Download or read book Everything Bad is Good for You written by Steven Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.
Download or read book U S Health in International Perspective written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.
Download or read book Front of Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past decade, tremendous growth has occurred in the use of nutrition symbols and rating systems designed to summarize key nutritional aspects and characteristics of food products. These symbols and the systems that underlie them have become known as front-of-package (FOP) nutrition rating systems and symbols, even though the symbols themselves can be found anywhere on the front of a food package or on a retail shelf tag. Though not regulated and inconsistent in format, content, and criteria, FOP systems and symbols have the potential to provide useful guidance to consumers as well as maximize effectiveness. As a result, Congress directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to undertake a study with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to examine and provide recommendations regarding FOP nutrition rating systems and symbols. The study was completed in two phases. Phase I focused primarily on the nutrition criteria underlying FOP systems. Phase II builds on the results of Phase I while focusing on aspects related to consumer understanding and behavior related to the development of a standardized FOP system. Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols focuses on Phase II of the study. The report addresses the potential benefits of a single, standardized front-label food guidance system regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, assesses which icons are most effective with consumer audiences, and considers the systems/icons that best promote health and how to maximize their use.
Download or read book The Power of Bad written by John Tierney and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most important book at the borderland of psychology and politics that I have ever read."—Martin E. P. Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at that University of Pennsylvania and author of Learned Optimism Why are we devastated by a word of criticism even when it’s mixed with lavish praise? Because our brains are wired to focus on the bad. This negativity effect explains things great and small: why countries blunder into disastrous wars, why couples divorce, why people flub job interviews, how schools fail students, why football coaches stupidly punt on fourth down. All day long, the power of bad governs people’s moods, drives marketing campaigns, and dominates news and politics. Eminent social scientist Roy F. Baumeister stumbled unexpectedly upon this fundamental aspect of human nature. To find out why financial losses mattered more to people than financial gains, Baumeister looked for situations in which good events made a bigger impact than bad ones. But his team couldn’t find any. Their research showed that bad is relentlessly stronger than good, and their paper has become one of the most-cited in the scientific literature. Our brain’s negativity bias makes evolutionary sense because it kept our ancestors alert to fatal dangers, but it distorts our perspective in today’s media environment. The steady barrage of bad news and crisismongering makes us feel helpless and leaves us needlessly fearful and angry. We ignore our many blessings, preferring to heed—and vote for—the voices telling us the world is going to hell. But once we recognize our negativity bias, the rational brain can overcome the power of bad when it’s harmful and employ that power when it’s beneficial. In fact, bad breaks and bad feelings create the most powerful incentives to become smarter and stronger. Properly understood, bad can be put to perfectly good use. As noted science journalist John Tierney and Baumeister show in this wide-ranging book, we can adopt proven strategies to avoid the pitfalls that doom relationships, careers, businesses, and nations. Instead of despairing at what’s wrong in your life and in the world, you can see how much is going right—and how to make it still better.
Download or read book Everything the Government Does is Bad For Us written by Ryan Aleckszander and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-08-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I often find myself going easy on the government. I let them off the hook by attributing the consequences of their actions to a failure. In this book, I will not be so kind. I believe that the results of government policies and actions are more than mere failure. Whichever country we are talking about, I believe all government policies and actions are actively harmful. Yes, all of them. Failure presumes a level of innocence, ignorance, or accident. I do not believe these excuses are justified. Governments do know what they are doing. Modern policies all have long histories and precedents. We are not experimenting - these are tried and true procedures. They haven't just failed us, they have harmed us. And they will continue to do so unless we make dramatic changes in our government systems. We have had more than enough time to see the consequences of every government policy. There is no longer any excuse for the pain and suffering these policies continue to cause. All policy derives first from ideology. The people who comprise governments believe certain things, and they form policies around these beliefs. I will argue that these ideologies are flawed at the core, and so any policies derived from them will also be flawed. There are two parts to my grievances with the government. First, we do not need the government to do the things it does. The useful functions we supposedly need the government to oversee can be handled by private enterprises. Often, these functions are already contracted privately. Roads are built and maintained by private companies, schools can be run privately just as effectively as by the government, and every other aspect of the amenities that comprise our modern life can be designed, built, and regulated by private industries. The second grievance is that governments tend to do things that do not need to be done at all. In the first case, the harm is a simple waste of resources. We do not need the middleman to contract private businesses. In the second case, the harm is much greater. When governments take it upon themselves to impose unnecessary rules, infrastructure, propaganda campaigns, and wars, we are all harmed. In my lifetime I have considered myself both a liberal and a conservative. I have voted for both left and right parties in my home country. I am now convinced that the distinction between left and right is a false dichotomy. These are two heads of the same serpent. I will not make the case that we should abolish government outright. We have a society deeply structured around an existing control system. Removing the system completely, I do believe would be chaos. I think there is a way out, but we must first understand the problem before we can really talk about a solution.
Download or read book The Coddling of the American Mind written by Greg Lukianoff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to produce these untruths. They situate the conflicts on campus in the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization, including a rise in hate crimes and off-campus provocation. They explore changes in childhood including the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.
Download or read book Licence to be Bad written by Jonathan Aldred and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It is going to change the way in which we understand many modern debates about economics, politics, and society' Ha Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism Over the past fifty years, the way we value what is 'good' and 'right' has changed dramatically. Behaviour that to our grandparents' generation might have seemed stupid, harmful or simply wicked now seems rational, natural, woven into the very logic of things. And, asserts Jonathan Aldred in this revelatory new book, it's economics that's to blame. Licence to be Bad tells the story of how a group of economics theorists changed our world, and how a handful of key ideas, from free-riding to Nudge, seeped into our decision-making and, indeed, almost all aspects of our lives. Aldred reveals the extraordinary hold of economics on our morals and values. Economics has corrupted us. But if this hidden transformation is so recent, it can be reversed. Licence to be Bad shows us where to begin.
Download or read book The Bad Bug Book written by FDA and published by Imp. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bad Bug was created from the materials assembled at the FDA website of the same name. This handbook provides basic facts regarding foodborne pathogenic microorganisms and natural toxins. It brings together in one place information from the Food & Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service, and the National Institutes of Health.
Download or read book To Err Is Human written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine
Download or read book Fed Up written by Danielle DiMartino Booth and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Federal Reserve insider pulls back the curtain on the secretive institution that controls America’s economy After correctly predicting the housing crash of 2008 and quitting her high-ranking Wall Street job, Danielle DiMartino Booth was surprised to find herself recruited as an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, one of the regional centers of our complicated and widely misunderstood Federal Reserve System. She was shocked to discover just how much tunnel vision, arrogance, liberal dogma, and abuse of power drove the core policies of the Fed. DiMartino Booth found a cabal of unelected academics who made decisions without the slightest understanding of the real world, just a slavish devotion to their theoretical models. Over the next nine years, she and her boss, Richard Fisher, tried to speak up about the dangers of Fed policies such as quantitative easing and deeply depressed interest rates. But as she puts it, “In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand that the Fed was simply too big to fight.” Now DiMartino Booth explains what really happened to our economy after the fateful date of December 8, 2008, when the Federal Open Market Committee approved a grand and unprecedented experiment: lowering interest rates to zero and flooding America with easy money. As she feared, millions of individuals, small businesses, and major corporations made rational choices that didn’t line up with the Fed’s “wealth effect” models. The result: eight years and counting of a sluggish “recovery” that barely feels like a recovery at all. While easy money has kept Wall Street and the wealthy afloat and thriving, Main Street isn’t doing so well. Nearly half of men eighteen to thirty-four live with their parents, the highest level since the end of the Great Depression. Incomes are barely increasing for anyone not in the top ten percent of earners. And for those approaching or already in retirement, extremely low interest rates have caused their savings to stagnate. Millions have been left vulnerable and afraid. Perhaps worst of all, when the next financial crisis arrives, the Fed will have no tools left for managing the panic that ensues. And then what? DiMartino Booth pulls no punches in this exposé of the officials who run the Fed and the toxic culture they created. She blends her firsthand experiences with what she’s learned from dozens of high-powered market players, reams of financial data, and Fed documents such as transcripts of FOMC meetings. Whether you’ve been suspicious of the Fed for decades or barely know anything about it, as DiMartino Booth writes, “Every American must understand this extraordinarily powerful institution and how it affects his or her everyday life, and fight back.”
Download or read book Eat for Life written by National Academy of Sciences and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Results from the National Research Council's (NRC) landmark study Diet and health are readily accessible to nonscientists in this friendly, easy-to-read guide. Readers will find the heart of the book in the first chapter: the Food and Nutrition Board's nine-point dietary plan to reduce the risk of diet-related chronic illness. The nine points are presented as sensible guidelines that are easy to follow on a daily basis, without complicated measuring or calculatingâ€"and without sacrificing favorite foods. Eat for Life gives practical recommendations on foods to eat and in a "how-to" section provides tips on shopping (how to read food labels), cooking (how to turn a high-fat dish into a low-fat one), and eating out (how to read a menu with nutrition in mind). The volume explains what protein, fiber, cholesterol, and fats are and what foods contain them, and tells readers how to reduce their risk of chronic disease by modifying the types of food they eat. Each chronic disease is clearly defined, with information provided on its prevalence in the United States. Written for everyone concerned about how they can influence their health by what they eat, Eat for Life offers potentially lifesaving information in an understandable and persuasive way. Alternative Selection, Quality Paperback Book Club
Download or read book Bad Bug Book written by Mark Walderhaug and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bad Bug Book 2nd Edition, released in 2012, provides current information about the major known agents that cause foodborne illness.Each chapter in this book is about a pathogen—a bacterium, virus, or parasite—or a natural toxin that can contaminate food and cause illness. The book contains scientific and technical information about the major pathogens that cause these kinds of illnesses.A separate “consumer box” in each chapter provides non-technical information, in everyday language. The boxes describe plainly what can make you sick and, more important, how to prevent it.The information provided in this handbook is abbreviated and general in nature, and is intended for practical use. It is not intended to be a comprehensive scientific or clinical reference.The Bad Bug Book is published by the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Download or read book Give Us Back the Bad Roads written by John Waters and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book When Bad Things Happen to Good People written by Harold S. Kushner and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an inspirational and compassionate approach to understanding the problems of life, and argues that we should continue to believe in God's fairness.
Download or read book Bad Education written by Lee Edelman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.
Download or read book STOP READING THE NEWS written by ROLF. DOBELLI and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Make America Healthy Again written by Nicole Saphier and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER! If Americans want to know why their health care is so costly and getting costlier, they need only look in the mirror. Americans are notoriously unhealthy—we eat too much, drink too much, and sit too much. When roughly 80 percent of cardiovascular disease and 40 percent of all cancer cases could be prevented by simple lifestyle changes, it is time to take a deeper look at the problem and ask who is truly responsible. Consider that: · After seventy years of innovation, heart disease and cancer remain the top two causes of death in the United States. · In 1960, health care spending was 5 percent of America's GDP; today, it is 17.5 percent. · The government spends over $1 trillion annually on health care. · Nearly one in five American deaths is associated with poor diets. · Simply reducing sodium intake by 1,200 mg per day could save up to $20 billion a year in medical costs. In Make America Healthy Again, Nicole Saphier, a Memorial Sloan Kettering physician, nationally recognized patient advocate, and media personality, reveals how individual negligence and big government incompetence have destroyed America’s health care system. Combining historical events, economic trends, and essential lifestyle advice, with her unique perspective, she offers concrete solutions to address this epic problem. We don’t need socialized medicine—we need to take better care of ourselves. By getting healthier and adopting preventative measures, Saphier believes, we can reduce the astronomical costs of treatment and improve overall care. The only way to lower medical costs for everyone is to stop incentivizing bad health decisions. Policies such as the Affordable Care Act and single-payer plans ignore something crucial to lowering the overall financial burden: personal responsibility. We can no longer expect doctors and the government to fix illnesses we have the power to prevent. Regardless of which health policy is adopted, our nation will flounder unless we take action. It is up to the American people to make America healthy again.
