Some days, you are reminded that the framers were some pretty smart dudes. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Plata ordered the State of California to move 32,000 inmates from its state correctional facilities because their treatment constituted a violation of the 8th amendment’s restriction on cruel and unusual punishment. Dalia Lithwick in Slate does a nice summary of the on-going case law on this subject:
In 2005, a federal court determined that “on average, an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the medical delivery system.” But conditions continued to deteriorate, and in 2009 a three-judge panel ordered California to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of the prisons’ design capacity within two years. (The system was designed to hold just under 80,000 prisoners, but at the time of the oral argument, it had more than 142,000, and Kennedy notes that since then the state has transferred about 9,000 inmates to county jails.) The state appealed, arguing among other points that it hadn’t enough time to remedy the problems.
In his opinion, Justice Kennedy, perhaps recognizing the limits of reasoned argument on this issue, attached photographs of the overcrowded conditions to his argument (here, here, and here). I have lots of sympathy for the court in this instance. They walk a fine line between having to uphold constitutional principles while at the same time legitimating them to a less informed but more petulant public. In my courses, very few students ever take the position that people in prison should have any constitutional protections. If we left it up to the public, the miserable conditions in state prisons would never be addressed. As Schneider and Ingram pointed out in their fantastic book, prisoners are constructed as deviant target populations and as such politicians have no incentive to adopt legislation that would aid them.
But the court (at least five of them) know full well that the constitution is intended to protect minority interests, no matter how vilified they are by the public (even if that vilification is justified). It does sadden me that the citizens of my state can’t show responsible citizenship in addressing the situation. I grudgingly have to accept that the framers had it right in positing a dim view of their fellow citizens’ ability to rationally assess social problems. Locking mentally-ill prisoners in a phone booth cell isn’t humane or rational, even if it’s satisfying in a primal way. Can we ever move to a place where the courts don’t need to step in to do what citizens themselves should be doing.
I’m currently reading Barbara Warnick’s Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web, an insightful look at prominent communication strategies used online. Warnick highlights one of my favorite Internet parodies, Jib Jab’s “The Drugs I Need, as an exemplar of how a discourse with a high degree of strategic intertextuality can “appeal to as many audience orientations as possible” (114). What I find compelling about this claim is that, different than the kind of intertextual mainstreaming that a lot of television employs (e.g. see George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory) — which steers clear of producing controversial appeals in order to appeal to as broad an audience as possible — this form of Internet media activism is able to aggressively target the drug industry through a mainstreaming strategy that does not lose its critical power. See the classic video below. The Drugs I Need
Good Magazine has just introduced me to my next Community Development course assignment. The BBC Broadsides project is the brainchild of Boston based artist Tim Devin. He places posters around his Boston neighborhood that seeks to enhance awareness of the surrounding community. One set of posters provides what he calls “mappy facts” regarding the demographics of the neighborhood:
The second he calls “street surveys” where he engages the neighborhood by asking survey questions, like this one.
What a great opportunity to create a 1.0 version of augmented cities (or campuses)! In my own suburb there is little engagement or awareness of who lives here. I’ll keep you posted on how this works in my courses!
I just saw this and CBS has a good run down of what went down. I think this exchange highlights one of the themes of today’s “infotainment”—confirmatory bias. Confirmatory bias is the psychological tendency to seek information that confirms existing beliefs. The news network pundits on Fox and MSNBC have made careers out of selecting issues and tailoring coverage for their respective conservative and liberal audiences. The audiences have grown accustomed to the “selective hate machine”, a term coined by Jon Stewart in describing Fox News.
Foxes & Hedgehogs
Stewart has made a career out of being a lampooning satirist who doesn’t stick to a strict ideological script, but he also knows who his audience is. Ironically, Stewart is more of a fox than a hedgehog, as he’s free to be an equal opportunity basher, er, critic. A few years back, Philip Tetlock used the fox and hedgehog metaphor to describe economic punditry::
“The most important factor was not how much education or experience the experts had but how they thought. You know the famous line that [philosopher] Isaiah Berlin borrowed from a Greek poet, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’? The better forecasters were like Berlin’s foxes: self-critical, eclectic thinkers who were willing to update their beliefs when faced with contrary evidence, were doubtful of grand schemes and were rather modest about their predictive ability. The less successful forecasters were like hedgehogs: They tended to have one big, beautiful idea that they loved to stretch, sometimes to the breaking point. They tended to be articulate and very persuasive as to why their idea explained everything. The media often love hedgehogs.”
The Culture War
Stewart has cultivated an audience looking for infotainment with a ton of snark and less of a penchant for sacred cows. His positioning as a “fox” is smart, as it differentiates him from the ideologues. Conservative hedgehog pundits like O’Reilly who whip up frenzy for an older demographic serve as particularly good fodder. In the clip, he loves poking fun at O’Reilly’s positioning in the political punditry market by taking jabs by using pop culture rap references with more than a hint of condescension. Stewart used similar tactics lampooning Newt Gingrich’s announcing of his candidacy on Twitter.
Nevertheless, Stewart brings up a good point that this is all manufactured outrage against Barack Obama. While O’Reilly is just revisiting the culture war, I’m not sure the same levers used in the past are going to work against Obama. He’s not an easy target. In fact, I would argue that the dissatisfaction the hard left has with Obama has everything to do with him positioning his administration to win the culture war, not put it to rest.
While a rational comprehensive approach to policy is now seen as naiive in explaining how policy is decided upon, only now are we really delving into the role of emotions in policy making…..good times in my discipline.
Miller-McCune, our neighbors to the immediate north, have a nice summary of recent research on the role of anger in mobilizing voters. As one of the scholars summarized puts it:
Anger gets people engaged…. There’s a tendency among scholars and others to say that things like negative advertising are bad. But our paper points out that negative emotions like anger can bring people out and get people more involved. So the consequences aren’t all bad.
This gets us to a key tension in civic engagement. We want people to participate in politics, but we don’t spend much time thinking about how they should participate. All the efforts aimed at GOTV efforts (here’s a good local example) presume that voters know their interests and automatically express them when they go to vote. But I question whether a politics driven by outrage and anger produces good policy outcomes.
The great challenge is to get politics to be about other emotions. While anger has its place, it is not the only, or even the best emotion to employ when thinking about public life. I think the central conceit of representative democracy whereby the “best and the brightest” filter out the passion and anger of the masses through deliberation and compromise has its value, but a core downfall is that it doesn’t place much obligation on citizens to be reasonable or civil.
In that case, how do you introduce these other emotions into civic life. For example, how do you talk about a “politics of love” without sounding like some sort of irrelevant crunchy peacenik. It is here where public life is at its most partriarchal. The only allowable feelings to express in public discourse are traditionally masculine ones. But we know from life that anger has to be controlled or kept in check. We don’t seem to hold those same standards in public discourse. Instead suggesting and anger towards government is good and a sign of “caring” about civic life. If anger and stress have negative health effects on the body, it’s possible that they also have negative health effects on the body politic.
It’s Marc Garneau. Just a quick post here on yesterday’s news out of Ottawa that the Liberal party has its first post-Ignatieff candidate for the party leadership, at least for the interim job, anyway.
Garneau was Canada’s first person in space, travelling three times on American space shuttle missions. Garneau was a “payload” specialist with expertise in operating the Canadarm of the shuttle, its famous Canadian content. Post space ventures, he became President of the Canada Space Agency. A scientist, engineer, military officer, it’s quite an impressive background and definitely would be a contrast to other party leaders in Ottawa.
In the past year, he distinguished himself on the F-35 purchase issue (see video here, for example, where he really seemed to be enjoying himself in the political sparring) and in challenging the Conservative decision to axe Canada’s long form census. Both issues were in his wheelhouse, given his background, and he seemed to mature politically due to his involvement in those issues. He’s only been in Parliament since 2008.
He also has a sleeper likability about him as well. Unassuming and solid are two other adjectives I’d use. And see his twitter feed for more of the personality aspect. That May 9th tweet suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.
Interesting that news of his bid came one day after the caucus first met to begin discussions on the interim leadership, among other things. This Canadian Press report indicates the caucus has still not accepted the national executive’s conditions for the person seeking the interim leadership. Meaning he threw his bid out there before the question of whether the interim leader can become permanent leader is resolved (at least, that question is unresolved to the public eye). That’s interesting and it may say something about a selflessness he brings, or, he just doesn’t have any ambition for the permanent slot at all.
There still may be other interim leadership candidates to come, but that’s a brief initial take on Garneau’s bid.
Today, Facebook signed up to use Web of Trust (WOT) reputation ratings to help create a safter on-line experience for its users. The effort is intended to avoid phishing scams within Facebook. Once a Facebook user shares a link:
Facebook automatically scans the links, applying WOT’s information, to determine if the website is known to distribute spam or contain malware. If the link is identified as untrustworthy, then a warning will appear allowing the person to avoid the link, learn more about the rating or continue forward.
Assessments about the trustworthiness of the site are determined by the crowd. I’m not sure exactly how it will work but presumably if enough people flag a site as malicious, a WOT warning appears.
Sounds good so far.But I wonder how this crowdsourcing of malicious links on Facebook simultaneously binds us even more closely to an “architecture of publicness” (a term I’m playing with as I prepare a manuscript on Facebook’s effect on political identity). What I mean by this term is a on-line design structure that provides social incentives to reveal elements of yourself, whether it be your behavior, your likes and dislikes or pieces of information from your past or present. All this can of course be aggregated and mined for marketing purposes, even if it won’t necessarily be used in this way.
Theoretically, WOT data would seem to be no different. As you report which sites are unsavory, Facebook (and/or WOT, I’m not sure how this data is collected) learns more about your tastes and preferences and your browsing habits.
An appropriate retort would be that this is all happening in the name of making Facebook a more secure environment….fair enough. There is no reason why the relentless revelation of your online self has to be all bad. In fact revelation is cathartic and desirable in many ways. However when we start to rationalize revelation by making it mundane, it does something to us (I think). I’m not sure what that is yet, but I’m afraid there’s a part of it that’s not so savory. How much sharing is too much sharing on-line? I’m not entirely sure.
If you have the time this weekend, there is a very worthwhile video at the Milken Institute site from a conference held this week. The session linked to was titled, “The Attention Deficit Society: What Technology Is Doing to Our Brains,” where four expert speakers addressed this subject matter:
Put down the iPad and pay attention: Technology may be rewiring your brain. Scientists say our ability to focus is being undermined by Twitter feeds, smartphones and other digital distractions. Many experts believe excessive use of technology can make users more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even narcissistic. It may reduce the ability to process information and think deeply and creatively. Distracted drivers have become a menace on the roads. Even worse, tech-obsessed parents spend less quality time with their children, causing not only hurt feelings but potentially stunting a child’s vocabulary and development. At the same time, studies show Internet users are more efficient at finding information, and gamers develop better visual acuity. Is the technology that was intended to make us more productive actually dumbing us down? Is its use in the classroom counterproductive? How does it change our culture and society in general?
That our brains are adapting to the constant use of technology is the contention of the first panellist, Nicholas Carr. Doesn’t sound like rocket science when you put it that way, it sounds like common sense but I’m not sure how much time people actually spend thinking about how they are using their own technology – smart phones, iPads, iPods – and how it is really changing their lives and their own capacities. It is very intriguing to hear the entire panel speak about the issues set out above. One of the other professors on the panel is presently living in the dorm rooms at Stanford to observe the way students are using technology. The MIT professor is fascinating.
If you have time for it, even part of it, it’s a good one. Our politics are affected by the way people are living with, using new technologies and getting changed by them. Anyone interested in crafting policies and messages going forward might be interested in giving it a look.
I was doing a post over on r h i z o m i c o n on innovation policy in Canada and also had a conversation with a future ThickCulture blogger on the future of biomedical innovation in the United States, which was the genesis of this post. I’ve been thinking about innovation policy, particularly in light of the Big Recession and the rise of global economies in places like China, India, and Brazil. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the implications for biomedical innovation in the US, given how the pharmaceutical industry is likely to get squeezed on: {1} the demand-side {through universal healthcare being a monopsonist buyer} and {2} how public expenditures on basic science and technology are threatened, in that are deemed by some as unsustainable in the near term {due to the deficit} and the long term {due to concerns about efficiencies}.
Innovation in General
US policy has a somewhat favourable tax treatment for innovation, along with a high public expenditure contributing to business and enterprise research and development {BERD}::
OECD Data on Government funding of business & enterprise R&D
While it’s fully understood the BERD is not the same as innovation, it nevertheless serves as a useful proxy measure. The sizes of the bubbles represent a measure for the productivity of BERD, with respect to value-added. The implication here is that the US government is spending a great deal on BERD and offering some tax incentives, while the outcomes aren’t that extraordinary.
As an aside, Canada’s government isn’t spending much, but offers a fairly generous tax treatment. Nevertheless, the R&D {and BERD levels} are disappointing and while some studies show some of this is due to industry effects [pdf], there are nevertheless structural issues that need to be addressed by policy, not the market alone.
Biomedical Research in the US
The US federal government is a big spender on health research, but these funds also go towards training and infrastructure. Historically, the funds for one of the big expenditures, the National institute for Health {NIH}, have been highly volatile::
While the pharmaceutical industry invests more in R&D than the government, this represents a division of labour—the government spends on basic research, while the industry focuses on commercialization and expensive sets of clinical trials. The problem is that the governmental basic science subsidy is unlikely to be sustainable, particularly if the returns aren’t there. What I mean by returns are both in terms of value-added and health-beneffitting therapies. Under scrutiny, the lack of accountability of NIH funds and the grant practices are unlikely to show either. So, first off, reform of the NIH is in order. The current situation is leading to increased cynicism by stakeholders::
“Today, the primacy of biomedical research and technology development is being challenged. Patients, physicians, insurers, and policymakers are all questioning the slow pace of advance, escalating cost, dubious clinical value, inappropriate commercial exploitation, and lure of false hope for patients with serious diseases.”
On the pharmaceutical industry side, value-added is must likely to come from is…marketing, not biomedical science. The industry is dependent on this public subsidy, so the cutting of NIH funding isn’t in their best interests. In order to address the volatility of and cuts to NIH funding, some are advocating for more public-private partnerships and a greater reliance on non-profits and medical philanthropy. Given that the pharmaceutical industry is likely to get squeezed by universal healthcare and the possibility of less publicly-funded basic science, this sounds like a perfect solution to leverage scarce resources by both. While this sounds good, it’s a myth.
Public-Private Collaborations in the Current Biomedical Paradigm
“We reviewed the lessons from 70 such alliances from the mid-1960s through 2000. Although it is too soon to judge the success of the most recent models, in the main, earlier ones have not accelerated the pace of either discovery or clinical application. The sources of difficulty are idiosyncratic, but recurrent problems are a failure at inception to agree on intellectual-property provisions, excessive secrecy, and disagreements over research aims.”
This isn’t surprising at all from an organizational sociology point of view. It’s a problem of governance and intellectual property rights. The source of the failure? Good old organizational inertia, stemming from the characteristics of large, bureaucratic behemoths::
“In our view, the most salient reason for failure is the centralization of authority within large, inherently cautious bureaucracies in government, universities, foundations, and companies.”
While advances in areas such as biotechnology done by smaller innovative firms may seem like a possible avenue for collaborations and value-creation, there remains the thorny issue of financial capitalization. The pharmaceutical industry {Pharma} with its deep pockets has been buying up startup biotech firms, although it remains to be seen if there’s a pattern of imposing its innovation-killing bureaucratic baggage on them. The idea of the old paradigm {Pharma} seamlessly integrating the new {biotech} is a stretch, particularly for an industry that has had pricing carte blanche in the US, in a world of pharmaceutical price controls. Looming is the possibility of revenue declines, given that the government will be one huge buyer and will have the ability to dictate price. I’m not stating that public-private ventures are categorically bad, although I am wary of private enterprise tied to public purpose, and I can see a role for these arrangements within a rival model of innovation—one that’s open.
A More Open Innovation System
I would argue that early stage biomedical research has to be open and patents should be deferred to later in the discovery chain [See Moses III & Martin]. Locking down intellectual property rights creates knowledge silos that inhibit scientific creativity and a federal court has resisted allowing the patenting of genes for this reason [See Myriad case, on appeal with a decision pending this summer]. In the “discovery” of DNA, Watson and Crick had the theory, but Rosalind Franklin had the x-ray crystallography data that supported the idea of a double helix shape. If these knowledge silos were kept apart, discovery would have needlessly waited. Other examples abound. Within 3M, an innovation officer position was created to prevent managers from “hoarding” discoveries, allowing ideas to cross divisions, giving credit where credit was due. Open innovation embraces the Schumpeterian economics idea of “creative destruction” in innovation, where the old paradigms are destroyed to make way for the new. For example, if there was open scientific knowledge about oncology or neurology, the low barriers to information would allow for more rapid modes of discovery. The development of fruitful areas and elimination of dead ends could be facilitated.
The current mode has an unholy alignment of interests of government, industry, philanthropic nonprofits, and academe, where discovery has nothing to do with patient benefit, but with ancillary objectives of organizations and the individuals within them. More public-private ventures would merely formalize the alliances and the results will be along the lines of “innovations” that have the most profitable potential markets, “junk science” in journal articles promoting certain biomedical paradigms and building careers, and a philanthropic sector throwing money at both.
What also needs to happen with open information for innovation is a function of connecting the dots, be it public, private, or public-private. The open information needs to be scrutinized, not only to winnow the wheat from the chaff, but to make inferences about how knowledge in one area can be applied to another.
"Real Men Don't Buy Girls" Campaign, Eva Longoria, Ashton, & Demi
In December, I blogged about the cartoon-childhood violence meme that morphed from something else and was being criticized for being another example of “one-click activism.” There were interesting comments that are definitely food for thought.
Celebrity Causes & Controversial Issues
While the crowd can start a viral meme, celebrities can use social media to promote their cause to their followers. The idea of increasing awareness for causes can be tricky, particularly when there are “sides”. I don’t think anyone is countering Sarah McLachlan’s pleas to stop animal cruelty, but issues like Jenny McCarthy’s advocacy surrounding better knowledge surrounding childhood vaccination and autism does. She’s facing a backlash, particularly in light of the fraudulent Wakefield study. Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com bashes her as a misguided mom, acting as if she’s railing against a mountain range of “science”, but, let me be frank here. The journalism of Mary Elizabeth Williams doesn’t scream health sciences expert, plus, it seems like she doesn’t even read what she links to. She cherrypicked a quote by McCarthy on the Oprah site, but conveniently left this out::
“I am all for [vaccines], but there needs to be a safer vaccine schedule. There needs to be something done. The fact that the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] acts as if these vaccines are one size fits all is just crazy to me…People need to start listening to what the moms have been saying.”
This is hardly the ravings of a lunatic. Plus, the problems with the “science” that Williams cites is that they do not prove that a vaccine-autism link does not exist. It may well be more complex than the studies are allowing for, with certain, very specific subpopulations at risk.
Is Bad PR Better than No PR?
So, this week, power couple Demi & Ashton started a campaign to fight sex trafficking, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls”. The ads have people scratching their heads.
I get the execution of the ads, but I think it’s a bad one. It’s using hyperbole and humour to make a point, while riffing on the Old Spice “Your Man…” campaign. The idea is that “real men” do certain things and don’t “buy girls”, so be a real man and don’t buy girls.
“One might argue that faux-zany vignettes in which Jamie Foxx opens a beer bottle with a remote and Bradley Cooper eats cereal bachelor-style are as effective at wiping out underage sex trafficking as posting the color of your bra in your Facebook status is at eradicating breast cancer. The video campaign just costs way more money.”
Popkin’s post is chock full of snarky cleverness and deconstructs the false syllogism, apparently unaware that effective advertising or campaigns need not be logical. Let me see, “the war on terror = the war in Iraq, hence…,” oh, nevermind. Popkin’s use of a Facebook meme example points to a recurring theme that people resent what they feel is tantamount to doing nothing. This may well be the case, but it doesn’t mean it’s always the case and I think it’s short-sighted to see anything having the appearance of an “identity” campaign, where a user identifies with a cause ostensibly to raise awareness as doing nothing. The challenge is to leverage the identity and awareness into action. Here’s a better critique of the ads on bumpshack.
“People’s criticism has created even more conversation…While we didn’t want to offend anybody and it’s certainly not our intention to make light of any issue we take very seriously, we see that it’s actually doing what we intended.”
Well, nevertheless, it’s a good cause, right? Not everyone thinks so. Melissa Gira Grant is calling Demi and Ashton out on their publicity stunt, providing links to organizations working on providing support for those in the sex trade. I must admit that I’m a bit troubled by D&A’s attempts to curb a serious problem, but the execution is just symptomatic of the entire approach. It reeks of paternalism and focuses on “girls” being trafficked, feeding into a saviour theme of philanthropy. Moreover, as it stands, their foundation’s initiatives are paper thin and does smack of a publicity stunt, given how there are many existing organizations doing work in the sex trafficking arena. Finally, the approach is hostile to sex work outside of trafficking by advocating vigilanteism on the Internet, smacking of Amber Lyon’s “investigative journalism” on the matter for CNN.
I think this is less about social media and “one-click activism” as it is about misguided celebrity ventures. While some might piss and moan that the use of social media in getting the word out doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, but I would argue that there’s a danger of celebrity use of social media that can result in misguided actions.
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