Respectful of Otters

Ten thousand visits since January of 2004! You like me, you really like me!

(Or actually, judging by my referrer logs, you were looking for factual information about otters, and probably found me disappointingly irrelevant. I'm going to try to help by, from time to time, including otter facts in my blog. Here's one to get you started: "A perfect spraint is 6-8cm long about 1cm thick and dark in colour, usually full of tiny fishbones. A fresh one easily distinguished from a mink scat by the scent - otter spraint smells pleasantly musky or fishy. Honestly.")

Anyway, a warm Respectful of Otters welcome to the verizon.net user who clicked through to my site via Nixve, at 9:18 this morning. Stop by the courtesy window to pick up your prize.

In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows.

The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for "collaborative capabilities."

Good job by the Center for American Progress in bringing these documents to light. They need to be out there on the public stage. That said, I think they're mostly useful in a Mutual Assured Destruction capacity.[1] The Republicans have been citing Kerry votes to eliminate weapons programs, divorced from context - attempting to make him look weak on defense. With this report of FBI cuts, Democrats can now do the same to Bush. What's the context of the FBI cuts? It's not clear from this article, but if they don't have to pay attention to that, then (in a MAD sense) neither do we. As long as we know that MAD is what we're doing.

Did the FBI need the extra $1 billion that was cut, $700-odd million of which was later restored by Congress? Probably they did. But not every law-enforcement program requested after 9/11 genuinely increased the nation's safety, and - from a civil liberties perspective, if for no other reason - Democrats should be careful about assuming the rhetorical position that the FBI should automatically get everything it asks for.

All that being said, I'll be thrilled if these revelations about the FBI budget push the Bush campaign into being more nuanced in interpreting the meaning of program cuts. It will be great if this takes the Kerry-voted-to-cut-defense weapon out of their hands. In the meantime, let's keep the real solid arguments about Bush's defense record front and center.


[1] MAD, for those readers too young to remember the Reagan era, was the doctrine that if my weapons can blow your country into its component atoms, and your weapons can blow my country into its component atoms, both of us will back off from those weapons and not use them. It worked okay.

Those of us who do HIV prevention don't like to talk about long-term exposed seronegatives. (You can tell, because we've given them a complicated, unobvious name.) These are people who continue to test HIV-negative after many years of unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner. The reason we don't like to talk about them is because we're afraid that every high-risk person out there is going to be convinced that they'll be in the bulletproof group too.

Researchers at the University of Washington have been studying these folks, and have found that they do have very small amounts of HIV in their systems. They never test positive because their immune system never produces antibodies to HIV - but somehow, they've managed to prevent the virus from replicating inside their T-cells. So their T-cells aren't destroyed by HIV, and they don't get sick. We don't understand how that happens, although obviously, we'd like to be able to bottle whatever it is and distribute it to everyone.

At the most recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, the UW team reported that 12 men in their group of 94 long-term exposed seronegatives had finally tested HIV-positive. Here's the kicker: none of them were infected by their long-term partners. The partners' HIV was too genetically different from the newly-infected guys' HIV for them to have been the sources of infection.

I learned about this study at a dinner presentation last night. When the speaker got to the genetic comparison, a ripple of laughter swept through the room. It's really not funny, but I'll admit that there is a certain dark irony to it. These guys thought they were immune to HIV, so they could cheat on their boyfriends without consequences. Turns out, they were only immune to their own boyfriend's HIV. And their participation in the study turned up unexpected proof that they'd been sleeping around. Poor bastards.

I clicked through a blog ad on Matthew Yglesias' site and found David Sucher's "City Comforts," a book about making cities more human and more likely to promote a sense of community. Tagline: "how to build an urban village." I'm a big advocate of city living, so I took a look at their sample chapter. It covers aspects of urban design that faciliate casual meetings and conversations among city dwellers - things like sidewalk cafes, sunny plazas, and lots of public bench seating. Nice stuff.

I have to say, looking at the illustrated examples, is that it's probably a lot easier to "build an urban village" if you do it in a real village. Sisters, Oregon has a population of 959, according to the 2000 census. Cannon Beach, Oregon, a pleasant little resort town with a year-round population of 1588. Nantucket, for heaven's sake, another resort town with a year-round population of 3830. It doesn't surprise me that these places have an intimate feel, but I'm not sure how helpful it is to offer them as salutary examples for Detroit and LA to emulate. Okay, so the chapter has pictures of Seattle, Tokyo, Boston, and New York, too - but the majority of the places pictured just aren't what I would call urban.

But my first reaction, looking at the pictures, was "hey, look at all the white people." Among the dozens of people pictured, I count two African-Americans - one playing chess, one listening to a concert. Both of them are surrounded by white people. None of the people in the pictures look to be sub-middle class. You don't see any green hair or leathers or multiple piercings, either. Fostering casual meetings is certainly a good way of building community, and I like most of the suggestions in the chapter - but the illustrations implicitly define "community" as "gatherings of unthreatening white middle class people." I'm not saying this to score some kind of an abstract point - I'm saying that, if you wanted to take pictures like this where I live, you'd have to find someplace to hide the vast majority of city residents.

That's not to say that we don't have great public spaces. We have some lovely plazas, squares, public markets, and parks. But people who hang out in them need to be comfortable negotiating their way around homeless people and junkies and crowds of rough-housing teenaged boys, as well as suited businessmen on their lunch hours. And white folks need to be comfortable being in the minority. I love the city, but it took some adjustment after living in a small, homogeneous town in the Midwest. Plenty of people stick to the suburbs precisely because they don't want to, or aren't able to, make that adjustment. They feel scared or awkward around the kinds of people who gather in the urban layouts that Sucher lauds.

The ironic thing is that you see a lot more examples of the kind of thing he's talking about - active foot traffic, people hanging out being social on the streets and sidewalks, public game-playing - in poor urban neighborhoods than you do in wealthy suburbs. Just down the street from me, for example, there's a block with several boarded-up houses on it. Scruffy black men congregate on the stoops of the abandoned houses, smoking, talking, calling out amiably to passers-by, sometimes passing around a bottle in a paper bag. It would make a great picture for the City Comforts chapter, encapsulating several of Sucher's ideas - except that his intended audience would probably find the scene more threatening than welcoming.

The absence of scary-looking people (from a middle-class suburbanite perspective) from Sucher's illustrations isn't just a cosmetic problem, it's a problem for his argument. Most U.S. cities don't have homogeneous populations who are only prevented from bonding over their essential similarities by the alienating influence of urban design. Cities are heterogeneous collections of people from different backgrounds and with different cultures, crammed together into a compact space with other people and groups they don't necessarily feel comfortable being around. Urban improvement plans which don't address differences of race, class, and culture are, essentially, suburban enrichment dressed up in urban language.

Title of an article at HeadlinedNews.com: "Ipod Used In Domestic Homicide."

A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod. [...] Police said no motive has been confirmed, although evidence suggested the murder was the result of a domestic dispute after Pulaski erased the contents of Mathers’ iPod.

In a callout box beside the article: "Related News: Get great deals on the new Apple iPod mini. Starting at under $250."

You know, I'm sure that there are people who read this article - complete with the coroner's quote "It took him a while to die,” Dr. Klamut said. “She must have stabbed him 40 to 80 times with that iPod. His death was not instantaneous, that’s for sure” - and thought, "Man, I've got to get me one of those." But are they really the marketing demographic HeadlinedNews wants to go after?

Update: The ironic thing about this is that I'm usually the one who scoffs at people who were taken in by a hoax. Alas for me.

Last December, when the Bush Administration pushed through its Medicare prescription drug plan, I made a couple of posts about its huge gaps in coverage. At the time, I assumed that the worst components - such as the part that prohibits Medicaid from covering prescriptions not paid for by Medicare, thus actually reducing benefits for the poorest seniors - were never intended to be implemented. Even in this era of Republican domination, they're simply not politically acceptable. I figured that they were in there to drive the projected cost of the bill down, and that eventually there would be "adjustments" - just as the economic impact of the Bush tax cuts was hidden by the various sunset provisions, which were never intended to stand.

So while I was crediting the Bush Administration with this fiendishly clever plan, it turns out that they were also just flat-out lying about the costs of the bill.

The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.

When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration's own analysts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had concluded repeatedly that the drug benefit could cost upward of $100 billion more than that.

Withholding the higher cost projections was important because the White House was facing a revolt from 13 conservative House Republicans who'd vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion.

You never reach the bottom of what these guys are willing to do. No matter how much you suspect them, it's always just a little bit worse than you thought. I wonder what effect this revelation will have on that famed Republican Party loyalty. This time they lied to their own guys.

Man, I actually had reservations about whether I was being too hard on Lauren Slater the last time I posted about her new book, Opening Skinner's Box.

I wasn't nearly hard enough.

I still haven't read the book - just excerpts. But according to this piece by B.F. Skinner's daughter Deborah, Slater's book perpetuates the nasty, and completely untrue, rumor that Skinner kept his baby in a "Skinner Box," or operant chamber, just as if she were one of his rats or pigeons.

Slater's sensationalist book rehashes some of the old stuff, but offers some rumours that are entirely new to me. For my first two years, she reports, my father kept me in a cramped square cage that was equipped with bells and food trays, and arranged for experiments that delivered rewards and punishments. Then there's the story that after my father "let me out", I became psychotic. Well, I didn't. That I sued him in a court of law is also untrue. And, contrary to hearsay, I didn't shoot myself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. I have never even been to Billings, Montana.

I heard those rumors myself in college; perhaps you have as well. A quick Google search for "skinner daughter conditioned" found several perpetuations of the myth in the first twenty results, although it also found several debunkings, including one from Snopes. Any serious book about Skinner's lfe and theories includes a debunking of the rumors. I myself took the radical step of asking someone who knew the Skinners personally, who explained the truth to me. What I mean to say is, although the rumors are in fact widespread, so are the facts. They're readily available to anyone who really wants to learn them.

The design of the crib was not at all like that of a traditional crib. Instead of the wooden slats that run along the side of the crib, Skinner's "air crib" had sound-absorbing walls and a large picture window made of safety glass. The crib was designed so that air entered through filters on the bottom of the crib and circulated clean air into the enclosed living space. Instead of having a mattress for the child to sleep on, the child was placed on a tightly-stretched canvas with ten yards of sheeting that protected it. This strip of sheeting could be cranked in a matter of seconds, leaving a clean section for the child to sleep on. [...] The filtered and humidified air reduced the danger of airborne infection and kept the baby clean. Because the crib was filtered with warm, moist air, the baby wore only a diaper to bed. Because of this, Deborah's skin was never "water-logged with sweat or urine" (Skinner, 1979). The baby could enjoy a sound sleep because noise was muffled by the sound-proofed walls. There was also a shade that could be drawn to keep the light out of the crib while the baby was sleeping.

The "air crib" was simply supposed to be an improved version of traditional cribs and playpens. Skinner intended the "controlled environment" to free babies from being swaddled in tons of clothes and blankets; he thought infants were more comfortable and moved more easily when they were naked. He also wanted to reduce the laundry burden. Deborah was taken out of the crib to be held, fed, played with, bathed, et cetera. The story still sounds isolating to modern parents, I think, because people today don't use playpens and cribs as much as they used to - but in the 1940s, when Skinner designed the aircrib, most babies spent most of their day in some kind of restricted space. If Skinner was inhumane, so were my grandparents - and probably yours.

Slater apparently claims she searched for Skinner's daughter Deborah and couldn't find her. That's funny, because entering her married name into Google instantly pulls up her e-mail address. Entering her maiden name pulls up this site from a gallery that represents her art. Okay, so possibly the gallery didn't want to put Slater in contact with Skinner, but I bet they could've confirmed that Skinner didn't shoot herself in a bowling alley in Billings. Slater did interview Skinner's other daughter, Julie Vargas, but Vargas now complains that she was extensively and egregiously misquoted. So do several other notable psychologists quoted in Slater's book.

Lauren Slater is a liar, plain and simple. And a malicious one, at that. The shame of it is that more people will read her book than will ever read serious accounts of Skinner, Milgram, Rosenhan, Spitzer, and the other psychologists she slanders. I hope Deborah Skinner Buzan is planning to sue.

(via Oursin.)

I’m thinking about a 19-year-old who was on my table. This guy could have been your next door neighbor. Smart kid, excited kid. But his life as he knew it was basically over. His legs were gone. It’s hard for these soldiers to believe. I’ve seen lots of people with severe, permanent injuries. They’re going to need a lot of help when they get back home, because their lives are going to change forever. And to have the guy [President Bush] cutting billions from the VA [Veterans Administration] budget, at a time when you’ve got all those guys coming back from overseas with major injuries, that’s disgusting! That hurts every person who ever served this country. I don’t understand how someone can stand up and say, “I’m pro-military,” when you want to cut $16 billion from the VA and close VA hospitals.

(Via Julia)

The sun rose in the east this morning. Additionally, a study was released demonstrating the ineffectiveness of teen abstinence programs. This one found that teenagers who take a voluntary abstinence pledge are just as likely to get an STD as teenagers who don't pledge, even though the pledgers have fewer sexual partners. The reason? When pledgers do have sex, they're less likely to use condoms.

Here's the most intriguing part of the results, for me:

The analysis also found that in communities where at least 20 percent of adolescents pledged to remain virgins, the STD rates for everyone combined was 8.9 percent. In communities with fewer than 7 percent pledgers, the STD rate was 5.5 percent.

So it's precisely in communities where there's a lot of vocal support for teen abstinence that, apparently, you have the greatest rates of unprotected sex. That doesn't surprise me at all. The study's author thinks this finding is related to socially-enforced hypocrisy - the old "swept away" phenomenon, where using birth control means that you intended to have sex, which means that you're a whore. Presumably, communities with a lot of vocal support for teen abstinence also tend to condemn girls who have sex, thus increasing girls' determination to only have sex if they seem to have been "swept away."

Another way to understand this result is by looking at the importance of peer norms for sexual behavior. We know from repeated studies that people, including teens, are more likely to use condoms if they think that their friends use them. It's the upside of peer pressure. If all your friends think that having condomless sex is crazy, you're going to feel more comfortable insisting that your boyfriend wears one. At a more basic level, you're simply more likely to think about using condoms, and talk about them with your partner, if your social circle considers them to be a standard feature of sex.

One of the most effective HIV prevention interventions took advantage of people's tendency to follow peer pressure. Instead of sending public health educators into the gay community, they went to gay bars and had the bartenders pick out the most popular and well-liked men. Those men were then trained to promote condom use via casual, one-on-one, personal conversations. When the popular guys became associated with promoting safer sex, everyone wanted to do it, and higher rates of condom use were seen throughout the community - well beyond the folks who actually received the intervention.

Abstinence pledges are the same thing in reverse. If the popular kids are publicly swearing off sex, there's an absence of social norms for condom use. Even kids who didn't take the pledge will hear fewer positive messages from their peers about condoms, and will have less of a sense that condoms are widely accepted in their peer group. It's hard for teenagers to do things that aren't widely accepted in their peer group. So high rates of abstinence pledges in a community make it harder for all the kids, not just the pledgers, to plan for and insist on condom use.