associated With Lower Weights In 4-7 Year Olds

 

Anne Innis Dagg visiting Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo in 2015. The zoo was where she first saw giraffes as a child, sparking a lifelong love of the species and an extraordinary career. (Photo: Elaisa Vargas)

I knew you would never leave me, PIN. AWESOME! Photo from: here — Follow me on Twitter —

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