week 4 post 1

Journalism for social change-

-using research to determine its newsworthiness

-Convert jargon and scientific language to consumable discourse

Jason Marsh Video

• Look at background of peer reviewed studies
• Is it adding something new to the public interest realm
• Has the media touched on it
• Skim the abstract
• Skim backgrounds and methods and results and THEN read the discussion section
• Write as if your best friend was reading it or if a friend who doesn't know a lot about it was reading it
• Look at the terms early on, make sure that when you define them it uses really clear language
• Causation is being able to probe 1 factor or variable caused something else to occur, correlation shows there is some kind of relationship between the two
• Compared to greater good science center alot of media misinterprets and does a bad job of using jargon and interpretation of facts

THE POVERTY CLINIC

Can a stressful childhood make you a sick adult?

By: Paul tough

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/21/the-poverty-clinic 

• monish a Sullivan, Sixteen years old, she was an African-American teen-age mother who had grown up in the poorest and most violent neighborhood in San Francisco, Bayview-Hunters Point
• Sullivan’s problems appeared to transcend mere physical symptoms, depressed and listless
• didn’t like her foster mother, and seemed not to care one way or the other about her two-month-old daughter, Sarai
• Sullivan lived with her father and her older brother in a section of Hunters Point that is notorious for its gang violence; her father, too, began taking drugs, and at the age of ten she and her brother were removed from their home, separated, and placed in foster care
• “I feel like I’m going to be damaged forever.”
• Molecular Psychiatry and Nature Neuroscience
• What if Sullivan’s anxiety wasn’t merely an emotional side effect of her difficult life but the central issue affecting her health?
• Burke believes that regarding childhood trauma as a medical issue helps her to treat more effectively the symptoms of patients like Sullivan.
• With someone like Monisha, we can help her recognize the neurochemical dysregulation that her childhood has produced in her, this helps to teach good decision making 
• It turned out to be surprisingly easy to get our immunization rates way up and to get our asthma hospitalization rates way down
• “The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning Gold Into Lead,” 
• the ace study, which assessed the health outcomes of patients enrolled in the Kaiser H.M.O. between 1994 and 1998. Felitti had conducted the study with Robert F. Anda, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta
• the prevalence of adverse experiences among this generally well-off population. More than a quarter of the patients said they had grown up in a household in which there was an alcoholic or a drug user; about the same fraction had been beaten as children.
• the higher the ace score, the worse the outcome, on almost every measure, from addictive behavior to chronic disease. Compared with people who had no history of aces, those with ace scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven times as likely to be alcoholics, and six times as likely to have had sex before the age of fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, and four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis. Adults with an ace score of 4 or higher were twelve times as likely to have attempted suicide than those with an ace score of 0. And men with an ace score of 6 or higher were forty-six times as likely to have injected drugs than men who had no history of aces.
•  Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University, and Frances Champagne, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, have shown that repeated, full-scale activation of this stress system, especially in early childhood, can lead to deep physical changes. 
• Traumatic experiences can cause tiny chemical markers called methyl groups to affix themselves to genes that govern the production of stress-hormone receptors in the brain. This process disables these genes, preventing the brain from properly regulating its response to stress.
• In many cases, what looks like a social situation is actually a neurochemical situation
• You can trace the pathology as it moves from the molecular level to the social level. You have a girl who grows up in a household where there’s domestic violence, or some kind of horrible arguing between her parents
• It becomes a cultural norm. It goes from the individual fight-or-flight adrenaline response to a social culture where it’s, like, ‘Oh, black people beat our kids. That’s what we do.’ ”
• psychopharmacology: fighting chemicals with chemicals, by directly targeting the mechanisms in the brain that get overloaded by early stress
• Helping people who are later in life who experience trauma as a child are more difficult to approach
• psychological therapies

Myriad Issues Contribute to Child Maltreatment and Death

Emily Putnam-Hornstein Video

• Data linkages
• You can figure out on the day of the child's birth how low or high a risk they are in becoming part of the system
• Preventative methods
• No single risk factors that determines it all but when they have a multitude of those risk factors can say when they might become part of the system
• Putting numbers on what we intuitively thought before
• 40% of teens who give birth in california have a history of neglect and the children born from these mothers had 3x more likely to be victim to these mothers
• Improving service array
• Risk strategizing and classifying
• The ethical issues, we need to look at this from an empirical standpoint 
• Never going to be 100% right, think about downside
• Identifying high risk children, and how to intervene
• NCANS data, national system for child abuse
• Estimate of data of how many children who will be affected by abuse and neglect

NEW STUDY SHOWS HEIGHTENED CHILD ABUSE THREAT

By Daniel Heimpel 

• On December 2, the new and increasingly influential Children’s Data Network partnered with the California Child Welfare Indicators Project to release a slew of studies showing that one in seven of all California babies born in 2006 and 2007 had been reported for abuse or neglect by age five.
• By age 18, the researchers found, one in eight American children will have the experience of a social worker entering their home and determining that they were abused or neglected.
• Cumulative rates of reported and substantiated child abuse and neglect are as much as eight times the annual rates reported by venerable, trustworthy state and national data systems.

Preventative Analytics

By Daniel Heimpel 

•  big data can be crunched in a way that helps determine which children are at greater risk of being abused
• applying “predictive analytics” to child maltreatment response and prevention has gained a new currency. Its Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection recommended that the county implement a predictive analytics model piloted in Florida that is meant to reduce child fatalities

the researchers found that certain at-birth risk factors were linked to heightened rates of reported or substantiated abuse. These included:

• Children born without fathers listed on their birth certificates
• Mothers on public health insurance
• Mothers who had not completed high school
• Teen mothers

• Dispute over labeling people

José Casas Interview

• Using storytelling to be a journalist 
• Issues changing people
• Observing the world
• Social activism
• Chicanismo, chicano, racial category from political standpoint, mecican american that deals with idea of social activism 
• Luis Valdez
• Make it constant conversation 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0HEqI3pJIM

Stasis, trigger quest, surprise, critical choice, climax, reversal, resolution

https://www.businessinsider.com/pixars-rules-for-storytelling-2014-10

Pixars 22 tips

Outlining

• Spoken Word (5 Minutes)

• Short  story (10 pages)

• Podcast (10 minutes)


• What happens in your story?
• Who are the characters? Describe the perspectives your characters take and how they develop.
• Describe the structure of your story. Does your story have a beginning, middle, and end? Is it circular?
• Who is your audience?
• How does your story create empathy with that audience?
• How does your story promote social change?

*connect this to my other class