The Dress

Late Thursday night, after returning home from a long day at the office, my daughter called me into the kitchen.  "Look at this dad," she said as she shoved a smartphone in front of me.  What's the big deal, I thought, as I looked a picture of a dress.

"What color is it?" my daughter asked.  My wife, who was standing next to my daughter, leaned in to hear my answer.  I responded, "gold and white."  My daughter said emphatically, "See mom!"

"No, no," my wife said insistently, "it's black and blue."

I thought nothing more about the disagreement as I left the kitchen to put the dogs out.  But the next morning I was startled to see that "the dress" was dominating social media.  What had started as a question on Tumblr was now a national obsession.  How could some people see black and blue where I saw gold and white?

I was so skeptical that I decided to do an experiment in my college class.  The students were all up to speed on the dress dispute, and all of them had seen it.  I projected the image on a screen in the classroom and asked the students what they saw.  Of the 20 students sampled, 40% saw black and blue.  I was amazed. 

Our class then talked about how this may be a metaphor for our politically divided country -- and, no matter what you say, people see what they see; nothing will change their mind. 

Of course, the controversy generated tremendous worldwide social media use overnight.  It seemed like everyone was weighing in on Twitter.  The dress had gone viral!  This, it was no surprise to see, meant that news organizations, publications and websites had to ride the trending tide of interest to draw viewers.  For instance, the network and cable morning programs devoted segments to the controversy where anchors disagreed and haggled on air over what the actual colors were. 

The New York Times reports that the dress was worn by a bride at a wedding in Scotland and posted online by a band member.  When no one could agree on the colors, she posted the picture on Tumblr.  It was off to the races!

Scientists and scientific magazines have been weighing in with explanations of what is hard for me to really understand.  Wired magazine quoted one doctor's explanation, "'What's happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,' says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. 'So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.'"

USA Today reports that the dress is actually black and blue, and it is for sale in the United Kingdom.

So why did the dress become such an obsession?  Maybe it was a welcome diversion from reports of terrorism, government gridlock, or the foul weather.

I guess it all depends on how you see it.

NSA Surveillance

The revelations that the U.S. Government has been collecting phone and Internet data has reopened a debate about the balance between privacy and security, at a time when America is becoming an increasing target of terrorists. 

Last week, President Barack Obama defended the government's surveillance program, “You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience."  He continued, “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. On balance we have established a process and a procedure that the American people should be comfortable about.”

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution guards American citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures, unless authorities get a judge to approve a warrant based on probable cause.  But does this extend to the mass collection of phone numbers and the duration of telephone calls? 

Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, members of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have called for more public disclosure about how the telephone surveillance program is run.  "Now that the fact of bulk collection has been declassified, we believe that more information about the scale of the collection, and specifically whether it involves the records of 'millions of Americans' should be declassified as well," Wyden and Udall said in a statement issued Friday. "The American people must be given the opportunity to evaluate the facts about this program and its broad scope for themselves, so that this debate can begin in earnest."

Does the Fourth Amendment extend to Internet metadata, which is data about data?  Metadata can be structural, data about the design of a webpage, or descriptive, data about the content and links.  IBM estimates that 90% of the data in the world today was created in the past two years.  Each day, according to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created, including from social media, email, digital pictures and video uploads, cell phone GPS signals, and blogs.  We live in the Big Data era.  

Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency (NSA), told NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday that the programs are lawful and justified in the war on terrorism.  He stressed that the Internet surveillance program, known as PRISM, is "about Internet data, not telephony, and it's all about foreigners."   He further explained, "So, if I've got a bad person in Waziristan, talking to a bad person in Yemen, via a chat room that is hosted by an American Internet service provider, the only thing American about that conversation is the fact that it's happening on a server on the West Coast of the United States."

Revelations that the NSA collects data on phone conversations are not new.  USA Today reported its existence in 2006, saying, "This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews." 

A recent Washington Post-Pew Research poll found that 62% of Americans sampled favored investigating threats even if it intrudes on privacy, while 34% responded that the government should not intrude even if it limits the ability to investigate threats.  But this presumes that the government has all the right procedures in place to limit the scope of its investigations to threats of terrorism.  In other words, Americans must trust the government to do the right thing.

In his remarks last week, President Obama said he welcomed the debate, noting, “If people don’t trust the executive branch, and also congress and the judicial branch, then we’re going to have some problems here."  But this is a complicated issue, and there are plenty of examples in history when the government has exceeded its authority.  The government should disclose to the American people the procedures and safeguards built into these programs against unreasonable intrusions into their constitutional rights of privacy. 

Contraception Compromise?

The Obama administration's decision to require religious institutions to provide health insurance that covers birth control and other contraceptive services has resulted in a firestorm of protest from the Catholic Church and Republican presidential candidates. Given the importance of the issue to many Catholics the administration will have to compromise.

There are more than 65 million Catholics in the United States, the country's largest religious denomination. President Obama carried 54% of the Catholic vote in 2008 according to exit polls. The Catholic Church, which is totally opposed to any form of contraception, oversees more than 600 hospitals nationwide and cares for one in six patients each year. Even so, most employees are not Catholic.

President Obama and Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York discussed the subject in a meeting at the White House last fall. "The president seemed very earnest, he said he considered the protection of conscience sacred, that he didn't want anything his administration would do to impede the work of the church that he claimed he held in high regard," Dolan said in late January. "I have to say, there's a sense of personal disappointment."

Yet, according to a report from the Guttmacher Institute, more than two-thirds of all Catholic women use sterilization, the birth control pill, or an IUD. The Institute says that, "making contraceptives more affordable and easier to use reflects the needs and desires of the vast majority of U.S. women and their partners, regardless of their religious beliefs."

Pointing out that 28 states require contraception to be covered by insurance, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius defended the policy Monday in a USA Today op-ed. "Today, virtually all American women use contraception at some point in their lives," Sebelius wrote. "And we have a large body of medical evidence showing it has significant benefits for their health, as well as the health of their children." She noted that the cost of birth control might be too expensive for some women who are not covered by insurance.

Former House Speaker and current Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has accused the Obama administration of waging a "war against religion" because of the requirement that Catholic hospitals and universities must cover contraception as part of their employee health plans.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, called the administration's decision on contraception a "violation of conscience." "We must have a president who is willing to protect America's first right, a right to worship God, according to the dictates of our own conscience," Romney said Monday.

But last week The Boston Globe reported, "Romney required all Massachusetts hospitals, including Catholic ones, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims, even though some Catholics view the morning-after pill as a form of abortion." "President Obama's plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics," C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, said in an interview with the Boston Globe, "but I'm not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this."

In her op-ed Secretary Sebelius said, "We specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith. This exemption includes churches and other houses of worship, and could also include other church-affiliated organizations." And she noted that doctors are not required to prescribe contraceptives and no one is required to buy them.

Nonetheless, no matter how the administration explains the decision, most Catholics see the proposal as forcing institutions run by the Catholic Church to violate the churches' own moral teachings. And, while well intentioned, this does not make sense and it is not smart politics.