Month: May 2013

The author explains how she and her therapy dog Pransky have been received while working at a local nursing home (with one awesome anecdote):

John Ensminger recently went through some new research into the effectiveness of therapy dogs, including what the experience is like for the dog:

[My dog] Chloe and I have been a therapy dog team for nearly five years.  Indeed there can be stress for the dog. In a visit to a cerebral palsy facility, one child locked a hand onto Chloe’s back.  I kept her calm while two attendants gradually unlocked the vice grip of fingers. Fran Breitkopf encountered a similar situation in a memory care unit:

“Although [my dog] Casey loved to visit people he was not able to sustain visits to deep dementia sections of Golden Hill. It exhausted him and he was only able to deal with the confusion that he felt for a short time.  I did have to pry a woman away from Casey in one of his visits to that section. She grabbed him and hugged him too hard. His eyes pleaded for help and we did have a nurse come in to help us. He was okay after that, not reluctant. When we left the facility, Casey would fall into a deep sleep by the time we got down the driveway to the main road, probably just 800 to 1,000 feet.  I ended up not taking him to that section after a time. On the other hand he loved going to Ten Broeck Elder Care Facility and was good for at least an hour. He just wanted to deliver kisses and sat on everyone’s laps and gave them many. He did not want to sit on laps of people who had wet themselves. I always thought he didn’t want anyone to think it was he who had peed.”

Nevertheless, negative incidents are rare and [researcher Dr. Dawn A.] Marcus describes a study in which visits to humans “resulted in significant positive changes (P≤0.01) in endorphin, oxytocin, prolactin, phenyl acetic acid, and dopamine levels in dogs.”  Corstisol levels have been shown to rise in dogs, however, indicating that there is a “need to limit visit frequency.”  Although my experience with Chloe has not been monitored for chemical changes in either of us, I do believe that the stress level varies with the assignment and that some assignments are actually fun for the dog.

Mental Floss has put together a gallery of therapy dogs in action. Sue’s new book, A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher, comes out tomorrow. Our Ask Anything archive is here.

It hasn’t been a good month for the armed services – first the Air Force, now the Army:

In the latest incident, the Department of Defense revealed on Tuesday a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army stationed at the Ft. Hood, TX military base is under investigation for sexual assault. Along with allegedly sexually assaulting two of his peers, the the sergeant is being investigated for possibly forcing a subordinate into prostitution. Making matters even worse, the soldier under investigation was assigned as the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) program coordinator for an eight-hundred person battalion stationed at the base.

Adam Martin notes:

The officer ran the sexual assault prevention program at the battalion level, for about 800 people, so it’s not quite the same as the Air Force lieutenant colonel who ran the program for the entire branch. But the accusations, if true, speak to an apparently more premeditated crime.

The latest scandal will surely fuel the reform effort from Congress:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is set to introduce a particularly drastic bill on Thursday in response to increasing military sexual assaults. Her bill would completely remove the decision to prosecute all major criminal cases from the military chain of command.

More in the Dish thread here.

Will Wilkinson asks:

I don’t think the subject or conclusion of Mr Richwine’s dissertation is out of the bounds of reasonable discourse. Yet I think a suspicion of racism is perfectly reasonable. Grad students can choose from an infinite array of subjects. Why choose this one? Who are especially keen to discover a rational basis for public policy that discriminates along racial lines? Racists, of course. Anyone who chooses this subject, and comes down on the side vindicating racist assumptions, volunteers to bring suspicion upon himself, to expose his work to an extraordinary level of scrutiny. Were Mr Richwine’s dissertation a model of scientific rigour, he might easily enough survive this scrutiny.

The first trouble with this is that Will provides no evidence that the dissertation is second-rate, except Dan Drezner’s quick browse. The PhD advisor is on record saying: “Jason’s empirical work was careful. Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error.” I’d put that more considered judgment over Dan’s. As for anyone thinking of examining group differences in IQ, the presumption of racism is pure prejudice. If Richwine had arrived at different conclusions, would he be given this treatment?

Freddie seconds Will:

Precisely so. It is not racist to ask these questions. James Flynn, one of the most important researchers of the question of human intelligence in history, has used this sort of research precisely to agitate for social justice and left-wing politics. But it is perfectly natural, in a country with such a long legacy of racism, to expect those arguing that race leads to inferior outcomes in as existential a quality as intelligence to be held to very stringent consideration. That is particularly true when, as in the case of Jason Richwine, that argument is levied in the service of further discrimination, a reactionary call against immigration and deepening racial diversity in the United States.

My problem here is with Freddie’s smuggling onto the argument a line about something “as existential a quality as intelligence.” That is not what IQ is. It’s a very limited measurement of predicted success on our modern economy. There are other kinds of intelligence, which can be measured differently. And you can also note that this research could also be saying that, on some cases, race may lead to superior outcomes – for, say, Asians and Ashkenazi Jews. If all this were a white supremacist plot based on rigged pseudo-science, I would not expect Jews to come out on top, or for there to be no measurable difference in IQ between the two genders, or for Caucasian whites to be in the middle of the pack. And I wouldn’t expect it to earn a PhD at my alma mater.

Since this issue is so explosive and important, I look forward to the scholarly dismantling of the Richwine thesis. Have at it. I’ll happily publish the grotesque, racist errors that somehow got past Christopher Jencks.

Michael Osborne interviews Andrew Guzman, author of Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change, about the strife that rising sea levels will likely cause:

The environmental-refugee problem becomes eye-poppingly scary when you look at the 150 million people living in Bangladesh. A one-meter sea level rise would swamp about 17 percent of the country. “We know where people go when they lose their land: They go to cities, and they go to refugee camps,” Guzman says. “So the Bangladeshi cities that remain are going to be overrun and crumbling. Just think of the sewage system alone.”

Lest you think no one has considered what might happen next, in recent years India has increased security along the border with Bangladesh. “But fences are only so good up to a point,” Guzman says. “So how much violence are you prepared to use to keep that border secure? It’s not at all clear to me that the border can remain intact.”

Closer to home, Suzanne Goldenberg reports on how rising sea levels threaten Newtok, a village in Alaska:

A report by the US Army Corps of Engineers predicted that the highest point in the village – the school of Warner’s nightmare – could be underwater by 2017. There was no possible way to protect the village in place, the report concluded.

If Newtok can not move its people to the new site in time, the village will disappear. A community of 350 people, nearly all related to some degree and all intimately connected to the land, will cease to exist, its inhabitants scattered to the villages and towns of western Alaska, Anchorage and beyond.

It’s a choice confronting more than 180 native communities in Alaska, which are flooding and losing land because of the ice melt that is part of the changing climate.

Lawrence Krauss wants more research into extracting existing CO2 from the atmosphere as a way to address climate change. He notes that, unlike other forms of geoengineering, “direct air capture would treat the disease, not merely the symptoms”:

First, one removes CO₂ from the air by using a sorbent, which is a material that can absorb gasses. Next, the CO₂ has to be extracted from the sorbent and sequestered, presumably by pumping it deep underground at relatively high concentration or by binding it to minerals—a bit like how we handle nuclear waste. But another possibility includes actually converting it back into fuel. One particularly attractive possibility that has been proposed involves using an “exchange resin” sorbent which binds CO₂ when dry and releases it when wet. In this way the evaporation of water could actually be used to help reduce the energy burden associated with binding and subsequently extracting the CO₂.

Scott Rosenberg wonders whether geoengineering, through either carbon dioxide removal or solar radiation management, is “a slam-dunk no-brainer or a regrettable last resort”:

Unfortunately, the slam-dunkness of geoengineering turns out to be illusory at best. We really don’t know if any of these schemes can or would work. How much time, energy, and money should we put into finding out? That was the theme of a debate on geoengineering that I moderated last week, and here’s the lesson I took from it: If we expect new technology to save us from the mess old technology has made, but don’t also fix the broken political processes and social dynamics that made it impossible to avert that mess, we’re just inviting a bigger mess.

Akshat Rathi cites literature indicating that multiple types of geoengineering will be necessary to avoid climate change:

Several geoengineering initiatives plan to tackle climate change by cutting incoming sunlight, through methods such as spreading reflective aerosols in the stratosphere. But without also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, such plans would fail to fully mitigate change in rainfall in the tropics, a study published in Nature Geoscience last week (21 April) suggests.