Month: May 2013

Ask Sue Halpern Anything: Training A Therapy Dog

Yesterday, the author pointed out how surprisingly fun it was to spend time in a nursing home with her therapy dog, Pransky. In today’s video, Sue talks about what made her want to train her Labradoodle as a therapy dog and what that training entailed:

Sue and her Labradoodle’s experiences with the elderly is the basis for A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher. On a related note, Stanley Coren recently explained that even though Freud had the equivalent of a therapy dog present for many of his psychotherapy sessions, the practice of dog therapy wasn’t taken very seriously until research bore out the benefits:

The ultimate validation of animal assisted therapy would come from psychologist Alan Beck and psychiatrist Aaron Katcher. They used direct physiological measures to show that when a person interacted with, or even was simply in the presence of, a friendly dog, there were immediate changes in their physiological responses. Breathing became more regular, heart beat slowed, muscles relaxed and there were other physiological changes suggesting a lowering of sympathetic nervous system activity. Since it is the sympathetic nervous system which responds to stress, this indicated that the dog was clearly reducing the stress levels of the people in its presence. … Since they could now see the direct effects that pets were having on the physiological indexes of stress, the notions associated with animal assisted therapy became much more acceptable. This is evidenced by the fact that the number of pet assisted therapy programs was under twenty in 1980, but by the year 2000 over one thousand such programs were in operation.

Ask Anything archive here.

What The IRS Was Trying To Do

There is a legitimate reason to examine 501 (c) 4 groups: they are officially just social welfare groups, arguing for better tomorrow tomorrow or whatever. They’re not supposed to spend money on campaigns for presidential candidates. Obviously, this should be done on a strictly nonpartisan basis, and the Cincinnati office (which seems to have been relieved of its duties recently) was way out of line in focusing mainly on the right and Tea Party groups. I’m with Rand Paul in wanting heads to roll once the full facts are available.

But notice nonetheless the bigger picture. 2012 was a year in which the airwaves were flooded by ads paid for by these nebulous groups seeking tax exemption. The right swamped the left with these groups. From ProPublica this morning, in a story which reveals allegedly illegal leaking of some of the data from Cincinnati:

One of the applications the IRS released to ProPublica was from Crossroads GPS, the largest social-welfare nonprofit involved in the 2012 election. The group, started in part by GOP consultant Karl Rove, promised the IRS that any effort to influence elections would be “limited.” The group spent more than $70 million from anonymous donors in 2012.

So the biggest social welfare nonprofit was clearly in violation of the law. And because of the IRS’s stupid behavior, that very relevant fact is obscured.

Obamacare’s Nightmare Scenarios

So you’re not depressed enough by the IRS outrage or the DOJ’s secret seizure of AP emails? Even Jon Cohn lists five ways that the ACA could disappoint. One of his concerns:

Administration officials say they expect strong competition. And it’s worth noting that the Massachusetts exchange, which most closely resembles the one the federal government is setting up, has generally only offered a handful of plans, and yet premiums have remained low. (The limited choice has also arguably been easier for consumers to navigate.) But Massachusetts gives officials power to aggressively negotiate bids, in order to drive down prices and encourage competition. In many states, exchanges will lack that authority. Jay Angoff, a former insurance commissioner from Missouri who worked on Obamacare, says it’s possible that what develops is “a government-compelled, taxpayer-subsidized market, but most of the inefficiencies of the [current] system are still there.” For insurers, that’d be the best of all worlds.

Which is why, at some point, surely, if only for fiscal reasons, the government will have to step in. Suderman highlights other potential problems:

[L]arge numbers of the uninsured are likely to have their work disrupted. Already we are seeing anecdotal evidence and government jobs data suggesting that employers are capping hours for part-time workers in response to the law’s requirement that employers provide health coverage to full time employees. Small businesses are reportedly weighing the possibility of firing employees or turning them into contractors. Researchers at UC Berkeley recentlyestimated that 2.3 million workers are at risk of having their hours cut back because of the law.

And Then There Were Twelve, Ctd

A reader writes:

Okay, I think your reference to Minnesota as a “bastion of midwestern Catholic values” is a first. There are plenty of Catholics in the state, but Minnesota is really a bastion of Lutheran decency. Rev. Tim Faust, who gave the speech on the floor of the Minnesota House to which you linked to last week [and seen above], is a Lutheran minister. His lilting drone is the drone heard throughout childhood by millions of small-town Minnesotans before they moved to the burbs and joined the megachurch. It is the boring, drumbeat drone of “do the right thing.” The political equivalent of the Lutheran drone would be a speech by Walter Mondale.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) now ordains non-celibate gay ministers. It is the largest denomination in Minnesota. The debate within the synod was intense, and it took place two years ago in every hamlet in the state. It was the debate within the Lutheran Church in Minnesota that broke the ground for people to talk about gay people. I am not Lutheran, but they laid the groundwork for this week’s victory. Even though a substantial number of their congregations split away from the ELCA, many churches picked up members after the decision.

To their credit, my Catholic Minnesota friends were strongly opposed to last fall’s anti-gay marriage amendment. Like much of the state, they relished voting against inequality.

Yes, you’re right. I guess I just see it as Catholic as that’s what I’ve been exposed to in the state. Another Minnesotan adds:

Minnesota’s culture is rooted in northern Europe, northern Germany and Scandinavia, as opposed to more Catholic southern Germany and southern Europe. Minnesotans place a high value on privacy – not in a libertarian sense, but in a “don’t meddle” sense. This emphasis on privacy makes it hard for an outsider or newcomer to make friends. On the other hand, it means there is some level of respect for “your business,” as in “Well I suppose who you marry is really your business, isn’t it?”

While this attitude is sometimes derided as “Minnesota Nice,” the truth is that Minnesota Nice does exist. Beyond politeness, it allows some space for private individuality. Minnesota’s culture may not much like it when someone stands out too much, but it also doesn’t like it when someone gets singled out for ill treatment.

Minnesota is not a secular place. Religion still has influence on the culture there. However, in my 13 years living in Minnesota, that influence is expressed in terms of grace more than in terms of sin. That is the Lutheran influence and I would suggest this religious value – graciousness towards others – is the one that prevailed today.

The DOJ’s Press Probe

Yes, the Department of Justice secretly collected the phone records of AP editors and reporters:

According to an article published by the AP, [the surveillance] may relate to its May 2012 article revealing an Al-Qaeda bomb plot. That plot, originating in Yemen, was targeted for the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, but was foiled when the device was given to a CIA double agent. The AP broke the story, holding it for several days at the request of the White House. According to the AP, the reporters on that story owned numbers that were among those subpoenaed, indicating that Justice may be trying to identify the source of the leak.

Ben Smith calls it yet another example of Bush era policy shaped into a leaner form by Obama:

The Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records in a leak case probably shouldn’t be a surprise: This Administration has been remarkably, unusually aggressive in targeting leaks — a policy that has surprised and pleased some critics, while alienating traditional allies. But, paired with questions about the IRS and a broader edginess over pervasive surveillance, it’s a sleeper issue that seems poised to break outside its small circle of reporters and advocates.

This reaction, and this new fear, is in no small part the Administration’s fault. Obama has always sought to control elements of politics that couldn’t be controlled, and has an obvious affection for the surgical strike. But it also taps perfectly into the fears of the moment, in which futuristic visions of surveillance, hacking, impersonation, and drone war have become everyday powers of corporations, civilians, and the government.

Orin Kerr thinks this is a “non-story”:

I would ask readers inclined to see this as an abuse to identify exactly what the government did wrong based on what we know so far.

Was the DOJ wrong to investigate the case at all? If it was okay for them to investigate the case, was it wrong for them to try to find out who the AP reporters were calling? If it was okay for them to get records of who the AP reporters were calling, was it wrong for them to obtain the records from the personal and work phone numbers of all the reporters whose names were listed as being involved in the story and their editor? If it was okay for them to obtain the records of those phone lines, was the problem that the records covered two months — and if so, what was the proper length of time the records should have covered?

Jonathan Adler disagrees with Kerr:

This is hardly the first time the federal government has investigated the leak of national security information in the past dozen years, and yet this is the first time a seizure of this scope has been reported.  The AP’s letter of protest certainly suggests this was an unprecedented seizure with serious implications for the AP’s newsgathering operations across a range of areas, and that the requisite efforts to obtain the necessary  information through other means were not undertaken. Perhaps the AP is wrong on these point, and perhaps DoJ did everything that is required.  If so, there might not be cause for outrage.  But that would hardly make this a “non-story.”

And Drum hopes the practice will finally receive proper scrutiny:

The government has been obtaining phone records like this for over a decade now, and it’s been keeping their requests secret that entire time. Until now, the press has showed only sporadic interest in this. But not anymore. I expect media interest in terror-related pen register warrants to show a healthy spike this week.

That could be a good thing. It’s just too bad that it took monitoring of journalists to get journalists fired up about this.

Your 19th Century LiveJournal

A Cornell researcher finds that before diaries became private and personal, people would share their daily entries in the same way we use personal blogs and Twitter today:

[T]hrough her research, [Lee] Humphreys found that it’s only been in the last hundred years that journalling has come to be considered a private practice. In the late 19th century, she says visiting friends and relatives would gather together and read each others diaries as a way of keeping up to date and sharing their lives. Journals were also kept in early American towns to mark and record important events: weddings, births, deaths and other events of community-wide importance.

“You don’t get a real sense of personal, individual self until the end of the 19th century,” Humphreys told the Cornell Chronicle in 2010, “so it makes perfect sense that diaries or journals prior to that time were much more social in nature.”

Incarcerated Ideas

Andrea Jones examines some of the banned books in prison, using the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as a case study:

As noted by the Texas Civil Rights Project, the majority of banned books fell into the two most nebulous threat categories: promoting deviant sexual behavior, and inciting disorder through strikes, gang violence, or riots. Wide tracts of literature grappling with challenging themes like race, sex, and poverty were denied at the discretion of prison authorities, with no clear link to penological objectives.

Examples:

Books by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors like Jeffrey Eugenides, Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Wallace Stegner, John Updike, Robert Penn Warren, and Alice Walker were deemed unfit. The Color Purple, for example, was banned for its opening scene of sexual abuse—Celie’s ensuing struggle for empowerment amid racism and patriarchy were of no value according to TDCJ’s mailroom inspectors. …

Books incriminating prison institutions were overwhelmingly censored for mentioning rape, despite the topic’s critical relevance. Prison Masculinities, a collection of essays edited by prison mental health experts, was banned for its candid discussion of sexual assault and violence behind bars. The Perpetual Prisoner Machine, a look into the profit motives driving mass incarceration, was barred for quoting a 1968 report from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office on the problem’s prevalence in local jails. Even self-help and rehabilitative titles about the prevention of violent sexual behavior, like Stopping Rape: A Challenge for Men, and Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest, were prohibited by TDCJ.

Previous Dish on prison libraries here.

Invading The Privacy Of Paying Customers

After the revelation that Bloomberg journalists had been accessing user information on Bloomberg’s computer system, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler clarifies what information was compromised:

[Reporters] could see a user’s login history and when a login was created. Second, they could see high-level types of user functions on an aggregated basis, with no ability to look into specific security information. This is akin to being able to see how many times someone used Microsoft Word vs. Excel. And, finally, they could see information about help desk inquiries. … At no time did reporters have access to trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter or other related systems. Nor did they have access to clients’ messages to one another. They couldn’t see the stories that clients were reading or the securities clients might be looking at.

Adam Penenberg connects the episode to another media scandal:

How different is this from News Corp. and its phone hacking scandal?

With Bloomberg you have customers paying roughly $20,000 a year per terminal and rely on them to help execute trades with vast sums of money at stake. With the phone hacking scandal you had employees of Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers accessing voicemails belonging to politicians, celebrities, and the British Royal Family. … If you think about it, Bloomberg reporters’ actions were not dissimilar to Gallagher and News Corp.’s. They intercepted information they were not supposed to have and gained unauthorized access to customers’ accounts. The difference: The latter is illegal. The former? It’s hard to say.

Neil Irwin argues that the incident reveals tension in the Bloomberg business model:

You can’t think about Bloomberg News without understanding that this is the ecosystem in which it exists. The journalists there create some excellent work on topics that have nothing to do with financial markets—but their bread and butter, their raison d’etre is to be one more thing that makes the Bloomberg terminal something that financial professionals can’t afford not to have. For Bloomberg, in other words, the terminal business is so lucrative and so important, that it can spare no expense to make sure that if a plane crashes in Mozambique or Hungary appoints a new central banker or, say, a senior executive of a major investment bank has been forced out of his job, the news will pop up on a Bloomberg terminal first.

Which brings us back to the events of the last few days. The practice of letting journalists access information about when subscribers had logged in and what broad categories of data they accessed pits the two imperatives of Bloomberg’s strategy against each other. On the one hand, it wants to do everything it can to ensure that its reporters are drumming up information that the competition isn’t. On the other, anything that discomfits the subscribers who are paying the bills could endanger the whole enterprise.

Kevin Roose doubts this will affect Wall Street’s “Bloomberg addiction”:

Terminal clients who are offended at the breach of privacy can take some steps — renegotiating their contracts with Bloomberg, moving certain extra-sensitive functions like IM off the terminal — but unless they’re willing to radically overhaul their company’s work flow at great expense and annoyance, they can’t just leave.

So while media watchers might rejoice in a legendarily secretive and cutthroat media organization coming under the microscope for a privacy breach, they shouldn’t celebrate too hard. After the privacy issues are tied up and a few pro forma steps are taken to put clients at ease, it will be back to business as usual for Bloomberg.