Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin, and Racial Bias in ‘Justifiable Homicide’ Trials
- Inbreeding Homophily
- California Hunger Strike Raises Issue of Force-Feeding on U.S. Soil
- Why So Many Flood Maps Are Still Out of Date
- Embracing the Economics of Happiness
- Quick Study: Leave Nagging in the Bag
- The Missus
- U.S. Aid to Egypt: Where Does the Money Go—and Who Decides How It’s Spent?
- History Is Your DNA
- Vacuum Cleaners, Yoga, and Keeping Inmates Sane
- The Strange and Possibly Illegal World of Truancy Court
- There Is No Station 2
- Would Giving Up Computers Protect Your Privacy?
- Can Ethiopia’s Best Runner Become Its Best Politician?
- Whither Cultural Critics?
| George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin, and Racial Bias in ‘Justifiable Homicide’ Trials Posted: 13 Jul 2013 09:39 PM PDT  Today a jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder. The decision was based on a law colloquially called "stand your ground" (SYG) which allows people to use proportionate force in the face of an attack without first trying to retreat or escape. Twenty-nine states have such laws. At MetroTrends, John Roman and Mitchell Downey report their analysis of 4,650 FBI records of homicides in which a person killed a stranger with a handgun. They conclude that stand your ground "tilts the odds in favor of the shooter." In SYG states, 13.6 percent of homicides were ruled justifiable; in non-SYG states, only 7.2 percent were deemed such. This is strong evidence that rulings of justifiable homicide are more likely under stand your ground. But which homicides? The very kind decided in the Zimmerman trial today. A finding of "justifiable homicide" is much more common in the case of a white-on-black killing than any other kind including a white and a black person. At PBS's request, Roman compared the likelihood of a favorable finding for the defendant in SYG and non-SYG cases, considering the races of the people involved. The data is clear: Compared to white-on-white crimes, stand your ground increases the likelihood of a justifiable homicide ruling, but only when a white person is accused of killing a black person.
It's simple: Stand your ground laws increase the chances that a homicide will be considered justifiable because it gives the jurors more leeway to give defendants the benefit of the doubt. But jurors will likely give that benefit of the doubt to certain kinds of defendants and not others. Stand your ground may or may not be a good law in theory but, in practice, it increases racial bias in legal outcomes. This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Posted: 13 Jul 2013 06:33 AM PDT  In The American Prospect, Nona Willis Aronowitz tells the tale of two Milwaukees. For some millennials, the Rust Belt city teems with opportunity. For others, the recession drags on. Globalization arrives in Wisconsin:
Emphasis added. To understand Milwaukee’s competitive advantage, one must spend time in world city Chicago. Migration, not racism, best explains the dramatic disparity of economic experience. There are the mobile and the stuck. Move or die. Globalization favors open networks, people who can do business with each other on a minimal amount of trust. Globalization avoids closed networks, the parochial neighborhoods that only look out for their own. In Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown: Civic Infrastructure and Mobilization in Economic Crises, Sean Safford draws such a distinction:
I’m seeing the same forces at play within a community, within Milwaukee. Those who left home for Chicago experienced life as a newcomer. Innovation is required every day as a bunch of folks from someplace else build relationships and crack the code of the international part of the city. Richard Florida invokes tolerance and diversity as key descriptive variables for the Creative Class. An abundance of both indicates open networks, globalization. Upon return, these migrants bring the open network way of doing business with them. This is how globalization diffuses. The world is flat. No such experience is afforded the stuck. Whether ethnic enclave or inner city ghetto, isolation and too much trust beget poverty. You have Youngstown instead of Allentown:
Emphasis added. A very dense urban enclave is a desert of labor market information. The disconnect from the outside world, the lack of migrants, makes the supposed density dividend moot. A grand and unfortunate irony, conventional wisdom preaches more social capital for the pockets of poverty. Promoting inbreeding homophily is the policy of choice. Such efforts increase inequality and segregation. The world is spiky. Talent retention, plugging the brain drain, is another form of inbreeding homophily. The aim undermines economic development and stifles innovation, density be damned. Your town is a black box, a closed network. Even people who dare to move there leave soon after because they don’t feel a part of the community. It’s a death spiral all too familiar in the Rust Belt. The cities become more isolated and poor. The best and brightest still go to Big City. |
| California Hunger Strike Raises Issue of Force-Feeding on U.S. Soil Posted: 12 Jul 2013 05:01 PM PDT  More than 12,400 inmates across California have been fasting since Monday to protest solitary confinement and call for improved prison conditions. The strike, involving roughly two-thirds of the state’s prisons, is one of the largest in California history. So far no prisoners have been force-fed, and the Corrections Department says they have no current plans to do so. “Hopefully no one will get to that point,” said a spokesperson for California’s corrections department. During a similar strike in 2011, the said he planned to seek court permission to force-feed inmates. (The strike ended before he did so.) As lawmakers call for an end to the force-feeding of Guantanamo detainees, the California strike serves as a reminder: inmates on U.S. soil can ultimately be given the same treatment. While there is no national data available on the prevalence of force-feeding in U.S. prisons, a number of cases have been documented in recent years, largely after appeals to stop the process were rejected by state courts. The courts have typically ruled that prisons can force-feed an inmate without their consent if it’s needed to maintain the safety and security of the prison. “It’s a little bit of bad press if you force-feed inmates. It’s a lot of bad press if you have a lot of protesting inmates and one of them dies.”Connecticut inmate William Coleman, who is hunger striking over what he says was a wrongful conviction, has been force-fed since 2008. The Connecticut Supreme Court has sided with prison officials, who said that Coleman’s strike could threaten the prison’s security and lead to copycat strikes. More recently, New York inmate Leroy Dorsey was denied the right to refuse feeding in May, when the New York Court of Appeals ruled the prison could continue to restrain and feed him with nasogastric tubes. Bioethicist Dr. Jacob Appel, who opposes the practice, says he believes that court rulings have resulted in more prisons turning to force-feeding in response to hunger strikes. “It’s a little bit of bad press if you force-feed inmates,” he said. “It’s a lot of bad press if you have a lot of protesting inmates and one of them dies.” California is one of only three states whose courts have ruled against force-feeding. In 1993, the state Supreme Court ruled that one a paralyzed inmate had the right to “decline life-sustaining treatment, even if to do so will cause or hasten death.” But the judges in that case noted that prisons could use force-feeding if a hunger strike was a threat to order in the prison and the safety of other inmates. “We do not preclude prison authorities from establishing the need to override an inmate’s choice to decline medical intervention,” the judges wrote. California prison policy says that inmates can refuse medical treatment as long as they’re conscious and able to do so. Prisoners can also sign statements that say they cannot be administered treatment, regardless of their condition. “Force-feeding inmates is not part of our medical protocol,” said Joyce Hayhoe, director of legislation for the California Correctional Health Care Services. But in 2011, the former head of California prisons said he thought those prohibitions against force-feeding could be overruled with a court’s approval. To do so, the Corrections Department would have to prove that force-feeding was in the state’s interest to maintain a safe prison environment for other inmates. The department never actually sought court permission, as officials agreed to meet with inmates and said they were reviewing the state’s solitary confinement policy. The two strikes in 2011 ended after three weeks. The prison system did revise its solitary confinement policies in March, but inmates now striking say the changes do nothing to limit the length of solitary confinement sentences, which can continue indefinitely. Inmates are also calling for an end to “group punishment,” such as race-based lockdowns that restrict an entire race of inmates for one prisoner’s violation. The California Corrections Department is facing federal lawsuits over both practices. “At this point, it is clear to us that the [Corrections Department] has no intention of implementing the substantive policy changes that were agreed to fifteen or sixteen months ago,” organizers said in a press release, announcing plans to renew the strike. Hunger strikers at Pelican Bay prison have released a list of five demands, which inmates in other prisons have expanded. Corrections officials have announced that inmates will face consequences for participating in the strike, ranging from being denied family visits to being put in solitary confinement. “It is against state law to participate in disturbances such as mass hunger strikes,” said corrections spokesperson Jeffrey Callison. “Eventually participants will be issued rule violation reports.” Dolores Canales’ son, an inmate at Pelican Bay prison, is striking for the third time in two years. She is worried prison officials may be less willing to work with inmates this time around. “They’re going to let them go God only knows how long without eating,” she said. Canales has lead efforts to organize other family members in support of the strike. She, like many family members she knows, has avoided discussing force-feeding with her son. “I don’t want to know,” she said. “If it were up to me I would say do whatever it takes to have him live.” Isaac Ontiveros, a spokesperson with the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Network, hopes the size of the strike will push corrections officials to consider inmates’ demands, and make it harder to crack down on the protest. As far as force-feeding, “It doesn’t need to come to that,” Ontiveros said. Prison officials “can end this very, very simply.” This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Why So Many Flood Maps Are Still Out of Date Posted: 12 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT  The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood insurance maps are critically important for millions of Americans who live in flood-prone areas. The maps determine the annual premiums for flood insurance, which is required by law for homeowners with federally backed mortgages who live in high-risk areas. But many of the nation’s flood maps are woefully out of date. ProPublica talked with David R. Maidment, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin who has advised FEMA on flood mapping, about why the data behind modern maps is 10 times as accurate as the older data and why half of Texas still doesn’t have up-to-date maps. How did you become involved with flood mapping? “Since federal disasters started being declared in 1952, two-thirds of them have involved flooding. The next one after that is fire.”Why is it important to have up-to-date flood maps? Since federal disasters started being declared in 1952, two-thirds of them have involved flooding. The next one after that is fire. There have been about 300 federal disasters declared from fire and 1,600 from flooding. Fire is a very horrible thing, but flooding occurs much more frequently, and it’s also much more widespread. That’s the fundamental reason. Floods devastate human lives to a greater extent than any other national hazard. What’s changed since you started studying flooding? How up to date are FEMA’s flood maps now? What makes the new maps more accurate than the old ones? If you live somewhere prone to flooding, what do these improvements mean? And FEMA couldn’t do that with the old maps? How much of the country has these newer, more accurate flood maps? This interview has been edited for clarity and length. This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Embracing the Economics of Happiness Posted: 12 Jul 2013 12:45 PM PDT  In the first decade of this century, the poverty rate rose, and no net jobs were created—yet America's GDP grew by nearly two percent. So why do we rely on GDP more than any other data point to gauge society's progress? Vermont thinks it's found an alternative. In a few weeks, a team of University of Vermont researchers will unveil a “Genuine Progress Indicator” to supplement more traditional economic metrics as a tool to help shape public policy. Vermont isn't the first place to try out the concept, but they are taking it a step further than any other state by tying GPI to actual government policies.While GDP is a brute-force calculation of economic activity, Vermont's GPI will incorporate environmental and social statistics to produce a more holistic measure for residents’ quality of life. For example, while the Green Mountain state's GDP grew 3.65 percent from 2000 to 2010, its child poverty and infant mortality rates rose and it's rate of volunteerism fell slightly. A state GPI score might try to incorporate all four data points, along with things like divorce rates, average hours spent in traffic, and air quality data. Academics have been discussing the concept of GPI for some time. One newly released study from Australian National University calculated a GPI for the 17 most populous nations in the world using similar metrics, finding that GPI leveled off around 1978, even as GDP continued to grow. Two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, jump-started interest in GDP alternatives stateside. Vermont isn't the first place to try out the concept, but they are taking it a step further than any other state by tying GPI to actual government policies. Maryland's Governor started posting the state's GPI on the state website in 2010, and now groups in states like Utah, Oregon, and Minnesota are arguing for similar measures. Critics point out the slipperiness of the concept, as the Burlington Free-Press summarizes nicely here: Who can really determine the value of abstractions like a good education and clean air? It will be interesting to see if even a pie-in-the-sky body politic like Vermont's will be able to use such a highly subjective composite of social statistics to budge decision-makers from their single-minded focus on dollars and cents accounting for societal health. |
| Quick Study: Leave Nagging in the Bag Posted: 12 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  In the journal Environment and Behavior, French and Italian researchers describe an experiment in which they asked people entering a Paris supermarket to sign a poster reading, "Stop using plastic bags. If I can do it, so can you." Half of those who signed were then asked whether they ever used the environmentally problematic containers; they all admitted to doing so at least occasionally. The other half weren't asked any such follow-up question. Later, at the checkout line, researchers compared the actions of all signers to those of a third group who had not been asked to do anything. Relative to the control group, the people who had simply signed the poster, with no follow-up question, were more likely to buy a reusable bag than take a free plastic one. The signers who were asked the question, however, used plastic bags at the same rate as the control group. The researchers theorize that somewhere between the produce aisle and the cash register, those shoppers who had confessed their previous plastic transgressions found a way to justify their past behavior, and thus felt no need to change it. |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2013 10:40 AM PDT  The Independent informs readers that younger married women on Facebook are less likely to take their husbands' surnames when they wed. From the British paper: "[M]arried women in their 20s are far more likely to have kept their maiden name than women in their 60s. A third of married women in their 20s have kept their maiden name, according to a study by Facebook." Some 63 percent of married women in their 20s took their husbands' names. That figure was 80 percent for married women in their 30s, and 91 percent for married women in their 60s. According to The Independent, this is "a sign that the younger generation is increasingly embracing feminism." This might be a little exaggerated. As Jen Doll wrote at The Atlantic Wire last year, despite the prominence of women who keep their own names among the world's journalists, actors, and others in the public sphere, most American women who marry opt to change their surnames. Some 10.1 percent of American college students agreed with the statement that "a woman keeping her name was less committed to her marriage."But while some 35 percent of American women in their 20s and 30s are now choosing to keep their own names, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a "resurgence of feminism," interesting as that would be. While retaining one's maiden name upon marriage has historically been pretty closely affiliated with feminism, it’s also a sign that, for a lot of women, adult identity is now already established well before getting wed. The first American woman to publicly insist on retaining her maiden name upon marriage was reportedly the abolitionist and suffragette Lucy Stone, who kept being Stone after her 1855 wedding to social reformer (and Republican Party founder) Henry Browne Blackwell. Today, the Lucy Stone League, which advocates for women's equality, keeps up the tradition, urging women to retain their own surnames, “because a person’s name is fundamental to his/her existence.” What's really going on in America is probably something much more prosaic. Feminism as a defined movement actually appears to be on the decline. Only 38 percent of women in the United States now consider themselves feminists. (In the United Kingdom it's only 14 percent.) The reason for the name change refusal is likely tied to the fact that, over the last 50 years, the age at the time of the first marriage has increased drastically. Today, the average woman is 27 years old when she first gets married. In 1990, she was 23. In 1960, the average bride was only 20 years old. The results of this should be unsurprising: Many women already have careers by the time they marry. They have college degrees or law partnerships and published work. It's time-consuming and difficult for a woman to change all of the documents affiliated with such things and convince people from networks past and present to start calling her something else. There are important implications for name changes. While some 10.1 percent of American college students agreed with the statement that "a woman keeping her name was less committed to her marriage," women in higher prestige jobs (medicine, the arts or entertainment) are most likely to keep their names. Part of this may stem from a desire to avoid having to change it back. The intricacies of this can get rather outlandish for women who have the misfortune of marrying multiple times. One could end up with problems like that of Demi Moore, an actress whose identity constitutes a sort of coral reef of failed marriages. She grew up Demi Guynes, but she achieved fame under another surname. "Moore" is technically the legacy of a marriage that ended in 1985. She was also compelled to change her Twitter handle last year—having somewhat ill-advisedly gone with @mrskutcher—when her third marriage, to actor Ashton Kutcher, collapsed. Whether or not one retains one's name is affiliated with all sorts of professional and class implications. In the most extensive look at women's naming conventions ever conducted, a 2009 study published in Social Behavior & Personality, researchers…
The more traditional a marriage appears—young bride, no professional degree, religious ceremony—the more likely Jane Smith will become Jane Doe. Research shows women are perhaps rather career savvy when keeping their names. In a Dutch study published in 2010, researchers looked into the perceptions people had of women's competence and intelligence based on their use (or not) of their husbands' surnames:
That's $472 a month. Basically, women appear more like successful professionals when they keep their names. But it's not necessarily one or the other. There’s also the sort-of name change. As one academic explained earlier this year in New York magazine, "the 5 to 10 percent of women who keep their names — 'and that includes hyphenators' — does not account for 'situational name users,' those who go by different names in different circumstances." And, while it's impossible to verify this, because it's definitionally unofficial, this appears to be very common. The singer Beyoncé Knowles, for instance, called her world 2013 tour the Mrs. Carter Show (this is odd on a few levels, but mostly because her husband, while born Shawn Carter, is known now as simply Jay-Z). There are a lot of people like her, who use different names in different places. Her name is Beyoncé Knowles, but she's commonly known as just Beyoncé. She's legally Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Maybe her grandmother sends her letters addressed to Mrs. Shawn Carter. There are probably even some people who call her Mrs. Z.
Or they're not as strident as first-wave feminists, a group whose agenda televangelist Pat Robertson once (bizarrely) characterized as "not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." His statement was an exaggeration, but it reflects a common perception of early feminists as extreme. Today's newly married women might be low-level feminists, but more importantly they often come to the altar with careers and their well-established identities and property; their own condos and cars. So, they've got husbands now. That doesn't mean they have to change their whole identities and start calling themselves something else. As the Social Behavior & Personality study put it:
This doesn't seem to matter in many foreign countries at all. In Hispanic nations this appears to be a non-issue. Women simply retain their own names from birth until death. This has nothing to do with the power of women in society and their ability to vote, hold political office, or own businesses and control property. This is also true, interestingly enough, in most Arabic-speaking countries; women retain their own names upon marriage. What we're seeing in America is that the older the bride, and the better her job, the more likely she is to keep her name. In the long run, that's probably a good idea for her career (that’s $472 a month). This is true even without the killing children, destroying capitalism, and practicing witchcraft hyperbole. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to take on a new name after putting so much effort into establishing the original one. |
| U.S. Aid to Egypt: Where Does the Money Go—and Who Decides How It’s Spent? Posted: 12 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  The recent military coup in Egypt has prompted a renewed debate about American aid to the country. Sens. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, have both called for cutting off aid, while the White House has said it’s in no hurry to end the aid. We’ve taken a step back and tried to answer some basic questions, including how much the U.S. is giving Egypt, what’s changed in the two years since the Arab Spring and who is benefiting from all the money. How much does the U.S. spend on Egypt? The exact amount varies from year to year and there are many different funding streams, but U.S. foreign assistance to Egypt has averaged about $2 billion a year since 1979, when Egypt struck a peace treaty with Israel. Let’s start with the military aid. How much is it, and what does it buy? American officials have long argued that the military aid promotes strong ties between the American and Egyptian militaries, which gives the U.S. all kinds of benefits. U.S. Navy warships, for instance, get “expedited processing” when they pass through the Suez Canal. Here’s a 2009 U.S. embassy cable released by WikiLeaks that makes essentially the same point:
The military funding also enables Egypt to purchase U.S.-manufactured military goods and services. A 2006 report from the Government Accountability Office, however, criticized both the State Department and the Defense Department for failing to measure how the funding actually contributes to U.S. goals. Does this aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights? When an exiled Egyptian dissident called on the U.S. to attach conditions to aid to Egypt in 2008, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who had recently stepped down as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, told the Washington Post the idea was “admirable but not realistic.” And then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2009 that military aid “should be without conditions” at a Cairo press conference. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, led Congress in adding language to a spending bill in 2011 to make aid to Egypt conditional on the secretary of state certifying that Egypt is supporting human rights and being a good neighbor. The language requires that Egypt abide by the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, support “the transition to civilian government including holding free and fair elections,” and put in place policies to protect freedom of expression, association, and religion, and due process of law.” It sounds pretty tough, but it’s not. So has American aid to Egypt ever been cut off? But Clinton waived the certification requirement (yes, the secretary of state can do that) and approved the aid, despite concerns about Egypt’s human rights record. The reason? “A delay or cut in $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt risked breaking existing contracts with American arms manufacturers that could have shut down production lines in the middle of President Obama’s re-election campaign,” the New York Times reported. Breaking the contracts could have left the Pentagon on the hook for $2 billion. What kind of arms have we been sending them, anyway? Does the coup and subsequent military crackdown change any of this? As the Washington Post‘s Max Fisher points out, Obama and his predecessors have dealt this kind of thing before. The president cut some aid to Honduras after a coup in 2009 and to Mali and the Central African Republic after coups there in 2012, but not all of it. And those countries aren’t nearly as important to U.S. foreign policy as Egypt. President Bill Clinton cut some aid to Pakistan after a coup there in 1999, but President George W. Bush reinstated all of it after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Obama’s refusal to call it a coup has infuriated Morsi supporters. “What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, asked the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.” What about economic aid and efforts to promote democracy? The various economic aid efforts have had mixed results. The State Department has described the Commodity Import Program, which gave Egypt millions of dollars between 1986 and 2008 to import American goods, as “one of the largest and most popular USAID programs.” But an audit of the four-year, $57 million effort to create agricultural jobs and boost rural incomes in 2007 found that the program “has not increased the number of jobs as planned.” And an audit of a $151 million program to modernize Egypt’s real estate finance market in 2009 found that, while the market had improved since the program began, the growth was “not clearly measurable or attributable” to the aid efforts. The U.S. has also funded programs to promote democracy and good government in Egypt—again with few results. It has sent about $24 million a year between 1999 and 2009 to a variety of NGOs in the country. According to a 2009 inspector general’s audit, the efforts didn’t add much due to “a lack of support” from the Egyptian government, which “suspended the activities of many U.S. NGOs because Egyptian officials thought these organizations were too aggressive.” A recent audit of the European Union’s €1 billion—about $1.35 billion—aid program found that it had been “well-intentioned but ineffective” in promoting good governance and human rights. And a WikiLeaks cable revealed the Egyptian government had asked USAID in 2008 to stop financing NGOs that weren’t properly registered. This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  For decades, scientists have turned to DNA to learn about our past, but their studies have been limited to eras much earlier than recorded history. Scientists have used genetics to mark the evolutionary split between humans and chimps as somewhere between 4.6 and 6.2 million years ago. They have identified a "mitochondrial Eve," a woman who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago and who is a female ancestor of all human beings alive today. The National Genographic Project is tracking down splits between different human populations that happened between 60,000 and 20,000 years ago. And researchers have discovered a DNA record of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals that dates back somewhere between 47,000 and 65,000 years ago. But what about more recent history? Most of the different ethnic groups around the world, and especially those in Europe, were formed much more recently than the time when humans and Neanderthals hooked up. In fact, individuals who are the ancestors of nearly everyone alive today could have lived as recently as just five thousand years ago. A little back-of-the-envelope math shows why this could be true. In theory, the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation you go back—you have four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and 30 generations back you would theoretically have roughly one billion ancestors. Your ancestors 30 generations back lived less than 1,000 years ago, when the human population of the entire world was less than 350 million. While this makes it impossible for anyone to have a billion ancestors who lived around 1000 CE, it's likely that any two random strangers from distant parts of an ethnically diverse area like Europe do share a surprisingly recent ancestor. Major historical migrations and invasions of the last 1,500 years have left a big impression on Europe's genetic terrain.If Europeans are likely to share recent ancestors with random strangers, then how did so many different ethnic groups arise in such a relatively small geographical area? Peter Ralph and Graham Coop, two geneticists at the University of California-Davis, used new genetic data to answer this question, by measuring the relatedness of different groups of Europeans. Their results confirm what we expect theoretically: "even pairs of individuals from opposite ends of Europe share hundreds of genetic common ancestors" within the last 3,000 years. They also found that major historical migrations and invasions of the last 1,500 years have left a big impression on Europe's genetic terrain. Ralph and Coop based their study on the fact that long blocks of identical DNA in two different people signify that those two people inherited that same block of DNA from a shared ancestor. For example, two siblings will share many long blocks of DNA inherited, unchanged, from their maternal grandmother. Two distant cousins will share unchanged blocks of DNA inherited from a great-great-grandfather, but those blocks will be shorter and there will be fewer of them. To measure the genetic relatedness of people from different countries in Europe, Ralph and Coop counted the number of blocks of DNA that individuals in one country shared with people in another country. Not only did the scientists find that nearly all Europeans in their sample shared very recent ancestors with geographically distant strangers, but they also detected very strong signatures of recent migrations, such as Irish into England and Poles into Germany. Dramatic new genetic patterns in Europe were set up when the Huns rode out of the steppes and into Eastern Europe toward the end of the fourth century, followed by the Slavs a few centuries later. The genetic aftermath of these large-scale migrations is substantial: Eastern Europeans today are more closely related to each other than any other broad-geographical group in Europe. Strangely, the close relationships between Eastern Europeans includes the non-Slavic speaking Hungarians and Romanians: their genes, but not their languages, were changed by these great migrations. Unlike Eastern Europeans, the Italians are least likely to share recent ancestors with anyone else in Europe, and in fact, Italians are even less related to each other than other European populations. Like Eastern Europe, the Italian peninsula was invaded by outsiders during the first millennium. But these new arrivals, the Germanic tribes, left very little genetic trace. Unlike the Huns and the Slavs, the incoming Goths and Vandals moved into areas that were already densely populated, and so their political impact was greater than their genetic one. Like geologists who can tell us the history of mountains and valleys by reading the rocks, geneticists are now beginning to understand the forces that shape our genetic terrain. Different kinds of historical events clearly have different effects on large-scale genetic relationships, and studies like the one by Ralph and Coop show us just how quickly a genetic landscape can be remodeled. |
| Vacuum Cleaners, Yoga, and Keeping Inmates Sane Posted: 12 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  An Associated Press exclusive on Thursday added intriguing new insights into the CIA's dealings with 9-11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After extensive and harsh interrogations in a facility in Poland, during which CIA officials seemed to exhaust Mohammed's knowledge of terror plots past and future, interrogators had to figure out what to do with him. Mohammed may have to stand trial someday, and for that, they realized, he would have to be sane. So, according to the AP, citing anonymous officials, they indulged his expertise in mechanical engineering and let him design a vacuum cleaner. It's a quirky story, one that's inspired comparisons to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana, which features a vacuum-salesman-turned-spy in Cuba. But of course it also points to a larger and more disturbing truth. Whatever your views of torture as a method for interrogation, it's indisputable that you can't keep someone awake for 180 hours and waterboard them 183 times and not expect them to be psychologically damaged. From the AP story:
This is true to some extent of all long-term detention, even when torture and interrogation are not involved, and even under conditions much less harsh than those at Guantanamo Bay. This week, as I have previously written about here, thousands of prison inmates are in the early days of what may be the largest hunger strike in California's history to demand, among other things, pens, paper, and wall calendars for their cells, and the ability to exchange photographs with their families. These are all things we take for granted in our everyday lives; but for these prisoners, these small comforts can go a long way toward keeping them on the right side of sanity. It's not just about the psychological damage that inhumane conditions bring these men and women while they're inside prison walls. If the inmates are ever expected to be released after they've served their time, how does it benefit society to send them back out into the world so broken? As state budgets shrink and prison populations grow, corrections facilities shouldn't hide behind arguments about the potential expense of these programs, either. Rehabilitation methods can be incredibly inexpensive and easy to incorporate into daily prison life. For instance, a new study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that a simple yoga course—just 90 minutes a week for 10 weeks—had a positive impact on prisoners' mental health and their ability to check negative impulses. Prisoners who completed the course "reported improved mood, reduced stress and were better at a task related to behavior control than those who continued in their normal prison routine," according to the University of Oxford, whose researchers worked alongside a prison-yoga program called the Prison Phoenix Trust. In prison populations, anxiety, depression, and aggressive behavior is often the norm; yoga exercises and the meditation techniques that accompany them may be able to help mitigate all of these. The implications for recidivism are clear. Dr. Amy Bilderbeck of Oxford offered the caveat that, obviously, yoga will never be a cure-all. Says Bilderbeck:
Whatever the method may be—whether it be handing out art supplies, or doing weekly guided stretching and meditation, or, sure, allowing vacuum cleaner construction—keeping prisoners sane while they're locked up can be inexpensive and simple. And it is absolutely vital to their lives beyond bars. |
| The Strange and Possibly Illegal World of Truancy Court Posted: 11 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT  School tardiness and absences come at a high cost in Dallas, Texas. Gone are the days of detention and writing lines on the chalkboard; now students are fined, even jailed. The enforcement of the state’s truancy laws, which were strengthened substantially in 2003, have led to a range of abuses, according to a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Justice: • Students have been taken out of school in handcuffs, held in jail for days at a time, and fines have totaled more than $1,000 for students who miss more than 10 days of school. • The students who are hauled into court to face truancy or lateness charges are not provided with legal counsel. The only lawyers in the courtroom are the judge and a member of the district attorney’s office, unless the student’s family can afford their own representation. • Defendants are charged court fees even if they prevail in fighting the accusations, discouraging people from exercising their right to a full hearing. The complaint, filed by a coalition of advocacy groups for young people and the disabled, targets the Dallas, Garland, Mesquite, and Richardson school districts in Texas and urges the Justice Department to force reforms and “declare the practice of criminally prosecuting children as adults for truancy” a violation of their constitutional rights. For their part, some school officials, lawmakers, and judges say that the rigid enforcement system has led to improved attendance. In a statement, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins defended the program. The policy, according to the complaint, can be especially hard on special education students and the disabled, who often miss school because of their physical or psychological issues.“The Dallas County system offers the best chance for truant students to get back in class and graduate,” said Jenkins, adding that the courts are staffed by attorneys who specialize in juvenile justice issues, and make use of agencies who work to solve the underlying issues behind the truancy of students. Certainly, the volume of cases has been striking. Texas adult courts in one recent year handled 113,000 truancy cases. Dallas County truancy court alone collected nearly $3 million in fines. It sent 67 students age 17 and older to jail because of truancy violations, and 53 students younger than 17 to juvenile detention centers. (Statewide records were not available.) The complaint asserts that the program unfairly targets minorities and underprivileged students, and routinely puts youngsters in jail rather than keeping them in school. Texas, like many other states, has been struggling with truancy issues for years. To combat the problem, the state legislature has passed a series of laws to stiffen penalties for absent and tardy students. In the 1990s, the legislature designated “failure to attend school” as a Class C misdemeanor, which meant that children could be tried as adults for missing school. Texas state law now requires schools to report students to truancy court when a student has 10 or more unexcused absences within a six-month period. The complaint says that when students appear in court, they are often pressured to plead guilty and accept fines of anywhere from $80 to $500 rather than go to trial, pay additional court fees, and risk jail time. If students fail to appear in court or pay their fines on time, they can be arrested and jailed. Wyoming is the only other state in the country with a similar law, the complaint says. In 2003, Dallas County got even more aggressive. According to the complaint, county officials lobbied the legislature to allow it to create its own specialized court system that would handle only truancy cases. The request was granted and since then four public school districts in the county have agreed to send their truant cases to the specialized courts. Michael Harris, a senior attorney with the California-based National Center for Youth Law, said each of those school districts are predominantly African American and Latino, but are overseen primarily by white superintendents, and that the specialized court system is overseen by a white judge. Chris Moore, a spokesman for the Garland school district, said the district has taken several steps to ensure parents are informed of their children’s unexcused absences well in advance of any complaint to the truancy court system. Tim Clark, director of communications for the Richardson school district, said the district always acts within the law in its handling of truants, and said that district officials would cooperate with any federal inquiry. In a statement on its website, the Mesquite school district said it informs students and parents about state truancy laws in the beginning of each school year. A call to the Dallas district superintendent was not immediately returned. “It’s pretty obvious that this program is set in school districts that do not have a large percentage of middle class white students. For example, the Dallas independent school district has less than 10 percent white students,” said Harris. “These students are thought of in a different way by key decision-makers in the county than white students.” A handful of parents and students interviewed by ProPublica say that the enforcement of the program has turned school grounds into something like a police state, with guards rounding up students during “tardy sweeps,” suspending them, then marking their absences as unexcused and reporting them to truancy court. According to the complaint, charges have been levied even when students have legitimate reasons for an absence, such as a family emergency or illness. Ashley Brown, a 16-year-old high school sophomore and honors student at South Oak Cliff High School in Dallas, said she missed four straight days of school in December 2012. Her grandmother, who she cared for personally, died of cancer, and she stayed home to mourn her death. She was also suspended twice for three days, once because she got in a fight, and another time because she was late to class. Brown was eventually charged with 10 unexcused absences, even though Brown’s mother sent the school the grandmother’s obituary, and suspensions are supposed to be counted as excused absences under state law. When Brown received a letter ordering her to appear in court, her mother panicked and called the school to correct her daughter’s attendance record. Afterward she missed a day of work and pulled her daughter from school to appear in court and explain the confusion. Eventually she persuaded the judge to dismiss the charges. Andrew Collins, the assistant principal at South Oak Cliff High School, told ProPublica that he believes in the tough truancy program. “To an extent, I do believe if a student is continuously truant, sometimes fines help solve a lot of that,” Collins said. Others haven’t been as successful as Brown in disputing their truancy charges. Roddi Ann Schoneberg, a 40-year-old former pre-school teacher and mother of three, said she struggled mightily to get her children to school on time after her mother suffered a stroke late in the summer of 2011. Her children, two of whom she says are autistic, were traumatized by the experience and often went into tantrums when they were supposed to get ready for school in the morning. Overwhelmed by her children’s behavioral problems and her responsibilities toward her ailing mother, Schoneberg said she brought her elementary-school-aged children to school five to 10 minutes late roughly 20 times in the first half of the 2011 school year. She said her children’s elementary school in the Richardson school district reported each late arrival as unexcused, and in December 2011 she received a notice to appear in court. School administrators refused to help her, she said. Schoneberg said she intended to contest the charges, but ultimately succumbed to pressure from court officers and a county prosecutor and pleaded guilty. She was told that if she wanted to contest the charges at trial, she’d be liable for court costs no matter the outcome. The complaint alleges that Schoneberg’s experience is not unique; it says the truancy court doesn’t provide legal counsel and frequently threatens children and their families with jail time in open court, thus encouraging people to plead guilty rather than go to trial. The county prosecutor initially tried to fine her $2,600, but Schoneberg said the judge decided to reduce it to $609. She had to return to court on five separate occasions to make payments. “It totally enveloped my life,” Schoneberg said. The policy, according to the complaint, can be especially hard on special education students and the disabled, who often miss school because of their physical or psychological issues. The complaint also describes the plight of a high school student who has asthma and chronic respiratory problems. It says the student sometimes needs to be out of school for days at a time to be closer to her medical equipment at home. Over the course of the 2011 school year she had several multi-day absences caused by her health problems, and on two occasions she forgot to turn in a note from her mother explaining why she was away. She was ultimately convicted of failure to attend school and paid a $100 fine and $77 in court costs. Her lawyer, Dustin Rynders, supervising attorney for a disability rights group in Texas, said the child ultimately missed as much school for the court appearances as she did for her illness. But the complaint suggests these steps aren’t working: By the time parents are able to reason with school administrators and get them to understand why their child was absent, it’s too late—the absences have already been reported to the truancy courts through an automated electronic filing system. “This is an actual school to prison pipeline in terms of how they send kids to adult criminal court for what’s really minor misbehavior,” said Michael Harris, an attorney for the National Center for Youth Law, who said he spent hours watching students get processed by the courts. “Research shows that once they go to criminal court the likelihood that they’ll be swept up in the justice system again increases greatly.” Harris and his fellow attorneys hope that the Justice Department will use the complaint as a roadmap to investigate the truancy court system in Dallas and eventually force changes to it. They make several recommendations, like giving children proper legal counsel and refraining from taking them out of class in handcuffs. A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately return calls for comment. This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Posted: 11 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  At one point during a shift a few months ago, I had somebody's vomit on my pants and my shirt was torn from crawling through a bathroom window to help an older woman who'd broken her hip. I couldn't make it back to the firehouse to clean up because every engine in the city was running as hard as my crew was, and the calls wouldn't let up. Eventually a skinny guy in a greasy mechanic's jumpsuit yelled at us for not getting to his car fire quickly enough. We could have explained about fiscal-year cycles and Oakland's new "flexible deployment" model. But then he broke down crying and said, "My shit's on fire," and told me he wouldn't be able to get to work anymore. I told him I was sorry we hadn't gotten there sooner. In 2011 there were just under 1.4 million reported fires in the U.S., accounting for 3,005 civilian deaths and almost $12 billion in property damage.For 15 years, I've worked as a firefighter for the City of Oakland. You've heard of Oakland. We're the city that had a freeway collapse in an earthquake, 3,500 homes destroyed by a grass fire, and the most aggressive Occupy movement in the country. We also had 131 homicides last year, making us the third-most-dangerous city in the United States. And, my fire department ran 52,321 calls for medical emergencies, fires, car wrecks, sports riots, and all manner of other mayhem. In the midst of all that, as in cities across the country, our budget tanked. Laying off 80 cops was the start of our austerity. When it came to the fire department, the city got creative. Our firehouses are numbered from 1 to 29, but that's a trick. There's no Station 2. There's no 9, no 11, no 14. So really, 29 means 25. And then last year, we closed two more, so 29 meant 23. But we didn't actually close them. We "flexibly deployed" them, which means that no firehouse in the city is closed for good. Instead all the firehouses take turns shutting down for three-day stretches. It's kind of a brilliant marketing move—the closures are so sporadic that most people don't even know they're going on. No neighborhood groups mobilize; no city-council member pounds the podium; and the risk is shared by every block, every school, every grandmother who falls asleep with her cigarette burning. Atlanta has about the same population as Oakland, but they've got about 1,000 firefighters to our 400. Baltimore—not exactly an economic nirvana, as I understand it—has about 50 percent more residents and almost three times as many ladder trucks. Oakland has the fourth-busiest port in the U.S., and we shut down our only fireboat. (Seattle has two.) If one of those big cargo tankers lights off, our plan is to … well, I don't know, actually. Some small-government folks point out that fires have decreased over the last few decades, but we haven't exactly solved the problem. In 2011 there were just under 1.4 million reported fires in the U.S., accounting for 3,005 civilian deaths, over 17,000 injuries, and almost $12 billion in property damage. And fighting fires is only about 10 percent of what we do. In the drill tower, our instructors told us that in one minute a fire will double in size and a man in cardiac arrest will have his chances of survival fall by 10 percent. Those stats are probably squishy, but our goal is to reach any address in the city within four minutes. When a firehouse closes, there's a cascade effect. One fire engine covers for another, and then a third one covers for that one until you've got rigs pinballing around town trying to get to a burning building that's next door to a shuttered firehouse. We didn't get into this line of work because we like washing the truck. But there's such a thing as too busy. If you've ever had to call 911, I'll tell you what you already know: Time never moves more slowly than in the interval between when you dial and when you hear the siren. I've seen fires that were a minute past out-of-control. I've seen people who were seconds away from making it out alive. We've made good saves over the years, but inside the truck, there's nothing worse than pulling up to a scene and knowing we're one minute too late. |
| Would Giving Up Computers Protect Your Privacy? Posted: 11 Jul 2013 10:08 AM PDT  The Associated Press is reporting today that the Russian intelligence service is upgrading some of its information systems to typewriters, for which they are ready to pay as much as $750.00 each, to avoid an Edward Snowden-type leak of digital information. The AP cited the Russian news service Izvestia. Apparently the Russian government already uses typewriters for some communications intended for leader Vladimir Putin. Would this tactic work for a normal person, who isn’t the Russian head of state? Forget giving up Facebook and encrypting your email: Would radical de-digitalization actually protect a person’s privacy in 2013? The feds received two million consumer fraud and identity theft complaints last year, most of which had to do with private information getting stolen out of someone’s mailbox.Only if you also stopped using the regular mail. Statistics from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, which crunches American crime stats for the Department of Justice, show that the feds received two million consumer fraud and identity theft complaints last year, most of which had to do with private information getting stolen out of someone’s mailbox. Just under half the complaints involved benefit fraud, which is someone taking your social security or other ID information from a stolen letter and hijacking pension or disability checks. Credit card fraud was the second most-common complaint. The DOJ stats don’t parse the complaints by those that were the result of digital intrusion over old fashioned mailbox-rifling for bank statements. But the nature and number of complaints—if even a half-million social security numbers were digitally stolen, we’d know—implies the latter. The result recalls the early ecommerce-era debate about privacy: On one hand, giving out private information online can be a crapshoot, but on the other, you probably hand your credit card to waiters only for them to disappear with it for several minutes all the time. Non-financial privacy is a more subtle matter. New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner would have avoided considerable scandal had he gone analog. But in that case, he risked running afoul of photo lab porn-reporting policies, which differ by state and by company. Had he gone even more analog he’d have been guilty of public exposure, which is not usually a crime if committed online. Maybe Putin’s bit of theater will work. But threats of hard labor in Siberia will probably still work better. As for you: Stop reading this and go take in the mail. |
| Can Ethiopia’s Best Runner Become Its Best Politician? Posted: 11 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  A list of Haile Gebrselassie’s accomplishments reads like some sort of comic book distance running superhero: 27 world records spanning two decades in disciplines ranging from 2,000 meters to the marathon. Amazingly, the Ethiopian continued to improve with age. In September 2008, a 35-year-old Gebrselassie won the Berlin Marathon in 2:03:59 (an absurd 4:43.7 per mile), breaking his own record by 27 seconds. Four days before his 40th birthday, he won the Vienna City half marathon in a little over an hour. Haile Gebrselassie was born to run. In the near future, however, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and four-time 10,000 meter world champion will enter a more difficult race. Gebrselassie, who retired from running soon after suffering an injury in the 2010 New York City Marathon but returned after healing, promised to run as an independent candidate for a parliament seat.
While Gebrselassie says he may eventually attempt to get elected president of the East African country, gaining entry into parliament would be an achievement in itself. Members of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) control 499 of the 547 seats, and there is only one opposition MP. The fame of the runner, who owns a hotel, cinema, and car dealership, and runs two schools, could help alter the landscape of Ethiopian politics, which many believe is a corrupt system. To his credit, Gebrselassie has no doubts about the uphill battle ahead:
Nor is the athlete-turned-politician a particularly unusual model. There are many slideshows on the Internet devoted to the subject, including—not surprisingly—an entire cottage industry on Bleacher Report. Presidents Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan played football in college. Princeton University and New York Knicks star Bill Bradley spent 18 years as a senator from New Jersey before unsuccessfully running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. Former Phoenix Suns point guard Kevin Johnson is currently the mayor of Sacramento. Stretch the definition of athlete a bit, and it’s possible to include former governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. Track and field has a few politicians as well, most notably Jim Ryun. He was a three-time Olympian and world record holder in the 800, 1,500, and mile run. He then held Kansas’ 2nd District between 1996 and 2007. But perhaps the closest parallel to Gebrselassie is George Weah, the Liberian-born soccer player who played for clubs including Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, and Manchester City home. Weah, the FIFA World Player of the Year in 1995 and African Player of the Century, ran for president of his country in 2005. His massive success as a soccer player and huge stardom carried him to a victory in the first round of voting—besting 20 others—but he failed to defeat the Harvard-educated Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in the second round. Critics cited his lack of education, a problem he attempted to rectify by earning his high school diploma in 2007. It didn’t help, however, as Weah lost a vice presidential bid in 2011. Gebrselassie, arguably a bigger star in his country than Weah was in his, will face similar challenges, but he has a better base of support. It will be a long run, frequently uphill. But that’s nothing new. |
| Posted: 11 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  At the University of Chicago in the 1970s and early ’80s, the mercurial behavioral scientists Robin Hogarth and Hillel Einhorn performed groundbreaking research examining how ostensible experts often make suboptimal judgments. One study showed that expert pathologists had a very low ability to predict a patient's survival time based on viewing a biopsy slide. Subsequent studies showed that aggregating the decisions of a group of people outperformed the predictions of individual experts. Hogarth and Einhorn's research began to threaten the idea of expertise in general, prompting a colleague of theirs—now a colleague of mine—to warn them in jest that their work was dangerous because people need experts. The actual accuracy of experts seems secondary to their purpose: to provide guidance. As a Midwestern teenager entering a phase of intensive cultural consumption in the 1990s, I sought out expert opinions in music, television, and film. This expertise came in the form of critics, who I believed had more access to media, earlier access to media, and more experience with the medium that they were covering. I turned to them for guidance, and I followed their critical advice. Plus, I couldn't expect to find out about Mr. Show, Miller's Crossing, and The Cenobites merely from my social network. Critics—with their extensive access, priority access, and comprehensive experience—provided this exclusive knowledge. Critics led, and I followed. Crowdsourcing is a wonderful tool, but it fails in a very particular way, which is that any evaluation is swayed by the evaluations that have come before it.WITHOUT DIPPING INTO TOO much armchair sociology, let me state the obvious: the Internet has dramatically changed the role of the cultural critic. Albums and movies "leak" far in advance of their due dates, entire libraries of music or television shows can be torrented and hoarded in a matter of hours, and as quickly as terabytes of .mp3s and .avis are transmitted, so too are all of our opinions on the media we are consuming. All of this means critics no longer have exclusivity, priority, or even, necessarily, expertise. Expertise requires that, compared to the average person, one has a deeper understanding of a topic, a more well-researched opinion on the topic, and privileged information on the topic. The ability for anyone with a fast wireless connection to obtain an entire Lou Reed discography or the entire compendium of Get a Life episodes means that anyone can dig deep into a particular body of work. Access to carefully written blog posts about the true meaning of Inland Empire and the hidden samples used in Paul's Boutique (not to mention access to Wikipedia) means that research is easy. Music and film piracy means that priority access has become a thing of the past. Much has been written about how the Internet has granted the opportunity for celebrity status to the masses, making good on Andy Warhol's promise of everyone getting their 15 minutes of fame, and justifying Time magazine's decision to give you (me) their 2006 Person of the Year award. But Thomas de Zengotita wrote the most intelligent treatise on this phenomenon in his prescient, pre-YouTube article, "Attack of the Superzeroes: Why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can’t compete with you." In it, de Zengotita noted, "Being famous isn’t what it used to be." This point continues to be exemplified by every Antoine Dodson who gets a TV show and every @Dadboner who gets a book deal. Less has been said about the transformative power of the Internet to turn us all into critics. To paraphrase de Zengotita, "Being a critic isn't what it used to be." Expertise no longer solely belongs to them. (Or, as Jay-Z recently put it, “I think reviews have lost a lot of their importance now because of the Internet.”) In many ways, though, the everyone's-a-critic age has been fantastically useful. I have carefully curated my Internet experience to inform me of the most entertaining movies, TV shows, and songs—not to mention the most interesting scientific articles, the most energy-efficient vacuum cleaner, the most user-friendly Mac-compatible app for making a to-do-list, and the best place in Chicago to eat mirchi ka salan. I now count on my social network to enlighten me on albums and films that, as a Midwestern teenager, I feared I could only find in the most selective, coastal-elite magazines. And I count on the hive-mind to give me consumer reports far superior to Consumer Reports. Indeed, crowdsourcing is a wonderful tool, but it still fails in a very particular way, which is that any evaluation is swayed by the evaluations that have come before it. A barbershop with a one-star rating on Yelp as its first review is subsequently more likely to accrue more negative reviews—and that same barbershop, were it to receive a four-star rating on Yelp as its first review, would be more likely to accrue more subsequent positive reviews. In a now-famous experiment, Matt Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts empirically demonstrated this effect in an artificial music market. They allowed people to download various songs and randomly assigned people to see the opinions of others who had downloaded these songs. Sometimes a particular song was shown to be well-liked by the masses, and in other versions of the study, that same song was shown to be disliked. Regardless of quality, people evaluated the songs they believed to be well-liked positively and the songs they believed to be disliked negatively. In more recent work, Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean Taylor have documented this "social influence bias" on a news aggregation website where users can up-vote or down-vote comments posted on various articles. The experimenters initially up-voted some comments and down-voted others at random, and showed that an initial up-vote led to increased subsequent up-voting whereas an initial down-vote increased down-voting. Interestingly, people also "corrected" the down-voted comments by up-voting them more than baseline levels, but even this correction never spurred them to the level of positivity that artificially up-voted comments attained. This experiment again suggests that our evaluations of anything are inevitably influenced by others' evaluations, and the increasingly public nature of opinion, objectivity is increasingly hard to find. SO WHERE DOES THIS leave the cultural critic? The pervasiveness of the social influence bias suggests that even professional TV, music, and film reviewers are not immune to others' evaluations influencing their reviews. Whereas in a pre-torrented world, reviewers had first access to film, TV, and music, now they must inevitably write their reviews after being exposed to the opinions of the masses who have already consumed, or at least previewed, the object of the review. When critics were first, their reviews initiated the social influence bias process, but now this process precedes them. Thus, whereas critics used to guide tastes, they often now function as mirrors of public opinion. Cultural critics now have an opportunity to provide a real service by reviving objectivity, and giving people an informed opinion rooted in legitimate and honest contemplation. At the same time, it's harder than ever for them to do that because of all the noise. (And harder for us to know what's been biased by others.) It’s a paradox, but it's a paradox that valuable critics will work through. Everyone can be an expert now, but the best critics were always something different altogether. |
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