Burn After Wearing (Grist)
BY Julia Shipley & Muriel Alarcón
A mountain of used clothes appeared in Chile’s desert. Then it went up in flames.
There, the students surveyed the inferno. It was “like a war,” Pino said. She felt waves of heat. Black smoke unspooled from the burning clothes. The air was dense and hard to breathe. Smoke coated the back of their throats and clogged their nostrils with the acrid smell of melting plastic. They covered their faces, trying not to breathe it in. Then the group heard a series of loud pops as mini explosions burst from within the vast expanse of burning garments.
Despite the danger, Pino and her students rummaged, pulling out specimens to examine from among unburned portions of the pile. On prior visits to the clothes dump, Astudillo had uncovered clothing produced by the world’s most well-known brands: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Old Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Forever 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Store tags still dangled from many of her findings. The clothes had come to the Atacama from Europe, the United States, Korea, and Japan. Now, as Astudillo began taking pictures and uploading them to Instagram, Pino wandered the mound, horrified and fascinated by the grotesque volume and variety of apparel: ski jackets, ball gowns, bathing suits. She plucked out a rhinestone-encrusted platform stiletto in perfect condition. She crouched to search for its match, but the wind was getting stronger. If it shifted, the team realized, they’d be trapped in the spreading fire.
The pain is real. The painkillers are virtual reality. (MIT Technology Review)
BY CASSANDRA WILLYARD
Immersing patients in virtual worlds can reduce the pain of a needle stick as well as more pernicious chronic pain.
Providing patients with an escape during painful procedures may not seem like a medical necessity. In most cases, the procedure can be performed successfully either way. But pain is powerful, and a patient’s experience can directly influence future interactions with the medical system. “These experiences in childhood are really sentinel to developing behaviors in later life,” Leong says. “Every time you have a needle, that’s an opportunity for something to go well, or terribly. And if it goes terribly, the next time you go back you’re dreading it.”
The Misguided War on the SAT (NYT)
BY DAVID LEONHARDT
Colleges have fled standardized tests, on the theory that they hurt diversity. That’s not what the research shows.
“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, recently wrote. Stuart Schmill — the dean of admissions at M.I.T., one of the few schools to have reinstated its test requirement — told me, “Just getting straight A’s is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not.”
An academic study released last summer by the group Opportunity Insights, covering the so-called Ivy Plus colleges (the eight in the Ivy League, along with Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago), showed little relationship between high school grade point average and success in college. The researchers found a strong relationship between test scores and later success.
The Next Battle in Higher Ed May Strike at Its Soul: Scholarship (NYT)
BY Anemona Hartocollis
Cases involving Stanford, Harvard and M.I.T. are fueling skepticism over the thoroughness of research — even from the academic world’s biggest stars.
A cottage industry of checking research papers had already sprung up in the last two decades, including Retraction Watch, the Center for Open Science and Data Colada, a blog dedicated to unmasking research based on bad data.
The number of retracted research papers has grown dramatically over time, to more than 10,000 retractions internationally in 2023, an annual record, according to the journal Nature, up from about 400 papers in 2010, when Retraction Watch began its work, Dr. Oransky said.
This may be in part because the scrutiny has intensified, he said. Nature also blamed the rise of paper-writing mills.
“What’s different this time is the levels at which this seems to be striking — Harvard and Stanford,” Dr. Oransky said. “These are cataclysmic events.”
DoorDash, delivery apps remove tipping prompt at checkout in NYC (ABC News)
BY KELLY MCCARTHY
DoorDash said it made the change due to “the impact of bad policies in NYC.”
DoorDash and Uber Eats issued statements this week announcing changes to their respective tipping policies in response to a new minimum wage increase for app-based food delivery workers in New York City.
Earlier this fall, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that “apps should immediately pay delivery workers the Minimum Pay Rate of at least $17.96 per hour,” according to the New York City Department of Consumer Worker Protection.
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