Latest news with #Ages
Chicago Tribune
3 days ago
- Sport
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Ahead of Chicago White Sox series, Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal says a rebuild ‘crushes' a sports town
It wasn't all that long ago that the Chicago White Sox were expected to dominate the American League Central for years, while the Detroit Tigers were everyone's favorite punching bags. But a baseball team's fortunes can change relatively quickly, and heading into the four-game series this week at Rate Field, the Tigers had the best record in baseball at 39-21, while the Sox were on pace to lose 113 games, after their record-setting 121-loss season of 2024. You can spend days and weeks theorizing about the downfall of the Sox since their 2021 season, and if you're a Sox fan, you probably have. But the bottom line is that not all rebuilds are alike, and now the Sox are back in another one and hoping to emulate the Tigers' rebuild. Does Detroit's rise provide hope for the Sox? 'I'm optimistic about the changes we can make because of the people that we have and the plan that's been laid out,' Sox manager Will Venable replied before Monday's opener. 'Certainly there are a lot of teams, including the Tigers, that you can point to that have reestablished themselves and their organizational identity. 'I know people over there in that organization have done a great job. We're hoping to do the same thing over here.' The Sox continue to insist that things are getting better, despite the losing, based on the pitching prospects and closer games. Maybe. But with a game-time temperature of 84 degrees Monday, they could make a statement by playing well this week against the Tigers, who came in with 10 straight wins on the South Side dating back to Sept. 1, 2023. That was back when Tigers broadcaster Jason Benetti was still happily employed by the Sox, and not the man whose departure ignited the 'Curse of Benetti' rumors. Times change. But Detroit ace Tarik Skubal, who was on the 2022 Tigers team that lost 96 games, doesn't buy into the whole rebuild concept, even as it appears theirs worked. 'How do I say this the right way?' Skubal told me before the game. 'I don't really believe in the term 'rebuild,' to be honest. Our rebuild was supposed to be five years, and it started in 2017 or whatever. That means we were supposed to have already won by now, and we haven't. So I don't believe in the word.' Skubal, one of the main reasons for the Tigers' turnaround, won't pitch this series. The Tigers are holding him until next Friday in Detroit, the start of a three-game series against the Cubs, the hottest team in the National League. Chicago is currently in the Dark Ages when it comes to our professional sports teams, so I talked with Skubal about Detroit's sports renaissance, where the Lions are a Super Bowl contender, the Tigers are a World Series contender, and the Pistons made the playoffs in 2025. 'The Lions kind of led the way, and we had a pretty good season last year and the Pistons this year, and the Red Wings are doing their thing, too,' he said. 'They're on the brink of making a serious run to the playoffs. It's a fun time to be an athlete in Detroit. It's a great sports town. 'When you have a great sports town and you come out and say 'We're rebuilding,' it crushes that town. Now we've finally got the fans to buy back into us, and it took too long — eight years or whatever. 'It's tough for fans. When you're a diehard fan and your team is kind of openly saying we don't want to win, that's not what you want to hear. I play baseball, but I'm a fan of other teams — the (Phoenix) Suns and the Arizona Cardinals — and when a team comes out and openly says we're rebuilding, you don't want to hear that. 'As a Suns fan, we've been through tough times, but now we have an owner that wants to win as badly as the fans do. That's all you can ask for as a fan.' That owner would be Mat Ishbia, a billionaire who bought the Suns along with his brother, Justin Ishbia, a limited partner in the White Sox. Justin Ishbia is considered next in line to buy the Sox when Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, or more likely his sons, decide to sell the team. 'Mat has been great for the community,' said Skubal, who grew up in Arizona. 'Obviously the Suns' season was disappointing, but it's good to know they have a plan in place, and that's all you ask for.' Reinsdorf had a plan, too. It worked until he decided to ignore his general manager, Rick Hahn, and hired his friend, Tony La Russa, as manager over A.J. Hinch, who eventually went to the Tigers. La Russa won in 2021 and then watched things fall apart one year later, leading to Hahn's firing in 2023. Now it's up to GM Chris Getz to fix things, and Year Two looks a lot like Year One. The Sox desperately need Luis Robert Jr. to wake up so they can trade him, but the .180-hitting center fielder was back in the No. 7 hole for the second straight game. Did Venable talk to Robert about the move before he made it on Sunday in Baltimore? 'I didn't on this one,' Venable said. 'I didn't think it was that big of a deal. Just kind of two spots (down). I think if you sit back and look at it today, these are the guys in our lineup. We're going to put them in an order that gives us the best chance to win. It's a logical order to me and not one to me that I thought needed an explanation. I don't think Luis is going to look at it as a big deal. It certainly wasn't a big deal to me.' If Robert dropping down to hit seventh is no longer a big deal on the South Side, it's a sad reflection on the state of the team. Maybe an eight-year plan is looking a bit optimistic.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Construction Workers Discovered Not One, Not Two, But Six Centuries-Old Shipwrecks
Crews working on the Varberg Tunnel railway project in Sweden recently uncovered six shipwrecks near the historic city. The wrecks ranged from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, and exemplified multiple ship designs and construction styles. The most intriguing ship was from the 1530s, as it remained the most intact for further study. Construction on the Varberg Tunnel in Sweden—part of a modern railway project—has resulted in an unexpected bounty of historical underwater finds: six shipwrecks spanning the Middle Ages to the 17th century, all maritime remnants of what was once a bustling harbor. Of the six separate wrecks found, four are from the Middle Ages (or Late Middle Ages), one is from the 17th century, and one couldn't be dated, according to a translated report from archaeology consultant group Arkeologerna. Elisabet Schager, Arkeologerna project manager, said in a translated statement that wrecks Nos. 2, 5, and 6 were the most intriguing. Found in the central part of the city, which was once an original shoreline and location of harbor defenses, Wreck 2 was both the most preserved and the only with a continuous structure. Wrecks 5 and 6 required hasty removal due to time constraints on the tunnel's construction project, which could have left additional portions of the ships underground. Wreck 2 comprises the remains of an oak sailing ship built during the second half of the 1530s. Using timber from West Sweden, the clinker-built style craft—where the edges of the timbers overlap—still included two hull sections from the ship's starboard side, along with scattered timbers. The ship's design also featured a berghult, or rock beam—a protective strip on the outside of the hull, which Schager called 'exciting.' The piece functions as a reinforcing support strip to protect the hull when docking, and can also serve as a brace for the superstructure. The ship was either fully or partially decked. In a fascinating twist, the team found traces of a fire on the protective strip of Wreck 2, meaning that the ship could have been intentionally burned before it sank. Wreck 5, which is from the 17th century, has much in common with Wreck 2, including local oak and a clinker-plank design. Experts believe both ships were likely sailed in the waters beyond the two medieval cities of Varberg and Ny Varberg, and that Wreck 5 also likely sailed much of the Baltic Sea. Wreck 6, though, differs from the opther two craft. This was the only caravel-style ship of the six, a style in which the planks are laid edge to edge, attached to the frame, and not wrapped around for a smooth finish. Also made of oak, Wreck 6 was the only wreckage with a preserved keel. This rabbeted (or grooved) keel shows traces of Dutch shipbuilding tradition, but experts were unable to date the timber. Wrecks 3 and 4—both from the 14th century—were flat-bottomed ships common in medieval trade. Crews will work to analyze these ships further, hoping to find additional clues about maritime life during the Middle Ages, including the area's trade networks. As more large infrastructure projects occur on the West Coast of Sweden, Schager said that crews are finding more shipwrecks in the areas that were either harbors or entirely underwater during the Middle Ages and early modern period, but may now be parts of city centers. The current work is happening in tandem with Bohuslän Museum, Visual Archaeology, and Cultural Environment Halland. 'It will be very interesting,' Schager said, 'and we will have a lot of exciting things to tell in the future.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Times
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Times
What caused the power outage in Spain and Portugal?
The comparison was as apt as it was obvious. Though two Iberian neighbours had been brought low and plunged back into the Stone Ages for an April afternoon, when it came to understanding the cause of the mass power cut, there was an information blackout. 'It was Putin,' said a mother rushing to collect her child early from school in Madrid. It almost certainly wasn't, but the lack of information fuelled the kind of speculation that Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, said he could live without. He might also have done without the Portuguese, who were the first to identify what happened — or at least what they thought had happened. • Spain-Portugal power outage: 'rare atmospheric phenomenon' to blame The national grid operator,
Time of India
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Why public health must always be led by economists
The blog is named after Seeing the Invisible, the title of a book on economics for children that Sanjeev wrote in 2018. Economics involves the study of incentives, motivations and information flows which are invisible. Likewise, self-seeking ministers and bureaucrats often work invisibly (and insidiously) against the public interest - more so in socialist countries like India where governments take on many unnecessary functions. On the other hand, self-interested businesses – through their competition for our custom – end up fostering the public interest. This blog straddles a range of autobiographical, governance and policy topics, including the experience working in the IAS, letting go of the Indian bureaucracy and learning new things in different countries, and attempting to build a liberal party for India. LESS ... MORE Dr Anthony Fauci was obsessed with covid. On 13 May 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Fauci is 'not … making the case that continuing to restrict activities will make Americans healthier overall, but only that it will, in his opinion, reduce Covid-19 deaths'. This blinkered focus, in which overall health does not matter, informed Fauci's testimony to the US Senate. He displayed no interest in 'the need to get the country back open again', stating that 'I don't give advice about economic things'. This episode summarises everything that's wrong with public health today. Excluding Sweden, most public health officials, globally, ignored society-wide health during covid, leading to hundreds of thousands of lives directly or indirectly lost from lockdowns, reduction in the life expectancy of hundreds of millions, and $15 trillion in wealth destroyed. All for a pandemic which is invisible in the aggregate mortality statistics of Sweden – the only country that didn't lock down. But Fauci was not to blame. He was simply following public health textbooks. The problem is that public health textbooks are wrong about almost everything. For instance, textbooks cherry-pick a few instances when quarantine seemingly worked without assessing the harms caused, and never evaluate the enormous cumulative harms of the myriads of historical quarantine episodes. The absence of a whole-of-society methodology in public health underpins its support for totalitarian interventions. This was not always so. At the commencement of modern public health, it was standard practice to use cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to assess quarantine and sanitation. But the golden age of public health, when rational thought and empiricism prevailed, lasted only for a few decades before medical doctors took public health back to the Dark Ages. started modern public health After centuries of quarantine quackery (led by medical doctors) the economist Jeremy Bentham proposed a systematic approach to public health in his Constitutional Code (1822-32). His disciples, the lawyer Edwin Chadwick (who was also a competent economist), and Dr Southwood Smith, used the CBA method to show that quarantine causes great harm while sanitation creates vast societal benefits. This led to the Public Health Act of 1848. Chadwick was clear: medical doctors must not lead public health In his 1842 report into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, Chadwick was happy to have doctors involved in the delivery of public health, recommending that the 2,300 doctors who provided Poor law medical relief should also undertake sanitary inspections when they visit someone's house. But he ruled out medical doctors becoming leaders of public health: 'the physician … has done his work when he has pointed out the disease that results from the neglect of proper administrative measures, and has alleviated the sufferings of the victims'. He advocated for 'the science of the civil engineer' as public health leaders. In his 1885 book he explained that sanitary engineers can vastly reduce mortality rates. At all times, he wanted the preventive and curative functions to be separate. He explained in 1885: '[t]he curative service, acts by the diagnosis of the individual. The preventive service acts by diagnoses, as it were, of the condition of a town' (i.e. the whole of society). But the medical fraternity hijacked public health The medical community was enraged that an economist-lawyer was leading the General Board of Health. The medical journal, The Lancet, attacked him bitterly, claiming that Chadwick's 1849 report against quarantine was 'especially malignant' … 'towards the medical profession'. His medical enemies managed to push him out and take charge of the role of chief medical officer. Very soon, all economic content and thinking was expunged from public health. In a 1913 article, Dr Charles Chapin claimed that 'losses by disease and gain through sanitation produce little impression … [It is] dangerous to rely upon a balance sheet of life and death'. Core competencies for public health require economics, not medicine Chadwick was right to firmly resist the encroachment of medical doctors into public health which needs minimal medical knowledge, no more than high school biology. Public health is also aware that medical doctors are not needed. In a 2003 book, 'Public Health in Practice', Andrew Watterson et al listed ten competencies for public health, none of which had any medical content. In a book chapter, Dr John Middleton wrote: 'Does the Director of Public Health need to be a doctor? Not necessarily. All of the ten … competencies for public health practice can be encompassed in individuals who are not doctors'. Instead, public health leaders need deep knowledge of society-wide health and well-being, which is the specialisation of economics. But not all economists! Many economists wrongly advocated lockdowns during covid based on 'negative externalities' and 'public goods'. Likewise, health economics textbooks wrongly promote vaccine mandates. As Harold Desmetz showed conclusively, these concepts have no empirical content and can't guide public policy. We need empirically minded scientist-economists. Public health leaders should know about the drivers of life expectancy, about opportunity costs and human factors, about CBA including the measurement of mental health through WELLBYs, and be able to empirically unpack historical experience. They should understand panics and function rationally when the public goes into hysteria. Only a small group of economists who specialise in happiness and wellbeing, fit the bill, but they will need additional training. Some doctors are finally realising the problem. In 2022, the Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom wrote that 'public health advice should consider the impact on overall health' (Chadwick had said that over 150 years ago!). But medical doctors know nothing about such analysis. Till today, no public health textbook incorporates a CBA of any form of quarantine, let alone of covid lockdowns. Instead, textbooks resort to subjective, speculative tools such as mathematical epidemiological models and ethics, which neither have anything to do with medicine, nor can they ever lead to robust policy. Can this competency gap be filled by training medical doctors in economics? No. To develop Treasury-style economists skilled in society-wide assessment takes at least a decade. It is far easier to identify good economists and teach them elementary biology. Conclusion Exactly as Chadwick had anticipated, medical doctors have badly botched up public health. We need economists to lead public health, with inputs from appropriate medical doctors and engineers. In particular, I recommend that a post of Chief Public Health Officer – always to be held by an economist – be created in each jurisdiction. Academic schools of public health should be transferred to economics departments. Medical doctors worldwide should be limited to what they know best: the curative function (Chief Medical Officer). Given the hegemony of medical doctors in public health, however, we will need a transitional strategy. First, let's create a Centre for Scientific Public Health headed by an economist, tasked with publishing textbooks to educate the world on the right way of doing public health. Second, more economists should write in established public health journals, demonstrating the value they bring. Third, a new branch called 'public health economics' should be created in economics to analyse the knowledge and incentive problems in public health, and irrationality during pandemic panics. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Bob Moore obituary
My friend Bob Moore , who has died aged 83, taught medieval history at the University of Sheffield from 1964 to 1994, and then at the University of Newcastle until his retirement in 2003. He was also known to many as RI Moore, the name under which he wrote as a historian. In 1987, he published The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Unusually for a book on medieval history, its second edition was the subject of a Guardian column by Madeleine Bunting in 2007. Its fresh and iconoclastic insights into the roots of intolerance in modern society remain sharply relevant today, and a third edition is in preparation. Bob's subsequent work on the persecution of religious heretics, culminating in The War on Heresy (2012), provoked considerable debate, and won him an important reputation internationally, especially in France. In 2000, he published The First European Revolution, which was, and still is, routinely taught in UK universities – and continues to electrify students. Its argument was that the history of European society, as opposed to classical civilisation, began around the year 1000. Bob was convinced that the Middle Ages were not a remote period of time cut off from our own world that could safely be ignored, but rather should be considered as laying the foundations for modernity. Bob was also a pioneer in the field of world history. Decades before British universities began to modify their teaching of history, Bob introduced an ambitious global history curriculum for all history students at the University of Sheffield in 1985, called World Civilisations, 600-1900, which he then took with him to Newcastle. As the founding editor of the Blackwell History of the World series, he commissioned and published enormously influential studies, including Chris Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World. Born in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, to Elsie (nee Ellis) and Thomas Moore, a civil servant, Bob studied at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and then went to Merton College, Oxford, to study history, graduating in 1962. He was appointed to his first academic post in Sheffield at the age of 23, before completing his DPhil. He became an experienced university administrator and was in the running at one point to become vice-chancellor at Soas University of London. He was married twice, first in 1968 to Wendy Jenrick, with whom he had three children; the marriage ended in divorce. In 2002 he married Elizabeth Redgate. He was a convivial host, with a taste for fine wine, a ruthless streak in backgammon, and a side interest in computer games. He was also an inspiring teacher and colleague. Bob is survived by Elizabeth, his children, Olivia, Richard and Gerald, and his sister, Frances.
