Eavesdroppers Seldom Hear Anything Pleasant: Have You Ever Read Your Medical Records?

Two recent articles delved into what seems like a pretty simple question: Should patients read their own medical records? Particularly the notes doctors jot down in the course of diagnosis and treatment?

It seems like it should be self evident. Your medical records are, after all, about you. That means they contain information that might be relevant to your interests, and reading them could shed some light on some things. But, by the same token, they are about you. They are written with you in mind, all right, but not as a reader, and, as it turns out, sometimes they say things that are not particularly nice. While ostensibly people should be noting things on charts like the patient will be reading them, that’s not always the case, and I know I personally have seen some rather nasty comments on my own medical records.

Which, you know, it always irks me when I go to the doctor’s and the medical records are tightly clutched and whisked away whenever I approach. Very, very, very rarely am I left in a room alone with my medical records. They are handled as though they need to be kept confidential not just from the general public, but also from me, which I rather resent, because they are about me, and I might be interested in reading them.

In the Wall Street Journal, an article on the OpenNotes Project, where patients are actively encouraged to read notes, has some interesting revelations. The Project is showing that being able to view notes improves the doctor-patient relationship, especially for patients with complex medical problems, and it also improves overall quality of care. That’s a pretty solid reason to implement it in other places, especially since it could be streamlined with the development of electronic medical records; imagine being able to log in and see your notes and test results, to review them at leisure, to not have to sift through piles of paper to get to the information you need.

One point made in the article is that being allowed to read your records, and the notes specifically, might help you comply with treatment better. Patients often forget things they are told in the office, or don’t realise how important they are. The doctor duly notes them down, but the patient doesn’t internalise the information. If the notes were provided, the patient could review them, understand why the issue is important, and follow through.

This could result in avoidance of potentially costly medical problems. We patients are sometimes shy about asking for clarification or requesting more information. That means that sometimes miscommunications happen. On a small scale, it might result in momentary confusion until the matter can be cleared up, but in other cases? It could be deadly. If you’re taking the wrong dosage of a medication, or doing something differently because you thought that’s what you heard the doctor say…and this is an issue that could easily be resolved by reading your own files, and seeing the note that says ’15 milligrams,’ not ’50.’

For that matter, some of us don’t do too well with oral communication. If we receive information in written form, we internalise and process it better. That’s why I take notes at the doctor’s, because since I can’t see my file to see what the doctor claims to have told me, I have to take my own damn notes to make sure I understand what is being said. And I am trying to be better about asking questions, requesting clarification, even though I sometimes feel really foolish. Not necessarily by any fault of the doctor, but because we are so trained to sit and listen to medical professionals, not to talk back, and it takes a lot to say ‘I’m sorry, I just want to be clear, it’s important to take this medication at least an hour before a meal?’

Writing at the New York Times, Dr. Pauline Chen discussed the OpenNotes Project as well, talking about the tension between doctors and patients over medical records as well as the confusion about what patients are legally allowed to access1.

Dr. Chen’s piece brought up a point I see coming up a lot in the debate about access and transparency: The attitude that patients are not intelligent enough to understand medical records and notes, and thus that doctors will have to waste time writing in plain language. I think that’s a big discredit to patients, because, well, for one thing it assumes that we aren’t capable of learning things and applying our knowledge, and for another, it assumes that we are incapable of looking something up if we don’t understand it. Looking over Mr. Bell’s medical record recently, I encountered a term I didn’t recognise from his anesthesia log, and I looked it up, and learned what it meant. Had I not been able to find a definition, I would have called the vet and said ‘hey, what does this mean?’

I think that transparency could really make doctor-patient relationships stronger. Better working relationships would result in better care. Perhaps if patients had their records as a frame of reference, they would not be so shy about asking questions. I know that I feel more comfortable when I have material to use as a basis for queries, and I feel most naked when all I have to rely on is my scrawled notes.

And access might make care providers more circumspect about what they say about patients, because they would say those things in full awareness of the fact that someday, in the near future, that patient will read it. And, believe me, ‘whiny bitch’ is not a medical term, and I understand it just fine.

  1. For the record, only psychiatric notes can be withheld from patients, if a doctor deems this ‘in the patient’s best interest,’ which is a subject for an entirely different post. ↩
31 August, 2010 – 10:45 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in health | Tagged , , |

Hazy Lorikeets

Check out Susan J., another nonbinary trans person who also happens to run a column called ‘Beyond the Binary‘!
Melissa Del Bosque at the Texas Observer: Droning In Dollars

The Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees the safety of U.S. airspace, reports that the Border Patrol’s accident rate for drones is 353 times higher than for commercial airliners.

Mac McClelland at Mother Jones: Sticking a Happy Face on Katrina

It’s awfully irresponsible to say all that stuff about recovery without also mentioning that you can’t even count the blocks that are still half-full of empty, broke-down houses, or that Pitt’s 50 new houses dot an area that lost 4,000—an area people sometimes compare to Hiroshima because its torn-up roads, total lack of streetlights, and abundance of overgrown lots contribute to a vast and penetrating emptiness.

Enrique Limon at San Diego CityBeat: Garden guerrillas

“We’re probably breaking some laws today,” Ava states in a matter-of-fact way. “Which ones exactly, I don’t know. Then again, I don’t care.”

Laura Paskus at the Santa Fe Reporter: Scientists want to know if Rio Grande contaminants are feminizing the endangered silvery minnow

At the center of the debate over the river’s health is a 4-inch fish—the silvery minnow—whose survival is intricately linked to the water in which it lives.

Sasha Abramsky at SF Weekly: Her House Divided

For Nancy Pelosi — Speaker of the House of Representatives, San Francisco‘s most influential politician, and the most powerful female political figure in American history — the stakes couldn’t be higher.

31 August, 2010 – 10:04 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Disability and the House Key: Housing Discrimination, Disabilities, and Where the Law Falls Short

A 1988 amendment to the Fair Housing Act in the United States specifically banned housing discrimination on the basis of ability status. Under the law in the United States, landlords, mortgage lenders, and management companies legally cannot discriminate against people with disabilities when it comes to renting and selling housing. ‘All types of housing transactions,’ according to the Department of Justice, are covered.

Specific provisions are included to oblige landlords to make ‘reasonable accommodations.’ If housing has a no pets policy, service animals must be permitted. Tenants who need to make modifications to make their residences accessible must be allowed to do so, although landlords are not required to pay for them. Other accommodations that might be necessary must be permitted, under the law, if they withstand the ‘reasonable’ test.

Provisions were also specifically provided to regulate construction of new housing. Landlords are not required to retrofit old housing, but companies building new housing must build it in ways that meet accessibility standards. At multiunit developments in particular, apartments designed to accommodate wheelchair users must be designed and implemented. This is designed to increase housing access for people with disabilities in the future, and it also benefits older adults, who are not necessarily disabled, but do appreciate modifications made for people with disabilities, like shower chairs and grab bars.

So, under the letter of the law, housing discrimination shouldn’t happen to people with disabilities1. Yet, in actuality, discrimination happens all the time. The Department of Housing and Urban Development released a study in 2005, ‘Barriers at Every Step2,’ documenting discrimination against people with disabilities. Using a time-honoured HUD technique known as paired testing, HUD used functionally identical applicants for housing, one disabled and one nondisabled, and compared responses.

What they found is that, well, landlords discriminate against people with disabilities. Realtors discriminate against people with disabilities. So do mortgage lenders. Management companies. Workpeople. All sorts of people involved in housing transactions. As many people with disabilities could have told HUD if they were asked, and as many did in reports to the agency documenting discrimination and asking for help.

Sometimes, housing discrimination is the small cut. It’s arriving at a house for rent and seeing that there’s a step to the door, a bathroom too narrow to wheel a chair into, stairs. In housing that’s actually accessible, it takes the form of turning in endless applications and being assured ‘you’ll get a call’ or ‘oh, we just rented it,’ it’s being asked probing questions about disabilities, ostensibly to see if you can afford the rent, but really with the goal of prying and snooping. Deaf applicants with landlords who refuse to communicate with them. Applicants who ask if they can make a reasonable modification, say, like installing a ramp to get in the front door and being told ‘no.’

This isn’t legal, but it happens anyway. Just like it’s not legal to refuse to rent to a single mother, or a young Black man, or a woman, on the basis of those traits alone, and it happens anyway. Housing discrimination is widespread and it’s entrenched. A lot of landlords are ignorant of the fact that there are laws governing this kind of activity, and others know, but don’t care. Because they know it’s highly unlikely that these laws will be enforced. They can continue on their merry discriminatory way as long as they like.

Few people report housing discrimination, because, when you are searching for a place to live, reporting discrimination isn’t high on your list of priorities. You sigh and cross that information off your list, you tell friends not to bother with that house if it comes up for rent in the future, and you move on. You’re struggling to pack, and get organised, and deal with a thousand tiny details that aren’t going to go away on their own. You don’t have time to file a discrimination complaint. To pull together the documentation. To go through questioning and court and investigations. You are too busy trying to survive.

There are occasional victories, which shouldn’t have to happen at all because the victims shouldn’t have been discriminated against in the first place, but these victories are thin on the ground. HUD uses what funding it can to identify and pursue egregious cases, in addition to following up on complaints filed by people who experience housing discrimination, but it can’t keep up. No one could keep up.

Because this is all the result of entrenched social attitudes. Combating discrimination with laws is great, because those laws provide a framework for identifying, investigating, and prosecuting discrimination, but legislation alone cannot be relied upon to address issues like housing discrimination. As long as people genuinely think that people with disabilities are bad people or difficult tenants or unreliable or ‘difficult,’ they are going to continue refusing to rent to us, refusing to grant us loans, refusing to show us houses for sale.

We need a two pronged approach, which is why I applaud organisations that are working on public outreach and education to familiarise landlords with the law so that they can learn, you know, why legally they should not do this, while also providing people with education about why it’s not ok ethically, as a human being, to engage in housing discrimination. These programs realise that the only way to stop housing discrimination is not with a law, is not on a case by case basis, but rather by actively fighting social attitudes that contribute to discriminatory beliefs and practices.

Our housing options are limited by so many things. Many of us don’t make very much money, and can’t afford the cost of living. Many of us have disabilities that render many types of housing inaccessible. Must we also endlessly combat discrimination from landlords and other people of power when it comes to property transactions?

  1. And families, and people of colour, and on the basis of gender. ↩
  2. No, the irony of this title is not lost on me. ↩
30 August, 2010 – 10:23 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , , |

Covered Donors

Chris Vogel and Patrick Michels at LA Weekly: Asylum Denied

If someone speaks up, he is silenced, usually with a bullet made in the United States. Mexican citizens have nowhere to turn. Except north.

Gregory B Hladky at Fairfield Weekly: Gag Response

“This is disturbing on so many levels,” state Sen. Andrew McDonald says of the idea of doctors asking their patients to sign contracts that would allegedly give the physician the right to take down negative comments the patient might post online.

Christine Dell’Amore at National Geographic: Spiders, Carnivorous Plants Compete for Food—A First

Laboratory experiments with the hunting spider R. rabida later confirmed that the presence of spiders can deprive the plants of bugs—and thus vital nutrients.

Michael Roberts at Denver Westword: Michael Brown: Ex-FEMA boss on return to New Orleans for 5th anniversary of Katrina

“This might be my fourth or fifth trip back — and my last trip was about a month or two ago, with Spike Lee, to do some interviews for his documentary on HBO.”

James King at Phoenix New Times: Morning Poll: How F***ed is Maricopa County Now That the Next County Attorney Will Likely Be Another Joe Arpaio Lap-dog?

The voters of Maricopa County have spoken and it appears another Joe Arpaio lap-dog will be the next county attorney.

30 August, 2010 – 10:08 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

I Read Romance Novels. So What?

Guaranteed conversationstopper in a group of people who like to consider themselves liberal and well educated: The words ‘I read romance novels’ or ‘I was reading a romance the other day and…’ or some combination thereof. Romance novels, you see, are simply Not Done in our circles.

Well, I’ve got news for you: I read romance novels. No ifs, ands, or buts. I read romance novels, and I like them. In fact, some of the most socially progressive fiction I’ve read in recent months has been in romance novels. I read them all. Paranormal romance, historical romance, you name it, I read it. And I enjoy it. Rather a lot, actually.

People often appear aghast when I make this statement. For some reason, it’s ok to write romance novels, especially if you do it in an ironic and hipster ways, but reading them is taboo and verboten. Like young adult literature, romance novels are highly stigmatised. People who have never picked up a romance novel in their lives seem to know a whole lot about what’s under the covers, and they will expound at length, usually without needing to be invited to do so, on the evils of romance novels if they catch wind of the fact that you read them and enjoy them.

Romance novels are trashy. They are mindless entertainment. They are popcorn novels. They are socially regressive. They feature troped and boring plots. People who read them are mindless drones incapable of independent thought. Reading romance novels is evidence of being suspect, intellectually. Why would you read Georgette Heyer when you could sit down with a nice Haruki Murakami1? All these beliefs are things I encounter all the time whenever romance comes up. Reading romance is treated like a waste of time and energy.

Well, I get to decide how I spend my time and energy, and sometimes, I like to spend it reading romance novels. Sometimes I deliberately read books that are incredibly cheesy and silly and have no real value. Why? Because I spend all day, every day, writing and reading serious things. I am steeped in so much written material, I shit 10 point Times New Roman. So, yeah, sometimes I like to have a little brain blowout with a book that doesn’t require a lot of energy and thought. Sometimes, I like to lie on my deck in the sun with a silly novel and a bowl of cherries, waving my legs in the air and chortling to myself at the ridiculousness, yelling at the characters and feigning shock and surprise about sudden plot twists.

But, you know, not all romance is completely silly and mindless. And a lot of modern fiction is. I don’t understand why a book is suddenly deemed to have no redeeming value whatsoever if it has a Harlequin imprint, but it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread with a penguin on the spine. What distinguishes these two books? It’s not necessarily quality and nature of content, it’s how people think about the content.

Let’s compare and contrast two books I read recently: David Mitchell’s highly acclaimed The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Charlaine Harris’ Dead After Dark, a reread for me. One of these books was filled with embarrassingly rampant Chinoiserie, objectification of Japanese women, ridiculous cultural stereotypes, and mindnumbingly predictable plot lines. The other contained embedded social commentary, wry humour, and, yes, very predictable plots.

While I would argue that the quality of the writing in Mitchell’s book was better, because he has a fantastic gift with language and paints absolutely beautiful pictures on the page, in terms of actual social value? I’d put my money on Harris. And it’s Harris I will be reading again, because Mitchell’s treatment of Japan and Japanese people pissed me off so much that I can’t imagine enjoying the book all that much if I enjoy it again. No amount of flowery prose can cover up the stench that hovers over the rest of the book.

Yet, I would be praised for reading Mitchell and mocked for reading Harris in a lot of circles, thanks to snobbery about literature and the belief that some kinds of literature are better than others. We’re told that mystery novels are a cheesy waste of time, but the oldest literature in the world is based on mysteries, tangled plots and conflicting loyalties and sudden plot twists. And the literature renaissance that happened in Victorian England, revolutionising English literature, a lot of that consisted of mysteries; you may read Wilkie Collins and laugh now, but he had an impact on the literature not just of his era, but of future generations of English writers.

So, you know, you can mock people for reading romance novels and sit smug in intellectual elitism and pride that you don’t touch ‘garbage,’ but keep in mind that many highly praised authors and books are pretty trashy, if you ask me. I care about what’s between the covers, not who wrote it, not the category it’s found in at the bookstore, not the lurid cover art.

Some of the most socially progressive literature right now is in genres like young adult, romance, and science fiction. These genres, traditionally treated as small potatoes, have authors who are willing to take risks and can take them, because they are established, and because publishers are willing to take more of a gamble. I’ve read more honest, accurate, interesting, challenging, and dynamic depictions of people with disabilities in romance novels than I have in mainstream literature, for example. I’ve also read my fair share of depictions that make me want to scream, of course, it’s not that every book in this genre is perfect and romance novels are rightly known for their fare share of rapey and racist plots. But that doesn’t mean that all of these books should be painted with the same brush; it does a disservice to them, and to their readers.

Related reading: Adrienne’s ‘Help! I’m…a feminist romance reader?‘

  1. Both of whom, incidentally, can be found on my shelves, in case you were wondering. ↩
29 August, 2010 – 10:53 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in commentary | Tagged , , , , |

Urchins and Indicators

Fun fact: Fort Bragg used to be a major sea urchin fishery. These prickly (and delicious) creatures made a lot of people rather wealthy in the 1980s, and the urchin fishery was a large part of Fort Bragg’s commercial fishery. Then, a strange thing started happening. Urchins became much less plentiful. Fishermen insisted they weren’t doing anything unusual, but they got blamed anyway. The urchin fishery collapsed, and a lot of people who were flying high at the height of the boom ended up in dire financial straits as a result.

The truth about what happened to the urchins was a bit more complicated than it appeared at first glance, and illustrates some interesting conflicts that arise when we start talking about how to manage commercial fisheries. Fisheries management is a delicate balance between the needs of human seafood consumers and animals, as well as sea life in general. An unhealthy fishery can create a domino effect that leads to widespread problems across the marine ecosystem, not just among commercially valuable species. For this reason, fisheries conservation should be a topic of interest to all people who care about ocean health and marine environments, whether you eat seafood or not.

What happened to the urchins was simple: Around the time that the urchin industry started booming in California, the otter population was in a critical state. Otter numbers were declining rapidly, and the state established programs to try and preserve and restore otters. Those programs, as it turned out, worked. Guess what otters like to eat?

A strange war developed between fishermen and otters, much like we see with the timber industry and spotted owls, as the fishing community resented the otters encroaching on a commercially valuable species. The otters, though, are here to stay, and that means that commercial urchin fishing isn’t very viable in many parts of California anymore. It would appear that the otters have won this round, and given that otters rely heavily on urchins as a food source while humans do not, I don’t really begrudge them this. Plus, they’re also really cute.

Urchins themselves are an indicator species, a very valuable one. Because they are highly sensitive to predation by nature of being slow and tasty1, changes in sea urchin populations can be indicative of larger shifts within an ecosystem, like an increase in the numbers of predators. A shift in the predator-prey balance is indicative of a problem at sea just as it is on land, making urchin monitoring important for environmental scientists interested in tracking what’s going on inside a marine ecosystem like California’s offshore waters.

These organisms are also very sensitive to pollution. This makes them a terrific indicator species for water quality monitoring not just in the natural environment, but also in aquariums, which is why many aquariums have urchins in their big tanks. It’s not just for ambiance, it’s because urchin health can be tipoff when a water quality problem is developing in the tank. Incidentally, some urchin species can live hundreds of years, if they manage to avoid predators.

Identification of indicator species like sea urchins is critically important. People can track ecosystem health by monitoring such animals, and they can play an important role in habitat restoration as well as monitoring. If an indicator species is abundant and healthy, it means something is going right. A restoration is proceeding as desired, and an ecosystem is remaining stable. If the indicator species is in trouble, there’s a problem, and that problem could become magnified, and will spread to other species. Some of these species are hardy enough to stay healthy during initial environmental changes like rises in pollution, but they will eventually succumb.

The urchin is one of the canaries in the coal mine. Tracking urchin populations gives people warning, and an opportunity to intervene before a situation careens out of control.

Tracking urchins, however, requires cooperation with commercial fisheries, and this has turned out to be a sticking point in some communities. Some crews don’t want government representatives or scientists on board, even if they are just there to study urchins, and not to do anything else. It can be hard to find crews that will cooperate with scientists who want to perform studies. This in turn means that scientists miss out on substantial accumulated knowledge. Long-term crews know the waters they work in, they know the animals they should see, they know what the environment is normally like. Working with an experienced crew can mean the difference between identifying something unusual and missing it, or thinking that something is unusual when it’s really not.

Cooperation with people actually working fisheries is critical, but unfortunately the prevailing attitude among some environmental advocates seems to be that fishing communities, like logging communities, are only interested in extracting the last drop of their natural resources and will stop at nothing to do it. It’s also not uncommon to see some education bias going on, with scientists assuming that loggers and fishers are uneducated and unknowledgeable, and therefore the environment needs to be protected from their ignorant depredations. In fact, the contrary is true; when you are relying on the environment for your livelihood and the future of your family and your descendants, you have a very personal and vested interest in protecting it, to ensure that stocks will be available in the future.

Insular communities tend to reject interference from outsiders, an attitude that is not always entirely healthy. But outsiders can be just as guilty of ignoring local knowledge and riding roughshod over communities. A truly cooperative effort with fisheries monitoring, like seen in the cod fisheries off the Grand Banks, could result in real, usable, helpful data that could make a huge difference.

  1. Yes, the spines are a deterrent, but not much of one, evidently. ↩
28 August, 2010 – 10:33 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues, Fort Bragg | Tagged , , , , |

The Unrelenting Misery of Misery Policing

There are a plethora of attitudes in this society that surround social class and are highly problematic in nature. One of the most irritating is the commonly held belief that people who are poor live in a constant state of misery and sadness over their poverty. That people who are poor do not have any fun. That poverty is an unrelenting grind with no bright spots, no hope, no light on the horizon. All poor, all the time, with no opportunities for a break. Poverty is Dickensian in scope. It is mythological. It is inescapable. To be poor, you see, is to live in sorrow.

Hand in hand with this attitude goes disapproval of occasions where poor folks do have fun. Most especially on the government dime. If you receive a penny of social assistance, you had better damn well be miserable all the time. You should, of course, be ashamed of receiving help from the government; ‘a handout,’ as people are so fond of sneering. You should cower before your betters, those righteous taxpayers paying your way. And, above all, you should not have fun. Ever. Period. If you are having fun, you are obviously not poor enough for government benefits.

I think of it as misery policing. And I see a lot of people, and the media, engaging in it. I was recently irritated about a series of stories in the Los Angeles Times about people on welfare going to casinos. Not about the content of the stories, but about the way that they were presented, and the fact that they were presented at all. The articles were presented as scaremongering and policing. ‘Look at those welfare recipients, using your tax dollars to go to casinos! Look at those welfare recipients, having fun! What is wrong with them?! Bubble with righteous rage, taxpayer!’

Misery policing bores me. I am of the personal opinion that everyone is entitled to have fun. And that everyone is entitled to figure out, personally, how much fun is advisable. If someone wants to take a welfare check and blow $10 on the slot machines, I say go for it. And I am one of those taxpayers, one of those ‘betters,’ one of those ‘productive’ people ‘paying into the system’ and I say ‘I can think of few better uses for my tax dollars than having fun.’ Taking the kids out for an ice cream cone. Splurging on a nice dinner. Going to the museum. Going to the casino. Whatever. It’s not my job to dictate what is fun or not to other people, nor is it my job to deny people their fun. You take your fun where you can get it, you know? Especially in these times.

Here’s something that a lot of misery policers don’t know: Being poor is work. When people talk about how people on government assistance should ‘just work for a living,’ they are missing the fact that they are working. Getting government benefits? Requires work. There are a lot of hoops to jump through. Lines to sign. I’s to dot. You must do everything exactly right or you will be bumped right back down to the bottom of the queue, the ladder, the breadline.

Social workers, the people who are theoretically responsible for helping people who need assistance, can be a sadistic lot sometimes. Unbelievable levels of oppression are perpetrated on people in poverty by petty-minded functionaries who get their rocks off on denial. Willful obtuseness. Abuse. Mockery. Receiving government assistance requires running a gauntlet, with obstacles at every stage of the way and sneering bureaucrats to kick you once you are down. This is work.

So is surviving while poor. Have you ever looked, really looked, for a job, and not been able to find one? Submitted resumes endlessly. Called on every possible opening. Filled out so many applications your fingers are permanently stained with blue or black ink, sign on the dotted line. Gone to interview after interview and been denied? Had to scrounge up clothing from friends to interview in? Not had a fixed address to put on a job application? Done all this while being disabled or having children? Looking for work is work. Jobs do not just fall into laps, they have to be sought out and applied for and won and vanquished like dragons. Don’t tell me that people on welfare don’t work.

Don’t tell me that people should feel ashamed and humiliated for poverty. Don’t tell me that shaming people is in any way productive, that telling people that they are bad, horrible, lazy, no-good people is in any way helpful. Being reminded over and over that you are scum, a drain on the system, worthless, this doesn’t make you magically find work. It doesn’t magically remove the barriers that make it impossible for you to find work. It just tears away at you and, over time, convinces you that you really are worthless and you really don’t deserve help.

It’s not my job to tell people to be miserable, to decide that someone ‘can’t really’ be poor for engaging in certain habits, for having fun, for pushing back against the overwhelming social narrative that says ‘curl up and give up, you are worthless and your life has no meaning.’ It’s not my job to tell people how to spend government benefits, yes, those very same benefits that I pay for. People earn their benefits. They work hard for them, physically, emotionally. Just like I get righteously pissy at people who tell me how to spend the money I earn, I say poor folks have a right to get pissy with people who inform them that they are not meeting the expectation, the narrative, the storyline, that being poor must go a certain way, be a certain way, fall out a certain way.

I’ve got better things to do with my time than to tell people what to do, to apply my personal standards to the lives of others. Don’t you?

27 August, 2010 – 10:31 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , |

Squinting Carbon

Michael Roberts at Denver Westword: Police brutality: Were Michael DeHerrera and Shawn Johnson targeted because they’re gay?

…there have been five incidents of police misconduct and brutality against members of the LGBTQ community in Denver this year, and four in others reported across the state.

Chris Faraone at The Boston Phoenix: Is micro-news the future?

Publishers are betting on hyper-local ventures on the basis of two beliefs: first, that consumers want information that’s directly relevant to their lives, and second, that while neighborhood businesses often can’t afford ad space in major newspapers, they will take advantage of reasonable online rates.

Tom Bowman at NPR: Marines Need To Regain ‘Maritime Soul,’ Gates Says

“Fundamentally, the Marines do not want to be — nor does America need — another land army.”

Greg Hambrick at Charleston City Paper: Romney launching 25-state tour

With a national campaign already behind him, it’s going to be difficult for any opponent to make a dent in the early goings of the presidential horse race.

Shay Totten at Seven Days: Recession? Not in the World of Campaign Fundraising

To read campaign finance reports detailing the millions being raised in the Vermont gubernatorial contest, you’d think the recession was a figment of your imagination.

27 August, 2010 – 10:15 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Why Are Telecommunications Companies So Sluggish On Text Harassment?

During the Presidential election, I received a string of extremely annoying electioneering calls from the California Democratic Party on my cell phone, often at extremely antisocial hours. While those calls are legal on landlines, they are not allowed on cell phones, and I registered my irritation with the CDP (of which I am not a member, incidentally) and got back a very rude response about ‘free speech,’ so I resorted to filing complaints with Verizon and the Public Utilities Commission. That put a stop to things, thankfully.

Thanks to overwhelming consumer irritation and vociferous complaints, phone companies have gotten a lot better about dealing with unwanted phone calls. There are do not call lists, there are mechanisms for blocking calls from specific numbers, and there are other steps people can take to get people to stop calling them. There are all kinds of reasons why people might want to do that, and harassment is certainly one of them.

But what about texts? Almost as soon as texting technology was developed, people started abusing it, and harassment is a really common abuse of texting. Text harassment is insidious, and it’s unpleasant, and it is a pain in the ass. People can use automated software to send texts randomly, doing things like waking their victims up while they get to sleep through the night, or sending a flood of texts to someone’s phone when that person is trying to work, or get through a meeting, or whatever else. Like phone calls, texts can be abusive and threatening and unpleasant and highly undesirable.

Given that texts are increasingly being used for harassment, why aren’t telecommunications companies doing more to address text harassment? If you are being harassed via text, your options boil down to turning texting off, or changing your number and hoping that no one gives it out to your harasser.

Both of these measures are completely unreasonable. First of all, they put the responsibility on the victim, as usual, to get the harassment to stop. The person being texted is not responsible for the person perpetrating the abuse. The person sending harassing texts is responsible, and that is the person who should be held accountable. Victims have enough to deal with as it is without having to deal with getting the harassment to stop, especially since text harassment usually does not occur as a standalone, but as part of a larger abusive relationship.

Both measures also ask people to do things they may not want to do or may not be able to do. By placing the responsibility on victims, phone companies are also placing the inconvenience on the victim. Even if someone doesn’t genuinely need a texting service, turning it off is just another way to let the harasser win. It’s another reminder that the victim is expected to modify ou life in order to avoid being harassed, that the abuser will never be expected to take responsibility for the harmful actions and the victim will have to do something to get it to stop. We agree that addressing rape by telling people ‘don’t get raped’ is a problem, and by the same token, demanding that people deal with harassment by closing themselves off is a problem.

Changing your number? Please! What if you’ve had a number for 10 years and you’re worried that people might lose track of you? What if it’s your work number? What if…there are any number of reasons, but ultimately, it all comes back to the core problem, that the victim is being told to inconvenience ouself in order to put a stop to harassment. The harasser can continue on ou merry way, with absolutely no consequences.

Yes, you can report text harassment to the police. You can even get a judge to include it in a no contact order, although such orders are only useful inasmuch as people comply with them. If you have an order and someone violates it, you can contact the police, but tracking down the harasser for a slap on the wrist might not be a high priority unless the texts include credible threats.

A simple solution would be to allow phone customers to block texts from specific numbers, just like they can block phone calls. Yes, people could get around it with SMS spoofing, although spoofing isn’t legal in all areas, but, honestly, a lot of harassers would probably not bother to do that, especially if it was blocked in a way that didn’t tip them off. With phone blocking, you have the option of simulating rings to make it sound like calls are going through, or having a short recorded message saying that the number has been blocked, and I should think you could do the same thing with texts; they could bounce back to the harasser to make it clear they are being blocked, or they could appear to go through, without ever reaching your phone, and fool the harasser into thinking you are getting them.

This should not be that hard to implement, yet, evidently, it is. Are we going to have to pass an act of legislature to get telecommunications companies to stop lagging on text harassment and start doing something? Or will some company with a savvy business model actively promote the ability to block texts and unwanted picture messages and use it to woo away customers? Because, I tell you what, that is a service I would absolutely switch phone providers for, and I suspect that a lot of people feel the same way.

Text harassment is intrusive, it’s violating, it’s offensive, and it should be preventable. There is no reason for phone companies to be sluggish on blocking it, unless they really are making so much money through charging people to receive abusive texts that they can’t stand the thought of losing all those revenues. And if that is the case, if that is why phone companies are not getting proactive about text harassment, that is really, really sad.

26 August, 2010 – 10:32 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in technology | Tagged , , |

Arch Rooks

Alice Klein at NOW Toronto: Bring on nature’s design firm

The biomimic asks nature how it accomplishes the different functions we humans need to carry out, like making fibres stronger than steel at low temperatures the way spiders do, out of carbohydrates with no toxins, or making solar cells that imitate the way leaves turn sunshine into energy.

Mimi Williams at Vue: Two ways of knowing

For decades, there has been a persistent gap between the proportion of aboriginals (which includes First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples) who attain a high school diploma and non-aboriginal Canadians.

Matt Davis at Gambit: Spike Lee’s: If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise

‘And I think it was his best, when he talked about the eight-hour window to call the mandatory evacuation, and he waited until the eighth hour, and I know … well, he didn’t talk about it, I didn’t ask him, I think that’s something that’s going to haunt him the rest of his life.’

Aaron Mesh at Willamette Week: The Geek Cure

Without a central base, open-source developers in Oregon have rarely rallied around large-scale projects.

Rhiannon Bowman at The Clog: What the heck is “deflation”?

…on the surface, it probably sounds like a good thing to most consumers. But just the mere mention of deflation makes some folks — like economists — freak out, even though everything’s on sale.

26 August, 2010 – 10:05 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , |