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Farmed fish exceeds beef worldwide

admin — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:02:37 +0000

The world quietly reached a milestone in the evolution of the human diet in 2011. For the first time in modern history, world farmed fish production topped beef production. The gap widened in 2012, with output from fish farming—also called aquaculture—reaching a record 66 million tons, compared with production of beef at 63 million tons. And 2013 may well be the first year that people eat more fish raised on farms than caught in the wild. More than just a crossing of lines, these trends illustrate the latest stage in a historic shift in food production—a shift that at its core is a story of natural limits.

As the global demand for animal protein grew more than fivefold over the second half of the twentieth century, humans began to press against the productivity constraints of the world’s rangelands and oceans. Annual beef production climbed from 19 million tons in 1950 to more than 50 million tons in the late 1980s. Over the same period, the wild fish catch ballooned from 17 million tons to close to 90 million tons. But since the late 1980s, the growth in beef production has slowed, and the reported wild fish catch has remained essentially flat. (See data.)

The bottom line is that getting much more food from natural systems may not be possible. Much of the world’s grassland is stocked at or beyond capacity, and most of the world’s fisheries are fished to their limits or already crashing. Overstocked rangelands become obvious as the loss of protective vegetation leads to soil degradation, which at its worst can cause punishing dust and sand storms. Overexploited fisheries are less readily visible, but fishing patterns over time reveal that more effort is required to achieve the same size catch as in years past. Boats are using more fuel and travelling to more remote and deeper waters to bring in their haul. Fishers are pulling up smaller fish, and populations of some of the most popular food fish have collapsed.
Cherry Creek News

Obesity can be predicted from infancy

admin — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:00:43 +0000

Infants as young as two months old already exhibit growth patterns that can predict the child’s weight by age 5, according to researchers at Case Western Reserve University’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and Tennessee State University.

“Almost from birth, we quickly saw this growth pattern emerge in our curves and growth charts for weight over height,” said Susan Ludington, the study’s lead investigator and the Carl W. and Margaret David Walter Professor of Pediatric Nursing at Case Western Reserve.

Analyzing well-child records, normal-weight babies with a body-mass index (BMI) in the 17 percentile were found to have plateaued at about two months and rarely deviated over the next five years, she said. Overweight or obese babies crossed the 17 percentile many months later (about age 14 months) and continued an upward climb when BMI growth patterns were monitored.

The findings were reported in Clinical Pediatrics. Ludington collaborated with Lisaann Gittner, assistant professor of public service at Tennessee State University, and Harold Haller, director of Case Western Reserve’s Center for Statistical Consulting.

The researchers found that, by age 5, normal-weight children developed differently from birth than those considered overweight, obese or severely obese.

For this study, 221 children were selected from 4,000 records of healthy children under the care of a health maintenance organization. Each had weight, height and medical records from nine well check-ups over the first five years of their lives.

None had a hospital or emergency room visit, medical procedure or other special medical condition, or were on medications that might skew results. No other study of early weight changes has used a sample of only healthy infants and children.
Cherry Creek News

Obamacare and Medicare – the impacts

admin — Thu, 30 May 2013 15:50:16 +0000

The Colorado Center on Law & Policy weighs in on the Affordable Care Act and Medicare…

March marked the third anniversary of the passage of the health reform law, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). When fully implemented, the law will fundamentally transform the American health care system, providing affordable, quality health insurance to 30 million otherwise uninsured Americans. The law makes significant changes to Medicare, the federal program that provides health insurance to more than 49 million seniors and disabled people across the country, including more than 660,000 people in Colorado. The ACA strengthens benefits for Medicare recipients, creates incentives for quality care and helps to improve the long-term financial stability of the program.

Strengthening Benefits

The ACA made several important improvements to benefits for Medicare recipients. In order to incentivize care that will help prevent illness, Medicare now covers more than 20 preventive services without cost or co-pay. These services include cancer screenings, diabetes screenings, wellness visits, flu shots and smoking cessation counseling. Since its passage, tens of millions of seniors have received preventive services under this provision of the ACA. In 2012 alone, 34 million people received preventive services through Medicare at no cost, including 215,000 Coloradans in the first nine months of 2012.

Seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries will also receive increased prescription drug benefits under the ACA. Since 2006, Medicare beneficiaries have been able to obtain prescription drug coverage through Medicare. Before the ACA, the standard Medicare prescription drug benefit included a deductible ($ 325 in 2013) and covered 75 percent of prescription costs until total prescription costs reached an initial coverage limit ($ 2,970 in 2013). Beneficiaries were responsible for all of their prescription costs in excess of the initial coverage limit until their costs exceeded the catastrophic limit ($ 6,734 in 2013). Beneficiaries were only responsible for 5 percent of any costs that exceeded the catastrophic limit. The gap in coverage between the initial coverage limit and the catastrophic limit is often referred to as “the doughnut hole.”

The ACA closes the doughnut hole. In 2010, the law provided each beneficiary who hit the doughnut hole with a $ 250 rebate. Starting in 2011, beneficiaries whose costs reached the coverage gap received a 50 percent discount on all brand name drugs. By 2020, beneficiaries will pay only 25 percent of the negotiated price for brand and generic prescription drugs above the initial coverage limit.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates that closing the doughnut hole has saved 6.3 million seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries $ 6.1 billion since 2010. In the first 9 months of 2012, nearly 30,000 Coloradans saved $ 18.6 million on prescription drugs, an average of $ 627 each.

Additionally, the ACA eliminates all prescription drug cost sharing for some of the poorest Medicare recipients. Many dual eligible individuals, those who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid, qualify for subsidies that help them cover the cost of their Medicare prescription drug coverage. Beneficiaries who receive the maximum subsidy have no deductible, minimal cost sharing in the initial coverage period and doughnut hole, and no cost sharing above the catastrophic limit. If these beneficiaries are in a nursing home or medical institution, they have no cost sharing. However, some dual eligible individuals who would otherwise need institutional care receive care at home. Before the ACA, these individuals would have still had some prescription drug cost sharing because they were not residents of an institution. The ACA completely eliminates prescription drug cost sharing for dual eligible individuals receiving care at home who would otherwise need institutional care. More than 70,000 Coloradans are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid and many will benefit from the elimination of prescription drug cost sharing under this provision.

Improving Healthcare quality

Traditionally, Medicare has paid providers based on the volume of procedures and tests they perform (fee-for-service) but has not held them accountable for reducing complications and improving patient outcomes. The Affordable Care Act makes a number changes to Medicare that seek to encourage doctors and hospitals to provide better quality care.

Medicare has historically paid hospitals each time a patient is admitted to the hospital even if that admission was preventable. Patients are often readmitted within days of being discharged from a hospital. Readmissions are often caused by complications or infections from the initial hospitalization, a lack of attention to a patient’s medication needs, and poor communication between providers and patients. In 2005, 6.2 percent of Medicare patients who were admitted to the hospital were readmitted within seven days, and 84 percent of these readmissions were preventable. Preventable readmissions cost Medicare billions of dollars annually and cause patients unnecessary harm.

Following the recommendation of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), the ACA holds hospitals accountable for preventing readmissions. The law requires Medicare to reduce hospital payments based on the amount of preventable readmissions for high volume or high rate conditions, such as heart failure or pneumonia. This provision seeks to incentivize better care coordination for patients being discharged and is estimated to save $ 7.6 billion over the first 10 years.
Cherry Creek News

Colfax Marathon – Traffic Impacts

admin — Wed, 15 May 2013 23:33:38 +0000

To provide a safe environment for the 2013 Kaiser Permanente Colfax Marathon, the cities of Aurora, Denver and Lakewood will have temporary traffic impacts along Colfax Avenue on Sunday, May 19, 2013. While travel on Colfax Avenue will be restricted, normal traffic patterns will resume as soon as it’s safe for athletes, spectators and motorists.

General Traffic:
*The marathon will have full and partial closures of westbound and eastbound Colfax from Aurora to Lakewood starting as early as 3 a.m. and ending as late as 1 p.m.
*Roads that cross Colfax Avenue and 17th Avenue could experience significant delays.
*The easiest places to cross Colfax Avenue will be at Interstate 25, Federal Boulevard, and Interstate 225.
*Drivers are urged to avoid Speer Boulevard and Colfax Avenue all together.
*Crossing intersections along Colfax will be allowed on a very limited basis when safety allows and only at intersections with uniformed police officers.
*Eastbound Colfax Avenue will be open from Denver’s City Park west to Quitman Street and from *Colorado Boulevard east to Ursula Street.
*Westbound Colfax will be closed from Havana Street in Aurora to Garrison Street in Lakewood in certain sections.
*As the race progresses from Denver’s City Park to Aurora and Lakewood simultaneously, streets will open to normal traffic as rapidly as possible.

Cherry Creek News

Biofuels get another boost – Peak Oil

admin — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:27:02 +0000

Advanced biofuels – liquid fuels synthesized from the sugars in cellulosic biomass – offer a clean, green and renewable alternative to gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. Bringing the costs of producing these advanced biofuels down to competitive levels with petrofuels, however, is a major challenge. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a bioenergy research center led by Berkeley Lab, have taken another step towards meeting this challenge with the development of a new technique for pre-treating cellulosic biomass with ionic liquids – salts that are liquids rather than crystals at room temperature. This new technique requires none of the expensive enzymes used in previous ionic liquid pretreatments, and makes it easier to recover fuel sugars and recycle the ionic liquid.

“Most of our ionic liquid efforts at JBEI have focused on using enzymes to liberate fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass after pretreatment, but with this new enzyme-free approach we use an acid as the catalyst for hydrolyzing biomass polysaccharides into a solution containing fermentable sugars,” says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI’s Deconstruction Division and was the leader of this research. “We’re then able to separate the pretreatment solution into two phases, a sugar-rich water phase for recovery and a lignin-rich ionic liquid phase for recycling. As an added bonus, our new pretreatment technique uses a lot less water than previous pretreatments.”

Simmons is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research that has been published in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels. The paper is titled “Production and extraction of sugars from switchgrass hydrolyzed in ionic liquids.” Co-authoring it were Ning Sun, Hanbin Liu Noppadon Sathitsuksanoh, Vitalie Stavila, Manali Sawant, Anaise Bonito, Kim Tran, Anthe George, Kenneth Sale, Seema Singh and Bradley Holmes.

With the burning of fossil fuels continuing to add 9 billion metric tons of excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, the need for carbon neutral, cost-competitive renewable alternative fuels has never been greater. Advanced biofuels, produced from the microbial fermentation of sugars in lignocellulosic biomass, could displace gasoline, diesel and jet fuel on a gallon-for-gallon basis and be directly dropped into today’s engines and infrastructures without impacting performance. If done correctly, the use of advanced biofuels would not add excess carbon to the atmosphere.

Environmentally benign ionic liquids are used as green chemistry substitutes for volatile organic solvents. While showing great potential as a biomass pretreatment for dissolving lignocellulose and helping to hydrolyze the resulting aqueous solution into fuel sugars, the best of these ionic liquids so far have required the use of expensive enzymes. Recent studies have shown that acid catalysts, such as hydrochloric or Brønsted, can effectively replace enzyme-based hydrolysis, but the subsequent separation of sugars and ionic liquids becomes a difficult and expensive problem can require the use of significant amounts of water.

Guided by molecular dynamics simulations carried out at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Simmons and his colleagues at JBEI solved this problem by deploying the ionic liquid imidazolium chloride in tandem with an acid catalyst.

Cherry Creek News

Fleeing Facebook

admin — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:20:07 +0000

With more than a billion active accounts worldwide, it can be easy to forget that some people don’t use Facebook.

A study by Cornell University researchers presented this week in Paris suggests that “non-use” of the social networking site is fairly common – a third of Facebook users take breaks from the site by deactivating their account, and one in 10 completely quit.

Study: https://cornell.box.com/FleeingFacebook

Of 410 people who responded to an online questionnaire, 46 reported that they had deleted their Facebook account. More than 90 percent said they were happy with their decision, and most stayed away. Others were not able to completely cut themselves off, but nonetheless reported taking breaks from using the social networking site.

More than one-quarter of respondents (110) reported deactivating their account, which hides everything they have done on Facebook but retains the data and allows them to reactivate at any time. Two-thirds of deactivators reported being happy with their decision; one-third subsequently returned to Facebook.

A few respondents reported using other creative means to limit their use of the site, according to the study’s lead author, Eric P. S. Baumer, a postdoctoral associate in communication at Cornell. The study was presented on May 2 at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris, France.

“Several participants asked their significant other or spouse to change their password, only allowing them to log in on a limited basis,” Baumer said. “One participant described redirecting all email from Facebook to an email address that he never checked. Others installed browser plugins that blocked them from visiting the site.”

Cherry Creek News

Just one 12 oz sweetened drink a day can increase ...

admin — Tue, 07 May 2013 23:20:54 +0000

Drinking one (or one extra)* 12oz serving size of sugar-sweetened soft drink a day can be enough to increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 22%, a new study suggests. The research is published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) and comes from data in the InterAct consortium**. The research is by Dr Dora Romaguera, Dr Petra Wark and Dr Teresa Norat, Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues.

Since most research in this area has been conducted in North American populations, the authors wanted to establish if a link between sweet beverage consumption and type 2 diabetes existed in Europe. They used data on consumption of juices and nectars, sugar-sweetened soft drinks and artificially sweetened soft drinks collected across eight European cohorts participating in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC study; UK, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Sweden, France, Italy, Netherlands)***, covering some 350,000 participants.

As part of the InterAct project, the researchers did a study which included 12,403 type 2 diabetes cases and a random sub-cohort of 16,154 identified within EPIC. The researchers found that, after adjusting for confounding factors, consumption of one 12oz (336ml) serving size of sugar-sweetened soft drink per day increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 22%. This increased risk fell slightly to 18% when total energy intake and body-mass index (BMI) were accounted for**** (both factors that are thought to mediate the association between sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption and diabetes incidence). This could indicate that the effect of sugar-sweetened soft drink on diabetes goes beyond its effect on body weight.

Cherry Creek News

How Charter schools cherry pick students

admin — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:18:26 +0000

Charter schools may be public, but they can shape their student enrollment in surprising ways. This is done though a dozen different practices that often decrease the likelihood of students enrolling with a disfavored set of characteristics, such as students with special needs, those with low test scores, English learners, or students in poverty.

“The Dirty Dozen: How Charter Schools Influence Student Enrollment,” by Kevin Welner, Professor of education policy at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education and director of the National Education Policy Center, is now available here: http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=17104.

To describe the strategies, Welner’sTeachers College Record article identifies 12 different approaches, using lighthearted category names such as “The Bum Steer,” “Location, Location, Location,” and “Mad Men.” But the subject itself is of crucial importance, since it raises vital issues concerning equity as well as the reporting of research outcomes.

Researchers and governmental authorities have long known that charter schools generally under-serve a community’s at-risk students. Welner’s article builds on this research to explore the charter school practices that result in those enrollment outcomes.

When charter schools fail to serve a cross-section of their community, they undermine their own potential and they distort the larger system of public education. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” says Welner. “The task for policymakers is to redesign charter school policies in ways that provide choice without undermining other important policy goals. For instance, being innovative doesn’t require being selective or restrictive in enrollments.”

“These practices,” Welner explains, “also make it difficult for researchers to accurately compare the effectiveness of charter and non-charter schools.” High-quality research studies make great efforts to include a comparison group of non-charter school students that matches charter school students in key ways such as race, free and reduced lunch status, and gender.

Yet the many ways charters influence enrollment create daunting obstacles for researchers. Welner cautions researchers and policy makers: “These studies cannot account for all these practices merely by research design or statistical adjustments. Studies of charter school performance are almost surely attributing results to charter school instructional programs that are caused in part by charter school enrollment practices.”

Welner says that he started to write this analysis after reading a February 2013 article written by Reuters reporter Stephanie Simon. Her article described a variety of ways that charter schools “get the students they want.” “I sought to build on Simon’s excellent work,” Welner said. “After reading the Reuters article, I started noticing a variety of other ways in which charter schools influence the makeup of their enrollment.”

Cherry Creek News

Teens less willing to work hard, more ...

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 23:15:18 +0000

Are today’s youth really more materialistic and less motivated than past generations, or do adults tend to perceive moral weakness in the next generation?

San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. Twenge — along with co-author Tim Kasser, professor of psychology at Knox College — has set out to answer that question.

In a study published today byPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Twenge and Kasser show that there is in fact a growing gap for today’s young adults between materialism and the desire to work hard.

“Compared to previous generations, recent high school graduates are more likely to want lots of money and nice things, but less likely to say they’re willing to work hard to earn them,” said Twenge, author of the book “Generation Me.”

“That type of ‘fantasy gap’ is consistent with other studies showing a generational increase in narcissism and entitlement,” Twenge said.

Twenge and Kasser drew from a nationally representative survey of 355,000 U.S. high school seniors conducted from 1976 to 2007. The survey examines the materialistic values of three generations with questions focused on the perceived importance of having a lot of money and material goods, as well as the willingness to work hard.

The fantasy gap

Compared to Baby Boomers graduating from high school in the 1970s, recent high school students are more materialistic — 62 percent of students surveyed in 2005-07 think it’s important to have a lot of money, while just 48 percent had the same belief in 1976-78.

Sixty-nine percent of recent high school graduates thought it was important to own a home, compared to just 55 percent in 1976-78. Materialism peaked in the 80s and 90s with Generation X and has continued to stay high.

As for work ethic, 39 percent of students surveyed in 2005-07 admitted they didn’t want to work hard, compared to only 25 percent in 1976-78.

The researchers also found that adolescents’ materialism was highest when advertising spending made up a greater percentage of the U.S. economy.

“This suggests that advertising may play a crucial role in the development of youth materialism,” said Twenge. “It also might explain the gap between materialism and the work ethic, as advertising rarely shows the work necessary to earn the money necessary to pay for the advertised products.”

Why it matters

Understanding generational trends in materialism among youth is important because placing a strong priority on money and possessions is associated with a variety of problems, including depression and anxiety, according to earlier research performed by Kasser.

“This study shows how the social environment shapes adolescents attitudes,” said Twenge. “When family life and economic conditions are unstable, youth may turn to material things for comfort. And when our society funds large amounts of advertising, youth are more likely to believe that ‘the good life’ is ‘the goods life.’”

Cherry Creek News

Choosing the right car

admin — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:06:56 +0000

Making a choice for a car can be more than just a matter of economy, style or price.

Automobile crashes are a leading cause of death and severe injury. So picking the right car can literally be a matter of life or death.

Via: CheapAutoInsurance.org

Cherry Creek News