Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 48

Rising seas are threatening historical sites around the world

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool, File

This article originally appeared on Massive.

The famous moai of Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) are, to many people, the face of archaeology. These massive statues made of dark, weathered stone, occasionally speckled with pale lichen, stare out across their island in the blue waters of the south Pacific. Their heads are oversized compared to their bodies, which gives them a dignity appropriate to their age; the oldest were crafted around 1200 CE. But the moai may not stand on Rapa Nui for much longer. They’re in danger from a very 21st century threat: climate change.

Warmer temperatures will lead to a rise in the level of the oceans, with some researchers predicting we might see them climb by more than three feet by 2100. That probably doesn’t sound like much, but many major cities will be threatened by even such a small rise, from New York City and Miami to Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, and Mumbai. Humans like to build our homes near the coast due to its easy access to water and other natural resources, and we always have. That’s why it’s not only our future that climate change threatens; humanity also stands at risk of losing much of our past.

The future of the past looks bleak

On Rapa Nui we’ve already begun to witness the consequences. It’s a small island, only 15 miles wide, and rising sea levels have increased erosion along the coast where many of the moai are located. In 2017, waves knocked down an ancient stone wall protecting a moai at Ura Uranga Te Mahina. That same year human bones were exposed near the beach at Hanga Roa, where the ocean broke open a platform containing burials, stone tools, and parts of a moai. Matters are expected to get worse as sea levels continue to rise.

Rapa Nui is an attention-grabbing example, but it’s not the only site at risk. Globally, there could be thousands or even millions of other endangered archaeological sites. We can’t even begin to protect them until we have a complete list of their locations and positions relative to the ocean. Thankfully, two teams of scientists have set out to solve that problem.

The first team, led by David G. Anderson from the University of Tennessee, focused on the southeastern region of the United States. They analyzed data from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), an open-source multi-institution GIS (Geographic Information System - basically a database linked to a map).

Archaeological sites have been and continue to be excavated by a wide range of researchers, from land managers at state or federal agencies to professors from public or private universities to archaeologists working for construction companies or local historical societies. Their results are often unseen or hard to access by researchers from other sectors. Even when they are shared, it’s often in the form of isolated facts and figures, incompatible with anyone else’s method of data collection. DINAA works to change that by compiling all of the many sources of archaeological data into a single, unified GIS and making it available to researchers, government resource managers, and the public.

DINAA’s existence made it possible for Anderson and his team to search for archaeological sites along thousands of miles of coastline, running all the way from Maryland to Louisiana (Mississippi was excluded from this study because its data was unavailable). Publishing in 2017, they announced that 32,898 recorded archaeological sites stand to be destroyed by a sea level rise of more than 16 feet, and 19,676 of those would be in danger from a rise of only three feet.

Many of these sites have never been excavated; they contain unknown levels of information on matters such as the first arrival of humans in the region, how and why they adopted agriculture, and the details of contact between Native Americans and Europeans. One of the sites in danger is Fort Sumter, widely regarded as the place where the Civil War began. Located on a small, low-elevation island in the harbor of Charleston, SC, 100 percent of Fort Sumter would be lost by a sea level rise of three feet. Washington DC is another low-lying city, and one threaded through by the Potomac river, which will experience higher tides and more frequent flooding as sea levels rise. This puts sites such as the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, not to mention the White House itself, in danger from climate change.

Of course most of these thousands of sites are not so famous, but they can still be deeply important to modern Americans. For example, the DINAA database includes 6,897 historical cemeteries, and even that number is only a fraction of all the cemeteries in the US. Families will likely want the places where their ancestors are buried to be protected or transferred away from rising oceans. They may even refuse to move for their own safety if it means abandoning a loved one’s grave. Any plan for relocating people due to climate change needs to consider the importance of these cemeteries and other sacred sites.

And matters are worse than they sound: 32,898 is only the number of recorded sites. An unknown additional number of sites still wait to be found. Fortunately, the southeastern United States has received many decades of organized, scientific archaeological research, which has been complied into a well-funded and managed GIS like DINAA. Other regions of the world have been less lucky.

Mark D. McCoy from the Southern Methodist University is working on one such understudied region: Polynesia. Consisting of over 1,000 islands controlled by at least 10 countries, Polynesia contains some of the most fascinating archaeology in the world, including Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, and Rapa Nui itself. Despite this rich background, very little of Polynesia has been systemically surveyed or excavated by archaeologists. In fact, McCoy found that only one area in the whole region had a tool comparable to DINAA.

This was the country of New Zealand, where the New Zealand Archaeological Association maintains ArchSite, a archaeological GIS open to both professional researchers and the public. McCoy used ArchSite to locate sites vulnerable to sea level rise and published his results in Sustainability in January of 2018. He predicts that at least 8,250 New Zealand sites will be impacted by a sea level rise of more than 16 feet. That number is over 12 percent of all of the recorded archaeological sites in New Zealand. Half of them, or 6 percent of all sites, will be flooded by a rise of only three feet.

Although not included in ArchSite, Hönaunau is another Polynesia site threatened by climate change. A political and religious center built in the 1200s CE on Hawaii, Hönaunau was the home of a long line of royalty, as well the location of a temple, a mausoleum for the dead, and a site of sanctuary and refuge for commoners who had broken laws or warriors who had been defeated. It suffered damage in the Japanese tsunami of 2011, when storm surges toppled ancient walls, flooded ponds, and closed roads. That catastrophic event saw waves reach more than three feet above the current sea level, giving archaeologists a brief glimpse of the higher waters that may soon become routine.

Although the future of the past looks bleak, both teams of archaeologists agree that not all hope is lost. They call for increased coastal surveys so that researchers can better document vulnerable sites. Once sites are located, time and resources should be focused on excavating or recording those most in danger.

Finally, archaeologists must continue to improve how we share our findings. Both Anderson and his team and McCoy relied on preexisting GISs that were not built with climate change in mind. Nonetheless, having information about sites’ locations available in a single, centralized database allowed them to address this new problem. Resources like ArchSite in New Zealand and DINAA in the US mean that large-scale issues like climate change can be responded to in an organized, well-informed manner. They deserve more funding and recognition.

Ironically, it may be a technology of the 21st century like online, open-source GISs that allows us to save our past from the devastation of climate change.

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The most important things my 95-year-old mother taught me

This story first appeared on Food 52, an online community that gives you everything you need for a happier kitchen and home – that means tested recipes, a shop full of beautiful products, a cooking hotline, and everything in between!

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. We had fruit trees in our suburban Southern California backyard—nectarines, apricots, and plums. We ate loads of them in the summer, mostly out of hand, but sometimes cut up in fruit salads. Judging from my school lunches and so many of our snacks, crudités were one of my mother's specialties, although I didn’t know the word “crudités” until I was nearly 20 and had been to France.

I knew that we ate a little differently from most of my friends. We weren’t super observant Jews, and we lived in the non-Jewish suburbs east of Los Angeles, but we ate bagels, lox, and cream cheese, seedy Jewish ryes, pumpernickel, and pickled herring. There might be cold beet borscht on a scorching day. Imagine inviting your (Baptist!) best friend to Sunday lunch for a blood red soup that turned Pepto-Bismol pink with sour cream stirred in.

Another Sunday lunch might be bowls of cottage cheese, sour cream, cucumbers, tomatoes, chopped scallions, radishes, smoked fish, bread, olives, etc., to be assembled into a custom salad on your plate. I later discovered this to be a sort of Israeli salad. We ate sardines on toast with raw onions and didn’t think anchovies were disgusting. We always had a green salad for dinner, which was always dressed with vinaigrette, but we called it “oil and vinegar” because “vinaigrette” was another word we didn’t know yet.

My mother didn’t love to cook, and always opted for simplicity, but she knew what was good.

She taught me how to order a chocolate ice cream soda properly — that is, with chocolate ice cream, not just chocolate syrup. She knew that the best éclairs were filled with custard, not cream. She prefers strawberry shortcakes made with biscuits, not sponge cake.

She taught me to put sauerkraut and/or pickles on a hot dog. Her coleslaw was tangy, made with lemon juice and a pinch of sugar, never mayonnaise. I make mine tangy, too, often spicy — but never with mayo. She loved (and still loves) a good BLT (no mayo). We ate sliced avocados on toast with salt an pepper and a generous squeeze of lemon juice — well before it was called “avocado toast.” My mother was never, and is not, an assertive woman—a bone of contention with us to this day — but she taught me how to order things with other things on the side — and to hold the mayo.

Mayonnaise was the enemy!

There were no deviled egg or egg salad sandwiches at our house, or curried (or any goopy) chicken salad, either. Artichokes were eaten with melted butter (not mayo). Hamburgers where slathered with ketchup and/or mustard. Other kids’ tuna sandwiches were super squishy with mayo, and I was a little envious of how they always stayed intact. Mine had chunks of tuna straight from the can, not even mashed up (!) — chunks that fell in into my lap along with the pickle pieces when you tried to take a bite. Mother!!! To her credit, she falls off her chair laughing when I recount the tuna sandwich story.

She told me that her mother didn’t teach her anything about food or cooking, and there wasn’t even any peanut butter in her childhood. This is her version of “you kids don’t know how lucky you are.” She likes us to know we were lucky to have grown up with peanut butter, and with a dad like our dad. She still loves peanut butter and definitely misses my father. But she still doesn’t like mayo.

Most memories of my mother include shopping and/or lunch. The grandest version of this took place at Bullock's department store in Pasadena. Ladies wore gloves and hats there. I wore a dress, though under most other circumstances, my mother insisted jeans and a white T-shirt were perfectly respectable, as long as they were clean. Lunch was served in the palm-themed “Coral Room,” and our favorite thing to order was the Shrimp and Crab Salad. I remember it as a “Louis” (pronounced “looey”) Salad, because my mother and I still love a good Louis, and have eaten scores of them over the years. However, a quick Google search turned up a historic Bullocks menu that proves otherwise. Regardless, my mother taught me how to order it—and many other things—with dressing on the side. I passed this valuable lesson on to my own daughter, who mastered it at an early age. The salad in question came in a giant ceramic scallop shell. To an eight-year-old in her best dress, it was grand indeed—certainly bigger than her head! We behaved like “ladies” and had a very nice time.

Mom and I managed to shop and lunch through some rocky teen years. Fed up with the world and high school in particular, I marched off campus in a huff one day and headed for home without a note or hall pass. Two blocks out, I spotted my mother driving in the opposite direction! It never occurred to me to hide behind a tree. My mother pulled the 58 Chevy to the curb and inquired as to my plans. I told her I’d had “just about enough” that day. She said: “Let’s go shopping and have lunch.”

I took my 83-year-old mother to Italy for three weeks after my dad died.

No matter what was going on, or who was grumpy or annoyed (always me, never her), we always had a good time at the table or with a glass of wine in hand. We had our ups and downs. Literally. After ignoring my demand that she stay on the train until I got all of the luggage off, she picked up a bag and fell off the train. She then had marvelous “conversations” with the ambulance attendants (who spoke no English) en route to the hospital, and with the charming doctor who set her broken wrist—he turned out to have studied a bit of English with a writer friend of mine in the area. These were her first words after the cast was on: “We don’t have to go home now, do we?”

To her credit, once again, my mother remembers nothing less than the most wonderful trip. We both remember the pork sandwich. Strolling the market in a tiny town, I spied a food truck with a whole roasted pig on a spit. Sandwiches were being made. “Mommy, I think that’s something we need to eat.” We sidled up and ordered two, watched the guy slice meat from the beast, and put it in the rolls. There was no secret sauce (or mayo), no lettuce, tomato, pickle, or what-have-you. Just meat and bread. Secretly, I thought, “What could be so great about this?” She might have been thinking the same thing. We continued our stroll, munching our sandwiches. After a while, I realized that neither of us had spoken in a long time. We were just both in porchetta heaven.

At 95, my mother still loves to go out for lunch. We recently stopped in a favorite spot for a glass of Primativo and handmade pizza with anchovies and fresh mozzarella. Actually, my mother has recently and reluctantly sworn off the Primativo (and all wine), in the hope it will improve her balance. I’ve introduced her to kombucha instead. So the Primativo was for me. It arrived in a perfectly elegant, but stemless, wine glass. I really (really!) prefer wine in stemmed glasses, but I didn’t say a word. My mother opined that she always thought wine tasted better in a stemmed glass, too.

I guess I am my mother’s daughter.

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Why pregnant women with depression often slip through the cracks

Gajus via Shutterstock

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Judy’s first pregnancy was planned, and she was looking forward to having a baby. Yet, halfway through the pregnancy, something changed. She began to feel down and bad about herself. She had less energy and struggled to concentrate. Thinking this was a normal part of pregnancy, she ignored it.

After she delivered her son, it all got worse. She felt as if she was in a black hole of sadness. She often gave her son to her mother, thinking he was better off without her. It wasn’t until a year and a half later, when she came out of the depression on her own, that she realized that she had not been herself.

Judy is a composite figure, based on the thousands of women for whom we have cared for or met during our clinical work and research. Her story demonstrates the profound impact that depression can have on mothers and their children.

Having a baby can be extraordinarily challenging. Women are extremely vulnerable to emotional changes during pregnancy and the year after delivery. In fact, depression is the most common complication of pregnancy. But women often have absolutely no idea they have depression, nor do anyone in their circle of influence, including their medical providers.

We believe there’s a missed opportunity to address depression in obstetric and pediatric settings: settings in which women are seen often during pregnancy and the year after birth. Women like Judy often drown in their illness, without anyone ever speaking to them about the possibility of depression. How and why does the health care system let this happen?

Untreated depression

One in 7 women experience depression during pregnancy and after birth. Depression negatively impacts mothers, children and families. It can affect birth outcomes, the way moms bond with their baby and can affect children’s mental health later in life.

When untreated, depression can also lead to tragic outcomes, including suicide or infanticide. In fact, suicide is the leading cause of death among postpartum women with depression.

This illness is also costly. One case of untreated depression

is estimated to cost over US$22,000 annually per mother and baby pair.

Despite being a common illness with profound negative effects, most depression among pregnant and postpartum women goes unrecognized and untreated. Of the 4 million women who give birth in the U.S. every year, about 14 percent will experience depression. At least 80 percent will not generally get treatment.

There’s historically been no system in place to detect depression or help women get care. But professional societies and policymakers are starting to recommend screenings, while medical practices are beginning to integrate depression into obstetric and pediatric care.

This is a great first step. However, screening is not enough. After screening, the health system must ensure women get appropriately diagnosed and treated. Unfortunately, many providers aren’t trained or equipped with the proper resources to help women with depression, or may be reluctant to do so.

MCPAP for Moms

In response to this need, our team is working on integrating depression into obstetric care in our state.

Our Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, launched in July 2014, helps front line medical providers screen for and treat depression and other mental health concerns among pregnant and postpartum women.

MCPAP for Moms provides training and toolkits for providers, as well as telephone and face-to-face psychiatric consultation. For example, Judy’s obstetric provider could call MCPAP for Moms and talk to a psychiatrist to get guidance on how to treat, and with consultation, decide on a treatment plan that would include therapy. MCPAP for Moms also offers resources directly to women with ongoing mental health care.

Every provider in Massachusetts can access our services free of charge. MCPAP for Moms is funded through the MA Department of Mental Health. It also offers access to mental health care to pregnant and postpartum women in Massachusetts for less than $1 per month per woman. We are now evaluating how the program has affected outcomes for the more than 4,000 patients directly served since launch.

Two other states, Washington and Wisconsin, are starting programs like MCPAP for Moms, and 17 others are seeking funding. Especially exciting, next year’s federal budget includes grant money for other states to establish such programs. We envision a health care system where all providers caring for pregnant and postpartum women are armed with the resources they need to support women with depression.

Tiffany Moore Simas, Associate Professor of Obstetrics-Gynecology and Pediatrics, University of Massachusetts Medical School and Nancy Byatt, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Obstetrics & Gynecology, University of Massachusetts Medical School

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Growing California rice and almonds against the grain

Massa Organics/Civil Eats

This story first appeared on Civil Eats.

In his now-weathered, century-old diary, Manuel Fonseca penned an entry in Portuguese about the many challenges he faced as a new immigrant trying to grow rice in California’s Sacramento Valley. Fonseca planted his first crop in 1916 and found himself wrestling with an alarming number of weeds in the paddies.

Despite the challenges, the farm survived, and three generations and a century later, his great-grandson Greg Massa is still growing rice, along with his wife Raquel Krach. Although Greg’s father, Manuel Massa Jr., opted to use herbicides, Greg has chosen to farm organically, meaning he’s facing the same weeds as his great-grandfather, which are difficult to remove once he floods his fields with nourishing waters.

“We farm organically because we think spraying poison on food and on our environment is wrong,” Massa says. But being an organic rice farm has been anything but easy, requiring Massa and Krach to employ an arsenal of farming techniques: crop rotation, cover crops, field preparation, timely planting, and deep water followed by drought stress to restrain weeds.

Read more Civil Eats: What Does Climate Change Mean for Vermont’s Maple Sugarers?

“Rice is difficult to grow organically with modern varieties that were bred for high inputs of nitrogen and herbicides to kill weeds,” Massa explains. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve tried using goats, mowing, and spraying vinegar with limited success.”

Set on 200 verdant acres in Hamilton City, Massa Organics farms rice, almonds, sheep, and pigs. Sandwiched between two majestic national forests, the Mendocino and the Plumas, with the Sacramento River at its feet, Massa Organics is 15 miles from the university town of Chico.

Massa Organics’ rice fields after a winter rain.

Though rice, which Massa sells to restaurants in town, is its primary selling staple, the farm also sells its grass-fed ground lamb at the Chico farmers’ market and raw nonpareil almonds, jars of almond butter, lamb, and pork to farmers’ markets in the Bay Area

In a rice industry dominated by larger producers like Lundberg (which does its own conservation work), Massa Organics is the rare independent brand selling directly to its customers through markets, CSAs, and small retail stores using social media as a marketing tool. Rarer still is the Massa approach to farming as a means of ecological work. The couple views each crop as part of a fully functioning ecosystem — the rice as part of a pond ecosystem and the almonds part of a woodland ecosystem—that relies on biodiversity and natural relationships for crop health.

An Ecological approach to farming

Massa and Krach both have Masters’ degrees in ecology and moved to the farm in 1997 with hopes of re-thinking his family’s approach to conventional commodity farming. Though they could have entered academia, the pair was inspired by Krach’s agroecology research on Costa Rican tropical tree plantations growing right next to rainforests without harming them.

“I was doing my research on this actual plantation and thought, ‘This is kind of weird that I’m doing this in a research-based situation when we have a real farm,’” Krach says. Hoping to engage in applied ecology that made an immediate difference, she convinced Massa they could convert his family farm into a living experiment.

“We chose organic farming as a means of doing conservation work because our methods promote biodiversity by mimicking natural ecosystems,” Massa says.

Snow geese spend a winter morning on the farm in this photo from a drone flying over Massa’s fields.

Like Massa’s ancestors, he and Krach chose to farm medium-grain Calrose rice, a versatile variety bred specifically to flourish in California. The result is a sweet, nutty brown rice high in fiber and taste that Charles Phan, executive chef at the renowned San Francisco restaurant The Slanted Door, serves and swears by. But its taste isn’t the only reason that Massa and Krach chose Calrose over jasmine and basmati varieties.

Read more Civil Eats: Adding Crushed Volcanic Rock to Farm Soil Could Boost Crops—and Slow Global Warming

“Small farmers in Thailand sell a little jasmine rice, and they’re reliant on that for their income,” Massa said. “Many generations of Thai farmers worked to select jasmine rice to make it what it is. We decided early on we were not going to grow jasmine or basmati because it felt too much like stealing their genetic heritage.”

Soon after taking over, Massa and Krach began to transition the land to organic, eventually diversifying the operation, adding almonds, wheat, and several heritage breeds of animals to the mix. By 2002, the rice operation was certified, and the rest followed over the course of the next eight years. Today, their whole operation is certified organic.

Creating a natural woodland environment

Integrating heritage animal breeds — Dorper sheep, Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, and Berkshire pigs — has been an important way to improve the farm’s ecological footprint as well.

Some of Massa Organics’ piglets.

Krach and Massa have pioneered a natural grazing pattern for their sheep, converting their 30-acre almond orchard into a natural woodland. Every morning, and sometimes in the afternoons, Massa and Krach move an electric fence to cover a different 6,000- to 8,000-square foot area, guiding 100 Dorper sheep and lambs to a new patch of orchard.

Mimicking the ancient patterns of pack herbivores like pronghorn antelope, the sheep graze happily on perennials and other grasses. In the process, the herd replicates a natural woodland ecosystem—one that consists of mature trees, understory plants, large mammals, small mammals, birds, and insects all living in symbiosis that serve the crops well.

The woodland environment attracts beneficial insects that protect against pests, and the grazing animals naturally remove weeds, fertilize the almond trees with their waste, and create a richer soil for insects and thus a richer food source for birds.

Massa and Krach pasture their 120 pigs as well. In addition to creating natural fertilizer, Krach says the pigs provide a plowing function for the farmers, digging up stubborn weeds, and are mostly fed rice, wheat, safflower, and hay that is grown on the farm. “They’re part of the cycle,” she says. “If they tear up the ground, we can just plow it and move them out.”

Agriculture is intricately connected to the larger web of life for the pair. “Everything we do with the animals is totally counter to mass production,” Krach says. “Letting them live like they should is the only way we can imagine.”

Spring is a lively time for Krach, as she manages their animal operations. Most of the 45 ewes are pregnant this time of year and hungrily mow down the tall grasses by at least a foot over three or four hours in the field. Krach finds it hard to go inside when she’s standing in three-foot grass watching her ewes and 11 lambs, the babies frolicking in a beautiful pink sunset.

Sheep before an approaching storm.

“It’s pretty idyllic,” Krach says. “It’s hard work, but raising the sheep is fun, and it’s lambing time, so I can’t get enough of them.”

Soon, the lambs will go to the farmers’ market to be sold. Krach sees letting the animals go as part of the cycle and hopes to educate omnivores about where their meat comes from. “We hope we can teach people and they can learn about [how we raise animals] by knowing our farm or buying our products,” she says.

Water limitations and an ecological lifestyle

Almonds, like meat, have often gotten a bad rap as a water-thirsty crop in drought-ridden California. But as an almond farmer, Massa sees much of that response as scapegoating.

“Yes, it takes some water to grow [almonds], but if you look at what you get out of these nuts, [it’s worth it],” he says. “They’re really full of health benefits — they can regulate your blood sugar and hold your hunger at bay for several hours. I’d challenge you to find another crop that could do that.”

Greg says rice used to have a similarly bad rap. “In terms of water used per serving, rice can be pretty good. Lots of crops use a lot of water, and in most of California, you can’t dry-farm everything.”

150 tons of compost to be spread on the Massa almond orchards.

With two water-intensive crops, Massa Organics is fortunately situated just a few hundred yards from the Sacramento River near its intersection with Stony Creek. Half the land is in an irrigation district with water rights from the river, and the other half of their water comes from what Greg called “very good groundwater,” with minimal sinking of the ground.

Massa and Krach’s dedication to ecology and conservation — a view of the bigger picture that goes far beyond profits—has also inspired innovation. They live in a well-insulated, energy-efficient rice straw-bale farmhouse, use solar panels to provide approximately 90 percent of the farm’s energy, and use biodiesel made from vegetable oil they recycle from local restaurants to power most of the farm’s vehicles.

“Our background in ecology directs everything we do on the land,” Massa says. “We’re always looking to stack enterprises, integrate processes, grow new things, and grow them better.”

Photos courtesy of Massa Organics.

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I want your (anonymized) social media data

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Social media sites’ responses to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and new European privacy regulations have given users much more control over who can access their data, and for what purposes. To me, as a social media user, these are positive developments: It’s scary to think what these platforms could do with the troves of data available about me. But as a researcher, increased restrictions on data sharing worry me.

I am among the many scholars who depend on data from social media to gain insights into people’s actions. In a rush to protect individuals’ privacy, I worry that an unintended casualty could be knowledge about human nature. My most recent work, for example, analyzes feelings people express on Twitter to explain why the stock market fluctuates so much over the course of a single day. There are applications well beyond finance. Other scholars have studied mass transit rider satisfaction, emergency alert systems’ function during natural disasters and how online interactions influence people’s desire to lead healthy lifestyles.

This poses a dilemma – not just for me personally, but for society as a whole. Most people don’t want social media platforms to share or sell their personal information, unless specifically authorized by the individual user. But as members of a collective society, it’s useful to understand the social forces at work influencing everyday life and long-term trends. Before the recent crises, Facebook and other companies had already been making it hard for legitimate researchers to use their data, including by making it more difficult and more expensive to download and access data for analysis. The renewed public pressure for privacy means it’s likely to get even tougher.

Using social media data in research

It’s definitely alarming to consider the prospect that people or companies might analyze my data and find ways to influence me to make decisions I might not otherwise – or that are even counter to my own best interests. I need think only of the number of times I’ve seen a TV ad for pizza during a sporting event and ordered a pizza.

That’s the point of marketing, of course – but social media is different because the information is about me specifically. And using that information can affect much more than what food I buy, such as whom I vote for. However, as a researcher in finance, I also recognize that the same data can be used to help us understand collective behaviors that are otherwise impossible to explain.

Some of my research, for example, explores short-term trends in stock prices. Financial experts have found that over the long term, a company’s stock prices are driven by the firm’s future value. Yet over the course of any single day, stock prices can vary widely. Many finance researchers and financial analysts will tell you that these movements are meaningless noise, seemingly random pieces of information about companies influencing investors’ perceptions and causing stock prices to vary constantly.

But by analyzing social media data, I can actually understand what that noise is, where it comes from and what it means. For instance, what people write on Twitter about the new iPhone will affect Apple’s stock price, sometimes within minutes – but even over the course of days. The speed of the effect depends on the importance or prominence of the person sending the tweet, as well as how quickly others – including the media – pick up the message.

Results from my research can help investors fine-tune when and how they enter the market. If, for example, social media users believe that the newest iPhone will not be as good as expected, investors might hold off on their investment in Apple stock. That could free them up to invest in something else with better buzz, in hopes of higher returns.

Anonymizing data

It’s true – and concerning – that some presumably unethical people have tried to use social media data for their own benefit. But the data are not the actual problem, and cutting researchers’ access to data is not the solution. Doing so would also deprive society of the benefits of social media analysis.

Fortunately, there is a way to resolve this dilemma. Anonymization of data can keep people’s individual privacy intact, while giving researchers access to collective data that can yield important insights.

There’s even a strong model for how to strike that balance efficiently: the U.S. Census Bureau. For decades, that government agency has collected extremely personal data from households all across the country: ages, employment status, income levels, Social Security numbers and political affiliations. The results it publishes are very rich, but also not traceable to any individual.

It often is technically possible to reverse anonymity protections on data, using multiple pieces of anonymized information to identify the person they all relate to. The Census Bureau takes steps to prevent this.

For instance, when members of the public access census data, the Census Bureau restricts information that is likely to identify specific individuals, such as reporting there is just one person in a community with a particularly high- or low-income level.

For researchers the process is somewhat different, but provides significant protections both in law and in practice. Scholars have to pass the Census Bureau’s vetting process to make sure they are legitimate, and must undergo training about what they can and cannot do with the data. The penalties for violating the rules include not only being barred from using census data in the future, but also civil fines and even criminal prosecution.

Even then, what researchers get comes without a name or Social Security number. Instead, the Census Bureau uses what it calls “protected identification keys,” a random number that replaces data that would allow researchers to identify individuals.

Each person’s data is labeled with his or her own identification key, allowing researchers to link information of different types. For instance, a researcher wanting to track how long it takes people to complete a college degree could follow individuals’ education levels over time, thanks to the identification keys.

Social media platforms could implement a similar anonymization process instead of increasing hurdles – and cost – to access their data. They could assign users identification numbers instead of sharing their real identities, and could agree to government regulations defining who could get access to what data, including real penalties for violating the rules. Then researchers could discover the insights offered by social media use, just like they do with census data, without threatening people’s privacy.

Anthony Sanford, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Washington

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Meet Mary Anning, a fossil hunter who changed the way we think about the history of life on Earth

AP/Francois Mori

This article originally appeared on Massive

Whenever we think about the origins of evolutionary biology, paleontology, and geology, we’re inevitably drawn to 19th century figures like Charles Darwin, Georges Cuvier – the founder of vertebrate paleontology – and Charles Lyell, who changed our understanding of Earth’s history. Unsurprisingly for the time, all these giants of science were men. Any woman who wanted to participate in the scientific world had to do so behind the scenes, which often meant they didn’t get the credit they deserved for major breakthroughs and discoveries.

Such was the case of Mary Anning, who discovered dinosaur fossils near her home in England at a time before anyone knew what dinosaurs were. Her discoveries sparked decades of debate on how old life on our planet really was, how fossil organisms originated and eventually disappeared, and ultimately how humans fit into this menagerie of life. Anning, whose 219th birthday passed on May 21, never achieved much recognition or compensation for her work during her own lifetime. But she’s come to be regarded by her many admirers as ‘the greatest fossilist the world ever knew.’

A family business

Anning’s story began with a tragedy and a stroke of luck. Before her birth, her father, Richard Anning, relocated to the town of Lyme Regis, England, where he started a part-time career selling fossils. Lyme Regis is situated along a series of steep cliffs made up of stratified clay and limestone deposits, called blue lias for its blue-gray hue. The clay is highly unstable, especially when wet, and is actively being eroded by ocean waves and coastal storms. Between 150 and 200 million years ago, when Pangaea was just beginning to split apart, the region was a shallow shelf beneath an ever-widening sea, the sea floor serving as a burial ground for the bones and shells of creatures that eventually found their way there. By combing the beach with a chisel and hammer, Richard Anning could easily unearth mollusks and crustaceans that had been entombed in shale since the time of the dinosaurs.

When the Anning children — Mary and her brother, Joseph — were older, their father took them out fossil hunting with him, much to their mother’s chagrin. The cliff sides were a dangerous place, prone to rockslides due to the unstable layers of clay within. The apprehension was not misplaced: while traveling to a nearby town to sell his fossils, Richard Anning lost his footing and tumbled down a cliff side. While the fall wasn’t initially fatal, his health waned over the next two years, culminating in his death in the autumn of 1810, leaving his daughter bereft of the principle guiding force that had shaped her childhood. But the love of natural history that had been instilled would remain with her for the rest of her life.

A girl and her fantastic beast

The years directly after Richard Anning’s death were bleak; he’d left the family of three with £120 of debt, a staggering sum at the time. With no reliable source of income, the family had to rely on parish support, a type of welfare at the time, just to avoid starvation. At age 15, Joseph Anning was apprenticed to an upholsterer in town, which meant his time as an avid fossil hunter was coming to an end. But before he completely turned all his energy toward his apprenticeship, he made the discovery of a lifetime. While looking through exposed rock along the shore, he came across what appeared to be the massive skull of an alligator. But without time to invest in looking for the rest of the fossilized remains, he asked his sister to undertake the search instead.

She searched the nearby cliffs for a year without any luck, a dogged pursuit that underscores her tenacity, even as a young girl. It wasn’t until a fierce storm wore down the exposed clay and limestone that part of the creature’s body was revealed. After months of ensuing excavation, and with the help of a few locals she’d managed to enlist, Anning unearthed a 17-foot-long fossil with an elongated neck, flippers, and a vertebra that had more in common with modern lizards than it did with fish. The specimen was sold to the owner of the land where it had been found. While this was only the third such fossil to be discovered, it was the landowner’s decision to then sell it to the London Museum that made it the most important.

Most scientists, and almost all laymen, at the time believed the Earth was created by a benevolent God less than 6,000 years ago, one that would never have allowed for extinction. In fact, one of the underlying reasons Thomas Jefferson ordered the Louis and Clark expedition was so they could bring back evidence of living mammoths, whose fossils he had adorned the White House with during his tenure as president. Anning’s ichthyosaur, Greek for ‘fish’ and ‘lizard,’ was another bit of a growing body of evidence that would prove conventional knowledge wrong.

The greatest fossil hunter the world ever knew

For the next two decades, Anning excavated several extinct organisms from the blue lias, including a new species of pterosaur (the only other fossil had been discovered a few years prior in Germany), a never-before-discovered species of aquatic reptile called a plesiosaur, which had an extremely long neck capped by a minuscule skull, as well as different specimens of extinct fish and several invertebrate fossils.

Despite her immense contribution to science, as a woman in 19th-century England, Anning was never allowed to publish on her own. The scientists who did publish on her discoveries, most of whom she was had personal friendships with, almost never acknowledged Mary in either their papers or speeches.

Still, Mary Anning became well-known during her lifetime, even if — as Charles Dickens would later note — some in her hometown valued her only as bait for tourists and distinguished guests. The researchers who knew her best, even if they gave her short shrift when it came to recognition, always made sure she was never left wanting and could pursue her digs without the fear of financial ruin.

But in her mid-40s, when she should have been at the height of her powers, she developed breast cancer, which she lived with for two years before it ultimately claimed her life at age 47. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, Anning is receiving the recognition she deserves in scientific circles as someone who helped change the way we think about life on Earth.

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Suspension of California’s aid-in-dying law leaves terminally ill patients in limbo

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This article originally appeared on Kaiser Health News.

This article originally appeared on Kaiser Health News.

Dozens of terminally ill patients in California who counted on using the state’s medical aid-in-dying law may be in limbo for a month after a court ruling that suspended the 2016 measure.

A judge who ruled in May that the law was improperly enacted refused to vacate that decision at the request of advocates last week. Riverside County Superior Court Judge Daniel Ottolia set a hearing for June 29, however, to consider a separate motion by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra to reverse the decision.

Opponents cheered what they hope will be the end of a law they’ve fought from the day it was passed. Compassion & Choices, an advocacy group that promotes aid-in-dying, filed a notice of appeal late Friday and asked Becerra to uphold the group’s legal opinion that their appeal would trigger a stay of Ottolia’s judgment. Such a stay would reinstate the law pending further court action. Becerra did not immediately respond to the group, or to requests for comment.

For an estimated 200 patients who had already started the process of hastening their deaths, the decision has sparked confusion and fear, said Kat West, Compassion & Choices’ national policy director.

As of May 30, doctors had stopped writing prescriptions for the lethal medications and pharmacists had stopped filling them, leaving patients uncertain how to proceed, she said.

Dr. Lonny Shavelson, a Berkeley, Calif., physician whose practice focuses on aid-in-dying, said more than a dozen of his patients have been directly affected by the suspension.

“These are patients who are in various stages of the process, all the way from a first verbal request to those about to get the medication,” he said.

They include Debbie Gatzek Kratter, 69, a lawyer from Half Moon Bay, Calif., diagnosed last year with terminal pancreatic cancer, who has planned to take the drugs when her suffering becomes too great.

Knowing she had the choice has helped her tolerate the disease, but the suspension has made her “very uncomfortable,” she said.

Debbie Gatzek Kratter, a lawyer diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, plans to use California’s medical aid-in-dying law when her suffering becomes intolerable. The 2016 law has been suspended pending a court review.

Kratter said she is considering moving to Washington state, where medical aid-in-dying remains legal, or flying to Switzerland, where physician-assisted death is allowed. Others may choose grimmer options, she said.

“This has the feeling to me of the coat-hanger abortion,” she said. “People are going to try to take things into their own hands in bad ways.”

But opponents of what’s sometimes called assisted suicide said the suspension “now opens the door to a discussion about how to better care for people at the end of their lives.”

“Halting the law likewise has the benefit of protecting a great many vulnerable people against deadly harm through mistakes, abuse and coercion — risks that go hand in hand with this type of dangerous public policy,” Matt Valliere, executive director of the group Patients Rights Action Fund, said in a statement.

California’s End of Life Option Act took effect nearly two years ago. It allowed terminally ill adults to request lethal medications from their doctors through a process that requires verbal and written requests at least 15 days apart. The practice is also permitted in six other states and Washington, D.C.

More than 100 people used California’s law in the first six months after it was enacted, according to state health officials. Hundreds more are estimated to have used it since then, though no official reports have been issued. Shavelson said he has received more than 600 requests and attended 87 deaths since the law took effect.

Several groups, including the Life Legal Defense Foundation and the American Academy of Medical Ethics, challenged the law, saying it failed to protect elderly, infirm and vulnerable patients. In mid-May, Ottolia upheld the groups’ motion that the law was unconstitutional because legislators improperly passed it during a special session limited to health care issues.

“Even the strongest proponents of assisted suicide should be gravely concerned about the lack of safeguards and protection in the law that was found to be unconstitutionally enacted by the Legislature,” Stephen Larson, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an email.

Compassion & Choices challenged that decision May 30 on behalf of two terminally ill patients and a treating physician, but Ottolia rejected their motion. However, Ottolia granted a request from Becerra to consider a separate motion on the same matter June 29.

That leaves patients and doctors without clear answers for at least a month, Shavelson said.

Among the questions: If Shavelson accepts a patient’s first verbal request now, will it count toward the waiting period? Will patients who used previously obtained medications have their deaths classified as suicides, rather than as a result of their underlying illness, as required by the law? Would doctors who provide the lethal drugs be legally liable?

For actively dying patients, even a temporary pause in the law could have a profound — and permanent — effect, Shavelson added.

“They are sick, home on oxygen, at home on hospice, in pain, wondering how they’re going to die,” he said. “I have to tell them, ‘We don’t know.’”

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The “hurricane show” and the perils of poor planning

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Think of it as "hurricane porn": Every June, Americans from Texas to Maine, with a mixture of nervousness and low-grade thrill, tune to this year’s hurricane forecasts of what the season is supposed to bring. We lap up images of last summer’s storms: newscasters bent double by the wind, howling into their mics, splintered houses in Texas, flooded cars in Puerto Rico.

Forecasters at Colorado State University now predict the 2018 season will bring us 14 named storms, including six hurricanes and two major hurricanes. This outlook is somewhat worse than 2017’s, for which 11 tropical storms were foretold, with four apt to grow into hurricanes.

Climate scientists agree that, due to warming sea temperatures caused by the greenhouse effect, hurricanes on average will inexorably grow more frequent, more vicious. One meteorologist, Michael Mann of Penn State, calls for adding a sixth category to the Saffir-Simpson scale that normally measures hurricane strength on a scale of 1 to 5, to take into account the stronger storms.

Already, even before the season officially started on June 1, the first named tropical storm of 2018 — Alberto — rampaged through Cuba and the American South, unleashing heavy rains and winds and killing 12 people.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that as we watch storm coverage, in the back of our minds we nag at ourselves to prepare: to stock up on flashlight batteries, drinking water, canned food. Dr. Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at University of Pennsylvania, might view this as reassuring behavior, typical of what he calls “Homo prospectus,” or the “planning human.” Humans are the only beings capable of non-instinctive planning, he asserts. Chimps, for example, don’t look much beyond the next banana. Orangutans don’t hoard batteries.

But where hurricanes are concerned, “Homo prospectus” is a joke. In fact, long-range hurricane predictions, and our reactions to them, suggest that the idea of humans as efficient planners is largely misguided. As a species we’re certainly able to speculate as far into the future as you like, but when it comes to actual, concrete planning, our behavior tends to be hopelessly short-term: an electronically mediated version of the “fight or flight” reflex.

Here’s what Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who helped coordinate response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, told NPR about current U.S. efforts to plan for hurricanes: “You have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Right now we are hoping for the best and not planning for the worst.” He pointed out that Louisiana’s levees, overwhelmed by Katrina, were built only to control snowmelt-related flooding in the Mississippi and are still inadequate for today’s storms. “We have tried to put a Band-Aid on it to deal with the last disaster,” he says.

Take Houston, devastated last summer by Hurricane Harvey, which killed 88 and caused $125 billion worth of damage. Despite the area’s history of devastating hurricanes, between 1996 and 2010 the metropolis blithely trashed 54,000 acres of water-absorbing wetlands. After Hurricane Ike, in 2008, concerned Houstonians mooted an “Ike Dike,” a barrier that would control storm surge in the Houston/Galveston area. The idea was talked to death, and Congressional support proved hard to secure; even after Harvey, the barrier has not been greenlighted.

Patchwork defenses have emerged in sections of New York City devastated by “Superstorm” Sandy in 2012 — in particular the Rockaway Beach area in Queens — but most of the city is as vulnerable as ever. A project known as “the Big U,” a horseshoe-shaped system of barrier berms and walls designed to protect downtown Manhattan from storm surge, has stalled from lack of funding. If and when it finally gets built, “the Big U might actually be half a J,” according to Mark Treyger, chairman of the city’s “resiliency” committee. Should another Sandy strike this year, Wall Street brokers will once again need kayaks to get to work.

Typical of this blasé attitude to future disaster is Donald Trump’s decision, just 11 days before Hurricane Harvey, to kill mandatory flood-protection rules, ensuring that from now on all federally funded construction will prove inadequate to resist the stronger hurricanes coming down the pike.

And as for Puerto Rico — the U.S. can’t even repair what’s left of the island after last year’s Hurricane Maria, let alone implement preventive measures. Recent revisions of the commonwealth’s hurricane-related death toll, from 64 (the U.S. government’s number) to somewhere between 793 and 8,498, starkly highlight how irresponsible, even criminal, is the country’s reluctance to take forceful preventive measures against hurricanes.

Why this lousy record on long-range planning for the one ape who supposedly looks ahead? A facet of behavioral economics provides a clue. Known as “hyperbolic discounting,” it describes how humans prefer immediate payoffs: basically, if we’re given the choice between $50 today and $100 in six months, we’ll take the 50 bucks now. If this is extrapolated to planning, we might well devote more energy to the immediate rewards of buying flashlight batteries than to the far greater benefits of building levees to fend off a devastating hurricane surge, and attendant power outages, five or 20 years hence.

How our perceptive systems are set up might also sap our ability to plan long-term. We assume that what we see, hear, touch, taste and smell reflects an accurate scan of our environment, but in fact the perceptive part of our brain spends equivalent energy looking for stuff it recognizes — what it’s seen before — as it does scanning for the truly new. The visual cortex of monkeys, for example, uses bandwidths of around 60 Hz to receive visual information; at the same time, it orders the brain to look for previously recognized shapes on frequencies of 10 to 20 Hz, according to research by Charles Gilbert of Rockefeller University. The same sort of informational trade-off applies to the human auditory system.

What this means, in terms of hurricane planning, is that we have an easier job looking for last year’s storm, which we clearly survived, than trying to imagine the deadlier but unknown storms that scientists tell us must inevitably come as a result of global warming and the overall rise in ocean levels.

But — what about the Dutch?

The Netherlands is famously prone to storm-related flooding, since a quarter of its territory lies below current sea levels and half of the country is highly prone to seawater intrusion. Ever since a devastating storm in 1953, which killed 1,800 people, the country has devoted enormous time and effort to preventive measures, through a binary system that pairs building giant dikes, high dunes and storm-surge barriers with deepening rivers and catchment areas in case there is a breach.

Are the Dutch, then, immune to hyperbolic discounting and the desensitizing effects of feedback?

Probably not. But their example illustrates one way forward. Flood control in Holland is run by 22 small, independent, local “water boards” (waterschappen), with an average of 500 employees per board, that assess danger and plan counteractive measures. They are funded by both local and national taxes; in a country of 17 million people, most of whom live in or near a flood zone, there are far fewer agencies, industries and lobbyists to brake proactive decision-making.

So the Dutch might have a lesson for us: The first step to adequate hurricane planning in the U.S. is to give generous funding and power to small groups, at the local level — where the storm hits first and hardest — so they can take immediate, site-specific action against what inevitably must come.

And don’t forget those flashlight batteries.

* * *

George Michelsen Foy is the author of  "Run the Storm: A Savage Hurricane, a Brave Crew, and the Wreck of the SS El Faro" (Scribner, May 2018).

 

Why cable news networks could use a reality check

AP/Richard Drew

Read more articles from the DC Report here.

You have to steel yourself to listen to television news and cable talk shows about politics. The idea of just checking in to see if America has started a trade war with its allies or just testing whether there are developments that will shape your day is gone.

What’s left is the ash heap of culture wars in which no statement by any political figure on any position on any conceivable public interest topic can be taken at face value.

Instead, what we have are stick-figure spokespeople stuck out before the cameras either because they look good in the glare of lights or are unrattled by questions uttered almost before they can be thought through to produce spin that passes for news.

It was “news” yesterday that Trump is forgoing mastering much of the detail of nuclear weaponry development because “attitude” is more important than a true grip on the facts that will be twisted and re-twisted to gain an advantage in the talks. It was a perfect encapsulation of our times. It’s about the appearance of mastery, not actual mastery.

Those various news surveys that are seen from time to time to measure “negative” or “positive” views of the president’s time in office, for example, are not really measurements of “news.” Rather they are measurements of the amount of time that stick-figure heads bob up and down or left and right to fawn over the person who is president or to abase his flaws.

It would be healthier for all of us if cable news were simply to ignore Rudy Giuliani for a week or two at a time until he finally had something to say that represented an actual development in the legal team on behalf of his client, Trump. And a day without lawyer Michael Avenatti opining about the universe on behalf of his client, Stormy Daniels, would be a godsend.

The bad habits of offering an opinion in place of actual news, unfortunately, are growing broader and more commonplace. Even sports commentators feel a need to over-explain with their own views rather than just tell us what is going on with the interpretation of, say, an unfamiliar game regulation.

How is it “news” that Rudy Giuliani has an opinion about the value of women who work in porn, like Stormy Daniels? Yet, this discussion has gone on and on.

Dear cable folks: Please regain focus on what is news versus what is simply you blowing your way through tons of fog about what you think we should believe about society.

When former President Bill Clinton came away ham-handed after his televised responses this week to questions of his behavior when viewed in the context of the current #MeToo movement thinking, it was clear that Clinton has not fully evolved. We heard it. We saw it. We don’t need it repeated a thousand times over.

So, too, for the silliness of Trump asking the Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau whether “you guys” once tried to burn the White House well before Canada was a country. This is news?

It was news that Trump is on an intentional defensive warpath against the Special Counsel’s investigation. It was news that Trump canceled and then pursued the talks with North Korea. It was news that the FBI raids on Michael Cohen’s office, home and hotel have resulted in tons of non-protected, non-legal correspondence, phone calls, texts and other information that likely will not help Trump’s cases. I’ll even accept that it was news that Trump disinvited the champion Philadelphia Eagles from a celebration that they did not want. But Trump not remembering the words to God Bless America in his counter celebration was not news.

Making it worse are White House news sessions with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying virtually nothing about almost any issue of note. Tweets are weird, but fine as presidential statements, but Trump tweets are consistently misleading, if not outright lies. You need someone like Sanders to explain what is and isn’t meant.

It is bad enough that you specifically have to pick a channel to hear pro-Trump or anti-Trump news. I’m still enough of an information nut that I’d rather just hear how many jobs the economy was able to produce this month without all the covering lace to praise or attack the president. The president, in fact, has pretty much little effect over the actual creation of jobs, but our insistence on pushing people into left and right teams every day on every issue is annoyingly consistent.

As news consumers, we understand by now that we must triangulate among the various sources to get a sense of what actually is happening.

But the news media can make it awfully hard to remember which issues matter and which do not, which is too bad: That skill is at the heart of the journalistic effort.

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How to stop your babysitter from sexting, texting, and tweeting on the job

Robert Kneschke via Shutterstock

This post originally appeared on Common Sense Media.

It used to be that the worst thing a babysitter could do was raid the refrigerator. But this was before Snapchat, texting, social media, and emojis. Today's sitters sneak — or outright flaunt — something many of us parents don't know how to deal with: constant texting, Instagramming, You-Tube-watching, you name it. So how do you dole out the rules?

Of course, the most important thing is that your kids are safe while they're under someone else's care. You might think the worst could never happen to your kids, but mobile devices just make getting distracted even easier, and that can have tragic consequences. Less severe than a major accident, but still disturbing, would be finding out your babysitter texted all night and ignored your kids.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when talking to your babysitter about your digital rules:

Spell it out. Teen and young adult babysitters have grown up with mobile devices, so don't expect them to have the same relationship with their phones as you do. If you don't want your babysitter texting or tweeting while on the job, tell them explicitly.

You saw your baby on Instagram, now what? As much as phones are part of everyday life, so is sharing. Your babysitter might not think twice before taking photos of your kids doing something cute and posting it on Instagram. If this is something that doesn't feel right to you, let them know right off the bat.

Set screen rules. You're probably used to talking to your sitter about when the TV needs to go off, but don't forget to mention your rules around showing your kids videos or images from their phone. Most sitters probably have a sense of what is or isn't appropriate, but if you're in doubt, mention it.

Use tech wisely. Running a few minutes late getting home? Having an always-connected sitter can really come in handy when you want to send a quick text from a restaurant. Plus, the ability to send and receive photos can help you decide whether you need to cut a date night short if your sitter is reporting a weird rash or skinned knee.

You're the boss. Hiring "digital natives" to babysit means learning to speak their language, and helping them understand yours. While you might never think of texting your friends or updating your Facebook status while at work, you can't assume they feel the same. Once you've figured out your rules, you need to discuss them with the babysitter as a condition of the job. And while getting rid of a good sitter can be a heartbreaker, you need to be ready to take action if there's any iffy behavior -- whether it happens online, on the phone, or IRL.

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