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At a time when public mistrust of science runs high, and non-experts are hard-pressed to separate fact from industry-sponsored spin, Sense About Science, a charity based in London with an affiliate in New York, presents itself as a trustworthy arbiter. The organization purports to help the misinformed public sift through alarmist claims about public health and the environment by directing journalists, policymakers, and others to vetted sources who can explain the evidence behind debates about controversial products like e-cigarettes and flame retardants.
One reason the public is so confused, suggested Tracey Brown, the group's director, in a recent Guardian op-ed, is that the media feeds alarmism by focusing on who sponsors scientific studies, rather than asking more important questions about whether the research is sound. Even when there is no evidence of bias, Brown contended, journalists attack industry-funded research, running exposés on subjects such as fracking, genetically modified plants, and sugar. Brown lamented that what she called "the 'who funded it?' question" is too often asked by "people with axes to grind."
Brown's downplaying of concerns about such research invites skepticism. Since the mid-1990s, numerous studies have shown that industry-funded research tends to favor its sponsors' products. This effect has been documented in research financed by chemical, pharmaceutical, surgical, food, tobacco, and, we have learned most recently, sugar companies. In the 1960s, the sugar industry secretly paid scientists to minimize the role sugar plays in causing heart disease and blame saturated fat instead, according to a study published in the September issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. For decades, industry-funded research helped tobacco companies block regulations by undermining evidence that cigarettes kill. Precisely because of the very real risk of bias, prestigious scientific journals have long required researchers to disclose their sources of support. Journalists in pursuit of transparency have good reason to ask, "Who funded it?"
Sense About Science claims to champion transparency. The organization has campaigned to see the evidence behind policy decisions and asked for pharmaceutical companies to release all the results of clinical trials, not just the positive ones. Nearly 700 organizations have signed on to the clinical trials initiative since it began last year. These are salutary efforts, and Brown points out that with the exception of one program funded by publishers, none of the group's projects are underwritten by companies. But this sidesteps a larger issue.
Sense About Science does not always disclose when its sources on controversial matters are scientists with ties to the industries under examination. And the group is known to take positions that buck scientific consensus or dismiss emerging evidence of harm. When journalists rightly ask who sponsors research into the risks of, say, asbestos, or synthetic chemicals, they'd be well advised to question the evidence Sense About Science presents in these debates as well.
In 2002, Dick Taverne, an English politician and business consultant, founded Sense About Science "to expose bogus science," he explains in his memoir, "Against the Tide." Through his consulting work, Taverne had cultivated relationships with energy, communications, food, and pharmaceutical companies. Sense About Science's early sponsors included some of Taverne's former clients and companies in which he owned stock.
Taverne must have known the power of media narratives about science firsthand, because he had experience with the tobacco industry, which labored mightily to change the conversation about its product in the face of evidence that cigarettes were lethal. According to internal documents released in litigation by cigarette manufacturers, Taverne's consulting company, PRIMA Europe, helped British American Tobacco improve relations with its investors and beat European regulations on cigarettes in the 1990s. Taverne himself worked on the investors project: In an undated memo, PRIMA assured the tobacco company that "the work would be done personally by Dick Taverne," because he was well placed to interview industry opinion leaders and "would seek to ensure that industry's needs are foremost in people's minds." During the same decade, Taverne sat on the board of the British branch of the powerhouse public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, which claimed Philip Morris as a client. The idea for a "sound science" group, made up of a network of scientists who would speak out against regulations that industrial spokespeople lacked the credibility to challenge, was a pitch Burson-Marsteller made to Philip Morris in a 1994 memorandum.
It's not hard to identify traces of this approach in Taverne's later work. Writing in his 2005 book, "The March of Unreason," Taverne complained that "eco-fundamentalists" and fearmongers had fomented a backlash against science and technology, which had in turn produced a "multiplication of health and safety regulations." That year British Petroleum donated 15,000 pounds to Sense About Science, and Taverne argued in the House of Lords that as much as 80 percent of global warming might be attributable to solar activity, even though that theory had been discredited two years earlier. Taverne, who stepped down as chairman of Sense About Science in 2012, did not respond to The Intercept's requests for comment.
Sense About Science established an American affiliate in 2014, under the direction of a Brooklyn-based journalist named Trevor Butterworth. In financial documents, Sense About Science claims Sense About Science USA as a sister organization "with close ties and similar aims." High-profile scientific publishers, as well as such reputable institutions as the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the Columbia Journalism Review, have promoted Butterworth's services to scientists and journalists.
From 2003 to 2014, Butterworth contributed to the website of an organization called STATS, a nonprofit that promoted statistical literacy. STATS had its own connections to the tobacco industry, in this case through founder Robert Lichter, a conservative political scientist and now a communications professor at George Mason University. Lichter also co-founded and continues to run the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which Philip Morris hired in 1994 to survey news reports about tobacco as part of its strategy, outlined in a memo from March of that year, to counter "personal and public bias" in stories about cigarettes' health risks.
Lichter, like Sense About Science's Tracey Brown, has argued that industry money doesn't necessarily taint the science it supports. In 2003, a congressional report charged the George W. Bush administration with stacking a government committee on childhood lead poisoning with industry scientists. Lichter appeared as an analyst on CNN and said, "Studies have found that scientists who have consulted for industry do not differ in their assessment of risks, of health risks, from scientists who have not consulted for industry." Lichter did not respond to The Intercept's requests for comment or citations to these studies.
Before STATS was dissolved in 2014, and its web site adopted by Sense About Science USA, it received regular grants from free-market sources. Between 1998 and 2014, STATS received $4.5 million, 81 percent of its donations, from the Searle Freedom Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, Donors Trust (a fund largely sustained by Charles Koch), and other right-wing foundations. Searle, which describes its mission as promoting "economic liberties," gave STATS $959,000 between 2010 and 2014. Anti-regulatory foundations, including these, spent over half a billion dollars between 2003 and 2010 to "manipulate and mislead the public over the nature of climate science and the threat posed by climate change," according to a 2013 study by Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle.
With these roots, Sense About Science should not surprise anyone when it promotes anti-regulatory voices on issues like asbestos. In a 2006 brochure called "Science for Celebrities" and purporting to correct misperceptions about synthetic chemicals, Sense About Science offers John Hoskins, a toxicologist formerly of the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit at the University of Leicester. Under the rubric "Toxic effects depend on dose," Hoskins reassures us: "Away from the high doses of occupational exposure a whole host of unwanted chemicals finds their way into our bodies. Most leave quickly but some stay: asbestos and silica in our lungs, dioxins in our blood. Do they matter? No!"
More than two decades ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared asbestos a proven human carcinogen. Since then, as countries continue to mine asbestos, industry groups have argued that certain varieties, including chrysotile and crocidolite, are not so toxic. In response, several groups, including the Collegium Ramazzini, an international body of occupational and environmental health experts, have issued consensus statements warning that no form of asbestos is safe at any dose. In calling for a universal ban on all forms of asbestos in 2010, the Collegium Ramazzini observed that the asbestos industry's attacks on evidence that "irrefutably" links its product to cancer "closely resemble those used by the tobacco industry."
Brown maintains that Sense About Science has not disagreed with the scientific consensus on asbestos, and she notes that dose and type of exposure are the issue. But when I asked Hoskins why his position differed from the scientific consensus, he shrugged over email, "Once upon a time the consensus was that the earth is flat." Hoskins further replied, "Unfortunately, to say that within a population low-level exposure of many chemicals must be dangerous is not borne out by reality, much to the chagrin of those who live in the fantasy world of 'chemical-free.' "
Hoskins's résumé states that he has represented the Chrysotile Institute in "discussion with the governments of several countries." But he did not disclose this relationship to the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health journal when he co-authored two scientific papers disputing claims that chrysotile or crocidolite caused a rare cancer in exposed populations. When his industry ties came to light, the journal issued errata for both papers to disclose this competing interest. (Hoskins denies any conflict of interest, insisting that his role in authoring the papers was confined to providing information the other authors requested. Yet all but one of the other authors had also failed to disclose their asbestos interests, which now appear in the errata.)
Soon after the first paper appeared, eight public health researchers wrote a letter to the editors of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health expressing outrage that the journal would publish a paper with "gross mistakes" and "no scientific content." A group that included many of the letter's signatories asked the journal to consider retracting the second paper, citing "seriously misleading information." But the journal's editors declined to retract the papers, which remain in the technical literature, casting doubt on the scientific consensus that all forms of asbestos are hazardous to human health.
It's hard to make a case for the safety of a substance like asbestos, which most people know causes cancer. Other commercial products are easier to defend, not because they are less hazardous, but because consumers are not as familiar with the evidence questioning their safety and utility. Scientists have known since 1997 that flame retardants, for example, can cause cancer. These brominated and chlorinated chemicals are used in a wide range of consumer products, including nursing pads and car seats. For more than three decades, studies in animals and humans have linked them to cancer, developmental delays, and other serious health problems. By 2010, the evidence was so persuasive that nearly 150 scientists from 22 countries signed a statement warning that flame retardants "are a concern for persistence, bioaccumulation, long-range transport, and toxicity." Flame retardants' fire safety benefit not only remains unproven, the scientists asserted, but the chemicals form highly toxic byproducts when burned.
Sense About Science has long relied on dubious numbers to insist on the efficacy of these chemicals. In 2006 it published a pamphlet on "misconceptions about chemicals" in which it claimed that British laws requiring flame retardants in furniture had reduced fire deaths by 20 percent, citing a 2000 European Commission report called "Flame Retardants." A European Commission press officer told me she knows of no such report. "The reference to the 20 percent reduction in fire deaths is repeatedly quoted in papers and publications from flame retardant industries and associations, and they always refer to 'Flame Retardants, DG Environment Video 2000,' which we cannot find." On the contrary, she told me, it is simply "not possible to correlate fire deaths to non-flammability requirements."
Who did make the claim? Flame retardant industry trade groups, including the European Flame Retardant Association and the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, run by Philip Morris's longtime PR firm Burson-Marsteller. The U.S.-based Citizens for Fire Safety also repeated the claim until it disbanded, following revelations in 2012 that leading flame retardant producers ran the organization, not the grassroots group of "staff and volunteers committed to national fire safety" its literature asserted.
The same year, Sense About Science again called on John Hoskins, identified as an independent toxicologist, this time to fact-check a study that found potentially carcinogenic flame retardants in sofas. In his response, Hoskins wrote: "The bottom line is that danger of fire is many, many times greater than any imagined danger from chemicals used to prevent it."
"Everything I wrote about flame retardants was taken from published works," Hoskins told me. "Reviewers at the time found nothing to criticize and I have had no comment from the thousands of people who must have read the pieces."
Sense About Science reprinted its guide on chemicals in 2014. "The trade-off between fire risk and toxicology is changing, and we represented that newer precautionary thinking in our most recent publications," Brown, the group's director, told The Intercept in an email. The new guide acknowledged "allegations of side effects" from flame retardants, including persistence in the environment and toxicity to humans and animals. But it also retained the unsupported claim that regulations requiring the chemicals saved lives. The guide even retained the text that countered concerns about traces of flame retardants found in children's bodies by asserting that because the chemicals protected children from death or injury from fire, "To fail to expose them to such chemicals could be regarded as negligent."
Scientists who reviewed human studies had come to a different conclusion the year before. They warned that although such links were impossible to prove conclusively, the evidence suggested that children's exposure to flame retardants could have serious health consequences, including neurobehavioral and developmental problems. The scientists called for regulatory oversight.
Of all the controversial chemicals in the public eye, the one Trevor Butterworth, Sense About Science USA's director, has most fervently defended is bisphenol A, a compound used to make plastics. BPA is found in hard plastics, the lining of canned drinks and foods, thermal receipts, and other consumer and industrial products, including cigarette filters. Manufacturers produce billions of pounds of BPA each year. Its market value is projected to reach $20 billion by 2020. And numerous studies and scientific consensus statements have linked BPA, which can interfere with hormone signaling, to developmental and reproductive disorders.
Leading reproductive biologists released a consensus statement in 2007 warning that "the wide range of adverse effects of low doses of BPA in laboratory animals exposed both during development and in adulthood is a great cause for concern with regard to the potential for similar adverse effects in humans."
Two years later, while working for STATS, Butterworth published a 27,000-word investigation sharply questioning the validity of the scientific studies and news reports about BPA's health effects. Butterworth's central claim was that a handful of scientists, journalists, and environmental activist groups had ignored good science in a crusade to paint BPA as "the biological equivalent of global warming." He singled out a widely acclaimed special report by Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger called "Chemical Fallout." These reporters, he claimed, relied on flawed studies by independent researchers and unfairly dismissed the industry-funded studies that found no harm. But the independent studies were not, in fact, flawed. Regulators just didn't consider them useful, because, like many such academic studies, they didn't measure toxicity but tested hypotheses about how BPA could alter living systems.
BPA trade groups have long insisted that the substance is metabolized too quickly to cause harm. Butterworth cites a 2009 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that measured BPA concentrations in newborns to make the same case. The study, he argues, "provides important evidence that infants — even those born prematurely — are able to detoxify BPA in the same way as adults."
The CDC study he cited was designed to gauge exposure, not metabolism. BPA has been detected in the urine of nearly every American tested. Premature babies' fragile systems make them particularly vulnerable to environmental contaminants. The researchers suspected that the use of plastic medical devices in neonatal intensive care units might expose premature infants to higher than average levels of BPA. And that's exactly what they found: Average BPA concentrations in hospitalized premature babies were about 10 times higher than those measured in adults. The authors noted that although premature babies appear to have some ability to metabolize BPA, their detoxification pathways "are not expected to be functional at adult rates until months after birth."
Butterworth ended his critique of what he called "the BPA is dangerous thesis" by suggesting that banning the chemical could result in greater harm: "What if some parents who turned to glass bottles for fear of … 'leaching' BPA drop and break them, causing injury to their babies?"
Butterworth's arguments have reverberated across an echo chamber of free-market organizations, including Philip Morris's product defense law firm, Koch-funded think tanks, chemical and food-packaging industry trade groups in Europe and the U.S., and an ostensibly neutral environmental health research foundation run by a chemical industry PR firm.
Reached by email for comment, Butterworth did not account for his questionable characterization of the CDC study. He said that his critique relied on the work of scientists from regulatory agencies involved in risk assessment, and that these scientists had criticized smaller studies that claimed adverse effects. He maintained that studies assessing the effects of low doses of BPA are inconsistent and unlikely to capture significant results because of methodological and statistical problems.
The year after Butterworth's 2009 investigation, the anti-regulatory Donors Trust awarded STATS $86,000 for its "research efforts," and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which belongs to the BPA Joint Trade Association, gave Lichter's Center for Media and Public Affairs $10,000 for "research support." Butterworth continued to defend BPA in news outlets and in 2013 made his case on a blog for Coca-Cola, another BPA Joint Trade Association member.
That year Coca-Cola gave more than $30,000 to Butterworth's future partner, Sense About Science, which hosted a BPA forum the next year. (Since then, Sense About Science has not received corporate donations, which "represented less than 3 percent of our income," Brown wrote in an email.) In the forum, a Q&A on social media, Sense About Science put forward a representative of the British Plastics Federation and a toxicologist whose longstanding ties to the chemical industry the organization did not disclose. Participants were assured that BPA posed no risk to human health. Several plastic industry trade sites praised the event. One welcomed Sense About Science's efforts, reporting that "plastic packaging was stoutly defended."
The tobacco industry pioneered tactics to fight regulations by manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that cigarettes kill. So it should be no surprise to encounter a strategy among defenders of the e-cigarette that also centers around doubt. If we don't know for certain that a product is safe, we might urge caution. Sense About Science has argued the opposite: so long as we don't know the product is unsafe, medical professionals have no business urging regulation.
E-cigarettes turn chemical solutions into a nicotine-filled mist, which consumers ingest without the added harm of tobacco tar. When the devices hit the American market in 2007, sales quickly took off. Tobacco companies increasingly dominate the industry, which is projected to be worth $54 billion by 2025. A recent national survey found a sharp rise in e-cigarette smoking among high school students — from 1.5 percent in 2011 to 16 percent last year.
The skyrocketing popularity of e-cigarettes among young people worries public health experts because so little is known about the devices' safety. E-cigarettes are too new for scientists to have assessed their long-term health risks. British and American scientific bodies have reacted to this paucity of evidence with different views of the relative dangers.
Last year, Public Health England joined other British public health organizations in encouraging smokers to use e-cigarettes as an aid in quitting tobacco. The Royal College of Physicians effectively endorsed this view in April, when it argued against regulating a product that could help smokers quit.
But American public health officials worry that nicotine, which is as addictive as heroin and cocaine, will hook young smokers and cause lasting harm to their still-developing brains. Nicotine is linked to immunosuppression as well as cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal disorders. There is evidence that it interferes with chemotherapies and may even play a role in cancer. Researchers are just beginning to study whether the more than 7,000 flavoring chemicals, which typically aren't disclosed on e-cigarettes, are safe when inhaled.
Back in 2012, the British Medical Association called for a ban on the devices in public in order to "ensure their use does not undermine smoking prevention and cessation by reinforcing the normalcy of cigarette use." BMA reaffirmed this judgment as recently as this past June, despite the opposing position of the Royal College of Physicians. Sense About Science reacted to BMA's call for a ban by asking the association to produce evidence that e-cigarettes caused harm. "This move towards heavy regulation appears to be driven by the fear that e-cigs might be harmful or act as a gateway to conventional tobacco — despite little or no evidence for either claim," the organization argued on its website in 2013, two years before Public Health England endorsed e-cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking. Such regulations, Sense About Science stated, could do more harm than good by inhibiting access to products that may help reduce harm from smoking tobacco cigarettes.
Although Sense About Science has demanded evidence that e-cigarettes cause harm, it seems poised to cast doubt on the evidence when it turns up. In August, the organization challenged the relevance of research presented that month at a cardiology conference showing that nicotine in e-cigarettes can stiffen arteries, an early indication of heart disease. Sense About Science's expert dismissively compared the effects of nicotine documented in the research to those of "watching a thriller or a football match."
Here in the United States, just this past May, the Food and Drug Administration moved to regulate e-cigarettes, including banning sales to those 18 and under. The CDC, too, takes the health risks of nicotine seriously. Last fall, the centers called for strategies to reduce the use of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. "The potential long-term benefits and risks associated with e-cigarette use are not currently known," the CDC reported. "What is known is that nicotine exposure at a young age may cause lasting harm to brain development, promote nicotine addiction, and lead to sustained tobacco use."
Having established itself as a credible voice in debates about science and industrial regulation in the United States and Britain, Sense About Science has set out for what may prove to be its most challenging assignment. In July, following Britain's vote to leave the European Union, Sense About Science established an EU branch in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Commission, which has placed tighter restrictions on e-cigarettes, chemicals, and other potentially risky consumer goods than the United States has mustered. The new branch of Sense About Science plans to "monitor the use and abuse of scientific evidence in EU policy."
Both Sense About Science and Sense About Science USA undertake some initiatives that serve the public interest. But the founder of the British organization worked with the architects of the tobacco industry's disinformation strategy, and both groups have been known to promote science that favors private interests over public health. When an organization claims to serve as a neutral arbiter in high-stakes debates about science, it pays to do what Sense About Science does: ask for the evidence.
This article was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent nonprofit news organization.


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The Challenge Games begin and we must complete birthday related games for my birthday!
Jen's Channel http://youtube.com/gamingwithjen
Don't forget to subscribe for epic Minecraft content!
Shirts! https://represent.com/store/popularmmos/
Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/pages/PopularMMOs/327498010669475
Twitter! https://twitter.com/popularmmos
Download Present Lucky Block Mod: https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/pat-lucky-block
– Start with 20 Lucky Blocks, 5 Super Lucky Blocks, 5 Unlucky Blocks, 10 apples, Iron Pickaxe, & Crafting Table
– Open all of them and craft the best items you can
– Do not take items or blocks from the world unless they came from your block
– Trade with villager to improve your items
– No Penalty for dying before the battle begins
– You may give items to the other player
– Beacons from Wells not allowed
– The winner from last time spawns the mobs
– The loser is the one who dies in the battle first
– Rounds go: 1 boss, 2 boss, 3, 4, 5, 6 each round harder…etc
– Running away from the mobs & leaving the other player is cheating
– Use the Arena to your advantage, but no placing blocks except TNT
In this Birthday Cake Challenge Games Modded Mini-Game:
Lucky Blocks Mod With Build Battle, Cake Collecting, and pvp!
Intro by: https://www.youtube.com/calzone442
Intro song: Spag Heddy – Pink Koeks provided by Play Me Records:
Follow Spag Heddy:
Royalty Free Music by http://audiomicro.com/royalty-free-music

subset: commoncrawl


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Holy hell, that is a LOT of starships.
This comparison chart, compiled by DeviantARTist Dirk Loechel, presents what he says is an accurate size-comparison between famous sci-fi starships. As far as I can tell it's got more or less every single sci-fi starship ever, from Star Wars to Warhammer to EVE Online to Halo and way, way beyond. In an update this month, Loechel added a ton more ships to what already must have been a huge collection.
Check out the most recent version below. Our in-post image enlarger can't make it big enough to read, so you'll want to click here to zoom around on the full image.
Ever wonder how a Cylon basestar measures up to a Mandalorean Arrowhead Battlecarrier? Wonder no longer.
* Okay, not exactly every single one, but a ton.
(Via Ann Lemay)


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I had an oddly poignant experience on Twitter yesterday — I know, the last place you'd ever expect to encounter something poignant.
I was going through the list of people I follow and was removing those who are just trying to sell something, as well as all the self-proclaimed "marketing gurus," "life coaches," and political pundits. Just part of the necessary pruning and cleaning one occasionally must do in the world of social media platforms. Nothing new there.
But in the midst of this utterly banal chore, I came to the Twitter profile of Ginger, a Catholic woman whose profile picture I only vaguely remembered seeing before and whose posts I hadn't seen in quite awhile. Opening her profile, I saw that her last several posts were from mid 2009 and were about her rapid decline from lung cancer. In one, she expressed how hard it was for her to deal with the shock of having just been diagnosed by her physician as "terminal." A few posts later, her comment stream just . . . ended.
Nothing more.
I Googled her name and saw that she died that summer, not long after her last post, mourned, no doubt, by many grief-stricken family and friends. She was only 41.
This brought back the sad memory of another Catholic woman I knew quite well and very much admired — a vibrant and vital young wife and mother of just 44 — who also died of lung cancer in September of that same year. A pang of melancholy rose up in me at that still-painful remembrance.
Gazing at Ginger's picture, the mouse cursor poised over the "unfollow" button in her profile, I was moved by the realization that, even though she had died some time ago and I would therefore never see any further posts from her, still . . . by pressing "unfollow," I would be, in a certain sense, letting go of her. It seemed strange that it should occur to me that way — after all, I never knew her personally. I was only aware of her existence through Twitter — a dim and superficial awareness of someone, to be sure. But still, there had been the slightest of connections there, albeit nothing more than pixels on a screen.
In that moment, an image from the movie Titanic arose in my mind; the one in which Rose is lying on a piece of floating debris holding on with one hand to the now dead Jack, almost entirely submerged in the frigid water. As she lets go of his hand, he sinks slowly into oblivion. True, those two were illicit lovers. In Ginger's case, well, she was someone I had ever even met or spoken to before, much less known personally.
And yet, for a few brief, uncanny moments, my mind was pervaded by that poignant image of Rose letting go of Jack's hand.
I pressed "unfollow," and in so doing said a kind of electronic "goodbye" to a sister in Christ I never knew, except through the medium of an ephemeral, tenuous, and insignificant collection of pixels on my computer screen. And then, I said a prayer for the repose of her soul.
How strange, it seems to me, and how perfectly fitting at the same time, that the Lord makes use of even something as casual and (seemingly) inconsequential as Twitter to remind the members of His Body of their connection to each other.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.


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Ichak Adizes on why some companies age prematurely while others go on to attain peak corporate performance.
We generally don't publish interviews with consultants about their management theories. OK, we ran one with Peter Drucker a few years ago, but that was a little like making an exception for God. When we began hearing about Ichak Adizes from various company presidents we knew and respected, they made no claims about his immortality or his infallibility. They simply said that he was a new breed of management consultant, one who really understood how businesses work and what could be done to make them better.
Adizes is, in fact, more than a consultant. He is a pioneer in the field of management -- a serious, insightful, and astute observer of organizational behavior, which he has been studying for 25 years. Born in Yugoslavia and raised in Israel, he received his doctorate from Columbia University and is currently an adjunct associate professor at the John Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles. In addition, Adizes has one thing going for him that even Drucker does not: he has built his own company, Adizes Institute Inc., in Santa Monica, Calif., which he founded in 1975. In the process, he has experienced many of the trials of management about which he writes, lectures, and advises other companies.
Over the years, Adizes has developed what amounts to a general theory of management, which he presents in an unusually lucid book titled Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It (Prentice-Hall, 1988). His basic contention is that organizations have life cycles just as living organisms do. They go through normal struggles and difficulties at each stage of the life cycle, and they face predictable problems in moving from one stage to the next. But unlike living organisms, business organizations do not have to grow old and die, he says. It is possible for them to arrive at and stay in their prime forever, and he describes a methodology that he claims will allow them to do it.
Adizes talked about getting to prime with senior writer Bruce G. Posner and editor-at-large Bo Burlingham.
INC.: We often think that any company could be like Federal Express if it only had Fred Smith as its founder. You apparently feel you've developed a methodology that allows a company to reach its competitive peak even if it isn't run by a superstar.
ADIZES: That's correct, and it is a liberating process, because in the American work culture we tend to look for individuals. When things go bad, we ask, "Who did it? Who should be fired? Who is going to save us?" I take a different approach. I say there is no savior. You have to learn how to work together if you want your company to operate at its peak. It is really a matter of getting the company to the stage of the corporate life cycle called prime.
INC.: Tell us what you mean by that.
ADIZES: A company's place in the life cycle depends on two factors -- flexibility and control. When a company is young, it is very flexible, but its behavior is erratic, which is a function of self-control. It's like a baby. You never know when it's going to smile, when it's going to wet its diaper. So what happens as the company ages? Flexibility goes down, and self-control goes up -- for a while, that is. Then it goes down, just as it does in a person. Prime is the point at which the two lines cross. The company is both flexible and controllable. You can decide to change direction, and then you can make it happen.
INC.: Are you saying that reaching prime is just a matter of time and experience?
ADIZES: No, no, no. This has nothing to do with chronological age or even size. A company can be 100 years old and extremely flexible. It can be 10 years old and bureaucratic. When I looked at Philip Morris, it had $8.5 billion in sales, but it was much more flexible than some food brokers I've seen. So when I say a company is young, I mean that it has flexibility with limited control. Old means that a company has a lot of control but little propensity to change. Every company has to be young at some point, but it doesn't have to become old. It can be in prime forever. The trick is to get there and stay there.
INC.: That's awfully hard to swallow. What about changes in the market, in technology, in product life cycles? You seem to be suggesting that a company can get rid of its problems and go merrily along its way as if nothing were happening in the world outside.
ADIZES: I didn't say anything about getting rid of problems. You can't get rid of problems, but you can make sure that you are focusing on the right ones.
INC.: Which are the right problems?
ADIZES: Look, success in business is a function of one factor and one factor only: the ratio between external and internal marketing. External marketing consists of product differentiation, pricing, delivery, everything involved in identifying customers and serving them right. Internal marketing is all the blood, sweat, and tears you have to put into the job to make sure something happens. An organization has a fixed amount of energy. If most of it is going into internal marketing, how much is left for external marketing? Very little.
INC.: So the idea is to minimize the amount of energy you're using up inside.
ADIZES: Yes, and that's a function of mutual trust and respect. If you don't have mutual trust and respect, you waste a lot of energy on internal problems and conflicts. By the time the customer comes in, you say, "Come back tomorrow. I am exhausted today." There is a big fad in the United States today about strategic planning, about solving all your problems by beating the competition. Wrong.
Success has to go from the inside out, not from the outside in. You have to solve the problems on the inside so you can deal with the ones on the outside, and then you have to make sure that you keep your internal marketing and your external marketing in balance.
INC.: You're saying that problems are here to stay.
ADIZES: Absolutely. When you stop having problems is when you stop changing, and that happens only when you are dead. Change causes problems, and problems require solutions. So you go out and solve those problems, and guess what? The solutions cause more change and more problems. All you've done is create the next generation of problems.
And the more successful you are in solving today's problems, the more difficult will be the problems you face tomorrow. My New Year's card to clients says, "I wish you bigger problems next year than this year . . . that you can handle!" Because you're as big as the problems you can contend with. Some companies cannot contend with big problems, so what happens? They stay small.
INC.: That's not a very comforting thought to someone who is feeling overwhelmed by the problems of a small business.
ADIZES: The question is, What kind of problems are overwhelming you? Are they the normal problems a company has at your stage of development? If so, don't worry. You will outgrow them. They are like childhood diseases -- unpleasant, but you must have them to build up your immunities. If you have abnormal problems, then you will need help to get over them.
INC.: How can you tell the difference?
ADIZES: You have to understand the patterns. You have to look at where you are in the corporate life cycle. The point of my work is to show that companies change according to a predictable pattern, and there is a predictable pattern to the problems they encounter along the way. The specifics will vary from company to company, and the stages overlap, but the patterns are very clear. If you know what they are, you can identify the problems that are abnormal and require special attention. This is the difference between being smart and being wise. Smart people learn from experience; wise people learn from the experience of others. You should try to be wise.
INC.: Let's take the example of a company that's just getting started. What are the normal problems, and what are the abnormal ones?
ADIZES: You're talking about a company in infancy. That's really the second stage in the corporate life cycle. The first one is courtship, when you are dreaming about your business, talking about it to everyone you can find, making a lot of noise like an airplane getting ready to take off. What you are really doing is building commitment -- the commitment you are going to need when you actually take the risk and start the business.
Then you are in infancy, and there is no more time to dream or talk. Now is the time to do. If you have to have a meeting, you hold it in the elevator going down to the parking lot, and you make the decision by the time the doors open. You are working all the time. When someone in your company says, "I've been thinking . . .," you say, "Please don't think. What have you done for me lately? Tell me what you've sold." There is no time to think because you have no money. You are undercapitalized. So everything is do, do, do.
INC.: Those sound like problems to me.
ADIZES: They are, but they are normal problems. Being undercapitalized is normal in infancy. What's abnormal is to be surprised by it -- to run out of cash and not know it. Normal is to have an autocratic, opinionated, strong-willed founder that nobody can argue with. Abnormal is to have a founder who delegates. Whom are you going to delegate to? People who are better than you? If they were better, they would not be working for you at that stage. Your company is too small. Look at the people you hired. Somebody who wandered into your office by mistake. A temporary you forgot to fire. Even if you're lucky enough to have good people, you can't delegate because you don't know what you're doing. Everything is trial and error in infancy. If you turn important responsibilities over to other people, they could make decisions that might destroy your company, and you will not even know it. Delegation at this stage is abdication. And it's a sign that something is wrong.
INC.: I thought the idea was to get everyone working together.
ADIZES: That comes later. An infant company needs a strong, opinionated leader to get it to the next stage, the go-go stage, when cash flow turns positive and the company really takes off. But you're raising a good point because what is normal behavior in one stage of the life cycle often becomes abnormal, and dangerous, later on.
INC.: How does strong, opinionated leadership become dangerous?
ADIZES: It begins in the go-go stage because the company is growing like crazy and it seems to be out of danger. Now this opinionated, strong-willed, nondelegating founder becomes arrogant as well. He thinks, I did it; I can do anything; let's go. He meets a developer on a plane, and suddenly he's in real estate. He goes to Hong Kong, and he gets into the trading business. He sees opportunities everywhere, and he's running the show. Put arrogance together with centralized management, and what you have is a Molotov cocktail.
INC.: Well, yes and no. We've seen companies go on like that for years and years without blowing up. Sometimes they become very large and successful.
ADIZES: Go-go can last for years, but eventually something is going to happen. Sooner or later the company is going to get involved in a product or a market it knows nothing about, and it will get hit over the head. The more arrogant you are, the bigger the hit will be. Because there is no structure in go-go, no clear responsibilities. The information doesn't flow very well. Cost accounting is a mess. The reward system is a patchwork of deals. Yes, the company is growing rapidly, but there is no accountability. It's a prescription for disaster.
INC.: Suppose the founder brings in professional management.
ADIZES: Founders usually do, or at least they try to. If they don't, they fall into what I call the founder's trap. By that, I mean the company cannot exist without that one person, which becomes a problem. When he or she goes in for a loan, the bank insists on personal guarantees, because it will never get its money back if something happens to him. He is the biggest asset of the company and the biggest risk. At some point he may even realize that he can't run the company as a one-man show anymore -- it's too big. He says: "I know how to start a business. I don't know how to run it. I need help. Bring me a professional manager." That is the beginning of the next stage in the life cycle, called adolescence, which is the most difficult transition of all. Starting a company is not nearly as difficult as keeping it. If a founder is going to lose his company, it usually happens in adolescence.
INC.: Why is it so difficult?
ADIZES: It's difficult because the changes are so fundamental and so necessary, and the entrepreneur often appears to be an obstacle to them. For one thing, the company has to make the transition from more is better to better is more. It's gotten this far by getting more and more sales, assuming a fixed marginal profit, but marginal profits are actually going down, down, down. One of these days you're going to make a sale and lose your shirt. The solution is to turn inward, get the place organized, increase productivity and profitability, and you don't know how to do that. You probably find it boring, maybe even threatening. You know the company has to change, but you worry about losing the entrepreneurial spirit that got you where you are. Now you bring in a professional manager who is by definition a number cruncher, an administrative type. When the old-timers start resisting him, you may side with them.
INC.: Perhaps they're right. We've seen professional managers come in and screw up a lot of good companies.
ADIZES: That can happen, but the founder hasn't solved the problem that led him to hire this guy in the first place. He's in the founder's trap, and the only way he can get out is to restructure the company. Up to now, the organization has always been structured around people, and that isn't working anymore. You need clear responsibilities; you need accountability; you need a reward system that makes sense. That means structuring people around the organization. I tell you it's very, very difficult. I've done this with all kinds of companies, big and small. I did it with Domino's Pizza and the Bank of America. Now I cannot restructure my own pip-squeak company, $3 million in sales. Why? Because every time I look at the organization, I see people. I know too much about them. I hired them. I reward them. It's very painful.
INC.: But presumably there's a payoff. What's on the other side of this transition?
ADIZES: If you do it right, you end up in prime. If you do it wrong, there are several possibilities. The most common one is called premature aging. The administrative types take over, and the entrepreneur is pushed out. The company gets under control, but it loses its flexibility, and it slows down. It may still have some momentum left over from go-go, but if something doesn't change, it eventually begins to decline. That is what's happening to Apple Computer. Another possibility is that you get stuck in the founder's trap, which is my problem.
INC.: That's interesting. Have you had all these problems of growth?
ADIZES: Of course. Being a doctor doesn't mean you don't get diseases. I have had almost all the normal problems, none of the abnormal ones really, but they have been painful anyway.
INC.: Can you give us an example?
ADIZES: In the early days people accused me of being authoritarian, nonparticipatory, arrogant. They didn't understand why I insisted on doing things a certain way. I took it very much to heart. I tried to change, and I couldn't. Looking back, I see I was fighting for my vision, which I couldn't articulate because I didn't have enough experience. There was no track record of success. Finally, I just told them, "Goddamn it, do it my way. I know what I'm doing." But it was very painful emotionally and intellectually. My present situation is just as painful.
INC.: So how does a company make the transition to prime?
ADIZES: There are 11 steps, and they go in a specific order. Do you want to hear them all?
INC.: Maybe you could give us a brief summary.
ADIZES: First, we make sure there is some mutual trust and respect among the top managers. If there is very little, we take some time to develop it, give people a sense that they are capable of making things better. Those are the first three steps. Once we've built that foundation, we can move on to the more difficult tasks. The sequence is important here. To begin with, you redefine the mission of the company. What business are you in? By the end of go-go, the company is in everything from shoes to real estate. So you need to refocus, which can be hard because it involves letting go of some dreams. After the mission comes the organizational structure, then the accountability systems and information flow. What we're doing here is building participative management at the top of the organization. In the following steps, we keep working with top management people on teamwork, performance goals, and strategic planning, but we are also bringing the lower levels into the process. Only at the very end, the 11th step, do we come up with a new reward system. That's very important. You have to follow the sequence: mission, structure, accountability, rewards.
INC.: Why is the sequence so important? We know of companies that do wonders with their compensation systems.
ADIZES: That's only because they're already clear about mission, structure, and accountabilities. A reward is meaningless if you don't understand the direction, if you don't have specific responsibilities, if you're not accountable and you don't know how you're being measured. Without those things, it's not really a reward at all. It's a bribe.
INC.: What about strategic planning? Earlier you dismissed it as a fad. Now you say it's part of your methodology.
ADIZES: It's the sequence that counts. Strategic planning is the ninth step of my methodology, not the first. Putting a cherry on top of a pile of manure does not give you a cherry pie. Some consultants come in, and they do a beautiful strategic plan, but the infrastructure is not there for delivery. The internal marketing is out of sight. People are eating one another alive, and they believe strategic planning is going to save them. You know what this is analogous to? A marriage that is falling apart, so let's have another baby. You only postpone the inevitable. Success is not outside-in. It is inside-out.
INC.: How long does the whole process take?
ADIZES: We can get most companies to prime in a year, sometimes less. It used to take longer, but we've gotten better. There are two exceptions. It will not work in a company with negative cash flow, which is like having a heart attack. What caused your heart attack is your lifestyle, but it does no good for me to stand by your hospital bed and say, "Change your lifestyle." At that point, you need a heart specialist. Later we can work on changing your lifestyle. The methodology will also not work with a manipulative, self-centered, arrogant, autocratic bastard running the company. I have had only two failures, and they were both cases that called for psychiatric intervention. I need leaders who have confidence in themselves.
INC.: Isn't that asking a lot?
ADIZES: No, not really. I don't change human beings. I change the environment human beings operate in. If people are intelligent and relatively balanced, they will read the writing on the wall. The environment changes, and they change their behavior.
INC.: But don't you also have to change people's attitudes to make this transition to prime?
ADIZES: That's exactly what I'm doing with this methodology. You have to understand there are different approaches to consulting. Some people are trained in psychology and group dynamics. They think you just get people talking to each other, working together, and everything will be OK. I don't believe it. I believe environment has an impact on behavior. If I want to make you OK, I don't talk to you. I change the environment within which you operate. I don't say, "You should be participative. You should have integrity. You should be honest." That has no value to me. Instead, I establish a system around you so you know what it means to be participative, to have integrity, to be honest. I change the behavior of a company by changing its structure and the process by which it makes decisions, and that guides the behavior and changes the attitudes.
INC.: What if people don't want to change?
ADIZES: Then they leave, which is OK. Let them go to the competition.
INC.: Let me stop you for a moment here. You seem to be suggesting that the only way people can get through this transition is to hire you.
ADIZES: Not necessarily, but if they don't hire me, I strongly recommend that they get outside help from someone they absolutely trust, someone who has experience in making these transitions and a lot of common sense. My methodology is really based on common sense. I take pride in the fact that I don't tell people anything they don't already know. Unfortunately, it's often difficult to use common sense when you are a founder or a president dealing with these kinds of problems. You form attachments -- to dreams, to people, to ways of doing things. It's not easy to see the situation clearly while you're in the middle of it. It takes an extraordinary individual. Believe me, if it were easy, I would have done it a long time ago in my own company. I wouldn't be stuck in the founder's trap right now.
INC.: Isn't it just as hard to turn your fate over to an outsider? It sounds as though you wind up playing a big role in the companies you take on as clients.
ADIZES: If you mean I make decisions for them, that is not true at all. The whole purpose is to empower them to deal with their own problems, to create an environment in which problems can be solved with trust and respect and cooperation and communication. That's why we do the methodology this way, giving people bigger and bigger problems they can solve by themselves. By the time they get to the reward system, they're ready to handle anything. We'll come back once a year to check how it's going, but our goal is to transfer the technology to the client. We're proud of every client we have lost.
INC.: I still don't see how it works. You talked earlier about making the transition from structuring the organization around people to structuring people around the organization. What actually happens in that process?
ADIZES: I'll give you an example of a recent client -- a construction and engineering company. The construction part has a unionized component and a nonunion component. Engineering is separate. They're all at each other's throats. Now the way for this company to make money is to integrate the different parts so it can provide turnkey delivery to customers, but the president cannot get the organization to change. He heard my lecture, and it took him three years to call me in. He was scared. He did not believe it could be done without risking the company. So we got the top people together, had them tell us the problems, and everyone agreed we had to solve them. Then we did a mission. What came out of the mission loud and clear was that the future is in turnkey delivery. But they are not organized for turnkey. So I started building the structure with them. By the time we finished, it was all integrated. I asked if anybody disagreed with the structure. Nobody disagreed. A guy came up to the president afterward and said, "I've got 30 years in this company. I don't know where I'm going to end up, and I'm scared. But you know what? This is exactly what we need to do." I didn't design it. They designed it with my help.
INC.: How did people get assigned to the different positions?
ADIZES: The president said, "All right, guys, I'm going to decide who goes where, but first I want to hear what you have to say." Then they talked about each person, one by one. The person would leave the room while the others were talking about him. At the end the president made the decisions, and everyone accepted. Nobody resigned. It would never have happened a couple months before.
INC.: You make it sound easy.
ADIZES: It's not easy, and it's not painless, but it's not all that difficult for us either, not at this point. You see, the methodology is very structured. It requires discipline. I believe there is no mutual respect without discipline. I spent a tremendous amount of time observing what retards and what encourages respect and trust, and I created rules -- about how to diagnose a problem correctly, for example, or how to conduct a meeting. When do you show up? Who talks? What do you talk about? Which words can be used and which cannot? It is a methodology of how to advance jointly, step-by-step, and people have to play by the rules. If you break a rule, you pay a buck. It's like poker. The reason you can play poker is because you follow the rules. I am really teaching people how to be colleagues. I am creating a learning environment. There is no colleague relationship and no learning environment unless they are respectful.
INC.: Do you use the same rules in every company?
ADIZES: I vary them a little bit. In a go-go company, four-letter words are forbidden, because that's the way people talk all the time and it promotes disrespect. In an aristocratic company, one that is past its prime, I encourage them to use four-letter words, because they are too closed. They cut each other to pieces very elegantly. And I make them take off their coats and ties. At one company they took their belts off -- I wanted them to feel vulnerable. In a go-go company, I would like them to wear a tie.
INC.: Isn't there a contradiction here? You're setting all these rules, and yet you say that you want to empower people.
ADIZES: You have to remember that these companies have no intention to empower. Empowerment is the solution, not the goal. They have an autocratic president who's deep in the founder's trap, or they're losing market share because they can't innovate. They've got big, life-threatening problems, and my job is to take them to prime. I am very strict with the methodology in the early stages because we have to develop some mutual respect and show people it's possible to change. As we go along, I relax more and more. By the time we get to the reward system, they can do whatever they like. If they want to send flowers as a reward, it's fine with me. Empowerment grows with experience.
INC.: So how does your methodology differ from other approaches to empowerment and participatory management?
ADIZES: It's the sequence again. Those programs start at the wrong place. They look at a company as a pyramid, with the line employees on the bottom and the managers on the top. It's not true. Only the people below think managers are on top. As you move up the company pyramid, you realize you are at the bottom of another pyramid, called the external environment, which includes all the people who are pressuring you from above -- bankers, regulators, competitors, suppliers, upper management, your own family. If a so-called empowerment program works, all you've done is increase the pressure from below. That's why middle management winds up killing those programs, because they're based on empowering employees and disempowering supervisors and managers. I want to empower everybody. To do that, you have to start at the top and work down.
INC.: You're saying that you empower people in spite of themselves.
ADIZES: I'm saying that my methodology harnesses the political energy of a company to make its own changes. It gives people the tools. You do not need any education to use my methodology.
As a matter of fact, I've found that the less educated you are, the better you understand it. I have the hardest time with people who have advanced management degrees. They fight every step of the way. They've been programmed with solutions that don't work, to problems that don't exist. When people are not educated in management, they are open-minded. They understand common sense very easily. What is common sense? In old English, common means everybody. Common ground means everybody can walk on it. Common law means everybody accepts it. Common sense means everybody believes it. If it makes sense to everybody, then it's common sense. What I have developed is a way to create a climate for people to find common sense through mutual trust and respect.


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Howard Stern Intern Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Sirius XM
As if the Howard Stern Show were not already controversial enough, we now have a class action lawsuit from a Stern Intern for unpaid wages. Plaintif Melissa Tierney is suing SuirusXM for unpaid wages. The suit is filed on behalf of herself and any similarly situated intern at SiriusXM. The case centers around the fact the UNPAID INTERNS do not get pay. Tierney served as an intern from about August 2011 through December of 2011.
In the history of television and radio there have always been interns. In most cases these interns do not receive any pay. The concept is that students that want to seek experience in the industry serve as interns. Usually these interns get to learn about the job, answer the phones, get coffee, and simply absorb the atmosphere while they are there. The intern gets their feet wet and sees how things work, and the company gets the benefit of a "gopher" of sorts. It is how things have been done for decades.
Now, I have no real way to verify this, but one almost has to assume that Interns being brought on board are very clearly told that it is an UNPAID POSITION. The SiriusXM website shows that Internships are unpaid , available to college enrolled students and those students receive credits for their internship work.
In the lawsuit Tierney states that she worked 4 days per week and between 6 to 9 hours each day. Interestingly, the suit claims that she had to work over 40 hours per week but did not receive overtime pay. Last time I checked, 9 hours a day multiplied by 4 days is 36 hours. She listed her duties as:
- running errands
- placing orders
- obtaining breakfast orders
- delivering food items to on air personality and office staff
- reviewing news clips
- reporting to on-air personalities
- compiling data
- obtaining signatures from guests
- other tasks necessary to the Defendant's operations
Tierney is apparently now self employed with a website called MissyonMadison.com, a fashion site where Tierney chronicles her journey to "find great looks at affordable prices". She launched the site immediately after finishing her internship at SiriusXM. Her Linked In Profile shows her as being the Intern for Robin Quivers. Interestingly, the lawsuit claims that she and other interns did not receive any academic or vocational training, yet the "resume" on LinkedIn indicates that the Digital Communications and Media/MultiMedia major lists that she contributed show ideas and even talked on air on the Intern Show. Ironically, while holding down her position at the Howard Stern Show, she was also a receptionist at Cactus Salon and Spa and an Intern at CupidsPulse.com. There seems to be no lawsuit filed against CupidsPulse, so perhaps that was a paid internship (hmmmm is another suit in the cards?).
Howard Stern Show
August 2011 – January 2012 (6 months) NYC
*Robin Quiver's Intern
*Find news articles for her to discuss on the show
*Contribute ideas to the show
*Answer calls
*Talk on air on the 'Intern Show' on Howard 101
*Run errands and make sure everything runs smoothly in the office
Receptionist Cactus
Cactus Salon and Spa
Privately Held; 501-1000 employees; Health, Wellness and Fitness industry
August 2010 – January 2012 (1 year 6 months)
*Schedule appointments for special events as well as everyday services
*Answer telephone inquiries pertaining to services, treatments and products
*Handle client payments
*Order retail merchandise
*Open and close the salon in absence of Manager
Sole Proprietorship; 1-10 employees; Online Media industry
April 2011 – November 2011 (8 months)
*Write celebrity gossip posts including dating and relationship advice
*Write longer feature stories providing tips and reviews
*Come up with marketing and advertising ideas
*Help plan events
This is not the first time that Interns have filed a suit over pay. Several organizations like Fox, Vanity Faire, and others have also had legal issues surrounding the tradition of unpaid internships. Law360 has an article on the subject. There is even a website dedicated to Intern Justice.
Now, I am not passing judgement on Miss Tierney, but the fact of the matter is that she likely knew very well that the internship was unpaid. The claim that there was no educational or vocational component to her internship seems washy at best. Miss Tierney openly acknowledges that she compiled data, contributed Stern Show ideas, was on the air, and certainly learned a thing or two while there. In fact, just seeing the operations run day in and day out contributes a valuable lesson. Miss Tierney is not at all shy about listing the Stern Show experience on her website and even links to it. If nothing else the Stern Show internship was apparently a valuable experience in that she lists it among her accomplishments in what can only be perceived as selling points. For future reference, if you are going to file a lawsuit you should make sure that your stance in the suit matches your stance on your social media and website. Melissa's attorney may well not be aware that what Melissa states on her public pages seems to differ from the suit claims.
Should interns get paid? I guess that debate can go on forever. On one hand I can see modest pay for what is done. On the other, the experience can and usually is very valuable. My stance on this suit. If you knew it was unpaid and did not like that, you should have not taken the position. This suit, to me, looks like a money grab. I suspect that the public profiles, on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. will change soon.


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may take place prior to court to have the opportunity to speak to see if the matter can be resolved without a hearing. A mediator will be provided by the court to assist the parties in discussing the matter, at no additional cost. If a decision cannot be reached during mediation, the court will set up a hearing date and the case will be presented to the judge.
If a party has witnesses, the party should bring them to the hearing. Written statements may not be accepted as evidence. If assistance is needed to obtain the attendance of witnesses, a
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Back in 1989 Marc McKee started creating skateboard graphics for World Industries, Blind, 101, Menace, A-Team and Almost. Probably most infamously known for his funny, offensive, and provocative graphics which were hugely popular then and remain so today. McKee, also editor of Big Brother Magazine for the first four years, later worked on Blunt Snowboard Magazine and continues to make art for skate companies today. Visiting Philadelphia artist Shawn Beeks and I went to check out this show, which we were both blown away by McKee's originals of some of the most notorious boards, from the Napping Negro graphic to Natas's Challegener Explosion board to the Fucked Up Blind Kids Series.
Seen/Unknown Exhibition
Works by Marc Mckee
Show Runs March 19th to April 10th
HVW8 Art + Design Gallery
661 N. Spaulding Ave. Los Angeles, CA
Photographs and words by Michael C. Hsiung
More boards.
The best take on the Ghostbusters guy I've seen.


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For over half a century, the comic book industry has been dogged by the work of one man, the anti-comics crusader and psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. His bestselling 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent convinced parents and politicians alike that comics were a direct cause of violence, drug use, and homosexuality among young people. It led to the restrictive editorial code issued by the Comics Magazine Association of America, and a national movement to keep comics away from children and teens.
Though Wertham claimed his evidence came from thousands of case studies, it turns out that he was lying. A new investigation of Wertham's papers by University of Illinois information studies professor Carol Tilley has revealed that the psychiatrist fabricated, exaggerated, and selectively edited his data to bolster his argument that comics caused antisocial behavior. Here is what Tilley discovered, and why it still matters today.
Published last week in Information & Culture, Tilley's work is based on unprecedented access to 200 cartons of Wertham's private papers at the Library of Congress, which were under seal until 2010. Over a period of roughly two weeks, Tilley pored over everything from Wertham's correspondence with colleagues to the extremely detailed notes he kept on interviews and sessions with the teens he worked with throughout most of his life. It was when she started reading these notes that Tilley realized that there were some pretty big discrepancies between what Wertham recorded in them, and what he wrote in Seduction of the Innocent.
What's poignant about Wertham's situation is that he had been a tireless advocate for poor and marginalized children his whole life. Most of the research he did for Seduction was at Lafargue Clinic in Harlem — the first psychological clinic in the area — which Wertham set up at the urging of the celebrated African American writer Richard Wright. He genuinely believed that the underprivileged children he worked with were being manipulated into crime by violent and sexual images in comics.
Like many of his fellow anti-comics crusaders, Wertham was particularly incensed by adult crime comics of the era, which often fell into children's hands. Remember, the late 1940s and early 50s, when he researched Seduction, came right before the rise of television. At that time, as Tilley writes, "more than 90 percent of children and more than 80 percent of teens in the United States read comics, often avidly."
Wertham was all too happy to blame these comics for violence and other issues his clinic treated, including what Tilley characterizes as "'undesirable habits' (e.g., masturbation and nightmares), 'personality traits' (e.g., daydreaming and restlessness), and 'undesirable behaviors' (e.g., truancy and disobedience)." These children were troubled, but few suffered from what we'd call mental illness today.
Some of Wertham's case studies, however, turned out to be stories he'd heard second-hand from colleagues. A famous anecdote about a teen named Dorothy who was obsessed with Sheena was actually cobbled together out of what he'd heard about the girl from another doctor. Writes Tilley:
According to the book and the case notes, Dorothy read jungle comics with strong females like Sheena as well as crime comics, including Penalty, which she regretted never showed the criminals getting away with their crimes. Wertham quoted Dorothy saying about jungle comics, "I like to see the way they jump up and kick men down and kill them! . . . Sheena got a big jungle she lives in and people down there likes her and would do anything for her."
In the case notes, Wertham commented that the images of strong women reinforced "violent revenge fantasies against men and possibly creates these violent anti-men (therefore homosexual) fantasies. . . . Sheena and the other comic book women such as Wonder Woman are very bad ideals for them." Yet Wertham omits from Seduction—and seemingly from his analysis—a revealing story about Dorothy's everyday reality. In the case notes, she related an incident in which her aunt was accosted by gang members, taken to a rooftop, and robbed of less than one dollar. Wertham also declined to mention in Seduction that Dorothy—in addition to being habitually truant-was a runaway and a gang member, was sexually active, and had both a reading disability and low normal intelligence. On the final page of Dorothy's case notes, Wertham instead wrote: "She would be good and non-aggressive if society would let her—Comic Books are part of society."
Wertham constantly omitted relevant details about these kids' lives.
In another famous passage from Seduction, Wertham suggests that Batman and Robin inspire homosexuality in young readers who identify with Robin. As evidence, he offers the story of a young man who read Batman and basically became gay afterward. Not surprisingly, the reality was more complicated. Tilley writes:
As part of his evidence for this identification, Wertham shared the insights of a young homosexual man who stated, "I think I put myself in the position of Robin. I did want to have relations with Batman."
The young man from the anecdote was actually two men, ages sixteen and seventeen, who had been in a sexual relationship with one another for several years and had realized they were homosexual by the age of ten. Wertham combined their statements, failing to indicate that the seventeen-year-old is the one who noted, "The only suggestion of homosexuality may be that they seemed to be so close to each other," and omitting the phrase that followed, "like my friend and I."
Further, Wertham did not make any mention that the two teens had found the Submariner and Tarzan to be better subjects than Batman and Robin for their early erotic fantasies.
In another case, Wertham blamed Batman comics for the "homosexual" crimes of a boy who had pissed in another boy's mouth. What he left out was the fact that the boy had previously been raped by the boy he attacked. He also left out that the boy was actually a much bigger fan of Superman than Batman.
When it came to violence inspired by comics, however, Wertham's greatest informant was a 15-year-old gang member named Carlisle. Wertham had carefully transcribed at least 15 pages of interview transcripts with Carlisle, and in the process of writing Seduction wound up attributing Carlisle's words to a succession of fictional young people. He's split into two different boys in one section, and later Carlisle's words find their way into the mouths of two more boys, ages 13 and 14. So one informant became four. This is part of a general pattern where Wertham exaggerated the scope of his research. Though he testified to the Senate that he'd examined 500 young people per year for years, the archival evidence shows that for the 10 years he worked at the Harlem clinic, only 500 people under 17 were admitted.
Tilley also found evidence in the Library of Congress papers that Wertham's observation that he'd seen children "vomit over comic books" was actually taken from a report from the psychiatrist's friend, the folklorist Gershon Legman. Wertham also claims in Seduction that he'd seen comics for sale to children in stores where prostitutes peddled their wares. This was actually from a report given to him by his colleague Hilde Mosse; Wertham never witnessed any prostitutes at comic book stores.
Though the extent of Wertham's lies and exaggerations is only now coming to light, his work has come under suspicion before. Even in the 1950s, critics questioned his research methods — and the psychiatrist was known for his snippy replies. Writes Tilley:
When the executive editor of Woman's Home Companion wrote to inquire about the source of Wertham's evidence for an anecdote in Seduction that featured the magazine, his response was a single, teasing sentence: "I'm awfully sorry you haven't kept your records because, as you well know, a physician is not at liberty to divulge his sources."
The debunking of Wertham, many decades after the damage he did with Seduction of the Innocent, should serve as a warning. Today, many crusaders make the same claims about videogames that Wertham did about comics. Violence and drug use are routinely blamed on gaming, in part because of the early "research" that Wertham did. But now we know that Wertham buried evidence that his subjects were often violent and sexual long before they read comics. And more importantly, they suffered from social and cultural disadvantages that no doubt contributed far more to their troubles than Batman did.
In email, Tilley told me that she hopes more scholars will go back to Wertham's papers now that they are available:
I would encourage scholars with greater depth in psychology / psychiatry / social work to examine what's available in Wertham's papers, as I think they'll help shed a lot of light on historical practices. My primary goal at this point is to use the materials to help support my current project examining children's comics reading; in particular I hope to reclaim some of the voices of the millions of kids who read comics during the 1940s and 1950s.
Looking to the future, let's hope we don't make the same mistake that people did in 1950s America. Violence among young people isn't caused by comics or videogames; it's caused by a complicated array of factors, not least of which is the violent society that surrounds them. And unfortunately, we can't blame Batman for that. We have to take responsibility for it ourselves.


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Tuesday, October 18, 2011
University of Twente Custom Street Views
The University of Twente is building a campus tour using the Custom Street View option in the Google Maps API.
The tour seems to still be a work in progress but already features some great custom Street Views of the 'Little Tower of Drienerlo' (pictured) and some Street Views that go inside the campus buildings.
The 'Little Tower of Drienerlo' is an art work by Wim T. Schippers which depicts the top of a church tower, giving the impression that a church lies at the bottom of the university pond.
Posted by Keir Clarke at 6:01 AM
Labels: campusmaps, Custom Street View, Netherlands
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Friday, November 8, 2013
Round 2 ends this Sunday at 11:59PM ET. Halford's in a close battle with Tom Araya of Slayer:
Fans can vote once per hour.
Rob sends a massive scream out to all the metal heads voting for the metal god and is thrilled to be in the company of such great talent, many of them being his good friends and hoping everyone digs the passion from the fans in the contest!


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Terra has in her HOT HANDS, an AUTOGRAPHED COPY of Tim Holtz' new book: A Compendium of Curiosities! We will have a fun giveaway when we get back from CHA! Stay tuned. This book is awesome, REALLY AWESOME! SOMEONE will WIN IT!
Stay tuned on our twitter log to see LOADS of live action from the CHA show!
Have a delightful day!
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Oh the modern teen.
So TMZ caught Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez at the IHOP in Philly the other day. Apparently they were on a date and held hands and giggled. Over pancakes. Sounds about right, right? Click here if you haven't yet seen the photo of them leaving arm in arm. If you have a 12 year old who seems particularly forlorn today, this would be why.
Bieber is 16. Selena is 18.
When I was 18, there was no f-cking way I was dating a 16 year old. When I was 18, it was either my grade or much older. It was only when I got older that I started testing the limits of gay math. But this is not the point. The point is, for the modern teenage girl, does Bieber's fever fame trump the younger age gap? If you polled ten 18 year old regular civilian girls right now, and asked them if they'd date Bieber, two years their junior, would they say yes because he's THE Justin Bieber? Like, check out that picture. Because she has to hunch to be as short as he is.
There's also the matter of this generation and their lover-sharing. Everyone in every friend circle ends up, at one time or another, messing around with everyone else. Taylor Lautner/Selena Gomez/Taylor Swift. Nikki Reed/Robert Pattinson/Kristen Stewart. Vanessa/Dan/Serena/Nate/Blair/Chuck. Ebola Hilton/Brody Jenner/Avril Lavigne. Now Demi Lovato/Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez. There are SO many examples. But it makes an already tense Lovato/Gomez situation even more so, non?
Photos attached of Selena and Bieber performing at the Jingle Ball the other night after their date.
Photos from Gilbert Carrasquillo/Splashnewsonline.com
16 & 18
Oh the modern teen.


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Organic Chia Seeds
The Chia Seed is an amazing food. For centuries many have used the seeds for
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When you hydrate the seeds in water the seeds shell opens up and absorbs up to
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Gel. It is said that the gel has the potential to help keep your body hydrated.
The gel is also 90% soluble fiber, which may be beneficial for your digestive
track. Many people say that they use the seeds when they are involved in sports
or physical activities for endurance.
The seeds have twice the protein of any other seed or grain, five times the
calcium of milk, boron which is trace mineral that helps transfer calcium into
your bones, omega 3 and omega 6 which are essential oils for the body. They also
have a very long list of valuable nutrients in them naturally. The soluble fiber
in the gel forms a wall between carbohydrates and the body, releasing them slowly
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Negotiations and Expectations
Some negotiations are like sailing in and out. Others – not quite. Why do so many negotiations fail and other, while successful, still present a thorny winding road to the participants? Why should people suffer through negotiations instead of just talking?
While there may be many reasons for not actually getting what you wanted in the first place in the negotiations and feeling frustrated about the results, should we actually make our lives harder than needed? What is the reason that many people think negotiations are a hard job? Why do they get drained out in a course of a short two hour business meeting that happens to be labeled "negotiation"?
I have a theory. It all has to do with expectations. Should you come to the meeting without particular expectations, you would be fairly objective and could actually follow the logic of the arguments on both sides, see compromises, do your job. But what happens when you come to such a meeting carrying expectations?
Expectations can never be met. It's a rule and it is dead simple. We are all different people and different organizations. It is extremely unlikely that we think in entirely similar ways and will form …
Read the full article ->


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Housing prices post record declines
Las Vegas, Miami and Phoenix all saw prices plummet by at least 20%. And so far, there is no sign of a bottom.
|30 yr fixed
|15 yr fixed
|30 yr refi
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Home prices have posted another record decline, as most of the nation's largest markets suffered double-digit drops over last year, a survey released Tuesday shows.
The S&P Case/Shiller Home Price Index, which tracks 20 of the largest housing markets, showed prices plummeting by 12.7% in the 12 months ending February. That's the biggest fall since the index began tracking prices in 2000.
Of those 20 metro areas, 17 posted their largest year-over-year declines ever. Ten of the 20 cities posted double-digit dips.
The 10-city Case/Shiller index is down 13.6% year-over-year, the biggest drop since its launch in 1987.
"There is no sign of a bottom in the numbers," S&P spokesman David M. Blitzer, said in a prepared statement. "Prices of single family homes continue to drop across the nation."
"This is huge," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "Back a couple of years ago, people were saying, 'Housing prices are not like stocks; they change slowly,'" he said.
But the drop in home prices appears to be accelerating. Indeed, Baker said that at the rate prices are falling, as much as $6 trillion in home values could be wiped out from the top of the market in June, 2006, through the end of this year.
Prices in the Las Vegas metro area have plunged more than any other city, down 22.8% over the 12 months through February. Miami prices plummeted 21.7%. In Phoenix, they've fallen 20.8%.
Of the 20 cities Case/Shiller tracks, only Charlotte, N.C. showed higher prices, up 1.5% over the 12-month period.
Other metro areas recorded only modest price declines, including Portland, Ore., down 2.0%, Seattle, off 2.7% and Dallas, 4.1%. In the nation's largest city, New York, metro area prices dropped a modest 6.6%.
The declines create a vicious cycle, according to Peter Schiff, the president of the investment firm Euro Pacific Capital. He was sounding alarms about the housing bubble more than two years ago.
As housing price losses extend, he said, the fall-off in demand for homes will deepen. And Schiff expects to see a national price decline of 30% - and by as much as 50% in the worst hit markets.
"People wanted houses as vehicles to make money," said Schiff. "Now that they can't make money, they don't want the houses anymore."
The S&P Case/Shiller statistics come on the same day as news that foreclosures spiked 112% in the first quarter, according to RealtyTrac, which said that more than 155,000 homes have been lost to foreclosures so far this year.
This flood of foreclosed homes onto the market is putting even more downward pressure on home prices.
On Monday, the Census Bureau reported that the number of vacant homes for sale has hit a record high. The report shows that 2.9% of U.S. homes -- excluding rental properties -- were vacant and up for sale in the first quarter. That translates to about 2.28 million properties - the highest quarterly number on record since 1956.
The number of vacant houses on the market is especially troubling, according to Pat Newport, a housing economist with Global Insight, a consulting firm. "I'm not surprised [by the record price declines], given the inventory numbers that came out yesterday," he said.
He called the vacancy statistic "the best measure of excess supply."
Many of these properties are owned by very motivated sellers, builders, banks and speculators who want to sell as quickly as possible in order to avoid having to pay to maintain them.
That's going to make these owners willing to take substantial losses just to get the homes sold. "It means prices will have to drop a lot more," Newport said.


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Tuna Secrets
Canned tuna is an affordable source of protein that many families depend on, but the conventional tuna industry's destructive fishing practices are sending too many marine species to the brink of extinction. Tuna has been a popular seafood items in America for generations, but companies like Bumble Bee continue to rely on fishing practices that kill millions of marine animals every year, including sharks, turtles, rays and juvenile fish of all kinds. These practices threaten the very ecosystems that will keep our oceans healthy for generations to come.


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written by
Keith Oliver and Lei Bao
In our research on student use of resources in learning quantum mechanics, we have begun to realize that a student often needs to make judgments among competing ideas. We start to see the potential to develop a new category of resources, meta-resources, to model the views and beliefs as well as meta-cognitive processes that students use in making judgments. Examples from student interviews are discussed as initial evidence for a larger scale investigation toward this area.
This file is available in multiple formats: .pdf, .doc
Published August 7, 2002
Last Modified July 6, 2013
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