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Jan. 2nd, 2010 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Hardships of a Nation Push Horses Out to Die
In this country of lush green landscapes, celebrated for its traditional love of horses and the generations of racing thoroughbreds it has bred to conquer the racetracks of the world, the Dunsink tip on the outskirts of the Irish capital is a place that wounds the heart.
Atop a muddy dome stretching over hundreds of windblown acres, bitingly cold in the bitterest early winter many here can remember, roam some of the tens of thousands of horses and ponies that have been abandoned amid Ireland’s financial nightmare. Only miles from the heart of Dublin, the tip, a former landfill now covered with a thin thatch of grass, is the end of the road for all but the hardiest animals, a place where death awaits from exposure, starvation, untended sickness and injury.
Beside a busy expressway, on one of the tip’s distant corners, mounds of fresh dirt mark the graves of the weakest horses, freed from suffering by animal welfare inspectors with .32-caliber pistol shots to their heads. Overhead, airliners climb out of Dublin’s international airport, where a plush new terminal matches Dublin’s sprawl of gleaming steel-and-glass buildings built for the investment tide of the boom years.
The distress among the country’s horses began showing up more than two years ago, when Ireland’s property boom collapsed. That was a grim marker on the road to the crunch that hit this month, when Ireland accepted a $90 billion international bailout package, pledged on the government’s promise of instituting the harshest austerity measures in Europe.
By rough economic estimates, the $20 billion in spending cuts and tax increases promised over the next four years by Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s government will lead to a 10 percent cut in the disposable income of Ireland’s middle class, and greater hardships still for many of the country’s poor. They will be hit by welfare cuts, public-sector job losses and a sharp reduction in the minimum wage, as well as a wider economic turndown, on top of the 15 percent shrinkage in the economy since 2008, if the emergency measures fail to restore economic growth.
But the horses that are such an enduring part of Irish culture are paying a price, too. For generations, keeping horses has been an Irish passion — for those who like to enter them in flat-racing, steeplechase and show-jumping competitions, for those who keep them for recreational occasions like hunts and equestrian events, and for still others who see horse ownership as a symbol of prosperity, much as other people find pleasure in owning luxury cars.
How many horses and ponies have been abandoned is a matter of informed guesswork. Irish laws require all owners to have their animals registered, and tagged with microchips for identification, but the laws have been only sporadically enforced. What is certain is that the boom years brought a rapid growth in breeding, and that tens of thousands of people who could not previously afford a horse or pony entered the market, many of them keeping their animals in gardens, on fenced-off building sites or on common land like the Dunsink tip.
With the economic downturn, many found that they could no longer afford to feed or stable the animals at costs that can run to $40 a day and more and abandoned them to wander untended around construction sites, through towns and villages and along rural roads. One common estimate, put forward by Joe Collins, president of the Veterinary Council of Ireland, is that there are 10,000 to 20,000 “surplus horses” across the country. Another leading expert on horses, Ted Walsh, the father of one of the country’s most famous steeplechase jockeys, Ruby Walsh, has said that the number could be as high as 100,000.
Another way to measure the scale of the problem is to visit the Dunsink tip. Celebrated in history as the site of one of Europe’s most famous astronomical observatories, established in 1785 at a time when Dunsink lay in open country, it became in more recent times a trysting place for drug dealers, car thieves and desperate people who came to its desolate reaches to hang themselves from the trees sheltering on the lower reaches of the land. The sense of desolation is accentuated by the scatter of concrete venting pipes that draw off lethal methane gas from the generations of decomposing garbage below.
But Dunsink was also traditionally a place to graze horses, common land where those without stables and land of their own could set their animals to roam, then return to recover them later. For some owners, that has not changed, and Dunsink still serves, for them, as a convenient and cost-free range. But for others, it has become a favorite dumping ground for horses and ponies they can no longer afford.
Differentiating between the various kinds of owners is not easy, as became clear in an encounter with Thomas Boyd, one of the few souls besides an animal inspector who had braved the near-arctic cold on a recent afternoon. Mr. Boyd, 33, recently released from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin after the latest in a series of terms for what he described as “law and order offenses,” along with problems with alcohol and drugs, arrived trailing a horse by a length of frayed plastic cord.
His story was an uncertain one, perhaps crafted to suit the encounter with the inspector, Tony McGovern of the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. As Mr. Boyd told it, he had come to the tip with the 3-year-old skewbald mare to find her a “more nutritious” diet than that provided in the stables close to his home in the working-class district of Finglas. He said he would leave the mare for “a couple of weeks,” then recover her.
Mr. McGovern demurred, saying there was little or no nutrition in the tip’s winter grass. In any case, Mr. Boyd bade farewells and, apparently thinking himself beyond the inspector’s reach, released the skewbald and began fruitlessly pursuing two gray ponies scampering across the tip in a herd of 30 or 40 horses.
His account, later, was that he wanted to catch the ponies for his children, but Mr. McGovern said he believed that Mr. Boyd was leaving the skewbald to fend for herself while hoping to capture the ponies for resale in the Smithfield Horse Market, a largely unregulated event that is held once a month on the grounds of an abandoned distillery beside the River Liffey in Dublin.
There, end-of-the-line horses are traded for as little as $15 each, some as pets, some for slaughter.
The animal welfare society has limited stabling capacity at its headquarters in the Dublin hills and a budget of only $500,000 for horses and ponies. And the society’s figures suggest that the problem is getting worse. In 2008, it took in 26 sick or injured horses and ponies; in 2009, it took in 106; and so far this year, 115.
On a recent morning, two American veterinarians who work as volunteers at the center, Judy Magowitz of Laurel, Md., and Katie Melick of Los Angeles, spent hours working feverishly to save a black Falabella miniature horse, Napoleon, which they had found collapsed in one of the center’s paddocks. Barely waist high, with a shaggy black coat, Napoleon was judged by nightfall to be beyond further help and put down, joining the dozens of other horses who have been brought to the center too late to be saved.
Computers and Cabbage at a Food Bank That Works
Not much has been easy for Madelyn Ruiz, a Florida native, since she arrived in New York in October after a job overseas fell through. For the first time in her 33 years, she has been living in shelters, most recently in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
She would be looking for another accounting job, but her daughter, who is 15 months old, has been in and out of the hospital with asthma. Last week, Ms. Ruiz was directed to a food pantry, where she fully expected that she would be handed a shopping bag full of groceries someone else had chosen, items her daughter might or might not eat.
Instead, when she arrived at St. John’s Bread and Life on Lexington Avenue, Ms. Ruiz was given a swipe card. She sat at a computer and used a touch screen to select her own menu: dried cranberries, canned spaghetti and meatballs, vegetable soup. As Ms. Ruiz made her choices, the system subtracted points from an allotment of 200 for the month (healthy items count for fewer points). A volunteer explained that she could pick everything up within a few minutes.
Going home with groceries she wanted: this, at last, was easy. “Some places you go and they give you stuff you’re not eating, so it’s not really helping,” she said. “Here, if you don’t eat it, at least you’re not wasting it.”
That is precisely what Anthony Butler, the executive director of the St. John’s Bread and Life pantry, was thinking when he put the system into effect in 2008. Since the economy soured, the number of families using the food bank has shot up, rising 85 percent in the first year since the system was put in place.
For Mr. Butler, customer service is not about making poverty pleasant; it is about building trust. “If you make it too onerous, they won’t trust you enough to engage in the other services,” he said. His staff members try to guide people, as often as possible, from the pantry to the food-stamp program.
It sometimes seems that the approach to hunger is as antiquated as the problem is old. Last December, I wrote about New Yorkers’ attachment to canned-food drives, a loyalty that frustrates some pantry organizers, who prefer cash donations so that they can feed more people by taking advantage of bulk discounts. And pantries that give out one-size-fits-all bags of food might not meet the needs of a fussy toddler or a man with hypertension.
Mr. Butler’s food bank not only gives clients more choice — something they lack in most aspects of their lives — but can also track their needs. The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, has said she is committed to trying to introduce the digitized system to as many food pantries as possible.
In bringing his food bank into the future, Mr. Butler may also end up changing the way it interacts with the neighborhood, including residents who do not need its charitable services. Impressed by Mr. Butler’s digital expertise, Local Orbit, a business that connects local farmers with markets, has established a hub at St. John’s Bread and Life, an experiment that injects locavore culture directly into the world of free food.
Something of a cross between FreshDirect and a community-supported agriculture cooperative, the program allows consumers to shop online for locally grown groceries — foodie options last month included kohlrabi cabbage and shallots — and pick up their orders at the pantry on Thursdays.
Residents in need with Bedford-Stuyvesant ZIP codes can use the same site to select fresh staples, like onions and potatoes, at no cost.
People in need of free food may not always have the resources to order groceries online in advance, and so far takers have been few. But the service, if it takes off, could provide more fresh produce in a neighborhood famously devoid of it, and a new model for what, exactly, a food bank is to a community: in this case, another place where people of various incomes would overlap over the same basic desire for sustenance.
“You don’t create community around problems,” said Mr. Butler, who hopes that clients on food stamps will eventually be able to shop from Local Orbit farmers at St. John’s. “You create community around shared projects.”
As pleasant as the experience of the pantry is right now, research has shown that there is little danger that it will lull its users into a sense of complacency: the greatest number of users are one-timers, people truly in crisis. For Ms. Ruiz, the system was painless, fast and efficient. She hopes to never come back.
Young Female Chimps Play Out Motherly Role
Young female chimpanzees like to play with sticks as if they were dolls, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology.
Although both juvenile male and female chimpanzees were seen playing with sticks in Kibale National Park in Uganda, females were more likely to cradle the sticks and treat them like infants.
In human children, societal stereotypes may dictate what boys and girls play with, said Sonya Kahlenberg, a biologist at Bates College in Maine and one of the study’s authors. “The monkeys tell us there is something different there,” she said.
The researchers studied juvenile behavior in a single chimpanzee colony over 14 years, and observed 15 females and 16 males.
Of the 15 females, 10 carried around sticks, while five of the males were seen with sticks. The young females were apparently mimicking their mothers, she said. “Females are the main caretakers,” Dr. Kahlenberg said. “Though it’s not that we didn’t see that in male chimps at all.”
In one instance, an eight-year-old male with a stick stepped out of his mother’s nest, built a smaller nest and laid his stick in it.
Although adult chimpanzees are also known to use sticks, they use them as foraging tools, not toys. Juveniles were defined as chimpanzees between the ages of five and 7.9. This is roughly equivalent to the human age range of six to nine, Dr. Kahlenberg said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/technology/07identity.html
The government warns Americans to closely guard their Social Security numbers. But it has done a poor job of protecting those same numbers for millions of people: the nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
At bases and outposts at home and around the world, military personnel continue to use their Social Security numbers as personal identifiers in dozens of everyday settings, from filling out health forms to checking out basketballs at the gym. Thousands of soldiers in Iraq even stencil the last four digits onto their laundry bags.
All of this is putting members of the military at heightened risk for identity theft.
That is the conclusion of a scathing new report written by an Army intelligence officer turned West Point professor, Lt. Col. Gregory Conti. The report concludes that the military needs to rid itself of a practice that has been widespread since the 1960s.
“Service members and their families are burdened with a work environment that shows little regard for their personal information,” the report says, adding that the service members, “their units, military preparedness and combat effectiveness all will pay a price for decades to come.”
Representatives for the military say they are aware of the problem and are taking steps to fix it, with the Navy and Marines making efforts in the last few months. The Defense Department said in 2008 that it was moving to limit the use of Social Security numbers, and in a statement last week it said the numbers would no longer appear on new military ID cards as of May.
But Colonel Conti said in an interview that the situation had not really changed: “The farther you get away from the flagpole at headquarters, those policies get overturned by operational realities.”
Social Security numbers are valuable to thieves because they often serve as a crucial identifier when dealing with banks and credit card companies. In the wrong hands they can lead to a cascade of problems, like ruined credit and, in turn, challenges for military personnel in getting security clearances or promotions.
In 2009, Social Security numbers were used in 32 percent of identity thefts in which the victims knew how their information was compromised, according to Javelin Strategy and Research, which tracks identity theft.
Javelin last looked at identity theft in the military in 2006, finding that 3.3 percent of active military personnel had been victims of such fraud that year, slightly below the 3.7 percent in the public at large. Over all, identity theft is on the rise; in 2009, the nationwide rate crept up to 4.8 percent, with each person losing $373 on average, Javelin estimated.
Most of those incidents affect individuals or households and do not make headlines. But in June, the Richmond County district attorney in Staten Island announced the indictment of a gang of identity thieves who victimized, among others, 20 soldiers at Ford Hood, Tex.
According to the district attorney’s office, the soldiers’ Social Security numbers were stolen from the base by a former Army member who moved to New York, and the thieves then made 2,515 attempts to abuse the soldiers’ identities, obtaining checkbooks or credit cards in their names.
Officials said some of the soldiers had been singled out because they were stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan where they would be slow to catch on to the fraud. That is precisely the fear of military officials concerning the vulnerability of soldiers.
“If you’re operational and you’re out there, you can’t do anything about the harm being done in the United States,” said Steve Muck, the Navy’s chief information officer in charge of privacy policy for Marine and naval personnel. “It’s a significant issue.”
In a major first step toward protecting Social Security numbers, the Department of the Navy expects to get the results this month from a broad review in which each department had to justify the use of the numbers on paperwork or remove them. Mr. Muck expects that 50 percent of the uses will be found to have been unjustified.
He cites practices already being dismantled that he says defy common sense, like using a Social Security number to check out a racquet or towel at the gym, get a flu shot or buy a pair of pants at a ship commissary. Children of military personnel as young as 10 carry ID cards with Social Security numbers, as do their parents.
Six months ago, the Department of the Navy introduced a campaign to alert personnel based overseas to the threat. One poster circulating in the Persian Gulf shows a Marine sitting in a Humvee, clad in camouflage and manning a machine gun, above the words “Who’s Using My Credit Card?” The poster goes on to say that “an operational deployment is not the time to be worried about your identity being stolen,” and offers tips on detecting fraud.
Mr. Muck also has a more ambitious plan: he wants to replace the Social Security number internally with a 10-digit number that is already assigned to most service members as a computer login. He said he was waiting for approval from the Defense Department to begin carrying out this change, a process that could start early next year.
Even if and when the change comes, he said, it would not affect some current uses of Social Security numbers, like on health care forms. And it would not affect much paperwork that is governed not by the individual branches but by the Defense Department.
The new report by Colonel Conti, titled “The Military’s Cultural Disregard for Personal Information,” was published Monday on the Web site of Small Wars Journal, which tracks military affairs.
Gary Tallman, a spokesman for the Army, said Colonel Conti’s report, was “absolutely factual,” adding that the use of Social Security numbers was “second nature to us.”
But he also said the onus falls in large part on the Defense Department to lead the changes, because it uses the numbers “for so many things.”
The Defense Department is carrying out its own review, saying in its statement that it planned to tell its staff that they would need to justify every use of the numbers and eliminate unnecessary ones. But it added that it was “exceedingly difficult” to determine the extent to which use of the numbers within the agency had led to identity theft.
For his part, Colonel Conti said he was particularly troubled by something he saw while he was deployed in Iraq.
“For heaven’s sake, I stenciled portions of my Social Security number on my laundry bag in Iraq, where it was memorized by foreign-national laundry workers trying to enhance their customer service,” he said. “I’d walk in and they’d say, ‘Number 1234, here’s your laundry,’ and they were very proud of that fact.”
In this country of lush green landscapes, celebrated for its traditional love of horses and the generations of racing thoroughbreds it has bred to conquer the racetracks of the world, the Dunsink tip on the outskirts of the Irish capital is a place that wounds the heart.
Atop a muddy dome stretching over hundreds of windblown acres, bitingly cold in the bitterest early winter many here can remember, roam some of the tens of thousands of horses and ponies that have been abandoned amid Ireland’s financial nightmare. Only miles from the heart of Dublin, the tip, a former landfill now covered with a thin thatch of grass, is the end of the road for all but the hardiest animals, a place where death awaits from exposure, starvation, untended sickness and injury.
Beside a busy expressway, on one of the tip’s distant corners, mounds of fresh dirt mark the graves of the weakest horses, freed from suffering by animal welfare inspectors with .32-caliber pistol shots to their heads. Overhead, airliners climb out of Dublin’s international airport, where a plush new terminal matches Dublin’s sprawl of gleaming steel-and-glass buildings built for the investment tide of the boom years.
The distress among the country’s horses began showing up more than two years ago, when Ireland’s property boom collapsed. That was a grim marker on the road to the crunch that hit this month, when Ireland accepted a $90 billion international bailout package, pledged on the government’s promise of instituting the harshest austerity measures in Europe.
By rough economic estimates, the $20 billion in spending cuts and tax increases promised over the next four years by Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s government will lead to a 10 percent cut in the disposable income of Ireland’s middle class, and greater hardships still for many of the country’s poor. They will be hit by welfare cuts, public-sector job losses and a sharp reduction in the minimum wage, as well as a wider economic turndown, on top of the 15 percent shrinkage in the economy since 2008, if the emergency measures fail to restore economic growth.
But the horses that are such an enduring part of Irish culture are paying a price, too. For generations, keeping horses has been an Irish passion — for those who like to enter them in flat-racing, steeplechase and show-jumping competitions, for those who keep them for recreational occasions like hunts and equestrian events, and for still others who see horse ownership as a symbol of prosperity, much as other people find pleasure in owning luxury cars.
How many horses and ponies have been abandoned is a matter of informed guesswork. Irish laws require all owners to have their animals registered, and tagged with microchips for identification, but the laws have been only sporadically enforced. What is certain is that the boom years brought a rapid growth in breeding, and that tens of thousands of people who could not previously afford a horse or pony entered the market, many of them keeping their animals in gardens, on fenced-off building sites or on common land like the Dunsink tip.
With the economic downturn, many found that they could no longer afford to feed or stable the animals at costs that can run to $40 a day and more and abandoned them to wander untended around construction sites, through towns and villages and along rural roads. One common estimate, put forward by Joe Collins, president of the Veterinary Council of Ireland, is that there are 10,000 to 20,000 “surplus horses” across the country. Another leading expert on horses, Ted Walsh, the father of one of the country’s most famous steeplechase jockeys, Ruby Walsh, has said that the number could be as high as 100,000.
Another way to measure the scale of the problem is to visit the Dunsink tip. Celebrated in history as the site of one of Europe’s most famous astronomical observatories, established in 1785 at a time when Dunsink lay in open country, it became in more recent times a trysting place for drug dealers, car thieves and desperate people who came to its desolate reaches to hang themselves from the trees sheltering on the lower reaches of the land. The sense of desolation is accentuated by the scatter of concrete venting pipes that draw off lethal methane gas from the generations of decomposing garbage below.
But Dunsink was also traditionally a place to graze horses, common land where those without stables and land of their own could set their animals to roam, then return to recover them later. For some owners, that has not changed, and Dunsink still serves, for them, as a convenient and cost-free range. But for others, it has become a favorite dumping ground for horses and ponies they can no longer afford.
Differentiating between the various kinds of owners is not easy, as became clear in an encounter with Thomas Boyd, one of the few souls besides an animal inspector who had braved the near-arctic cold on a recent afternoon. Mr. Boyd, 33, recently released from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin after the latest in a series of terms for what he described as “law and order offenses,” along with problems with alcohol and drugs, arrived trailing a horse by a length of frayed plastic cord.
His story was an uncertain one, perhaps crafted to suit the encounter with the inspector, Tony McGovern of the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. As Mr. Boyd told it, he had come to the tip with the 3-year-old skewbald mare to find her a “more nutritious” diet than that provided in the stables close to his home in the working-class district of Finglas. He said he would leave the mare for “a couple of weeks,” then recover her.
Mr. McGovern demurred, saying there was little or no nutrition in the tip’s winter grass. In any case, Mr. Boyd bade farewells and, apparently thinking himself beyond the inspector’s reach, released the skewbald and began fruitlessly pursuing two gray ponies scampering across the tip in a herd of 30 or 40 horses.
His account, later, was that he wanted to catch the ponies for his children, but Mr. McGovern said he believed that Mr. Boyd was leaving the skewbald to fend for herself while hoping to capture the ponies for resale in the Smithfield Horse Market, a largely unregulated event that is held once a month on the grounds of an abandoned distillery beside the River Liffey in Dublin.
There, end-of-the-line horses are traded for as little as $15 each, some as pets, some for slaughter.
The animal welfare society has limited stabling capacity at its headquarters in the Dublin hills and a budget of only $500,000 for horses and ponies. And the society’s figures suggest that the problem is getting worse. In 2008, it took in 26 sick or injured horses and ponies; in 2009, it took in 106; and so far this year, 115.
On a recent morning, two American veterinarians who work as volunteers at the center, Judy Magowitz of Laurel, Md., and Katie Melick of Los Angeles, spent hours working feverishly to save a black Falabella miniature horse, Napoleon, which they had found collapsed in one of the center’s paddocks. Barely waist high, with a shaggy black coat, Napoleon was judged by nightfall to be beyond further help and put down, joining the dozens of other horses who have been brought to the center too late to be saved.
Computers and Cabbage at a Food Bank That Works
Not much has been easy for Madelyn Ruiz, a Florida native, since she arrived in New York in October after a job overseas fell through. For the first time in her 33 years, she has been living in shelters, most recently in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
She would be looking for another accounting job, but her daughter, who is 15 months old, has been in and out of the hospital with asthma. Last week, Ms. Ruiz was directed to a food pantry, where she fully expected that she would be handed a shopping bag full of groceries someone else had chosen, items her daughter might or might not eat.
Instead, when she arrived at St. John’s Bread and Life on Lexington Avenue, Ms. Ruiz was given a swipe card. She sat at a computer and used a touch screen to select her own menu: dried cranberries, canned spaghetti and meatballs, vegetable soup. As Ms. Ruiz made her choices, the system subtracted points from an allotment of 200 for the month (healthy items count for fewer points). A volunteer explained that she could pick everything up within a few minutes.
Going home with groceries she wanted: this, at last, was easy. “Some places you go and they give you stuff you’re not eating, so it’s not really helping,” she said. “Here, if you don’t eat it, at least you’re not wasting it.”
That is precisely what Anthony Butler, the executive director of the St. John’s Bread and Life pantry, was thinking when he put the system into effect in 2008. Since the economy soured, the number of families using the food bank has shot up, rising 85 percent in the first year since the system was put in place.
For Mr. Butler, customer service is not about making poverty pleasant; it is about building trust. “If you make it too onerous, they won’t trust you enough to engage in the other services,” he said. His staff members try to guide people, as often as possible, from the pantry to the food-stamp program.
It sometimes seems that the approach to hunger is as antiquated as the problem is old. Last December, I wrote about New Yorkers’ attachment to canned-food drives, a loyalty that frustrates some pantry organizers, who prefer cash donations so that they can feed more people by taking advantage of bulk discounts. And pantries that give out one-size-fits-all bags of food might not meet the needs of a fussy toddler or a man with hypertension.
Mr. Butler’s food bank not only gives clients more choice — something they lack in most aspects of their lives — but can also track their needs. The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, has said she is committed to trying to introduce the digitized system to as many food pantries as possible.
In bringing his food bank into the future, Mr. Butler may also end up changing the way it interacts with the neighborhood, including residents who do not need its charitable services. Impressed by Mr. Butler’s digital expertise, Local Orbit, a business that connects local farmers with markets, has established a hub at St. John’s Bread and Life, an experiment that injects locavore culture directly into the world of free food.
Something of a cross between FreshDirect and a community-supported agriculture cooperative, the program allows consumers to shop online for locally grown groceries — foodie options last month included kohlrabi cabbage and shallots — and pick up their orders at the pantry on Thursdays.
Residents in need with Bedford-Stuyvesant ZIP codes can use the same site to select fresh staples, like onions and potatoes, at no cost.
People in need of free food may not always have the resources to order groceries online in advance, and so far takers have been few. But the service, if it takes off, could provide more fresh produce in a neighborhood famously devoid of it, and a new model for what, exactly, a food bank is to a community: in this case, another place where people of various incomes would overlap over the same basic desire for sustenance.
“You don’t create community around problems,” said Mr. Butler, who hopes that clients on food stamps will eventually be able to shop from Local Orbit farmers at St. John’s. “You create community around shared projects.”
As pleasant as the experience of the pantry is right now, research has shown that there is little danger that it will lull its users into a sense of complacency: the greatest number of users are one-timers, people truly in crisis. For Ms. Ruiz, the system was painless, fast and efficient. She hopes to never come back.
Young Female Chimps Play Out Motherly Role
Young female chimpanzees like to play with sticks as if they were dolls, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology.
Although both juvenile male and female chimpanzees were seen playing with sticks in Kibale National Park in Uganda, females were more likely to cradle the sticks and treat them like infants.
In human children, societal stereotypes may dictate what boys and girls play with, said Sonya Kahlenberg, a biologist at Bates College in Maine and one of the study’s authors. “The monkeys tell us there is something different there,” she said.
The researchers studied juvenile behavior in a single chimpanzee colony over 14 years, and observed 15 females and 16 males.
Of the 15 females, 10 carried around sticks, while five of the males were seen with sticks. The young females were apparently mimicking their mothers, she said. “Females are the main caretakers,” Dr. Kahlenberg said. “Though it’s not that we didn’t see that in male chimps at all.”
In one instance, an eight-year-old male with a stick stepped out of his mother’s nest, built a smaller nest and laid his stick in it.
Although adult chimpanzees are also known to use sticks, they use them as foraging tools, not toys. Juveniles were defined as chimpanzees between the ages of five and 7.9. This is roughly equivalent to the human age range of six to nine, Dr. Kahlenberg said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/technology/07identity.html
The government warns Americans to closely guard their Social Security numbers. But it has done a poor job of protecting those same numbers for millions of people: the nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
At bases and outposts at home and around the world, military personnel continue to use their Social Security numbers as personal identifiers in dozens of everyday settings, from filling out health forms to checking out basketballs at the gym. Thousands of soldiers in Iraq even stencil the last four digits onto their laundry bags.
All of this is putting members of the military at heightened risk for identity theft.
That is the conclusion of a scathing new report written by an Army intelligence officer turned West Point professor, Lt. Col. Gregory Conti. The report concludes that the military needs to rid itself of a practice that has been widespread since the 1960s.
“Service members and their families are burdened with a work environment that shows little regard for their personal information,” the report says, adding that the service members, “their units, military preparedness and combat effectiveness all will pay a price for decades to come.”
Representatives for the military say they are aware of the problem and are taking steps to fix it, with the Navy and Marines making efforts in the last few months. The Defense Department said in 2008 that it was moving to limit the use of Social Security numbers, and in a statement last week it said the numbers would no longer appear on new military ID cards as of May.
But Colonel Conti said in an interview that the situation had not really changed: “The farther you get away from the flagpole at headquarters, those policies get overturned by operational realities.”
Social Security numbers are valuable to thieves because they often serve as a crucial identifier when dealing with banks and credit card companies. In the wrong hands they can lead to a cascade of problems, like ruined credit and, in turn, challenges for military personnel in getting security clearances or promotions.
In 2009, Social Security numbers were used in 32 percent of identity thefts in which the victims knew how their information was compromised, according to Javelin Strategy and Research, which tracks identity theft.
Javelin last looked at identity theft in the military in 2006, finding that 3.3 percent of active military personnel had been victims of such fraud that year, slightly below the 3.7 percent in the public at large. Over all, identity theft is on the rise; in 2009, the nationwide rate crept up to 4.8 percent, with each person losing $373 on average, Javelin estimated.
Most of those incidents affect individuals or households and do not make headlines. But in June, the Richmond County district attorney in Staten Island announced the indictment of a gang of identity thieves who victimized, among others, 20 soldiers at Ford Hood, Tex.
According to the district attorney’s office, the soldiers’ Social Security numbers were stolen from the base by a former Army member who moved to New York, and the thieves then made 2,515 attempts to abuse the soldiers’ identities, obtaining checkbooks or credit cards in their names.
Officials said some of the soldiers had been singled out because they were stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan where they would be slow to catch on to the fraud. That is precisely the fear of military officials concerning the vulnerability of soldiers.
“If you’re operational and you’re out there, you can’t do anything about the harm being done in the United States,” said Steve Muck, the Navy’s chief information officer in charge of privacy policy for Marine and naval personnel. “It’s a significant issue.”
In a major first step toward protecting Social Security numbers, the Department of the Navy expects to get the results this month from a broad review in which each department had to justify the use of the numbers on paperwork or remove them. Mr. Muck expects that 50 percent of the uses will be found to have been unjustified.
He cites practices already being dismantled that he says defy common sense, like using a Social Security number to check out a racquet or towel at the gym, get a flu shot or buy a pair of pants at a ship commissary. Children of military personnel as young as 10 carry ID cards with Social Security numbers, as do their parents.
Six months ago, the Department of the Navy introduced a campaign to alert personnel based overseas to the threat. One poster circulating in the Persian Gulf shows a Marine sitting in a Humvee, clad in camouflage and manning a machine gun, above the words “Who’s Using My Credit Card?” The poster goes on to say that “an operational deployment is not the time to be worried about your identity being stolen,” and offers tips on detecting fraud.
Mr. Muck also has a more ambitious plan: he wants to replace the Social Security number internally with a 10-digit number that is already assigned to most service members as a computer login. He said he was waiting for approval from the Defense Department to begin carrying out this change, a process that could start early next year.
Even if and when the change comes, he said, it would not affect some current uses of Social Security numbers, like on health care forms. And it would not affect much paperwork that is governed not by the individual branches but by the Defense Department.
The new report by Colonel Conti, titled “The Military’s Cultural Disregard for Personal Information,” was published Monday on the Web site of Small Wars Journal, which tracks military affairs.
Gary Tallman, a spokesman for the Army, said Colonel Conti’s report, was “absolutely factual,” adding that the use of Social Security numbers was “second nature to us.”
But he also said the onus falls in large part on the Defense Department to lead the changes, because it uses the numbers “for so many things.”
The Defense Department is carrying out its own review, saying in its statement that it planned to tell its staff that they would need to justify every use of the numbers and eliminate unnecessary ones. But it added that it was “exceedingly difficult” to determine the extent to which use of the numbers within the agency had led to identity theft.
For his part, Colonel Conti said he was particularly troubled by something he saw while he was deployed in Iraq.
“For heaven’s sake, I stenciled portions of my Social Security number on my laundry bag in Iraq, where it was memorized by foreign-national laundry workers trying to enhance their customer service,” he said. “I’d walk in and they’d say, ‘Number 1234, here’s your laundry,’ and they were very proud of that fact.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Hardships of a nation?
Date: 2010-12-21 06:34 pm (UTC)Y'know what, that doesn't sound to me like "the hardships of a nation", unless improvidence in times of prosperity is reckoned as a hardship these days. That sounds like tens of thousands of people who had absolutely no business buying a horse or pony, who didn't even have a proper place to keep one, went beggar-rich crazy when they got hold of a little more money than they were used to.
It's not the current hardships that have doomed those horses; it's the former temporary prosperity, and the fantasy-island mentality that led people to believe it would last. Woo hoo, let the good times roll; now that we're going to be rich forever, let's go acquire a large, expensive, high-maintenance animal just because we can!
It's exactly the same kind of folly I see with people here who acquire large dogs they can't afford and don't train, or too many cats. These people think of themselves as animal lovers, but it's not loving to force an animal to live in inadequate circumstances, and certainly not to abandon one to shift for itself.
"those who like to enter them in flat-racing, steeplechase and show-jumping competitions, for those who keep them for recreational occasions like hunts and equestrian events, and for still others who see horse ownership as a symbol of prosperity, much as other people find pleasure in owning luxury cars."
Exactly. Few in Ireland use horses as simple transportation any more, by saddle or by wagon; few are farming, herding or logging with horses (assuming that there's anything left to log in Ireland.) As for hunting, what they mean is fox-hunting, "the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable", several notches down the morality-scale from cock-fighting. Hardly anyone in the British Isles has any need to own a horse; most are just luxury recreational vehicles - status symbols, objects to gamble on, fancy toys for children.
Would have been nice if that law about microchipping had been consistently enforced, eh? Might also be that they need some new laws regarding the conditions in which one may keep a horse, and enforcement of those laws as well. Meanwhile, good luck to the poor horses, and to the folk trying to rescue them; I hope a lot more volunteers will step up to the plate to help.
Re: Hardships of a nation?
Date: 2010-12-24 06:57 pm (UTC)