Latest news with #Friendly
Mint
2 days ago
- Health
- Mint
Health facilities to display "Sugar and Oil" warning boards
New Delhi: Taking a leaf from schools and workplaces that have recently started displaying warning signs about high sugar and oil content in street food, the central government is planning to install these so-called 'oil and sugar boards' in hospitals, medical colleges and healthcare centres. The National Health Mission's (NHM) plan is part of a playbook to combat obesity and curtail unhealthy eating habits. An alarming recent report in the Lancet predicted obesity in India could jump from 180 million individuals in 2021 to 449 million by 2050, making it the country with the highest obesity burden globally after the US and China. Another Lancet study from 2022 revealed that India had 12.5 million obese children in 2022, a significant increase from 0.4 million in 1990. The Centre has asked the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to come up with an ideal nutrition diet for Indians and roll out a nationwide screening programme for measuring obesity among school children. 'Our nation is experiencing a rapid rise in obesity and associated lifestyle disorders, particularly in urban areas and among children. There is an urgent need to combat obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCD) through healthier habits and reduction in oil and sugar consumption," said a health ministry official in a letter to States/UTs, seen by Mint. "In view of this, States/UTs are requested to take proactive measures to ensure prominent display of 'oil and sugar boards' in health facilities such as Ayushman Arogya Mandir (Health and Wellness Centres), Primary Health Centres (PHCs), Community Health Centres (CHCs), District Health Centres (DHCs) and sub-divisional and district offices and medical colleges,' the letter added. Beyond the new warning boards, the health ministry is implementing a multi-pronged approach to combat unhealthy eating, focusing heavily on sensitization and education at the community and school levels. The ministry has specifically called for school teachers and children to be educated on healthy diets and reduced sugar and oil intake. This will be integrated into existing health screening and counseling activities. The initiative extends to adolescents, with a directive to sensitize peer educators and healthcare providers at 'Adolescent Friendly Health Clinics (AFHCs)'. To amplify this message at the grassroots level, the government plans to leverage community engagement platforms under the National Health Mission (NHM). This includes utilizing women's groups, other civilian groups, and community platforms to conduct discussions and practical demonstrations on healthy cooking and dietary habits. This 'comprehensive strategy' aims to embed awareness about healthy eating into various facets of daily life, from schools to community gatherings. The ministry is also asking for more cooperation with the education and women and child development departments to take this initiative even further. Dr Rajeev R. Jayadevan, public health expert and past president of Indian Medical Association (IMA), Cochin, said that hospital canteen signboards currently are no different from those at a restaurant, simply listing items and prices. But the government is now rolling out a significant behaviour change strategy to change that. These new boards won't ban popular cultural foods; instead, they will highlight the hidden sugar and fat within them. The next crucial steps, according to Jayadevan, is to expand this initiative nationwide, integrate healthier food options and could lead to substantial long-term health benefits. 'Increased awareness about the dangers of excessive sugar and salt intake will significantly reduce the disease burden in the coming decades.' Queries sent to the health ministry spokesperson remained unanswered.
Vox
03-07-2025
- Business
- Vox
Don't let AI steal your job
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. It's okay to be scared of AI. You should learn to use it anyway. Getty Images/CSA Images RF User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. ChatGPT's most advanced models recently served me a surprising statistic: US productivity grew faster in 2024 than in any year since the 1960s. Half that jump can be linked to generative AI tools that most workers hadn't even heard of two years earlier. The only problem is that it's not true. The AI made it up. Despite its much-documented fallibility, generative AI has become a huge part of many people's jobs, including my own. The numbers vary from survey to survey, but a June Gallup poll found that 42 percent of American employees are using AI a few times a year, while 19 percent report deploying it several times a week. The technology is especially popular with white-collar workers. While just 9 percent of manufacturing and front-line workers use AI on a regular basis, 27 percent of white-collar workers do. Even as many people integrate AI into their daily lives, it's causing mass job anxiety: A February Pew survey found that more than half of US employees worried about their fate at work. Unfortunately, there is no magic trick to keep your job for the foreseeable future, especially if you're a white-collar worker. Nobody knows what's going to happen with AI, and leadership at many companies is responding to this uncertainty by firing workers it may or may not need in an AI-forward future. 'If AI really is this era's steam engine, a force so transformative that it will power a new Industrial Revolution, you only stand to gain by getting good at it.' After laying off over 6,000 workers in May and June, Microsoft is laying off 9,000 more workers this month, reportedly so the company can reduce the number of middle managers as it reorganizes itself around AI. In a note on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees that the company would 'roll out more generative AI and agents' and reduce its workforce in the next few years. This was all after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the same timespan, a prediction so grim that Axios coined a new term for AI's imminent takeover: 'a white-collar bloodbath.' This is particularly frustrating because, as my recent encounter with ChatGPT's tendency to hallucinate makes clear, the generative AI of today, while useful for a growing number of people, needs humans to work well. So does agentic AI, the next era of this technology that involves AI agents using computers and performing tasks on your behalf rather than simply generating content. For now, AI is augmenting white-collar jobs, not automating them, although your company's CEO is probably planning for the latter scenario. Maybe one day AI will fulfill its promise of getting rid of grunt work and creating endless abundance, but getting from here to there is a harrowing proposition. 'With every other form of innovation, we ended up with more jobs in the end,' Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of the newsletter One Useful Thing, told me. 'But living through the Industrial Revolution still kind of sucked, right? There were still anarchists in the street and mass displacement from cities and towns.' We don't know if the transition to the AI future will be quite as calamitous. What we do know is that just as jobs transformed due to past technological leaps, like the introduction of the personal computer or the internet, your day-to-day at work will change in the months and years to come. If AI really is this era's steam engine, a force so transformative that it will power a new Industrial Revolution, you only stand to gain by getting good at it. At the same time, becoming an AI whiz will not necessarily save you if your company decides it's time to go all in on AI and do mass, scattershot layoffs in order to give its shareholders the impression of some efficiency gains. If you're impacted, that's just bad luck. Still, having the skills can't hurt. Welcome to the AI revolution transition It's okay to be scared of AI, but it's more reasonable to be confused by it. For two years after ChatGPT's explosive release, I couldn't quite figure out how a chatbot could make my life better. After some urging from Mollick late last year, I forced myself to start using it for menial chores. Upgrading to more advanced models of ChatGPT and Claude turned these tools into indispensable research partners that I use every day — not just to do my job faster but also better. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) But when it comes to generative AI tools and the burgeoning class of AI agents, what works for one person might not be helpful to the next. 'Workers obviously need to try to ascertain as much as they can — the skills that are most flexible and most useful,' said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. 'They need to be familiar with the technology because it is going to be pervasive.' For most white-collar workers, I recommend Mollick's 10-hour rule: Spend 10 hours using AI for work and see what you learn. Mollick also recently published an updated guide to the latest AI tools that's worth reading in full. The big takeaways are that the best of these tools (ChatGPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic, and Google Gemini) can become tireless assistants with limitless knowledge that can save you hours of labor. You should try different models within the different AI tools, and you should experiment with the voice features, including the ability to use your phone's camera to share what you're seeing with the AI. You should also, unfortunately, shell out $20 a month to get access to the most advanced models. In Mollick's words, 'The free versions are demos, not tools.' 'If I have a very narrow job around a very narrow task that's being done repetitively, that's where the most risk comes in.' You can imagine similar advice coming from your geeky uncle at Thanksgiving circa 1984, when personal computers were on the brink of taking over the world. That was the year roughly the same percentage of white-collar workers were regularly using PCs at work as are using AI today. But the coming AI transition will look different than the PC transition we've already lived through. While earlier digital technologies hit frontline workers hardest, 'AI excels at supporting or carrying out the highly cognitive, nonroutine tasks that better-educated, better-paid office workers do,' according to a February Brookings report co-authored by Muro. This means AI can do a lot of the tasks that software engineers, architects, lawyers, and journalists do, but it doesn't mean that AI can do their jobs — a key distinction. This is why you hear more experts talking about AI augmentation rather than AI automation. As a journalist, I can confidently say that AI is great at streamlining my research process, saving me time, and sometimes even stirring up new ideas. AI is terrible at interviewing sources, although that might not always be the case. And clearly, it's touch-and-go when it comes to writing factually accurate copy, which is kind of a fundamental part of the job. That proposition looks different for other kinds of white-collar work, namely administrative and operational support jobs. A Brookings report last year found that 100 percent of the tasks that bookkeepers and clerks do were likely to be automated. Those of travel agents, tax preparers, and administrative assistants were close to 100 percent. If AI really did make these workers redundant, it would add up to millions of jobs lost. 'The thing I'd be most worried about is if my task and job are very similar to each other,' Mollick, the Wharton professor, explained. 'If I have a very narrow job around a very narrow task that's being done repetitively, that's where the most risk comes in.' Related These stories could change how you feel about AI It's hard to AI-proof your job or career altogether given so much uncertainty. We don't know if companies will take advantage of this transition in ways that produce better products and happier workers or just use it as an excuse to fire people, squandering what some believe is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform work and productivity. It sucks to feel like you have little agency in steering the future toward one outcome or the other. At the risk of sounding like your geeky uncle, I say give AI a try. The worst-case scenario is you spend 10 hours talking to an artificially intelligent chatbot rather than scrolling through Instagram or Reddit. The best-case scenario is you develop a new skill set, one that could very well set you up to do an entirely new kind of job, one that didn't even exist before the AI era. You might even have a little fun along the way. A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don't miss the next one!
Business Wire
26-06-2025
- Health
- Business Wire
New Hampshire's Recovery Friendly Workplace Initiative Supports Culture Change and Business Impact, Survey Finds
CONCORD, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to a 2024–2025 survey conducted by New Hampshire's Recovery Friendly Workplace (RFW) initiative in partnership with the Behavioral Health Improvement Institute at Keene State College, 91% of responding Recovery Friendly Workplaces (RFWs) reported positive workplace changes over the past year as a result of participating in the initiative. New Hampshire's Recovery Friendly Workplaces provide a hand up to Granite Staters seeking to better their lives as they recover from substance use disorders Share "This round of evaluation was especially important to us in terms of getting a more in-depth sense of how RFW is serving the business community," said Samantha Lewandowski, Senior Director of RFW for Granite United Way. "We are really encouraged by these results, as there are significant indicators of supportive cultures being developed at our RFWs." The survey also found: 95% of respondents shared that RFW helped them feel better equipped to respond to employee concerns about substance use. 76% had at least one employee disclose a mental health and/or substance use concern. 57% helped at least one employee seek treatment. 52% expressed an increased willingness to hire people in recovery. Notable improvements in workplace culture, including: Enhanced support for employees Increased connections to resources Expanded training opportunities Improved trust within the workplace The most valued RFW resources included staff support, educational materials, and tailored training opportunities. 'New Hampshire's Recovery Friendly Workplaces provide a hand up to Granite Staters seeking to better their lives as they recover from substance use disorders,' said Governor Kelly Ayotte. 'I'm proud to support this important program, and I thank the RFW team and businesses across our state who are helping to create a culture of support for people in recovery.' "Granite United Way is proud to administer this initiative in partnership with the Governor's Office, and we are pleased to see how these efforts are strengthening the workplace as a pillar of community support," shared Shannon Swett, Chief Impact Officer for Granite United Way. For more information about the Recovery Friendly Workplace initiative or to get involved, please visit About Recovery Friendly Workplace The New Hampshire Governor's Recovery Friendly Workplace (RFW) initiative was founded in 2018 by Governor Chris Sununu, is administered by Granite United Way, and is a current initiative of Governor Kelly Ayotte. The mission of RFW is to help employers address the impacts of substance use by fostering supportive, recovery-friendly work environments where employees can thrive, in turn, building stronger workplaces and healthier communities.
Irish Independent
15-06-2025
- General
- Irish Independent
Pics from Cork show a proud day for one community as its thriving Men's Shed is opened in style
Also in attendance were Cllr. Bernard Moynihan, Moira Murrell, CEO Cork County Council, Niall Healy, North Cork Divisional Manager, Cork County Council, Engineer Billy Dennehy, Minister Michael Moynihan, Leonora Kelly and Shane McHale representing IRD Duhallow. Cllr. Moynihan congratulated all involved in establishing the Shed, as well as the organisations that provided funding for the project. 'Sincere thanks also, to all those who do such great work around the village, and to those who promote the area. Everyone is deeply dedicated to community here,' he said. Paddy O'Connor, speaking on behalf of Kiskeam Development Association remarked that the Shed is 'an open door' for all the men who want to use it. 'Our aim was to develop a Men's Shed that would welcome people from all around Western Duhallow - Kiskeam, Ballydesmond, Cullen, Newmarket, Knocknagree and Rathmore, everyone is welcome. 'From the perspective of the Development Association, it was an absolute treat to work with such an enthusiastic group of people.' After cutting the ribbon and officially opening the Shed, Mayor of Cork County Cllr. Joe Carroll commended everyone involved in what he described as an exceptional project. 'I've met with so many communities all around the county and I've been hugely impressed by what they have achieved, but what you have here is exceptional, you can congratulate yourself. 'This is a marvellous day for Kiskeam, there is a fantastic community here. It's a great honour to be here today and what I'm seeing here is an inspiration to communities everywhere. 'To the people who use the Shed – I wish you great health, good conversation and plenty strong cups of tea! Thank you for inviting me,' the Mayor said. ADVERTISEMENT Learn more Denis O'Mahony, speaking on behalf of the Men's Shed group outlined the progress of the project since it was first mooted two years ago. 'Kiskeam Development Association conducted a survey amongst members of the community in 2023. Following a positive response, the group organised an open night for those who might be interested in setting up a Men's Shed. 'Following the initial meeting, a committee was formed in November 2023. With generous donations from our local community fundraising, we sourced a shed from local suppliers ProSteel Suppliers which was erected during the summer of 2024 and subsequently opened in August 2024. 'We sourced tools and equipment from various partners and funding was secured from IRD Duhallow in August 2024. Since then, we have welcomed guest speakers on diverse topics such as Emergency Medical Response, Age Friendly Ireland, Social Welfare Financial Advice, Crime Prevention and Horticulture. The Men also hosted Open Evenings for the Bealtaine Festival and Culture Night. 'Going forward, our intention is to support good health and well being, support men's mental health, increase physical activities, facilitate workshops and collaborative projects within the community, and promote volunteering opportunities,' Denis said.
Extra.ie
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Christmas comes early as Dublin Zoo make Wild Lights announcement
It might just be June, but tickets for Dublin Zoo's annual winter event, Wild Lights, are going on sale this week, as they enlist the help of youngsters to organise the exciting event. This year, the adults are stepping aside and allowing the children to take over and plan an unforgettable Christmas experience complete with plenty of surprises and more magic than ever. The little ones have been pictures armed with clipboards, giant pencils and their huge imaginations but aren't giving anything away just yet. Gray Harte (5), one of the tiny experts at Dublin Zoo, who have announced that Wild Lights will go on sale tomorrow, Thursday, 12th June. Pic: Dublin Zoo Tickets for the festive event go on sale tomorrow, Thursday, June 12 via Dublin Zoo. As well as getting ahead of the crowds and securing your tickets now, Dublin Zoo have released brand new 'Winter Bundles,' for the first time ever. Dublin Zoo said: 'Whether visitors want to combine a Wild Lights evening visit with a trip to Santa's Grotto, or pair a day-time weekend Dublin Zoo experience with a visit to the man in red, there is a bundle to delight every visitor.' Pictured are Kate Cosgrove (4) and Gray Harte (5). Pic: Dublin Zoo Winter bundle including a daytime visit to Dublin Zoo and a visit to Santa's Grotto will only be available from November 8 to December 21. Additionally, the beloved zoo has extended the exciting event until January 31, and will be open every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night of the month. Daytime events include Zoo-liday Cheer with Santa and Sensory Friendly Zoo-liday cheer while Wild Lights at Dublin Zoo and Glow Ho-Ho! take place after dark! Ticket prices for Wild Lights range from €21.50 per child and €26.50 per adult with winter bundles including a visit to Santa's Grotto starting from €31.50 per child and €25.50 per adult. Discounted tickets are available for infants under 1 year, senior citizens and carers. For full details on pricing go here.
