UCLA hospitals to pay $865,500 for breaches of celebrities' privacy

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

Los Angeles Times

Settlement with U.S. regulators also calls for UCLA to retrain staff and take steps to prevent future breaches. Some staff have already been fired for viewing the records of Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and others.

UCLA Health System has agreed to pay $865,500 as part of a settlement with federal regulators announced Thursday after two celebrity patients alleged that hospital employees broke the law and reviewed their medical records without authorization.

Federal and hospital officials declined to identify the celebrities involved. The complaints cover 2005 to 2009, a time during which hospital employees were repeatedly caught and fired for peeping at the medical records of dozens of celebrities, including Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett and then-California First Lady Maria Shriver.

The entire story can be found here.

Survey: 90% of companies say they've been hacked

Are breaches becoming a statistical certainty for companies?

By Jaikumar Vijayan

ComputerWorld>Security

If it sometimes appears that just about every company is getting hacked these days, that's because they are.

In a recent survey (download PDF) of 583 U.S companies conducted by Ponemon Research on behalf of Juniper Networks, 90% of the respondents said their organizations' computers had been breached at least once by hackers over the past 12 months.

Nearly 60% reported two or more breaches over the past year. More than 50% said they had little confidence of being able to stave off further attacks over the next 12 months.

Those numbers are significantly higher than findings in similar surveys, and they suggest that a growing number of enterprises are losing the battle to keep malicious intruders out of their networks.

"We expected a majority to say they had experienced a breach," said Johnnie Konstantas, director of product marketing at Juniper, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based networking company. "But to have 90% saying they had experienced at least one breach, and more than 50% saying they had experienced two or more, is mind-blowing." Those findings suggest "that a breach has become almost a statistical certainty" these days, she said.

The organizations that participated in the Ponemon survey represented a wide cross-section of both the private and public sectors, ranging from small organizations with less than 500 employees to enterprises with workforces of more than 75,000. The online survey was conducted over a five-day period earlier this month.

Roughly half of the respondents blamed resource constraints for their security woes, while about the same number cited network complexity as the primary challenge to implementing security controls.

The Ponemon survey comes at a time of growing concern about the ability of companies to fend off sophisticated cyberattacks. Over the past several months, hackers have broken into numerous supposedly secure organizations, such as security vendor RSA, Lockheed Martin, Oak Ridge National Laboratories and the International Monetary Fund.

Many of the attacks have involved the use of sophisticated malware and social engineering techniques designed to evade easy detection by conventional security tools.

The attacks have highlighted what analysts say is a growing need for enterprises to implement controls for the quick detection and containment of security breaches. Instead of focusing only on protecting against attacks, companies need to prepare for what comes after a targeted breach.

The survey results suggest that some organizations have begun moving in that direction. About 32% of the respondents said their primary security focus was on preventing attacks, but about 16% claimed the primary focus of their security efforts was on quick detection of and response to security incidents. About one out of four respondents said their focus was on aligning security controls with industry best practices.

danger + opportunity ≠ crisis

How a misunderstanding about Chinese characters has led many astray

by Victor H. Mair

There is a widespread public misperception, particularly among the New Age sector, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of elements that signify “danger” and “opportunity.” I first encountered this curious specimen of alleged oriental wisdom about ten years ago at an altitude of 35,000 feet sitting next to an American executive. He was intently studying a bound volume that had adopted this notorious formulation as the basic premise of its method for making increased profits even when the market is falling. At that moment, I didn't have the heart to disappoint my gullible neighbor who was blissfully imbibing what he assumed were the gems of Far Eastern sagacity enshrined within the pages of his workbook. Now, however, the damage from this kind of pseudo-profundity has reached such gross proportions that I feel obliged, as a responsible Sinologist, to take counteraction.

A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate statement. A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references to this spurious proverb. It appears, often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for “thinking outside of the box,” and practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. This catchy expression (Crisis = Danger + Opportunity) has rapidly become nearly as ubiquitous as The Tao of Pooh and Sun Zi's Art of War for the Board / Bed / Bath / Whichever Room.

The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. For example, one of the most popular websites centered on this mistaken notion about the Chinese word for crisis explains: “The top part of the Chinese Ideogram for 'Crisis' is the symbol for 'Danger': The bottom symbol represents 'Opportunity'.” Among the most egregious of the radical errors in this statement is the use of the exotic term “Ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters. Linguists and writing theorists avoid “ideogram” as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes. (For similar reasons, the same caveat holds for another frequently encountered label, pictogram.) It is far better to refer to the hanzi / kanji / hanja as logographs, sinographs, hanograms, tetragraphs (from their square shapes [i.e., as fangkuaizi]), morphosyllabographs, etc., or — since most of those renditions may strike the average reader as unduly arcane or clunky — simply as characters.

The second misconception in this formulation is that the author seems to take the Chinese word for crisis as a single graph, referring to it as “the Chinese Ideogram for 'crisis'.” Like most Mandarin words, that for “crisis” (wēijī) consists of two syllables that are written with two separate characters, wēi (危) and jī (機/机).

The third, and fatal, misapprehension is the author's definition of jī as “opportunity.” While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean “crisis” and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of “danger,” the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify “opportunity.” Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines “opportunity” as:

1. a favorable juncture of circumstances;
2. a good chance for advancement or progress.

While that may be what our Pollyanaish advocates of “crisis” as “danger” plus “opportunity” desire jī to signify, it means something altogether different.

The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one's skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis.

For those who have staked their hopes and careers on the CRISIS = DANGER + OPPORTUNITY formula and are loath to abandon their fervent belief in jī as signifying “opportunity,” it is essential to list some of the primary meanings of the graph in question. Aside from the notion of “incipient moment” or “crucial point” discussed above, the graph for jī by itself indicates “quick-witted(ness); resourceful(ness)” and “machine; device.” In combination with other graphs, however, jī can acquire hundreds of secondary meanings. It is absolutely crucial to observe that jī possesses these secondary meanings only in the multisyllabic terms into which it enters. To be specific in the matter under investigation, jī added to huì (“occasion”) creates the Mandarin word for “opportunity” (jīhuì), but by itself jī does not mean “opportunity.”

The rest can be read at Pinyin.info

The Dark Side of "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness"

opednews.com
By Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and Stephen Soldz  

Why is the world's largest organization of psychologists so aggressively promoting a new, massive, and untested military program? The APA's enthusiasm for mandatory "resilience training" for all U.S. soldiers is troubling on many counts.

The January 2011 issue of the American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association's (APA) flagship journal, is devoted entirely to 13 articles that detail and celebrate the virtues of a new U.S. Army-APA collaboration. Built around positive psychology and with key contributions from former APA president Martin Seligman and his colleagues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for our soldiers and veterans. While these are undoubtedly worthy aspirations, the special issue is nevertheless troubling in several important respects: the authors of the articles, all of whom are involved in the CSF program, offer very little discussion of conceptual and ethical considerations; the special issue does not provide a forum for any independent critical or cautionary voices whatsoever; and through this format, the APA itself has adopted a jingoistic cheerleading stance toward a research project about which many crucial questions should be posed. We discuss these and related concerns below.

At the outset, we want to be clear that we are not questioning the valuable role that talented and dedicated psychologists play in the military, nor certainly the importance of providing our soldiers and veterans with the best care possible. As long as our country has a military, our soldiers should be prepared to face the hazards and horrors they may experience. Military service is highly stressful, and psychological challenges and difficulties understandably arise frequently. These issues are created or exacerbated by a wide range of features characteristic of military life, such as separation from family, frequent relocations, and especially deployment to combat zones with ongoing threats of injury and death and exposure to acts of unspeakable violence. The stress of repeated tours of duty, including witnessing the loss of lives of comrades and civilians, can produce extensive emotional and behavioral consequences that persist long after soldiers return home. They include heightened risk of suicide, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and family violence.

(dropping to the ethical concerns)

Ethical Concerns

We also believe that other key aspects of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness should have received explicit discussion in this special issue. It is standard practice for an independent and unbiased ethics review committee (an "institutional review board" or "IRB") to evaluate the ethical issues arising from a research project prior to its implementation. This review and approval process may in fact have occurred for CSF, but the manner in which the principals blur "research" and "training" leads us to wish for much greater clarity here. This process is even more critical given that the soldiers apparently have no informed consent protections -- they are all required to participate in the CSF program. Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during the post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors. That code begins by stating:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

Disturbingly, however, this mandatory participation in a research study does not violate Section 8.05 of the APA's own Ethics Code, which allows for the suspension of informed consent "where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations." Despite the APA's stance, we should never forget that the velvet glove of authoritarian planning, no matter how well intended, is no substitute for the protected freedoms of individuals to make their own choices, mistakes, and dissenting judgments. Respect for informed consent is more, not less, important in total environments like the military where individual dissent is often severely discouraged and often punished.

More broadly, the 13 articles fail to explore potential ethical concerns related to the uncertain effects of the CSF training itself. In fact, the only question of this sort raised in the special issue -- by Tedeschi and McNally in one article and by Lester, McBride, Bliese, and Adler in another -- is whether it might be unethical to withhold the CSF training from soldiers. Certainly, there are other ethical quandaries that require serious discussion if the CSF program's effectiveness is to be appropriately evaluated. For example, might the training actually cause harm? Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or under-estimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades, or civilians at heightened risk of harm?

The entire piece can be read here.

Supervisor Self-Disclosure

*Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training* has scheduled an article for publication in a future issue: "Supervisor Self-Disclosure: Supervisees' Experiences and Perspectives."

The authors are Sarah Knox, Lisa M. Edwards, Shirley A. Hess, and Clara E. Hill.  Here's how the article begins:

[begin excerpt]

Farber (2006) suggested that, in addition to the inherent need for supervisee self-disclosure, supervisor self-disclosure (SRSD) is also crucial to supervision.

He asserted that supervisors disclose to build the supervision relationship, share discoveries from their own professional experiences, model skills, and provide feedback.

Given the role that SRSD may have in supervision, it is important to examine its impact on supervisees and on supervision.

Existing studies, primarily using quantitative survey methods, have described types and outcomes of SRSDs (Bahrick, 1990; Gray, Ladany, Walker, & Ancis, 2001; Hess et al., 2008; Ladany, Hill, Corbett, & Nutt, 1996; Ladany & Lehrman-Waterman, 1999; Ladany & Melincoff, 1999; Ladany & Walker, 2003; Ladany, Walker, & Melincoff, 2001; Norcross & Halgin, 1997; Walsh, Gillespie, Greer, & Eanes, 2002; Worthen & McNeill, 1996; Yourman, 2003). In the only qualitative study in this area, Knox, Burkard, Edwards, Smith, and Schlosser (2008) examined supervisors' perspectives about using SRSD with supervisees. Supervisors used SRSDs when supervisees struggled, and intended them to teach or normalize. Supervisors' disclosures focused on supervisors' reactions to their own or their supervisees' clients. These SRSDs had positive effects on supervisors, supervisees, the supervision relationship, and supervisors' supervision of others.

These results suggest that the supervisors were attuned to their supervisees' clinical needs and sought to intervene such that supervisees could function more effectively, all of which led to salutary results. Although Knox et al.'s results are intriguing, we wonder if supervisees feel the same way about SRSDs . . . do such disclosures have the salutary effects that supervisors perceived? Relatedly, the literature is replete with examples of supervisees' negative feelings about their supervisors, and also the belief that they must hide such feelings for fear of political suicide (Gray et al., 2001; Hess et al., 2008; Nelson & Friedlander, 2001). Learning about supervisees' reactions could thus help us understand the other side of the SRSD interaction. We need, then, a probing examination of supervisees' experiences of SRSD, so that we may "get inside" the phenomenon by asking those to whom it is directed how they experienced such disclosure.

A qualitative design could help us fill this gap in the literature by addressing the central question of the current study: How do supervisees experience SRSD? How does SRSD affect supervision and supervisees' clinical work? Examining such questions from the supervisee perspective is essential, and will add important new understandings to the extant literature. In the present study, then, we examined supervisees' experiences of SRSD, extending with a distinct sample the work by Knox et al. (2008) about supervisors' experiences of SRSD. We asked supervisees to describe in depth one particular instance of SRSD and its impact.

[end excerpt]

Another excerpt: "When describing a specific SRSD experience, supervisees reported a range of antecedents (e.g., difficult clinical situation, selfdoubt, tension in supervision relationship) followed by supervisor disclosures about clinical experiences or personal information. Supervisees perceived that their supervisors disclosed primarily to normalize, but also to build rapport and to instruct. The SRSDs had mostly positive effects (e.g., normalization), though some negative effects (e.g., deleterious impact on supervision relationship) were reported."

The author note provides the following contact information: " Sarah Knox, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Counselor Education and Counseling Psychology, College of Education, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881. E-mail: sarah.knox@marquette.edu.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.

Parents' Military Deployment May Harm Kids' Mental Health

MedicineNet.com

Children with a parent on long-term military deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan are at increased risk for mental health problems, new research suggests.

In the study, published in the July 4 online edition of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, researchers examined the medical records of 307,520 U.S. children, aged 5 to 17, who had at least one parent on active duty in the U.S. Army and received outpatient care between 2003 and 2006.

During that time period, nearly 17% of the children were diagnosed with a mental health disorder. The most common conditions were depression, behavioral problems, anxiety, stress and sleep disorders, the investigators found.

More than 62% of the children's parents were deployed at least once during the study period, with deployments averaging 11 months. Mental health problems were more likely to be diagnosed among children who had a parent who was deployed at least once to Iraq or Afghanistan. The risk of a mental health problem among the children rose with increased length of parents' deployment.

"We observed a clear dose-response pattern such that children of parents who spent more time deployed between 2003 and 2006 fared worse than children whose parents were deployed for a shorter duration," wrote Alyssa J. Mansfield, then of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, now of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Honolulu, and colleagues. "Similar to findings among military spouses, prolonged deployment appears to be taking a mental health toll on children."

In an accompanying commentary, Dr. Stephen J. Cozza, from the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., noted that as of 2009, 44% of active duty military members have children (an estimated total of 1.2 million children), in addition to 43% of Reserve and National Guard members. Since 2001, about 2 million U.S. military personnel have deployed at least once.

The study provides "an important contribution to our understanding of a child's health and its relationship to parental combat deployment," Cozza said in a journal news release.

"Brief screening for anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, academic difficulties, peer relational problems, or high-risk behaviors (such as substance misuse or unsafe sexual practices) is warranted and will help identify treatment needs," Cozza concluded.

Practical Tips: Emailing Patients

Practical Tips for Psychologists When Using Electronic Media to Supplement Face to Face Therapy with Patients

Rachael L. Baturin, MPH, JD
Professional Affairs Associate

As electronic media is becoming more prevalent among patients, psychologists are starting to incorporate it more and more in their practices. Some psychologists use email and texting as a way to communicate with their patients between face-to-face therapy sessions. As such, psychologists should set up a policy on how they are going to use these means to communicate with their patients and psychologists should communicate this policy to their patients. Here are some practical tips that psychologists should consider when adopting a policy on the use of electronic media with patients:

1. Psychologists should clarify to patients what, if any, kinds of emails they will accept. Generally, emails should be professional in nature and should not get personal. If emails are becoming too lengthy or prolonged you should notify patients to come in or call to discuss the issue.

2. Emails should not be used in emergencies. Patients should be advised to contact psychologists by phone if an emergency arises.

3. Psychologists should advise their patients on headings that they will use in the subject line of the email (ex. billing question, appointment).

4. Psychologists should establish a turnaround time for their response to patients’ emails.

5. Psychologists should inform their patients about privacy issues. Patients should know who besides the psychologist processes emails during normal business hours, during vacations and when the psychologist is out sick.

6. Psychologists should maintain a copy of all messages sent to/from their patients in their records.

7. Psychologists should include a standard block of text to the end of the email message to patients containing the psychologist’s full name, contact information and reminders about security and the importance of alternative forms of communication for emergencies.

8. Psychologists should remember that email has inherent limitations in that the lack of non-verbal cues (facial expression, voice tone) may cause the intent of the communication to fail. For example, an attempt at humor may come off as being sarcastic even though it was not meant to be.

Ethical dilemmas: A model to understand teacher practice

Ehrich, Lisa Catherine; Kimber, Megan; Millwater, Jan; Cranston, Neil

Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, Vol 17(2), Apr 2011, 173-185.

Over recent decades, the field of ethics has been the focus of increasing attention in teaching. This is not surprising given that teaching is a moral activity that is heavily values-laden. Because of this, teachers face ethical dilemmas in the course of their daily work. 


This paper presents an ethical decision-making model that helps to explain the decision-making processes that individuals or groups are likely to experience when confronted by an ethical dilemma. In order to make sense of the model, we put forward three short ethical dilemma scenarios facing teachers and apply the model to interpret them. Here we identify the critical incident, the forces at play that help to illuminate the incident, the choices confronting the individual and the implications of these choices for the individual, organisation and community. 


Based on our analysis and the wider literature we identify several strategies that may help to minimise the impact of ethical dilemmas. These include the importance of sharing dilemmas with trusted others; having institutional structures in schools that lessen the emergence of harmful actions occurring; the necessity for individual teachers to articulate their own personal and professional ethics; acknowledging that dilemmas have multiple forces at play; the need to educate colleagues about specific issues; and the necessity of appropriate preparation and support for teachers. Of these strategies, providing support for teachers via professional development is explored more fully.

In Trying to Test Students' Ethics, Colleges Find It Hard to Do the Right Thing

by Peter Schmidt
Chronicle of Higher Education


Union College, long focused on engineering and the liberal arts, five years ago adopted a new educational mission: teaching its students to be ethical.



It established an Ethics Across the Curriculum program that encourages faculty members to weave discussions of ethics into all of their courses, no matter the subject.



Although faculty throughout the college's four academic divisions have gotten behind the effort, it is hard to tell what, if any, effect it is having.



Here and elsewhere in academe, ethics instruction remains a means to unclear ends.



<snip>



"Ethical reasoning and action" is one of the "essential learning outcomes" that the Association of American Colleges and Universities says is "best developed by a contemporary liberal education."



But these days, making that claim is not enough: The accountability movement has put colleges under pressure to assess students' progress in meeting all educational goals.



Assessing ethical learning is especially challenging.



Sure, colleges can test students' recall of class lectures or assigned readings.



But being able to parrot Plato is a far cry from skillfully applying moral philosophy to today's moral dilemmas.



<snip>



Colleges might even be able to measure whether their students have become more sophisticated in the thought processes they use in working through ethical problems.



But the most widely used instruments for measuring moral reasoning are intended for research or to evaluate institutions, not for student grading, and educators disagree on their validity.

When it comes to measuring whether ethics instruction sticks, making students more likely to do the right thing throughout their lives, about all colleges can do is hope.



<snip>



But the truth is that there is no telling whether today's college student will go on to become a mensch or the next Bernie Madoff.



Ethical development lies "at the outermost ring" of the learning outcomes institutions are able to measure, says Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis who has extensively studied assessment practices.



Of the tests of ethical learning devised so far, she says, "I don't know of anything that is even beginning to be universally accepted."



<snip>



Among the many challenges in assessing students' development is the lack of universally accepted "right" answers to many moral and ethical problems.



"By definition, you are coming up with some sort of normative value judgment on what the right outcomes are for students," says Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education at New York University and co-author of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.



"It is hard to get objective measures that are not tied in with cultural assumptions."



If colleges send students the message that there exists a correct answer to any given ethical question, Mr. Arum says, they are likely to run into a problem routinely encountered by social scientists whose research involves surveys: People often answer a question with the response they perceive as most acceptable to others, failing to say what they truly believe.



Deni Elliott, a professor of media ethics at the University of South Florida and the founder of ethics centers at both Dartmouth College and the University of Montana, argues that colleges need to separate "instructional objective from pedagogical hope."



<snip>



Union College has left it up to faculty members to individually devise ways to determine how well students absorb and apply ethics lessons.



Many of its faculty members gauge learning mainly by judging how well students identify and analyze ethical problems in writing assignments, on essay tests, and in classroom discussions.



That approach, widely used throughout academe, puts a premium on ethical reasoning and rewards students for demonstrating critical thinking.



In focusing on cognitive development, however, such assessments get at only one of two key aspects of ethical thinking, argue experts like David T. Ozar, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and veteran instructor of journalistic and medical ethics.



Also important, he says, is affective learning, the acquisition of attitudes and values that leave one more predisposed to act ethically.



"It is really hard to measure ethical learning because it's not declarative or semantic knowledge, but, like any expertise, it is knowing the right thing to do in the right way at the right time," says Darcia F. Narváez, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame.



In her research, she has found that intuition plays such a big role in moral decisions that she argues it is a mistake to ignore its influence.



<snip>



The Union program seeks to promote ethical development through both the application of moral philosophy to various academic fields and practical discussions of the ethical codes under which those fields operate.



<snip>



Faculty members involved in the effort met this winter to compare notes on approaches that seemed to be improving their students' ability to spot and deal with ethical problems posed to them in assignments and on tests.



At about the same time, however, a committee of students, administrators, and faculty members gathered elsewhere on campus to talk over an effort to stem cheating through the adoption of a new honor code.



Kristen A. Bidoshi, Union's dean of studies, estimates that she deals with roughly 200 cases of academic dishonesty each year, out of a total undergraduate enrollment of about 2,500.



Claire M. Bracken, assistant professor of English at Union College and a member of the steering committee for its ethics-education effort, says she is hopeful that getting students "passionate and engaged with these issues" will lead them to retain the ethics lessons learned in college classrooms and behave more ethically throughout life.



But, she acknowledges, "There is no good way of knowing what they are thinking when they leave."


     *     *     *     *     *     *

Thanks to Ken Pope for the information.