Chester Eastside News: May 2014

Friday, May 30, 2014

The Link Between STEM Training and Civil Rights - Nextgov

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By Brittany Ballenstedt May 29, 2014 4 Comments

Article link: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/wired-workplace/2014/05/link-between-stem-training-and-civil-rights/85411/?oref=nextgov_cio_briefing

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Securing America’s future in science, technology, engineering and math fields requires more than expanding opportunities for women. Promoting interest and opportunities for minorities also should be a national imperative, particularly as more than half of children born in the United States today are of minority descent.

That was the topic of a symposium at the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday that sought to find solutions for providing minorities and women with proven pathways for obtaining good jobs and a higher standard of living through STEM education.

The event, hosted by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, highlighted that now, 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, education in the United States remains separate and unequal for many minorities, children with disabilities and those living in high-poverty areas. STEM is one area that has great potential to reverse that trend and help the United States maintain a competitive edge, experts noted.

“The era of pick-and-shovel jobs is gone,” said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Those who would support themselves in the 21^st century need a high school diploma and more -- career training, an associates degree, or ideally, a four-year college degree.”

The symposium explored the need to pique girls' and minority children's interest in science and math; the importance of expanding access to Advanced Placement courses and broadband access; and the need for more technology-competent teachers.

The Obama administration’s five-year strategic plan for STEM education shows that only 2.2 percent of Hispanics and Latinos, 2.7 percent of African Americans and 3.3 percent of Native Americans and Alaska Natives have earned a first university degree in natural sciences or engineering by age 24. Women represent less than 20 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients in areas like computer science and engineering, and hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs.

“We have only 21 percent of students in high school STEM programs who are girls, and we know girls are about half of the kids in high school,” said Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. “We are not serving our girls period in STEM.”

David Johns, executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, spoke about programs like My Brother’s Keeper that aim to unlock opportunities for boys and young men of color.

Lhamon urged symposium participants as well as government agencies, policymakers, educators and the public to visit ORCdata.gov, the Education Department’s civil rights data collection website, to analyze student equity and opportunity. She also stressed the need for continued funding for programs like Race to the Top, which provides competitive grants to states willing to innovate and reform K-12 education, in helping open up opportunities in STEM to minority students and women.

“We should be asking questions about whether disparities present in the data warrant further action and warrant changes at our schools and districts in our state,” Lhamon said. “We should be doing better than offering calculus to a few said students; we should be doing better than offering physics to a few said students. We need to be sure we have access to teachers that are prepared for them and schools that are prepared for them. … We should be one joined community in demanding civil rights for all of our kids.”

Comcast-Time Warner deal may hinge on anemic low-cost Internet plan - Center for Public Integrity

Article link: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/05/28/14808/comcast-time-warner-deal-may-hinge-anemic-low-cost-internet-plan

As Comcast Corp. tries to convince the federal government to permit it to buy Time Warner Cable Inc. for $45 billion, opponents of the deal will inevitably bring up people like Ed.

“The Internet today is like electricity. If you don’t have it, you’re screwed.”- Ed, a Scranton, Pa. resident, has been unemployed for nearly four years

Every morning at 8:15, Ed climbs into his red, 1999 Mazda sedan and drives 15 miles down Main Street in Scranton, Pa. He passes mom-and-pop sandwich shops, a shuttered elementary school and a computerized shooting gallery for archery on his way to a friend’s 86-year-old house where coal miners once lived — and where there’s an Internet connection.

Ed, who comes here because he can’t afford the parking fees at a library six miles away, first reads his email and then turns his attention to job sites such as snapjobsearch, glassdoor, Monster and Craigslist. He’s been following this routine for nearly four years, looking for an opening in the hotel or restaurant business where he’s got some experience, but he has yet to land a job. Without the Internet connection, he’d have no hope.

“You can’t walk into a Wal-Mart without filling out an application online first,” said Ed, who doesn’t want to use his last name because he fears employers may avoid hiring him. “The Internet today is like electricity. If you don’t have it, you’re screwed.”

Ed wouldn’t have to rely on the goodwill of friends and make the daily 30-mile round trip if Comcast, the only fast, wired broadband provider in the Scranton area, offered its low-priced Internet service to people like him. But the $9.95-a-month program, called Internet Essentials, is available only to low-income families with school-age children.

Comcast Promised Poor Americans Cheap Internet, But Most Of Them Didn't Get It - Nextgov

David Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation, left, testifies with Robert Marcus, Chairman and CEO, Time Warner Cable at a hearing on the proposed merger of the two companies. // Carolyn Kaster/AP

By Allan Holmes Quartz May 28, 2014 1 Comment

Not for everyone

Ed, 53-years-old and single, isn’t eligible, even though he’s living on $169 a month in food stamps and the generosity of family and friends.

Comcast offered Internet Essentials shortly before its last big acquisition, when it bought NBC Universal in 2011. To ease federal approvals of the transaction, the company promised that it would offer low-priced Internet connections and computers to low-income families. But the Federal Communications Commission, which approved the merger, didn’t set any participation requirements, or metrics to define success.

Now the cable and broadband giant, wants to buy Time Warner Cable, and again in an attempt to show regulators the deal is in the public interest, is offering to extend the program indefinitely and offer it to all Time Warner’s customers too. The deal, if approved, will give Comcast control of about 40 percent of U.S. Internet users.

The program makes for good public relations, but its real impact on the persistent problem of low-broadband adoption rates among the poor is negligible and is a weak substitute for a national strategy, advocates say.

Of the 7.2 million low-income people in Comcast’s service area, only 2.6 million are eligible for Internet Essentials, according to data compiled by the Center for Public Integrity. The program requires the participant’s household to include a child who is eligible for the federal school lunch program. Of that 2.6 million, only 300,000, or 12 percent, have signed up since Internet Essentials was launched in 2011.

Weekly Update from Chester Eastside, Wednesday, May 28

Weekly Update from Chester Eastside, Wednesday, May 28

Poverty: Lacking even the basics.

Nearly half of all Chester children under the age of five live in poverty; overall, 35 percent of Chester residents fall below the poverty line.

Basics like food and shelter are priority number one for families living in poverty. Out of the twelve food centers that belong to the Delco Interfaith Food Assistance Network (DIFAN), five are located in Chester alone. Chester Eastside’s Food Ministry is one of the largest DIFAN programs, serving on average 600 people per month, a fourth of them children.

U.S. food stamp funds cut, then cut again.

Last November, 47 million Americans, including 22 million children, saw their federal food stamps reduced under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). For a family of three, that amounted to a loss of $29 a month.

Then in February, Congress passed a farm bill that would lop another $8.7 billion off SNAP in the coming decade. As a result, 400,000 households in Pennsylvania stood to lose another $60-65 a month on average. Help for those Pennsylvania households came from an unexpected source: Governor Tom Corbett moved to restore SNAP money; he had previously sought to limit access to food stamps.

When food stamps are cut, food cupboards feel the pinch.

When funds for things like food stamps are reduced, more people are forced to turn to food cupboards like the one at Chester Eastside. The resources needed to run the Food Ministry at Chester Eastside come from a number of sources. DIFAN is one. TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program, a federal program) is another. But an essential part of the mix is the generous donations of food from area churches.

It’s not just food that makes the Food Ministry work. People from Chester and nearby suburbs give many hours of their time as volunteers every Monday and Wednesday morning, helping to operate the program. Without them, we would have a hard time providing this urgently needed service.

You may want to forward this Weekly Update to a friend.

Chester Eastside

www.chestereastside.org

610-872-4812

• Meeting basic human needs

• Helping people of all ages be all that they can be

• Working for a more just society

Thursday, May 22, 2014

How Being Poor Makes You Sick - The Atlantic

Some patients are being "prescribed" bicycles and groceries as doctors attempt to treat the lifestyle consequences of poverty, in addition to its medical symptoms. Can it work?

Olga Khazan May 21 2014, 9:00 AM ET

Article link: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/poverty-makes-you-sick/371241/

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

When poor teenagers arrive at their appointments with Alan Meyers, a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center, he performs a standard examination and prescribes whatever medication they need. But if the patient is struggling with transportation or weight issues, he asks an unorthodox question:

“Do you have a bicycle?”

Often, the answer is “no” or “it’s broken” or “it got stolen.”

In those cases, Meyers does something even more unusual: He prescribes them year-long memberships to Hubway, Boston’s bike sharing program, for just $5 per year—a steep discount from the regular $85 price.

“What we know is that if we are trying to get some sort of exercise incorporated into their daily routine, [the bike] works better than saying, ‘Take x time every day and go do this,’” Meyers told me.
The bike-prescribing program is paid for by the city. For patients without bank accounts, Boston even puts up its own city credit card. Meyers thinks the two-wheeled solution tackles several problems at once.

A Hubway bike in Boston (Louis Oliveira/Flickr)

“Boston is pretty compact, parking is always a problem, and getting around on a bicycle makes all the sense in the world,” he said. Plus, doctors at Boston Medical Center use their electronic medical records to prescribe the bikes, and they plan to measure how patients’ use of the bikes tracks with their weight and health over time.

Meyers realizes that sedentariness is one of the many ills that afflict the poor to a greater degree than the rich. People earning less than $36,000 are far less likely to exercise than those earning $80,000 or more. Low-income people may live in dangerous areas, have little free time, lack access to parks, or some combination.

The bike program is one example of the various ways physicians are attacking a vexing problem that’s not in any medical handbook: Poor patients are sicker, and their poverty actually makes them sick.

How ‘Toxic Stress’ Damages the Brain

One in every six Americans lives in poverty–for an individual, that means earning less than $11,670 per year. The immediate lifestyle implications of such an income are clear: It’s not enough to buy a decent one-bedroom apartment in most cities, let alone a gym membership, fresh produce, or access to high-end medical care. A healthy diet, as one study determined last year, costs $1.50 more per day than an unhealthy one.

And it’s well known that low-income people aren’t as healthy. People of a lower socioeconomic status have a 50 percent higher risk of developing heart disease, for example. Writing in the New York Times, Annie Lowrey found that though Virginia’s Fairfax County and West Virginia’s McDowell County are separated by just 350 miles, men in the richer Fairfax County have “a life expectancy of 82 years and women, 85, about the same as in Sweden. In McDowell, the averages are 64 and 73, about the same as in Iraq.”

But a growing body of evidence suggests that the very condition of living with no money, in a tumultuous environment, and amid stark inequality can alter individuals’ gene expression. What’s more, the pressure of being poor sometimes weighs so heavily that the body pumps out more stress hormones, which ravage the immune system over time.

Poor nutrition, trying times, and environmental toxins in childhood can turn certain genes “on” or “off.” Even poor children who seemingly overcome the hardships of poverty—by making good grades and adapting socially—tend to have higher levels of stress hormones, blood pressure, and body mass index than their wealthier peers.

"Exposure to stress over time gets under the skin of children and adolescents, which makes them more vulnerable to disease later in life," says Gene Brody, founder and director of the University of Georgia Center for Family Research.

Child-rearing problems that are more prevalent among poor households, such as chronic neglect or a parent's incarceration, compound on money woes and congeal into something known as “toxic stress.” These “adverse childhood experiences” jab at the brain at critical moments in its development, changing the architecture of key brain structures and setting the stage for long-term anxiety and mood-control issues.

“If you have a whole bunch of bad experiences growing up, you set up your brain in such a way that it’s your expectation that that’s what life is about,” James Perrin, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me.

In a groundbreaking study in Science last year, people who were primed to think about financial problems did worse on a series of tests that involved decision-making—a sign that physical scarcity can make it difficult for our brains to free up enough space for long-term planning.

One study found that the anxiety of living in poverty is a stronger predictor of mental health problems than going to war. Food-stamp recipients cannot use their benefits to buy diapers, and last year, a team of researchers at Yale University’s School of Medicine found that mothers who couldn’t afford diapers for their babies were more likely to feel depressed and anxious.
These worries can leave their mark on children, both in the form of a more volatile childhood environment and, potentially, through the mother’s own genetic makeup: Animal studies have shown that anxieties about certain stimuli can be hereditary.

Poverty can also deplete self-control. Smoking and unhealthy eating habits are more prevalent among the poor. A just-published study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that girls who were repeatedly exposed to poverty growing up were more likely to be overweight or obese as young women.

“Habits form early,” Daphne Hernandez, the study author and health policy professor at the University of Houston, told me. “You begin to crave those [inexpensive] foods, and making the transition to healthier foods is difficult. Even when you’re not living in poverty anymore, you may still be buying the cheaper foods.”

Hernandez found that for boys, childhood poverty wasn’t linked to adult weight problems—but that isn’t necessarily anything to celebrate. Hernandez thinks it's heavy childhood manual labor that’s protecting the boys from obesity. “If you live in poverty, you’ll enter the labor market earlier,” she said. “For girls, it’s babysitting, but for boys in impoverished communities, they’ll more than likely engage in construction work.”

All of these factors combined mean that when doctors treat poor patients, they’re facing not just one ailment, but two: the illness itself, and the economic fragility that underlies it.
“Our society in general has looked at the issue of poverty in two ways: either a social problem, or a mental-health problem,” said Nadine Burke Harris, a San Francisco pediatrician. “But it's also a serious medical problem.”

A Patchwork of Programs

Some doctors are incorporating the treatment of poverty-related obstacles into their medical routines. In addition to its bicycle program, Boston Medical Center operates a food pantry for food-insecure families.

There are also groups like Health Leads, which was started by the lawyer Rebecca Onie at Boston Medical Center when she was a Harvard sophomore. Today, Health Leads allows doctors in 20 clinics across the country to “prescribe” services like healthy food or safe housing to their low-income patients. Health Leads volunteers (usually med students) set up card tables in clinic waiting areas and try to connect patients with prescribed services.

“A busy mom, a single mom who has two kids and doesn't have a car—when she walks out of the doctor’s office, she will never be more motivated than she is right there,” Health Leads’ marketing director, Connie French, told me. “If all of this can happen in one environment, it's more likely she'll have the time to do the things she needs to do to stay healthy.”

One D.C. woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, recently met with Health Leads in the lobby of the office where she takes her grandson, who lives with her, for asthma treatment. The group told her that the roaches in her mobile home might be exacerbating his asthma and taught her how to trap them with roach motels.

Roughly two-thirds of Health Leads patients secure at least one resource—receiving food, getting their heat turned back on, or finding a job—within 90 days of speaking to a volunteer, Onie told The Atlantic in 2011.

In San Francisco, Burke Harris launched the Center for Youth Wellness, where each child gets a universal screening for adverse childhood experiences as part of his or her first doctor's visit. Depending on the roots of the patient’s stress, the Center may provide counseling for both mother and child. Or it might refer them to a practitioner trained in biofeedback—a type of meditative training that aims to bring relaxation through greater awareness.

“[The biofeedback specialist] hooks the kid up to a bunch of electrodes that measure things like heart rate and breathing,” Burke Harris said. “It helps them to bring a cognitive awareness to kids of their internal states. One thing we know that happens is that kids with toxic stress have decreased engagement of prefrontal cortex. When you have strengthening of the prefrontal cortex circuit, it helps to physiologically and neurologically balance effects of chronic stress.”

Payment and Culture Obstacles

The rub is that Medicaid and other insurance don’t cover many of these services, so the groups are often left scrambling for funds. As Perrin puts it, the programs are “being paid for with a combination of bubble gum and rubber bands.”

French told me that Health Leads also saw that, in addition to the roaches, the D.C. woman’s mobile home had very old carpet that needed to be replaced—but the organization can't afford to buy her new carpet right now.

Meyers said that Boston’s city government, which picks up the tab for the discount bike program, would probably tolerate “two or three” bikes being stolen before they pulled out, but “there are many ways that this could cause a problem. The thing might just end.”

Another challenge is getting primary care physicians to screen for toxic stress and other poverty indicators in the first place.

“That's something the medical community has not responded to at all,” Burke Harris said. “Physicians say, ‘What do you want me to do? I have a 15-minute patient visit.’”

Perrin said the connections between destitution and illness have grown so strong that he’s been moved to push for poverty-combating legislation from a medical point of view.

“We have a role to argue that we need to do things better for America’s families, like the minimum wage, and the Earned Income Tax Credit,” he said. “Those aren’t things doctors have traditionally talked about, but we’re starting to. If patients get the resources they need, we’ll have healthier people.”

Monday, May 5, 2014

Poorer Countries Stand to Miss Out on the Big Data Boom - MIT Technology Review

Ranking countries by their “networked readiness” reveals a major geopolitical digital divide.

Article link: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/526941/poorer-countries-stand-to-miss-out-on-the-big-data-boom/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-weekly-business&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140502

Data sets are “a new form of asset class,” which, with the right analysis, can be translated into economic wealth, say the authors of the 13th Global Information Technology Report. But many countries in the world lack the technological infrastructure, social environment, or both, needed to capitalize on them. Wealthier nations continue to build new infrastructure that will widen the use of information and communications technologies (ICT). But the report says many developing and emerging economies remain “comparatively stagnant” when it comes to such investments.
The report ranks 148 economies according to the “Networked Readiness Index,” which accounts for 54 variables, including qualitative aspects like the strength of a given country’s education system and regulatory environment, as well as quantitative factors such as usage of ICT and access to data via the Internet.
As in last year’s version of this report, the top of the list is dominated by northern European countries (Finland was #1, Sweden was #3, and Norway #5) and other advanced Western economies, as well as the so-called Asian Tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan). The lowest ranks are made up of countries in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa, as is shown by a color-coded map of the index. The authors note that several “rising stars”—Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Panama, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—have been improving their scores more quickly than the average.
While many poorer nations have seen access to mobile telephony and Internet services expand in the past few years, overall the development of ICT infrastructure in those countries has lagged. Figures for the availability of international data bandwidth in different countries help illustrate the divide between the infrastructure of the leading and trailing economies. In 2012, the year for which the most recent data are available, the top 20 countries by this measure averaged 465.7 kilobits per second per Internet user, up from 159.1 in 2010. The bottom 20 countries averaged just 1.6 kilobits per second per Internet user, up from 0.7 in 2010.