Articles

Hundreds of police agencies in small towns, suburbs and rural areas across the country are checking in on seniors who live alone by offering them a free automated phone call every day. Already, nearly half of women age 75 and older live alone. Automated telephone reassurance systems for seniors have grown in popularity in recent years and now are used by police departments from California to Massachusetts.     Dispatcher Kelly Orsini at her communications desk at the Naugatuck, Connecticut, Police Department. Across the country, hundreds of police age… more »

Jill Norgren reviews: With the publication several years ago of Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home readers began to realize that something radical had happened in the world of comics. Stories of airborne Wham! Bam! Super Heroes now share bookstore and library shelf space with graphic biographies and memoir that explore culture, art and science, family relations, racism, sexual identity, politics, and a host of other serious and sometimes controversial topics. more »

Over 400 participants in 'memory implantation' studies had fictitious autobiographical events suggested to them — and it was found that around 50% of the participants believed, to some degree, that they had experienced those events. "We know that many factors affect the creation of false beliefs and memories — such as asking a person to repeatedly imagine a fake event or to view photos to "jog" their memory. But we don't fully understand how all these factors interact. Large-scale studies like our mega-analysis move us a little bit closer." more »

CBO and JCT estimate that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under the legislation than under current law. Most of that increase would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate. Some of those people would choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums. Later, following additional changes to subsidies for insurance purchased in the nongroup market and to the Medicaid program, the increase in the number of uninsured people relative to the number under current law would rise to 21 million in 2020 and then to 24 million in 2026. more »