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­­The Impact of a National Cash Transfer Programme on Reducing Suicide

CCT programs play an important role in poverty reduction and well-being improvement for beneficiaries. We have also demonstrated that it contributes towards reduced suicide rates. Targeting social determinants, using cash transfer programmes, could be important tools to limit suicide, predicted to rise in the aftermath of the economic recession, consequent to the Covid-19 pandemic
— Read on papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm

Astonishing findings from a study of 76 million Brazilians found the case transfers reduced suicide risk by 61% over 12 years.

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Culture is Key: Towards cultural determinants-driven health policy

Important report from the Lowitja Institute , which outlines a call to action on the cultural determinants of health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It includes the comprehensive framework below.

Framework

References

Williamson, L., Dent, P., & Bowman, N. (2021). Culture is Key: Towards cultural determinants-driven health policy. Lowitja Institute. https://www.lowitja.org.au/page/services/resources/Cultural-and-social-determinants/culture-for-health-and-wellbeing/culture-is-key-towards-cultural-determinants-driven-health-policy
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Lexical necropolitics

The theory of lexical necropolitics through which I explore this situation is based on Foucault’s view of racism as a technique of governance. After introducing Foucault’s work on racism below, I argue that the PRC, as a Han supremacist state, subordinates all minority languages, including Tibetan, to the state-mandated national language, producing annihilation anxieties and Sinophobic backlash. I then examine how certain languages are particularly impacted by this dynamic: abandoned by the state, and perceived as ‘mixed languages’ by Tibetans, these languages are targeted for elimination and their speakers subjected to everyday violence.

Lexical necropolitics: The raciolinguistics of language oppression on the Tibetan margins of Chineseness

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Neural network detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded cough

they found it was able to pick up patterns in the four biomarkers — vocal cord strength, sentiment, lung and respiratory performance, and muscular degradation — that are specific to Covid-19. The model identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people confirmed with Covid-19, and of those, it accurately detected all of the asymptomatic coughs.

“We think this shows that the way you produce sound, changes when you have Covid, even if you’re asymptomatic,” Subirana says.
— Read on news.mit.edu/2020/covid-19-cough-cellphone-detection-1029

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Substack 1940s edition

Cockburn was among a crop of journalists during the mid-20th century who turned their back on traditional media and used the mimeograph to go directly to their readers. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve lately seen the rise of staff-journalists-turned-newsletter-writers, such as Emily Atkin (formerly of The New Republic, now Heated), Judd Legum (formerly of ThinkProgress, now Popular Information), and, most recently, Casey Newton (formerly of the Verge, now Platformer). These writers have leveraged paid subscriptions on personal platforms to report and write full-time for a private audience. Many publications are hailing our arrival at this moment of Peak Newsletter. But they’re forgetting Cockburn and his colleagues.
— Read on www.wired.com/story/peak-newsletter-that-was-80-years-ago/

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The inside story of how Trump’s COVID-19 coordinator undermined the world’s top health agency

Birx seemed fixated on applying the lessons of HIV/AIDS in a small African nation to COVID-19 in the United States, says a CDC official who was present. “Birx was able to get data from every hospital on every case” in Malawi, the official says. “She couldn’t understand why that wasn’t happening in the United States” with COVID-19. Birx didn’t seem to see the difference between a slow-moving HIV outbreak and a raging respiratory pandemic. “[CDC Principal Deputy Director] Anne Schuchat had to say, ‘Debbi, this is not HIV.’ Birx got unhappy with that.”
— Read on www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/inside-story-how-trumps-covid-19-coordinator-undermined-cdc