Besides the political-administrative morass of a delayed presidential election and deferred donor aid decisionmaking, Haiti’s recovery has been restrained by the obstacle of rubble removal.  Both Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti produced about the same amount of debris, 25 million to 33 million cubic yards, the equivalent of seven Hoover Dams.  In New Orleans, the debris issued from wood frame houses being knocked down and tepid floodwater ruining the interiors and furnishings of houses that otherwise suffered survivable structural damage.  In Port-au-Prince, the main population center for the nation’s 10 million people, the debris consists of concrete buildings leaning at crazy angles, slabs and walls, and pulverized concrete in piles like potato salad at a park picnic.

As of my September trip to Port-au-Prince, only two percent of the rubble had been removed.  The photo above shows the destruction on the street where I stayed.  The one below is from one of the hotels three miles away in Petionville.

In an article in the Huffington Post, Tamara Lush suggested several factors delayed rubble removal:
heavy equipment must be shipped by sea;  large earthmoving equipment have a hard time negotiating the narrow, debris-filled streets; poor recordkeepiong makes it hard to determine who owns destroyed properties; no single person has assume the mantle of rubble removal czar, prompting NGOs to take on the job themselves.  Lush points out that the groups often fight over small amounts of money.

In a November Newsweek article, Jeneen Interlandi notes that the slow pace of rubble removal matches the lack of capacity of either the Haitian government or the NGOs to direct large-scale disaster recovery and reconstruction.  Virtually all of the rubble removal taking place in 2010 was performed by hand.  The groups competing for money have demonstrated expertise in emergency relief and skills in building hospitals and schools in nondisaster situations.  But competency in those areas doesn’t mean they can reconstruct entire cities.  Interlandi includes a quote from Randal Perkins, CEO of AshBritt, a private company that recently won the first major contract for rubble removal from the government of Haiti.  While praising the NGOs for their “amazing” work in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Perkins warned “that the work that’s needed now is of a much larger scale.”

Yet another issue is where to dump whatever rubble is removed.  Huff Post’s Lush notes that landowners have resorted to dumping debris in the streets, canals and the countryside, there’s only one place in the entire country where NGOs using U.S. funds can take contaminated rubble: an approved and environmentally surveyed site.  Even a year after the earthquake, experts in rubble removal such as one I met are certain they will encounter human remains.  As Michael Zamba, the spokesperson for the Pan American Development Foundation said, “There’s a lot of contaminated rubble with human remains in it.  It can’t go in a standard landfill.”

One solution may be at hand, courtesy of engineers from Georgia Tech in Atlanta.  Haitian-born Dr. Reginald Desroches, returned to his homeland in the aftermath of the earthquake.  His goal was to determine whether the buildings still standing were safe enough for occupancy.  Dr. Desroches and his team found the concrete in Haiti to be not just substandard but extremely weak.  One of his graduate students, Brett Holland, noted that “You could just scratch the surface with your thumb or finger.  It was like completely different from anything here in the U.S.  I was amazed.”

Learning that little landfill space was available on the island and that the Haitian government was studying dumping the rubble in the ocean, the Georgia Tech team was determined to find a way to recycle it.  Bringing samples of the Haitian concrete back to Georgia Tech, they used Hait’s natural resources to turn the rubble into a stronger concrete.  The process can be completed  by “nearly anyone in Haiti can do themselves without the use of heavy machinery.”

Now that a runoff election between the two presidential finalists is scheduled for March 20, perhaps decisions will start to come from what had been a weakened government.  Perhaps the rubble will be reborn in buildings that will re-emerge from the dusty streets of Port-au-Prince.  And perhaps the decades that it takes to rebuild Haiti may be reduced if those in charge of the process listen to the ideas of the sons and daughters of Haiti like Reginald Desroches.

A fun comment on our wired world from the folks at UCB:

We want to believe that science holds all the answers. But it doesn’t. Nature and her universe grasp those answers tightly and wait for us to feebly tease them from her grasp, sometimes with fallible and clumsy attempts we humans deign to reveal or admit to ourselves. Though scientists want to believe that they cover all the bases, nature sometimes rears her head up with a loud “gotcha” as we scratch our heads at methodology gone wrong. A recent article in the New Yorker, The Truth Wears Off, asks: Is there something wrong with the Scientific Method? My head began spinning at the choice of title and by the time I got past the question posed my eyes were rolling back into my head. It made for difficult reading.

The ‘truths’ in question have to do with, in this case, repetitive clinical trials of a class of drugs, used to treat a specific psychosis, no longer showing the efficacy found in earlier trials. This leaves scientists wondering what to do with costly and rigorously formerly-proven truths that are no longer truths, and wondering what might be wrong with the Scientific Method. It would seem, at first glance and with more than a modicum of horror that Gremlins came in through the doors of science and stole the truths of the decade, those truths elicited through expensive and careful planning of studies compliant with standards we equate with the Scientific Method. Indeed, what do we do with all of this, toss the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak?
Probably not. But what is sad is that most people, and it seems that even those who employ the method, even taking it to the bank, don’t quite understand the rules, or what results or lack of results, really means.

The Scientific Method does play itself out, sometimes repeatedly, with results that toss about theories and truths like tides, sometimes cyclically, and sometimes with tragic results. You have old moldy truths? That means that you missed something, something embedded in humanity’s code that may not now, or even in the near future, be ferreted out, even if it is staring its research teams in the face. In the meanwhile, though, there are practical issues and real people affected by wavering truths, especially in the realm of psychiatric medicine. But without replication of research as per the Scientific Method, the old moldy truths would stand as truth when it shouldn’t. It works, even if we don’t like how it works, or the speed at which it works, but the Gremlins, so to speak, have to also play by the rules.

One problem lies in how we process, analyze, and eventually use the information gleaned. Though we hope that the Scientific Method eliminates the squishiness of pseudoscience, Psychiatry’s intricacies of mind somewhat arbitrarily cut into territories that include neurology and psychology, it appears that negotiating the stuff of gray matter is still gray and squishy. Unlike strep throat, which is identified by the presence of a definable organism, schizophrenia and other like diagnoses are mostly diagnosed by observation of human behaviors and a relaying of human experience between patient and human physician, who then weighs those using parameters in a manual, currently the DSM-IV. There’s a lot of room for human error, if just in discerning degrees of the seriousness of whatever diagnosed illness in any particular person. And now we’ll have a new DSM (DSM-5) that will make everyone look as though they need these meds and more…just to cope with the stresses of where to stash the Old Worn Out Truth paperwork… but will those drugs work?

Not according to a recent review of accepted data that reveals our Gremlins of Flawed Research and Reporting regarding the efficacy of antidepressants. This Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics report being submitted to the FDA concludes that because ‘negative result’ trials were not reported alongside positive trial data, we need to reconsider current treatment plans for those who suffer from depression. Our Scientific Method may work just fine, but in the end, or even in the middle as the cycle agitates, its truth may not be not born forward on any reliable basis as scientist struggle with human fallibility in an arena where profits rule, grants for research are not evenly distributed, and the general public wants something new RIGHT NOW to add to its arsenal of fix-its.

How depressing…or maddening!

The New Yorker article goes on to explain some of the quirks associated with research, most of them humanly emotional, not scientific. After all, we’re not robots testing motor oil on metal as we put chemical effects on the human mind to the test . I sincerely hope that we reconsider, as a society, just how much reliance we put on the Scientific Method in exercising our own capabilities of critical thinking and free will. Perhaps our physicians might become less the authority and more the educators, giving us appropriate choices and updates when research doesn’t bear out consistent results over the long haul. Debunking old moldy truths is part of the Scientific Method we merely hope plays out to our advantage, but our own intellectual freedoms ought not to lose out to quirks and tampering.

The question in my mind is not about truth….unless it’s about timely disclosure from research facility to front page news. My big question is…do we understand the difference between actuality and reality and a scientific truth and…do those truths, as they are, serve us well enough to take for granted? As the new truths emerge, do we underestimate the human costs of the old truths and continue to ignore those people who claim that their medications are not working and blame their demise on their own lack of compliance, or worse…their own illness? Has the Scientific Method served them well? Probably not. Has it served us well across the board and in our daily lives? Well, I do like my synthetic motor oil and Microwave popcorn maker, but I’m ever so glad not to be taking the drugs in question. I wonder what method we’d use to hold researchers subject to their own truths and scientific scrutiny.

Back to the drawing board…but let’s not pretend that the madness is in the method. Bad science is just plain bad science.

Next: A culture based on bad science?

References:

1. Leher, J. The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method. New Yorker [serial online]. 2010 Dec 13 [cited 2011 Jan 26]; Sect. Annals of Science. [link]
2. Edmund Pigott, Allan M. Leventhal, Gregory S. Alter, John J. Boren (2010). Efficacy and Effectiveness of Antidepressants: Current Status of Research. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 2010;79:267-279. (DOI: 10.1159/000318293) [link]

Edit: My original post on this topic was too glib, hurried and as a result poorly presented.  I appreciate commenter thatsnotcanon for taking me to task on the tone and content of my original post and helping me vet my thinking on this.  I am duly chastened and I apologize to anyone I offended with the content of my original posting.  I have revised the post in the hopes that it makes my points more clearly and thoughtfully.

according to the Catholic Church . According to Pope Benedict, the Internet has a numbing effect on users and creates an “educational emergency – a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence.”

While responsible internet use is an important goal, it is not altogether settled in the research literature that the Internet “numbs” people or that it creates solitude.  I think Pope Benedict’s position is in keeping with a belief he has previously espoused that modernity in itself is isolating and numbing and that the church has a necessary role as a stalwart against the more egoistic and isolating aspects of a reason based culture.

While the Internet may not isolate or numb us, it does  promote is instantaneousness.   I imagine the Pope is concerned that having everything we want online when we want it might further lock us into a sense of the “good life” based on Benthamite notions of pain, pleasure and utility.  The “numbing” might serve to steer Catholics away from tradition, community and hierarchy…things to which the liberal enlightenment project has an uneasy relationship.  However, we’re not sure this is happening.  Research on Facebook users find that they are more likely to engage in off-line contact with friends when compared with non-Facebook users.

I think the Pope’s issue is with modernity, not with the Internet.  The Internet speeds up communication, but whether that communication is inherently numbing or anti-social is up to the content of the communication and the orientation and skill-set of the communicator. Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion comes to mind as a form of communication that seeks to push back against the “hardening of the heart.”  Indeed a commenter to my original post notes that the Catholic Church has its own active web presence.

I would hope the Pope turns from this initial critique of the Internet towards guiding Catholics and others towards ways in which the Internet can be used in ways that build community….ostensibly this is what he means by “creative intelligence.”  But we need more scholarship to gauge whether this is indeed a problem unique to the Internet.

I have been bad about posting…I will now be good. Thanks to Ken for holding down the fort!

Rahm Emanuel’s bid for Chicago mayor was off and now back on, thanks to the Illinois Supreme Court. Now, the campaign is taking aim at the opponents with slick ads bankrolled by a huge warchest. Carol Marin at the Chicago Sun-Times brings up some interesting points about Rahm’s rhetoric. This ad, “Hard Truths”, from earlier in the campaign says that city government isn’t about cronyism and getting rich off of the system::

His opponent, Gerry Chico, posted this, which calls into question Rahm’s role in the failure-ridden Freddie Mac:

Marin recounted questions directed at Emanuel at the mayoral debate. Co-moderator Bruce Dold asked him flat out about his receiving $320,000 to attend six meetings a year as a Freddie Mac board member—an appointment given to him by Bill Clinton, despite Emanuel having no finance experience. Marin had some hard truths of her own to point out to Emanuel:

One, Emanuel’s job on the Freddie Mac board was a high-end patronage job given to him by his former boss and friend, then-President Bill Clinton.

Two, Emanuel’s most recent boss and friend, the current president, has refused to release the minutes of Freddie Mac board meetings during Emanuel’s tenure.

Three, Rahm Emanuel is talented and smart. But not smart enough to see the potential hypocrisy in launching an ad about how clout-heavy politicians hand out jobs to their friends and not see himself in that story.

Strategically, this is a flop on his campaign’s part. He’s the frontrunner in the polls and making a stink out of patronage when he’s benefitted from it is pretty amateurish. Given the swirling of controversy over his “residency” eligibility to run, I think it would have been better for him to focus solely on a platform that shows that he’s in touch with the needs of Chicago.

Twitterversion:: [blog] #RahmEmanuel’s #Chicago mayoral bid’s back, but why is he running like he’s in a dogfight, not pack leader? http://goo.gl/C9rxh @ThickCulture

Watch while you can. Al Jazeera English is being streamed, but a media clampdown may shut it down. Police are said to be on the way to the Al Jazeera office. A 6PM local time curfew is impending.  Currently, a social media expert is explaining the overlap between Internet activists and protests. Take that, Malcolm Gladwell.

Updates::

An Illinois court, in a 2-1 vote, put Rahm Emanuel’s bid for Chicago mayor on hold [court opinion-pdf]. Rahm was the frontrunner in the polls and has been a fundraising juggernaut. The issue is whether he meets the one year residency requirement for the office, given he was living in the Washington DC as Obama’s Chief of Staff. The rationale behind the residency requirement is an attempt to ensure that the candidate knows the wants and needs of her/his constituents.

The court made various legal distinctions and ruled that he did not meet candidacy eligibility. While “carpetbagging” is nothing new in politics, the statutory laws in Illinois specify voter and candidate eligibility. While Rahm would be eligible to vote, he was not deemed eligible to be a candidate. His lawyers tried to use the remedy that he was in service of “business of the United States” as a reason for his not physically being in Chicago. The court interpreted the statute as only applying to voting.

While going after Rahm’s standing may be politically motivated, it nevertheless does bring up an interesting question on how the Illinois law should be interpreted. Proponents of allowing him on the ballot state that he is a Chicagoan and had every intent of returning to Chicago after his stint in Washington DC. Another argument is that it would be unfair to disallow his candidacy, likening his situation to a military person serving outside his home district and citing his history of being in Chicago.

On the other hand, is there something to the statute that requires a candidate for office to be physically present for a year in order to be eligible? Is Rahm somehow less qualified, possibly less in touch with his constituents, because he wasn’t in Chicago all year? Is this a matter of the rules being the rules and leaving the White House when he did, as opposed to earlier, was a risk he took on?

I feel he should have known better and if he knew he was going to run in February of 2010, he should have quit the White House then or at least have shown a commitment to being in the Chicago area on weekends, etc., between February of 2010 {or earlier} and when he moved to Chicago in October of 2010. Why? The statute is clear and him at least showing some commitment to being physically present shows a deference to the spirit of the law. Hindsight is 20/20 and nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Some pundits say Rahm is to big of a player to be benched on the sidelines. He’s pretty confident that he will prevail, but, then again, it’s Rahm talking.

Twitterversion:: [blog] Thoughts on the court decision taking #RahmEmanuel off the Chicago mayor ballot @ThickCulture

I was taking a break from a stack of work and watched a bit of the Australian Open on TSN here in Montréal. I saw the above attack ad by the Conservative Party of Canada, targeting Liberal Party of Canada leader Michael Ignatieff, and I was wondering if it was recycled, since the rhetoric was rather familiar. After some research, I saw that impolitical, who is always on top of these things, already blogged about the new campaign. In a phrase, “forced and desperate”. This ad is one of several attack ads on the CPC YouTube channel. I could analyze these ads but this overview in the National Post pretty much says what I wanted to say {also has the ads embedded in the post}.

I think strategically this crop of ads is phoning it in. Maybe PM Stephen Harper is believing the hype that he can eradicate the Liberals.  This “stay the course ad” doesn’t inspire and only makes sense if the Conservatives wanted to hold onto a comfortable majority in Parliament, not get one::

The rest of the ads represent, in my opinion, muddled thinking and a lack of strategic prowess. The attacks on Ignatieff are saying nothing new and border on making Stephen Harper and the Conservatives look like bullies. Attacking the NDP’s Jack Layton definitely makes Stephen Harper and the Conservatives look like bullies. Plus, here in Québec, the ads are targeting the Bloc’s Gilles Duceppe {in French, but you can get the drift with the on-screen text}::

Layton is a relatively popular leader of a relatively unpopular party. Attacking Layton, rather than the NDP, is an interesting way to go. I tend to agree with the conventional wisdom that a strong NDP erodes Liberal support by splitting the vote on the left, so attacking the NDP only makes sense if the objective is to get converts. If the strategy is to shift support from the NDP to the Conservatives, that’s an uphill battle. In 2010, those polled by EKOS who support the NDP are more likely to support {as a second choice} the Liberals, no other party, or the Greens, in that order, rather than the Conservatives. Attacking Duceppe on his home turf, as opposed to showing the positives of the Conservative Party for Québec, seems downright reckless. Bloc Québécois supporters’ second choice is no other party, the NDP, the Greens, and then the Liberals and Conservatives, in that order.

Over the holidays, I heard a pundit on CBC radio saying that it might be the end of the road for all of the party leaders including Harper. He hasn’t obtained a majority and if this is part of his bid to do so, I think it’s a risky strategy. The negativity runs the risk of coalescing ABC, anything but Conservative, sentiments and fostering strategic voting. While in the US there’s a call to tone down the negative rhetoric, the CPC is turning the heat up.

It’s always better to be lucky than good and I’ve always wondered when Harper’s luck would run out. With this advertising strategy, I wonder if his time is up.

As for the featured 2nd. round matches at the Australian Open, Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova advanced.

Twitterversion:: [blog+videos] The Offensive Offensive:: Conservative Attack Ads Target Ignatieff http://t.co/KOkTFPZ #ThickCulture

I’ve been observing the ideological war in the media in the wake of the Tucson tragedy and I’ve been wondering how Sarah Palin would respond to the fingerpointing regarding charges that her heated rhetoric may have played a role. Today, she responded with a video::

It will go down as the “blood libel” speech, as she used that loaded term to accuse the media of an unwarranted pointing of fingers at her.

Was this another gaffe -or- was this part of a very controlled and disciplined Sarah Palin who is taking upon the role as a leader? This WaPo article isn’t missing the fact that the video was a stark departure from her prior history of Tweets and Facebook updates, where she reacts with off the cuff “reflexive spasms”. The article ends with this::

“Republican operatives report that Palin has been calling around in recent weeks to seek advice not only on whether but how she should run for president in 2012. This statement might suggest she is not only seeking that counsel, but taking it as well.”

Hearing the video in its entirety, it uses very specific language invoking God and country to get her message across and frame it in a way that will resonate with her base and show she can “talk the talk” of sounding like a presidential candidate.

So, I don’t think the use of “blood libel” will be a gaffe, unless she plays into criticism of its use. I do wonder if a little contrition would have been a better tactic, in that her base is already sold on her, but contrition may have made inroads into support of the coveted moderates. I get a sense that a little of Palin’s feistiness goes a long way and showing a bit of humility could broaden her range without necessarily diluting her brand.

Another cheerless anniversary has arrived, this time in Port-au-Prince, destroyed by a massive earthquake one year ago today.  The media commemorated the first month and the sixth month after the earthquake, recounting the death and destruction and assessing the recovery.  Perhaps the most heartfelt approach to observing the grim event came from Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, writing in an opening comment in The New Yorker Magazine.

Danticat shared a Haitian voudou tradition about the souls of the dead slipping into the waters of rivers and streams.  They remain submerged there  for a year and a day until ritual prayer and songs lure them from their suspension and they are reborn.  Danticat tells us that the year-and-a-day tradition is seen among families who hold it as an obligation because it maintains a continuity that has kept Haitians linked to their ancestors for generations.

Because of the scandal of recent presidential elections that are believed in many quarters to be fraudulent, the slow recovery of Haiti from the earthquake has likewise been suspended.  If Haiti is to rise from the ruins, the deadlock must be addressed.  In many ways, the election symbolizes the continuing ritual of suffering experienced by Haitians for its entire existence, but it also offers the opportunity for the spirits of the nearly dead society to rise figuratively from the waters where they have floated for one year.

I bore witness last night to the earthquake anniversary from Port Sulphur, LA, where I’ve volunteering in a Katrina rebuild five years after the hurricane.  I reminded the other volunteers that today is the first anniversary of the horrible event.  In this way, I try to explain how important it is not to forget the the dead and survivors who struggle to restore and, with luck, improve Haiti.