Collective consciousness and its pathologies: understanding the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States

Gentrification and binge drinking in California neighborhoods: It matters how long you've lived there

BACKGROUND

Neighborhood context plays a role in binge drinking, a behavior with major health and economic costs. Gentrification, the influx of capital and residents of higher socioeconomic status into historically-disinvested neighborhoods, is a growing trend with the potential to place urban communities under social and financial pressure. Hypothesizing that these pressures and other community changes resulting from gentrification could be tied to excessive alcohol consumption, we examined the relationship between gentrification and binge drinking in California neighborhoods.

METHODS

California census tracts were categorized as non-gentrifiable, stable (gentrifiable), or gentrifying from 2006 to 2015. Outcomes and covariates were obtained from the California Health Interview Survey using combined 2013-2015 data (n = 60,196). Survey-weighted logistic regression tested for associations between gentrification and any binge drinking in the prior 12 months. Additional models tested interactions between gentrification and other variables of interest, including housing tenure, federal poverty level, race/ethnicity, sex, and duration of neighborhood residence.

RESULTS

A third of respondents reported past-year binge drinking. Controlling for demographic covariates, gentrification was not associated with binge drinking in the population overall (AOR = 1.13, 95% CI = 0.95-1.34), but was associated with binge drinking among those living in the neighborhood <5 years (AOR = 1.49, 95% CI 1.15-1.93). No association was seen among those living in their neighborhood ≥5 years.

CONCLUSIONS

For those newer to their neighborhood, gentrification is associated with binge drinking. Further understanding the relationship between gentrification and high-risk alcohol use is important for policy and public health interventions mitigating the impact of this process.

The limits of collaboration: a qualitative study of community ethical review of environmental health research

OBJECTIVES

We assessed the effectiveness of various systems of community participation in ethical review of environmental health research.

METHODS

We used situation analysis methods and a global workspace theoretical framework to conduct comparative case studies of 3 research organizations at 1 medical center.

RESULTS

We found a general institutional commitment to community review as well as personal commitment from some participants in the process. However, difficulty in communicating across divides of knowledge and privilege created serious gaps in implementation, leaving research vulnerable to validity threats (such as misinterpretation of findings) and communities vulnerable to harm. The methods used in each collaboration solved some, but not all, of the problems that hindered communication.

CONCLUSIONS

Researchers, community spokespersons, and institutional review boards constitute organizational groups with strong internal ties and highly developed cultures. Few cross-linkages and little knowledge of each other cause significant distortion of information and other forms of miscommunication between groups. Our data suggest that organizations designed to protect human volunteers are in the best position to take the lead in implementing community review.

Evolutionary radiation and the spectrum of consciousness

Evolution is littered with polyphyletic parallelism: many roads lead to functional Romes. We propose consciousness embodies one such example, and represent it here with an equivalence class structure that factors the broad realm of necessary conditions information theoretic realizations of Baars' global workspace model. The construction suggests many different physiological systems can support rapidly shifting, highly tunable, and even simultaneous temporary assemblages of interacting unconscious cognitive modules. The discovery implies various animal taxa exhibiting behaviors we broadly recognize as conscious are, in fact, expressing different forms of the same underlying phenomenon. The variety of possibilities suggests minds today may be only a small surviving fraction of ancient evolutionary radiations--bush phylogenies of consciousness pruned by selection and chance extinction. Although few traces of the radiations may be found in the fossil record, exaptations and vestiges are scattered across the living mind.