Author Archives: RozellaMccune

How to Protect Your Photos and Files from Natural Disasters

by RozellaMccune Posted on January 4, 2016

If your home is unexpectedly hit by fire, floods, a hurricane, a tornado or even a crashing tree, will your photos and important papers be safe?

If you take some smart precautions before disaster strikes, you can minimize your losses and save yourself a lot of worry, too. Here’s what to do:

1) Digitize photographs. If you still maintainphoto albums that are important to you, be forewarned that they are heavy, bulky and if you have a lot of them, probably too voluminous to move quickly. If you don’t have time to evacuate before a disaster hits, you could lose them all. The solution is to digitize your photos while you have the time and peace of mind to do so. Get an inexpensive scanner and set it up next to your computer screen. Go through your albums, but don’t scan every single image. Most albums show multiple pictures from the same scene. Pick one or two that are most representative, scan those, then file them into folders you can easily sort through and retrieve. The initial scanning process will take time, but once it’s done, you will breathe easier knowing your photos are secure. You can also create a list in Word or other word processing file to remind yourself what pictures are where.

2) Digitize documents. Scan insurance policies, last wills and testaments, passports, bank records, birth certificates, your mortgage and any other documents you wouldn’t want to lose in the event a natural disaster occurs.

3) Set up a back-up hard drive. I have an external hard drive that constantly backs up my files. When I scan a photo, it not only goes to a file on my laptop, it also ends up on the backed-up hard drive. The hard drive is light and portable, so in the event of a disaster, I could easily carry it as well as my laptop out of the house. NOTE: Some people back up to thumb drives, and of course, this works and is better than nothing. But I have a tendency to lose thumb drives or get them confused. The hard drive keeps everything in one place and nicely organized.

4) Back up to “the cloud.” Even though I have a back-up hard drive in my home, I also back up my computer constantly to a secure file in the internet cloud. I had this lesson reinforced a couple of years ago, before I had my own external hard drive back up. I decided I would back up everything to the cloud “just in case.” The day after the back-up was complete, a massive electrical storm in my area completely fried my computer. When I replaced the computer, the backup files were easily re-installed from my file in the cloud, with nothing lost. Companies like Carbonite.com offer good cloud back-up services.

5) Store original documents in a safety deposit box or in a fire-proof bank vault. If you have original documents at home, even after you’ve scanned them, you might want to secure them in a secure safety deposit box in a safe place ora fire-proof bank vault. If you had a lawyer draw up your will, or you have a financial adviser who helps with investments, both of them should also have copies of these documents; check to make sure they’re taking proper precautions.

6) Use the photo back-up options available on your phone. I have an Android phone, so the photos I take on my phone frequently and automatically back up to my Google photos folder. You can do the same on a Mac. By the way, using this feature is also handy in the event your phone is stolen.

7) Store documents and photos on your second floor or higher, if you have one. This is an especially good precaution if you live in an area that is prone to flooding.

8) Identify the most valuable documents, images, files and records to protect, recommends Polygon. Most of us have far more files than we need. Know which ones you need to keep, and which ones aren’t of primary importance. Winnowing out the extras has an added bonus: it will reduce clutter.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security offers useful guidance on how to prepare for natural disasters generally here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How to Protect Your Photos and Files from Natural Disasters

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The GOP Is the Party of No Escape

by RozellaMccune Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the print magazine this month (yes! print!) I have a piece arguing that this year’s odd lack of enthusiasm among Republicans for repealing Obamacare—something that many folks have noted—is just a bellwether for wider GOP problems:

Obamacare’s foes running out of steam is just the most obvious sign of a larger trend: A lot of traditional conservative issues are losing their momentum. Gay marriage lost its fear factor years ago….The economy is probably in good enough shape to not be a big campaign issue. Taxes have already been lowered so much that the average family pays only about 5 percent of its earnings to the IRS.

….True, Republicans still have a short list of hot-button topics that inflame their base, but increasingly these are wedge issues that promise nearly as much downside as upside. Immigration is the most visible example….Republican voters aren’t sold on the idea of Iraq War 2.0….Even abortion runs the risk of becoming a wedge issue for the party as activists demand that candidates take extreme positions such as opposing exceptions for rape, incest, or the life and health of the mother—even though these are popular among most Republican voters.

The big Republican problem right now is not that they’re out of ideas. The problem is that just as Democrats were torn apart by their ideas 30 years ago, Republicans are being torn apart by theirs today. All the once-reliable Republican applause lines are fast becoming wedge issues that divide the party regulars from the tea party base. And this is all coming at the same time that Republicans are fighting the headwind of a long-term demographic shift that weakens them further with every election cycle. “In an era when the inmates are running the asylum, it’s not just Obamacare bashing that’s become a double-edged sword for Republicans. It’s nearly everything they’ve relied on for the past three decades.”

Read the whole thing! I’m excited about it. Not because it’s the most astute piece of political analysis ever, but because it’s my first print piece in over a year. That’s right: As of a couple of months ago, I had recovered enough from chemotherapy that I once again had the energy to start writing longer print pieces in addition to blogging. And I just finished another, better one for the next issue. Read it too! (When it comes out.)

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The GOP Is the Party of No Escape

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The US Government Spent Hundreds of Millions on Afghan Health Clinics. Now It’s Not Sure It Can Find Them.

by RozellaMccune Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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The US government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on heath care facilities in Afghanistan as part of its efforts to rebuild the war-torn country. The problem is that two government agencies involved with the project can’t seem to agree on whether they know where the facilities are located—or even whether they’re all in Afghanistan.

Under the US Agency for International Development’s Partnership Contracts for Health program, the US government helps support basic health care needs for people across Afghanistan. As of March 2015, it had spent more than $210 million on the program, spread across 641 individual facilities.

But the location data USAID gave to a federal inspector general doesn’t seem to line up with actual facilities. John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), who leads the group charged with making sure Afghanistan reconstruction resources are used appropriately and lawfully, told USAID in a June 25 letter that the location data are incorrect—sometimes wildly so—for nearly 80 percent of the 641 health care facilities the agency is helping to support. Using geospatial data from the Army Geospatial Center, SIGAR tried to verify location data for the list of facilities that USAID provided.

“Thirteen coordinates were not located in Afghanistan,” Sopko wrote, noting that six were in Pakistan, six were in Tajikistan, “and one was located in the Mediterranean Sea.” There were also 13 cases where USAID reported two distinct facilities at the same location, more than 150 coordinates that didn’t clearly identify a specific building, and 90 cases where a location wasn’t provided, Sopko wrote. “To provide meaningful oversight of these facilities, both USAID and the Afghan government need to know where they are,” he added.

USAID says the data SIGAR used for its analysis is Afghan government data rather than USAID data, that USAID data is accurate, and that the agency knows how to find these clinics and monitor them, thank you very much.

“Local staff, third-party monitors, Afghan Government officials, and the benefiting community do not use GPS to navigate, let alone to find a health facility, because they are familiar with the area or from the community benefiting from the project,” Larry Sampler, an assistant to the administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs for USAID, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones. Sampler said USAID has put in place a “rigorous” monitoring system to oversee these clinics.

A USAID spokesperson further said the agency has its own set of data, distinct from Afghan government data, and that it is working with the Afghan government to bolster its record-keeping, a process that has already improved the Afghan data in the time since SIGAR requested information in the first place.

In response, a SIGAR spokesperson told Mother Jones that the information was originally requested in the course of an ongoing investigation into the Partnership Contracts for Health program, and that SIGAR went forward with the information provided by USAID. When asked why USAID didn’t just give SIGAR the correct data if it had it, a USAID spokesperson said, “The separate USAID data came from third party site visits that took place after May of 2014. I believe that SIGAR’s initial request for the data was informal in nature. SIGAR did not express concerns about the data with us prior to this inquiry letter.”

The point might seem trivial, but the geospatial data within geotagged photos, along with site visits, are used by USAID to verify that inspections actually take place. In a country where civilian travel is incredibly difficult, geotagged photos with precise location data are one of the best ways to ensure work is getting done and money is being spent correctly. In order to inspect these costly facilities, it’s helpful to agree on where to find them.

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The US Government Spent Hundreds of Millions on Afghan Health Clinics. Now It’s Not Sure It Can Find Them.

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How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

by RozellaMccune Posted on January 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’ve all heard this advice before. We might have even passed it on to encourage a struggling friend or to mentor a younger person: Follow your dreams. Imagine the future that you want, and it will come to pass. And yet, we still struggle to lose that weight, or finish that project, or improve that relationship. When we make resolutions at the start of each new year, it’s easy to feel optimistic that this time it will be different. But deep down we know that if it didn’t work in the past, it’s unlikely to work in the future.

Believe it or not, there’s substantial scientific evidence that fantasizing about a bright future can actually make us less likely to achieve our goals. “We have found that the more positively people daydream about the future, the less well they do over time,” explains Gabriele Oettingen on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg, has been studying the science of motivation for more than 20 years. And her new book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, challenges the conventional wisdom about optimism.

In one early study, for example, Oettingen and her colleagues tracked the progress that a group of obese women made as they attempted to lose weight. The researchers recorded the extent to which these women fantasized about their svelte future selves. The results were surprising: It turned out that women who had frequent positive daydreams about being thin were actually less likely to lose weight.

And in a more recent study, Oettingen and her colleagues asked undergraduates to daydream about a future in which they had positive, negative, or neutral experiences. Once again, the results were striking—positive fantasizing led to poorer achievement outcomes. “And the more positively they fantasized about an easy transition into work life, the less well they did in the future,” says Oettingen. Why was this the case? The study suggested one possible mechanism by which positive daydreams can affect productivity: Using physiological instruments and behavioral indicators, the researchers found that these types of thoughts actually sap a person’s energy. (Exactly why that happens remains a mystery.)

So is the link between positive thinking and achieving one’s goals completely spurious? Can we finally just agree that you can’t dream your way to success? Well, not so fast.

As scientists disentangle the different ways in which we can engage in positive thinking, an interesting distinction between positive expectations and positive fantasies has emerged. Positive expectations based on past experience are generally a good thing. For example, “you expect that you do well in a meeting because, in past meetings, you did well, especially in this specific context,” explains Oettingen. But daydreams about the future, in which we indulge in optimistic fantasizing that isn’t based on solid evidence, can be counterproductive.

Remember the women in Oettingen’s early study who wanted to lose weight? It turns out that if they had a positive expectation of success, but realistic or negative daydreams (perhaps imagining what it would be like to bulge out of a favorite pair of jeans), they were more likely to shed pounds.

What’s more, Oettingen has found that a specific method of positive thinking can lead to better outcomes. She calls it mental contrasting. “It starts with identifying a wish,” she explains. The wish can be big or small—a major life change or just a task that needs to be completed today. “And then,” she says, “you identify the best outcome if you fulfill that wish.” That’s where the daydreaming comes in. You fantasize about what your future will be like if you attain your wish.

But don’t stop there, even though it’s enjoyable. Instead, make a serious effort to think about the obstacles that stand in your way. “Now what is it in me that holds me back?” Oettingen says. “What is it actually that stops me from fulfilling that wish and experiencing that outcome?” This is the “contrasting” portion of mental contrasting. Once you identify the obstacle, you go back to fantasy land and imagine what you need to do to overcome that barrier. The last step is to lay out a plan—either by writing it down or simply by thinking about it—that includes both your desired outcome and the ways in which you can overcome the obstacles that have thwarted you in the past.

“We have plenty of experiments which show that this mental contrasting is effective,” says Oettingen. And not just in one domain—mental contrasting works for problems related to your work, your family life, and even your interpersonal relationships.

But careful! Oettingen says the order of your directed thinking matters. For example, she points to one study in which her participants hoped to become more physically fit. She divided them up into two groups: Both groups fantasized about a future in which they were more fit, and both thought about the obstacles that stood in their way. But one group used mental contrasting—that is, they first imagined their future accomplishments, and then they thought about the obstacles they needed to overcome. The other group reversed the process: They imagined the obstacles first and then fantasized about the future.

After this exercise, Oettingen asked participants to go from the ground floor of the building to the fourth floor, where they would meet to discuss the experiment. Then she counted how many of them rode the elevator to get there. And sure enough, the people who used mental contrasting in the correct order were more likely to take the stairs.

Click below to listen to the full interview with Oettingen:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How Science Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

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Cell Phone Carriers Are Fighting a Plan to Make It Easier to Locate 911 Callers

by RozellaMccune Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

The nation’s biggest cell phone carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, are opposing a government proposal that aims to save lives by making it easier for emergency responders to locate 911 callers. The companies say they lack the technology to implement the plan—which would require them to quickly find a way to deliver more accurate location information—and they’re working on a better, long-term solution. Emergency responders and activists say that the cell carriers are trying to stymie the proposal because they don’t want to pony up the money for the improvements.

Under current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, carriers must provide a 911 caller’s latitude and longitude within 164 to 984 feet. But these rules, last revised in 2010, were never designed to apply to cellular calls placed inside buildings, where cell phone technologies, like GPS, are less likely to work. Now that many Americans don’t own landlines, emergency responders are finding that it’s increasingly difficult to track down 911 callers inside apartment and office buildings. “This spells a real potential disaster for the delivery of emergency services,” says Paul Linnee, who has over 40 years of experience designing and managing 911 systems, and now works as a consultant.

The FCC proposal, released in February, would mandate that, for 67 percent of 911 calls in the first few years, cell phone carriers provide the horizontal location of an indoor caller within 164 feet and the vertical location (i.e., the floor in an apartment building) within about 10 feet. The proposal would also require providers to demonstrate compliance and establish a channel for 911 administrators to raise complaints.

Last year, Steve Souder, the director of the department of public safety communications in Fairfax County, Virginia, demonstrated to a former FCC head that when he called 911 from his dispatch center, the location that came back was the meat department in a nearby Costco. In California, an organization that advocates on behalf of dispatchers looked at millions of wireless calls placed across the state, and found that more than half failed to transmit precise location data. In San Francisco, the failure rate was over 80 percent.

Cell phone carriers contend that recent studies give a misleading picture of their accuracy rates, because they don’t take into account cases in which 911 call centers don’t retrieve the data provided by the carriers, for any number of reasons. And in numerous comments submitted to the FCC—which the commission is currently reviewing—the companies argue that the plan is simply not feasible.

On July 14, Sprint wrote to the FCC that its proposal is “not achievable using current technology” and that there is little evidence “that the technology will be available in the near future.” AT&T called the FCC’s proposed timeline for improving location-finding technology “unrealistic” and wrote that forcing providers to “incrementally” improve their systems will “waste scarce resources (i.e., time, talent, and money),”

Don Brittingham, the vice president of national security and public safety policy at Verizon, tells Mother Jones that Verizon and other carriers are already implementing new technologies that will significantly improve accuracy. He says that even if the FCC’s requirements could be met at some point in time, the proposal would risk directing valuable resources away from the long-term goal—delivering a specific, accurate address to emergency dispatchers. “Instead of putting a lot of money and time and effort into a set of solutions that may not actually help, we would like to see more focus on things that provide some long-term benefits,” he says.

Jamie Barnett, former head of the FCC’s public safety and homeland security bureau, is directing a large coalition of emergency responders and activists—initially funded by True Position, a company that makes GPS technology—to rally support for the FCC proposal. He says that multiple technologies are currently available that fit the FCC’s criteria, but cell companies just don’t want to pay for them. “Carriers are currently negotiating to delay and weaken the implementation of this lifesaving rule. While it would save the carriers money, it could cost tens of thousands of additional lives,” he says.

Linnee recalls that in the late 1990s, cell phone carriers fought the FCC on providing any 911 location information at all. “The wireless carriers were kicking and screaming and squawking that this can’t be done,” He adds, “This is standard industry behavior. They fight you every inch of the way.”

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Cell Phone Carriers Are Fighting a Plan to Make It Easier to Locate 911 Callers

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