Day: April 16, 2024

Putinism and Russian Culture – Google Search https://t.co/Ge9BOeFPZA https://t.co/RsBnQ87nYS

— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) April 16, 2024

Putinism and Russian Culture – Google Search https://t.co/Ge9BOeFPZA https://t.co/RsBnQ87nYS

— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) April 16, 2024

NPR News: 04-16-2024 8AM EDT

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Arrests of journalists for fulfilling their duties are absolutely unacceptable. Stefan Shennach, former PACE Rapporteur on Azerbaijan and rapporteur on freedom of the media, told Turan news agency. “If they think that by selling oil and gas they can risk everything, then they are mistaken. Azerbaijan has already received numerous…

It’s impossible to escape the soaring popularity of Ozempic and similar drugs these days—daily headlines, celebrity “success” stories, and apparent ease in procuring prescriptions (even Costco sells them now) abound. But the cumulative effect of all of this has many experts in the eating disorder field worried about how this might affect their patients. This makes sense—even for those without eating disorders, these drugs can feel both triggering and enticing. After all, research tells us about 90% of women are dissatisfied with their bodies. This sounds like a quick fix.

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Then, I started hearing reports—first anecdotal, then published—that some doctors were prescribing weight loss drugs like Ozempic to their patients with eating disorders. As in, to help treat them.

As a journalist who has extensively researched the harms of eating disorders and the barriers to recovery—and as a woman who had suffered from eating disorders on and off for much of my own life—I thought I must have misunderstood. Yes, we as a society are in the midst of Ozempic Fever—and by “fever,” I’m referring to excitement, rather than a possible side effect of the drug (which it is). Researchers are continuing to find new potential applications for these drugs, initially developed to treat type 2 diabetes. In March, the FDA approved a new indication for the weight-loss drug Wegovy (which has the same active ingredient as Ozempic), allowing it to be used as a treatment to reduce the risk for heart attack and stroke. Ozempic, a diabetes drug, used off-label for weight loss, is also being studied to treat anxiety and depression, polycystic ovary syndrome, substance abuse, Alzheimer’s, and now—eating disorders.

Read More: Ozempic Exposed the Cracks in the Body Positivity Movement

It’s early days and research hasn’t yet caught up with the enthusiasm.  But our cultural misunderstanding of eating disorders, even by well-meaning practitioners, could exacerbate the illnesses for those who suffer from them—and have dire consequences.

The new class of weight loss drugs mimics the body’s GLP-1 hormone, stimulating insulin production, and lowering blood sugar levels, helpful to those with type 2 diabetes. The drugs also curb appetite and slow the speed that food moves into the small intestine—you feel full more quickly and eat less. Many patients without eating disorders who take these drugs, have reported a reduction of “food noise” in their minds—referring to obsessive thoughts and preoccupation with food. (Though, as philosopher Kate Manne wisely posited in a recent New York Times piece, isn’t “food noise,” simply, hunger?)

For folks suffering from binge eating disorder (BED) or bulimia nervosa (BN), a drug that decreases appetite may seem to make sense. Both illnesses are characterized by eating large amounts of food, eating until uncomfortably full, and feeling distress around that (bulimia is distinguished by purging after a binge).

Binge eating often emerges as part of a cycle of restriction—dieting, fasting, or eliminating entire food groups—like carbs, for example. “Many people struggling with BED view the binge episodes as the problem and the restriction as something to strive for,” said Alexis Conason, a psychologist specializing in the treatment of binge eating disorder. “When people with BED take a GLP-1 medication that dampens their appetite, many are excited that they can be ‘better’ at restriction and consume very little throughout the day.” Subsequently, Conason adds, there is a dangerous potential for BED to then morph into anorexia, starving oneself with possibly life-threatening complications.

Eating disorders are complex illnesses that aren’t yet fully understood, even by experts in the field. Underneath the behaviors around food is often an intricate web of trauma, anxiety, and even genetic predisposition, all set against the backdrop of a culture that prizes thinness. Low weight is frequently (incorrectly) conflated with good health, and people in larger bodies are often subjected to bullying, negative stereotypes, and discrimination in the workplace.

Read More: Ozempic Gets the Oprah Treatment in a New TV Special

Emerging research strongly supports that for many, eating disorders are brain-based illnesses and in most cases, there exists a co-morbidity like anxiety, mood disorders, or substance abuse.

“GLP-1’s can’t help someone deal with their stress, anxiety, [and] trauma-history,” said psychologist Cynthia Bulik, one of the world’s leading eating disorder researchers, and Founding Director of the University of North Carolina Center of Excellence of Eating Disorders. “All of that background distress—fundamental distress that might be driving the BED in the first place—is temporarily bypassed by removing the desire to eat.”

Nearly 30 million Americans with have an eating disorder in their lifetime, but only about 6%  of those are medically diagnosed as “underweight,” according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. This means that a person may exhibit all of the diagnostic hallmarks of anorexia, for example, extreme restriction and even malnourishment, but still present as average weight or even overweight. They may even be told by a physician to lose weight, despite the fact that they are already going to dangerous extremes to chase that “goal.”

“We tend to think that everyone in a larger body with an eating disorder must have BED and everyone in a smaller body must have anorexia, but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” said Conason. “So many people with BED seek help in weight loss settings instead of seeking eating disorder treatment; many view the problem as their weight and think they need more help sticking to their diet” when in reality, an end to the restriction would more likely regulate their eating.

It’s much easier to get weight loss treatment than help for an eating disorder. There is no standard of care for eating disorders in this country and treatment is unregulated. While there are some promising, evidenced-based treatments (cognitive behavioral therapy for adults, and family-based treatment for children and teens), they don’t work for everyone. If a person is fortunate to be diagnosed and receive adequate treatment, relapses are common and full recovery can be elusive.

Further, these drugs are often intended to be taken for a person’s entire life. “When they go off the drug, or can’t access it due to supply problems, the urge to binge comes right back and they have not developed any psychological (or) behavioral skills to manage the urge,” she told me. Just like with a diet, any lost weight will likely be regained when a person stops taking the drugs. Weight fluctuations, themselves ,may increase a person’s risk of chronic illnesses like type 2 diabetes, according to multiple studies.

“The focus on weight and erasing the desire to eat could indeed do harm,” cautioned Bulik. “The potential for abuse is high and will become higher with new preparations that don’t require an injection … Remember, these drugs are ‘for life.’ Stop them, and everything comes rushing back.”

The long-term side effects of GLP-1’s are not yet known. But the harms of eating disorders are: eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates of any mental illness (second only to opioid overdose). People with eating disorders are more likely to attempt suicide, and during COVID-19, emergency room visits and inpatient admissions for eating disorders at pediatric hospitals skyrocketed, particularly for young women. According to the CDC, emergency room visits for 12-17 year old girls who suffer from eating disorders doubled during the pandemic. Those numbers, as shown by recent studies, have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

An even greater concern is that the gaps in comprehensive care for eating disorders invite experimental, potentially harmful treatments and leave patients vulnerable. GLP-1’s may seem like a short-term “fix,” but they won’t graze the deeper issues nor will it diminish the eating disorder crisis in this country. And it is a crisis—every year, eating disorders cost the U.S. more than $65 billion.

I know too well that if a doctor advises their patient with an eating disorder “here’s something to make you eat less” most patients would happily oblige. That’s part of the pathology of the illness. It’s the eating disorder talking. Ideally, it wouldn’t be your doctor’s voice, too.

I’m standing over a table, looking at a 3D architectural model of a room. Then I hit a button, and suddenly I’m inside the model itself. I can walk around, get a feel for the space, see how the plumbing and lighting systems intersect, and flag any potential problems for the room’s designers to tweak. 

Of course, I haven’t actually shrunk into the table: I’m wearing a headset in an architectural  virtual reality app. Over the past few years, more and more architects have started to incorporate immersive VR tools in the process of designing buildings. VR, they say, helps them understand spaces better, facilitate better collaboration, and catch errors they might not have otherwise. These architects hope that as VR technology improves and becomes more commonplace, it could fundamentally transform the way that they approach their jobs, and lead to more efficient and effective design. 

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But there are also architects who feel that the current spate of VR products does not yet live up to the hype put forth by technologists. “We have questions we can already very effectively answer in 2D on a screen,” says Jacob Morse, the managing director at the architecture and design firm Geniant. “Putting it in goggles is just a gimmick.”

Building from scratch with the headset on

For decades, architects have designed buildings starting with 2D blueprints, which require technical knowledge to fully comprehend. When it comes to design, working in two dimensions is “not a natural experience,” says Jon Matalucci, a virtual design and construction manager at Stantec, a global design and engineering firm. “We experience things in 3D, and there’s a loss in translation.” 

Prior to a few years ago, using VR was prohibitively expensive for many architects, and it took far too long for design programs to render 3D spaces. But upgrades in both hardware and software mean that many architecture firms now own VR headsets, whether it be the Meta Quest or the Google Cardboard. Design tools like Revit and Rhino turn blueprints into 3D digital models. And in programs like Enscape and Twinmotion, architects can walk into spaces they’ve designed within minutes of creating them.

Read More: The Biggest Decider of the Vision Pro’s Success Is Out of Apple’s Hands

The architect Danish Kurani, who runs his own design studio, has been using VR tools for seven years. Early on in the process of designing a room or building, Kurani puts on a headset to view proposals created by architects on his team and talk through different options. When they’ve finished their preliminary designs, he then gives his clients guided tours to get them excited and to solicit feedback. During our interview over Google Meets, Kurani takes me through a virtual rendering of a nonprofit entrepreneurship center for kids that he designed in Baltimore, its rustic brick walls lined with 3D printers and other tools. 

“As we walk around, I’ll ask them questions like, ‘Is this enough space in front of the laser cutter?’” Kurani says. “They’re really appreciative of being able to see it this way as opposed to looking at abstract black and white lines on a floor plan. They’re really able to immerse themselves.” 

Kurani says that VR allows him to detect subtle design problems that he might not have noticed on a screen. Walking around a classroom in VR with an audiovisual engineer, for example, lets them figure out the best placements for cameras so that remote teachers can clearly see their students and vice versa. Being in VR also allows Kurani to see if an exit sign might block the view of a student sitting in a back row who is trying to see a presentation on a high projector screen. 

Matalucci, at Stantec, says that his company now has the ability to “put a headset on every desk.” The company is a customer of the design software powerhouse Autodesk, and its employees were among the first users of Autodesk’s Workshop XR, a 3D design review software which was announced in November and is available in beta. The software allows architects to virtually step into their creations at a 1:1 scale. One of the projects that Stantec recently used Workshop XR for was a hospital in rural New Mexico. Matalucci says that VR is especially useful in designing healthcare buildings because of all of the overlapping systems required in them, from process piping to oxygen to electrical. 

VR helped Stantec’s designers receive feedback from clients and make tweaks in real time, Matalucci says. They even sent VR demos to night-shift nurses to see how they felt moving around the virtual hospital’s halls. “We were populating the facility with features based on their requests. At any moment when they wanted to see where we were in the process, they were able to put on their headset and go to remote rural New Mexico, giving them visibility into a very complex process,” he says. “As a result, we were getting answers to questions that we didn’t even think to ask.”

Read More: Cell Phone Pouches Promise to Improve Focus at School. Kids Aren’t Convinced

Experiencing Workshop XR myself, via a Meta Quest 3 headset,is a surreal experience. With the help of Autodesk XR product marketing manager Austin Baker, I teleport in and out of architectural models and fly around a Boston municipal building, seeing how its grand staircase unfolds into a large atrium. I can trace how sunlight and shadows move across the floor. Theoretically, dozens of different people working on various aspects of the project could convene here, hashing out decisions in real time before a single brick is laid.

“What would have been dozens of back and forth emails, Zoom calls, and trying to share renderings of our 2D data is now a 15-minute intuitive walkthrough, where we have all the data at our fingertips,” Baker tells me, his avatar floating next to mine. “We’re able to spot issues that could cost millions of dollars downstream.” 

Steffen Riegas, a partner and lead of digital practice at the Basel-based firm Herzog & de Meuron, says that VR has been especially useful in designing and reviewing complete interior situations like staircases. “It’s really hard to communicate those narrow vertical spaces and depth in two dimensions; it’s almost impossible,” he says. “VR solves that.”

Herzog & de Meuron has incorporated VR and XR (extended reality) tools into many parts of its practice. The firm’s partners and project teams sometimes don headsets to make design decisions. And the company’s architects even took Microsoft’s HoloLens—a mixed reality headset that allows users to project virtual objects onto the real world—onto an actual project site in Basel, to see how their new building designs might look next to the physical ones already there. “If you want to get an impression of what a site will feel like, it’s difficult to experience or illustrate that with drawings,” Riegas says. “But with XR, you can walk to the other side of the block and see how a new building will look from different perspectives.”

The limitations of current VR tools

But the current VR tools are not universally hailed by architects or other professionals in the design space. Kurani says that he’s encountered general contractors and subcontractors who are resistant to using these new tools due to the learning curve, which makes integrating them into processes less worthwhile. “If subcontractors can’t use the technology, then you’re wasting time and energy,” he says. 

Jacob Morse, at Geniant, says that from what he’s seen, many architects use VR goggles only as a marketing tool, as opposed to integrating it into their design processes. “I’ve yet to see the compelling use cases, apart from selling and presenting, that really push the field of architecture forward,” he says. “At large, it hasn’t unlocked completely new insights and new solutions that we can’t accomplish in desktop computer programs.” 

However, Morse does hold out hope that as headsets and software and software improve, VR could allow him and other architects to approach design as a more iterative process, using it to research, prototype, and test how people respond to slight tweaks in their virtual environments. David Dewane, the chief experience officer of physical space at Geniant, hopes that VR could also be used in education: to allow students to virtually accompany an elite design team from conception to construction, or to study the most famous buildings in the world up close.

“Any architecture student should be able to go into the library and not just pull out a book on the Barcelona Pavilion, but go to the Barcelona Pavilion,” he says. “We are ready for that now. But nobody in the market has gone out and built it yet.”

Taipei, Taiwan — China’s growing security presence in the Pacific will be scrutinized this week as the Solomon Islands holds its national election on Wednesday. While the Pacific island nation has been plagued by a slew of domestic issues such as youth unemployment and weakening health and education systems, some analysts say the election is a “de-facto referendum” on its relationship with China.

“The results will determine whether the Solomon Islands continues growing its relationship with China or changes course in favor of a different approach,” Parker Novak, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, told VOA in a written response.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, who seeks an unprecedented second consecutive term, has focused on deepening the country’s ties with China since he returned to power in 2019.

After switching Solomon Islands’ diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019, Sogavare signed a series of security-related agreements with China, including a security pact in 2022 and a police cooperation agreement in 2023.

The developments prompted the U.S., Australia and other Pacific island nations to express concerns about the security implications of these deals. So far, the Solomon Islands hasn’t revealed details of the controversial security pact with China.

However, a leaked draft agreement shows that China could potentially deploy security and naval assets to the country.

The lack of transparency around the security deal with China has prompted several opposition candidates in the Solomon Islands to vow to abolish or review the security pact.

While opposition leaders have sounded the alarm about China’s growing security presence in the Solomon Islands, Sogavare has strongly defended his administration’s efforts to deepen bilateral ties with China.

Centering his campaign around his signature “Look North strategy,” which aims to consolidate Solomon Islands’ economic and diplomatic ties with Asian countries, Sogavare has repeatedly emphasized how Chinese support with infrastructure developments and the Pacific Games has helped place the Pacific island nation “in a more favorable footing domestically and internationally.”

In response to opposition politicians’ concerns about China’s growing influence over the Solomon Islands, China’s Foreign Ministry said Monday that Beijing supports the people of Solomon Islands “in choosing a development path that suits their national conditions.”

Some experts say China’s entry into the Solomon Islands’ security sector in recent years has created friction with traditional security partners like Australia. “There has been an increase in friction as a result of China’s entry into the security space in the Solomon Islands and other parts of the Pacific,” said Mihai Sora, a research fellow in the Pacific Islands program at Lowy Institute in Australia.

While the Solomon Islands is trying to retain relationships with partners like Australia amid its efforts to deepen ties with China, Sora said the Sogavare administration’s attempt will be difficult to execute because of continuing “strategic friction” between Beijing and Canberra, especially in the security space. [The Solomon Islands] “will need to resolve the increasing frictions,” he told VOA by phone.

Chinese security presence in the Pacific comes into focus

In addition to the Solomon Islands, China’s growing security presence in other parts of the Pacific region is also coming under scrutiny ahead of other major political events. Earlier this month, Tonga’s Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni said he would be open to accepting Chinese security support when the country hosts the Pacific Islands Forum in August.

“There’s no reason to be concerned. China is offering to assist with the hosting of the foreign leaders’ meeting,” he told reporters in the Tongan capital Nukuʻalofa.

The Chinese Embassy in Tonga told AFP in a statement that Beijing “has no interest in geopolitical competition or seeking the so-called ‘sphere of influence.’”

Some analysts say Tonga’s decision to welcome China as a potential security provider reflects Pacific island nations’ efforts to diversify their security partners since 2021.

“China has had success in presenting itself as a security stakeholder in the region and this is certainly of concern to Canberra, Wellington and Washington, who view China’s security interests in the Pacific as disruptive and indicative of China’s broader interests,” Anna Powles, an associate professor in security studies at Massey University in New Zealand, told VOA in a written response.

Meanwhile, Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka told ABC Australia in March that the country has removed Chinese police embedded in its police force despite the earlier decision to uphold Fiji’s policing cooperation agreement with China.

Some experts say Fiji is “walking a fine line” in its relationship with China and Western countries. “By not throwing away the police deal, Fiji is showing that they are not willing to go all in and align with the West,” Michael Walsh, an affiliated researcher at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, told VOA by phone.

In his view, Fiji’s careful calibration of its security relationship with China demonstrates that “they are going to keep having a relationship with China that extends into the security domain for the foreseeable future.”

While some experts agree that China has made progress in expanding its security presence in the Pacific, Novak from the Atlantic Council said Beijing’s security influence in the region “shouldn’t be overstated.”

“More often than not, Pacific islands countries have elected to maintain or even grow traditional security partnerships with countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United States while carefully maintaining their own sovereignty,” he told VOA.