Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 159

How to hack an intelligent machine

(Credit: Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

This week Microsoft and Alibaba stoked new fears that robots will soon take our jobs. The two companies independently revealed that their artificial intelligence systems beat humans at a test of reading comprehension. The test, known as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), was designed to train AI to answer questions about a set of Wikipedia articles.

Like the image-recognition software already deployed in commercial photo apps, these systems lend the impression that machines have become increasingly capable of replicating human cognition: identifying images or sounds, and now speed reading text passages and spewing back answers with human-level accuracy.

Machine smarts, though, are not always what they seem. The tech mavens who develop deep-learning networks and other AI systems are finding out just how fragile their creations are by drilling down to see if the machines really know anything. Stress-testing software — before it is loaded into a self-driving car, for instance — will be crucial to avoid the blunders that could lead to catastrophic accidents. “In some domains neural nets are actually superhuman, like they’re beating human performance,” says Anish Athalye, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student who researches AI. “But they have this weird property that it seems that we can trick them pretty easily.”

Two preprint articles by Athalye and other students at MIT, collectively known as LabSix, demonstrated they could make a deep-learning system — one trained to recognize objects from thousands of examples  — into thinking a picture of a skier was a dog (pdf) and a turtle was a rifle (pdf). A December paper from the Google Brain Team, the company’s AI research contingent, used a different approach to trick the system into classifying a banana as a toaster.

In LabSix’s method an algorithm slightly modifies the color or brightness of every pixel in the image. Although the picture looks the same to you or me, these subtle changes cause the system to interpret it as something entirely different. Camouflaging the image modification “makes it more relevant to a real-world attack,” Athalye says. “If you see somebody put up a road sign in the real world that looks all psychedelic, people might think, ‘oh something fishy is going on here,’ and it will be investigated. But if you have something that looks like a speed limit sign to you but your self-driving car thinks it’s something completely different, that’s a much scarier scenario.”

With the toaster, Google Brain took a different tactic. Instead of changing images individually, they wanted to develop a technical foil that could be placed in any scene. This meant creating a new unique image — an adversarial patch — that confuses the deep-learning system and distracts it from focusing on other items. Instead of blending in, the toaster patch needed to stand out. “Given that the patch only has control of pixels within the small circle that it’s in, it turned out that the best way for the patch to fool the classifiers was to become very salient,” Googler Tom Brown wrote in an e-mail. “A traditional adversarial attack changes all the pixels in a single image by a small amount. For the adversarial patch, we change a few pixels by a large amount.”

To work outside a lab, the patch also had to be resilient to the visual noise in the real world. In earlier studies, just changing the orientation or brightness of the altered image could defeat the adversarial technique. A doctored picture of a cat viewed straight on is classified as guacamole, but turn the cat sideways and the system knows it’s looking at a cat again. The toaster patch, by contrast, can be presented in any lighting or orientation and still sabotage the system. “This was more difficult to develop because it meant training the patch in a wide variety of simulated scenes so that we could find a single patch that is successful in all of them,” Brown wrote.

Although the examples are silly, the potential real-world implications are deadly serious. Athalye speculated an adversarial attack could trick a self-driving car into ignoring a stop sign. Or that it could disguise an x-ray image of a bomb during airport baggage screening. A goal of the research of Athalye and Brown is to help identify weaknesses in the technology before it is deployed.

Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, suggests AI is susceptible to being duped in this way because “the machine doesn’t understand the scene as a whole,” he told me. AI can recognize objects but it fails to comprehend what the object is or what it’s used for. It is not “truly understanding the causal relationships between things, truly understanding who’s doing what to whom and why.”

After the headlines about AI systems acing the reading-comprehension tests, Marcus disparaged the results, saying what the machine was doing had nothing to do with true comprehension. Marcus tweeted: “The SQuAD test shows that machines can highlight relevant passages in text, not that they understand those passages.”

Instead of training an AI system on hundreds of thousands of examples, Marcus thinks the field should take its cues from cognitive psychology to develop software with a deeper understanding. Whereas deep learning can identify a dog and even classify its breed from an image it has never seen before, it does not know the person should be walking the dog instead of the dog walking the person. It does not comprehend what a dog really is and how it is supposed to interact with the world. “We need a different kind of AI architecture that’s about explanation, not just about pattern recognition,” Marcus says.

Until it can do that, our jobs are safe — at least for awhile.

How can I use TV and movies to teach my kids media literacy?

(Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Sometimes, we’re so concerned about texting, apps, social media, games, and so on that we forget how important — and influential — TV shows and movies are to our kids. Whether you’re watching together or they’re off streaming shows on their personal devices, kids still take in tons of TV and movies. And the messages that come through have a huge impact on their attitudes and behavior. But you know what else has a huge impact on kids’ attitudes and behavior? Parents.

The idea of media literacy may not seem to mix with the fun of TV and movies. But when kids relate to the content, they’re more engaged, and they can learn critical-thinking skills from discussing it. All you want to do is get your kids to think more deeply about what they’re watching. You may want to reinforce the positive ideas on the shows, or you might want to offer a different perspective. Teaching kids to pause and think — and not just accept things at face value — is teaching them a valuable skill. If your kids watch shows on their phones and tablets, they’ll be used to discussing, sharing, and commenting with their friends. Ask them to show you what they like to watch (sharing what you’re watching helps, too). Use those moments to inject your opinions and values (bonus points for not lecturing!). Here are some ways to teach media literacy using TV and movies for all ages:

Little Kids

Teach them to recognize commercials. Until around age 7, children don’t understand the “persuasive intent” of commercials (the idea that someone is trying to sell them something).In fact, they often really like the “shows” that feature their favorite toys or foods. Begin by getting kids to understand the idea behind ads. When a commercial comes on, ask:

What is this about?
How do you know that?
What do you like about it?
What is it telling you?
How does it make you feel?


Reinforce real-world lessons. Make the connection between positive actions and real life. When you see something you like (a character being helpful or resourceful), say, “That’s nice that Joe helped Sam.”
Make sure they understand what they’re watching. Little kids don’t always follow how screen media relates to the real world. Point out connections to the real world (familiar people, activities), and ask questions to check that kids are making sense of what they see.

Older Kids

Encourage deeper thinking about commercials.

Point out when favorite characters are used to sell products, and ask kids if they’re more likely to want something if, say, SpongeBob is on the packaging.
Ask whether they think a food commercial is about healthy food or junk food; ask for examples to support their opinions.
Ask whether they think products work the same in real life as they do on commercials.


Discuss the real-world consequences of characters’ behavior. Encouraging this kind of critical thinking will help them avoid imitating or accepting behavior that they haven’t fully thought through.
Nip stereotypes in the bud. Point out positive, non-stereotypical attributes of characters (the princess is brave; the train conductor is kind).
Talk about how TV shows and movies are made. You can discuss camera angles, lighting techniques, props, and even close-ups and long shots. All of these help kids understand that different methods are used to tell a story, provoke different reactions, and sometimes manipulate audiences.

Tweens and Teens

Dive into media-literacy questions to get them thinking for themselves. You don’t want tweens and teens just accepting everything they see. Ask:

Who made this? How can you tell?
Why did they make it? Why do you think that?
What is the creator’s point of view? How do you know?
Who is the audience? How do you think this would go over with different audiences?


Discuss ethical dilemmas. The tween and teen years are when kids begin to figure out their own sets of principles to live by. Using characters who struggle with right and wrong from movies and TV can really get them to think through those issues for themselves.
Talk about the marketing of movies and TV. Explore how production houses use different methods, including viral videos, celebrity appearances on late-night shows, online quizzes, and teasers, to promote their shows. Ask tweens and teens why certain shows use certain outlets, such as social media, to get attention.

Maryland offers many insured men free vasectomy coverage

(Credit: ABB Photo via Shutterstock)

It was a well-intentioned effort to provide men with some of the same financial protection from birth control costs that women get. But a new Maryland law may jeopardize the ability of thousands of consumers — both men and women — to use health savings accounts.

The law, which took effect Jan. 1, mandates that insurers cover vasectomies without requiring patients to pay anything out-of-pocket — just as they must do for more than a dozen birth control methods for women.

But the measure may run afoul of Internal Revenue Service rules that do not include vasectomies among approved preventive services for high-deductible health plans. People with health savings accounts — which are exempt from tax liabilities — tied to those plans could no longer contribute to the savings accounts in that case.

Under the Maryland Contraceptive Equity Act, insurers generally can’t charge patients a copayment or require any other cost sharing for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The 2016 law is similar to what’s required under the federal Affordable Care Act, with a twist: It adds male sterilization — vasectomies — to the list of services that are free for patients.

“While the ACA made important strides … it completely left men out of the equation,” said Karen Nelson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Maryland, whose organization supported the bill.

Before the law took effect, a vasectomy at the organization’s Baltimore office would cost between $225 and $1,100, depending on someone’s ability to pay, said Nelson. Now the procedure will generally cost nothing for men in insured plans in Maryland.

The state law doesn’t apply to companies that are “self-funded,” meaning they pay their employees’ health care claims directly rather than buying state-regulated insurance policies.

Under IRS rules, consumers making tax-free contributions to health savings accounts (HSAs) that are linked to high-deductible health plans have to pay for all their medical care until they reach their deductible of at least $1,350 for individuals and $2,700 for families in 2018. The only exception is for preventive services. The hitch for the Maryland law is that vasectomies aren’t on the IRS list of approved preventive services.

The IRS hasn’t responded to a request for clarification by Maryland Insurance Commissioner Al Redmer Jr. A bill was reintroduced this year — after it failed to pass last year — that would exempt these high-deductible plans from the state mandate to cover vasectomies before the deductible is met. Such a move would preserve the tax advantages of the HSAs linked to them.

Maryland is joining a few other states, including Illinois, Vermont and, starting next year, Oregon, that have expanded contraceptive coverage without cost sharing to include male sterilization.

Vermont’s law includes language to exempt high-deductible plans with health savings accounts. While the issue has raised concerns in Maryland, in Illinois and Oregon it hasn’t appeared to generate much attention to date, legislative analysts say.

Some advocates for extending no-cost coverage to vasectomies noted that the IRS’ list of approved preventive services specifically says that it isn’t exhaustive.

But until the issue is clarified, “the safest thing to do is not make a contribution to your HSA,” said Roy Ramthun, a Maryland resident and president of HSA Consulting Services. Ramthun helped implement health savings accounts while working for the Treasury Department during the George W. Bush administration. He stressed that the uncertainty applies only to HSA contributions made after the law became effective in 2018, not to earlier contributions. The issue doesn’t affect people’s medical coverage.

Beyond the uncertainty around health savings account contributions, Maryland’s law requiring coverage of vasectomies without cost sharing addresses a gap in men’s preventive coverage.

“There are arguments to be made that male condoms and vasectomies have preventive benefits for both women and men, in terms of [sexually transmitted infection] prevention and preventing pregnancy,” said Mara Gandal-Powers, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center.

Seven percent of men ages 18 to 45 have had a vasectomy, according to a 2013 study by researchers at Northwestern University. The prevalence increased to 16 percent among men ages 36 to 45. Men with higher incomes, higher education and a regular source of health care were more likely to have had the procedure, the study found.

The Maryland law doesn’t apply to the method of birth control that many men use: condoms. A bill introduced this month by state Sen. John Astle, a Democrat, would expand the law to include condom coverage.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Control your phone. Don’t let it control you

(Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

As adults we’re pretty savvy when it comes to advertising and commercials. Those juicy cheeseburgers or shiny new cars look pretty appealing, sure, but we know the tricks advertisers use to tempt us, from upbeat music to attractive young models. Now, how many of us have tapped an icon on our phones to check a quick email only to look up an hour later and wonder where the time went? When it comes to our phones and other digital technology, we might not be as savvy as we think.

We might not know, for instance, that engineers and designers use the color red in notifications to trigger an emotional response that makes us want to click or swipe. Or that auto-play functions are designed to hijack our good judgment. And more and more of us are feeling addicted to technology. As a few key members in the tech industry start coming forward — including Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology and a senior fellow at Common Sense — we’re starting to understand why it’s so hard to put our phones down.

According to Harris, this is all by design. And if we feel tethered to our little devices, imagine how our kids feel. So if we want to be good digital role models and make sure our families are using tech in healthy ways, we need to fight back against these tricks. We need to show our kids how to get all the benefits of these mini-computers in our pockets without forgetting to put people first.

Here are some simple tips — recommended by Harris — to work around the tricks phone designers use to keep us hooked:

Turn off all notifications, except those from people. Notifications can be helpful when they let you know something important needs your attention, like a text from your kid or an email from your boss. But most notifications are sent by machines, not people. And they’re designed to draw you into interacting with an app you might not otherwise prioritize. Go to your phone’s settings (on iPhones, it’s Settings > Notifications) to turn off everything except messaging apps or other crucial tools.

Go grayscale. All those colorful apps? They’re designed to trigger your brain’s reward system and make you feel good. If you want to check your phone less, cutting off this trigger may help. It won’t be easy, though. We’re pretty hooked on all those flashy colors. But most phones let you choose muted colors. On iPhones, you can go full grayscale. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations. Turn on Color Filters, and set to “Grayscale.”

Limit what’s on your home screen. Keep only your email, maps, calendar, and whatever else you use daily front and center. Put all those other apps — from games to recipes — into folders or move to the second or third screens. If you don’t see them right away, you’ll be less likely to use them.

Type to find apps. Tapping is so easy! It’s easy enough that we do it without even thinking sometimes. But if you need to take the time to type the name of the app, it gives your brain a second to consider whether you really need to play another game of Candy Crush.

Take social media off your phone. You’ll likely be more intentional about when and where you dip into Facebook and Instagram if you only do it on a computer. If you’re a regular social media user, you might be amazed to find how much time you actually spend on these apps. And when you feel the urge to add them back to your phone, consider where that compulsion is coming from.

Charge your phone outside of your bedroom. It’s so easy to roll over, tap snooze on your buzzing phone, and delve right into the latest news or last night’s work emails. But is that really the habit you want to create? And for kids, having a phone by the bed is known to cause sleep problems. Invest in an old-fashioned alarm clock and keep phones away from sleeping bodies overnight.

Fight fire with fire. It’s ironic, but downloadable apps and extensions remove some of the triggers built in by designers and engineers and help you to be more conscious of what you’re doing. Harris recommends Apple’s Night Shift setting to reduce the phone’s stimulating blue light, as well as apps such as Moment, Freedom, and InboxWhenReady. Plus, there are other apps to help kids stay focused while on devices, plus some great tools that can help kids and adults reduce digital distraction.

Schools, sex and scandals: See it all at the movies

A still from "Mädchen in Uniform" (1931) (Credit: Filmchoice)

Lately it seems that school sex scandals are in the news as much as school shootings. In both cases, our collective shock is no longer accompanied by surprise. One important difference between these two sadly familiar school epidemics is that, in most cases, the news is out on a school shooting before the bullets have stopped flying, whereas a school sex scandal can carry on for decades unreported, pushed under the rug and ignored by the school and the public alike. This silence adds special relevance to the recent acknowledgments of sexual abuse of minors on the campuses of Brearley, Choate Rosemary Hall, Phillips Academy, Emma Willard, Horace Mann, Poly Prep, Nichols, St. George’s, St. Paul’s, Deerfield Academy, Hackley and Yeshiva High. It not only means that young people had to suffer needlessly for years because no adult would help, but it also means that these same abuses are likely occurring right now and no one knows or is willing to talk about it. As it has become with gun violence, each revelation of a teacher’s sexual misconduct feels like deja vu all over again, leaving administrators scrambling to restore a sense of safety and control, and the rest of us simply bracing for the next revelation of a crime that we know is already underway.

Over a decade ago, we began researching the uncanny prevalence of teacher-student relationships in films, resulting in the book “Filmed School: Desire, transgression and the filmic fantasy of pedagogy.” At the time, our lectures and writings seemed primarily a philosophical and aesthetic undertaking. Society as a whole was largely unaware of the extent to which real-life incidents of sexual abuse were a regular part of school life. Such wrongdoing seemed more an anomaly than a norm, and limited in scope to abuses that had recently been revealed in the Catholic Church. Over the course of our work together, however, the relevance of these screen images has become more real than we could have imagined. As the number of actual victims’ stories published in newspapers now vastly outnumber the 50 or so films we address, perhaps it is time to take stock of how our society’s fantasies of teacher-student relationships played out in film reflect and contribute to a culture of sexual violence against children, and how our critical reflection on the images we make of teaching might help us combat this widespread social problem.

Part of the unsettling quality of the public revelations of sexual abuse over the past few years has been the fact that we are dealing with decades of missteps on the part of administrators, fellow teachers and the public at large, implicating more than just the immediate actors. In the past, when a teacher committed inappropriate sexual advances or acts upon a student, entire school communities often looked the other way and pretended there was no issue, or sent the teachers (along with letters of recommendation) to other teaching posts. Schools behaved like churches, each quietly serving as an arbiter of its own questionable moral code. Today, schools caught in the grip of scandal send apologetic emails, enlist lawyers and make promises to prevent future abuses. We feel a collective relief knowing that perpetrators, if not always punished, are at least no longer teaching at the scandalized school. Like so many administrators in decades past who simply dismissed teachers rather than addressed the problem openly, we comfort and content ourselves with the belief that the crime leaves the building with the predator, the monster, the sociopath.

If the number of these crimes were minimal, we might be able to get away with the idea that there will always be a few bad apples and that our best response is to stay aware of unusual relationships that develop in between classes. But when a problem is this common, we have to stop looking at it as an aberration within an otherwise healthy culture — or the invasion of that culture by an intruder — and instead start to inquire in what ways the potential for abuse is already an inherent part of what we do as teachers. In other words, if old institutions want to reckon with past misdeeds, they need to develop new strategies: namely, to transcend the reflexive and routine apologetic discourse offered to victims, and see the entire problem in a new light.

So far, it is hard to see that any change has occurred in the ways that schools anticipate and address this ever-growing crisis. Official data on administrators’ precautions against sex abuse are, as might be expected, scarce. Anecdotally, it is clear that while schools and teacher preparation programs alike are rattled by the scandals, little has altered in the way that we prepare teachers for the personal, emotional aspects of their profession. Catholic schools have introduced some ethics training in response to their highly public scandals; national accreditation bodies for teacher preparation programs have included “dispositional” elements in their requirements of how practicing teachers are evaluated. Still, as before, teachers only learn once they are on the job that their work often involves managing and responding to complicated interpersonal exchanges with vulnerable young people. While teachers are now told to keep their distance from students outside of work and to follow common-sense professional standards of behavior, these obvious pieces of advice do little to help teachers navigate difficult terrain, one in which their own identities are affected by students’ demands and attention.

Simply telling teachers not to communicate with students on social media is inadequate. The influence of social media is a recent phenomenon; sexual misconduct is not. Leaving the office door open when speaking to students may make flirting slightly more difficult but far from impossible. Instead of discussing door angles, let’s recognize the elephant in the room: learning depends upon the desire of the student. A popular teaching meme quotes Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” However, the student often mistakes this igniting of desire with a love for the teacher, confusing the verb teaching with the noun teacher, the activity with the embodiment. Again, in the words of Yeats, they cannot “know the dancer from the dance.” It is the responsibility of teachers to redirect their students’ attention and recognize that the love is not for them. Teachers who make grave mistakes and cause considerable damage do so not because they fail to observe institutional protocols; rather, their actions are based upon a fantasy of power: one that occurs before teaching careers begin and goes unchecked long into adult lives. Furthermore, a culture of silence often prevents teachers from talking about the affective motivations that drive their professional lives.

To make some kind of a change, we need to start talking about desire as both an integral and problematic fact of pedagogy. But how do we start a conversation that, no matter how important, threatens to implicate the very teachers who might benefit from discussing the personal hazards of teaching? As for the students — most of whom are minors — it is often legally impossible to discuss actual incidents that are fraught with the damage left in the wake of teachers’ misdeeds. While our inability to talk about desire in the classroom paralyzes us in preventing another generation of abusers from causing harm to yet another generation of students, our representations of pedagogical relationships in popular media carry that conversation on for us; these representations act as a mirror to our beliefs and desires about teaching, showing us something that deserves our attention. For one hundred years, since the release of “Vingarne” (1916) and “Anders als die Andern” (1919), cinema has brought us eroticized images of teacher-student relationships, revealing something that we know but only begin to acknowledge in the face of another school sex scandal.

“Be careful you don’t fall in love,” are the first words of warning given to teenage Manuela in “Mädchen in Uniform” (1931), after she announces to her classmates that her teacher is the captivating Fräulein von Bernberg. “She’s obviously in love with you,” offers the Deputy Head, in “To Sir, with Love” (1967), to rookie teacher Mark Thackeray regarding his star student Barbara Dare; “You shouldn’t be surprised.” None of us should be surprised, because the message we receive from these films is shockingly consistent. From “The Corn Is Green” (1945) to “Term of Trial” (1962), from “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1967) to more contemporary films such as “Election” (1999), “Notes on a Scandal” (2006) and “The History Boys” (2006), we are presented with a vision of education tied inextricably to the erotic growth of the student, and at times tied tragically to the downfall of the teacher.

Historically speaking, these films present nothing new. Plato devoted one of his finest dialogues to the subject of erotic peril in education. He observed that desire is the force by which the human soul is shaped through its experiences in the world but also the force by which the soul can be turned in a tragic manner that is irretrievable. His insights shaped Western philosophy, birthing ideologies as diverse as Catholic scholasticism and German idealism, and re-emerging in the 20th century through the field of psychoanalysis. Freud re-christened the phenomenon as “transference,” or the patient’s motivational faith in the analyst’s all-knowing authority, which manifests itself in romantic fantasies. Freud also believed these fantasies could be used productively, when manipulated by the analyst for the good of the patient. His follower, Jacques Lacan, devoted an entire year of his famous seminar to the topic of transference, concluding that with respect to the fantasy, “the lure is reciprocal,” motivating student and teacher alike, but always threatening to undo the pedagogical relationship.

Clearly, we educators need to recognize the emotional underpinnings of our academic craft. As teachers, it’s high time we were better educated, better able to direct and edit our own narratives instead of reading about them in the news. In a society where abuse in schools is allowed to continue, largely because it remains unspoken, the study of films that depict teachers as all-knowing masters and students as desiring subjects is a good place to start. “We all know that Art is not truth,” said Picasso; “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Teachers need to acknowledge past actions and present feelings in order to create better futures for their students and for themselves.

A Congressional hearing for Trump’s accusers is political TNT: could it actually happen?

Rachel Crooks (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan)

In a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday night, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand pushed once more for a congressional investigation into accusations of sexual assault against Donald Trump. “I think he should resign, and if he’s unwilling to do that, which is what I assume, then Congress should hold him accountable,” she told CBS. “We’re obligated to have hearings.”

The chances that these hearings could take place, let alone pave the way for legal proceedings that could take Trump down, are slim. But the public, Gillibrand and Trump’s accusers are ready to set this plan in motion—and regardless of whether it takes place or not, her call for action could have near-immediate political impact.

Most recently, Gillibrand used the Rob Porter scandal to draw attention back to other sexual predators in the White House—namely, the president. “This is an important time to talk about this WH and whether they value women,” she wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “Because, consistently, their actions tell us they don’t.”

After Trump called for “due process” for those like Porter accused of abusing women, Gillibrand responded with a call for legal proceedings on Capitol Hill:

“The President has shown through words and actions that he doesn’t value women. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t believe survivors or understand the national conversation that is happening.”

“The lives of survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse are being shattered every day. If he wants due process for the over dozen sexual assault allegations against him, let’s have Congressional hearings tomorrow. I would support that and my colleagues should too.”

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) February 10, 2018

 Gillibrand first called for an investigation back in December, after several Trump accusers spoke on the “Today Show” about the abuse they received at the hands of the president. “He should immediately resign, and if he doesn’t, we should have the investigation,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Since then, more than 50 Democratic congresswomen have requested the House investigate the allegations against Trump. Eight senators have called for the president’s resignation and similarly demanded a congressional investigation.

The public wants these hearings, too. A new survey shows that 76 percent of voters — including a large chunk of his own supporters — support an investigationinto Trump’s sexual misconduct.

More importantly, it’s likely that many of the accusers themselves would participate. Under oath in a congressional hearing, they could dissuade Republicans’ concerns that they are lying, which makes official investigation the ideal course. In a statement to AlterNet, one accuser, Lisa Boyne, who witnessed Trump parading models around at a formal dinner, looking up their skirts and commenting on whether or not they were wearing underwear, said:

“Yes, I will participate and swear under oath to my story. Trump is a liar and a bully. He doesn’t remember meeting me. He has no story to tell, just the broad stroke of ‘they are all liars.’ He lied about a lawsuit against me that will never happen because he will have to lie again under oath. He doesn’t get to use complicit women of his administration to tell my story. They weren’t there. Trump is using his bully pulpit to defend accused sexual predators, child molesters and now wife-beaters. I stand by my story 100% and I believe Colbie Holderness, Jennie Willoughby and all the other Trump accusers.”

Several of the 20 women who have accused Trump could participate as well. Jessica Leeds, Samantha Holvey and Rachel Crooks, the three accusers who spoke about their encounters with Trump on the “Today Show,” all said they would testify before Congress if hearings took place.

If the hearings do happen, there is a marginal chance that Trump would be compelled to testify or even attend the testimonies of the women he’s claimed he never met. There’s an even smaller chance such a hearing would lead to impeachment proceedings; it’s unclear if sexual assault is an impeachable offense, and it would be up to the majority-Republican Congress to decide.

Given the unlikelihood that her calls for hearings will come to fruition, which Gillibrand must know, there could be another motivation for her outspoken stance. Pundits have speculated for some time that she may run for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020, though she has so far said she’s not interested. Beyond her strong stance criticizing Trump’s behavior toward women, she’s been one of the most consistent Democrats to vote against his policies and nearly all of his government appointees. Her media push in recent months, including appearances on CNN and Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” could have as much to do with positioning herself as a contender as with denouncing Trump’s behavior.

Gillibrand’s months-long feud with Trump has certainly painted her as a bold contender. Trump sexually harassed Gillibrand on Twitter back in December after she proclaimed her support for his accusers and began calling for a congressional hearing. Her response was quick and strong: “You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak out about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office.”

 While an official congressional hearing is unlikely to take place as long as Congress is controlled by the GOP, if she’s serious about making the hearing happen and not merely using it as a way to boost her visibility, an alternative route Gillibrand could pursue would be to host the hearing independently through her own Senate offices. Such a convening would not require congressional followup like an official investigation, but would certainly build momentum for the case that Trump is unfit for office. It would at least have more backbone than billionaire Tom Steyer’s monumental impeachment push.

As of now, Gillibrand hasn’t announced interest in any such plan, and is sticking to the official congressional route. A spokesperson for Gillibrand told AlterNet: “We don’t have the ability to call [official] hearings, so we are making the case publicly to put pressure on Congress to do its job, and it’s clear the public agrees with us.”

Reconsidering the femme fatale: Laura Lippman’s “Sunburn”

"Sunburn: A Novel" by

Laura Lippman (Credit: Harper Collins)

In 1995, a person could still disappear. Stick to cash and pay phones and letters mailed with decoy postmarks, drift into a random town, lay low, blend in. In 1995, back when it took more than a few clicks to dig up anyone’s past, if a woman decided to skip town and start over, she could become whoever she wanted to be. Single. Childless. A waitress dreaming of a modest, happy life.

For a while.

In acclaimed crime novelist Laura Lippman’s slow-burning new novel “Sunburn” (William Morrow, out Tuesday), bewitching redhead Polly Costello does just that. One day while her husband plays with their 3-year-old daughter on a beach not too far from their Baltimore home, she packs a bag, leaves two notes, and sends herself into the wind. She touches down in nearby Belleville, Delaware — with plans to move west, but not yet — a small town not close enough to the beach to be worth it, a town “put together from some other town’s leftovers.” In a locals tavern called the High-Ho she meets handsome Adam Bosk, also passing through but suddenly stranded in Belleville with a broken truck, the bad luck of it all, he guesses he’ll have to stay on for a while. Adam is very interested in finding out who Polly really is. They both take jobs — he’s the cook, she’s the waitress — and embark on what they think is a discreet affair.

And who is Polly? A woman who abandoned her child, we know from the start. And what kind of woman does such a thing? Two kinds, at least: the kind with no heart who destroys everyone in her path, and the kind with extreme self-discipline who is willing to do whatever it takes to be free. According to her husband Gregg, it’s “[t]he kind of woman he picked up in a bar four years ago precisely because she had that kind of wildcat energy.” Which kind of woman is Polly? That’s not exactly the question Adam is asking when he first approaches her in the High-Ho with his own secrets, his own capacity for drawn-out games, but it’s the only question that matters in this story.

Their affair tethers them to each other in ways neither could have predicted that first night at the bar. Then an untimely death in sleepy little Belleville tests their bond. How much do either of them really know about the other? Is their love real, or is someone getting played?

The tension in Polly’s situation increases the longer she stays put and indulges in her affair with Adam, “the first thing she’s ever chosen for her own pleasure and delight,” while her past, considerably more complex than we know at first, closes in on her. Lippman, a master storyteller, deals the story’s cards slowly and deliberately, sprinkling the book with loving homages to Maryland-native noir novelist James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce.”

Lippman sets Polly up with the hallmarks of the genre-standard femme fatale — mysterious, irresistible, seductive as a means to other ends, and unnaturally willing to disconnect from her child — and then delights in peeling away those traits to explore the truths behind them. Praise the fiction gods, we seem to have moved beyond the literary-world debate over whether or not female characters need to be “likeable” in fiction. The consensus, let’s hope (and if not, let’s pretend), is “who cares, as long as they are interesting.”

With Polly, an intriguing, vulnerable and insightful survivor who also walked away from her little girl, Lippman raises compelling questions about the limits of sympathy for a sympathetic woman committing an unsympathetic offense. Can you still care about a woman who would do such a thing?Are there worse things a person could do? Would you even be asking if Polly were a man? We’re taught that a woman who rejects her children is unnatural. What does her disappearing act say about what else she might be capable of, and why?

Underneath it all simmers the question that keeps the pages turning, beyond the desire to find out how the pieces of Polly’s past will catch up to her: Is the reader the one being played for a fool? Lippman makes it worth your while to find out.

Smashing Pumpkins are almost reunited — and that’s the problem

(Credit: Getty/Matt Roberts)

On Thursday, Smashing Pumpkins announced their first concerts — to feature three of the band’s original members, vocalist/songwriter Billy Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and guitarist James Iha — since 2000. Dubbed the Shiny And Oh So Bright Tour, the extensive trek is being promoted as the band playing music from their first five albums: the psychedelic hard rock fever dream “Gish”; alt-rock behemoths “Siamese Dream” and “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”; the electronic excursion “Adore”; and the New Order mash note “Machina/The Machines of God.”

The announcement didn’t come without drama, of course. In the weeks leading up to the tour, debate raged as to whether original bassist D’Arcy Wretzky would be involved, making it a true reunion of the classic Smashing Pumpkins lineup. The news cycle was whiplash-inducing, as it changed by the day and involved the sharing of private text messages and plenty of he said-she-said denials. Things got so heated and intense that the band issued a statement about comments Wretzky had made in an interview with a site called BlastEcho — which in turn led to her doing her first extensive interview in 20 years, in which she laid out her side of the story.

Unsurprisingly, when the Smashing Pumpkins tour dates arrived, Wretzky wasn’t involved. For many fans, that’s a deal-breaker. Although she’s been out of the group since 1999, she remains beloved, as integral a part of the golden-era lineup as any other member. It’s easy to see why: Wretzky was an unflappable and nimble player, with an impossibly cool stage presence and the kind of performance confidence that was empowering. In a charmingly awkward vintage MTV interview, Corgan mentions all of the letters Wretzky received from girls especially thanking her for being “somewhat inspirational in a band.”

However, the tour press release came packaged with a stark and serious black-and-white photo featuring long-time guitarist Jeff Schroeder next to the three original members. Seeing a Smashing Pumpkins lineup with four men was almost a jarring sight, since for much of the band’s history, they’ve had a kickass woman playing bass. (One notable exception was a late 2014 lineup when the Killers’ Mark Stoermer filled in, as part of a lineup that also featured Rage Against the machine drummer Brad Wilk.)

After Wretzky left in 1999, former Hole member Melissa Auf der Maur took over as touring bass player. In fact, she played on the tour for “Machina/The Machines of God,” the final record that’s part of the Shiny And Oh So Bright Tour. When Smashing Pumpkins reconvened in 2007 after a few years away, Ginger Reyes, Nicole Fiorentino and then Katie Cole assumed bass duties. (For the record, Corgan was asked about Smashing Pumpkins’ tendency to have female bassists in a 2012 Consequence of Sound interview, and his answer illuminated much about the band’s distinct sound.)

Over the years, other women — including violinist Gingger Shankar, keyboardist Lisa Harriton and multi-instrumentalist Sierra Swan — have also joined the band on tour. The gender diversity within their live lineup has always been one of Smashing Pumpkins’ biggest assets, as it was effortless and didn’t feel like tokenism. Like another influential rock band, Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins had a woman (or women) in the band. It was just what they did.

Studio-wise, things are somewhat more complicated. Corgan’s domination in this realm has been well-documented and, admittedly, the group has covered a slew of male-fronted rock bands. However, one of the act’s biggest ’90s radio hits is a delicate cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a Stevie Nicks songwriting masterpiece, while Blondie and Missing Persons covers appear on the boxed set “The Aeroplane Flies High.” Corgan has also written vividly about women: the fantastical figures portrayed in “To Sheila” and “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans,” for example, or “For Martha,” which is an elegy for his late mother.

During live shows, Smashing Pumpkins also put a howling (and rather reverent) spin on Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me” about a decade ago — and it was one of the few Spears rock covers that didn’t feel ironic or shticky. Even the band’s album art prioritized female iconography. For example, NPR reported on how “Mellon Colie and the Infinite Sadness” used a body from Raphael’s “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” painting and a face lifted from Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s “The Souvenir” to create the angelic figure.

Of course, to be fair, with details of the 2018 concerts just starting to emerge, who’s to say that the touring band won’t have more gender parity? Plus, pointing out that the current Smashing Pumpkins core lineup is all men isn’t meant to shade any of the musicians. To the contrary, Schroeder is a fantastic guitarist, songwriter and creative foil for Billy Corgan, as well as a talented artist in his own right. (Listen to his excellent and sadly defunct band the Lassie Foundation and thank me later.) Chamberlin’s drumming style has been massively influential to generations of musicians, while Iha is a versatile musician and guitarist who improves any band with whom he plays.

And, of course, there’s no denying that Corgan’s vision helped Smashing Pumpkins become an alt-rock pillar in the ’90s. The band drew on familiar eras — classic rock, synth-pop, shoegaze and psychedelic rock — and combined them all into something ferocious, fresh and exciting. However, Smashing Pumpkins didn’t get to the multi-platinum point without help. In fact, it feels disingenuous to celebrate the band’s halcyon days without Wretzky, as it feels like an erasure of the contributions she made to the group and this music.

In a nostalgic twist, Smashing Pumpkins announced this 2018 tour with a video featuring the original “Siamese Dream” album cover stars, Ali Laenger and LySandra Roberts, who are now adults. Besides making any ’90s kid feel positively ancient (after all, the women were just tiny kids back then) it was also a stark reminder that time doesn’t stand still. The classic rock phenomenon — bands touring with a negligible amount of original members — long ago started trickling down into other, younger genres. That Smashing Pumpkins would be on a victory lap without all original members isn’t out of the ordinary. It’s just a tough bit of historical revisionism to swallow.

The complex history of “In God We Trust”

A newly-stamped gold coin of President John F. Kennedy is examined at the U.S. Mint at West Point on Tuesday, July 22, 2014, in West Point, N.Y. Kennedy is getting a new look on the new coin that is being made by the mint to mark the 50 years since the slain president debuted on a half-dollar. (AP Photo) (Credit: AP)

In his address to the National Prayer Breakfast on the morning of Feb. 8, President Donald Trump emphasized the centrality of faith in American life. After describing the country as a “nation of believers,” Trump reminded his audience that American currency features the phrase “In God We Trust” as does the Pledge of Allegiance. He also declared that “our rights are not given to us by man” but “come from our Creator.”

These remarks come a week after Trump linked religion with American identity in his first State of the Union address. On Jan. 30, he similarly invoked “In God We Trust” while proclaiming an “American way” in which “faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life.”

But the history of such language is more complex than Trump’s assertions suggest.

The place of “In God We Trust,” and similar invocations of God in national life, have been a subject of debate. From my perspective as a religious history scholar they reflect a particular view of the United States, not a universally accepted “American way.”

The Civil War

Political rhetoric linking the United States with a divine power emerged on a large scale with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. M.R. Watkinson, a Pennsylvania clergyman, encouraged the placement of “In God We Trust” on coins at the war’s outset in order to help the North’s cause. Such language, Watkinson wrote, would “place us openly under the divine protection.”

Putting the phrase on coins was just the beginning.

In 1864, with the Civil War still raging, a group supported by the North’s major Protestant denominations began advocating change to the preamble of the Constitution. The proposed language — which anticipated President Trump’s remarks about the origin of Americans’ rights — would have declared that Americans recognized “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government.”

If the amendment’s supporters had succeeded in having their way, Christian belief would be deeply embedded in the United States government.

But, such invocations of God in national politics were not to last. Despite lobbying by major Protestant denominations such as the Methodists, this so-called Sovereignty of God amendment was never ratified.

Though “In God We Trust” was added to coins, it was not added to the increasingly common paper money. In fact, when coins were redesigned late in the 19th century, it disappeared from coins as well.

As I demonstrate in my book, these developments were related to the spread of secularism in the post-Civil War U.S. For many people at the time, placing religious language in the Constitution or on symbols of government was not consistent with American ideals.

The revival of ‘In God We Trust’

The 1950s, however, witnessed a dramatic resurgence of religious language in government and politics. It was that decade that brought “In God We Trust” into widespread use.

In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill placing the phrase on all American currency. One sponsor of that legislation, Congressman Charles Bennett, echoed the sentiments that had inspired the Sovereignty of God amendment during the Civil War. Bennett proclaimed, that the U.S. “was founded in a spiritual atmosphere and with a firm trust in God.”

The next year, “In God We Trust” was adopted as the first official motto of the United States.

Both of these developments reflected the desire to emphasize Americans’ religious commitment in the early years of the Cold War. Historians such as Jonathan Herzog have chronicled how leaders ranging from President Eisenhower to the evangelist Billy Graham stressed on the strong faith of the nation in setting the U.S. apart from the godlessness of Soviet communism.

Recently, however, Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse has shown that religious language was not merely rhetoric against communism. “In God We Trust” reflected domestic concerns as well.

The belief in American religiosity that put “In God We Trust” on coins and made it the national motto in the 1950s had emerged over several decades. Conservative businessmen had allied with ministers, including Billy Graham, to combat the social welfare policies and government expansion that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. These wide-ranging programs, designed to tackle the Great Depression, irked many conservatives. They objected to government intervention in business and Roosevelt’s support for labor unions.

As Kruse notes, this alliance of conservative business leaders and ministers linked “faith, freedom, and free enterprise.”

In this way then, President Trump’s repeated assertions of “In God We Trust” could be said to reflect certain American values. But, as my research shows, for much of U.S. history, the acceptance of such values ebbed and flowed.

“In God We Trust” is a not a motto that reflects universally shared historical values. Rather it represents a particular political, economic and religious perspective — one that is embraced by President Trump and the modern GOP.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb. 2, 2018.

David Mislin, Assistant Professor, Intellectual Heritage Program, Temple University

How many gigs are you wearing?

FILE - In this March 9, 2015, file photo, the Apple Maps app is displayed on an Apple Watch during an event in San Francisco. Apple Maps quickly became the butt of jokes when it debuted in 2012. After Apple fixed errors as users submitted them, Apple Maps is now used more widely than Google Maps on iPhones. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File) (Credit: AP)

The classic nightmare of suddenly realizing you’re naked in public could soon get a futuristic twist: it might involve the horror of losing not just your modesty but also your pass codes. Scientists recently created magnetic garments that they say can store data, automatically unlock doors or control a nearby smartphone with gestures.

The concept of interactive “smart clothing” has drawn attention in the past couple of years. For example, Google and Levi’s created a touch-sensitive denim jacket that can operate a smartphone. This and other smart garments are made with conductive thread and usually require an attached electronic device.

To eliminate the need for such peripheral gear, researchers at the University of Washington recently took advantage of what they say is a previously untapped property of conductive thread: its ability to be magnetized. Using magnetic instead of electric properties of the thread “may seem like a small difference, but it’s what makes this work interesting and exciting,” says Chris Harrison, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not part of the research. The new technique allowed the researchers to do something they say is unique among wearables: turn them into storage devices.

The Washington team magnetized a patch of fabric embroidered with conductive thread, giving different parts of the cloth a north or south orientation that corresponded to binary 1’s or 0’s. This step allowed the researchers to store up to 33 million different combinations — such as pass codes for doors — on a shirt cuff. They also created magnetic gloves that could control a nearby smartphone with gestures. The team described its findings last October at a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery.

The garments still stored data after washing, drying and ironing, but they could not escape time’s eraser; after about a week, the threads’ magnetic fields had weakened by around 30 percent. The researchers suggest that using custom-made thread designed to hold stronger magnetic fields might work longer. But for now the clothes may be best suited for storing temporary codes, such as those found on hotel key cards or clothing tags in stores.

Harrison says that it is “very unlikely you’re ever going to achieve a comparable density [to magnetic hard drives]” with data-storing fabric, however.