The reckless pomposity of Mike Pompeo


TOM HUSSAIN

1 DAY AGO

As the curtain closes on his tenure as Secretary of State, Pompeo has cynically pursued a strategy of provocation to undermine the incoming Biden administration.

Some 23 years ago, senior members of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations paid a visit to Abu Dhabi. Over a lunch in which a whole camel - resplendent with glistening hump - was the pièce de résistance, they were pressed by senior Emirati officials over US policy on Iraq.

According to my sources in both camps, the veteran senators were asked why the US persisted with occasional airstrikes against Saddam Hussein's regime. The UAE had just embarked on the massive diversification programme which created the "Hong Kong West" the world is now familiar with. But the US policy of containing Iraq, heavily military defeated as it was after the Kuwait War, was muddying the waters.

As long as uncertainty prevailed about the security situation in the Gulf, the UAE's ability to attract foreign direct investment would be hamstrung. Why not just get rid of Saddam, the Emiratis asked.

Because, they were told by the senators, the US plans for the Middle East were not defined by the threat posed by Saddam. Iraq - and Syria - were the only two Arab states that were practically on an industrial and military par with Israel, they said.

When the US attacked Iraq, it would be with the aim of reducing it to a pre-industrial economy, one of the senators declared, rendering his hosts gobsmacked.

Five years later, whilst investigating US preparations for its invasion of Iraq, I came across evidence of what this would mean, in practical terms, for the people of Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries on Capitol Hill's hit-list.

My sources in the ports and shipping industry gave me good insights into, broadly speaking, what US government cargoes were being pre-positioned at ports in the Middle East as part of the logistical preparations for the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign.

First, stockpiles were gathered at hub ports like Salalah in southern Oman and the UAE's Jebel Ali, and then were transhipped to ports in the northern Gulf, predominantly to Kuwait. Naively, I had expected the US and its allies to cater to the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, seeing as most of them would welcome liberation from Saddam's clutches.

After six months of hopping around port cities in the region, I was mortified by my findings: not a single shipment of humanitarian aid had been shipped by the US. Literally, not one.

The World Food Programme had stockpiled dry food supplies in Jordan, but they were glaringly inadequate considering the scale of the humanitarian disaster that was bound to unfold.

Pompeo’s parting salvo

Since becoming the US Secretary of State in April 2018, Mike Pompeo has single mindedly pursued this destructive, soulless geopolitical agenda.

Seeking to create a fake legacy, Pompeo's tweets and actions on the world stage over the last few weeks have been truly despicable. Certainly, they have been on par with his Neocon responsibility for the fake news about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

I'll start with Pompeo's decision to lift decades-old restrictions on senior US officials visiting Taiwan. He even scheduled a trip to Taipei. There could only ever have been one response from Beijing to Pompeo's brazen attempt to end US adherence to the "One China" policy agreed on by President Nixon in 1972: back down or face a war, the Chinese state media threatened.

Undoubtedly under pressure from Congress and the Biden camp not to trigger World War 3, Pompeo ended his theatrics - much to Taipei's relief. Not, however, before he ensured the premature declassification of details about the Trump administration's policy for the so-called Indo-Pacific region. It confirmed what Beijing had claimed all along: Washington is working aggressively to contain China, up to and including erecting reluctant India as a regional policeman of sorts.

That was provocative, and aimed mainly at further poisoning a US-China relationship undermined by trade warfare before Biden could reset its tone.

But it pales in comparison to Pompeo's moves in the Middle East last week.

The State Department's declaration of Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militia as a terrorist organisation has been greeted with horror and outrage because, if not reversed by Biden, it would exacerbate the world's biggest humanitarian crisis and cause the deaths from malnutrition and sickness of tens of thousands more Yemeni civilians.

Apparently, Pompeo is not satisfied that 85,000 children aged under five died between 2015 and 2018, the first three years of the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. It is, as British politician David Milliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, described it: "Pure diplomatic vandalism".

US Senator Chris Murphy called it an act of "mind blowing insanity" and demanded that the incoming Biden administration rescind it immediately upon taking office next week.

Pompeo's grand finale came after he had a conspicuously public dinner with Israeli intelligence chief Yossi Cohen at a popular Washington restaurant last Monday. Out of the blue, Pompeo declared that Iran had become the new "home base" for Al Qaeda, after Afghanistan.

He offered no new evidence about the complicated relationship between Iran's security services and exiles of the notorious terrorist organisation - just nonsensical spin.

The same spin, in fact, that was imparted to news of Israel's assassination of Al Qaeda's deputy chief Abu Muhammad al Masri in Tehran in July, when it was leaked by the US in November.

In reality, the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda has been defined by expediency and betrayal, according to noted Iran-focused journalist and scholar Barbara Slavin. Stanford University scholar Asfandyar Mir has dismantled Pompeo's claims with his own previous statements, concluding that America's chief diplomat was not motivated by any fresh threat from Al Qaeda.

The same can be said of Pompeo's connivance with the Mossad chief in planning and executing the biggest Israeli airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria.

Whilst there is no debating that a freshly-arrived cache of Iranian missiles was fair game for Israel, Pompeo's primary aim was to mine the waters for the Biden administration by making the prospective return of the US to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that much more difficult.

Indeed, if there is a legacy to Pompeo's term as US Secretary of State, it is one of provocation, instigation, demonisation, inhumanity and hypocrisy.

America and the world will be a far better place without him.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

AUTHOR
Tom Hussain @tomthehack is a journalist and analyst on Pakistan affairs and geopolitics in South Asia.

Sharing profitability with users may be the only way forward for Facebook

RAVALE MOHYDIN

If Facebook wants to maintain its status as the world's biggest social media network it will need to rebuild trust, yes, but more importantly it will need to share a piece of the pie.

Facebook has an identity crisis: is it a platform or a publisher?

For many people, Facebook is their primary news source. For the same people though, it is also a platform, through which they connect with family and friends, find reviews for restaurants and even buy or sell goods. For more than half of all Indonesians, Nigerians, Indians and Brazilians, it is the internet itself.

Facebook is many things to more than 2 billion people – however, its growth is slowing. For the first time ever, it reported a decrease in the numbers of daily active users in the US & Canada region in 2017 Q4.

The slowdown could be due to the changes introduced in 2017 to News Feed, Facebook’s most lucrative product, which changed the type of content shown to users, showing less viral videos that were likely to increase time spent on Facebook.

Facebook also announced that they would only promote content from trustworthy publishers, leading to a jump in the stock prices of media companies such as News Corp and the New York Times. But there is still time before these strategies bear fruit, and investors have decided— for now—to stay put.

In the tech world, however, a company’s valuation is based on how the company will do in the future, given its current state and trajectory. At this point, it looks like Facebook is no longer ‘cool’ to use, as more teenagers – who are the future, literally – in the US and UK are leaving in high numbers.

Facebook can, on the other hand, benefit from its gigantic international audiences: as of January 2018, India, Brazil and Indonesia alone had more than 500 million Facebook users. But here again, Facebook’s future is vulnerable, as foreign governments, along with companies, are beginning to worry about threats to national security, given the disastrous Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle.

Turkey, with its 51 million Facebook users, has already developed an alternative search engine. China never even let Facebook in.

The question remains: how does Facebook protect itself…from itself?

It appears that its own ad-driven business model, resulting in an insatiable appetite for users’ time and data without any consideration for societal costs, is going to be its Achilles’ Heel.

Do we need Facebook?

Facebook, as it is, does have its benefits though. It enables global economic activity by helping to unlock new opportunities through connecting people and businesses, lowering barriers to marketing, and stimulating innovation.

According to a Deloitte report, the ‘Facebook Economy’ resulted in global economic activity worth $227 billion and supported more than 4.5 million jobs in 2014 alone.

Additionally, social movements, such as the Women’s March held one day afer the inauguration of Donald Trump, are arguably more powerful today than they used to be because of Facebook.

Such a powerful platform took time and effort to develop, and no alternatives – with the same level of popularity – exist. Even if a more ethical alternative came into being right now, it will take a very long time to reach the scale at which Facebook has achieved user buy-in. It is important that the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater.

Facebook instinctively knows that its users’ “wellbeing” (read: engagement) is the currency that can sustain its continued growth, and is the right direction to take. However, its attempts to help users ‘spend more time meaningfully’ by using it as a platform to build and maintain social connections, feels like an attempt to fit into a dress that it outgrew five years ago.

A strategy that seems old, and at worst, painfully earnest and saccharine sweet – probably turns off many users (like me). Before that happens, Facebook needs to, yes, definitely go back to its roots, but in a stronger manner.

Without taking responsibility for all content on the platform, Facebook can never truly counter fake news. Without countering fake news, they will never be bona fide publisher.

Instead of trying to be something they are not capable of taking responsibility for (imagine monitoring and editing all content produced all day every day by all 2.2 billion users on Facebook), they should instead focus on what they are truly the best at: being a platform.

They can take it to the next level by allowing users to rent out their data to advertisers for a limited time, after which it self-destructs.

This is not an entirely new idea. Airbnb and Uber Technologies, part of the Sharing Economy, are already doing it, enabling users to rent out their homes and their cars, respectively. This is more sustainable than following a freemium pricing strategy – offering ‘premium’ features at a price – because that risks many users quitting or not upgrading, resulting in a drop in advertisement revenue.

Besides, it’s hard to determine what features would be included in the upgraded (paid) version (capping number of friends one can have? Limiting number of status updates? All these lead to less user engagement, an anathema for Facebook).

‘Steem’, a blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers to monetize content and grow community is already betting on people creating social data if they can profit from it.

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu writes ‘in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity’. Facebook has the chance, once again, to make waves.

19 APR 2018

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.


AUTHOR
Ravale Mohydin @Ravale_Mohydin

 writes about media effects on society, public diplomacy and non conventional warfare. She is an alumna of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Lahore University of Managament Sciences. She currently works at TRT World Research Centre.

Imagining a socialist internet


FAHAD DESMUKH

Can we move toward an internet where your personal data isn't currency to be traded with advertisers, and where services exist for the common good? The good news is that it already exists.

There’s a massive elephant in the room, and the problem is far bigger than Facebook. It's capitalism, and how it manifests itself on the internet.

The solution? A socialist internet - in which the internet is a tool for common good rather than a vehicle for profit.

Guess what? That internet already exists.

Let's be clear on what the fuss is about. An external researcher harvested the personal details of 50 million Facebook users by getting them to use a "personality app".

He then gave the data to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, without getting the consent of the users.

Cambridge Analytica has bragged about it’s role in the Trump campaign and was involved in the Brexit campaign – and the concern is that Facebook data may have been used to support these victories.

What we should be equally worried about is that Facebook already has the data of not just those 50 million users, but of all more than 2 billion active users, and in far greater detail.

They know who most of your friends and acquaintances are, how often you interact with them, what your likes, dislikes, hobbies and work interests are, where you live, where you travel, what your face looks like, your contact information, your phone and laptop model, your internet service provider (ISP), which websites you visit and much more.

We willingly give our private data to Facebook, and give Facebook the consent to use it to earn its annual net income of almost US $16 billion.

Without our consent, Facebook has also (willingly or unwillingly) shared large amounts of our data with government bodies such as the US National Security Agency.

Of course, none of this information is new, but it should make us realise that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is probably the least of our problems when it comes to privacy.

Facebook is just a symptom of a larger disease

The #DeleteFacebook campaign makes it seem like Facebook is an isolated case of an online business that has overstepped its boundaries.

However, most of us should be well aware by now that the problem isn't that of Facebook alone, but it is the business model shared by most internet behemoths controlling the most valuable online real estate, in which we are not the customers, but the commodity.

Facebook and other social media sites sell our eyeballs to advertisers so that we can buy their products. That is their business model.

This business model is novel in some ways, but in essence it is not different from traditional ad-based media. They give us free content to consume, and then sell some of our attention to businesses wanting to sell us things.

The key difference, as far as privacy is concerned, is that the internet allows the businesses to know far more about our personal lives and preferences than was the case for traditional media.

For example, a commercial radio station trying to sell an ad spot to an advertiser would only be able to provide the broad generalised demographics and preferences of its listeners, not the personal and granular details that Facebook offers. But if that radio station could do what Facebook can, then it would, because that is the model of success that we idealise – and it's called capitalism.

One way to describe capitalism is as an economic system in which things are produced not to meet a social need, but so that the capitalist can sell them for a profit. This is precisely what corporations have done to the internet – they have turned it in to a big marketplace to sell things that most people do not need so that a tiny privileged few can hoard more wealth.

As long as we are living in such a system, the pressure will always be on companies like Facebook to be as predatory as they can to maximise profits for its shareholders.

It is what drives capitalists to steal private data and sell it to the highest bidder, or to steal entire communities of humans and sell them to the highest bidder.

Those of us who believe that a better world can be created, in which poverty is eradicated and the caste system of worker and capitalist is abolished, are often accused of being dreamers and Utopians.

It's difficult to imagine that societies without capitalism have existed in the past, or that a world without capitalism is possible in the future, so, when it comes to privacy and social media, many people will just shrug and say that this is just how the world works. Since Facebook is offering us their platform, they will obviously take something from us in exchange.

However, when it comes to software and the internet, it shouldn't be so difficult to imagine a better world, because it already exists – and it’s a large eco-system of software developer communities that have defied the hegemony of capitalism to a large extent.

The open internet

Free and open source software (FOSS) is a category of software that anyone is free to use, modify and distribute without compensating the original developer – in essence, it is software that does not have a private owner.

The idea behind the free software movement is that society as a whole benefits from having software that is communally owned as it allows the public to use the software, and encourages software developers to improve on each other's work rather than re-inventing the wheel within the confines of private company walls.

In fact, much of the software that forms the backbone of the internet and the web today is a product of the FOSS movement, whether it is the operating system of a website server (Linux), the software that delivers a webpage to you (Apache or nginx), the platform used to manage a website (Wordpress) or the browser on your computer to view a website (Firefox).

There is also a benefit to privacy. Capitalist entities like Facebook and Microsoft keep the source code of their software a fiercely guarded secret, so that no one can examine how it works in order to prevent anyone from copying or modifying it.

This means that when Facebook or Microsoft tell us that their software is not spying on us or stealing data from us, we have no way of verifying this and just have to take their word for it. FOSS software, on the other hand, is transparent.

For many of us, it may still be hard to understand the economics of how or why anyone would work on building a product that they cannot sell. But one example of this is Wikipedia.

Not only is the software used to run Wikipedia FOSS, but crucially all of the articles on Wikipedia have been written by volunteers, and can be freely copied, improved and distributed by the public.

The volunteers contribute their time to Wikipedia not in order to make a financial profit, but because they believe that society can benefit from their knowledge, as they can benefit from the knowledge of others.

This idea of helping each other voluntarily (sometimes called “mutual aid”) is at the same time both intuitive and extremely alien. On the one hand, this is how we behave with our family and friends, yet it is alien because our interactions with the rest of society are not dominated by sharing.

So, the technological groundwork has already been laid for an internet which doesn't doesn't steal data or exploit its users. It now requires the political and moral will of the rest of society to adopt those tools and services. They don't have the massive marketing budgets that the corporations have so you have to search for them yourself. And they don't have all of the frills of commercial projects just yet, but as more and more people join and contribute the services will get better and will start looking more like what you’re used to.

So for example, an alternative to Facebook is the Diaspora social network, where the data of users is not in the possession of a single corporate entity. Instead, the data is distributed across several independently managed but federated “pods”, among which you can choose where put your data (or you can even set up your own pod if you have a bit of technical knowledge).

The FOSS movement has shown that the internet and information technology can serve a greater purpose than a marketplace in which the richest companies always win – often at the unknown expense of the public.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

26 MAR2018 

AUTHOR
Fahad Desmukh @desmukh
is a journalist and researcher based in Islamabad, Pakistan, and a member of the research collective Bahrain Watch.

World Wide Web inventor opposes Australia's 

news payment plan

To check the tech giants' power, Canberra is pursuing world-first laws that would require Google and Facebook to compensate Australian news organisations, or pay millions of dollars in fines.

This file photo taken on October 1, 2019, shows the logos of mobile apps Facebook and Google displayed on a tablet in Lille, France. (AFP Archive)

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has said Australia's plan to force digital giants to pay media outlets for news content is "unworkable" and undermines a "fundamental principle" of the internet.

Canberra is pursuing world-first laws that would require Google and Facebook to compensate Australian news organisations, or pay millions of dollars in fines.

The aggressive move to check the tech giants' power has prompted blowback from the US firms, with Facebook warning Australians could be blocked from sharing articles on its "News Feed", while Google has been experimenting with hiding local news in searches.

Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who created the web in 1989, said in a submission to an Australian Senate inquiry he is "concerned that the code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online".

"The ability to link freely -- meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees -- is fundamental to how the web operates, how it has flourished till present, and how it will continue to grow in decades to come," he wrote.

In the submission dated January 18, Berners-Lee said he supports the need for publishers to be "properly rewarded" for their work but "constraints on the use of hypertext links are not the correct way to achieve this goal".

"If this precedent were followed elsewhere it could make the web unworkable around the world," he wrote.

"I therefore respectfully urge the committee to remove this mechanism from the code."

READ MORE: Facebook threatens ban on Australians sharing news posts

The Office of the US Trade Representative has also urged Australia to abandon its "burdensome" plan, saying there could be "long-lasting negative consequences" for consumers and companies.

Canberra's initiative has been closely watched around the globe, as news media worldwide suffer in an increasingly digital economy where big tech firms overwhelmingly capture advertising revenue.

The planned legislation has received widespread support from Australian media organisations, many of which have been hit hard by a drop in revenue during the coronavirus pandemic.

READ MORE: Australia to force Google and Facebook pay for news in unprecedented move

The digital giants have also made submissions to the inquiry, with Facebook urging a return to the voluntary code of conduct first mooted by Canberra.

"Facebook remains willing to pay Australian news publishers for news content made available on Facebook, as long as it is subject to genuine commercial considerations," it said.

Google has said some revisions to the draft proposal have improved the law but called for several further amendments to the rules.

Australia plans to introduce the new rules this year, with the Senate committee set to hold public hearings from Friday.

BREAKING NEWS

We might finally know how dinosaurs had sex

© Provided by BGR dinosaur mating

Dinosaur bones have told scientists a lot about how the ancient animals lived, hunted, and died, but reproduction has remained largely a mystery.

A new fossil from China provides such an incredibly well-preserved look at the dinosaur’s hindquarters that it shows the orifice that was likely used for expelling waste as well as for mating.
This discovery only shows how this particular dinosaur species likely mated.

Despite the fact that they lived tens of millions (and in some cases, hundreds of millions) of years ago, we know a surprising amount about dinosaurs. That’s thanks in large part to the fact that they left plenty of bones behind for us to find, study, and make educated guesses about.

But while hard bones are the most durable and long-lasting remnants of dinosaurs left today, soft tissue is much harder to come by. Because of that, understanding more complex behavior like mating has been a huge challenge. Now, a new fossil from China is helping to open the eyes of scientists and offer clues as to how one species (and perhaps other) dinosaurs pooped, peed, and reproduced.

Butterflies create jet propulsion with a clap of their wings

Scientists at Lund University in Sweden set out to verify a decades-old theory that insects "clap" their wings together, squeezing out the air between with such force that it thrusts them forward.

"Oogomadara" or tree nymph butterflies, the largest butterfly in Japan, fly at Ryugujo Butterfly Garden in Okinawa island, Japan, February 16, 2007. (Reuters Archive)

The whimsical, wafting flight of butterflies may not give the impression of top aerodynamic performance, but research has suggested their large flexible wings could be perfectly designed to give them a burst of jet propulsion.

Scientists at Lund University in Sweden set out to verify a decades-old theory that insects "clap" their wings together, squeezing out the air between with such force that it thrusts them forward.

In their aerodynamic analysis of free-flying butterflies published in the journal Interface, they showed that the clap function does generate a jet of air propulsion.

But they also found that the butterflies perform this move "in a far more advanced way than we ever realised," said co-author Per Henningsson, a professor in the department of biology at Lund University.

At the moment the wings beat together they "were not just two flat surfaces slamming together," he told AFP.

Instead, they form a "pocket" shape believed to trap more air.

When the researchers recreated this using mechanical wings, they found that those with butterfly-like flexibility that form this pocket at the moment of impact were 22 percent more effective in the amount of force created and 28 percent more efficient in the amount of energy used compared with rigid wings.

The team suggested that their findings could have uses for drones that use clapping wing propulsion.

A banded orange butterfly rests on a palm at the Camden Children's Garden in Camden, New Jersey, on September 27, 2005. (AP)

Predator evasion

Henningsson said the "dramatic improvement" in performance came as a surprise.

"This is the type of finding that is the most exciting for a scientist – the ones you didn't really expect," he said.

Butterfly wings "although conventionally considered aerodynamically inefficient" might be particularly good at forming this pocket shape, he added, suggesting they may have evolved enhance clap propulsion as a way to evade predators that might spot them as they take off.

"To minimise the risk of capture, butterflies typically take off very fast and suddenly and many of them fly in an erratic and unpredictable manner," he said.

"If indeed the clap is improved dramatically by the cupped shape of the wings this would allow a butterfly to take off faster and avoid being captured better, and hence you can imagine a strong selective pressure on this feature."

The study suggested other creatures – like fish or frogs – may also have developed clapping propulsion using cupped wings, fins or feet.

Henningsson said while the theory of the wing clap has been around since the 1970s, studies on butterfly flight had often relied on tethered butterflies or used simulations.

But improvements in technology to measure flow meant the authors were able to observe the creatures in natural flight.

READ MORE: Did blue butterflies help unearth mass graves in Bosnia?

READ MORE: Climate change in North America leaves monarch butterfly vulnerable

All-natural Covid-19 vaccine made from honeycombs shows promising results

Ireland’s Cellnutrition Health’s natural vaccine is showing promising results during test trials on animals by combatting the ever-mutating coronavirus, bacteria fungi and certain parasites

.

This picture taken on November 13, 2019 shows bees on a piece of honeycomb with honey at Chinese farmer Ma Gongzuo's apiary in Songyang county in China's Zhejiang province. (AFP)

An Ireland-based nutritional supplements company has announced its natural vaccine, made from honeybee comb, has shown promising results combatting viruses, including Covid-19.

Cellnutrition Health says it "is in the process of testing and producing a new vaccine for all viruses including the ever-mutating coronavirus, bacteria fungi and certain parasites" in a press release published earlier this month.

The company claims it's BEEMAR Formula vaccine is showing successful results in its four-year clinical trials treating infectious bronchitis virus, a member of the coronavirus family.

BEEMAR boosts no side effects as it only uses two active ingredients marine plasma and non-allergenic bee material sourced from protein-based enzymes, lysozymes.

"The first test batches of both the vaccine and immunotherapy will be used specifically to prevent and treat Covid-19," the release said.

USA

State responses, not federal, influenced rise in unemployment claims early in the pandemic

The researchers found found no evidence the Payroll Protection Program affected the number of initial claims during the first six weeks of the pandemic.

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

ATLANTA--Early in the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment claims were largely driven by state shutdown orders and the nature of a state's economy and not by the virus, according a new article by Georgia State University economists.

David Sjoquist and Laura Wheeler found no evidence the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) affected the number of initial claims during the first six weeks of the pandemic.

Their research explores state differences in the magnitude of weekly unemployment insurance claims for the weeks ending March 14 through April 25 by focusing on three factors: the impact of COVID-19, the effects of state economic structures and state orders closing non-essential businesses and the impact of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES) legislation.

During the first week studied, unemployment claims appeared to be driven by consumer reactions to the coronavirus as they adjusted their behavior prior to government shutdown orders. States with greater employment in the industries most affected by the virus and those with a larger share of workers making less than weekly unemployment benefits saw higher shares of new unemployment insurance claims.

By March 21, 31 states had issued orders prohibiting in-restaurant dining. Those that closed nonessential businesses experienced larger numbers of unemployment insurance claims per covered worker. Those that had larger numbers of employees able to work from home did not have a lower increase in new claims. This finding is contrary to what other research has suggested, the co-authors said.

"Earlier studies exploring the effects of COVID cases and school closures on state job markets suggest the reduction in employment was mainly a nationwide response to COVID, and that specific state policies to the disease had a comparatively moderate effect," Sjoquist said. "By considering various state responses, including stay-at-home orders and those closing schools and non-essential businesses, our research provides insight into the effect of a state's industry and employment mix on its unemployment claims during a pandemic."

Individual and organizational capacity to change can reduce health care workforce burnout

New George Mason University Study is one of first to explore the effects of individual and organizational capacity for change on burnout among health care professionals

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

Research News

IMAGE: DR. DEBORA GOLDBERG IS AN EXPERT IN PRIMARY CARE PRACTICE TRANSFORMATION, PATIENT EXPERIENCE, AND CARE FOR THE UNDERSERVED, WITH HER CURRENT AND UPCOMING RESEARCH FOCUSED ON WORKPLACE HEALTH AND WELLBEING. view more 

CREDIT: GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

Even prior to the pandemic, burnout among health care professionals was a pervasive public health concern, with some studies reporting burnout in more than 50% of clinicians. During the COVID-19 pandemic, health care professionals are required to work even longer hours in high stress situations. Understanding causes of burnout and factors that can protect against it can help improve quality of life for the health care workforce and quality of care for patients.

New research by faculty in George Mason University's College of Health and Human Services found that health care professionals with a greater personal ability to respond to change experienced lower rates of burnout when their work environments offered strong communication, teamwork, and leadership support. This is one of the first studies to look at both individual response to change and organizational capacity for change and how these factors affect burnout among health care professionals.

Dr. Debora Goldberg led the study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Goldberg is an expert in primary care practice transformation, patient experience, and care for the underserved, with her current and upcoming research focused on workplace health and wellbeing.

"We know that health care work environments and job demands have a profound effect on the health and well-being of those delivering care, and they may even influence the quality of health care received by patients," explains Goldberg. "Especially as our health care professionals and systems are being pushed to the limit in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative that we are more aware of the influences of the work environment and job demands on health care professionals' health and well-being."

Goldberg and colleagues surveyed 1,279 individuals in 154 primary care practices in Virginia. They measured the practices' capacity for change, individuals' change readiness, hours worked per week, and burnout. Participants were part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Heart of Virginia Healthcare (HVH) collaborative, which supported these practices with transformation and implementation of evidence-based cardiovascular care as they made major changes in operations and employee roles.

Burnout was measured with a single question on whether the health care professionals were experiencing burnout, a measure previously validated and used in workplace studies. Individual change readiness was measured with the Change Diagnostic Index©(CDI), which was developed by Dr. Victoria Grady in Mason's School of Business. Typically, the CDI is used in organizations that are planning for large change initiatives, and this is the first time it has been applied in primary care. The CDI measures individual attitudes toward organizational change in the areas of anxiety, frustration, delayed development, rejection of the environment, refusal to participate, withdrawal, and overall attitude. These individual attitudes can be indicators of larger organizational issues with morale, productivity, motivation, conflict, absenteeism, turnover, and overall organizational issues. The capacity of practices to change was measured by the practice adaptive reserve (PAR) instrument, which asks about an organization's communication, teamwork, relationship trust, leadership, work environment, adoption of innovations, and learning systems.

Consistent with their earlier work, the researchers found that providers were more likely to report burnout (25.5%) than other professionals (19.9% of clinical support staff, 17.5% of administrative staff).

Among all types of health care professionals (providers, clinical support staff, and administrative staff), both practice and individual factors were related to levels of burnout. Lower levels of burnout were reported among those who had higher scores for individual response to change as well as practices that had higher organizational capacity for change. As the change capacity of the practice increased, burnout in healthcare professionals decreased. As health care professionals had more positive responses to change, burnout decreased.

Higher levels of burnout were reported among those who worked more hours per week, were part of a larger practice (more than 10 clinicians) or were part of a single specialty practice.

"We found that the capacity of the practice to change influenced the relationship between individual response to change and burnout," added Goldberg. "Therefore, we recommend that physician practices and health care systems implement initiatives to reduce burnout by creating positive work environments through interprofessional teamwork, employee engagement, and enhanced communication."

###

This study was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) under grant number R18HS023913.

About George Mason University

George Mason University is Virginia's largest and most diverse public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., Mason enrolls 39,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. Mason has grown rapidly over the past half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity and commitment to accessibility. For more information, visit https://www2.gmu.edu/.

About the College of Health and Human Services

George Mason University's College of Health and Human Services prepares students to become leaders and shape the public's health through academic excellence, research of consequence, community outreach, and interprofessional clinical practice. George Mason is the fastest-growing Research I institution in the country. The College enrolls more than 1,900 undergraduate and 1,370 graduate students in its nationally-recognized offerings, including: 5 undergraduate degrees, 13 graduate degrees, and 7 certificate programs. The college is transitioning to a college public health in the near future. For more information, visit https://chhs.gmu.edu/.

Revisiting the Global Workspace orchestrating the hierarchical organisation of the human brain

A paper published on 4 January in the open access journal Nature Human Behavior by Gustavo Deco, director of the Brain and Cognition Center,

UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA - BARCELONA

Research News

 

The celebrations in the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven would not be the same without Herbert von Karajan's brilliant performances conducting Beethoven's memorable symphonies. The execution of any musical symphony is a hugely difficult task, demanding very significant skills on the part of each individual musician - but perhaps the most difficult task lies with the conductor who has to orchestrate the musicians into making the music cohesively come alive and speak to our deepest emotions.

In many ways the human brain is like an orchestra, where different regions perform very different types of processing, such as in the individual musician in the orchestra who needs to be able to read the music, play their instrument and listen to the music produced. Still, the role of the conductor is different, namely to coordinate and orchestrate the output of each musician into a cohesive whole. Without a conductor, the music invariably fails - as shown beautifully in Fellini's magisterial film "Prova d'orchestra" (eng. "Musical rehearsal").

It has been proposed that the human brain is similar to an orchestra in that it is hierarchically organised but that there is unlikely to be just a single conductor. Instead, in 1988 psychologist Bernard Baars proposed the concept of a 'global workspace', where information is integrated in a small group of 'conductors' before being broadcast to the whole brain. This much celebrated theory proposes an elegant solution to how hierarchical organisation allows the brain to orchestrate function and behaviour by organising the flow of information and the underlying computations necessary for survival. As such, this is a theory of consciousness as pointed out by neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, who proposed the 'global neuronal workspace' hypothesis where associative perceptual, motor, attention, memory, and value areas interconnect to form a higher-level unified space where information is broadly shared and broadcast back to lower-level processors. Colloquially, the brain's global workspace is thus akin to a small core assembly of people in charge of an organisation; in other words like a group of many Von Karajans leading a musical orchestra.

Yet, until now it has not been known where and how this orchestration takes place in the human brain. It is only with the new paper "Revisiting the Global Workspace orchestrating the hierarchical organisation of the human brain" published the leading open-access journal Nature Human Behavior on Monday 4th of January 2021 that researchers have discovered the existence of a functional 'rich club' of brain regions incarnating this 'global workpace'. This radical new discovery resulted from Profs Gustavo Deco and Morten L Kringelbach's international collaboration between Center for Brain and Cognition at University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Spain) and Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford (UK) and Center for Music in the Brain, University of Aarhus. Based on a large dataset of over 1000 human participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings, the findings have shed new light on the nature of consciousness.

Prof Deco says: "To identify the global workspace, we determined the information flow between brain regions by means of a normalised directed transfer entropy framework applied to multimodal neuroimaging data a large group of healthy participants. This revealed for the first time a set of unique brain regions orchestrating information from perceptual, long-term memory, evaluative and attentional systems across many different tasks. Furthermore, we confirmed the causal significance and robustness of our results by systematically lesioning a generative whole-brain model".

Prof Kringelbach adds: "Our findings shed light on a major unsolved challenging problem in neuroscience. While the results presented here pertain to the global workspace of conscious task processing, future work could use our framework to investigate other states such as sleep and anaesthesia, allowing for a direct comparison with other theories of consciousness. Equally, our framework could be used to investigate unbalanced brain states in neuropsychiatric disorders and be used to perturb and rebalance the model to identify novel optimal, causal paths to health".

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Even a small amount of gender bias in hiring can be costly to employers

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Tiny amounts of gender bias in employee hiring decisions contribute to concerning rates of discrimination and productivity losses that together represent significant costs, financial and otherwise, for employers, a new study from Oregon State University has found.

Gender bias is a subtle, unintentional preference for one gender over the other. Despite significant efforts to reduce bias in hiring over the last several decades, it continues to persist and pose potential problems for companies, said Jay Hardy, an assistant professor of management in OSU's College of Business and lead author of the study.

"The research has long shown bias exists. This study shows that it matters," Hardy said. "When carried through the hiring decision-making process, tiny amounts of bias will balloon into a high probability of discriminatory hiring outcomes in the eyes of the law, which also has important financial consequences for companies that end up hiring less-qualified candidates.

"The message of this study is that you can't ignore gender bias, even if you think its influence is so small as to not be concerning. Society generally recognizes bias as a moral issue, but we are now learning the extent to which it is a financial and strategic issue, as well."

The findings were published today in the Journal of Management. Co-authors on the paper are Richard Martell and Andy Olstad of Oregon State and Kian Siong Tey, Wilson Cyrus-Lai and Eric Luis Uhlmann of INSEAD, one of the world's largest graduate business schools, with locations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America.

Hardy's research focuses on areas of human resources, including employee recruitment and selection and systematic bias in hiring. His goal for the study was to better understand the effects gender bias in hiring might have for employers.

"Bias is a problem ingrained in us. It is systematic," Hardy said. "It's not typically about bad intent. It is a natural response of human beings to make sense of our complex world by taking mental shortcuts. However, these cognitive shortcuts can have big consequences for us when high stakes rewards like a sought-after job are on the line. Our goal is to better understand it so we can find solutions."

Hardy and his colleagues first reviewed about 30 years of studies on gender bias and hiring in the workplace. The good news is that there appears to be less gender bias effect than there used to be. A couple of decades ago, gender bias influenced about 4% of hires. Today bias influences 1% or possibly fewer hires, Hardy said.

"The science shows that the effects of gender bias on hiring are very small," Hardy said. "In broad strokes, it seems like hiring decisions are actually pretty fair - certainly more fair than they used to be."

To better understand the impact this bias has and what it means for companies, Hardy and his colleagues ran a series of computer simulations. The researchers found that even a small amount of bias in hiring decisions can lead to discriminatory action against job candidates, putting companies at risk of costly legal action. They also found that biased hiring decisions can be costly for companies because a less-qualified candidate may not be successful in the position.

For example, a typical Fortune 500 company that hires 8,000 new employees a year with a 1% gender bias effect can expect 32 additional failed hires and many more sub-optimal hiring decisions, resulting in productivity losses of about $2.8 million per year. A 4% bias effect would lead to an additional 192 failed hires and an additional $17 million in lost productivity.

The study focused specifically on gender, but Hardy said it is likely that other types of bias would have similar or even bigger impacts. Past research has demonstrated that racial bias effects in hiring are much larger than they are for gender, so it is reasonable to think there would be more discrimination and more costs for employers as a result, he said.

"My estimates for gender bias were conservative and my simulations modeled near-optimal hiring conditions, so the impact of gender bias is likely to be higher in many real-world hiring contexts than my study indicates," Hardy said.

Hardy and his colleagues also simulated the impacts of some common methods for reducing gender bias in hiring, such as targeted recruiting efforts to build a bigger pool of female candidates, and found those methods still pose challenges.

"The targeted recruitment of highly qualified candidates can increase representation, but if you're not fixing the underlying bias problem, these methods do not address discrimination and can lead to other issues, including employee dissatisfaction," Hardy said.

Companies looking to reduce gender bias in their hiring processes should look for ways to remove human judgments from the process as much as possible, Hardy said. Interviews are one of the most common but least objective hiring tools, he noted. Future work by Hardy will further explore how to address bias in hiring and other employment decisions.

"Hiring is always going to be an imperfect process because human beings are complicated," Hardy said. "But the gold standard for any hiring manager should be to be as objective as possible in the hiring process."

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Worker safety goes beyond human error

Perceptions of safety procedure quality and utility are the best predictors of workers' likelihood to comply, Texas A&M researchers found

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

Disasters in high-risk industries can have catastrophic environmental, financial and human safety consequences. One way these industries help prevent and mitigate disasters is formal procedures designed to standardize how work is done. These procedures typically come in the form of a written document workers use while performing a task.

Camille Peres, associate professor at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, said that there are two models of safety companies usually follow to varying degrees, whether they realize it or not. Safety model one "is very much a control paradigm," Peres said. "The idea the company has is that if they control absolutely everything that's going on, then they will be safe." This narrow, rule-following approach does not account for unexpected circumstances and broader system issues, such as safety climate.

Safety model two focuses on procedures as a tool for the worker, and the worker being sufficiently trained to know how and when to adjust to unforeseen circumstances.

"Safety model two involves empowering the workers to understand the risks and be able to adapt when necessary to unexpected situations," Peres said. "There is an acknowledgment that things don't always go according to plan, and there is constant feedback between workers and superiors about how best to accomplish work -- this often means improving procedures in an efficient and effective way."

Although safety model two seems like an effective way to prevent incidents from occurring, there has been little empirical evidence for it in the workplace. To fill this research gap, Peres and colleagues, including Joseph W. Hendricks, research associate at the School of Public Health, recently conducted a study to investigate how both safety models one and two influence safety in the workplace through individual and system-level characteristics.

Individual characteristics include amount of work experience, attitude toward procedure utility (or usefulness), and attitude toward procedure compliance. System-level characteristics include worker subjective judgments of procedure quality, safety climate, the efficiency of the procedure change process and the impact of procedure improvement.

The researchers' main findings were that the better the worker's attitude toward compliance and the utility of procedures, and fewer years' experience, the less likely they are to deviate from and actually use procedures.

Further, the researchers found that of the individual-level characteristics, attitudes toward procedure utility were found to be the best predictor of incidents and near-misses, suggesting that the better workers' attitudes regarding procedure utility, the fewer incidents and near-misses they were involved in per year.

"To have utility associated with incidents and near misses is a big deal," Peres said. "This tells industry that it's not enough to have high quality procedures -- you have to have procedures that help workers do their jobs." Specifically, they found that utility was the best predictor of procedure use, even after accounting for procedure quality.

As found in other studies, procedure quality was found to be important. The better the quality of the procedure, the fewer deviations there are, resulting in fewer incidents and near-misses per year.

This study is unique in that it demonstrates procedure quality to be a better predictor than all other predictors -- including individual characteristics. This supports the safety two model, as it suggests that the characteristics of the workers are not what is most predictive of procedure use, procedure deviation, incidents and near misses.

Peres said the study is not advocating for the abandonment of safety model one, but rather for the two models to be used together so that individual and system-level factors can be taken into account to design more effective procedural systems.

Further studies are needed to compare workers' performance in different experimental conditions. It will also be necessary to conduct longitudinal studies to determine how these variables change over time. Peres and Hendricks are working with industry partners as part of the Next Generation Advanced Procedures Consortium to conduct these studies.

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Safety Science link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753520304136?via%3Dihub

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

New study connects religiosity in US South Asians to cardiovascular disease

Scientific Reports publishes the first study to analyze the relationships among proteomic signatures, religion and spirituality and risk of developing a clinical condition

MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL

Research News

 

BOSTON - The Study on Stress, Spirituality and Health (SSSH), a cutting-edge proteomics analysis, suggests that religious beliefs modulate protein expression associated with cardiovascular disease in South Asians in the United States. The research, published by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) in Scientific Reports, demonstrates that spiritual struggles, in particular, significantly modify the impact of unique proteins on risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) in U.S. South Asians, a community that has especially high rates of CVD.

This study represents the first proteomics analysis ever conducted on protein levels in relationship to CVD within a U.S. South Asian population and the first published study to analyze proteomics signatures in relationship to religion and spirituality in any population.

"Before we can develop the best interventions to reduce CVD disparities, we need to understand the biological pathways through which health disparities are produced," says the study's principal investigator and co-senior author Alexandra Shields, PhD, director of the Harvard/MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities at the MGH Mongan Institute and associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "As this study shows, psychosocial factors - and religious or spiritual struggles in particular - can affect biological processes that lead to CVD in this high-risk population. Spirituality can also serve as a resource for resilience and have a protective effect. Given that many of the minority communities that experience higher levels of CVD also report higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, studies such as the SSSH may help identify new leverage points, such as spiritually focused psychotherapy for those in spiritual distress, that could reduce risk of CVD for such individuals."

Results of the study, which included 50 participants who developed CVD and 50 sex- and age-matched controls without CVD from the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) Study (100 participants), indicate that there may be unique protein expression profiles associated with CVD in U.S. South Asian populations, and that these associations may also be impacted by religious struggles, in which, for example, individuals experiencing adverse life events feel they are being punished or abandoned by their God, or have a crisis of faith. The MASALA study includes 1,164 South Asians who were recruited from the San Francisco Bay Area and the greater Chicago area and followed for approximately eight years with the goal of investigating factors that lead to heart disease among this high-risk ethnic group. MASALA is one of the original cohorts participating in SSSH, through which this research was conducted.

"Understanding the pathways of this mechanism at the molecular level using proteomics technology is crucial to developing potential interventions that can help reduce CVD incidence in this population," says Long H. Ngo, PhD, lead author and co-director of Biostatistics in the Division of General Medicine at BIDMC and associate professor of Medicine at HMS.

Co-senior author Towia Libermann, PhD, director of Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Center at BIDMC, adds: "The kinds of blood-based protein biomarkers used in this study are particularly effective in assessing CVD risk because they carry clinical information about risk of disease and are the most commonly used molecules for diagnostic applications."

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Other investigators included Alka Kanaya, MD, professor of Medicine at UCSF and principal investigator of the MASALA Study; Austin Argentieri, MPhil, research associate at the Harvard/MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations, and Health Disparities; and Blake Victor Kent, assistant professor of Sociology at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

The research was funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

About the Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2020, Mass General was named #6 in the U.S. News & World Report list of "America's Best Hospitals."