As children they were given Ritalin to help them concentrate. Now -- as adults -- they are choosing to say no to meds.
Many of the 'ADD generation' say no to meds
technorati tags:ADD, Ritalin, AttentionDeficitDisorder, ampnetamine, methylpenidate, college, students, collegestudents, psychiatry, mentalillness
Several testable research hypotheses follow from the previous posts:
"Hyper-resonance" is a term used in celestial mechanics to refer to the entrainment of some body by a very low force that you wouldn't think would have any effect, but, over the long term, dominates the outcome. So, a planet that rotated exactly 3 times for every two revolutions around the sun would be "hyper-resonant". The fact that the moon keeps the same face towards the earth all the time is surprising - where's the coupling torque that changes the rotation speed?
A key concept in aperture synthesis coherence is "phase-lock", which only occurs in a "phase lock loop". This is a feedback phenomenon that keeps different systems that could operate independently synchronized, even though they don't have to be. They're "entrained" to each other. This is a critical phenomenon to understand when looking at the behavior or possible behaviors of tightly-coupled regulatory feedback systems.
So, in human cells, the DNA can be intentionally damaged in one cell and, if that cell is placed in a context of healthy cells, it can often continue to operate normally. In some way it "borrows" the health of its neighbors in a "field effect."
Is that just a property of cells? Probably not. It's probably a property of ANY coupled set of feedback-controlled regulatory circuits, regardless of scale. If so, we should see such a phenomenon among humans.
If even some of the above hypotheses are true, this implies a totally new method parallel method of preventing the bad outcomes from stress and depression than "cognitive behavioral therapy" (CBT) and a lifetime of psychactive drugs.
What's good about this is that, once understood, it is highly scalable and probably something we can do for each other without needing a billiion psychiatrists to assist. Because these behaviors can result in massive increases in productivity and creative problem solving, corporations can be motivated to pay for this transformation in their own self interest. It's not something that comes at the expense of corporate success.
There are definitely downside of peer group interactions, as the history in the 60's of T-groups demonstrated. But the point is that there is an upside as well. LIke cars, which can run off the road, they can also get us where we need to go.
These hypotheses seem worth researching. There are people looking at the routes and health outcomes of positive psychology. One is the Positive Emotion and Pyschophysiology lab ( PEPLab at UNC )run by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. Productive power of such teams is documented at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan by Professor Kim Cameron in "Positive Organizational Scholarship", mentioned in other posts here.
We need something to lift us by out bootstraps into the 21st century. These initiatives don't take away from other good work, but provide a parallel and very interesting path to explore further with good, solid research.
technorati tags:hyperresonance, resonance, teams, organizations, groups, learning, hope, behavior, organizationalbehavior, teamwork, positivepsychology, psychology, positiveemotions, Fredrickson, UNC, psychphysiology, healtheffects, fieldeffects, cells
Needham, Massachusetts made national news from CNN to Jay Leno when the high school principal, Paul Richards, sent e-mail to parents that the school council had decided to stop publishing the honor roll in the paper out of concern that the stress of grades might be contributing to the string of deaths the school had experienced. Boston Globe coverage.
According to freerepublic.com,
The move comes as the town copes with a string of tragedies in the past two years, including four student suicides and a car crash that kill two seniors last month -- Soledad.Principal Paul Richards said a key reason for stopping the practice is its contribution to students' stress level in "this high-expectations-high-achievement culture."
Needham High's principal said the decision to no longer publish the honor roll is not nailed in cement. Richards said it is "subject to review." He said, "We'll go through this year without it and assess the impact on the school culture."
The decision to drop publishing the honor roll comes at a time when the Needham High community is dealing with heartache. Last month, two seniors were killed in a car crash. Last spring, a Needham High student committed suicide.
Worcester (Mass) Telegram.com discounted the deaths and focused on the message of devaluing grades, as follows:
The notion that published honor rolls contributed in any way to the four suicides among Needham High School students in the last two years is highly conjectural at best. What is certain is that by eliminating the public acknowledgement of a job well done the schools send a message that high achievement is somehow an embarrassment.
The recently formed Needham Coalition for Suicide Prevention conducted a survey that found one-third of Needham high school students engage in binge drinking and smoke marijuana, behaviors they say are now “part of the Needham teen culture.”
===============
My comments:
This is certainly a microcosm that reflects problems of the entire US educational system.
There are two distinct but related problems I see here. One is the question of getting realistic feedback about reality, and the other is how that message can be dealt with.
First, consider realistic feedback.
The fact that some students are doing worse than others in a given US high school is only the tip of the iceberg, the rest of it being that the whole US grading curve is far below our international competition. As jobs are increasingly globalized, we're graduating students who mistakenly think they are highly competitive and will discover they can't even make the first cut, internationally, and there go more jobs and more companies that will elect to build their facilities somewhere besides the USA.
Americans are famous world-wide for thinking that learning one language is a challenge, when the competition typically is fluent in several. Many companies, such as Intel and Microsoft, are moving their research facilities and jobs abroad -- where the talent is.
Forget Needham, and ask whether the US as a whole wants to hear about how we're doing. Here's one example. There's an international college-level computer programming contest that's been held every year for the past 30 years by the ACM called the International Collegiate Programming Contest. It used to be that Stanford or Caltech or some US school always won. Not anymore. It's really worth looking at the 2006 comparative ratings Here's the recent winners:
2006 - Saratov State U. (Russia)
2005 - Shanghai Jiao Tong U. (China)
2004 - St. Petersburg Institute (Russia)
2003 - Warsaw University (Poland)
2002 - Shanghai Jiao Tong (China)
2001 and 2000 - St. Petersburg State (Russia)
1999 U of Waterloo (Canada)
you get the idea...
Failure to recognize that we have a problem only makes the problem continue to get worse.
But, is this realistic feedback, or cold water in the face helpful? Or does it just make people depressed, stressed out, less likely to care, or actually suicidal?
I don't think anyone doubts that many people's response would be "I already know I'm not succeeding. I don't need any more reminders to rub it in." To some extent, this is true both on the personal level for the students, and on the national level, for the educational system as a whole.
As I've said repeatedly before in this weblog, the problems the world faces and the problems we face are simply too large for one individual to cope with, alone.
Does that mean we should abandon all hope and give up? No, it means we should stop trying to do this ALONE.
The operative word is "alone".
It's time to abandon this competitive "rugged individual" approach to problem solving, and start learning how to work as cooperating, mutually supportive teams.
The problem we have isn't that individuals are stupid - it's that the whole way we structure our interactions for working together is stupid. It's a structural defect.
The solution to this problem then, the appropriate intervention, is not antidepressant drugs, or alcohol binges, or marijuana, or other forms of oblivion or sedation or distraction. And it's not building in more insulation so we don't have to see how others are doing, abroad or at home.
The solution is learning how to overcome this unhelpful debilitating idea that each of us should somehow master this world separately, without help from each other, or else we're "worthless". That's just plain dumb. THAT is what needs to be fixed.
Can it be fixed? Yes, and that's what all the work in Positive Psychology or Positive Organizational Scholarship I've quoted in earlier posts is about.
Clearly, teams of people can still learn how to work together and learn together and be highly creative and productive together - if you get this idiotic constraint off that we should all be competing with each other while we do it.
People are not robots or machines. Human support matters. If we can get ourselves remoralized, collectively, re-inspired, re-awakened, the energy we're desperately needing to cope with life and deal with schoolwork will come back to us.
It's paradoxical that one property of depression is a lack of interest in interaction with other people, when it is precisely the reaffirming interaction with other people that is lacking and was lacking that made the world so depressing in the first place.
Our problem, nationally, is that we have too few "reaffirming interactions" and way too many negative interactions that put us down, or make us feel worthless.
So, it's a feedback problem. The news about Shanghai, or the honor role, only does some good if we're at the TOP of the energy curve, with power to spare. If our car battery is close to dead, and the alternator seems to have died years ago and no longer charges the battery each day, then, no, we don't need one more hill to climb.
In the short run, personal and national depression need to be dealt with enough to get us recharged somewhat. But then we need to also address why we spend all our time trying to discharge each other, instead of building up each other. Why do we think our "battery" of spiritual energy and motivation is "inside" us, or inside a bottle, when it is actually all around us, in the people we interact with daily?
Why do we keep trying to drive on the battery, running it down, instead of starting the engine we all have, the one that understands what the Boys' Town motto means: "He's not heavy father, he's my brother."
That is something we can do FOR each other instead of TO each other. It's non-linear, it's not zero sum, it's a possible win-win game.
This isn't rocket science. It doesn't require a trillion dollar budget, or high tech instrumentation. It only requires us to actually care about and be honestly encouraging to each other.
Maybe that's why we don't recognize the idea. We think it has to be hugely expensive or high-tech or something.
In other posts I discuss what researchers now see are the key ingredients in high-reliability organizations, and they all need a "safety culture" where people are free to say "I don't know" or "I don't agree."
Somehow, our school systems, up to and including college, don't understand the concept of teamwork. Perhaps teamwork is not very widespread among academics, and they are not specialists in it.
In industry, however, the difference is known between a group that "divides problems", with some moochers, and a group that "multiplies strengths". The latter is what I'm suggesting.
It's time to abandon the dream or fiction of a "superman", of one individual who can "do it all". If that ever was true, it's not true anymore. Computer scientists discovered several decades ago that it was just dumb to try to develop a "supercomputer" with a huge CPU - the way to go was to get a million small computers networked together so they add up to something more than they would if running separately. This is a very solid, very robust concept, not something "soft" or "squishy" or "touchy-feely."
It always seemed to me, in college's "group work" assignments, that no one really understood what the point was of the group, or how to make a group work, or why we were doing that.
Photo credit: Amish barn raising by heyburn3.
technorati tags:Needham, honorroll, grades, stress, pressure, suicide, depression, teams, positivepsychology, psychology, psychiatry, hope, postivedeviance, systems, emergence, prosperity, success
The New York Times has an article today "Talk in Class Turns to God, Setitng off Public Debate on Rights", by Tina Kelly.
Here's the event:
Here's the community reaction (this is 10 miles west of New York City):KEARNY, N.J. — Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.
Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.
In this tale of the teacher who preached in class and the pupil he offended, students and the larger community have mostly lined up with Mr. Paszkiewicz, not with Matthew, who has received a death threat handled by the police, as well as critical comments from classmates.
Greice Coelho, who took Mr. Paszkiewicz’s class and is a member of his youth group, said in a letter to The Observer, the local weekly newspaper, that Matthew was “ignoring the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives every citizen the freedom of religion.” Some anonymous posters on the town’s electronic bulletin board ... called for Matthew’s suspension.
On the sidewalks outside the high school, which has 1,750 students, many agreed with 15-year-old Kyle Durkin, who said, “I’m on the teacher’s side all the way.”
One teacher [said...] “He had the right to say what he said, he was not preaching, and that’s something I’m very much against.”
Here's the legal reaction
“This is extremely rare for a teacher to get this blatantly evangelical,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit educational association. “He’s really out there proselytizing, trying to convert students to his faith, and I think that that’s more than just saying I have some academic freedom right to talk about the Bible’s view of creation as well as evolution.”
Even some legal organizations that often champion the expression of religious beliefs are hesitant to support Mr. Paszkiewicz.
Comment: This event looks like an example of the power of perspectives to blind us. It can remind us that communicating with other people is not as easy as we might think. And it makes a clear case that a "neutral point of view" is in the mind of the beholder.
This whole debate illustrates a point about the power of reference frames or perspectives to push explicit assumptions into implicit context, to the point that it's easy to forget that such a fact is even being asserted.
What seems most interesting here is that the community is so immersed in one perspective that the whole neutral point of the debate has shifted: they can't even perceive that an authority figure, with control over grades and college admission, affirming one sect of one religion's viewpoint to a captive audience he has been entrusted with might be a problem, let alone illegal and a violation of the US constitution.
As a consequence, the only motives they can attribute to someone who objects to this are sinister. One resident said "they’re simply looking for a payout and to make a name for themselves." The result is a major conflict, with threats of violence and even a death threat against the student who objected.
This seems to me a microcosm of part of the problems the US has in the Middle East where many people can't comprehend why their "neutral" actions are perceived as "hostile" or "objectionable."
I can't find the quote, but the idea is relevant: "It's not what we don't know that's the problem, it's what we think we know that we don't."
The action conclusion, or take-away message, is that it is hard to tell whether you are "doing anything" and therefore it's hard to tell if the other party is "getting all upset over nothing" or "attacking us out of the blue for no reason at all."
As will all active systems, we spend most of our time like a helicopter rotor, in our own propwash. Most of what we see coming back at us, if seen from a distance, is the echo and response to something we did that we can't see that we did, or are still doing.
This unrealized difference in perception is a key part of any solution to this kind of conflict. We need to stop looking through the windshield, for a moment, and look at the windshield and the distorting effects it is having on what we think we see going on outside. Both sides of such conflicts need to grasp that they way they "come across" is startlingly different from what they assumed.
We need perspective on perspectives. We cannot see our own blind spots, and need to keep reminding ourselves of that. What other people see, and react to, is not what we see, and realizing that is the first step towards conflict resolution. Above all we should be careful about inferring sinister intentions to actions that seem out of place.
Rule of thumb - never ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence - or, in this case, almost complete unawareness of how something that makes sense to us comes across to someone from a different background.
(phot credit: jojobear99 )
technorati tags:perspective, referenceframe, frameworks, conflicts, mediation, differences, God, creationism, rights, perception, conflictresolution, peace
Michael Zimmerman, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University, is running The Clergy Letter Project, an alliance of Christians who back evolution.
He says
For too long, the misperception that science and religion are inevitably in conflict has created unnecessary division and confusion, especially concerning the teaching of evolution. I wanted to let the public know that numerous clergy from most denominations have tremendous respect for evolutionary theory and have embraced it as a core component of human knowledge, fully harmonious with religious faith.
He has received over 10,000 signatures so far from clergy and has expanded the project from its start in Wisconsin to nationwide and is now going international.
Thanks to New Scientist print issue of 2 December 2006 with their short item on this effort. They quote Zimmerman's effort to counter the efforts of fundamental Christian "creationists" to displace the teaching of evolution to children in school:
The best way to overcome this pernicious situation is for religious leaders and scientists to come together and discuss how religion and science can be compatible - how they use different methodologies to help people understand the world and the human condition.
technorati tags:religion, science, creationism, creationists, evolution, intelligentdesign, God, Zimmerman, ClergyLetterProject
African American megachurches are rising in Baltimore-Washinginton corridor and may meet some social needs that the government is not, according to the article's focus.
The comments on the article are fascinating and reflect a wide range of strong opinions as to whether churches or religion at all is a good thing, whether these churches care strongly about poverty or whether they are an exploitive scam to make the pastor rich, whether social programs to help the poor are effective, whether the focus of these churches is helping the rich or the poor, etc.
On of the recurrent themes of this weblog (Perspectives in public health) is to explore the conditions or forces that lead to the rise and evolution of multicellular entities and their analogies at larger scales, from people to corporations, churches, cultures, nations, and planets. Whether this is a "force" or a "design" or an emergent outcome, it seems to be everywhere.
With corporations, certainly, there many be an original goal of the founder of personal wealth but as the corporation takes shape, other forces analogous to angular momentum dominate development and instead of collapsing into a purely greed-enhancing exobody, the corporate entity takes on "a life of its own" and an agenda of its own, often deciding to throw out the original founder entirely.
CEO's, pastors, presidents, and kings may think they're in charge, but they are often in charge of much less than you would think.
These corporate or collective entities aren't considered by biologists today to be "alive", but since they are self-regulating, energy-consuming, goal-seeking thingies, I put them in the category I call MAWBA - "Might As Well Be Alive." Public health has models for general "multilevel" studies, but this particular shape and species of multilevel doodad where each level has an independent life of its own seem particularly interesting and relevant to humans.
There is the ever-present question, which the programs in public health focus on heavily, of how to measure whether assistance to a group of people is effective, and the need to focus on empowering and organizing the recipients to end up better able to take care of themselves and not become dependent. "Teach a man to fish..."
Some of the comments reflect racism, others deal with the search for identity in America, and some reflect a search for power and influence in America.
On that note, the stunning rise of senator Barack Obama in popularity and his visit to New Hampshire in the last few days shows that the times are changing in the USA. Wikipedia's article on Obama has some interesting links, and an interesting strategy of blocking unregistered and newly registered users of Wikipedia from making changes to the text in the search for the "neutral point of view" and is fascinating in its own right.
Anyway, the Washington Post has an article today discussing the demographic changes in Charles County, Maryland. The Southern Baptist group, that was very effective at organizing and providing relief on location following hurricane Katrina, is among the growing population.
"If it wasn't for the churches and their support, a lot of people would be living in the woods," said another participant, Dean Stachura, 41.
An army of volunteers from First Baptist Church of Glenarden, which has a 7,000-member congregation, came several times this year to Nanjemoy, a severely impoverished rural area of Charles. They provided free clothing, household goods and books, as well as dentistry and other medical services.
Local churches were so impressed that they asked First Baptist to guide them in conducting their own social programs.
Megachurches MIgrating to Charles
Boom Mirrors Population Growth
By Philip RuckerThe Rev. Rodney J. Blackmon has a vision. He wants to build a megachurch along a rural road in Charles County.
He sees computer labs, playgrounds and athletic facilities. There would be classrooms to train entrepreneurs to become millionaires. The sanctuary would seat 2,500 people, and the chapel would hold 800 more.
Megachurch leaders in Prince George's have been teaching their counterparts in modest black churches in Charles how to organize programs for the homeless and clean-up efforts in poverty-stricken areas. They also have been advising them about successfully winning government funding for faith-based initiatives.The number of new faith-based social programs "has jumped dramatically," said Sandy Washington, executive director of a Charles alliance of black ministers. "We've said, 'Listen, there's some basic needs.' "
African Americans have almost exclusively driven the rapid growth in Charles. The county's white population remained relatively stagnant between 2000 and 2005, while its black population increased by more than 50 percent, according to census estimates. Blacks now make up about 34 percent of Charles's roughly 139,000 residents.
African American megachurches -- roughly defined as having more than 2,000 worshipers -- have been rising in suburbs across the country, in such places as Atlanta, Chicago and Houston. Their large congregations generate huge resources, which allow them to do significant social missionary work.
"The megachurch model is a predominant model now," Best said. "That's the goal of a lot of churches: to reach that level in terms of what they can do with regard to social programs."
In Charles, LifeStyles Inc., a faith-based community services organization affiliated with the black ministers group, launched a program one year ago to provide dinner and overnight shelter in churches for homeless people during the winter months.
technorati tags:churches, socialneeds, socialwork, megachurches, charlescountry, washington, poverty, black, africanamerican
By Ben Schaffer, 12/12/2006 - 3:58pm
[Eds. note: Over the past decade a major industry has arisen to provide technology solutions to political campaigns and advocacy groups. These vendors, or what we call "software-as-a-service providers," offer a wide range of services, from email blasts to content management systems (CMSs) to online fundraising. They include Aristotle International, Blue State Digital, Campaign Advantage, Capitol Advantage, CivicSpace Labs, Complete Campaigns, Convio, Democracy in Action, DCS Congressional, Electionmall Technologies, GetActive, Kintera, Media Mezcla, NGP Software, and Plus Three. In this article, Ben Schaffer argues that this industry needs to take a new approach to data standards and portability. We will soon be launching a new PDF section featuring reviews of these vendors--stay tuned.]
Attending the recent RootsCamp summit in Washington was a great opportunity to learn how progressive activists and organizers accomplished their goals in the 2006 election cycle. Certainly, technology played a significant role, and today's online tools are much more mature and widely implemented than what we had to work with in 2004.
But the implicit question in this analysis of the past is, "What should we do next?"
This is especially important because interoperability is more advanced with software in general than it is with software used by activist organizations, political campaigns, and non-profits. You'd be surprised if two word processors, two drawing programs, or two email programs couldn't share common formats, and yet applications for advocacy organizations are largely without this key feature.
Instead, applications used every day to run campaigns and organizations each exist on their own islands. An organization might accept contributions by two or three separate methods, and have no way to combine them all into a quarterly report. A campaign might have an email mailing list, a list of contributors, a list of volunteers, and a list of voters in their community, but no way to cross-reference them for an overall picture of their supporters.
In order for applications for online advocacy to work together, we must overcome two separate but related obstacles: the lack of open and commonly accepted standards for storing the types of data used by advocacy organizations, and the lack of mechanisms for moving data between different tools in real time.
... However, vendors are beginning a conversation -- which will necessarily include consumers of their software -- for the first time. As a vendor, I believe this represents an important stage in the maturation of our industry.Ben Schaffer (bschaffer@mediamezcla.com) is the president of Media Mezcla LLC, the developer of Campaign Engine for progressive political campaigns and not-for-profit organizations.
technorati tags:campaigns, elections, advocacy, web2, politics, fundraising, consultants
What I find refreshing and inspirational is that actual companies and business schools are even starting to think about humans in positive ways.
According to professor Kim Cameron, at the University of MIchigan's Ross School of Business, there is too much focus on what's wrong and not enough focus on what's right.
Organizations have been designed to remove deviance, or departure from the norm, with a goal of removing what's wrong, but in the process have been also punishing what's right. Conformity becomes the goal, instead of productive diversity.
Here's what he says about this new way of thinking:
It focuses on the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster vitality and flourishing in employees, make possible resilience and restoration, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance.
This emphasis parallels the new movement in psychology that has shifted from a traditional focus on illness and pathology—e.g., deviancy, abnormality, and therapy—toward a positive psychology focusing on human strengths, virtues, positive affect, and what makes life worth living.
Similarly, positive organizational scholarship examines the positive side of
organizational performance. It investigates positive deviance, or the ways in
which organizations and their members flourish and prosper in extraordinary
ways
There's a whole page of links to free video's on this subject, covering the collected best talks of the best researchers at the University of Michigan in this area, which he calls Positive Organizational Scholarship or POS.
That title is to emphasize that this site is based on academic research that has been published in peer-reviewed journals, not just some person's thoughts about what might be true. It describes what the evidence shows actually works in practice, and who is working on it now.
Some of the topics with free videos you can download from there:
"Making the Impossible Possible" - The Rocky Flats cleanup
"Improving Quality of Life in Old Age: Field Experiments in Retirement Communities"
"Democratizing Commerce: The Challenge for the 21st Century"
"POS in Action: Creating Empowered Practice Environments."
"Bringing Yourself to Your Work: Leveraging the Strength of Diversity to Generate Authentic Engagement"
"Positive Self-Regard: Origins, Benefits, Possible Costs"
"The Place of Pleasure in the Meaningful Life"
"Psyched Up or Psyched Out? The Influence of Co-actor Status on Individual Performance"
"Thriving At Work"
Professor Cameron's personal web site has many more fascinating links on it as well.
He and his coworkers also have a consulting business, Competing Values, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
technorati tags:Cameron, kimcameron, pos, positiveorganizationalscholarship, positivedeviance, deviance, psychology, organizations, organization_theory
In college, my friend Jim had this test for a potential roommate: If we could clone them and make two of that person, could they live with each other?
LA times today describes this new kind of mortages, "pay option" loans, where there are a few years with a monthly payment as low as half the interest alone. The result is that the debt goes up over time, instead of down. Here's some highlights, and a comment on how this relates to the problems of public health.
David Streitfeld
Los Angeles Times
December 11, 2006
"I am rather screwed," he said.
The real estate boom of the last few years has made it very easy to become overextended.
Essentially, option loans are bets that good things will happen. ...
After four years of escalating prices, they're the only way some first-time buyers can get into the market. But another group flocking to option loans are homeowners who find themselves stretched. For those beset by calamity, these are the loans of last resort.
Last fall, he went to a mortgage broker and refinanced again to make his payments easier to bear. He thought he would have a five-year window before the principal started coming due.
But the day of reckoning is arriving early. By paying the minimum, Hertzberg has increased the size of his loan ...warning that when his loan hits 115% of its original size he'll run out of credit with the company.
That will happen in about two years if he continues to take the smallest payment option. Then his minimum payment will automatically go up [from $1,106] to $2,848 a month.
"If I could afford that," he said, "I wouldn't have needed this loan in the first place."
It's a sorry situation, and Hertzberg is generous in assigning responsibility for it. To start with, he blames his mortgage broker, who didn't advise him how risky these loans were.
"The government wanted to keep the housing party going," he said."I got spoiled and complacent and was not prepared when the bottom fell out," he said.
[Mozillo] seemed to indicate that these borrowers might be naively optimistic.
Hertzberg always looks at these fliers, hopeful in spite of himself. "I'm waiting for a 100-year loan," he said. "My heirs can worry about paying it off."
"The average age of our borrowers is about 38 years old," Mozilo said. "They have never in their adult lives seen values going down. The concept is alien to them."
Maybe, the correct title of this article should be "A lifestyle that will get ugly fast, based on greed, ignorance, and too much arrogance to think parents, friends, or the library could tell you something you need to hear."
With few exceptions, these loans seem like a "deal with the devil" - promise of very short term relief from the consequences of your own actions for a few years, in exchange for a much worse fate following that. Despite that the nation, the states, the homebuilding industry, and individuals have been rushing to this phony "solution" to our problems in affordable housing.
Over 1 million people recently bought these, and the rates have increased in the past few years from very low to a third of the new mortgages being written. When the trap swings shut, the pigeon is the first to say a combination of "it's not my fault" and "how could I have known?"
I bring this up again to illustrate the costs of a society in which people aren't plugged into each other and don't seek advice and consultation with each other, let alone with history - or aren't willing to take that advice when it says they shoud "face the music" instead of "put it off more."
As to context effects, the lessons are admittedly harder to learn when "everyone is doing it", and even the country as a whole is racing into debt at a rate that has the international community shaking their heads and wondering how on earth the USA intends to ever repay it.
In a "systems thinking" way, of self-fulfilling expectations and perceptions, living "like there is no tomorrow" can be what brings about precisely that outcome.
Lessons from all that:
If the story above describes you, there are support groups that are willing to help. The sooner you go, the easier it is to sort things out.
The problem really traces back to the wide spread belief in the power of "individuals" in the US. We worship people with high "IQ" and design our whole school system to sort those out and raise them up, at the expense of everyone else.
That gives the false idea that people with lower IQ's can't make it just fine by working together, and the false idea that really bright people don't need the rest of society to succeed.
As my earlier post on the dice suggests, in much of life there is no "best". The whole idea of "best", and of "being number one" is flawed at its core.
And, the idea of being desperate to reach the status of being "number one" only means that you've shut your eyes to all the dimensions you sacrificed in order to put all your energy into succeeding in that one.
The lesson is that people and nations are chasing the impossible when they think they can only be worthy if they are "the best" or "on the top." In the long run, there is no such thing as "best", only those that are willing to be part of a mutually reinforcing society, and those who want to drop out and not play by those rules.
And the literature shows more daily that those who drop out tend to collapse inwards and self-destruct. It's overly simplistict to think that people, or companies, or countries don't need each other.
There's nothing wrong with that, and nothing "wrong" with people who need other people's help to get by. If we could just get that lesson across, we'd stop trying the impossible and start accomplishing the possible, and everyone would be happier.
Even in business, the new literature is showing that "Theory X", where the boss has to know everything, is far less efficient, and less fun, than operating under "theory Y" where it's ok if the staff know things too.( photo credit: spoon )
technorati tags:mortgages, optionloans, payments, interest, individualiism, advice, colletivesolutions, socialnetworking, groupsolutions, coherence, friends, gettingby, isolation, loneliness, depression, debt, gettingoutofdebt
technorati tags:smoking, tobacco, humor, marketing, advocacy, myspace, tobaccocontrol, regulations, grassroots, web2, norms, socialnorms, socialnetworking, networking, memes
5) Magic dice
Each turn, you let your drinking buddy pick any of the four he likes.
You will pick one of the remaining three. You both roll the dice, and whoever gets the higher number wins.Die A: (3,3,3,3,3,3) (a die with 3 on all 6 sides)It's probably best to make them different colors so they are easierto tell apart.
die B: (4,4,4,4,0,0) ( 4 sides with "4", two sides with zero)
die C: (5,5,5,1,1,1) ( 3 sides have "5", 3 sides have "1")
die D: (6,6,2,2,2,2) (2 sides with a 6, four with a 2)
But if you get out to the scale of the solar system or larger, electrical attraction more or less "goes away" and the force that determines the shape and fate of everything is gravity, the "weakest force".
Discussion from "Inquiring minds" about what "strong" really means.
============================
commentary:
These examples actually do relate to public health and aren't just party games.
When we're designing scientific tools or methods to detect "causality", the examples above can come in handy as part of our test cases.
These are important lessons for social engineering, whether you're designing an intervention, or trying to detect someone else trying to intervene in your life.Essentially no scientist or superbright computer, that had never seen air before, would look at a beaker of air and "see" the possibility of tornadoes or hurricanes.
Those possibilities are"in there", but they're not, but they are. The dangers in multilevel modeling that discards feedback is that it also discards all the emergent effects that depend on feedback, such as the devices above, or tornadoes or hurricanes.
technorati tags:vortextube, siphon, magnetron, amazing, strongforce, weakforce, dice, nontransitivedice, best, bumblebee, causality, scale, games, intuition, systems
We seem to have, at least in the USA, an epidemic not so much of stupidity, but of reluctance to ask for help. Many people in the US are having trouble making ends meet, and may spend less on Christmas presents this year. These two facts are related.
The problem with money apparently comes as a surprise to financial analysts and forecasters, who must be in the upper percent that's growing in prosperity. There seems to be a puzzled shock in the Wall Street Journal that Wal-mart sales are down, bankruptcies are up, and even mortgage payments are falling behind at a record rate.
Meanwhile, the sale price of homes is declining, depending on what you read. Government figures show prices increasing 1 percent, but New York Times investigation in the same regions show prices declining at 15-25% from last year. Hmm. (See "Economix - What Statistics on Home Sales aren't Saying", NY Times Dec 6 2006).
As, one analyst put it, people seem to have turned their houses upside down like piggy banks, shaken all the money out, and spent it already, and now there's nothing left to use to pay the new bills. To top that off, the monthly mortgage payment magical 3 year grace period has expired, and the minimum payment they're demanding just doubled. How can that be?
And interest rates, whatever those are keep on rising, though maybe that's over now. Actually, that's highly doubtful, as the government keeps pushing to "let the dollar fall." The math is complex, but the outcome is predictable - foreigners, who now own over half of the IOU's the government prints, want a certain amout of value each year for holding onto those IOU's. If each dollar they get in interest payments has less value, they're going to want more of them to end up with the same international purchasing power. Voila, the interest rates will be pushed up.
How far up? The dollar is estimated to be easily 30% overvalued. So, the dollar could fall 30%. If that happens "gracefully", say over 6 years, that will add 5% to the interest rate the government is paying - well, actually, that you are paying with your taxes.
So, an interest rate now at, say 6% could rise to an annual rate of say 12%, just to cover the dollar's fall. So, here's a fast quiz.
If you have an interest-only mortage at 6%, paying $1000 a month (for easy numbers),
and the rate goes up 6% to 12%, will your new payment be:
a) $1006
b) $1012
c) $ 2000
The right answer is (c) - your payment will double.
(here's a handy calculator if you don't have one.)
From everything I can read, I think that many people, maybe most people, but easily millions of recent home-buyers, believe the answer to that quiz would be (b), and they are now getting a huge surprise they were totally unprepared for.
Some young people might think interest rates couldn't possible go "that high", and if you look in Yahoo or other sites, you can only see charts that go back a few years and you'd think that would be true. Older people remember how bad it can be, and here's a table with the history they remember.
Between August 1979 and September 1982 the "prime" (best) interest rate never got below 15%, and it hit a high of 21.5% in December 1980.
I read books like Why Smart People Do Dumb Things by Feinberg and Tarrant, looking for clues.
But all those papers and studies miss the much larger problem, with huge effect on people's pocketbooks and health - the average or below average person and how they end up making terrible mistakes, and how to prevent that from happening. Problems picking bad boyfriends or bad clothes are harder to study, but a problem picking a bad mortgage can teach us a lot and is relatively easy to define.
Every day we read about how high government official seem to have messed up something or other, from Katrina to Iraq. We can ask how, with a hundred thousand specialists working for the government on such topics, can top officials appear to not know the first thing about what they're doing? Maybe the don't ask.
Do we? Bring that question down a few levels. How is it, in a wired country with a huge amount of information on line, known, published, and available for asking, that some people, many people apparently, still make terrible mistakes that could have been avoided if they'd just asked someone for helpful advice first?
We seem to have, at least in the USA, an epidemic not so much of stupidity, but of reluctance to ask for help.
We laugh about stories of guys who will drive for hours in the wrong direction rather than stopping to ask someone where they are. That's just annoying. Losing the house and becoming broke and homeless is not just annoying, and it takes the children with it.
Recent studies by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, and researchers at Duke have shown a significant decline in the number of friends people have. One in five adults in the USA now has zero, zip, no close friends at all they can go to for advice or help on something personal.
The cult of "rugged individualism" seems to have gotten out of control here, somehow worshiping individuals with huge IQ's or Rambo-like muscles, and forgetting the African wisdom that "it takes a village" and people were never designed or evolved (pick one) to survive alone.
At the high end, in cockpits or nuclear power plants or operating rooms, the findings are clear - it is simply not possible to "perfect" individuals. If you want to avoid errors, you need a team of people who look out for each other. That's the only thing that works, and there is very solid, credible evidence that it works. Aircraft pilots are now trained as teams, not as individuals, using techiques of "Threat and Error Management".
We have to wonder, however, if top officials in the government, or business, or our own workpalce who don't ask for or listen to advice are not all part of the same culture of those who will drive forever before asking for directions.
This is one of those remote causality issues this weblog talks about. A seemingly small cultural issue that, when multipled 10 billion times a day, results in huge costs in misguided policies and actions on every level, from personal to national.
It is also an intervention point, a leverage point, a place were we can fix something. We could take some of those same people who figure out how to sell us cars and pills, and put them to work selling us on the simple idea that it's ok to ask for help, and it's ok to not know everything, and it's ok to need each other to get by.
I think that would be a better investment than many others we're currently doing trying to clean up the messes that avoidable bad decisions have created.
There are some initiatives underway. One example is the Baha'i faith's emphasis on the process of local "consultation" among regular people trying to figure out how to make hard decisions in an increasingly complex world. In my mind we need a lot more energy put into such initiatives by many more groups, more collaboration, more social networking.
In it's own way, that attention will produce an "emergent" solution to many problems that formal analysis and huge government programs would never address.
(photo by crowbert )
technorati tags:homelessness, interest, mortgages, policy, helping, collaboration, decisions, decisionmaking, advice, takingadvice, bahai, listening
A post "Rules for using MySpace in Politics" was posted on Personal Democracy Forum - Technology is Changing Politics.
By Joshua Levy, 12/04/2006 - 10:31am
This year, a handful of web sites and technologies that had been reshaping the cultural, economic, and political landscape finally made a tangible dent on American politics... it was de rigueur for politicians, local or national, to set up user profiles on MySpace and Facebook.
This last phenomenon -- the political use of social networking sites -- is perhaps the hardest to quantify. I've been more and more curious about how political action actually happens on social networking sites.
To find out, I talked to Scott Goodstein and Ivan Boothe, two early pioneers of political action on MySpace. ..
[see the post for more.]
technorati tags:politics, myspace, web2, socialnetworking, influence, government, democracy, campaigning, power
O'Reilly Radar describes a new geosearch and mapping tool "Ask City". As O'Reilly describes it,
Mapping Tools: The most striking to me is the toolbar beneath the map. The toolbar very simply and effectively lets you mark the map (with lines, polygons, text and a number of other standard drawing tools) and then "take a snapshot of current map". It also lets you browse previously saved versions visually. These instances can be shared....
Panes: There are 3 panes in Ask City. The search pane (left) allows you to search for events, movies, business, and maps/directions.
Data: The data that have acquired and merged is perhaps the most impressive.
Ask has also added neighborhood data to help contextualize their search results.
Adding all of this to their already excellent multi-point directions, Ask has definitely made a compelling offering. Local search is still a big area that has yet to be won and we can expect to see more advances in time at Where 2.0.
technorati tags:mapping, geocoding, analysis, tools, spatial, epidemiology, clustering, tracking, surveillance, assessment, collaboration, web2, networking
According to the NY Times, "The New York City Board of Health voted yesterday to adopt the nation’s first major municipal ban on the use of all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking, a move that would radically transform the way food is prepared in thousands of restaurants, from McDonald’s to fashionable bistros to Chinese take-outs."
This is another initiative by NYC mayor Bloomberg, a major supporter of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (named after him.)
And, like control of smoking or soft drinks in schools, there are battle lines forming over advocates of public health measures and arguments over freedom of choice and governmental intrusion. It reflects the transition of public health from focusing on sanitation and epidemics of infectious disease to epidemics of obesity and other man-made disorders that we bring upon ourselves or each other by life-style and business decisions.
It also reflects the theme of public health of stepping back from the problem, such as diabetes, and continually asking where that came from, tracking diabetes back to obesity and obesity back to availability of health foods in today's urban and rushed world.
The article, "New York Bans Most Trans Fats in Restaurants"
by Thomas J. Lueck and Kim Severson
December 6, 2006
continues
Some experts said the measure, which is widely opposed by the restaurant industry, would be a model for other cities. Chicago is considering a similar prohibition that would affect restaurants with more than $20 million in annual sales.
and
While the trans fat regulation captured the most attention, the Board of Health approved a separate measure — also the first of its kind in the country — requiring some restaurants, mostly fast food outlets, to prominently display the caloric content of each menu item on menu boards or near cash registers.
Health officials said displaying calorie counts was meant to address what is widely regarded as a nationwide epidemic of obesity.
The city’s prohibition on trans fats, which would be phased in starting in July, was a victory for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, an outspoken health advocate, and his activist health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.
Both measures have come under fire as impractical and unwanted intrusions by the government into free enterprise and civil liberties.
“This is a misguided attempt at social engineering by a group of physicians who don’t understand the restaurant industry,” said Dan Flesher, a National Restaurant Association spokesman.
technorati tags:NYC, newyork, transfats, restaurants, ban, publichealth, obesity, regulations, bloomberg
Diesel soot from construction equipment is blamed for illnesses and premature deaths.
Dire health effects of pollution reported
By Janet Wilson
Los Angelest Times Staff WriterDecember 6, 2006photo credit: scragz
The effects of air pollution from construction equipment in California are "staggering," according to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The report was one of two studies released Tuesday on the severe health hazards of exposure to the soot in diesel emissions.
The second study, by Brigham Young University professor Arden Pope and a team of doctors, found a sharply elevated risk of heart attacks for people with clogged arteries after just a day or two of exposure to diesel soot pollution.
The study was published in Cardiology...
The fine particulate matter that is spewed from diesel engines and tailpipes lodges "like tiny razor blades" deep in human lungs, said Kevin Hamilton, a Fresno-based respiratory therapist who reviewed the findings.
...regulations don't cover existing engines. Anair said an average excavator or tractor can last 20 or 30 years, meaning it could be decades before all the dirty equipment is replaced.
janet.wilson@latimes.com
The construction pollution report can be found online at http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles
The draft regulations can be found at
http://arb.ca.gov/msprog/ordiesel/workshops.htm *
technorati tags:pollution, particulates, soot, exhaust, diesel, california
"Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS."
The most-e-mailed article from yesterday's Washington Post is an op-ed piece that describes this shift in more detail. Here's a few highlights:
Message From a Megachurch
Washington Post
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006; A29
Some AIDS Crisis Reference Sites:When Rick Warren, one of the nation's most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.
For a quarter-century since the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, white evangelical Christians have been widely seen as a Republican preserve.
But Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS.
Warren is also the most gifted religious entrepreneur since Billy Graham. Warren's book "The Purpose Driven Life" has sold in the tens of millions, and his specific model for the megachurch has spread all over the country. He is not building a new denomination. He is building a new network, and it's powerful. Warren and his wife, Kay, have made alleviating the AIDS crisis in Africa one of the central components of their mission.
[outbound links added, note that the first 7 chapters of The Purpose Driven LIfe are available free on-line here. ]
technorati tags:Warren, rickwarren, megachurch, politics, christianity, AIDS, Obama, rightwing, poverty, christian, beliefs, socialactivism, compassion, fundamentalism, evangelism, movements
