text:
The million-fold increase in computing power over the last few decades has made possible types of quantitative analysis that were previously available only to rulers with access to large amounts of menial but highly precise labor. Because the humanities generally tend to trail the sciences and the social sciences in adopting such new-fangled techniques. Instead, academics have preferred to write about such new technologies using existing frameworks: see the now-forgotten hypertext boomlet of the early-90s led by Stuart Moulthrop.
Here, I want to contrast two scholars who have seriously used quantitative analysis in literary criticism. My negative example is Franco Moretti; my positive example is Brian Vickers.
This piece is something of an appendix to my n+1 piece "The Stupidity of Computers," because I found that the conclusions I presented there held just as true for literary analysis as they did for data mining, search engines, and online dating. Computers are still dumb, so we must be sure to be extra-smart in using them.
Moretti's Materialism
Franco Moretti caused something of a splash in the last fifteen years by advocating a quantitative model for tracking literature's paths. He seeks, in his notorious phrase, a "materialist sociology of literary form." I'm not fond of the phrase, but it gives an idea of the overlapping circles that are at work here: quantitative, materialist (in the Marxist and positivist sense), sociological, taxonomic.
I do not endorse a never-the-twain-shall-meet split between natural sciences and human sciences, the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. Many literature departments and continental philosophers cling to the separation as though their jobs depended on it–which indeed they might. But the great inadequacy of quantitative methods applied to artistic and social forms (e.g., economics) still serves as a reminder that the human sciences are vastly more imprecise and variable than the most successful of the natural sciences.
I believe that the reasons for this, as I discussed at some length in my recent n+1 piece, "The Stupidity of Computers," primarily have to do with language and the endlessly fine-grained distinctions and variances it forces upon us. The practical result is that almost any quantitative approach falls down, and I think Moretti's is a particularly good example of such a failure.
Moretti's work has foundered on two main points:
- Presuppositions of taxonomies, ontologies, and evidentiary relevance that are then set up to be "confirmed" by the statistical model at work.
- Sheer lack of evidence, caused by the vast scope on which Moretti is working.
I have written on the first issue of presuppsitions with regard to political issues: attempts to discern how "liberal" and "conservative" blogs link to one another rely on purely human classification of blogs into the two-category taxonomy selected by the researchers themselves, rendering the results highly dubious.
In the political sphere, complicated charts analyzing networks of links from one political blog to another show clusters of linkages tightly within sets of "conservative" and "liberal" blogs. Another chart from a separate analysis shows clusters using a different taxonomy: progressive, independent, and conservative. Who decided on these categories? Humans. And who assigned individual blogs to each category? Again humans. So the humans decided on the categories and assigned the data to the individual categories—then told the computers to confirm their judgments. Naturally the computers obliged.
"The Stupidity of Computers", n+1 13
The same principle is at work in classifying books and sentences, as Moretti does. This sort of ontological question begging is so ubiquitous it should be the first question anyone asks on seeing a pretty chart or graph purporting to represent some aspect of human society.
The second issue is more particular to Moretti, which is that even with unprecedented processing power at his command, I gather Moretti still doesn't have the resources to do the requisite analysis at the level which would be required.
Cosma Shalizi, expert statistician, has written extensively on these failings with regard to Moretti's two main books, and his articles elaborate the problems sufficiently that I won't go into much detail here. He criticized the statistical methods of Atlas of the European Novel, but his review of Graphs, Maps, Trees, which attempted to make a statistical case that new genres of novel tended to occur in bunche, cuts closer to the theoretical problems at hand:
[Moretti should] give actual causal accounts of how macroscopic patterns emerge from the interaction of many material bodies (notably, people and books), of the sort we know to exist, endowed with the kinds of abilities we know them to have.
This commitment may sound harmless, because contentless, but it does actually have implications. It means that you have to do a lot of work to justify functionalist explanations (though it's not impossible). It should make you very dubious about ideal types. It should make you more interested in exploring variation, and not dismissing it. It should make you very dubious about "practices" and other shared mental objects, at least as ordinarily conceived. And it suggests a lot of productive directions, investigating communication, cognition, and the collective patterns they produce.
If anything, Shalizi understates the difficulty. There needs to be a huge amount of work, and it must be done with partial, often inaccurate data from biased observers. The hermeneutic circle holds sway here. It's not impossible. But the data analysis is vastly easier than the data collection, which computers still can't do.
Vickers' Wissenschaften
I have a positive example, however. Studies of authorship attribution are nothing new. They have frequently employed quantitative methods, albeit frequently in a haphazard and unsystematic way. In English, at least, the writer who has been subject to more of them than any other is William Shakespeare.
There has not been a good track record. Two attributions of new (and rather poor) works to Shakespeare in the last couple decades, "Shall I die?" and "A Funeral Elegy," seem almost certainly incorrect. In the second case, the original claimant, Don Foster, has retracted the claim. In the first, it appears that no one except the original claimant supports the attribution anymore. Unfortunately, the original claimant, Gary Taylor, is the editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, so you can find "Shall I die?" there. What are you going to do?
Against that, though, there is Brian Vickers and particularly his recent work Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford. (A short overview is available behind the TLS paywall.) This is a distinctive case because it's trying to pull authorship of A Lover's Complaint away from Shakespeare. The long (329 lines) poem was published in the same book as the sonnets in 1609, attributed to Shakespeare, but it has never garnered too much attention. There have been some doubts but, over the last 50 years, general endorsement of Shakespeare's authorship.
Work had already been done to identify Shakespeare's co-authors on Titus Andronicus, Pericles, Timon of Athens, and others, but this is the first instance I know of pulling a poem away from Shakespeare.
Vickers is upfront in his biases: he thinks the poem is lousy, too lousy to be Shakespeare's, uninventive and moralistic. He attributes it instead to a mediocre but prolific poet named John Davies, whom I'd never heard of. But his method is far more solid than most. He recognizes the need for a holistic/hermeneutic understanding of the period and its literature, and so Vickers' book takes both a top-down and a bottom-up approach, deriving general regulative and evaluative guidelines from a comprehensive knowledge of the period, then using atomic, discrete metrics to attempt to make meaningful distinctions. I believe this bi-directional method to be the only one that has a chance of success. (Moretti, in contrast, is entirely top-down, while much philological work is bottom-up.)
Here is a brief sample, taken from the TLS overview:
Davies did so on over 160 occasions. The author of the Complaint used "th'-" elisions frequently, and twice clumsily, not on words beginning with a vowel -as in Shakespeare's "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame" -but before a consonant: "th'wel doing", "th'smallest teene". Davies regularly contracted the definite article without any concern for euphony, with such equally clumsy elisions as "th'reversions", "th'reprobates" or "th'Gospel". Critics have judged the contractions in "A Lover's Complaint" to be a sign of Shakespeare's later style, but here is a different explanation. The poet of the "Complaint" ended two lines with the formulaic phrase "forme receive", once an infinitive (using the pleonastic do): "which did no forme receive", and once a present tense: "all straing formes receives", both times rhyming on "leave". In John Davies's poetry there are twenty-one instances of the rhyme word "deceive"; ten of them need a pleonastic do, twice rhyming with "leave". The author of the "Complaint" took liberties with the English language to obtain a rhyme, coining the nonce-words "sawne" and "loverd". In one poem Davies rhymed "wander" and "gander", adding a marginal note justifying "The word . . . Gander for the Rime's necessity".
So while the first section of the book, "Background," is somewhat traditional literary criticism and close reading, the second section, "Foreground," is tabulation across many metrics. Vickers downplays one of the most common (and easiest) forms of analysis, that of uncommon word occurrence, owing to the ambiguity of word placement and meaning. Vickers does use this analysis, but not to the exclusions of others, as some of his predecessors had in making the case for Shakespeare's authorship.
Regardless, A Lover's Complaint is only 329 lines long, so the sample size for any feature is quite small. Because of this, doubt should accompany any supposed distinction established along any one axis. Aware of this, Vickers is definitely trying for a preponderance of evidence, attacking the poem from different levels and angles. Those in favor of the attribution to Shakespeare (John Kerrigan and Katherine Duncan-Jones are the two most vocal, I believe) have not done a comparable study from the other side, which is what would be necessary to counter Vickers' claims.
Similarly, statistical analysis is somewhat down-played, because the margins of error are so great. There are lists and collections, but they are presented in the sense of outlying features that distinguish the poem from other work. They are also presented in the sense of non-outlying features that are actually typical of work in the period against common knowledge. The presence of both types of claims is reassuring.
And it underscores something to bear in mind when reading the work of Moretti and others: beware statistical analysis on incomplete evidence. The challenge is in deciding on the metrics and applying them in the most exacting fashion, something that remains in the human sphere, not the computer. What computers have enabled is the ability to run some of the metrics on a large corpus rather quickly: a significant evidentiary boon, but not a paradigm shift. The most satisfactory uses are considerably less sexy than Moretti's graphs: for example, searching for particular words and variations of a word across all (or most) Elizabethan literature.
(Again, I refer back to my n+1 article, where computers proved themselves most useful in dumb tasks performed in great quantity: lexical analysis rather than semantic analysis.)
For any analysis, there is also the ever-present problem of negative evidence. The significance of what words aren't co-occurring is considerably harder to analyze, and so is frequently ignored. The case study Vickers gives is that of neologistic word formation with the prefix un-. Shakespeare indeed did form an awful lot of new words by attaching un- to existing words, a feature of A Lover's Complaint. But Vickers cites Juergen Schaefer's work in showing that the OED overrepresented Shakespeare (for assorted reasons) and that other writers had coined similar un- neologisms at a similar rate. Two of them were Thomas Nashe and…John Davies (133).
And in fact, when it comes to neologisms, A Lover's Complaint introduces 11 Latin neologisms in 329 lines, including wackiness like annexions, fluxive, and Cautills (151). This is hardly sufficient evidence but it is the sort of heuristic metric that gives reason for doubt. Moreover, Vickers uses it to bash those who have claimed that the supposed lexical inventiveness of A Lover's Complaint was unique to Shakespeare, when in fact it seems to have been a common feature among many writers of the period. Context is everything.
Above lexical and grammatical analysis, Vickers performs more complex rhetorical analysis. One striking example is Davies' almost compulsive use of asyndeton (omission of conjunctions), helping to produce what's been called the "cramped, gritty, discontinuous quality" of A Lover's Complaint. Vickers has some fun citing instances of Davies piling on up to ten verbs in a row in his other work.
A high level of elision of other parts of speech and peculiar inversions of word order is also present. Here the qualitative element kicks in, as distinguishing "awkward" and "unnatural" inversions from "good" ones is simply not something that is uncontestable. Here Vickers returns to close reading and attempts to see what purpose inversions serve in the function and rhythm of the poem. This is not a positivistic method, but I'm with him in thinking it is more convincing than attempting to taxonomize inversions on a purely grammatical level as "unnatural" or not.
This alternation between the quantitative and the qualitative continues throughout the rest of Vickers' book, and because Vickers is forceful in his aesthetic judgments, they do not always stand by themselves, but in tandem with the statistical evidence, they do gain a certain amount of force. Because I am not an expert in rhetoric and not an expert on the literature of the period, I cannot say how contestable some of the judgments are. But the work is there to be evaluated. Vickers also shows how metrics have been abused in the past to make other wrongful attributions, and so points out the pitfalls.
For rhetorical devices in particular, it helps a great deal that Vickers is immersed in the rhetorical taxonomy that Shakespeare and Davies themselves would have learned, and so applies metrics that they themselves would have used in constructing their works. This is where historical knowledge is crucial; the ready-made ontological categories that happen to be popular at a given time (structuralist tropes, for example) are less likely to line up as well as taxonomical devices that authors would have knowingly applied to their work at the time of creation.
Let's look at some of the general metrics Vickers applies to A Lover's Complaint, in order to see how that middle-ground is navigated:
- A set of six rare words occurring in Davies work and in the Complaint
- 21 common phrases like "high and low," "wake and sleep," and "gainst plus admirable moral principle" occurring disproportionately in Davies work and present in the Complaint
- Six instances of poetic diction unique to A Lover's Complaint and Davies other work
- A reflexive fondness for a a handful of rhetorical figures, particularly the overuse of the word "all" (often twice in a line), occurring in the complaint and in Davies' other work (and nowhere else save sometimes John Donne)
- A certain overlap in metaphorical vocabulary, such as the "congestion" and "compounding" of individual appetites into desire
- Of rhyme-word pairs in the Complaint not used by Shakespeare, 25% of those pairings do occur in Davies' work
The last one gives an example of how inexhaustible the work is, since the analysis is only performed on rhyme-word pairs not occurring in Shakespeare and is not compared to other authors. Similar objections can be made to other metrics, but the thing to remember is that Vickers has still set the bar vastly higher than usual, and since such work is a progressive process, the details are at least there to be rebutted by someone who wants to perform some of the many remaining analyses. To use an apt legal analogy, such matters are always decided by the standard of a preponderance of evidence, not a K.O., and right now it appears that Vickers has presented the preponderance.
Harold Love, in the TLS, in fact criticized Vickers for not using more sophisticated statistical and computational tools, and disputed the certainty of the Davies' attribution. Vickers' response displays, in my opinion, the right attitude to take toward such tools and analyses:
Your readers are told that Vickers uses "an old-fashioned kind of testing", and "lacks real understanding" of modern computational stylistics, such as "John Burrows's Delta algorithm, based on complex statistical probing of lengthy frequency lists".
To reply in brief: I am perfectly familiar with modern stylometry, but the Delta algorithm uses small vocabulary samples, such as the fifty most frequently occurring words, which are then treated as individual counters, deprived of semantic identity and grammatico-syntactical relationships with other words. It has achieved some success, but it is open to suspicion that two or more writers might favour the same fifty words. I am currently working with a team of medical statisticians who are applying to computational stylistics a technique developed for measuring irregular heart beats, which is able to use all the words in a text. It lists shared words in descending frequency and then uses a phylogenetic algorithm to create a tree, grouping similar texts on nearby branches and dissimilar texts on distant branches. (Intertextual distances are measured, applying a weighting function which is the sum of Shannon's entropy–details on request.)
Love definitely erred in endorsing the Delta algorithm, which is indeed dangerously arbitrary in its metrics. Endorsing any one metric, in fact, is liable to be dangerously arbitrary because of evidentiary limitations. Fancy statistics run the danger of obscuring the anecdotal component of the work.
Vickers impresses, ultimately, because he bears three main points in mind: all such analyses are to be treated as incomplete, no one metric should ever be seen as definitive, and conclusions must be based on a pluralistic methodology utilizing both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
In conclusion: the human sciences are inexact and dismal, much like humans.
Afterword: Duncan-Jones and Kerrigan's rebuttals to Vickers' de-attribution were not sufficiently substantive to need addressing here. Kerrigan's failure should not obscure my esteem of his panoramic study Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon.)
In addition, I should say that Vickers' critical sympathies are not necessarily my own. While I've learned a great deal from his work on the history of rhetoric, someone who can confidently announce of the sonnets, "These are, to state the obvious again, not homosexual poems"–and then cite Sonnet 20 as evidence–either sees friendship as a wildly fertile ground for manic jealousy, or else is using such a narrow definition of homosexuality as to make the observation tautological. I prefer Samuel Butler's witty (though coy) formulation:
Fresh from the study of the other great work in which the love that passeth the love of women is portrayed as nowhere else save in the Sonnets, I cannot but be struck with the fact that it is in the two greatest of all poets that we find this subject treated with the greatest intensity of feeling. The marvel, however, is this, that whereas the love of Achilles for Patroclus depicted by the Greek poet is purely English,absolutely without taint or alloy of any kind, the love of the English poet for Mr W. H. was, though only for a short time, more Greek than English. I cannot explain this.
Samuel Butler


text:
June 28, 2006
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500
Via Facsimile: 202-456-2461
Dear President Bush:
In advance of your July 14 meeting in St. Petersburg with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Committee to Protect Journalists draws your attention to the acute problem of impunity in violent crimes against journalists in Russia.
In particular, we highlight the case of Paul Klebnikov, editor of Forbes Russia and a U.S. journalist of Russian descent, who was gunned down outside his Moscow office on July 9, 2004, in retaliation for his work. Two years later, the gunmen and the plotters of this terrible crime remain at large. The Klebnikov case is among 12 contract-style murders of journalists in Russia during President Putin's tenure. None of these murders has been solved.
We urge you to include the Klebnikov case on the agenda for your coming talks with President Putin. The problem of impunity is the most serious threat to press freedom in Russia today. Journalists fearing for their lives cannot do their jobs, and news coverage of important events is chilled as a result. We ask you to underline in your meeting with President Putin the importance of apprehending and prosecuting those responsible in the Klebnikov murder, as well as those responsible for the other unsolved journalist murders.
On May 5, a Moscow City Court jury acquitted Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev in the murder of Klebnikov after a four-month, closed-door trial. In addition to holding the trial out of public view, the judge imposed a gag order on all trial participants, including the 12-member jury, barring them from talking about the proceedings. Court officials said the proceedings were made secret because some evidence was considered classified and because they needed to guarantee the safety of jurors and other participants. Authorities turned down a motion by the Klebnikov family's lawyers to close only portions of the trial during which confidential information was to be reviewed.
CPJ has found reasons to question the verdict. State prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin stated publicly that "serious violations" of criminal procedure led to the acquittal, but he did not elaborate. Another source familiar with the trial told CPJ that authorities failed to guarantee the safety or impartiality of jurors. Jurors were not sequestered and could be readily approached entering or exiting the courtroom. Judge Vladimir Usov and other court officials did not stop the defendants or some defense representatives from making threatening statements in court that could have affected the jury, a CPJ source said.
Procedural questions arise because Judge Usov left the courtroom three times after receiving–but before announcing–the jury's verdict. His only explanation was that "there are a few things to clarify," a source told CPJ. In each instance, our source said, jurors followed him outside the courtroom–beyond even the limited scrutiny afforded by this closed trial.
Richard Behar, an investigative journalist who directs Project Klebnikov, a global media alliance that is investigating the killing, reported in a June 5 article for Forbes that investigators had compiled compelling evidence against Dukuzov and Vakhayev. The evidence included mobile phone records that suggested Klebnikov was watched by the defendants for two weeks before he was murdered; fingerprints matching Vakhayev's were found in a car that a witness identified as the vehicle from which the fatal shots were fired; and the testimony of an acquaintance of the defendants who recalled them talking around the time of the murder about being paid well for a "big job."
Moscow City Court officials, whose actions in the trial raised many questions, are now effectively blocking the Klebnikov family's appeal to Russia's Supreme Court. The family, which supports the prosecution's appeal, filed an appeal of its own on May 15. But the Moscow City Court has yet to provide the Klebnikovs or their representatives with access to the trial transcript needed to prepare a detailed appeal. Russia's Law of Criminal Procedure requires that such access be given to the plaintiffs within three days; the Klebnikovs filed their request on May 10. Since the trial was sealed and audio and video recording in the court room was prohibited, the transcript is the only document detailing the proceeding.
The secretive nature and questionable conduct of the trial have led to confusion and bewilderment, a result that ill serves the Klebnikovs and the public. The Klebnikov case is closely watched throughout the world, and its disposition sends an important signal about Russia's international standing. We ask you to engage President Putin in a dialogue that would result in an open and impartial proceeding that would demonstrate Russia's commitment to reversing its record of impunity. Demonstrating such commitment would be timely on the eve of the Group of Eight summit of industrialized nations, which is to be hosted by President Putin in St. Petersburg beginning on July 15.
Thank you for your attention to these urgent matters. We await your response.
Ann Cooper
Executive Director

subset: commoncrawl


text:
The temporal and geographical scales of climate change present a challenge to communicators in public debates. How can a long-term, global condition be made a matter of immediate, local concern? This puzzle has contributed to climate change communication becoming a well-established research field. Yet the majority of this research is based in textual analysis (for a review, see Pearce et al, 2015). In this project, we use a variety of digital methods to investigate the images that are associated with climate change across a range of locations on the web. In doing so, we show that there is no single visual language of climate change. Rather, we identify six platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al, 2014), distinct to particular locations and social media platforms on the web. These vernaculars chime with a recent call by Climate Outreach for a new iconography of climate change, that goes beyond cliches of smokestacks and polar bears to develop "a new – more diverse, compelling, and powerful – visual language for climate change" (Corner et al., 2015). The report identifies seven principles for visual communication of climate change: show 'real people', not staged photo-ops; tell new stories; show climate causes at scale; climate change impacts are emotionally powerful; show local (but serious) climate impacts; be very careful with protest imagery; and, understand your audience. Our findings confirm that climate change visual communicators should indeed take notice of their audience, but that on the web this takes distinctive location-specific forms. Indeed, we suggest that communication strategies can be enriched by understanding publics as platform publics embedded in communicative spaces, with distinct aesthetics and affordances. In short, we ask, can one make visual climate change communication platform-friendly?
Theoretically, the project builds on the notion 'that each social media platform comes to have its own unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics, which can be considered as constituting a 'platform vernacular'" (Gibbs et al, 2014). Indeed, new genres of ordinary communication emerge from the affordances and constraints of communicative spaces and the dynamic habit-formation and creative expressions of users within these spaces. Hashtags, participatory features, 'likes', retweets, reposting, limited character space, and social metrics shape communication in fundamental ways. Consequently, in our research we approach climate change communication as a phenomenon that is taking place in and through social media platforms and that is in turn animated and constrained by their communicative infrastructure. We suggest that one can find climate change communication in the form of platform vernacular and 'explore the implications of this vernacular mode of visual communication'.We set out to study climate change visual communication in six social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google Images. The challenge at hand is to do so in ways that account for their platform, digital, and network nature. Methodologically, we then turn to digital methods, a framework for doing social and cultural research with online data. Its credo, so to speak, involves repurposing the methods embedded in digital platforms and devices in service of social and cultural research. A digital methods approach lends itself to studying platform vernacular; it accounts, involves, and challenges the operations and practices that are native to the medium. In our case studies, for example, the search capacities of platforms and the metadata associated with the results — what is called 'search as research'— are made epistemologically valuable anew. Subsequently, engagement and ranking metrics of each platform are employed to filter and create subsets of 'most engaged with' images. The goal here, as mentioned before, is to profile each platform in terms of visual climate communication vernacular. The analysis combines different techniques: top engaged images per platform are superimposed using photoshop so that visuals merge and can be the annotated, using also traditional content analysis. We attend to the broader datasets in a number of substudies including the Google Visual API and (visual) network analysis.
The analysis allows concluding that indeed each platform has different vernaculars. We have summarized them as follows:
Instagram 'awareness travelling': beautifully edited, travel pictures that provide an insider's perspective and action shots. Experience-based, not informational. It's not national geography but the insta- world traveller. It overlaps with instagram's travelling culture.
Tumblr's environmental 'screenshotting': Screenshots from other social media platforms and GIFs depicting noteworthy movement in which 'skeptics' are put in their place. 'Iconic' moments.
Twitter: 'in the moment': more in sync with 'breaking news', and a site of contestation.
Reddit: trending mainstream media. Most images on selected specialist sub-reddits come from articles (mostly mainstream news sources) being linked-to by the users. Because of this, the images tend to feature politicians (especially Donald Trump), political or diplomatic events and sometimes also demonstrations and protesters. Smaller sub-reddit forums, however, tend to use more user-generated images.
Facebook (expert accounts) 'shareable statements': Non-controversial statements, written in a large font, overimposed to known personalities or cute animals. Offer the opportunity for appropriation.
Google: hyperbolic and cliches images. A more garish array of images that are the furthest away from the guidance suggested by Climate Outreach. No relationship with the 'standard' web search
The relationship between these vernaculars and Climate Outreach's communication principles will be expanded upon below. For the moment, it is sufficient to emphasise that the application of any communication principles should be sensitive to local platform vernaculars.
For the creation of the questionnaire every platform group reviewed their data sets to add a list of themes and items for the coding of the images. After a review of all proposed questions, a list of 40 questions containing questions about the contents, form, composition, framing, and sentiment of the images was chosen. A try run was done by coding a image together and tweaking the questions that were unclear or not workable. The images were coded with 3 fixed responses: yes (1), no (2), and unrelated / unidentifiable (0). While the type of enquiry was quantitative in nature, the coding contained to a large degree interpretive responses. Thus, the coding was done both individually and collaboratively through group discussions and double-coding to increase inter-coder reliability.
In addition, composite image stacks were created for the top ten most engaged with images/posts of each platform. This was done on Adobe Photoshop using the following protocol:
Stack the images in same order as ranking (when applicable)
Centre all images on square
20% opacity for each image
Layer of saturation 20%
Figure 7. Instagram (stack of top 10 most liked images).
Instagram is a social network built around image and aesthetics, and this is reflected in the image stack: visually engaging and often professionally shot. Also notable here is the absence of any text in the most engaged with images
Figure 8. Google (stack of top 10 search results by image)
The images displayed in Google image search for climate change contrast with those in Instagram. Here, the colours are more garish and are more likely to have been adjusted ('Photoshopped'). Images here are also more likely to conform to the cliched visual language highlighted by Climate Outreach. Visible here are a polar bear image and a picture of the Earth in a human hand. Text is visible on some images, in the form of annotated scientific explainers.
Figure 9. Tumblr (stack of top 10 most engaged with images)
Tumblr provides a surprise in that the image stack looks a lot like the Twitter platform, including a number of screenshotted tweets. This means that text plays an important role in Tumblr imagert. (also visible is a graph of sea ice coverage). In this image stack, Tumblr acts as an unofficial clearing house for repurposed material from other social media platforms.
Figure 10. Twitter (stack of top 10 most retweeted images)
The announcement of the US's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement reanimated controversy around climate change, reflected in this Twitter image stack. Images includes coverage of the Weather Channel's founder claiming that climate change is a hoax, and screenshotted text making claims regarding Al Gore's investments in carbon trading. Also visible is the presence of a Time Magazine cover, doctored to claim the coming of a new Ice Age in 1977. This is particularly notable considering that Time Magazine exposed that the cover was a hoax in 2013, yet it still circulates today.
Figure 11. Facebook (stack of top 10 most liked images on pages of selected organisations)
High engagement images on the Facebook pages of climate change organisations are heavily text-based, aiming at memetic or infographic styles. The presence of celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio and Adam Sandler is notable, although this may be as much a consequence of the sample of pages as the Facebook platform itself.
Figure 12. Reddit (stack of top 10 'up-voted' image-based posts on selected subreddits)
Finally, Reddit provides a very different visual vernacular to the other platforms. Here, official staged 'photo ops' dominate with politicians, microphones and flags visible. The images are thumbnail 'cards' that appear on Reddit when users post the URL to an article. The images appear prominently, to the left of the article title, so can be reasonably assumed to play a role in engagement. However, Reddit differs from other platforms in that the images are not directly uploaded by users. So the visual vernacular of Reddit owes as much to tropes in media coverage of climate change as it does to the behaviour of its users.The main finding of this project is that distinct visual vernaculars were present across different social media platforms. Images are an important part of climate change communication, and Climate Outreach's seven principles provide useful guidance. For social media, it is their final principle "understand your audience" that has particular resonance. We suggest that thinking of social media communication in terms of platform publics acknowledges that social media platforms are diverse in terms of content and style, that these platforms therefore attract distinctive publics, and that these factors need to be considered when communicating climate change (or any other issue) on social media.
Returning to the Climate Outreach report, visual cliches such as smokestacks and polar bears were notable by their absence. Only in Google Image Search were such images prominent, opening up questions regarding how Google ranks image content. In particular, the source pages for the most highly ranked images were varied and often obscure compared to the largely expert pages highly ranked on Google Web Search (NASA, New York Times etc).
We collected a huge amount of images on this project, and there is potential to do a deeper analysis on some of the platforms. In particular, social media image analysis at scale using the Google Vision API provides the potential for a more in-depth comparison between platform vernaculars and the Climate Outreach communication principles. In this wiki report, we have highlighted the production of image stacks as a means of comparison and amplification in visual analysis. Future research will complement this through methodologies that go beyond analysing only the most engaged images to take into account the rich multiplicity of images within social media climate communication, in order to understand distinct publics and clusters that occur within platforms.
Corner, A., Webster, R., & Teriete, C. (2015). Climate Visuals: Seven principles for visual climate change communication (based on international social research). Oxford: Climate Outreach. http://climateoutreach.org/resources/visual-climate-change-communication/
Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Carter, M. (2015). #Funeral and Instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. Information, Communication & Society, 18(3), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.987152 Latour, B. (1999). Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.O'Neill, S. J., & Smith, N. (2014). Climate change and visual imagery. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5(1), 73–87. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.249
Pearce, W., Brown, B., Nerlich, B., & Koteyko, N. (2015). Communicating climate change: conduits, content, and consensus. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 6(6), 613–626. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.366 -- WarrenPearce - 29 Jun 201 *I | Attachment | Action | Size | Date | Who | Comment |
jpg | Making climate visible.jpg | manage | 28 K | 17 Jul 2017 - 08:48 | NataliaSanchez | |
doc | Van den Dool, Anne - nasaclimatechange Instagram.doc | manage | 957 K | 03 Aug 2017 - 15:35 | WarrenPearce |


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Former Boy Scout Leader Says Officials Let Him Get Away With Molesting Boys
LatestPrepare to have cartoon smoke shooting out your ears because apparently Boy Scout officials in both the U.S. and Canada could've stopped an admitted child molester who was working for them and because no, it doesn't stop there. They also helped him cover his tracks.
A Los Angeles Times and Canadian Broadcasting Corp. investigation (http://lat.ms/tYtWBX ) finds scout leader Rick Turley molested at least 15 children, most of whom he met through American and Canadian Scouting beginning in the 1970s.
Records show Boy Scouts of America officials didn't call police after he admitted molesting three boys. Turley then returned to his home country of Canada, where he signed on with Scouts Canada, and continued his abuses for at least a decade.
Now 58, Turley says he is surprised at how often he got away with it.
In case you read that a bit too quickly for your own good, Boys Scouts officials knew that Turley was molesting boys he met through the organization but didn't call the police because, if this is actually what happened, they are soulless fucks.
You know how soulless they are? EVEN THE CHILD MOLESTER HIMSELF THINKS WHAT THEY DID WAS HEINOUS.
And then, because he knew he could get away with it —if they didn't report it, it's not exactly a message telling him to stop or forcing him to stop— he just continued to molest young boys. For a decade "at least".
Turley is one of more than 5,000 suspected child molesters named in confidential files kept by the Boy Scouts of America.
Judging by this account of the practices of Boy Scouts Of America, that may be the most troubling part of this.
Records: Boy Scout officials failed to report leader who molested children in [WashingtonPost]


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BC: Bear Cat
Daily conversation - The best day of nine lives:
MK: Bear, I have a surprise for you.
BC: Nope! Un uh! I'm getting out of here! Your "surprises" never turn out well for me!
BC: Oh no no no no no! No CPR! No mouth-to-mouth! The Boy tried that the other day, but I was just PLAYING dead! I'll never recover! Dude should wear pants at all times! I don't know what was worse ... no pants ... or CPR from a pants-less man when I was only PRETENDING to be dead so he'd get a clue that I prefer my humans to be fully clothed.
MK: I wasn't going to ...
MK: You don't have just ONE tasty whole chicken ... you have three!
BC: Whoooooooooooa!
BC: WHOOOOOOAA. Hey! Where's the halfwit? Because I'm not sharing my chicken with him.
MK: Who?
BC: The Boy!
MK: He moved out.
MK: I decided that you are the most important thing in my life. I don't need any boys. From now on, it's just you and me.
BC: WHOA! Is it my birthday? Christmas? Are you making up for eleven years of miser-ness?
MK: No.
BC: Chicken ... no boy ... chicken ... yum ... chicken ... me ... CHICKEN!!!!!
BC: WAIT! Is this a trick? Are you trying to get me to come out so you can brush my teeth and clip my claws?
MK: No. That would be mean! I know I used to be mean ALL THE TIME ... but I've turned over a new leaf. In fact, I'll throw away the acne pads, the claw clippers, and the tooth brushing supplies right now.
{Bear comes out from under his cat tree}
MK: I know my singing and dancing damages your senses. So I won't do it anymore.
MK: I love you, Bug.
BC: You know what would make all this even better?
MK: What?
BC: Sharing it with my favorite tortie!
MK: She's on her way over. I'll break out the treats, catnip, and toys you can only have with supervision.
BC: Over? Tortie? Gorgeousness? Catnip? Hubba hubba. I might be having a heart attack!
MK: Bear! Are you okay?
BC: What happened?
MK: You were sort of dancing in your sleep and you rolled off the bed.
MK: Yeah. You were asleep.
BC: No Boy ... chickens ... tortie .. desk chairs ... full food bowl ... no more torture ...
MK: Ummm ... okay. It's not my fault you rolled off the edge of the bed!
BC: I'm screwed! SCREWED! Screwed squared ... and cubed ... and ... and ... RATS! I'm going back to sleep!
BC: Tse tse tse ... chicken ...
{Light snoring}
The Boy: Oh my gosh ... if something happens to you, your Momma will kill me! BREATHE!!! Wait! I know CPR! And mouth-to-mouth! Hold on, Bear!
BC: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! NO PANTS! No pants!
MK: BEAR! You were having a nightmare. You're okay! Want cuddles?
BC: I'm never sleeping ever ever again!!
MK: I love you, Bear.
BC: I love you too, Momma. Hold me tight, okay?
MK: Absolutely.
BC: And don't let me fall asleep!
MK: Why ...
{Bear gives Momma a look}
MK: Okay, Bug. Come here.
BC: You're a good Momma. Thank you for wearing pants.
MK: Ooookay. I'm afraid to ask.
BC: You should be.
- Many of Bear's grievances with Momma were addressed in ...
- Momma's resolutions.
- Feline support groups {Bear post}.
- Momma shaming (Momma turned the tables in Momma's revenge).
- Bear and Momma have had quite a few confrontations over brushing Bear's teeth. For a few examples ...
- The Dread Drop.
- And your little teeth too.
- Bear brutality.
- "Conversations" With Bear Cat: Part 15 ("On Bear's horrible, no good, very bad day.")
- "Conversations" With Bear Cat: Part 23 ("On ignoring sense," "On Bear hiding from Momma," and "On nomnums.")
- "Conversations" With Bear Cat: Part 16 ("On Bear's great new hiding spot.")
- "Conversations" With Bear Cat: Part 17 ("On the deranged donkey.")
- Bear shared his displeasure with Momma's singing in Imitation: the sincerest form of flattery.
- Bear loves to steal Momma's desk chair ... to read more about the desk chair wars:
- To read about the beginning of the desk chair wars: Chair + Towel + Cat = Tons of Pictures. The pictures aren't up to current standards, but it gives you an idea of the history.
- Another series on the desk chair wars occurs in "Conversations" With Bear Cat: Part 12 (On the desk chair wars, parts 1-3).
- The most recent updates to the desk chair saga are found in: "Conversations" With Bear Cat: Part 23 ("On sharing selfishness"), "Conversations" With Bear Cat: Part 24("On MOO!"), Loud, proud ... and blunt, 1.14876 seconds, What's wrong with this picture?, Iz speako nodo engleeesh, Better in my head, WHEE!, The custody "arrangement," The re-debut, "I do what I want," Share ... NOT in the feline dictionary, NOT a cat, Let's talk reindeer {Bear post}, Cat v. Kat, Momma's resolutions, and I'm the shark.


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Below are the summary results for the trade ideas that were closed during the month of May. Results in May were above average in most areas.
A few notes:
The above results do not include currently open trade ideas.
All trade ideas come with specific entry and exit criteria and are tracked daily.
All trade ideas are in highly liquid stocks and ETF's. The Quantifiable Edges Subscriber Letter does not deal with small caps.
All trade ideas are quantified through testing prior to entry. Subscribers may use the backtest results to help judge whether the idea may be appropriate for them.
This is not a performance report. I don't know subscriber's financial situations and risk tolerances. Therefore I do not suggest trade sizes.
There are essentially 3 kinds of trade ideas: 1) CBI trades, 2) System trades, and 3) Index trades.
For those that may be interested in the Index trades, they mostly use the S&P 500. All S&P index trades are entered using SPY. I don't use leveraged etf's like SDS or SSO to juice the performance numbers. Many times I will suggest scaling in to these trades in either 3 or 4 parts. Below are all SPY trade ideas that received fills since the 2/19/2008 inception:
If you'd like to either take advantage of Quantifiable Edges market timing, track the individual trades that construct CBI, or learn new systems (like this one) whose code is available for subscribers to download into Tradestation, you may want to give the Quantifiable Edges Subscriber Letter a look. For a free 3-day trial simply send an email with your name and email address to email@example.com For further information or to subscribe, click here.


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Much has been written accurately demonstrating the authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump, but a consequence of our two-party system is that far too many people ignore a similar lack of respect for democracy by leaders of the Democratic Party. Donna Brazile showed how the Democratic Party rigged the nomination for Hillary Clinton in a book last fall. In recent statements she inadvertently adds additional evidence of the lack of respect for democracy among the Democratic leadership.
The Democratic Party recently voted to reduce the power of superdelegates by not allowing them to vote on the first ballot as long as the nomination was contested. The real benefit of this is that it it will probably eliminate the tendency of the news media to include superdelegates in their counts early in the nomination process. In 2016 this helped Clinton tremendously, when added to the other mechanisms used by the party to essentially rig the nomination for her, by having counts showing her substantially ahead of Sanders. This played into her strategy of making her nomination appear to be inevitable. Superdelegates will still be able to vote on other matters, such as convention rules, enabling them to play a major role should there be a contested convention even prior to a hypothetical second ballot.
Democrats voted to removed automatic delegates from the first round of voting. But we still have seats at the table. We are still in the room and very much capable of setting the menu.#PowerRising https://t.co/vuD99YqFe2
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) August 25, 2018
Donna Brazile reminded us that the Democratic Party leadership has many other ways of getting the results they want when she tweeted: "Democrats voted to removed automatic delegates from the first round of voting. But we still have seats at the table. We are still in the room and very much capable of setting the menu." It is rather shocking that she had no reluctance to admit this, countering the desires of Tom Perez to at least give the illusion that the Democratic Party's nomination process is fair and honest.
Of course Brazile is correct, with the party using methods as such front-loading southern states, along with superdelegates, to increase the chances that a more moderate, ideally southern, candidate would be chosen. The party greatly increased their actions to hand Clinton the nomination in 2016 with tactics including limiting debates, the deal described in Brazile's book to essentially give Clinton control of the party, changing fund raising rules during the campaign to help Clinton, making it harder for Sanders supporters to vote in some states, and Harry Reid's games in Nevada. The party establishment will continue to be able to limit democracy by limiting our choices.
Brazile went further in showing contempt for democracy in an op-ed today in USA Today. I do not believe it is a stretch to assume that this represents the attitudes of others in the party establishment. Brazile complained about the loss of her power, writing as if she and other superdelegates are entitled to decide the nominees and override the decisions of the voters:
According to the new rules, we superdelegates won't be able to vote on the first ballot at the convention. Or on any ballot, unless there's a tie or some other sort of deadlock in the process.
So, we superdelegates are now what? Merely the mechanism you default to in case of a tie? Great. I've fought for the Democratic Party my entire life, and now I'm one notch above a coin toss.
She argued that the "party faithful" deserve their power to override the decisions of elected delegates for the work they have put into the party, failing to understand that in a democracy power should go to those who receive the votes. She claimed that, "the superdelegates aren't the infamous 'smoke-filled room' full of 'old white men' deciding the fate of everybody else." Having greater racial and gender diversity does not change the fact that having decisions made by the superdelegates are just as undemocratic as the smoke-filled rooms. She argues that "I earned my place at this table," but in a democracy the table should be made up of those who have been elected to be there.
It would be different if we had a multi-party democracy, or if we were talking about a minor party. I would not mind if those who have built the Libertarian Party limited their nominees to those who have a roughly libertarian philosophy as that would not limit our overall choices. However, in the current duopoly, the system is rigged so that the either the Democratic or Republican Party nominee will win virtually all elections. Supporters of the major parties certainly make that point clear when they insist that this is the case and try to guilt us into voting for their candidates.
They don't even allow other parties to participate in debates, with participation controlled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, controlled by the Democratic and Republican Parties. As a result, the two-party duopoly limits views which are considered. The parties essentially differ on reproductive rights, some differences in taxation rates, and on how much is spent on social programs. The elections rarely offer a choice on matters such as continuing our state of perpetual warfare, mass surveillance, or the drug war and mass incarceration.
The Democratic Party remains stuck in the past, seeing current elections as filtered by the 1972 loss by George McGovern. For Democrats to say that they should not nominate a candidate of the left because McGovern lost badly back in 1972 would be like Republicans saying they should not nominate a conservative because Barry Goldwater lost badly in 1964.
A better parallel for Democrats to think about would be fifty years ago when the party leadership rigged the nomination for Hubert Humphrey, instead of allowing an anti-war candidate supported by the party's base to be the nominee. This resulted in the Democrats losing to Richard Nixon, comparable to how the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump after the party leadership rigged the nomination for pro-war candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Our most realistic chance of having a real choice in elections is to have the ability for candidates outside of the system to have a fair shot at the major party nominations. It is not fair for Democrats to both support a system which only allows those they consider to be true Democrats to run, and to simultaneously support a system which intentionally makes it extraordinarily difficult for outsider candidates to win outside of the two-party system.
The reality is that the rules changes by the Democratic Party were far too limited. Superdelegates should be entirely abolished. Our entire electoral system also needs to be overhauled, included rank-choice voting and proportional representation. These are necessary so that people like Donna Brazile can no longer set the entire menu of which people we can vote for and which issues are considered during elections.


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Article • 6 min read
How Freshly provides seamless, time-sensitive support
Door Colin Crowley, Vice president of customer experience at Freshly
Laatst gewijzigd September 21, 2021
As one of the fastest-growing prepared-meal companies, the most important part of our business is accurately shipping fresh, nutritious meals to customers every week.
In addition to providing a variety of delicious meals, Freshly also delivers seamless customer support, which has been a huge factor in our continued growth in a new category. In order to try out a new service, customers have to get the answers they're looking for in a quick, informed way. They're interacting with our customer support team regularly to choose their meals and ask questions about ingredients and nutrition.
Customers have to make decisions about what meals to get every week or whether they want to skip that week instead, so we need to handle these communications quickly and efficiently.
At Freshly, we aim for the highest standards in customer care: average email response times of no more than 30 minutes (frequently even half of that), average chat response times chat of 20 seconds or less, and an average of 10 seconds to answer phone calls.
We empower customers to contact us in the way that's most convenient for them by embracing omnichannel support—talk, email, chat, and text.
Omnichannel service level agreements (SLAs) for individual channels
For a business like ours, omnichannel support is really the only option. The goal is to balance service speed and excellence with efficiency. If we're answering emails in real time, we can't have too limited a pool of agents. At the same time, however, we can't over-staff the pool of agents so that their time isn't used efficiently. Then there's the fact that we also embrace phone, chat, and text support. That's where omnichannel support comes in.
Today, most of our agents are dual-channel—they're responding to customers via chat and email or phone and email. We need to have multiple people constantly looking at emails to meet our tight, 30-minute response goal. Since the cadence of emails rises and falls, we staff for the "worst" but still make sure time is well-spent when agents aren't answering emails.
Our agents know that they're held to certain standards, and omnichannel empowers them to achieve them. They know they can easily go back and forth between channels, and that the response time is within their reach. It's a win-win when our agents feel supported in meeting our high SLAs and it keeps our customers happy, too.
Get started with omnichannel support
Managing agents and customizing metrics
Employing an all-encompassing customer support solution allows us to react quickly and meet our SLA standards—but we also know that this support approach is better for our customers.
At Freshly, we're all about convenience. Thanks to omnichannel support, our agents know a customer's history at a glance. We're connecting frequently with customers who receive Freshly deliveries weekly, and who may contact us using varying channels. It's important that an agent has a seamless insight into the customer's prior contacts and history so the agent can take up an issue that was previously reported.
Another benefit? With an omnichannel solution and using the surveying functionality in Zendesk, we've seen an increase in survey responses, which allows us to be more strategic. We're able to standardize the surveys and how they're delivered, and, because they're automated, they're consistently deployed and synthesized. More data means surveys are more effective as a rating tool for agents, removing the distortion of outliers.
Surveys are crucial, too, because they inform our internal (and extensive) quality assurance program. We monitor contacts that have survey responses, breaking it down by agent, to identify why customers are unhappy and what we (Freshly or the agent) could have done to make their experience better. We can individually monitor an agent's effectiveness in helping the customer, as well as how empathetic they are throughout the interaction. This leads to improved performance and to better customer interactions overall.
In email, phone, and chat, we also evaluate response-time metrics, examining different aspects depending on the platform. We create custom metrics to evaluate response times across all contact channels under many different criteria, including by day of week, time of day, and team/supervisor. This kind of granular insight has been critical as we build our team, because we're able to understand where aspects of our customer support need to be tweaked so we can offer consistent, superior support.
Structuring support for omnichannel—tiers and specialization
We factored in geography and time zones when structuring our omnichannel support to maximize efficiency and flexibility.
We have two Freshly offices, one in Arizona and one in New York, with the Arizona office focused on front-line phone, chat, email, and text communications, and the New York office focusing on a number of specialty tasks that help our support function run as smoothly as it does.
Importantly, a key part of our customer support is the fact that we're open 6 AM-11 PM, and staffed by Freshly employees in the United States, rather than outsourced support. We deliver to customers from California to Georgia, so we're focused on providing support across all key times of day, in all continental time zones, except the wee hours of the morning. Omnichannel support only works, and is only really omnichannel, if hours of operation across all contact channels are maximized to encompass 90% of customer contact volume. Omnichannel support for eight hours of the day means that you have unichannel support (email, by default) for the vast majority of the day—16 hours.
Because omnichannel support requires flexibility, it's important to emphasize dexterity in support operations. For this, we make sure that even specialists in our customer service team, who normally handle other matters, excel in support and can be employed to assist with contact volume as needed to maintain our gold standard SLAs, even during times of high contact volume.
Extend the impact of omnichannel tools with specific apps for each individual channel
We've extended the reach and impact of our customer support tools by employing specific apps for each channel. We've found that apps really enhance both our agent and customer experiences, enabling or complementing the efficiencies we need:
- The User Data App makes it easier to provide a full view of the customer's history when agents examine a ticket.
- The Answer Suggestion App links to our company guides so agents have the right talking points for common questions requiring very specific terminologies, such as those involving nutrition.
- The Recorded Calls App enhances our training by providing examples of good and bad calls.
- The Emoji App lets agents spruce up tickets with smileys and personality. Food is a very personal experience for people, so we want to connect with customers. We're not "agents," we're people!
For Freshly, given our mission and our offering, there's no substitute for an omnichannel solution to customer support. Our company needs the insights omnichannel delivers, our agents need those tools to provide real-time customer support, and our customers deserve the excellent experience they receive as a result.


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Workplace wellness programs have increased popularity through the years. According to the most recent UBA Health Plan Survey, 49 percent of firms with 200+ employees offering health benefits in 2016 offered wellness programs. Workplace wellness programs' popularity also brought controversy and hefty discussions about what works to improve population health and which programs comply with the complex legal standards of multiple institutions that have not really "talked" to each other in the past. To "add wood to the fire," the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) made public some legal actions that shook the core of the wellness industry, such as EEOC vs. Honeywell International, and EEOC vs. Orion Energy Systems.
To ensure a wellness program is compliant with the ACA, GINA and the EEOC, let's first understand what each one of these institutions are.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a comprehensive healthcare reform law enacted in March 2010 during the Obama presidency. It has three primary goals: to make health insurance available to more people, to expand the Medicaid program, and to support innovative medical care delivery methods to lower the cost of healthcare overall.1 The ACA carries provisions that support the development of wellness programs and determines all rules around them.
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) is a federal law that protects individuals from genetic discrimination in health insurance and employment. GINA relates to wellness programs in different ways, but it particularly relates to the gathering of genetic information via a health risk assessment.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a federal agency that administers and enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination. In 2017, the EEOC issued a final rule to amend the regulations implementing Title II of GINA as they relate to employer-sponsored wellness program. This rule addresses the extent to which an employer may offer incentives to employees and spouses.
Here is some advice to ensure your wellness program is compliant with multiple guidelines.
- Make sure your wellness program is "reasonably designed" and voluntary – This means that your program's main goal should be to promote health and prevent disease for all equally. Additionally, it should not be burdensome for individuals to participate or receive the incentive. This means you must offer reasonable alternatives for qualifying for the incentive, especially for individuals whose medical conditions make it unreasonably difficult to meet specific health-related standards. I always recommend wellness programs be as simple as possible, and before making a change or decision in the wellness program, identify all difficult or unfair situations that might arise from this change, and then run them by your company's legal counsel and modify the program accordingly before implementing it. An example of a wellness program that is NOT reasonably designed is a program offering a health risk assessment and biometric screening without providing results or follow-up information and advice. A wellness program is also NOT reasonably designed if exists merely to shift costs from an employer to employees based on their health.
- Do the math! – Recent rules implemented changes in the ACA that increased the maximum permissible wellness program reward from 20 percent to 30 percent of the cost of self-only health coverage (50 percent if the program includes tobacco cessation). Although the final rules are not clear on incentives for spouses, it is expected that, for wellness programs that apply to employees and their spouses, the maximum incentive for either the employee or spouse will be 30 percent of the total cost of self-only coverage. In case an employer offers more than one group health plan but participation in a wellness program is open to all employees regardless of whether they are enrolled in a plan, the employer may offer a maximum incentive of 30 percent of the lowest cost major medical self-only plan it offers. As an example, if a single plan costs $4,000, the maximum incentive would be $1,200.
- Provide a notice to all eligible to participate in your wellness program – The EEOC made it easy for everyone and posted a sample notice online at https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/regulations/ada-wellness-notice.cfm. Your notice should include information on the incentive amount you are offering for different programs, how you maintain privacy and security of all protected health information (PHI) as well as who to contact if participants have question or concerns.
- If using a HRA (health risk assessment), do not include family medical history questions – The EEOC final rule, which expands on GINA's rules, makes it clear that "an employer is permitted to request information about the current or past health status of an employee's spouse who is completing a HRA on a voluntary basis, as long as the employer follows GINA rules about requesting genetic information when offering health or genetic services. These rules include requirements that the spouse provide prior, knowing, written, and voluntary authorization for the employer to collect genetic information, just as the employee must do, and that inducements in exchange for this information are limited."2 Due to the complexity and "gray areas" this item can reach, my recommendation is to keep it simple and to leave genetic services and genetic counseling out of a comprehensive wellness program.
WellSteps, a nationwide wellness provider, has a useful tool that everyone can use. Their "wellness compliance checker" should not substituted for qualified legal advice, but can be useful for a high level check on how compliant your wellness program is. You can access it at https://www.wellsteps.com/resources/tools.
I often stress the need for all wellness programs to build a strong foundation, which starts with the company's and leaders' messages. Your company should launch a wellness program because you value and care about your employees' (and their families') health and well-being. Everything you do and say should reflect this philosophy. While I always recommend companies to carefully review all regulations around wellness, I do believe that if your wellness program has a strong foundation based on your corporate social responsibility and your passion for building a healthy workplace, you most likely will be within the walls of all these rules. At the end, a workplace that does wellness the right way has employees who are not motivated by financial incentives, but by their intrinsic motivation to be the best they can be as well as their acceptance that we all must be responsible for our own health, and that all corporations should be responsible for providing the best environment and opportunities for employees to do so.
ByValeria S. Tivnan
Originally Posted By www.ubabenefits.com


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If you notice every imperfection in your smile and you are aiming for a more ideal-looking smile, veneers might be for you. Veneers are common tools in cosmetic dentistry for improving the look of your teeth. They are thin layers, either made of resin composite or dental porcelain, that go over your teeth. If you are considering dental veneers, these five reasons to choose them may help persuade you.
1. They hide imperfections.
The basis of cosmetic dentistry is providing an attractive smile, and veneers are designed to hide imperfections such as chipped, uneven, or badly aligned teeth. With veneers, teeth are even and uniformly colored.
2. They are durable.
Dental veneers can last for a decade to up to 30 years, so you do not need to continually go back to our Houston, Texas office to replace them. On average, veneers last longer than standard fillings.
3. You can get the process done quickly.
Often, you can get a full set of dental veneers in a three visits and within a few weeks. The first appointment is a consultation to evaluate your teeth and plan your treatment. At the next visit, the doctor and our team prepare your teeth for veneers and take an impression of your teeth so the laboratory can custom-make your veneers. During the final visit, we bond the new veneers to the surfaces of your teeth.
4. They can whiten the appearance of your teeth.
Coffee, smoking, excessive fluoride, and certain drugs can yellow your teeth over time. Dental veneers can be colored to have a bright white appearance so your teeth appear noticeably whiter. This can be especially beneficial for individuals whose teeth are naturally off-white and do not respond well to bleach-based whitening treatments.
5. They can fix minor dental problems.
Dental veneers are not solely cosmetic. They can improve a variety of dental concerns, such as teeth with uneven spaces. They can hide the appearance of chipped and broken teeth, and make more even teeth that are worn down, spaced unevenly, or shaped irregularly. Since the doctor can manufacture the veneers to match your natural tooth color, these thin layers are more attractive than unsightly fixes such as metal fillings.


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The Digital Patient - Introduction to the special theme
by Ioannis Tollis and Nicholas Ayache
Initiated by the European Commission as a major multidisciplinary scientific challenge, the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) aims to develop robust, in silico models of human physiology and pathology. The desired outcomes include the identification of novel diagnostic biomarkers, the optimization of clinical decision-making and the discovery of innovative therapies. In this way, individualized models of human function could serve as virtual testbeds for a better understanding of pathophysiological processes (ie the disturbance of normal mechanical, physical and biochemical functions), as well as evaluating potential therapeutical strategies in silico.
This scientific direction is reflected in the recent calls for projects for the European Union's 7th Framework Programme on VPH, which will target:
patient-specific computational modelling and simulation of organs or systems targeting specific clinical needs such as prediction of diseases
data integration and knowledge extraction, and most importantly
clinical applications and demonstration of the tangible benefits of patient-specific computational models.
This European initiative will give rise to new environments for predictive, individualized, evidence-based, more effective and safer healthcare. In addition, better therapy and the modelling of adverse drug effects will reduce medical errors and improve patient safety.
However, in developing such patient-specific models it is crucial to implement multi-layered models that describe different properties (eg electrical, mechanical and biochemical), and appropriate image analysis and data assimilation tools to identify their specific parameters from patient images. An ultimate goal is to meaningfully integrate these models to describe/model/mimic some life function, rather than individual properties, at different scales; for example, from cellular dynamics to organ function. To realize this ambitious scientific vision it will be necessary to address a number of challenges related both to infrastructure and data management, computational issues, validation and legal ethical issues.


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Topic: Safety (Read 71722 times)
Feature Winner
Posts: 150
Re: Safety
Reply #30 on:
February 23, 2009, 10:06:13 PM »
im_79, how can you put a price on your kids safety. Economy or not safety is your first expence in .25.
Magic Man
Posts: 49
Re: Safety
Reply #31 on:
February 24, 2009, 02:35:32 PM »
I want you all to honestly answer these questions.
1.) Does a properly mounted seat increase a drivers safety?
2.) Would you put your driver in a midget/sprint with a few cushions only?
3.) Should driver comfort take presidence over driver safety in regard to how tight seat
belts should be worn or if a seat should be mandatory
3.) Does a hans make the driver more safe?
4.) Is leaning really honestly a good idea in regard holding safety to the highest
5.) Is leaning the best and safest cure for biking?
6.) Are newer seatbelts better than 2 year old belts?
I think alot of people I have met in quarter midgets are great people, great parents but due to lack of racing experience outside of quarters are not qualified to make the decision on what is best for safety because what you have seen is only in your few years. If you do this long enough you will see that what you think is a freak accident happens all the time and once is enough. This is why an organization with experience like USAC should manage the safety and QMA should have an outside commitee draw up their safety sheet instead of the RCP process.
Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 02:44:35 PM by Magic Man
Posts: 24
Re: Safety
Reply #32 on:
February 24, 2009, 03:24:16 PM »
well said buddy. I never knew you were that smart....especially for a man your young age. Happy b-day, btw.
Feature Winner
Posts: 104
Re: Safety
Reply #33 on:
February 24, 2009, 06:46:14 PM »
Quote from: Magic Man on February 24, 2009, 02:35:32 PM
I want you all to honestly answer these questions.
1.) Does a properly mounted seat increase a drivers safety?
2.) Would you put your driver in a midget/sprint with a few cushions only?
3.) Should driver comfort take presidence over driver safety in regard to how tight seat
belts should be worn or if a seat should be mandatory
3.) Does a hans make the driver more safe?
4.) Is leaning really honestly a good idea in regard holding safety to the highest
5.) Is leaning the best and safest cure for biking?
6.) Are newer seatbelts better than 2 year old belts?
I think alot of people I have met in quarter midgets are great people, great parents but due to lack of racing experience outside of quarters are not qualified to make the decision on what is best for safety because what you have seen is only in your few years. If you do this long enough you will see that what you think is a freak accident happens all the time and once is enough. This is why an organization with experience like USAC should manage the safety and QMA should have an outside commitee draw up their safety sheet instead of the RCP process.
1. No. You must know first I'm not at all for hanging out of the left side of a car like an ape. Sitting the younger/smaller drivers straight up in a seat has more negatives than positives. Most of the really hard impacts are from head on or hard right front crashes. When you are sitting in the car straight up you are relying solely on the belts, neck collar, helmet, hans, etc to absorb shock, and there is none. When you roll down in the car and tilted to the left (like I said before, not hanging out like an ape!) the shock load is transfered not only more evenly through the shoulder, waist and 5th belt (which probably 50% of quarter midgets dont have and is stupid) the drivers feet, legs, back, will also help absorb the hit. Also sitting in this position the drivers left shoulder comes up naturally and most use an arm rest on the right that does the same, which keeps the neck collar tight to the helmet. Most younger drivers sitting upright with the belts properly tightened, you could throw a cat between their shoulders and neck collar. The issue is with the under developed neck and shoulders of the younger drivers and heavy helmets.
2. Not comparing apples to apples
3. No
3. Dont know, jury is still out (By the way Magic, you got 2#3's lol)
4. See answer of 1
5. If you could see the numbers when you calculate roll centers, moment arms, weight transfer etc. with driver in different locations it all comes down to the drivers eyeballs work better when they are side by side rather than on top of each other LOL!
6 No The QMA 2-year seatbelt rule is one of the dumbest.
Not meant to be a pissin match or arguments just food for thought. Good post Majic Man.
Triple Crown Champion
Posts: 525
Re: Safety
Reply #34 on:
February 24, 2009, 07:28:31 PM »
Here are my answers to the questions above:
1. Yes
3a. No, but it is possible to have a comfortable driver and a safe one at the same time. I still kick myself to this day for not taking a picture of my son sound asleep in his car in the chute waiting for the track to clear out on an open practice day (he was strapped in for about 20 minutes without moving).
3b. Yes, I also like the Hutchens device too.
4. NO...How could a kids head outside of the roll cage be safer than inside the cage?
5. Nope, buy a novice setup guide if you need some help with biking.
6. Depends...4 year old belts that are still in good shape, I would say yes they are just as good. A set of six month old belts that are showing signs of wear due to crashes or installation, should be replaced.
Now for my two cents:
My family made a choice when my son started that we were investing in a Lajoie seat and we couldn't be happier with the purchase. We could have a gotten a really great set of shocks for the car instead of running those old smoker shocks that needed refilled every race, but we decided to spend that money up front on something that would keep him safe and wait on the stuff that would make him faster. After a couple shots into the wall, I am glad we did what we did. We have also decided before he moves up he will be using either a HANs or a Hutchens device. We know for that amount of money we could help make his car faster when he moves up, but we will go the route of safety now and speed later.
To put it bluntly, we all strap our kids into racecars knowing there are some inherit risks associated with it. However, if the worst case scenario, that we all know is possible, should happen do you want to look back and wonder if a few hundred dollars might have changed the outcome? I do not!
Scott Freitas
Patriot Motorsports Inc.
Feature Winner
Posts: 104
Re: Safety
Reply #35 on:
February 24, 2009, 07:43:40 PM »
Sorry my post got screwed up
Posts: 46
Re: Safety
Reply #36 on:
February 25, 2009, 10:10:12 AM »
Thanks to all for keeping this post alive. Through our discussions the sport will be safer. I respect everyones input and lets agree to disagree on somethings. But, with my experience as a driver and my research I have found these things to be truths:
1. The best position for a race driver to survive an impact is upright. The force of
impact is distributed over a larger area of the spine. For those of you who have
been around sprint car racing, high backed seats became common after Brad
Doty's wreck. The theory is if there is a "backboard" running the length of the
driver the shock would be spread over a larger area, reducing the chance of a
broken back. This to me justifies using a seat. (we run 160 and do not have
biking issues by the way) . If a leaning position is safer than why hasn't other
forms of racing adopted it. I am sure Dr. Trammell or Dr. Henry Bock would love
to give you info on this. Dr. Trammell's website is motorsportsmd.com. They are
leading medical advisors for the IRL and the FIA.
2. The HANS works!!! Even at this level. My daughter started wearing one after
she hit her head on the steering wheel causing her to bite her tongue. This
incident happened at Terre Haute in NOVICE. She was strapped in tight and
was wearing a neck collar and her head and neck still stretched enough to hit
the wheel. We normally ran Mini Indy which was a lot faster than the dirt at
Terre Haute. Two years have passed with her wearing the HANS and there
have been plenty of big hits and never has she even complained of being sore.
The HANS or similar device helps with the heavy helmet on a little head problem
as it slows down the whipping motion in a crash. According to research done by
the SFI foundation the neck collars actually cause more harm than good as it
ads weight to the head and neck. Neck collars are HELMET SUPPORTS!!! There
is no manufacturer that will claim otherwise.
There is one more issue that needs to be mentioned. UNDERARMOUR or similar material is very dangerous to wear in auto racing. The material has a very low melting point and will embede itself into the skin requiring surgery. The material will melt even without direct contact with flame. Simpson Safety equipment has a bulletin about this topic. I just wanted to mention it because it is popular at the indoors(for obvious reasons).
Posts: 9
Re: Safety
Reply #37 on:
March 01, 2009, 04:14:30 PM »
A lot has been said about Driver Safety. But what about personnel properly trained to attend an injured driver. How many people know how to put a neck collar on, properly remove a helment. Should the helment be removed or left on after a hard crash? Does your track have the proper Fire Bottles (Cold Fire) is highly recommended, used by many of the top short tracks and the IRL. There are many more issues that come up on race day. So how tracks have the right people in place in case an accident happens.
The IRL at one time had a Safety class given by Dave Brown, I don't know if it still availabe but would be worth looking into and very helpful
Posts: 13
Re: Safety
Reply #38 on:
March 02, 2009, 08:22:52 PM »
I'm a reapointed safety dir.at CQMA I also hold a NASCAR hard card for MIS Fire & Safety Crew. As a safety dir. you need to be a leader in safety on your suff and all the other drivers equiptment also. Even if it is your buddy you can't let any thing slide for the kids sake. We will be trained in April on the new Hats off device that NASCAR,IRL and AMA Super Bikes & Supercross are recomending. I see that Simpson is offering there own device also. I do not hold any medical card for the State of Michigan but I have 17 years of fire & rescue training and experiance. As far as properly trained I feel that I am trained enough to know when to call for help. All I can say is work as a team on a driver that may be injured don't rush or feel like you are holding up the show remember the safety of the kids comes first. Most tracks don't have neck collars or stuff like that. Don't ever remove a helmet unless the driver is having a hard time breathing leave that up to a medic or EMT. I will be bringing some stuff from MIS that I learn this spring to CQMA this summer. To also add the IRL has there own safety team and I doubt they would share any info with any one trying to better our kids sport. Just my thoughts
Jeff Steele
CQMA safety Dir
Posts: 54
Re: Safety
Reply #39 on:
March 02, 2009, 08:52:24 PM »
Quote from: atfd404 on March 02, 2009, 08:22:52 PM
To also add the IRL has there own safety team and I doubt they would share any info with any one trying to better our kids sport. Just my thoughts
Jeff Steele
CQMA safety Dir
The one thing that I disagree with is the above statement. I am the Customer Service Rep. and on the Advisory Board of INDY DownForce, "The Official Fan Club of the IRL" Tony George has been on the top of the list when it comes to Safety. I talk with some of the Safety teams, flight nurse etc.. and while I cannot speak for them, I cannot see any of them turning their back on a kid, if asked to come and talk, I bet you a few would, barring it isn't during race season which starts April 5th in St. Pete. We have had the Safety Team come out and talk to INDY DownForce members, never a problem.
Nancy Gass
Last Edit: March 02, 2009, 08:55:11 PM by gass
Posts: 13
Re: Safety
Reply #40 on:
March 02, 2009, 09:23:23 PM »
Don't get me wrong the IRL Safety Team is one if not the best in the busness. They have a job to do and they do it well along with the crew ISC puts together for the NASCAR events at MIS that crew is top knoch just ask Ernie Ervin.Yes Tony George is on top of safety for the drivers I have seen it first hand and maybe the Safety Team's members are not the same as a few years ago as IRL no longer has a race at MIS.I'm not trying to start a argument my main consern(sp)at the track is the safety of my driver and all of the other drivers at that event. Please do all you as a handler and a parent keep the kids safe.
Jeff Steele
Posts: 54
Re: Safety
Reply #41 on:
March 02, 2009, 09:56:18 PM »
It's all good, everything you have said regarding removing helmet etc... is true. I have seen parents and handlers thinking they were doing the best for their kids by getting them out of the car and removing helmet and they don't realize the harm they can cause. We have always tried to keep our son safe but have seen some that have skimped on safety. We bought a Hutchens Device for our son and a few people asked what it was for, it really surprised me. I also see the radio as a added bonus for the kids, I know if we had it last year we may have not been hit a few times after a yellow...
Feature Winner
Posts: 106
Re: Safety
Reply #42 on:
March 03, 2009, 01:48:16 PM »
You all are saying exactly the right thing with the safety of the children and NOT removing the helmet. I do wish to point out though that you need to take a good look at the medical team you bring in to be on stand by at the event. This last summer our racer was run into a wall where she traveled the wall flipping numerous times. Having come to a stop finally-medics were on hand as well as myself. Finally making sure she was conscious she was taken to the medic ambulance where they proceeded to evaluate her. I was very upset that they could not get a Blood Pressure on her because they had very poor equipment. Finally I said get the cuff on her and I checked it radially. Now to me these were NOT proper EMT techs let alone a set up for handling an emergency. Thankfully, she had the proper equipment on, belts were tight, helmet was the best that she could have had as it was cracked after inspection. Yet again I had to scream DO NOT remove the helmet, Support the neck.
So please everyone double check the EMT people you bring in. If the track insists you use theirs then check their equipment and make sure they are certified EMTs-if not then time to say to the track that they need to be replaced no matter what the cost.
A big thanks to all concerned over the safety of our children.
Re: Safety
Reply #43 on:
March 03, 2009, 03:19:54 PM »
sure makes me feel alot better seeing you at the track granny, your always lending your great advice and everyone that reads your posts gains valuable knowledge, helping make our sport safer. i thank you.
Feature Winner
Posts: 106
Re: Safety
Reply #44 on:
March 03, 2009, 04:58:06 PM »
Anytime I can help you know where to find me always have minor first aide stuff with me.
Glad you are a great friend to my son.
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An introduction to the video timeline.
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Image by Joshua Martin
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