Saturday, February 13, 2010
Sara Kaffashi - Environmental Economist in Southeast Asia
Labels: advocacy, agriculture, Asia, comparative-effectiveness, ecology, economics, economy, ecosystem, education, global, international, Iran, Middle-East, survival, sustainability, vegetarian, warming, water, young-adults
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Whether Wheaton College's latest distinction is a good or not-so-good thing depends a lot on what you're looking for.
When The Princeton Review released results of its annual college rankings this week, the Christian institution in Wheaton was second in the nation in the Stone Cold Sober Schools category, right behind Brigham Young University in Utah.
BYU has held the top spot for 12 years and Wheaton is "a usual suspect" in that category, said Robert Franek, author of "The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition."
The rankings are based on surveys of 122,000 college students, and any student with a college e-mail address can participate in the annual surveys at princetonreview.com.
Wheaton College officials say the ranking is a positive mark because it fits the school's moral philosophy.
"Part of our campus environment and goal is to cultivate an atmosphere that stimulates moral and intellectual growth," spokeswoman LaTonya Taylor said.
Wheaton College encourages all students to agree to a Community Covenant, which cites the school's Christian values and discourages behaviors officials believe are at odds with their religion and scripture, such as excessive alcohol consumption, any use of illegal drugs or anything deemed pornographic.
Taylor said many students are looking for such guidelines to help keep them true to their beliefs.
"The students who come to Wheaton are interested in growing their faith, as well as for challenging academics," she said.
In addition to being a the second-most sober school in the country, Wheaton also ranked in several other categories: first, Alternative Lifestyle Not an Alternative (low acceptance of gay community); second, Got Milk? (low beer consumption); second, Scotch & Soda, Hold the Scotch (low hard liquor consumption); third, Most Religious Students; fourth, Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution; fifth, Town-Gown Relations are Great (good relationship with Wheaton residents); sixth, Don't Inhale (low marijuana use); eighth, Most Conservative Students, 13th, Best Campus Food.
Last year the college was said to have the best food in the nation. This year it moved from fifth to first place for low acceptance of the gay community. Franek said the rankings vary from year to year based on the changing student body.
"Each list is an incredible resource because it reports so much information from primary sources, which is college students themselves," he said.
He added that there is no such thing as a bad ranking in the book. Instead, the categories are created simply to help prospective students make the best decisions.
"If you're a young, gay kid thinking of applying to any school, you want to know what the campus climate is," Franek said. "If the tolerance is low, you would at least want to understand that and prepare some questions. It doesn't mean you should stop your research there, but you should let that make your research that much more savvy. I don't want people to cross a school off their list simply because of our rankings."
Labels: bible, biblical, Christian, dry, eden, nondrinking, sober, sobriety, survival, sustainability, teetotaler, Wheaston, WheatonCollege
| This is the campus-wide Harvard University Green Tip of the Month. Having trouble reading this newsletter? Click here to see it in your browser. |
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 | Eat Less Meat!
Industrial meat production, especially beef, accounts for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions* (from the entire meat production cycle). Pick up some vegetarian ingredients at a local farmer's market, including three near Harvard:
Or find a market near you: http://www.massfarmersmarkets.org * United Nations (September 2008) "Livestock production alone contributes to 18 percent of the global warming effect - more than the emissions from every single car, train, and plane on the planet. Though livestock production only contributes 9 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, the sector is responsible for 37 percent of methane and 65 percent of nitrous oxide, both potent greenhouse gases." http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm Setting the Record Straight 
It is healthy to be vegetarian. Studies have shown that vegetarians (who follow a well-balanced, low-fat, high-fiber diet) often have lower incidences of coronary artery disease, hypertension, obesity and some forms of cancer. Your Actions Add Up!
If every Harvard affiliate replaced one average daily diet containing meat with one vegetarian meal a week, we would Prevent 14 million pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. That's like taking 1,280 cars off the road! Resources
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Labels: agriculture, diet, ecology, economics, economy, eden, environment, food, global-warming, green, Harvard, intervention, nutrition, pollution, prevention, survival, sustainability, vegan, vegetarian
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Forget Who Pays Medical Bills,
It’s Who Sets the Cost
(and it's not preventing any problems, anyway!)
By DAVID LEONHARDT Published: July 25, 2009
Related
Political Memo: Partisan or Not, a Tough Course on Health Care (July 26, 2009)
Obama Defends Proposed Health Office (July 26, 2009)
Obama Moves to Reclaim the Debate on Health Care (July 23, 2009)
Times Topics: Health Care Reform
WASHINGTON — Every fight over health care reform is different, and every fight over health care reform is the same.
In 1929, Michael Shadid, a doctor in western Oklahoma, proposed an idea for making medical care affordable to farmers. Rather than pay piecemeal for treatments, farmers would each contribute $50 a year to a cooperative. Dr. Shadid and his colleagues would pay their own salaries and expenses with the aggregate sum, and no farmer’s annual bill for family medical care would exceed $50.
Horrified by the plan, other Oklahoma doctors tried to revoke Dr. Shadid’s license. The conflict was soon duplicated across the country; cooperatives sprang up, and the American Medical Association tried to beat them back. The A.M.A.’s members, as the historian Paul Starr has written, felt threatened because the cooperatives “subjected doctors’ incomes and working conditions to direct control by their clients.”
The issue was clear: Who controls the doctor-patient relationship? That question has been at the core of every big subsequent battle over health care. Should doctors determine not only their patients’ treatment but also their own pay, through the fee-for-service system that has survived since the 1920s? Or should patients have more power in the relationship? And who could claim to act on patients’ behalf, monitoring treatments and bargaining with doctors?
A succession of presidents — from Harry S. Truman to Richard M. Nixon to Bill Clinton — volunteered the government for the role of patients’ advocate, and their grand efforts all failed. Now it is President Obama’s turn to try to remake America’s medical system.
Last week’s back and forth, when Congressional Democrats squabbled and Mr. Obama took his case to the public, highlighted how difficult his task will be. Reform of health care has the potential to threaten profits and incomes that make up one-sixth of the economy. More daunting, perhaps, Americans seem to have great trust in their doctors — more, certainly, than they trust the government on medical matters.
More than three in four Americans are “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their own care, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. But a substantial majority also say that the health care system needs fundamental change and that rising costs are a serious threat to the economy — a view that economists strongly share.
Thus the political challenge facing any effort at an overhaul: Americans say they want change, but they also want to preserve their own status quo.
The disconnect can be explained partly by the peculiar economics of health care. Because third parties — the government or a private insurer — typically pay the bill, many people miss the fact that the money originally comes from them. They see the benefits of medical care without seeing the costs.
But trust in doctors is a factor as well. Even when doctors order costly treatments with serious side effects and little evidence of their being effective, as studies find is common, patients are loath to question the decision. Instead of blaming such treatments for the rising cost of medicine, many people are inclined to blame forces that health economists say are far less important, like greedy insurance companies or onerous malpractice laws.
Mr. Obama is well aware of the public perception. This is why he directs his criticism not at doctors but at insurers and drug companies. In his news conference on Wednesday night, he advocated creating a government panel with the power to begin moving Medicare away from its fee-for-service model and emphasize outcomes instead. But he described it in doctor-friendly terms — as “an independent group of doctors and medical experts who are empowered to eliminate waste and inefficiency.”
His rhetorical choices highlight one of the least discussed but most important conflicts in the current health care debate. The fight isn’t just a matter of Democrats vs. Republicans, Blue Dogs vs. liberals or patients vs. insurers. It is also doctors vs. doctors.
That’s the same as in Oklahoma in 1929. And what has happened to Dr. Shadid’s model? It has survived. He built a team of doctors who collaborated closely and were not paid based on how many procedures they performed. Today, this description fits the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic (which Mr. Obama visited on Thursday), as well as less-known groups around the country.
Medicare data shows that these groups generally provide less expensive care and appear to deliver better results. Armed with this data, the doctors who run the groups have been lobbying Congress to make their model a bigger part of health reform. Two weeks ago, 13 such groups released a letter saying that recent versions of proposed legislation did not control costs enough.
Their goal is to weaken the fee-for-service system. In its place, doctors might receive a lump-sum payment to treat a patient with a certain condition, based on average costs elsewhere and on what scientific evidence had found to be effective. Hospitals with especially good outcomes might earn bonuses.
Advocates say such a system could ultimately give doctors more control. Rather than having to organize their schedules around the tests and procedures that insurers agree to reimburse, doctors could opt for the treatments they deem most effective. “It’s a lot more accountability, which is why it’s scary for physicians,” said Dr. Mark McClellan, a former head of Medicare under George W. Bush. “But in some ways it’s also more autonomy.”
On Tuesday, doctors and hospital executives from 10 cities with below-average cost growth gathered in Washington for a conference called, “How Do They Do That?” They were a diverse lot, only some of whom hailed from providers resembling the Mayo Clinic. While crediting a range of factors for their success, they generally agreed about what ails American medicine.
When Dr. McClellan, who helped organize the conference, asked how many people thought the fee-for-service system was “archaic and fundamentally at odds” with good practice, most hands shot up. In effect, they were siding with Dr. Shadid and against a system that provides incentives for more and more care, regardless of its benefit.
“There are no consequences right now to over-utilization,” Dr. Anthony F. Oliva, chief medical officer of the Guthrie Healthcare System, in northeast Pennsylvania, said later. “If you don’t have consequences, you won’t change the culture. If you don’t have consequences, the people that are killing themselves to control cost are going to say, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
It is a message, of course, that a doctor can deliver more easily than anyone else.
Labels: budget, COI, costs, economics, healthcare, intervention, medical, medicine, Pharma, pharmaceutical, prevention, risks, survival, vegan, vegetarian
Sunday, April 26, 2009
On my refrigerator is a refrigerator magnet from folk song artist Jay Mankita, for his melodic and memorable album, 'Dogs are watching us." He talks about their trust in us (unlike cats, some might add; others have inspired the trust and love of one or more cats, but that's a different day's posting).
Some of us may find this topic mildly to moderately offensive (some may find it greatly or even profoundly bothering or offensive). It's an obvious takeoff from the song 'God is watching us' which gave many folks pause in the face of an unsettled society in multifactorial upheaval.
Others might think, well, if God is not vegan or even vegetarian (think of all the omnivorous animals in the creation and the deadly 'food chain' observation, even if some of us are exempt, as perhaps the stewards - we humans - who can honor God in the respect of loving all creation (a la NT scholar and professor Richard Alan Young: Is God a Vegetarian?), then at least (omnivorous) dogs CAN be (and should be, for ethical reasons.
Others object, but though cats need taurine (which CAN now be synthesized in a lab (it's good to be gifted with the neurological complexity that enables rational behaviors AND rational analysis, which can lead to the social construction of scientific method and scientific results which reshape society according to socially desirable HUMANE values), (omnivorous) dogs clearly CAN be not merely vegetarian, but also vegan.
The watershed book in the Vegetarian Dogs (and possibly! cats) movement was Dogs and Cats Go Vegetarian by the co-authors whose surname rhymes with EDEN: Barbara Lynn Peden (who did most of the journal research, I'm told; she is now a folksinger, I'm told) and her former husband, James Peden, who in the divorce got full rights to their shared book production AND VegDog & VegCat and empire (he had a paying job on the side and could sustain the D&GV 'empire' (enterprise) ("Harbingers of a New Age"), and she, claiming no extra-corporate skills of her own (though she had done most of the journal research and networking), left with little in the way terminated employees often do, with no IP rights to the work they have done along the way. Jim has since written new literature and a new chapter in the re-released book. In this light, one ought to read the book about Little Tyke, the vegetarian (not vegan) lioness, sold by the American Vegan Society (she died from being overstressed and overexposed on television as a celebrity - read 'oddity' or 'curiosity')
Blaming PETA in the recent media blitzes about vegan - read that again - not vegetarian but VEGAN dogs AND CATS - are those who (IMHO rightly) are concerned that some animals are, when not technically assisted with periodic lab-derived supplementary doses, suffer - read that again - SUFFER. However, the question persists, particularly in a Christian (read Genesis: God gave the animals the world; there was no DEATH (thus no killing for food) in Eden (rhymes with Peden).
More broadly, in monotheistic, Abrahamic 'traditions' of receiving the common literature of Genesis, the problem remains. Mohammed reported taught that 'it is better to drink milk than to eat meat', and while not PROSCRIBING the eating of meat (forbidding or teaching that it is wrong), there is remarkable tolerance in some branches of Christendom and Jewish practice, and even calendared encouragements of it (for its spiritual and 'meditative' or devotional benefits - as in Lent or in PRAYER AND fasting, etc.). Some monastics are largely or always vegetarian in some branches of Christendom. Dissident NON-MONASTIC groups have been suppressed, but often for doctrinary (not doctrinaire, but doctrinary - related to teaching or 'doctrine') or 'non-subscribing' (to doctrine) reasons.
What concerns me, though, is the philosophical problem of thinking inductively in the present world (as we all must) and committing oneself to a loving, rational (and both all-wise and all-knowing AND all-powerful) Deity, known among the uninitiated as God, though sometimes and by some through more personal names, quite reverently thought.
God has an interest in our intentionality - our behaviors - deliberate and unintentional
Some ways of being ourselves behaviorally and mentally are better (or at least less objectionable) than other behaviors. Some secular folks agree to this much; not all do.
In Genesis we are given stewardship in the sense of caring for all life; from this our (a) ecological and (b) humane AND (c) sociological stewardship obligations are derived.
In terms of our spiritually-derived public policy contributions, how can we endorse (let alone mandate) that we OR others care for animals - and humans, too - and the ecosystem in ways that trade off the well-being of some for that of others, even if mathematically one is numerically or quantitatively better.
Further, we’re helped along in this reflection by the prophecy of Isaiah, where the predatory rests with the herbivore, and there is no more exploitation of one (type) of the other (type), nor of one (type) by the other (type).
So, is keeping carnivorous animals, even pre-existing animals BEFORE any possible PHASING OUT of carnivorous animals by massive spay-neuter programs, ethically tolerable, particularly for those who derive at least part of their moral reasoning and rationale from Biblical sources and indirectly from others who also derive their thinking from those Biblical sources/texts?
Searching for vegan-friendly pet food is laudable in general, but specifically in light of this contextual reflection, that somehow, in the process BEFORE God becomes 'All in All', we ought to live in light of the eschaton, the hope of which (perhaps the Indwelling spirit, would be a foretaste or earnest (like earnest money) of one's spiritual inheritance, a life in a world of no more violence, for which righteousness we are to hunger and thirst (and surely our food would be characterized by having no violence).
Labels: animals, bible, biblical, eden, eschatology, evolution, hope, predation, reproduction, spay-neuter, species, survival, vegan, vegetarian
