William Hammill's Digital Past Blog

Health care in the US is a touchy subject. Some people think that we should be letting the market take precedent, others think that the US Government should assist in controlling the price/access to health care.

My thesis for the research paper is this: A country that has access to universal healthcare is going to have less intrastate violence than a country that does not have access to universal healthcare. I have chosen the Wikipedia Health care in the United States for this blog post and will judge whether it will be useful for my paper this fall.

Sources:

There are over 200 sources that are listed on the article. Many of them are US Government websites and reports, some are from groups like UNICEF and WHO, some are from medical and financial/business journals, and some are news reports that have been on television and in newspapers. I’m sure that there is a plethora of reputable information I will be able to use and site, not only from this page, but from the provided sources.

Discussion:

The discussion doesn’t really have a lot going on, yet there are multiple groups and projects that have been keeping tabs on the article, making sure that vandalism is prevented and important work is being done on it. The article is also listed as a controversial article so the page is under watch all the time. Below are some of the rules of the page:

History:

I was surprised to see that the article was last updated in June. I would have expected that this article would have garnered more information. The statistics are up to date as of the most recent healthcare law so I will have to check on where the numbers are now. There have been, however, many edits by many well versed and educated authors. I do feel extremely comfortable using this article as a starting point for my research essay.

With the birth of Twitter, Internet culture took a drastic turn. It’s hard to say if it is for better or for worse. 140 characters, mobile apps, and free access to the service enabled all sorts of new and innovative microblogging and information aggregation. Just as fast as someone’s ISP can connect them to Twitter, they can post information about a news article, a picture, a video, their location, what they are doing, who they are with, and all sorts of personal information no one really cares about.

Twitter, however, also enabled people throughout the Arab world to organize mass protests and topple dictatorial leaders and oppressive governments, paving the way for new leadership. This fast acting Internet service has also spurred campaigns like AIDS and Cancer research information sharing, places for political candidates to express views and connect with constituents, and even started a large job market online.

I’d like to discuss Twitter in relation to the Photography as a Weapon article. Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and expert on digital photography, brought up research that had been produced about how people perceive information:

“You start putting it out there and saying, “Oh look, this picture? It’s a fake. This picture? It’s a fake.” But you know what people remember? They don’t remember, “It’s a fake.” They remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation. They forget the tag associated with it.”

Twitter also relates to this idea of misinformation being what people remember. I worked for an organization called Resolve, a DC lobbying group that works on East African issues and prepares reports on the actions of regional governments and a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In the spring of 2012, Invisible Children, an organization that makes films about the LRA and rebuilds schools in northern Uganda, released a film called “Kony 2012” and began a campaign, of which Resolve was a partner. The campaign went viral and the film was seen by over 125 million people around the world.

Yet some information, mostly passed through services like Twitter, was misinformed, some of them even flat out incorrect, and took a toll on the work that was trying to be done. Trying to correct the information was near impossible, as this misinformation was so counter to what the campaign was all about, people believed it was a scam or a CIA operation. If it wasn’t for the importance of the work we were trying to do, it would have been comical.

This is something that is detrimental to how documentation of world events will be regarded in the future. If misinformation is spread, which is not hard to do the more ridiculous and damning it is, it is hard to correct that information. Humans are hardwired to look for that controversy and be skeptical (which is sometimes a good thing) yet as far as unbiased information is concerned, it will be hard to find when every Joe Shmoe can have access to all sorts of misinformation and have the ability to spread it.

**Disclaimer** These are my personal opinions and I am no longer professionally affiliated with the organizations Invisible Children, Resolve, or other partners of the Kony 2012 campaign. This is purely for a conversation for a class and does not necessarily reflect the views of the above organizations. 

Yesterday as I was in my Conflict 340 class (International Conflict Theory), we discussed the question as to why in all of the OECD nations, the US is by far, even a statistical outlier, the most violent nation. OECD is an international organization of the 30 richest countries throughout the world, most of them are in Europe and North America. Something that kept popping up in my mind was that almost all of the other countries had access to universal healthcare and free or extremely affordable, high quality, higher education.

I brought up Keynesian economics in the conversation. My comments alluded to the idea that as long as constituents of a nation are invested in their government, there is less violence. Many of the nations in OECD that have universal healthcare and free education have higher tax rates, keeping their population invested in the work the government is doing, leading to lower inner violence. The argument I made was that as long as there is a perpetual, manageable debt, there is less violence.

So I think I would like to explore this more. So my new research question is this:

How does access to universal healthcare/free high-quality education affect intrastate violence?

As a conflict major this will be something that I can carry over into my other courses and I may even use this as a starting point for a thesis later on if I choose to go on for a graduate degree in Conflict Analysis.

I found a newspaper article from the Huffington Post about how since the Aurora shooting there has not been a substantive conversation in the presidential campaign, or in Washington, about gun violence in the US. I find this nearly insulting that it has taken this long to do something since incidences like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Springfield, and Aurora. This article discusses the reasons why this conversation hasn’t happened and why it should.

I also found a collection of photos like this one of gun shows in the US, where citizens can buy just about any type of weapon, whether they need it or not. This picture below is the one that stuck out to me the most, as it shows the accessibility of firearms in the US as a mass market (which I oppose).

I did find a lot of articles about guns and about universal healthcare, but there isn’t much in the way of comparing the two of them. I have this set about gun violence here, but I will still need to look for more information on the effect that access to universal healthcare has on violence in the developed world. I think I will also need to revisit the film Bowling for Columbine, a documentary about gun control from Michael Moore. I remember there being some really good statistics in it.

When digitizing historical documents, one of the greatest challenges is taking a large amount of information and enabling users to search through hundreds of years of text. This can create a difficult task of creating usable online archival documents. A problem that I have seen recently involves readings for classes that are in a PDF format but are only scanned images of books and papers. Without searchable text, a 50 page reading is difficult to navigate.

Cohen and Rosenzweig discuss this issue in their book Digital History:

“Manually correcting OCR probably makes sense only on relatively small-scale projects and especially texts that yield particularly clean OCR. You should also keep in mind that if you use a typist, you don’t need to invest in hardware or software or spend time learning new equipment and programs. Despite our occasional euphoria over futuristic technologies like OCR, sometimes tried-and-true methods like typing are more effective and less costly.”

It’s great when there are all sorts of available programs that turn imaged text into searchable text for cheap, some even are free. The newer versions of Microsoft Office even include a document imaging GUI that is pretty intuitive and can proved upwards of 98% accuracy with typed text.

But that isn’t statistically perfect for historical documents, especially when those documents are primary sources. This OCR technology is great, but, like Cohen and Rosenzweig have stated above, nothing can beat having someone type word for word. Another advantage of using a typist is that if a character is hard to read, logical understanding of language and a knowledge of words and their spelling limits the number of possible mistakes, and a typist can consult with others about what a document says, which a computer is unable to do.

Something that is a little bit related that I have seen some information on is the CAPTCHA system. This system is an anti-spam protection software that shows an image of words that the end user must correctly input into the dialogue box to complete a transaction.

This system has been recently circumvented by spammers employing the use of OCR software. There are some security downsides to the use of CAPTCHA. But I think something that is really useful with the system in the academic world is that those inaccuracies from OCR processed documents are put into CAPTCHA so that as the system is used and users are typing what they see, documents are crowdsourced and corrected.

Research Question:

How has the historical use of US Foreign Aid prevented development throughout developing countries?

I found the essay written by Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig to be a bit long winded in regards to the points they were discussing. However, I did pick out one very significant segment they wrote:

Flexibility transforms the experience of consuming history, but digital media—because of their openness and diversity—also alters the conditions and circumstances of producing history.

I find this idea that new changes in how history is documented also changes how history is produced a new and refreshing take on the importance of the Internet. It makes me think of the chaos theory where one slight change can completely overhaul an event.

But Cohen and Rosenzweig make the point that with the new capabilities of online storage, access, interaction, and editing, the concept that history is documented by historians is proving inaccurate. People all around the world are able to create their own blogs, websites, and profiles, telling their own version, whether researched or not, of history.

This history is not like what is thought of in the classroom like studying WWII or the political climate of Cambodia, but is more of a glimpse into life at the time and place of the author. When archeologists began excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century, homes that had been buried by ash and pumice still had their morning meals on the table and wine in their casks.

This was an absolutely fascinating find as it was indisputable what the items on the table were. Now there are phone apps like instagram where the thing to do is take a snazzy photo of your dinner and post it online for all to see. This gives record of the types of things that this person of this country of this gender and of this time ate.

That’s what is changing in how history is produced. It’s real time documentation of everything. Information overload? Probably. Good for posterity? Only to be found out.

Ideas for Research:

Colonialism in East Africa

The Rise of Labor Unions in the US

US Foreign aid in the 20th Century