This paper describes how a reparative futures approach alters the orientations and methods of institutional DEI work and generates a different set of affective, joyful outcomes. New paths forward ...emerge when past injustice is examined to imagine better futures. This activity resulted in novel perspectives on what a holistic, inclusive, anti-racist campus community could look like someday. We introduced the creative, optimistic, and long-term perspective of futuring into a year-long reparative anti-racism project to advance institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at an arts college. Reparative DEI processes, centered in tenets of anti-racism, rarely engage creative imagination to look forward. In addition, futures tools are seldom designed for the critical consciousness of reparative processes, which must be rooted in re-examining and challenging established narratives. The work shared here demonstrates an opportunity to explore both perspectives. Our experience reveals that reparative futures approaches alter both the feel of the process of approaching DEI work and establish a different set of outcomes. We propose that the radically hopeful visions created through critically conscious reparative futures practices offer an additional way to engage with reparative processes, bringing in creativity and consideration of relational connections.
•A creative futuring project expands the work of an anti-racism task force at an arts college in the United States.•Diversity, equity, and inclusion processes can benefit from and expand our thinking about collective futuring practices.•Challenging narratives of the past is an essential part of a new praxis toward imagining justice-based futures.•Radically hopeful visions offer a creative and optimistic way to engage with reparative processes.
The impact of COVID-19 on the burden of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) during the early pandemic remains unclear. COVID-19 has become one of the leading causes of global mortality, with a ...disproportionate impact on persons with CVD. Studies of health facility admissions for CVD found significant decreases during the pandemic. Studies of hospital mortality for CVD were more variable. Studies of population-level CVD mortality differed across countries, with most showing decreases, although some revealed increases in deaths. In some countries where large increases in CVD deaths were reported in vital registration systems, misclassification of COVID-19 as CVD may have occurred. Taken together, studies suggest heterogeneous effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on CVD without large increases in CVD mortality in 2020 for a number of countries. Clinical and population science research is needed to examine the ways in which the pandemic has affected CVD burden.
The future is open: This is a basic assumption of modernity. It originated in the 18th century and still shapes our self-image today. This study uncovers another tradition: the effort to close the ...future again, to ‘fill it up’ with orders, models and political expectations. The theoretical and literary procedures of this closure from the period around 1800 recur in later phases of modernity as well.
In this article we focus on futures as a cultural anthropological subject of research and an analytical concept, reviewing studies from “cultural futurism” of the 1970s and anticipatory anthropology ...of the 1980s to the “anthropology of futures” burgeoning in the last decade. We discuss different approaches to the central issue of how anthropology deals with futures (future as a cultural fact, multitemporality, temporal agency, presentism, multiple futures, etc.) and illustrate the research framework being developed within an ongoing research project “Urban futures: imagining and activating possibilities in unsettled times” (www.citymaking.eu). In this project, future-making refers to a comprehensive understanding of the factors and processes involved in imagining, anticipating and perceiving collective futures as well as in the modalities of engagement, values, habits, practices, and affects, that construct specific attitudes towards futures in everyday life.
Between 2000 and 2014, annual Colorado River flows averaged 19% below the 1906–1999 average, the worst 15‐year drought on record. At least one‐sixth to one‐half (average at one‐third) of this loss is ...due to unprecedented temperatures (0.9°C above the 1906–1999 average), confirming model‐based analysis that continued warming will likely further reduce flows. Whereas it is virtually certain that warming will continue with additional emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, there has been no observed trend toward greater precipitation in the Colorado Basin, nor are climate models in agreement that there should be a trend. Moreover, there is a significant risk of decadal and multidecadal drought in the coming century, indicating that any increase in mean precipitation will likely be offset during periods of prolonged drought. Recently published estimates of Colorado River flow sensitivity to temperature combined with a large number of recent climate model‐based temperature projections indicate that continued business‐as‐usual warming will drive temperature‐induced declines in river flow, conservatively −20% by midcentury and −35% by end‐century, with support for losses exceeding −30% at midcentury and −55% at end‐century. Precipitation increases may moderate these declines somewhat, but to date no such increases are evident and there is no model agreement on future precipitation changes. These results, combined with the increasing likelihood of prolonged drought in the river basin, suggest that future climate change impacts on the Colorado River flows will be much more serious than currently assumed, especially if substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions do not occur.
Plain Language Summary
Between 2000 and 2014, annual Colorado River flows averaged 19% below the 1906–1999 average, the worst 15‐year drought on record. Approximately one‐third of the flow loss is due to high temperatures now common in the basin, a result of human caused climate change. Previous comparable droughts were caused by a lack of precipitation, not high temperatures. As temperatures increase in the 21st century due to continued human emissions of greenhouse gasses, additional temperature‐induced flow losses will occur. These losses may exceed 20% at mid‐century and 35% at end‐century. Additional precipitation may reduce these temperature‐induced losses somewhat, but to date no precipitation increases have been noted and climate models do not agree that such increases will occur. These results suggest that future climate change impacts on the Colorado River will be greater than currently assumed. Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will lead to lower future temperatures and hence less flow loss.
Key Points
Record Colorado River flow reductions averaged 19.3% per year during 2000–2014. One‐third or more of the decline was likely due to warming
Unabated greenhouse gas emissions will lead to continued substantial warming, translating to twenty‐first century flow reductions of 35% or more
More precipitation can reduce the flow loss, but lack of increase to date and large megadrought threat, reinforce risk of large flow loss
A 60-year-old woman with a past medical history of asthma presented with fulminant myocarditis 9 days after testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and 16 days after developing symptoms consistent with ...COVID-19. Her hospital course was complicated by the need for veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, ventricular arrhythmias, and pseudomonas bacteremia. She ultimately recovered and was discharged to home with normal left ventricular systolic function. Thereafter, she developed symptomatic ventricular tachycardia, for which she received an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator and antiarrhythmic drug therapy.
Anticoagulation in Patients With COVID-19 Farkouh, Michael E.; Stone, Gregg W.; Lala, Anuradha ...
Journal of the American College of Cardiology,
02/2022, Volume:
79, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Clinical, laboratory, and autopsy findings support an association between coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) and thromboembolic disease. Acute COVID-19 infection is characterized by mononuclear cell ...reactivity and pan-endothelialitis, contributing to a high incidence of thrombosis in large and small blood vessels, both arterial and venous. Observational studies and randomized trials have investigated whether full-dose anticoagulation may improve outcomes compared with prophylactic dose heparin. Although no benefit for therapeutic heparin has been found in patients who are critically ill hospitalized with COVID-19, some studies support a possible role for therapeutic anticoagulation in patients not yet requiring intensive care unit support. We summarize the pathology, rationale, and current evidence for use of anticoagulation in patients with COVID-19 and describe the main design elements of the ongoing FREEDOM COVID-19 Anticoagulation trial, in which 3,600 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 not requiring intensive care unit level of care are being randomized to prophylactic-dose enoxaparin vs therapeutic-dose enoxaparin vs therapeutic-dose apixaban. (FREEDOM COVID-19 Anticoagulation Strategy FREEDOM COVID;
NCT04512079
)
The futures of humanity and planet Earth are at stake. This is reflected not only in the increasingly dire future imaginations of billions of people around the world but also in an ever-increasing ...body of future-related literature in the social sciences and humanities. However, despite growing sociological engagement with the future, an astonishing desideratum remains: the dissemination of future imaginations. Although many works imply that future imaginations disseminate, they rarely spell out how the cultural mechanisms of dissemination work. Therefore, in this article, I develop the notion of future-cultures to conceptualize how future imaginations disseminate throughout the social, drawing from cultural sociology and theories of social practices. I conceptualize the future-cultures framework in three steps: (1) how future-cultures generate future-cultural codes, which select and classify (il-)legitimate future imaginations, sites of futuring and futuring practices; (2) how future-cultural codes relate different (futuring) practices and discourses into broader practice-/discourse-complexes, which (3) organize transversally in fields of futuring and modes of futuring, thereby disseminating distinct future imaginations over space and time.
Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is associated with systemic inflammation, endothelial activation, and multiorgan manifestations. Lipid-modulating agents may be useful in treating patients with ...COVID-19. These agents may inhibit viral entry by lipid raft disruption or ameliorate the inflammatory response and endothelial activation. In addition, dyslipidemia with lower high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and higher triglyceride levels portend worse outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Upon a systematic search, 40 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with lipid-modulating agents were identified, including 17 statin trials, 14 omega-3 fatty acids RCTs, 3 fibrate RCTs, 5 niacin RCTs, and 1 dalcetrapib RCT for the management or prevention of COVID-19. From these 40 RCTs, only 2 have reported preliminary results, and most others are ongoing. This paper summarizes the ongoing or completed RCTs of lipid-modulating agents in COVID-19 and the implications of these trials for patient management.
Futures consciousness (FC), considered to be the basis for human anticipation, is important for its role in facing uncertainties and delineating alternative courses of action. This is especially so ...for emerging adults, who are traversing a life stage fraught with uncertainty and complexity. The COVID-19 pandemic as a high-impact event may trigger modes of engaging with the future to become more explicit. Through critical engagement with the 5-dimensional FC model (Ahvenharju, Minkkinen, & Lalot, 2018), we develop a methodology for qualitatively assessing FC. We analyze how emerging Dutch and Greek adults narrate FC dimensions (time perspective, agency beliefs, openness to alternatives, systemic awareness, concern for others) in letters written from the perspective of a desired post-Corona future. Results show that emerging adults, although caught-up in a subjective timeframe in which the pandemic is enduring, think beyond immediate concerns. They do so in a way that conveys some attribution of agency and systemic awareness. Openness to alternatives is shown using several sophisticated linguistic devices. When further developed, the methodology will enable educators and futurists to support individual’s imagination of possible and preferred futures. This may contribute to resilient people and societies in and beyond times of economic, health, and environmental crises.
•Proposes a novel, qualitative methodology for eliciting and analysing futures consciousness based on Letters from the Future.•Considers Futures Consciousness as a situated, sense-making capacity.•Based on a unique international study on emerging adult’s imaginations of a desired post-covid19 future.•Captures individual variation and patterns in how the five dimensions of Futures Consciousness are used.
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