Mississippi is a favorite punch line of comedians whenever they need to point to a state that is the worst in terms of almost any social measure such as poverty, teen pregnancies, education, and so on. But interestingly, Mississippi has the highest vaccination rates. How did it get that way? Melissa Bass and Austin Vitale explain how a state that is usually last came to be first in something good.
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Jon Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is back with another excellent investigative report. This time he takes aim at one source of the problem of why health care costs in the US are so high and that is the way that drug companies work with doctors to push people into taking expensive prescription drugs.
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NPR had report on an interesting experiment in which they found that if physicians, in their interactions with the parents of children, simply acted as if it was a given that the children would be vaccinated, then over 70 parents went along with it. But when the physicians had an open-ended discussion with parents about vaccinations, 83% decided against it. Of course, this ‘don’t ask, just tell’ policy works only with those parents who are unsure or on the fence about vaccinations. It has little effect on die-hard opponents.
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A US District Judge Callie Granade ruled on January 23rd that Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriages violated the US constitution and ordered that marriage licenses be issued beginning today. That verdict was appealed by Alabama and last week a federal appeals court declined to issue a stay of the lower court judge’s ruling. In response Roy Moore, the chief justice of Alabama’s state supreme court and a vehement opponent of same-sex marriage, issued his own order late last night that said that until the US Supreme Court ruled on the issue, probate court judges were not obliged to issue licenses and he was ordering them not to do so.
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Jed S. Rakoff is a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York and in a recent article in the New York Review of Books he discusses why so many innocent people plead guilty. He puts it down to the system that is peculiar to the US, that of plea bargains where, instead of going to trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys agree to have the defendant plead guilty to a lesser charge. So even though the defendant might be innocent, the prospect of being found guilty of very serious charges and facing very heavy punishment can persuade them that it is not worth the risk. This is why so few cases go to trial.
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In my writings, I use whatever words that come to my head and that I feel comfortable using and never go to a dictionary or thesaurus to look for the appropriate word. I do not gratuitously use swear words or scatological words unless I am quoting someone else. It is not that such words offend me (they don’t) but it is just not my style to use them. I also do not shy away from words that are not too commonly used as long as I think they exactly fit my needs and are not so esoteric that too many readers are baffled because its meaning is not clear from the context.
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In my post on the increasing role of technology in helping adjudicate close decisions in cricket, I mentioned three of them: the Hawkeye ball tracker (using multiple camera angles to track the path of the ball and predict its future trajectory), the Snickometer (that displays sound as an oscilloscope signal to show the sound if the ball struck anything), and the Hot Spot (that uses infra-red cameras to detect the minute amounts of heat generated when the ball strikes the bat or the person of the batsman).
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Thanks to the relentless scare-mongering by our news media, parents nowadays are terrified that their children will suffer harm, either due to accidents or at the hands of strangers. This has led to them placing very strict limits on their children, to the extent of some never letting them out of their sight, not having play dates with other children, or letting them have sleep overs at friends homes, riding bikes, and so on.
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Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, has a very interesting and informative article that shows that the anti-vaccination movement that we currently see is not its first incarnation. It occurred before in the 19th century following the development of the smallpox vaccine.
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Jon Stewart looked at the recent outbreak of diseases that we once thought had been eliminated in the US and some of the reasons given by people behind the trend to not vaccinate children. Potential presidential candidate Rand Paul said the same kinds of things that Michele Bachmann said about vaccination back in 2012, and passed along stories that he had heard about children getting neurological problems from getting the vaccine. She was mercilessly ridiculed for it back then and it will be interesting to see if it will similarly come back to haunt Paul.
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