Search Content

Displaying results 7651 - 7700 of 87950

Homeless Veterans

Hat tip to Majikthise and Steve Gilliard for bringing my attention to this article about vets from the Iraqi war becoming homeless after leaving the military. I'll quote just a little bit of the story from one returning Iraqi vet: A gunner's mate for 16 years, Arellano said he adjusted after serving in the first Gulf War. But after returning from Iraq, depression drove him to leave his job at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He got divorced. He said that after being quickly pushed out of the military, he could not get help from the VA because of long delays. "I felt, as well…

No Penalty For Lying

Over at Hullabaloo, Tristero describes this conversation with a respected journalist about the manufactured smear of CBS reporter Lara Logan's coverage of the Haifa Street battle: Well, recently, I was at dinner with a friend who is a major journalist at a major media outlet in New York City. (I will not identify the person further, including whether my friend is male or female, or what kind of media s/he works for - video, print, or online). In the course of the conversation, I brought up the Lara Logan video and s/he said, with certain authority, "I know about that. Y'know, there's a lot of…

A Scientific Road Trip

Right above the tree tops -- where most people might think there is just air -- Prof. Dan Yakir sees a distinctive atmospheric layer in which all sorts of complex exchanges are taking place. CO2, of course, is one of the important ones, and we still don’t understand all of the ins and outs of its flux through the forest, soil and atmosphere. Moisture, heat (and by extension light) and oxygen all cycle through the interface between the forest canopy and the lower atmosphere, as do a number of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by many trees. These compounds may contribute to the…

The Week in ScienceBlogs

8.13.07 to 8.19.07 Homepage Buzzes 8/13: Science Panel on C-SPAN On Saturday, C-SPAN aired a televised broadcast of the "Science, Politics, and Activism" panel that took place on August 3 at the YearlyKos Convention. The video of the panel, moderated by Tara Smith and featuring science bloggers Sean Carroll, Chris Mooney, and Ed Brayton, is available online. 8/14:Karl Rove Out Karl Rove, who has been a political adviser to President Bush for over 10 years, has announced his plans to resign as White House deputy chief of staff. He will leave his position on August 31, bringing to an end an…

My picks from ScienceDaily

We're Sorry This Is Late ... We Really Meant To Post It Sooner: Research Into Procrastination Shows Surprising Findings: A University of Calgary professor in the Haskayne School of Business has recently published his magnum opus on the subject of procrastination -- and it's only taken him 10 years. Joking aside, Dr. Piers Steel is probably the world's foremost expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today. His comprehensive analysis of procrastination research, published in the recent edition of the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin,…

OSHA urged (again) to revise PSM standard

Members of Congress George Miller (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and Corrine Brown (D-FL)  sent a letter to acting OSHA chief Jordan Barab urging the agency to expand its process safety management standard (PSM) to address reactive chemicals.  Reactives are highly unstable that can violently generate heat, energy and/or toxic gases when they come into contact with air, water or other substances.   The letter reminds Mr. Barab that members of Congress wrote to his predecessor, Asst. Secretary Foulke, in January 2008 asking him to begin the rulemaking process to address the hazards…

Salvaging EPA Libraries

Remember how EPA library closures and record purges were threatening public access to important environmental information? Now Congress is requiring the agency to restore library services, reports Katherine Boyle of Greenwire: U.S. EPA must craft plans to reopen regional libraries shuttered from a Bush administration cost-cutting effort under a provision in the agency's fiscal 2008 budget. Congress allocated nearly $3 million for restoring library services and requires the agency to report its progress to lawmakers within three months. At issue are EPA libraries that were closed in Chicago,…

Breaking FDA's User Fee Habit (2)

By David Michaels The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), through which the FDA collects money from drug makers in exchange for faster reviews of their new products, gets skewered again â this time in a piece by Christopher Moraff in the American Prospect Online. (We've been covering the issue here at TPH; more materials on the link between PDUFA and the drug safety crisis are also posted on DefendingScience.org). Following hot on the heels of yesterdayâs Washington Post/Bloomberg critique by Cindy Skrzycki, Moraff summarizes the shortcomings of PDUFA raised by the Institute of Medicine,…

Hippos are photographed biting a crocodile to death

You've probably seen - presumably on TV - Nile crocs Crocodylus niloticus interacting with Common hippos Hippopotamus amphibius (if you've seen it in real life, lucky you). By and large the two seem to keep apart. Having said that, there are certainly photos of the two sharing the same sandbanks. And then there are those instances of hippos scaring crocs away from carcasses, the weird reports of hippos mouthing and chewing the backs and tails of resting crocodiles, and those cases where crocodiles have been seen to walk or run across hippos' backs. What can certainly be said to be the most…

RoboCroc

Tales of animals that have undergone reconstructive surgery, or end up with prosthetic attachments, always make the news: wheels in place of tortoise legs [example] and that sort of thing. As reported in the Mail online (and other sources) a few days ago, during December 2008 an unfortunate 3-m long, wild American crocodile Crocodylus acutus was run over by a car, in Florida. The animal sustained substantial head injuries: apparently its snout was 'hanging limp' and it was unable to feed. It was captured and taken to the Miami MetroZoo [images below © Barcroft Media]. Here, plans were made…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the excitement begins!

Now that the Open Lab 2008 is done and up for sale, it's time to turn our sights towards the next year. If you read the comments on Sci's post and my post (as well as some chatter I picked up on Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed and privately), the pick for the 2009 editor is a Big Hit! I am truly looking forward to the year of collaboration with SciCurious on the next edition of the anthology. But, as you know, the anthology is a collaborative project of the entire science blogosphere. Thus, we need to get started! That means YOU! First, you need to go into your blog's archives and look at your…

Extreme Solar Systems VII - extreme habitability

Extreme Solar Systems conference has finished, and the lovely WiFi service at Athens airport just crashed and wiped out what I wrote... aargh. Hrmph, the previous version was much snappier and comprehensive, with amusing and informative hyperlinks. Ok, before my battery runs out, here goes... Lots of new instruments coming online. Some new dedicated or semi-dedicated planet hunting telescopes. Good prospects for near future space missions. Shortage of time for followups. we're probably missing stuff because of slow followup and poor cadence on good targets, this will get much worse as…

16th Century Campaign Archaeology

My buddy Claes Pettersson is a field archaeologist in Jönköping and always has a lot of fun projects going. Last year he told me about an undocumented manor park he had studied through geophysics. Right now he's digging bits of Jönköping's obliterated castle. And recently he sent me an intriguing little fieldwork report (available on-line for free). It's a piece of, not exactly battlefield archaeology, but campaign archaeology, which is rare. The back story is short and nasty. Sweden fought the Northern Seven Years' War from 1563 to 1570 against Denmark-Norway, Lübeck and the Polish-…

Rotational Motion of a Bouncing Football

I followed up my ranty-y post about "Sports Science" with an experimental investigation over at Forbes, tossing a football around on the deck out back and then doing video analysis of the bounces. This provided a wealth of data, much of it not really appropriate for over there, but good for a physics post or two here. One of the trajectories I looked at was this "forward bounce": Here's the trajectory reconstructed in Tracker: Trajectory of a football bouncing forward. This is notable because not only does it bounce forward, it includes one of those big pop-up bounces that take people off…

The Growth of My Digital Photography

Over at Wired, Rhett has a post providing mathematical proof that he takes too many photos. As is traditional, he includes homework at the end of the post, specifically: Now it is your turn. Find the number of photos you have taken each year. Is it possible for you to detect changes in your life by significant changes in the image rate? Maybe you purchased a new phone or had a new addition to your family which resulted in an increase in images. That would be cool if you could see that in your data. Well, I can't really resist a challenge like that, so I went looking at my own photo…

January Pieces Of My Mind #1

We built a snow entity. I shall miss Cousin E. Waiting to blow The introductions to academic paper anthologies often consist of descriptions of the contents. I never read them. That information is in the title to each contribution. Pointless. H.G. Wells became public domain on 1 January! My new project is writing a Latin grammar in Pidgin English. Have you ever been to a Yule Spruce Looting event? The blotter pad at the bottom of a supermarket meat tray would probably work well as a wound dressing or a panty liner. Be it known that I cooked 1/4 of a goose with wine, garlic, onions,…

Two Women-in-Science Notes

Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro course (which is required of all students there): Known as CS 5, the course focused on hard-core programming, appealing to a particular kind of student -- young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. This only reinforced the women's sense that computer science was for geeky know-…

Links for 2011-01-23

Food for Thinkers: The Rise of White People Food - Food - GOOD "White People Food has nothing to do with the relative melanin level of the person eating it. There are plenty of black and Hispanic foodies happily gorging themselves. They, too, in this case, are White People. And it has nothing to do with cuisine or the chef. In fact, Momofuku, the very quintessence of a White People restaurant, serves Asian-themed food and is run by David Chang, who is Korean. White People Food does, however, have a lot to do with money. Are you wealthy enough to afford cuts of [insert farm name] [insert…

The digital revolution and the mainstreaming of arthropods

In 1934, a diminutive book by an unknown author seeded the largest conservation movement in history. The book, Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds, pioneered the modern field guide format with crisp illustrations of diagnostic characters, all in a pocket-sized read. The Guide sold out in a week, but the book's effects are ongoing. To understand the magnitude of Peterson's impact, consider how naturalists traditionally identified birds. They'd take a shotgun into the field, and if they saw something of interest they'd kill it. Birding was necessarily limited to the landed-…

You can't say that on the radio

If you need to kill some time while you wait for word on who Obama has chosen as running mate, check out this transcript of a radio debate on climate change. Canadian PR agent Richard Littlemore takes on British journalist Christopher Monckton on the Roy Green Show on Hamilton, Ont.'s CHML. The sad affair was presciently summed up 500 years ago by Michel de Montaigne: "No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately." Monckton, who most recently embarrassed the American Physical Society by convincing one its online editors to post an error-ridden paper on…

Sunday sermon: Atheism in the WaPo

A pair of stories in Saturday's Washington Post would have us believe that atheism is on the rise in America and in Europe. And despite the popularity of the subject here on ScienceBlogs, the culture of science barely rates a mention in either story. Also missing are much in the way of quantitative evidence to back up the main thesis, but there are some hints that the recent proliferation of "New Atheist" literature may be responsible for whatever growth in atheism there really is. The Post's story on the situation in Europe is headlined " In Europe and U.S., Nonbelievers Are Increasingly…

Brains, Past and Future

By sheer coincidence (or some journalistic twist of fate) two magazine articles of mine are coming out this week, and they just so happen to make a nice neurological pairing. In Science, I've written an essay about what seventeenth-century natural philosophers have to teach twenty-first century neuroscientists about the brain. In the February issue of Popular Science, my cover story looks at the latest work on brain-machine interfaces that will let people control machines with thought alone. Inevitably, the Pop Sci piece can only focus on a time scale of a few years. But the latest brain-…

Many economists have egg on their face

Economic historian, Gregory Clark, details why times have changed for academic economists: The current recession has revealed the weaknesses in the structures of modern capitalism. But it also revealed as useless the mathematical contortions of academic economics. There is no totemic power. This for two reasons: (1) Almost no-one predicted the world wide downtown. Academic economists were confident that episodes like the Great Depression had been confined to the dust bins of history. There was indeed much recent debate about the sources of "The Great Moderation" in modern economies, the…

Science blogging article & paper

The current issue of The Economist contains a short article about how weblogs are beginning to change the way science is being communicate: Earlier this month Seed Media Group...launched the latest version of Research Blogging, a website which acts as a hub for scientists to discuss peer-reviewed science...The new portal provides users with tools to label blog posts about particular pieces of research, which are then aggregated, indexed and made available online. ...According to Adam Bly, Seed's founder, internet-aided interdisciplinarity and globalisation, coupled with a generational…

The Buffyverse and Incidental Exposure to Science

One of the great paradoxes of contemporary society is that Americans by way of the Internet and specialized cable TV channels have greater access to scientific information than at any other time in history, yet knowledge of science and related policy matters remains very low. The problem is too many content choices. In a fragmented media system, strong "preference gaps" exist, as citizens not only select among media choices based on ideology or religious views, but also based on their preference, or lack thereof, for science-related content. As a result, with a wide diversity of…

Not Even Wrong

From time to time, my Seed magazine hosts throw out a question for bloggers to answer. Today's question is concerns a column by James S. Robbins on global warming in the National Review Online. Robbins claims that global warming will be a great thing if it happens, which he doubts. The question is, does he have a point? The question of what the full range of effects from global warming will be--both good and bad--is an important one, but Robbins shows little ability to offer an answer. His column overlooks important things, gets various facts wrong, and belies a general ignorance of and…

New Books of Interest

I found out about these two books from the Chronicle Review; haven't read either one, but they looked interesting and some of you may want to check them out. Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low, according to recent surveys. And relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities, and preparation needed for them to choose computer…

Info-boxes and resistance to science

There's been lots of commentary online about Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg's article about why children (and adults) often resist learning scientific information. Deric Bownds gives the money quote from the article: Resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and it will be especially strong if there is a nonscientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are thought of as…

Cognitive Daily readers tackle change

Last Friday, we asked readers to identify changes in a painting by Eugène Delacroix, Christopher Columbus and His Son at La Rábida. For the test, the picture flashed maddeningly between its original state and a doctored version Greta made in Photoshop. Here's the original: We admit it -- we were being a little sneaky. We asked you to "identify the change" in the picture, subtly hinting that only one part of the picture would change. You can click on the picture to see the movie again and convince yourself that two things are changing in the picture: the arch in the center transforms to a…

Chimps With Spears

In a comment to the last post, "Korax" mentions a paper published online in Current Biology this week on chimpanzee tool use. The tool use described in this paper is, as far as I can tell, as or more complex than any previously witnessed in chimps. Here's the abstract: Although tool use is known to occur in species ranging from naked mole rats [1] to owls [2], chimpanzees are the most accomplished tool users. The modification and use of tools during hunting, however, is still considered to be a uniquely human trait among primates. Here, we report the first account of habitual tool use during…

Memo to whom it may concern.

The bullets are addressed to different people and organizations, and I doubt very much that some of them would recognize these were addressed to them even if they received an actual memo. (It's been that kind of week.) Be it known that: I do not at present have the power to be in more than one place at a time. If I did, rest assured that I would find more interesting ways to use it than simply getting two kids to soccer-related activities in different locations at the same time. I wrote a detailed FAQ for my online class for the express purpose of helping students locate the answers to…

Should Scientists Date People Who Believe in Astrology?

I remember, when I was getting to know Amanda, carefully exploring certain key issues such as this. It actually didn't take long to find out that we had almost identical political views, and perspectives on science, rational thinking, religion, and so on. (I say "almost" only because there is room for variation, but I can't think of any actual differences in perspective ... only differences in level of attention to various issues). Anyway, here is a piece by Aaron Rowe in The Wired on the topic: While searching for a soulmate on several online dating sites, I caught myself disregarding…

Rare genetic variants protect against type 1 diabetes

Nejentsev et al. (2009). Rare Variants of IFIH1, a Gene Implicated in Antiviral Responses, Protect Against Type 1 Diabetes. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1167728 The first item on my long list of predictions for 2009 was that this will be the year of rare variants for common disease - the year that we really start tracking down the low-frequency genetic variants (between 0.1 and 5% in frequency) that likely contribute substantially to the risk of common diseases like arthritis and diabetes. It's far too early for me to claim vindication for this prediction, but a paper published online today…

My Wisconsin Death Trip on Twitter

Some time back, I was researching a feature for Wired when I stumbled across the US Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration. One of the responsibilities of this office is to monitor workplace fatalities. Each week, a roundup of deaths in the workplace are posted online. They make for compelling reading. As Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis states on the site: "With every one of these fatalities, the lives of a worker's family members were shattered and forever changed. We can't forget that fact". Yet the lists only hold the briefest of details. The company…

Further Sugary Carbonated Thoughts

Dudes, I don't even drink soda. Of any kind. Ever. Seriously, though, I'm saddened by the loss of several of my sciblings. Many of them are individuals who I consider role models, and look up to. Dr. Skyskull is attempting to keep a list of new locations for them, here, and I've been adding links to responses to this debacle on the bottom of yesterday's post - I'm sure I've missed a few, though. Several other sciblings of mine are taking the wait-and-see approach that I advocated yesterday. To their credit, SEED and Scienceblogs are making some of the requested changes. You'll notice that…

Sensitivity, charm and cleverness: very sexy

Ah, the life of the female giant Australian cuttlefish…males fight for her affections, and during the mating season she will have sex with 2-8 different males each day, with an average total of 17 copulations per day. She can be picky, too, and rejects most of the mating attempts (yet still manages to mate up to 40 times a day). It must be a good life. Males have a rougher time of it, I would think. There are many more males than females, and so it's a struggle to get access to one; the bigger, stronger males will guard females, acting as a consort, and use aggressive displays to chase off…

Beware and get ready, my U.K. readers...

...because the author of the book that fueled the rise of the mercury militia in 2005, that indefatigable purveyor of bad science, logical fallacies and bizarre speculations, that useful idiot that antivaccinationists all know and love, is coming to the U.K next month. Yes, I'm talking about David Kirby. Credulous blogger Ginger of Adventures in Autism has informed me that, thanks to "support" from antivaccinationist groups Generation Rescue and the National Autism Association, Autism Research Institute, Coalition for SAFE MINDS, and Talk About Curing Autism, David Kirby will be traveling to…

Stupid Congressional tricks

Radar Online assesses the ten stupidest congresscritters. But any such list which doesn't include Senator Ted "made of tubes" Stevens is clearly bogus. Furthermore, the entire premise misses a vital point. These congresscritters may well be dumb, but what made them deserving of mockery is their public displays of stupidity. Jim Ryun has said things about climate change at least as stupid as what Senator Inhofe has said, and I'd say his ad touting sustainable energy, in which he addresses the camera while gassing up his SUV, easily tops the press conference on energy described in the entry…

Special Request

[Update; I've now received all the papers (thank you all!), but I'll leave the list up here just in case anyone else is interested in tracking these down for their own interests.] In the process of writing a chapter on the evolution of birds (and, therefore, dinosaurs) I've found that there is a much larger body of literature on the topic than I had previously accounted for. I've got a few books on the topic and have downloaded dozens of papers, but some of the most important papers to my vision for the chapter are beyond my grasp. Many of these are older papers by Richard Owen and T.H.…

Not concerned with getting creationism into public schools, eh?

Just in case you needed more evidence that the young earth creationists of Answers in Genesis are boldfaced liars, they've published a new webpage advising students how to start "Creation Clubs" at their public schools. AiG has sworn up and down that it doesn't want to force their (appallingly incorrect) version of the history of the world into public schools, but over and over again the opposite has turned out to be true. Indeed, taking advantage of the ability of many schools being able to host religiously-oriented clubs run by students, Ham & Co. recommend doing the following to…

Why I Hate Earth Day

I bloody hate Earth Day. No offense to those of you who love it, and I know there are some awesome Earth Day programs out there, but by the time we get there, I'm spending my days hiding under the covers, because every freakin' time I open my email inbox a wave of the most nauseating spew of greenwashing comes flowing out. Guess what? A major department store chain, nearly in bankruptcy, is now selling the eco-tote, made from organic sheepskin, embossed with "Think Global, Act Local" to show your care for the earth and indifference to grammar. And not to trouble me, but just so you know,…

No matter where you are, you can participate in the Science Blogging Conference

Yes, about 200-something people will be participating in the Science Blogging Conference in the real space and real time, being physically present. But, both those who are here and those who are not should also participate online. Here are the three main places to do so: 1. The Wiki The main conference wiki, set up by Anton Zuiker, is the center of the conference universe. Look around and see what is happening. Check the 'Recent Activity' tab to see who made changes to what page recently. Feel free to edit pages - no need to enter the e-mail address (it will reject your edit) - just solve…

The World's Fair: Year 2 Agenda

The World's Fair began last year with the goal of contributing to the on-line, public conversation about science. Scienceblogs.com is dedicated to that mission generally, so Dave and I figured we'd add in by talking about a few areas of common interest to us. Things like: visual art-science connections, science and the humanities (literary, visual, cinematic, theatrical, etc), satire and humor, writing on/about/for science (this dous double duty: as the subject of discussion while also doing it) - this, they say, is called science communication, and Dave seems to be particularly adept at…

Teachers Gone Wild

My wife, a biology teacher, gets crazy in the biology classroom. She is famous for her interpretive dance renditions of numerous cellular processes. The students in the first class of the day reportedly stare in disbelief and roll their eyes, but the students in the other classes throughout the day seem to love it. Several of her students have taken to filming her pedagogical paroxysms, and you know that some day, Amanda will be a YouTube Star. But this brings up the interesting and difficult mixture of students, personal technology in the classrooms, teachers, schools, school…

Autism quackery invades my hometown, part II

Not again. I have no way of knowing if the media in my hometown happen to be more credulous when it comes to pseudoscience than average, but, given the number of stories referred to me emanating from Detroit and its surrounding suburbs, you'll forgive me if I'm very depressed right now. For instance, we have "investigative reporter" Steve Wilson of WXYZ Channel 7 Action News, who, although claiming the title of "Chief Investigator" for that station, clearly couldn't investigate his way out of a paper bag--at least when it comes to medical stories--given that he is known for routinely…

Birds in the News 165

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter American Avocet chick, Recurvirostra americana. Image: Richard Ditch, 2007 [larger view]. Birds in Science and Technology Researchers have discovered the first direct evidence that exposure to stress in young birds affects the way they react to stress when adult. Exposure to stressful events soon after birth has significant effects on a range of physiological and behavioral responses later in life. Previous work in mammals has been unable to work out whether this is due to raised stress hormone levels produced by…

Friday Not-So-Random 10

This past week, I discovered a new digital music download site, called Bitmunk. It's less expensive than iTunes or Amazon, and has a fantastic selection of obscure bands. Through Bitmunk, I found a couple of terrific new neo-progressive bands, which has me on a serious prog kick. So for today, I've narrowed the domain of the randomization to just the progressive stuff, and I also cheated a bit to make sure that the two best of the new bands I found are included in the list. Just to be clear, I've got no connection with Bitmunk, they're not giving me anything to mention them, etc. I found…

When Privatization Fails: College Loans

Last week, Joe Nocera had an excellent piece in the NY Times about how college loans became so exorbitant. Nocera first relates his own college loan experience--in 1974: ...I was constantly falling behind on my payments. The bank that administered my federally guaranteed loans would send a stern notice whenever I got too far behind, which would prompt me to cobble together a few payments by skipping some other bill. Then I would start falling behind again. Though I found the situation onerous at the time, what strikes me now is how benign it actually was. My bank probably didn't make a dime…

Devil Take the Hindmost As Public Policy: Thoughts on Joblessness and Need

While I've disagreed strongly with Megan McArdle, she recently wrote one of the more humane pieces I've read in the mainstream media about unemployment and underemployment (italics mine): I was unemployed for basically two years between the time I graduated from business school in 2001, and the time I accepted a job with The Economist in 2003. I was much luckier than most people in that situation, both because my parents let me stay in their spare bedroom, and because I was working during much of that time--freelancing, flirting with a start up, doing some tech consulting, and of course,…

Healthcare.gov opens again for enrollment, with modest but varying premium increases

On Saturday, Healthcare.gov opened for enrollment in 2015 health insurance plans, and so far it’s proceeding without the horrific technical problems that greeted would-be enrollees last year. This year, as will be the case in future years, the enrollment window is just three months long. People can renew the coverage they had last year or choose a new plan. Those with incomes of between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level (in 2014, $11,670 - $46,680 for a one-person household, $23,850 - $95,400 for a household of four) are eligible for subsidies to help them afford premiums. The Obama…