Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Both Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt believe that children are over-supervised in childhood. But they differ on phones.
Both Gray and Haidt believe that children are over-supervised in childhood but Haidt says that they are then released into a maelstrom of malevolent influences on the internet without any protection at all, with predictably dire results for mental health.
Gray is quoted extensively in The Anxious Generation. However, when Gray saw an early proof copy of the book, he was horrified. He felt that by calling for age restrictions on phone use and online activity, Haidt was repeating the mistakes made by parents for the past 70 years, that is: trying to protect young people from every risk. For Gray, despite its dangers, the online world is just another aspect of reality that young people need to learn to navigate.
Research shows that not all types of activity are equally effective
for improving muscle strength and physical function. Because muscle
plays such a central role in movement, balance and recovery from
illness, maintaining it becomes a key target for healthy ageing.
...
Strength training works best when combined with adequate nutrition,
particularly sufficient dietary protein, which provides the building
blocks muscles need to repair and grow. Starting gradually and
building up over time can reduce the risk of injury.
Comparing a newborn's brain to an adult's brain.
Massive synaptic pruning between birth and adulthood: the nervous system gets simpler with age! Two-decade connectomic effort in Lichtman lab @harvard reveals how the order in which motor neurons activate decides which connections survive. Connectomic evidence that ordered activity drives neuromuscular network formation
Incidence among the elderly is falling fast
Last year he and some colleagues published research in the Journal
of the American Medical Association showing that, whereas 40 years
ago three in every ten Americans aged 85-89 had dementia, by 2024
just one in ten had it (see chart 1). What is more, America is
not the only beneficiary of this trend. Between 1988 and 2015 the
share of older people being diagnosed with dementia fell by 13% a
decade across six countries in North America and Europe, according
to a study of almost 50,000 people by Frank Wolters of the Erasmus
Medical Centre in Rotterdam, and colleagues.
...
The single biggest risk factor for dementia is age. Prevalence
doubles roughly every five years after 70. In America in 2016, for
instance, just 4% of people aged 70-74 had dementia, but the rate
jumped to 9% for those who were 75-79 and again to 18% for 80- to
84-year olds. More than a quarter of those over 85 had the condition.
Russ Roberts EconTalk podcast.
Introverts are underrated. So says Susan Cain in her conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about her book, Quiet. She explains why introversion isn't the same thing as shyness and she speaks of the many benefits of solitude and silent contemplation. They also discuss why modern schools and workplaces' obsession with extroversion is problematic, and the reasons for the shift from a culture of character to our current culture of personality. Cain concludes by sharing how the book has changed her own life and helped other introverts navigate a world that can't seem to stop talking.
The unfortunately botched economics of emergency care
American ambulance bills are enormous and unpredictable because of how American law forces ambulance services to work. In 1965, almost as an afterthought, Medicare decided to pay for ambulances the way it paid for everything else: as a per-ride fee, after the fact, as though a trip to the hospital were just another medical procedure. Commercial insurers, who build their payment systems on top of Medicare's fee schedules, followed suit.
In the decades since then, the cost structure of ambulance services has changed enormously, and very little of their cost now comes from the ride itself: nearly all of it goes to standing ready-the stations, the vehicles, the crews waiting around the clock for a call that may never come. But the way we pay for ambulance rides has stayed the same. And nearly everything strange and cruel about ambulance billing follows from that disjunction.
AI has the potential to dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and the development of healthcare interventions.
Claude Science is an app that integrates the tools and packages that researchers most commonly use, produces auditable artifacts, and provides flexible access to computing resources.