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Senate GOP Could Use Procedural Tactics To Delay Sotomayor Hearings
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Thursday said that the GOP has not ruled out the use of procedural tactics, such as a Republican boycott, to attempt to delay Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor"s confirmation hearing, Roll Call reports. Republicans have complained that the scheduled July 13 start date for the hearing does not give them enough time to review Sotomayor"s record. Kyl said that Republicans will try to negotiate with Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) for more time if they feel they cannot meet the July 13 deadline (Stanton, Roll Call, 6/11). Leahy said that Sotomayor is entitled to be confirmed on the same timetable as Chief Justice John Roberts, who appeared before the Judiciary Committee less than two months after his nomination (Kivlan, CongressDaily, 6/11).Republican Senate aides say Judiciary Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is not likely to make a final decision for several weeks on whether the GOP will try to delay the nomination. According to Roll Call, Sessions has sought to approach the issue "in a careful, measured way," though he has been critical of some of Sotomayor"s public statements. Roll Call reports that Republicans are apt to display an impartial stance on Sotomayor until the hearing starts, meaning that they likely will delay a decision on whether to stall the nomination until the last minute (Roll Call, 6/11).Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that Republican senators are stalling to give conservative groups more time to organize a campaign against Sotomayor that they hope will taint her nomination. Feinstein said that there are "groups out there who need more time for attacks and sound bites." She added, "This is a woman who is qualified, who is brilliant, and who worked her way up" (CongressDaily, 6/11).
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Nutrient-Rich Foods Index Aims To Reshape Nutrition Education
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Diabetes Is Significant Economic Burden For US Health-Care System
Excess medical expenses and reduced productivity due to diabetes costs the U.S. economy more than $174 billion annually, a figure that could be reduced by lifestyle modifications and preventive care and by pay-for-performance incentives that reward improved disease management, as supported by three articles in the recent issue of Population Health Management, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.. These diabetes-related reports are available free online here.
Mental Health

Anxiety's Hidden Cost

The effect of anxiety on academic performance is not always obvious but new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council suggests that there may be hidden costs. The research found that anxious individuals find it harder to avoid distractions and take more time to turn their attention from one task to the next than their less anxious peers. The researchers, Professor Michael Eysenck and Dr Nazanin Derkshan, designed several experiments to explore the effects of anxiety on our ability to perform tasks such as avoiding distractions on a computer screen, when reading a story, or solving a series of simple mathematics problems. According to Professor Eysenck, these findings have clear practical implications in the classroom: "A lot of the negative effects of anxiety appear to be caused by difficulties with controlling attention. This suggests that training techniques designed to enhance attentional control - the ability to ignore distractions and to switch attention from one task to another - could help anxious students to achieve their academic potential," he explains. In addition, the study showed that anxious individuals often perform at a comparable level to non-anxious ones but only do so at a greater cost in terms of effort or perhaps long term stress. "This shows that it is important that teachers focus not only on whether a student"s academic performance seems to be OK but also on how much effort the student had to put in to achieve that level. Anxious students may be trying desperately hard just to keep up and this could be at great psychological cost," says Professor Eysenck. In one of these experiments, participants" eye movements were recorded as they read a story that included a few "distracter" words that were unrelated to the story. The researchers found that anxious participants took longer to read the story because they tended to dwell on the irrelevant words, particularly when they thought that their comprehension would be evaluated by others In another experiment, participants performed two arithmetical tasks such as multiplication and division either in separate blocks (all the problems requiring multiplication grouped together and kept separate from the division problems) or with one task alternating with the other. In this experiment, anxiety levels did not appear to affect the number of correct answers given but anxious participants took longer to complete the task, particularly when they had to keep switching from one type of mathematical calculation to another. Overall, the experiments showed that anxiety had more effect on how much effort it took to perform a task than on how well the task was actually performed. In other words, anxiety often produced "hidden costs" that were not apparent in performance. Danielle Moore Economic & Social Research Council


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