[they/them] 🏳️‍⚧️, 🏳️‍🌈, disabled, disgruntled. Former librarian, future dust.
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No longer brushed off: A Minnesota clinic tries to rewrite medicine’s approach to miscarriage

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WOODBURY, Minn. — By the time Taylor Teske came to be sitting on an exam table in an obstetrician’s office in Minnesota, her medical records marked a devastating journey: nine pregnancies, one baby, eight miscarriages.

The first miscarriage happened in June 2018, almost as soon as she found out she was pregnant. Teske told her boss at the vascular clinic where she worked that she was pregnant, and he asked if she wanted to sneak a look using the clinic’s ultrasound. He searched for sounds on the black-and-white screen. Minutes passed, but nothing happened. An obstetrician-gynecologist later confirmed that Teske was having a miscarriage. 

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synapsecracklepop
21 days ago
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A long and important piece. I know too many people who've faced repeated, often unexplained miscarriages -- and now with the potential for the clotting issues caused by COVID/long COVID, I fear we'll only see more. Because many people only work with OBGYNs, not reproductive specialists, it's even more important they know about what's in this.
ATL again
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Serif or sans serif?

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Most people care about their typefaces

Appearances matter, especially whether fonts have serifs or not.

"Font Wars Spread After State Department Replaces Times New Roman with Calibri

"'I'm banging my head against the wall;' camps divided in fallout from government efforts to make documents easier to read"

By Katie Deighton, WSJ (3/14/23)

One wonders whether it is a matter of functionality and efficiency or esthetics and taste.  Whatever motivates the confrontation, one thing is evident, and that is that people have deeply held opinions in favor of / against one side or the other.

What sounds like a typeface tempest-in-a-teapot has boiled over in the U.S. and U.K., where changes in document requirements have set off a war of words among cantankerous font factions.

The State Department announced in January that Calibri would replace Times New Roman on official documents to make them easier to read. U.K.’s Home Office, for similar reasons, x-ed out the 83-year-old Times New Roman, which has the wings and feet on letters known as serif style.

“For every study out there that says that sans serifs are more legible than serifs, you’re going to find an opposite study,” said Maria Lindenfeldar, the creative director at Princeton University Press in New Jersey.

A 2017 study published in the scientific journal Annals of Dyslexia found that text in Dyslexie, a typeface designed to make reading easier for people with dyslexia, didn’t test any better—whether measured by speed or accuracy—than words in Times New Roman.

Some typeface executives say that, in fact, the serif flourish makes letters easier to distinguish. They cite the identical appearance in some Calibri fonts of the lowercase “l,” as in look, and uppercase “I,” as in India.

The serif versus sans-serif debate extends to nonverbal communication.

Typographer Sarah Hyndman, author of the book “Why Fonts Matter,” found that people saw serif typefaces such as Times New Roman embodying “traditional,” “conventional” and “trustworthy” values, she said; Calibri and other sans-serif typefaces were seen as “confident,” “friendly,” and “honest.”

Rebecca Creed, a Florida-based appellate attorney, had in the past used Times New Roman or Courier New for court briefs and other legal documents. In 2021, the Florida Supreme Court adopted a rule requiring Arial or Bookman Old Style, chosen for their readability on screens, for computer-generated documents.

At Ms. Creed’s law firm, Bookman Old Style won out.

“We just liked the way it looked,” she said. “That sounds dumb, but it’s really just what it came down to.”

Chacun Ă  son goĂťt.

 

Selected readings

 

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synapsecracklepop
187 days ago
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During and after an extended period of vision loss, I found APHont as wonderful as it was designed to be. (Free for users/audiences with vision loss)

From a 2007 research review: "The American Printing House for the Blind (APH) recommends the use of its APHont font when creating large-print materials for individuals with low vision because of its usability characteristics: even spacing between letters, no serifs, wider letters, rounder letters, and larger punctuation marks. We did not locate any experimental, published studies on APHont..."

Some say it's not "attractive," but I think it's not unattractive -- anything is better than TNR, one of the stingiest little serifs ever. And with the benefits of increased access, fluency, and textual immersion, APHont readers and typers likely have less interest in nitpicking the finer points of presentation. That, at least, was my experience.
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davenelson
186 days ago
To bad APHont font is only available for personal use.
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Becerra: Judge set to rule on abortion pill is ‘beginning to read the law’

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WASHINGTON — Health secretary Xavier Becerra on Tuesday warned of dramatic consequences if a federal judge revokes the federal approval of mifepristone, a form of medication abortion.

The judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, is set to rule on a case brought in Texas by anti-abortion advocates seeking to overturn the drug’s initial approval more than two decades ago. Mifepristone, taken in combination with misoprostol, accounts for over half of U.S. abortions. It is also used to treat miscarriage.

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synapsecracklepop
196 days ago
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"Becerra warned that if Kacsmaryk — an appointee of President Donald Trump — overturns mifepristone’s approval, the impact of the ruling would extend far beyond threats to abortion access. [As if that weren't nightmarish enough -SJ]

"Such a ruling would challenge the country’s basic system for approving drugs and encroach on the authority of the Food and Drug Administration, Becerra argued."
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Study of trans men suggests that androgen hormone therapy can lower breast cancer risk

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When transgender men transition, their risk for breast cancer tends to plummet and look more like the breast cancer risk for cisgender men, excluding those with high-risk mutations like BRCA1 or BRCA2. Many researchers thought the main reason for this was probably breast removal during chest reconstruction surgery, but recent research suggests that the androgens during hormone replacement therapy may also play a crucial role in reshaping transgender men’s breast cancer risk.

That’s hinted to researchers that androgens, the male sex hormones, might offer new paths to develop powerful therapies to treat or prevent breast cancer.

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synapsecracklepop
196 days ago
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ATL again
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“Justice” — Langston Hughes

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synapsecracklepop
197 days ago
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ATL again
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New mouse study shows genes aren’t only way to pass obesity to next generation

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From the color of our eyes to our odds of developing cancer, we’re all shaped by the genetic legacy of our ancestors. But a new study in mice provides the clearest evidence yet that acquired traits can be passed down from one generation to the next in mammals without DNA changes, challenging centuries of evolutionary dogma and raising fresh questions about the factors that affect our health.

Scientists created mice that were obese or had high cholesterol, not through tinkering with the animals’ genetic code, but by making little chemical modifications that changed which genes were active without altering the DNA sequence. Both these modifications and their metabolic effects were shown to have passed down for at least three to six generations — something scientists once assumed was impossible.

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synapsecracklepop
208 days ago
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The body keeps the score, transgenerational epigenetics edition
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