HEALTH
Mother Nature may be an efficient therapist: Five minutes of exercise in a park, on a trail, or even in a backyard garden has measurable benefits to mental health, especially for young people and individuals with mental illnesses, according to a study in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The benefits both of physical activity and of communing with nature are well known, but the new research defines the amount of “green exercise” that may boost short-term mental health and long-term physical health.
The largest positive effects for mood and self-esteem came from a five-minute “dose,” report authors Jules Pretty and Jo Barton, and even urban parks can provide the boost.
Source: American Chemical Society, www.acs.org.
SOCIOECONOMICS
The disparities in well-being and socioeconomic development across the United States have become so wide that it would take some groups a century to catch up.
Asian Americans and whites score highest on the latest update of the Human Development Index created by the American Human Development Project. The Index measures life expectancy, income, educational attainment, and other factors to provide a more complete picture of well-being than is shown by GDP.
The latest Index shows that Asian Americans living in New Jersey are 50 years ahead of the national average in terms of development, and Native Americans living in South Dakota are 50 years behind.
“If current trends continue, it will take Native Americans in South Dakota an entire century to catch up with where New Jersey Asian Americans are now in terms of life expectancy, educational enrollment and attainment, and median earnings,” according to the report.
Source: “A Century Apart,” American Human Development Project, www.measureofamerica.org/acenturyapart.
GENDER
If there can be any “good” news from the horrors of genocide in Rwanda, it may be that it allowed women to rise to positions of leadership. Rwanda now has the most gender-equal government in the world, with women making up 56% of parliament.
This elevation of women’s political status may not be the result of improved education or other advances, as typically occurs in developed countries such as Sweden. Simply put, the 1994 genocide created a shortage of men and thus an opening for women in politics, according to researcher Christopher Kayumba, a doctoral candidate at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
Though Rwanda’s elite have attempted to defuse conflicts between the Hutus and Tutsis, focusing on the “Rwandan-ness” of all regardless of ethnicity and gender, a sustainable democracy is still a challenge, Kayumba warns.
Source: University of Gothenburg, www.gu.se. The abstract for Christopher Kayumba’s thesis may be viewed at http://hdl.handle.net/2077/22216.
FORECASTING
If economists can’t predict economic crises and prevent their ensuing disruptions, maybe physicists can. In 2005, Didier Sornette—a physicist, earthquake scientist, and financial expert at the Swiss Technical Institute in Zurich—accurately predicted the bursting of the U.S. real estate bubble three years later.
The emerging field of econophysics relies on the study of complex systems, which looks at feedback loops and cascading effects. Forecasts do not rely on averages, as mainstream economists do, and take into account irrational decision making, herding behavior, and other destabilizing influences.
Econophysicists argue that markets are not stable, efficient, or self-regulating, so models that succeed in predicting upheavals will be those that understand the rich dynamics of market interactions.
The multidisciplinary approach to economic forecasting has spawned a European research initiative called FuturIcT, and is also getting support from billionaire George Soros, who has established the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
Sources: ETH Zurich, www.ethz.ch. FuturIcT, www.futurict.eu.