TASK DEFINITION: Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
PROBLEM: Paragraph: Mays, speaking to a TV critics’ meeting Friday, pointed to several bottles she had filled with her tap water and challenged the room to taste or even smell it. There were no immediate takers. The activist, who said the battle over water safety continues, is among the residents portrayed in Lifetime’s movie titled “Flint,” debuting Oct. 28. Mays is played by Marin Ireland, who co-stars with Betsy Brandt, Jill Scott and Queen Latifah. Executive producer Neil Meron said the film is intended to spotlight what happened in Flint, including how a united community and “the voice of the people” can force officials to act. Mays said there have been successes, including the outcome of a lawsuit to get half of the service lines replaced, although not the main lines or interior plumbing. “So one of the things we hope come out of this is to let people know it’s still not over. It’s not even close to over,” she said. The movie is intended to honor Flint victims by telling the story “that even in a poor, broken, poisoned town, we banded together, and we fought. We fought, and we win.” In 2014, a switch of Flint’s water source and failure to add corrosion-reducing phosphates allowed lead from old pipes to leach into the water. Elevated levels of lead, a neurotoxin, were detected in children, and 12 people died in a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that experts suspect was linked to the improperly treated water. An ongoing investigation has led to charges against 13 current or former government officials, including two managers who Republican Gov. Rick Snyder appointed to run the city. Last January, state officials said Flint’s water system no longer has lead levels exceeding the federal limit. The announcement was promptly met by skepticism from some residents, Mays among them, maintaining the system still contains lead and continues to cause illness. Brandt, the former “Breaking Bad” star who’s a native of Bay City, Michigan, not far from Flint, said the person she portrays, LeeAnne Walters, was among those driven to act when authorities failed to heed complaints about their children becoming ill. “As a mom, it just shakes you, because there’s some things that we just should be able to count on,” Brandt said. Claim: Lifetime movie ‘Flint’ dramatizes city’s water crisis.

SOLUTION: Melissa Mays, a resident of Flint, Michigan, came armed to discuss the city’s tainted water crisis and a new Lifetime TV movie dramatizing it.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: None of the stories we reviewed gave readers sufficient information on the cost of the research scans used in the study. This story includes a comment from a researcher saying that increased use of this type of brain scan would bring the “high cost” down, but it doesn’t provide an estimate of the current cost or any comparison to alternative methods of assessing reading ability or other features of dyslexia. We will give this story a satisfactory rating because it portrays this research as providing information for researchers seeking to understand dyslexia, rather than offering important direct benefits to individuals. However, most of the story is about what it is like to live with dyslexia. These anecdotes have little or nothing to do with the research. The list of celebrities who may have or had dyslexia also seems irrelevant and distracting. Then the story tosses in discussion of a study that looked at correlations between dyslexia and spatial skills; again, unrelated to the topic of the primary study reported here. The jumble of extraneous personal tales and other research muddles the point of the story. MRI brain scans are generally considered to present little physical risk, so the issue here is really the potential negative effects of the information the test produces. At least the story raises that issue by including comments from parents who worry that this sort of scanning could further stigmatize children who have trouble reading or writing. This story fails to point out that the “children” studied were not beginning readers, but teenagers who were already identified as having dyslexia and may have been involved in special reading programs for many years. It also fails to mention several of the caveats and limitations that the researchers noted in their journal article, including the possibility that misclassification of the participants based on their initial testing could affect the results. In other words, rather than actually improving during the study, it is possible some of the teens were actually better readers from the beginning, but just scored low on the baseline tests. Nevertheless, the story appropriately describes this study as helping researchers to understand the disease, rather than evaluating the clinical usefulness of brain scans. Also, one paragraph deep in the story highlights the preliminary nature of the research; specifically that the study included only 25 participants with dyslexia, “which is too small a sample size to prove anything.” It also notes that the study did not look at whether different varieties or reading instruction or other interventions might have had some effect and it includes a comment from an independent expert about the lack of data on instruction or other factors that could influence reading ability. The story would have been better if the alert to the preliminary nature of the study had been near the top, rather than buried near the end. The story refers to estimates that between 5 percent and 20 percent of the population has dyslexia. Unlike the Reuters story we also reviewed, this story provides a useful definition of dyslexia as “a condition that, broadly speaking, hinders a person’s ability to interpret language.”  The story does include independent experts. Although it does not discuss conflicts of interest, the authors of the main study declared no conflicts and reported that their study was supported by a number of grants from public agencies and foundations, though the baseline assessment of the participants was supported by a company that markets treatment interventions for people with dyslexia. One troubling point: the story describes one person who claims to have been helped by “training at a learning development center.” If this individual was associated with the company that helped sponsor this research, the story should have disclosed that connection. The study authors wrote that although standardized tests did not accurately predict changes in reading ability during the study period, “it is possible that there are behavioral measures not included here that may predict outcome.” Indeed, their journal article specifically referred to other research into clinical testing that did appear to predict how children with poor reading skills responded to teaching. The story fails to make clear that the study reported here did not attempt to make a comprehensive comparison of the predictive power of scans and other methods of assessing children with reading problems. The story notes that the type of scan used in this study is not widely available. The story implies that this study is the first to suggest young people with dyslexia use a certain area of the right hemisphere of their brains more than average readers. Actually, the study authors pointed out that their research provides some additional data to support the findings of many other studies of differences between the brains of people with dyslexia and those who read normally. The story does not appear to rely on a news release. Claim: Dyslexia: Scanning the brain for clues

SOLUTION: This story is the best of the three we reviewed about a study indicating that brain scans may help researchers understand brain structure and function in people who have dyslexia. It refrains from claiming that the work has near-term clinical implications for people who have trouble reading and writing. However, the bulk of the story is made up of personal stories about living with dyslexia, while key features of this research are buried deep in the story or left out entirely. What’s more, the story describes the study participants as “children,” thus leaving readers with the impression that researchers looked at beginning readers, when they actually were studying teenagers who presumably had been dealing with dyslexia for many years. In addition, the story tosses in a discussion of an unrelated study of dyslexia and spatial skills. Even people with advanced reading skills are likely to come away from this story befuddled about the scope, findings and implications of the research. Good reading skills are fundamental to educational, social and financial success. Dyslexia is a type of reading disability characterized by difficulties in word recognition, spelling and decoding. Most studies suggest early intervention is important, but little is known about why some children respond better than others. This research suggests that brain scans can provide insight to underlying mechanisms of dyslexia and perhaps help track and refine interventions that could be tailored to individuals. But for readers to understand the value of this study, stories must clearly describe the research and its implications.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Registered Nurse Amanda Tyacke (L) injects saline solution through the abdomen of Jazmine Raygoza, 17 (R) into an under-skin port which will fill Raygoza's Lap-Band at Rose Medical Center in Denver August 3, 2011 about 6 weeks after Jazmine's surgery. After trying multiple diets and exercise Raygoza decided on the surgery with the encouragement of her mother Veronica who recently had gastric bypass. At the six week mark Jazmine had lost 21 pounds. REUTERS/Rick Wilking Plastic surgeons said patients either don’t know about this extra surgery, called body contouring, or simply can’t afford it — yet doctors say it’s more than just a cosmetic procedure. “It is surgery that improves patients’ quality of life,” said Jason Spector at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, to Reuters Health. The excess skin that is left after severe weight loss can get in the way of exercising, interfere with patients’ ability to wear clothes properly, and cause rashes and serious infections. Spector said weight loss surgery, also called bariatric surgery, is just the first step. “In order to complete the journey, patients really do need to undergo the appropriate post-bariatric body contouring. Even though that has a slightly cosmetic ring to it, it’s certainly something that we, as plastic surgeons, would consider reconstructive,” he added. To get a sense of how many patients were actually going on to have body contouring surgery, Spector and his team mailed a survey to 1,158 patients whose operations were done by two surgeons between 2003 and 2011. They received 284 responses. Only a quarter of the patients said they discussed body contouring with their surgeon around the time of the operation, with about 12 percent actually undergoing the procedure, said Spector, who presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. The most frequent reasons for not having body contouring were expense and lack of awareness of the procedure. Nearly 30 percent of the patients said they might have chosen differently if they had received more information. The excess skin can pose a very real danger, Spector said. He described a patient whose overhanging skin was caught underneath the electronically controlled seat of her car as she was adjusting it. “A large piece of skin was ripped off and caused a big open wound and subsequent infection. UP to that point, her insurance company had told her, ‘sorry, you can’t have the surgery. You don’t need it.’”   According to Healthcare Blue Book, a consumer guide to healthcare costs in the United States, body contouring comes with a price tag of about $13,000. Claim: Body contouring rare after weight-loss surgery.

SOLUTION:
Patients who have had weight loss surgery rarely have excess skin removed, although it can be such a bother for people who have shed a lot of weight that it has a negative impact on their quality of life, a poll said.