Words can hurt: The casualties of social media

The news of late has included the very sad tale of a 12 year Florida girl who committed suicide, apparently at the behest of cyberbullies.  This article from The Verge speaks of other suicides and the lessons that could have been learned from the cautionary tale of Formspring.me, a (now defunct) Q&A site.

E. Nicole Thornton and I wrote about Formspring.me in an article entitled, "Governance within social media websites: Ruling new frontiers," which appeared in Telecommunications Policy in July 2012. Here, in standard academic jargon, is the abstract of that article:

Governance within social media websites can be evaluated in terms of conformity to or transgression of external legal requirements, social mores, and economic incentives. By examining social media websites as frontiers and heterotopias in which rule is indeterminate, this paper explores the way rule is established and changed. The authors illustrate this approach using the case of changing governance within Formspring.

The conclusion that we drew was that there's a kind of contestation between the owner of social media site, who sets rules through the terms of service and other statements, and the actual users, who create rules through their practices.  If something (i.e., cyberbullying) is done often and if those who do this are not (or are rarely) disciplined, then the implicit and meaningful rule becomes: Doing that is OK.  On Formspring and apparently on many other forms of social media, this translates as: Cyberbullying is an accepted practice.  Formspring's owners tried iteratively, but ultimately unsuccessfully to change that rule and to enforce a "no cyberbullying" rule.

Sadly -- and this story is nothing but sad -- the most recent news of more suicides further highlights the limits of the social media as a tool for engineering a better (more democratic, more peaceful, more connected) world.  The mainly false promise of social media as a tool for democratization was the subject of another fairly recent publication of mine: "I hear America Tweeting." 

(By the way, that article was submitted to the journal prior to the Arab Spring and was published well before the brittleness of democratic changes in the Arab world became apparent.)

In short, our social media are a reflection of the imperfections of our social life -- and sometimes also an intensification of those imperfections.



Thanks to EB for passing along the Verge article.

Told you so.... The risks to civil liberties from access to data

Quick comments, roughly written.

This week's revelations about Prism, code name for the US government's surveillance system for foreign electronic communications, and the collection of telephone call metadata from Verizon sounds really familiar.

In a paper I presented at the 2004 American Political Science Association meeting, I wrote:

Of questionable legitimacy are Echelon and Carnivore, two United States government programs that seek to extract information that people would like to keep secret: information related to national security and terrorists’ plans and information related to criminal activity.  Echelon is apparently a collaborative system used by the US, New Zealand, the UK, Australia, and Canada, that intercepts various kinds of electronic messages and uses computer routines to sift through the vast amounts of data looking for security-relevant keywords.  Questions have been raised about what kind of oversight is being used to make sure the civil liberties of citizens are not being infringed upon. 

            Similar questions have been raised for Carnivore, a way for the FBI to conduct surveillance of a suspect’s on-line activities.  Whether the law limits the FBI to collecting information in the headers or allows the collection of message content (which might reveal the private information of people who are not suspects) is not yet clear.  Civil rights advocates maintain that Carnivore potentially violates Constitutional protections against “unreasonable search and seizure”(American Civil Liberties Union 2003).  Because programs like Echelon and Carnivore are, themselves, secret, finding out what information they collect is problematic, and determining whether this is a just application of computer technology remains unclear.  

Prism sounds an awful lot like Echelon. Taking call metadata from Verizon for all calls (indiscriminately, without probable cause) sounds like Carnivore on steroids.

In my view, simply saying that Congress has oversight and the FISA court approved the programs does not answer the question of whether our civil liberties are being eroded.  Further, simply saying that a plot was thwarted does not answer that question either.  Not only does "success" not answer the civil liberties question, the fact (?) that there was success does not answer the counterfactual question of whether appropriate police work conducted without wholesale collection of the personal information of people who are not suspects could have resulted in the same positive end.

The Patriot Act is, I believe, more dangerous to us and our democracy than terrorists.  If we take away all the freedoms that are the soul of our country, there will be nothing to save from other threats.  A wholly totalitarian state may be the least risky in terms of vulnerability to terrorist attack, but such a state would be the antithesis of what the US is supposed to be.

Department of Justice's Unjust Policy: "Hire" lawyers without compensation

I find it completely outrageous that it is legal for the Department of Justice to post ads like this one:
http://www.justice.gov/careers/legal/jobs/12-wdnc-sausa-02.htm

The position is for

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
SPECIAL ASSISTANT UNITED STATES ATTORNEY (UNCOMPENSATED)
UNITED STATES ATTORNEY'S OFFICE
WESTERN DISTRICT OF NORTH CAROLINA
12-WDNC-SAUSA-02

Notice the "Uncompensated"!  This is a volunteer job.  But this is not a job for a young college student or someone still learning in law school.

Qualifications: Required qualifications: Applicants must possess a J.D. degree, be an active member of the bar (any jurisdiction), and have at least two (2) years post-J.D. experience.

This is for a grown up.  The qualified applicant will be at least 27 years old.  The qualified applicant is someone who ought to be earning an appropriate wage for work done, someone who ought to be starting a family, someone who ought to be building his or her retirement savings and maybe even saving for a home.

Further, you can't use your legal skills in a second job and you don't even get any help with moving expenses:

Note: Employees of the Department of Justice, including uncompensated Special Assistant United States Attorneys, may not engage in the compensated practice of law outside the office. Attorneys are not eligible to serve as Special Assistant United States Attorneys if they have had an employment offer deferred by a law firm and received a payment for the period of their deferral with the expectation of future employment with the law firm, or if they will receive any payment from a law firm during their unpaid employment with the Department of Justice. In addition, contractors, including employees of contractors who do business with the Department of Justice, and who also are attorneys, are not eligible to serve as uncompensated Special Assistant United States Attorneys.

Location: The duty location is Charlotte, North Carolina.

Relocation Expenses: Relocation expenses will not be paid.

DOJ would simply get the Chutzpah Award if it weren't for the fact that young people routinely apply and compete for these jobs, buying into the idea that they need to dig themselves (deeper) into debt and provide slave labor for a period of time in order to get "experience"  and then be more employable.

I don't expect wet-behind-the-ears attorneys to get six digit incomes, but I do expect them (and everyone working person, for that matter) to earn a living wage.

The ethical issue here is grave, in my view, for all new lawyers trying to find jobs.  It is especially grave for those without trust funds.

Global Political Economy and the body

I wrote a post on a shared blog I co-author, An Embodied World, that has relevance for this generally GPE-focused blog:
Putting the human body (back) in GPE 

A personal post: my weight loss

I normally use this blog for commenting on global political economy issues, and I tweet my posts to publicize.  This post is more personal: Nothing embarrassing, nothing that I am unwilling to share with friends and acquaintances and even strangers, but certainly not professional.

Over the past year, I have lost a lot of weight tracking my food intake and exercise.  This has been gradual, so people who see me every day may not really notice.  But I posted a picture of my new self on Facebook, and people who haven't seen me for a while are astonished.  It's a big change.

Lots of people have asked how I did it.  The short answer is by carefully tracking my food intake and exercise using myfitnesspal.com, which I can access on my computer, my cell phone, and my tablet.  The longer answer has to do with my relationship to food and exercise.

First came a more serious commitment to exercise several years ago.  My goal has been at least ½ hour cardio exercise 5 days a week.  I decided I deserved to enjoy exercise: I deserve to enjoy "play-outs," not suffer through workouts.  I enjoy listening to music, watching TV, or reading for pleasure (magazines, junky novels) while walking on the treadmill, peddling an exercise bike, or using the elliptical.  We purchased both a treadmill and an elliptical, both strategically placed near TV screens. Even better is walking around a track (more comfortable than a treadmill), so I knew I wanted to join a gym.  When we moved to Baltimore and I joined the Hopkins faculty, I quickly discovered that the recreation center on campus has something that makes it truly wonderful: separate dressing rooms for faculty/staff.  I figure I can exercise with my students, but I was not going to shower and change clothes in the same dressing room.  Combine that with a really reasonable cost for faculty, and I was sold.  Oh, it's not glamorous, but it has what I need.  There are treadmills, exercise bikes, and an indoor track. A typical exercise session might be connecting my phone to the wifi and then accessng  Pandora's "cardio dance radio," and off I go around the track: 30 minutes of not working, just enjoying the music and walking along.  That's 30 minutes of fun that I simply deserve in my life. 

It was important to me, too, to realize that the gym was not just for perfect, already fit and skinny people.  It's not just that I was not the only person there with extra poundage, nor was I the only person walking (and not running) around the track.  It was more fundamental than that. I decided that I had a right to my play-out sessions.  I belong in the gym just like everyone else there.

More fun was to be had when a Zumba class for faculty and staff started on campus.  I'm a regular every Monday.  More recently, a sophomore started an Israeli dance group at Hillel.  I'm a regular there, too.  And as I started losing weight, I began to combine my walks around the track with a little bit of running and strength training.

My changes in diet started after I started exercising more.  An ophthalmologist told me that my migraines were being caused by the aspartame from all the Diet Coke and other aspartame sweetened things I was consuming.  Well, I wasn't sure if he was right, but I decided to give up aspartame to see what would happen.  I told my internist about his advice, and her response was: "No one has ever shown that people lose weight because of artificial sweeteners.  Your body knows what to do with ordinary sugar.  It does not know what to do with the chemicals in artificial sweeteners that produce super sweetness."  At about the same time, I read an article summarizing research that suggested that artificial sweeteners make us crave more sweet stuff, not less.  So, I decided to give up all zero calorie artificial sweeteners.  I also, to the extent possible, eliminated high fructose corn syrup from my diet.  It, too, is manufactured to be extra sweet.  I made one other diet change: At my husband's urging, I started trying to buy products with lower sodium content.

I did not switch from diet to regular soda.  Instead, I gave up soda, except for seltzer (which I love), either plain, with a squeeze of lemon, or with a little fruit juice.  We bought a SodaStream seltzer maker.  I also make pitchers of iced tea.  If I want it sweetened (and I often don't), I limit the sugar or honey to 1 teaspoon per 12 ounces or so.  That takes the bitter edge off the tea and makes it a little sweet, but not overly so. 

With these changes, I started tasting flavors better: more flavors became apparent when my senses weren't overloaded with salty and sweet flavors.  That appealed to my inner foodie!

Then, Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food, came out and was covered widely in the press.  Full disclosure: I never actually read the book, but I did read the summary:  "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And:  "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food."  This really resonated with me.  I know enough about the political economy of the American and global food industry to understand how the interests of Big Agribusiness skew policies that structure food supply in the US market to be cheap and "processed."  Added sweeteners and salt in those processed products is one part of the story.  Other additives are another part.  So, to the extent possible, I started eliminating additives from my diet.  (Trader Joe's has been quite helpful here, though a lot of its food is still too high in sodium.) By changing the quality of the ingredients I used, the food I prepared started tasting even better.

That was sufficient incentive to get me to bring my lunch to work most days.  For my beverage I drink hot tea in the colder weather, and I bring 20 oz. glass bottles of homemade iced tea for warmer weather.  (Aquasana glass water bottles are perfect for this purpose.)  Sometimes my lunch is dinner leftovers; sometimes it's a sandwich or a can of sardines and crackers.  I always toss in some fruit and usually some sort of vegetable. I bring healthy snacks along, too.  Eight nuts is a surprising good pick-me-up.

In general, I began cooking more "from scratch," but I have been taking only a little more time to cook because I'm cooking simple, tasty things.  Instead of opening a jar of spaghetti sauce, I started to quickly make my own sauce, often using pre-chopped onions or mirepoix from Trader Joe's.  (Quickly sauté some onions or mirepoix in olive oil, add garlic [either crushed, chopped cloves or garlic powder], add plenty of dried oregano, toss in a bay leaf, then add a can or two of no salt added chopped tomatoes. Add some no salt added tomato paste, if desired.  Presto: Nice, chunky, flavorful tomato sauce that can be used for many purposes.) 

To this point, I was making behavioral changes for getting more physically fit and eating "purer," tastier food.  I wasn't losing weight, though I did lose an inch or so from getting more muscle.  I did not gain weight even though I stopped using artificial sweeteners.

Then, last March, I had to have a medical treatment that usually results in weight gain for me.  I decided I was going to do something to avoid gaining weight this time around.  I searched online for a calorie log and found the USDA's Supertracker program, which I could use online and as an app on my Android devices.  I started recording everything I ate and my exercise, and something completely miraculous occurred:

I started losing instead of gaining weight while on this treatment.

This wasn't hard.  I was already eating pretty healthy foods, and by using the tracking program I realized that I needed to carefully measure and weigh to get the portions right.  If I ate a cup of ice cream, I entered a cup of ice cream and I could see immediately how that contributed to a reasonably balanced diet (calories, nutrients).  Then I realized that a half of a cup of ice cream still meant I got to eat ice cream, but the smaller amount fit better into my daily nutritional profile. And so it went.  If I want spaghetti, I weigh out a 2 oz portion.  I can eat what I want in moderation.

Supertracker is great, and I do recommend it because it really gives a full picture of nutritional value of foods, but when I found myfitnesspal.com, I switched.  Myfitnesspal crowdsources nutritional information.  If I enter "Trader Joe's sunflower salted" into the search field, up pops "Trade Joe's Roasted and Salted Sunflower Seeds," with all the nutritional information from the package, which had already been added by a fellow user of the program.  Also, I can type in the ingredients of my own recipe and add that to the stored information on my account.

One thing to be careful about with myfitnesspal is that it keys your recommended food intake to your exercise.  If you have your settings set to lose about a pound a week and you don't exercise on a particular day, myfitnesspal will tell you eat only 1200 calories.  If you do exercise, the recommended calorie count will be closer to 1400.  I know that 1400 is a minimum for me, and 1450 is even better.  I was not in a race.  In fact, I initially suggested to myself that three years would be a reasonable amount of time to take off the weight I wanted to lose for my health.  Instead, it took me slightly less than one year, but I was careful not to go too fast.  And I'm careful to eat a balanced diet.

A month or two after I started tracking my calories, I read news reports about how this method was the best for losing weight and maintaining weight loss.  Yay!  I had stumbled on a winner.

But for this method to work, one needs to really track.  I measure and weigh.  I bought a digital food scale, extra measuring cups, and extra measuring spoons.  I write down everything, even if it's a day when I indulged and blew my calorie budget.  I am brutally honest with myself.  I try to record breakfast and lunch by mid afternoon.  That way I know what my afternoon snack and dinner budget will be.  I try not to eat too late at night.  I also try to spread my calories out through the day so I don't leave most of them until dinner, as tempting as that might be.

Back in September, I saw a Living Social offer for half-priced body composition testing, metabolic rate testing and nutritional counseling at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Weight ManagementClinic.  By this point, I had lost quite a bit of weight and was about two thirds of the way to what I assumed was a healthy goal, but I wasn't really sure of what my goal should be.  I bought the offer and had a very interesting appointment.  Being able to bring my food diary, printed out from myfitnesspal, made it much easier for the nutritionist to counsel me.  On balance I was doing pretty well.  The trainer recommended that I add strength training to my exercise routine (I have done so) and the results of the body composition and metabolic rate tests allowed for more precise recommendations about weight goals and appropriate calorie counts to get me there.  The nutritionist checked over my food diary and found it well balanced, reassured me that slower weight loss was normal as I neared my goal, recommended that I not eat most of my calories at dinner, and suggested I limit myself each day to either alcohol (i.e., a glass of wine with dinner) or a dessert (I make a bittersweet hot cocoa), but not both.  She also told me that I would probably always need to track my food intake, perhaps not every day once I reach my goal, but most days.  Also, I would never be one of those mythical people who gets to eat 2000 calories a day.  1500 or 1600 would probably be my limit. 

By the end of January, I met my goal.  I have never been this thin in my adult life before.  I was heavier than this for most, if not all, of high school.  I am not skinny, but I am at a healthy weight and a good level of fitness.

When I look back on my path, I see that I actually made lots of changes over a long period of time.  I have come to believe that cheap, super sweet and/or salty food is poison, whether the sweetener has calories or not.  Those of us with a familial (nature or nurture or both) predisposition toward obesity are constantly being sabotaged by food advertising, packaging, contents, etc. 

My advice to those who want to lose weight:

Eat good food only.  Quality matters.  Retrain your palate to taste real food, and avoid dulling your ability to taste by consuming  too much salt or sweeteners.

Eat good food in appropriate quantities. Measure and weigh.

Exercise not because it's a chore that has to get done, but because it's fun to move and it's something you get to do even if you are really busy.  It's a break that we get to have not because we earned it but just because we are human.

Making a small change is better than not making any changes.

Exercising for five minutes is better than not exercising at all.

Scrupulously logging food and exercise every day using websites and apps really does work, but you have to actually fill out the log.

Don't try to lose weight quickly. 

Learn how to make simple, tasty dishes from scratch quickly.

Vegetables are great.  They have a low calorie density, and they taste good.

Make room in your calorie budget for a little bit of chocolate (if you like chocolate).  For me, bittersweet cocoa (8 oz of low fat, lactose free milk, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 2 heaping tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa) does the trick.

Focus on health goals.  I think that the science suggests that a modest weight loss that you can maintain is healthier than a big weight loss that you can't.

And one other thing.  This is not the only way.  This worked for me.  Someone else I know has had a similarly dramatic weight loss not counting calories, but instead using the "paleo diet."

PG County Board of Education: Are you crazy???

Answer: Apparently.  See:
This and this.

The Prince Georges County (Maryland) Board of Education is trying to assert ownership of the copyright of employees' & students' works in a REALLY broadly construed way.  In addition to claiming copyright on what could reasonably considered "works for hire," such as the school system's website, the Board wants to claim ownership of copyright for basically anything that educators create for the classroom (like their lesson plans, handouts, and bulletin board displays), regardless of whether the work is produced during work hours and on school property or elsewhere.  Furthermore, any works created by employees OR STUDENTS "during school/work hours, with the use of school system materials, and within the scope of an employee's position or student's classroom work assignment(s) are the properties of the Board of Education."

There are just so many things wrong with this.

First of all, if the policy works you could have all sorts of stupid scenarios:

• "I'm sorry, Mommy.  We made valentines for you in art today, but we're not allowed to give them to you because they belong to the school."
• That essay you were going to send in with your college application as a writing sample?  Sorry!  It was a class assignment and you researched it during period 4 using the school system's resources.  It's not yours and you are not authorized to make a copy of it to send to the college of your dreams (or to any other college for that matter).
• Sure the school will let you publish that novel that started as a class writing assignment.  Perhaps the school will even allow you to have a small percentage of the royalties!  (The idea that students might publish works that started as school projects is not as far fetched as it seems.  The Washington Post article I linked to above refers to a book, written "in elementary school for a project" that the young authors published.)

Second, what happens to the teachers who move to another school district? Do they have to recreate all their teaching materials from scratch?

Third, such sweeping claims of copyright are counter-productive. Why should students think about heeding appropriate copyright restrictions when they are faced with such ridiculous ones?

Fourth, this is total chutzpah.  By what right can the Board of Education simply tell students that they do not have rights to their own work? (The situation with employees seems more complex to me because of work for hire rules.) Students have no reasonable alternative if they are unhappy with the Board's usurpation of their rights.  It's not like a contract where they can either agree to the terms or go elsewhere.  (Yes, I know private school is a possibility, but it's not a realistic option for the vast majority of students.)  On the bright side, I suspect that this law is likely not going to stand up to court challenges.  From the Washington Post article linked to above:

Peter Jaszi, a law professor with the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic at American University, called the proposal in Prince George’s “sufficiently extreme.”
Jaszi said the policy sends the wrong message to students about respecting copyright. He also questioned whether the policy, as it applies to students, would be legal.
He said there would have to be an agreement between the student and the board to allow the copyright of his or her work. A company or organization cannot impose copyright on “someone by saying it is so,” Jaszi said. “That seems to be the fundamental difficulty with this.”

Peter, in his lawyerly way, politely points out the problems with the policy.  I'll be less polite: This is a stupid, stupid policy.  And I'm hoping that Peter and his colleagues will litigate this if the Board of Education doesn't quickly revoke the new rules.

And finally, I'll immodestly add in a link to my book, Knowledge Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy, for those interested in an introduction to the history, politics, and global political economy of intellectual property rights.

Missed opportunity to STEM the decrease in US innovative capacity

The US used to have a lot of students going into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.  That is no longer the case, which is rather disastrous for US innovative capacity.
 
BUT US universities remain extremely attractive to foreign students pursuing graduate degrees these fields, and these students would often prefer to remain in the US after the completion of their studies.  Unfortunately, it is rather difficult for them to do so, given current immigration law.  Congress failed to act to fix this problem. The bill, HR 6429, introduced by Lamar Smith (R-TX), as far as I can tell without reading it really carefully, was a corrupted version of a Democrat-sponsored bill -- corrupted in a way that would reduce opportunities for legal immigration, so Democrats voted against it.

Some conservative commentators also opposed the bill that was voted on because they said, that would make it more difficult for US students to get in to STEM graduate programs.  There's just one problem with this logic: The US students are not there.  There are not enough qualified US students applying for   graduate school in STEM fields to take up the available slots.

Here's the emailed blurb from the AAAS that I received:

STEM Jobs Act Fails in House. Last week the House of Representatives failed to pass a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) immigration bill introduced by Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX). The STEM Jobs Act of 2012 (H.R. 6429) would have replaced the current system of awarding permanent residency visas via a lottery system with one that would award visas to foreign nationals who have earned a Ph.D. or master's degree from a U.S. university in a STEM field. Smith's bill was introduced after negotiations over broader immigration reform failed, but there are hopes that some compromise may be reached during the post-election lame-duck session. A competing approach that would maintain both a lottery visa system and a STEM-degree visa system was Rep. Zoe Lofgren's (D-CA) bill, the Attracting the Best and Brightest Act of 2012 (H.R. 6412). Ultimately, the Smith bill became caught in a political divide over the importance of maintaining the existing lottery system which benefits immigrants from developing countries such as Africa. Smith's bill received 257 votes in support, with 158 opposed, but the measure fell 20 votes short of the two-thirds majority that was required by having the bill rushed to the House floor without committee approval.

More information can be found here:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/09/stem-visa-bill-falls-short-in-us.html?ref=hp

I hope something gets accomplished in the lame duck session.  Sending really smart physics PhDs and engineers with MS degrees back to China because we don't want to allow them to stay in this country is a policy that ought to be changed.

Yes, there is a global political economy side to all this.  Ibn Khaldun, a 14th century social theorist, would not have been surprised at how the US is slipping relative to the rest of the world in innovative capacity. That happens to polities, Ibn Khaldun would argue, once the people get comfortable with their lives.  Americans are rich and comfortable.  We're not as driven as we used to be.  The Cold War is no longer providing a rationale to invest in STEM fields in order to beat the Soviets; the comfortable standard of living that we have (for the most part) and the continuing myth of US leadership in tech fields means that we don't have a compelling incentive to push ahead further relative to the rest of the world.  We're happy to rest on our laurels.  And that, Ibn Khaldun would argue, is a sign of a declining polity.  I am enough of an economic nationalist to want the US to be a STEM leader in the world.  On the other hand, I am not interested in a renewal of the Cold War, and my laurels seem pretty comfy.  (I didn't pursue a STEM field!)  So is there a way to escape the creeping mediocrity that Ibn Khaldun predicts?  Is encouraging immigration of tech savvy folks the answer?  I think it is at least part of the answer, especially in a globalized world in which corporations are increasingly likely to outsource R&D.