99 Percent Invisible: Sound and Health: Cities

Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic environments have serious, long-term impacts on our mental and physical health. This is part one in a two-part series supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about how sound can be designed to reduce harm and even improve wellbeing.

Many of the sounds we hear are created with very little thought for how they interact with each other. Some of these are byproducts of modern technologies, like engine sounds or the hums of computers. Others are made intentionally, like alarms or cellphone rings. There are the sounds of overhead planes, air conditioning units, stores pumping out music, sirens and then people talking loudly to be heard over the rest of the noise. Then there are cars, which may be the biggest culprit.[...]

Joel Beckerman, a sound designer and composer at Man Made Music , believes we need a new approach to sound — one where we decide what we hear in our everyday environment. He calls this Sonic Humanism. “[It’s] really about how [we can] use music and sound to make people’s lives richer and simpler,” he explains. He wants sound to be something we’re thinking about all the time. But while cities have more noise laws than ever, over half of the world’s population live in urban areas experiencing way too much noise.

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The Conversation: How many humans tomorrow? The United Nations revises its projections

These new projections replace those that the United Nations published in 2017. The calculations have been revised upwards or downwards according to the countries or regions. For example, in the medium scenario, the figure for China in 2100 is 44 million higher than that in the 2017 projections (4% more). In contrast, for India, it is down 66 million (4% less). The same goes for Africa as a whole, whose projected population in 2100 is reduced by 187 million (-4%). For the planet as a whole, the upward and downward revisions offset each other, but only partly. According to the medium scenario, the global total for 2050 is projected to be 37 million fewer people than in the previous projections (-0.4%) and 309 million fewer in 2100 (-3%). [...]

The first time the United Nations published population projections up to 2100 was in 1981, and their medium scenario predicted then that the world population would reach 10.5 billion that year. The June 2019 projections suggest a figure of 10.9 billion – 0.4 billion higher. While the world total is slightly higher, it conceals a radical change in population distribution across the different continents. In 1981, the population of Asia was projected to reach 5.9 billion by 2100, but in 2019 the figure was revised downward to 4.7 billion (20% less). Likewise, for Latin America, the figure of 1,187 million in 2100 was lowered to 680 million (a decrease of about 43%). For Africa, on the other hand, the 1981 projections were 2.2 billion for 2100, while the 2019 projections have nearly doubled this figure to 4.3 billion (see Figure 2 below).

Where do these changes come from? The population of a country or continent changes because of fertility and mortality. Migration is also a factor, but to a lesser extent for many countries and with zero effect worldwide. It is therefore the assumptions on mortality and fertility that affect projections. For mortality, it declined faster than imagined 40 years ago, especially for children, which led to more rapid growth. The AIDS epidemic was certainly not anticipated at the time, and Africa has paid the heaviest cost. But the excess mortality it has caused will have lasted only one-time, and life expectancy has begun to increase again in recent years and relatively quickly. AIDS has had little effect on the demographic vitality of Africa.

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UnHerd: How the poor are kept in their place

Those differences carry out through the education system. In 2017, almost 42% of 18-year-olds in London accepted a university place. In the south-west, the figure was less than 29% and Scotland managed only 26%.

This pattern produces some extreme, eye-catching examples. I’m generally not a fan of using Oxbridge entry as a proxy for social mobility but sometimes the numbers speak volumes. In 2016, the number of children from the lowest-income homes from the north-east of England, Yorkshire and the Humber who got into Oxford or Cambridge was one. Yes, one. [...]

Measured in terms of everyday lives, these differences are striking. Average household incomes today in the Midlands, the north and Wales are roughly equivalent to household income in the South East during the 1990s. Large parts of the country are economically decades behind the richest places. [...]

Yes, London as a whole is hugely wealthy, but Londoners are still more likely to be unemployed than people in north-west England, Yorkshire or Scotland. Even when they’ve got jobs, the typical London worker is actually worse off than the typical Brit. Once the capital’s enormous housing costs are met, London’s above-average salaries deliver below-average disposable incomes.

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TLDR News: Will Scotland Leave the UK Because of Brexit?

For years Scotland has been talking about leaving the United Kingdom and Brexit has really reignited that conversation. We discuss the history of Scottish independence as well as if Scotland will actually leave because of Brexit.

Politico: The House committee quietly racking up oversight wins against Trump

The panel has secured wins on a number of fronts, and aides and lawmakers alike attribute that to the under-the-radar support they’re getting from Republicans, many of whom have grown exasperated with the president’s decisions on foreign policy and national security issues. It’s also a historically bipartisan committee that boasts a strong relationship between the top Democrat and Republican on the panel. [...]

The committee’s record on securing documents and witnesses isn’t flawless, mostly due to the Trump administration’s stonewalling of Democrats’ myriad inquiries targeting the president. But unlike other committees that have faced the same roadblocks, the Foreign Affairs Committee hasn’t issued a single subpoena, held an official in contempt of Congress or taken an issue to federal court to secure critical documents and witness testimony. [...]

Democrats say Engel’s low-profile, bipartisan strategy is paying off. Republicans participate in the committee’s negotiation sessions with the Trump administration, and they show acute interest in many of the investigations — creating bipartisan buy-in on hot-button probes that can’t be dismissed as partisan broadsides.

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The New York Times: How Should Christians Have Sex?

A majority of adults who came of age in evangelical churches in the 1990s and 2000s were exposed to “purity culture,” a term for teachings that stressed sexual abstinence before marriage. We had our own rituals, such as “purity balls,” and our own merchandise, such as “purity rings.” I had a “Wait for Me Journal” that I kept as a college freshman; created by a prominent Christian pop singer, the journal was designed to hold letters to my future husband. It held out the promise that if I remained pure, then God would reward good behavior with a husband — surely before I turned 30 so that we could have lots of children. [...]

In light of its damaging effects, several Christian leaders have recently suggested a more gracious sexual ethic. Joshua Harris, best known for his 1997 manifesto, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” in which he argued for a model of “courtship” supervised by parents, with no kissing before the wedding day, publicly apologized to people who were “misdirected or unhelpfully influenced by” his teachings. His thinking on sex and dating “has changed significantly in the past 20 years,” he wrote. He admitted that much of what he taught was not actually scriptural. The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor in Denver, has proposed a “sexual reformation” in light of purity culture’s traumatic effects. In “Shameless,” Pastor Bolz-Weber writes, “It is time for us to grab some matches and haul our antiquated and harmful ideas about sex and bodies and gender into the yard,” “burn it” and “start over.” She proposes a sexual ethic grounded in the goodness of bodies and of sexual expression based in consent, mutuality and care. [...]

This is why a sexual ethic centered on consent, which is what those of us who’ve lost purity culture are left with, feels flimsy. To be sure, consent is a nonnegotiable baseline, one that Christian communities overlook. (I never once heard about consent in youth group.) But two people can consent to something that’s nonetheless damaging or selfish. Consent crucially protects against sexual assault and other forms of coercion. But it doesn’t necessarily protect against people using one another in quieter ways. I long for more robust categories of right and wrong besides consent — a baseline, but only that — and more than a general reminder not to be a jerk. I can get that from Dan Savage, but I also want to know what Jesus thinks.

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statista: The Wars With the Highest Annual Death Tolls

When we take into consideration the length of time that the conflicts were fought over though, we get a different picture, revealing the wars with the highest annual death tolls. World War ll had an average 14.17 million deaths per year, compared to 0.51 million for the much longer Iberian Conquest. As our infographic shows, using this measure, World War l moves into second place with its 15 million deaths over 4 years resutling in an annual average of 3.75 million. The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War led to the deaths of 3 million people, qualifying it for third on this scale.

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The Huffington Post: This Is London's Murder Rate Compared To Major US Cities

In 2018, the UK capital saw 1.8 murders per 100,000 people, fewer than New York, Austin and San Diego. [...]

The murder rate in Baltimore is a whopping 31 times higher per capita. New Orleans is 22.4 times higher and Detroit 22 times.[...]

Khan’s spokesman released a scathing rebuke, pointing out the comment was taken out of context. 

The mayor had “more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet”, he said.

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Inc.: Want to Be Happy and Healthy? Science Says Do This 1 Pleasurable Thing (For About 17 Minutes Per Day)

Today's installment in that happy collection: a study from the University of Exeter in England. A study there found people who spend at least two hours a week in nature were much more likely to report that they had good health and better psychological well-being than those who didn't. [...]

More outdoor time was good, but the added benefit continued only up to five or six hours per week. Once study participants hit that level, they no longer reported any additional increase in health or well-being. [...]

"We tentatively suggest, therefore, that 120 mins contact with nature per week may reflect a kind of 'threshold,'" the report says, "below which there is insufficient contact to produce significant benefits to health and well-being, but above which such benefits become manifest."

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