Oct. 26th, 2015

birdwatcher: (Mr. Twister)
theguardian.com -- Bacon, ham and sausages rank alongside cigarettes as a major cause of cancer, the World Health Organisation has said, placing cured and processed meats in the same category as asbestos, alcohol, arsenic and tobacco. It places red meat in group 2A, as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. Eating red meat is also linked to pancreatic and prostate cancer, the IARC says.

Чувствую, скоро будем выращивать овец самостоятельно на секретных подземных пастбищах под искусственным освещением. Зоотехник будет романтическая профессия, вроде химика. С таким здравоохранением для постапокалипсиса не надо и апокалипсиса.
birdwatcher: (Dore: Ogre)
NPR: How important is preschool?

A new answer comes in the form of a study — out of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. — that is as clear as it is controversial.

The focus of the research is Tennessee's Voluntary Pre-K program. It's state-funded preschool on a grand scale, serving 18,000 of the state's poorest children, costing about $86 million a year and built on one big assumption:

That the answer to that earlier question is, "Very."

And Vanderbilt researcher Dale Farran says that at first glance, her team's results showed a big positive impact.

"The children who'd had the Voluntary Pre-K program were much better prepared for kindergarten by all of our achievement measures — significantly so," Farran says.

The Vanderbilt researchers followed nearly 800 children through the program along with a smaller control group of kids, most of whom did not attend pre-K.

Here's where the controversy starts: By the end of kindergarten, Farran noticed something odd in the data: "The children who had not had pre-K caught up," she says. Keep in mind, all of the kids in the study are low-income, which makes the team's next headline even stranger.

"By the end of second grade," Farran says, "the children who'd had state pre-K were underperforming the control children. And that continued into third grade."