The Mediasphere

What will future generations condemn us for?

By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Sunday, September 26, 2010; B01 

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?

Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.

Is there a way to guess which ones? After all, not every disputed institution or practice is destined to be discredited. And it can be hard to distinguish in real time between movements, such as abolition, that will come to represent moral common sense and those, such as prohibition, that will come to seem quaint or misguided. Recall the book-burners of Boston’s old Watch and Ward Society or the organizations for the suppression of vice, with their crusades against claret, contraceptives and sexually candid novels.

Still, a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

With these signs in mind, here are four contenders for future moral condemnation.

Our prison system

We already know that the massive waste of life in our prisons is morally troubling; those who defend the conditions of incarceration usually do so in non-moral terms (citing costs or the administrative difficulty of reforms); and we’re inclined to avert our eyes from the details. Check, check and check.

Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China’s rate is less than half of ours. What’s more, the majority of our prisoners are non-violent offenders, many of them detained on drug charges. (Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering.)

And the full extent of the punishment prisoners face isn’t detailed in any judge’s sentence. More than 100,000 inmates suffer sexual abuse, including rape, each year; some contract HIV as a result. Our country holds at least 25,000 prisoners in isolation in so-called supermax facilities, under conditions that many psychologists say amount to torture.

Industrial meat production

The arguments against the cruelty of factory farming have certainly been around a long time; it was Jeremy Bentham, in the 18th century, who observed that, when it comes to the treatment of animals, the key question is not whether animals can reason but whether they can suffer. People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they’re doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.

Of the more than 90 million cattle in our country, at least 10 million at any time are packed into feedlots, saved from the inevitable diseases of overcrowding only by regular doses of antibiotics, surrounded by piles of their own feces, their nostrils filled with the smell of their own urine. Picture it — and then imagine your grandchildren seeing that picture. In the European Union, many of the most inhumane conditions we allow are already illegal or — like the sow stalls into which pregnant pigs are often crammed in the United States — will be illegal soon.

The institutionalized and isolated elderly

Nearly 2 million of America’s elderly are warehoused in nursing homes, out of sight and, to some extent, out of mind. Some 10,000 for-profit facilities have arisen across the country in recent decades to hold them. Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The United States is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heat wave that hit France in 2003: While many families were enjoying their summer vacations, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures.) Is this what Western modernity amounts to — societies that feel no filial obligations to their inconvenient elders?

Sometimes we can learn from societies much poorer than ours. My English mother spent the last 50 years of her life in Ghana, where I grew up. In her final years, it was her good fortune not only to have the resources to stay at home, but also to live in a country where doing so was customary. She had family next door who visited her every day, and she was cared for by doctors and nurses who were willing to come to her when she was too ill to come to them. In short, she had the advantages of a society in which older people are treated with respect and concern.

Keeping aging parents and their children closer is a challenge, particularly in a society where almost everybody has a job outside the home (if not across the country). Yet the three signs apply here as well: When we see old people who, despite many living relatives, suffer growing isolation, we know something is wrong. We scarcely try to defend the situation; when we can, we put it out of our minds. Self-interest, if nothing else, should make us hope that our descendants will have worked out a better way.

The environment

Of course, most transgenerational obligations run the other way — from parents to children — and of these the most obvious candidate for opprobrium is our wasteful attitude toward the planet’s natural resources and ecology. Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you’ll see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier was a lush and verdant landscape. That’s the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognized in the 1990s as Europe’s first man-made desert. Desertification, which is primarily the result of destructive land-management practices, threatens a third of the Earth’s surface; tens of thousands of Chinese villages have been overrun by sand drifts in the past few decades.

It’s not as though we’re unaware of what we’re doing to the planet: We know the harm done by deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions — the whole litany. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. Chances are, they won’t be able to avert their eyes, even if they want to.

* * *

Let’s not stop there, though. We will all have our own suspicions about which practices will someday prompt people to ask, in dismay: What were they thinking?

Even when we don’t have a good answer, we’ll be better off for anticipating the question.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.”

 

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© 2010 The Washington Post Company

September 26, 2010

By Thomas H. Benton

I am only a decade out of graduate school—and I suppose it’s possible that I am a disagreeable person—but I have had more than a few unpleasant conversations with complete strangers, and even some friends, in which they have expressed their anger about professors while knowing that I am one.

• “What you teach is worthless—I mean, who needs more measurements of Walt Whitman’s beard when the economy and the environment are collapsing?”

• “Being a professor is good money for, like, six hours of work per week. What do you do with all that free time?”

• “Oh, I can’t talk to you, since I’m not politically correct or anything.”

• “I wish I had tenure and didn’t have to worry about being fired for not doing my job.” 

• “Why don’t you English profs just teach people how to write?”

• “I still owe more than $50,000 for my undergraduate degree, and it’s never done me any good.”

• “My job [pharmaceutical sales] saves lives; your so-called work is a waste of other people’s time and money.”

I seldom admit or discuss my primary occupation with nonacademics nowadays, if I can avoid it. It’s safer to say that I’m a program administrator.

By now, most academics are inoculated against attacks from the right, the conversational relics of the culture war of a generation ago: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Charles Sykes’s ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988), and Martin Anderson’s Impostors in the Temple (1992), to name just a few. I almost feel nostalgia for that time, since the conversation was about what professors should teach. There was no doubt, as yet, whether higher education would continue in some recognizable form.

Over the last 20 years, the positions on both sides have hardened. But now the criticisms of academe are also coming from the left, and not just from the think tanks and journalists, but increasingly from within academe. Some of those works include Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (2008); Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010); and, most recently, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It (2010), by Andrew Hacker and Claudia C. Dreifus; and Mark Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (2010).

For the past several months, The Chronicle’s forums and the comment section of its articles—and the larger blogosphere—have been abuzz with discussions of a string of seemingly anti-faculty articles with titles like “Goodbye to Those Overpaid Professors and Their Cushy Jobs” (July 25) and “Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices?” (July 30). The majority feeling seems to be that the present model of higher education is no longer sustainable, and that the necessary changes will focus—for good or ill—on the working lives of professors.

I can’t remember a time when professors, particularly in the humanities and social sciences—already the survivors of a 40-year depression in the academic job market—had a stronger feeling of being under siege. At some institutions, there is something aggressive and visceral about the recent rounds of cutbacks and accountability measures. They go beyond mere economic justifications.

So “hate” is not too strong a word, I think, for how nonacademics feel about us. Some of the reasons should flatter us, some are the result of economic and institutional forces beyond our control, and a few should cause us to wonder whether we deserve to be the last generation of traditional academics.

Anti-intellectualism and populism. Those tendencies in American life are not new, but they have become more virulent (see parts one and two of my column “On Stupidity”). Traditionally, professors have countered the tendency toward simplistic, slogan-based thinking—and manipulation—by teaching students to evaluate sources and reach their own conclusions on the basis of evidence derived from painstaking research.

The notion that knowledge is always political, and that perspectives are always relative, has eroded the belief in expertise and earned authority. If everyone’s biased, including professors, why not just “go with your gut”? It’s much easier, and it empowers you against the academics whose admonitions—as we have lost influence—have become increasingly condescending, sanctimonious, and shrill.

Market-based values. Academics, as a group, are among the last people who question the market as the sole determiner of value. We continue to hold out against the idea that our students are customers who must be pleased even at the cost of their own development. I think most professors still believe, privately, that our role is to liberate students and prepare them for lives of leadership in a relatively democratic society.

A generation ago, we could still defend the belief that our courses in literature, art, history, philosophy—the liberal arts, broadly defined, and always self-critical—were enriching in ways that could not be deposited in a bank or measured by outcomes assessment. In the intervening years, that consensus has fragmented, and we are no longer able to articulate a coherent vision of why others should value what we teach. And with that, I think, we have lost any remaining justification for our autonomy.

The rising cost of higher education. The price of a college degree has risen faster than the cost of health care. Anxiety about those costs crowds out the mental space that might be given to contemplating subjects without direct, practical applications.

The cost increase is driven not by faculty salaries, primarily, but by the rapid growth of administration, massive athletics programs, and the amenities arms race—not who has the most full-time faculty members so much as who has the most successful football team and the fanciest dorm rooms. Some institutions have astronomical endowments and tax-exempt status, asking a mostly excluded population to support what looks like country-club indulgences for elites.

But it is the faculty members who are held accountable for the cost of education, even while a growing majority of them are adjuncts and graduate students who receive no benefits and earn less than the minimum wage.

The changing job market. For a long time, college has been marketed as a requirement for entry into middle-class occupations. A lot of students—surely the majority—now attend college for reasons that have little to do with education for its own sake. Even so, when higher education was a reasonably secure pathway to employment, professors were worthy of some respect: We were gatekeepers, and we could help you. But in today’s economic climate, a college degree is expensive, time-consuming, coercive, and does not necessarily lead to employment.

If institutions can’t respond to that situation, why shouldn’t students, who are not wealthy or devoted to the life of the mind, invest their money and time in something else, like starting a business?

Ignorance about what professors do. Highly paid academic stars make it politically possible to paint faculty members as pampered elites. A few weeks ago, I heard Andrew Hacker say, in an NPR interview, that a major problem with higher education is that “you have professors drawing six-figure salaries for two hours in the classroom each week.”

That’s a common claim, most often made by politicians looking to slash education budgets. But academic superstars are rare. They are limited to elite research universities, where professors are not paid, primarily, for their teaching.

For all of us, time in the classroom is just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to published research (now required of faculty members at most levels of higher education), courses must be prepared, papers graded, students advised and supported, and administrative work conducted. Many tenure-track faculty members spend more time on administrative work than they do on teaching or research, because there are relatively few of us left to conduct the business of our institutions.

Professors are not a leisure class. Most of us work more than 50 hours a week, and whatever free time we have is generally spent thinking about work or answering e-mail and texts from colleagues and students. We are never off the clock.

Overproduction of scholarly research. Specialized research is inherently difficult to understand, yet we often hear demands that work outside of the sciences should be immediately accessible to the general public. There is no question that more work can be done to publicize the value of scholarship in many fields, but there is also no doubt that a lot of scholarly productivity is a result of the increasing competitiveness of the academic job system.

The pressure to publish, at every level, arguably at the expense of our students, is not something that most academics have chosen, and it has led to a collapse of the university-press system, skyrocketing publishing costs, unsustainable pressures on library budgets, and, ironically, declining engagement with our larger disciplines—a loss of a common scholarly culture—since it’s a challenge simply to keep up with a few subfields.

Another result is that many courses reflect specialized research interests rather than broader topics that might be more useful to our students.

Tenure. In a period of extreme anxiety about economic security, when millions of people are losing their jobs, and their lives are unraveling, the appearance of a professor with a job for life and no accountability seems as offensive as a portly aristocrat being carried in a sedan chair through the streets of Paris during the hungry summer of 1789.

Even before the great recession, misunderstandings about tenure were the main reason for disliking professors. But, as Marc Bousquet (a Chronicle blogger) has often observed, academic tenure offers fewer protections than those enjoyed by most civil-service workers. Tenure provides no protection from penalties for not doing your job or for making public statements about issues that are outside your field of professional expertise. Moreover, it takes, on average, about 20 years for professors to attain tenure, and, in the past 40 years, the number of tenure-track positions has shrunk relative to the number of available job candidates. That hyper-competitiveness has resulted in a stultifying culture of conformity, but that is less a function of tenure than it is of the unjustified expansion of graduate programs and the shift of money away from faculty to other campus expenses.

Lack of professional solidarity. Academe has always been fragmented by internecine squabbles about scholarly minutiae. There have always been rivalries among leading scholars and among disciplines. Those divisions are an inherent part of academic culture.

But now academe is divided even more by the conditions of employment. Tenured professorships have become such a privilege, held by a small minority, for such seemingly arbitrary reasons, that anyone who holds such a position is quite naturally resented by someone who does not and probably never will. That is exacerbated by the tendency in our profession to think in terms of hierarchies—to look down on people—based on pedigree, academic rank, and institutional affiliation. We are unable to command respect for ourselves as a profession by working together across those divisions.

There are, of course, many other, less prominent reasons for the current anti-faculty climate. But perhaps it is enough to say that the reason we feel more “hated” than ever is that we deserve it. Instead of collaborating, we competed with each other. We focused on our research instead of on the needs of undergraduates. We even exploited our graduate students, using their labor to underwrite our privileges, and then we relegated most of them to marginal positions as adjuncts. We waited too long to institute reforms to our profession, and now—after 40 years of inaction—the reforms are going to be forced upon us.

Some of that may be positive: Perhapsa more equitable labor system will emerge. Maybe there will be a greater focus on undergraduate education and less emphasis on specialized research. In any case, some big changes are coming, and what will change will not be decided, for the most part, by faculty members.

Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College.

The Andre Bauer solution: Starve the poor, they’ll stop breeding 12:17 pm January 24, 2010, by Jay

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

– Andre Bauer, lieutenant governor of South Carolina
and candidate for S.C. governor.

It’s hard to know where to start with a statement like that. Apparently, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer believes that we should try to starve the poor out of existence. Deprive them of food and they will cease breeding: Problem solved, neat as that. (An audio version of Bauer’s remarks with additional context is available here. Hearing the vehemence with which Bauer makes the above statement only compounds its ugliness.)

For the moment, though, let’s set aside the pure viciousness of that statement and address what Bauer claims is his larger point. In effect, his thesis is that government assistance actually causes poverty because it subsidizes and encourages irresponsible actions. “In government, we continue to reward bad behavior,” he said. “Any time we give somebody money we’re rewarding them. We’re telling them to keep doing what they’re doing.”

Cut off those subsidies, in other words, and poverty will decrease.

In some circles, that’s a politically popular explanation for the problems of the underclass. So let’s take it seriously for a moment and try to test that analysis against what we know to be reality.

The first problem is history. Human poverty has existed in every culture and era, without exception. It is a constant of human existence, a pre-existing condition, so to speak. No matter what Bauer chooses to believe, government did not create it. South Carolina, for example, was mired in deep poverty long before school-lunch programs and welfare programs existed.

Second, if Bauer were right, we would expect that poverty would be lowest in those nations that do nothing to “subsidize bad behavior,” and highest in those countries where the government support system rewards such behavior. Yet if you look around the world,  the opposite is true. Poverty levels are highest in those societies that make little attempt to address it, and lowest in those that offer some form of safety net.

We can also test Bauer’s thesis here at home, by comparing states that offer varying degrees of support for the poor. A liberal Northeastern state such as Connecticut, for example, offers a more extensive government support system to its poor than does a conservative state such as South Carolina. Mississippi offers even less support to its poor than does South Carolina. Put in Bauer’s terms, Connecticut rewards poverty while South Carolina and Mississippi try to penalize it.

If Bauer’s thesis is correct — if government support causes poverty — then Connecticut ought to be drowning in poor people while Mississippi has relatively few poor people.  Yet in fact the exact opposite is true, and Census Bureau figures prove it. In Connecticut, which “subsidizes bad behavior” most heavily, 5.7 percent of families lived below the poverty line in 2007, while 16 percent did so in Mississippi, where poverty was least subsidized. (The figure in South Carolina was 11.2 percent; in Georgia it was 10.8 percent. And all those numbers are undoubtedly a lot higher in 2010.)

That data suggest that poverty is a much more complex phenomenon than Bauer would like to pretend, and is not in the least “caused” by government assistance.

Nor does government assistance encourage “breeding,” as Bauer so cruelly described it. It is demographic fact that in every culture and in every era throughout history, poorer families tend to have more children than affluent families. The presence or absence of government support has nothing to do with it. By the way, Bauer’s dismay is also nothing new; in cultures throughout time, the more affluent have always been dismayed by those “breeders” in the lower classes.

In his speech, Bauer recounts a second-hand tale of a 10-year-old child who supposedly gave birth to a baby of her own. If true, it is a tragic tale for both. Even if that particular story is false,  the larger problem of teenage and out-of-wedlock births is very real and must be confronted honestly. However,  that honest discussion must begin by acknowledging that the 10-year-old did not “breed” in response to financial inducements offered by the government.

Bauer did offer one concrete suggestion in his speech, proposing that parents be required to attend parent-teacher conferences and take drug tests or lose government benefits such as school lunch programs. If they want government benefits, he said, they should be required to act responsibly.

To any responsible person, that instinctively sounds great, but let’s think it through. The population that Bauer is attempting to target are by definition not responsible. They are parents who abuse drugs or simply don’t care enough about their children to ensure that they get a good education. Is that population going to change its behavior in response to a possible cutoff of free school lunches? Sadly, no. If they responded to that kind of thing, they wouldn’t be in that predicament in the first place.

And if you nonetheless go ahead and deny a free or subsidized lunch to a kid whose parents are on drugs, what have you accomplished? You condemn the child to hunger and malnutrition, heaping another significant problem on his or her already overburdened shoulders. You reduce the incentive for that child to go to school every day, where at least he or she knew food was available. And you make people like Andre Bauer feel better.

Bauer’s fundamental mistake is his assertion that the poor respond to market signals sent by the government.  The real problem is that they don’t respond to market signals at all.  Living in poverty ought to be a huge market signal, but for a variety of reasons, the poor are largely immune to it. Many of them don’t recognize what the signals are saying, they lack the education to know how to respond to them, and they have no faith that the market would reward them anyway.

Changing that is difficult; only a small percentage of those born into poverty escape it.  Perhaps the best we can do is to champion programs — and the school lunch program is a perfect if small example — that increase the odds of escape for individuals mired in poverty.

One last point: In his speech and subsequent press release, Bauer complained that “political correctness” makes it impossible to discuss such issues publicly. I would suggest that rhetoric likening our fellow Americans to overbreeding stray animals makes it far more difficult to discuss these things rationally than does political correctness.

 

Mysteries That Howl and Hunt By CAROL KAESUK YOON Published: September 27, 2010

With a chorus of howls and yips wild enough to fill a vast night sky, the coyote has ignited the imagination of one culture after another. In many American Indian mythologies, it is celebrated as the Trickster, a figure by turns godlike, idiotic and astoundingly sexually perverse. In the Navajo tradition the coyote is revered as God’s dog. When European colonists encountered the species, they were of two minds, heralding it as an icon of the expansive West and vilifying it as the ultimate varmint, the bloodthirsty bane of sheep and cattle ranchers.

Jason Holley

Jonathan Way

Animals in the Northeast thought to be coyotes actually carry wolf and coyote DNA, studies have found.

Mark Twain was so struck when he first saw that “long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it” that he called it “a living, breathing allegory of Want.” And Twain’s description itself was so vivid, it inspired the animator Chuck Jones to create that perennial failure known to cartoon-loving children everywhere, Wile E. Coyote of Road Runner-hating fame.

Yet as familiar as the coyote seems, these animals remain remarkably poorly understood. They have remained elusive despite fantastic ecological success that has been described as “a story of unparalleled range expansion,” as they have moved over the last century from the constrictions of their prairie haunts to colonize every habitat from wild to urban, from coast to coast. And they have retained their mystery even as interest has intensified with increasing coyote-human interactions — including incidents of coyotes dragging off small dogs and cats, and even (extremely rarely) attacks on people, from Los Angeles to the northern suburbs of New York City, where four children were attacked in separate incidents this summer.

Coyotes have managed to elude much serious scrutiny by being exquisitely wary, so much so that even dedicated coyote scientists can struggle to find ways to lay eyes on them, not to mention hands.

Dr. Laura Prugh, a wildlife ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said trying to survey a population of coyotes in Alaska was “like working with a ghost species.” To even have a chance of catching a coyote, she said, traps must be boiled to wash away human scent, handled with gloves and then hidden extremely carefully with all traces of human footprints brushed away. Even then, the trap is likely to catch only the youngest and most inexperienced of animals.

Coyotes have remained so much in possession of their own secrets that it was not until this year that the real identity of the coyotes living in the eastern part of the country was revealed. Two separate teams of researchers studying the genes of coyotes in the Northeast reported evidence that these animals that have for decades upon decades been thought of as coyotes are in fact coyote-wolf hybrids.

The team headed by Roland W. Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, studied coyotes from New Jersey to Maine. Jonathan Way, wildlife biologist with the Eastern Coyote Researchconsulting firm, and colleagues examined coyotes around Cape Cod and Boston. Both teams found that the animals carry wolf and coyote DNA. The paper by Dr. Kays and his colleagues was published in Biology Letters; the paper by Dr. Way and his colleagues was published in Northeastern Naturalist.

Based on the wolf DNA found in the Eastern coyotes, Dr. Kays and colleagues hypothesize in their paper that Western coyotes dispersing eastward north of the Great Lakes across Canada during the last century mated with wolves along the way, bringing that wolf DNA along with them to the Northeast.

The findings may explain why coyotes in the East are generally larger than their Western counterparts — that is, more wolflike in size — and why they are so much more varied in coat color, as might be expected from a creature with a more diverse genome. It may also explain why Eastern coyotes appear to be more adept as deer hunters than their Western forebears, which tend toward smaller prey, like voles and rabbits.

What the finding does not settle is how to define exactly what these animals are, or for that matter, what to call them. Dr. Way favors the term “coywolf” to denote the animals’ hybrid heritage. He said because these animals are part wolf — species that enjoy protected status — they deserve some benefits not available to coyotes, which are typically freely hunted.

Dr. Kays, however, says that he is not a fan of the name, in part because the animals are “mostly coyote and a little bit of wolf,” but also because the Eastern coyote may be less a finished product deserving of a name and more an evolutionary work in progress.

There are even hints that the traveling coyotes may have been up to more than just dawdling with a wolf or two. Dr. Kays’s team also found one coyote carrying something similar to domestic dog DNA, suggesting that the question of what exactly an Eastern coyote is may become even more complicated as scientists learn more.

One major complication is that all the species in the genus Canis, to which the coyote belongs, can successfully interbreed. In other words, coyotes (or Canis latrans, meaning “barking dog”) and domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and every kind of wolf, from the red wolf to the Eastern wolf to the gray wolf (Canis lupus), can mate and produce perfectly healthy pups. No wonder, then, that interactions among these species have led to a genetic mess that researchers sometimes refer to as “Canis soupus.”

That coyotes will consider a wide variety of species as mates may be a reflection of their adaptability, also evident in their catholic tastes in food. Stephen DeStefano, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological Survey’s Massachusetts Cooperative Research Unit and author of “Coyote at the Kitchen Door” (Harvard University Press, 2010), explains that coyotes will feast on things as diverse as beetles, bird eggs, garbage, pocket gophers, raspberries, pigs, wild plums, porcupines, apples, flying squirrels and watermelons.

But while such broad tastes have mostly made villains of coyotes as they happily expand their diet to take in the family pet when they can get it, they have also, at least once, made them the hero. Dr. Stanley D. Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State University who has studied coyotes in the Chicago area for the past decade, found that coyotes have a taste for Canada goose eggs. Rather than just dining at a single nest, the coyotes will plunder multiple nests in a night, gathering what eggs they can’t eat and burying them for later. The result has put a significant dent in what had been fast increasing numbers of geese, considerably noisier and messier urban creatures than the coyote.

Flexibility is also a hallmark of coyotes’ hunting. Not only do coyotes hunt singly and in packs, they have even been observed hunting cooperatively with other species. In Wyoming, scientists have seen coyotes hunting with badgers, large burrowing creatures that enjoy a nice bit of ground squirrel. As badgers dig toward squirrels in their tunnels, coyotes wait above for the squirrels to pop up for a quick escape, or perhaps to be chased back down to be eaten by a badger. Teams may work together often for an hour or more, the coyote mock-chasing or otherwise playfully inviting the lethargic badger to activity when it pauses, and to good purpose. Coyotes hunting with badgers had to work less and ate more than solitary coyotes in the same area. These teams were so effective that researchers reported often seeing the same pairs working together again and again.

Despite such charming intelligence, the coyote has found itself almost universally despised, feared and hunted. Ranchers hate coyotes for killing millions of dollars in livestock each year. These thefts have been answered with many millions of tax dollars spent over the years on programs to kill coyotes through the deployment of cyanide, strychnine, baited sheep collars and guns of many kinds. It is a war that has been as unrelenting and intense as, some researchers say, it is useless.

“Killing coyotes is kind of like mowing the lawn,” said Dr. Prugh. “It stimulates vigorous new growth.”

Even in their new habitat of the great metropolises, with nary a sheep in sight, the coyote finds itself, at best, a nervously tolerated visitor. In recent years, urbanites have been simultaneously charmed and disturbed by coyotes strolling in Central Park, trotting into a Quiznos restaurant in downtown Chicago and taking a dash around a federal courthouse in Detroit. Such news is, more often than not, soon followed by the news that the coyote has been rounded up and removed. It doesn’t seem to matter that coyotes are relatively harmless, as researchers point out, as any person or pet is much more likely to be injured or even killed by a domestic dog.

Neither does it seem to matter that the removal of a single showy coyote is unlikely to leave a city clear of these animals, or even give any sense of just how many coyotes a given city harbors. Dr. Gehrt said that when he began his research he would have guessed there were some 50 to 100 coyotes in the Chicago metropolitan area. After a decade of radio tracking and genetic analyses, he knows better. Dr. Gehrt said he conservatively estimates the number of these rarely seen creatures at more than 2,000.

The coyote is out there, and it is here to stay. For most people (as long as they are not very unlucky and they and their neighbors refrain from feeding coyotes — the No. 1 reason coyotes end up hurting someone), the coyote offers a bit of wildness to anyone willing to listen to the gift it has shared for millenniums — its unforgettable voice.

The moniker “barking dog” just doesn’t cut it. The coyote has a bountiful lexicon that includes growls, huffs, woofs, whines, yelps, howls, “wow-oo-wow” sounds and more. Each serves its purpose in the coyote business of giving greetings or disseminating alarms.

But perhaps the sound that listeners know best, the one that makes us stop what we’re doing and look up into the night sky, is that mad cacophony of mournful howls and maniacal yips. That, scientists say, is the coyote’s territorial declaration, an effort to make a few coyotes sound like 10 or 100, to insist on their unassailable presence.

Dr. DeStefano writes in his book of the legends that coyotes are talking to us, that they can tell us things like where to find water, whether danger is approaching and whether today is the day that death will come, that the coyote has learned Comanche, Apache and many other languages, but not English.

But even we English speakers know what the coyote is telling us when we hear those calls, shrill and fierce as they bounce along canyons of rock or concrete or just down the cul-de-sac. The coyote is saying to everyone, fellow barking dogs or otherwise, “We are here.”

Racist messages pose quandary for mainstream sites
By The Admin on September 27, 2010

Although you rarely hear racial insults on Main Street these days, there’s a place where unashamed bigotry is all too easy to find: tossed off in the comments sections of some of the Internet’s most popular websites, today’s virtual Main Street.

Internet anonymity has removed one of the strongest barriers to the type of language that can ruin reputations and end careers. Racist messages are a small percentage of the wild and woolly web, but they stick out since they are rare in person — and they raise a host of questions.

Do these comments reflect a reversal of racial progress? Is that progress an illusion while racism thrives underground? What kind of harm are these statements doing? Could there be any value in such venting? And what, if anything, should a free society do about it?

“We’ve seen comments that people would not make in the public square or any type of civic discussion, maybe even within their own families,” said Dennis Ryerson, editor of The Indianapolis Star. “There is no question in my mind that the process, because it’s largely anonymous, enables people who would never speak up on Main Street to communicate their thoughts.”

At the newspaper’s website, moderators delete individual racist comments that are brought to their attention, and will take down a whole thread if such comments persist. On some stories that are expected to provoke racism, the entire comments section is disabled beforehand, a practice shared by a growing number of newspapers.

On a single day recently, racially offensive online remarks were not hard to find:

In a comment on a Yahoo News story about a black civil rights era photographer revealed to be an FBI informant, someone called blacks farm animals who “were not and are not wanted in this society.”

Another commenter wrote, “We all know who MADE America what it is today, and we also know which group is receiving hefty tax dollar pay outs… so until the tables turn the only thing you should be saying is ‘thank you’ to all the hard working (whites) who gave you the life you now take for granted.”

Black racism was evident, too. One person on the site wondered if the FBI beat information out of the photographer: “You know how white people do.” On a BlackVoices.com story about two black sisters jailed 20 years for an $11 robbery, someone used several crude epithets to suggest that the judge was a white racist.

A USAToday.com story about demographic changes in the nation’s kindergartens turned into open season on Latinos. “Go to any ER, school, jail and see first hand what race is over consuming precious US resources?” one comment said. Another complained in ugly terms about Latino birthrates.

Some believe such comments indicate that racism has not declined as much as people may think. Joe Feagin, a sociologist at Texas A&M University, said a study he conducted of 626 white college students at 28 institutions revealed thousands of examples of racism in “backstage,” all-white settings.

Are these comments cause for alarm?

“Like the loudest ambulance siren you’ve ever heard,” Feagin replied. “All this stuff was already there. It’s just the Internet has opened a window into it that we normally would not have had.”

Linda Chavez, chairman of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, says racist comments come from a “very small but often vocal minority of people. Most Americans do not like this type of coarse race hatred.”

Chavez has received plenty of racist comments in response to her online writings. “My sense, based on their grammar and spelling, is they’re not the people who are hiring. These are not influential people who make policy.” But she does see a destructive aspect: “It may actually increase the percentage who will feel comfortable expressing these views. Social pressure is important.”

Racist comments may scare average people away from productive conversations about race — conversations that are moving rapidly into the digital domain from print publications, town halls, street corners and shopping malls.

“When there are forums about race, people flock there to do battle,” said Eric Deggans, a reporter and blogger for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. Whenever he blogs about race, “about 20 percent of the comments will be straight-up racist. Another 20 percent are questionable.”

The racial comments and other personal attacks have made Deggans, who is black, feel more defensive, as if he’s always under attack: “It wears you down after a while.”

“I have to constantly coach myself to dial down the hurt and the anger, because you get three comments that are really hurtful and prejudiced, but the fourth is someone who wants to have a genuine conversation,” he said.

Some journalism observers believe real names should be required to post comments, some of which would never be chosen for publication in the traditional “letters to the editor” section.

“It astonishes me that they allow such blatant expressions,” said Robert Steele, a journalism scholar at DePauw University and The Poynter Institute.

The comments sections of media websites are meant to foster community discussion and keep people engaged with the site, which in turn generates revenue for an industry still struggling to make money online.

“Even if it’s legitimate to try and draw viewers to sites, is it legitimate to allow individuals who are swinging a sharp ax, and often doing so with a hood over their heads in anonymous fashion, to have this forum that can not only create harm but breed hatred?” Steele asked.

As champions of free speech and enemies of censorship, journalists take care to tailor any proposed limits.

“I recognize the value of citizen dialogue,” Steele said. “But when the comments are poisonous … you have to go back to the issue of why you would allow the dialogue.”

“For me, all the problems of online anonymity and comments outweigh any imagined benefits,” said Herb Strentz, a retired journalism professor and dean at Drake University in Des Moines. “If people want to contribute thoughtful things, they should be willing to stand up for them and be quoted.”

Polls and studies that measure racism are hotly debated because most people won’t acknowledge prejudice to a stranger, the subject is so subjective and politically charged, and many people of all races may not even recognize their own biases.

On one side sits evidence that racism remains a major challenge: For instance, some 40 percent of white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, according to a 2008 Associated Press-Yahoo poll that focused on racial attitudes and the presidential election.

On the other are signs of progress: The percentage of African-Americans saying black people’s situation improved over the last five years has doubled since 2007, to 39 percent, according to a 2010 Pew poll. The poll also found that 70 percent of whites and 60 percent of blacks believe the values of the two groups have become more similar.

These surveys all measured racial attitudes in what used to be known as the “real world.” Today, “the digital space IS the real world,” said Pablo Boczkowski, a professor in Northwestern University’s Media, Technology and Society program.

“We always had people shouting on the street,” Boczkowski said. “It was a handful of people, and the sender of the message could be clearly identified. Now the audience is much bigger, it’s more unknown, it’s more diverse potentially, and this has changed the dynamics of the game.”

The dynamics of racism on the recipient can be powerful online, said Brendesha Tynes, a professor of psychology and African-American studies at the University of Illinois.

Her study of 264 Midwestern high school students found that 20 percent of whites, 29 percent of blacks and 42 percent of “other” or multiple races reported being personally subjected to racial epithets or other discrimination online — and that these youths were more likely to feel depression or anxiety. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“We’ve made a lot of progress online and offline on race relations, but you can go into some of these spaces and it will take you back to pre-civil rights times,” Tynes said.

“The danger is, people see other folks online saying whatever they want to say, and they think it’s acceptable online behavior,” she said. “Over time, that might become an acceptable way to talk about race online.”

Public disapproval has played a major role in reducing face-to-face racist speech, and Tynes noted that public complaints can get racist comments removed from popular places like Facebook. But, she added, “the Internet is just too vast to say that certain groups’ disapproval will impact the way people express race online.”

She believes more education and discussion are needed: “Even though we talk about a post-racial America, race has never been more salient than it is right now.”

So what types of people are typing these anonymous attacks? The white homeowner who smiles at his black neighbor? Minorities trying to make whites look bad? People of any race just looking for a thrill?

Jared Taylor, who is white and calls himself a “race realist,” believes that whites and Asians are more intelligent than Hispanics and blacks. He avoids using racial slurs, and his organization’s website does not allow racial insults — but he has an explanation for the source of the comments: “Intense frustration among ordinary whites at what they see as coddling and excuse-making for blacks and Hispanics.”

“Many, many whites are hopping mad about that kind of double standard,” he said in an e-mail interview. “Their frustrations are never voiced in the mainstream media, and anger provokes crude language. … Most of those people probably never use racial slurs when they speak. This gives them a chance to commit what is considered a great and shocking sin and get away with it.”

Is there any value in venting online? Ryerson, the newspaper editor, said a mental health professional once told him that the act of writing virulent letters to the editor probably provided a “safety valve” — because knowing the letter would be read, if only by the editor, could deter the writer from violence.

“The only problem,” Ryerson said, “is we didn’t print those letters.”

Nathan Schroeder, national secretary for the Supreme White Alliance — whose website warns visitors of its “racist overtone” — says people who share his views benefit from online anonymity.

He said many white people “aren’t to that point yet where they will openly come out and say, ‘I stand for this. I am proud of my heritage. I want to preserve my people.’ They don’t want their close friends, families, what have you, to find out so they are more comfortable speaking about it on the Internet.

“Regardless, they still feel the same feelings that we do, whether they want to be open right now about it or not.”

The number of U.S. hate groups has more than doubled in the last 10 years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, up to 932 hate groups in 2009. Deborah Lauter, civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League, said there are thousands of hate websites — “more than we can possibly keep track of.”

The most popular hate websites draw tens of thousands of visitors each month. Mainstream sites draw into the millions — and some comments there would not be out of place within the Supreme White Alliance.

Many people were angered by recent stories on the Des Moines Register website about black youths who attacked white patrons at the Iowa State Fair. An early report said the black youths were heard saying it was an occasion to beat whites, although police later said that could not be verified and did not press hate crime charges.

One anonymous commenter said slavery should never have been ended, while another wrote that blacks should be put in a coliseum with guns and left to kill each other, said Strentz, the retired professor.

He believes there is still much racial progress to be made in America.

“Even if we do away with anonymity, we clean up the comments online, well, that’s just treating the symptoms,” he said. “We really haven’t solved anything, except on the surface.”

Jesse Washington, AP

Is user data safe in the cloud? FORTUNE | TECH

Posted by JP Mangalindan, Writer-Reporter
September 24, 2010 3:00 AM

Thousands of websites and millions of pieces of private data are increasingly in one big cloud, where some of the old rules of data security are out the window.

Image by Kevin Krejci via Flickr

With the rise of cloud computing companies, and the ferocity with which tech’s biggest companies are snatching those firms up, it’s no secret that a good chunk of our user data is already stored in the cloud. Our emails, our documents, our social network profiles and hundreds of thousands of tiny startups already rely on cloud services like SalesForce.com to be more productive and cost-effective. But one concern that remains constant is that of security. By off-loading more data to the cloud, are companies increasingly opening themselves and their users up to hacking, data loss, and privacy compromises?

What’s at risk

Take the example of credit card data. Most of us don’t think twice about saving account numbers and security codes into our online shopping profiles. The Payment Card Industry (or PCI) is a global information security standard established by a consortium including Visa Card, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, that places specific requirements on the operational infrastructure that handles high-risk data like credit card information. If an infrastructure doesn’t conform to any and all PCI regulations, then it’s not PCI compliant. And because cloud infrastructure is so vastly different than that what PCI was written for, most cloud service providers are in fact, not PCI compliant. 

How a cloud service provider encrypts client data is also key to security. According to Forrester cloud analyst Chenxi Wang, cloud data encryption can be scattershot. Some services encrypt their data; some don’t. For those that encrypt, it’s worth figuring out whether the encryption is strong enough, whether the physical server that stores your data is entirely encrypted (ie. is all client data encrypted the same way?) or whether the service provider offers applications that encrypt your data separately and with different keys than other stored data.

That last concern stems from a popular cloud practice: some cloud providers store data from multiple clients on the same physical server. So, Client A may be running one “virtual machine” and Client B can be running on another “virtual machine,” but both could be physically running on the same server. If an experienced hacker gains access to Client A via a security hole, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility for the hacker to gain access to Client B’s data as well. Even Client A, if they’re up to no good, could become the culprit.

“The risk of that, depending on how the cloud provider, may be minimal, or it may be quite substantial.” admits Wang. “From the absolute security stance, there is a risk that the other company who happens to rely on the same infrastructure may be able to utilize some covert terminal, or some kind of interface that’s available to actually hack into your part of the infrastructure.”

Another concern is the use of the third-party companies for various components of a cloud service. While Amazon’s cloud services are entirely in-house, other cloud services are relying on third parties more and more.

Wang brings up a recent example where third party usage has gone horribly awry. For back-up purposes, client data is often written to tapes or drives, but after a given period of time, most back-ups need to be destroyed. Recently, an unnamed cloud provider sent their back-up tapes to a data disposal company. Wang says the data disposal company lost all the tapes, and thus all the cloud client data on them.

“The cloud provider was put in a very bad situation because they don’t have any assurance the data was actually destroyed,” says Wang.

Minimizing cloud risks

To reduce the chances of a nightmare scenario like that from happening, potential clients shopping around for a cloud service provider need to do their research.

The only way clients can fully understand and control their data is by learning as much as possible and being firm throughout contract negotiations. In the absence of standards like PCI, it’s not enough to trust providers to protect your data or take their word for it: companies need to get details on how data will be physically stored, how well it will be encrypted on physical servers that share storage space with other client data, whether the provider employs third parties, and what those companies’ operational procedures are. Clients need to be crystal clear in understanding how their data is handled and who within the company or outside the company will have access to it.

In the case of the lost back-up data situation, it almost sounds like a no-brainer that the provider would turn around and notify affected clients about compromised security, but in reality, the company is under no obligation to do so unless their contracts say otherwise. So, requirements for client notification, whether a good or bad situation arises, is a must.

Also worth inquiring about during contract negotiations? “First right of refusal” when hiring third parties, separate physical servers and cabinets, and/or separate data encryption services. Clients won’t necessarily be granted such demands — that depends on their history with the provider and how much they values the business — but the price of not asking and subsequently suffering a security breech could be immensely high. Of course, some of the worst losses of private data over the last few years have come from the “stolen laptop” syndrome, where data that should’ve never been on personal computer ended up in the hands of petty thieves (or perhaps worse).

All of this, of course, is vital for companies who are setting up cloud based businesses and do right by their users. Average users generally have no way of knowing how their data is being treated, outside the boilerplate privacy policies that companies post on their websites. Which is to say that short of creating a total information blockade, we are already living in the cloud.

• 10 U.S. states had their hottest summer on record and all but 7 states were above normal. And summer nighttime heat records were set in 37 states.
• June-August global land surface temperature was the warmest on record, 1.80 F (1.00 C) above the 20th century average of 56.9 F (13.8 C) and surpassing the previous record of 1.66 F (0.92 C) set in 1998.
• For only the third time in the satellite record and the third time in the last four years, the Arctic sea ice extent fell below 5 million square kilometers (1.93 million square miles). This summer’s Arctic sea ice extent fell more than 25% below the 1979-2009 31-year average.
• Arctic sea ice volume (extent and thickness) reached the lowest level ever recorded, prompting Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center to predict, “The Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover.”

• 

  
  Image via Wikipedia
  A record Russian heat wave caused massive wildfires and drought and may have killed up to 15,000 people, cost the Russian economy $15 billion, and destroyed a third of the Russian grain crop, causing global wheat prices to nearly double. Peat bog and forest fires filled Moscow’s air with carbon monoxide levels reaching 6.5 times more than the maximum allowable levels.
• Devastating floods inundated one-fifth of Pakistan, drove millions from their homes, and led to the deaths of more than 1,600 people. Up to a foot of rain fell in a 36-hour period and Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research Programme, pointed to climate change: “There’s no doubt that clearly the climate change is contributing, a major contributing factor. We cannot definitely use one case to kind of establish precedents, but there are a few facts that point towards climate change as having to do with this.”
• Hundreds of walruses on Alaska’s North Slope were stampeded to death when they beached themselves on land because there were no sea ice floes available.
• This year’s extreme heat is causing only the second known global bleaching of coral reefs. In oceans from Thailand to Texas, scientists fear this year’s die-off may be as bad as or worse than in 1998 when an estimated 16% of the world’s shallow water reefs were severely damaged. In the waters off the Philippines, 95% of the corals have died this year.

Sources:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2010-09-08-record-summer-heat-_N.htm
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/09/37-states-set-nighttime-high-temperature-records-this-summer.php
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/hottestsummer/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100919104002.htm
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52896
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-10/russia-may-lose-15-000-lives-15-billion-of-economic-output-in-heat-wave.html
http://www.economist.com/node/16994407
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100808/160116529.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7937269/Pakistan-floods-Climate-change-experts-say-global-warming-could-be-the-cause.html
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Map-of-Pakistan-s-flood-area/Article1-591497.aspx
http://www.eenews.net/public/climatewire/2010/08/18/1
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/39278191#39278191
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/earth/21coral.html
http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0923-fidenci_coralbleach.html]

September 25, 2010 The G.O.P.’s ‘Pledge’

Extravagant promises and bluster are the stuff of campaign rhetoric, but the House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” goes far beyond the norm.

Its breathless mimicry of the Declaration of Independence — the “governed do not consent,” it declares, while vowing to rein in “an arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites” — would be ludicrous, if these were not destructively polarized times.

While it promises to create jobs, control deficit spending and restore Americans’ trust in government, it is devoid of tough policy choices. This new “governing agenda” does not say how the Republicans would replace revenue that would be lost from permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts, or how they would manage Medicare and Social Security, or even which discretionary programs would go when they slash $100 billion in spending. Their record at all of these things is dismal.

The best way to understand the pledge is as a bid to co-opt the Tea Party by a Republican leadership that wants to sound insurrectionist but is the same old Washington elite. These are the folks who slashed taxes on the rich, turned a surplus into a crushing deficit, and helped unleash the financial crisis that has thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes.

Not only are the players the same, the policies are the same. Just more tax cuts for the rich and more deficit spending. We find it hard to believe that even the most disaffected voters will be taken in. But again, these are strange and worrying times.

Still, the pledge was worth a careful reading. It is a reminder that there is a choice to be made this fall.

THE BUDGET DEFICIT The Republicans’ central claim is that they will be able to reduce the budget deficit, while cutting taxes deeply and making marginal cuts in spending. That pledge is impossible to keep. There is no chance of reducing the deficit without tax increases. The budget has been chronically short of revenue since the start of the Bush-era tax cuts, and more indiscriminate cutting will only dig the hole deeper.

Cutting the deficit will also require curbs on the government’s biggest and most popular entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, collectively 40 percent of the budget. Ditto military spending, another 20 percent. Yet Republicans pledge to shield seniors, veterans and the troops from spending cuts.

It is difficult to put an exact number on the size of the deficits and debt implied by the pledge, because the details are sketchy. What is known is that if current tax and spending policies continue, the deficit (currently estimated at $1.3 trillion) will double in size as a share of the economy in the decades to come.

TAXES AND TAX CUTS The Republicans’ pledge also fails to mention that President Obama has already called for extending the tax cuts for 98 percent of taxpayers (couples making up to $250,000 and individuals making up to $200,000).

So what the pledge is really advocating is a permanent extension of tax cuts for the top 2 percent. In all, the pledge’s tax proposal would add $3.7 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years, nearly $700 billion more than the administration’s proposal.

The drive for permanent high-end tax cuts is profligate; there is no other word for it. The nation cannot afford it. We are fighting a war in Afghanistan and only now winding down the war in Iraq. The baby boom generation is about to retire. To keep competing, the country needs enormous investment in infrastructure, energy alternatives, education and basic research.

The pledge asserts that letting the high-end tax cuts expire would kill job creation. With the economy weak, letting all the tax cuts expire would be a big hit to consumer spending and, by extension, job growth. But richer Americans tend to save, not spend, their tax cuts. Of 11 ways to boost the economy analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, preserving the high-end tax cuts ranked last.

Republicans also assert that letting the high-end cuts expire would devastate small businesses. But less than 3 percent of taxpayers with business income would be affected. Republicans claim that 50 percent of small-business income would be hit. The only way to get that number is by including “small businesses” like some major law firms, investment funds, actors and athletes — hardly Main Street.

In any case, business owners do not typically base their hiring decisions on their income tax rate. If the top tax rates reverted to the pre-Bush levels, wealthy owners would keep less of the additional profit. But if a hire is profitable before tax, it will be profitable after tax. Undeterred by facts, the pledge would let small-business owners deduct 20 percent of their business income. Given the Republicans’ broad definition, that implies another big tax cut — an estimated $25 billion over two years — flowing to many high earners.

SPENDING The Republicans’ document promises the American people a “fact based” discussion of the scale of the nation’s budget problems. Then it offers a laundry list of spending-cut proposals, none of which are up to the scale of the problem, and many that cannot be taken seriously.

Calling the $862 billion stimulus wasteful and unnecessary, it says Congress should immediately cancel any unspent funds. Never mind that the stimulus, while too small given the depth of the crisis, still prevented a bad recession from being much worse.

There is also not much to cancel. Of roughly $260 billion left, contracts have already been signed for $150 billion. Another $45 billion is tax cuts that will soon be claimed, and $33 billion is for safety-net spending, like food stamps. That leaves $31 billion in investment projects — like roads and rail systems — still up for grabs. At a time when the private sector is not creating enough jobs, canceling them would be a mistake.

The House Republicans also promise to roll back spending, saving $100 billion in the first year alone. There are no details, but the proposal appears to reflect an earlier Republican proposal to cut programs like education, food safety and environmental protection.

Even in the best of times, it would be disastrous to slash such vital programs. Right now, it would also remove purchasing power, cost jobs and heighten the risk of a prolonged downturn.

The Republicans also say they will save taxpayers $30 billion by ending the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A serious debate on the future of the huge mortgage companies needs to take place. Currently, however, they own or back most new mortgages. Cutting them loose too soon would risk further damage to the wounded housing market.

Then there is the bank bailout, or TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. which the pledge vows to end “once and for all,” for a savings of $16 billion. What it does not say is that new TARP spending was basically outlawed in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill passed in July.

HEALTH CARE REFORM The Republican plan to “repeal and replace” the new reform law is set forth in a skimpy chapter that fails to offer any real alternative to cover uninsured Americans or reduce medical inflation.

The pledge contains a few golden G.O.P. oldies: medical liability reform that will probably not save serious money; allowing Americans to purchase insurance issued in other states, which could bring down premiums for the healthy while driving them up for the chronically ill; and expanding so-called health savings accounts that are useful for some Americans but not all.

At the same time as they revile reform, the authors embrace, or at least pretend to, some of the most popular, consumer-friendly features of the law, like eliminating spending caps and prohibitions against dropping your coverage just because you get sick. The Republicans say they would provide incentives to states to develop innovative reforms; that, too, is already in the law.

The pledge document does not mention the Republicans’ plan — should repeal fail — to block the annual appropriations needed to carry out reform. That just-say-no approach is flat-out irresponsible. The health care reforms are so intertwined that it is hard to eliminate one provision without undermining others.

•

Americans are right to be worried and even angry about the bad economy. And they are right to demand that Washington do a lot more to revive employment now and start to reduce the deficit soon. But these are hard problems built up over eight years of mainly Republican leadership. The pledge takes the country backward — a place no one should want to go.

MORE IN OPINION (5 OF 18 ARTICLES) Op-Ed Contributors: Ditch Your Laptop, Dump Your Boyfriend

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Stuxnet Suspicions Rise: Has a Cyberwar Started?

By Richard Adhikari

TechNewsWorld 
09/23/10 11:40 AM PT

The Stuxnet worm has been rattling security experts for quite some time with its complexity and ingenuity. New suspicions have been raised recently that the worm was used to sabotage a nuclear reactor in Iran. That, coupled with the worm’s behavior, has led to some speculation that Stuxnet is a state-sponsored weapon.

The Stuxnet worm, which made headlines last summer when it hit one version of a system that controls critical infrastructure systems governing power grids and industrial plants, is once again creating a buzz.

This time, there’s speculation that it was created by Israel to target Iran.

However, security experts remain divided on the origins of this troublesome bit of malware.

Worming Teheran

Ralph Langner, an expert on industrial systems security, published an analysis of the worm and suggested it may have been used to sabotage Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor.

Iran was perhaps hit hardest by Stuxnet, with nearly 60 percent of all infected PCs found in that country.

“In the statistics we’ve collected, there was an abnormal rate of infections in Iran,” Pierre-Marc Bureau, a researcher at ESET, told TechNewsWorld. “But there were infections in other countries as well. This might lead us to think that somebody was paying more attention to Iran but I can’t jump to any conclusions at this point in time.”

High-Class Malware

Suspicions that a nation state was behind the Stuxnet worm were voiced in August by Roen Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher with Kaspersky Lab Americas, at a conference the antivirus vendor held in San Francisco.

“We agree this worm was state-sponsored because it is the most professional malware we’ve seen so far, and the resources needed to create it were far greater than we usually see deployed in creating other pieces of malware,” ESET’s Bureau pointed out.

However, whether Israel specifically was behind the attack is a question that’s still being debated.

“There’s nothing that proves whether it has or has not been created by Israel,” Bureau said. “But it might have been created by other countries,” he pointed out.

Israel has been accused of hacking into other countries’ systems before, Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, pointed out. Mossad, Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, allegedly hacked a Syrian laptop and bombed a Syrian nuclear facility as a result of information it discovered, Cluley claimed. He pointed to a story in the German newspaper Der Spiegel as his source.

Cluley wrote about that incident and about cyberwarfare among other countries in his blog.

The Fog of Uncertainty

“I don’t think anyone can prove that it was even created in Israel, let alone sponsored by the powers that be in Israel,” Cluley said.

“It’s not clear who’s behind Stuxnet,” Kaspersky Lab’s Schouwenberg told TechNewsWorld. “A nation-state is the most probable scenario, but without somebody claiming responsibility for this worm, we’ll probably never find out who was behind it.”

Why the uncertainty? Why is it taking so long to track this worm down?

“We’ve dedicated a team to investigate this Stuxnet worm, and months afterwards, we kept finding out more stuff,” ESET’s Bureau said. However, the worm is so complex that “we realized other companies were finding different things than we were,” he said.

The different findings are probably because Stuxnet profiles systems and will run differently on different systems. It attacks industrial control systems, known as SCADA systems, and works on all versions of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows after Windows 2000.

In addition to stealing code and design projects and hiding itself using a classic Windows rootkit, Stuxnet can upload its own code to the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in SCADA systems, controlling or changing how those systems operate.

The Rules of Cyberengagement

If a nation-state sponsored this attack, could it be regarded as a cyberterrorist act?

Not at all, Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld.

“A terrorist attack’s goal is to create fear,” Enderle pointed out. “The goal of this attack wasn’t fear, and it was probably launched by a nation-state in a state of undeclared war with another, so I don’t think this meets the bar of a terrorist attack.”

The attack could be considered state-sponsored malware rather than cyberterrorism, but there’s no solid proof that a state is indeed behind the Stuxnet worm, Sophos’ Cluley said.

“I think it’s wrong to call this terrorism,” he declared. However, it’s to be expected that nation-states will “use every dirty trick in the book to spy upon each other, disrupt activities, and grasp an advantage.”

The U.S. State Department, which is busy with the United Nations General Assembly’s annual meeting currently being held in New York, was unable to provide comment by press time, but State Department spokesperson Harry Edwards told TechNewsWorld that “we’re working to provide you answers.”

Gimme Shelter

As more attacks emerge, more and more of them may begin to resemble state-sponsored activities, Sophos’ Cluley predicted.

Is there any way to protect against such attacks? Could countries come up with a common code of conduct to govern cyberactions that would rule out such attacks?

“The best way to protect yourself or your country is to use the same defenses that all computers should already have — up-to-date antivirus and other security software, security patches and so on,” Cluley said. “A code of conduct for cyberwar is an awfully nice idea, but I very much doubt it would be achievable in practice.” 

Next Article in Cybersecurity

Pentagon: Yep, We Got Hacked
August 26, 2010

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense William S. Lynn III has admitted that the Pentagon suffered a serious security breach in 2008, an incident he categorized as “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever.” Though the breach was reported in the press at the time, the DoD has only now publicly acknowledged that it occurred — and that it took 14 months to clean up the mess left behind.

Copyright 1998-2010 ECT News Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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William Gibson and the Future of the Future By Douglas Gorney

Michael O’Shea

Compared to the AI entities and digitally-enhanced hackers of his debut novel, Neuromancer, William Gibson’s current cast of characters is remarkably dialed-down. But their quest is the same—to gain an edge by identifying critical, emerging patterns of data among the noise. In his new novel, Zero History, global marketing genius Hubertus Bigend and his team find themselves in less virtual though equally dangerous realms of military contracting and fashion, chasing the holy grail of post-modern marketing—the secret brand. 

Like Bigend, Gibson’s ability to discern codes among the background noise of our culture has made him a larger-than-life figure in both science fiction and information technology. Gibson talked with The Atlantic from his home in Vancouver about why, since coining the term cyberspace, he’s become interested in the comparatively low-tech pursuit of marketing, and whether it’s possible to find the cool in a post-geographic age. He also explained why he thinks we need the science fiction toolkit to handle the complexities of the present. In your first novel, Neuromancer, you paint a very internal, hermetic vision of the future, which was at odds with the grand, “space opera” version of science fiction. That is the future we’re getting, though. With the US space program being downsized and unmanned—the narratives of our future seem to be far less “out there” than they are earth-bound, and increasingly internal. 

I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F—it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well. When I wrote Neuromancer, I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense I intended Neuromancer, among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me. 

As I was writing it, when I really got to a fork in the path—should I do this or do that?—my guide was to just do the opposite to what I assumed traditional science fiction would do. I stuck with that, thereafter, and eventually brought it back to the present. I think I’m actually still doing the same thing.

How do you think younger people today think about the future? Do they think about the future at all? Is there a disappointment among those who once thought in a big way about the future? 

I’m not going all Sex Pistols, shouting No Future!—I’m suggesting that we’re becoming more like Europeans, who have always retrofitted their ruins, who’ve always known that everyone lives in someone else’s future and someone else’s past. It’s the American aspect of futurism that, as I understand it, was for a very long time to assume that there was more space over the next rise where you could go and build an entirely new future. That was America’s experience as a growing country. If things didn’t work out, you moved West. There was a seemingly infinite amount of unsettled land that we had. People supposedly moved West out of their inevitable discontent with how things were going where they happened to be living. 

Whether or not that was historically true I don’t know, but we carried that idea into our vision of the future, and it acquired its capital F around the beginning of the 20th century and held onto it until maybe sometime in the ’70s. It was still very capital F in the ’60s. At some point the blush went off it a bit, and we’ve been entertaining a different sort of future since then. 

Zero History revolves around post-modern fashion marketing. People now seem more invested in technology than clothing styles, however. Is technology in a sense replacing fashion? 

For me fashion is like Oscar Wilde’s dictum, that “Fashion is something so ugly that we’re compelled to change it every six months.” I’ve never been very interested in that kind fashion. I’m interested in how people all over the world array themselves and go forth in the morning to do whatever they have to do to make a living. The kinds of codes of information inevitably involved in that—what passes for fashion—is, for me, more anthropological. 

I agree with you in the sense that the old, annoying, Oscar-Wildeian sense of fashion has been to a large degree overtaken by technology. That’s not to say that technology isn’t to a very large degree about fashion and marketing—it obviously is. But I don’t think there’s any wearable designer product in the world that could get the sort of overnight-standing-in-lines-a-mile-long consumer turnout that you could get for a new iPhone, say. That’s an intense response. Prada is not likely to get that kind of line. 

But certainly, we live in an age when people are as invested in appearance as I’ve ever seen them to be. People still have to cover themselves in something when they get up in the morning, and there’s still competing with one another with clothing, and making declarations of self with clothing, and disguising themselves with that which they aren’t—with clothing. It’s just a fantastically basic thing that we do. I think that it’s always a bit dangerous to write about codes of apparel and the sociology of dress—there’s something about our culture that demands that we think of it as inherently lightweight. I was a bit concerned about that but I thought ah, you know, I can afford to be seen to have gone a bit lightweight here, particularly if I don’t think I’m going lightweight with it.

Putnam Adult

Maybe it’s just my particular little world in my part of San Francisco, but looking out at the parade of people passing by my window I sometimes wonder if we are in this post-fashion period.

Well, I was in San Francisco last month, and what struck me about it was that I’d never seen San Francisco manifest such coherent street fashion. People under 30, particularly, were dressed to global urban standard. You could have plucked them out of San Francisco and dropped them into Tokyo, London, New York or Williamsburg and you’d be absolutely unable to pick them out of the crowd. People 30 and under are taking their codes from the web, not from fashion magazines. Young people in Vancouver have never dressed like young people in New York or London. Now they do. They get all the details right, because they’re reading The Sartorialist every day. They’ve got a way to crack the code without having to go to New York, Tokyo or London. And it’s kind of—I don’t know, is this a good thing? Like we’re losing local palettes. Everything is starting to look the same.

In the post-modern marketing intrigues in your recent books, characters like Hubertus Bigend must trace larger movements in culture before anybody else knows they are there. But if everybody is seeing the same things, dressing the same way, and hewing to the same cultural norms because of the Internet, are there any cultural differentiations left to make? 

I don’t know. That’s a really good question, and it’s going to be interesting to see how that goes. It reminds me of what some people including myself were saying ten years ago about bohemias, and whether it’s still possible to do them in a culture that has evolved to detect and commodify them, and sell them back to you before you can even get into the second gear with your bohemia. Bohemias are sort of like designer lifestyles, in a way, and it seems like the Internet may have put an end to them, at least in terms of how we were viewing them before. We’re post-geographical now. 

Perhaps that same mechanism applies to coolness. Maybe what we’re really talking about is novelty. Because a mechanism like Twitter is probably the single most powerful and efficient aggregator of novelty that ever existed. The real function of magazines, for the most part, has been to aggregate novelty, to run around to find a lot of new things, put them in your issue, and get them out ideally before the other magazines notices it—then people buy it, bring it home, and wolf down all this novelty. 

Now if you’ve got your Twitter feed set up right, every day you can get more raw novelty dumped on your desktop than you can get buying an entire magazine store. And it changes every day. What does that mean? One thing it means is that magazines have to find something different to do—you have to find some niche that you can operate in. 

If novelty is available wholesale at that level and at that quantity for free to a 15 year-old in Nebraska, what’s that going to do to the rest of us? I don’t know, but I’m sure the next time I’m writing a novel that’s going to be one of the post-it notes on the windshield.

Is this commodification of novelty—that novelty is so available to everyone that novelty, per se, may not be a novelty anymore—behind the more here-and-now setting of your recent novels? 

Well, when I started writing in my late 20s, I knew that I was a native of science fiction. It was my native literary culture. But I also knew that I had been to a lot of other places in literature, other than science fiction. When I started working I had the science fiction writer’s specialist toolkit. I used it for my version of what it had been issued for. As I used it, though, and as the world around me changed, because of the impact of contemporary technologies, more than anything else, I found myself looking at the toolkit and thinking, you know, these tools are possibly the best tools we have to describe our inherently fantastic present—to describe it and examine it, and take it down and put it back together and get a handle on it. I think without those tools I don’t really know what we could do with it.

Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we’re living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to—the material demands it. Global warming demands it, and the global AIDS epidemic and 9/11 and everything else—all these things that didn’t exist 30 years ago require that toolkit to handle. You need science fiction oven mitts to handle the hot casserole that is 2010. 

Do you think that there are Hubertus Bigends around somewhere, scanning the world with a heightened perception of these larger trends that interweave marketing and fashion and technology and enormous revenue streams? 

I doubt that there are, but I sort of wish there were. The closest thing that might ever have existed, however briefly, was when [Sex Pistols manager] Malcolm McLaren was hired by the Polish government to “rebrand Poland”. I think the very idea of that having happened was part of the original inspiration for Bigend. 

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/09/william-gibson-and-the-future-of-the-future/62863/

Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

Posted At : January 8, 2009 3:24 PM | Posted By : Paul Wilmott
Related Categories: GeneralThe Financial Modelers’ Manifesto

Preface

A spectre is haunting Markets – the spectre of illiquidity, frozen credit, and the failure of financial models.

Beginning with the 2007 collapse in subprime mortgages, financial markets have shifted to new regimes characterized by violent movements, epidemics of contagion from market to market, and almost unimaginable anomalies (who would have ever thought that swap spreads to Treasuries could go negative?). Familiar valuation models have become increasingly unreliable. Where is the risk manager that has not ascribed his losses to a once-in-a-century tsunami?

To this end, we have assembled in New York City and written the following manifesto.

Manifesto

In finance we study how to manage funds – from simple securities like dollars and yen, stocks and bonds to complex ones like futures and options, subprime CDOs and credit default swaps. We build financial models to estimate the fair value of securities, to estimate their risks and to show how those risks can be controlled. How can a model tell you the value of a security? And how did these models fail so badly in the case of the subprime CDO market?

Physics, because of its astonishing success at predicting the future behavior of material objects from their present state, has inspired most financial modeling. Physicists study the world by repeating the same experiments over and over again to discover forces and their almost magical mathematical laws. Galileo dropped balls off the leaning tower, giant teams in Geneva collide protons on protons, over and over again. If a law is proposed and its predictions contradict experiments, it’s back to the drawing board. The method works. The laws of atomic physics are accurate to more than ten decimal places.

It’s a different story with finance and economics, which are concerned with the mental world of monetary value. Financial theory has tried hard to emulate the style and elegance of physics in order to discover its own laws. But markets are made of people, who are influenced by events, by their ephemeral feelings about events and by their expectations of other people’s feelings. The truth is that there are no fundamental laws in finance. And even if there were, there is no way to run repeatable experiments to verify them.

You can hardly find a better example of confusedly elegant modeling than models of CDOs. The CDO research papers apply abstract probability theory to the price co-movements of thousands of mortgages. The relationships between so many mortgages can be vastly complex. The modelers, having built up their fantastical theory, need to make it useable; they resort to sweeping under the model’s rug all unknown dynamics; with the dirt ignored, all that’s left is a single number, called the default correlation. From the sublime to the elegantly ridiculous: all uncertainty is reduced to a single parameter that, when entered into the model by a trader, produces a CDO value. This over-reliance on probability and statistics is a severe limitation. Statistics is shallow description, quite unlike the deeper cause and effect of physics, and can’t easily capture the complex dynamics of default.

Models are at bottom tools for approximate thinking; they serve to transform your intuition about the future into a price for a security today. It’s easier to think intuitively about future housing prices, default rates and default correlations than it is about CDO prices. CDO models turn your guess about future housing prices, mortgage default rates and a simplistic default correlation into the model’s output: a current CDO price.

Our experience in the financial arena has taught us to be very humble in applying mathematics to markets, and to be extremely wary of ambitious theories, which are in the end trying to model human behavior. We like simplicity, but we like to remember that it is our models that are simple, not the world.

Unfortunately, the teachers of finance haven’t learned these lessons. You have only to glance at business school textbooks on finance to discover stilts of mathematical axioms supporting a house of numbered theorems, lemmas and results. Who would think that the textbook is at bottom dealing with people and money? It should be obvious to anyone with common sense that every financial axiom is wrong, and that finance can never in its wildest dreams be Euclid. Different endeavors, as Aristotle wrote, require different degrees of precision. Finance is not one of the natural sciences, and its invisible worm is its dark secret love of mathematical elegance and too much exactitude.

We do need models and mathematics – you cannot think about finance and economics without them – but one must never forget that models are not the world. Whenever we make a model of something involving human beings, we are trying to force the ugly stepsister’s foot into Cinderella’s pretty glass slipper. It doesn’t fit without cutting off some essential parts. And in cutting off parts for the sake of beauty and precision, models inevitably mask the true risk rather than exposing it. The most important question about any financial model is how wrong it is likely to be, and how useful it is despite its assumptions. You must start with models and then overlay them with common sense and experience.

Many academics imagine that one beautiful day we will find the ‘right’ model. But there is no right model, because the world changes in response to the ones we use. Progress in financial modeling is fleeting and temporary. Markets change and newer models become necessary. Simple clear models with explicit assumptions about small numbers of variables are therefore the best way to leverage your intuition without deluding yourself.

All models sweep dirt under the rug. A good model makes the absence of the dirt visible. In this regard, we believe that the Black-Scholes model of options valuation, now often unjustly maligned, is a model for models; it is clear and robust. Clear, because it is based on true engineering; it tells you how to manufacture an option out of stocks and bonds and what that will cost you, under ideal dirt-free circumstances that it defines. Its method of valuation is analogous to figuring out the price of a can of fruit salad from the cost of fruit, sugar, labor and transportation. The world of markets doesn’t exactly match the ideal circumstances Black-Scholes requires, but the model is robust because it allows an intelligent trader to qualitatively adjust for those mismatches. You know what you are assuming when you use the model, and you know exactly what has been swept out of view.

Building financial models is challenging and worthwhile: you need to combine the qualitative and the quantitative, imagination and observation, art and science, all in the service of finding approximate patterns in the behavior of markets and securities. The greatest danger is the age-old sin of idolatry. Financial markets are alive but a model, however beautiful, is an artifice. No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to breathe life into it. To confuse the model with the world is to embrace a future disaster driven by the belief that humans obey mathematical rules.

MODELERS OF ALL MARKETS, UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your illusions.

The Modelers’ Hippocratic Oath

~ I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations.

~ Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.

~ I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so.

~ Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.

~ I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.

         

Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott January 7 2009

Please join in the discussion of this Manifesto here.

 

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September 21, 2010 | Chronicle of Higher Education

Education Pays, but How Much?

By Beckie Supiano

Higher education has a public-relations problem. Family incomes are stagnant, but tuition keeps going up. Many students who begin college don’t graduate. Even among those who do, students who borrow are finishing with greater and greater average debt burdens. And then they’re walking into a tough job market. So what is a college degree really worth?

The answer to that question is clearly important for higher education. But trying to find it isn’t easy and brings a fair bit of controversy.

On Tuesday, the College Board released its latest installment of “Education Pays”, a report that showcases the financial and nonfinancial payoffs of earning that degree. In the introduction, the report’s authors make clear that they know the fray they’re stepping into: “Too often, colorful anecdotes about individuals who have had unfortunate experiences capture the spotlight and lead to inaccurate generalizations about the dangers of making this major life investment,” they write.

The last iteration of the report, released in 2007, was publicly criticized by Charles Miller, the former chairman of the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education, who wrote a response letter taking issue with the report’s methodology, which he said overinflated the value of a degree.

The College Board is a membership organization representing colleges, and its mission is “to connect students to college success and opportunity.” As Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, puts it, “the College Board is not in the business of turning people away from college.”

Despite that mission, Sandy Baum, an independent analyst for the College Board and one of the report’s authors, says that “Education Pays” is about data, not advocacy. “This report per se is presenting evidence,” says Ms. Baum, who also writes for The Chronicle on its Innovations blog. “We’re not telling anyone to do anything.”

And she wonders a bit about the criticism surrounding the report’s finding that college graduates fare much better than nongraduates. “When people talk about ‘well, maybe people shouldn’t go to college,’” she says, “ask the people if their kids go to college.”

Even Mr. Miller, who says the report greatly overstates the benefit of a degree, doesn’t take that to mean people shouldn’t go to college. Instead, he sees that as evidence that higher education’s financial system is broken.

The report’s findings will be no great surprise to anyone who has read the previous installments. Education, it finds, does pay.

Over the course of a 40-year career, the average college graduate earns about 66 percent more than the typical high-school graduate, and those with advanced degrees earn two to three times as much as a high-school graduate, according to the report.

Unlike previous reports, this time around the College Board did not include a dollar figure to show how much money college graduates earn over a lifetime compared with nongraduates. The 2007 report said that college graduates earn up to $800,000 more over a career than nongraduates, a figure that climbs to $1-million with the inclusion of advanced-degree holders. When taking into consideration that some of those earnings are in the future, the bachelor’s-degree holder earns an additional $450,000 in today’s dollars, or $570,000 when including advanced-degree holders. Those figures were taken out of context, Ms. Baum says, which is why no equivalent numbers were used this time around.

The Value Debate

“The point is, yes, you make more going to college. There’s no question about it,” says Mr. Vedder, who is a professor of economics at Ohio University and also writes for Innovations. The question is whether the report adequately accounts for those who do not graduate, he says.

The report does show the expected lifetime earnings of students who begin college but do not complete an associate or bachelor’s degree, finding that they earn more than high-school graduates but less than degree holders.

“There is evidence that there is a payoff to every year of education,” Ms. Baum says. “On average, every year of education does pay off. Every year pays off more than the year before.” But those are averages, she adds—that doesn’t make taking on $30,000 in loans and then dropping out after six months a good idea.

The financial value of a degree depends heavily on what that degree is in and where it is earned, says Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. That’s because what a student majors in decides her occupation, which decides her earnings, he says: “There is no job called ‘B.A.’”

At the same time, Mr. Carnevale adds, having a postsecondary degree does lead to higher earnings within an occupation, at least through the bachelor’s degree.

Another point of contention—and a moving target—in the value debate is the time and the expense required to earn a bachelor’s degree. The new College Board report considers this and finds that by age 33, the typical college graduate has earned enough money to compensate for taking four years out of the labor force and for borrowing the entire cost of tuition and fees at the typical public college.

Mr. Miller continues to take issue with the assumptions used in “Education Pays.” For example, he says, the report combines GED recipients and high-school graduates into one group, which pulls down the high-school graduates’ earnings, as GED holders tend not to fare as well. Ms. Baum agrees that this isn’t ideal, but she says getting separate figures for the two groups is impossible.

Mr. Miller also disputes the authors’ decision to assume that students go to a public college and graduate in four years, because a significant minority of students go to private schools, and because many students do not graduate on time. It would take longer to pay back the cost of a more-expensive private-college degree, Ms. Baum agrees, but all that means is the crossover point happens a year or two later for students who attend independent colleges. And many students who don’t graduate on time work and are not full-time students.

While some of her assumptions may favor colleges, she says, others—like that students don’t work or receive grant aid—are unfavorable from the institutions’ perspective.

In addition to earnings data, the report highlights that college graduates are less likely to be unemployed. In 2009, the unemployment rate for those 25 and older with at least a four-year college degree was 4.6 percent, compared with 9.7 percent among high-school graduates in the same age group. Still, a college degree is no guarantee of a job, Ms. Baum says: Nothing is. But having one increases a person’s employment chances.

Not Just Money

The benefits of a college degree are not only financial. The report points out other positive outcomes that correlate to having earned a college degree: Graduates are more likely to vote, to volunteer, and to exercise, and less likely to smoke or to be obese. While the report focuses on correlations, other research, some of which is highlighted in the report, shows that education itself is one cause for these behaviors, Ms. Baum says.

Mr. Carnevale is skeptical. He thinks most of the nonfinancial benefits of education boil down to social class: “When you stand on the stage and they give you the degree, how did you become healthier? Was it because you walked up the stairs?”

But Mark Kantrowitz is fascinated by the idea of an education-health connection. While there may be a selection bias that explains part of the overlap between people likely to go to college and those likely to be healthy, it’s possible to account for at least some of those factors, says Mr. Kantrowitz, publisher of the Web site FinAid, which provides student-aid information to families. And, he says, he suspects that college graduates make better health choices, in part, because they’re better informed. “It’s nice to say if you graduate with a four-year degree, you won’t just be wealthier, you’ll also be healthier.”

 

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Patricia Reid, 57, lost her job at Boeing four years ago and has struggled to find a new position.

By MOTOKO RICH Published: September 19, 2010

VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.

The New Poor

Accidentally Retired

Articles in this series are examining the struggle to recover from the widespread strains of the Great Recession.

Previous Articles in the Series »Tougher Job Market for Older Workers
Related

• Economix Blog: The Plight of Older Workers (September 20, 2010)

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Liz Howland, standing at left, leads a “mature workers” seminar for people like Deborah Luger, 56, seated at left, who want to be more attractive to employers.

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Job seekers like 60-year-old Janet Alcantara can polish their job-seeking skills at “mature workers” seminar.

But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.

College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.

But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever.

Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.

Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.

After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.

For Ms. Reid, it has been four years of hunting — without a single job offer. She buzzes energetically as she describes the countless applications she has lobbed through the Internet, as well as the online courses she is taking to burnish her software skills.

Still, when she is pressed, her can-do spirit falters.

“There are these fears in the background, and they are suppressed,” said Ms. Reid, who is now selling some of her jewelry and clothes online and is late on some credit card payments. “I have had nightmares about becoming a bag lady,” she said. “It could happen to anyone. So many people are so close to it, and they don’t even realize it.”

Being unemployed at any age can be crushing. But older workers suspect their résumés often get shoved aside in favor of those from younger workers. Others discover that their job-seeking skills — as well as some technical skills sought by employers — are rusty after years of working for the same company.

Many had in fact anticipated working past conventional retirement ages to gird themselves financially for longer life spans, expensive health care and reduced pension guarantees.

The most recent recession has increased the need to extend working life. Home values, often a family’s most important asset, have been battered. Stock portfolios are only now starting to recover. According to a Gallup poll in April, more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995.

Older workers who lose their jobs could pose a policy problem if they lose their ability to be self-sufficient. “That’s what we should be worrying about,” said Carl E. Van Horn, professor of public policy and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, “what it means to this class of the new unemployables, people who have been cast adrift at a very vulnerable part of their career and their life.”

Forced early retirement imposes an intense financial strain, particularly for those at lower incomes. The recession and its aftermath have already pushed down some older workers. In figures released last week by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate among those 55 to 64 increased to 9.4 percent in 2009, from 8.6 percent in 2007.

But even middle-class people who might skate by on savings or a spouse’s income are jarred by an abrupt end to working life and to a secure retirement.

“That’s what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security,” Ms. Reid said. “Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job.”

As an auditor, Ms. Reid loved figuring out the kinks in a manufacturing or parts delivery process. But after more than 20 years of commuting across Puget Sound to Boeing, Ms. Reid was exhausted when she was let go from her $80,000-a-year job.

Stunned and depressed, she sent out résumés, but figured she had a little time to recover. So she took vacations to Turkey and Thailand with her husband, who is a home repairman. She sought chiropractic treatments for a neck injury and helped nurse a priest dying of cancer.

Most of her days now are spent in front of a laptop, holed up in a lighthouse garret atop the house that her husband, Denny Mielock, built in the 1990s on a breathtaking piece of property overlooking the sound.

As she browses the job listings that clog her e-mail in-box, she refuses to give in to her fears. “If I let myself think like that all the time,” she said, “I could not even bear getting out of bed in the morning.”

With her husband’s home repair business pummeled by the housing downturn, the bills are mounting. Although the couple do not have a mortgage on their 3,000-square-foot house, they pay close to $7,000 a year in property taxes. The roof is leaking. Their utility bills can be $300 a month in the winter, even though they often keep the thermostat turned down to 50 degrees.

They could try to sell their home, but given the depressed housing market, they are reluctant.

“We are circling the drain here, and I am bailing like hell,” said Ms. Reid, emitting an incongruous cackle, as if laughter is the only response to her plight. “But the boat is still sinking.”

It is not just the finances that have destabilized her life.

Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. “We’ve both been hard workers our whole lives,” said Mr. Mielock, 59. Ms. Reid sometimes rose just after 3 a.m. to make the hourlong commute to Boeing’s data center in Bellevue and attended night school to earn a master’s in management information systems.

“A job is more than a job, you know,” Mr. Mielock said. “It’s where you fit in society.”

Here in the greater Seattle area, a fifth of those claiming extended unemployment benefits are 55 and older.

To help seniors polish their job-seeking skills, WorkSource, a local consortium of government and nonprofit groups, recently began offering seminars. On a recent morning, 14 people gathered in a windowless conference room at a local community college to get tips on how to age-proof their résumés and deflect questions about being overqualified.

Motivational posters hung on one wall, bearing slogans like “Failure is the path of least persistence.”

Using PowerPoint slides, Liz Howland, the chipper but no-nonsense session leader, projected some common myths about older job-seekers on a screen: “Older workers are less capable of evaluating information, making decisions and problem-solving” or “Older workers are rigid and inflexible and have trouble adapting to change.”

Ms. Howland, 61, ticked off the reasons those statements were inaccurate. But a clear undercurrent of anxiety ran through the room. “Is it really true that if you have the energy and the passion that they will overlook the age factor?” asked a 61-year-old man who had been laid off from a furniture maker last October.

Gallows humor reigned. As Ms. Howland — who suggested that applicants remove any dates older than 15 years from their résumé — advised the group on how to finesse interview questions like “When did you have the job that helped you develop that skill?” one out-of-work journalist deadpanned: “How about ‘during the 20th century?’ ”

During a break, Anne Richard, who declined to give her age, confessed she was afraid she would not be able to work again after losing her contract as a house director at aUniversity of Washington sorority in June. Although she had 20 years of experience as an office clerk in Chattanooga, Tenn., she feared her technology skills had fallen behind.

“I don’t feel like I can compete with kids who have been on computers all their lives,” said Ms. Richard, who was sleeping on the couch of a couple she had met at church and contemplating imminent homelessness.

Older people who lose their jobs take longer to find work. In August, the average time unemployed for those 55 and older was slightly more than 39 weeks, according to the Labor Department, the longest of any age group. That is much worse than in August 1983, also after a deep recession, when someone unemployed in that age group spent an average of 27.5 weeks finding work.

At this year’s pace of an average of 82,000 new jobs a month, it will take at least eight more years to create the 8 million positions lost during the recession. And that does not even allow for population growth.

Advocates for the elderly worry that younger people are more likely to fill the new jobs as well.

“I do think the longer someone is out of work, the more employers are going to question why it is that someone hasn’t been able to find work,” said Sara Rix, senior strategic policy adviser at AARP, the lobbying group for seniors. “Their skills have atrophied for one thing, and technology changes so rapidly that even if nothing happened to the skills that you have, they may become increasingly less relevant to the jobs that are becoming available.”

In four years of job hunting, Ms. Reid has discovered that she is no longer technologically proficient. In one of a handful of interviews she has secured, for an auditing position at the Port of Seattle, she learned that the job required skills in PeopleSoft, financial software she had never used. She assumes that deficiency cost her the job.

Ms. Reid is still five years away from being eligible for Social Security. But even then, she would be drawing early, which reduces monthly payments. Taking Social Security at 62 means a retiree would receive a 25 percent lower monthly payout than if she worked until 66.

Ms. Reid is in some ways luckier than others. Boeing paid her a six-month severance, and she has health care benefits that cover her and her husband for $40 a month.

And she admits some regrets: she had a $180,000 balance in her 401(k) account, and paid $80,000 in penalties and taxes when she cashed it out early. She did not rein in her expenses right away. And now, her $500-a-week unemployment benefits have been exhausted.

She has since cut back, forgoing Nordstrom shopping sprees and theater subscriptions, but also cutting out red meat at home and putting off home repairs.

In order to qualify for accounting posts, she is taking an online training course in QuickBooks, a popular accounting software used by small businesses. She recently signed up for a tax course at an H&R Block tax preparation office in Seattle.

And she is plugging ahead with her current plan: to send out 600 applications to accounting firms in the area, offering her services for the next tax season. Eventually, she wants to open her own business.

With odd jobs and her husband’s — albeit shriveled — earnings, she could stagger along. For now, she stitches together an income by gardening for neighbors, helping fellow church members with their computers, and participating in Internet surveys for as little as $5 apiece.

“You don’t necessarily have to go through the door,” Ms. Reid said. “You can go around it and go under it. I can be very creative. I think that I will eventually manage to pull this together.”