Energy and the Environment

With the ongoing war in Ukraine and the recent suspension of the New START treaty, concerns about nuclear escalation have been on the rise.

Using premier Language Environment Analysis technology to measure and analyze the home language environment, this observational study aims to describe the home language environment and child language ability, drawing on empirical data from 77 households with children aged 18–24 months from rural China. The results show large variation in measures of the home language environment and early language ability, similar to other rural Chinese samples. Results also demonstrate significant correlations between child age and the home language environment, maternal employment and the home language environment, father’s educational attainment and the home language environment, adult–child conversations and early language ability, and child vocalizations and early language ability.

The United States And Southeast Asia

The elimination of stockpiled weaponry constitutes a key step in arms control and disarmament processes, lending permanence and irreversibility to arms reductions.

Purpose: We examine how adolescent free time allocation—namely, screen time and outdoor time—is associated with mental health and academic performance in rural China.

Methods: This paper used a large random sample of rural junior high school students in Ningxia (n = 20,375; age=13.22), with data collected from self-reported demographic questionnaires (to assess free time allocation), the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (to assess mental health), and a standardized math test (to measure academic performance). We utilized a multivariate OLS regression model to examine associations between free time allocation and adolescent outcomes, controlling for individual and family characteristics.

Results: Our sample’s screen time and outdoor time both averaged around 1 hour. About 10% of the sample adolescents reported behavioral difficulties, while a similar percentage (11%) reported abnormal prosocial behaviors. Adolescents with higher levels of screen time (> 2 hours) were 3 percentage points more likely to have higher levels of behavioral difficulties (p< 0.001), indicating that excessive screen time was associated with worse mental health. Meanwhile, outdoor time was associated with better mental health, and positive correlations were observed at all levels of outdoor time (compared to no outdoor time, decreasing the likelihood of higher levels of behavioral difficulties by between 3 and 4 percentage points and of lower prosocial scores by between 6 and 8 percentage points; all p’s< 0.001). For academic performance, average daily screen times of up to 1 hour and 1– 2 hours were both positively associated with standardized math scores (0.08 SD, p< 0.001; 0.07 SD, p< 0.01, respectively), whereas there were no significant associations between outdoor time and academic performance.

Conclusion: Using a large sample size, this study was the first to examine the association between adolescent free time allocation with mental health and academic performance, providing initial insights into how rural Chinese adolescents can optimize their free time.

Lessons from the aftermath of the first nuclear strikes demonstrate it can take decades to establish peaceful stability

Background
Mothers’ perception of infant hunger cues is a critical content of responsive feeding, which is central to the promotion of early childhood development. However, only a few studies have examined responsive feeding in China, especially lacking the studies on perceptions of infant hunger cues. Consider the cultural differences, the aim of this study was to describe the perceptions of infant hunger cues of Chinese mothers for infants aged 3 months, and explore the relationship between maternal perceptions of infant hunger cues and different feeding methods.

Methods
A cross-sectional study was conducted with a sample of 326 mothers of healthy 3-month-old infants, including 188 exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) mothers and 138 formula feeding (FF) mothers. It was implemented in four provincial and municipal maternal and child health hospitals. The mothers’ perceptions of infant hunger cues were surveyed by self-reporting questionnaires. Chi-square tests and logistic analysis were applied to analyze the differences in maternal perceptions of infant hunger cues, including the number of hunger cues and the specific cues, between EBF group and FF group by controlling sociodemographic variables and the daily nursing indicators.

Results
We found that a higher proportion of EBF mothers could perceive multiple hunger cues (≥ 2) than FF mothers (66.5% vs.55.1%). For specific cues, the EBF mothers had higher perceptions of infant’s “hand sucking” (67.6% vs. 53.6%) and “moving head frantically from side to side” (34.6% vs. 23.9%), all p < 0.05. Regression analysis revealed that EBF might support mothers to perceive infant hunger cues than FF mothers, with the number of infant hunger cues (OR = 1.70, 95% CI: 1.01–2.85), “hand sucking” (OR = 1.72, 95% CI: 1.04–2.87), “moving head frantically from side to side” (OR = 2.07, 95% CI: 1.19–3.62). The number of infant hunger cues perceived by mothers was also associated with their educational level and family structure.

Conclusion
EBF mothers of 3-month-old infants may be more likely to perceive infant hunger cues than FF mothers in China. It is necessary to increase the health education about infant hunger and satiety cues to caregivers in China, especially among mothers with lower education levels, mothers living in nuclear families, and FF mothers.

In recent years, offensive cyber operations are becoming another tool among many in the diplomatic toolbox of states, with countries discussing cyberattacks more openly than before.

We need a permanent national nuclear waste disposal site now, before the spent nuclear fuel stored in 35 states becomes unsafe

If there was once a time when it was reasonable to expect end users (people who are not technical wizards) to manage their own cybersecurity, that time has long since passed.

The Biden administration’s new National Cybersecurity Strategy takes on the third rail of cybersecurity policy: software liability. For decades, scholars and litigators have been talking about imposing legal liability on the makers of insecure software. Authored by Jim Dempsey for Lawfare Blog

From The Lancet, March 2023

According to World Bank data, only a handful of economies have risen from middle to high-income status since 1960, when economic catch-up growth in many developing economies took off. This article looks at how China compares to other countries stuck at the middle-income level.

In Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, editor David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford Law School) and his 28 co-contributors, including Diego Zambrano, dissect the legal and policy implications of the technologies that are poised to remake the civil justice system.

So, what was it about this particular incident that generated such swift, bipartisan calls for a military response?

Recent disclosures that President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, and former Vice President Mike Pence stored classified documents at home have shined a spotlight on what many people believe to be excessive government classification of information.

In this JAMA Health Forum commentary, SHP's Michelle Mello and colleagues argue that the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill that Congress passed in December 2022 responds to several urgent public health needs, yet only narrowly addresses some of the critical determinants of pandemic preparedness.

Background
A rich language environment is an important element of a nurturing home environment. Despite their proven importance, vocabulary and conversation have been shown to vary widely across households—even within the same socio-economic class. One significant gap in the existing literature is its nearly exclusive geographic focus on Western and developed settings, with little attention given to poorer communities in lower/middle income countries. The purpose of this study was to empirically illustrate the characteristics of the home language environment in the low SES, non-Western cultural setting of rural China.

Methods
Using Language Environment Analysis (LENA) automated language-analysis system, this study measured the home language environment of 38 children aged 20-27 months in Northwest rural China. Our primary measures of the home language environment were Adult Word Count (AWC), Conversational Turn Count (CTC) and Child Vocalization Count (CVC). Multivariate linear regression models were used to examine the association between home language environment and family/child characteristics, and language skills (Measured by MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory score).

Results
In this paper, by comparison, we found that the home language environment of our rural sample fell far behind that of urban households. We also identify significant, positive correlations between language skills and both AWC and CTC. Our analysis finds no significant correlations between home language environment and family/child characteristics.

Conclusion
In this paper, we present the first ever findings using the LENA system to measure the home language environment of young children from poor rural communities in China. We found that the home language environment of lower-SES household was significantly worse than high-SES households, and demonstrated the importance of the home language environment to language skills, pointing to a need for more high-quality studies of the home language environment in rural China to better understand possible mechanisms behind low levels of parent-child language engagement and ways to improve the home language environment.

Chapter from the forthcoming book Roots of Underdevelopment: A New Economic (and Political) History of Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Felipe Valencia Caicedo.

Chapter in Nation Building: Big Lessons from Successes and Failures, edited by Dominic Rohner and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Angela Y Lee, Ryan C Moore, Jeffrey T Hancock

In opening his annual remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized the need for member countries to address the dire international security situation, as described in this year’s Doomsday Clock statement.

Objective: To evaluate the cost effectiveness of California's statewide perinatal quality collaborative for reducing severe maternal morbidity (SMM) from hemorrhage.

Results: The collaborative was cost effective, exhibiting strong dominance when compared with the baseline or standard of care. In a theoretical cohort of 480,000 births, collaborative implementation added 182 QALYs (0.000379/birth) by averting 913 cases of SMM, 28 emergency hysterectomies, and one maternal mortality. Additionally, it saved $9 million ($17.78/birth) due to averted SMM costs. Although sensitivity analyses across parameter uncertainty ranges provided cases where the intervention was not cost saving, it remained cost effective throughout all analyses. Additionally, scenario-based sensitivity analysis found the intervention cost effective regardless of birth volume and implementation costs.