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Daily Rounds: Facebook's Donor Status; Binky For Breastfeeding; Smallish Rate Hikes (And Declines); The Baby's Mind

Facebook Urges Members To Add Donor Status (The New York Times) — "The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors. It is a rare foray by Facebook into social engineering from social networking, and one with a potentially profound effect, according to experts in the field of organ donation."

Bring Back The Binky? Study Finds Pacifiers Actually Boost Breastfeeding (Times Healthland) — "...OHSU, which is trying to achieve Baby-Friendly certification, found that limiting pacifier use resulted in decreased rates of exclusive breast-feeding. After tracking 2,249 babies born between June 2010 and August 2011, they noted that exclusive breast-feeding dropped from 79% of infants between July and November 2010 to 68% between January to August 2011. At the same time, the percentage of breast-fed babies receiving supplemental formula increased from 18% to 28%. Meanwhile, the proportion of babies who received only formula didn’t fluctuate. “We were really surprised and disappointed because we had hoped that limiting pacifiers would improve breast-feeding rates,” says Dr. Carrie Phillipi, an associate professor of pediatrics at OHSU and co-author of the study, which was presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Boston."

Mass OKs Small Hike In Health Insurance Rates (The Boston Globe/AP) — "State insurance regulators approved an average 1.2 percent quarterly increase in base health insurance rates for individuals and small businesses in Massachusetts and announced that two of the state's largest insurers would actually reduce rates in the three-month period starting July 1. It was the second consecutive quarter in which rate increases had been held below 2 percent, the state Division of Insurance said Monday, continuing a trend that began more than two years ago, when Gov. Deval Patrick ordered state regulators to use their authority to reject hefty rate hike requests. Base rates for Worcester-based Fallon Community Health Care will drop 2.2 percent for its HMO customers and 2 percent for non-HMO subscribers. Tufts Health Plan rates will also decline, 1.3 percent for HMO and 2.2 percent for non-HMO."

From The Minds Of Babes (The New York Times) — "What Dr. Spelke is really doing, he said, is what Descartes, Kant and Locke tried to do. “She is trying to identify the bedrock categories of human knowledge. She is asking, ‘What is number, space, agency, and how does knowledge in each category develop from its minimal state?’ ” Dr. Spelke studies babies not because they’re cute but because they’re root. “I’ve always been fascinated by questions about human cognition and the organization of the human mind,” she said, “and why we’re good at some tasks and bad at others.” But the adult mind is far too complicated, Dr. Spelke said, “too stuffed full of facts” to make sense of it. In her view, the best way to determine what, if anything, humans are born knowing, is to go straight to the source, and consult the recently born."

This program aired on May 1, 2012. The audio for this program is not available.

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