An Underrated Upside to YIMBY Ideas? Better-Looking Buildings
This week the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and the Chicago Athenaeum released their yearly Europe 40 under 40 list of young architects. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.
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Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Germany train crash: Everything we know after derailment kills three and injures dozens
At least three people were killed and dozens were seriously injured after a passenger train derailed in the southwest German town of Biberach, authorities said. Emergency personnel were deployed to the scene, where rescue dogs searched throughout the night for survivors. No more casualties had been found as of Monday morning. About 50 people are believed to have been injured, of whom 25 were seriously injured, German media reported citing local authorities. German chancellor Friedrich Merz expressed his shock over the crash. He said in a post on X: 'I am in close contact with the Interior Minister and the Transport Minister and have asked them to support the rescue forces with all available means. We mourn the victims. I express my condolences to their relatives.' The Independent takes a look at everything we know about the German train crash. What happened and how did the train crash? Around 100 people were on the train when two carriages derailed in a forested area at around 6:10pm local time, German news agency dpa reported. The crash happened near the town of Riedlingen, dpa reported, roughly 158km west of Munich. According to reports, there had been a storm in the area shortly before. 'Two carriages of a regional express train derailed on the railway line between Sigmaringen and Ulm early Sunday evening. According to current investigations, three people were killed and other passengers were seriously injured,' Ulm Police said in a statement. Authorities believe that a landslide is the likely cause, after significant rainfall struck the area shortly before the train passed through. 'There have been heavy rains here, so it cannot be ruled out that the heavy rain and a related landslide accident may have been the cause. However, this is currently the subject of ongoing investigations," said Thomas Strobl, interior minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg. At least two wagons are believed to have derailed at the site of the crash, which is around 45 kilometres southwest of Ulm. Police continue to investigate the possible causes of the crash, district fire chief Charlotte Ziller told German outlet Bild. Who died in the crash? Three people died, with the number of injured estimated at 50. Around 25 are believed to be injured seriously, emergency services told Bild. Ms Ziller said the dead include the driver of the train and another employee of Deutsche Bahn, Germany's second largest rail company. "It was terrible to witness," resident Karl Figler, 76, told the outlet. "Two people were lying dead next to the train. They were carried away in blankets. At the same time, seriously injured people were being cared for." A collection point for relatives has been set up at a local community centre, and Deutsche Bahn has set up a special hotline for the affected people and their families. What was the aftermath? Scores of emergency services personnel swarmed the site to search urgently for survivors, using rescue dogs in case some remained trapped in the rubble. As of Monday morning, no further survivors or dead bodies had been found in the search. A number of high-profile figures also rushed to the scene after the news broke on Sunday afternoon. This included the CEO of Deutsche Bahn Richard Lutz, the minister-president of Baden-Württemberg Winfried Kretschmann, of the GReen Party, and the federal and state transport ministers Patrick Schnieder and Winfried Hermann, of the CDU and Green Party respectively, Bild reported. Emergency workers continue to work at the site of the crash.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Opinion: Parents Want to Support Their Kids. Behavioral Science Can Help Them Follow Through
For over 10 years, the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago has been investigating how parents make decisions. A key insight from our research is that what parents do does not always align with what they intend to do. This 'intention-action gap' can reduce parents' engagement with their children, which in turn interferes with children's skill development. This gap is a common characteristic of decision-making. People plan to save for retirement or stick to diets, but often fall short of their goals. In parenting, the stakes are higher: Not reading a bedtime story or skipping a day of preschool may seem momentarily insignificant, but small gaps in learning time accumulate over time, making it increasingly difficult for children's skills to catch up. Why do well-intentioned parents sometimes struggle to follow through with engaging their children, and how can behavioral science help parents close the intention-action gap? Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter The field of behavioral economics offers insights into what creates intention-action gaps and our research identifies practical ways to bridge the gap. Many of these approaches rely on the concept of 'nudges' — subtle changes in how choices or information are presented that make the desired action easier or more likely to occur. In parenting, nudges often come in the form of reminders, feedback, or other simple tools sent through digital technology. These nudges acknowledge that busy parents aren't failing to engage their children in learning activities that are key to the child's future because they lack love, knowledge, or good intentions; rather, daily life is full of friction and temptations. Our research has shown that 'present bias,' a manifestation of the intention-action gap, is central to parenting choices. Parents, like everyone, often prioritize immediate rewards over future benefits. Raising a child requires long-term effort; while considerable research shows that reading books to a toddler boosts their language skills in the future, the benefits of today's actions can be long delayed. Meanwhile, daily distractions and fatigue demand immediate attention. Related This bias can cause parents to focus on the 'now' rather than the 'later,' even when they value activities like reading. In our Parents and Children Together (PACT) study, we tackled present bias by sending parents text-message prompts and goal-setting reminders to read to their children from a digital library that we provided to parents. These reminders were intended to 'bring the future to the present.' Parents who received these reminders read to their child over twice as much over six weeks compared to parents who received the digital library with no reminders. Notably, the parents who gained the most were those who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments given before the experiment began. In other words, the parents most prone to procrastinate on reading were the ones who saw the greatest improvements when we helped them overcome present bias. Parents without present bias already read regularly, so the extra reminders had little impact for them. Tools to Help Parents Follow Through Another successful example of narrowing the intention-action gap from our research lab is the 'Show Up to Grow Up' study, a randomized controlled trial we conducted to increase attendance in Chicago's publicly funded preschool programs. Our intervention sent personalized text messages to parents over 18 weeks, indicating the number of days their child had been absent and highlighting the learning opportunities they missed while not in school. The messages reminded parents of their commitment to adopt good attendance habits and their goals to help their child develop kindergarten readiness skills. For children whose parents received these messages, preschool attendance increased by about 2.5 school days, and chronic absenteeism — a measure of missing 10% or more of the school days in a school year — decreased by 20% compared to the children of parents who did not receive the messages. The text nudges and reminders helped align parents' actions with their long-term goals. This type of light-touch program is inexpensive and easy to scale, making it a viable tool for education policymakers aiming to reduce early absenteeism. Technology offers a promising solution to close the intention-action gap. Our recent Children and Parents Engaged in Reading (CAPER) study provided families with a tablet preloaded with a digital library of over 200 high-quality children's books. The tablet had no apps or internet access beyond the library to reduce distractions. The goal was to remove the obstacle of finding new books and to make shared reading as easy and engaging as possible. Related The impact on children's language skills was notable. Over an 11-month trial, low-income children whose families received access to the digital library showed approximately 0.3 standard deviations more progress in language skills (equivalent to three months of language learning on the test we gave to children) than those who did not, moving from roughly the 41st to the 50th percentile nationally. Notably, the treatment impact was significantly larger – 0.50 standard deviation, equivalent to approximately five months of language learning on the test we gave to children – for parents who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments administered before the experiment began (as in the PACT study). Sometimes the best way to narrow the intention-action gap is to reduce barriers to the intended action. From Research Insights to Early Childhood Policy These research insights go beyond academics: They offer a new toolkit for early childhood policy. Traditional parenting programs often assume that if parents are informed about the benefits of their decisions or provided with free resources, they will naturally act accordingly. However, information and resources alone don't always lead to behavior change, especially when cognitive biases interfere. Relatively low-cost, behaviorally informed interventions can directly address the intention-action gap. For example, text-message programs can be scaled through school districts, pediatric clinics, or social service agencies to encourage behaviors like daily reading, conversations, or preschool attendance. Digital tools, such as the library tablet in the CAPER study, could be integrated into public early education programs or library initiatives to ensure families have access to books and find them easy and enjoyable to use. Such approaches can promote equity by focusing on parents who face more cognitive biases or for whom these biases cause the most harm. Behavioral tools can help close early learning gaps before children reach kindergarten, which research shows is the most effective and cost-efficient time to empower parents as active partners in their children's development. Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
15 hours ago
- New York Times
Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
When I was a kid in the 1980s, my parents sent me to a Waldorf school in England. At the time, the school discouraged parents from allowing their kids to watch too much TV, instead telling them to emphasize reading, hands-on learning and outdoor play. I chafed at the stricture then. But perhaps they were on to something: Today I don't watch much TV and I still read a lot. Since my school days, however, a far more insidious and enticing form of tech has taken hold: the internet, especially via smartphones. These days I know I have to put my phone in a drawer or in another room if I need to concentrate for more than a few minutes. Since so-called intelligence tests were invented around a century ago, until recently, international I.Q. scores climbed steadily in a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. But there is evidence that our ability to apply that brain power is decreasing. According to a recent report, adult literacy scores leveled off and began to decline across a majority of O.E.C.D. countries in the past decade, with some of the sharpest declines visible among the poorest. Kids also show declining literacy. Writing in the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video. Other research has associated smartphone use with A.D.H.D. symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023. The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on. The conversation no one is ready for, though, is how this may be creating yet another form of inequality. Think of this by comparison with patterns of junk food consumption: As ultraprocessed snacks have grown more available and inventively addictive, developed societies have seen a gulf emerge between those with the social and economic resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle and those more vulnerable to the obesogenic food culture. This bifurcation is strongly class-inflected: Across the developed West, obesity has become strongly correlated with poverty. I fear that so, too, will be the tide of post-literacy. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
