Gender Equality, Human Rights, Science
For the past decade, Dauqan has burst through glass
ceiling after glass ceiling with fearlessness and grace.
Even
as a young girl, she was rebel. "I was a little naughty," she says
with a snicker.
She
liked breaking rules. And proving people wrong. So when her parents told her
she might not have the smarts to go into science and engineering — like her dad
— Eqbal thought: Watch me.
"I told my father, 'I've heard a lot about scientists in chemistry. What
is the difference between me and them? So I want to try," she says.
Dauqan has
already done so much for science — and society. When little girls in the Middle
East see photos of Eqbal as a chemist — wearing a head scarf, measuring pH — they
don't need to use their imagination to think: "I could be just like her. I
could be a scientist."
Education/Military
Veterans
“I joke with my Army
buddies, I tell them [theory] is like the plane that gets you there,” the
36-year-old former paratrooper, who deployed to Iraq for the 2007
surge, said. “But once you jump out of the plane, everything else is
different on the ground. That’s how you have to look at economics.”
Hardly any Vassar student
could have arrived at this analogy until four years ago, when de la Torre and
10 other United States military veterans embarked on an experiment Vassar was
leading among small, selective liberal-arts colleges: to seek out and enroll
vets. In partnership with the Posse
Foundation, a nonprofit with a successful track record of connecting
students from underrepresented backgrounds with elite schools, Vassar enrolled
its first cohort of veterans in the fall of 2013. The results of this effort
became clearer in May as five of those student-veterans, including de la Torre,
graduated after spending the traditional four years on campus.
In the years that followed,
some peer institutions followed Vassar’s lead—Wesleyan University initiated a Posse
Veterans cohort in 2014 and its first Posse
veteran graduated a year early last month, while other schools, like
Williams College, have partnered with Service to School to
recruit veterans to their campuses. The initiative rests on the premise that
liberal-arts colleges, whose educational doctrines insist on well-roundedness
and inclusion, have both the resources and civic obligation to educate the
almost 1.7
million post-9/11 veterans seeking college degrees.
Conservation, Science, Technology
In August 2016,
the result of the Great Elephant Census, the most extensive count of a wild
species ever attempted, suggested that about 350,000 African savannah elephants
remain alive. This is down by 140,000 since 2007.
That most of
the decline has been brought about by poaching is scarcely in doubt. Seizures
of smuggled ivory, and the size of the carved-ivory market compared with the
small amount of legal ivory available, confirm it. But habitat loss is
important, too—and not just the conversion of bush into farmland. Roads,
railways and fences, built as Africa develops, stop elephants moving around.
And an elephant needs a lot of room.
One source of
conflict with elephants has been competition for pasture as the herders’
populations have grown. Indeed, the reserve itself is now sometimes invaded by
cowherds and their stock. But, on top of this, some pastoralists have begun to
settle down. Buildings and fences are appearing on land which, though outside
the reserve, is part of the local elephants’ ranges as they travel from one
place to another.
Understanding
elephants’ behaviour also permits it to be manipulated in ways that help reduce
direct conflict between elephants and people. One such project harnesses
elephants’ fear of bee swarms.
Armed with that
knowledge, Dr. King and her colleague Fritz Vollrath came up with the idea of
protecting farms with bee fences.
Women, Politics, Government
With a state legislature made up 40 percent of women, Nevada is
second only to Vermont in terms of female representation. And that translated
into a landmark session for women’s rights and health this year, even under a
male Republican governor.
Nevada lawmakers just wrapped up a state legislative session that
delivered a startling number of progressive victories for women: tax-free
tampons, a new $500,000 family planning program, workplace accommodations for
pregnant women, and mandatory insurance coverage of contraception and
mammograms.
“We started with some pushback from Republicans, but by the end of
the session we had broad bipartisan support on a lot of these measures,” said
state Sen. Julia Ratti (D), a freshman from Sparks.
Healthcare, Medicaid
This small set of outcomes includes hospital
complications that can be minimized, such as limiting the risk of patients’
acquiring pneumonia in the hospital after a stroke, treating a cold at a
primary care doctor’s office or an urgent care center instead of an emergency
room, and limiting avoidable hospital admissions or re-admissions by treating
ongoing conditions, such as out of control diabetes, at the primary care
doctor’s office.
It should be noted that these states are led by
governors of both parties. These are programs that can have broad bipartisan
support, in part because they not only lead to cost savings, they also lead to
better medical outcomes.
There are significant savings opportunities across other
states to improve outcomes and reduce waste. Rather than uniformly cutting
costs and/or health care coverage, the federal government could incentivize
progress by instituting programs like the ones these states have already shown
can be successful. While the status of the AHCA is unclear, the need to address
payment reform—especially for Medicaid—remains. How much money can be saved by
improving outcomes? The Institute
of Medicine estimates that between 20–30 percent of total
health care spending is either wasteful or a consequence of poor outcomes.
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