haven

2Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

EDUCATION

Online School Offered A Safe Haven For Bullied Teens

Online school during the COVID-19 pandemic was hard on many teens, but new research I co-authored has found a potential silver lining: Students were bullied less during remote instruction than while attending classes in person. We learned this by surveying 388 ninth graders at U.S. high schools. We asked them to answer questions three times over the 2020-2021 school year, at about three-month intervals: in November 2020 and February and May 2021. During that period, many students switched between online-only, in-person-only and hybrid schooling, as the severity of the pandemic shifted and state and local guidelines adjusted. We asked the students to tell us which of those environments they were learning in, how frequently they were the target of bullying, and whether they were feeling de...

No Haven In Family Courts For Victims Of Domestic Abuse

2Dec

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY

No Haven In Family Courts For Victims Of Domestic Abuse

The #MeToo movement may have shifted the balance of credibility on sexual abuse and harassment at work more toward victims and away from alleged perpetrators. But the same cannot be said regarding men’s violence and abuse at home: In fact, women’s reports of domestic violence are still widely rejected, especially in one critical setting: the family court. When women, children or both report abuse by a father in a case concerning child custody or visitation, courts often refuse to believe them. Judges even sometimes “shoot the messenger” by removing custody from the mother and awarding it to the allegedly abusive father. For instance, courts reject 81% of mothers’ allegations of child sexual abuse, 79% of their allegations of child physical abuse, and 57% of their allegations of partner a...

People Haven’t Gotten Information They Need When They Needed It And Have Had A Hard Time Weighing Pandemic Risks

30Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

People Haven’t Gotten Information They Need When They Needed It And Have Had A Hard Time Weighing Pandemic Risks

The decision to pause and then restart the Johnson & Johnson vaccine underscores how hard it is even for experts to gauge health risks. It’s been still harder for everyday people, most of whom have no medical background and little experience analyzing risks and benefits. People have experienced confusion about mask-wearing, physical distancing, travel, remote work, financial assistance measures and more. Now people are weighing uncertainty about vaccines. Further, some members of historically marginalized groups are skeptical of vaccine safety, as retired NFL star Marshawn Lynch detailed in a recent interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden. We are informatics and regulation researchers who study intersections among information, policy and human behav...

Brain scientists haven’t been able to find major differences between women’s and men’s brains, despite over a century of searching

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TECHNOLOGY

Brain scientists haven’t been able to find major differences between women’s and men’s brains, despite over a century of searching

People have searched for sex differences in human brains since at least the 19th century, when scientist Samuel George Morton poured seeds and lead shot into human skulls to measure their volumes. Gustave Le Bon found men’s brains are usually larger than women’s, which prompted Alexander Bains and George Romanes to argue this size difference makes men smarter. But John Stuart Mill pointed out, by this criterion, elephants and whales should be smarter than people. So focus shifted to the relative sizes of brain regions. Phrenologists suggested the part of the cerebrum above the eyes, called the frontal lobe, is most important for intelligence and is proportionally larger in men, while the parietal lobe, just behind the frontal lobe, is proportionally larger in women. Later, neuroanatomists...