HIPAA was written specifically to ensure that medical records are not passed around without the patient's consent.
...or so, any normal person would believe.
Based on my conversations with lawyers, I would say that the HIPAA laws were written specifically to ensure that hospitals could disclose medical records to law enforcement without incurring any liability.
When politicians want to do something particularly outrageous, they use Orwellian language. They call it the "Privacy Rule" because it takes away your privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person.
If you want something to be private and confidential, don't let it go in your medical record.
A lawyer once told me that a medical record is a "public document." It's accessable to everyone with a "need to know," and that includes the janitor who mops up your room and is concerned about infections.
The Soviet Union, China, and most Communist countries had 99% literacy.
TGetting to 99% literacy is trivial if we do it the way the communists did it: Just put the same people responsible for educating the children, in charge of also measuring the results. It is amazing the results you can achieve if you just let people evaluate themselves.
I've seen that 99% figure by so many people from so many different perspectives, pro-communist, anti-communist and neutral, that it seems to be true. Loren Graham of MIT, who was probably the best-informed US expert on Soviet science, said that they were failing in most other things, but they were very successful in education. You can condemn the Soviets for a lot of things, but their education system, and literacy rate, isn't one of them.
The final proof is the Soviet emigres who came to the US. I've met a lot of them, and the students told me that the US schools were a year behind them.
I think it's partly extreme nearsightedness in seeing the world. "What's good for General Motors is good for America."
They see their business as the only business in the world that counts, and of course America should sacrifice children to the computer God. What else counts in the world?
You will never get ALL kids to read. You will rapidly run into diminishing returns, and spend huge sums on one-on-one training of retards, and even then some of them will never get it.
The Soviet Union, China, and most Communist countries had 99% literacy.
I'm a chicken processor. I think all kids should learn to pluck chickens in the 4th grade. That way I can hire cheap chicken pluckers. Until I decide to outsource them to Vietnam.
The "right to vote yourself communist" translates to "the all-too common practice of a large chunk of the population following a demagogue into dictatorship."
The alternative that Kissinger advocated was the practice of having a foreign power (the US) overthrow a democratically-elected government that he believed was a communist dictatorship.
The dictators they replace are no better (but probably no worse, when you measure actual health and wealth of the average person, and maybe better.) There is little freedom in either case.
I believe that there is more freedom when a population makes a decision based on a vote, than when the decision is imposed on them by a foreign power.
Some people could reasonably choose communism over the alternatives. According to first-hand stories from the Wall Street Journal, many Afghans preferred the communist regime to the Taliban.
The CIA isn't a terrorist organization. They are the ones protecting your rights to say stupid things on the Internet and allowing Allu Akbar from chopping your head off for belonging to the wrong religious group.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/... Mapped: The 7 Governments the U.S. Has Overthrown. Yes, we now have confirmation that the CIA was behind Iran's 1953 coup. But the agency hardly stopped there. By J. Dana Stuster August 20, 2013
“I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” -- Henry Kissinger
Terrorism isn't in the eyes of the beholder, it's in the act of the beheader.... Who slaughter villages full of people for being insufficiently the right way about some particular twist or turn of believing in magic and some specific flavor of fantasy mythology.
The Feds have been known to choose where to deem a computer/internet crime occurred to favor jurisdictions where they feel they have the best chance of a favorable outcome.
I liked it because I can use it as an example of how investigational drugs touted as miracle cures don't work, and how the conspiracy theories of the FDA/pharmaceutical industry suppressing useful drugs are all wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Polygraph tests have one ability. If suspects can be interrogated without a lawyer present, they could be subject to questions that a lawyer would never permit. They can ask, "Have you ever stolen anything from an employer?" They can ask, "Have you ever watched pirated movies?" They can use the Reid Technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to get a false confession.
Thirdly, because many of the people in jail or prison weren't actually guilty http://www.innocenceproject.or... , or were there because of behavior that shouldn't be a crime in the first place.
Well, they *are* vulnerable, because they operate outside the law and can be exploited by criminals You don't think that a prostitute you've paid $300 gets to keep that money? Almost all of that goes to the pimp.
Freelancing women are targets for beatings by pimps because they threaten the pimp's income. And what are they supposed to do, go to the cops and say "This guy is trying to steal my prostitution business?"
Once a prostitute is in the clutches of a pimp, she's not free to leave to business either. Even if she wants to move to a different city, if the pimp keeps her in place by threats to her friends and family.
And not every prostitute is a prostitute by choice. There are runaways who fall into a pimp's control; rural foreigners who are tricked into thinking they're immigrating to the US for a high-paying (by their standards) domestic service job.
Understand I have no issues with prostitution per se, but I have a big problem with slavery, and in any system where prostitutes operate outside the protection of the law it's a given that most of them are de facto slaves.
I'd like supporting evidence for that. That sounds more like a tabloid TV show than the results of research done by criminologists.
We all know how Nicholas Kristof's reporting on the supposed "sexual slavery" fell apart. Other studies of so-called sexual exploitation, forcing women into sex work, and forcing minors into prostitution have similarly fallen apart when they were investigated by social scientists who were trained to get the facts.
When somebody is running an anti-prostitution organization, some of which have budgets of $1 million or more from government and private grants, they have a strong motivation to exaggerate and lie about the problem, and they've often been caught exaggerating and lying.
Similarly, when a commercial sex worker (the public health term) gets arrested for prostitution (the prosecutor's term), they have a choice: they can admit that they are voluntarily engaging in this business because that was the best way they could make money, and become criminals who go to jail; or they can claim that they were forced into it, enslaved and exploited by pimps and johns, and become victims who cooperate with the prosecutors, has all the charges dismissed, becomes a client of a social service agency that gets her housing, work and education, and sometimes gets citizenship as a political refugee rather than being deported as a criminal. So they also have a strong motivation to tell the prosecutors what they want to hear.
Suppose I assume for purposes of argument that it's explotation for a woman to make $300 a night as a sex worker. Is it also exploitation for a woman to make $300 a week as a minimum-wage fast-food worker or hotel worker making beds and scrubbing floors? I would say they're both explotiation, and a woman has a right to decide which exploitation she prefers. If you really want to stop commercial sex work, do what Mao did and provide the sex workers with better jobs and living conditions. That would take public money.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/06... Why Did Nicholas Kristof Believe Somaly Mam's Lies? The roots and consequences of a deception. Jesse Walker Jun. 3, 2014
Last week, Somaly Mam resigned from the foundation she co-founded seven years ago. Mam, dubbed "the James Frey of anti–sex trafficking activism" by my colleage Elizabeth Nolan Brown, achieved her fame by telling the world that she had been forced to work in a Cambodian brothel as a child and that her group rescued girls who had suffered a similar fate. For several years, journalists have been questioning many of Mam's claims. Those investigations culminated last month in a devastating Newsweek piece that showed Mam had lied repeatedly both about her own life and about the experiences of the people she says she rescued. One of the latter
It matters because they claimed that "trending" was determined by computer algorithms that analyzed what people were actually talking about, but that turned out to be a lie: they were instead determined by people, who necessarily have a bias.
It matters because it artificially shapes how people see the world. Facebook isn't just "a news site" it's also a site that - in theory - shows you how your friends view the world. Except it turns out that conservative views were being censored on Facebook.
This was written by a right-wing wacko who didn't bother to read the Guidelines (which FB posted on the Internet), who doesn't understand how newspapers work, who thinks everybody is conspiring against him, and who libelously accuses people of telling a "lie" when they merely disagree with him, or because he doesn't understand the issues.
(They would override the algorithm if it is obviously a junk topic, like "Pizza rolls," which has no association to a real-world event.)
P. 9
National Story: You should mark a topic as a "National Story" importance if it is among the 1-3 top stories of the day. We measure this by checking if it is leading in at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA TODAY, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BuzzFeed News.
So that's when the human editors intervene -- when the algorithms deliver a high-ranking topic like "Pizza rolls", because it took over on Reddit, they need human editors who can understand it's not a real news story.
A topic does become a national story if it's leading in Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and one other major news source. Fox News and the WSJ should be conservative enough for anybody.
This story came about because, in an attempt to provide balance and objectivity, FB commendably hired a diversity of editors, including conservatives, to make these judgment calls.
The conservative editors didn't like it, because FB's stories weren't conservative as they wanted. Duh. They're conservatives. The rest of the world isn't as conservative as they are. They'll never be satisfied unless it looks like Breitbart or Washington Times.
It's hard to tell from the Gizmodo story exactly what FB stories were censored. http://gizmodo.com/former-face... But it's easy to look at the FB guidelines and see that there are good, reasonable journalistic reasons for selecting or not selecting them.
If you read the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, you'd know that marijuana didn't even increase the risks of crashes and fatalities.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2014 Jan; 75(1): 56â"64. PMCID: PMC3893634 Drugs and Alcohol: Their Relative Crash Risk Eduardo Romano, Ph.D.,a,* Pedro Torres-Saavedra, Ph.D.,b Robert B. Voas, Ph.D.,a and John H. Lacey, M.P.H.a
Abstract
Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine (a) whether among sober (blood alcohol concentration [BAC] =.00%) drivers, being drug positive increases the drivers' risk of being killed in a fatal crash; (b) whether among drinking (BAC >.00%) drivers, being drug positive increases the drivers' risk of being killed in a fatal crash; and (c) whether alcohol and other drugs interact in increasing crash risk.
Method: We compared BACs for the 2006, 2007, and 2008 crash cases drawn from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) with control drug and blood alcohol data from participants in the 2007 U.S. National Roadside Survey. Only FARS drivers from states with drug information on 80% or more of the drivers who also participated in the 2007 National Roadside Survey were selected.
Results: For both sober and drinking drivers, being positive for a drug was found to increase the risk of being fatally injured. When the drug-positive variable was separated into marijuana and other drugs, only the latter was found to contribute significantly to crash risk. In all cases, the contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk was significantly lower than that produced by alcohol.
Conclusions: Although overall, drugs contribute to crash risk regardless of the presence of alcohol, such a contribution is much lower than that by alcohol. The lower contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk relative to that of alcohol suggests caution in focusing too much on drugged driving, potentially diverting scarce resources from curbing drunk driving.
Unfortunately, imitating the style of Ayn Rand and Cicero's oration against Cataline is not a good way to write about scientific studies.
I read about a dozen medical journal studies a week, and the kind of objections that the Justice Department raised, about racial identifications, are perfectly legitimate and would usually appear in a "Limitations of this study" section of a major journal.
I would have liked to see the study, which Mac Donald says was posted on the Internet by the Bergen Record and finally released (as it should be, under FOIA). But Mac Donald didn't give the full name of the report, or enough information that I could find it on the Internet. I did try to find it under the name of the author she mentions, Robert Voas, but I couldn't get it that way either. So she goes on complaining about how a study was suppressed, and then when it was released, she doesn't tell me how I can get it.
So as a result of Mac Donald, I wasted an hour trying to find the article she wanted to publicize.
It wasn't a complete waste, because I found one of Voas' articles on the topic of this Slashdot story. Drugs and Alcohol: Their Relative Crash Risk Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs 75(1):56-64 Â January 2014â
How about the old fashioned way, we punish people for reckless driving and accidents. The officer can ticket for reckless driving at his discretion already.
That's right. The officer at his discretion can ticket you for not signaling a turn 500 feet before the turn, particularly if the driver is black and the county is making a lot of money from traffic tickets.
There have been randomized, controlled trials in criminology.
For example there were studies in Boston during the heyday of psychoanalysis which divided what were called "juvenile delinquents" into a group that got psychoanalysis and a group that got the usual treatment such as social work counseling. Psychoanalysis was no more effective than usual treatment.
Another study randomized teenagers into a group that received the DARE anti-drug program and a group that did not; the group that received the DARE program did worse than the control group.
What they prove is that the conventional wisdom was wrong.
There have also been studies for example in health care which found that insurance policy holders didn't act according to their financial incentives as economists predicted. For example, when they increased co-payments, policy holders reduced economically efficient preventive care, and cost the insurer more money over a year or two.
I do read studies by criminologists which may not have controlled trials in JAMA and Nature, but those studies are peer-reviewed by experts in the field who understand experimental design and the limitations of statistics. I don't have any confidence in the NBER, Steven Levitt, or Daniel Kessler understanding experimental design.
No, I said that Ms. magazine was biased towards an advertising client, the cigarette industry. That was true of all the womens' magazines and most of the consumer magazines that took cigarette advertising, including Playboy. (The big articles on smoking and health were in the Readers Digest and Consumer Reports, which had no advertising.)
The political bias I referred to was the WSJ's bias against Democrats and for Republicans and Republican policies, after Murdoch took over, as documented in that link I gave.
Before Murdoch took over, the WSJ was one of the few places where I could find uncomplimentary information about big advertisers, like the auto industry and the cigarette industry. The WSJ was profitable enough, and their advertising was diverse enough, that they could afford to tell advertisers to go ahead and cancel their ads if they didn't like a news story. They also had the support of the Bancroft family, which owned the WSJ, and was committed to that kind of journalism.
I would follow up the accusation with more or less vigor depending on the supporting evidence.
For example, I once sat in a library and went through 12 years of Ms. magazine counting the pages of cigarette advertising (several pages in each issue), and looking for an article on smoking and health (none). Then I called Ms. magazine to make sure I hadn't missed anything (I hadn't).
Whenever I write about something I have strong feelings about, I make a particular effort to talk to people I disagree with, and get their best argument. About half the time they have something useful to say. Sometimes they convince me to change my mind.
News media start with a huge flow of information, and go through a process of tremendous condensation. Researchers who examined newspaper newsrooms found that 1 press release out of 10 or 100 made it into the newspapers at all; now it's probably more like 1 out of 100 or 1,000. If Facebook is listing the top 100 stories that day, they're choosing 100 stories out of the entire enormous volume of news (maybe hundreds of thousands of stories) that day. Most of the stories you like won't get in.
I personally like to read stories on the extreme of the right and left (which is why I used to read the WSJ editorial page), but it's a reasonable editorial decision to give greater weight to CNN or The New York Times (or Fox News) than Breitbart, and to select stories that have appeared in 3 or 4 major news sources already (as Wikipedia encourages). So maybe CPAC don't get the coverage a conservative would like, but single payer health care doesn't get the coverage a social democrat would like.
But the bottom line is that they did hire conservative journalists, so it seems as if they were making an effort to get a diversity. Now the conservative journalists are complaining that Facebook didn't give as much coverage to conservative stories as they would like.
Well, yeah, they're conservatives. Non-conservatives would have a different news judgment. That's why you try to get a diversity of editors.
They don't give any objective statistics, which is relatively easy to do in these days of text search engines. How many times did "Rand Paul" appear in the Facebook feed, and how many times did it appear in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times? How does Facebook compare to Google and Yahoo News? If I saw some data they might convince me. Without data, it's just unsupported whining.
If Facebook is merely reflecting the major news media, then their complaint is with the major news media, not Facebook. And their complaint is with the readers who click on those news stories in the major news media. You like the free market? That's the judgment of the free market.
Newspapers - holy god, have you never read the WSJ?
I know something about the WSJ. I read them for 30 years. I was a journalist, I ran into their reporters, and I used to pick up stories from the WSJ all the time, adding my own reporting, and frequently interviewed/fact checked the same sources they interviewed.
For all that time, the WSJ had an uncanny reputation among left and right for objective, accurate, unbiased reporting that was not influenced by their advertisers or publisher. That was unusual in the news business. One of their reporters, A. Kent MacDougal, wrote a great article for Monthly Review about how he, as a socialist, could write anything he wanted as long as he backed it up with facts.
The great moment that established the WSJ's credibility was when in the 1950s they got a leak of General Motors' new cars, and GM didn't want them printed. GM threatened to cancel all their advertising in the WSJ if they printed it. The WSJ printed it. GM cancelled their ads. GM needed the WSJ more than the WSJ needed GM. GM finally came crawling back, and it was a long time before the WSJ took them back. There really aren't too many newspapers or magazines that would stand up to a major advertiser like that. I used to read stories on auto safety and pollution in the New York Times that were effectively censored by their auto advertisers. Ms. magazine throughout its history published cigarette ads (which according to Ms. advertising policy, were a seal of approval), while running stories on every cancer except lung cancer.
The reason for that, I concluded, was that the WSJ was owned by a wealthy family, the Bancrofts, who were politically liberal but believed in free speech and balanced journalism, and weren't out to maximize their profits. If every wealthy corporate owner was like the old Bancrofts, America would be a better country. But the next generation of Bancrofts were more interested in money than principle, and sold out to Rupert Murdoch. That's my great man/woman theory of journalism.
Under Murdoch, the WSJ has indeed become a corporate whore. I tried to give him a chance, but stopped subscribing when they started writing about "death taxes." Great journalism was worth $250 a year. Murdoch propaganda is worth zero.
A little over a year ago, Robert Thomson, The Journal's top editor, picked Gerard Baker, a columnist for The Times of London, as his deputy managing editor. Mr. Baker is a former Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times with a great deal of expertise in the Beltway. The two men came of age in the more partisan milieu of British journalism.
According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper's Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper's circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there's nothing to suggest that The Journal's readers don't approve. Continue reading the main story
Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits â" "health care reformâ is a generally forbidden phrase â" and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)
The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly st
2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows
White papers by economists at the NBER are not scientific evidence.
White papers aren't peer-reviewed. That allows authors to get away with any bullshit that the reviewers and editors of a peer-reviewed paper would challenge.
Economists aren't scientists. They find association and accept it as causation, as they do with this study. Scientists find associations all the time, but when they do a controlled study, about half the time the association doesn't hold up and there is no causation.
Steven Levitt is especially a bullshit artist who doesn't know how to deal with numbers (even though he is very skillful at making a name for himself). He once wrote a column in the New York Times claiming that children's seat belts don't save lives. I checked his sources and he got his numbers wrong. For an economist, the inability to count is a serious problem.
Slashdot Mirror
HIPAA was written specifically to ensure that medical records are not passed around without the patient's consent.
Based on my conversations with lawyers, I would say that the HIPAA laws were written specifically to ensure that hospitals could disclose medical records to law enforcement without incurring any liability.
When politicians want to do something particularly outrageous, they use Orwellian language. They call it the "Privacy Rule" because it takes away your privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person.
If you want something to be private and confidential, don't let it go in your medical record.
A lawyer once told me that a medical record is a "public document." It's accessable to everyone with a "need to know," and that includes the janitor who mops up your room and is concerned about infections.
The Soviet Union, China, and most Communist countries had 99% literacy.
TGetting to 99% literacy is trivial if we do it the way the communists did it: Just put the same people responsible for educating the children, in charge of also measuring the results. It is amazing the results you can achieve if you just let people evaluate themselves.
I've seen that 99% figure by so many people from so many different perspectives, pro-communist, anti-communist and neutral, that it seems to be true. Loren Graham of MIT, who was probably the best-informed US expert on Soviet science, said that they were failing in most other things, but they were very successful in education. You can condemn the Soviets for a lot of things, but their education system, and literacy rate, isn't one of them.
The final proof is the Soviet emigres who came to the US. I've met a lot of them, and the students told me that the US schools were a year behind them.
I think it's partly extreme nearsightedness in seeing the world. "What's good for General Motors is good for America."
They see their business as the only business in the world that counts, and of course America should sacrifice children to the computer God. What else counts in the world?
You will never get ALL kids to read. You will rapidly run into diminishing returns, and spend huge sums on one-on-one training of retards, and even then some of them will never get it.
The Soviet Union, China, and most Communist countries had 99% literacy.
I'm a chicken processor. I think all kids should learn to pluck chickens in the 4th grade. That way I can hire cheap chicken pluckers. Until I decide to outsource them to Vietnam.
The "right to vote yourself communist" translates to "the all-too common practice of a large chunk of the population following a demagogue into dictatorship."
The alternative that Kissinger advocated was the practice of having a foreign power (the US) overthrow a democratically-elected government that he believed was a communist dictatorship.
The dictators they replace are no better (but probably no worse, when you measure actual health and wealth of the average person, and maybe better.) There is little freedom in either case.
I believe that there is more freedom when a population makes a decision based on a vote, than when the decision is imposed on them by a foreign power.
Some people could reasonably choose communism over the alternatives. According to first-hand stories from the Wall Street Journal, many Afghans preferred the communist regime to the Taliban.
The CIA isn't a terrorist organization. They are the ones protecting your rights to say stupid things on the Internet and allowing Allu Akbar from chopping your head off for belonging to the wrong religious group.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/...
Mapped: The 7 Governments the U.S. Has Overthrown. Yes, we now have confirmation that the CIA was behind Iran's 1953 coup. But the agency hardly stopped there.
By J. Dana Stuster
August 20, 2013
Iran, 1953
Guatemala, 1954
Congo, 1960
Dominican Republic, 1961
South Vietnam, 1963
Brazil, 1964
Chile, 1973
http://www.alternet.org/world/...
“I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” -- Henry Kissinger
Terrorism isn't in the eyes of the beholder, it's in the act of the beheader .... Who slaughter villages full of people for being insufficiently the right way about some particular twist or turn of believing in magic and some specific flavor of fantasy mythology.
My Lai Massacre http://www.history.com/topics/...
The Feds have been known to choose where to deem a computer/internet crime occurred to favor jurisdictions where they feel they have the best chance of a favorable outcome.
You mean forum shopping.
Like prosecuting a California web site in Tennessee or Florida on pornography charges. http://www.pcworld.com/article...
I liked it because I can use it as an example of how investigational drugs touted as miracle cures don't work, and how the conspiracy theories of the FDA/pharmaceutical industry suppressing useful drugs are all wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As a bit of background, polygraphs don't work.
Polygraph tests have one ability. If suspects can be interrogated without a lawyer present, they could be subject to questions that a lawyer would never permit. They can ask, "Have you ever stolen anything from an employer?" They can ask, "Have you ever watched pirated movies?" They can use the Reid Technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to get a false confession.
Thirdly, because many of the people in jail or prison weren't actually guilty http://www.innocenceproject.or... , or were there because of behavior that shouldn't be a crime in the first place.
Bad guys are bad guys but, since marijuana was legalized bad guys needed to go elsewhere.
Why is somebody who sells marijuana a bad guy?
Well, they *are* vulnerable, because they operate outside the law and can be exploited by criminals You don't think that a prostitute you've paid $300 gets to keep that money? Almost all of that goes to the pimp.
Freelancing women are targets for beatings by pimps because they threaten the pimp's income. And what are they supposed to do, go to the cops and say "This guy is trying to steal my prostitution business?"
Once a prostitute is in the clutches of a pimp, she's not free to leave to business either. Even if she wants to move to a different city, if the pimp keeps her in place by threats to her friends and family.
And not every prostitute is a prostitute by choice. There are runaways who fall into a pimp's control; rural foreigners who are tricked into thinking they're immigrating to the US for a high-paying (by their standards) domestic service job.
Understand I have no issues with prostitution per se, but I have a big problem with slavery, and in any system where prostitutes operate outside the protection of the law it's a given that most of them are de facto slaves.
I'd like supporting evidence for that. That sounds more like a tabloid TV show than the results of research done by criminologists.
We all know how Nicholas Kristof's reporting on the supposed "sexual slavery" fell apart. Other studies of so-called sexual exploitation, forcing women into sex work, and forcing minors into prostitution have similarly fallen apart when they were investigated by social scientists who were trained to get the facts.
When somebody is running an anti-prostitution organization, some of which have budgets of $1 million or more from government and private grants, they have a strong motivation to exaggerate and lie about the problem, and they've often been caught exaggerating and lying.
Similarly, when a commercial sex worker (the public health term) gets arrested for prostitution (the prosecutor's term), they have a choice: they can admit that they are voluntarily engaging in this business because that was the best way they could make money, and become criminals who go to jail; or they can claim that they were forced into it, enslaved and exploited by pimps and johns, and become victims who cooperate with the prosecutors, has all the charges dismissed, becomes a client of a social service agency that gets her housing, work and education, and sometimes gets citizenship as a political refugee rather than being deported as a criminal. So they also have a strong motivation to tell the prosecutors what they want to hear.
Suppose I assume for purposes of argument that it's explotation for a woman to make $300 a night as a sex worker. Is it also exploitation for a woman to make $300 a week as a minimum-wage fast-food worker or hotel worker making beds and scrubbing floors? I would say they're both explotiation, and a woman has a right to decide which exploitation she prefers. If you really want to stop commercial sex work, do what Mao did and provide the sex workers with better jobs and living conditions. That would take public money.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/06...
Why Did Nicholas Kristof Believe Somaly Mam's Lies?
The roots and consequences of a deception.
Jesse Walker
Jun. 3, 2014
Last week, Somaly Mam resigned from the foundation she co-founded seven years ago. Mam, dubbed "the James Frey of anti–sex trafficking activism" by my colleage Elizabeth Nolan Brown, achieved her fame by telling the world that she had been forced to work in a Cambodian brothel as a child and that her group rescued girls who had suffered a similar fate. For several years, journalists have been questioning many of Mam's claims. Those investigations culminated last month in a devastating Newsweek piece that showed Mam had lied repeatedly both about her own life and about the experiences of the people she says she rescued. One of the latter
It matters because they claimed that "trending" was determined by computer algorithms that analyzed what people were actually talking about, but that turned out to be a lie: they were instead determined by people, who necessarily have a bias.
It matters because it artificially shapes how people see the world. Facebook isn't just "a news site" it's also a site that - in theory - shows you how your friends view the world. Except it turns out that conservative views were being censored on Facebook.
This was written by a right-wing wacko who didn't bother to read the Guidelines (which FB posted on the Internet), who doesn't understand how newspapers work, who thinks everybody is conspiring against him, and who libelously accuses people of telling a "lie" when they merely disagree with him, or because he doesn't understand the issues.
Here's the guidelines. The relevant excerpts are:
So that's when the human editors intervene -- when the algorithms deliver a high-ranking topic like "Pizza rolls", because it took over on Reddit, they need human editors who can understand it's not a real news story.
A topic does become a national story if it's leading in Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and one other major news source. Fox News and the WSJ should be conservative enough for anybody.
This story came about because, in an attempt to provide balance and objectivity, FB commendably hired a diversity of editors, including conservatives, to make these judgment calls.
The conservative editors didn't like it, because FB's stories weren't conservative as they wanted. Duh. They're conservatives. The rest of the world isn't as conservative as they are. They'll never be satisfied unless it looks like Breitbart or Washington Times.
It's hard to tell from the Gizmodo story exactly what FB stories were censored. http://gizmodo.com/former-face... But it's easy to look at the FB guidelines and see that there are good, reasonable journalistic reasons for selecting or not selecting them.
If you read the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, you'd know that marijuana didn't even increase the risks of crashes and fatalities.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2014 Jan; 75(1): 56â"64.
PMCID: PMC3893634
Drugs and Alcohol: Their Relative Crash Risk
Eduardo Romano, Ph.D.,a,* Pedro Torres-Saavedra, Ph.D.,b Robert B. Voas, Ph.D.,a and John H. Lacey, M.P.H.a
Abstract
Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine (a) whether among sober (blood alcohol concentration [BAC] = .00%) drivers, being drug positive increases the drivers' risk of being killed in a fatal crash; (b) whether among drinking (BAC > .00%) drivers, being drug positive increases the drivers' risk of being killed in a fatal crash; and (c) whether alcohol and other drugs interact in increasing crash risk.
Method: We compared BACs for the 2006, 2007, and 2008 crash cases drawn from the U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) with control drug and blood alcohol data from participants in the 2007 U.S. National Roadside Survey. Only FARS drivers from states with drug information on 80% or more of the drivers who also participated in the 2007 National Roadside Survey were selected.
Results: For both sober and drinking drivers, being positive for a drug was found to increase the risk of being fatally injured. When the drug-positive variable was separated into marijuana and other drugs, only the latter was found to contribute significantly to crash risk. In all cases, the contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk was significantly lower than that produced by alcohol.
Conclusions: Although overall, drugs contribute to crash risk regardless of the presence of alcohol, such a contribution is much lower than that by alcohol. The lower contribution of drugs other than alcohol to crash risk relative to that of alcohol suggests caution in focusing too much on drugged driving, potentially diverting scarce resources from curbing drunk driving.
Oh. Heather Mac Donald.
Unfortunately, imitating the style of Ayn Rand and Cicero's oration against Cataline is not a good way to write about scientific studies.
I read about a dozen medical journal studies a week, and the kind of objections that the Justice Department raised, about racial identifications, are perfectly legitimate and would usually appear in a "Limitations of this study" section of a major journal.
I would have liked to see the study, which Mac Donald says was posted on the Internet by the Bergen Record and finally released (as it should be, under FOIA). But Mac Donald didn't give the full name of the report, or enough information that I could find it on the Internet. I did try to find it under the name of the author she mentions, Robert Voas, but I couldn't get it that way either. So she goes on complaining about how a study was suppressed, and then when it was released, she doesn't tell me how I can get it.
So as a result of Mac Donald, I wasted an hour trying to find the article she wanted to publicize.
It wasn't a complete waste, because I found one of Voas' articles on the topic of this Slashdot story.
Drugs and Alcohol: Their Relative Crash Risk
Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs 75(1):56-64 Â January 2014â
Traffic enforcement should be done for the purpose of improving safety, not fund-raising for the local police department.
I don't think there is an epidemic of traffic accidents caused by people not signaling a turn soon enough.
I don't think anybody wants to live in a town where the cops enforce turn signal laws on them. It's just something cops do to raise money.
Criminologists say that the most effective enforcement is small punishments with wide enforcement.
For cops, the easiest way for them to raise money, and turn out good statistics, is to catch a few people and give them big fines.
If they really wanted people to signal the turns properly, they would have $5 fines and enforce the traffic laws very strictly on everyone.
Unfortunately, our tough-on-crime philosophy leads to exactly the opposite of effective policing.
How about the old fashioned way, we punish people for reckless driving and accidents. The officer can ticket for reckless driving at his discretion already.
That's right. The officer at his discretion can ticket you for not signaling a turn 500 feet before the turn, particularly if the driver is black and the county is making a lot of money from traffic tickets.
There have been randomized, controlled trials in criminology.
For example there were studies in Boston during the heyday of psychoanalysis which divided what were called "juvenile delinquents" into a group that got psychoanalysis and a group that got the usual treatment such as social work counseling. Psychoanalysis was no more effective than usual treatment.
Another study randomized teenagers into a group that received the DARE anti-drug program and a group that did not; the group that received the DARE program did worse than the control group.
What they prove is that the conventional wisdom was wrong.
There have also been studies for example in health care which found that insurance policy holders didn't act according to their financial incentives as economists predicted. For example, when they increased co-payments, policy holders reduced economically efficient preventive care, and cost the insurer more money over a year or two.
I do read studies by criminologists which may not have controlled trials in JAMA and Nature, but those studies are peer-reviewed by experts in the field who understand experimental design and the limitations of statistics. I don't have any confidence in the NBER, Steven Levitt, or Daniel Kessler understanding experimental design.
No, I said that Ms. magazine was biased towards an advertising client, the cigarette industry. That was true of all the womens' magazines and most of the consumer magazines that took cigarette advertising, including Playboy. (The big articles on smoking and health were in the Readers Digest and Consumer Reports, which had no advertising.)
The political bias I referred to was the WSJ's bias against Democrats and for Republicans and Republican policies, after Murdoch took over, as documented in that link I gave.
Before Murdoch took over, the WSJ was one of the few places where I could find uncomplimentary information about big advertisers, like the auto industry and the cigarette industry. The WSJ was profitable enough, and their advertising was diverse enough, that they could afford to tell advertisers to go ahead and cancel their ads if they didn't like a news story. They also had the support of the Bancroft family, which owned the WSJ, and was committed to that kind of journalism.
I would follow up the accusation with more or less vigor depending on the supporting evidence.
For example, I once sat in a library and went through 12 years of Ms. magazine counting the pages of cigarette advertising (several pages in each issue), and looking for an article on smoking and health (none). Then I called Ms. magazine to make sure I hadn't missed anything (I hadn't).
This is what I call strong evidence of political bias. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
Whenever I write about something I have strong feelings about, I make a particular effort to talk to people I disagree with, and get their best argument. About half the time they have something useful to say. Sometimes they convince me to change my mind.
As a journalist, I'm not convinced.
News media start with a huge flow of information, and go through a process of tremendous condensation. Researchers who examined newspaper newsrooms found that 1 press release out of 10 or 100 made it into the newspapers at all; now it's probably more like 1 out of 100 or 1,000. If Facebook is listing the top 100 stories that day, they're choosing 100 stories out of the entire enormous volume of news (maybe hundreds of thousands of stories) that day. Most of the stories you like won't get in.
I personally like to read stories on the extreme of the right and left (which is why I used to read the WSJ editorial page), but it's a reasonable editorial decision to give greater weight to CNN or The New York Times (or Fox News) than Breitbart, and to select stories that have appeared in 3 or 4 major news sources already (as Wikipedia encourages). So maybe CPAC don't get the coverage a conservative would like, but single payer health care doesn't get the coverage a social democrat would like.
But the bottom line is that they did hire conservative journalists, so it seems as if they were making an effort to get a diversity. Now the conservative journalists are complaining that Facebook didn't give as much coverage to conservative stories as they would like.
Well, yeah, they're conservatives. Non-conservatives would have a different news judgment. That's why you try to get a diversity of editors.
They don't give any objective statistics, which is relatively easy to do in these days of text search engines. How many times did "Rand Paul" appear in the Facebook feed, and how many times did it appear in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times? How does Facebook compare to Google and Yahoo News? If I saw some data they might convince me. Without data, it's just unsupported whining.
If Facebook is merely reflecting the major news media, then their complaint is with the major news media, not Facebook. And their complaint is with the readers who click on those news stories in the major news media. You like the free market? That's the judgment of the free market.
Newspapers - holy god, have you never read the WSJ?
I know something about the WSJ. I read them for 30 years. I was a journalist, I ran into their reporters, and I used to pick up stories from the WSJ all the time, adding my own reporting, and frequently interviewed/fact checked the same sources they interviewed.
For all that time, the WSJ had an uncanny reputation among left and right for objective, accurate, unbiased reporting that was not influenced by their advertisers or publisher. That was unusual in the news business. One of their reporters, A. Kent MacDougal, wrote a great article for Monthly Review about how he, as a socialist, could write anything he wanted as long as he backed it up with facts.
The great moment that established the WSJ's credibility was when in the 1950s they got a leak of General Motors' new cars, and GM didn't want them printed. GM threatened to cancel all their advertising in the WSJ if they printed it. The WSJ printed it. GM cancelled their ads. GM needed the WSJ more than the WSJ needed GM. GM finally came crawling back, and it was a long time before the WSJ took them back. There really aren't too many newspapers or magazines that would stand up to a major advertiser like that. I used to read stories on auto safety and pollution in the New York Times that were effectively censored by their auto advertisers. Ms. magazine throughout its history published cigarette ads (which according to Ms. advertising policy, were a seal of approval), while running stories on every cancer except lung cancer.
The reason for that, I concluded, was that the WSJ was owned by a wealthy family, the Bancrofts, who were politically liberal but believed in free speech and balanced journalism, and weren't out to maximize their profits. If every wealthy corporate owner was like the old Bancrofts, America would be a better country. But the next generation of Bancrofts were more interested in money than principle, and sold out to Rupert Murdoch. That's my great man/woman theory of journalism.
Under Murdoch, the WSJ has indeed become a corporate whore. I tried to give him a chance, but stopped subscribing when they started writing about "death taxes." Great journalism was worth $250 a year. Murdoch propaganda is worth zero.
That's not "settled science":
1) Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime
2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows
White papers by economists at the NBER are not scientific evidence.
White papers aren't peer-reviewed. That allows authors to get away with any bullshit that the reviewers and editors of a peer-reviewed paper would challenge.
Economists aren't scientists. They find association and accept it as causation, as they do with this study. Scientists find associations all the time, but when they do a controlled study, about half the time the association doesn't hold up and there is no causation.
Steven Levitt is especially a bullshit artist who doesn't know how to deal with numbers (even though he is very skillful at making a name for himself). He once wrote a column in the New York Times claiming that children's seat belts don't save lives. I checked his sources and he got his numbers wrong. For an economist, the inability to count is a serious problem.