Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions.

A Guide for These Uncertain Times
The Wealth of Nations: The U.S. Leads the Globe in Inequality
Fighting the Child-Porn Problem With Digital Technology
Does the NSA Tap That? What We Still Don’t Know About the Agency’s Internet Surveillance
Detroit Saved
Volunteer Security and the Rise of the Neighborhood Watch
United Nations: More Developing Countries Funding Their Own Anti-HIV Programs
Why Are We So Obsessed With Sharks?
Should Republicans Still Fear the Tea Party?
The Happiness of the Extreme Right Winger

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 04:05 PM PDT

The language of science doesn't always lend itself to making persuasive arguments. There's the theory of evolution. The overwhelming consensus on climate change. And the uncertainty, of, well, just about everything.

Recall how Michelle Nijhuis discussed the breed of “doubt makers” for us several years ago:

… Scientists are allergic to certainty; no matter how strong the evidence, an alternative explanation may exist somewhere, and scientists are trained to acknowledge that possibility. And scientists continue to argue about important aspects of climate change, such as exactly how much sea-level rise or drought certain regions can expect. Researchers accept such disagreements as a normal part of scientific debate, but to a public less familiar with the ways of science, they often sound like fundamental confusion — and a very good excuse not to act.

A new guide (download it for free here) from the folks at British non-profit Sense About Science takes on uncertainty with grace, patience, and Donald Rumsfeld. In Making Sense of Uncertainty, authors Tabitha Innocent and Tracey Brown make the point that far from being "a deficiency of research," the acknowledgement of uncertainty is the mark of "sound science" and its existence is no reason to automatically take no action.

The guide was unveiled at a conference last month for science journalists, yet its contents ought to be part of the discussion beyond the newsroom or the lab, really for anyone who's been stymied in a conversation when the other guy cites uncertainty as making your point invalid or suggesting that as a result anything could be true. As Innocent wrote in describing the guide at the Impact of Social Sciences blog:

Discussions of uncertainty can seem esoteric, academic, and not directly relevant to everyone else. But if people are discouraged by the very idea of uncertainty, then we miss out on important discussions: about weighing up the risks and benefits of new treatments, what action to take to mitigate the impact of earthquakes, or how individuals and governments should act in response to sudden changes in temperature or sea level or the latest pandemic flu threat.

The biggest “uncertain” policy debate right now centers on climate change, but uncertainty routinely pops up whenever something science-y is on the table, from Jenny McCarthy on vaccinations to quantum mechanics. Living on the edge of coastal California, how it impacts earthquake preparation is of particular interest to me.

With the help and sound bites of 21 active scientists, plus Chairman Rumsfeld's koan on "known unknowns," the authors discuss both the use and abuse of uncertainty in scientific discourse, when to use precise numbers, and why the underlying question is not "Do we know everything?" but "Do we know enough?" There isn't anything classically "new" in the guide, except the vocabulary that so often escapes us of how to argue a scientifically literate case. (One debating point I especially like: "You should ask anyone who promotes an alternative idea of what is going on to indicate the uncertainty levels in their own theory.")

The best approach to uncertainty is pragmatism. While it is important to be alert to the possibility of 'unknown unknowns' – of discovering that ideas about how the world works are stronger or weaker than we realized – that possibility alone doesn't point us towards better explanations.

At 28 pages, the guide is a little bit much to keep in your wallet next time one of those uncomfortable dialogs start up and you determine, for a change, to stand your ground rather than let it devolve into a monolog. But in its conclusion, Making Sense of Uncertainty fleshes out four salient points that can be placed on a card:

• Scientific research works on the basis that there are things we don't know.
• Scientists don't draw conclusions based on a single piece of evidence.
• Scientific research seeks evidence not consensus.
• Scientific research is not political, but the implications of research can be.

The Wealth of Nations: The U.S. Leads the Globe in Inequality

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT

Wealth data is not easy to get. Still, for three years now, Credit Suisse Research Institute has published an annual Global Wealth Databook, which attempts to estimate global wealth holdings. The most recent issue includes data covering 2012. According to Credit Suisse, the goal "is to provide the best available estimates of the wealth holdings of households around the world for the period since the year 2000."

According to the publication, global household wealth was $222.7 trillion in mid-2012, equal to $48,500 for each of the 4.6 billion adults in the world. Wealth is defined as "the marketable value of financial assets plus non-financial assets (principally housing and land) less debts."

Not surprisingly, as the figure below shows, average global wealth varies considerably across countries and regions.

Also significant are the values of the mean vs. the median wealth in each of the countries. Mean or average wealth is calculated by dividing the total wealth of a country by its adult population. Median wealth is the wealth holdings of the adult in the middle of the wealth distribution. The median is generally considered a far more reliable indicator of wealth because it is less sensitive to extremes at the top or bottom of the distribution. The greater the divergence of mean and median wealth, the greater is the wealth inequality.

The table below provides mean and median wealth estimates for those countries with generally reliable data. As you can see, the U.S. ranks high in terms of mean wealth, trailing only five countries. Things are quite different when it comes to median wealth; the U.S. trails 26 countries! Not surprisingly, then, the U.S. is number one when it comes to the mean/median wealth ratio, or wealth inequality.

We clearly dominate in the number of millionaires and the upper global wealth categories. Are we a wealthy country? Definitely. Is that wealth concentrated in relatively few hands? Definitely.

This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site.

Fighting the Child-Porn Problem With Digital Technology

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 12:06 PM PDT

In what was bound to be only the second-biggest news story to come out of the U.K. on Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron announced a new program to filter pornographic content from Britons' online searches. By the end of next year, Internet users will have to actively choose whether or not to allow porn on any device connected to their ISPs. (Or, as one British site declares in a headline, "UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters.")

Cameron's broad proposal applies to all pornography, and so encompasses material that falls in both the adult-consensual and underage-exploitative categories. These "family-friendly filters" are meant to protect children from seeing images that their parents don't think they're ready for—in his words, to crack down on porn's "corroding influence" on kids. But in addition, "extreme pornography," including scenes of simulated rape, will be outlawed altogether.

If past examples in other categories of crime are any guide, technological advances in enforcing the rules will inevitably be met with further technological advances in breaking them.

At the same time, many U.S.-based tech companies are specifically focusing their efforts on the other side of the child-porn equation: the exploitation of children in pornographic material.

According to the U.K. newspaper The Times earlier this month, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and several other companies are discussing how to standardize the ways they all deal with pornographic images featuring children. Previously, each company had its own set of methods and policies in place for combating child porn. But executives are considering creating a common database of "the worst of the worst" images to be blocked by all of their servers. This database would then be maintained by a non-profit organization called Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, launched in 2009 by a foundation supported by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

Under this proposed system, the Thorn database wouldn't include the actual offending images; it would just keep track of the images' unique digital signatures. Then, when users uploaded new images to the servers, the companies could check to see whether the digital signatures of the new images matched those in the database. If they did, those images would be blocked.

It sounds far-fetched, but according to the Guardian, Facebook has already been using a slightly similar method with a program called PhotoDNA for about two years now. Just as Facebook can identify your unique mug in your friends' photos with face-recognition technology, making the tagging process both faster and creepier, it can also identify images that are illegal. Twitter is set to adopt the program soon, too.

Though it has lately started to catch on among social media companies, PhotoDNA was originally developed for law enforcement agencies to help find images of missing or exploited children online. The New York Times Gadgetwise blog explained the technology in 2011, when Facebook announced the program:

PhotoDNA can currently search for about 10,000 images collected by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which has amassed 48 million images and videos depicting child exploitation since 2002, including 13 million in 2010 alone.

…

PhotoDNA works by creating a 'hash,' or digital code, to represent a given image and find instances of it within large data sets, much as antivirus software does for malicious programs. However, PhotoDNA' s 'robust hashes' are able to find images even if they have been altered significantly. Tests on Microsoft properties showed it accurately identifies images 99.7 percent of the time and sets off a false alarm only once in every 2 billion images….

Meanwhile, Tumblr is exploring different ways to make porn a bit harder to (accidentally) stumble upon there, too, though it has already hit some snags along the way.

So will this latest rash of technological-filtering make a real difference—either in the number of children who are exposed to images they shouldn't have access to, or the number of children who are themselves exploited?

It's hard to say. If past examples in other categories of crime are any guide—say, identity theft, credit card fraud, or malware—technological advances in enforcing the rules will inevitably be met with further technological advances in breaking them.

Yes, curious kids can probably pretty easily figure out how to change their parents' ISP settings. (Stop the presses.) What is obviously much more worrisome, however, is the fact that child-exploiting criminals will surely continue to get around digital blocks to their reprehensible trade. For instance, they can use proxy networks and anonymous browsers to evade browser filters. They'll probably find a way around the digital-signature database, too, if they have not already, after which Facebook and Twitter and the other companies will have to develop another method to block them. And the technological arms race will continue.

Does the NSA Tap That? What We Still Don’t Know About the Agency’s Internet Surveillance

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT

Among the snooping revelations of recent weeks, there have been tantalizing bits of evidence that the NSA is tapping fiber-optic cables that carry nearly all international phone and Internet data.

The idea that the NSA is sweeping up vast data streams via cables and other infrastructure—often described as the “backbone of the Internet”—is not new. In late 2005, the New York Times first described the tapping, which began after the September 11, 2001, attacks. More details emerged in early 2006 when an AT&T whistleblower came forward.

But like other aspects of NSA surveillance, virtually everything about this kind of NSA surveillance is highly secret and we’re left with far from a full picture.

IS THE NSA REALLY SUCKING UP EVERYTHING?
It’s not clear.

The most detailed, though now dated, information on the topic comes from Mark Klein. He’s the former AT&T technician who went public in 2006 describing the installation in 2002-03 of a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco. The equipment, detailed in technical documents, allowed the NSA to conduct what Klein described as “vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet — whether that be peoples’ e-mail, web surfing or any other data.”

Klein said he was told there was similar equipment installed at AT&T facilities in San Diego, Seattle, and San Jose.

There is also evidence that the vacuuming has continued in some form right up to the present.

“I think that there’s evidence that they’re starting to move toward a model where they just store everything,” says Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A draft NSA inspector’s general report from 2009, recently published by the Washington Post, refers to access via two companies “to large volumes of foreign-to-foreign communications transiting the United States through fiberoptic cables, gateway switches, and data networks.”

Recent stories by the Associated Press and the Washington Post also described the NSA’s cable-tapping, but neither included details on the scope of this surveillance.

A recently published NSA slide, dated April 2013, refers to so-called “Upstream” “collection” of “communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.”

These cables carry vast quantities of information, including 99 percent of international phone and Internet data, according to research firm TeleGeography.

This upstream surveillance is in contrast to another method of NSA snooping, Prism, in which the NSA isn’t tapping anything. Instead, the agency gets users’ data with the cooperation of tech companies like Facebook and Google.

Other documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the Guardian provide much more detail about the upstream surveillance by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the NSA’s U.K. counterpart.

GCHQ taps cables where they land in the United Kingdom carrying Internet and phone data. According to the Guardian, unnamed companies serve as “intercept partners” in the effort.

The NSA is listening in on those taps too. By May 2012, 250 NSA analysts along with 300 GCHQ analysts were sifting through the data from the British taps.

IS PURELY DOMESTIC COMMUNICATION BEING SWEPT UP IN THE NSA’S UPSTREAM SURVEILLANCE?
It’s not at all clear.

Going back to the revelations of former AT&T technician Mark Klein—which, again, date back a decade—a detailed expert analysis concluded that the secret NSA equipment installed at an AT&T building was capable of collecting information “not only for communications to overseas locations, but for purely domestic communications as well.”

On the other hand, the 2009 NSA inspector general report refers specifically to collecting “foreign-to-foreign communications” that are “transiting the United States through fiber-optic cables, gateway switches, and data networks.”

But even if the NSA is tapping only international fiber optic cables, it could still pick up communications between Americans in the U.S.

That’s because data flowing over the Internet does not always take the most efficient geographic route to its destination.

Instead, says Tim Stronge of the telecom consulting firm TeleGeography, data takes “the least congested route that is available to their providers.”

“If you’re sending an email from New York to Washington, it could go over international links,” Stronge says, “but it’s pretty unlikely.”

That’s because the United States has a robust domestic network. (That’s not true for some other areas of the world, which can have their in-country Internet traffic routed through another country’s more robust network.)

But there are other scenarios under which Americans’ purely domestic communication might pass over the international cables. Google, for example, maintains a network of data centers around the world.

Google spokeswoman Nadja Blagojevic told ProPublica that, “Rather than storing each user’s data on a single machine or set of machines, we distribute all data—including our own—across many computers in different locations.”

We asked Blagojevic whether Google stores copies of Americans’ data abroad, for example users’ Gmail accounts. She declined to answer.

ARE COMPANIES STILL COOPERATING WITH THE NSA’S INTERNET TAPPING?
We don’t know.

The Washington Post had a story earlier this month about agreements the government has struck with telecoms, but lots of details are still unclear, including what the government is getting, and how many companies are cooperating.

The Post pointed to a 2003 “Network Security Agreement” between the U.S. government and the fiber optic network operator Global Crossing, which at the time was being sold to a foreign firm.

That agreement, which the Post says became a model for similar deals with other companies, did not authorize surveillance. Rather, the newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources, it ensured “that when U.S. government agencies seek access to the massive amounts of data flowing through their networks, the companies have systems in place to provide it securely.”

Global Crossing was later sold to Colorado-based Level 3 Communications, which owns many international fiber optic cables, and the 2003 agreement was replaced in 2011.

Level 3 released a statement in response to the Post story saying that neither agreement requires Level 3 “to cooperate in unauthorized surveillance on U.S. or foreign soil.”

The agreement does, however, explicitly require the company to cooperate with “lawful” surveillance.

More evidence, though somewhat dated, of corporate cooperation with NSA upstream surveillance comes from the 2009 inspector general report.

“Two of the most productive [signals intelligence] collection partnerships that NSA has with the private sector are with COMPANY A and COMPANY B,” the report says. “These two relationships enable NSA to access large volumes of foreign-to-foreign communications transiting the United States through fiber-optic cables, gateway switches, and data networks.”

There’s circumstantial evidence that those companies may be AT&T and Verizon.

It’s also worth noting that the NSA might not need corporate cooperation in all cases. In 2005, the AP reported on the outfitting of the submarine Jimmy Carter to place taps on undersea fiber-optic cables in case “stations that receive and transmit the communications along the lines are on foreign soil or otherwise inaccessible.”

WHAT LEGAL AUTHORITY IS THE NSA USING FOR UPSTREAM SURVEILLANCE?
It’s unclear, though it may be a 2008 law that expanded the government’s surveillance powers.

The only evidence that speaks directly to this issue is the leaked slide on upstream surveillance, and in particular the document’s heading: “FAA702 Operations.” That’s a reference to Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. That legislation amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1970s law that governs government surveillance in the United States.

Under Section 702, the attorney general and director of national intelligence issue one-year blanket authorizations for surveillance of non-citizens who are “reasonably believed” to be outside the U.S. These authorizations don’t have to name individuals, but rather allow for targeting of broad categories of people.

The government has so-called minimization procedures that are supposed to limit the surveillance of American citizens or people in the U.S. Those procedures are subject to review by the FISA court.

Despite the procedures, there is evidence that in practice American communications are swept up by surveillance under this section.

In the case of Prism, for example, which is authorized under the same part of the law, the Washington Post reported that the NSA uses a standard of “51 percent confidence” in a target’s foreignness.

And according to minimization procedures dating from 2009 published by the Guardian, there are also exceptions when it comes to holding on to American communications. For example, encrypted communications—which, given the routine use of digital encryption, might include vast amounts of material—can be kept indefinitely.

The government also has the authority to order communications companies to assist in the surveillance, and to do so in secret.

HOW MUCH INTERNET TRAFFIC IS THE NSA STORING?
We don’t know, but experts speculate it’s a lot.

“I think that there’s evidence that they’re starting to move toward a model where they just store everything,” says Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The Utah data center is a big indicator of this because the sheer storage capacity has just rocketed up.”

We know more details about how the GCHQ operates in Britain, again thanks to the Guardian‘s reporting. A breakthrough in 2011 allowed GCHQ to store metadata from its cable taps for 30 days and content for three days. The paper reported on how the spy agency—with some input from the NSA—then filters what it’s getting:

The processing centres apply a series of sophisticated computer programmes in order to filter the material through what is known as MVR – massive volume reduction. The first filter immediately rejects high-volume, low-value traffic, such as peer-to-peer downloads, which reduces the volume by about 30%. Others pull out packets of information relating to “selectors” – search terms including subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest. Some 40,000 of these were chosen by GCHQ and 31,000 by the NSA.

How does the NSA do filtering of the data it gets off cables in the United States?

“I think that’s the trillion dollar question that I’m sure the NSA is working really hard at all the time,” Auerbach, the EFF expert. “I think it’s an incredibly difficult problem.”

This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site.

Detroit Saved

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 11:28 AM PDT

One hundred forty million dollars for three miles of streetcar won’t save financially strapped Detroit. As the postmortems continue to stream in, urban fix-it gurus show off silver bullets. Detroit could be Chicago:

Chicago is also a city of immigrants: The foreign-born make up 21 percent of the city's population, and 35.5 percent of the population speaks a language other than English at home. Immigrants revitalized neighborhoods, not just in Chicago but also in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other urban centers. "The broader leadership of Chicago was global before global was cool, while Detroit was much more insular," says Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Adds Robert Sampson, social sciences professor at Harvard University: "Chicago has seen a healthy influx of immigrants for a long time. Detroit is a more home-grown town."

Emphasis added. Indeed, Detroit is a former immigrant gateway. Chicago is a continuous one. But in suburban Detroit, the foreign-born legacy is apparent. Detroit is more of home-grown town in terms of domestic migration. Anyone who wants to be someone moves to Chicago:

The North Side of Chicago is such a refuge for young economic migrants from my home state that its nickname is "Michago." In 2000, a quarter of Michigan State University graduates left the state. By 2010, half were leaving, and the city with the most recent graduates was not East Lansing or Detroit but Chicago. Michigan's universities once educated auto executives, engineers, and governors. Now their main purpose is giving Michigan's brightest young people the credentials they need to get the hell out of the state.

In South Chicago, where young cosmopolites fear to tread, you can find a home-grown town struggling like Detroit. The immigrant gateway doesn’t seem to make much of a difference there. The above article also mentions Pittsburgh as a possible fix for Detroit. That revitalization tale doesn’t have the foreign-born numbers to back it up.

Immigrant gateways such as Chicago do enjoy a population boost that gloss over horrendous domestic migration numbers. Using IRS data for 1996-2010, Chicago has lost twice as many people as Detroit to relocation. On net, more than 5,000 people left Detroit for Flint, Michigan, than moved to Chicago. That piece of demographic trivia surprised me, too. Does Flint already have a cool streetcar? Watch out, Portland.

In trying to figure out what went wrong in Detroit, we reveal how little we know about cities and what makes them successful. Chicago is dense with world class urban amenities and public transportation. It’s also a perennial vote with your feet loser that makes Detroit look good by comparison.

Volunteer Security and the Rise of the Neighborhood Watch

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT

While the not-guilty verdict of the Trayvon Martin trial has triggered extensive discussion about crime and race in America, Florida's Stand Your Ground law, and even youth fashion, there’s barely been any discussion about a very real structural change that made incidents like these possible: the rise in volunteer security patrols—the neighborhood watch—of residential neighborhoods. They now make up a significant part of the American security structure, but do they really work? No one knows. In general, it seems some programs do, but the reasons for this, and the difference between a good and a bad neighborhood-watch program, are still unclear.

George Zimmerman was the neighborhood watch coordinator for a gated community in Sanford, Florida, called The Retreat at Twin Lakes, where Martin was temporarily staying and where the shooting took place. Zimmerman notably "wanted to join the police force—either the State Police or the county police," and decided to "take matters into his own hands" after he called local authorities to report the suspicious (to him) presence of Martin in a neighborhood where a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, semi-detached house with "a balcony off the second floor" and a kitchen with "plenty of counter and cabinet space [that] includes matching white appliances" sells for around $100,000.

But until very recently, Trayvon Martin's death at the hands of someone volunteering to protect the neighborhood where Martin was staying as a guest wouldn't have been possible. Until the 1970s, most American neighborhoods had no watch.

The rise of the neighborhood patrol may have started with one specific incident. In 1964, Winston Moseley stabbed a New York City woman, Kitty Genovese, to death in her Kew Gardens neighborhood in Queens. Reportedly, she screamed audibly in the presence of almost 40 neighbors, who ignored her. As Martin Gansberg wrote in the New York Times about the incident:

For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

The man explained that he had called the police after much deliberation. He had phoned a friend in Nassau County for advice and then he had crossed the roof of the building to the apartment of the elderly woman to get her to make the call. “I didn’t want to get involved,” he sheepishly told police.

While it turns out this may have been inaccurately reported—it's not totally clear that anyone could really tell Genovese was in danger—the incident changed the way Americans viewed their own responsibilities for targeting and preventing crime.

Kitty Genovese. (PHOTO: PUBLIC DOMAIN)

An article in Life magazine at the time concluded that Americans were "becoming a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people." This reflected a growing sense many citizens had that they were sitting ducks in hostile, crime-ridden cities. If the police couldn't protect them, well, they would have to do it themselves.

Shortly thereafter, the residents of New York City created what appears to be the country's first contemporary neighborhood watch programs. According to the New York Times: “In 1973, a group of 63 volunteers — ‘doormen, building superintendents and business executives,’ … — were sworn in as block watchers, trained to give fast, accurate eyewitness accounts of crime. Some neighborhoods gave the watchers silver whistles or walkie-talkies. The program flourished in the 1980s, with a reported 81,000 block watchers in 1983, up from 30,000 five years earlier.

Around the same time, the National Sheriffs’ Association began an effort to organize “watch groups” across the country. "Not only does the Neighborhood Watch Program allow citizens to help in the fight against crime," the Sheriffs' Association explains, "it is also an opportunity for communities to bond through service."

The 2000 Crime Prevention Survey reported that 41 percent of the U.S. population lived in areas that were covered by a neighborhood watch program. "This makes Neighborhood Watch the largest single organized crime prevention activity in the nation,” the report concluded. By the early 2000s, most suburban areas in America had some sort of watch in which homeowners, armed with walkie-talkies, pepper spray, and often actual guns, walked around their neighborhoods to look for suspicious behavior.

One problem: The neighborhood watch as an institution has almost always had a reputation for racial hostility.

While 33 percent of white Americans say the shooting of Trayvon Martin was unwarranted, some 87 percent of African Americans believe the shooting was unjustified. An editorial in Liberation characterized neighborhood watch programs as something that developed "as a national phenomenon and institution in the early 1970s largely as a reaction to the Black freedom movement." This is, if not clearly the case, certainly a little hard to disprove. Neighborhood watch did come up at the same time as black militancy, and it is often associated with fear and distrust of ethnic minorities. (Last year, Eliyahu Werdesheim, a resident of an Orthodox Jewish community in Maryland and member of the area’s watch, was convicted of "second-degree assault and false imprisonment" for attacking and pinning down a 15-year-old black man.)

Social scientists have attempted to measure the effectiveness of community policing programs, and some evaluations have yielded promising results. According to a 2008 literature review of 18 research projects examining the relationship between crime reduction and citizen policing programs conducted by U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services:

The strongest finding of this review relates to the mean effect size estimate produced by the meta-analysis. This indicated that, across all eligible studies combined, Neighborhood Watch was associated with a reduction in crime. It is not immediately clear why Neighborhood Watch is associated with a reduction in crime; however, it is possible that the reductions were associated with some of the essential features of the Neighborhood Watch programs as discussed earlier. Neighborhood Watch might serve to increase surveillance, reduce opportunities, and enhance informal social control. Unfortunately, this kind of information is not provided in the majority of evaluations and the precise reasons for the reduction cannot be determined.

Overall, neighborhood watch programs were associated with a 16 percent decrease in crime. But there has never been a large-scale, cross-country evaluation. The Justice Department's paper was a review of existing studies, mostly anecdotal evaluations conducted in various cities across the country. And very few of the local studies looking at community policing are adequately controlled or randomized, so it's hard to support any definitive takeaways about the strategy.

A 2002 study by the National Institute of Justice and the University of Maryland reached a different conclusion, for example, explaining that neighborhood watch might not provide much more than the illusion of safety:

The primary problem … is that the areas with highest crime rates are the most reluctant to organize…. Many people refuse to host or attend community meetings, in part because they distrust their neighbors. Middle class areas, in which trust is higher, generally have little crime to begin with, making measurable effects on crime almost impossible to achieve. The program cannot even be justified on the basis of reducing middle class fear of crime and flight from the city, since no such effects have been found.

So neighborhood watch programs might be good at reducing crime—but only in neighborhoods where there isn't much crime to begin with. Minor crime reduction in low-crime areas is worth celebrating (really, it is—no one should have to live in fear that their house or car will be broken into, or that they will be mugged during a late-night stroll), but for the neighborhoods where we need additional security and measures of protection the most your local neighborhood watch isn’t going to be able to do much good.

United Nations: More Developing Countries Funding Their Own Anti-HIV Programs

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 09:48 AM PDT

DevEx’s John Alliage Morales has a fascinating report out today from Vietnam, where rapidly improving standards of living have vaulted the country up the usual U.N. and World Bank prosperity lists. The problem is, international assistance programs that used to help Vietnam’s government buy medicine are starting to get rolled back as the country demonstrates more and more capability to handle its own public health programs. Timing the transition of those aid rollbacks is an inexact science. DevEx found that Vietnam’s ability to provide services specifically for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment are faltering because the international aid pullback has come too fast and been too sharp. Right now, about 70 percent of Vietnam’s HIV/AIDS programs are funded by foreign assistance.

A report commissioned by various U.N. agencies last year found that countries with growing middle classes were funding most of their own AIDS-related health and prevention program costs.

DevEx’s investigation highlighted a U.K. decision to pull 6.2 million pounds—about nine and a half million dollars—from Vietnam’s AIDS programs by 2016. The money isn’t being cut entirely from London’s foreign aid budget; it’s designated for the world’s 28 poorest nations, and Vietnam no longer qualifies. And the U.K. isn’t the only one, apparently. The U.N.’s office on AIDS expects all foreign assistance to Vietnam on AIDS to reach zero by 2020.

A report commissioned by various U.N. agencies last year found that countries with growing middle classes were funding most of their own AIDS-related health and prevention program costs. But the transition was not easy, and that a shortfall of some $7 billion for such programs worldwide still existed as of 2011. To put that in perspective, the global spending total for AIDS-related programs, including domestic programs and internationally-funded assistance efforts, amounted to $16.8 billion in 2011. Of that, just under half—$8.2 billion—has come from international aid each year since 2008. Still, the U.N. research found that domestic spending on efforts to combat the virus—that means countries paying for their own AIDS-related programs—has surpassed the amount funded by international aid: “Domestic investments have surpassed global giving in 2011,” according to the report. “Low- and middle-income countries invested US$ 8.6 billion in 2011. While countries are tipping the balance, international assistance still remains critical and indispensable in the short and medium term.”

Several of the so-called “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) have successfully taken on most of the expense of their domestic AIDS prevention and treatment programs. Brazil funds almost all its own expenses, according to the U.N. study. China’s at 80 percent, and India hopes to hit 90 percent soon. Other middle-class nations have had similar success. South Africa funds 80 percent of its AIDS program itself and has “quadrupled its domestic investments between 2006 and 2011.”

Seven of every 10 dollars spent on AIDS-related programs globally are for medication, particularly expensive antiretroviral therapies, the U.N. found. Brazil, South Africa, China, India, and Russia are close to paying those expenses themselves. Others aren’t quite there yet. In the Vietnamese case, foreign assistance for AIDS programs is expected to reach zero by 2020, giving Hanoi six and a half years to find alternative sources, domestic or otherwise.

Why Are We So Obsessed With Sharks?

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT

In the wake of the cinematic masterpiece Sharknado, you might find yourself thinking my life needs more sharks. Well, guess what? Discovery Channel's widely popular “Shark Week” starts up August 4, ready to fill your void. Unfortunately, there won't be any chainsaws.

But why this cultural obsession with sharks? Maybe it's some intrinsic pull, the knowledge that sharks and humans split from a common ancestor, thus connecting us metaphysically to these ocean dwellers. Or maybe it's because they're really, really cool.

Westerners were more likely to believe in dragons than a great white.

In her book Demon Fish, Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin argues that the shark's "outsized role in our psyche" makes more sense in a historical context. In Western history, sharks weren't always seen as mysterious monsters. Phoenician pottery dating back to 3000 BCE displays images of sharks, and, according to Eilperin, Aristotle gave the first accurate description of shark sex. But then came the Middle Ages, when "the Western world forgot that sharks existed." At banquets, noblemen would take fossilized shark teeth, drop them in their goblets, and claim they were "dragon tongue stones." Eilperin describes this time period as the total break in our understanding of sharks; Westerners were more likely to believe in dragons than a great white.

Sharks re-entered the Western psyche in the seafaring surge between the 15th and 17th centuries, but Eilperin says they remained a fairly abstract concept to most Americans until 1916, when we started spending lots of time at the beach. That same year a series of shark attacks off of the Jersey shore caused widespread panic.

Citizens demanded that the government "stamp out the shark horror," and Woodrow Wilson even convened an inconsequential cabinet meeting on sharks. (He still lost votes in the area where the shark incidents occurred.) Sharks were now completely on the radar—scary beasts that the government should take care of but seemed unable to. Eilperin argues that the panic felt in 1916 has continued through today; the unpredictability and seemingly uncontrollable nature of sharks is what scares us the most and what drives our fascination. "We have a primal fear," she writes, "because they come out of the darkness."

IN LIGHT OF STATISTICS, our shark fear-obsession seems a bit odd. According to the University of Florida, in 2012 there were 53 shark attacks in the U.S. and seven fatalities worldwide. On the other hand, it's estimated that an average of 19 people die in the U.S. from dog attacks each year. In Australia, according to The Guardian, "The nation has averaged just over one fatal attack a year over the past 50 years." Yet Australian officials approved a plan to allow fishery services to kill sharks that appear a threat, despite great white sharks being a protected species in the country’s waters.

While we celebrate the "awesomeness" of sharks, humans worldwide kill an estimated 100 million of the creatures every year. More organizations than ever exist to create awareness for shark conservation, but the fact of the matter is that shark populations have declined by up to 80 percent. Is it that, regardless of our knowledge of the necessity of sharks in our ecosystem, we're still too scared of them to really care? As Western Australia State Premier Colin Barnett said: "We will always put the lives and safety of beachgoers ahead of the shark. This is, after all, a fish."

If the necessity of sharks within the ecosystem is a hard sell, maybe a couple of economic points will be more convincing: Whale shark tourism is estimated to be worth $47.5 million annually worldwide. Shark tourism activities bring $78 million annually to the Bahamian economy alone.

Should Republicans Still Fear the Tea Party?

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT

Last week, Kevin Drum argued that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has no chance of becoming his party’s 2016 presidential nominee because he has angered the Tea Party over immigration reform. That’s enough to end his presidential aspirations, says Drum, since the Tea Party makes up about half of the Republican Party’s base.

Is that figure right? Steven Greene breaks down the newest data from the 2012 American National Election Study and finds that, in fact, almost exactly half of Republicans who reported voting in the 2012 primaries and caucuses (a reasonable proxy for “the base”) claim to be Tea Party supporters. (Notably, people who didn’t vote in the primaries were overwhelmingly not Tea Party supporters.)

But it’s not just about numbers. As Greene notes, even among their fellow primary voters, Tea Party supporters are far more active politically—they’re more likely to attend rallies, donate to candidates, sign petitions, etc., even controlling for ideology, income, education, gender, and other demographic factors. In other words, these are people you want on your side if you’re trying to win the GOP nomination. And if you’ve managed to alienate them, yes, you face a much harder road.

The Tea Party’s agenda today can probably be described as “Republican, only more so.”

Now, these data come from 2012. Given that the Tea Party didn’t even exist four years before that, it’s hard to project what they’ll look like three years from now. It’s also still pretty hard to say just what the Tea Party is, or was. My impression back in 2009 was that this was a legitimate grassroots political movement (albeit one being promoted by CNBC and Fox News) that was somewhat distinct from the Republican Party. As with many grassroots movements, it was hard to know just who was in charge or what it stood for at any given time. Did it want to form a new organization to challenge and replace a decaying Republican Party? Did it want to reform the Republican Party from within, making it more conservative? Did it represent people who were new to politics, or was it a cynical rebranding of an established faction? Depending on whom you were talking to, they answer could be yes to all of these.

Nonetheless, several years into its existence, it’s possible to generalize a bit about the Tea Party movement. While nearly all its members were Republicans, it seemed to have a populist, anti-corporate agenda that wasn’t necessarily in line with the goals of GOP officeholders. Yet while its tone was uncompromising, it was willing to be pragmatic in some elections, even enthusiastically backing the very moderate Scott Brown for a chance to take a Senate seat in Massachusetts.

In 2010, however, the Tea Party managed to elect many new members to the U.S. House of Representatives (mainly in the South) as Republicans took over leadership of the chamber. Since then, it’s been more challenging to distinguish the Tea Party’s agenda from that of the rest of the Republican Party, arguably because the rest of the GOP has moved toward the Tea Party.

Today, we can conclude a few things about the Tea Party:

1. It was never a serious third-party movement (although it did back alternative candidates to Republicans in a handful of races, as profiled in this wonderful This American Life essay).

2. It was and remains a large and potent wing of the Republican Party, both among its active voters and among its officeholders.

3. Its agenda today can probably be described as “Republican, only more so.” That is, its adherents believe in roughly the same agenda the rest of the party believes in, but they are much less prone to compromise and much more willing to resort to non-traditional political means (shutdowns, debt ceiling votes, etc.) to achieve it.

So can a candidate who angered the Tea Party win the 2016 GOP nomination? Chances are, anyone with a vaguely credible political record will have done something that makes the Tea Party mad at some point in his or her career, so it’s possible that Rubio’s immigration apostasy won’t appear so bad compared to the other choices out there. But it may mean that candidates like Rubio will have to go out of their way to demonstrate fealty to the group on other issues. That may help with the Tea Party, but it will likely hurt with the general electorate in 2016.

The Happiness of the Extreme Right Winger

Posted: 23 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT

Given the many instances of Tea Partiers lashing out in anger over the past few years, it's reasonable to think this is an extremely unhappy group of people.

Reasonable, but wrong.

At least, that's the implication of newly published research from Canada. It finds a "significant association" between authoritarian attitudes and a subjective sense of well-being. These findings are "in line with evidence that conservative ideology … may promote positive psychological outcomes," writes a research team led by psychologist Cara MacInnis of the University of Toronto and Michael Busseri of Brock University.

In the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the researchers describe a study featuring 237 Canadian university students. Participants provided a set of opinions to determine the extent to which they are aligned with right-wing authoritarianism—that is, a tendency to submit to authority, condemn those who violate the rules, and uphold established traditions.

A strong sense of social hierarchy (the notion that everyone has their place) can arguably provide a coherent structure that makes the world seem less chaotic.

They then gave a second set of opinions designed to determine their "social dominance orientation," another aspect of generalized authoritarianism. Specifically, they expressed the extent of their agreement with statements such as "Some groups of people are just more worthy than others" and "In getting what your group wants, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups."

Finally, they were asked to rate their current life on a scale of one to nine (from the "worst life I could have" to the best). They were also given 20 adjectives (10 positive, 10 negative) and asked about the extent to which each described how they feel "in general."

The results: "On the general level, greater generalized authoritarianism was clearly related to greater subjective well-being," the researchers write. "The association suggests that generalized authoritarianism may be 'good' for the self."

In some ways, this result is counterintuitive. Much previous research has tied conservatism to higher levels of perceived threat. It's hard to reconcile how people can both feel threatened and have a strong sense of well-being.

On the other hand, a strong sense of social hierarchy (the notion that everyone has their place) can arguably provide a coherent structure that makes the world seem less chaotic—and theoretically more controllable. That could, in turn, promote a sense of well-being.

It's also important to note that the study participants were overwhelmingly young and female. They were also Canadians, who as a group report higher levels of well-being than Americans. It's conceivable that an older, more male-skewing, U.S. sample could produce different results.

Still, this research calls into serious question the notion of far right-wingers being grumps who are taking out their misery on those around them. If these results are correct, they may be making others (such as, say, Republican moderates) plenty miserable, but on a personal level, they're doing quite OK.

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