The Justice Department today announced guidance to help law enforcement agencies (LEAs) recognize, mitigate and prevent gender bias and other biases from compromising the response to, and investigation of, sexual assault, domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, right
“At the Department of Justice, we know that investigating cases involving sexual assault and domestic violence is challenging – it demands thorough investigations and a careful effort to avoid unintentionally worsening the victimization for survivors of these crimes,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “This guidance provides best practices that — when implemented into all levels of policy, training and supervision — help law enforcement provide services free from discrimination on the basis of gender, and therefore handle these cases more effectively.”
The department is committed to reducing violent crime, building strong communities, and ending gender-based violence. The 2022 guidance builds on the first principle of the department’s comprehensive strategy to reduce violent crime by building trust through meaningful law enforcement engagement with, and accountability to, the communities they serve, including survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.
“When gender bias impacts policing — from ignoring reports of sexual assault, mishandling sexual misconduct investigations or the failure to discipline officers who commit domestic violence — law enforcement’s legitimacy erodes, and survivors’ trust in police is diminished,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Our dedication to combatting gender bias in policing is about promoting accountability, and fostering greater trust in investigations of gender-based violence.”
Jo Freeman’s Review of Wilma Mankiller: How One Woman United the Cherokee Nation and Helped Change the Face of America
Wilma Mankiller: How One Woman United the Cherokee Nation and Helped Change the Face of America
Excerpts from the Office of Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary – Assessment Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UFOs), 25 June 2021
Segment from the report:
AVAILABLE REPORTING LARGELY INCONCLUSIVE
Limited Data Leaves Most UAP Unexplained…
Limited data and inconsistency in reporting are key challenges to evaluating UAP. No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019. The Air Force subsequently adopted that mechanism in November 2020, but it remains limited to USG reporting. The UAPTF regularly heard anecdotally during its research about other observations that occurred but which were never captured in formal or informal reporting by those observers.
After carefully considering this information, the UAPTF focused on reports that involved UAP largely witnessed firsthand by military aviators and that were collected from systems we considered to be reliable. These reports describe incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2021, with the majority coming in the last two years as the new reporting mechanism became better known to the military aviation community. We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained.
• 144 reports originated from USG sources. Of these, 80 reports involved observation with multiple sensors.
Most reports described UAP as objects that interrupted pre-planned training or other military activity.
UAP Collection Challenges
Sociocultural stigmas and sensor limitations remain obstacles to collecting data on UAP. Although some technical challenges—such as how to appropriately filter out radar clutter to ensure safety of flight for military and civilian aircraft—are longstanding in the aviation community, while others are unique to the UAP problem set.
• Narratives from aviators in the operational community and analysts from the military and IC describe disparagement associated with observing UAP, reporting it, or attempting to discuss it with colleagues. Although the effects of these stigmas have lessened as senior members of the scientific, policy, military, and intelligence communities engage on the topic seriously in public, reputational risk may keep many observers silent, complicating scientific pursuit of the topic.
• The sensors mounted on U.S. military platforms are typically designed to fulfill specific missions. As a result, those sensors are not generally suited for identifying UAP. • Sensor vantage points and the numbers of sensors concurrently observing an object play substantial roles in distinguishing UAP from known objects and determining whether a UAP demonstrates breakthrough aerospace capabilities. Optical sensors have the benefit of providing some insight into relative size, shape, and structure. Radiofrequency sensors provide more accurate velocity and range information.
UNCLASSIFIED 5 UNCLASSIFIED
But Some Potential Patterns Do Emerge Although there was wide variability in the reports and the dataset is currently too limited to allow for detailed trend or pattern analysis, there was some clustering of UAP observations regarding shape, size, and, particularly, propulsion. UAP sightings also tended to cluster around U.S. training and testing grounds, but we assess that this may result from a collection bias as a result of focused attention, greater numbers of latest-generation sensors operating in those areas, unit expectations, and guidance to report anomalies.
Encountering the News From the British Library’s Breaking the News Exhibition: Unsettling, But Exciting
One of the special features of the British Library’s Breaking the News exhibition is a large-scale panorama, created by designers Northover&Brown. Objects and graphics have been placed into flowing pictures of networks, places and people, tracing the changing ways in which we have discovered the news over five centuries, from town squares to what Elon Musk calls ‘the digital town square’. This post complements the panorama.
Interior of a London coffee-house (c.1690), British Museum
Thence to the Coffee-house … where all the newes is of the Dutch being gone out, and of the plague growing upon us in this towne; and of remedies against it: some saying one thing, some another.
On 24 May 1665 Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary of his quest for news. Pepys visited one of London coffee houses two or three times a week over 1663-1664, the habit falling away in 1665 as plague took its grip on the city. He seems not to have cared that much for coffee, but yearned for the companionship, good business contacts and information to be found at a coffee house. Here one discovered the world.
The news one gleaned from a 1660s London coffee house came as much from discussion and talks as it did from printed news. Coffee houses had long tables on which the latest newsbooks and newsletters would be laid out. In 1665 there were only two print newsbooks available (from one publisher), both mostly restricted to overseas news: The Intelligencer and The Newes. The news Pepys discovered was an amalgam of publication, rumour and opinion. Such it was then; such it has remained.
The news has to seek us out. Just as much as it is shaped by those who are able to publish it and those who choose to consume it, news is shaped by where it is found. News publications in Britain in the seventeenth-century were found in print shops, coffee houses, taverns, and in the homes of those in business, officialdom and the church served by private news services that provided handwritten newsletters. Tight publication regulations prevented coverage of anything except overseas events, but the Civil War (1642-1651) created an audience hungry for information and opinion. Mostly confined to London, it was circulated, at some risk to publishers and sellers, as newsbooks, newsletters and proto-newspapers, news from the streets that was sold on the streets.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries newspapers gradually grew in numbers, geographical range, and habit. News was carried across the country by mail coaches along ever-improving roads to homes and public spaces such as taverns and workplaces. Copies passed from hand to many other hands. Such news could be shared verbally, reaching out to the illiterate or those priced out of purchasing a newspaper by taxes designed to suppress radical thought. Working class memoirist Thomas Carter recalled passing on the news in 1815:
I every morning gave them an account of what I had just been reading in the yesterday’s newspaper … My shopmates were much pleased at the extent and variety of the intelligence which I was able to give them about public affairs, and they were the more pleased because I often told them about the contents of Mr. Cobbett’s “Political Register”, as they were warm admirers of that clever and very intelligible writer. (T. Carter, Memoirs of a Working Man, London, 1845)
In the nineteenth century the newspaper flourished, aided by rapid growth in readers and advertising money that freed newspapers from political control. Coffee houses remained a popular location, but from the 1830s newspaper reading rooms emerged, followed later by newspaper sections of public libraries, greatly widening access to local and international affairs to those who had previously been priced out of such knowledge. The rapid spread of a rail network not only boosted the distribution of newspapers but created a new kind of space for news, the commuting space, private consumption in a public environment. Newspapers could be organised to last for the duration of a rail journey. Truly national newspaper titles came to the fore – The Times, The Morning Chronicle, The Daily Telegraph (few other countries have so dominant a national newspaper culture as the UK). Sunday titles such as The Observer and The Sunday Times fitted into the weekend pattern of lives with greater leisure time. All culminated in the great game-changer, The Daily Mail, launched in 1896, a million-seller by 1901.
What Are You Worried About?* Protecting Water Supplies and Power Generation by Propping Up Lake’s Powell’s Level
Officials from the seven Colorado River basin states agreed … with a federal plan to sharply cut releases from Lake Powell, as both groups scramble to protect water supplies and power generation by propping up the lake’s level.
The states were responding to a proposal two weeks ago from Tanya Trujillo, an assistant secretary for water and science for the Interior Department, to withhold almost a half-million acre-feet to address “critically-low elevations over the next 24 months” at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
“We definitely, collectively, agreed that some very significant and precise, also timely actions be taken,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, of the states’ letter.
Under Interior’s proposal, releases from Glen Canyon Dam would be reduced from 7.48 million acre-feet to 7 million acre-feet in fiscal 2022. That would reduce the risk of damage to the hydropower turbines at Lake Powell and protect water deliveries to Page and the Navajo Nation.
Buschatzke said that while local water delivery and power generation is an important consideration, the states agreed to the cuts now to protect “against very, very large reductions in water moving from Lake Powell to Lake Mead that would send Lake Mead to really critical elevations” that would require more severe action in the future.
While they agreed with the Lake Powell plan, the states said it is just a short-term solution to a long-term problem, and that more action will be needed.
“The mechanisms described in Assistant Secretary Trujillo’s letter and our agreement to those mechanisms are very creative,” Buschatzke said Friday. “They are short-term, however, and we need to continue to work on conserving more water through various programs.”
Federal officials conceded that more needs to be done, and that everyone is in uncharted territory as they grapple with historically low lake levels.
“Given our lack of actual operating experience in such circumstances since Lake Powell filled, these issues raise profound concerns regarding prudent dam operations, facility reliability, public health and safety, and the ability to conduct emergency operations,” Trujillo’s letter said.
The letter came weeks after the Bureau of Reclamation said that the elevation of Lake Powell had dipped below 3,525 feet. If the lake falls to 3,490 feet, there would not be enough water to operate the generators in Glen Canyon Dam, which provides power to Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Nebraska.
In addition to reducing the amount of water released from Lake Powell, the upper basin states on Thursday proposed releasing an extra 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge reservoir upstream to further bolster Lake Powell.
While those efforts will help Lake Powell in the short term, they would also mean less water for Lake Mead downstream, which supplies water to the lower basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California. Lake Mead is already in a Tier 1 shortage, with lake levels below 1,065 feet, which triggered the drought contingency plan and resulted in a substantial cut to Arizona’s share of the Colorado River.
The moves are the latest response to a 20-year drought that scientists said recently may be the most severe in the region in more than 1,200 years. In addition to a lack of precipitation, hotter temperatures have led to drier soils that cannot hold water when it falls.
Kayakers access Lake Powell at the Antelope Point Public Launch Ramp, which was closed to motorized vehicles because of low water in this photo from March 2021. (Photo courtesy National Park Service)
And Trujillo’s letter said that current predictions indicate “that the effects of climate change will continue to adversely impact the basin” for some time to come.
Lake Powell has historically functioned as a vast “bank account” of water that can be drawn on during dry years, making the lake’s levels especially critical as the Southwest suffers through the drought, according to the Bureau of Reclamation website.
Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, said the region is “living on deficit income” as far as its water resources are concerned. The states’ letter said Lake Powell’s “live storage” is currently only at 25%.
“Your savings account is not indefinite, infinite, right? And so eventually you get to the point, like we are with Lake Mead, that our savings account is being depleted,” she said.
The bureau already boosted releases from upstream reservoirs once this year to prop up Lake Powell, and reduced releases from it by 350,000 acre-feet. The latest proposed reduction in releases should “delay or avoid operational conditions below the critical elevations” for now, Trujillo said, but she said it is only a temporary fix.
“We fully realize that absent a change in the recent hydrological conditions, we may not be able to avoid such (adverse) operations,” her letter said. “This reality reinforces the need for the Basin States, and all entities in the Basin, to prioritize work to further conserve and reduce use of Colorado River water to stabilize the System’s reservoirs.”
The immediate concern, however, is Lake Powell, which has not been this low since it was filled in the 1960s. If it falls below 3,490 feet. “the western electrical grid would experience uncertain risk and instability, and water and power supplies to the West and Southwestern United States would be subject to increased operational uncertainty,” Trujillo said.
“The consequences are more severe for Lake Powell now, including for Page,” said Kathy Jacobs, director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the UArizona.
Even with a reduction in releases from Lake Powell, Trujillo said more will need to be done to reduce the risk of the lake dropping to the point that Glen Canyon Dam could no longer generate power.
“We’re in a situation where emergency action is required to ensure the integrity of Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell and the whole Colorado river system,” said Anne Castle, senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School.
Jacobs said there is no time to waste.
“If we fail to come up with a shortage sharing plan that protects the users in the basin and the environment, then the consequences are likely to be severe,” she said.
*Copyright, What Are You Worried About?*; Tam Martinides Gray
How They Did It: Tampa Bay Times Reporters Expose High Airborne Lead Levels at Florida Recycling Factory
When investigative journalist Corey G. Johnson started working at the Tampa Bay Times in 2017, he had been following national news coverage of lead poisoning the public water supply in Flint, Michigan, where he spent summers as a kid visiting family.
After some digging, Johnson identified the recycler as the last lead smelter operating in the state. He also learned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had cited its owner, Gopher Resource, as a significant lead polluter.
“It turns out the EPA had issued a report looking at all the places in the country that were out of compliance with the Clean Air Act, the federal act on pollution,” Johnson says. “In the report, there was one place in Florida that was in violation for lead and that one place was in Hillsborough County.”
Johnson teamed up with two other journalists at the news outlet — investigative reporter Rebecca Woolington and data reporter Eli Murray — to find out what was going on there. Their 18-month investigation, chronicled in a three-part series published last year, exposes a host of serious problems at the factory and in the surrounding community.
What the journalists uncovered
The plant employs more than 300 people and recycles about 50,000 used car batteries a day. The lead they contain is toxic to humans and, at high levels, can cause kidney and brain damage and even death. It’s especially dangerous for children because their bodies are more sensitive to its effects. Even low levels of lead in their blood can result in lower IQ scores, learning difficulties, hyperactivity and developmental delays, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Johnson, Woolington and Murray’s series, “Poisoned,” reveals workers were exposed to airborne lead at levels hundreds of times higher than the federal government allows, and some inadvertently took lead dust home and exposed their children. And while officials at Gopher Resource knew the plant had too much lead dust, key features of its ventilation system had been dismantled or turned off, the journalists reported. Respirators issued to workers did not provide sufficient protection for the levels of lead circulating inside the factory.
Some of the other main findings:
- “Eight out of 10 workers from 2014 to 2018 had enough lead in their blood to put them at risk of increased blood pressure, kidney dysfunction or cardiovascular disease,” they write. “In the past five years, at least 14 current and former workers have had heart attacks or strokes, some after working in the most contaminated areas of the plant. One employee spent more than three decades around the poison before dying of heart and kidney disease at 56.”
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency in charge of workplace health and safety, “has repeatedly bungled the job at Gopher, allowing hazardous conditions to persist for years,” the journalists write. “OSHA gave Gopher ample warning before site visits, which meant the company had time to deep-clean a factory coated with lead. The agency sent inspectors who missed evidence of dangerous levels of lead in the air, or who made other critical errors, including testing for the wrong chemical after workers complained about high gas exposure.” They note that OSHA stopped inspecting Gopher altogether five years before Johnson, Woolington and Murray began investigating.
- The factory polluted the air and water outside its walls. “In the past six years, Gopher repeatedly discharged polluted water into the Palm River, sent too many chemicals into Tampa’s sewer system, and mishandled hazardous waste,” according to the series. “It erroneously shipped tons of a dangerous material to a landfill near a residential community in Polk County at least twice. Gopher reported the error, and state regulators forced the company to dig up the waste.”
In spring 2021, in response to the Tampa Bay Times investigation, two members of Congress from the Tampa area asked the U.S. Department of Labor to look into the plant’s practices. Shortly afterward, OSHA launched a six-month inspection and ultimately cited Gopher for 44 violations, including one for willfully exposing workers to high levels of lead.
In the midst of that review, the global credit-rating agency Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Gopher’s credit rating to “very high credit risk,” potentially making it more difficult and expensive for the company to borrow money.
Meanwhile, county regulators conducted their own inspection and found more than two dozen possible violations. OSHA and Hillsborough County’s Environmental Protection Commission levied a total of $837,000 in fines.
The series prompted other changes as well.
President, CEO of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Importance of Studying Innovations in Payment Technologies
James Bullard is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has a long tradition of providing thought leadership in monetary economics. An important issue in this area today is the emergence of new payment technologies, given their potential to transform money and the payments system. Therefore, our 2021 annual report examines opportunities and concerns surrounding cryptocurrency, blockchain and decentralized finance. While these payment technologies are new to some, economists at the St. Louis Fed have been studying innovations such as those discussed in this annual report for several years now.
Cryptocurrencies and a Non-Uniform Currency System
Cryptocurrencies were introduced to the global economy more than a decade ago, and since then, they have inspired much research and commentary. As a research economist myself, in addition to my role as a monetary policymaker, I have studied “private money” and have given talks on currency competition. For example, I spoke about “Non-Uniform Currencies and Exchange Rate Chaos” (PDF) at a May 2018 CoinDesk conference.
Currency competition is nothing new. Globally, we have ample currencies issued by government monetary authorities, and these currencies tend to trade at volatile exchange rates. In the current environment, privately issued currencies (such as cryptocurrencies) are also competing with publicly issued currencies. The exchange rates between the public and private currencies tend to be more volatile than the exchange rates between various public currencies.
I have argued that cryptocurrencies may be creating a movement toward non-uniform currency in the U.S. — a system that society has disliked historically. In the pre-Civil War era, the majority of the U.S. money supply consisted of privately issued banknotes.1 Publications listed and frequently updated the going exchange rates for different currencies in particular locations. Similar to today’s global currency system, the pre-Civil War era was characterized by exchange rate chaos, with currencies constantly fluctuating against one another. People didn’t like that system, and a uniform currency was implemented in the U.S. during the Civil War. But cryptocurrencies may unwittingly be pushing us back in the direction of a non-uniform currency system.
Some Potential Risks of These Payment Technologies
In theory, the new payment technologies that have emerged in recent years may help reduce costs and improve efficiencies of financial transactions. They may also be used to facilitate financial transactions that could otherwise be difficult.
Cryptocurrencies, however, are currently viewed more as a store of value than as a medium of exchange. Their volatile prices and exchange rates make them not ideal for payments and can result in large losses for those who view these cryptocurrencies largely as investments.
Another well-known concern is that cryptocurrencies are sometimes used for transactions that are illegal. For instance, ransomware attacks typically ask for payment in cryptocurrency. Therefore, much of the impetus behind the technological innovation in payments seems to be coming from illegal sectors. An economist would interpret that as a form of regulatory arbitrage or illegal arbitrage, whereby people are trying to bypass a barrier that exists with ordinary financial channels.
In addition, these payment technologies are unregulated by governments — which some view as a benefit. From a policymaker’s perspective, the lack of government regulation and oversight has implications for financial stability of the system overall.
Cryptocurrency Market and Implications for Monetary Policy
What about implications for monetary policy? Famous 20th-century economist Milton Friedman said that if people are allowed to issue private currency, then a lot of private currencies will be issued. We see that today with the proliferation of cryptocurrencies — free entry has resulted in thousands of them. While an individual cryptocurrency may have limited supply, the cryptocurrency market overall does not. At least from a monetarist perspective, the question would then become: What is the money stock of the nation? This, in turn, would have implications for forecasting what the price level and inflation will be in the future.
In light of the cryptocurrency wave, some have called for the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC). In January, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors released a discussion paper on the potential benefits and risks of a U.S. CBDC. This paper “invites comment from the public and is the first step in a discussion of whether and how a CBDC could improve the safe and effective domestic payments system,” as stated in the Board’s press release. Accordingly, the topic is under study, but the Fed is not making any commitments regarding a CBDC at this point.2 More recently, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in March for various government agencies, including the Fed, to study digital assets (such as cryptocurrencies) and the potential creation of a U.S. CBDC, as summarized in a fact sheet related to the order.
Importance of Continuing to Study Payment Technologies
Technology is always changing, and it is very clear that financial intermediation will be different in the future than it is today. But exactly how this technology will be dispersed and how long that process will take remain uncertain.
Nevertheless, we at the Federal Reserve have to track developments in this area closely so that we can maintain price stability and financial stability and promote a strong economy in the U.S. Also, the Fed already is working toward improving the efficiency of the payments system. The Federal Reserve banks have made a lot of great progress on the development of the FedNow Service, which aims to provide real-time payment services to financial institutions 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Whether the new payment technologies discussed in our 2021 annual report are a genuinely innovative disruption that may prove useful for the nation’s financial system remains to be determined. I hope you will read our annual report and find the main essay “The Blockchain Revolution: Decoding Digital Currencies” informative.
James Bullard
President and CEO
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Endnotes
- See Temin, Peter. The Jacksonian Economy, W.W. Norton, 1969.
- The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also collaborating on research focusing on central bank digital currency. For more information, see the findings from their initial research.
Reflections on Monetary Policy in 2021 By Federal Reserve Governor Christopher J. Waller or “How did the Fed get so far behind the curve?”
May 06, 2022
At the 2022 Hoover Institution Monetary Conference, Stanford, California
Let me start by reminding everyone of two immutable facts about setting monetary policy in the United States. First, we have a dual mandate from the Congress: maximum employment and price stability. Whether you believe this is the appropriate mandate or not, it is the law of the land, and it is our job to pursue both objectives. Second, policy is set by a large committee of up to 12 voting members and a total of 19 participants in our discussions. This structure brings a wide range of views to the table and a diverse set of opinions on how to interpret incoming economic data and how best to respond. We need to reconcile those views and reach a consensus that we believe will move the economy toward our mandate. This process may lead to more gradual changes in policy as members have to compromise in order to reach a consensus.
Back in September and December 2020, respectively, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) laid out guidance for raising the federal funds rate off the zero lower bound and for tapering asset purchases. We said that we would “aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time” to ensure that it averages 2 percent over time and that inflation expectations stay anchored. We also said that the Fed would keep buying $120 billion per month in securities until “substantial further progress” was made toward our dual-mandate objectives. It is important to stress that views varied among FOMC participants on what was “some time” and “substantial further progress.” The metrics for achieving these outcomes also varied across participants.
A few months later, in March 2021, I made my first submission for the Summary of Economic Projections as an FOMC member. My projection had inflation above 2 percent for 2021 and 2022, with unemployment close to my long-run estimate by the second half of 2022. Given this projection, which I believed was consistent with the guidance from December, I penciled in lifting off the zero lower bound in 2022, with the second half of the year in mind. To lift off from the ZLB in the second half of 2022, I believed tapering of asset purchases would have to start in the second half of 2021 and conclude by the third quarter of 2022.
This projection was based on my judgment that the economy would heal much faster than many expected. This was not 2009, and expectations of a slow, grinding recovery were inaccurate, in my view. In April 2021, I said the economy was “ready to rip,” and it did.1 I chose to look at the unemployment rate and job creation as the labor market indicators I would use to assess whether we had made “substantial further progress.” My projection was also based on the belief that the jump in inflation that occurred in March 2021 would be more persistent than many expected.
There was a range of views on the Committee. Eleven of my colleagues did not have a rate hike penciled in until after 2023. With regard to future inflation, 13 participants projected inflation in 2022 would be at or below our 2 percent target. In the March 2021 SEP, no Committee member expected inflation to be over 3 percent for 2021. As I argued in a speech last December, this view was consistent with private-sector economic forecasts.2
When inflation broke loose in March 2021, even though I had expected it to run above 2 percent in 2021 and 2022, I never thought it would reach the very high levels we have seen in recent months. Indeed, I expected it would eventually fade, due to the nature of these shocks. All the suspected drivers of this surge in inflation appeared to be temporary: the one-time stimulus from fiscal policy, supply chain shocks that previous experience indicated would ease soon, and a surge in demand for goods. In addition, we had very accommodative monetary policy that I believed would end in 2022. The issue in my mind was whether these factors would start fading away later in 2021 or in 2022. (more…)
Stanford Medicine Study: Around age 13, Kids’ Brains Shift From Focusing on Their Mothers’ Voices to Favor New Voices
Around age 13, kids’ brains shift from focusing on their mothers’ voices to favor new voices, part of the biological signal driving teens to separate from their parents, a Stanford Medicine study has found. New Africa/Shutterstock.com
By Erin Digitale
New Africa/Shutterstock.com
When your teenagers don’t seem to hear you, it’s not simply that they don’t want to clean their room or finish their homework: Their brains aren’t registering your voice the way they did in pre-teenage years.
Around age 13, kids’ brains no longer find their moms’ voices uniquely rewarding, and they tune into unfamiliar voices more, a new study from the Stanford School of Medicine has found.
The research, which was published April 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience, used functional MRI brain scans to give the first detailed neurobiological explanation for how teens begin to separate from their parents.
“Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother’s voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices,” said lead study author Daniel Abrams, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “As a teen, you don’t know you’re doing this. You’re just being you: You’ve got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”
(Abrams explains how children’s attention to voices evolves in this video.)
In some ways, teens’ brains are more receptive to all voices — including their mothers’ — than the brains of children under 12, the researchers discovered, a finding that lines up with teenagers’ increased interest in many types of social signals.
However, in teenage brains, the reward circuits and the brain centers that prioritize important stimuli are more activated by unfamiliar voices than by those of their mothers. The brain’s shift toward new voices is an aspect of healthy maturation, the researchers said.
“A child becomes independent at some point, and that has to be precipitated by an underlying biological signal,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “That’s what we’ve uncovered: This is a signal that helps teens engage with the world and form connections which allow them to be socially adept outside their families.”
Age-related shift toward new voices
The Stanford team previously found that, in the brains of children 12 and under, hearing Mom’s voice triggers an explosion of unique responses: A study published in 2016 showed that kids can identify their moms’ voices with extremely high accuracy and that the special sound of Mom cues not just the brain’s auditory-processing areas, but also many areas not triggered by unfamiliar voices, including reward centers, emotion-processing regions, visual processing centers and brain networks that decide which incoming information is salient.
“The mother’s voice is the sound source that teaches young kids all about the social-emotional world and language development,” said Percy Mistry, PhD, co-lead author and a research scholar in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “Fetuses in utero can recognize their mother’s voice before they’re born, yet with adolescents — even though they’ve spent even more time with this sound source than babies have — their brains are tuning away from it in favor of voices they’ve never even heard.”
The new study built on the previous study, adding data from teenagers 13 to 16.5 years of age. All participants had an IQ of at least 80 and were being raised by their biological mothers. They did not have any neurological, psychiatric or learning disorders.
The researchers recorded the teens’ mothers saying three nonsense words, which lasted just under a second. Using nonsense words ensured that the participants would not respond to the words’ meaning or emotional content. Two women unfamiliar with the study subjects were recorded saying the same nonsense words. Each teenage participant listened to several repetitions of the nonsense-word recordings by their own mother and the unfamiliar women, presented in random order, and identified when they heard their mom. Just like younger children, teens correctly identified their mothers’ voices more than 97% of the time.
The teens were then placed in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, where they listened again to the voice recordings. They also listened to brief recordings of household sounds, such as a dishwasher running, to allow the researchers to see how the brain responds to voices versus other non-social sounds.
Justice Department Announces New Training Resource for Sexual Assault Medical Forensic Examinations
Today (May 4th, 2022), Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco and Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) Principal Deputy Director Allison Randall announced the launch of an updated and expanded resource aimed at health care professionals. Originally developed in 2008 with OVW funding by the Dartmouth Medical School’s Interactive Media Laboratory, the Sexual Assault Medical Forensic Examination: A Virtual Practicum (SAMFE VP) teaches every step of a victim-centered sexual assault medical forensic examination and serves as a training tool for law enforcement, prosecutors and other professionals. The revised and improved SAMFE VP is designed to enhance care for patients from diverse communities, including transgender patients, young people, elders and incarcerated patients. The SAMFE VP provides interactive training on various topics including evidence collection, physical examinations, medical and forensic documentation, crime laboratory analysis and courtroom testimony. Earlier this year, President Biden signed into law the historic reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which expands access to justice, safety and services for survivors and enhances training for sexual assault forensic examiners.
“All survivors of sexual violence deserve access to compassionate and competent care, and professionals must be able to obtain the resources, training and institutional support required to meet survivors’ needs. Medical forensic care providers can have an enormous impact on survivors, as well as on the investigation and prosecution of these cases,” said Deputy Attorney General Monaco. “Programs, initiatives and projects funded under the Violence Against Women Act, including the SAMFE Virtual Practicum announced today, support practices that save lives and help build coordinated community responses to sexual and domestic violence.”
“Forensic medical examiners are often among the first people survivors encounter in the aftermath of sexual assault, on what might have been the worst day of their lives, when they are just beginning to process the trauma of what they’ve been through. It is not an easy job, but it is critical in so many ways: research shows that survivors who work with forensic medical examiners have much better outcomes when compared to those who do not,” said OVW Principal Deputy Director Randall. “The SAMFE Virtual Practicum ensures that nurses and other professionals have the knowledge and skills they need to respond effectively when a survivor needs medical treatment and evidence collection after an assault.”
With funding from the department’s National Institute of Justice, OVW collaborated to update the SAMFE VP with End Violence Against Women International; the Academy of Forensic Nursing; the International Association of Forensic Nurses; and more than 30 multidisciplinary experts – the full list of people and institutions who made the project possible is available as a pdf file. For more information about SAMFEs and Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs), OVW’s Patchwork Podcast has an episode titled “Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners Assist Survivors at the Intersection of Health and Justice Systems.”
OVW provides funding under several grant programs to provide sexual assault patients with medical forensic exams to treat their post-assault healthcare needs and to collect evidence of their sexual assault. OVW provides leadership in developing the nation’s capacity to reduce violence through the implementation of the Violence Against Women Act and subsequent legislation. Created in 1995, OVW administers financial and technical assistance to communities across the country that are developing programs, policies and practices aimed at ending domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. In addition to overseeing federal grant programs, OVW undertakes initiatives in response to special needs identified by communities facing acute challenges. Learn more at http://www.justice.gov/ovw.