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   Although an oft-cited poll showed that 85% of Americans approve of organ donation, less than half had made a decision about donating, and fewer still (28%) had granted permission by signing a donor card, a pattern also observed in Germany, Spain, and Sweden. Given the shortage of donors, the gap between approval and action is a matter of life and death. 

    What drives the decision to become a potential donor? Within the European Union, donation rates vary by nearly an order of magnitude across countries and these differences are stable from year to year. Even when controlling for variables such as transplant infrastructure, economic and educational status, and religion, large differences in donation rates persist. Why?

   Most public policy choices have a no-action default, that is, a condition is imposed when an individual fails to make a decision. In the case of organ donation, European countries have one of two default policies. In presumed-consent states, people are organ donors unless they register not to be, and in explicitconsent countries, nobody is an organ donor without registering to be one.

   We examined the rate of agreement to become a donor across European countries with explicit and presumed consent laws. If preferences concerning organ donation are strong, we would expect defaults to have little or no effect. However, defaults appear to make a large difference: the four opt-in countries (Denmark, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany) had lower rates than the six opt-out countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Sweden). The two distributions have no overlap, and nearly 60 percentage points separate the two groups

    Our data suggest changes in defaults could increase donations in the United States of additional thousands of donors a year. Because each donor can donate for about three transplants, the consequences are substantial in lives saved. Our results stand in contrast with the suggestion that defaults do not matter. Policy-makers performing analysis in this and other domains should consider that defaults make a difference.

Eric J. Johnson; Daniel Goldstein. Do Defaults Save Lives?

Internet: <www.dangoldstein.com> (adapted). 

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English as a Lingua Franca

        A number of researchers have studied conversations in English as a Lingua Franca and have noted a number of somewhat surprising characteristics, including:

•  Non-use of third person present simple tense -s (She look very sad).

•  Interchangeable use of the relative pronouns who and which (a book who, a boy which).

•  Omission of articles where they are mandatory in native-speaker English.

•  Increasing of redundancy by adding “inexistent” prepositions (We have to study about…, The article treats of…).

•  Pluralisation of nouns which are considered uncountable in native-speaker English (informations, staffs).

        The evidence suggests that non-native speakers are not conforming to a native English standard. Indeed they seem to get along perfectly well despite the fact that they miss things out and put things in which they ‘should not do’. Not only this, but they are actually better at ‘accommodating’ - that is, negotiating shared meaning through helping each other in a more cooperative way - than, it is suggested, native speakers are when talking to second language speakers (Jenkins 2004). In other words, non-native speakers seem to be better at ELF communication than native speakers are.

(Jeremy Harmer, The practice of English language teaching. Adaptado) 

Ten critical actions needed to address four major cybersecurity challenges:

Cybersecurity: An overview of cyber challenges facing the nation, and actions needed

Federal agencies and the nation’s critical infrastructure — such as energy, transportation systems, communications, and financial services — depend on Information Technology (IT) systems to carry out operations and process essential data. However, the risks to these IT systems are increasing—including insider threats from witting or unwitting employees, escalating and emerging threats from around the globe, and the emergence of new and more destructive attacks. Rapid developments in new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and ubiquitous Internet and cellular connectivity, can also introduce security issues. Over 28,000 security incidents were reported by federal civilian agencies to the Department of Homeland Security in FY 2019.

Additionally, since many government IT systems contain vast amounts of personally identifiable information (PII), federal agencies must protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this information—and effectively respond to data breaches and security incidents. Likewise, the trend in the private sector of collecting extensive and detailed information about individuals needs appropriate limits.

To highlight the importance of these issues, Government Accountability Office (GAO) has designated information security as a government-wide high-risk area since 1997. This high-risk area was expanded in 2003 to include the protection of critical cyber infrastructure and, in 2015, to include protecting the privacy of PII.

GAO has made about 3,300 recommendations to federal agencies to address cybersecurity shortcomings—and we reported that more than 750 of these had not been fully implemented as of December 2020. We designated 67 as priority, meaning that we believe they warrant priority attention from heads of key departments and agencies.

Adapted from: https://www.gao.gov/cybersecurity. Available on November 16th, 2022