Archive for October 2024

Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said: “Children must not pay the price for balancing budgets.” Local government minister Jim McMahon said the new government had inherited a crisis and there was “no shying away” from the scale of it.

Morgan State University’s School of Social Work is preparing a new crop of social work professionals with the skills and training to address the public health crisis caused by the rapidly escalating opioid misuse epidemic, thanks to a new $500,000 State Opioid Response grant. Awarded by the Maryland Department of Health’s Behavioral Health Administration and funded through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the grant will support the establishment of 38 social work student fellows made up of undergraduate seniors and master’s degree candidates, and eight doctoral training fellows as part of the Substance Use Disorder and Health Initiative for Education and Leadership Development (SHIELD) initiative.

Algorithms can be employed to sniff out desperation for income based on the extremes people are willing to take on the job, such as high trip acceptance rates among Uber drivers. With this hoard of granular information, A.I. can calculate the lowest possible pay that workers across sectors will tolerate and suggest incentives like bonuses to control their behavior. While bosses have always offered so-called variable pay—for instance, paying more for night shifts or offering performance-based salary boosts—high-tech surveillance coupled with A.I. is taking real-time tailored wages to new extremes.

As a recent White House convening underscored, Latinx communities continue to face disproportionately high rates of HIV, driven by structural inequities, stigma and limited access to culturally responsive care. The summit highlighted the pressing need for cities across the U.S. to implement community-driven solutions that effectively address barriers to accessing life-saving HIV prevention and care services.

“Property insurers who deny legitimate claims,” notes Martin Weiss, the founder of the nation’s only independent insurer rating agency, “are sending the implicit message, ‘If you don’t like it, sue us.’”

To add injury to that insult, Weiss adds, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had just before last year signed into law new legislation that makes policyholder lawsuits against insurers “far more difficult.”