The Barbarians are past the gate

I was advised by my dean of the pending lawsuit at Georgia State, concerning digital distribution of copyrighted materials for instructional purposes (see the New York Times, and Inside Higher Ed coverage for more details).

I'm mortified... my alternatives appear to be:

1. Rely on overpriced, dumbed down, glossy, pre-packaged, drek, sold by the major, for profit, publishing houses, which are funneled through the Barnes and Noble owned campus bookstore and their 34% markup or...
2. Put together a course reading pack that (upon imposition of the publisher's use fee) will cost as much as the overpriced, dumbed down, glossy, pre-packaged, drek, sold by the major, for profit, publishing houses, which are funneled through the Barnes and Noble owned campus bookstore and their 34% markup, but without being resellable.

.

When books cost as much as they do (sustained at a price that clearly reflects lack of real competition in the marketplace) they must be capable of resale. I'm at a loss to decide what to do... if the publishing houses put out more decent texts, I'd be inclined to select one and stick with it. As it is, it seems that I must choose between accelerating volumes of bad options.

"It was in the best interest of these chidren..."

So claims Marleigh Meisner, spokesperson for the the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services regarding the placement of more than 400 children into emergency state custody after removing them from a polygamous colony in Southwest Texas. On Friday, after a long and chaotic two days of hearings, the Judge presiding over the case signed an order validating this move.

Now the State of Texas has 400+ more children to place into a foster care system that most observers describe as already overburdened. One has to wonder if this move really is in the best interest of all these children.

For the uninitiated, this case presumably began with an anonymous phone call to State officials, allegedly made by a 16 year old girl, who claimed to be sexually assaulted and held against her will by her much older spiritual husband. Investigators have yet to publicly report that they've located this girl and few, if any, of the women brought out of the community match this description. Some now argue that the phone call was a prank, hoax, or purposeful lie used to justify the investigation. On that, I'd like to remain agnostic until more of the facts come forward. Once investigators entered the community (using a swat team to gain entry), they justified the remove of the children on the grounds that the women were being socialized to accept being raped, while the boys were being socialized to become rapists. From my vantage point, this case (which is already a mess) highlights serious problems in the ways in which the United States exercises "child welfare".

I've spent much of the last two years carefully studying the sociology of Child Welfare Services. By way of preface, I am sympathetic to child protective workers. They have a difficult (and perhaps impossible) job, which they are expected to fulfill their duties with limited resources, high caseloads, and generally low respect from those they work with. They are asked to carryout law enforcement policies, without the authority of a full fledged law enforcement officer. They are asked to make split second decisions regarding the welfare of children in high stakes situation. One does not need to look hard to find examples in the news media where a child, known to CPS, died at the hands of an abuser where the department had an opportunity for removal. When this happens, the CPS system becomes the whipping boy (which is probably a poor analogy in this example) of the news media, politicians, and the general know-it-all public. The same is true, however, when CPS officials remove a child from a home prematurely... Their decisions are second, third, and fourth guessed by others (often by lawyers who are predisposed to emphasize due process). In the majority of these situations where there are no clear right and wrong courses of action, the CPS personnel will be held responsible for making a wrong decision where no right decision was obvious.

Having said all that, what I've read about this case gives me pause. The New York Times has a series of stories that are informative and the Salt Lake City Tribune's coverage is extensive (you can follow the links above). While the Texas CPS officials are claiming that they have evidence to support belief that all 400 of these children were in danger, I don't think those claims pass a smell test. Put differently, the investigators and officials may believe they have evidence, but their position is clearly shaped by religious bigotry, the nationwide moral panic concerning pedophilia, and the dynamics of minority threat.

The invasive investigation was trigged by an anonymous phone call suggesting that this sect's religious practices condone rape. Since the case broke, all kinds of outlandish things have been said in the media (particularly on NBC's Today show) about this group's exotic religious behaviors (ranging from symbolism of their dress and hair styles, to theological doctrine supporting rape). Brooke Adams, a journalist with the Salt Lake City Tribune, has been covering these allegations and posting counter claims on her blog. I leave it to the readers to determine which set of claims are more believable. As I've read commentary on this case in the blogosphere, it's becoming increasingly clear that many people associate polygamy with rape... E.g., they're polygamists, therefore they must have been raping these girls (or were about to) and therefore these actions are acceptable. What little I've read about Polygamy (or Plural Life) suggests that, while the marriage of young women occurs, it's not that common. [I'm not an expert here, only reporting what I've read so far].

I have read nothing in the accumulated pool of news coverage to suggest that the investigators have evidence actual abuse. There are cryptic quotes in the papers referring to children in a certain age range who are pregnant (the age range being 14-17). A pregnant 14 year old may have been statutorily raped, but she may also have been impregnated by another minor. A reasonable reaction to this discovery, given the allegations of spiritual marriage of young girls to older men, would be to remove the pregnant girls into custody and question further. While this might even be objectionable, it would be responding in proportion to the evidence of abuse. Instead, they appear to be responding to the potential threat of abuse, filtered through a culturally ignorant understanding of this religious group and fueled by the nationwide panic over pedophilia. To remove 400+ children, the majority of whom, I'm certain, manifest no indicators of abuse or neglect, because of some ideologically motivated belief that they are being socialized into a deviant life style, strikes me as beyond the pale of what should be tolerable in a pluralistic society.

Law enforcement generally, and Texas in particular, has a habit of ham handed interaction with minority religious groups. Sociologist Nancy Ammerman provided a stinging indictment of the Justice Department's handling of the Branch Davidian siege of the mid 1990s. She suggests that had the authorities developed more cultural understanding of this group, they could have avoided the tragedy. Like that case, it appears that the actions of the State here are simply reinforcing group's persecution complex (which can hardly be called a complex when it's demonstrative!)

According to the series in the New York Times, the broader community in El Dorado Texas has viewed this sect with suspicion from the get go. In a 2004 article about the establishment of the YFZ compound, the local sheriff routinely watched their activities with suspicion and local residents went on record worrying that the new residents could quickly take over the community's government and politics. This is a clear example of minority threat. The existing community has been looking for a way to expel the threat and now they have one. Under these circumstances, benefits of the doubt are interpreted in a way that justifies further investigation and invasive state action.

Now that the children are in State custody, it becomes incredibly hard to reverse the process. Each will now be evaluated and officials will develop family plans for reunification. I have no doubt that these plans will be intolerant of the family's religious beliefs. The 1st amendment is fine and dandy, until it runs into the teeth of a moral panic. Then such niceties as constitutional protections go out the window. I'll be watching to see what happens next, but am not optimistic that CPS will come out of this looking good.

Why I like Stata... reason #9

I'm evaluating West Virginia's benchmark performance on the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (or ICPC). This compact establishes agreements between States so that one may place a child into foster or kinship care in another. It's necessary, because there are many steps that are required before a child can be placed (background checks, home studies, etc)... Intrastate placement is comparatively easy because the State law governs all agencies within the State's borders. If I want to place a child in an adjacent county & State law dictates that county social services will take care of the background checks, homestudies, etc, then we (theoretically) have no problems. But if I wanted to place the child in Pennsylvania, I'd have no means of compelling their social services to do this work and I wouldn't be able to do it myself, because I'm not licensed in that State. The ICPC facilitates state-to-state agreements.

I received a bunch of data from our State's ICPC office a few weeks ago. I'm using these data to calculate performance indicators (mean or modal # of days from benchmark 1 to 2, estimates of variance, etc).

In this line of work delays are common. For that reason, the federal government has been trying to figure out ways to structure incentives to minimize delays. However, they drafted the legislation without really understanding the dynamics that contributes to them (shocking, I know). In this State, they've been proactive in gathering data to document reasons for delay. The spreadsheet that they sent me includes a column labeled delay and containing the following codes.

 delay 
          1 
      1 & 2 
      1 & 3 
      1 & 5 
       1 &2 
        1&3 
 1,  2, & 3 
   1, 2 & 3 
 1, 2 & 3   
   1, 2 & 4 
  1, 2, & 3 
 1, 2, 3 &5 
   1, 3 & 5 
  1, 3 & 5  
    1,2 & 3 
    1,2,& 3 
    1,4 & 5 
          2 
      2 & 3 
          3 
      3 & 5 
       3 &5 
          4 
          5 

There are six codes for delays (code 6 was never used in these data). To make these data analytically useful, I have to create binary indicator variables (0/1) for each delay condition.

Now if I were using SPSS bad software, I'd have to write approximately 25 IF/Then Statements with the proper substring parsing to convert these data into something that's useful. This is the sort of thing that we did a lot of at the old data farm (and it's one of the reasons I looked for employment away from the data farm, ugh).

But Stata has implemented regular expression substring functions. While regular expressions are truly cool, I don't need to use a complicated pattern match here. I simply need to know, for each of my six indicator variables, if the matching digit is somewhere in the string. Take #3. If you look at the list above, you'll notice that sometimes 3 is in the first position (3 & 5), sometimes it's in the middle (1, 3 & 5) and sometimes it's last. Moreover, there's lots of uneven text in this string field (spaces, commas, the & sign, etc). I just want to know if code 3 applies for a given case. Stata lets me do that efficiently and elegantly.

foreach x of numlist 1/6 {
  gen delay`x' = (regexm(delay,"`x'"))
}

This is a simple loop that cycles through a list of values. For more about the power of forloops in Stata, consult Nick Cox's excellent article on the topic. This particular loop initiated with 1, does what I ask it to do, increments to 2, does what I ask it to do, and continues to iterate until it reaches six. Below is my translation of what this concise little loop did.
Translation:
Dear Stata, for each digit in the series 1,2,3,4,5 & 6, please generate six new variables, one for each digit in the series. Name the variables delay1, delay2... delay6. Please use the regular expression match function to examine the original string variable (called delay) and indicate if the reference digit is present. If it is, please follow the rules of regexm (which is to return a 1 if true and 0 if false). Thank you and have a lovely day.

The results:

. tab delay1

     delay1 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        281       87.00       87.00
          1 |         42       13.00      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        323      100.00

. tab delay2

     delay2 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        262       81.11       81.11
          1 |         61       18.89      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        323      100.00

. tab delay3

     delay3 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        250       77.40       77.40
          1 |         73       22.60      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        323      100.00

you get the point.. it worked

So now, I have functional indicator variables that I can plug into my models and be all quantitative and stuff.

Why did I post this indictment of my geekiness? Because, I know many people are doing applied social research based on uncleaned administrative data. This is information often gathered for purposes other than analysis. If you get to know the programming capabilities of your statistics package of choice (yes, even SPSS) you can save yourself a heck of a lot of work. Avoid the impulse to use point and click menus. There is no GUI guidance from Stata on how to put together this loop; had I relied on the GUI I'd never get this thing done.

That is all.

An infinite regress of incompetence?

Via Meagan McArdle, I read this short article about some psychological research coming out of Cornell.

The gist... most incompetent people have no grasp on the bounds of their incompetence. Well, I knew this, for I once worked at... (those who know, know... those who don't can rather quickly discover this with an innovative google search).

But the more disconcerting finding:

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

Hmmm... if you have a penchant for identifying incompetence... does that mean you are more incompetent than the incompetents? Is this the rubber-glue effect in action?

The power of survey monkey

I'm doing a medium scale study of Child Welfare in West Virginia. My original protocol called for a mail survey of Child Protective Workers, Attorneys, and assorted support staff. Since the majority of these people now have access to the Internet at work, we decided to change the protocol to a web-survey.

This morning a link to the survey was sent out to all Child Protective Services personnel in the State. After 4 hours, I have approximately 25% of our anticipated responses in. Since we used a web-based data collection strategy, these responses come to me pre-coded and ready to analyze. In these 4 short hours, the $200 I spent for full access to Survey Monkey has more than paid for itself.

I am a fan of Survey Monkey.

Bibliomancy Meme

Eszter at Crooked Timber posted an interesting exercise. The task: Grab the nearest book that is at least 123 pages long, open the book to page 123, find the 5th sentence on the page, type the following three sentences, then tag five people. I'm not going to tag anyone, but welcome the three of you who read this blog on occasion to do the same exercise.

I looked above my monitors and the first book on my shelf is, Erving Goffman's Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Page 123 takes me to the essay, "Alienation From Interaction."

What the individual takes to be immodesty in others may present itself in many forms: immodest individuals may seem to praise themselves verbally; they may talk about themselves and their activity in a way that assumes greater interest in and familiarity with their personal life than the individual actually possesses; they may speak more frequently and at greater length than the individual feels is fitting; they may take a more prominent "ecological" position than he thinks they warrant, etc.

One interesting source of other-consciousness is to be found in the phenomenon of "over-involvement." During any conversation, standards are established as to how much the individual is to allow himself to be carried away by the talk, how thoroughly he is to permit himself from becoming so swollen with feelings and a readiness to act that he threatens the bounds regarding affect that have been established for him in the interaction.

< $50 will get you five and other wisdoms of our criminal justice system

So I'm reading an opinion issued by the West Virginia Supreme court of Appeals. This case involves a young woman who voluntarily relinquished her parental rights to her newborn son (who was born with Cocaine and Marijuana in his bloodstream; the mother's parental rights to three older children had been involuntarily revoked by the Court.

It's standard policy here for the State to petition a court for emergency custody when a parent, previously found to be unfit, gives birth to a new child. The process involves an initial petition, followed by a finding of fact and adjudication. The respondent may file a petition with the court for an improvement period. In this case, the parent was preparing to do so. She checked herself into a treatment facility to demonstrate to the court that she's serious about making changes. However, upon admittance to the treatment program, a background check turned up warrant for her arrest.

The mother had been convicted of check fraud in Virginia. Although she served her sentenced time (the opinion does not indicate how much time she served), she never paid a $50 fine. Accordingly she was arrested, extradited, and re incarcerated. I wonder how much the State of Virginia paid to have her transported from Beckley, West Virginia to where-ever Virginia and then reincarcerated. Certainly more than the $50 fine that they imposed on someone who is indigent. (The reason most people write bad checks is that they lack the resources to pay for goods and services the legitimate way). Well at least justice was served.

I haven't finished reading the opinion, but the from the Syllabus, I know that the Supreme Court ruled against her. While she was incarcerated she voluntarily relinquished parental rights. The appeals indicates that she felt coerced into this decision. West Virginia's Supreme Court concurred with the original decision (that this was a voluntary action).

Graduate Schools must hate recommendation writers

It's that time of year when undergraduate students are busily preparing dossiers for graduate school admissions. I was asked by one of our best students to write a letter of recommendation for her. This, being one of the things I'm paid to do, I happily obliged. But then, I started looking at all these forms. It used to be that one could substitute a letter for the official form supplied by the institution. But in today's world of online applications, more schools are requiring the recommender to use their STUPID bothering (Jeremy, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery) form. So I have a student who has applied to 4 different programs and must fill out 3 different forms, each asking slightly different questions. I can can cut and paste from my 500 word letter of recommendation, but must do so differently for each school (not to craft the recommendation to fit the school, which I would do with a letter anyway, but to satisfy the stupid freaking administrative layout of the stupid bothering form).

Nimrod Nation vs. Friday Night Lights

I just finished watching Nimrod Nation, an 8-part documentary series on the Sundance Channel. The series follows a group of people from Watersmeet Township Michigan, a rural community in the western U.P. of Michigan. The primary story arc follows the boy's basketball team as they make a run at the state playoffs. But secondary storylines focus on the stark economic realities of rural America; rural cultural practices (hunting and fishing); and snow.

I found the show both interesting and refreshing. It didn't sanitize, romanticize, or infantize, the poor rural folk depicted in the story. The editing seemed to let the townspeople speak for themselves. The final episode of the series emphasized an important reality (part of life is dealing with disappointments), etc.

In contrast to my take on this show, Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times argues it is a reason why we should be watching NBC's Friday Night Lights. I offer this as exhibit A demonstrating why Ms. Bellafante is an ignorant snob, out of touch with reality. Friday Night Lights is a (poor) adaptation of a (poor) movie, which itself was an adaptation of an (excellent) book. The book's storyline focuses on highschool football in the late 1980s in Odessa Texas. It followed the real working class boys who played football, some of whom hoped to use athletics as a ticket away from the oil fields of west Texas, while others played for the reasons that most of us played sports (because it's fun and it helps you meet girls). The television show adaptation (in so far as I can tell, I suffered through three episodes last year and deleted the tivo season pass. The storyline was cliche, the characters plastic, and the writing droll. In short there was little of redeeming value.

Ms. Bellafante suggests that the creator of Nimrod Nation borrows conventions from FNL so much that "it almost seems to be rampaging on intellectual property." Her examples: focusing on high school sports in rural America, and splicing radio commentary over game footage). I suppose she has not seen one of the dozen sports based documentaries produced over the last two decades.

Anyway, while I am not an ivy league trained cultural critic for the New York Times, I can wholeheartedly recommend Nimrod Nation over Friday Night Lights.

amusement in other's outrage

The newspaper from the hometown of my youth has a story today about the conviction of a 21 year-old man who forcibly raped a young woman in the center of town. Thanks to the greater equalizer of the inter-tubes any and all may publicly comment on the story.
Apparently someone is discusted.

discusted wrote on Jan 25, 2008 6:15 AM:
" Why only 13 years? He gets off easy. The victim will suffer for her lifetime! Twenty five years should have been the punishment! "

Sociologically, I think these sentiments are important. Though the case described in the story is a statistical outlier (most rapes and other sexual assaults are not perpetrated by strangers; they often occur in situations that lack hard-edge concreteness for making decisions; and the meanings associated with the sexual conduct are contested), it serves as a lightening rod to absorb public outrage. This case lacks those ambiguities and murky waters that make this topic controversial. As such, any and all are free to vent away.

What's dangerous, however, is for positional advocates to turn to this story as the exemplar of all rapes/sexual assaults. Sociologist Joel Best has built his career showing how advocacy groups count phenomena using the most inclusive criteria possible and then marry the measurements to a-typical but compelling stories. This may help social movement organizations mobilize resources, but it also leads to policies where 17 year old boys are placed on sex-offender registries because they had relations with their 15 year-old girl friend, whose parents found out and contacted the authorities. (Which is not to say I am supporting adolescent sexuality... but I question the wisdom of administratively labeling a hormonally normal 17 year-old as a sexual predator. Sex offender registries evolved through this very process).

In the, MY GOD, READ THE TEA LEAVES, department

I'm reading through my RSS feeds this morning before heading off to the State capitol for a fun filled day of meetings. The first paragraph of this Inside Higher Ed article caught my eye.

A law student received a 1.948 grade point average her first year, just below the 1.95 GPA students need to guarantee their spot at Southern Illinois University’s School of Law for a third semester. The student, a white woman with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia and type II bipolar disorder, petitioned for readmission, per the law school’s policy. The student says she is one of six who applied for readmission. Among the others, none were disabled, four were racial minorities, and two had such low grades that were only eligible to petition for readmission after the law school allegedly changed their grades. Only Lisa Dawn Rittenhouse, who claims that she had the highest GPA of the six, was denied readmission.

Ok, call me insensitive but...

Speaking as someone with some documented cognitive challenges (so I am sympathetic), it appears that this student is attributing her performance (< 2.0 gpa) to cognitive deficits. If it's truly her cognitive capacity that is making it difficult to perform well in the classroom, how in the world does she expect this to remedy itself when she starts to practice law? I for one don't want her representing my fiduciary interests, or protecting my legal rights.

Grades mean more than a ticket to employment. They're supposed to be an assessment of mastery... an indicator of competence. If you're not doing well, it might be because you are in the wrong freaking field.

Sigh..

Insurance companies are evil (lessons learned the hard way dept)

Well, if you are a consumer of U.S. Healthcare and "lucky" enough to be "covered" by a PPO/POS Medical plan, I doubt I will need to convince you of the veracity of my title line. If you're not insured and have recently experienced the underbelly of our health-care billing system, you are right.. I am in no position to bitch. Still, given my pathological low tolerance for frustration, I proffer the following tale of woe...

On January 15, 2007 I resided in Morgantown WV while my family's official address of record was Quincy Michigan. Shortly before I was offered my position in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at West Virginia University, my wife learned that she had been admitted into the RN training program at the community college near our Michigan home. She had been on a waiting list for more than a year to enter this program. After mulling the various options available to us, we decided it made the most sense that she and my daughter remain in Michigan where she could attend school and work (for a family business) and where we would have reliable childcare, while I would move to West Virginia.

As an employee of the State of West Virginia, I was given a range of insurance options to chose from. However, there was only one plan that provided any out of State coverage, the Public Employees Insurance Agency (hereafter PEIA). I have neither the time, nor energy, to chronicle my frustrating tales of getting PEIA to provide out-of-area coverage as in network (it involved several forms, validations, secret handshakes, and I think a telephone operator letting slip the secret national network name... but I can't prove any of that). Suffice it to say that we could receive in-network services at Beechstreet affiliated providers.

My coverage is actually quite generous, though not nearly as comprehensive and affordable as MCARE was while we were at Michigan. We $250 individual deductibles or a $500 family deductible, afterwhich the plan pays 80% of allowed costs (and the provider waives non-allowed costs). That's the coverage in theory at least....

Now, back to January 15, 2007. My wife, after consulting with a physician, scheduled an outpatient surgical procedure at W. A. Foote Hospital's Outpatient Surgery Center. Prior to scheduling this procedure, we dutifully confirmed that the physician, and the hospital were in-network providers. I confirmed with PEIA that, so long as we sought out the service at a Beechstreet provider, it would be treated as in network. The hospital and doctor's office likewise assured us that they participate in the network.

There were several billing problems with the surgery...specifically related to lazy claims adjusters at PEIA not bothering to confirm that that my family was authorized to seek beechstreet services outside the confines of West Virginia. But after many frustrating phonecalls with customer service reps of varying competence (there were some customer service reps who clearly went the extra mile, while there are some others, like the jackass I talked to this past Friday night, that deserve to be relegated to a special corner of hell).

Now fast forward to last Friday night. An envelope from my insurance company came in the mail. Puzzled (I haven't been to the doctor in months and my wife and daughter are now covered by wife's insurance plan... which, ironically enough, is different than mine, even though she is also an employee of WVU... except she works for the hospital which is run as a private corporation, partially I believe, so they can provide more competitive salaries and benefits... not that I can confirm any of that) I opened it. I find an explanation of benefits from my insurance company, rejecting a nearly $1,000 charge from the Anesthesiologist from my wife's procedure. Of course, because explanations of benefits don't explain anything, I had to call PEIA to find out, if you will, WTF?

The unempethetic voice at the other end of the line, gruffly said that this service was out-of-network and the claim came in after the allowed deadline for out-of-network coverage... "the patient is responsible." "But it was in network" I protested....I called everyone and confirmed this before the procedure. The operator, nearing the end of his shift, replied, "no, we called Beechstreet and confirmed this provider (the Anesthesiologist) is not in their network. He then condescendingly told me, "you should read your statement of coverage; this is clearly spelled out on page 57." Sensing an urge to tell him what he could do with his statement of coverage, I hung up.

Next, I called the Beechstreet customer service number. A helpful young lady searched for the Anesthesiologist's name, but could not find it. She did confirm that the surgeon and hospital were network providers. I asked, how can it be that a doctor providing an essential service for a surgery in a network facility for a network surgeon, is not also in the network. She said, "unfortunately, that's the way some hospitals do things."

So, I stew on this all weekend. My daughter asked me why I was so grumpy. (I didn't want to tell her that I was trying to decide if I should buy her Christmas presents, or make sure that I have money in the bank to pay for a year old medical bill that should have been covered). This morning when I got to the office, I called the hospital. I asked the billing office, to explain what happened. I was informed that:

* this hospital is indeed a network provider

* but, the hospital contracts with it's physicians.

Meaning that it has no say in what networks its practicing physicians are in, or are not in. While we had done the legwork on the surgeon, we didn't know that we also needed to inquire about the anesthesiologist, radiologist, pathologist, or any other potential expensive billing MD as to their participation.

I protested that we were not given a choice of anesthesiologists... we showed up at the surgery center and some dude in a funny hat came in and asked about loose teeth. That was it. Had I known that 20% of the billable services for the surgery were out of network, we would have found a different doctor in Kalamazoo, Lansing, or Ann Arbor. The hospital person was understanding, but told me that ultimately, this is not her problem. [As an aside, it's un-bothering-believable how often I've heard those three words in the past two years when sorting out medical billing. There are an awful lot of problems which don't belong to anyone but the patient/consumer].

The silver-lining in the story came when this woman at Foote hospital asked me why the claim came in so many months after the procedure. "How am I supposed to know?" I replied. "That's what has me ready to scream right now, we've done nothing wrong here and we seem to be the ones getting punished."

She told me, "well, we expect our contracting Physicans to bill in a timely and responsible manner. This looks like a billing problem, which was not your fault. If your insurer is refusing any payment for failure to file claim in a timely fashion, the billing folks usually write off the charge (e.g., PEIA could process the claim as out-of-network, force me to pay my $500 deductible, and then cover 60% of the remaining balance... but they're not even doing that because the claim was not filed within 6 months of the service.) Since this is the billing office's mistake, they will eat the claim. But they apparently, need to the insurance company to reject the claim first before they can adjust it. That's why I got the EOB, (because whenever the company takes an action on my behalf, they must explain it).

So, if at the end of the day, I owe nothing, why am I upset?

In what universe does any of this make sense? I spent too much time today on the internet googling "specialist out-of-network". This is a surprisingly common problem. Many medical specialists do not join managed care networks because they don't have to. Insurance companies take a hardline in establishing fee schedules that providers feel are too low. If all the specialists in the area decide to remain independent from networks, there is little the hospital can do to force them to participate. The hospitals compound this problem by not being transparent about the extent of network coverage. I'd argue that a reasonable person, upon hearing that a hospital is in-network, would assume that all services rendered in said hospital are likewise, in-network. (My google search confirms that this is a shared sentiment). This is especially true for services essential to the procedure being performed... it's kind of hard to have someone cut you open without an anesthesiologist on hand to keep you both asleep and alive.

In this bureaucratic journey, I've yet to find anyone who disagrees with me on the central point that I had done nothing wrong. Yet, the insurance companies calously point to their contract of service agreements generally, and the specific language such as the following:

Why is my anesthesiologist not in network when my hospital and surgeon are?

Your anesthesiologist is a separate entity from the hospital. Anesthesiologists’ contracts with hospitals do not require that they contract with the same insurance companies as the hospital. It is the patient’s responsibility to verify that all providers are in network.

Some lessons we learn the hard way. (I'm crossing my fingers that the biller actually does write this charge off. But I wouldn't be surprised to get a bill in the mail next month). God save us from the evil single-payer heath care system!

Words of wisdom from Timmothy Burke

I don't know the guy but I've been reading his blog for some time now. This is advice I need to take to heart.

If you insist on being actively involved every single time someone else in your institution is doing something objectionable, you will almost certainly devolve into being a crank and an asshole.

Then again, I may be doomed.

Too much snark

I don't have time to be doing this, but I don't want to do what I need to be doing at the moment, so I will write a short post.

One of my on going writing projects has a working title, Criminology and the Culture War. Labeling conduct as criminal (or not criminal as the case may be) is inherently both value-laden & political. The politics often seem to trump any reasonable discussion about the values driving the politics. Consider, for a moment, the ongoing clamor about hate crimes. We have pretty good evidence to suggest that some victims of violent crime or threats are selected because of their affiliation with particular groups. The contemporary news (sorry, I'm too lazy to look up links right now) serve up example, after example, white on black, or black on white violence that is driven by racial tension. Homosexuals have long experienced beatings, threats, and intimidation directed at their identity. Insofar as Criminology is a science (and MY GOD there are days when I wonder about this) it should be deriving theories based on the empirical evidence at hand.

Yet, there are those that would seek to have such contextual data about crime stricken from the record. My friends on the Christian Right assert that the State has no business validating sexual orientation as a status of record. They are seeking to stamp out hate crime measurement laws where we might actually, I don't know, measure the extent to which people are targeted for violence because of their perceived sexuality. This leads GLBT groups to gather their own figures (cynically manipulated to maximize the impression of incidence; such is a standard social movement strategy covered in detail by Joel Best in several books). Thus, we have Christian-based no-nothing types covering their eyes and shouting that this problem doesn't exist, and GLBT true-believer activists jumping in our faces with contrived and poorly measured data yelling that is, and pundits partial to one side or the other, echoing party-lines. All, with snark. I'm sick of snark; it gets us nowhere. Yet, snark seems to have replaced reasoned criticism as the methodology of public philosophy.

I discovered this little bundle of joy this afternoon and became very depressed (and I hate using the word "very"). Why must social movement partisans attack their positions with disingenuous characitures? (blogger doesn't recognize that spelling, but it looks right to me). To my Christian friends, if all truth is God's truth? Why not confront the evidence that people are beaten and threatened and treated poorly because of their sexual orientation? Furthermore, why not recognize that your behavior on this issue as at odds with Christ's teachings from the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 5-7). (I'm not saying you have to condone the lifestyle, behavior, worldview, etc. I am saying, remove the plank from you own eye, and while doing so, allow the rest of us to consider the evidence).

To my activist friends on the left; please stop ridiculing and mocking people who act from principle. Sure, the principle might be corrupted beyond recognition by the most evil of evil people (I'm pretty sure that if there is a heaven and hell, Jerry Fallwell went to the warm place; Jim Dobson, my guess is that you're next). But, the corruption is not the fault of our neighbors who are just trying to live their lives according to how they believe they've been instructed to. The best way to convince them that their principles have been corrupted, is to model grace back to them.

2 Clarifications on Laud Humphreys

As I posted a few days back, the stories about Larry Craig have revived interest in Laud Humphreys' controversial book, The Tea Room Trade.

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Education (and Crooked Timber) offered a detailed book review of a recent Humphreys biography. Based on this review, I grabbed our library's copy of the book and read it Friday morning (minus the appendices, the book is about 100 pages). Two things presented in the biography struck me was being worth comment:

1. Alvin Gouldner assaulted Humphreys in retaliation for posting an unflattering posters portraying the professor as a bird that "feeds on underdogs." Humphreys told a New York Times reporter that he thought Gouldner's 1968 article in the American Sociologist, "was an unfair personal attack on leading exponents of what some term 'underdog sociology,' and an oblique attack on certain members of the sociology department at Washington University." Later in the Times piece we read, "Professor Gouldner, who called Mr. Humphreys a 'peeping parson,' contends that the altercation had been precipitated by the former clergyman's anger at his article."
   
   Ah, Sociology... You can't make this stuff up. But this confirms that I was wrong before; the stories of Gouldner beating up Humprheys for his "unethical research practices" do not hold water.
   
   
2. More interestingly, the biographers went to Humphreys's tearoom and examined the physical space. They conclude there is no way that he could have ascertained the detail of these encounters reported in his book as a non-participant observer. That is, he could not have observed the nuanced details of this ritual as a watch queen. This leads the biographers to conclude that he was engaged in as a participating observer.
   
   The biographers address the ethical implications of this, specifically that when Humphreys appeared to do his "survey", it's entirely possible that the subjects recognized him and felt compelled to answer his questions in fear of being outed. But there are some substantive implications as well. If he was an active participant in the tea-room trades, his work could be understood as normalizing advocacy. That is, an effort to communicate to heterosexuals that they should not fear this activity; that *we* have come up with ways to protect your innocence. Perhaps this is more wishful rhetoric than scientific reporting?

I haven't thought this through all the way yet, but it's an interesting question to follow. I know that advocacy research or participatory action research is popular within some areas of the field, but I have my reservations about it. I'll leave it at that for now. The only other impression I took away from the book was that Humphreys did not seem to be a terribly pleasant human being, at least to those he disagreed with.

Althouse on Craig-gate

Ann Althouse offers her two pence on the Craig affair. She criticizes a post by Arianna Huffington which stakes out a position somewhat similar to mine (Huffington, overplays the rhetorical terrorism card, in my humble opinion). Althouse makes several fair points in her criticism (though also uses a strawperson argument) and ends her post with an interesting rational-choice economic argument supporting the enforcement of so called "quality-of-life" crime investigations:

I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that the sting is cost effective. One police officer, carrying out very few arrests, ruins the reputation of this bathroom as a place for sex encounters. That bathroom is in the state's most important airport, a hub of commercial activity. Minnesotans have a huge interest in maintaining the quality of their international airport, and travelers have endless opportunities to choose other routes when they dislike an airport. I would speculate that Karsnia's work probably produced a large net benefit to taxpayers.

Having said that, someone in the comments thread referring to him/herself as EngimatiCore countered with an equally reasonable counter-argument.

...unless Sen. Craig was one of the first arrests by any officer in that bathroom. I think it is clear that the reputation of that bathroom had been unscathed at the time of the incident, and probably would still be had this not broken nationally.

I would bet that a cop stationed, in uniform, outside of the bathroom would work just as well. People would not have to 'go looking' for him, we would be further from the line of entrapment, and the cop would not be forced to spend his time on a commode.

Of course this reasoned discourse can't stand for long among the commenters of the Althouse blog. First troll A makes some silly sweeping generalization of the right, "The GOP Mantra...", followed by an equally sweeping generalization of the left, "You just repeat the same questions over and over again, while ignoring the debate that has previously occurred in response to such questions." And the troll baiting continues.

But to Ann and EnigmatiCore, I salute you.

More on Craig-gate

Well Senator Larry Craig has resigned from the Senate. An opinion column in yesterday's New York Times by Laura MacDonald argues that Senator Craig was entrapped.

MacDonald's interesting piece draws attention to a Sociological classic written by Laud Humphreys in the late 1960s. Every undergraduate sociology student who takes a research methods course will be exposed to Humphrey's book, The Tearoom Trade, which Earl Babbie and other text book authors point to as an exemplar in unethical research practice. Briefly, Humphreys was aware of a practice whereby men utilized highway rest-stops to engage in trysts with other male strangers. In his study, he observed these encounters (usually through the pretext of being a "lookout" and documented the ritual by which men identified potential partners and safely confirmed mutual interest). MacDonald does a better job describing this part of Humphrey's work than I can offer. While he was observing the "trade", Humphreys took down the men's license plate information, then used surreptitious methods to get names and addresses from the DMV. He appeared at the participant's door weeks later, in a disguise, to administer a survey. Data from this part of the study showed that a substantial number of these men lived their public lives in heterosexual marriages. Many were prominent men in the community. [Note: this is the unethical part. Humphreys collected his observational data under false pretenses, thereby not allowing the subjects truly informed consent. When he showed up at their door weeks later and asked them rather embarrassing questions in front of their families, he risked outing them. There is sociological lore that Alvin Gouldner punched Humphreys in the face and broke his nose, over the incident. Note that there are many variations of this story published in peer reviewed articles about the history of Sociology. All that we know for certain is that Gouldner hit Humphreys and was publicly critical of his work. I've yet to track down an authoritative accounting of the details. While Humphreys did put his subjects at risk, one could plausibly argue that these methods were necessary for us to really understand what's happening here; both to counter fear mongering and get a handle on the actual risks involved. I suppose that's not for me to judge at this time.]

Part of Humphrey's argument 37 years ago was that heterosexual worries about sexual advances from strange men in the rest-room are unwarranted. The participants had a vested interest in only approaching those that would reciprocate. Soliciting the wrong person could reasonably do violence to one's person or reputation. Therefore, they worked out an elaborate signaling system using subtle cues. One would have to be "in the know" to realize that he was being propositioned. Without a return cue, the seeker moves on.

Suggesting that the Minneapolis men's room activity is similar to Humphrey's tea-room, MacDonald argues that the police investigation amounts to entrapment. I disagree. While I share her assessment of the negligible public safety risk constituted by tearoom activities (the signaling mechanism maximizes safety) and I agree that this sort of a sting operation is not an effective use of public resources, it is not entrapment.

As I posted back in June, entrapment occurs when the State induces a subject to a commit a crime that he or she would not carry out on his or her own. Jacobson v. United States illustrates this where law enforcement sent catalog materials to the subject baiting him to order child pornography. Following Robinson v. California, an underlying condition or predilection (no matter how distasteful to prevailing public opinion) can not be criminalized. Only conduct may be criminalized. Thus, when To Catch a Predator's, the vigilante group (Perverted Justice,) baits a predator out to make a rendezvous, it's tough to prosecute because this is entrapment. But when an undercover police officer poses as a streetwalker, and a would-be john asks, "how much?", it's not entrapment. In the latter case, the suspect initiates the transaction; it's reasonable to presume that he or she would have done so without the aide of the State.¹

Craig's case falls into this latter category. Based on the documents released to date, I'm satisfied with the state's argument that Craig was signaling and there is a public ordinance that makes this conduct illegal in that jurisdiction (though I still question the legality of that ordinance). Therefore, this is not entrapment. Indeed, it is the model of good police work. It's a stupid use of good police work, but good work none-the-less.

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1. I am not a Lawyer, nor do I have any formal training in the law from a law school. But, since I started teaching courses about and doing research on criminal justice processes 10 years ago, I've been reading a lot of case law. Should someone with a legal background stumble upon my analysis and wish to comment on my interepretation, I welcome it. Actually, I welcome anyone's comments generally.

Radley Balko makes a good point...

One of the things I appreciate most about Radley Balko's writing is his libertarian consistency. Principles rather than political positioning guide his analysis. In a recent post Balko asks what conduct is Senator Craig actually guilty of committing? This is a great question.

For those not following the news, Senator Craig was arrested in a mens room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport back in June of this year. He was charged with (and plead guilty to) disorderly conduct. But he was arrested for lewd conduct (specifically, trying to pick-up an undercover deputy). The arresting officer wrote wrote in his report that Craig peered into his stall, then occupied the next stall and...

Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.... I saw Craig swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds....Craig swiped his hand again for a few seconds in the same motion...

. The report goes on to document that Craig did this for a while, leading the officer to believe that he was trying to solicit a sexual encounter. He arrested the man, only later to learn that Craig is a United States senator. Later in the report, the officer indicates what Craig said in a post Miranda interview (meaning, after the Senator had been reminded of his 5th and 6th amendment rights.

Craig stated the following

• He is a commuter
• He went into the bathroom
• He was standing outside of the stalls for 1-2 minutes waiting for the stall
• He has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine
• He reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor

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These are all plausible (if creepy) bathroom behaviors. However, that's not Balko's point. While not condoning the actual engagement of sexual activity in a public bathroom, he asks:

Is it really illegal to try to find a sexual partner in a public bathroom using code? How would that be any different than looking for a sexual partner at a dance club, be it using code, pick-up lines, or any thing else in your singles arsenal?

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I'm inclined to agree. While I agree with public decency laws prohibiting of sexual behavior in public places, Craig wasn't arrested for that. He was arrested for trying to pick someone up. And, he didn't try to pick someone up in an overt, offensive way. Had he walked up to someone with a wink and a nod and explicitly said... "hey, how about it?" I would support a charge of Harassment. But he was using an obscure code that effectively keeps those of us who are blissfully ignorant in that state.

Yeah, it's creepy. (Of course, I find many of the heterosexual mating rituals in the bar scene to be equally creepy). And, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing a hypocrite called to task. But at the end of the day, one has to wonder if we should be allowing the state to criminalize mate selection.

Like OMG? Overheard at the coffee shop

Young lady standing in line behind me yapping conversing on her cell phone:

Like... it was ridiculous. I mean, like, I couldn't even take notes, y'know. My teacher said um, like 364 times during her lecture. No... like, I counted them because she's like soooo obnoxious. I mean, like oh my gawd, how are you even a teacher? Sheesh, you should, like, think about what you're going to say and then say it.

My thought: Like, I wish I could get some of my students to pay such close attention to what I say in class. I'm going to try saying um more often.

Well at least we're #1.

Dead Sociologist Quote for August 27, 2007

A commitment made on the basis of an unexamined ideology may allow us to feel a manly righteousness, but it leaves us blind.
- Alvin W. Gouldner (1968) "The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State." The American Sociologist. 3:103-116. Pg 105.

This essay also has one of the strongest lead-in sentences that I've encountered in a sociologist's writing:

Sociology begins by disenchanting the world and it proceeds by disenchanting itself (pg 103).

.

Alvin Gouldner (1920 - 1980)was one of Sociology's brightest lights. A clear writer with acerbic wit, Gouldner challenged the orthodoxy of grand theory building sociology in the 1950s and 60s. But, while he critiqued the mainstream fairytale of scientistic sociology, Gouldner also recoiled against the self-congratulatory liberal activism which claimed the title of scholarship in the 60s. As he wrote in the quote above, we may vociferously proclaim our convictions, but that doesn't automatically make them thoughtful. In "Sociologist as Partisan" Gouldner put Howard S. Becker firmly in his sights.¹.

Becker was the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and delivered a presidential address asking, "Whose Side Are we On?" Becker goes on to develop what Gouldner calls, the metaphysics of the underdog and the underworld. While this seems reasonable, even admirable, on its surface. Gouldner (who shares the sympathy) begins to pick apart the logical conundrums of such a metaphysics. I won't go into this in any detail here (though I am working on my own essay applying Gouldner's criticism of Becker to the principles of public sociology as outlined by Michael Burawoy in his 2004 Presidential address to the American Sociological Association.

I don't quite know where I'm going with this yet; my friends in sociology know that I harbor deep reservations about the public sociology project. Part of me worries that public sociology is nothing more than a new lingo thrown over the partisan sociologies of old. But there seems to be something worth considering in Burawoy's project. So, I slog along on an essay that will be difficult to publish and probably won't be read if it finds its way into print. Yet, it's been fun to re-read this essay that I first encountered in Gerry Markle's Advanced General Sociology seminar a decade ago.


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1. As any of my graduate students will attest, I am a Howard Becker fan boy. That is a testament to the power of Gouldner's position. I didn't want to like Gouldner's essay, but was persuaded by the power of the writing.