Month: August 2013

Chuck Bryant extols the benefits of playing an instrument, which among other things has “been proven to actually increase your memory’s capacity as well as your ability to concentrate”:

It’s also great for developing your motor skills, it’s literally good for your ears, and it can improve your cognitive abilities. It’s also been shown to improve your math skills, even if you never learn to read music. And if you do learn to read and write music, [it] will help you in the reading and writing department as well.

And this isn’t just me talking—there are countless studies and a lot of research that back up these truisms. Basically, it’s an all-around great workout for your noodle, like a brainteaser puzzle you have to use your hands (and sometimes feet) to solve.

Learning to play an instrument will also pay off at work, by helping to improve your organizational skills and time management. It takes a while to learn to play an instrument, so figuring out how to fit it into your schedule as well as the payoffs of completing a goal are both valuable. Persistence is a great life quality and you’ll get it in spades if you pick up a guitar with even modest goals in terms of how accomplished you want to be. And if you join a band (also something everyone should try) you’ll get some very real lessons in teamwork, social skills, personality management, and again, tenacity and perseverance. All of these things will help you at your job and in your personal life.

Previous Dish on the neurological effects of music here, here, and here.

Atul Gawande’s article on how innovations spread has inspired Brett Keller, a global health worker who started as a missionary, to consider how the two fields overlap:

[W]hile I think there are very good general reasons to keep public health and missionary efforts as separate as possible, both in theory and praxis, there are several things we secular liberals can still learn from the more devout.

One example is the never-ending debates amongst evangelists between those who seek technological shortcuts and those who stick with old-fashioned person-to-person contact. This is a frequent topic at missions conferences (if you didn’t know such conferences existed, it might be an interesting Google). You can view the rise of Christian radio broadcasts, followed by Christian TV and televangelists, as the great technological shortcuts: they give a single preacher the ability to reach millions, and if the message is just as good as when delivered in person, why shouldn’t it be just as effective? Some people are persuaded by televangelists, of course, but the effectiveness of the individual doesn’t scale easily to mass media.

Likewise, in recent years there’s been much enthusiasm for social media and its potential to save more souls – but the results rarely pan out.  So despite all of the advances in mass and social media, most evangelists still harp on the importance of individual contact, of building relationships. One of the most effective (in terms of growth rate) groups in the world are Mormons, who, no coincidence, devote years of effort to one-on-one contact.

More Dish on Gawande’s article here.

Lauren Kirchner updates us on the devastating black market for rhino horns:

South Africa, where 75 percent of the world’s rhinos live, [is] at the forefront of a counterintuitive move to legalize the rhino horn trade. If adopted, the new policy would promote safer rhino-horn farming: rhinos could be sedated while parts of their horns were cut off, and then the horns would grow back. A team of Australian conservationists signed on to the idea in March.

Legalization remains highly controversial among animal rights activists and wildlife conservationists.

The World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Investigation Agency, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare have all been critical of the idea. What if lifting the ban increases demand, as it did in fact following similar, previous experiments with the ivory market? Or what if a legal trade simply establishes a parallel but separate market, while illegal (whole) rhino horns and heads continue to sell underground?

Likewise, would legitimizing the sale of rhino cups encourage and validate the baseless myth that they actually have medicinal properties? Perhaps conservationists’ and governments’ efforts would be better directed toward fighting the very misconception that drives the demand in the first place.

Update from a reader:

Has anyone suggested flooding the market with fake rhino powder? It’s not like there is an FDA certification or Good Housekeeping seal of approval for rhino horn guaranteeing authenticity. If the fake can’t be distinguished from the real, then flood the market with fake. Then the expense of getting the real may make it not worth doing since there’s so much more profit with the fake.

Previous Dish on the subject here and here.

(Photo: Indian forest officials stand near a one horned horn Rhinoceros, which was killed and de-horned by the poachers at Karbi hills near Kaziranga National Park, some 250km east of Guwahati the capital city the northeastern state of Assam on September 27, 2012. A rhino was killed by poachers and its horn removed in the early hours on Thursday, barely a day after one was killed and another left bleeding in the world-famous Kaziranga National Park. By Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

The NYT reports that a “federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in New York, and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms.” Leroy Downs, a Staten Island substance-abuse counselor who took part in a class-action lawsuit against the city, feels vindicated:

This is something that people in the community are going through every single day, so I feel good that the judge affirmed that we’re not lying; we’re not making it up; it’s not that so-and-so witness has a grudge against the police. These things are happening to us and it’s impeding our lives. I just want to be able to go to the store and walk home without being accused of something.

Mayor Bloomberg, who has already announced an appeal, thinks New York City will collapse without stop-and-frisk:

In a good-cop-bad-cop routine with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the mayor argued that the court “ignored the real-world realities of crime” and “displayed disturbing disregard for the good intentions of our police officers,” but he really got heated at reporters who dared question his immovable stance. To one journalist – but really to all of them and any critic of stop-and-frisk, however moderate – Bloomberg exclaimed, “You couldn’t be more wrong!”

Jack Dunphy made the same case a little more crudely:

I do not endorse, nor should any police officer endorse, extra-constitutional means to achieve law-enforcement ends, no matter how noble. But in the Bronx, a week ago Sunday, an NYPD officer shot and killed 14-year-old Shaaliver Douse as he, Douse, was attempting to shoot some rival gang member. Would it not be preferable that the police had stopped and frisked Douse before his crime than shot him after? And is there anyone who believes that the added layer of federal bureaucracy over the NYPD, with all its inherent inefficiencies, will make the city safer? Liberals, especially those who would never dare set foot in the Bronx, can rejoice at Judge Scheindlin’s ruling, then watch the bodies begin to pile up.

Jacob Sullum, on the other hand, welcomes the ruling:

The result-oriented approach that Bloomberg takes is inherently hostile to civil liberties, which by design make law enforcement more difficult.

“This case is not about the effectiveness of stop and frisk in deterring or combating crime,” [Judge Shira] Scheindlin writes. “This Court’s mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool. Many police practices may be useful for fighting crime – preventive detention or coerced confessions, for example—but because they are unconstitutional they cannot be used, no matter how effective.” Police and their boosters tend to lose sight of this distinction, which is why we need judges like Scheindlin to enforce it.

Ta-Nehisi believes that discrimination is inexcusable:

As I’ve noted before Ray Kelly and Michael Bloomberg justify the number of stops by arguing that black and Latino men commit the majority of violent crime. This position intentionally ignores the fact the data which shows, even after controlling for crime rates, the NYPD still discriminates. It’s very important that people interested in this case understand that.

Adam Serwer argues along the same lines:

Inspiring fear in criminals by targeting anyone who shares their racial background was the sometimes unstated subtext of stop-and-frisk, and the reason why many support racial and ethnic profiling from street crime to the war on terror.  It’s also why stop-and-frisk was so clearly unconstitutional. “The goal of deterring crime is laudable,” Scheindlin wrote, “but this method is unconstitutional.” Defenders of stop-and-frisk seemed to know that from the beginning. They just hoped that if they could convince people it worked, it wouldn’t matter.

Philip Bump reviews the numbers:

This chart explains why the judge determined that the city’s policy was unacceptable.

It shows:

• That crime has dropped largely independently of the fluctuations of the number of stop-and-frisks. It began going up in 2011 – alongside more stop-and-frisks.

• The number of murders in 2012 dropped alongside the number of stop-and-frisks.

• In every year, almost all of the stop-and-frisks (red line) were of people who were innocent (yellow line) and / or a person of color (orange line). The gap between the red line and the orange line is the number of those stopped who were not black or Latino.

And Kevin Drum wants further investigation into the causes of New York’s crime drop:

If stop-and-frisk really is the reason crime has dropped so dramatically in the Bronx, then a judge would be justified in weighing this against the legal issues on the other side. Even decisions based on fundamental constitutional rights aren’t rendered in a vacuum. But if reductions in atmospheric lead are the primary reason for the drop in crime, then stop-and-frisk really has no justification at all, and the judge’s decision becomes an easy one. That’s why it’s worth getting a more definitive answer about this. Other cities have seen dramatic crime drops without expanding their stop-and-frisk programs as aggressively as New York, and it would sure be worthwhile to find out how and why that happened.

(Chart from a 2010 report (pdf) by the Center On Race, Crime And Justice)