One of the 1% facts
highlighted by Pacific Standard magazine:
One percent of all U.S. dairy farms produce 35 percent of America’s
milk. One American milk cow produces an average of 22,000 pounds of milk
per year—up from 8,000 pounds per year in 1965.
I was over there looking for
this article:
One day in the spring of 2010, Sporleder made a three-hour trek north
to Spokane to attend a workshop given by a molecular biologist. He was
encouraged to make the trip by a community organizer affiliated with the
Washington Family Policy Council,
a state agency that had become unusually galvanized by a recent body of
research. Sporleder was one of many educators, social workers, law
enforcement officers, and other community leaders who were being sent to
similar conferences around Washington with state dollars, all as part
of a large-scale campaign to educate people about the impacts of trauma
and stress on children.
For Sporleder, the workshop—with keynote speaker John Medina, a scientist and the author of a best-selling book called Brain Rules—was
nothing short of a conversion. As soon as he got back to Lincoln, he
began changing his methods, especially when it came to discipline. His
old approach, which relied heavily on automatic suspensions, went out
the window. Then he brought in a trainer to teach everyone on his staff,
from instructors to secretaries, about the science of trauma and
resilience. Bit by bit, he and his staff remade Lincoln to address what
he now saw as the real force driving his students’ behavior: chronic
stress.
Between 2009 and 2011, suspensions at Lincoln fell by 85 percent;
expulsions dropped from 50 to 30. In the same period, the school’s
graduation rate nearly tripled. By the time I met Sporleder in 2012, the
student body had swelled from 77 to nearly 200—the result of students
actually opting to transfer to what had once been the district’s
“dumping ground.” It’s hard to say exactly what’s driving these
transformations. But it’s striking that Sporleder himself—a former
volleyball coach, and not a trained scientist—largely attributes
Lincoln’s turnaround to a new understanding of the science of stress and
the brain.
The whole story is worth the read. It is fascinating. Finally, there was
this note about Cleveland:
Infant mortality within a three-mile radius around one of the nation’s
best children’s hospitals, in Cleveland, Ohio, is worse than that in
some third-world countries, Dr. Michele Walsh, neonatology director of
Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, claimed in a radio interview last week.
The hospital anchors the relatively affluent University Circle
neighborhood, home to Case Western Reserve University, on the east end
of an otherwise pretty impoverished city. (Seventy percent of the infants that enter Walsh’s intensive care unit are on Medicaid.)
Infant mortality rates higher than those of countries like Japan or Sweden are one thing—several reports
in recent years found the United States to have a slightly higher rate
than many such peers—but Uzbekistan? The Gaza Strip? That would mean
communities around the hospital far outstrip the national rate of 6.7
deaths per 1,000 live births. Understandably disturbed by the claim, Politifact Ohio confirmed it using a Case Western regional social and economic research database:
Infant mortality in the University Circle neighborhood …
was slightly above 69 deaths per 1,000 live births. That exceeds the
rate in countries that include, among others, Bangladesh, Haiti, Burma,
Cameroon, Djibouti, Sudan, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, Rwanda, and Uganda.
The 69 deaths per 1,000 live births statistic is from 2009 only;
taking a three-year average still yields 18.6 deaths, higher than many
Caribbean and Eastern European countries. But here’s the real gut-punch:
Looking within University Circle communities like Hough and Mount
Pleasant, PolitiFact found “infant mortality rates above 27 per
1,000—worse than in North Korea, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Samoa, Maldives,
or the Gaza Strip.”
Wow. It's just a lot more comfortable and easy to sleep at night being ignorant of such realities. I tend to forget how lucky I am.
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